Chris Williamson - Importance of Pain and Suffering | Keep Hammering | Ep. 003

[Music] every step I take I move my truth every time they tell me stop I every comte that makes my up my energy and Bo I them talking saying the way that I move is so reckless that is a part of my mind I've been blessed with giving my blood so I am [Music] Relentless here we are the keep hammering Collective with Chris Williamson today how are you doing I'm good man how are you oh I'm doing great this is uh I've been waiting for this I've been following you for a while I love your

content I love what you put out and watching you makes me wonder the modern wisdom podcast is you made a huge name for yourself what how'd that come about and what is wisdom to you so I was a club promoter for a very long time I got to University and wanted to have an excuse to party uh for free and became pretty good at it so me and a business partner the first guy I ever sat next to in my first seminar at University uh still 15 years later we working together we hadn't got rid

of each other and um we just wanted to build a business I love business building did that for a long time got toward the end of my 20s I'd done some reality TV I was on some dating shows MH and then it got to sort of 27 28 and I'd done this big reality TV dating show which was kind of like the Pinnacle of uh the party boy World Championships and I thought is this really all that I've got to offer the world you know me in a tiny of swim shorts prancing about on TV

not that that's not nothing but it just felt like there was something else missing and even though I loved the work that I'd done it felt like being a a crab that kind of was outgrowing his shell somehow and it was like constraining and I was feeling just ambient sort of uncomfortable about stuff uh and that was a good time it whatever 2015 16 so you had your Jordan Peterson's your Sam Harris's your Rogan's talking about taking ownership talking about telling the truth and finding a purpose uh so I I really enjoyed consuming that stuff

I got invited on some podcasts just because I'd done some TV bits and I really enjoyed the process and I thought well if I do my own I can do this as much as I want M and then it I just started my show it's almost 5 years ago exactly now and uh yeah we're now 600 episodes in 5 years later that's a lot of work that is so much work you know you telling that story do you think I know he had a sort of childhood a little bit talked about bullying and and being

lonely do you think that that reality show was kind of a book into that like you didn't get much attention as a kid and now you're getting all this attention do you think that was part of that journey and that's why you you were drawn to that that's a really good point so most of the high performers that I know about are coming from a place of insufficiency you know they're trying to prove something to that parent that teacher that b bully that group of friends or whatever from their childhood that they actually are worthy

of Love or praise or acceptance or admiration and I think that you could track certainly through my 20s the fact that um I think my fundamental like framing of who I was was people might not like me or want to be around me because of the uh world that I'd come up from being really unpopular and bullied in school but if they need me that's like close enough that's a close proxy I see so if I'm the guy in the front door of the club with all of the VIP bands yeah the power people need

me now obviously this is fundamentally flawed like you don't need to offer people things in return for them liking you or wanting you to be in their life that's not the way that it works but for me I I was so convinced that I was flawed and chronically meant to be alone that I needed to be able to offer the world something in order to be accepted in that way right um and yeah I think that you could see going on the reality TV Earth is just scaling that up like just give me more give

me more more leverage more scale more exposure mhm and yeah I think that wouldn't be too wrong to say but it does it still creeps up in other areas of life you know even with all of the self workor and all of the bits and pieces I've been exposed to over the last six or seven years I still see it creeping back up it's very important that I need to keep in check my uh fears of insufficiency or lack of confidence or lack of self-belief how does it crop up um sometimes I feel like success

is a fluke and uh impostor syndrome of nobody knows that I'm not supposed to be here I think you've mentioned this as well the fact that it almost feels like one day someone's going to come out of the woodwork and go oh this actually isn't your life yeah you actually don't deserve this you're the you're the lonely kid by yourself that nobody you're supposed to be here oh [ __ ] we made a mistake it's not supposed to be you it's supposed to actually be that guy over there and you go I knew it all

along this is one of the strange things about the routines that you learn when you're a kid because they just seep into all of the Senus of life and they're so hard to pull out you know you can change your approach with relationships at 30 and then 34 and then 38 and you you know you've got perspective you can at least see them in a different way mhm there's tons and tons of stuff from childhood that I simply can't remember yet I'm able to call on this like worldview of acceptance or lack of and uh

it's very difficult to deprogram in that way I spent a lot of time trying to Dr program stuff so you know for anybody that has suffered with bullying as a kid uh that felt lonely that felt isolated uh that feels like they need to prove something to the world like I I feel for you because that's me and the only way two ways I suppose actually that I found that have been pretty successful at helping me one has been having an undeniable stack of proof that I am who I say am am MH so Rogan

calls it building a mountain with layers of paint right it's just one iteration after the next right better better better better each single time that you do something you can get yourself to a stage where you've disproven your imposter syndrome so many times in the real world that it just has to it's crushed under this ridiculous weight of evidence right there's no way that you could continue to exist and the other side is to find find people that just want you for you mhm you know this is friends this is family this is Partners right

uh and if you've got someone who there's no contingency for why they want to be around you yeah that's hard though because they know you as you now and you now is like you know looks like a a model fit popular have power because you have a a platform so yeah I mean I understand that you know you can't you have changed but I think you're still the worry is like I'm still that kid do they only want me because of now my position and this is one of the problems of success I think this

is why you have you know actors that you find out about uh their entire Entourage was pushing them aichi this famous DJ who didn't want to continue playing and all of the friends that were around him his assistants and his managers and stuff they it looked like they were pushing him to continue to play because they were invested in that not only were they monetarily invested but that was their status that was their lifestyle that was what they wanted to do and they were prepared to push this guy to the stage where he had to

take his own life so you can definitely when you start to gain Accolade or success the motivation of the people that are around you can be called into question yeah and if you've got that framing already that maybe the world doesn't want me for me you can what was this this quote that I heard um a negative mind will find any way to make the world fit his priors right so if you go into a situation adamant that this is that you are unlovable unwanted broken flawed insufficient MH you will manage to warp reality to

be able to fit what you already believe right yeah that's interesting you know I found myself one thing that I I enjoy about your podcast and your style is I of course the gogun podcast came out recently last Monday and I was probably I don't know maybe one of the first ones to listen to it I was so pumped I like I got to go on a run so I can listen to this because when I'm running there's no distractions and I can just absorb every word but I found myself distracted too because as Goggins

was talking about his experience and you were you know probing and and it had me had me reflecting back on my journey too which I think is the beauty of podcast and it's a beauty of discussion and storytelling which is what makes this platform so powerful but um it had me thinking of uh childhood pain basically and you know I'm 55 years old it's just like get over it right but I still think that man that you still it I don't know if it ever goes away but they had me wondering too do you remember

as a child um the most painful thing you had to go through as a Young Man and I'm trying to I'm trying to validate myself wondering it maybe it's just me or do people remember so for me there's no individual situation that occurred it was like a um what's that Japanese water torture type thing you know it was just a consistent ENT dri forehead thing sense of yeah and I think I don't know I would be interested to look at the psychology behind what happens if someone has an indiv a single very traumatic event versus

a more protracted drawn out um suffering uh and you know i' like to I wasn't abused my parents were great um you know we didn't come from a rich place but you there wasn't anything that I was struggling for like poor I wasn't starving MH but I was alone I was an only child and I didn't have very many friends and I was bullied in school and you can create an awful lot of suffering yourself the back of that and I also think you know talking about I'm 55 like time to get over it like

[ __ ] that the the prior that you have become the laws of physics that your world exists within and if you have a particular type of worldview that you've held for a very long time that doesn't make it easier to get rid of that makes it harder to get rid of you know the fact that you can carry a burden with you for 55 years doesn't mean like oh well now it's time to drop it [ __ ] it's it's fused into my [ __ ] flesh right it's part of me no yeah I

understand that what what came to my mind was and it wasn't you know I had whatever sort of childhood it's fine but what the hardest thing for me was I remember I left living with my mom because I didn't like my stepdad uh moved in with my dad in town here you know from the small town out where we drove yesterday and then I was I felt lonely which is why your story kind of resonates with me because we moved to Portland I was on my own my brother wasn't there so the ver the thing

that I remember being the hardest as my childhood was telling my dad that I wanted to move back with my mom because it was like this divorce thing it was kind of a a pulling back and forth you know my mom of course wanted me there my dad wanted to win this little battle have have me with him and I wanted to be with him cuz he was my real dad but then I was just so lonely and so to telling him I want to move back with my mom was you know kids say crazy

things to their parents they say yeah I don't love you and you know it's just kids being stupid and trying to to hurt people but that I knew that hurt him deeply in and man as a so I was in eighth grade so probably I don't know 13 or 14 telling my dad you know I want I want to move away man that was rough cuz it hurt him well the reason that it hurts you is because you care about people we were talking about this yesterday you know fundamentally one of the reasons that we

get hurt when we watch other people suffering is that we see the good in people we don't want to see other people suffer and for you to be on your own and want to be back with your brother because your brother would be social support he would be like literal physical support if you in school and you know you would have your boy back yeah but one of the side effect or byproduct of you no longer being alone was your dad now being alone yeah and you have to say I mean this is the person

that stays in a relationship because they think that the other partner is not going to be able to deal with it by themselves this is the uh daughter or son that never leaves the hometown because the Grandma and Grandpa are going to be they're not going to have anyone to look after them you know like these sorts of tradeoffs that people have are they're serious like they're not things that should be snarked at they're not just simple situations they're incredibly difficult because there are it's like apples and oranges like how how many lonely nights without

your brother is worth your dad not feeling insufficient like what how the [ __ ] am I supposed to weigh these two can't win that one can't can't make it work yeah the math doesn't work yeah and even in retrospect you know you can spend 40 years going back over this conversation with yourself and still not working out was that the right decision yeah yeah did I do the right thing yeah it's uh that's why I say it's it's hard looking back cuz it's on one hand I'm like you know whatever why am I still

thinking about this but uh it's because you're a good man that's why it's because you care about other people and you don't want other people to hurt you know I don't so here's the thing too I actually don't think I'm good cuz I know my I know how my brain works it's like it reminds me another thing somebody was the other day was talking [ __ ] about goggin and I was you know I have a hard time with that because um I feel like and maybe this is why I'm questioning myself because I feel

like some people I mean I've met people regular people who think they are amazing at whatever they do they're the best you know and I look at what they're doing and what they're producing and I'm like you're not the best dude and I saw this guy talking [ __ ] about goggs and I'm like what are you this guy influences millions of people do you really think you're looking down on him and you can you have what have you done where you have that where you should be judging somebody like gogin right who has um

two New York Times Best Sellers multiple World Records a a Navy SE served his country for 17 years and what have you done but this guy is I think some people get um they o over I guess I guess over uh estimate what they're doing what they're contributing or are they delusional so I'm like you say I'm a good guy I'm like I look at myself in the mirror and I know the thoughts I have about you know I'm like this guy screw this guy I know you know who I really am so it's it's

hard and I wonder can people buy their own BS or are they delusional what what do you how do you perceive that you can manage to convince yourself of pretty much anything this is the same as the prior thing right like if you have come into a situation um believing that your selfworth is almost always determined by your monetary wealth let's say so your parents perhaps were keeping up with the Joneses when you were younger or perhaps they showed love through presents Christmas was a huge deal and birthdays were a big deal and it was

always about new shoes and new cars and blah blah and holidays and stuff you are going to go into the world with a presumption that that is where your self-worth is derived from mhm that's no more or less real than anybody else's prior it's less effective and this particular person if their fundamental source of value is comparison MH between them and somebody else absolutely to them that is that's the physics of their life mhm now they're not the sort of person I want to be around yeah they're not the sort of person that I spend

my time with mhm but I I would be hesitant as you seeing the mean or nasty thoughts or the retributive fantasies that you have about calling this person out or meeting them in an alley or doing whatever you know like yeah we don't have control over our thoughts in that sort of a way it doesn't make you a bad person to have bad thoughts like this is what was so interesting about um do you remember Minority Report yes with Tom Cruz yeah so I always think about that film because it showed what would happen if

