Chris Williamson
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Look, I always felt reticent that I did business at university. I did two business degrees, including a master's, and I can't remember anything from either of them. I spent a lot of time partying. Again, club promoter, bingo. And I always thought, I wish I'd gone and done psychology. I wish I'd sort of followed something more approximating a passion or philosophy or sociology or something.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
And then I realized a couple of years ago, I was like, well, you have done that. You've got to design your own degree, only speaking to the best in their field about the very specific niche part of their topic that you want to learn on your terms with no coursework or homework beyond what you want to do. And you get to call it a job.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
So whatever version of the simulation that we're in at the moment, I need to sort of Thank the designer because it's wild that I get to call this a career.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
No, he's been on once.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Yeah, his wife's been on as well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
It's kind of like having to choose from 900 children, I suppose. One of the most reliable guests, actually, a guy called Rory Sutherland.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
For the people who don't know, imagine a... gruff, upper-class, British, sweary uncle who also happens to be one of the best behavioural economists on the planet. So this guy understands consumer behaviour like nobody else. In fact, if you go onto Ogilvy's website and you look at the job description, on the board members it says, Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Rory got to design his own job title specifically so no one actually knows what he does. LAUGHTER And he's just, he's fantastic. Speaking to Jordan was great. Alain from the School of Life is just, he sees the human condition very accurately. So it's fun. You know, I get to indulge my own curiosities and follow my instincts.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Yeah, I think Christopher Hitchens says, everyone has a buck in them. And for most, that's where it should stay. I wonder whether podcasting may be something similar. But it's certainly a skill set that you can develop. Look, I think the best thing is a project so personal to you that you would do it if nobody listened. Right. And for me...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
If everybody switched off tomorrow, I did this when no one listened.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
It's a private, it's an autobiography for me. It's a repository of my own.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
All of the people that are here, I listen every week. I think the pod's fantastic. I get to tune in and just listen to between three and five guys, depending on who's available that week. Just have a hang. And it feels like you're dropping in on precisely the poker table or the private room of the steak dinner. And that's why I think people are massive fans of the show, because it feels like...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I know.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
It's like if your friend list was just a little bit better educated than you. And you're like, okay, I get to find out. It's a little bit more elevated as a conversation. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Yeah, final cut. Look, You can still play that game. I have two full-time front catalog strategists and two back catalog strategists as well for YouTube. So we have a big team that's playing the algo game. They're chopping down clips. So look, I think that what is it that Ferris says about in the short term, your results are determined by your intensity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
In the long term, your results are determined by your consistency. But don't trade the latter for the former.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
And if you try and go too hard, if you try and do things where you're being ventriloquized by the audience, I'm going to try and reverse engineer what I think the audience wants from me, which means that if they stop loving you, not only do you not have the one thing you used to have, but you didn't even make a body of work that you cared about either. So you end up resenting the audience.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
And yeah, for me, it's kind of like a bulletproof strategy. You're going to keep going for longer because you like what you do.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Yeah. So I realized about three years ago that most podcasters are something with a podcast. They're a UFC fighter with a podcast. They're a comedian with a podcast. They're a whatever, investors with a podcast, right? It's not their profession. So I asked myself, what would it look like if we turned pro at being a podcaster?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
And part of that is the lift needs to be very low for most people that are busy doing other things because they're busy doing other things. So they can't spend ages going towards this, you know, one big production. So I started working with cinematographers. I got one of the best directors of photography in America. He's out of Nashville. I got a producer. We got grips, gaffers.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
We started using location scouts. And we started to dial in a very specific look. We started to use handheld cameras on tripods, monopods, dollies, doorway dollies. We did the first ever five-camera podcast on LED video wall, the same It's technology that was used for the Mandalorian. And as we were talking live, the video controller changed the scenes based on what we talked about.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
So if we moved from a war story to a scary story in a spooky house, we went from Afghan base with trucks driving around and helicopters coming in
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
It's not far off that. We can get it down by squeezing here and there. Thankfully, my line producer is a sort of bully. when it comes to trying to get that stuff down. But look, I like pretty things. And I think that one way that you can excel is to stand out visually. Look who I'm on stage with. I like things to look nice.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
And I didn't see anyone that was really elevating the way that stuff looked.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
So I have this belief that, at least in the world of podcasting, we're sort of splitting into two directions at the moment. One of them is perhaps a little bit more elevated, it's the modern wisdoms, it's the Stephen Bartlett's of the world, and then the other side is the more sort of low-tech. It would be All In, it would be Matt and Shane's secret podcast.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
And then, you know, you've got sort of a Rogan or a flagrant that sort of sits somewhere in the middle, which is good quality, not insane. It's just facilitating the hang. And I think that barbelling both of those is a good way to go. You can lean into the real sort of high-end production stuff. And when the guest turns up and they're like,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
wow, we're in, you know, 25,000 square foot warehouse in the middle of LA and there's a team of 15 people here and there's huge lights and there's guys holding dollies. Like they lock in, you know, they're really there to, oh, this is an occasion. This isn't me just turning up for a chat, but that wouldn't work for every type of show.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
In fact, what you want to do is facilitate a little bit more ease. So that's why I still like doing stuff over Zoom or I guess like, Riverside or whatever you use. Because I want to have that casual sort of conversation. Not everyone wants to turn up and it feel like it's the World Cup final of podcasting.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Yeah, so it was emergent over time. You start off just taking whoever you can get. A lot of supplement companies and teeth whitening companies, whatever's available. You read ads.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I did outreach for the first five or 600 episodes of the show. So I was managing my own ads. I was sending the invoices. I was slowly scaling up the CPMs. You can get between a $15, $25 CPM, something like that, audio only.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I made the commitment not to do ads on YouTube, because if it was a virtual episode, it felt like it was such a low lift that that kind of didn't justify making people sit through baked in ads, at least on YouTube. But we got away with it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
No, these are hard coded into the file itself. They're coded in, yeah. Yeah, that's what's referred to as baked in. And then look, we've got ourselves to the stage now where we have some pretty interesting setups. I think I'm one of the only podcasters that does this where we sell an entire ecosystem.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
So if you come on board as one of what we call our flagship partners, you get a set of impressions across the entire year, let's say 40 million, 60 million impressions. Then you get a number of Instagram story sequences on my Instagram. You'll get newsletter drops on my newsletter, which has got 300,000 subs and a 50% open rate, lots of click through on that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
And then maybe I'll come speak at your AGM or I'll do something else and we build out this Big package.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I mean, Function Health, who I think are on here somewhere, we did a two-year deal with them, and I love what they do. I use them to track my blood work, and I thought, why would I not want to be in bed with a company that I use all the time?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I mean, in our case, it's... And you deepen the relationship as well. So Element, James from Element, if there's something he wants to talk about to do with brand, have a good insight when it comes to brand, especially from a creator side, or ad reads, and I'll happily just, you know, do a couple of hours of, well, this is what we've seen that's been working recently.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
You know what it is? In the same way as following your instincts on the show when it comes to what you talk about, if you can get yourself to the luxurious position where you get to choose your partners as well, every single product that I partner with, I use.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Just tell me the category. Anything which is to do with investing, we've said no to. Buy gold. Jonathan, my ads guy, stood there and he hates it because these guys are prepared to spend big money.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I don't have the chops to be able to assess whether or not this bank or this new investment opportunity. Can you turn your Roth IRA into a 501k? I don't know. I have no idea. I hear these things and I go, Ben Shapiro, you don't know either. Right. That's interesting. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Maybe. I mean, I think it's a difficult... And you've never done it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
It's a difficult game to play because people can go to creators of sort of around about my size, and it's very reliable. You know what you're going to get in terms of plays, you know what you're going to get in terms of demographic, but the shows that are smaller are growing, so you don't actually know what it is that you're going to get.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
So maybe you can bundle all of these guys together into some weird sort of dispersed multi-channel network type thing, and they will bulk be sold by some company that sits above them, but it's so effortful. And when you think... some podcast's going to do 25,000 plays. You've got to go through all the rigmarole and the red tape and the ad read to hit 25,000 people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Or you could go to Rogan and hit like 100,000 times that. Have you ever used site reps?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
If you want to do that, then fine, but I have no desire to start managing a ton of other content creators. Managing myself is hard enough.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Perhaps, I guess. It just doesn't speak to me all that much. And I think a question is, what do you need this additional money for? Is it that you just need to continue to build more and more profit? Because I quite like where I'm at. I quite like the level of revenue that I make, the workload that I have.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
The fact that I get to spend a morning reading and I don't feel like I should have been on more Zoom calls. So my ability to put my foot on the gas or take it off is exclusively on me as opposed to having other obligations. So it's very much a lifestyle business. And I understand that that's going to cap the upside. Now, there's some things I can start CPG.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I can start to do some clever stuff with ads where that will begin to ramp and ramp and ramp. But yeah, I'm- You've got unlimited upside with how you spend your time now that you don't have to do work 24-7. Absolutely. And there may be a day when I decide to press that button again, but it's not right now. But just before Jason jumps in,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
You've got YouTube AdSense, partners, Spotify partner program, which is brand new, and that's actually cranking quite a lot. And then the one area that I think way more podcasters need to look at, which is monetizing clips. So you do mid-roll ads on a long podcast episode, you know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 50 minutes, 120 minutes into it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
an episode, but you can also be seven minutes into an eight minute long clip. And you can crank clips out all the time. So you can be putting out one a day. So there's other points of leverage. Exactly. So you can look at, okay, how can we be a little bit more innovative?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
We can put Instagram stories up, we can use newsletters, these sort of 360 deals and fill out all of the ecosystem where you can without obliterating the viewing experience and making the audience hate you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
So true. There's sort of a weird level that people get to. Anybody who is sufficiently talented for you to think that they're an A-grade player is probably not going to want to sit underneath anybody else. And if someone isn't that good, you're kind of just filling the air with something that maybe isn't going to catch.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I think so.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I think so because a lot of people want that lifestyle.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
More money comes out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Yeah, some high points of leverage would be getting a strategist who understands the YouTube algorithm and can ensure that no matter what it is you're recording and how honest and truthful that is to your instinct, it's being presented in the best way for the algorithm. We can repurpose clip. What are the sections that we're choosing?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
So one thing that hasn't been spoken about today, which is interesting on YouTube, is timeliness. So YouTube is increasingly becoming where people go to find out their news. So maybe you see something that trends on Twitter, and you'll catch some clip of some kind. But then you quickly go over to YouTube, OK, where's the breakdown?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
And you'll have seen, to use Shapiro as a good example, Daily Wineman, I think it's called Ben After Dark or something like that. it's not Ben after dark, it's Ben in his living room, because something's happened today, and before he can get back into the studio tomorrow, they need to get a video out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
We're talking about a 24-hour turnaround. Sorry, that's stale. That's old now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
This is what a lot of streaming is doing, right? You look at Hasanabi, you look at Destiny, you look at Asmongold, Charlie, Penguin Zero. All of these guys are doing it. Now, yeah, they're also playing...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
you know, like video games too, but they're commenting on a lot of culture and they crush on this, not because they're insane cultural commentators that are, you know, really deep in the research, but because they're timely and they've usually got some take.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Well, you were talking about the relatability authenticity thing before. If somebody is talking about a developing situation which happened... three hours ago. You haven't had time to become contrived. You know what I mean? Totally.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I would continue to bet on Substack. I think, and that style of blogging, very frictionless, it's enabling writers to work out loud. I think Jonathan Haidt basically wrote his entire new book chapter by chapter, published it on his sub stack, allowed feedback.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
There's another one about the Tower of Babel thing, which he's working on next. But yeah, it's this seamless transparent door. So writing, I think, has got just huge, huge upside there. I'm not too sure what we're going to see from short form. I'm aware that algorithmically it's able to get the bottom of your brain stem really well. But you were talking about this before.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
It doesn't seem like TikTok creators are able to convert. One TikTok sub is worth, you know, 100 TikTok subs is maybe worth one YouTube sub. Correct.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Millennial.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
TikTok said, hold my beer.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I think this is one of the reasons why I wouldn't bet against the reading thing. I'm aware it's limbically less hijacking, but it feels like going to rehab for your dopamine system. It's one of the few things... It's hard. ...that you can only do it, right? You can watch a movie in double screen. Yeah. You can be listening to a podcast while scrolling Instagram. Yeah. You can, you know...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
You cannot read and do anything else.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I would love to look at how people pay attention to a conversation between multiple people like a podcast compared with an audiobook. And the author is trying their best to come across with bounce and energy and engagement and stuff like that, but really it's not. And it's one person.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Just one tone going through, recorded very carefully. Whereas when you've got stuff bouncing around, even that author talking about that book on a podcast, why am I so much more engaged? There's something about that which is more compelling.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
You've seen that list of five regrets of the dying. It's things like, I wish I'd allowed myself to be the person I wanted to be, not the person others expected of me. I wish I'd worked less. I wish I'd kept in touch with my friends. I would bet an awfully large amount of money that one of them in starting about 30 years' time is going to be, I wish I spent less time on my phone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
And that's going to be fun.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Three hours and 12 minutes. Brian, you're Kardashian famous now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Andrew Huberman, who was the star of the show.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Andrew Huberman and Brian. That was my Trump-Zelensky moment, you two in a room, I'm aware.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
It's us all in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Spotify moved to video. I think that's an interesting one to talk about. That's something people aren't really sort of factoring in. Because you turn what was an audio platform into, is this audio? Is this video? Now there's trailers that you can see as well. And they are paying creators a pretty penny. So we were a part of the partner program for January and February.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
And we made more money from them with only 10% of our catalog uploaded than the entirety of our YouTube AdSense. So they are throwing everything at it to try and take it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
The golden child.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Awesome. Ryan, are you going to be able to be within the vicinity of that passive smoke? I imagine you're going to be counting down how many minutes it's going to knock off your life.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Yeah, we'll do it backstage. Dude, I'm an expert promoter.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I'm okay, thank you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Thank you. Thank you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Perilously close to the creator Tony Robbins. I can see you on stage.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
What? Wow.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
You're crowdfunding this?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Other people that also eat that thing from Sweetgreen can be like, I want to know if it's got loads of plastics in it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Have you guys checked out plasticlist.org? Do you see that?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Annie Hari turns up with 400,000 signatures outside of Kellogg's HQ and says, you make in the same factory, the Canadian version, which uses beetroot coloring and carrot coloring to make it. And the exact same factory is throwing red 40 and
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
JB, there's others in the other green room. There's some in the other green room.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
I've got a question for Brian in the meantime. I'll look for a good question. Brian, if you were to, without someone having to completely decimate their entire diet and never look at meat again, what would you say are sort of top triaged lifestyle changes most people should look at making based on what it is that you guys have looked at?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Yeah, there's some cool stuff around. People thought it was the blue light from screens that were impacting melatonin release and cortisol and stuff as you went to sleep. It seems like it's much more what you're interacting with on the phone, that you're so engaged, that dopamine's firing, you're probably getting riled up about you sending stuff to friends.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
It's triggering all of these ideas in you. As opposed to if you just...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Yeah, pretty good. Yeah? Pretty good, thank you. Yeah, audiobook as I go to sleep, turn that off. And you've probably got a problem with the ionizing radiation, non-ionizing radiation. You bothered about Bluetooth headphones, Brian? No. Oh, that's good. That's the first thing I've proposed to you that I'm still allowed to do in my life.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
Everything else is... I like the fun police that comes in and tells me everything's... Oh, the die police, I guess.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
So, yeah, I think, like, really, really great.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Oh, so you're doing some CBT homework all the time. That's exactly right.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
ACT, ACT, yeah. I've started CBT this year and I did twice weekly psychotherapy for a year. Okay. How was that? tough actually in retrospect wasn't so tough at the time um I loved it uh my therapist was amazing it taught me an awful lot about myself it taught me more about myself than one and a half thousand sessions of meditation uh and many many years of journaling um
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
because somebody else is pointing at the things that you've got that are going on inside of your mind. But it opens an awful lot of loops that it doesn't close. Because there's no action steps. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. Correct. And maybe for some people who aren't as dopamine or epinephrine as me, that's fine because they can just sit in the story.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But if I do that, if I've got open loops, I'm going to try and fix them. And I think that this is There's lots of different modalities where people can improve their mental health, where people can improve the quality of their life. Your outcomes may vary, as they say in trading or whatever it is.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And I think psychotherapy is really, really useful for learning about yourself, but you need something which is more action-focused. So for me, CBT has been fascinating. It's been very rewarding. But fuck, dude, it's hard.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Because for the people that don't know, cognitive behavioral therapy is basically one hour a week where you speak to a guy and then the remaining, whatever it is, 163 hours a week where you do homework.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You do homework. He gives you homework and it's not, I have, if you looked at the reminders in my phone, you'd think I was a crazy person.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. I wrote this the other day. It kind of, I think it resonates a little bit with what you're talking about there. Some advice on how to support men.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Men want to aim high without feeling insufficient if they fall short. Men want their suffering to be recognized and appreciated without being pandered to or patronized and made to feel weak. Men want to believe that they can become more without feeling like they're not enough already. Men want to be able to open up without being judged. Men want support without feeling broken.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Men want to be loved for who they are, not for what they do. Too long didn't read. Blending inspiration with compassion is not an easy task. How do I set lofty goals which drive me to fulfill my potential without feeling less than if I don't get there tomorrow, said every guy ever. The desire for self-love and high performance comes into conflict inside of the mind of everyone, men especially.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Sure, some men are all drive and goals with non-introspection. And sure, some men are all reflection and inner work with few external desires. But most men desire a mix of encouraged self-belief and understanding support. inevitably, these two things come into conflict.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Basically, every man just wants to hear, I know you can be more, but you are enough already, and even if you just stay where you are, I'll be right here next to you. You're going to be great, but you don't need to be great, and I'm with you no matter what. Or, as said best by Sturgill Simpson's mum, boy, I don't care if you hit it big because you're already number one.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And that reminds me of what your wife said.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah, that you don't need to push me. I'll push myself more if I know that I don't need to.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Well, I mean, you know, that's a...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
phenomenal piece of advice and I put that essay out and perhaps unsurprisingly a lot of girls women who caught a hold of it or follow me on Instagram said well like women want this too and I'm like yeah I'm sure they do can I tell you that drives me crazy that makes me insane dude the every conversation has to be so universal at all times you've got to equivocate god almighty if I write a note on Instagram to dads
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
What have you learned about how to hold space for somebody that's... going through a difficult time from the, um, my first ever relationship just broke up with me all the way through to the, I just lost a child.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You'll notice that it doesn't really happen in the other direction.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I had a conversation with Richard Reeves sat here. Gosh, what Richard?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah, so he's great. American Institute of Boys and Men. And it was the second time he'd been on and we went for like three and a half hours. It was phenomenal. And I mentioned I was getting a bit frustrated because
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
The fact that every time I talk about the problems facing boys and men, I need to do this weird social land acknowledgement about the fact, well, we must recognize that there is issues that women have faced and we have to remember that it's only been a recent time that men have been falling behind and we must not forget the fact that we've got the sexual assaults and blah, blah, blah.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And after we've gone through all of that, let's begin to talk about men.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Everything has to have a qualifier. And I'm like, can I say this once at the beginning of my career and never have to say it again?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Because it's, you know, part of it's clipping culture that if somebody is able to pull you out of context by not having said the thing, and even if you do, if you say it at the beginning, this happened to me the other day, I said the thing, I said it, and it just got cut off. I'm like, right, well, fuck, I might as well not even say it. You can't. But what about this?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I get the sense. That's big, man. I get the sense that it is me being conned into saying the equivalent of the N word for texting people. Yeah. And the Texas Tribune is going to catch me hard-R-ing my way through y'all a couple of times. So I'm not falling for the sigh up. I can't quite get to that. I'm up to sidewalk and trash can, but y'all, not yet.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
joe's i'm gonna think the best of chris well the problem is god almighty we don't like to think the best of people because hypocrisy on the internet is like catnip right being able to catch somebody out this was the reason you remember when joe got uh popped for his n-word video uh which is like five minutes of you hard actually hard r-ing your way yeah yeah a combination of a-ing and hard r-ing anyway um
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
This video goes live. And Joe's like, yeah, fuck, that looks bad. That's not good. And the internet was told by legacy media, this is what this guy is truly like. And this is what it means about him. He's really the secret, bigoted, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, blah, blah, blah, that we've always known he was. They were saying, this is the tip of the iceberg.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And we know that below it is all of this. But the problem was, most of the people they were trying to convince are like, I've listened to 500 hours of him speaking. You're saying that this is the tip of the iceberg. I've seen the whole iceberg. I know there's nothing down there, or I have a reliable sense that there isn't anything down there. And that...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
situation kind of taught me what gets sucked in what what causes people to get sucked in to this and the precise thing is a vacuum of information and this speculation the the opportunity for people to point a finger and say i see i got him i fucking i got him yeah and um no the the principle of charity is not extended to people on the internet but it's not extended to people in our homes like the gotmans say when you distill all the way down what makes a great marriage beyond all like religion finance are y'all friends
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Our self-worth stands on the shoulders of other people's shortcomings.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Speaking about challenges, why do you think...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Well, I suppose you can become enchanted by a person that you're attached to. Yeah. Which fills a literal void inside of you. And when this is a primary caretaker, this is good. But when this is an inappropriate partner, it's not. So you're used to, I think a lot of the time, if you grow up around difficult adults, children can't change anything.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
or get rid of their caregivers, so they just learn to cope. They learn to solve it. Yeah, they learn to hold on to long enough in the hopes that maybe the person will take mercy on them and change. If you're five, you don't have a passport. You don't know how to leave the house. So you become, if you were not cared for in the way that you should...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
as a child, you learned to become unusually good at surviving on a meager diet of love.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Well, I mean, that's why when we look at, you know, the highest performers in business and, and, uh, Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
,,,,,,, ,,,,,,, I've been thinking an awful lot about where people take joy and satisfaction from in their work. And for people who maybe have a little bit of agency or self-determination to the sort of work that they do.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
So it needs to be a business owner, but they can maybe contribute to how the teams are put together, maybe part of a small business or a startup, or maybe they are, you know, independent contractor or something like that. And I've been thinking a lot about bands and the way that bands operate. they have to work very hard, but it's a very enjoyable career.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And performing and concerts rank as some of the highest happiness pursuits that you can do. Huge, huge, huge studies that look at anything that's collective effervescence, especially if you're performing, but also if you're experiencing. You have to presume that if you're performing, you also get the benefit of experiencing at the same time.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And I was thinking like, okay, so what is it that they're doing that's keeping them going when they're, you know, 50 dates deep into this big long tour and they're in fucking Japan and they're sleep deprived, blah, blah, blah. And I think a big part of it is having other people to share the successes with.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
To be able to, I don't just mean like coming home to your wife and her going, no, thank good for you, honey, or whatever it might be. But a good thing happens and you have someone that you can go, ah, that's fucking sick. You know what I mean? Like, and it wasn't your wife in that moment, but it was your manager. That's right.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
right you on the phone to your manager your manager's there screaming down the phone because you're both on a journey together that's right if you'd done your own buckings who would you have screamed to yeah I would have pumped my fist and been like cool and forgotten about it right got this memory that's right you wouldn't have remembered it if it was on your own that's right you wouldn't have remembered it yeah and then having my wife walk up at one of those events she surprised me walked up with a microphone and said I'm so proud of you I'll remember that to the day I die
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Well, I mean, you have immediate response from the audience.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah, you play a good note, they make a noise. You tell a good joke, they make a noise. It's very quick. So yeah, I think just one thing that's come to me, although the internet and remote working have afforded everybody the opportunity to step back and to, you know, I can work from anywhere, man. You know, I can be on the top of a mountain. I can determine my own working schedule.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I don't need anybody else. I just need a laptop and an internet connection. I'm good. That's great. But it's siloed you off. from being able to do the thing that you actually wanted to do, which was enjoy the fucking process of doing the work. And look, some people are just looking to earn in pounds and spend in pesos and they have whatever, like fulfillment that occurs outside of their job. Fine.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But if you want to get some fulfillment from your job, I don't think that you can solo Sigma Male Lone Ranger Wantrepreneur in fucking Bali. Because when you nail this next client on a sales call for like the biggest deal you've ever, oh my God, like Hewlett Packard are going to use our software. Dude, you just made 20 grand. You just made 20 grand. Oh, it's just me that made 20 grand.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Who am I going to celebrate with? And I'm fired up, kind of, but I'm not that fired up because the whole reason that you want to win something is so that you can go with other people.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yes. Yes. So that becomes the proxy. And all the money is, is just the number that you get to like shout in the air with everybody else.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
That's it. And the awe and the, oh my gosh, how'd you do that? It's amazing. So a perfect example of this. I'm going to go and do, it looks like it's the first time I'm talking about it. I'm going to go and do a tour around America and Canada.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
So as a part of that, I'm going to get to – I don't need a warm-up, right? It's two hours of me talking on stage. I'm going to take a warm-up because I want someone to finish the show with and fucking high-five. And it might be Zach, my ex-housemate who plays guitar. It might be James Smith from Australia. It might be somebody I might get, you know, guests to come and do warm-up.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But I want someone there with me so that I don't go back to the hotel on my own and think about how good or how bad it was. You know what I mean? Like, I've got friends who are DJs, dude. I've got friends... DJing looks from the outside like the most dialed life in the world. Let me tell you, it is...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
on the come up before you've got your tour manager with you before you've got an opener with you before you've got like a structure around you it's kind of a bit like hell you're playing until three in the morning if you've got back-to-back gigs i have a friend who did played a gig on a monday in argentina buenos aires something and the next time he got to sleep in a bed was saturday so it's monday to saturday he played four gigs over five time zones of whatever it was and uh
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
He ended up basically having like a small psychotic break. Talked about it on the podcast years ago now. And he came to in a supermarket, sat on the floor, and he had laid around him one of every different type of hair product. He'd been scooping it up and putting it on his head because he realized his hair was shit. Grabbed a floret of broccoli 48 dishwasher tablets and walked out.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Like he had a full, you know, part psychotic break. You think, huh. That doesn't sound fun. But from the outside, it's, oh, my God, he's living his dream. He gets to play his music around the world.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Talking about, I guess, the next step, people get into relationships with those that they feel like they need to fix. Why do people stay in relationships even if they're not being fulfilled?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Because the want can be denied. That's right. But the need can't. The want could be denied, but the need should not.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And that's terrifying. That's an awesome reframe. That's really good. Hmm. Yeah, I think in the process of defining our wants and risking the potential for somebody to be unprepared to fulfill them for us, we feel less than.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
That's fascinating. I suppose as well, you know, it goes back to what do you think you deserve? And if... We don't have a...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Well, also, what was the model of needs and wants and desires being requested and fulfilled in the household? Because, you know, a lot of the generation that are growing up now and are asking themselves these questions, their parents, they didn't have that sort of communication education. You know, there wasn't podcasts and fucking Arthur Brooks and all of this stuff to help everybody through.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
So you go, okay... Well, what was the model of how to communicate to things? Well, what about like passive aggression? That's it. What about shadow sentences? What about not requesting what you need and then getting bitter about the fact that you never got it?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah, you didn't attend a party, you weren't invited. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then how dare you not show up? Yep. Right, yeah. Yep, and you don't know. So yeah, I think... the sense of what are you worth? What are you worth? What should you get out of this? And do you even know what it is that you're asking for? Like, have you got an idea of it?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And I guess, okay, moving one step forward from this, And if somebody feels convinced that they should leave a relationship, but they're struggling to accumulate the bravery to be able to sort of pull the pin, maybe they've got close a few times and they've bailed out. What would you say to sort of motivate that person who deep down knows that it's the right thing to do, but as of yet, just...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
the courage kind of hasn't come to them?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
We'll get back to talking to John in just one minute. But first, I need to tell you about Function. Staying on top of your health requires more than just an annual physical, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that track over 100 biomarkers and monitor for early signs of thousands of diseases.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more than than you get from an annual physical. You receive insights from a team of expert physicians who provide detailed written clinician summaries of their observations and phone consultations for any critical findings. Getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's only $500.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And right now, you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. Yeah, I think... Some of the questions I've asked friends about when they've been on the fence, unsure, scared about being alone, about losing this attachment.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
The most, I mean, it's a beautiful story. And, uh, The first time that I ever really started thinking about this was Sean Strickland on Theo Vaughn's podcast a year ago, where Sean has that really bad experience sort of reliving his childhood. And Charlie Hooper from Charisma Uncommanded did this unbelievable breakdown. He's redone it again. He's run it back on his other channel.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You know, one of the things is how much of your life is thinking about this breakup taking up? Like what other productive or peaceful or mindful thoughts? is this taking the space of how often are you not present at dinner or not present at work or, you know, trying to meditate or train in the gym or do any of the things that usually bring you joy. And you're not thinking about where you are.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah. They've got a sense of relief from that being on the other side. They're just asking you for permission. That's right. They're just asking you for permission. There's this great, you know Rick Hansen? He wrote Hardwiring Happiness. Dude, unreal. Okay. Imagine CBT. meets Dharma wisdom, meets mindfulness, meets neuroscience. It's Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hansen.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
He's got a phenomenal, phenomenal podcast with his son, Forrest Hansen. I think it's called Being Well. And he dropped this quote that said, wisdom is choosing a greater happiness over a lesser happiness. And I think, you know, a lot of the time we assume that change is only ever going to make things worse, even though when we look back, almost all changes have made things better.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But we don't fear change, we fear loss. True. Yeah. But that's uncertainty. We don't necessarily feel lost. We feel uncertain. That's right. Right. Because losing an abusive partner isn't you're not fearing that you're fearing the uncertainty of what it would be like to be without them. You know, we have two needs as humans. We have an exploration need and we have a security need. Yeah. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And their intention. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah. Yeah. Novelty. Safety. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
you need to go out and get some berries you need to go to a new bush because this one's empty but also there's a risk of going there because there might be a line behind it it might kill you um i think one of the things that's really useful is to try and have faith that you are the sort of person who can handle change well like just to think about that as an ideal like it makes a
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
world inside of your mind where you don't need to fear things adjusting because change has happened in the past and you seem to deal with it quite well then change is going to happen in the future you're probably going to deal with that so why not this one like why not back yourself to be able to be the sort of person who can deal with change well like you've got this you're flexible and you're okay in different situations and yeah i you know unfortunately a lot of the people who
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
have the opportunity to choose partners, to not just have to settle for the first thing that happens, to have different life opportunities, to move away from their town, they are probably quite hard workers. And the problem with being a hard worker is that you have to have a pain tolerance
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And if your pain tolerance is quite high, that means that your pain tolerance for emotional deprivation is quite high, which means that you'll stick about in a relationship that isn't serving you for a very, very long time. Just keep going and going and going and going. Because that's what we do. Yeah. You're used to putting your nose against the grindstone and things being tough. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And coming out the other side and going, I wasn't that happy, but fuck, I got through it. Yeah, I got through it. Because in the past, in other areas of life, in the gym or in diet or in... building a meditation habit or in business or in skill acquisition, you have learned to associate delayed gratification. You're basically marshmallow testing your way through life over and over again.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And you go, well, look, there's certain things that you just kind of need to embrace the suck. Yes. And on the other side of which there will be maybe not happiness, but meaning and fulfillment and wellbeing. And perhaps downstream from that, you get some like fun and enjoyment and happiness and blah, blah, blah. But probably not in your relationship, right?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I don't think anybody's going to congratulate you on your deathbed for saying he suffered in silence. You know what I mean?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And it's so beautiful. He just explains he's... Sean... is sort of gripping this bottle. I think he's gripping the bottle with his left hand. He's drinking from it like this and you can see he's grasping with this left hand. He's actually trying to grip onto something. He's trying to get a hold of security and firmness and Charlie's breaking down his body language.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I've heard you say before about how the time, I think this was your conversation with Arthur Brooks, the time when you want to pull away the most is the time when you're supposed to lean in.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You can see what Theo does that drops him in and then pulls him out and then he goes back in again because Theo kind of, he doesn't make it about him. He does like a triple A. I don't want to give any shade on Theo. He literally inspired me to become a better space holder, a better communicator in difficult times. Um, but there's some things that you do that just rip someone out just a little bit.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You know, one final thing that I heard that I thought was such a fucking great rubric for how do you know if you've sort of really given this as good of a shot as you can in a relationship before you decide to pull the pin? It was, you know, that you've made a serious effort by comparing the level of effort that you've put in.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
to the people that you admire and the level of effort that they bring to something before they decide to quit. Like, just think about that. Think about how much effort the people that you admire, the friends around you, people in your life, the people you look up to, think about how much effort they put into something before they go like, it's time to stop trying to grow roses in this parking lot.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I think that gives you confidence in your view that it's time to move on. So you go, any other reasonable person would have said this is too much. Even the best of the reasonable people, which are the people presumably that I admire. So I think what everybody wants to hear when they've got a really existential disagreement in a relationship is, you know what, man? you're not crazy.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You're not crazy for thinking that. And you go, that's it. Oh my God. Cause I was wracked with so much self doubt. And I thought this was me being petty. I thought this was me. And a lot of the times it is right. And you need to know that's why you got to have a fucking blame on the people. That's right. Um, But I thought it was me being petty. I thought it was me being juvenile.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I thought I was being rash. And someone goes, you're not crazy. You're not crazy for feeling like that. I think that's completely an acceptable position to hold. Fuck. Well, what do I do now? I actually have a firm, because you get stuck in, are my desires legitimate? Should I be able to, is it okay to want what I want?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to be careful with rubbish bin here. Rubbish bin. Yeah, you don't know what that means. Crack that open. Come on, get it in you. All right. You've been waiting for this. I've been excited for this moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you'll have an unlimited amount going to the office soon. Well, I appreciate that. Orange sunrise for you. Excellent.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And if you've had a life of marshmallow testing your way through things, you have learned to not want what you want. That's it. You've learned to put off the things that you want in place of doing something that's harder or more boring.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And that's a lot of, a lot of people, especially now, uh, you know, how do you say physiologically decapitated from the neck down? I love that. Uh, you know, they just exist. And the, you know, this is me speaking to me as I desperately tried to get more embodied with, with stuff. But yeah, Dude, feeling feelings is really fucking hard.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And then they, they close off and they, well, you know, like, what does it matter? I'm a big guy. I'm a, I'm a grown adult. And then he sort of starts to get back into it, starts to get back into it. And then, you know, the most beautiful thing that Theo says in that entire exchange is, is like, we don't need to talk, man. We can just sit here for a while if you want.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I went on a journey over the last year of trying to do it, speaking to Conor Beaton, speaking to every different expert that I could find to talk about, okay, so what does it mean to tap into your emotions? What does it mean to feel feelings? You know Joe Hudson? Are you familiar with him? Art of Accomplishment? Going on a seven-day retreat the back end of September with him called Groundbreakers.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And they've got clinical studies showing that it moves neuroticism longitudinally, nudges neuroticism in the direction that you want it to. It makes a bunch of other personality changes. But it's like Navy Seal Hell Week for your emotions. So don't book anything for the next week. And I'm really excited. I'm going to get daunted as I get closer to it. But yeah, man, it's a...
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
One of the most interesting questions talking about wants is what do you want to want?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I adore that question. It's an essay by Kyle Eschenroda from years ago. His website has now been taken over by like a Ukrainian porn thing. You know, someone's got a hold of the WordPress logins and they've changed his website. But I downloaded the PDF, so I revisit it pretty regularly. And yeah, the question of what do you want to want? You know, because you're...
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Your desires define the path of least resistance that your life is going to take. And a lot of the time, people... Wait, unpack that. So the things that you want, your desires, will pull you in a direction that is the easiest for you to go. Even if that is very difficult. Even if it's very difficult. Yeah, of course.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And even if it is painful, even if it's toxic, even if it's malignant to the world at large, the things that you want, it's the old, the man who loves to walk will walk further than the man who is forced to walk or whatever. Your desires define the path of least resistance inside of your life. So what you want to do is align the things that you want with the things that you want to want.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Because if you don't ever step in and ask yourself what you actually want to want, you end up having your desires defined for you by the worst parts of yourself. That's exactly right. By society at large and by the way that you've dealt with past traumas and by the paths of least resistance and all of this stuff, it all comes together.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And then if you're not careful, you end up in a place not only that you don't want to be, but that you didn't even mean to get to. Yes. And it doesn't solve the problem you thought you were trying to solve because what you wanted was not what you wanted to want.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Absolutely. She's just a wise, still... I didn't realize that you were the relationally retarded one. Oh, are you kidding me? Yeah, dude. The guy that's got the call-in show is the one that actually doesn't know anything about... But she never would have been at a...
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah. Okay, taking one step forward, what is your advice for how people can better move on from breakups? They've got this... Gosh, that's a great question. ...rumination, they're struggling, checking the social media, everything reminds them of them, I'm never going to find anybody as good. How do people move on from relationships?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
What are the most typical forms of leakage?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
uh that there's a carve out in the dsm for grief around depression yeah which to me undermines the whole dude don't get me started on dsm but that's a whole other thing it makes sense to me though yeah that if you were to say i feel depressed my dad died yesterday i broke up with my girlfriend yesterday yeah well that okay the emotion might be that of depression right so the symptoms are correct
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But the diagnosis that's caused the symptoms or the cause of the symptoms seems to not fit.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah, I had an incident that opened up something similar. It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago. And I finished recording upstairs, finished this episode and came down. And Jonathan, who's outside, his dog was walking around. I was like, what the fuck's Jonathan's dog doing here? Oh, he must be here to show us the new merch samples because we're starting to get merch done.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And as I walked in, it turned out that there was a surprise birthday celebration for me. And there was only five people there. All of them worked for me in one form or another or work with me. And it was the middle of the day on a Friday. So who's free at 2 p.m. on a Friday to come and do stuff? And my best friend was getting married the next day and I was his best man here in Texas.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
So my head's in a different place. I'm thinking about the speech. I've just finished this episode. I've got to go and work on the speech. I've got to remember the thing, do the joke about the white people. And I come down and there's five people and they put a banner up and it said, happy birthday. And there was a cake and one of the guys was filming it. Our videographer, Max, was filming it.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
, , , , ,, in the. P P P P P P G實, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a and a
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
the end of my 20s until a couple of years ago but a lot of it just ended up being homework it's like admin that's it and I'm like I'm just paying fucking in retrospect I thought I was doing the thing and I can't I shouldn't shout at a previous version of me who did the thing he thought he was supposed to be doing yeah But I was largely just like filing stuff.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Whereas now, and this is half Tony Robbins, half Rick Hansen, I've dispensed with most of the other stuff from journaling on a morning and just three things that you're grateful for. But as opposed to just writing them down, like take one minute for each thing and just really... So I had a call with my best friend, the guy who's best man I was at his wedding.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I had a call with him yesterday for like 45 minutes. I was like, I fucking love Zach. Like he always listens. He's always got awesome advice. He's in a good mood all the time. He's really receptive. He's so fun. Like he really cares. He really cares about me. That's so nice. And you're like allowing that and sense. I think, fuck, that took a minute to do. What was the other one?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
The fresh air this morning just smelled awesome. Like coming through the window in front of my bedroom. Smells so good. Like it's really, really refreshing. What was the other one?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
uh uh i developed uh bravery and courage to overcome difficult things and i wouldn't have done that previously i think about how proud of yourself you are that you've done this stuff like three really but one of them was literally the fucking wind but so and i just you know i finished that and i was like i only had three minutes before the gym in any case and i was like that was so fucking nice what a lovely way to start a morning yeah and uh yeah i get the sense that a lot of journaling
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And I was like, oh, this is really, really beautiful. And then we sat down and we had some cakes. It was all laid out really nicely. Then they sang happy birthday to me. And there was this bit, there was this sense as I went down, as you said there, about almost having this odd feeling
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's it like for him to, but in some ways, you know, being selfless is one of the most selfish things you can do. Right. Because you get all of the positive sense of that. But yeah, I, you know, male normative ex-alexithymia, like it's so common now among men to not feel feelings that it's got a fucking name. And yeah.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I think... It's bananas. I think that there is a big cohort of people in the world who need David Goggins screaming in their face to go harder. And that may be... Do they need that or is it pornography?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah, I do understand. I... I get the sense that most people that listen to shows like this are type A people with a type B problem. They're hard-charging, insecure overachievers that need to learn to chill out and play video games. But there is a really big cohort of type B people with a type A problem who are...
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
too lazy not sufficiently disciplined they don't have upward mobility they don't have a sense of agency they don't feel like they have control over their life and the problem is that people that have got type a type a people with type b problems like oh my god sorry you've just got too much discipline like you keep winning the marshmallow test all the time no one's going to give you sympathy for this and but they'll see your heart attack from space oh of course right but
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
guilt, debt that you want to repay to people because, well, if they're doing this just because they love me, then I need to be able to sort of feel that in a way as opposed to there being some sort of value exchange. You know, all of these people in one form or another work with me, work for me, and that's fine.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
It sounds like if you are a David Gogginsy, like hard charging, pick yourself up, you don't need to fucking worry about how you feel, just keep on going guy. That sounds like every underdog movie that you've ever heard because every underdog movie has a dude down on his luck who needs to sort himself out by getting disciplined.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And there's an old Japanese guy who teaches him how to do Kung Fu and he gets the girl and everything's great, right? Yeah. There are no movies about how to log out of Slack at 6 p.m. or learn to spend a day under a tree, right? Because that sounds opulent and bourgeois and privileged and a champagne problem. It's like, dude, just chill out. No one gets told to just work harder.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Well, you need instruction to work harder. You don't need instruction to just chill out because the assumption is that chill is the set point and work is the aberration. But that's not the case. For a lot of people, that's not the case. A lot of people... It's a great frame, dude. Yeah. Type A people, type B problems. Type B people, type A problems.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But it's actually happening at all, like in real time.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Everyone wants to feel like If things go badly for me, I can get myself back to where I wanted to be. That's right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, dude. As opposed to if everything's going right for me, I need to learn to chill out. But you're right. I mean, you will see.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
The most common, I used to be a college athlete and I'm about to give myself like a double fucking tendinopathy is basketball by far, by far. So I played cricket until I was 2021. I got my grades reduced to get into the university I got into because I was going to go and play at a high level for them. It was, I'd done everything. It was my entire life throughout my childhood. Yeah.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And I stopped playing for a decade and a bit. And then COVID came along and I was like, I should play cricket again. And the first game back, I snapped my Achilles. And that was 12 months of rehab and three and a half months in a boot and a surgery, the first major surgery I've ever had. And I learned a lesson I already knew. One of my friends snapped every CL, every CL in his knee.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
All of the CLs went. Tom Segura managed to snap his knee and his arm in the same move playing basketball. It's like, guys, look, if you used to be fit and you're now...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
40 pounds heavier don't than you used to be and you've not conditioned anything and the only running that you do is to like you know avoid the rain going from the car to the house don't try basketball because you're going to fuck something up but we do it with everything we do it with drugs we do it with relationships oh yeah like if people who abstain from cocaine oh I'm going to fucking run this back watch me I'm going to start where I ended yeah exactly it's essentially like I press pause on a video game
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You know, we're working together, we're building this project, we're doing the whatever thing. And yeah, watching... Five people sing happy birthday to me at 2.30pm on a Friday. I did a live show in London last year to 3,500 people. the five people was way more uncomfortable.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And the like sniffer 1000 video game. And then I'm going to immediately re-begin. You're going to the gym, taking a break. Everybody knows.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Like, what are you doing, man? Yeah, no. It's not going to happen. Uh, dude, you're fucking awesome. You're absolutely awesome. And I can't wait to have you back on. And today was so much fun. And, uh, where should people go? They want to keep.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I got interested in it... toward the back end of 2020, 21, I really started thinking about mating dynamics. And I think it's so fundamental to how the world works, you know, survival and reproduction, okay? Survival thing has been sorted by medicine. So let's talk about reproduction. And reproduction is mating dynamics. And I just really fell in love with understanding
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I guess, the nuts and bolts of how human attraction works, about how mate values work, about mate guarding, jealousy, male parental investment, all of this stuff. And I kind of got welcomed with open arms by the EP world, which I was very fortunate about.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
People like Rob Henderson, William Costello, Dr. David Buss, Dr. Robert Plowman, even though he's behavioral genetics, all of that world of unspeakable fucking totally cancelable academics really were very kind to me. And I don't think anyone had fully stepped into the world of EP before. at the level that this show was at and is at now, I don't think anyone really opened it up.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And I think that it's very interesting. I think that fundamentally my question is why are we the way that we are? I'm trying to understand myself and the world around me. And I think that EP gives us a really wonderful look into it. And then you can look at human behavioral ecology, you can look at evolutionary biology, but I just found it so compelling that I didn't stop
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah, because I was seen by them.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
and then i spoke at hbess i spoke to the human behavioral evolutionary society in palm springs um i gave it i was part of a symposium there i'm about to get my first uh whatever it is citation authorship on a study congratulations man so this is going to be cool i'm going to do this with candace blake and mac and murphy about i have a theory that uh
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
people who are in shape will be more threatened by potential as MPCs than people who are out of shape. Despite the fact that people who are out of shape would be having their true selves denied as the fat acceptance movement falls away. Lizzo's in moderately all right shape now. I don't know whether you've seen it. She's lost, it must be over 100 pounds. So she looks very different.
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But the reason being that if you are
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
someone who's quote unquote in shape i'm aware that ozempic doesn't make you in shape it just makes you skinny but um if you're someone who's in shape your fitness signal is being derogated attacked by this person being able to get an easy route to something that you had to use willpower to do and you're going to see that as a threat and uh yeah i've i've moved a little bit my my i'm still super interested in ep and if anyone's bringing out a new book and i just had uh uh bill von hippel on um he's fantastic i guess evolutionary anthropology technically um so i'm still
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
balls deep in it just did a great conversation with who the fuck did Matt Ridley about it's like birds sex and Darwin or something which is all about sexual selection that was yesterday and I love it. And I'm super interested. I'm now moving a little bit more neuroscience, emotions, feeling feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I think understanding that All, even the most mindful person in the world, even you at your most peaceful, you have a sense that you are the author of your own desires, of your own needs, of your own wants, of your own actions. But realizing that you are basically a vehicle for your genes and understanding the myriad of different ways that they polybate and switch on you.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And just realizing how little you're in the driver's seat has been oddly reassuring in a way because it makes you feel less alone because you understand that you're not personally cursed by this thing. Perfect example. Here's one good example. So basically, your pathologies are not some unique thing.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
idiosyncratic issue the only you deal with they're endemic and they're a part of being a human that would be like kind of I guess or they're not characterological yes yeah yeah yeah exactly so perfect example of this Dr. David Buss writes a book and in it he talks about how there is a part of the male brain which is rewarded with pleasure for looking at things that just look sexual.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
He talks about how guys will happily look at a pair of rocks that look like boobs, right? And you go, okay, it is inherently rewarding for guys to look at stuff that looks sexual.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And he got this letter from a man who said, I just wanted to let you know that your book saved my marriage because I was looking at other women and I was finding them attractive, even though I wasn't going to go and do anything. And I thought that there was something wrong with my relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I thought that there was something that was an indication that my marriage was broken because I found other women attractive. I wasn't going to cheat on my partner. I love her to death. But I saw other women as attractive. And your book told me that, yeah, you're a guy. You're going to see other women that are attractive as attractive.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And you have a system that's inbuilt in you that you do not have control over. And that, okay. So when I don't eat for a while, I get hungry. sense uh but for every you know behavior a lot of things it just makes me feel like oh i'm you know the the things that i struggle with aren't some personal deficiency yeah they are just part and parcel of you being you huh that's fantastic
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Good, good. Yeah, you're now five IQ points smarter. Ten. Each sip is... I accept, man. You'll light me up like a Christmas tree. Half a standard deviation. All right. I have no idea how I didn't stumble across you and the work that you do, because it aligns so much with lots of the things that I'm very interested in, and I really appreciate the way that you... are firm but gentle and reassuring.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah, I mean, look, it's been a rough 12 months physically for me. America is a fantastic country, but it tries to kill everybody that enters it. Every one of them.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
That's good. The food, the water, the air, the building materials, everything, the cars, the fucking everything. And perhaps, I mean, look, someone asked me a question about... And this is self-serving too, because I got my own stuff, not that, but... Look, here's a way to look at it. Most people are stuck...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Most people that are hard charging are stuck somewhere on the spectrum between guilt and overwhelm. Right? It's like, choose your direction, Western man. Because if you've got that type A energy, you are going to continue to want to do stuff. You're going to want to drive harder, more, more, more. I just did the number one bestseller, but let's look over the shoulder of it as I'm receiving it.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Correct. To ask what's next. And, you know, I... In some ways, this is very early because I'm still in it, right? I haven't fixed it. And if you haven't fixed the thing, you can't fully feel sort of appreciation for it.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But trying to find some of the silver linings, one of the things it's really done is it's taught me the value of a slower pace, slower pace of life, taking pleasure in simpler things. Because when your capacity gets restricted, and this is for anybody that's going through health problems, it brings you back to a much more sort of pure sense of yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You're not able to use bravado or momentum or distraction in the same way that you would previously. It's like stripped back, right?
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#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
underneath in many ways and i think it reminds you of the stuff that really really doesn't matter because if you can't do all of the things you have to do a few of the things and presumably the few things you choose to do are much more important so um my my feeling around this is i do not want to look back on a life or a I don't want, and this is where, you know, I love Hormozy.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
He's a fantastic friend, but he is a one in a couple of hundred million constitution. And I don't think that most people are built to work like he is. And that's where if I had two, if I had an angel and a demon sat on either shoulder, the angel would be Chris Bumstead and the demon would be Alex Hormozy.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And Chris would be saying, you should just chill out and, you know, eat some chicken with your friends. And Alex should be saying, like, don't listen to your feelings, stop being such a pussy. And I'm way more in the sebum energy than I am in the hormosy energy at the moment. And I think you can switch between the two. Or seasonally, right? Yeah. But I just get the sense that...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
If you want to enjoy, presumably the reason that you want success and you want to work hard is so that you can find some sort of enjoyment at the end of it. And you have to be careful not to sacrifice the thing you want, which is joy and happiness, for the thing that's supposed to get it, which is success.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Like, you're literally cutting off at the knees the opportunity for you to enjoy things along the way because you're so concerned about getting the thing that gets you what you want. That's it, that's it. The reason that you wrote the book was to enjoy something During the process of writing it, you were thinking about whether it was going to be successful.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
During the promotion of it, you were thinking about whether it was going to be successful. And during the success of it, you were thinking about whether the next one would be successful. You go, at no point have you arrived. It's like running toward a mirage. Every step you take toward the horizon, the horizon moves one further step away from you. And, um...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
yeah the only fucking way to like win any game is to stop first off stop moving the goal posts because if every time you try and fucking kick the ball toward it and it goes about to cross the line and then you like move the goal another hundred yards back well that's not gonna work so i'm very much in my at least trying to embrace my sort of slower more considered energy um
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And in some ways I've heard you this. Do you have people in your life that you can talk to that are just your friends that you don't work with? That seems to be a common thread. Yeah. Some of the conversations. Yeah. You have some housewife. I've heard you speak to a bunch of these recently. Housewife who's there was one had insomnia. She kept waking up throughout the night.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
really like really really hard trying to not take the same levels of satisfaction and dopamine from uh like chaotic busyness um you know What you should be trying to do is move your life toward an outcome that you want. And you have proxies for that because like the outcome that I want, like a good life, real amorphous.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
So you have stuff like I go to the gym every day and I make sure that I speak to my wife and I have a project that I care about. And all of those are broken down into subcomponents, right? I lift the weights in this sort of a manner and we have these kinds of conversations at this sort of a cadence. I have to answer Slack and I have to do emails and so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But don't mistake the little steps that you're supposed to take to get somewhere for the thing that you're supposed to be doing. And you need to regularly be reassessing, is the thing that I'm doing moving me toward my goal? Because when you start on a journey, a lot of the time you need to be answering every email and checking Slack all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And you need to be like, chaos, go, go, go, go, go, like super Adderall mode. And then a little bit later, you think, well, I kind of don't need to do that quite so much. Maybe you're part of a team now in the organization that you're in, or maybe it's your own business and you've got some people that can actually do that on your behalf.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You go, your entire reason for doing this was to not have to do things you don't want to do anymore. You are at the stage where you don't have to do things you don't want to do anymore. And you're addicted to still doing them because they gave you such a sense of completion. And you have existential angst if you're not busy every single day.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You... You look at your calendar as a judge of your self-worth. And if your calendar is stacked, how can you be a piece of shit? I can't be useless. Look how many people need me. Look at all of the people that need me. If I wasn't here, what would they do? What would all of these just reaching out to check calls? That's why Americans won't take vacations right there.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Oh, because they feel like they always need to be on the grind? Is it not because they're all poor and they don't get any maternity leave? Well, there's definitely that. Structural issues also.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
there's a pastor in Nashville that says if busyness is your drug rest will feel like stress you can't you can't it's like being off coke for a week a beautiful equivalent of that is the ancient Greek word for work is translated as not at leisure So the Greeks saw leisure as the set point and work as an aberration. Now in the modern world, we see work as the set point and leisure as an aberration.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
So we've turned it upside down. And just to go back to the, you know, how are you dealing with, like, is it pressure of doing all of this stuff causing stuff to arise in your body? Perhaps. And, you know, it's too late to fucking turn it around now. So I'm just doing my best. It's a realization. You know, I said to, who the fuck was I talking to about this? I can't remember who I was talking to.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I do know who I was talking to, CEO of one of the companies that I work with. And he's about to have a kid. And he was saying, hey, man, my drive's dropping a bit. I was like, you're doing your wife's eight months pregnant. It's like, yeah. And I was like, well, you know the science on this. Testosterone drops in men when they get into a relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
It drops again when the wife gets pregnant and they're about to give birth. You know that that's your kid. You're ready for this to happen. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like... Can we just for a second imagine that you might have had an aneurysm in five years' time and that this has saved you from it? Because we don't know. We don't know what was coming down the path.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Can we imagine just for a second that this gives you a new, more nurturing approach to being able to run your business, which actually stops some impending catastrophe that would have happened if you'd gone more hard charging? We just don't know where it's going to end up. And for the first time in today's conversation to talk about faith,
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You said, how many friends have you got? And you dug real deep and it turned out she did have, it seemed like she had quite a good social network. But yes, it does seem we spend so much time at work and we're so obsessed with productivity and moving forward in some way that we don't have friends for the sake of being friends with them. We have friends who are...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
George Janko refers to periods where people are struggling. And he says, every man knows God when he's at his lowest. And I think about that going back to a more sort of stripped back version of you, sort of remembering, okay, I don't have momentum. I don't have ego. I don't have bravado. I don't have the charisma. I don't have the charm.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Like, who am I deep down? Who am I now? Yeah. Yeah. One of my values and my virtues when I'm not quite as flamboyant as I usually am. And do people still like me? Do I still like me? And, um, I think again, it's still early days, but I think I like me a lot more now than I did before I had to fight a ton of health problems. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
because it's reminded me that sort of the person that's underneath all of that stuff, when I have to go to bed at 8 p.m. every night and when I'm tired all the time and when my mood's not right and when I need to rely on people more, like... I think that's a good person. And I don't think that I would have realized that or I don't think I would have known that if it hadn't happened.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Dude, I can't wait to bring you back on.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You're fucking great. Where should people go?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Everyone should go and subscribe. Dude, until next time. Appreciate you.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
compatriots and soldiers in whatever battle it is that we're fighting against getting our Brazilian Jiu Jitsu purple belt against becoming better at pickleball against learning to salsa dance against learning to do improv against the job interview the promotion whatever it is and it's An odd blend. It makes people into a 401k.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Is it your opinion that there is something lesser about friendship with people that you work with too?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Well, it's the same issue with men who get divorced, right? The single most predictive lifestyle change for suicide is men who get divorced. The reason being, it seems... Women are much better at holding on to their own social networks when they get into a marriage, whereas men supplant their own social networks and they use the wives.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
So, you know, the wife has loads of female friends and the female friends have husbands and you as the husband become friends with the husbands of her.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah, how's work? Good. The only thing you have in common is the fact that your wife knows their wife. That's it.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah. Yeah, it's that ability to be able to sit with, oh, well, people actually want to be here for this. There's a degree of discomfort. Not for this, for you. Yes. And that's hard to hold. James, you spoke about him earlier on, the other half of Newtonic. I fucking love this story. I tell it all the time, but I fucking adore it. He did a load of mushrooms.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I won't mention the country in case they're going to kick him out. Did a load of mushrooms on a rock. And this question came to him. And the question was, do people love you for who you are or for what you do?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And, you know, people loving you for what you do feels transactional. It feels flimsy. It feels volatile. And, you know, the subtext is, if I stopped doing what I do... then the love would be taken away from me as well. What we want is people to love us for who we are because it feels grounded and forever. It's attached to our sense of self where our work isn't. And it's rigid, right?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I am slowly becoming native. Someone told me that I was allowed to use the word y'all because I've been here for three years now.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And, you know, I told this story on the pod and someone asked, well, it's an interesting question, but a more interesting question is, do you love you for who you are or for what you do? Mm-hmm. Because a lot of the time, we want the world to love us for who we are. Meanwhile, we love us for what we do.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
I think when you speak to people, a lot of the conversations around relationships and dating and mental health tend to me to either be so soft as to not have an impact or so brusque and harsh as to cause people to get defensive and for it to feel a little bit more about the host or the commentator, the advice giver, than it is about the person who has the problem.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
So you're asking the world to show up for you in a way that you're not prepared to show up for yourself. You don't love you for who you are, for the fact that you actually care.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
about other people that you have empathy that yeah sure it looks a little bit wimpy when you cry at Christmas films but it's because you've got a soft side to you or because you're really reliable you know like genuine good traits that are as timeless as you can be No, no, no, no.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You've judged yourself on the last 10 hours of productivity and the fact that you got distracted on YouTube for 30 minutes, despite the fact that you've crushed it. Even if you look at your productivity over the last six months, you've crushed it as well. But no, no, no. You know exactly where your shortcomings lie and the scabs that you can pick at and the scars.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And you know exactly what to say to yourself to torture yourself about these things. And... You're not a nice friend to you, but you want the world to be a nice friend to you. You want the world to love you for who you are. Meanwhile, you love you for what you do. I just thought that was such a lovely little... No, I think that's a...
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Getting married is just choosing one person's faults over another. Is that right?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
If that's green flags, is there an equivalent for red flags? Are there traits that are highly, I guess, not being conscientious, not being flexible, not being open to new experiences, a way to look at that. But is there a different category of thing to other traits that people have that are highly predictive of relationships going badly?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
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Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
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Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
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Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
That's kettleandfire.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. That's interesting. Do you think there's such a thing as being too different from our partner? What are deal breaker differences?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think opposites attract might not be entirely accurate, but you need to have some level of resonance. And I think you need to agree on your fundamental principles and values of how you see the world.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
If you think that a family should be built like X, but your partner thinks that a family should be built like Y, that's probably going to be pretty predictive of things being difficult down the line.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
I think anybody who disagrees about how you should raise a child or the way that education should be done, looking at how the homes run, how the environment is supposed to be run, and expectations around that, sort of the sharing of workload and stuff like that. I mean, I would imagine that if you have incompatibility in terms of how much sex is the right amount of sex,
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Idiosyncrasies.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Let's do a child. Raising a child, schooling, the approach that we should have around how this child should be disciplined, rearing of the kids.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Dig into that a little bit more for me. What did he find?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
How much of a circuit breaker are conversations like this? I'm sort of interested in how effectively people can unlearn the way that they typically argue because you have a habit, you have a pattern of behavior bad habits of disagreeing poorly with your partner.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
And it always results in one getting the silent treatment and the other one feeling hard done by or heavily criticized or whatever it is. And it's almost like putting on an old leather pair of shoes. Well, this is what we do. This is the rhythm of how our disagreements go. So what are some of the ways that you can really try to break that frame of this familiar discomfort when disagreeing?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
So there's a sense there that I think people would assume, well, if you're having to do counseling or therapy or something in the first year of a relationship, that doesn't bode very well. We're in the honeymoon phase. We shouldn't need to be going to therapy to try and deal with my three-month-old relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Why do you think it is that people get drawn to partners that they want to fix? It's the I can fix her meme.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Did you know that your annual physical only screens for around 20 biomarkers, which leaves a lot of gaps when it comes to your understanding of your health, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They even screen for 50 types of cancer.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
At stage one, they've got a team of expert physicians that then takes that data, puts it into a simple dashboard, and gives you actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health and hormone levels to your thyroid function. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this usually costs thousands, but with Function, it is only $500.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
And right now, you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com Slash modern wisdom. Does this need for approval that reflects a type of need for approval that you once had as a child?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Yeah, I was thinking about this yesterday. I wonder if a little bit of it is...
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
if you have low self-esteem yourself, if that's something that's maybe been bruised in the past and somebody else is treating you in the way that you internally treat yourself, that you're observing in this significant other a reflection of the way that you see yourself and that therefore in the pursuit of trying to win the love and acceptance of the person that you are, you maybe wonder whether or not
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
that would almost fix what it is that you have internally what it is that you're missing internally it's sort of a misplaced projection with like aspiration for what you want to achieve if oh if i can get them to love me then perhaps and there's this sense of familiarity yeah yeah i'm good enough and i already know that i'm not so they're telling me the thing that i agree with them i agree with i agree with what they're saying i agree with this sense of not feeling good enough yeah and if somebody just loves me outright they must be fucking crazy
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Yeah, that push and pull, you know, that dynamic, that very juvenile sort of immature dynamic of I like someone until they like me back is it's it's such a common tension that happens in relationships. And, you know, there's a huge meme apparently on TikTok of in a relationship, it needs to be the girl who likes the guy less, right? Because that's sort of the only way that he'll remain interested.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
That basically the power in a relationship lies with the person who cares the least.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Healthy advice there from TikTok.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Yeah. You mentioned before there about sort of a more normal disagreement that you might have with your partner rather than a blow-up that you've got in the counseling session. What's the gold standard for how to do rupture and repair well, in your opinion?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
It seems like the most important thing here is that it's on a foundation of very, very deep trust that both of you know that you have the other's best interests at heart. You both appear as a team. It's us against the world together. It's exactly what it is.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
It's the difference between you... calling the opposing team member a bad name because you want him to miss a penalty? Are you calling your own team member a bad name because you think, dude, you could have done better and like, let's do better next time or whatever, like the more encouraging equivalent?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
You mentioned this a couple of times, the friendship levels.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
It's an interesting thing. You're looking at a familiar type of discomfort and the deal that you're really trading it for is not familiar discomfort for unfamiliar comfort, but familiar discomfort for unfamiliar discomfort.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
What else was predictive of longevity from the Gottman research?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Well, that's one plus one equals three, right? That's sort of a positive sum game where you together become more than you could have ever been apart type thing.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
You mentioned how much time we spend learning maths, whichever useless subject that we can't remember anyway from when we were in school, and how little time gets spent learning about relationships. But maybe you could lay that at the feet of an ineffectually designed education system. But you're an adult now and you haven't decided to go. How many times did you go to pickleball lessons?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
You remember when you did 15 weeks of pickleball lessons and you went twice a week and you did that class? Do you remember when you did that? And what are you doing with your pickleball now? You still suck. Whereas your relationship, this thing that you know is the single most important decision that you're going to make in your entire life, What have you done with that?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Oh, you watched a couple of TikToks. You made a couple of scientifically unsound conclusions from a few TikToks. So, yeah, I just, you know, I do think that this is changing a little bit. The world of personal development, personal growth, sort of self-development stuff is
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
seems to me to be crossing over into how can I use my relationship as a vehicle to make me, my partner, our union, and our lives better all together as one big thing. It's so efficient. Correct. That's a perfect way of putting it. Yeah, it's super, super efficient. And I guess on the other side of this, the personal growth that you get from a how can I alchemize maybe a bad relationship way
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
What is flexible in this context? Because neuroticism for me in the classic big five is sort of predisposition to low affect, low mood, et cetera. But I know lots of people who have a tendency toward low mood that make pretty great partners. And I would also describe as quite flexible. So I'm guessing it's a slightly different definition.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Bad relationships will teach you more about yourself than probably pretty much any other situation in your life. So it is a... I get... I really do understand why people are sort of checking out of dating. I don't agree with it, but I understand emotionally the motivation for them to do it. There's protection. I've been hurt before. This is painful. I don't understand, so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
But with a tiny little bit of a frame change, it just seems to me like there's... You have the opportunity for the...
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
consistently having yeah exactly the greatest growth periods in your entire life to come off the back of this and then you become better for the next one right um so yeah i it's it's an interesting it does feel like rolling the dice you know it feels it feels like risk and people are very risk averse in the modern world so i kind of get it we are we are and yet we're so drawn
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
In other news, Whoop is the best fitness tracker I've ever used. It's a 24-7 health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, your strain, your recovery, your stress, and more to provide you with personalized insights that help you reach your goals.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
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Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
You can track over 140 different habits and behaviors. They correlate that with your health. And finally, they've even got a step counter. You can stop guessing about what's happening inside of your body by wearing a small thing on your wrist that tracks absolutely everything. And if you're still on the fence, you can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4.0 strap.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Join by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash. Modern wisdom. This is an interesting one.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
I'm going to try and combine a couple of different areas of the stuff that you do. So you assess lingering emotional stress, psychological pain, stuff like that. How can people expedite relinquishing themselves of that lingering emotional stress and psychological pain, but from a relationship standpoint.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
So they've been in a relationship previously and they've developed coping patterns, expectations of themselves, behaviors, habits, and not only do they not want to see the world in that way, they don't want to bring that into the next relationship. So what are some of the ways that people can detox from previous relationship patterns that they want to get rid of?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
So your answer is counseling.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
What should people do if, in your opinion, this is not medical advice, where would you direct people for the best evidence-based category of marriage?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
So you're looking for a Gottman licensed couples therapist?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
You mean two people separately going to psychotherapy, doing the normal talk therapy thing?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
I love it. I guess final thing, something we haven't spoken about is breakups. And is there anything to say from an evidence-based perspective on what getting over a breakup looks like? Is that even an area of research?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Right. That's the answer to a lot of problems. Just go to bed. Yeah. And put your phone away. No, it's very interesting. I actually asked Huberman this question about probably about three years ago. And he started talking about the neuroscience of grief. So he said that the way that it works with grief is there is a, an area of our brain, which is expecting our ability to connect with that person.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
And that has been taken away.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
I can send you the link to the clip.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Okay. Yeah, the professional nerd in the room as opposed to the unprofessional nerd. Yeah, basically, it's like grief, right? That you've lost somebody, that they're dead. But the unique pain that you get from a breakup is that the person is still accessible. Maybe they don't care about you anymore. Oh, yes. They moved on with...
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Maybe they maybe you left them and you've got this sense of guilt and there is still going to be this sense of missing existential messiness of it all. Yeah. Like imagine imagine a type of death where somebody dies, but you can get them back. but you have to pay a very high price in order to do it. And you can do that over and over and over and over again.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
So it's his opinion, I think, that from a sort of neurobiology perspective, you're looking at the same pathways that you get in grief. And...
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
It's just endogenous. It's coming from inside of them, except from outside.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
provides i think a little bit of an avenue for uh reconnection or healing isn't it funny we're just you know shaven primates trying to make sure that the next generation comes along um and all of this stuff comes for the ride you just have these complex psychological mechanisms and you know what about your childhood what about the inner voice and where that's come from and you got to think about you know the foundation of the house needs to be friendship first and then you're going to do the thing
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
It's like, hey, dude, I'm a fucking grandchild optimizing machine that has become self-aware. I'm like ChatGPT9 or something. Did we ask for this? I don't feel like I asked for this. But this is why it's interesting. It's interesting because you know the idea of spandrels? You must know the idea of spandrels. No. Oh, okay.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
So, um, it's, I don't know whether the word actually exists outside of psychology, but it exists. The best example is you were an alien that comes down to earth and you look at a light bulb and somebody was to say, what's the job of an old school style light bulb? One from 50 years ago. And they'd say, what's the job of that light bulb?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
And you say, it's obvious the job of the light bulbs to give off heat. Look at how much heat it's giving off.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Interesting. Interesting comment. No, job of the light bulb is to give off light. That heat is a byproduct. So we didn't mean to give off the heat, but in order to give off the light, we gave off the heat. And it's kind of like the entirety of everything that we're dealing with here of fucking spandrels. They're all just spandrels that we've had to try and find ways to compensate and work around.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
You know, a very ungainly God when it came to him designing the sort of way that men and women interrelate. I mean, he's tired. It's late on a Saturday afternoon. He's had an edible. And, you know, you're thinking, are you really this bit? You know, there was some slickness. Look at the beauty of a swordfish swimming through the sea. And look at, you know, the sort of majesty of the nice guy.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
And there's this simplicity and all the rest of it.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
And then at the end- And he really had to rush it toward the end. He was like, I've got so many Slack notifications. Yeah, my fucking Trello board is a nightmare. And honestly, that second edible is looking really good. So I'm just going to send this and hope for the best. The code that you wrote this with is a little bit messy. It's like, yeah, it'll be fine.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
So no, look, Dr. Shannon Curry, ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciate you. It's fascinating to look at the world of relationships through an evidence-based lens is really, really unique. So where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything you do.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Heck yeah. Dr. Curry, I appreciate you. I'll see you next time.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
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Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
You have a partner that is not quite as tender as you might like. They're not as loving. You're staring at the night sky and you really wish they would say something high-flown and thoughtful, but they start singing a song that they heard yesterday or playing a tune or something like that, or they make a joke. And you think, I just really want somebody that's so deep and is there.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Never watched it.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
What's the role of conscientiousness?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
So this was a longitudinal study that was done in a relatively sort of academic setting?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Those three traits were predictive. Conscientiousness, which is being a combination of thoughtful and kind.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
You said that.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. I was more thinking, I was trying to sort of interpret it, I guess, into the language of romance. But yes, if you're talking straight up, what is conscientiousness? I think Good definition. They are flexible psychologically. If there is some sort of perturbment, they end up getting back to baseline in not an insane amount of time.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
If something occurs, they're able to adapt to it, which is maybe distinct, but kind of sounds a little bit like a subset of agency, which I would put not too far away from consciousness as well.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
And then you decide to switch for another partner and you're at a party and your previous partner would have been really involved in the conversation. It would have given you something that you could have bonded over. But at the new party with the new partner, this partner sort of needs your attention all of the time and they don't really allow you to connect.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Right, okay. So you want highly agentic partner.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
And then your final one, you want a degree of openness to new experience. Presumably that's somebody that just doesn't want to sit on their ass all the time. It helps to keep things exciting. But that is something that you can overshoot for. And you end up with someone who is going to be very open sociosexually.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
Yeah, correct. So, okay, that's interesting is three traits. I guess a question would be, let's say that you are on an early date with someone or you're early into a relationship. What are some of the ways that you can adjudicate how much or how little of those traits your partner has?
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
So you have certain elements of discomfort traded for other elements of discomfort. One person is phenomenal to watch movies with because they don't interrupt and they just like to sit there and be calm. But the next person that you bring along is really interesting and engaging when you have conversations about stuff that fires you up and you end up making these trades.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Talk to me about where we should put our hands.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
What about crossing arms, hands on table, stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
what about hands on face hands around face hands on mouth
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
What were the other three actions?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
What is it that we're doing? Are we trying to self-soothe there in some way?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
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Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
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Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
It has definitely worked for me. My progress this year has been wild and it's due to nothing else really than sticking to an actual evidence-based science-backed plan. And you can do that too.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
You can follow the exact same training plan that I have and get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Okay, talk to me about detecting lying then. What's true and what's false?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Yeah, it's fascinating that The physical language comes second to the spoken language, even though that's the thing that is usually most front and center.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
And the goal is to make lying tells into recalling tells? Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
You mentioned there about smart people sometimes struggling with being charismatic. Explain that to me.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Wow.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Yeah, it's interesting that it gets in the way. It's as much a block as it is an enabler. I had a great conversation recently with William von Hippel, and he was talking about this tension between warmth and competence. I know that's something that you talk about a lot, and it was interesting to see an anthropologist talk about it as well. Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
People that are competent and demonstrate competence is often seen as being more cold. People that are warm are seen as less competent. And you've got this sort of ruthless tension between the two.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
What about in person, competent people that want to feel more warm and warm people that want to appear more competent?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
What if someone's not speaking? What if somebody is supposed to be just receiving? Where should our hands go then?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Yeah, I have actually. I don't spend that much time. I try to spend as little time on LinkedIn as possible.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
In other news, Whoop is the best fitness tracker I've ever used. It's a 24-7 health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, your strain, your recovery, your stress, and more to provide you with personalized insights that help you reach your goals.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
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Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
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Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
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Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Trying to look at somebody for the entirety of the time when you're speaking is really, really hard. It almost feels like you've had to strap your eyeballs down and not let them wander around because they want to wander. Yes. You're thinking about stuff. You're like, what was that thing?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Oh, that's interesting, because they also have to use less processing power to think about what they're doing. They're actually recalling as opposed to generating.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Yeah. What about the issue of over rehearsing again for smart people who want to try and do a thing? They're not trying to be deceitful. They're not trying to lie to you. But, you know, the perils of being underprepared versus being overprepared.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
That's interesting. Yeah, it's certainly trying to be as precise as possible, trying to control the outcomes, trying to ensure that every word is said with absolute accuracy. I don't know, it communicates the ideas correctly, but it's not exactly the vibe that most people are going to feel most warmth toward.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
What should we know about vocal charisma?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Hello. Hello.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
How dynamic should people be when it comes to volume?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
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Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
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Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
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Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Yeah, I was going to say, what's your advice for people who are overthinkers when it comes to the way that they communicate to kind of get out of their own head?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Hmm. Just trying to resonate with people. I guess what we don't want is to feel like we're the odd one out and some sort of weird Lone Ranger thing. Yeah. And resonating. What about small talk? The absolute nightmare encounter that lots of people have. How can you get better at small talk?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Do introverts have more of a problem with being charismatic?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
What about becoming more resilient when we think that people might be socially rejecting us or we kind of get into an awkward conversation or a new one in the group. We don't really know how people feel about us and you don't want to come across as being too brash. You don't want to come across as being too much of a wallflower. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
That hypervigilance, I imagine that a lot of introverts and people that pay attention, maybe smart people have as well, where the micro movement of everybody that's in the room and they're paying attention to it all. How can we become sort of more resilient to that fear of social rejection and maybe actual social rejection?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
What were the, what, what are some of the sort of predictive factors for that?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
It's like a conversational shit test.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Thank you. Thank you for sending up a warning flare nice and early.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Oh, no. Okay. What about coming across as more attractive when it comes to dating?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Yeah, because they've become more intense. Why? What is it that they're doing? Is it they're paying more attention or is it they're maybe a bit confused? Talking about giving presentations, going to do public speaking, what are some ways to build up energy and positivity before going out and speaking? Have you got a little priming process that you go through, Tony Robbins jumping up and down?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
So much of the stuff that you're talking about sort of aligns with a lot of what CBT teaches. It's a combination of exposure therapy, CBT, reframing. Look, this isn't as bad as you think it can be. It's not just rooted in sort of nonverbal and verbal communication. I'm going to guess the neuroscience of what's going on in your brain and how that actually relates to your habits of communication.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
What about online dating profiles, cues, important, attractive cues there?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
What's that look like?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Yeah, it's strange the stuff that we think that we're going to resonate with other people on compared with what it's actually going to be. Are there sex differences between men and women? The way that we sort of come across in terms of charisma, how we get adjudicated, how gender neutral are these bits of advice or are there certain things that only work for men and women?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Yeah, I think especially in this new world of guys being very concerned about not wanting to make women feel uncomfortable or be part of some awful news headline or a TikTok or in the background of a gym. But a lot of women still getting sort of living in this blast radius of why men love bitches, treat him like you treat him mean, keep him keen. I think...