people's intentions were able to be used to project forward their actions no it was actually more complex than that it was actually able to work out what was going on you could imagine a world in which cancellation came not from the things you said but from the things you thought right yeah that's what I'm afraid of but that would be that would be terrifying dude some of the things like and this is the concern that people have about parents calling or children calling their parents out for the stuff that's said in the home my dad

said this sexist or racist joke in the house because what is happening is you are ever more constraining the space within which people can openly think or play with ideas right uh and there is a question like are there some ideas that are so toxic and and and brutal that they shouldn't ever even be said out loud even in the comfort of your own home for the most part people would say no like there has to be a boundary right but you could push that one step further and say are there some thoughts that it's

a toxic that you shouldn't even be allowed to have them inside the comfort of your own head yeah and I would be very hesitant around you know taking a sense of selfworth or accusing yourself of being I don't know any kind of person for not for thinking things that are just a natural response to someone that's being a dick yeah like this guy is being he's being a penis and and rightly so but it's about your actions right and let's flip it on its head so imagine that someone said to you uh cam I really

love what you do with regards to your training I just wanted to let you know like I'm one of the most motivated people on the planet and you go wow like how does that manifest you go well dude I think about training all the time right you would say well you're not training mhm how how much do you go out and do oh well no I I don't actually go out and do any training at all but I think about it a lot right if I flip that round to you and I say you think

bad thoughts and do good things MH that doesn't make you a bad person right I see the actions the actions louder than the thoughts for sure correct yes and there was another thing from uh that I learned from Joo he had this conversation with Sam Harris like 5 years ago I was listening to it in preparation for the conversation I had with him uh a few months ago the the episodes that we're talking about we'll put them in the show notes below the Goggins and the Joo and stuff if people want to go and check

those out because course they were both great and um Sam was saying that courage or bravery is an emotion that you can't fake mhm he said that doing the courageous or Brave thing in spite of not wanting to do it is bravery right there's no such thing as fake bravery if you do the thing and didn't want to do it that's bravery and if you don't do the thing despite wanting to do it that's cowardice right but motivation works the same way if you do the thing and you didn't want to that is motivation it

doesn't matter whether you felt motivated or not the outcome is what matters right effort and the same thing is uh Right In Reverse when it comes to being a good person M like if you do good things with bad thoughts that's being even more good in my eyes thank you I overcame more cuz I wasn't starting at zero I was starting at less than zero start such a dick yeah exactly okay good I feel better well that's a good segue to this wisdom thing where have you were you a boy Genius did you were you

a v voracious reader what how did where did this perspective and wisdom come from I mean your podcast is modern wisdom and I have to say when I listen to you I do I feel smarter I'm not smart SM I feel smarter so where did the where's the wisdom piece come from oh man I'm just repurposing what other people have said like you know I I well no you have that perspect the perspective you just had on the thoughts that that seems but that's taken from Sam right like that Sam's idea that I've repurposed and

I've run with it for a couple more I've just developed that across well it could be courage but then it could be motivation but then it could be being a good person so that's a perfect example like I I can't remember who it was that said uh there are no new thoughts under the sun M and the point there is that a lot of the big problems and big questions that human humans ask themselves have been asked already and they percolate through whether that be directly through a quote in a book or indirectly through culture

or the way that your parents looked at each other or whatever like you can take these things they all really exist out there um so I don't know I I spent almost all of my 20s dude being a professional party boy like the most fun outgoing degenerate lifestyle that you can think of 30 trips back in forth to a bether a thousand club nights stood on the front door met a million people going in and out of nightclubs like this wasn't the environment in which that you were supposed to cultivate I don't know like a

wisdom approach to life I wasn't asking people about answers to the firmy Paradox around why there's no aliens out there on the front door it was like hi mate by mate here's your VIP band mate that was my life so I don't know I think the opportunity to learn has always excited me and um the introspection or the Curiosity it's really curiosity I think the sort of short answer is just I'm so [ __ ] interested about everything right and other people are as well and it's just a quirk of whatever version of the simulation

that we live in that I can call that a job that I can commercialize that weaponize that utilize that right and I can then deploy it and then other people get to learn from the [ __ ] that I learned um I was thinking about this last night the uh because you have a a truck which is very very nice but very very analog like there's no self-driving there's no nothing else it's like you put your foot on the floor it makes a big loud noise and it goes fast in the straight line that's right

um but I was thinking about Tesla's uh automatic driving self-driving car system and I learned about this thing from a data scientists that the reason that Tesla is so much further ahead than all of the other competitors is because it's accumulating more and more road miles to train its own system on so because they've got this uh broad distribution more data precisely and that means that more data makes the system better which then iterates an even better experience which makes them sell more cars which means that they get more data which means that all the

way up y um and that means that they leave any competition in the dust very very quickly mhm uh and I realized that there is a it's called a power law right uh so the Matthew principle says it's a quote from the Bible um to those who have everything more will be given to those who have nothing more will be taken right uh and it it explains why success begets more success and failure begets more failure yeah people hate to hear that don't they yeah because it identifies that it isn't some ruthless capitalist malign Force

that's keeping them from success and giving it to other people it's a natural byproduct of the way that increasing success begets more success is that was a Bible referencing faith was a Bible talking about more faith because more faith I think that it was more to do with at least my interpretation of it is it's more to do with poverty and success in in kind of the social realm however I would imagine it's the same with everything dude confidence you know the people who are on an absolute tear whether this be in the NBA or

in podcasting or in art or in music or in whatever that are just everything they touch is Magic M and it just gets better and better and better and then you see the people that are on the other side of that hill and they everything that they do just gets worse and that reinforces their fears about it being wor the um baseball pitcher that's got The Yips right just can't hit anything at all um and what I realized was that the show and my exposure to all of these people you know Jordan Peterson jocker willink

Andrew hubman David gogins like all of these different people mhm has given me the same kind of um competitive advantage that Tesla has mhm because for each podcast that I do that's another layer of paint right as Rogan would call it yeah more data for you to precisely know what works what resonates more interlinking stories uh and that means that when you have a conversation with someone dude I've had a conversation with a guy who's trying to re-engineer human DNA to be able to survive space flight because our DNA is very very fragile and space

doesn't have the protection of um the from radiation that we have here on Earth mhm so one of the problems that we're going to have even if you could create the life support systems you could create a propulsion uh system that would get us to Alpha sanor or whatever sufficiently quickly DNA is going to suffer it's going to be really really difficult so and I'm like okay well [ __ ] who have I spoken to that's got something similar to do with this and there is something and that's where um you can start to see

people that look unbelievably competent the goggin of the world MH someone that has this inhuman level of capacity mhm and yet layers of paint every single day for years and years and years and decades mhm you can see how that happens yeah I mean I guess your your wisdom Journey I'm still thinking about that too because I was I was you're at the nightclub and I'm thinking it's definitely a different path path than Marcus aelius you know to gain that wisdom but and what why I was thinking about that is you said you're kind of

repurposing it's been discussed before just as Ryan holiday has proven Marcus's wisdom is still relevant today I mean you read uh what is what is his meditations meditations and it's it's like it can apply today how how does that work but I guess it goes back to your point that nothing's really changed correct is right the fundamental problems that everybody faces are the same as they've always been the original name for ation was letters to himself right is what he he wrote it as was never meant to be published uh so you can imagine this

you know philosopher god king who is trying to be virtuous in a time of massive corruption he deals with the antonine plague you know this this basically a pandemic which affects half of the Roman Empire or something and he gets uh struck down and his only surviving son or his eldest surviving son is this like party boy idiot mhm uh who really shouldn't Ascend the throne but he because aelius was given such a leg up by his mentor he kind of has faith that you can craft a very rough rock into a beautiful gemstone and

unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case when his son does come into power but yeah nothing is that particularly new but another thing that I really love one of my favorite things from Marcus aelius is the whole universe is change and life itself is but what we deem it mhm life itself is but what we deem it the eight most profound words in all of philosophy what he means is that things are going to happen you are going to have experiences in life almost all of the important impacts of how those experiences change you

are going to be the story that you tell yourself about what that experience means H how you interpret it so you could imagine that you are yesterday meaning you had to carry a 72 lb Rock up a 1.5 mile hill that's got 1,000 ft of Ascension right the way that I felt after doing that first leg up a very steep incline mhm was painful but satisfying I knew why I felt that way right the story that I told myself about why my heart rate was at 140 150 and my shoulders were burning and I was

sweating and all of this stuff was because of what I'd done mhm if I felt that spontaneously sat in a car in traffic I would call an ambulance I think what the [ __ ] is happening to me I'm having a pan attack or heart attack or something so the story that you tell yourself in some regard very much is what's happening right you know the framing that you place around the present moment largely determines your experience of it and this is where having faith in yourself having confidence in yourself you know an undeniable stack

of proof that you can deal with whatever is put in front of you is super important yeah it's true well it's you know I I learned people they watch things like this and you don't you don't really know the person yeah you can listen to hours you can try to interpret what they're saying infer what they actually mean who they are but you don't really know but how I find out what type of person somebody is is you put a [ __ ] rock on their back right and so what I what I saw yesterday

um people who don't know you can make all sorts of assumptions but what I saw yesterday was and why I like doing it is because when someone suffers there's never more honest time you can't fake when you're suffering you can't fake it it's one reason why suffering the mob has used torture to they're going to pull out fingernails they're going to find out the truth about a person the military puts their they make their men suffer because they want to find out who's weak and who's the best because you cannot lie when you're suffering what

I saw yesterday is you were suffering it hurt but I liked I saw a clip um the guys filmed of you I was watching it last night you're going up the hill and you were talking about suffering for no reason I think is how you termed it is uh is a challenge you know it's not like you're doing a race it's not like anybody's watching so to speak but do you think that suffering is the ultimate truth teller truth serum it definitely opens people up so this was two things again from Goggins which people need

to go and check this episode out cuz it was so much fun MH um two concepts from his new book one is performance without purpose uh and the other is chosen and unchosen suffering mhm so unchosen suffering is going to happen in life mhm your parents are going to pass away loved ones are going to die your relationships are going to break down your body is going to fail you you're going to become ill or sick or destitute things are going to happen that you have no control over and the only way that you can

prepare yourself for unchosen suffering is with chosen suffering right you can elect to put yourself into a position to become a stronger alloy of whatever the metal is that you're made of and by purposefully choosing difficult things you will armor yourself against that situation it's still going to suck MH but think about how much more fragile you would be if you hadn't overcome all of this stuff we spoke about this yesterday every single person that I know that is incredibly successful in a balanced way and has a good perspective on it elects to do very

hard things regularly it humbles them it reminds them that they're just mortal and it also means that if the entire Main media apparatus tries to come down on top of you let's say just as a hypothetical let's say that that occurs that you can deal with it because you know that you've dealt with a thousand disgusting kettlebell workouts followed by a cold tub or whatever and then the performance without a purpose thing is is from David's new book as well and I found that very interesting because a lot of the time people need an excuse

to perform mhm they need a race to be working toward a goal a holiday a photo shoot a wedding right and that is what drives them forward and you know that's not nothing that's an incredibly powerful potent motivator worked for a long lot of people if you can manage to perform without that MH that's real power because it means that not only are you going to choose your suffering but you're going to continue to hit close to your maximum performance MH with no Finish Line no crowds celebrating your completion no glory no nothing M uh

and that why you know you carrying this [ __ ] pointless Rock up a hill with Mar pen on it yeah is with no one there mhm that's why that's impressive that's why that and that's something that for me I as I've got more mature into my training age I I find it like I like training with my boys more I was prepared to push myself harder on my own in the past and now I like to train train with my boys I like throw and get some metal music on all the rest of it

and that's fun but it has made me more fragile when it comes to training on my own I can't push myself as hard so that's something having seen you having spent time with Goggins that's something that I'm going to try and uh reintroduce like that that ability to be self-powered as well as uh use the motivation of others yeah and and goggin is it seems like he's mastered that because he doesn't post often so it's uh he's doing it every day you know it his routine you guys talked about that in detail and people think

that that follow him know his routine but he's a master of suffering on his own and I think that's that's what's given him great power and influence and it's you're right it's not easy but yeah I was thinking too about Marcus's uh writings to himself or meditations to himself or whatever that was and it's like so my version of that is I wrote poser on that rock so that's the only one word and uh and I just like thinking about yeah people call me a poser and I'm like that's all I need that so that's

my version of Marcus's deep thoughts so Goggins has got a very similar um motivation desire that you do I think I asked him toward the end of the episode I start saying uh someone is struggling to do hard things and he was like what are the excuses for it and I said well it's cold outside the couch is warm part an argument and he's saying keep going and I was like what he says I need you to keep going I was like this is like a sex thing David like and uh I was like uh

you you're hung over you've had a hard day at work and he's like yep yep yep and he's like that [ __ ] there makes me happy because I know that everybody else is facing that and that everybody else is going to fold with that right and um I reflected on that segment a good bit and and I've also reflected on your like poser thing as well and not bitterness or resentment but uh the desire to prove other people wrong is a [ __ ] potent fuel yeah but it is toxic I do think that

as much as proving other people wrong is great and useful and can get you a good amount of the way there I do wonder how much peace you find with that and I asked Goggins that as well I said have you found peace and he says when you go to war with yourself you find an awful lot of peace right so maybe the only way out is through with stuff like this but I think we've spoken about we spoke about a good amount in the car yesterday that I want for the people that do this

sort of thing that are going to war with themselves I do want them to go to bed on a nighttime having made a sacrifice having tried to inspire other people but I want them to be at peace you know I don't care about whether they're happy or not but I do want them to be peaceful right and um it does make me think like if I could gift just a little bit more um Insight around like how much you impact people The Davids of the world etc etc uh just to like a [ __ ]

like if the guys could have a tiny bit more peace but if you had a little bit more peace how much less motivation and discipline would you have that's what I was thinking of right then because I also Hear What I Hear when people say peace like that is I also see a lot of people say the key is balance and when I think about that I'm like if you're balanced you're probably not doing [ __ ] to stand out you're going to be very a lot of people are balanced you know they they go

run a mile they have a cookie yeah very balanced you know you rewarded your effort the best the people I know who are the best at what they do are not balanced and I don't know about how peace relates to that um I don't I feel that peace in the mountains at home I never feel I feel like I I don't I have a hard time sleeping because I'm like I should be uh putting miles doing work I'm wasting time sleeping would you rather life be way where you were able to sleep for longer where

you were able to take time off the mountain mhm I don't know I mean this is all I really know I I know you know sacrificing more makes me you know it feels like when you're exhausted like last night I'm like we had a good day good training day uh good Brotherhood love love the fellowship I felt pretty good last night I was distracted with thinking about this discussion today you know because I I I was kind of intimidated because this is kind of an aside but all the preparation you do to prepare you know

to be at your best podcast wise and I'm like oh my God I [ __ ] suck I I don't do anything it's like everything he does I do the opposite and so I was a little intimidated but I was at peace with the effort yesterday so that's but that's not balanced I mean because it's not and this is where I think it's it's very interesting looking at the sort of inspiration that guys like you and David give to normal people right um you are in the top 0.1 percentile of people that do hard things

unchosen suffering on a daily basis and that inspires a lot of other people um but you hear this a lot like uh I'm glad for the inspiration but I wouldn't want to live that life mhm and maybe you could almost see it as kind of like how a scout for an army is going out that on their own you know they're suffering with Wilderness and loneliness and foraging for food and all the rest of it for the good of the troops what they bring back is the information that makes the rest of the army better

and that's a [ __ ] Noble purpose that's an incredibly Noble purpose I haven't thought about that before yeah I mean I do see because I think did you ask gogin or maybe he's talked about being at I don't know um The Suffering it's like how can you be a peace suffering but yeah I mean when you go to with yourself you find a lot of Peace said but here's another thing as well we spoke about this before we started that um you can't take part of someone's life right someone can't look at you or

Goggins and say I you know what it is I really like his approach to training but I don't when who sleep 4 hours a night or uh permanently feel like I should be out there getting in miles I want Cam's motivation for training but I don't want to have to deal with like the uh permanent ambient discontent hard you don't get this is an out this is a onesie right you have to take every single bit you have to take the bad childhood you have to take the loneliness at the age of 13 you have

to take the regret for four decades about the decision to leave your father every single bit of you has contributed to make the person that you are right and this is where um it's like Alchemy like taking something which is toxic or bad or useless and turning it into something which is positive mhm uh that is where the magic lies I think and it's the same for me as well you know going from how could I take a childhood where I was uh alone and uh flawed felt like I was flawed felt like there was

something wrong with me and that I needed to find a way to fix that I needed to find out why I would obsess over stuff like why people in school tied their ties a certain way or the type of shoes that they had or the type of haircut they had I'll be adamant that that was the reason that they had a good group of friends and I didn't and it was because of the fact that they were able to socially connect and I didn't I didn't have the same social skills that they did right uh

but you roll the clock forward 20 years and that level of attention and introspection has meant that I can have insights that I really value and then I can talk about them and maybe they help some other people too so on the bright side of a lot of the things that you're ashamed about yourself for MH are some of the things that you're most proud of yourself for as well you know it's a double-edged sword and on one side is the suffering that you've been through a lot of it unchosen and on the other side

are the things that people praise you for the most right yeah it's a rocky Journey isn't isn't it um one thing my whole point with this podcast is talking to outliers and that's I look I see you as an outlier of you know wisdom of leadership of uh perspective what's your so you've made this impact and I see I see your trajectory and I see it I think it's going to Skyrocket because you're like you remind me of Jordan Peterson but also like a David Beckham type like you know broy Peters I don't know but

uh what's your goal what I mean what's your goal where are you taking this um I'm really not very good at having long-term plans and I came from the productiv space when I first started the podcast it was big into the world of productivity and that was something that I always felt a little bit like a fraud for because in productivity is supposed to have your uh 10-year goal with your oneyear stretch with your 90day Sprint with your daily actions and this is how you build it up and I was good at doing the daily

stuff but I just never had a long-term plan and it's the same with this like I just don't know where it's going to go I I I still feel like the podcast is hopelessly undersubscribed compared with where it could be yeah so that excites me the fact that we've got more headro for growth but I would like to um start to really try and pay it forward to people because for a long time you're slipstreaming everybody else is clout and you're kind of repurposing ideas from other people and it gets to a stage after a

while that you can be a springboard for ideas that you think are super important uh and reminding guys but girls as well like that there is so much agency that they can have they can change themselves so much if that was the impact that I had where it just gives people a greater sense of control over their own lives MH dude I consider that a win I mean I it looks like I'm going to start maybe trying to write a book or two uh over the next couple of years um some live shows I'm getting

a lot of offers to do sort of live talks and that really excites me as well um maybe some products of some kind I think there's some gaps having spent a lot of time working with partners and and stuff for the show there's certain things products out there that I wish were out there and I want to make them uh which is cool it's not really about it's all just a byproduct for me of learning it's like if I can satisfy my curiosity every single day everything else is going to be fine I see um

so yeah I was just I was just thinking about uh on your journey it seems like I see you're reaching a lot of men what's the breakdown on men to women uh on audio it's about 65 35 uh on YouTube it's like 9010 or or um 85 15 YouTube Excuse massively male in any case right why is that well you know my daughter watches a lot of book review shows those are all girls but why do you why do you think uh that YouTube is skewed for men I don't know I think it's skewed for

men for the type of content that we're putting out okay uh I mean call her daddy or whatever girls watch or listen to It's not like girls don't use but when it comes to the personal development stuff I don't know I don't know the algorithm is a hell of a beast it just it just starts to deliver stuff but you know I mean if you're a guy that's watching endurance racing or slap fighting or whatever the likelihood that you also get serve David Goggins on a podcast is probably pretty high pretty high yeah yeah um

so that that that brings me to another Point all the people that I follow and maybe it is the algorithm controlling my entire life but these people who are influential right now um and we'll just say uh goggin Joo Rogan is there a common theme you can throw you in there too as this Ascension up um everybody is fit and disciplined is that is there people who are not fit and not disciplined who are influential well think about it this way do you think that the most successful people in the world became successful and then

got disciplined or do you think that they became disciplined and then got successful yeah obviously the latter yeah correct yeah you know it's an outcome now you that's not for me to say that there aren't undisciplined people that have managed to get super super successful like we all know that there's flukes out there and I come from that world right like I came from this reality TV obligation free Status plucked out of obscurity and 6 weeks later 2 million followers and a million pound fast fashion deal that's the world that I came from right and

that is the most transactional low investment way that somebody can become super famous and successful for nothing right however I don't think that's scalable and the only way that that happens is you beat the odds it's like a lottery you ever see the Hunger Games like yeah like it's being plucked out of obscurity and hoping that you're going to be given this opportunity right that's not that's not how most people are going to win most people are going to win by through discipline okay correct and so I and again is it the algorithm or is

it just a people I'm but uh we spoke about this a little yesterday those seem like Joe Joe would say he's a cist but more right leaning hard work type mindset I don't know about political um some of those guys don't talk politics but who is influential on the left for the let's say we talked about we reach mostly men I mean you you said 9010 on YouTube 6535 but that's still mostly men I'm 9010 um who is having influence fluence on the left for these young the the men that we're talking about and and

people characterize young men as many times the power of the company because or power of the country excuse me because they're the ones building the roads putting in the INF building the infrastructure Water and Power um going to war that's young men that feels like the power of a country so who on the left is reaching those type of people I would say guy called Hassan ABI who is a twitch streamer he is the I think uh nephew of one of the founders of The Young Turks chuga uh there's another guy called Destiny uh also

another twitch streamer like very much from the left but Destiny especially is a very very well-meaning guy he is uh super open to having conversations I'm doing a panel with him in Austin in a couple of months time uh he regularly goes on shows where he disagrees with people he this guy is he plays star which is like a a strategy role playing game right Twitch streaming is games right it it is usually although there is increasingly people like Hassan who just talk it's there's a category called just talking or just chatting I think it

is okay um I don't know anything about this so here's the here's the wild thing so Destiny does just chatting right he'll talk or debate people and while he's doing it he'll be playing this strategy game so he'll run rings around some of the best Debaters in the world whilst taking over a new planet in [ __ ] Starcraft or some [ __ ] it's it's wild to see um so both of those guys are like relatively okay meaning examples I think but you do have a problem especially if you're talking about men that the

left has mostly abandoned that conversation with them MH it is so unpopular to talk about men's issues and to raise men up and to pedestalize them masculinity uh and Traditional Values in any sort of a way that any left person who wants to try and gain traction online with certain areas of the left is going to struggle to do that because as soon as you like where is the firm place that you're going to stand in order to talk about something good from the left for menh you know as soon as you begin to discuss

anything here's the way it works what men want in terms of a role that can make them feel proud of themselves and what is popular to talk about in many left leaning circles mhm don't line right you have the choice between virtue signaling the effective talking points to the left M or you have things that are admiration uh aspirational uh for men to follow and those don't cross over right and that means that the left largely has abandoned the conversation with men seems like a flaw on The Matrix uh it's [ __ ] something dude

and here's the here's the problem like for anybody that is and there are like you know [ __ ] half of the country is from the the left M anybody that is a well-meaning leftist if that was me mhm I would be very very unhappy at the conversation that the left is having with men because the vacuum is allowing whoever you hate the most from the right to take over this conversation if you have a problem with jocker willink or David Goggins or Cameron Haynes or Andrew Tate or pick just in wallet like pick whoever

your heinous example of patriarchal super structure is MHM where's the alternative that you're offering right yeah that's that's the premise to the question because I don't see it but like like I said maybe I don't know I mean I don't know twitch yeah but I don't see any I see a lot of I don't know I just don't see any males on that side that I would listen to in like you know I I feel like pretty open-minded if somebody's making sense I'm like okay I can I can see where they're coming from I don't