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
we need an iOS update for what it is that women understand about sort of how men are interpreting. If it's anything other than an absolute hell yeah with a big sign above your head, it's a, oh my God, I don't want to get in trouble.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Halfway house. What about, have you looked at paying and receiving compliments? How to get better at doing that?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Really? That's the best that you could come up with.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Yeah, it's... Being able to take compliments well. I remember sort of, I don't know whether it's the Brit in me, although I do think that a lot of Brits do this, this sort of disparaging, oh God, you know, I mean, like someone would say, I really love how much attention you pay to dude, but you know, I've got nothing else going on in my life.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
So it's like, this person said something really nice to you. You've managed to make it even more about you somehow, but in the saddest way possible. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
No, don't be silly. It's like, hey, this person just said something nice to you and you've denied their accuracy of the world.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Like it's also a little bit of a shit test to make sure that they're actually, it's like, Oh,
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Vanessa, you're awesome. Chase, mutual friend of ours, has been harping on about you for forever. And it's awesome. As a recovering, socially awkward, only child person who's also British as well, you're doing the God's work. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the stuff that you've got going on.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Heck yeah. Vanessa, until next time. I appreciate you.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Okay, so when it comes to the verbal cues, you said that you're being purposeful with the ones that you're using. What's that mean? That you're talking to people backstage and you're just making sure that you're sprinkling positivity?
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Yes, tell me. Explain.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
So songs that remind you of times you won, chit chat backstage with positive verbal cues and laugh lots, watch a comedian.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
And then just step out on them.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
How much truth is there in power poses? I thought they got replication crisis into oblivion.
Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
Okay, let's say people are sat down, meeting, interview, podcast, dinner, what are the do's and don'ts when I'm a sat down?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
episode 41 was when you were last on the show and this will be 910 or something maybe so you've been busy yeah it was so have you uh but you've barbelled uh two ends of a half decade of of lots of content um so i was thinking i was just i just got back from a walk and i was thinking about your new book and
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
If you're a bat that's only got however many milliliters of seal blood that it's got over the last evening of hunting, the algorithm's relatively easy. It's like... Is this enough for me to survive? If yes, maybe I can give some to my friend. How long ago was it that they gave me? Whereas if it's free information, well, how valuable is this information?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
And how close to my coalition is this person? And do I really want them to know that?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
So how did hunter-gatherers manage this balance?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
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#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
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#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
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Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
I'm going to guess that without laws and police and stuff, hunter-gatherers needed more connection to enforce group norms to ensure that behavior didn't get too crazy. So that... That need for connection is driven by a need for cooperation, calmness inside of the group.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
The selection pressures, the difficulty of the environment, I imagine also must have driven way more connection because you need, it's you versus the elements. Whereas all I need to go do is twist the nest thermostat and the elements can go fuck themselves.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
What are some of the other universal rules?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
That's interesting. I'm trying to think about some sort of psychological sex differences between
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
women's better local uh memorization like spatial memorization close by maybe they know what herbs go in the pot more effectively or something i mean i'm really i'm really grasping at straws here that she knows the difference between time and sage because she can remember it more effectively i'm like uh yeah that's that's really interesting that's really possible and
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Materialism. How materialistic did you find out hunter-gatherers were?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Yeah, it's a, I don't know, it's a upsetting realization that we all know in the back of our minds. And we all have this sense of ungratefulness, or at least I do. I have this, you know, I understand I can one click order my Amazon parcel and it arrives one day late to my house. But I really wanted that sun cream so that I could go to the beach, you know, on that day or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Hmm. There has to be an incentive. It's such an interesting game that was played there where, let me give you a thing that you can consume without the conspicuous consumption of the rest of your group seeing you consume it. There must be hunter-gatherer stories where they make a kill And they just eat there. And then they don't bring it back to the tribe.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
There must be a time where they find a new berry bush or nut bush or something. And they just go to town. Well, I mean, we came back with, it's a few berries, but you know, it was, it was very, it was kind of sparse overall.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
And I had to go to the corner shop. And I mean, the corner shop had it too, but you know, how inconvenienced I was. And it just, I don't know, I don't necessarily like being reminded of it, but it does give us a very fascinating insight into the way that human psychology, well-being, satisfaction, happiness, the way that that works.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Yeah. One of the other things I was really fascinated to learn was this tension between competence and warmth and that these two things are, they're opposed in some ways.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
What's cold and warm in this context?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
I wonder whether that could be manipulated in a job interview to go in and seem overly cold and like an absolute killer. My abilities are completely terrible, but he seemed like he was such a serious actor.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Because it's so stark and it's so front and center to all of our experiences. Even just over the last 50 years, the last 100 years, the difference in the quality of our lives. And yet, you might even know this, how do we rank? in modern society in terms of happiness rates overall across the span of human history?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
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#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
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#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
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#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
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#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Yeah, so another way to put this would be that people that are very competent, there is this subtext that in order to have achieved this level of competence, I must have been quite selfish for a good while. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Wow. So even when going on a hunt, a warmer, friendlier, better hang will be chosen over a better hunter.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
I've been thinking a lot about bands and how bands tour recently. And I wondered, I asked a bunch of friends this question, actually, which is how many times when you've tried to find somebody new for a group or previous groups have in the past? Have you found someone who's a fucking virtuoso? Like, man, he's just on the base. You know, it's like it's an extension of his body.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
But when they get back on the tour bus, he sucks or the equivalent of whichever other position it is. And apparently it happens all the time. Okay, well, what does that show? It shows that competence actually doesn't always win out. Even in something which is, you know, very tight performance, you're on stage.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Nobody on stage, no one in the thousands of people in the crowd that's looking at you really cares about the vibe back on the tour bus beyond however much it impacts your performance. But you can't separate out what it's, you don't stop, you don't turn your brain off as soon as you step off stage and you go, oh God, I've got to sit down with Rick again.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
He's going to do my head in for the next 23 hours until we get back on stage. And I finally get a bit of peace from him and he gets to do the one thing that he's actually good at. Um, so yeah, it's even in, even in, uh, modern environments, I think we still have this, this sort of sense, this subtext. So just to kind of, I guess, kind of summarize and ensure that I'm at the right place. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
And I had this sort of consideration in my mind, whether it would be useful for us to still have hunter gatherers living amongst us today, just to remind all of the modern humans about how good we've got it across human history, this sort of weird inequality reminder that would sort of be lingering there in the back of our minds.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
The thing that's most important to humans is connection. One of the ways that we can get to connection is by being pro-social, by being reciprocal, by bonding, by being warm, by being friendly. That's a suggestion that if times are tough, we will help you and we will bound together. We're trustworthy. One of the other things that we can do is to develop competencies.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
These competencies help us to stand out. They give us value. They make sort of each unit of effort that we can give to you more valuable because we're kind of more effective with our units of effort. But in order to be able to develop these competencies, we need to use autonomy.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
because it's very difficult to work on our skills whilst also being super pro-social because those two things tend to be at least a little bit in opposition. I can't focus on me whilst focusing on you. I need to go away, Steph Curry it for 500 shots for today and then come back and then we can run some drills as a team or whatever it might be.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
And these two things are intention because the most direct route to doing it is the human connection part. But human connection in the absence of competence means that you're probably going to be beaten for make choice. You're going to be beaten for
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
selecting being selected to go on the hunt you're not going to have the same kind of status and as soon as you put hierarchies in and as soon as you have female mate choice you end up as soon as you have mate choice at all you end up with everybody trying to jostle and this is where that tension comes from how how close am I
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Did certain ancestral environments or times or periods of history setups prioritize one over the other, do you think? Can you imagine? I'm thinking high conflict. I'm thinking a battle for leadership. I'm thinking war with a neighboring tribe. predation, starvation, cold snaps in the climate, stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
I imagine that there would be periods where competence and autonomy would be more heavily valued and periods where the connection pro-social stuff would be more valued.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Bill, put the bass down.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
I can't remember whether it was Tracy Viancore or Joyce Benenson that did the study on female basketball players. Have you seen this? Keep going. It's not familiar so far. You may have done. So basically, she looked at the physical affection between players on their own team and players on opposing teams in male games and in female games.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
and men on opposing teams showed more physical affection than female uh competitors on the same team wow that's interesting yeah and i just as you were talking there i i thought about that sort of coalitional warfare type like let's just let's just crack on we need to just get our heads down we need to do this thing you know men just sort of drop in and whether it's toddlers
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
learning to play like what is it that the girls are doing they're learning to look after a rabbit or they're playing nurse or they're raising a baby or they're doing whatever what are the boys doing they're fighting aliens or cowboys or you know whatever it is um i i always think about that sort of disposition that that um tend this this tendency toward toward dropping in and you see it with
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Guys at football matches, like you both support the same team. I'll happily go and fight the other supporters of the other team for you for no reason, for no reason. But that's the Brit in me coming out.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Yeah, it's so funny. We romanticize the deep connection that hunter-gatherers have got as if they have a different psychology to us. But we are them. This is the funny thing that we sort of look at as if they're a different species, right? And you go, no. Same species, different environment. Same species. Different setup.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
What's it called? The Superior Wharf?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Isn't it crazy that every single person who's listening to this now, or me or you, had we have by some weird hospital quirk being dropped in with the Hadza tribe. You just ended up with this little baby. We would have been them. That would have been our psychology.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
You know, for all that you're certain that it's your anxious attachment and it's your genetic predisposition to not clearing dopamine so quickly and it's the fact that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like if you were there, you would almost certainly just be exactly the same as them.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
What are the forces that shape autonomy and connection then?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
And if low empathy, severe low empathy, sorry, if very high empathy is associated with connectedness and very low empathy is associated with high autonomy, this is almost mapping perfectly your hypothesis. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
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#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
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#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
You can track over 140 different habits and behaviors. They correlate that with your health. And finally, they've even got a step counter. You can stop guessing about what's happening inside of your body by wearing a small thing on your wrist that tracks absolutely everything. And if you're still on the fence, you can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4.0 strap.
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#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Plus you get your first month for free And there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it, after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Join by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.woop.com slash modern wisdom.
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#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Why do you think that is? What did you come to understand?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
What about gender roles and their influence on autonomy, connections, stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Yeah, Steve Stewart Williams's new book is going to be all about sex differences, apparently, which I'm super excited for him to do, even though he will be stepping into that much of a landmine, I guess, given what's happened over the last couple of months. But it definitely wouldn't have been particularly popular five years ago. I know that much.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Adactylidium is a genus of mites known for its unusual life cycle. An impregnated female mite feeds upon a single egg of thrips
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
rapidly growing five to eight female offspring and one male single male might mate with all of his sisters while they're still inside the mother the new females now impregnated eat their way out of the mother's body so they can emerge to find new thrips eggs killing their mother in the process through the cycle may only be four days old starting the cycle again the male emerges as well but does not look for food or mates and then dies after a few hours oh i thought they ate him too so i misremembered that so that's good he gets to get out of there he's getting a little bit of fresh air
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
You know what I mean? It's good to stretch your legs after you've had sex with all of your sisters. I wanted to see the sunrise. Yeah. Okay. Let's move into the modern world. How is all of this off balance when we get into contemporary society?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
What has encouraged this lean toward autonomy in the modern world?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
What about wealth and technological advances, education?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
That's so interesting. It's kind of the same as the competent people not being seen as quite so warm that... if you see somebody who's quite rich, you have to assume, I mean, unless they've made it, unless their friends have just given them tons of money, it's because of all of my pro-social contacts, you have to assume that they've spent a lot of time on themselves.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
And that's a kind of isolating, autonomous, individualistic existence.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Why do you think it is that... This kind of explains what's enabled the autonomy thing, but this worship of individualism, this worship of autonomy, given the fact that the evidence suggests the more connected you are, the happier you're going to be, and so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
When you look at that Harvard study, the longitudinal thing, number of close connections are the best predictor of your outcome, etc., etc. How is it that our... autonomy-seeking systems or individualistic-seeking systems have been so hijacked? How have they been run awry and sped up to this sort of really overclocked way?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
That's so interesting. Yeah, I love your term around sad success stories. People who have achievements, but they don't feel particularly fulfilled because they don't actually have a tight network of friends to share it with. I think that's like an endemic problem to the high performer community.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
You look at the people that everybody aspires to be like, the ones that have got the most accolade and acclaim and reputation and so on and so forth. And you really probably should look at them with some degree of pity to think, well, what's driven this person to get to this stage? And what have they had to sacrifice in order to get there? And how alienating is it for them to be in that situation?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
And how few people have they got to share this with? And how few people understand what they've gone through in order to be able to... Yeah, sad success stories, I think, are a good means.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
How do you ensure, I mean, this is not an issue and it's interesting and I'm particularly fascinated with this sort of open loop about why we've tended toward autonomy as opposed to sort of connection. But there is a risk of sacrificing too much autonomy, right? There has to be some downsides to that too.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
I was going to say, how much can relationships and marriage assuage these problems of disconnection and over-reliance on autonomy? They have to make some sort of an impact.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
So from an evolutionary lens, explain to me why autonomy is so important.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Has this research given you a better lens on why there's such a widespread sense of isolation and sort of dissatisfaction in the modern world, material comfort, but psychological dis-ease?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Why anxiety, do you think? What is it about that that's the emotion du jour of the contemporary world?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
I'm interested in whether you think it's possible for people to rebalance this in their own lives. We can't step outside of the contemporary world. I don't know how many people are going to go and move and live with the Hadza. So what do you think can be done?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
What about adjusting our expectations? I imagine that that's something else that people need to get used to.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Yeah, I had a conversation with Rick Hansen that wrote Hardwiring Happiness. And, you know, digging into the sort of neurobiology of where happiness comes from, what our sort of set point is, how much we can actually nudge it over time. It's both reassuring and fatalistic at the same time, I think. This is kind of an interesting one.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Lots of people believe that they have agency when it comes to things like their career, their earnings, where they're going to live, the sort of partner that they choose, the kind of partner that they're going to show up and be. But as soon as we get past the boundary of the outside of our own skull,
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
lots of our assumptions and sort of whims and wishes about agency kind of go by the way it's well you know i'm just as happy as i'm ever i'm going to see things in this kind of a way and uh i think that level of you have a bracket that you're working within that bracket is very heavily predisposed but within that bracket it's all on you and i think that thinking about thinking about things in that kind of a way um is it should humble people that
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
people who have got worldly success but in a disquiet should feel, huh, maybe my worldly success kind of was a little bit less in my agency than I might have thought. Maybe I was kind of dragged along by my nature because I have this sense internally that something is my nature and my agency isn't able to get its way around it.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
But when it comes to the meritocracy thing, I'm more than happy to sort of lay it at the feet of how hard I worked and my sweat and my spit and my sawdust.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Yeah, well, I suppose it kind of relates back to what you were saying with regards to a partner, that the path of most easy connection and autonomy is to choose a partner whose interests align with yours so that your autonomy is your connection. And it's the same when it comes to, you know, you can try and...
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
swim against the tide as much as you want with trying to make yourself into this kind of a person. But so for instance, you mentioned earlier on about the highly empathic person. Look, man, like if you know, you really feel the pain of others very deeply that you have the opportunity to connect, you seem to sort of make connections more quickly and sort of drop in more easily than other people do.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
You probably shouldn't be a Navy SEAL sniper. Like that's probably, that's probably not the career for you, but working with soldiers that have got PTSD or, you know, working with a job that requires that, that level of connection, therapy, stuff like that. Oh my God. You know, like that's really, that's really a wheelhouse as long as you can avoid bringing your work home with you. Um, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
So yeah, I've been talking about this a ton. I did a DNA test about three or four months ago with this company called Intellex DNA. No affiliation, but they're cool. And I'd already taken the Robert Plowman behavioral genetics red pill a long, long time ago. But I'd never actually thought, well, what are you talking about? When you talk about your genes, what is it you're actually referring to?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Well, you're referring to pairs of alleles.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
And there's very specific pairs of, now you've got the polymorphic thing, which is sort of these big bundles of them that come together, which tends toward traits of X and Y. But very individual alleles do very specific things, especially when you're talking sort of neurobiologically, when you're talking, and getting to see the building blocks of your behavioral genetics in front of you written out.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
It's like, oh, you've got the one copy of the CY4KK protein gene, which means that you clear adrenaline and norepinephrine more slowly or something like that. This is one of the reasons why after an emotional event, it takes you longer to come back into land. But it's also associated with you being able to work incredibly hard at one thing for a long period of time.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
And you're seeing written in front of you, the bricks, literally the bricks that make up the house that is you. It was so fascinating. I can't stop thinking about it.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Yeah. Bill, you're awesome. I think your research is fantastic. It's so cool for someone to go deep into the hunter-gatherer stuff and sort of use that to help us understand ourselves. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing. Check out the book.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
What does success look like in the paradigm that you're talking about here?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Well, you're awesome. I can't wait to see what you write next. And yeah, people should go and check it out. The book's fantastic, super readable. I really loved how many stories were in there. It's really great. And I think it's given a good new perspective that I didn't have before. So I appreciate all your work.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
That sounds like a connection element rather than an autonomy element. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Yeah. So why, given the fact that obviously the joke that everybody hates to hear, I hate to hear it. I hate to be reminded of my opulent, bourgeois, luxurious, you know, 21st century life. But given the fact that living standards are objectively the best they've ever been, why is it that so many people are struggling to lead happy lives despite being relatively blessed? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
That's interesting. So just give me whatever we've missed on the evolutionary lens on connection. I think everybody has this sense that a solo human doesn't last very long in the wild. It's important. You versus a lion is not a very good fight. You plus 15 of your mates against a lion is a little bit more fair of a fight.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
You plus 15 of your mates who've whittled a bunch of weapons for the last couple of weeks, that might be even more fair of a fight. What else haven't we got from the evolutionary lens on connection?
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
I will sell my open AI stock.
Modern Wisdom
#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty
Yeah, I imagine that the complexity, the compute that's needed to be able to keep track of all of this, because there is a sense of coalition going on here. There is a sense of reciprocity, even if it's relatively costless. That means that the information can be spread more strategically. You can give it to some and not to others.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan. What's that mean?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It really does. The reason I've become particularly interested in this, I did about a year of twice-weekly psychotherapy up until about six months ago. I've just started doing CBT. And I also did a very, very comprehensive
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
hundred page DNA analysis that takes down all of the different alleles and obviously polymorphisms, like there is no one gene for X or Y, but there are certain things that say you clear dopamine less quickly, or you clear adrenaline less quickly, or you do this with oxytocin, or you do that with serotonin.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And combining all of that together, I can't wait for AI to get its hands on the work that you've done and be able to feed in people's genetic data and then be able to say, based on other cases like mine and what you know about me, please give me the most likely best course of action that will allow me to regulate my very particular idiosyncratic cocktail of hormones. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, a state in the brain that informs us of what is going on in the rest of our body.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
In other news, Whoop is the best fitness tracker I've ever used. It's a 24-7 health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, your strain, your recovery, your stress, and more to provide you with personalized insights that help you reach your goals, whether you want to put a little bit more effort
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
in the gym or encourage yourself to get some extra hours of sleep, Whoop helps you improve every day to make your health and wellness better. Every morning, Whoop gives you a recovery score that acts as a daily guide for how much you should exert yourself. And at the end of the day, you get a recommendation for your ideal bedtime and wait time.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You can track over 140 different habits and behaviors. They correlate that with your health. And finally, they've even got a step counter. You can stop guessing about what's happening inside of your body by wearing a small thing on your wrist that tracks absolutely everything. And if you're still on the fence, you can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4.0 strap.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Join by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash. Modern wisdom. Yes, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
There's a little bit of a few steps to get there first. I guess one thing, even before we get into looking at the techniques, you've mentioned it a bunch of times, the emotion du jour of the modern world, anxiety, the boogeyman of modern times. What is it about anxiety and our experience of the modern world that has made it such a front and center thing What is it that's causing that particular?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It could be anything. Everybody could be angry all the time or everybody could be depressed all the time. Everybody could be elated and joyful all the time. Have you thought about what it is that modern world environment causing anxiety so much?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Pressure in the brain, I think. Pressure in the head.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Probably not. I mean, I don't think I knew of anybody who was in therapy. Therapy, I think, was for, you know, people that tried to throw themselves off a bridge or something.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
See what that does to them. I think, you know, to go back to your analogy of somebody who's not in shape or wants to start going to the gym. And you know that by going to the gym, there's going to be these improvements that are made to you. It's funny how, and I find myself sometimes thinking in this way as well. My right arm doesn't move itself on its own. Like it's exclusively my volition.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I'm moving this up and down for the people that are listening. I'm waving at you like that's me. I'm choosing to do it. my mind doesn't feel like the same sort of place. My mind moves itself up and down and makes gestures in manners that I don't feel like the originator of. Do you see what I just did?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
For me, I'm so like olfactory pilled. If someone, this was like super common in fighting, Thai boxing, kickboxing, if someone just got their sweaty kit, threw it in their bag and then put it back on again, it hadn't been aired, that sort of foisty, like mildew kind of thing. I mean, you might as well just knock me out if we're sparring in the ring because I'm more concerned.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I'm way more concerned about your smell than I am about the gloves that you've got on. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
If you could see the inner texture of my mind, Ethan, you would know how familiar I am with that.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
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Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It's been designed from the wheels up to be lighter, stronger, and hold more. It's got best-in-class materials, 360-degree silent glide wheels, patent-pending micro-welding technology, and integrated TSA locks. Basically, you can pack
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
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Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
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Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, I had this insight that I talked about in my live show last year, which was you don't necessarily control the first order emotion, I called it, but this infinite regress of feeling bitter at your anxiousness and then feeling resentment about your bitterness, about your anxiousness, and then feeling anger about your resentment, about your bitterness, about your anxiousness, you know, this sort of, it just keeps on going up and up and up.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That is something you have to step into.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
There you go.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, I think just to continue the gym analogy, everybody knows that if you go to the gym and you work out, you will get fitter. Everybody knows, and a lot of people believe, I can influence my career, my trajectory. But inside of my head, that's kind of, for some reason, the only thing we do have direct control over, like literally our brain, is...
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
outside of the purview of our ability to influence it, that kind of we're along for the ride and then we'll hopefully wrangle this unwieldy thing between our ears to get us to do what we wanted to do. So let's say that somebody feels at the mercy of their emotions. How can you convince them that they can actually influence their internal state?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
What's the most compelling story and evidence that you can give them?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It makes me feel good or sad or better.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
instances in which there are things you could do to manage your emotions am i convincing you at all absolutely yeah i think um another hammer to drive a nail into the coffin of why you should care about this and why you should believe what studies have been done or what have you found about the differences in life outcomes between people who are good at managing emotions and people who are bad at managing emotions like what is because look i am i saw this sentence the other day uh
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I am unusually adept at living in a emotion calorie controlled environment that my capacity for dealing with misery is greater than most people's than it should be. And I think a lot of people almost wear that as a badge of honor. It's like life is difficult and I'm going to overcome it. And there's no beyond the moment to moment sense of there not being that much joy that
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
life outcomes don't really change all that much. In fact, in many ways, there's this sort of Protestant work ethic, like sense of superiority. I look at all of the things that I'm overcoming. So I'm interested about what the differences are in life outcomes from people who are good at managing emotions and ones who are less good.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Did you know that your annual physical only screens for around 20 biomarkers, which leaves a lot of gaps when it comes to your understanding of your health, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
They've got a team of expert physicians that then takes that data, puts it into a simple dashboard and gives you actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health and hormone levels to your thyroid function. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this usually costs thousands, but with function, it is only $500.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And right now you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link In the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I just want to kind of drill on that point. This is something I've been fascinated by.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I think psychotherapy kind of put me on this trajectory, but your entire life's body of work has kind of been an obsession of mine for decades.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
the last year or so i think psychotherapy was part of that trajectory um understanding feelings i i i don't think that i was fully connected with the things that i was feeling in life um with my emotions with sort of the felt sense of stuff i'd be able to explain it rationally but i don't think i was necessarily actually embodying it and tapping into it and um
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
One of the, I guess, like odd quirks of certain people's psychology, one of which is mine, is that if I hear you say you're going to live longer and you're going to have happier relationships and you're going to have all of the rest of this stuff, like the sort of external outcomes, those are compelling to me. But I do think that it's worth lingering just for a moment on the fact that
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
your moment-to-moment experience of your life is almost exclusively determined by the emotions that you're feeling. 90% of the time, you're feeling an emotion. And if that is something which when intensity and duration is too high on something that shouldn't be there or has been there before or isn't serving you, this isn't a dress rehearsal. This is it.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
This is the one life that you're going to get. And To be honest, nobody is going to congratulate you on your deathbed for saying he suffered in silence. No one is going to give you that. This is the one shot that you've got to actually have some fucking fun, find some enjoyment in the biggest and smallest things that you do. And I just think that that point...
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
is one that often gets overlooked because people are so used to negotiating with the world and its difficulties and building up resilience and discipline and all of those things. Like, hooray, great, good for that. You're going to be less at the mercy of bad stuff. But you also should be enjoying this because it's going to end pretty soon. Well, hopefully not that soon.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Oh, that's interesting. And you mentioned there was this really interesting element at the beginning, things that we determine as meaningful or things that are meaningful to us, which is why there's a plant there, like a fake plant that we didn't use as a backdrop that I need to put away. I have no story that really comes along with that. I can look at it.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That's the point I was trying to make earlier on, that my hand doesn't move itself on its own, but the thoughts in my inner voice do. And it's that sense of helplessness, right? That not only did I not... I don't feel like I architected this thought. Like, tell me what the next thought that's going to pop into your head is going to be. You can't do it. You don't know what it's going to be.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And then on top of that... So first off, I didn't originate this thing, although I kind of did, and then I identify with it, and it's me, but it's also not me because it came from somewhere that wasn't me. And then... I don't know how to get rid of it. So I'm like, hey, I'm like the fucking prisoner and the prison guard of this same issue.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So look, we've done an entire hour hopefully convincing people emotions are important. You can change them and there are going to be some tools. Second hour, let's get into some of the shifters that you talk about. So first one, sensory shifters. What about them?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Oh, my God. And it all went downhill from there.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And there's no salient emotional affect that comes up. The pen, that pen. Unless that pen was a pen that your daughter said is her favorite pen or something like that. You got it to sign your most recent book deal with. Presumably that pen is just, it's not meaningful to me. That's right.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Should I keep the shift? Um, I just give me for a touch, taste and smell. Um, give me your favorite non-invasive usually makes people feel better ideas. So touch, you know, if it's someone at work,
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Is putting on a particularly comfortable blanket or a piece of clothing, would that count as one as well?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
More powerful to do with another person, though, I'm going to guess.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Get me on the journal, Ethan. Let's run this up together.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I'm doing my first ever, I will be authored on my first ever study. I came up with an idea talking about how I thought... Fit people would have more of an aversion to our Zenpick users than plus size people because it derogates the fitness signals that they achieved with hard work and gives people an easy route. And I'm going to do that with Candice Blake and Mac and Murphy over in Australia.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So I'm legitimate. I can say I am an academic person.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Honorary PhD. Honorary PhD. Okay. There we go. Smell. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
A little bit more gentle than a cold. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
From spending three and a half hours in the bath when you've got stuff to do. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
OK, next one. Attention shifters.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
There's people with fears of blood all over the internet turning away at the moment. Oh my God. Sorry, I didn't mean to trigger you. Just before we get on, let's take a sort of adaptive evolutionary lens. Why do we feel anything? What's the point of emotions? Why have we got them?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah. One of the things that's been really interesting around that is if a clip from an old episode or a tweet that I sent a long time ago, if somebody gets a hold of that and takes offense to it, I don't know why, but it feels way less... emotionally aggravating if it was something from two years ago than if it's something that I tweeted today. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So that's kind of not too dissimilar to what you're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. Why? Because that's still me, right? I still said it, but there's some amount of distance that's gone away from it that makes it feel less strong.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
On that point, that sounds great. But what if you're just spending the next two days ruminating about that fucking email and that fucking guy that sent that fucking email? And you're like, well, it's great that I've given myself this psychological distance, but all I've done is been in two days of turmoil.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So you're listening to Journey. Don't stop believing on repeat for two full days until you get to come back to the email and then you can do. You've read me. You now know me.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Do you speak any second languages? Just British English and American English. That's it.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You've got some distance. That's so interesting. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah, that's great. I was reading a study recently looking at patients who have had some sort of brain trauma and their primary or secondary language had been impacted, but their secondary or primary language hadn't. And sort of showing that different languages can exist in sort of different portions of the brain.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And it kind of makes sense with regards to this, that we're just activating. And I've got to assume that the primary language is going to be the one that's going to have the greatest sort of sense of self-authorship. This is me. That's right. You got part of my sense of self.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We together as a team navigated a very, how do you say, a very forthcoming, very keen maid in the hotel who came and put water next to me. So I think I tried to say like una hora, like one hour, and she said, agua, si, and came over. I'm like, no, fucking water. Nevermind, we left it in the episode. Just before we finish up on the attention thing, what was that NASA astronaut training thing?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I had the first live tour that I did a year and a half ago. The Manchester show was the biggest one of the tour. It was the biggest crowd that I'd ever been in front of. The venue was brighter and it had a higher ceiling and the sound wasn't quite so great. And it had all of my friends there. It was the closest one to the city that I was from in the UK.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So mom and dad were there and my business partner was there and all of these people and all of this stuff. And I just wasn't happy with how the first half went. And there's an interval for 15 minutes. And without having read your book, because it was before it was even written, I went and had a word with myself for five minutes in the mirror. I was like, look,
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
If you're not having fun now, like what the fuck are you doing? You've got people here that love you. Everybody wants to see you succeed. They're not an adversary. There's nothing to fear. This can't go wrong. You've already done the thing. You've sold out this venue on your first, but you know, a lot of sort of positive reinforcement. Think about all of the prep that you've done.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Think about how meaningful these ideas are to you. go out there and enjoy it. And in some ways it kind of feels a bit silly because, I don't know, it's just, there's a certain amount of pitifulness, I think, when you're talking to yourself and you're like, God, I wish that this was somebody else or whatever. And you go, hey man, fucking no one else is coming to do this.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It's one of those unique challenges that is exclusively yours to bear and nobody will care if you don't do it. It's just on you. And that was a moment that came to mind for me.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
This always happens with you. You're useless.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Oh, nice little combination. I like that.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, I wanted to sort of interject there and maybe front run a potential concern or criticism that some of the more diligent, I can't change my emotions holdouts might have. A lot of this... so far feels like sort of a top-down dictation, which doesn't change the way that we feel, but it changes the story that we tell ourself about how we're feeling.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Is there anything about sort of getting a little deeper about actually sort of tapping into the feeling? Or is it just surprising when you deploy these tactics about how much of a, how permeable you are when you start to do this sort of stuff?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
From your time decades looking at them, what are emotions from a definitional perspective? How do you come to actually define them?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, let's not forget, if everybody looks back on their life at the moments of greatest change, greatest inflection, invariably it's around, it's in the blast radius of some huge period of pain. This thing occurs and you realize, oh my God, I'm doing X or life's really short or nothing is promised or the world wasn't the way that I thought it was or whatever it might be.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And yeah, if you have a no bad vibes, good vibes only philosophy, you're robbing yourself of the opportunity to learn from those things. That's right.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Oh, very well litigated. Let's move on to the next ones. So space shifters. Oh, space shifters. Okay. So...
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, of course. So the bedroom that I've got here, the sort of outside deck area next to a pool, the gym that I attend on a Saturday morning, maybe not super restorative. That's a slightly different emotion, I think. But those are some. And then the walk that I tend to take on a morning.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It is far easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So that's another way you can use your space. So you've sort of beautified certain spaces. You've used this friends and loved ones influence to help bring to life what it is. that makes you feel good. Plants, great. Safe walk in nature, maybe even better because it's more immersive. And then the opposite, this compensatory control thing.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I imagine as well, there must be a version, you know, I got a bunch of friends that are musicians and their space invariably tends to be a little bit... messier than mine. They may say inspirational, but the desk that you want to do your taxes at and the desk that you want to come up with the idea for your next novel are probably not the same spot.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You want to go into an artist's studio, there's random socks and half-finished cigarette butts and upended paint cans and torn pages from newspaper. That's the space that you want to be in, but it's not maybe that if you want to answer your emails or be on a Zoom call.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, that's so good. Okay, relationship shifters.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Problem solving versus emotional listening. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, almost always. It focuses attention. It makes you feel excited. It stops you from being distracted by other stuff. But as you say, intensity and duration are devils in the details, the dosage. Devils in the details.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
What's the role of secure versus insecure attachments here?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, and also the people that are around you. You know, how important is it? You know, you've got this sense, this lineage between you and this person and whether they're on your team and whether they're supporting you and whether they've actually got your back. And you said before, be careful about who you give bad news to. It's...
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
we don't always invest our emotions into the right people all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
These secret enemies who we've maybe never met or never spoken to or don't even know that we exist. And yet here we are, like hating them secretly.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That's kind of like your environment design thing, but it's a digital environment design.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I suppose that relationships will have that. I heard it said the other day, it's so cool. When you get into a relationship with someone, you create your own subculture. And everybody knows that. Think about what was the tenor, the tone, the energetic sort of typical experience that you would have in the second relationship that you ever had that was long.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
oh yeah i remember that we used to talk about this stuff all the time and then and then i started getting interested in this thing and then we broke up on my next my next partner we talked about it was always like this and that was so different to that one and so you're creating this subculture in your own life and i suppose that if you check in with what is the emotional subculture
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
within my household, within my friendship group, within my relationship. I really don't like this. Well, I guess you've got two choices. You can either give them this podcast episode in your book and say, hey, look, we can change this. And I think that there's some room for improvement and it would be better for you and better for me.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Or you can do some environment design and put yourself in a different place.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It's ever-present. I get the sense that some sort of accountability buddy...
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
uh with a lot of the work that you're doing at the moment would be really great you know the person that you speak to very regularly maybe it is your partner or a close friend or whatever you say hey i really want to work on making my emotions my friend and i want to feel less of the bad and i want to feel more of the good uh how do you feel about us reframing learning these techniques and sort of working on this together because you then you
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And the Lollapalooza effect of all of that stuff happening at the same time is pretty wild. You've got social consistency bias. You've got accountability. You've got... Yeah, I love it. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I think the sort of final element I have, it's so great. I'm really, really glad that you wrote this. I get the sense that we are at the beginning of a tapping into emotionality that we haven't necessarily seen for quite a while. We had the rationalist movement, lesswrong.com, astralcodex10, that sort of stuff. We had a big push towards stoicism, which-
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
has a lot of benefits but is often criticized for i think denying uh feelings and you don't necessarily use them as advisors you sort of treat them as adversaries and enemies um and i get the sense that as with everything pendulum swing one way pendulum swing back the other uh you know rick hansen dr rick hansen um neuroscientist phenomenal guy uh all of his work that he's doing with his son forest your book that's just coming out i think we're really sort of at this
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And the thing that is most primitive and salient to our experience, which is the way that we feel moment to moment, is sort of being rediscovered, revisited and retreated in this way. But the final element to kind of bring all of this together, all of this research is how do you advise people to make this emotional regulation more automatic, less effortful? How do we make it a habit?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
What are the powerful daily small practices? How do we sort of really instantialize this? we have to whoop it up.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Why do we struggle to control our emotions? Why is there no user manual? If I'm so capable of accessing my anger or my depression or my anxiety or my resentment or my fear, and then I'm so capable at managing to perpetuate that over time, why can't I also get in and stop it? Surely that would be adaptive too.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, maybe you're right.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Positive vision of what it could be.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, I guess the one other element, would you mind giving us some of your favorite recipes or some of your favorite stacks of what you tend to put together? Because I think that would give people a good place to start. You know, there's a lot of experimentation that people can go through, but maybe getting to jump ahead a couple of steps might be useful. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
One final question. Let's say that somebody's feeling something good. They're feeling a good emotional state. We've spoken a lot today about managing negative ones. Based on the evidence and the stuff that you look at, or maybe your personal life, what do you do to try and enjoy, absorb, perpetuate that enjoyable emotional state more?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I'm all for it. So good. Ethan, we've managed to go from daylight to nighttime with you. But this is just so great. I really do think that this is really, really important to change people's quality of life in the moment, how long they're going to live, et cetera, et cetera. And you're a fucking beast. So thank you for being here. Where can people go?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you do and improve your H-index. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Heck yeah. Ethan, until next time, mate. All right, look forward to it. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books...