see it I mean I don't see it on the left I don't think that well I don't know maybe I'm missing it but I spend a good bit of time being exposed to this sort of stuff MH and yeah I mean you is it impossible to like eating meat and shooting guns whilst believing that immigration is okay and that being pro-choice is okay right he was he was an interesting thing so Sam Harris as a guy that kind of keeps on getting in hot water a little bit at the moment through a variety of different

means but I always appreciated and I still do that Sam is prepared to hold a bunch of views which don't align with any one party right so for instance he was anti-trump but anti-woke okay he was prox but anti-lockdown he was um Pro Free Speech but he's also I think pro- life pro-choice sorry um this means that you have all of these crossing over streams that no one is going to be happy like you're going to piss off both sides with your Centrist opinion which Falls both ways on different topics you can be weaponized on

both from both sides dude the the best way to guarantee disagreement is to not be in an extreme if you're out on the extreme you guarantee agreement from at least one side but if you're in the middle you guarantee disagreement from both M and the problem that you come up against is that he kind of becomes an unreliable Ally right if I know that you are the cookie cutter leftist every single view I know one of your views and from that I can accurately predict everything else that you believe MH I don't need to assess

you I know that you're a trustworthy Ally because I know that you hold every single belief and you're easy to predict mhm but if you're someone that falls left and right on a variety of different topics well [ __ ] knows what you're going what about when the next social issue arises maybe you're not going to be with us here's another thing that I realized that an absurd ideological belief is a show of fty to your own side and it's a threat display to the other so let's say that uh in order to be on

the left you needed to believe that the Earth was flat right let's just say okay what you're saying is I put the value of this ideology so high that I am prepared to push reality and my own senses to the side in service of this so it's like a a show of loyalty right I'm pushing my own rationality out of the way in order to uh be loyal to this group and this movement so it is a a show of fty it's like I don't know like a branding exercise almost and it's the same on

both left and right and what that means is that you can judge the commitment of certain people to a movement by the Ridiculousness of the belief that they're prepared to swallow right and if they're not prepared to swallow it then well maybe you're not actually that trustworthy of an ally yeah yeah it seem like it wouldn't uh Trump people be couldn't they be categorized as that because they would say um they will take Trump and all his fa flaws to support that side right I mean there there because he says some crazy stuff I mean

yeah you can say well he produced and he did a great job leading the country and all this said some crazy stuff but because you're aligned here you're going to just absorb all that and just deal with it correct yeah you you would be prepared to give um Trump or Biden a degree of Freedom that you wouldn't show to the other side right you know like you have to treat if you want to be a rational being you have to treat each uh situation with as much rationality as you can find right and you go

okay well if I'm going to let let's say how many Trump gaffs and like sexist outbursts is worth a Biden alic slip up yeah [ __ ] in his pants like how how how how do you how are you supposed to do that but you would happily point out the other side's flaw and forgive your own this is just the nature of bias seeds right that's absolutely fine for you to say that I well I've got my prior then you can't step into the situation and say coming from a place of reasonable rationality I have

morally reasoned that this is the way it's like no no it's not it's not you are you are a biased individual as is everybody but don't claim that you're not do you think it's getting worse in that regard or has it always been like this no it's it's the political polarization the data seems to suggest that it's getting worse and the a bunch of different reasons for it one that I found which is really really interesting everyone talks about Echo Chambers online right so you um start to engage with a particular type of content and

then the algorithm feeds you more and more of that content I had a guy called uh he wrote human compatible Dr Stuart Russell he literally wrote the book The Textbook which is used in nearly 80 languages worldwide to teach people about how AI works okay he wrote this book about the alignment problem which is how do you get computer systems to effectively align with what you actually want them to do so there's a a thought experiment called the paperclip maximizer have you heard of this no [ __ ] brilliant so this dude I haven't I

carry a rock that's all I do well you might have learned about paperclips while you were carrying the rock I don't know um you could imagine that a paperclip company manages to create a super intelligent artificial general intelligence right let's just go with me okay uh and Nick Bostrom from the future of humanities Institute in Oxford gives this example where he says the programmer gave it one function and he said make as many paper clips as possible in presum that seems like a pretty good idea for a paperclip company to give to its new super

intelligent AGI now the problem is that the AGI realizes well first off if I'm Switched Off I can't make as many paperclips as possible so immediately it neutralizes all of the people that work in the factory says if they stop me from making as many paperclips I won't make as many paper clips so everybody's tranquilized then it realizes that all of the atoms that make up the planet Earth could be used to become paperclips so it just turns the entire Earth into paper clips and then it realizes that all of the matter in the entire

universe should be paper clips now the function of make us as many paper clips as possible wasn't quite aligned with what we wanted right so here in you can see this in compatibility problem it's called the alignment problem okay and one of the issues that Stuart brings up in human compatible is with uh the algorithms that optimize social media content there two ways that you can increase the amount of clickthrough that you get on a social media Platform One Is to make the content that you serve to people ever more accurate based on their preferences

right so I that's where the echo chamber thing comes from now the other way to do it is to reprogram the preferences of the user to make them more predictable H explain that so you could imagine that if I am able to shift your preferences ever so slightly over time MH I can know what you are going to want more easily right if you are someone that falls left of center on one View and right of Center on another that's actually quite hard to predict in the same way that we said before you're like this

unreliable Ally yeah whereas if I can push you all the way out to this cookie cutter version of left or right or you know libertarian or authoritarian or whatever it's very easy for me to predict what you're going to want so there is a two-way streak going on with algorithms one is it is trying to predict what you want but the other is it's trying to repurpose and reprogram your preferences to make you easier to predict right and I think that that really explains a good part of what's going on the social media algorithms have

an incentive to push people out to the edges because they're easy to predict when they're there yeah once you're in there social reinforcement mechanisms encourage you to behave in a way that is going to be uh applauded by your side that usually means the most extreme low resolution take like nobody really gets rewarded for nuance on the internet right um and then once you are there you use the other side as a tribal sort of threat display thing like we are not them we will bind ourselves together over the mut hatred of that outg group

um and yeah that pushes people to either side it means that it's even more difficult to speak across the aisle and finally any show of nuance or subtlety in your Viewpoint [Music] um it's seen as a weakness it's seen as a [ __ ] in your armor yeah from the other side they say oh so maybe you're not quite as committed right as we thought you were it's the whole premise behind clickbait on articles right I mean that it's extreme that's just a a one sentence or few word example of extremism for whatever the point

is left right or whatever it's just like here's what you want here's what's important I mean take it yep and yeah that that uh so I was thinking about that as you were talking and this was kind of interesting is America the capital of podcasting I mean is you know they're talking about uh America is people consider us being elitist sometimes you know Pro what our country whatever I guess I thought everybody was like that every country was like that but maybe I need to ask you why why did you move here why did you

move to Austin to podcast or can people podcast in other countries or what is it why is it is it do I only see American podcasts or are there is there some African podcast I don't know about this is killing it uh probably I think the UK and the US and Canada and Australia are leading the way with regards to this just because they've got the best access to language especially when it comes to podcasting right access to language well they speak English as their first language you know it's going to be very difficult for

someone who is uh French right to be as effective on a podcast that can access all of the people that speak English I guess I don't know what is the percentage of breakdown of language how many chines I think Chinese is the most used language or it'll be English and Chinese will be first and second okay um and then probably something around Indian subcontinent type stuff yeah but uh the reason I moved out here is I really like the community aspect that Austin has everyone's a cultural Refugee from somewhere else they were super open to

me but more than that the for all that America is a you know disgusting CIS heteropatriarchal super structure that's capitalistically keeping everybody down MH you guys have an amazing positive attitude to life and the blue sky Vision that the American dream now is like the after effect of that perhaps you know like from the 80s and '90s where it was like really really [ __ ] potent yeah still exists you know I I fa some challenge with regards to work um and all of my friends that live in Austin will just tell me dude you

got this like here's 15 reasons why this is going to be absolutely fine and here's five solutions for you that's not to say that there aren't people like that in the UK but I met like I say about a million people right over year a decade and a half and I managed to from them distill down a very very small group of friends and it took a lot of work I I I really wish that I could gift people in the UK the level of positivity and uh the like inclination that you guys have over

here that blue sky Vision um very pro-social very outgoing uh prepared to deal with things um why is it why do you think it's different there's a number of reasons I mean where does culture come from is like just generally an interesting question the UK is water locked on all sides and it's quite small the population density is super high so there is a higher level of competition and sort of zero Suess like you see somebody else's success as as detracting from yours because there's just less to go around I see um that Pioneer Spirit

doesn't exist you our countries exist it there's dude there trees in our country that are older than your country right and it just means that there's less new stuff new ground to Break um the weather makes a huge impact I think it's really cold and really miserable most of the year and it genuinely impacts people's demeanor right um there's a whole a whole host of reasons but I wish that it wasn't that way and it's one of the things that I really appreciate about being out here mhm uh that you know I'll get checked in

on by huberman or whoever like about what been going on or just like like a a well-meaning message about something which was RAR to find in the UK there is still even the best most growth-minded people in the world you know Steven Bartlett this guy that's got a big show with buddies and true Jordy also another guy with a big show like even us I find we communicate despite the fact that we're like you know the British wing of podcasting or whatever even we communicate less than uh some of the guys that I deal with

in the US just because you you're more forthcoming some would say some would say uh like um overly excitable but like I like it I really really like it I I've the excitability of America is like something that I very much appreciate this Big Stiff idiot of a housemate Zach and he's like this 6'4 240b weightlifter yeah and he's just like a huge [ __ ] alian all the time and he's really really good for me he's a very good influence what's an alian like a dog oh okay like a [ __ ] big fluffy

excitable dog I got you right yeah I guess I didn't know that breed um yeah I I was wondering about that just thinking about it seems like all the podcast I know of our America based of course would make sense but I just didn't know how the how it worked but that that is interesting um and you're at the end of the Oregon Trail speaking of pioneer Spirit here we are right Oregon what's the Oregon Trail that's how they came over in they explored the new new Lewis and Clark If youever heard of Lewis and

Clark anyway those are the people the explorers that came over here on the Oregon Trail and discovered this land so dude I was I was driving through uh New Orleans driving to New Orleans um three or four years ago and uh I couldn't believe when you look at the [ __ ] landscape that you guys had to get through yeah navigate yeah like going through the Bayou okay so it's like a forest but it's underwater and you've got to get you just got to keep going and hope that you find something that's not totally useless

at the end of it like what if this just turns into the sea what if there's nothing on the other side of this and that's everywhere MH and you go through pick any other extreme landscape oh it's just trees that are 3T apart for the next 200 square miles and you've just got to get through them and then try and make a road and then try and make a Town and then try and get people to go there yeah it's [ __ ] insane not for the F of heart no no um I was also

thinking about this too when I was thinking about your Jour Journey um how much would you attribute Joe Rogan to you starting your podcast did you listen to him before you had a podcast massively yeah okay yeah he was he was very influential for for me I think you know anybody that's in this sort of a space uh that hasn't been influenced by Joe as an outlier MH the guy has pioneered an awful lot of the way the podcasting is done he's an incredibly benevolent person to have at the top and it's not usually that

way the person that accumulates all of the Power and all of the influence is not usually prepared to give it away right very quickly to step to one side and then allow other people to shine like three or four times a week yeah and not make it about them right uh and we're we're very very fortunate uh that that's the case right now and there is a part of me that I don't know is I wonder who comes next I wonder who takes that mantle next because you know if we beat the odds two for

two that the next person is equally benevolent and good willed and good natured and all the rest of it yeah [ __ ] hell like that would be a surprise so maybe we do end up with like some absolute Tyrant dick that now takes over the podcasting Crown in however many decades Rogan stops doing it right but no he's hugely influential man I used to listen to him I told you yesterday about this drive that I used to do from Manchester to Newcastle which was heading home after the bar correct yeah so you know do