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
What are you looking at with regards to the sort of set point that people have? How much room is there? We're talking about heritability here, a bit of behavioral genetics, perhaps. The difference between me and Usain Bolt when it comes to running speed is pretty high.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Have we got even more variability when it comes to the set point of people that are naturally Usain Bolt runners, but managing their own emotions? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
How did you get interested in studying bullying?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
How many people?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, because you need the sort of sycophants and exactly around you. And if you're too much of an asshole, you become a Nelson.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
How many people are victims and bullies?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
So the benefits to bullies, maintaining power, popularity, it seems like they have in some ways better outcomes in later life. I assume that that's not because they don't get better outcomes because they were bullies. They get better outcomes because the things that permitted them to bully are also useful when they become adults. Like
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
socially being quite adept, maybe being a little bit more ruthless and assertive than other people are, having this lowered sense of anxiety, which allows them to maybe be a little bit more risk-taking in a calculated way, et cetera, et cetera. So those are some of the benefits. Are there any costs to bullies bullying?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
That's kettleandfire.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Okay, so moving on to the victims, what are the types of people who get bullied?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
100%.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Okay, so is social exclusion and the need to belong, is that sort of one of the fundamental components of how bullying works?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
I wonder whether one of the kind of ruthless things, I guess, about bullying is that if you as the high-powered, prestigious, slightly dominant person make it socially cancerous to be associated with the person that you're always picking on ruthlessly, the 10% or whatever, or maybe more. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
It means that it becomes increasingly difficult for other kids to step in and give the victim the thing that they really need, which is a support structure, because they don't want to be in the blast radius of the super cool kid that's always being mean.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
100%.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And presumably that gets passed down from year to year as well.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Which is why you have 15% schools as well as 70% schools.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
What about ethnic group differences in bullying?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
so being a minority anywhere probably not a not fantastic unless you've i know you're some sort of sexy minority i don't know i was gonna say there are some minorities that like um are more protected than others so like in canada black youth are seen as more cool um wow they're like a rare shiny charizard in in canada i imagine
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Right. So that's always going to be the case. All right. What about the relationship between overweight and bullying?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
It seems like for both boys and girls, attractiveness is one of the protective mechanisms or one of the enabling mechanisms, you know, a very sort of obvious bestowed type of prestige, which you can then sort of transmute into dominance. And being obese is one of the things that's going to damage your attractiveness, whether you're fat coming in or get fatter as it goes on.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
But the last thing that you want to do when you're a teenage boy or girl and everybody is highly scrutinizing the way that everybody else looks and changes day to day, month to month, year to year, is to lose some attractiveness. And yeah, I suppose it's a vicious cycle that... being bullied causes you to, I don't know how many people get bullied in school and become more attractive because of it.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
What's next? What would you want to look at next? Or what do you think the broader bullying research community needs to be focused on?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
So interesting. So for the boys, it's insufficiently masculine. You don't have that dominance. You don't have that physical presence that would maybe say, hey, don't fuck with me.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
But for girls, it's because other girls see that as potential, like, I guess, sexual competition, for want of a better term for when talking about teenagers, but like precocious sexual competition or whatever, a future rival in one way or another because of the way that they look.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Talk to me about, you've kind of touched on it there, this difference between girl bullying and boy bullying. How do they differ?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, that's funny. They're interacting in one way or another, but it changes.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
I suppose until puberty kicks in, little boys and little girls, apart from one very specific part of their anatomy, are basically physically the same thing. There's not much difference between them. So I imagine even physically, an eight-year-old girl could pick on an eight-year-old boy, but it's going to be very rare for a 16-year-old girl to be able to pick on a 16-year-old boy.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
What do you think that is? Is that just some really precocious version of the same dynamic, the venting, the intrasexual competition, the sort of very manipulative ways that females are going to have to use sort of social networks and stuff when they grow up? Is this them just sandbox training grounding it very early on?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Heterotopic continuity.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
This is a safe space for you, Tracy.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
I had this conversation with Joyce Benenson probably 18 months ago, two years ago, and she was telling me it made so much sense. I know that even in, you know, three month old, six, sorry, three to six month gestating period, uh, humans, you can see sex differences in the brain already. Like you're a minus three months year old and we can already begin to see structural differences in the brain.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And then I think by age 10, an fMRI is 93 or 95% accurate at working out whether this is a male or a female brain, which is about the same accuracy that adults have when just determining a human face. It's
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
however accurate you think you are at picking out whether that's a man or a woman that's the same accuracy at 10 years old and obviously the sex differences before birth kind of gets rid of the socialization social roles theory thing but What she taught me that I thought was just super interesting kind of makes so much sense.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Even when I think back to my time in school, she was saying that if you look at the sort of games that girls play, they're being veterinarians, they're being nurses, they're raising something. It's about caring for something else. It's sort of collective, but it's usually sort of outward focused toward an individual. Whereas if you look at what boys are doing, it's warfare.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
It's they're cowboys or aliens or they're whatever, and we're going to take them down. And it's practicing for... ancestrally, I guess, what the most salient, most important roles would have been when we grew up to become adults.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And no matter how much you sort of emancipate women from the kitchen and put them into the boardroom or tell men that they can be stay-at-home fathers or whatever, it's going to take a very long time for our biology to catch up with that, especially when you're only three and you haven't been exposed to second wave feminism at three years old yet.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
metrosexual movement for men and and you know like holistic masculinity when you're five so yeah we still get to see maybe in a sort of a more unencumbered uh unmolested nature like what what that is like for uh humans when you're looking at kids
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Have you ever seen that video of a golden retriever sat in the passenger seat of a car when the owner, it's a truck, and in the back seat of the car is a baby cow? So there's a baby cow sat in the back seat that the owner's just gone to go and buy, and there's a golden retriever sat in the passenger seat.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And the owner's trying to reach over to sort of stroke the golden retriever, and the golden retriever's just refusing to look. Like it's just looking straight ahead and the guy's next to him and he keeps leaning back and as he gets touched, he sort of moves his arm away like this. I thought that's, yeah, that is that love withdrawal thing.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
That's, you know, I'm mad at you because the dog thought that he was being replaced by this baby cow that was sat behind him.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
You got to avoid the replication crisis. Yeah, I think it's fascinating. I think that's so interesting to consider how young this starts. If you're two, what can you really do? Especially what can you do to mom and dad? But that's...
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
it's something i've been thinking about an awful lot more recently which is limestone or brad wilcox or you know whoever you want from like the institute for family studies both of whom have been on the show but they have an agenda like they have an agenda of keeping families together they're very pro-marriage uh you know melissa carney's work the two-parent advantage or two-parent privilege um
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
If you're looking at this stuff and you think, well, it's really important that parents stick together because we know that the outcomes from single parent homes aren't fantastic. But the way that parents stick together, what are the lessons that your kids are learning about what love is and attachment and
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
dealing with disagreement and regulating uh dysregulation and how do people come back together and what does that tell you about what you should expect from your friends and from future relationships is this really the best that you should hope for like this sort of um silent
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so explain to me the motivations for why people bully. What's the reason for doing it?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, you're so right. And I think I pushed Brad on this point. And I think he arrives at the right place, which is basically, yes, there are many cases in which a marriage would be better to break up than it would be to stay together. But it's his belief that the threshold for when you should break up has been lowered too much.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
That, you know, this person isn't helping me fulfill my highest ideal or, you know, I really hate the way that they slurp their tea or whatever it may be because of a million different reasons that we don't need to get into. But I think finding out and resetting where that barometer lies and looking at interventions for relationships to, okay, how can we come back together?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
How can we have a hard reset on this so that we can really restart? And thinking about what is it that we're modeling for our kids? Am I begrudgingly making my way through the next 18 years of this
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
marriage so that my kids can leave a non-broken home uh but you know how how much are they taking from from the way that we interact there's this video that you might have seen that's been floating around on twitter which is uh the best thing that parents can do for their kids is show them how much they love each other and it it's this video of a child sat down on a couch and
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And it pans to the two parents salsa dancing out on a balcony together. It's a little bit kind of a meme, but definitely in that regard, I think, yeah, it's not just about sticking together for the kids. It's about sticking together in a good way.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, that's interesting. So a broken home isn't just a broken home. A lot of the time it's a poor home and a poor home is a stressed home and you can't separate those out.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
What about bullying for LGBT youths? This is a topic that I keep seeing online.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
anti-trans movement um i mean they are not living a good life at all let's separate just before we go any deeper actually let's separate this to lgb and t because even though i agree fly under the same flag sometimes uh i don't think they're the same thing
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
I guess with that point, it's difficult to know whether the kids are mentally distressed because they're trans or whether they're trans because they're mentally distressed.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, I mean, the significantly higher rates of OCD, of autism, of neurodivergence in these groups. And, you know, you're right. It's when you're just talking about the well-being of kids and you just want somebody who can't really advocate for themselves, who's still very much at the mercy of their parents or their school or their caregivers or the state.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
they don't have agency and you shouldn't expect them to have that same kind of agency over this stuff. And I think it's one of the reasons why the discussion around like trans youths becomes so fraught because you can very quickly go from biological man who wants to be creepy in woman's bathrooms to to confused young girl who has really horrible mental health outcomes.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And you go, well, you need to be able to hold these two worlds in your mind at the same time. You're saying that you're sort of being empathetic for women, but you're not being empathetic for this young girl who is even more vulnerable than the women, the adult women that you're supposed to be protecting. So yeah, it's a really interesting one. And I don't know, I think
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
I kind of hope slash get the sense that the defocusing on the trans discussion, which it could go either way with four more years of Trump, but by actually focusing on it less might normalize it a little bit more.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Um, and I, I feel like there was a, maybe a little bit of sort of, I don't know what you call it, like conceptual fatigue, um, around, around, around people hearing these sort of stories all the time and maybe actually allowing them to take a backseat will help to sort of normalize, um, the, the discussion and make it a little bit less fiery. I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, I think that's a good point. So getting back to, I guess, the relationship between bullies and victims, how do bullies see their victims? There has to be some kind of moral disengagement, some sort of disrupted self-concept thing going on. What's happening here?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
What is the process of moral disengagement?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, I mean, the shame of being socially excluded, of being picked on, causes you to hide your sadness. And sadness is the very thing that might cause this bystander effect to cease or for teacher to notice or for parents to realize or for the bully themselves to actually breach this threshold of reduced empathy.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Okay. So how much work is being done in the world of evidence-based bullying intervention, stuff like that?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Is that something, actually, have you seen as you're tracking longitudinally, do adult ex-bullies have less empathy?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, it's so interesting. So why does it happen so much in school? Is there something special about the setup of the school environment? Is it something about the teenage and puberty years that encourages bullying? What's going on?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, you're having to fight against something. There's like a bullying entropy, which is always going to be there, and you're permanently going to have to intervene and intervene. But I guess one of the things that, at least to me, seems quite hope-inducing is that if you can intervene and create kind of a circuit breaker...
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
in the school you can have this recursive culture thing work for you as opposed to against you you can go from the 70 school to the 15 school and that that seems quite reassuring so i remember i was having this when i had my chat with tony and he said there's something to do with the ossification of social hierarchies and the fact that you don't move out of them much and
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
for a very long time what's the role that that's got to play with childhood bullying because there is a like an obvious question you get to university and it's not happening as much and then you get to the workplace and even in the workplace you know people are there for a while, not quite so long. So you think, well, is it immaturity?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Is it some hypervigilance to social hierarchies that we have during puberty when we're trying to flee the nest and we're looking for who our partner might be and all the rest of it? What's the unmoving long-term exposure to the same social hierarchies and social people? What's the role that that's got to play?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
How does bullying impact victims? What does it do to them?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And that's 90% of bullies?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Are there some biological or genetic vulnerabilities to the effects of bullying?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Okay. Why is it not the case that you get a benevolent leader at the top? Why is it that when people get power that they end up going toward cruelty rather than kindness?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
I suppose the ruthless thing about that is that if you've got this predisposition to ruminating brain, to being a little bit more anxious, and then
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
something happens to further activate that, like the very fear that you had about the world has sort of come to pass and the raw materials that you had that were there ready to be activated, whether it's from an epigenetic, genetic predisposition standpoint, whether it's from a worldview perspective, whether it's from the patterns that you've learned from your parents at home or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, you kind of get a 2x, 3x multiplier bonus that pushes you further into this sort of dysfunctional perspective.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah. What about overcoming childhood bullying as an adult? Has there been much work done on how people after the fact can help
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
I think, you know, even the people that have got the deficits in later life would be interested in knowing, okay, this thing happened to me and maybe I'm carrying it with me to varying degrees. How can I learn to overcome or how can I move past that? Maybe reprogram some of that worldview that you said.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Look, if I was to totally bro-sign to this and pull it out of my arse, I would guess that what you're able to do is...
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
lower the threshold or increase the threshold basically for what high status bullies think is acceptable behavior or who they think that they should be able to go after but the problem being that they still need to maintain power and control in one form or another which means that a smaller number of lower status victims are bullied more intensely because you're spreading the same or a similar amount of bullying across fewer victims.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
It's ruthless. I mean, I don't know what the solution to that is because you're the suffering of the few saving the suffering of the many, but then it's more on those few.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
What do you say to people who push back and say, well, bullying is good for developing resilience or, you know, I was bullied as a kid and it made me a stronger person or it prevents you from being too weak?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Well, it's the difference between saying, I achieved this because of that, and I achieved this in spite of that.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, fascinating. I mean, look, in many ways, it's cope. It's a way for an adult who went through a tough thing as a kid to look back and say, well, this wasn't so bad. I don't need to hold on to the grudges because without that, I wouldn't be who I am, as opposed to without that, I would be more of who I am.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
How effective are most interventions at the moment? Give me the world of interventions. 20% max.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And what does 20% mean?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
It does. What are the current most commonly used anti-bullying interventions?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
What's the principles behind it?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
popular bullies are doing or even the nelson type bullies are doing then you'd be in a better position because you've removed the incentive to exactly interesting okay so how much or how effective is it to make bullies realize how much of an impact that they're having you know you've given
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
all this compelling evidence about what it's going to do in later life and what it does to them at the time and their educational outcomes and they're going to gain weight and they're going to be blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, as adults, this is the entire way that campaigns for malaria nets and stuff like that are done, right?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Here is a story of what your effort could have as a positive or a negative impact. How effective is it to say to bullies, look at all of the downstream implications of doing this. Is that not an option?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, it depends what direction the social and emotional learning is going toward, whether it's going toward that there's no genders or the biological sexes.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
So, you know, I saw this last year. There was a pivot in UK schools away from criticizing toxic masculinity and toward promoting positive masculinity. Now, the campaigns were exactly the same. It was very much derogating lots of typical behavior that you would see from boys and young men and done in the classic frame that everybody that isn't insane hates.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
But this is one of those times where maybe a rebrand could be useful. And you might be able to, you know, cool. It's called social emotional learning. Not anymore. Now it's called, now it's called like holistic interaction treatment or, you know, behavioral success or something like that. And yeah, this is one of the times where a rebrand might be, might be a good idea.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, I suppose it's the difference between getting somebody from sick to well and well to fit that you can stop them from being. And you're right that it's not even that. It's that we don't have a need to not be bullied. We have a need to be included. Exactly. It's not avoiding exclusion. It's creating inclusion. You mentioned there about memory.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
What's the impact of bullying on memory, childhood memory, and then later life?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
So that means it affects their memory. That means they have fewer recall.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, neurobiology is stepping in to put a cap on your capacity. And again, this is the you succeeded because versus you succeeded in spite. Yeah. Yeah, not nice. What about, I read something to do with increased supervision, restricting bullying, and something to do with spatial design, spatial planning, the way that schools and physical environments are put together.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
So you're saying that another pandemic would be great.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
We used to have dinner ladies and, you know, they weren't teachers, but they were just adults. They were adults that were on the playground. You know, look, I don't mean to badmouth teachers. A lot of them, I was dating a teacher for a long time and she would get into school at some ungodly hour and she'd be there for two hours before the kids got in and then work through.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And it's like, you know, you've got this one 50 minute block to have some food and reset before you go again in the afternoon. I'm aware teachers get to leave at 3.30 p.m. sometimes. But also it is the one break that they get during the day.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
All of that being said, paying somebody who is, you know, maybe a working mom for a couple of hours to help with a bit of supervision seems like a relatively low cost to improve the well-being of the kids.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
school trips, back of the bus, staying overnight, doing camping, whatever it might be. So I guess one thing that I'm kind of interested in, we skirted around some behavioral genetics-y type stuff today, you know, interaction of nature and nurture of environment and genes. What about parents who were bullied then trying to parent their kids.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And, you know, this sort of hyper awareness, this may be this fixation on their experience as a child, and then the inability to regulate what their future child is going through.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
So you're basically making the child see threat where there may not be any.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
What about the differences between childhood bullying and workplace bullying? Have you ever looked into what happens? People get out, they're now 25, they're no longer 15. And if there's anything that's interesting or illuminating?
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Does that mean the bullies are smarter than average if you do an IQ test?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Well, you've seen from Bad Men by David that study where criminals or sexual assaulters were shown, maybe it was silhouettes of women walking or maybe it was videos of women walking and they were asked who they would pick and they converged a lot of the time on the same sort of women. So it's exactly the same. You're not laying this at the feet and say, oh, it's because of the way that you walk.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
But there is some sort of signal which is given off, which portrays, bestows, exposes a vulnerability of some kind that a cohort of people may pick up on and then try and take advantage of.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
And there's probably... Oh, they try it out on a bunch of different... You try it out on a bunch of different victims and you wait and see what the reaction is. Oh, that's so interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, very interesting. Tracy, you're awesome.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah, well, be careful.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Be careful what you wish for because you've got a book coming out soon. Yeah. In the interim between now and... Is it still called Mean Girls?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah. Between now and when that comes out, where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing? You seem to be publishing an awful lot of studies.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Let's go. We're doing it again. We're ready to run it back. You're great. You're great. I adore speaking to you. And I can't wait to see the new book and go through it. And everyone here will be there to listen as well.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
They've never put it. No one's ever commented anything mean on the internet.
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
All right. Until next time. Thank you, Tracy.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
So they're privileged in one of many ways, athletically capable, good looking, presumably probably people from rich homes or homes that have got that. And then even the more sort of difficult to observe privileges of social skills of, I'm going to imagine they're higher on disagreeability and assertiveness and stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
That's interesting. What's the truth around bullies being from broken homes?
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
That's interesting. I think it's one of the kind of go-tos of the hopeful, slightly dismissive person when it comes to bullying, which is, well, you know, this is just a normal response to an abnormal raising situation. And that's kind of the place that they go to.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Yeah. Talk to me about the, I know if you were to make a meal that was bullying, what are the ingredients, the component parts that go into it in order for you to sort of have that? You've mentioned about power, power imbalance, sort of inability to fight back, social exclusion, stuff like that. What are the individual components of bullying?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Bonnie Blue might be pregnant.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
health restriction escape velocity and we're going to be able to just design shit that is negligible on side effects and does make your life better in the same way as you might be able to, you know, before the germ theory of disease, people just wouldn't, oh, it's tiny invisible things. You mean it's not the, what was it called? Not efflusa.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
What was it that they thought it was carried through why they had those big long noses?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Miasma. You mean it's got nothing to do with it? You mean that my lavender in the end of this long beak isn't protecting me in this way? You know, we just move forward, we move forward, and we get ever more sort of finely tuned. But yeah, my...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
But something tells me actually, yeah, that social services might, if you want to expand the definition of sex worker to include this sort of stuff, then perhaps the social services have got something to say about that.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
That's the epidural, right?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
It's got amino acids for better sleep and collagen, which improves your joint health. And the quality of this bone broth is unparalleled. Each batch takes over 14 hours to cook. They use only grass-fed, grass-finished beef bones, and it's sourced with 100% organic ingredients, which is why they've got over 50,000 five-star reviews and millions of happy customers.
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's kettleandfire.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. I learned from Daniel Sloss, his most recent live show, because his wife and him have now had two kids. I learned that women are given some weird cocktail of hormones endogenously. that makes them forget how painful some areas of the process were of childbirth.
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Now, are you going to tell me this is... So you mean people get that naturally? Yes.
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Right. So Daniel does his live bit and he's talking about, I think, second child maybe was a complicated birth. And he's in the room. Dr. Anna Machen says something not too dissimilar as well about her first child. Complicated childbirth. Father who, you know, has been able to wrangle the world around himself, at least some amount of agency. He's managed to get this woman pregnant.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
That's not totally unagentic. And he's sat in the corner literally with his dick in his hands, unable to help, unable to do anything, like the most spare prick in the entire room as an army, like a Formula One style squadron of people in latex gloves move around the the love of his life, carrying the next love of his life.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And then something happens and he doesn't know what's going on and he can't help again. He's just completely trapped, completely helpless. And then a thing comes out and everybody gets wheeled out of the room in basically no time at all. Everyone's wheeled out of the room. Mom goes to one room, child goes to another room, or maybe the same room, I don't know. And nobody turns to look at dad.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Nobody turns to say, are you okay? This is what's going on. Here's an update because you're not a priority. But psychologically, the scars that come through from that, you know, the PTSD that men have post-childbirth isn't something I think that should be overlooked. And then his wife, apparently during this, I don't know whether this is true or he's exaggerating for comic effect.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
She's screaming at him like, you did this to me. I can't believe, you know, the classic sort of comedy sketch. And then, Maybe 12 hours later, everything's okay. Baby's okay. Mom's okay. And dad and baby and mom are reunited. Anna, like later that day, she turns to him and she says, I wasn't so bad, was it? Yeah. We should have another one.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And Daniel's there, shell-shocked, you know, like the old Battle of the Somme style shell-shocked. He's still, you know, his adrenals are never going to recover. And he's like, and then he learned about this thing. He's like, oh, women get this fucking amnesia drug for free.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
But dad doesn't. So you've got this Jekyll and Hyde bipolar fucking wife in front of you. And the first time I ever learned about it, and I thought, how have I got 36 years old? Never learned about this. Crazy.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
The sleep deprivation helps you forget the sleep deprivation.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I guess if you've had a sample of a thousand guys, you've got to be one good one in there. Or maybe not.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Just to sort of, I think there's maybe a little line that we can draw back to the Lily Phillips thing. You'd mentioned about this kind of, I'm only good for one thing, me, when she's trying to make a cup of tea or she burns some toast or something like that. But I do see, and I remember this from being in nightlife, especially around girls that worked in strip clubs.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And then, you know, I had admireme.vip Chelsea Ferguson. She's the owner of OnlyFans competitor that's in the UK. And I brought her on the podcast. I think she was episode maybe 150, something like that. I really wanted to know what it was like to do this. And there is this... I want to call it something else, but I can't think of it.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
There is kind of like this Stockholm syndrome thing where girls that begin to do some form of sexual capitalism... go native in a weird way and they start to maybe derogate their own capacities or what they could do outside of this. And, you know, it's like, it's the guy that goes to a life of crime and believes that he can never, he can never stop.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
you know, no job would ever have me or, you know, a straight life just wouldn't be for me. I'm just built to be in and out of jail or the addict that just believes that he's never supposed to get off drugs, that he's sort of not worthy of this thing. And that made me sad.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Now, in watching the Lily Phillips thing, it reminded me of some of the vibes that I felt when I used to work in nightlife and it was three in the morning and we'd go to the only place that was open that was the strip club. And, you know, these girls would be in there with some bachelor dude on his...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
It was guy number 854. And I saw him across the room and I thought, you're for me.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
stag do cheating on his wife for the final time before of cheating on his fiance for the final time before he can seeing the worst of men in their you know warped drunken late nights desires and uh yeah it it's that bit was probably the least comfortable but it wasn't the end of the sex thing seeing her cry was uncomfortable and that that was pretty undialed
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
But the fact that you've sort of internalized this story that you've told yourself, which is a combination of self-deprecation and a coping mechanism to be able to justify why this is the thing that you can continue to do, even though it's evident that it's not your thing.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Like if Bonnie Blue is the LeBron James of fucking guys and not catching feelings, you're like LeBron James's five foot six cousin. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Is that the lady that you looped me in with?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
That's a lot of sperm.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
What do you make of, you know, it's kind of... It feels like we're in kind of a bit of a post-OnlyFans era, or we were until Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue sort of re-injected some attention into it. I wasn't really seeing people talk about it in the same way. It kind of become normalized.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And I'd be really surprised if they're being- You're talking about nine figures to be able to not have to do it again. And you've got to, it's going to have to be a lot more men than a thousand to be able to get that.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Yeah, I remember my first ever job. I was a room service boy at Tall Trees Hotel in Yarm, which had a nightclub attached to it. So I would go and deliver the drug dealers their breakfast on a morning, literally move huge big pillows of pills aside and weed and all the rest of the stuff and pop it down and they would give me £1.50 and change it.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And I remember that I really hated this job, but I just didn't. I wanted to be proud of the fact that I had a job. And this is when the internet was just about coming online and you'd be able to get through some weird browser hack for a Nokia phone. You'd be able to get MSN Messenger or you'd be able to get MySpace or something like that on your phone.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And in order to be able to connect to the internet, I actually worked this out. I didn't like the job so much that I was distracting myself by buying internet packages so that I could go on MSN and talk to my friends who were all out having fun. But I realized that I was being paid £4.50 an hour, but to connect to the internet, it was £9 an hour.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
So I was netting a loss of £4.50 an hour to go to work. in order to sedate myself from having to be at a job that I didn't like. And that is the same sense I get from your sex worker lady friend.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I think a lot of the market inflation, the bubble that had occurred around COVID, had maybe started to decline a little bit. And this wasn't... I don't know. It was a thing. Some people do it, some people don't. But, you know, there was a big talking point for a long time, which was...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
At least in part. Observable metrics and hidden metrics are two things that people often make the wrong trades for. And this is another example of that, that an observable metric is how nice is the car that you're driving, how high are the heels that you're wearing, how big is the bank account, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
But what you're trading that for is a sense of self-worth and security and future and psychological pain and all of the other things. And even for yourself, I harp on about this hidden observable metrics trade all the time, but And it's not even that easy to work out yourself because you go, well, where is my bank balance of sanity?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
This relationship is really hurting me, but it gives me a sense of belonging or it gives me a sense of camaraderie or I've got someone who's really hot or I've got someone who's out of my league or whatever it might be. And you think, well, fine.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
fine like that's something that you can parade around in many ways but how do you know what what does it mean that you're in psychological pain because they're mistreating you like what well how much is that show me where that is you can show other people go dude dude your new girlfriend's hot you know like you can see that registers somewhere but you having a sleepless night that doesn't register so it's a it's an interesting trade that the girls are making here as well which is
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
observable metric of fame and attention and money and things that money can buy for stuff that even they actually aren't able to necessarily see about themselves.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Talk to me about the declining rates for marriage because this is a trend that's been going on for a while. I think we've got whatever it is, 38% of Gen Z saying that they're not having sex. We've got sex recession and all the rest of it. But I do get the sense that more worrying than that is the casual sex coming and going unless it, I don't know,
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
precedes more meaningful relationships happening. I don't know what the sort of heritage is there. But the marriage thing, I think, seems to be a little bit more concerning. So have you had a look at this? Have you thought about what's going on here, modern marriage trends?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
you do this as a younger woman and then you try and either find a partner and then if and when you find a partner, you then have a child and there's this archaeological evidence that vestigially follows you around potentially and follows your kids around for the rest of time. What did you make of that?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
What did you make of sort of the concern around that for young women who want to make a little bit of money but then have their whole life ahead of them that they have to carry it forward with?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
See how reliable I am. I just went to war. I can raise your child.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because, frankly, I'm dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day the same way with Element in a cold glass of water. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't.
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Each grab-and-go stick pack contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no coloring, no sugar, no artificial ingredients, or any other junk. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue, while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite, and curbing cravings. Their orange salt in a cold glass of water is gorgeous.
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
It's a beautiful, salty, sweet, orangey nectar, and it's how I've started my day every single day for as long as I can remember, and I genuinely feel the difference when I take it versus when I don't. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it totally risk-free. If you don't like it, you don't even need to return the box.
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things going on, but certainly comparatively, if you were to roll in whatever Malcolm Collins' or Stephen Jay Shaw's idea around this, that as females who seem to be much better... all types of education, socioeconomic success in the modern world is pretty much laid at their feet until they pay the motherhood tax in their thirties or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I struggled a little bit, but yeah, I got through it.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
They are more conscientious on average. They're better at handing in homework. I saw Alex Date Psych post something this morning about how they can do better sort of long-term planning about when they need to revise for tests. And so like every different part of education, when the breaks get taken off for women, for girls, it seems to be they're pretty good at it and they're flourishing.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And then I think if you have that, which sets, well, look, this is how much I can look after me. If you at the very least can't look after me as well as I can look after me, how much faith can I have in you being able to step up? The bare minimum should be that you can do what I can do. And it seems like you maybe can't. And then on top of that, I think the exposure that we have to
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
life expectations of other people online getting to see the best of everyone's life while we get to see the worst of our own creates this lifestyle inflation expectation you know intergenerational competition theory look at where my parents were when they were my age and they had this house and they had this this thing and they had this that i'm never going to be able to get this despite when economists do every different type of analysis that you fucking can adjusted for inflation gen z are better off than every other generation that came before them economically and
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
They feel like they're not. And the way that you feel is reality when it comes to this, because you're not doing an economist, you don't have a spreadsheet to work out what's actually going on. What you're doing is saying, well, how do I feel about this? You go, I feel poor and unprepared and like the world is about to burn because it's filled with carbon. That's what I'm concerned about.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Just haven't found the right partner.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Yeah, that was the GSS survey. Just haven't found the right partner. Every time that I'm around... You know, my favorite place to do evolutionary psychology mating research is the Soho House pool here in Austin. So it's just replete with university-educated... 60 to 100 grand earning attractive girls.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And there's all of these cabanas around the outside of this pool and the music's at a level where everybody can hear and no one's really got much going on. It's kind of a bit boring, but it's sort of interesting to talk. And I just sit and go, so girl, who's single? And talk to me, what is it that you're finding about the girls that you date? Invariably, it's They're not mature.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
They don't have their life together. And I'm like, okay, so what do you mean when you say that? Like, talk to me about what you mean. And sometimes they can come with, you know, that emotionally they can't really get on the same level as me.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
They don't seem to be prepared to commit, you know, like the classic kind of Lothario guys, especially if you're going a little bit more quote unquote high value. But a lot of the time it's a bit more amorphous than that. It's kind of blobby. And I think to myself, I reckon you out earn most of the guys that you're trying to date. And so, okay, so who is it that you're dating at the moment?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
You're 26, Lydia. Who is it that you're dating at the moment? Oh, well, my last boyfriend was 35. And the guy that I'm seeing at the moment is 38. I'm like, these are big, big age gaps. And yeah, that was really surprising to me.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Oh, I see. You're just picking someone at the start of the race as opposed to the end of it.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Look at how much effort I've put into myself. Look at how much sweat and blood and tears I've crafted. And, you know, I think... One of the things that might help this at least a little bit in terms of reducing the need for hypergamy, because it does seem like high-performing women desire more hypergamous mates than non-high-performing women. So this is as women...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
earn and educate themselves more effectively further up the socioeconomic ladder, they don't reduce down their desire for a partner who's better than them. Proportionally, they want even more, even as they are in absolute terms more effective.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
So you go, oh my God, as you are a rarefied, if you stand atop your own dominance hierarchy, you're looking above and across one to like, who is it that's left? It's like, again, it's LeBron James. You know what I mean? It's like all roads lead back to LeBron James. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
But you also can't build the house around the lamp.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
That's so interesting. Why do you think it is that anytime anybody wants to bring up declining birth rates and marriage, that it's seen as a right wing or fascist talking point?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
To push back against nationalism in a way.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Even if that doesn't appear in practice, it appears in rhetoric. And that's what you're able to espouse online.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
That's a one 57 actually breaks it.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
The narcissism of small differences, the bigotry of small differences. It sounds a little bit like that.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
It's probably worse than book publishing.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
There was a well done video about the sort of right wing support of population collapse or the right wing concern about population collapse. I featured quite prominently. It was really well done, actually. I thought it was a really, really good video. This guy that put it together, I've watched some of his stuff before. He's done some really great videos.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I think maybe I was part of the Manosphere. Again, the Manosphere fucking hate me. So I'm sure that they were very insulted to have me use, like given their moniker in the chapters and the timestamps and all the rest of this stuff. But what I found was kind of interesting with that video was
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
A lot of the quotes that at least I was taken as saying were these sort of very milquetoast as far as I could say. Me saying things like, well, I'm not saying that climate change isn't something that we should be bothered about. In fact, I think there should be more attention paid to climate change properly than there is already.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
But climate change isn't going to cause an issue within the next hundred years. And I think that birth rate decline is. I'm like...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I can't see within that sentence, I can't see what's supposed to be so fucking controversial unless you believe that I don't actually believe the thing that I'm just playing lip service to the climate change discussion so that I can sneak my white supremacist pronatalist policy in underneath it, which is obviously not what I'm doing.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
You know, another question that I asked was, well, how do we know that it's not women's standards being too high and that men's standards aren't meeting what it is that women should do? I'm like, is that not like the entire sort of leftist discussion around like the sort of pro-feminist, third-wave feminist entire thing?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
So when it comes to even, like I say, this video was really well done and I commented on it and said, well done, not just because I was in it. Even this left-leaning assessment of these issues is, in many ways, seems to not really be able to fully square the circle.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
It's like, well, you're trying to find some nefarious, at least in me, I'm not to say that all pronatalists, I'm sure there's many pronatalists that are assholes and bigots and stuff, as there are people that are antinatalists. But at least with the sections that I was looking at, I was like, well, I know, at least I think I know the place that I'm coming from when it comes to this.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And this isn't the Chris Williamson, like fucking DEFCON 1 Iron Dome defense thing, but a bunch of, it's the first conversation I've had about birth rate decline since I keep getting popped for random clips. This one was old. This was a really, really old one. And this is a Carl Benjamin take who says he was adamant
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
You have a duty to produce children so that you contribute to the pool of people to look after old people, given that you're going to be a person that's going to be old at some point in future. First time I ever heard it, I was like, fucking hell, Carl, that's a bit strong. And then after a little bit more thought, I was like, oh, I can kind of see the logic. I understand where you're coming from.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And I said something not too dissimilar when we were talking about birth rate decline exclusively. in the service of countries and economic future. And I'm like, well, look, who do you think is going to keep the GDP going when you get old? Because it's not going to be you.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And this was somebody, I think, on the right that was saying, oh, yeah, this is the only reason that anybody should have kids so that you can continue to drive the GDP. I'm like, no, fucking, obviously, I'm not that retarded as to not think that it's the most meaningful, loving, caring thing that you can ever do for your genetic progeny.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And it's going to be the single most important part of your life when you look back from your deathbed. Like I'm taking that as a given. And then on top of that, there are these other things that people don't talk about all that much. So it just seems that the entire discussion, no matter whether you're coming from the right or coming from the left, is largely just not that thoughtful.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And a lot of the time people have either problems with or sort of problems for that they really struggle to articulate. And as far as I can see, no one has put together the definitive sort of
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
thesis on birth rate decline why it's a problem why it's happening etc etc it's all being you know pulled together there's a pronatalist conference happening here in austin and you know like when you've still got conferences going about stuff it basically means that the science isn't settled about what the fuck's going on because people have still got so much shit to discuss so yeah that's a long rambling diatribe about how i don't think that people from either side of the fence fully understand what they're talking about when it comes to population collapse
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
It's like... Not to replace it.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
This is a line in the sand that I'm prepared to absolutely stand on. If we get pushed back against the golden retriever population, that's an issue for me.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
what's the what have you sort of come to think about the bonnie blue lily phillips contribution to the conversation around sex and and women at the moment um so i think from having watched the lily phillips documentary i've heard from um journalists have interviewed her that she's really really nice actually and it does come across i think that genuinely she is
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
It's going to get clipped by Mary Harrington and she's going to take massive offense to it for a Labrador.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've worn Whoop for over five years now, since way before they were a partner on the show, and it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it is the best. I've actually tracked over 1,600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is pretty crazy. Whoop is super innocuous. You don't even remember that you've got it on, and yet it tracks...
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
everything 24-7 via a little device on your wrist. It tracks your heart rate, your sleep, your recovery, all of your workouts, your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, how much you're breathing throughout the night, and now can even track your steps. Puts all of this into an app and spits out very simple to understand and fantastically usable data. It's phenomenal.
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I'm a massive, massive fan of them. And best of all, you can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4.0 strap, plus you get your first month for free, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, I'll just give you your money back.
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#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
You can get the brand new Whoop 4.0 and that 30-day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, that's exactly what I had in mind. This is the first time I've heard anyone put words to it, but it makes complete sense. It's natal fatalism, right?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
We are on this particular set of rollercoaster tracks. Just to call it out for the people that maybe aren't behavioral genetics pilled, your political ideology, the positions that you tend to take on lots of issues is... highly predisposed by your personality and your personality is highly predisposed by its heritable, it's disposed by your parents.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
If you are part of a ideological group, which is less likely to have children, that means that that group's genes, the ideology genes are less likely to be passed on, which means that that ideology gets less predisposed to over time and dies out. So you end up with over time, you should do basically people who have kids have kids and those kids are more likely to be the kid having type of kids
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
which means that they continue. But if you've got this squeeze that we're going through at the moment, it may end up looking a lot like an hourglass where you have sort of wide, lots of people liberated, everyone can do it. You get some technologies and some environmental changes, which causes this to stop.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And then you select out and then come through on the other side when you have a critical mass of people who are the children of kid havers, even in the new environment. And then you get through that. But you're right. I mean, the next...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
300 years probably i don't know has anyone done far out like real far out projections like centuries away projections to see when this sort of thing would rebound um if anyone has it's probably malcolm and simone collins um i mean they've definitely spoken about the risk actually of having a j curve in terms of population explosion where the
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
So we've had population boom, which was an issue, population bust, which is an issue, and then population double boom, which is a bigger issue.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
That's scary. And that's something that I hadn't considered. And you've now given me another thing to be worried about. It's okay. It's fine. I'll just add it to the list.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
My housemate, his sister recently had her first child and he drove to go and see her. And this kid's, you know, weeks old. And he said that he... held this baby in his arms and sort of looked down and realized that it was his genetic progeny and felt this sort of surge of meaning go through him that he hadn't felt before.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
This is the first nephew or niece that he's ever held, first baby that's kind of in his vicinity of genes that he's ever held. And he said he's got a contrarian opinion that he doesn't want to have kids until he's 50. He's just going to like Lone Ranger, solopreneur it, make all of the money, have all of the life experiences and then lock in at 50 and just go to town.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I think a bunch of our friends, I know, classic men.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
However, he basically said he sort of felt this surge of genetic dynasty sort of go through him. And it got me thinking, we both had a long conversation about this, the sort of desire to be a parent being mimetic, not only in close friend groups that you see friends have kids, which makes you think about having kids, or you don't see friends having kids, which makes you less likely to have kids.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Also, if family sizes are reducing, I know that it seems like the data is kind of mixed on this. Like if you have one kid, one child, it's likely that you're going to have blah, blah, blah.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
um but if you have fewer siblings to show you what it's like to have children maybe that sort of mimetic desire to become a parent gets turned down and you know you have this kind of recursive loop of fewer mothers beget fewer role models showing other non-mother women how it what it's like to be a mother and extolling the virtues like the best advertising campaign ever the thin end of the wedge is your friend that's just had a kid and is loving it
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
But if you don't have any friends that have had kids yet, then nobody wants to be the first mover unless you've got the Elon Musk of women that's going to go and be agentic or Bonnie Blue, I suppose. So yeah, mimetic desire to be a parent. What do you reckon there?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Given that you're now a mother of two, what have you learned about optimal parenting and the perils of the pressure of trying to be an optimal parent and how resilient children are and stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Michelangelo's Pieta, it's a sculpture.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Oh, interesting. Maybe or maybe not.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I suppose, you know, in the way that you have a distribution of different mental makeups within any society... Your genes are going to roll the dice on a few mutations and a couple of tinkerings here and there. Maybe you'll have a guy that can grow his hair into a ponytail and raid Lindisfarne and come back and not have any PTSD. That's one type.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Exactly. Who cares about the state of the economy? Who cares about the carbon parts per million?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Wow, that's interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I would be fascinated to see whether the children of neurotic parents have higher or lower infant mortality.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Lack of supervision.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Wouldn't do to have a society filled with all of them. Would probably be quite chaotic. In the same way, perhaps, there is a role for one of the local women to not really care too much about getting attached when they have sex with a lot of men. And...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
It's so fascinating. I certainly know that ADHD diagnoses are increasing, but I don't know whether the DSM criteria with which ADHD is diagnosed has remained stable across time. Or whether there is just, well, this new, more peaceful, more brains, less brawn style world. It's kind of just inconvenient for these boys to be the way that they are. And, you know, you have...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
you could argue perhaps that apart from being a huge step change, anything that's within sort of the 95th to the fifth percentile of any trait is like just, that's just normal. Like all of that is normal, even out to pretty close to the tails. That's just, that's just pretty normal. But as soon as it begins to get inconvenient and,
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And it's kind of simpler to just register that as a thing, some sort of pathology, something that needs treating, something that needs therapy or medication. And yeah, I can just see how you go, well, look at the gold standard.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
they're just they sit there they color in they clean up after themselves you know the dolls and then i look over the far side and there's a hole in the door like where's that come from you're not even you weigh 10 kilos how do you put a hole in the door and um yes uh yeah i mean basically we kind of cut i don't know what portion of uh boys are diagnosed with adhd it's pretty high though i think it's like i don't know
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Get over to Texas. There's communes everywhere. You'll teach them to whittle a flute out of a stick. They'll learn to do archery by age four. I mean, they can't count, but holy shit, they can skin an elk in five minutes flat.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Wow, that's interesting. And I totally didn't think about that. Why would they get involved?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
It's not floral prints and baking cakes.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Exactly, yeah. God's eye view of this. Well, I have a bunch of friends who've tried to do bilateral trad life or whatever the polylateral trad life, whatever the other word would be. And this is a funny story. So maybe, how many? It's probably 10 couples, I would say, something like that. And they had this plan Some of them had kids. Some of them are about to have kids. All of them quite wealthy.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Many of them had had exits from companies, late 20s, early 30s, highly agentic, very white, very middle upper class people from all over the country living in Austin, Texas. And they decided that they were going to do the commune thing. They were going to homeschool the kids, but that one of them was a teacher.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
The intention was at some point in the next five to 10 years, we buy 100 acres of land between us all and we do the...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
polylateral trad life thing they tried to do a couple of pet projects i think one of them was to uh revamp a ranch out in bastrop out toward bastrop sort of out uh east from austin um there was a couple of other projects they've done to see how they would get like a test project right you know it's like a job interview for everybody to interview each other to see how they would get on and you know whether the group would work like this and uh
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I don't think it's happening. I don't think it worked. Just the coordination problem. Because, again, what people are doing there is they're LARPing as trad life people, which causes you to be as selective as the girl that's 27, earns 100 grand and has got two degrees.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
as opposed to what actual trad life was, which was an imposition that was placed upon you that you just had to make it fucking work. Like you don't get to test run it and go, I don't actually really like the way that that homeschooler did the history stuff because I really want it to be done. It's like, no, you just get what you get.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And yeah, I think, I wonder whether elective trad life with the expectations that the people who have the ability to do trad life have, I wonder whether that's just incompatible because you want the five-star service. You want the business class flights and you want the Uber Black XL. I don't think that that's realistic unless you sort of keep rolling the dice and really come up lucky.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Isn't it interesting because... there is this desire for agency that everybody has. It's kind of tied into a meritocracy that you can design your own destiny, that your life should not be lived by default. Who are you to tell me what I can do? Remembering that Lily Phillips is British. We don't exactly have a flourishing culture of freedom at the moment in Britain.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
The only way that you can bear to put up with someone that you're in that close proximity to is if you're genetically related.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
We're not, you know, I mean, I'm in Texas, like the home of come and take it as a tagline. Um, The UK is, please feel free to come and take it. So yeah, that's interesting to me that this sort of emancipation, liberation, freedom thing that everybody sort of bows down to, at some point you go, well, maybe we do need a kind of paternalistic oversight position that we go on here. Maybe there's...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
That's certainly one of the concerns, I think, in David Buss's book, Bad Men, about how women become socially isolated from brothers and uncles and fathers and grandfathers who would have been able to step in if there was an abusive partner in the mix or if she was a financial prisoner in one way or another.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
So in many ways, I can see actually why it would be more adaptive for it to be matrilocal because...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
you know the the guy should be a little bit more robust at being able to deal with the slightly overbearing mother-in-law than the wife would be able to deal with a potentially abusive partner and a bunch of uncles and brothers who aren't her genetic uh part of a genetic lineage that are turning a blind eye to it so yeah i imagine that's a
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Yeah, of course you would. Louise, you're great. I love every time that we get to speak. Where should people go? They want to check out the things you write and things you say and whatever else you've got going on.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
that would be i can't wait to see what sort of a response you get for that one like whether it's this you know right wing mother trying to color the the thoughts of our impressionable meanwhile bonnie blue and fucking lily phillips are just like yes queen over the far side so far i've had like
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
We didn't even get a chance to get around to being cis-English today. We can maybe talk about that next time. Look, Louise, you're so great. Everyone should go and check out your stuff. Case Against Sexual Revolution is a seminal book. People refer to being peripilled now. Young women refer to being peripilled. If nothing else, your legacy will live on as a meme in New York, like college chicks.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And until next time, I hope that you survive all of the children and the craziness.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books... that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
certain types of disposition. This isn't me saying that we need to step in and like, you know, have a fucking intervention with Lily Phillips. She's an adult and she can do what she wants.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Michael Malice had an interesting take on this where he said, A lot of the time people get criticized for looking up to role models too much, sort of mimetically following the desires of others.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
But it's his position that for maybe most people, this is a Michael Malice-ism, not me saying it, maybe for most people, they're too stupid to be able to design from first principles what they want to do with their life. So actually outsourcing your thinking and your life direction to someone who's cleverer than you is not a bad idea.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
bonnie blue or lily phillips but it's like they i mean they do like work from home in the sense and like it's i think it would be very very difficult for to protect children completely yeah it's perilously similar and you know the word sex worker was reclaimed by only fans and online models and stuff like that and it kind of sex worker i guess 20 years ago would have been
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
My pushback against that would be, you know, 50%. The average American is obese, divorced, and with less than 1K in the bank. So doing what everybody else does sounds like a safe option, but it's actually a reliable route to a life that you probably definitely don't want. So in this, we have a difficulty, right?
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
Yes, there are lots of ways that you can try and do it yourself and fuck it up, like building your own car or something. It's like, hey, look,
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
People that are good at car building have tried this before, but this would be like if the car manufacturer market had more than a 50% fatality rate, or more than a 50% serious incident crash rate, and you're saying, well, I've actually got two quite difficult choices in front of me. I can sort of roll the dice on my own, so I guess you need to make...
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
the people that need to make the judgment of, am I smart enough to be able to try and roll this on my own and build my own car, are precisely the people that can't do that and that actually need to follow it because they're maybe divorced, obese, and less than 1K in the bank, is better for them than had they have tried to do it from design, not from default.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
I'm fascinated. It's a very unpopular position, still now a very unpopular position to be anything that is an anti-Zen pick online. At least, maybe I've made my own bed a little bit. The audience agency is one of the most important things in my life and intentionality and designing your life in the way that you want it to be.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
uh so perhaps the chickens are coming home to roost in that regard but yeah uh ozempic and this sort of bolstering this naturalistic fallacy sense that you should be using the willpower that you should make it more difficult for yourself you know there's a a new class of um
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
psychiatric medication coming out Welbutrin is one of them which is an SNRI rather than an SSRI people use it people that suffer with seasonal affective disorder can use it and they can quite easily go on and go off within the space of sort of three to four months and there's another new class as well I can't remember the name of it but
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
all of those are kind of getting perilously close to just free happiness. So it's like, hey, are you a little bit more neurotic than you would like? Are you too high on neuroticism? Does negative affect affect your life a little bit more than you would like? Well, maybe just like this is the ozempic equivalent for
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
girls that were out on the curb at sort of the dark hours of the night and guys driving past. And now it covers a whole range of sins, many of which are digital and totally parasocial and totally solo.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
And I understand that we have this long, illustrious history of SSRIs are one point on the Chapman scale out of 56 of depression, that dancing with somebody for one hour a week has three times the effectiveness of this with none of the side effects and all the rest of the stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?
But you have to assume that as medicine and science and our understanding of the human system becomes better, that we are going to be able to design better drugs that impact people in a more effective way with fewer side effects. And you go, okay, well, if that's happening, at some point we're going to reach...
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Is it a challenge, especially as people are maybe a little bit younger and their life is in more flux? Because the thing that you want right now might be to get a partner. Like, that's really what I want, what I really, really should be focused on. Does this make me more likely to be attractive to the sort of person I would spend the rest of my life with?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Well, after a while, presuming that you managed to be successful in that, That needs to fall by the wayside. And then there's another one. And maybe that's an even shorter window. Like when your son is 18, I mean, unless you end up going to the Jets or something and you're like, wow, this is fucking sick. I've like transitioned again. That's going to have to change.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
We'll get back to talking to Sahil in one minute. But first, I need to tell you about nomadic. Traveling should be about... the pleasure of the trip and not the stress of packing, which is why I am such a huge fan of pneumatic. This travel pack, the 14 liter travel pack is what I wear every single day.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It is the biggest game changer and it genuinely makes spending your day lugging your possessions around infinitely more enjoyable. They've got compartments for everything, your laptop, your shoes, your sunglasses. So well organized that even your toothbrush will feel important. It's like the Marie Kondo of luggage. Everything has got its place.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And if you're still on the fence, their products have got a lifetime guarantee. So this is the last backpack you'll ever need to buy. And there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it, throw your possessions in it, and if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Right now, you can get a 20% discount off everything from Nomadic by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modernwisdom. And they ship internationally. That's nomatic.com slash Modern Wisdom. Yeah, you had this insight around you need to work hard first before you can start to work smart. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Okay, well, I had norovirus. I was in a three-piece tuxedo at the New York Athletic Club running back and forth from shitting my brains out in the toilet. So...
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, another one that I loved from you. The worst decisions in life are made when you allow your head to talk you into something when your gut already said no. And that, I think, even if you haven't done the formal exercise of the life razor, you have an idea about where you want to be. And there's this little voice in the back of your mind that keeps a tally.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You know that, what's that game where, like, hot or cold? And someone's trying to work out what it is that you've hidden in the room and you're going, warmer, warmer, colder, colder, colder. And there's just a little... radar GPS ticker in the back of your mind that goes, Hey, you moved yourself further away from the person you want to be today.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And if it's poorly defined, I think that probably causes, um, discontent because you think, ah, fuck, like what, what is that thing? What is that place I'm going to? I know I moved further away from it today with my actions, but I don't, I can't specifically tell you why maybe, or maybe I can, but I can't tell you what it was that I moved further away from.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I just know that I acted like a bit of a dick today, but yesterday, perfect example of I got off the plane and I'd had fucking norovirus. So a bad 48 hours. The plane journey had been long. I'd been traveling and I had to get in. It was all rushed. And I wasn't as courteous to the Uber driver as I should be. And I remember thinking like, huh, that's not the sort of person I want to be.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
So I sort of shook his hand and wished him a good day and tipped him and stuff afterward. And it was like, okay, that's... Like that kind of rids me at least a little bit of this agitated state. But yeah, everybody knows.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Like, you know, you've got this little conscience or daemon or whatever sat in the back of your mind, knowing if you're moving yourself further toward that or further away, regardless of whether you've designed and defined your life razor or not.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
So yes, but- more so when you have more experience. Because again, in the first instance, if you're 20, what do you... I mean, unless you've had very experiential teens, what the fuck are you listening to? What experience are you drawing on here? That is where... you would look at it and maybe call it impulsivity, sort of irrationality, emotionality.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You're not being driven by making logical, illogical decisions. But yet, as you start to accumulate some battle scars and some experience and some decades under your belt, I think that's when you can. But again, this is periods of your life, seasons of your life, right? The tools that got you here won't get you there. And one of the tools that
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
got you here was being very deliberate, very, um, thought through a very top down. You're like dictating to the rest of your body. This is what you're going to do. You're going to push hard. You're going to train more. You're going to, et cetera. And after a while you go, Hey, body's saying it needs to take a rest.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And the last time this happened and I didn't listen to it, I, that was when I injured my knee. That was when that I got burned out. That was when I got sick and fucking got norovirus at New York athletic club. Uh, I think, again, one of those periods where the tools need to change.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Have you got any idea about how people can recognize when that's happening to them? I think you start to see...
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I have a friend who worked for a big recruitment company for a while here in Austin, and they place very, very high level tech execs around the world. And it meant that he was able to have access to some of the first and second round interviews that they did with the best candidates on the planet. And Tim Cook was one of them.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And Susanna was another one of them, too. And I was asking him this question. I was saying, hey, man, so what's the difference between, you know, these people that go on to earn obscene packages and then the best in the world, the people that lead the, you know, FTSE 100 companies? And he said, well, I can tell you what the first line of the first word of Tim Cook's summary was.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Remembering that these people, they spend their time trying to find holes, trying to pick holes. And what is it? The psychographic profile? What is it to do with their childhood that's coming up? What is it to do with their work ethic? Well, they've got an inability to deal with criticism or they're too concerned about the opinions of others or whatever it might be.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, you've got a bracket that your world exists within, and much of that bracket has actually been determined by things that were outside of your control. But within that bracket, almost everything is within your control. And the fact that people can't hold two thoughts in their mind at the same time is where that gets confusing.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And the first word, the top of the summary of Tim Cook just said, rock star, full stop. in a sea of the best candidates on the planet, there is still a step difference between everybody and then the best.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Have you ever heard Dana White talk about what it's like being friends with Donald Trump? No. Dude, it's wild. Dana says Trump will come to one of the UFC events and he'll watch, you know, he rocks up toward the beginning of the main card and he'll walk out with him and he'll do that and fucking kid rocks with him or whoever, Elon jumping about in the background.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And then he'll watch the fights and he'll like shake the hands and do the thing and he'll leave. And then Dana will be on the way home and he'll get a call from Trump because he wants to talk about the fights and he wants to discuss stuff. And then they'll get onto something else. He'll go to bed. And by the time that Dana, Dana is a guy to me that seems very, very high energy.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
By the time that Dana's gone to bed and got back up, Trump's already on his flight and he'll have messages from him about shit that they spoke about the night before. And, I don't know, man. It doesn't matter whether you like him or not, whether you agree with his politics or not. For a guy that's 78, 79, something like that, that's fucking terrifying.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
None of my friends in our 30s are able to do that. And yeah, that's when you realize that there are builds to people that are kind of inevitable. Peterson's got this line about... Like conscientious people are crazy. If you put them in an abandoned forest with an axe, they're just running around chopping down trees for no reason.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And yeah, that's the kind of Tim Cook, like Trump energy, like just chopping trees.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And you get accused of victim blaming or not fully understanding the challenges that people face, or... and not giving people sufficient motivation and giving them a hard enough kick up the ass to get them to go and do the thing. So ultimately, I think that it's very difficult to please anybody, frankly.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
But yeah, the fact that one year of focus, it is absurd to look back as you get a little bit older and find individual 12-month periods where you say, wow, the difference between the beginning and the end of that. And for me personally, you can probably track it from the beginning of the year as well. It doesn't happen June to June. It does tend to happen January to December.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And that's an interesting thing about resolutions. I know it's cool to hate on resolutions to kind of take a more holistic view and say, well, there's nothing particularly special about January 1st. Why couldn't you have done it on December 31st? Because the human brain is irrational and it uses loads of random motivation. Look at the, you'll have seen this, the split times for marathon.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And they all cluster around important milestones. They cluster around three hours and 3.15 and 3.30. But there's not a big spike at 3.37. Have you seen diamond pricing?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Me and a two-and-a-half-year-old sharing a bathroom together at three in the morning. Yeah, we actually have someone that does that on a frequent basis, so you wouldn't have been alone. That's good. Just if you do have a stomach bug, my advice is don't wear an outfit that requires... three minutes to undo.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Isn't it interesting, the bravery component there? Like it's so important, the uncertainty that you were talking about before and how much can you tolerate of that? How much can you tolerate of fear and how brave can you be to sort of overcome that?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because, frankly, I'm dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day with Element. It's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need, nothing that you don't.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
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Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I, that's why I, I'm, we're at the start of the year. I'm all for someone carrying the new year's resolution thing forward. And, uh, Yeah, you can achieve an awful lot in a single year.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And it is the ultimate way to begin your day. And I genuinely feel the difference when I don't take it. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy. So you can buy it and try it, use the entire box. And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back and you don't even need to return it. That's how confident they are that you'll love it.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. Yeah, it's an interesting, I don't know, and a sad point as people become increasingly lonely or increasingly single that, yes, sometimes you can't pull the pin all on your own.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It's awesome, dude. I'm so happy for you guys. And what an inspiring story to have had that. The conception thing, I think, is so true as well. I read this really harrowing article about the crisis of childless men. You know, a lot of the time, women have a biological window and, you know, rightly a lot of the priority and attention is focused on them.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
But the same happening for men, whether it's that they get to an age where sperm count is so low that it's no longer viable, whether they get to an age where they're not able to date quite so easily, or the only partners that they can date now are too old. And, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Given the challenges that you had conceiving once, what are your feelings about trying to conceive again?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Just that sort of maybe PTSD thing, like, fuck, we made it. Do I really want to get my hopes up again? Yeah. And then maybe... I wondered whether that was the sort of thing that lingers. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
That's a great question. This sort of blast radius that's fed back up from the child.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
and that i think is like the highest calling as a man to feel that you can leave this legacy that exists beyond you where your child is going to be okay i think as well you're right the selfish thing is something i've thought about a lot especially as i reflected on last year and uh every time that i see kids more and more of my friends are getting pregnant uh at the moment in one form or another and uh
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
In one form or another. What are the other forms? Well, like, as in... I'm just giving you shit. They're at varying stages of pregnancy and also varying stages of, how do I say, announcing it, which is why I'm not saying. There's a number of people that have been on the show a good bit. You can only be stealth pregnant for so long. Fuck, dude.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I mean, it's starting to show on a couple of the girlfriends and wives. So... A lot of the pursuits that I think me and a good chunk of my friends have done for the first 15 years to two decades out of university, full-time education, have been basically just surrogate family building. I'm going to start this project. I'm going to create this brand. I'm going to pursue this passion of some kind.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I'm going to get good at this thing. And you're just pouring energy and care and focus and obsession and emotion into... thing, which kind of feels a little bit like a baby. People even refer to it. I'm sure at some point in your past, you've referred to your newsletter as like, my baby, my writing is my baby. But it's not.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And one of the best things that I can think of is if you do end some worlds in your 20s and put yourself in a position where you go, hey, financially, I'm stable and I've acquired some skills and I've got some scars, but I feel good about them. And I actually think that I'm now ready to sort of pay this forward.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
That makes the selfishness in your twenties feel way less selfish because you go, maybe it wasn't about me just doing things for me. Maybe those were the important lessons that I needed so that when the next generation comes along and it's me that's coaching them and I can tell them exactly all of the different pitfalls that happened.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And I know how to deal with this emotional ups and downs and swings and turbulences that they've gone through. And I've got the life experience and we've got the financial stability and we've got, you know, I've closed all of the different loops, all of those questions about, oh, I wonder what it would have been like to have traveled to Bali.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And now we've got three kids and I can't go to Bali anymore. And you go, you went to Bali twice. Like that's fine. All of these things have been closed off. So yeah, I love the idea of, And it'll be fascinating to see just how much having kids totally reframes the way that I look at everything that happened before. I think Russ Roberts says there's two types of people in the world.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
There's pre-kids and post-kids. And he said the two will never be able to talk to each other fully about what life's like.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah. What's the problem people have when they look at the scoreboard of their lives? You know, we're kind of hinting toward what it means to live a good life, how you sort of create the constituent parts of that. What do people get wrong when they think about that scoreboard?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, you said expectations are your biggest liability. And that kind of feels like the same thing.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Public service announcement. 20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids. So true.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Is that an argument to front load the life and wealth acquisition and to really try and send it as much as you can in your 20s? so that some of that price, that overhead has been paid a little bit before the kids come along?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
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Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It also boosts memory, focus, and cognitive function, while also... improving sleep and reducing stress, which is why it's a massive part of my brain, body and sleep stack, which I use every single day. It's got a huge impact on my cognition and my strength and my recovery. And if you're still on the fence, Momentous offers a 30 day money back guarantee.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
So you can buy it and try it before you go to bed every night for 29 nights. And if you don't love it, they'll give you money back. And they ship internationally.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Right now, you can get a 20% discount off all of their products and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. It's cool to draw that line from...
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
why I'm doing this work to the outcome that I'm going to get. I played a lot of sport when I was a kid and I never was taught when we were training, this sounds so dumb, but I was never taught that the reason that you went to practice wasn't to enjoy the team building and to do drills for no reason.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It was that these were the individual components that when you stepped out onto the field of play would make you a better player. And I just hadn't drawn that lineage between preparation and performance. Like, obviously it's there.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And I think I'd had it, it was there sort of vaguely, but to really, really understand the dopamine that comes, the reward that comes from, okay, this is why you're going to break this down into its component parts. You're not just doing it so that you can do it right now. You're doing it so that when the game time comes, you're actually going to be better. And I think
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Humans are driven by little more than they're driven by dopamine. And if you can say, hey, this is the playbook for how it works. This is the playbook for how reward works. I'm doing this thing because I care about it and it's hard, but it makes me feel good. And I think that it makes the world a better place. This is how it works. And you just drill that blueprint for a decade and a half.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
If your kid is built even remotely like you, they're going to be very, very well set.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Dude, I think about this all the time from how much you zoom in to the little duration. Nobody looks at a single minute and says, I didn't really balance that minute enough. You know, was I really fully embracing my fun side during that minute? But across a day, we do. We say, you know, today, I didn't really do enough X or Y. But that's not how your life is lived.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yes, if you're not careful enough Can you get to the end of a month and look back on that month and realize that there was a big missing gap? But really, you should be doing it across an entire 12-month period and looking back and saying, well, this year I... I focused a little bit too much on this thing, but I'm glad that that was the case. We periodize, weightlifters periodize their lifting.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
They're not trying to max out all the time. They pull back, they do deloads, they go up, they peak for competition, then they lift, then they come back down again, then they go back up. Like that's the way that life's supposed to be lived. And, uh, It's odd that across a single day we can get agitated at ourselves for not having enough time for dot, dot, dot. And you go, well, you don't need to.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Like, what if all of Wednesday is spent on that thing that you think last week you didn't spend enough time on? You go, would that be enough? Would like one day out of 14 be enough? You go, absolutely. You go, okay, well, you're going to have periods of imbalance, but you're going to have large cycles of balance, right?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And after that year, people called him lucky. Exactly. What does it mean to expand your luck surface area?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah. It's a, It's really interesting what you said before as well about God winking at you. I love that line. And it does seem that luck very rarely comes into your life when you're being timid, when you're only listening to your head.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You could probably write out a bunch of times when you felt the most lucky and what were the sort of behaviors, what was the kind of energy that you were bringing to the world. And it would probably be
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It's probably very rarely when you're full of ego and bouncing around.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, it feels like you've spent a lot of time looking at the relationship between money and happiness. What's your, it's too trite to say, you know, being poor can make you miserable, but being rich might not make you happy. Summarize that for me.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
That's why we love underdog stories, right? We love the underdog story because there is nobody that is never going to be at that bottom position. If you're in the fortunate situation of things being better for you, then good. You catch the trajectory halfway up the staircase. But if you're at the very, very bottom, you think, wow...
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
that was when things were hard to set when was when gravity was at its strongest. That was when your launch velocity was at zero and you needed to rip this fucker off the launch pad one inch at a time. Uh, That's inspiring. That's something that I hope for in me or that I hope that more people are able to achieve in themselves.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Or if I fall from grace and I hit rock bottom again, that means that that's the place that I can sort of bounce back from. But yeah, talk more about winning momentum. I like that.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
The worst prison in the world is having the talent and intelligence to achieve something great, but lacking the courage to go out and do it.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Well, one of the ruthless things about ever having a very successful day is that the new baseline for your next most successful day just got raised by a You know, one of the worst days of your life in an odd regard would maybe be the day that you won the lottery. So you think, well, how are you going to have a better day than that?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And what you want is to basically plan your entire existence to just slowly step change up. And then the day that you die...
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
the final payment check for the fucking home bounces right like that's where you want to get to but what people have are these i spoke to dan bilzerian about this like you've been to the top of the hedonic mountain what would you give me some of the insights and he said you know like quickly accumulating a lot of pleasure is a really really bad idea because where'd you go from that
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
That would have been a solution. But the problem was that the guy at the front, the toilet attendant guy at the front must have thought, This man, I'm in an event filled with rich bankers and like dynasty money and all the rest of it. Probably quite a lot of cocaine going on. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. He must have looked at me and thought, that is the fucking king of cocaine. For sure.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
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Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
What was that study that you told us about in our chat to do with when you ask people how much money they want to, would make them happy? And it continues to go up. Can you explain that?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, it's fascinating about the what's get. What it is that we can measure is the thing that we care about the most. And money is just the best game at that. Is that an argument to try and gamify the other areas of your life? Should you have a dashboard that's tracking everything else?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
That man is shoveling some good stuff in there. Because I was back and forth every seven minutes or so.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
He was outside. That's always a little embarrassing. Speaking of the new year, though, I saw a tweet from you that said, you're one year of focus away from people saying you got lucky. And yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
The single-ordinating principle thing, I seem to remember two examples, one from Bezos, one from Elon. The Bezos one was every question through Amazon went through the filter, does this make the customer experience better? And I think Elon's was, does this get us closer to Mars? And yeah, when you think that
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
There's a lot of ways that the world can be chaotic and bringing that under a single variable, one dimension, does this achieve, does this get us closer to X? Does this make me more likely to be the sort of father that would be able to coach my son's sports teams? Does this make me more likely to be able to leave at 5 p.m. to go on a date with my wife?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
So getting into the meat of it, why do females choose certain males based on beauty and performance rather than obvious survival traits?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Otherwise known as the sexy sun hypothesis.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
That was good. That's good. okay so we have this sort of fisherian runaway selection thing going on that traits that are sexually attractive are selected over time that causes sons to become sexier but eventually you end up with a risk and a trade-off for the males the even before we get onto risks and trade-offs
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Why is it that there is such a thing as sexiness that isn't just utility of survivalness? Why is it not that maximized survivalness is sexiness? Why is there this other pathway, this other attribute?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
It's not always the biggest tails. It's not always the brightest front.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Well, if you assume that the reason that you have fitness is to survive in order to be able to reproduce and hotness allows you to reproduce more quickly, they end up netting out at the same outcome, even if they sort of get there in different paths.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
That's really cool to understand that there is one dial for fitness and one dial for hotness. And they're maybe interrelated upstream before them. There is something that causes them both to happen. And maybe they do, on average, tend to happen sort of synchronously. That fitter tend to be hotter. I would also imagine that that's the case.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Yeah, I can imagine that Victorian England wasn't superbly keen on the idea of flipping the gender hierarchy upside down and saying, well, maybe the males were shaped by female preferences. And that also sort of has in it a sense of almost sort of promiscuity in a way, a degree of female sexual agency, which, again, Victorian England, probably not superbly popular.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
But that they are distinct and they are interpreted in different ways. So that's cool. So just to kind of round out the Fisherian runaway thing. Any minor advantage in terms of sexual selection trait display that a male has, if it's even 51-49, over time that will be selected for sufficiently that it continues to get more and it continues to get brighter and it continues to get more elaborate.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And that's where you end up with, after a few million years of evolution, you just end up with these sort of very, very extravagant displays.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I don't know. I feel like you need to sow the seeds with girly daytime magazines that have got the new trend. What to look for in this summer's new boyfriend or whatever. And that's how you sort of inject it socially. And from there, the runaway begins.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Oh, it's like a snipe aesthetician giving them some beautification augmenting. So it's a boob job. It's a boob job for snipes.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I've worn Whoop for over five years now, since way before they were a partner on the show, and it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it is the best. I've actually tracked over 1,600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is pretty crazy. Whoop is super innocuous. You don't even remember that you've got it on, and yet it tracks everything. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
What is the fundamental mystery when it comes to sexual selection?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because, frankly, I'm dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day the same way with Element in a cold glass of water. Thank you so much for watching. regulating appetite and curbing cravings. Their orange salt in a cold glass of water is gorgeous.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
It's a beautiful, salty, sweet, orangey nectar. And it's how I've started my day every single day for as long as I can remember. And I genuinely feel the difference when I take it versus when I don't. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it totally risk-free. If you don't like it, you don't even need to return the box.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Okay, so could sexual selection have shaped the human mind? We've talked a lot about birds so far.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Let's bring it a little bit closer to home for what it could have done to us.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
a civilization which still has the sort of conceptual inertia of intelligent design, of beauty being sort of divinely bestowed from above, that you observe these birds doing crazy dances and making themselves into smiley faces and hopping around and pecking and doing all of this stuff and thinking, well, how lovely that God has made these birds do this dance for our benefit.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
It's mating all the way down. It was always mating. It's turtles all the way down. It is. So, you know, one of the things that you've mentioned there is this, I guess, bi-directional sexual selection that traits happen both, not just male to female, but female to male as well. What determines whether it is unidirectional or bi-directional? And
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
This is beauty incarnate. I get to observe and enjoy. You go, maybe it wasn't for you.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Yeah, what does that sort of say about the environment and the child rearing and the expectations of that particular species? How does that all fit together?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Are there any parallels between bird mating behaviors or whatever and human romantic displays or social structures?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Okay. Another similarity question, I guess. Do birds and humans have an innate appreciation for beauty? Is the drive for aesthetic pleasure some evolutionary force?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I like it. I mean, definitely the...
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
refined nature of it not being everything suggests that you're purposefully doing this one thing if you're brown this you didn't mean to be brown you just are brown but if you're such a pure color if you're such a pure note or tone or sound or whatever that suggests that there's been some thought put into it some pressure selected for it yes there's a sort of watchmaker um aspect to it
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
What do you think, so taking a broader picture here, lots of past failures in evolutionary theory, trying to work out why things were the way that they were. What do you think we should learn about biases in interpreting our nature, what we should consider, where things come from, given the replete history of us putting both of our feet in our mouths and getting stuff wrong all the time?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Matt Ridley, ladies and gentlemen. Matt, I'm a massive fan of your work. I think this is really, really interesting. I didn't realize I was going to become such a garage ornithologist for the afternoon. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with your work and what you've got coming out.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Fiction and nonfiction and real life stories. And there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Yeah. What was the reaction when Darwin first proposed sexual selection?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Isn't it interesting that Darwin, someone whose proposals were recently heretical to the previous dominant ideology, inside of his own new ideology becomes a heretic? You know what I mean?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
By this point, he's sort of pleading with them. I mean, again, look, maybe he doesn't have the spear in the side and the crown of thorns on the head, but it does feel a little bit like a guy who's being prostrated a little bit, sort of begging for a bit of like, guys...