I'd accumulate you know 30,000 40,000 miles a year of driving almost all on my own uh and I would be listening to whoever it was you know episodes 6 700 was probably when I started listening to Joe MH um yeah man I've spent you know thousands of hours listening to that guy and then you sit down with him and it's just the same experience that you've had before it is one of the easy things I suppose about having listened to someone so much that you sit down and you have a conversation you go I kind

of know where this is going I've got an insight yeah is uh okay so there's a Cate category of people and I would put you in there what is an intellectual you know people say they'll say Jordan Peterson or the Brett Weinstein or Sam Harris they're intellectuals what is that uh people that think deeply about stuff I suppose there's no reason that I wouldn't put Rogan in that category as well the only difference is that he does a lot people look at intellectual as a a thinker not a doer mhm but Joe thinks a lot

he also just does a lot and the same would go for a Goggins you know he he mentioned it on the podcast he didn't put it in the book I wonder whether if he does a third book whether he'll talk about this he's got this like sweet or I think he calls it a garage of garage of um 20 wst earlier iau that I caught it you like it you said it you're obsessed with wst I've never heard it it's awesome he screaming it we tried to go for dinner yesterday and he was screaming at

at the top of your lungs I I don't know about screaming yeah that was what happened server came over and said sir I need you to stop shouting that word um I think that it's people that think deeply about problems is how I would look at it it's the most like broad definition that I could think of but I really like the idea of this uh doer philosopher situation you know somebody that doesn't just think about stuff but then goes out and acts it and you go back to the ancient Greek that they didn't think

you were supposed to just consider you were supposed to act you know you supposed to wrestle you were supposed to uh feel the extremes that your body could go to as well and doing hard things mentally is good but doing hard things physically benefits that and they compliment each other maybe absolutely yeah okay you know there was an article I I I can't remember what was it was the New York Times I'm not sure but it was called the intellectual dark web do you remember that article yeah yeah and who they who they put in

there that's where I was like what is an intellectual really you know and what's this dark web it's like um what do you think about that piece yeah I think it's interesting now because it's kind of like a a loose that was a a loose um conglomeration of certain individuals that had a good amount of clout within the thinking talking space and now the band has broken up and none of them are friends really there's a couple of them that are still friends but basically none of them are it was uh Brett Weinstein uh Eric

Weinstein Sam Harris Ben Shapiro Jordan Peterson Rogan was in there Douglas Murray was in there CLA Layman maybe Barry Weiss uh I think Dave rubben was in there and now like half of the people don't speak to half of the people yeah and a bunch of the people don't speak to any of the people so when that came together it was a cultural moment that was needed because you had to have a show that is a way that certain individuals who do not necessarily disag do not necessarily agree with regards to their politics can have

a well-meaning conversation right and this was the height of woke you know it was kind of just before BLM and everything kicked off and you needed to be able to show Ben who is as conservative as they come and Brett who was from the left and Jordan who was a little bit more Centrist and Dave Ruben who used to be on the left and you know blah blah blah you had all of these different people within Sam Harris who's you know sort of swings both ways they were all able to have a conversation and the

point of that was to try and turn down the volume of the conversation this you know partisan Echo chamber right versus left thing that was going on MH and um for whatever reason that experiment didn't end up going particularly well in the long term it was effective in the short term yeah but the fact that it still sticks about is really interesting to me and I'm not really too sure why like you know that was one article nobody as far as I'm aware unironically self-referred to themselves as like this Avengers [ __ ] group of

intellectuals right and then it kind of you know pitted out within the space of 18 months or something uh and and it was never really used that much during the 18 months in any case and yet it's still spoken about to this day so there was something culturally important about that whether you agree with the people or not whether you liked it or not whether you thought it was cringe or not you can't deny that it's stuck about as a term mhm and I do think that there's something interesting about that I'm not really too

sure why it's the case but it was needed to just turn down the volume of the conversation what why do you think that they were now they're not as tight as they were thatou some of the people you mentioned it's beyond not as tight as they were man I mean Sam in a couple of most recent episodes he did one with Josh seps and he's had a couple of others where he just outright calls out uh Dave Rubin for being like a dense idiot he says that Brett Weinstein he you know he can't speak to

him anymore he's like this person's lost his mind and that person's and Sam's kind of a burn it all down socially kind of guy because he's got his own thing going on and he's like an individual with regards to that um I think one of the problems that you had there was the ostensively what was supposed to happened with the IDW was people were from differing points of view were prepared to have conversations where they all disagree and that happened but it only happened up to a point M and then a combination of trump and

pushed the limits of how much these people could disagree and still be on the same page yes precisely and and the problem that you had was Whenever you set yourself up as being um as having a particular standard so for instance with David gogins or yourself right you guys have positioned yourselves as the do hard things people right and then if somebody finds out that do hard things people continue to shy away from doing hard things they'll go ah I got you I got you you prick that's your hypocrisy yes and one of the issues

you had with the IDW especially was that it was the we talk about things that nobody else can talk about in a well-meaning way people so as soon as there started to be cracks and splinters in that that was the hypocrisy that got pointed out I see uh even if you know they might have maybe come together had they have not had so much scrutiny on them I kind of get the impression that it was doomed from the from the start um but he was other thing that I realized that was really interesting this is

from uh the happiness hypothesis by Jonathan height and he talks about why people love Scandal so much and this is certainly something that I see online as well hypocrisy is like catnip to the internet right and the reason that I think that that's the case is that if you call out somebody else's hypocrisy or their uh lack of ability to keep to their promises MH what you do the subtext of what you're saying is I would never yeah I would me I would never I would never behave like that I stick to my word my

virtue is impeccable I am the most honest and trustworthy person so what happens is this sort of uh performative outrage allows your morality to stand on the shoulders of somebody else you get to feel moral whilst having done nothing moral to earn it right and this is why I think the internet is so prepared to call out hypocrisy it's like purpose built for the internet because all that you need is two clips yeah first clip someone making a preposition second clip somebody breaking it and you go look at this look at this and the subt

of that is I am not that all of my views are perfectly aligned you don't need to worry about me but let's have a look at that person over there yeah and then if you get a reputation of being the sort of person that calls out people that do that people then want to call you out on your inconsistencies yeah which is why starting fights on the internet that is is like doing outright call outs is a relatively dangerous thing to do yeah um cuz it's going to come back around it's open season as soon

as you decide to do that it's open season you need to be incredibly strategic huberman actually had this really [ __ ] interesting take I put it in my newsletter this week MH and um if anyone wants to check that out by the way there's a a reading list of a 100 books that I absolutely love and you can get that at Chris wilx.com books but I put this uh this quote in from huberman he's a really interesting guy cuz he kind of purposefully avoids um drama yeah yeah yeah yeah he he he doesn't really

even engage in talking about why he avoids drama but he he's always positive I mean if he's talking about anybody there's always a positive spin to it it's sickening isn't it yeah um advice I got early in my career don't over engage in any controversy unless you are willing to stake your entire reputation on it rather keep focused on discovering new things and creating or else you become known for the controversy and nothing else that is no going back right you want to be known for the things that you do or do you want to

be known for the takes you have right exactly I want to be known for the things that I do I think the people who who choose uh for the takes is they're not doing anything noteworthy right wouldn't that be the argument well it's very easy to do that now there are people who have great takes and also do things like that would be and it's impossible to be in the [ __ ] podcasting world and be like Oh I'm don't want to be known for my takes it's like dude you are your takes but on

the flip side if someone is able to both do and think at the same time that's that's good yeah huberman is a man he's a unicorn too as I was explaining this yesterday is like normally people as smart as him they're nerd out I don't I can't understand what two nerds talking to each other are saying but he talks at my level it seems like about smart things and I'm like oh okay that makes sense to me somehow I don't know how but it's because how he's delivering it it's a it's a that's a skill

that man not everybody has especially you know what uh what is he a neuroscientist uh yeah I think that's his qualification from Stanford yeah yeah and so he came here and lifted ways like a dumbass like me and that was kind of cool how can somebody be both it's pretty amazing yeah you learn about Opthalmology or whatever it is that his specialities in and then come in here and Crush you on deadlift I know but that's you know this is what attracts people and this is why as well I think that shows like Joe's and

and hopefully mine and yours are interesting and attractive because most people aren't just interested in one thing most people aren't just a neuroscientist they aren't just a weightlifter they aren't just a film nerd you know they they're idios syncratic they've got tons of different interests and things that they want to maybe they've got like a a secret Ultimate Frisbee like Obsession or something they just love watching Motocross uh accidents or whatever in YouTube like one of my friends says if you want to find out who somebody truly is look at their YouTube watch history between

the hours of 10 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. at night that's that's window into the soul that you're never going to get um people are interested in lots of things which means that when you see someone which is multifaceted as well like a huberman you go ah yeah like he's like me he's not just one thing he's competent in multiple things he's got lots of different interests uh and that's why I think you know shows that um facilitate those sorts of conversations are effective as well it's to me it's inspiring because you know you can say

somebody's good at this one thing it's just like well that's all they do but when they are multifaceted and they're varied and they offer different skills and and can communicate effectively then you're like that to me that's inspiring it's like I want to be like that I want to be the dumbass that carries rocks but I also want to be able to write and impact people and and uh that to me that's why he's he's inspiring um who who inspires you to you know obviously Rogan but to step up your game I mean where do

you think you're impacted most by who Joe is definitely a big impact on me um I dude I take stuff from everybody I mean Sam for all that he is like very very unpopular at the moment with a lot of corners of the internet because he's had like a three or two or three like big [ __ ] Fu in mouth moments at least that's what he's being accused I think he stands behind what he said right um his ability to speak is as Elite as it gets the clarity that he speaks with the Precision

that he speaks with is world class and I'm yet to find really anybody him Peterson they're so [ __ ] precise man and and and that's something that I very much admire and we've been speaking about some of the like training that I've done to try and improve my I put you in there too because every time I see you every clip I see of you I'm just like God dang this guy's polished I mean so whatever you're doing so is Andrew Tate man Andrew Tate's ability to communicate regardless of what you think about the

things that he says the way that he says it is [ __ ] Elite yeah that guy's verbal agility is phenomenal it is and that's one of the you know let's say that you're somebody that doesn't agree with his takes right even a little bit or a lot um what Tate has identified is your ability to speak in a fluent and seductive manner can carry you a hell of a long way right and especially in a world where everybody feels quite uncertain mhm if you speak absolutes mhm that creates a little bit of order from

chaos because for me I'm sure for you as well the world's the world's changing very quickly M we don't know whether the rules from yesterday applied to today Technology's changed everything society's changed everything laws and norms and everything's up in the air so when somebody comes along and says this is the way it is right I can give you a black and white EXP why of how of what I can tell you everything you go [ __ ] thank God thank God I'm not this certain about anything in my life right therefore in order for

me to have the level of certainty that he does I would have to know everything inside out you know you observe your own hesitancy from a front row seat every single day and then you see this person come out and say I've got the answer and you go [ __ ] he's got the answer like I'm he has to be right yes uh and that's why I think that he's particularly been effective but dude I you I'm a real uh admire Tim Dylan Jesus Christ yeah that guy's ability to tell stories Chris deler as well

you know he someone that's again is going through the ringer a little bit at the moment too but that guy does solo podcasts with nobody else in the room and maintains a level of energy for 60 minutes or 90 minutes and you're like holy [ __ ] it's incredible yeah it's phenomenal and these guys are performers but they're all different you know like you know can that be learned I mean it certainly has been for me certainly has been the difference the difference between when I started my show and now is is Worlds Apart um

and it's layers of paint you know it's 600 it's probably a thousand hours over the last five years of trying to have conversations about hard things as as a kid you couldn't communicate very well so I was always like gobby we would call it in the UK like talkative um but I didn't have anyone really to talk to you know I was playing in my room on my own listening to audiobooks yeah uh there's this really cool story about a uh famous Color Picker so she was um used by interior design companies Elite interior design

companies and fashion houses to create color wheels right so these beautiful color palettes of um different shades that complement each other and there was this interview with her and she was asked how how have you managed to develop this incredibly unique skill to become the most sought-after person in the world at this she said well I've got no formal training I've got no formal training however my parents when I was about 11 or 12 years old got me the biggest Crayola crayon set that was available and I used every single one of them down to

the the end yeah and I think a lot of the passions that we have when we're a kid come back around to be the things that we want to do where an adult and for me A lot of it was audiobooks so i' be in my room on my own listening to them and you roll the clock forward by 20 years and what's the 2023 equivalent of an audio book yeah podcast yeah so yeah I think it can absolutely be learned when I see the difference in in myself from uh just the time and Detention

of doing stuff uh focused work on trying to be precise with your speech and it's made everything better it's made my social anxiety less uh it's meant that I'm able to um be more me MH you know your ability to communicate in a large degree determines other people's experience of you you know you can be whatever you feel you are there's an Essence right there's like this sort of cloud that is you yeah but that needs to get squeezed into language some sort of communication unless you're going to do sign language or something or [

__ ] interpretive dance like you need to communicate what is inside of you to everybody else that's around you language yeah and for the most part language is going to constrain that I think it's Vicken Stein that says the limits of my language mean the limits of my life I see and the broader your vocabulary the more precise that you can put across what it is that's inside of your head whether that be written or spoken or whatever you you you are more yourself MH if you can say that there is a restriction between what's

in your mind and what comes out of your mouth you're being less you you're being an imprecise version of you do do people who can't get that out of their mouth could they be a good writer though perhaps yeah but even that you know you need there has to be a way that you can communicate it whether it's from brain to hand brain to fingertips brain to mouth you have to be able to communicate it and if you can't you're going to go through life living this limited version of you uh you might be tormented

because if your mind is saying telling you one thing but you can't get it out in word or in Lang in writing yeah that would be miserable did you write as a kid did you write no no I did I did five years at Uni I did two degrees both of which were useless uh and neither of which I can remember but I didn't write for any other reason now I do a newsletter that thing I said earlier on um and I love it it's maybe 90 minutes a week it takes me to two two

hours a week I absolutely love it I love I love sitting down and writing and going through yeah it's great I haven't seen is it your thoughts on different topics yeah so I do um maybe 500w reflection on something that I've learned learned each week this week was about the effectiveness of sexual gossip uh between women like why they use it so much so women gossip way more than men right loads more than men the interesting thing about sexual gossip is that it it is a Precision targeted weapon to reduce down the competition that other

women see in their competitors so um amongst women Chastity is something that is valued by men right that on average you want to make is less promiscuous than one that isn't because of male parental uncertainty you need to make sure that the kid that comes out of that woman is yours therefore if you have a woman who is um sexually Less open you would presume that there is a greater likelihood now the thing that's subconscious correct none of this is none of this is front of brain um no one's reverse engineering this apart from The

evolutionary psychologists that I have on my show who have like you know laid this all out right um but the thing about sexual gossip the person that deploys the sexual gossip is by first off identifying oh I'm really worried about Mary because she's spending all of this time with guys I'm just really worried that she's going to get hurt that is a very caring way it's called venting um it's a very caring way to put across Mary's a [ __ ] Don't Go Near her but the other thing it does is it uh displays your

own Chastity the subtext of I'm she's going to get precise yeah and it's very difficult to disprove how you like look at all of the sex I'm not having like sex is inherently private so anyway like I did 500 words on that and then I'll have three lessons that I learned each week which I put on my Instagram which you might have seen before so that gets taken actually from the from the newsletter but just building up this variety of outlets to repurpose the [ __ ] that you learn is brilliant where where did you

learn that about women I mean where did that writings come from that was a conversation I had with Dr Tanya Reynolds who is an evolutionary psychologist Focus on inter seexual competition from the univ University of New Mexico I had her on a couple of weeks ago she was great um and I'll just you know each week I'll have a conversation I'm like [ __ ] hell that's great yeah about reflect on it precisely and it's the the Fineman technique of memorization is the best way to learn something is to teach somebody else it uh so

my training partners that I have in Austin like my housemate or whatever I'll usually read for maybe like 15 minutes or 20 minutes on a morning yeah and whoever it is is going to get it whatever I've read that morning I'm going to try and for 5 minutes while we're in the car on the way there before we put rock music on to get a samp up talk about it I'm going to try and tell them and it just means that it's such a an unbelievably good way know even that even trying to explain about

the sexual gossip thing now that's just refined it a little bit more in my mind it up yeah you know how we were talking at the start about performance without purpose Learning Without purpose is quite difficult why am I why would I go through all of the discomfort of learning all of this stuff if I wasn't going to have an outlet to to display it on right okay you know she curiosity you have incent plus your incentive is you want to be able to share it yeah to your to your listeners yeah so having a

platform in that regard can actually be one of the best vehicles for personal learning right that you can have yeah that's that's a good point how I used to learn in college and I would go through I would just I would have to write everything so I could read it what that'd be one thing but if wrote exactly what I read writing it cemented it in my brain yeah okay exactly the same as me I would take whatever the thing was I was learning the slides of the book yeah write it out on paper and

then I would learn it off by heart MH so let's say I had eight pages and I would read through all of it and then close my eyes and try and remember every single point and then once I'd done that one I'd move on to the next one and then when I got into the exam and some question about an accounting principle came up I GL okay I know that's on the one two three third page top of the third page oh and that was the one where the asterisk was like a little bit [

__ ] so I had to do it again yeah yeah yeah and I so for me I didn't really learn anything I just kind of memorized for a short period of time get through the test corre good to go correct now I have no idea what even anything was mean you both I I'm interested to hear your thoughts on masculinity and this book Wild A Heart by John Eldridge is a book uh Michael Chandler talked about and he had a great quote in there it's on on my podcast there but um we spoke about this

yesterday and I I wanted to get your thoughts on masculinity and how men in society these days but let me read this paragraph to you again out of Wild at Heart this is Page 38 by John Eldridge this wonderful terrible creature should have been out roaming the Savannah ruling his pride striking fear Into the Heart of every will to Beast bringing down zebras and gazel whenever the urge seized him instead he spent every hour of every day of every night of every year alone in a cage smaller than your bedroom his food served to him

through a little metal door sometimes late at night after the city had gone to sleep I would hear his Roar come down from the hills it sounded not so much fierce but rather mournful during all of my visits he never looked me in the eye I desperately wanted him to wanted for his sake the chance to stare me down would have loved it if he took a swipe at me but he just lay there weary with that deep weariness that comes from boredom boredom taking shallow breaths rolling now and then from side to side for

years after living in a cage a lion no longer believes it is a lion and a man no longer believes he is a man so it's the it's creating this link between a a lion in a zoo and a man living a a existence of boredom in a house so um what's your thoughts on masculinity and and why is that why Tate's message of what being a man is is resonating so much because so many people are like that lion in the zoo with no feeling no purpose or not knowing what what the role is

what do you think I think that definitely contributes to it yeah I think that finding a firm place for masculinity to stand is very difficult in 2023 uh one which is publicly applauded which personally feels fulfilling which aligns with you know some biological predispositions that you have which isn't going to be accused as being toxic which isn't actually perhaps dangerous to the people that are around you whether they be you know other citizens or women specifically like it's it's a difficult needle to thread with all of these different things and for someone like Tate to

come in and say I have the answer it's traditional roles it's masculine dominance it's Prestige it's success Monet with women sexually you know it's seductive because it's a kind of a low resolution view but it's one that aligns with what a lot of men kind of feel inside of them now there aren't many men that are traditionally masculine that have said this isn't the way that men are supposed to be what they've said is that this is an uncivilized way for men to be like this doesn't align with what Society in a a developed world

is supposed to behave this is like going back to a more ancestral view um a doggy dog kind of world now the problem that you have with masculinity at the moment is as we've said there are very few proposals for what masculinity can be which is agreed on by all sides MH like tell me tell me one principle which would be agreed on by both left and right let's say one that should be agreed on by both sides would be something like bravery or courage right like the to protect preserve provide mhm well that seems

like you could be pandering to women I women not able to protect themselves now why do they need protecting maybe it should be men that shouldn't be so predatory that women don't need to be protected in the first place what about provide well you telling me that women can't earn their own economic independence oh you want women to stop going to University you want women to stop being in the workplace you want women to just be domestic prostitutes right no like there is a way for anybody on the internet to find a problem with any

proposal of masculinity right now it's not the same necessarily with femininity right and you know biologically and reproductively women are more valuable than men as it's called women are uh genetics play things you have more Geniuses and you have more retards with men like that's actually what happens the average IQ is the same but the distribution is much wider so you have super Geniuses and you have guys that lose you have more men that are CEOs but you have more men that kill themselves or go to prison you have you know more male Superstar athletes

but more men that end up being shot so men are the play things in that regard and that makes it difficult man you know you have for all that you could point at men that are doing incredibly well in CEO positions and say look at how fantastic the life is that they're living and they go yeah but look at the [ __ ] bottom end of the distribution that having a great time I I've heard that example too like you're looking at a very small percent of successful men you know that say well some people

say well all CEOs running multi-million dollar companies are all white men and it's just like so it's white men have all the advantage but you're not looking at all the white men killing themselves or in prison you know what I mean so it's a I I I get people do they make a lot of assumptions um I know one thing uh Tate does mention too and i' I've read this in the book in in this book too and it's also I sometimes I think Tate gets a lot of his material from the Bible itself and

U Quran now yeah Quran that's true um but they talk where men they don't so much need love they they want respect like if if they had to choose between love and respect from their mate from their from their wife or their their girlfriend they would choose respect and men aren't really love is whatever just respect me when I come home I'm I'm willing to die for if somebody broke in the house I would die to protect you just respect me and if men don't get respect that's when they that's when problems come up women

need love they want to be loved and adored and and everything else men different um interested in your take on that so I had a psychotherapist called Adam Lane Smith on my podcast and he has dealt with attachment issues and depression from both men and women for decades he's been a a clinical worker and he said that male depression gets treat did like female depression men are made to feel loved and accepted when all they want to do is feel capable and Powerful mhm and he used this example of the Blitz in World War II

so the Germans are coming over and they're bombing London and before the war started there were these psychiatric Wards and they had patients in these patients had been uh catatonic for years totally comos unresponsive and the nurses would come in feed them roll them over clean the bed pan wash them leave them again these men mostly men had been completely unresponsive then the blitz starts and bombs are being dropped and one of the problems that you had was that a lot of the men had already been taken off to war they were already working in

jobs uh a lot of the women were also working nurses all looking after kids down in bunkers and in the underground trying to protect them from the bombs MH so there were fires and there were injuries all over London and there were ambulances and fire engines and there was no one to drive them M these men who had been catatonic for 5 years and a decade got up Rose to the challenge put their shoes on went outside and started driving fire engines and ambulances these men that had been unresponsive for years and years and years

because they had purpose and that's what Adam said Adam said that give a man a purpose and the ability to achieve it and he will crawl over broken glass with a smile and I think that feeling capable and powerful and competent and respected and admired is something that will get a man so far MH you give a man those things and he'll deal with suffering until the ends of the Earth We're designed to do that we're designed to suffer we're designed to deal with that suffering but it needs to be in service of something yeah

you know the man that suffers and doesn't have competence capability purpose respect meaning admiration that's a man that's depressed that's a man who is alone and and struggling and may take his own life or may become increasingly useless to the potential partner and society around him or may become radicalized you know in one form or another MH and a man who is able to do things well is useful to everybody around him MH one of the problems that you have is because there is a very small but pretty vicious cohort of men who do bad

things mhm MH to other people and women especially um in the same way as you said you know 90% of CEOs of white men therefore all white men are having it great yeah you know whatever it is like 0.1% of men or 0.05% of men are something commit uh sexual violence acts therefore all men are predators right what you do is you smear all of masculinity with the example of its most egregious transgressors mhm the problem that you have there is is what baby have you thrown out with the bath water right if in order

to make a society where a very small cohort of men is no longer going to misbehave you have to make all men sedated and useless what do you want like what what is it that you want this is a really interesting question so um going into my evolutionary psychology Obsession at the moment there's a a a dynamic called young male syndrome and young male syndrome describes a society in which there is a uh large cohort of unmarried childless men usually young men this happens sometimes if there has been selective uh breeding if um women or

if parents for some reason have chosen to have more male than female Sons you're seeing this in Japan and China at the moment uh or it could be if there has recently been some sort of catastrophe which has affected women more than men perhaps it was a cold snap and women were able ble to fend off this sort of cold a little bit uh less effectively and throughout history when you have this preponderance of men also another one would be what's called a gerent tocy which is where um polygynous Rel relationships and mating is reserved

only for the older men I see and uh the younger men would tend to have to go through a bunch of trials and tribulations and stuff and it's until you get to 35 that you actually are allowed to mate well Happ is the young men mate on the side in any case but they resent the older men basically you have a uh large number of men mhm young men now when you get into a relationship as a man your testosterone drops when you have children your testosterone drops again what this means is it reduces risk-taking