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
please like it's ultimately this is going to hurt you more than it's going to hurt me on judgment day you know like he does have this like messiah thing going on although as far i've read um uh robert wright's book was the first one moral animals what got me into evolutionary psychology again for wonderful book i mean it that's that book is 30 years old now more than 30 years old it's like 92 or something it came out and for anyone that wants a good site kind of
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
half-biographical look at Darwin's life with framing of evolutionary psychology. There's some stuff in there that's a little outdated. Obviously, it's three decades of a relatively new field, so some stuff's moved on, but it's still great. But in that, Darwin seemed to be pretty sort of wracked by self-doubt, uncertainty. He had a little bit of a disposition toward low moods sometimes.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I imagine... He doesn't get mad, he gets sad. And he doesn't have the big sort of fuck you energy that a renegade, rebellious, anarchist thinker would have. So I think he's actually kind of an unlikely individual to go so hard against the dominant sort of mainstream hegemon that was whatever came before him. And I do wonder what would have happened, how much further his work could have gotten
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
If he didn't have to get over not only himself, but then the additional pressure of everybody else saying he was wrong and then his own self-doubt being reinforced by what people were saying from outside of him.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
It must have been really tough for him to navigate because he didn't have, I think I'm right in saying this, by the time that he died, he still didn't have a fully perfect explanation of the peacock's tail. It was this sort of, it's kind of there and I think I've got this inclination, but I don't have something that's concrete.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And then if all of your peers are saying, yeah, mate, I mean, you hit the lottery once with that thing. But you don't get to run it. You can't wheel it up and run it back another time. It just isn't going to work.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Why are birds so useful to use for this study? What is it about birds? Why is it not dogs? Why is it not cows? Why are we not using sheep for this study? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
How many hours a day are most people spending on their phones? How many times are they picking them up?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
If not longer. Exactly. Yeah. Get a sundial, you know, get a, get a cockerel. Um, exactly. Get a window. Um, yeah. Take your phone outside of your bedroom. Uh, Dopamine detoxes, another super trendy thing. I've seen lots of videos with millions of plays on YouTube. Are they legit? Do they do anything? Do they work?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Can I give you my contrarian opinion on intermittent schedule reward in that way as well? You may, of course. I think it's one of the reasons why people are drawn to partners that are difficult to date.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yep. Yep. Yeah. We are singing from the same hymn sheet.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
No eye contact, raw jogging flights by just looking at the flight map on loop.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yes. Yeah, no, I agree. I did a very comprehensive DNA analysis toward the back end of last year that everyone listening will be sick of me talking about, but it was so interesting. And one of the clusters of alleles that was identified that is non-typical for me, like less than 10% of the population have got, is this particular combination of them, not just individuals that are 10%.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
When you roll them all together, you realize just how genetically individual all of us are. It's like 10%, 9%, 10%, 3%, 1%, 10%. And you're like, fuck, when you start to add all of these together, it's one in 7 billion. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
um and mine very very epinephrine norepinephrine dopamine uh struggles to clear adrenaline quickly may may find um it difficult to stop begin stop tasks once they've begun it's like super like internet dgen focused energy and for me dopamine is just it's the sort of drug that my body runs on largely um and you know that's not to say that the um
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
epigenetic uh situation the soup that i've existed in for the last 36 years uh has or hasn't activated those fully i don't know how much those switches are on but i certainly know that there's times where um you know you just get locked in on something and you can't stop but as great as that is you're conscientious you're able to focus on tasks this is really really good you're driven you want to go and chase new things it's like yeah man but that same drive can be hijacked by instagram
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Oh, screen your citizen. Very good. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
or by YouTube, or by World of Warcraft, or by a lot of stuff. And I like that you used the
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
berry picking analogy I remember learning about information foraging oh yeah did you look at that study was it squirrels in trees with nuts I mean probably they do a lot of I think it was I'm thinking about the distracted mind by Adam Ghazali and Larry Rosen where they talk about how human beings tend to forage for information in the same way that animals forage for food I imagine it's probably even one of those guys I remember this was on Sam Harris's pod fuck like six seven years ago and um
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
There's an equation that can be done. Let's say that you're a squirrel looking for nuts in a tree. Okay. Just imagine for a second. Yes. And you are able to create an algorithm, an equation, which is how many nuts have been found in the tree, how many nuts are left in the tree, and how far away is the next closest tree.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And from that, what you're able to basically create is a predictive model about when the squirrel is going to abandon this tree for another one and try and find the nuts in the next tree because it's working increasingly hard to find increasingly few nuts. But in order to go to the next tree, that's far away.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And yeah, the information foraging idea, I think it's just so interesting because for almost all of human history, we had less information than we wanted. And then there was... There was one day in mid-2010 when the amount of information humans desired and the amount that was available perfectly matched up. And then almost immediately, the internet just blasted straight through that ceiling.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And now here we are, all with attention spans of 0.3 seconds.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I'm psychotic. Yes. Problem. Yes. One needs to intervene in my new. Didn't you? Wasn't there something I heard you talk about? Was it Victorian doorknobs as well?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Bouncing from tree to tree.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
What about memory? What's phones doing to our memory? I've heard of TikTok brain before.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I suppose what's interesting about this is something I only realized a few years ago, which is phones come in and they take, let's say, six hours of our day. And I'm going to guess that a lot of what's being studied here is not word processors, emails at work. It's much more social media, sort of casual leisure time type stuff. But we haven't gained the length of the day hasn't become 30 hours.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, well, the energy match of an old guy chilling out and you being very excited with your new book, I imagine, was exactly what he wanted. I mean, that will have made a memory for him. I imagine that that's something that stuck in his mind.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Elite confirmation bias. Yeah, exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
When I first started the show, one of the things I was really interested in learning was why life seems to feel like it speeds up as we get older. So Susanna Hallinan wrote some really great stuff on this. A bunch of people. And Gretchen Rubin did some stuff too. And basically what I came... I may be wrong. Neuroscientists may disagree with me, but this is my bro science theory.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So that six hour window has had to squeeze other bits of life that 25 years ago existed that has to have been squeezed from somewhere unless you've become more efficient at playing in the park or more efficient at spending time with your friends or whatever it might be. So inevitably to put six hours of your day onto screens, that means six hours of your day doing something else has had to go.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Novelty and intensity, two pretty easy ways to... What people mean when they say... life seems to be moving very quickly is I don't remember where the time went. I think that's a better way of putting it because by design, time always moves at the exact same pace.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Even if you're traveling near the speed of light, for you, time is moving at the exact same pace, even if you're on the edge of a black hole. So your experience of time is at the exact same pace. It's your retrospective memory of what happened during that time, which is what you're kind of referring to. And there's some points around the fact that as you get older, things just don't seem as new.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And I'm like, well, that's just novelty and probably intensity as well, that you just don't get as excitable about stuff because things don't have that sense of novelty. So anyway, I think one of Susanna's pieces of advice is never take the same walk twice.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So try and sort of turn left when you turn right, just go down that street or that side, you know, go left around the tree instead of going right around the tree when you're taking a dog for a walk, just little bits of novelty that you can and the intensity piece as well.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And yeah, I get the sense that because, and she uses this really lovely example to explain how a lack of novelty and a lack of intensity compress memories down into a single memory.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So for the people that have got a commute that they take to work every single day, apart from that one time there was a car crash or that one time that somebody was set on fire on the tube or that one time that it broke down, you know what I mean? Like apart from those times when something novel and intense happens, your last four years of work, you know, maybe a thousand journeys. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
to a particular place and a thousand journeys back from a particular place are kind of just compressed into a single memory. Like, tell me what happened four Thursdays ago on your drive to work, unless it was something novel and intense. You probably can't remember it. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Well, because in order for you to be able to remember your life, you have to do things that are memorable and worthy of remembering. And if you're not, what do you expect your brain to do? It's very lazy. You have to give it a reason to do this stuff. All of that is to say...
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I think that largely our experience of our phones is it is your commute to work for four years doing the same journey with nothing happening. Sure, you're given the illusion of novelty, and there is genuine novelty in there, but it's at such a low level, and the actual environment that you're inhabiting is, from a stimulation perspective, it's a surface. It's so shallow that I don't think...
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
This is all to say that your point around, if you're using your phone while you're having a novel experience, you're watching some band of yours that you've been looking forward to seeing for forever, you're watching a sports game, you're at your kid's basketball tournament, whatever it is, and the phone is out, I think your brain is going to pattern match.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I've seen this before, the screen that's very salient, that's driving the dopamine. I don't need to pay quite so much attention to what's going on. And if nothing else...
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, I wonder what the comparison is, because that's presumably across a bunch of different age groups. So if you were to go under 30, I would guess that that number goes up. I would also guess that the hours of sleep would go down under that. I certainly know Luke, who is a good friend of mine and my tour manager. He regularly manages to double his sleep time with his screen time.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
How can people work out whether or not their time on screens is something they want to be doing or something they don't? Given that we all do it, so presumably at the time we want to be doing it, kind of.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I mean, if you think the birth rates are declining too quickly already, this will really plummet them.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You've been pixeled. You've been pixeled. That's it. You're going to be retargeted for the rest of time. Yeah, it's very funny.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Somebody who's unpredictable and sometimes doesn't think that your ideas are amazing.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I watched. Oh, you haven't seen it? What's that? What's that other one about the billionaire guy who gets the coda to come and live with him?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Deus Ex Machina. Yes. I watched that on a plane. Have you seen that one yet?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
It's pretty close to the bone for you for your work.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
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Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Now, I actually... Good question, though.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You can be a bro. It's basically any type of bro science is just... This is me postulating a totally unsubstantiated idea that I thought of while I was in bed. That's what it is. It's a notion. You could say I have a notion. It's a notion. I have a notion.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
My notion is, at least for men, I don't know if this is the same for women, I would actually guess that when you're talking about females and female attachment, they will be the ones who have maybe a higher risk of something like a chatbot because of the level of sort of emotional affection and attentiveness.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
The reason that I think it's not so much of a risk for men is the same reason that guys don't flex the OnlyFans models that they subscribe to as if they're their girlfriends. And it's that very fundamental to the reason that men look for a partner is is the signal that they have been chosen, that presumably this other individual could have selected a variety of men, but they selected me.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And the issue that you have with subscribing to OnlyFans is that anyone with the price of a cheeseburger can... per month can subscribe to the OnlyFans. And the same thing when it comes to a chatbot, that there's no prestige associated with having an AI girlfriend. Now, it may be able to sedate your feelings of loneliness. It may be able to do whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I don't think, at least for men, at least for most... for psychologically typical men, I don't think it is a long-term viable solution. Now, my white pill take... I don't think it's a solution.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
It's something that's just going to be, sorry, a solution in that it would satisfy their desire for connection and attachment in a way that would preclude them from actually going and seeking it in the real world over a long amount of time. I don't think... Because there isn't the prestige, there isn't the amount of selection that's going on.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
All of that being said, I do think there's a white pill here, especially when VR comes online and if we can get good chatbots, good VR headsets, etc. I think that you can create, whoever does this will be very, very rich. If you could gamify the flirting process with a very highly dexterous, accurate,
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
virtual dating environment where you can say and move and it can detect body language and tonality and what you're saying and it can respond in real time. Dating is one of the few things you don't get to sandbox. You know, you can practice free kicks for football all day long. You don't get to practice going up to that girl in the bar.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You just have to every time that you try to practice it is game day over and over and over and over again. Whereas I think that overcoming approach anxiety, which is one of the myriad of reasons why I think there is a sex recession at the moment.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
overcoming that if you've been you dude i'm level 55 on flirt ai uh i i got this in the bag i'm like a black belt or whatever um and i genuinely do think that it would help to give guys the confidence to be able to overcome that approach anxiety so there are some white pills in there why would you buy so i i hear what you're saying and i hope that's true although i also sound like you're like the reason guys want to have girlfriends is because it makes them look good
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
There's many, many, many reasons.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
All I've spoken to is ChatGPT. I'm going to guess that it gets much more...
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I know what I'm doing this evening then.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
What else is happening sort of more deeply to you? Happiness, health, memory, attention spans, stuff like that. Sort of beliefs, sense of self, existential concerns.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
crises like is there there must be something that because you know all of this are kind of sort of disparate contributions but it's not it's not necessarily talking about our felt sense of ourselves what the story is that we tell ourselves about this we're talking about a polarized world we're talking about people that struggle to talk across the aisle the you know um risk aversion that people have got about all this sort of stuff what about what's happening more deeply what what deeper changes are happening to to us from our use of screens
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, okay. I've stepped in as a surrogate ear to hear the complaints for a little while. No, look, I...
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You seem upset. Yeah, look, the 10th episode that I ever did on the show was with Kai Wei, the founder of the Light Phone. This was, I think episode eight was called A Hacker in Your Pocket, How Your Phone is Stealing Your Attention. This was all off the back of Tristan Harris's first conversation with Sam Harris. And that was my first introduction to him. And then you go on to get...
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
his Netflix show, and then he goes on Joe's show a couple of times, once with Daniel Schmachtenberger, which was like a really odd conversation that I thought was super interesting, but I didn't predict. And I've been worried about this for a long time.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I have, I would say, over the last seven years, since thinking about this deeply, kind of got pain fatigue with it, that you sort of run out of steam a little bit, and there's so much stuff... that's capturing your attention. The lack of novelty of complaining about the same thing over and over again, you know what I mean?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Which is presumably why your husband switches off because you've been talking about this since 2018.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
He's like, I'd rather read a book. Yeah. So look, I'm really concerned. I have been concerned for a long time. I would go as far as to say that since 2013, the most reliable New Year's resolution theme that I have made has been some form of digital minimalism that I have tried to create different structures. And some of them have worked really well.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Sleeping with my phone outside my bedroom, I've done since 2011. I don't know, 18, 17, something like that. And it's one of the most powerful habit changes, like single decision habit changes.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I think I go as far as to say, I think you get an instant 20% improvement in your quality of life just by making that one decision because your sleep improves, your morning and evening routine improves, like all of that, millions and millions and millions of things. And I am, you know, I am concerned about this. I also had Stuart Russell on the show.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Stuart wrote the textbook, the AI textbook that was translated into, I think, 130 languages and was the one that every person, every AI programmer read. And he taught me this interesting thing. I'd love to work out whether or not it's true with you. which was algorithms have two ways that they can become better at getting us to click on things. One of them is to better predict our desires.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So to learn what it is that we like and to put more things that we like, even if it's stuff that we hate, but learn what we click on and put more things that we click on in front of us. The second way is to nudge our preferences to be more predictable.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So he was teaching me about this sort of dyadic relationship that you have where if, because all it is, is the black box has one optimizing function, like click through, right. And maybe watch time for YouTube, something like that. Um, and, it will find ways to do it that are relatively novel.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And one of the really novel ways that he thinks is happening is it's not just that it needs to become better at predicting what you want, but that it can make you more easily predictable. Is this something that you've looked at?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
and read it, someone wrote this article about where have all the emos gone? And it was basically the death of subcultures, that in order for you to have a sort of fashion, philosophical, musical subculture,
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
flourish uh it needs to it needs to have time to stick about and when you think just across the course of a single year like like like it's hot girl summer then it's feral girl summer then it's brat summer then it's you know there's no time for it to ossify and sit and really sort of establish what the boundaries are this is what we are and this is what we are not and this is the kind of person that is this kind of person and you sort of acute like a little cult type thing
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
passive cult that kind of accumulates people and uh you know goths emos sporty kids whatever i don't know this may be a i am not down with the kids moment but i don't see i see a much more homogenized young people culture now and um i get the sense that that's because the pace of change is super high and also you don't have as much opportunity to actually individuate because
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And everybody is everything. Everyone is seeing all people across the world. And it's this sort of Western, Hollywood, polished, come America influence. And that's kind of it. That's it across the world.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
What has been the, or what are the highest impact habits that you still rely on now, six years hence, seven years hence, to help with phone use?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
What have you come to believe about whether it's best to refer to our phone use as an addiction, a compulsion, a habit, a dependency? I mean, largely these are just sort of semantic questions, but I imagine that if you were someone smarter than me who knew what those words meant, that would actually have sort of important distinctions.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
There's some really interesting stats around people that get bariatric surgery. And out the other side of it, the suicide risk is really, really high. Now, bariatric surgery is a pretty big deal. And sometimes the American... healthcare system leaves gauze in them and surgical equipment and there's complications and that, you know, there's pain and there's things like that.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And then, you know, after any major surgery, there's a bit of a suicide risk. But with bariatric surgery, gastric bands, it's way more. And one of the reasons for that is that People had an emotional problem. They ate to stop themselves feeling the emotional problem. They now have a restriction how much they can eat and they still have the emotional problem.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So their one coping mechanism has been taken, their primary coping mechanism has been taken away from them. And it made me think about the phone situation that being a human is hard. You are permanently in states of mild discomfort, uncertainty, fear, anxiety that just appear as a natural byproduct of day-to-day life.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And you use your phone as a crutch, your buttress, to help support you through these times, to distract you, to give you something else to focus on, to make you feel good, to give you a little drip of dopamine. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, if you aren't prepared for the sort of impending emotional existential crises that's maybe going to smash you in the face, you're going to go back to the path of least resistance, which is to pick your phone up again.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So he's 12 hours a day on phone, six hours of sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So good. Catherine Price, ladies and gentlemen. Catherine, I really appreciate you. I want to bring you back on. I need to talk about fun. I've been formally trying to bring more fun into my life and all of the stuff that we do. As a Brit, I feel like we're culturally predisposed to be a very unfun uh, uh, group. So, um, it's interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I mean, the funny, the funny compliment, please come on. You're making me blush. Um, but yeah, fun. I'm going to bring you back on and we can talk about that, but let's leave this one here and bring it into land. Um, people might want to sign up for the mailing list for the sub stack. They want to check out the book. Why should they go? What's going on?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Everywhere books are sold.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Catherine until next time. I appreciate you.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Okay, let's talk about what it's doing to our attention span. Headlines, people being unable to pay attention, everybody knows this sort of ease of distraction, increasing ADHD diagnoses. Has there ever been any research looking at what phones directly do to attention spans?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
He's a club promoter. He's like patient zero for phone use. All of us are. So anybody that used to run Nightlight stuff, we basically were hardwired into WhatsApp. And it's very, very difficult to get rid of that. Maybe this is me just creating a... an excuse for myself.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, how possible, you know, a lot of people listening will identify with the terminally distracted person who feels like their phone has broken their brain and they're now some sort of some weird prisoner's dilemma Stockholm syndrome from themselves to themselves. this thing in their pocket. How possible is it to retrain our attention span if it's been nuked by phone use?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But yeah, if you grew up being some sort of club promoter type person, you have maybe the worst neural networks possible for phone use. It's not good.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, I remember when I first started trying to read as a proper adult after university, maybe 29 at this time. And I'm thinking, I'm starting to listen to podcasts and I'm starting to sort of take intellectual curiosity a bit more seriously. The classic... Party boy tries to be less of an adult infant, manopause-type situation that lots of guys go through.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Manopause. Manopause. Manopause. And I sat down. I remember when I sat, one of the first times that I sat down to try and read, my fingers were moving just a little bit like this, and I realized that I was just so used to overstimulation And I'm looking at this, you know, totally static white piece of paper with black words on it.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And my body is just no, my nervous system is evidently regulated for bings and bongs and banners and the stuff moving. And I, you know, these words don't even change. It's just the same words. And if you don't read them, then they don't go away. And yeah, that was, you know, I sort of felt that.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I wasn't that much of an idiot. That being said, though, you know, going back to the compulsion addiction dependency habit thing, everybody knows what it's like when you're on a plane and you know that you have no signal and you get the phone out and you swipe up and you do the things and you do the thing and you do your little loop around whatever the apps are. And you realize how futile it is.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
It's a different species, technically. Yes, yes.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And then as you put it away and then you take it with like a sharpshooter pulling it back out of your pocket. So there's definitely something going on there. Those myelin sheaths that we've got are pretty sort of deeply ingrained.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Wow. Wow. Dopamine detoxes. You said sort of retrain attention span, be mindful with your use, try and do some proper mindfulness, keep your phone outside of your bedroom, which is the number one life hack that I've been harping on about on this show for as long as I can remember. Just put the charger, take the charger now and put it in another room and do not...
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I'm already learning. That's it. And have we got, I was going to say, when you look at different cohorts, do boys or men use it more than women? What have we got about teenagers, young people? Does this tend to sort of fluctuate over time?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
try and fucking tell me that it's because you use your phone as your alarm clock. Radio alarm clocks have been around for like 2000 years. So please buy yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Well, they did step in and manage to turn around Lord of the Rings in a manner that I think was actually impressive.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Yeah, it always felt like video games were cool and exciting and interactive, but the prestige was held with movies, right? You know, that's what you go to go see at the cinema. And now it feels like, if what you're suggesting is correct, that the world of Hollywood and movies are going to have to suckle at the teat of...
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do backend inventory management. Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US.
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#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
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#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
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#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
There's way more books that come out every single year than there are video games, especially AAA, although probably about the same number of very small portion of video games and books make it to the top of the tree.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Say what you want, JK. Yeah, I suppose it's interesting that you've got this sort of concern against progressive overreach thing, which in... some ways slash many ways, people might assume from the outside seeing JK tweet about trans issues that she would be aligned with. But actually, she's just very, very specific about protecting women's spaces.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
And I don't think that it seems to bleed out that much into the rest of her politics. I don't know much about her politics, but I imagine that she's probably quite a progressive sort of liberal lady who just happens to have one very staunch set of beliefs around women.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I don't know, man. I mean, look, every time that you go home for Christmas, it's kind of like some sort of weird tribute that you need to do. where it's mandatory to watch at least 30 minutes of one Harry Potter movie at some point sort of between the 20th of December and the sort of 2nd of January. It's on TV in the background at some point.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
It's great. Well, we saw this recent thing with Bezos stepping in with the Washington Post. You see that he's saying we're going to have more balance, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know. Maybe we'll start to see some more of that crossover a little bit into the world of Amazon, Amazon Prime.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Yeah, it seems to, whether you like it or not, it just seems to appear kind of, it just sort of emerges like fucking Michael Bublé around about Christmas time. And then it just comes out, just appears. Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé. And Harry Potter, Harry Potter omnibuses. But my point was, you know, Those are really dated.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
The first one will be coming up on 20 years now, or maybe it'll already be over 20 years old. And it does surprise me that it's taken this long to sort of get back to continuing to rinse this franchise because there's Harry Potter world at Universal Studios and all of the clothing. You go to Edinburgh and there's Harry Potter stores, bookshops all over the place, memorabilia. Tell me about it.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
they are well i know they're certainly doing i think it's called the forbidden forest which is this sort of outdoor experience i did that in the north of the uk a couple of christmases ago it's happening here in austin texas right now like dude it's i mean at no point in the harry potter law did it talk about scorching hot 30 degrees sunshine for five days in a row so yeah i don't know how true to the source material that is you mentioned dune there um
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I think one of the interesting challenges that seems to be faced is can you have Blockbuster that also does well when it comes to awards? Can you have Blockbuster that also ends up actually making its money back? Because it's a real challenge. What was the, I haven't done any research on this, what's the synopsis of how Dune got on?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I mean, I loved it, thought it was great, seemed to have a lot of critical acclaim, but from a awards, monetary standpoint, everything else, how did it do?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
So the margins are often tighter than you think. I was thinking about this. I'd really love to kind of get an insight about the state of the movie industry and what's happened to it now up against streaming. Airlines seem to have movies within... I don't know, six weeks to sort of 12 weeks of them being in theaters.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
And then you can watch it on some transatlantic flight on British Airways or something. You know, a lot of the time I know musicians have got problems with what Spotify and streaming has done to record sales and the fact that there's basically a much smaller pie and everyone's having to do different things. Now we've got to do more live. We need merch. We've got to have a membership site.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
You've got to get exclusive access. There's got to be a Patreon or whatever. When it comes to the movie industry and sort of what, the theater to netflix amazon prime pipeline or airlines and stuff like that's done is this is this kind of a just a slow plane crash a slow car crash into uh it not being viable and stuff's just going to go straight to streaming what do you think
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Yeah. Well, I mean, we saw, it was enlivening to see, I think the passion around Interstellar's 10 year anniversary. And, you know, they put that back into 70 mil IMAX theaters. Maybe there'd been a little bit of tinkering to sort of dial up some sound and, and, you know, refine some resolutions and stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
And you think that, that caught, I spoke to McConaughey about this, this very thing. And, uh, That's a question. He was lament, perhaps unsurprisingly, lamenting the loss of the rom-com. And, you know, he said that you could sort of spin this thing up for between $10 and $20 million, and it would be an easy return at the box office.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
And you get, you know, replays on holidays, replays at Valentine's Day, date nights. That seems to be a genre which is almost exclusively just being eviscerated. Is it ever going to come back?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
That's the reality of it. I suppose we're seeing, you know, I think Andrew Schultz's live special life is...
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
number two number three in america at the moment on netflix and um maybe we're seeing comedians who can kind of bear the brunt and have less oversight from uh executives and franchise owners and different stakeholders and people that say we can't say that we must not talk about this problem um so there maybe the absence of comedy movies has created a vacuum which is going to allow more stand-up specials to appear on streaming services and stuff like that
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Yeah, I think you're right. And you might not be realizing that these two things are related, but I promise you they are. Lizzo's BMI and the preparedness of the world to accept new comedy movies. The reason I say that is I think we had a period where... toxic compassion or performative empathy or I stand up for the good guy. Look at me.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
be wanting to restore a bit of balance which is great but as long as people like her are actually in charge of their creative output at amazon studios that's not going to change so people like her have to go sadly i was thinking about how bond seems to have been protected but as you've suggested it's you know one very tightly uh defined set of boundaries around who it is that's got creative control and as soon as you start to build that out into teams of
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
This is saying good whilst doing bad or at the very least saying good whilst not doing good. Kind of nobody scrutinized for a while and it was all around posting a black square and making sure that you sort of support the message. But Lizzo has dropped a fucking ton of weight because Ozempic is a hell of a drug and she appears to genuinely be taking care of her health.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
And you go, okay, well, if... And the same thing at the Golden Globes. You know, the Golden Globes just proved that body positivity was a total fucking farce all along because as soon as people were given an easy route to be able to get themselves out of being plus-sized, they did. And I think that...
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
That is one more little Jenga piece that gets pulled out of this tower, which was already pretty unstable of the performative empathy of the saying good whilst not doing good thing. And yeah, I think it's so fragile that it's getting to the stage where it's in its own parody phase, if that makes sense. So yeah, I think that's progressive overreach stuff. I mean, fuck...
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
For those of us that have been swimming in the waters of it for the last, whatever, five years, it felt like we were already in parody come back end of 2020. And then we've just been waiting for this behemoth Leviathan to finally kick the bucket.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
150 with a couple of people at top that paid a few million dollars a year. I imagine that your ability to stay true to the source material starts to go out the window.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
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#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
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Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
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Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
It is interesting how the sort of allurement of Bond is in his aloofness. It's the fact that there are all of these open loops. And as soon as you begin to say, well, this is the real woman that he loved. And this is why he's womanized all the way down from this is what happened in his past. And he did the orphan and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
You know the energy it gives me? It gives me Jada Pinkett Smith energy.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Yep. Real Jada Pinkett Smith energy. Speaking of which, give me your thoughts on the Oscars. Should we have thanked the sex work community before we started the episode today?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Like a land acknowledgement before you start.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Would Dune 2 not have been in the bucket for this one?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I just figured it's this epic movie, did really well at the box office, fan favorite. Artistically seemed to be sufficiently legitimate and edgy that it would justify people that know what movies are about to put it in.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
seemed to have the opposite effect really no one was really talking about it this episode is brought to you by Gymshark Gymshark makes the best gym wear on the planet their hybrid shorts in onyx grey and navy are a complete game changer they're the best men's training shorts in the world. They've got a crest hoodie, which is what I'm flying in anytime I'm traveling in there.
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#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
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#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
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#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
That's gym.sh slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom10 at checkout. Yeah. Do you think it was purposefully sedate? I think so.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
And you think, ah, okay, this, as soon as you give an answer, all of the speculation that was exciting gets collapsed down to, it's like Schrodinger's Bond. You know, there's so many different versions that it could be and then they tell you and it gets collapsed into the version that it is based on what they said. But yeah, I mean, fucking She-Hulk. You know, like, you know, there we go.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Yeah, I mean, or alternatively, Hollywood realizes that nobody really cares all that much now and that celebrity law is genuinely losing steam and they're adapting. I'm aware that both me and you might be skeptical of Hollywood's ability for self-awareness, but perhaps that's actually happening.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. I don't know. You've got this weird anchoring bias thing from the past. Normal people used to be interested in award ceremonies, therefore they should be moving forward.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
But there's no reason to assume that that was what was accurate and now is an aberration or some sort of flaw in the typical system, as opposed to they fluked it, people were interested for a bit, but this is actually reverting back to what it is.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I think that's the reason. It's so true. I've thought about this for ages, that the allure of celebrity, for the most part, is really hard to hold on to. How are you supposed to do that? People know the name of your dog. They know that you recently bought new pet food for them and they didn't agree with it or whatever. This...
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
the fourth wall has been sort of thoroughly smashed open and left open. And people can just stare in 24 hours a day on your Instagram feed or on your Twitter feed or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Why did you have to say that name? Sorry. I'm aware it's a trigger word for you. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Keanu Reeves seems to have got a good blend of it as well.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I don't know, would you... There's a bit of me that kind of wishes that Nick Cage in his heyday was, like, uploading stories all the time behind the scenes, because that would have just been fucking brilliant. It would have been bonkers, yeah. Like, Nick Cage is... He's something truly special. I hope that man never stops working.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Well, I think based on his financial position, I don't think that that's an option for him. Possibly not, no. Yeah. Star Wars, is it redeemable? Uh...
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
would creative today number one pick some old franchise with a loyal fan base number two remake it but remove everything that once made it popular number three insult the fan base when they protest your creative decisions number four blame negative reviews on toxic trolls number five move on yeah it still holds true it still holds true today
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
What did you think of Loki? What did you make of that?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
It's crazy, man. You can lay the playbook out and it's always going to happen. So yeah, we have this odd world in which we're at Star Wars saturation. Meanwhile...
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
george rr martin seems to be having a competition with patrick rothfuss for who's going to write their next book last yeah like i i'd saw he opened a coffee shop or something the other day bar yeah cocktail bar yeah and you think uh someone had tweeted it's like it's been two thousand one hundred days since winds of winter came out more like four thousand uh is it yeah it's a nerd rotic an absolutely excellent channel that you should definitely have on here to talk to but uh
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Wow. That sucks. I mean, so does someone know? Is there a potential for somebody to continue on his legacy? Is he going to pass this on to the people that did the world of Ice and Fire? Are they going to complete it?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I really hope that that's not the case meanwhile fucking Brandon Sanderson is just a one man word factory who seems to be able to put out what was it that he announced was it last year or the year before said oh yeah alongside all of the other stuff that I've been doing by the way he's a five buck series that I just wrote on the side just dumped another couple of million words on you.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Plus, hard Mormon energy. That's what George should do. George, if you are listening and you convert to Mormonism, there is a... There's a spirit that speaks through your pen.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
to the point where now he just doesn't know what to do with it um and it's it's interesting i think it's an interesting philosophy well it's sexy and complex in some ways because you have twists and turns and you realize that the person you thought you hated you don't actually end up hating i mean jamie lannister a really great example of this pushes a fucking eight-year-old kid out of a window episode one and uh
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
by the end of it, you think, I really respect this man. I really, you know, he's standing up for his principles. Yeah, sure. He's fucking his sister, but you know, aside from that twin sister, nobody's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. We've all got our ways that we like to spend our evenings. Um, but, I ended up really liking him.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I thought he was one of my favorite characters in the entire series by the end of it. And that's cool and unexpected and subversive in a way. And that's pretty exciting. But it's also the delineation when you haven't actually worked out what the...
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
trajectory is and this is one of the reasons I think that Top Gun Maverick was such a success that it was easy bastards in black helmets versus good guys that wear leather right like that's it very easy to work out good versus bad but I mean even now we've seen
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Suicide Squad, the only way that you can have a goodie is for the baddies to be the goodies and even they are conflicted somehow internally and there's no clear delineation anymore between heroes and villains.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
What was that one with Jason Momoa where he was blind? Was everybody blind? Maybe everybody was blind? Sight or something? What the fuck was it called? Jason Momoa Apple TV
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
uh c it was called c right uh 7.6 on imdb 63 rotten tomatoes uh came out in 2019 only did one series um it was really cool uh yeah all of their descendants have lost their sense of sight and uh it's that was that was pretty fun i remember thinking that was the first thing i ever saw on apple tv and i Apple TV, they're just going to be buying up other series.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
But no, they're a legitimate production house, and they're making this stuff, and they're commissioning things, and the ideas seem to be interesting. And yeah, the only issue is that for every new, exciting network or technology that has a production house attached to it that actually makes good stuff, it's another membership that I need to buy.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I'm like, okay, well, I need Max, and I need Disney+, and I need Apple TV, and I definitely need Netflix, and obviously I need Amazon Prime, and Before long, you'd like, how the fuck do I aggregate all of this stuff?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
An aggregator. Oh, that'd be so good. Well, just put your logins here and we'll give you all of the options that we think that you'd like. And then if you could, I've thought this for ages. A lot of the time, you don't know what to watch. People will send you Spotify songs. They'll send you albums and tracks from artists freely. I don't even know how I send a friend something from Netflix.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I don't even know. I'd take a photo of it and say, hey, you should find this on Netflix, but I'm not going to do that. It's just not the sort of headspace that I'm in when I'm doing it. But if there was a way for your friends to refer to you what they think you would like. Yeah. Oh, Stephen suggested that you should watch Severance with a little note or a star rating or something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
That would be fucking awesome.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
What's happening with the production of Rust after the Alec Baldwin incident? Is that just fucking continuing as if nothing ever happened?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Okay, I've just asked ChatGPT, what is happening with the production of Rust? Production of film Rust has been notably turbulent due to a tragic incident in... I mean, this is years ago that the accident happened, so I would have thought... 2021, following this event, production was halted but later resumed in April 23. Film was completed in May 23, premiered in Poland November 20, 2024.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
As of now, there is no announced release date for Rust in the United States, but Alec Baldwin is doing The Baldwins.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
We saw it with Thor as well, right? That you go from this beautiful arc where competent, powerful, maybe a little bit sort of naive, immature, sort of childish in a way, but that was part of charm. And then over time, it just gets ramped up and up and up and up and up. And then he's doing the splits over a set of dragons or whatever. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Dude, what are you focused on over the next couple of weeks and months? What have you got? Apart from obviously the star-studded release of Snow White, what else are you focused on?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
So perhaps that's... Sure.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Can you remind me of the stages that I think it's either movie franchises or sub-genres go through that finishes with parody? I swear that you taught me about this.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Seeing that and knowing that parody is kind of the... There's a couple more nails to go into the coffin and then it's about to be brown bread. Once I've seen that, I can't unsee it. And I'm always on the lookout for whatever it is, whether it's a genre, whether it's a series, whether it's a movie, whether it's a franchise.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Even directors, you know, their style almost becoming a caricature of itself. You being able to predict what it's going to be, even if it's a totally new movie. M. Night Shyamalan, I think, is... sort of perilously close to becoming a caricature of himself.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
The lady doth protest too much. So you mentioned the message there. Every single time that I talk to somebody about sort of culture stuff and we talk about have we passed peak woke and how much inertia and momentum has this thing got? surely the movie and TV industry can only keep pushing awful productions that don't make returns for so long before they run out of money and need to change.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
So how much longer has the message got
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
What do you predict for the next five to 10 years? If you could throw a couple of coins onto a roulette wheel for what we're going to see?
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
Hopefully. Yeah, well, let's not speak too soon. People vote with their feet and their butts on seats and their dollars. And as much as you can say, well, we want to make something that stands up for what we believe in. Yeah, but eventually there's going to be some very, very high up guy with a very, very sort of long job title whose entire job is to look at spreadsheets all day.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
And the far right hand column is going to be a big, bright red number with a minus in front of it and lots and lots and lots of zeros after it. He's going to say, I don't fucking care. I don't care about how cool you think this new movement is. We're a business. Ultimately, we're a business. This isn't a charity.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
We're not here to try and promote some message at the expense of shareholders, stakeholders, IP, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, it's going to be interesting. I mean, you touched there on the video game industry. I think I'm right in saying the video game industry makes more money than movies, TV, and music combined together. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?
for the for triple a titles that's a lot of money i remember when uh kevin spacey was cast in uh call of duty this is probably about 10 years ago i think yes uh and then conor mcgregor was put in it not that conor mcgregor is exactly a sort of a triple a star but i do remember thinking like oh fuck like kevin spacey as a fully facial mapped all you know soundboard all that stuff
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
You said you've limited your impact in the world because of a lack of self-belief. Tell me the story then.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Yeah, there's no seminars on how to be more depressed or how to have less confidence. All of those things come so easily, so naturally. We don't need any more coaching. We're already black belts. Yeah, we're naturals. Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. It's wild. I wonder how... universal this is. Different people have different constitutions and different set points.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
But for a pretty big cohort of people, this is the thing that they're going to be battling with.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
It's the fact that for some reason, they seem to always be swimming against the tide when they're trying to get themselves toward a good state, toward a hopeful state, toward something that appropriates optimism or abundance or a vision for themselves that isn't based around fear or around concern or worry or anxiety. And yeah, that
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Being able to somehow reprogram that, being able to step in and fact check your own mind is, I think, the battle that a lot of people have got to contend with.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
The people for whom a good mental state comes the easiest are the ones that end up getting to the highest point.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
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Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Isn't it fascinating that the people that we admire the most have got the least admirable internal states?
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
You know, the people that we all look up to that are the best known, the most notorious, the most successful, richest, famous, whatever it might be, on average are going to be the ones that you wouldn't trade places with the inside of their mind.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Is there a level of success that you get to where you don't deal with overthinking? No, I haven't found it.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Yeah, it's strange to think that you don't get paralyzed by overthinking about positive outcomes. You only overthink about terrible ones. And yeah, again, if you were to say, well, it's the people that are the most positive that end up with the best outcomes in life. So why are so many high achievers plagued by overthinking? They're not overthinking how well things could go.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
They're overthinking all of the different errors and potential vectors for weakness and that thing over there. You know, they're vigilant. They're permanently vigilant to all of the different ways that these things could go wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
What is it that you're saying to the people that you work with, the athletes, et cetera, when they come to you and they say, I just cannot. stop overthinking. I feel paralyzed by it. It consumes me. It's stopping me from enjoying the things that I want to do. It's stopping my performance from the very thing I'm supposed to be overthinking about. Now I have a relationship with my overthinking.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
How can people work out if they are being ruled by fear in their life?
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
I'm not even thinking about the thing. I'm thinking about my overthinking. How do you interject that? How do you pattern break it? Action.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
It's interesting sort of bringing it back to the fear thing that fear doesn't keep you safe. It's keeping you trapped. It feels like it's keeping you safe, but what it's actually doing is it's keeping you trapped and being trapped. The paralysis is precisely the thing that's going to keep you fearful.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Hmm. Yeah, the fact that the potential pitfalls are more terrifying than the potential outcomes are enthusing, the fact that you've got this sort of running away from something that you don't want as opposed to running towards something that you do want, and the balance between those two energies is really interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Where does that self-belief come from or that courage?
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
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Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. What happened over time with your relationship to fear?
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
You had your own Deadpool.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Can you tell me more about the relationship with this guy, this criminal?
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
I like a letter as much as the next guy.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Just going through more of that sort of fear setting, you're about to go and speak on stage as somebody that was an introvert as a kid and wouldn't speak on a 15-hour car ride. You're sat opposite somebody that's got a switchblade out who's sent you multiple letters saying that they're going to kill you. what's happening inside of you? What's the reframe? What's the body feel like?
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
What's the mind feel like? What is it that you're saying to yourself? Because a lot of people will like the idea of this, like the idea of fearing less and being fearless. And yet they step into a situation like that and they're just overcome with this wave, this tidal wave that they can't stop.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Do you see faith as the opposite of fear?
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Yeah. What's the line? Draw this line between self-love, self-belief and overcoming fear. Do these things fit together? Are they exactly the same or is there something different going on?
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Wouldn't it be lovely if we could love ourselves in the way that we quite easily love the people around us?
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
One of my friends took a medium dose of mushrooms in Australia and sat on a rock. And this question came to him, which was, do people love you for who you are or for what you do? And it's a difficult question to answer because what we want is for people to love us for who we are, because if people love us for what we do, it feels contingent and dependent and fragile and volatile.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
And like, if people love us for what we do, not for who we are, and we stopped doing what we do, the love would go away with it. But an even deeper question is, well, do you love you for what you do or for who you are? Because a lot of the time, I think we ask the world to show up for us in a way that we're not prepared to show up for ourselves.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Saying, hey, I want you to love me for who I am, not for what I do. Meanwhile, my self-love will be contingent based on my performance today, not my character over time.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
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Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Let's do some inversion for a second. Imagine that you have somebody who is, they've maybe got a bit of a predisposition for fear, but you wanted to get them to spend their life being as fearful as possible, to be as terrified, as trapped, as paralyzed as they could be. What are the things that you would get them to do? What are the ways you would get them to think?
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. Just going back to that difference between our expectations and our performance, how do you come to think about how people can balance that high expectations with things that they need to be grateful for, with things that they do well? This sort of balance of pursuing perfectionism and also giving yourself grace when you fall short.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
I think this is kind of one of the curses of competent or high-performing people.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
What are the sort of mindsets that you would get them to embody?
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
There's also a pressure that comes along with that, though. The fact that if you realize just how much you could contribute, that sets an even higher ideal, right? And then there's a pain when you realize, oh, even though I think I've been working hard, I've been working hard in a very particular kind of way, in a way that's very selfish.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
and in a way that was serving me and my shallow need for recognition and validation and to fill this internal void and so that people think that I'm cool and so I can fix the wounds from my past without fixing the wounds from my past by filling them in with the adoration of those around me.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
The responsibility of capacity is very interesting, but painful, right? Because again, with that, oh God, I've got this thing that I need to deal with and I need to grapple with it and it's more complex and it's going to cause me turmoil and the overthinking. And now you're saying that I need to pay it forward. Absolutely.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
I love it. Dude, I'm so glad that we got to speak today. I've wanted to sit down with you ever since I saw you talk last year. Owen McManus, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything that you've got going on.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Yeah. There's a lyric from a Beartooth song, the first song on the new album that says, all my worries were a waste of time. I've got that written. I've got that written on a post-it note above my desk at the moment that, you know, whether it's we suffer more in imagination than reality, whatever trite version of this you want to sort of rebring up. But
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Heck yeah. I appreciate you, man. Until next time.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
It is wild how much worse our minds are able to make anything than even the worst that reality would be able to deliver to us. All of the extremes, everything's maxed out at 10.
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
The way that people are going to judge us, the lack of forgiveness that the world's ever going to give us, the way that they're going to know, the way that it's going to define us, the way we're never going to be able to get over it. so on and so forth. And then usually that thing doesn't come to pass. And even if by some obscene chance it does come to pass, it's nowhere near as bad as we think.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
And we get over it more quickly and nobody else really cares that much. So yeah, I think the fear of fear is the biggest one.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Who are some of your favorite people that you've either worked with or people from history or stories that have sort of embodied this desire to overcome fear in their lives? Well,
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Yeah, there's this odd sense, kind of like a, I don't know, like inspirational melancholy. I've got that before when, you know, you're looking at a story. I used to get this when I watched my friend's band perform on stage.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
So I was friends with a bunch of like quite big bands and, you know, I'd go and see them play and it would be, you know, thousands of people had sold out and this adoring crowd. And I remember I'd be stood at the back of the room and I'd be looking at, you know,
Modern Wisdom
#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
This person not only conducting their own music, but conducting a room filled with 3,000, 5,000 people and getting them to do this collective effervescence, getting them to dance the way that they wanted. If that person turned up in this way, the rest of the crowd reflected that back to them. I just remember seeing it as so competent, so admirable, so powerful.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
But then very quickly after that, it throws into harsh light the places that you're not doing that. So you have this odd sense of inspiration and melancholy happening at the same time. You say, oh my God, that's so amazing. I'm so happy for my friend and I'm so inspired by what they do and I want to be more like that.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
But as soon as you get to the, I want to be more like that, you then begin to think, well, that's an ideal. And as soon as I posit an ideal, I find myself comparing myself to the ideal and by design, I find myself lacking. oh, and the lack makes me feel like insufficiency and it makes me feel fear and it makes me feel inwardly turned and introspective and ruminative.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
And yeah, it's odd how inspiration, it's a bit of a double-edged sword in that way.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
Yeah, action is the antidote to anxiety is something that I wrote down in my 20s. And it's so true. You're not scared of the future when you're moving toward it, regardless of how slow it is, regardless of how kind of useless or even in retrospect, how completely pointless the actions were that you took. There's something about that forward momentum that does help to fix it.
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#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life
I remember hearing you speak last year and you talked about a factory defect, the fact that every positive emotion flies through you and every negative emotion sticks to you. I want to dig into that.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I was saying to you before we got started, I really have noticed in myself as I've spent more time creating content and talking about challenges in life, I've started to gravitate toward the people that I listen to or the sorts of topics that I use to consume when I very, very first started.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah, I think there's a few different ways that you can do it. Maybe people that are more
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
When you ask someone, when I ask myself this question, I'm like, look, would you sacrifice that? if it meant that you didn't have to, like is ignorance bliss, basically. And maybe this is like psychological Stockholm syndrome or something that I'm like, I have to love my captor. I wouldn't, I don't think I'd take that deal.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I think that I value too much the opportunity to really, to broaden out and fully, fully investigate everything that life's got to offer. And I also think that when you arrive at successes and conquests in that kind of a way,
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
uh you know deep ones insights about yourself connections with other people when you arrive there and you did it through spit and sawdust and sweat and blood and tears it feels really earned as opposed to somebody that just sort of stumbled on it didn't know where it came from and then kind of blew past it because they hadn't they hadn't really worked out why it was there
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
disposed towards positive affect or extroversion or like high energy perhaps they would default to kind of laughing it off you know they make a joke out of it it's not so big of a deal isn't it silly like look at the way that my brain works look at the um and then there's different horses for courses i think if you've got the level of self-reflection of someone like oliver berkman laughing at the absurdity of your own thoughts is probably a little bit harder to do so you know he i
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom. Check out. There's a famous Instagram reel that gets shared pretty regularly. That's, um, maybe a woman that's talking. She says, no one is coming to save you. And, you know, it's kind of played as part of a alpha motivational idea of, you pick up the weight and carry it yourself. This is something that you need to do.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
This is an issue that you're going to have to face, so on and so forth. And I think in many ways, it's cool and it's aggressive and it's lean in and it's high testosterone stuff. But the really, really difficult
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
works through it kind of more methodically. He takes it sort of step by step. He understands, okay, well, this is because of this and this is because of this and this because of this. And then with this very large view, we actually get some perspective and we step back from being caught up in the torrent of our own thoughts.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
place that everybody needs to look at and that everybody needs to face is that when it comes to issues inside of your own mind, when it comes to boring, repetitive thought patterns, the way that you see yourself, the fact that you continue to show up in relationships in this way all the time, and that you almost create this self-fulfilling prophecy.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
You almost say, I think that this is the way that things are going to happen. And I'm going to continue to push the buttons that seem to have caused it to happen before because I'm more concerned with proving myself right than breaking a negative pattern. I would sooner be miserable and correct than happy and incorrect. And I'm doing CBT for the first time.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I don't know whether you've ever tried doing cognitive behavioral therapy, but it is...
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
it it's frankly a lot of fucking work like it's just really hard yeah and it's not you know meditation yes you do mindfulness throughout the day you come back to the breath you can notice you can you know label release and allow you can do those things but for the most part a lot of the work happens on the cushion right and you go okay here's my 10 30 60 for you 120 minutes a day that i'm
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
CBT is like Japanese water torture for the mind. Because it's like, dude, if you can see the number of fucking reminders I've got on my phone, it's insane. If anybody was able to look at my phone throughout the day for the different triggers that I need to do, they'd be like, what the fuck is this? Like, why does kick the bully appear every 30 minutes throughout your day?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And that's just one of a bunch of different triggers. And I'm like, right, okay, I'm going to commit. I'm going to try and work on this real hard. But- My point being that no one is coming to save you is literally the most true place it's ever going to be true is when it comes to the inner landscape of your mind.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
You're rate limited by how much you're distracted, 100%. And yeah, you're right. The brain can't do parallel processing. I'm sorry, even for the people that think they're amazing. Multitasking isn't a thing. You can just task switch really quickly. And yeah, you're right. You know, you think about, you'll remember this when you're reading and you're unmindfully reading.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And this is such a funny one. You go through a page and you go, I know that I looked at each individual word and I probably kind of somehow vocalized them in my mind. And if you held a gun to my head and asked me to tell you anything that just happened on the page, I'm like, I have no... Like, how the fuck did I do this?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I understand how I can watch a TV show and be distracted, but how did I say the words inside of my own mind? I know. And not taking any... I had to say it myself. And yeah, the... The interesting thing you said about being around friends, this is another thing I've realized.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
The challenges of training the mind, whether it's through meditation or through CBT or through psychotherapy or through whatever, being around friends that eat healthily and regularly go for walks, will probably result in you eating healthily and going for walks. Or at least you're not going to be smoking as much. There's sort of social influence in that way. They get up on time.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
They don't go out and party. They don't cheat on their partners. All of these things, many habits that people want to develop, can be things that you imbibe, you absorb from being around people that also do those things. And being around people that are sort of
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
thoughtful and mindful and peaceful and gentle and inquisitive and curious and loving caring fuck like yes give me more of that but ultimately you being able to access that level of presence is only a you thing so yeah i do get the sense that kind of the final frontier for anyone that wants to do the you know sigma male personal growth lone ranger bullshit
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
thing anybody that really wants to do that it's got nothing to do with what you can flex on your social media it's got everything to do with what the texture of your own mind feels like it definitely does and you know and I'm not going to discount the power of like
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And these are people like yourself, Oliver Berkman, Alain de Botton from the School of Life, people that really see the human condition with all of its challenges, all of its shortcomings, all of its foibles and the sort of very unashamed, unabashed self-reflection of, look, we're irrational, we're shaven chimps on a rock. We didn't ask to be here. We don't know how to be here.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
What have you learned about the problem of struggling to connect with people when you start to do personal growth? You know, some people come along for the ride. But if you've sat with your emotions, if you've started to do even kind of a modicum of self-work, you can have a challenge to connect with people in the same way that you used to.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah. It's so funny. I did maybe 27 workouts 28, probably. I stopped drinking for the first time. I didn't drink that much, but every fortnight or so, I'd send it. And that's like classic club promoter drinker, right? Professional party boy shit. And I just don't think that I'm going to drink for six months. I'm going to see what happens if I don't drink for six months.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And something not too dissimilar happened, which was Some people got spiky around it because I think if somebody starts to make a positive change or even just any change, especially a positive change, it throws into sharp contrast the areas of your life where you're not behaving the way that you should do.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
If you keep cheating on your missus every time that you go on a night out, then someone gets into a new relationship and they're like, do you know what it is, man? I just really fucking love her. And I not only do I have no desire to cheat on her, I kind of don't really have that much desire to do anything else other than hang out with her. It's like, oh, fucking gay. What are you doing?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And, you know, because they these people know, I think some people don't. Uh, no deep down. And then you've got the other friends that are like, ah, sweet man. I'm going to go fuck this girl. That isn't my girlfriend. Like that's a different category of, that's a different category of friend. But, um, yeah, the other side that's super interesting. I think about this a lot.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
We like people who are easy to predict. Thank you.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah, it's an unruly steed to have between your ears in the same way as a bad horse might be between your legs. But, I mean, you know, when you realize... And... I feel like I have to put this caveat on the internet for the edge cases of people. There are certainly some people for whom the world has mistreated them consistently from when they were a baby until when they were an adult.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And for those people, I feel bad for you. That being said, the vast majority of the bell curve, with that caveat out of the way, we are the ultimate source of most of our own suffering. We know exactly where our fears lie. We know where our shame is hidden and we're able to pick at that scab over and over again.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
We almost get this strange sense of satisfaction when we do that, when we go back over a familiar but painful loop that we moved through. Oh, you did this thing and you did that thing and it's going to make this happen and you didn't do that thing before. You know...
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
What a beautiful level of self-awareness, dude. You know, to have someone that's going to sit with the thing and investigate it and investigate it and investigate it and then go, yeah, this is a me thing. This is a me thing. One of my friends, George, keeps texting me, different times when you should never trust your thoughts.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Maybe it's Rousseau that said, never trust a thought that you have indoors. that basically you should always be on a walk when you have a thought. Never trust a thought you have when you're on less than six hours sleep. Yeah. Never trust a thought that you have when you're hungry. Never trust a thought that you have after 10 p.m. at night.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
You know, there's kind of actually, when you think about it, it's a very small window of time and scenarios in which you should trust your thoughts.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
the path it's like going on a walk it's like a little mental walk that you take yourself on and you turn right when you get to this tree and you turn left when you get to that stream and um yeah when you realize holy fuck Sure, stuff happens outside, but largely that's just these sort of little sparks. The Palisades fire that comes from that is me perpetuating it, pouring kerosene on it. Exactly.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Is there a relationship between that and enoughness, this sort of desire to not feel like there's something missing, to feel whole?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
In other news, you might have heard me say that hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late. And while that's true, it turns out that when a brand puts hundreds of hours into design and organization and durability, suddenly checking a bag doesn't feel quite so much like a trap. It actually feels like an upgrade, which is what Nomadic's done with their new method check-in luggage.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
and hold more it's got best in class materials 360 degree silent glide wheels patent pending micro welding technology and integrated tsa locks basically you can pack for between one and two weeks of clothes it's got a full perimeter expansion for even more space and it's lighter so no more panic attacks every time that you wear your bag and their new carry-on can hold up to 20 more than other carry-ons which means you can fit nearly a week's worth of clothing without checking a bag and
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Not giving myself a break, not allowing myself to have perspective. And it's two things. It is... liberating and guilt-inducing because you realize that the... If you're a prisoner inside of these bad thoughts, you're also the prison guard. And that means that the fact that you haven't sort of turned the key and opened the door is on you.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
That's nomadic.com slash modernwisdom. You could be more. Balancing those two things is...
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
so challenging because we want to have this sense of progress you know if we were to look back on the days of our lives that we're most happy with it's when it's probably not when we actually achieved the thing it was when we were balls deep in the process of getting toward the thing and um both me and you uh big fans of the
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
challenging translation of the word dukkha that I just love that every time that someone tells this story of sort of what it could be and what it might be as well can you just explain the sort of suffering dissatisfaction yeah I'm so glad you brought that up that's so cool my goodness so one of the initial translations of dukkha this is a Pali word that's really important in the Buddhist teaching um
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And there's a type of pressure that's associated with that which can make you feel uncomfortable.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah. The first time I ever learned about that was in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True. Oh, yeah. He crushed that book. That was so good. Fuck. I mean, evolutionary psychology meets mindfulness for me is like... Yeah. So... just realizing that most things are kind of designed to be a little bit shitter than you thought that they were going to be. The, the orgasm is going to last less long.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
The holiday is going to be more complicated. The cocktail is not going to be quite as cold. You know, the, the, the gym routines just get, you're going to be two, two, two reps short. And, um, I guess there's two areas, right? So there's one which is, what's the story that you tell yourself about what happened and what is the thing that you're making happen?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
So you have your stimulus, you have whatever the thing is that you're relating to, that's environment design, that's ensuring that you want what you want to want and you go after the things that you actually want. So the sort of intentionalism approach. Yeah. And then the other side is, okay, even in the midst of something which is a little bit dissatisfying, how can I try and reframe this?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And that's where the CBT side of stuff that I'm currently really interested in is super fucking powerful because you're training yourself, at least currently what I'm trying to do, I'm training myself on a daily basis to find all of the things that are good, to try and find arbitrary, stupid, small things that... And then you realize, hey, these things are there for me to enjoy.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Like the front and center of consciousness. So I kind of had this idea. I wonder if you agree with this. Sam Harris has a thought that all that we're ever trying to do is give our minds a good enough reason to be here in the present moment.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And a lot of the time we do that through base jumping and skydiving and rock concerts and achievements and new cars and sex and drugs and all of the things that we do. And we're trying to...
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
raise the level of stimulus to the point where we can't do anything but be in the moment paul bloom talks about this uh uh he spoke to a dominatrix for one of his books and uh she used this line nothing catches attention like a whip and you know if you've just been slapped across the face by a there's not much going on in your mind for five seconds.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
The same thing goes for elite sporting events, fighting in a ring, you know, all of these things just give us a good enough reason to be there in the present moment. And I've kind of had it in my mind for a while that
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
The goal, as far as I can see it, of the mindful person should be to try and lower the bar of external stimulus that you need in order to excuse yourself to be here in the present moment. That you want to try and be able to do it. Naval's, if you won't be present with a coffee, you can't be present on a yacht, quote. Just, okay, I want to try and get myself to the stage where the smallest thing...
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Oh, it was a really lovely gust of wind. That was refreshing. Like I really enjoyed that gust of wind. How, how fortunate I am that I'm here walking in, in, in this good weather or this bad weather, but I'm still here walking in that gust of wind was like really nice. And how great that I, you know, I got up early today and I, you know, like, yeah, sure.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I got stuck in a little bit of traffic, but how great that I, you know, I got to listen to that song that I love on the radio. I got to, you know, like you're chipping away at this negativity by you're chipping away at Duca. You're just eroding it away over and over and over. And this is where, again, everyone's new shiny toy is the fucking coolest thing that they play with.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
So I'm kind of cautious of being fully CBT pilled about everything. But I do get the sense that there is a place for more... more lean in, more kind of crafting. This is Rick Hansen's hardwiring happiness approach.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
This is sort of, I get the sense that there's a real place for that, that at least for me, my meditation was a great foundation for, but it's been a good springboard on top of that, that utilizing the, The ability to have the mind be nice and clear and then come in over the top and actually actively notice things that go out of your way to almost like lean in. It feels aggressive.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
It feels like action oriented. Whereas a lot of the time I think that meditation feels a little bit more kind of sit back. It's not necessarily passive, but it's, you know, things like let be, let go, let in. Like this stuff is sort of flowing through you a little bit. And yeah, just that's...
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
That sense that there is always something pretty much that you can find in the present moment that's pretty good and trying to get yourself to the stage where you don't need to be on stage in front of three and a half thousand people. You don't need to have just won an award. You don't need to have just watched your first child be born.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah, I would say probably more thought-oriented. It's Shinzen Young's Five Ways to Know Yourself, which you'll probably be familiar with. I really like that because it's the most rational, procedural, would be a good way to put it, sort of approach to meditation, right? You see, hear, feel. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
uh clarity equanimity uh whatever the fucking third one is consistency whatever it is anyway um just having a framework that you can follow quite easily and you can step through i had a really great uh brian maniscalco i i used to work with this guy one-on-one during covid and before And, you know, I'd do these check-ins and I'd have little notes.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
You could even export your insight time and notes after a session. So that was cool. And, you know, it'd be like a little training course. But yeah, it's the opportunity to actually be able to just experience life without this mental chatter in the back of your mind is really great. And I'm aware that for everybody that doesn't meditate or thinks that meditation is hokey, this is just like...
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
to two people that believe in ghosts, like talking about how there's fucking ghosts everywhere.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Dude, I appreciate the heck out of you. I love what you talk about online. I think everybody needs to follow your Instagram. We came on here to talk about your new book and we got so distracted talking about meditation, we haven't had time. So why don't we run this back?
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Why don't we do another episode within the next couple of weeks and we can talk about love, what it is, what it isn't, problem of struggling to connect, all of that attachment stuff. But it was so great to get to talk about this with you.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And like I say at the very beginning, I really, really love and increasingly I'm finding myself being drawn to people that just see the human condition the way it is. And I think you're definitely one of them. So people need to check out new book, you, everything that you do online. Where should they go?
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
It's productivity and pain. It's how much am I getting done and how much am I suffering while I'm trying to do it?
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
We're living in an environment that's hopelessly mismatched with the genetics and the biological predisposition that we were given. We've got technology that's moving way quicker than even our brains can keep up, let alone our evolution. it's tough and it's okay. And maybe this comforting sentence will help. Like that's kind of the center of where I'm at at the moment.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah. You know, you're well read when it comes to Buddhism, significantly better than I am. But the tiny little like cliff notes stuff that I've got, you know, letting go of desire, letting go of non-attachment. I think if everybody just had to meditate... that might actually be a really great strategy. That would probably be kind of the single turnkey solution.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
If you can let go of all attachments, if you can let go of all desires, then you're probably going to end up, assuming that you're not totally terrible at meditation and mindfulness, you're probably going to end up somewhere close to pretty good. The problem is, and the reason that I've never been able to kind of fully get on board with that is,
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
given that you probably have constraints around your ability to dedicate yourself to that philosophy, you have to exist within the existing framework, which is I am a social animal that needs status and validation and recognition and external praise. And that's me. It's part of me. And
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
One route would be completely detox myself from that, rid myself of all of these attachments, basically transcend the programming that a couple of million years have given me. You go, all right, assuming that that is perhaps too lofty of a goal for almost everybody to get, except for super elite meditators, how can I play within the system?
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
How can I play the game whilst knowing that it's not about the game? And that balance, I think, is where the sort of devil in the details lies.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah, well, that's the attachment thing again, right? In advance of it, you're anticipating it. You can't wait for it to happen. While it's happening... You can have a bunch of things going on. You can feel Oliver Berkman describes this beautifully. He talks about a gorgeous morning in the Yorkshire Dales near where he lives. And he says he gets up on time.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And I think you slot very nicely into that.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
He has the perfect coffee that he made himself in his hand. And he walks out. It's the middle of December. There's this beautiful vista in front of him. You know, it's just untouched, unfettered snow perfectly. You know, it looks like a postcard. And during the experience of this very normal but very peak moment, he thinks to himself, this is a beautiful morning.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
This is the sort of morning that you should be having all of the time. And the fact that you're not having this sort of morning all of the time is actually a failing of yours. So in the moment of experiencing... He's already looking over the shoulder of the present moment to consider what's coming next, to regret the fact that he hasn't done this in the past.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And yeah, I mean, there's so many ways that you can ruin peak experiences. And then what you end up with is basically a string of miserable successes. You know, you have the wall of all of the things. You've got the photos or you've got the accolades. You can say that you did the thing. But when... This is definitely true for me, man. This isn't me fucking castigating the audience.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
This is me saying, like, this is me. This is my experience when I'm not... When I'm untrained, when I haven't spent enough time meditating, when I'm not putting my mind where my feet are. You can have... a repertoire of different things that you've achieved, and you weren't there for any of them.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah. A lot of us, uh, you say decapitated below the neck, right? Uh, what is it that the, the, the last time that somebody that the guillotine was used actually wasn't that long ago.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I don't think if you look worldwide, obviously there's probably guillotines being used in war crimes across, across all sorts of different horrible places, but one that was officially used actually wasn't all that long ago. Um, so you think, wow, you know, decapitation, how barbaric. And it's like, dude, you've done that emotionally to yourself since you were born. Yeah. And, um,
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah, this problem of struggling to connect with other people after you've spent time working on yourself is an interesting challenge, I think. You know, the sorts of people that consume your stuff and, you know, hopefully this show too, they're considered. They really, they're reflective. Maybe they are a bit predisposed to low mood.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And the reason that they're on this path is that they're trying to work out what's going on. And they think, fuck, Like, if only I didn't have this thing holding me back, you know, and if you're behaviorally genetics-pilled, it's part of your predisposition. If you're attachment theory-pilled, it's part of your upbringing. If you're, you know, trauma-pilled, it's part of your first relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
You know, wherever it is that you lay the feet. And it's a conglomeration of all of these things. Yeah. a lot of people can kind of wish, and I catch myself doing this too, if only, you know, if only, if only, if only, if only the, the raw materials, the ingredients that this dish that I am was made from, look at all of the work that I need to do.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Look at how hard I need to climb uphill to be able to overcome these particular pathologies that I didn't choose, that I didn't ask for, that was somehow like whatever the, not gifted to me, like the thrown at me and it's all of this slime and I've got to wipe off all of this slime. And as you said, it's not a one-time event. I've got to, you tell me I've got to do it again. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I did it perfectly today and you're telling me I've got to fucking do it again. But, but, I think that everybody can look, everybody that that resonates with, this sense of unfairness, this sense of sort of additionally heavy burden, there is an unbelievable light side to this, which is your level of self-insight is so much greater than the people who don't have to deal with that.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And this isn't a, that's better or worse, it just is.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And when you think about how much pleasure do you take from knowing yourself truly, from being able to do this kind of self-investigation, from the quality of your thoughts being driven by this need to understand, not only this need to understand you, but this need to be able to sympathize and empathize and connect with other people on a much deeper level.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Dr. Rick Hansen, welcome to the show.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Yeah, I think people feel like they're stuck with their mind. Like it just is the way it is. This is my programming.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Well, look, the most important thing in mine and a lot of my friends' lives is agency. It's our ability to change the outcomes, to win the computer game no matter what the boss is that's put in front of us, to not need permission, to do it completely permissionlessly. And yet there is a couple of pound wet thing between my ears that I'm prepared to, much of the time,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
move the world out of the way in order to get the things that I want but because you can't see it happening internally because there's no this is to be done this is being done this has been done sort of widget criteria that you can track it's all ephemeral and difficult to work am I better is this better now than it was back then am I actually doing anything It's tough.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So yeah, I think convincing people that they can change their minds at a fundamental level is something that's probably pretty important.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
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Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
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Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
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Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I appreciate that. Yeah, episode 47 was you, and this is going to be episode 902, something like that. So yeah, you were like a protoplasm. You were just a mere amoeba at the beginning of this journey. And look now as we're dinosaur-sized Diplodocus plodding around.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
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Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Let's go through in painstaking detail the process for making our brains more likely to be happy than somebody is going through their normal day. They think this Dr. Hansen guy sounds pretty good. He was on episode 47 of Modern Wisdom. I can trust him. I reckon he knows what he's talking about. Take us through it. Take us through the evidence-based processes.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Just on the let yourself have the good experience and allowing it to sort of sink in. Sink in. Yeah. Can you just, with a little bit more description, what is the process of doing that? Or what have you found to be the best way to do that?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
How does that process or where does this map on to HEAL, your acronym for a framework?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I've only had six years to prepare, so.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Is there anything else to say on here before we get to all?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Yeah. I suppose, you know, in the word heal, uh, Maybe most people would think about there being an issue which is being made better. And so far, three quarters of it, we've been engendering more of what we want to see in our lives. We have been finding the particular areas that we may feel deficient in or that we would just like to...
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
bring more of into our experience and we're moving toward that. But everything kind of changes or we move more into the remediation part when we look at the linking. So talk to me about the neurobiology of that.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
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Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
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Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
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Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It's interesting to think about that cognitive superposition of holding both the positive and then to sort of add this in without collapsing it down into one, but allowing them both to sort of sit together and then... That's very good. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It seems like one of the most, no matter what your outcome goal is here, Being able to slow down around experiences seems central. So quickly moving beyond experiences to the litany of new novel things or the next achievement that you're trying to do is fundamentally amputating our capacity for embedding happiness in this way.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Yeah, I've been... spending a lot of time thinking about conspicuous productivity recently being obviously busy and the social rewards that you get for that, whether it's internally within a company, whether it's externally with the people around you, look at how much I'm doing, see how frenetic and how quickly I move. But if you look at what happens in systems that are very, very tuned up,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You remember the Ever Given, that big tanker that got stuck in the Suez Canal a couple of years ago? They're still paying off the supply chain issues that that caused. It was tens of billions of dollars. I think it was maybe stuck sideways in the Suez Canal for four days, five days, something like that. But the system is tuned up so tight.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
that there is no tolerance left and the smallest error causes massive, massive repercussions and everything falls apart. And I think about the way that a lot of people, myself too, overtune our... Our lives, we try to overclock our speed run through how many thoughts can I think at once? How much work can I do at once?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I'm going to wash the dishes whilst listening to a podcast at two times speed and I'll have my emails open over the far side. So while the water's getting hot, I'll quickly go and do this thing. And in some ways, it's exhilarating to do that. you know, it's exciting, it's rushy, it's very obvious the ways in which you are moving toward something.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
But when you actually ask yourself, okay, what did I get done today? When you look back, the dishes weren't, washing dishes is maybe a bad example because it's pretty difficult to do it badly, but maybe the dishes weren't washed thoroughly. You don't remember anything from the podcast and you didn't send any emails, but you kind of looked at them a little bit.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So my point being that we can prioritize, we can optimize for trying to do very obvious things that in no way meaningfully move us toward the goals that we have in life, the actual outcome that we're trying to achieve. And much of the time, the thing that we're looking for is right under our nose. Why is it that you're trying to do the very next thing?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Why is it that you're rushing toward this next set of novelty or this next task that you can tick off or to achieve the next whatever target it is that you've set yourself? Well, presumably it's because you want to try and achieve an enjoyable emotional state. Like that's really all there is, just enjoyable emotional states. Yeah, I just want to be in the present moment and feel good about it.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Okay, what if... By chasing the next shiny new thing, you are denying yourself the very thing that you're trying to achieve by doing that thing. So you're sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing which is supposed to get the thing that you say that you want.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like I can't stop to look at the sunset whilst I'm driving in the car. I must drive quickly toward the sunset so I can see it. Like I must have my eyes down at the steering wheel so I can get toward the sunset. It's like, dude, it's right fucking there.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And, you know, the more that I hear about the importance of slowing down, the fact that you do need to – something good has happened. allow it, notice it, allow it to sink into you, build it up, build it up, allow it to be felt in your body. Okay. You cannot do that. If your next thought is the next thought, if you're moving toward the next action, the next thing that's going to go on.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
That's correct. And, uh, yeah, I think I'm at the stage and a lot of my friends are now where we're just like, ah, dude, I'm kind of sick of myself. I'm I'm like really kind of bored of this, of using that chasing of the dragon, the dopamine thing, because tried it, become very successful at it. But, source code, fundamentally, it doesn't change that much.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It is, you know, an Ouroboros, or it's like a one of those ancient gods that had an unlimited size stomach. And it's like, it can just continue to eat and continue to eat and continue to eat. And there'll never be an amount of stimulation that's enough. So I think that getting in and actually tinkering with the knobs and the dials at the very bottom is a seems like a much better strategy.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I can't touch one arm.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I'll let that sink in. In other news, creatine is one of the most researched and effective supplements for improving strength, muscle recovery, and it even improves cognitive performance and mood. But not all creatines are created equal. Purity, consistency, and the absence of impurities like heavy metal can make or break its effectiveness.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
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Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy the best creatine on the market, try it for 29 days, and if you don't love it, They'll give you your money back. And they ship internationally.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Right now, you can get a 20% discount on everything from Momentous, plus that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. I had this idea a long time ago. I was interested in why...
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
personal development seemed to assuage my feelings of insufficiency, even though the insufficiency was still there and the fear of not being enough. And I think that it's the denial of something like the word already or enough, which is if I know that I'm on a trajectory where every day I'm getting a little bit better,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And today I might not be good enough, but because tomorrow I know I'm going to be a little bit better. Maybe tomorrow will be the day when I feel enough. And you continually push off the promise of when you will be happy or satisfied with yourself or with the place that you've got to. You continually push that off until the next step. It might not be now, but it'll be tomorrow.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And I imagine that maybe people with eating disorders, you know, maybe girls suffering from anorexia, maybe, well, you know, my body's not right now, but if I don't eat today, maybe tomorrow will be the day that I do this. This sort of anticipatory prediction that we have that something that's going to come up will be the moment at which I'm at peace. That was when it was enough.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It's not right now, but the trajectory is moving me in the right direction, even if it's the wrong direction.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It's a big difference. I mean, it's the difference between running away from something that you fear and running towards something that you want. And even the thing you're running toward that you want is done in the knowledge that you can have it and it'll be great if you get it, but you don't need it and you're enough without it.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I think, you know, whatever cognitive superposition thing, these are two very difficult ideas to hold in our mind at the same time, because so much of what we do is driven by fear of insufficiency and uncertainty and wishing that we were. It's a really powerful fuel in the beginning, but it's toxic when you use it for too long.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It's got a hole in the bottom.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Looking back at the HEAL framework, I know the most recent paper that you put out was only 2023 or something. So this thing's like hot off the press in academia terms. How much evidence is there of the impact of these strategies on things like personality, neuroticism or extroversion, well-being, health outcomes? What's happened in the evidence-based literature for this? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Yeah, not exactly a glowing review for the field of psychotherapy there that you haven't really been able to make any progress. It would be like finding some sort of a drug and never developing a better one and saying, well, it's kind of all right-ish, but some... Yeah, survival rates for breast cancer.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
If Tony was doing the E and the A, you might see even greater responses, even bigger reactions. That's right.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Just getting back into the more negative side of experiences, what is happening in the brain when we can't stop ruminating about some upsetting scenario or memory or fear that we have?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
What are some of the ways to break that circuit? Sometimes people get stuck in a vicious cycle. Now they don't even have the culpable deniability. They don't know it's further increasing their sensitization to negative experiences in future, which may actually make them more fearful of the experience. Make them more freaked out, sorry. Yeah, well, look, you've given the poison.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Now it's time to give the tonic. That's right, that's right. Yeah. I can tell you there's several things that are really cool. Cool. Let's get aggressive with the intervention. Someone's been ruminating for a long time. There's something they're worried about. What are some of the ways they can break that circuit?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Fantastic.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So good. So let's say that someone's acquired negative learning across life. They've just found this insight now, fantastic, but they think that's quite a few decades of accumulating thought patterns in this way of sensitizing myself. How possible is it to get rid of those negative learnings? Is it possible that once those pathways are laid down that we can actually prune them?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Or is it simply a case of us having to create other patterns? Are these bro science of myelin sheaths never getting, being gotten rid of? I don't know. Give me the truth. Oh, that's really great. Never bet against the human heart.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Rick, you're so great. I can't believe I had to wait six years to speak to you again.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Dude, I adore this intersection, the way that you're able to weave between the hard neuroscience, neurobiology stuff, the sort of peaceful, dharmic side. It's so great. We need to run this back. Let's do another episode at some point this summer. I've got so much more to talk to you about.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Where should people go? Do they want to keep up to date with all of the things that you do and put out and have created? Where do you want to send them?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So it seems like we have a couple of systems going on here. We have the state changes that are how can we interject during an experience while something is happening? How can we top down try to dictate a little bit more with the newer bit of the house toward the back of the house?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Heck yeah. Shout out, Forrest. Rick, I really do appreciate you. I think you're great, and I can't wait to run this back again. I promise it won't be six years. Maybe it won't even be six months.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Thank you. I appreciate that. Until next time.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
The goal is to change as best we can to enhance and latch on to good things, to mitigate beneficial things, to mitigate the impact of bad things, to also begin to retrain the house to move away from this predisposition it has of being negative in that direction. And that, I mean, everybody is aware in one form or another about the negativity bias. You know, if you get...
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
nine compliments and one criticism. You forget the compliments and you remember the criticism and that sticks with you maybe for the rest of your life. I was having a conversation with Canada's lead chair of the anti-bullying psychologists association. She's like evidence-based bullying intervention. She was telling me this story about an 82-year-old woman
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
who was diagnosed with something and she maybe didn't have too long to live. And she was opening up to Tracy about the fact that she still remembered when she was 12 years old and the girls who picked on her in school. And Tracy's response was that those bitches are dead. Like you don't need to be. But it kind of shows just how competent we are
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You know, we don't need – there is no training course out there for people to become more anxious or more concerned or more sad or more worried or more shameful.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
We are black belts in that from the womb. But we need to work – we're all white belts in the rest of it. So I think – Maybe to just sort of dig a little bit deeper into the negativity side, can you take us through the phases of the neurobiology of that negativity bias, sort of how it occurs step by step?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
The progeny continues on. So I want to go through the neurobiology of happiness today. This is maybe taking you back to sort of the beginning of your work, which I've become hugely obsessed by neurobiology, especially as it relates to well-being, interpersonal stuff. It really does feel like we sort of go around the houses of
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
finding explanations and personifying and coming up with interesting descriptions and titles for things to just come back to the nervous system and to just come back to sort of neurobiology. And I kind of really want to get this year into the nuts and bolts of this. So I guess maybe a good place to start would be what are positive and negative mental states from a neurobiological perspective?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so the best argument for the neurobiology of positivity and of trying to hardwire the stuff that you advocate for is that, well, this just brings you back to baseline. This just sort of levels the playing fields because you've been fighting an uphill battle your entire life.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Because if ketamine topic alignment is non-addictive, what's the reason for people to keep coming back?