Behavior amongst men and this would make sense like if you now have to provide for first a wife and then kids don't try and jump off that cliff and say if you don't die because if you leave behind some kids that aren't going to be able to defend for themselves that's not good for your genetic line right so men's risk-taking behavior goes down when they get into relationship and have kids which means goes down yes which means that if you don't have many married men or Andor men with kids you have a greater increase in

risk-taking behavior and testosterone men who are between the ages of whatever like 17 and 28 let's say just going around causing Havoc pushing over granny graffitiing walls and sometimes creating populist uprisings right you know this is the the classic um like gang mentality MH uh situation the problem that you have at the moment is we have the highest rates of sexlessness amongst young men I think ever in history the number of men reporting No Sex in the last year has tripled from 8% to 28% W from 2008 to 2018 roll that clock forward the next

four years through the pandemic I honestly think if you see a man on the street between the ages of 18 and 30 you pointed at him there would be a 50% chance that he hasn't had sex in the last year that's not good right and what what's that what's going to happen what's the result of this so most theories would suggest that you would have increasing societal instability you'd have three things uh individual happiness drops because no matter how much of a hardcore men going their own way like red pillar you are there is a

good amount of evidence that suggests having a companion having friends having connections is correlated with every outcome you want Happy lifespan Health span longevity etc etc etc so people individually are going to be less happy societally it should be less stable because of this young male syndrome that we've spoken about you have less reason to buy in yeah if you're not if you don't if your misses isn't going to keep tabs on whether or not you're [ __ ] up the local Gardens at night or whatever with your friends cuz you're just like playing football

or whatever it is that you decide to Doh and then civilization you've got Birthright problems the one that we're talking about is the societal stuff so we we know that we've got increasing rates of sexlessness amongst young men yeah uh but we haven't seen this huge preponderance of incel killings you know that's not to say we haven't had none like Elliot Rogers and blah blah blah most of the killings that do happen are coming from disaffected young men mhm but given that we've got as yet unseen rates of sexlessness mhm where are all of the

terrorist events yeah and my theory which is the male sedation hypothesis is that men are being sedated out of their status seeking and reproductive Behavior through porn and video games I think that they are getting a titrated dose just a little trick and medicated didn't you medication as well is also happening I think I saw you put that up the other day correct yes so that's from the newsl 2,000 hours a year uh men between the ages of 18 and 30 on average pay $2,000 a year of video games and a good chunk of them

at least 50% of them doing it whilst on prescription meds or on weed so young male syndrome right and this is a perfect example of what we were talking about earlier on mhm let's say that there are two versions of the world one in which the traditional young male syndrome of populist uprisings and and dangerous men and stuff occurs and the other one in which you've got my sedation hypothesis going on given the choice between the two I would rather have men not be causing havoc and burning down buildings mhm but only by a little

bit mhm like you have got an army of useless sedated men mhm who are not contributing to society they're not working jobs they're not innovating they're not driving GDP and every year that they continue to do the things that they're doing playing video games whilst on weed they become less and less of an attractive mate for the sort of partner that would drag them out of that in any case so you have a choice here between men who are dangerous but competent or sedated but useless yeah tough choices [ __ ] hard man like do

you want do you want the risk of uprisings whilst you if you do need them to do something they're there to do it they're available correct and this prepared this is the problem you know this is Peterson's whole thing like you'd rather be a warrior in a garden than Gardener in a war that you need to be able to have competence and danger that you voluntarily control because a rabbit isn't by its nature good it's simply weak right yeah that's that's a good point it it also reminds me I've I've read that you know years

ago college educated kids were 6040 men to women and now it's 7030 is some of the stats so women are being more educated men are whatever Le I guess less of a a byproduct of an uh higher education um and so yeah we flipped that script on that and the intentions were good because hey have women been imp oppressed who knows but there was a concerted effort to get more women educated college educated and now it's reversed and now I mean it feels like I don't know is there an e and flow to everything or

is are we are we going too far with some of it so when Title 9 was introduced which was uh to try and improve the number of female uh college graduates that you had that was 50 years ago and the percentage Point Gap was uh 13 percentage points right between uh men and women the Gap is now 15 percentage points in the other direction right nobody nobody at all and I spoke to Richard Reeves who wrote a great book that everybody should check out called of boys and men MH uh he's looked at this he's

a like a policy wonk from uh Washington DC also a fell Countryman fellow Countryman of mine and uh nobody thought that in 50 years this trend would blast through parity and swing back the other way right nobody thought that this was going to happen at all so I mean what do you do when you have ever increasing numbers of uh women that are going to college and university well it's just I'm I'm just considering it with your example too so you get the the less capable men who you know that's that's unrelated issue it seems

like and now the women and less men going to college also that's like men taking a big hit oh it's dude it's a ton of L's it's L's everywhere for men at the moment structurally the three main areas that uh Richard looked at was education employment and fatherhood MH um in employment the male labor force participation has dropped by 0.1% per month every month since 1950 M 87% in 1950 down to 68% now and by 2040 it's going to be 65% which will be an all-time low you have um two men as three women for

every two men completing a fouryear US No in fact it's yes it is three to two uh for every two men completing a fouryear US college degree and you know is it right that we should give everybody as many opportunities as possible yes absolutely was it the case that women's access to education and employment had been restricted for a good amount of time yeah it was you know they didn't have the same level of of opportunities but the problem that you have is this ever increasing cohort of high performing women are now competing for an

Ever decreasing cohort of ultra high performing men you know the stats on Tinder suggest that the bottom 80% of men compete for the bottom 20% of women and the top 80% of women compete for the top 20% of men so the top 20% of men if you do get yourself into that cohort quite rightly a commitment averse because they've got just this wealth of options in front of them so they use women in because why not you know men are not going to say no to many many women right these women become bitter and resentful

they Retreat from dating into a boss [ __ ] career lifestyle which for some women is right but I would argue on average for most women is not what they necessarily want long term this big cohort of men here down the bottom they become uh lonely and resentful and they just Retreat into porn and video games so it's not really it's not really fantastic for anybody and it's not even I think that fantastic for the you know the Andrew Tate uh like Hustlers University crowd war no I don't think that it's great for them either

because like do you really want in your 50s to still be slaying puss yeah like is that really and dude this is my like this comes full circle for me as someone that lived that mhm lifestyle The Nightlife thing all of the values that I was told that Society should that I I should care about you know the social rown and the all the girls knowing your name and all this sort of stuff mhm maybe for some guys that are more differently inclined than I am that is the Pinnacle of what they want but for

me it's not like you know I look forward to having a family I can't wait to have kids I can't wait to be a dad like I want to do that that's part of my life path and I don't want to have a family whilst you know sneaking out even if it was with the allowance of my partner to like go what [ __ ] some like 25-year-old bird like that's not that's not what I want to do some people grow out of that and evidently some people don't or maybe some people kid themselves if

they don't want to but it it's not good man like it's it's really really concerning and I think that um trying to find a firm place for men to stand is really really important raising men up without dragging women back right is a very difficult situation to to get ourselves into well especially given the you said extremes on both sides you know nobody's working together on this it's super adversarial it's a feminist feminist and then the toxic masculinity correct and so the coming up with a solution is almost impossible with those two camps I mean

how's it going to work but um so are you feeling pressure yourself to find a mate to find somebody so I've got I'm I'm in a relationship and uh I I very much enjoy the like calm peace that I found in that uh were a very good match and yeah I I I do feel the to a degree I do feel the pressure of um all of these sort of competing values and pulls in different directions you know it is even for whatever you want to say about Tate's message it it adds more options into

the water for like oh well maybe it should be the case that that that uh you should convert to Islam and and try and have four wives like that's not my path but every time that a new narrative gets added the path becomes a little bit less clear mhm uh thankfully for me I've always known that I wanted to be a dad I've always known that I wanted to have a traditional family but even I can see from like having observed it from the outside I'm like wow this can become really like difficult for people

and I think it's going to take a lot of work to try and turn down the volume of the conversation between men and women to make this effective again yeah and I think you know I remember being in your position and then being where I am now and it's the the challenge I always had was your wife mate partner whatever you want to call it doesn't necessarily need me to go carry a rock up the mountain every day just wants me home just you know just be home you don't need to be this what so

you have these goals of you want to make an impact you want to be this Communicator you want to be this messaging for you know what your pass about then that competes with time for your spouse you know so they just want you around you have these goals that's always that's hard you need to find somebody who aligns with your desires for life you know I I think I see this very well with Kish and Goggins yeah that she is just there to help him be the best version of him and him being the best

version of him allows him to show up for her in the best way as well you know the tiny amount of time that I've got to see yeah those two together that seems to be the dynamic of that relationship and yeah man but it's difficult like as a as a driven guy with high capacity and goals that you want to achieve in life do you want do you want to sacrifice that fulfillment existentially for fulfillment in terms of a relationship and the goal is obviously to find a partner that allows you to do both that

takes pride and respect from the hard work that you put in that's the dream but for a lot of people they you know they they struggle to find that kind of a partner yeah that was you you mentioned respect again like the your spouse would have to respect your hunger and your drive and your passion for whatever and uh yeah I mean for me what I always wanted to do is yeah did I need to go run all these miles should I have just been home with the kids but there's also this other flip side

of maybe I'm not home but I'm also showing them what hard work can result in and being the example and that's I've always I've struggled with that because I you know do I need to leave the house at night to go run in the rain yeah I mean is it subconsciously telling showing my kids that it's going to take hard work if you're going to stand out setting an example is a pretty good way to I mean dude your kids are beasts the like in the nicest way possible they're [ __ ] freaks like they

they do things that nobody else would do and that's because of the values that have been inculcated from yourself there's probably people though that would would say that they had the same goals I did and then it didn't turn out their kids weren't their kids struggled their kids had abandonment issues their kids their dad was never around so what what makes an effective like parenting style is so like who the [ __ ] knows man I don't know you know so there's a a field of behavioral genetics which is how your genes what you inherit

from your parents biologically impacts your outcomes in life right so it's anxiety alcoholism depression happiness set point uh IQ [ __ ] shoe size everything right and at least 50% of pretty much everything that you are isn't determined by your environment and it's not like it's just oh you take father plus mother and you're a combination of the two there's all manner of weird versions of you sitting inside of sperm and eggs and it can come together and it can be oh well it's not you it's actually your great great great grandpa who happened to

have this weird Quirk and you go you know you as the get hard things lift Rock like keep hammering guy could have some creative [ __ ] grandfather who was an artist or a musician and you're like where the [ __ ] did this musician kid come from friend Dr steu McGill he's the number one back pain specialist on the planet he's got uh two sons and a daughter uh he is a very hard big mustached Canadian man who has spent his entire life doing science and hard things built his own house all phenomenal human

very very powerful guy one daughter uh became a ship captain you think yeah I see the alignment there the uh other son became a um a doctor and like a building something something to do with architecture I think again like I can see the line the third son went to theater school and became this unbelievable I think he did dance like some sort of dance or maybe ballet or something like that he's a Savage mhm but it's very different and go where the [ __ ] did that come from yeah did so you just don't

know the outcomes that you're going to get and I mean parenting Styles is something that I part of the reason I can't wait to have kids is I can't wait to learn and go deep on par in yeah um but I don't think that you get to choose that the best that you can really do with regards to kids is set a good example be there for them you know instill in them the values that you think would be effective there's not really much else that's left to do yeah yeah it's uh I mean I

I think I I struggled with my first son maybe got a little better was pretty easy by the time my daughter was born but all be between there I was 20 some years old to 30 some years old you Chang as as a person and of course as a dad so yeah it's a I don't know it's it's very interesting to me um the the la last topic I wanted to touch on and I know you've mentioned it before but you had a thousand days of no alcohol I was interested in in what you learned

from a thousand days of no alcohol and um was there such a benefit that it made you not want to ever drink again or what was that Journey like yeah so the UK is a big ler L culture MH uh especially if you're a young guy from a workingclass town like I was you know I went to UNI and I went to a what class there a red brick uni so like a high high class uni or whatever um but even there like it's just a it's a drinking culture you know everybody gets smashed most

nights per week and that was my life Not only was I doing that recreationally but that was also a good amount of time that I spent at work you know it was money izing this alcohol culture in the UK and contributing to it as well and encouraging it um and then I got sort of 23 24 and training really started to become important to me so I dialed back my partying and I'd maybe only party once every couple of weeks and I'd work a lot um and then it got to 27 28 and I'd had

this sort of uh Epiphany out the other side of the uh reality TV stuff and I thought [ __ ] like I need more time I need more consistency I felt like I would make good progress and then i' get the Friday afternoon itch which is this compulsion to like just be a degenerate and get on it with the boys which is fun but I knew that I needed more time more money more energy and more consistency if I wanted to make the changes that I needed to like fundamental changes to the way that you

see the world are really really hard to do and if I was resetting my progress every two weeks because I was spending a day hung over in bed or a day and a half hung over in bed or whatever I wasn't going to get anywhere and I was sick of this like Groundhog Day style two steps forward two steps back two steps forward two steps back I was never able to hit a streak with meditation or reading or make any fundamental changes because I was just like shaking the etcher sketch every couple of weeks right

so I thought right well what happens if I go sober for 6 months and I'll see if that impacts my performance and I loved it like I found I had basically an extra you know day every two weeks free to my myself because I wasn't getting drunk I had better consistency that started to compound over time went back to drinking for a little while didn't really enjoy it did another six months went back to drinking after that for like two or three months didn't really enjoy it and then was like right [ __ ] it

I'm just going to do a thousand days M and that was incredibly impactful for me because it gave me focused consistency um I think going sober is the most effective compet itive Advantage for most young people to do because it just gives you so much more mental Clarity and ability to be consistent what you're doing when you choose to drink is basically electing to have a self-induced illness mhm for a day every two weeks like if this was a if if if this came from outside of your own choice you would [ __ ] hate

whoever this person was you would feel like it was a like torture like it was a cur hang on so you're telling me that whatever it is like 7% of my life is going to be spent like this mhm this is Agony but because it's you and because it's a right of passage and because it's like a byproduct of of a fun night the night before so yeah I did this thousand days sober and um it was it was great um coming out the other side of it my relationship with alcohol which was already very

uh balanced right I didn't have a problem with alcohol I wasn't dependent on it at all I just wanted more from my life right uh but the strange thing about going sober is that it's very it's a very odd uh pursuit to do if you don't have an addiction alcohol is the only drug where if you don't do it people assume you have a problem right I've I've heard that I've heard you say that and that does make sense it's true it's very odd the actually the other one I li I did realize after I

said that that caffeine is probably the other one it's like I don't I don't drink caffeine you go what how but with alcohol you know you'd speak to any especially workingclass person in the UK and it's like you've claimed that you're Jesus or something and you're like what how do you how I did surely not no are okay I'm absolutely fine thank you um that's being changed a little bit the What's called the low and no movement low alcohol no alcohol is uh really taking uh up steam uh Heinen 00 sponsors all of the Formula

1 so you know it's obvious that they see a massive opening in the market for it uh but then I did um the thousand days and I was like right okay well I'm going to go back to drinking dude I'm such a lightweight now like my my alcohol tolerance is through the floor and the main thing that it's done is it stopped that uh desire to go out and and party hard um because that was inculcated from work right like and a lot of people will feel this that your right of passage the stuff that

you do as a young guy going away on holiday going to Vegas or doing whatever like that's what you bonded with your friends over yeah and that's cool but you know you used to play with Power Rangers when you were 11 right you don't play with them anymore right like the the tools yeah the tools and the experiences that formed you when you were younger aren't necessarily the ones that will serve you when you're older yeah and yeah I I also didn't like the idea that I I used alcohol to give me social confidence um

and one of the reasons for that was that I was in social situations that I didn't want to be in mhm uh but I was able to sedate myself out of realizing that I didn't want to be there by just getting drunk everyone knows this situation your misses says that we've got to go to such and such's birthday party and you know that they're boring as [ __ ] so you've got to go you're like oh it's fine I'm just going to get drunk and if I get drunk then it'll be okay mhm but you

never end up asking yourself the question of why am I allowing myself to go to an event that I don't want to spend my time at and you sedate yourself out of that problem right uh so I did that came back to drinking but it's very rare very inconsistent it would be maybe you know every month or so for me it's rarely like uh if I go on a plane like if I'm going on a long trip and the the air hostess comes over and says you like a champagne yeah I do want a champagne

that' be that's nice got um but it's very limited and then I did 500 days without caffeine uh which I haven't done a video on yet but I'm going to soon and that was very interesting because I realized on the other side of the fence to alcohol most people are propping up their confidence with alcohol and most people are propping up their fatigue with caffeine oh and Alex hosi one of my friends has got this great quote where he says if you can't perform without it it stopped conferring a benefit right most that makes sense

like you're no longer being uh assisted by caffeine you need it in order to be able to perform yeah and the problem that you have there is nobody ever stops to ask themselves why am I tired at 11:00 a.m. why do I need caffeine at 11:00 a.m. I've been up for 4 hours what the [ __ ] is wrong with me should be tired but because you can paper over the cracks with the caffeine you never end up saying well maybe my sleep routine is not so good oh maybe I'm actually spending too much time

on my phone or oh maybe I'm not actually eating well or whatever it is and people don't even say I'm tired people say I need a coffee right so oh hang on a second so you've supplemented your level of fatigue for the caffeine concentration in your blood MH and it's just it's another eye opener I really like this whole sort of sovereignty agency thing is like a big deal for me I think it's because I didn't feel like I had a lot of that when I was younger um and I I don't like anything having

control over me any substance any anything and I wanted to okay club promoter ,000 so Roger that yeah okay guy that used to stay up until 4 in the morning three nights a week because he had to work and is now trying to be uh productive and write and do podcasts and stuff like that no caffeine 500 Days yeah away we go right and I learned an awful lot about um sleep I reset my caffeine tolerance I didn't have headaches I didn't have withdrawals uh which was fortunate cuz I know a lot of people do

especially people that are that go hard on caffeine yeah um but I would highly highly recommend that everybody do that like that both of them they're the two substances that people I think are they sneak under the surface without people realizing like the [ __ ] if you're taking opiates every night to go to sleep or if you're smoking weed it's not hiding in the dark like it's front and center you know what's going on alcohol to be able to get past your group of friends that aren't actually your friends they're just drinking buddies or

to uh put up with the boring events that you take yourself to or to deal with your lack of social confidence that sneaks under the the the table a little bit and then the same thing for caffeine yeah I guess how I've you know some of it is just me wanting to justify to myself but alcohol the things that I cared about alcohol wasn't helping you know I wanted to be more fit I wanted to be more dis disciplined I wanted to be the best bow hunter the best athlete and alcohol was always a step

backwards on all those things so it's like this is what I care caffeine hasn't that I've noticed been a step backwards on anything yeah I might maybe I would be sharper if I got a little more sleep but it hasn't been like the the huge Silver Bullet that's just killing everything that I want to do so um alcohol definitely was I mean I that thousand day sober was intriguing to me just because alcohol I did have a problem and it was I wouldn't be I wouldn't be who I am if I would have kept drinking

that's how powerful it is so I was interested in uh your journey there on that but um yeah I mean such a powerful drug I mean it's it's acceptable one and people don't realize the uh the poison that it is but I think with with regards to your use of caffeine man like what you're doing if you were trying to do that without it would be very difficult MH um this is how people can become reliant on stuff and it not seem like they are right uh you know if you wanted to do the RX

plus version of whatever you're already doing okay how how much can I just start to dial that dose back just a little bit and see if I still perform that being said with alcohol everybody kind of has it in the back of their mind that it's not really it's not good for them yeah man people get [ __ ] upset when I start pointing out their use of caffeine they get really really upset you [ __ ] piece of [ __ ] who do you this is because you've got no joy in your life because

you don't have a coffee first thing in the morning and blah blah blah I'm like hey whoa hey I'm just saying I'm just saying that I think your life could be a little better if you needed less caffeine in order to be able to perform the way that you do and the problem that you have is because it's not it's not socially unacceptable you can't go out of the office at midday and have two pints and come back in right but you can happily go out and get a quad shot vanilla [ __ ] supercharged

Rocket Fuel [ __ ] are you talking about me come on now you got me one yesterday you you might have noticed I actually only drank about a quarter of it yesterday it would have taken my [ __ ] face off that's why I started vibrating like right Manning we're just going to stay nice and steady with that front arm like dude this is my entire body at the moment is like at 1,000 Hertz yeah um however I think that just assessing like how much do I rely on stuff and this can be for anything

right how much do I rely on social media in order to be able to distract me when I get bored why can't you sit with boredom right how much do I need to use television to calm me down on a nighttime why you not calm how much do I need caffeine to be able to wake myself up how much do I need alcohol to calm myself down blah blah blah like all of these different things symptom of the Cure yeah yeah um yeah interesting I mean I'm I just wanted to cap this off by saying

how thankful I am Chris that you came out here I know Oregon is the middle of nowhere and uh you know to share the lift run shoot experience my life with you is uh is powerful for me and um before we go one of my favorite things to do is expose people to the world of archery and hopefully bow hunting it someday and so I'd like to welcome you to the bow hunting Brotherhood here's your bow man this is so [ __ ] cool and you shot it great yesterday it was amazing dude I shot

a a balloon at 50 yards I know with this first day ever shooting a bow within 2 hours 3 hours yeah it's Wayne the wizard for you it's so this is so beautiful and I have a ton of friends in Austin that are going to absolutely hate the fact that you've given this to me because uh I'm now going to be able to compete with them on whatever it is they do I mean this is just for a second look at how much of a [ __ ] weapon this is It's a beautiful it's so

cool man beautiful piece of equipment I can see why you guys get obsessed by it yeah um definitely it's phenomenal and this is just you know what a beautiful way to cap off what's been an awesome few days yeah well for me me building the bow hunting Brotherhood is that's my mission in life it feels like because bow hunting has changed my life I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Bohan I'd still be out in that little small town we went visited yesterday so it's had a life-changing impact on me and that's why it's

I feel like it's a you know my mission to share that impact with others and that's I'm very thankful you came out and you you were mastered it so quickly I mean shooting so well and just being at the B rack and then capping that off with the training and the lifting it's like man Best Day Ever for me thank you take I move my truth every time they tell me stop I every com hate that makes my G up my energy and boom I hear them talking saying the way that I move it so

reckless that is a part of my mind I've been blessed with giving my blood so I am Relentless my fault they want someone to blame they s their hate it fuels my Pace I am Roy tough I I am the change the F in dirt feeling like cam hands give me the nobody wants I'll give you my heart I car to work give me that impossible task I'll give you that unbreakable cage give me that right up in that hurt I'll give you that mind set that I earn give me that last question on Earth

that I just died that I end dir give me them odds nobody wants I'll give you my heart I'll carry the work give me that impossible task I'll give you that unbreakable courage give me that right off and that heartt I'll give you that mindset that I ear give me that last question on Earth did I just die did I end