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Can you explain what compounding pharmacies like, you know, white label? Yeah. Like what that is? Because I always hear people talking about it and I have no idea.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Oddly, it's actually quite an American approach to things. You know, profits first. It's very important to us. It is. It's wild. There's a few areas that we maybe should put profits second or third, perhaps.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because, frankly, I'm dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day with Element. It's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need, nothing that you don't.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
It's got a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, or any other junk. And it plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite, and curbing cravings. This... orange flavor in a cold glass of water is like a beautiful, sweet, salty, orangey nectar.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And it is the ultimate way to begin your day. And I genuinely feel the difference when I don't take it. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy. So you can buy it and try it, use the entire box. And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back and you don't even need to return it. That's how confident they are that you'll love it.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What are the drugs that you're most worried about at the moment? You know, if we started to put opioid crisis, everyone was talking about that.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
It seems like this is something that in yet there's some downstream complications. But I have to assume that getting them into a high level of scrutiny when it comes to your prescription is better than where we were before. So, OK, something has been started. Yeah. What are the drugs that you're most concerned about for the future of America?
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
How... Recently, has it been since saying stuff like this didn't sound like crazy conspiracy theories?
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
What do you think the future of the sort of psychiatric drug world is? Surely this is ripe for some new formulation, SSRIs. I saw that study that dance was the most effective way. Dancing regularly was the most effective way.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
It was a big study that was like exercise versus SSRIs. It's some absurd amount more effective. But when you actually looked at the list and they put it in order of what was the most impactful, dancing with another person was the highest impact thing. But I think that's kind of a bit of a cheat because you're not just looking at an exercise modality there.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
You're looking at something that's pro-social. You're looking at something that's got other people involved and so on and so forth. It's like, hey, that's a little bit of trickery. But anyway, surely... Psychiatric drugs, mental health world. Is there not something coming down the pike?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I think it was for me as well. The agencies, the media, the people that are supposed to be in charge and know what they're doing did not shower themselves in glory during that time. And there's only so many situations where you can publicly face plant that badly and
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
and then have to walk it back, or you get called out for hypocrisy, or just ignore the fact that you once said something that you've now got to say the opposite of.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I think it really opened an awful lot of people's eyes, and it doesn't surprise me that we're kind of... It was very fertile ground, in some ways a good thing, because it did lay some fertile ground for the questions that people are asking now, causing them to dig deeper into what's going on. But I guess...
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
You know, there's a lot of people that listen to the show who aren't American, who aren't subject to the American health care system. Can we just have a look at sort of what the state of health is like for a modern American? What's the sort of health outcomes that they've got? How do they deal with the issues that are coming up? What's the kind of care that they get? Go through that.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
and your heart rate with 99% accuracy. Eight Sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night, increase deep sleep by up to 2.5 hours a month, and reduce wake time by up to three hours per month. Best of all, they ship to the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Plus, they offer a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 days.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. back. Right now, you can get $350 off the brand new Pod 4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Yeah, I mean, it's wild to hear that sort of process happen, especially coming from the UK. And look, you know, for the American people that might look at a nationalized healthcare, I actually am kind of superbly in favor of making some level of basic healthcare available for absolutely everybody for free. And I think that it seems kind of barbaric that...
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
you get hit by a bus and you've got to walk it off because if you don't walk it off, you're bankrupt. Like the choices between having a broken leg for the rest of my life that doesn't heal properly or being bankrupt and maybe being homeless. And then, you know, the cascade goes down from there.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
All of that being said, and my, you know, very small area of socialist beliefs, one of which is in healthcare. I have to just explain for the people in America that might look at the UK and go, oh my God, like this is so fantastic. We, the standard of care that you have in the UK is, it's not good. It's not fantastic.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
You know, I walked in when I was 22, 23 and started talking about the fact that I had a low mood and the doctor looked at me and said, well, what's wrong? I'm like, there's like nothing ostensibly wrong other than just like, you know, the weight of existing. I don't really know what's happening.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I haven't had a, you had a recent grief, you had a recent breakup, you're in financial straits, you're in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no, no, no. He sort of gave me this puzzled look and then gave me a single page printout and sort of said, go on your way.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
So, you know, in the UK, GPs, general practitioners that are our sort of first port of call, you've got something up, you've got a cough, your back hurts, you've got something that you're worried about, you go and see them. They have 10 minutes. to get you in, introduce, diagnose, explain, recommend, and get you back out of the door again.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And that's just cycled through over and over and over again, like a turnstile all day long. So, you know, you don't get to choose your fucking surgeon in the UK. It's the NHS, good luck. You know, you don't have the same kind of levels of care in that way. You know, in the UK, every time that I post about blood work,
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Every single time I post about blood work, I get tons and tons of messages from friends, from other people. Where can we get this done in the UK? I'm like, I fucked if I know, man. There is no such thing. Like when I came over here and I was introduced to the idea of an annual physical or a six monthly checkup. And they said, well, when was your last six monthly checkup? And I'm like,
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I've never had this. We don't have. You don't do preventative. There is no, there is zero preventative care. It's crazy. But the main reason there's zero preventative care is that the power users of a nationalized healthcare system, the people that are the sickest, are the ones that take up the most time for the doctor.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
So if you, a relatively well person, tries to get from wellness to fitness as opposed to sickness to wellness, he looks at you and goes, dude, I've seen someone who's going to fucking lose their leg because of their diabetes earlier on this morning. Yeah. Your lower back pain, meaning that you can only deadlift 80% of your max as opposed to 100%, is not my problem. Get the fuck out.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Because the anchoring bias that they're used to is so skewed toward the sickest members of society. Quite rightly, they're the people that need the most care. But there is this odd adjustment bias where they can't make the site actually come back down to point at someone much closer to them, which is...
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I'm not absolutely catastrophic, but I'm not as good as I could be and I would like to become better. The first time I moved to America, I had an assessment so I could start working with telehealth. And they said, just normal physical, got to get you in for normal physical. So they bring me in and they do the knee tap thing and the height and the weight and all the basic shit.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And then they said, we'll do an eye exam. Okay, cover this please and read that. And I'm like, ah, P, Q, I can't read that one. Okay, we'll go one bigger. Like, S? V? And she's like, we'll go one bigger. And we finish up this eye exam. She's had a couple of cracks in it. We finish up this eye exam and she goes, you can't legally drive without glasses. I'm like, What?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I actually think the UnitedHealth CEO shooting for me was a real eye-opening moment because I just thought a guy shoots another guy on the street, obviously there's going to be public outcry about this. And I didn't realize how strongly the American populace feels against all healthcare insurance companies. It was, I mean, again, I'm an immigrant here.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
It's like, yeah, yeah, your eyes are really bad. And I'm like, what are you talking about? My eyesight's perfect. I don't know. I've never had bad eyes. She's like, no, your eyes are pretty bad. I'm like, I don't know. And then I did notice I'd been squinting a lot when looking at text. Stuff that was far away had been a little bit blurry. I was like... Holy fuck. Went and got my eyes tested.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I'm like, yeah, you need glasses. Then I went and got LASIK, which is why I don't need these. These are just because I look cool. I love it. That was like, I didn't know that I had like vision problems. Because especially when it's your, anybody that's transitioned from seeing perfectly to seeing a little bit less than perfectly, you're like, ah, I don't know, was stuff always this blurry?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
It's far away. Who knows if it's supposed to be sharp? You know, is it fucking 360p or 4k? I don't know. Um, and, None of that stuff was picked up. There is no preventative care in the UK at all. There is no such thing as an annual physical. Now, you can have Bupa, Nuffield. Those are private medical companies. You can have those things.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And maybe if you went in and you had some indications, your doctor would say, let's get your bloods done and let's do the whatever. I have no idea what... This is what it feels like. In the UK, healthcare feels like you have to say this weird...
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
series of secret incantations and do some special rain dance thing to get your gp to do the test to do the thing that you want them to do yeah what you're saying is my back hurts yes i've been through all of the different things it's not referring down my leg i've got this issue i've done this thing i've done rehab i've made sure i'm active i'm sleeping in this bed i've checked my bed i've checked my sleeping posture i'm walking all day i would just really love to get a scan
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Well, what we really need you to do, I'm like fucking, so many times someone goes in to try and get their particular pathology moved forward on the medical side of the scenario and they're left with something that you have to do. And maybe on average, that's actually what needs to be done because lots of people go in and they say, my feet hurt. And it's like, dude, you're 50 pounds overweight.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
We need to, here's some leaflets on healthy eating. Here's some ideas about what Keiko is and how you can reduce your calorie consumption and stuff like that. Maybe that's actually on average what most people need. But the fact that you're on this 10 minute long conveyor belt speed date thing means that no one is ever prepared to look at somebody.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Unfortunately, you know, a lot of the time, people point the finger at sort of medicine overall. I've got friends that are doctors, at least doctors in the UK. I think I've maybe one or two friends that are doctors in the US. I don't know a single one of them that got into the job of being a doctor in healthcare because they wanted to push some fucking new world order, nefarious agenda.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I know you can understand most of the words that I say, but I was just, fucking shocked i come from a country that's got national health service yeah right if someone had gone and shot the head of the nhs who'd been like what the fuck are you doing yeah
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
They don't need to help people. They're like, you know, caregivers or druids or wizards or a medic or some shit. They're so beat down, Chris. They're beat down. But what's the level of... Restriction, complicity, ignorance, neglect.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Because if you were looking early on, you would catch diseases, which then wouldn't be monetized further down the line.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And I'm incentivized- Because he's going to be a new employer that's got United or Blue Cross Blue Shield. You got it. Right. So this is weird. This is kind of a game of Russian roulette, sort of a mutually assured United destruction where they're going to send you their sickest. And it's a game of pass the parcel. Yes. And at some point, musical chairs.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And at some point, the music's going to stop and you are going to be left holding this diabetic- You got it.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
This shit is fucked up. Can you just kind of explain, zoom out a little bit more, This loop, this cross-pollination loop between food producers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, FDA, regulatory authorities. What is the simplistic process or structure or format of how they feed into each other?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Traveling should be about the pleasure of the trip and not the stress of packing, which is why I am such a huge fan of pneumatic. This travel pack, the 14 liter travel pack is what I wear every single day. It is the biggest game changer and it genuinely makes spending your day lugging your possessions around infinitely more enjoyable.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
They've got compartments for everything, your laptop, your shoes, your sunglasses. So well organized that even your toothbrush will feel important. It's like the Marie Kondo of luggage. Everything has got its place. And if you're still on the fence, their products have got a lifetime guarantee. So this is the last backpack you'll ever need to buy. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
So you can buy it, throw your possessions in it, and if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Right now, you can get a 20% discount of everything from Nomadic by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. And they ship internationally. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Well, this was sort of a big question that I had, you know, especially coming from the UK. And look, again, not to beat on the UK in many ways, it's great that we're like this. But 96% of people in the UK, I think around about 96% took their first dose of the COVID vaccine. It was about 90% second dose and then in the 80s for the third for the booster, something like that.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
My point being that we're a very orderly bunch, right? You give us a set of instructions and people will follow. I think that it's in the 90s, although I may be told I'm wrong by the internet. Point being, it was way higher than it would be in America.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
That sense that there is someone looking over you, that we're not adversarial with the key suppliers of our infrastructure, of our sort of life-saving care. Nobody looks at the NHS. People look at the NHS and they think that's shit and that is inefficient. The NHS uses Windows XP still, right? Wow. That tells you everything that you need. Yeah. You fax things. In the UK, right?
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Windows XP and fax, okay? So you have inefficiencies, you have this sort of lumbering behemoth, which is essentially impossible to upgrade, all the rest of the stuff. But nobody looks at it and thinks it's malicious. They think it's incompetent.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
In America, same isn't true. People have this sort of very adversarial relationship. Well, it feels very malicious, and that's where I was going.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
But my point was, is there nobody in America that fundamentally the book stops with? Because in the UK, we have this sense that someone is on our side. Yeah. That if you got 100,000 petitions together on whatever, parliament.org or something, it has to be presented. It has to be presented on the floor.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Is there no one like who's who is responsible?
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Whose job is it to look after health?
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Or they'll make you pay over the odds. Boom. Wow. Okay.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And why is anybody that begins to ring the bell accused of being a conspiracy theorist or somebody that is Team Cuckoo Land or whatever it was? Yeah, I don't know, man. Look, I understand, especially post-COVID, I was... I was made to feel uncomfortable with a lot of the Facebook status theorizing that went on.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
There was a super famous WhatsApp image of one squaddie, one army guy walking down the street in London, basically saying that martial law was about to be begun and that from tomorrow that you're going to be held in your houses and all the rest of this stuff. This thing went fucking interstellar.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
online right you know have you ever seen on whatsapp where it says forwarded many times have you ever had oh yeah yeah it's a little label it's like yeah you should probably be a little bit cautious about this might be interesting or it might be bullshit yeah and um nobody was held to account for that every single person was like this is i've got a text from my brother and he's part of the 143rd battalion of the whatever's highlanders they're going to do this thing like all right is anyone calling your fucking brother
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
brother or retard sister for that fucking Facebook status out like what's going on here so I understand that there was a lot of additional room for speculation to be injected that caused people to first off waste fucking brain cycles thinking about it but secondly
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
get agitated and concerned in a way that they didn't need to, causing unnecessary stress and stuff like that and making them doubt paths that would have been actually more evidence-based, more efficacious, although there wasn't many of those in COVID in the first instance.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
However, when we've got ourselves to a much more sort of peaceful, sedate situation like this, it does... I mean, look, you guys are going to continue to bang this drum and very, very slowly, more conversations like this. Fanny's been on the show, Callie's been on the show, etc., etc.,
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Eventually, I think we will get to catch up, but this conceptual inertia, right, where people are so slow to be dragged along and that it has to be like these realizations that to me seem pretty obvious. America is not a healthy country since moving here. All I've done for the last 18 months is try and fix my health, which had been perfect until I moved here, right?
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I've only been here for three years. I'm the fucking split test. I'm not fucking everybody, right? But I'm a pretty good split test. Perfect health until I was 33, moved to America by 34 and a half. SIBO, H. pylori, candida, gut dysbiosis, environmental mold exposure, kicking off EBV, maybe some Lyme. I'm like, I'm now spending 18 months fixing it.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I really do. It's fucking wild. So my point, all of that together being, I just wish that we could use a little bit more
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
tasteful discernment when it comes to the level of scrutiny because it seems like a lot of the time scrutiny is applied not against ideas that don't have merit but against people that you don't like from sides of the aisle that you don't 100% you know if it hadn't been for the fact that RFK was on the right side of the aisle and they've been attached to people like Elon and Trump and Tulsi and all the rest of it you know remembering that not so long ago they would have been on a different side of the aisle uh
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And you just watch the reaction online can be determined by whether or not they used to be on your team or they are now on your team.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
So, you know, you've been close to the RFK unit. How much impact can RFK really have, do you think? Surely there's going to be so many barriers in the way of him making real change when it comes to health care. New FDA head. How much change can...
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
That's a good point. Let's say that you had the FBI most wanted list. If you had a top three, top five changes that you would make, what would they be?
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
It really does. Just on that point, is there as much of an issue with pharmaceutical conglomerates company people going into the FDA, because presumably the FDA wants people that have got expertise. And there's only like there is. And then the problem is they go back forth, back forth. Right. But would you be happy with them going pharma to FDA, but not FDA to pharma?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Of course, because you're now in the regulatory body. It's either the regulatory body gets paid for off before they leave and then gets a cushy job, or a person who still mates with all of the people in their WhatsApp chat.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Have you ever heard, like if Joe does an advert for some gambling company or whatever, and you've got a 60 second advert and 45 seconds at the end are not available in Nebraska. And if you have a gambling property, if you're in New York, you need to call this number. And I'm like, holy fuck. Like, I suppose it's in there as protections, but you're right. They're not the most sexy ads.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
in the world, given that 50% of them are talking about the disclaimers that they've got that go at the front.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
A quick note, I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, Function run lab tests that monitor over 100 biomarkers, and then they've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
If you've been feeling a bit sluggish, then your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a massive role in your energy and your performance, and being able to see them charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
So if you have not been performing in the gym or the bedroom the way that you would like, this is an awesome way to work out what's happening inside of your body. Getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is only $500.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And right now you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
How big of a panic do you think there is behind the scenes for this odd combination of increased transparency, governmental transparency through stuff like Doge, Elon floating around, RFK, Tulsi? Like, I mean, I just have to assume, you know, you were talking about the papers being burned earlier on.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
There's people with just no fucking shoes or socks on sprinting around, just trying to like shred USB files and, you know.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I've got to assume these are these companies that are owned by the insurance companies. Are these an additional layer, which are private? They're companies that are owned by the insurance companies. Now, it's just another arm of the correct. It wasn't originally. And then they just got you got it. You got it. Right. OK.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
How do Americans compare when you look at other developed countries around the world from health care outcomes?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
How long do you think it is until we've got to a really comprehensive, well-put-together AI system?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Who knows what the future holds? Have you heard Peter Diamandis' term longevity escape velocity?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
That's what he's talking about. So he's saying, you know, when you have this really exponential curve of healthcare improving insights, longevity, health span extension, stuff like that, you just need to stay alive long enough to be able to get to the escape velocity bit.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
It's like hands can be off the wheel a little bit more now because for every year that you're alive, it makes living an additional however many days more likely. And then for every two years, it's even more days and it compounds and compounds.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And so it's like that.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I mean, look, it's why money is the best game on the planet, because you can literally exchange it between you and somebody that's in Thailand. You know exactly everybody's got this one metric that means all of this stuff. And what are we left playing with, really, when it comes to most people's understanding of where their health's at? Weight.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Maybe they understand how to do a BMI calculations because they know their height as well. The small number of autists that have started using wearables like Whoop or Aura or whatever, you know, they may be starting to do HRV hacking and stuff, but still, I mean, CGM, CGM's a fucking primitive at the moment. Like, you know, we're not tracking... anything really that consistently.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And one of the things that's really important when it comes to gamification is the speed of the feedback loop. If you do something that's good, but you only find out about how good it is in six months time, it's not that compelling.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
If you do something that's good today and tomorrow you wake up and something's improved or it gives you a little high five, virtual high five or score on the app or whatever. He goes, Hey, you know that you didn't eat chocolate last night. And actually this morning, your resting heart rate was this much lower or your blood sugar was this.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And if we keep going at this trajectory, this is where you can expect to be in this long.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Well, yeah, you're hiding health behind a game, right? You're playing about with numbers on the screen, but the underlying thing that you're working on, because you could imagine a different app that tracked how much alcohol you had and gave you a high five every time you hit double digits or something. You know, you've just got to gamify the right things. And unfortunately, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Making something painful today, which gives you a reward further down the line is really, really hard. And almost all health decisions result in pleasure today, pain tomorrow. And the good health decisions are pain today, pleasure tomorrow or improvement tomorrow. But it's not. It's in six months time. Yeah. Eating a cookie right now tastes good. Not having a cookie right now feels like shit.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And you don't even lose any weight for six more months of non-cookie eating.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
It's not a game for him. A lot of people are obsessive about different things. It's just about harnessing that obsession to point it in the right direction. People can become obsessive about playing video games or smoking weed or ruminating about the bad things that happened to them in their childhood or, you know, fucking fan fiction, whatever it is. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
There's lots of things that you can become obsessed about. And that's fine. You can become obsessed about lots of them and they're not going to damage you. But you need to have a couple of pieces in place. And yeah, I think. Looking to video game design as a good rubric, I mean, just for clarity, the video games industry is worth more than music, TV, and film combined together. Oh, that's wild.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
The video games designers understand human psychology more effectively than anybody else on the planet.
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#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
But you know, they've tapped into the fundamental need for humans to feel like they're making progress and have fast feedback loops. You can just, I'm going to play this level, I died, I'll try again. I'm going to play this level, I won. Yes, let's go again. We keep moving, keep moving, keep moving.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
There's no incentive for people to really dig into their health because...
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
for every step that they need to take for every time that they hit some sort of a barrier it's just demotivating and demoralizing and they forget you know everyone's got the day after you get better from being sick one of the first things that you want to do is like I mean this is you know I'm really gonna I'm gonna get my health together that's really it so continuing to use those little lily pads for people to bounce off to use that motivation to keep them pushed forward so I guess you know that's great and that will be a wonderful world that was
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
maybe very quickly moving toward right now, what's your advice for how patients can advocate for themselves better? What can they do to take control of their health care more? And this podcast is an unlimited number of episodes on how to take control of your health.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Where are we at with Purdue Pharma now? I've watched at least two or three documentaries or series that have been made about that situation, I think, in the last half decade. What's the current state of Purdue and what's the current state of opioids, accessibility, how hard they're being pushed in America?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Although it may be a slightly challenging process for 36 hours or whatever when you go through it.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
I remember I came to L.A. maybe 2018, something like that. And this would have been, I think, before California legalized weed. But when you could get it with a medical marijuana card. And I remember the first time I ever went to Venice Beach. Oh, my God, I'm going to go and see Muscle Beach. It's going to be so cool. I'm like, you know, just living the dream. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
sort of late 20s, one of the first times I've come to America and a famous Venice boardwalk. Every third little kiosk was some guy that could give you a medical marijuana card. Like how many marijuana doctors are there that exist on Venice boardwalk? And, you know, for every... legislative loophole, there is an opportunity for people to capitalize on it. Correct.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And, you know, I suppose you also have during COVID people got lazy. Only fans did well over the last 50 years. People have got fatter, which now has opened up the opportunity for anorectics. Yeah. Similar drugs to come through.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
And the root cause is diet, lifestyle, and nutrition. So the opioids have been pulled. Access to those has been made more difficult. That's resulted in people having... They've still got the dependency, but the supply is now being cut off because... And if we walk through, like, how?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
All right, what's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. It is the 900th episode of Modern Wisdom. Big number. Didn't think that I would do 900 of anything. I don't know whether I ever have done 900 of anything, but today I'm going to go through some lessons I've learned over the last 100 episodes from life and from reading and from the show and from other stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
probably a decade now and it's not as if i've been rich for a decade um but basically if you don't have a lot of materialism in you i think that's a competitive advantage and i think that you can look at people who need lots of uh expensive material possessions as kind of having a
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
a weird sort of curse that they need they're a very very hungry animal and they need to keep on feeding this beast in a way that you don't or basically their burn rate for happiness materially is way higher than yours and you can get away with it being 10 or 20 or whatever of this person because they need to have a new car that's never more than two years old and they need to have the design shoes and you've got to have the bag and they've got to have to this um
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And I think that realizing if making more money wouldn't change much about how you live your life, you are already rich. Or if you can even see little glimmers of that, it's a good starting point. So anyway, I love those two. And trading things that matter for ones that don't. Living a comfortable life. Losing...
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
time or sanity for uh additional even something that's super arbitrary and even more silly idea that james doesn't use um a promotion uh getting a better job title, which has no material use unless you're then going to cash that in for a better position at some point at some other company in future.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
But I think if you offer people a 5% pay rise or a promotion in terms of their job title, on average, more people choose the promotion because status is one of these things that we're just driven for. But you literally can't cash it in unless at some point in the future you manage to find a way to do it. So yes, be careful about the focus on wealth and not the focus on lifestyle.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
All right, next one, deliberate de-optimization. How much should you try to optimize your life was a question that I asked myself, sort of how much should you be thinking about ways to improve? How much should you care about things? And for many people, perhaps even most people, the answer to all of those questions is more.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Things like money won't make you happy, or fame won't fix your self-worth, or you don't love that pretty girl she's just hot and difficult to get, or nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it. You will regret working too much. Worrying isn't improving your performance. All of your fears are a waste of time. you should see your parents more.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
The world largely belongs to the intense optimizers and not the laissez-faire guy chilling in a hammock who's hit snooze three times this morning. So telling people to optimize harder is a reliable way to improve the lives of most people because most people need to be tightened up rather than loosened off. And being more obsessive will tend to deliver better results in worldly success.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
most advice is charitably given to people who need to think more carefully, be more deliberate, and work harder. The problem is when this message lands with the wrong audience, the perennial perma-optimizers, then it creates a world where overthinkers are convinced to think even more. And these people need loosening off, not tightening up.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And given the fact that you listen to this podcast or read my newsletter, I'm going to guess that you fall into this category. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be obsessive and pay attention to detail. The problem arises when you can no longer delineate between the very small number of things that matter enough to obsess over and everything else.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Assume that you have a small bucket of pursuits which are important. You've probably learned that a very deliberate, effortful, optimized approach is a successful strategy. This obsession and addiction begins to bleed into all other areas of your life. And turning off the tap of optimization is hard. Soon enough, the entire map is flooded with the same desire to always push for perfect.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Your brain tells you, look at how effective your perfectionism has been in your professional life. Why don't we try and apply that to your sleep routine and your training plan and your love life and the house cleanliness and your toenails? And it doesn't go well.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
actually from the CTO of RP Strength, a guy called Andrew Zay, who works with Mike Israetel, is deliberate de-optimization. So you purposefully let areas which could be dialed in further fall by the wayside in order to give your brain capacity to focus on the ones that really matter, focusing on your pounds and not everyone else's pennies. Sure.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
You could have five credit cards with special cashback bonuses and capture all of the points for your air miles. But given that you're already close to capacity on the things to give a shit about list, is it wise to add yet another thing onto that?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Sure, your intra-workout nutrition could probably be dialed in more with pre-digested grass-fed whey and dextrose, but what if this takes your energy away from the key area of just hitting the gym five times a week?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
In the same way, you could spend all day watching the stock market instead of just investing in an index fund, but how much damage will this new candle graph addiction do to your relationship? Oliver Berkman inspired me with this thought recently which is how much should you care about things? Question, how much should you care about things?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Answer, I'm unsure exactly but I know that it's not the absolute maximum amount all the time for everything. Basically not everything is a life or death situation and even if you know this cognitively you still behave implicitly like it is. So deliberately letting go of certain areas is a good way to give overthinkers like you and me more space to regain a little bit of sanity.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Basically, the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections. And choosing the very small bucket of things that are unbelievably important to you and that you want to have your obsession focus on. And when that habit, that thought pattern, that framing starts to appear in other areas of your life, you just sort of notice it.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
You go, oh yeah, that's that thing that I really love at work.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
and really don't want in my relationship or in my sleep routine or in the way that i keep my house or whatever so i'm i'm just gonna like thank you for that and i appreciate you i see you there but i don't really need to worry so much and it's difficult because you're going to be hypertrophying this muscle in one very particular domain or a few particular domains and you're going to be trying atrophy the same muscle in other domains and it's really really tough this is a uh
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
You'll be fine after the breakup and you'll be grateful that you did it. It's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life. And even listening to that list back, I find myself sort of rolling my eyes at how fucking trite it is because they are all basic bitch, obvious insights that everybody has heard before.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
problem to be managed not a paradox to be solved perhaps that there is no point at which this is going to be stopped and just learning like being on one of those balance board things where there's a sphere in the middle of it at no point are you actually at stasis you're always just making little adjustments and i think maybe it's kind of like that
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
This episode is brought to you by the RP Hypertrophy app. This app has made a massive impact on my gains and enjoyment in going to the gym over the last year. It's designed by Dr. Mike Israel and comes with over 45 pre-made training programs and more than 250 technique videos. It takes all the guesswork,
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#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
out of crafting the ideal lifting routine by literally spoon feeding you a step-by-step plan for every workout. It'll guide you through the exact sets, reps and weight to use and most importantly, how to perfect your form so that every rep is optimized for maximum gains.
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#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
It even adjusts every week based on your progress and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it and train with it for 29 days. If you don't like it, They'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout.
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#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. This next lesson, I think might be the best thing I've written in probably about a year. So I listened to a podcast from Joe Hudson and he just blew me away with this insight around productivity. And it really...
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
concretized something that I've been thinking about for ages, which I love and hopefully will be useful to you as well. I realized there's a very painful transition that everybody eventually needs to make in their career and their productivity journey to go from operator guy to idea guy.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
At the beginning of your career, the only advantage that you have is your work rate because you've got no experience to draw on and any natural talent you have is capped by the fact that you've got no experience to unlock it. So you just work hard to get ahead.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
You answer all of the emails, you take all of the would love to connect calls, you send the invoices, write the copy, hire the contractors, everything. It's all you. But eventually, that stage of your journey expires and you need to let it go. Maybe you have staff to delegate to now. Maybe you've been given a promotion and need to be thinking at a more strategic high level.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Previously, your job was to work hard, but not so much anymore. And Joe Hudson says, your job isn't to work hard. Your job is to have great ideas. But here's the problem. You've spent an entire career acclimatizing yourself to getting stuff done. You've built a monster inside of you, which sucks in difficult, tedious tasks and spits out completed efforts.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
You've created a link between being busy, doing things you don't want to do, and success. The issue is it's really hard to work out what you truly want and determine whether or not you're moving toward it. But it's really fucking easy to see the number of emails that you sent or how many hours you spent on calls today. Being busy is more satisfying than being effective.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And it's very hard to work out if your productivity efforts are actually useful or if they're just a dopamine fix that allows you to check the done box and feel like you completed something. So ask yourself, is your job to press enter on emails or to actually move the mission forward? And you can't confuse the first one for the second one.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
But if they're so basic, why does everybody so reliably fall prey to them consistently throughout our lives? And if they're so obvious, why do people who have recently become famous or wealthy or lost a parent or gone through a breakup start to proclaim those facts with the sort of renewed, grandiose ceremony of someone who's just gone through religious revelation?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Another challenge is this level of busyness helps to make you feel important. A full calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness. you think to yourself, there's no way that I can be an unwanted piece of shit. Look at how many calls I have today. Look at all the people who need my time and attention. I have to be important. I have to be valuable.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Please, please, please assuage my deep feelings of insufficiency. You are hooked on the dopamine of, I got stuff done today because even if this wasn't a great use of your day, at least you don't feel useless. And you didn't have any time to consider that you might not be fully actualizing your potential in any case because you're drowning in fucking emails.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Another challenge is that conspicuous busyness is much more societally rewarded than quiet effectiveness. We want other people to see how hard we're working. Even if the best thing for your mission's outcome was for you to go and lie on the beach today and think. Who's going to congratulate you for taking on that challenge? Let's just think for a second.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
The best thing that you could do for your professional outcomes, your personal outcomes, your net worth, your mental health, your physical, everything, all of that would be going offline, lying on a beach and getting a bit of a tan. Maybe you grab an ice cream. There's a dog there. For a little while, you play with the dog. It's somebody else's dog, but you play with the dog.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And then you come back and you have an early night. And from every objective metric that makes your life and the lives of the people around you better, Who's giving you an award for that? Dude, well done today. Really, really well done.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Well, if we assume that the reason that we do the work, the reason that we do any work is to move us toward a goal that ultimately we want, why would we assume that sending useless emails that don't move the project forward should be more applauded than going to the beach, which does? And it's because we still have this industrial age Puritan work set mindset around what working hard looks like.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And again, it's this conspicuous productivity or obvious busyness. Near burnout is worn like a badge of honor to show your fealty to the mission. Obvious productivity is more praised than private efficacy. And here's the thing. Almost everyone's life goal is where they get to a point where they can say, I just don't want to have to do anything I don't want to do anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
But what happens when you get there? Because so much of your self-worth is derived from overcoming hard things and pushing yourself through difficult tasks that you don't want to do. So imagine that you do reach your goal of not having to do things you don't want to do anymore. Where are you going to find your satisfaction from now?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
This is why it's so difficult to let go of grunt work and to let go of being permanently busy, even when your precise goal was to get here to the point where you don't need to do grunt work and you don't need to be permanently busy. I guess finally as well, there's a question of why is it so hard to take pleasure in our successes?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And a big part of that is largely because you're constantly peering over the shoulder of the present moment to see what's coming next. You're always just sort of looking past what is in front of you or what's happening right now.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So even during the act of attaining a goal, you're already looking past it a little bit, getting ready to move the goalposts that you just this second kicked the ball into further away down the field. We are all chasing a sense of completion, but we never actually allow ourselves to savor any tastes of completion that we get along the way.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
We assume that one day we're going to arrive and that day never comes because we never give ourselves a break. And then we realized that the path we were speed running through was actually the one to our grave. And how many people, I mean, what's the five most common regrets, deathbed regrets? One of them, I wish that hadn't worked so much.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
It's strange that stuff everybody kind of accepts as being true, we all are surprised about when it happens to us. And the other thing is, it is a very contentious list of points to say on the internet.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
I mean, if you're going to outsource it to people that are on their deathbed, they've got no reason to lie. I wish that I kept in touch with my friends. I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy. I wish I'd lived my own life and not the one that others expected of me. I wish I'd kept it.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
What is it that you're trying to achieve? Are you here to crank widgets? and to keep your slack at zero and to send emails? Are you here to move your life meaningfully toward the thing that you want? The problem is slack and calls and emails are much easier and more obvious for you to judge than did I get myself toward a life that I want?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
That's really amorphous and tough, but I buried myself in work or I only slept four hours last night. We use the proxy,
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
thing that in the beginning of our journey when we were doing grunt work was supposed to be predictive of where we were going to end up we use that mindset for the rest of time and look if you're starting out on a career journey or you're at the bottom of a ladder of something new uh this might sting a bit because you're hearing about a transition that you as of yet don't have to make and aren't going to get to make for quite a while but you need to keep it in the
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
If you don't like the grunt work in the beginning, the only thing worse than that is doing it when you no longer need to do it, when you've managed to get somewhere closer up the top of the ladder. And refusing to let go of it is going to cap your progress and your happiness, and it's going to trap you in thought patterns that you really don't want. and it's a difficult transition.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
The existential loneliness that you have to deal with, where it's like, everybody needs me, everybody wanted me, I was so busy all of the time. It's like, yeah, dude, you need to ask yourself sort of deeper questions now, and you need to genuinely consider whether a 30-minute walk is the best thing that you can do for your business or your relationship or your family or whatever it might be.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And that's just, I don't know, why is that less sexy than, you know sitting down and grinding out whatever needs to be the house cleaning the the emails the you know hardcore workout whatever it might be it's like you need to learn to chill out a little bit more and uh that'll actually in some weird roundabout way move you closer to your goals too it's interesting All right, next one.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So this is from Justin LaMilla, who does a ton of really interesting sex research. Gay men see bisexual men as secretly gay and lesbians see bisexual women as secretly straight.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Across two studies involving a total of 288 gay and lesbian participants, researchers examined attitudes towards stereotypes of bisexuals, and some of the findings were that both gay men and lesbians hold more negative views of bisexual persons of the same sex It's kind of interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So if I have an interview with a billionaire who says that all of his money didn't make him happy, or a movie star who says that her fame felt like a prison, the internet quite reliably will tear them apart for being ungrateful and out of touch. Don't you know that there's people that are struggling? Oh my God, how tone deaf could you be?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So you're going to get to learn that. You're also going to get to indulge in this beautiful facial hair for a while. I don't know how long this moustache will last. So it's a limited time offer for you to be able to enjoy it. So bask in the reflective glory of my upper lip and let's get into it.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
I wonder whether that is some sort of a sense that this person could be competing in a market that the individual wouldn't be threatened by, but they've chosen to step into their market and maybe they'll take their partner away. That might be an idea. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So not only do we refuse to learn the lessons, we even refuse to hear the message from the people warning us about them. And even more than that, for every single one of those lessons, if I think a little bit deeper, I can probably recall a time including right now where I convinced myself that I was the exception to the rule.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
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Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. , , , , ,, P P P P P P P P Pத ac la , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , h P P P P P P P P P P P P P Next one, this is a Mark Manson insight, which I fucking adore.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
that my particular mental makeup or life situation or historical wounds or dreams for the future render me immune to these lessons being applicable. No, no, no, no. My unique inner landscape would be fixed by skirting around some of the most well-known wisdom of the ages. It's like, no, no, no, no. I can thread this needle properly.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Watch me dance through this minefield and avoid all of the tripwires that everyone else has kicked. And then you kick one. And you then share a sort of knowing luck with someone else who also learned one of these unteachable lessons. And it's the kind of luck that can only occur between two people who have been hurt in the exact same way. And a little voice in the back of your mind will say,
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So he says, neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than what you think of yourself. Anytime that you alter your words or behavior to fit someone else's needs rather than your own, that's needy. Any time you lie about your interests or your hobbies or your background, that's needy.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Any time that you pursue a goal to impress others rather than fulfill yourself, that's needy. Whereas most people focus on what behavior is attractive or unattractive, What determines neediness and therefore attractiveness is the why behind your behavior.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
You can say the coolest thing or do what everyone else does, but if you do it for the wrong reason, it will come off as needy and desperate and turn people off. Turning people off is definitely not optimal. I like turning people on as much as the next guy. But I think there's an even bigger price to be paid here, which is your own self-worth.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So imagine for a second a world in which you are unanimously adored by millions, but you hate yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
I propose that self-love you would be happier. Because ultimately, in some Taoist roundabout way, the reason we want validation from others is to give us a good enough reason to validate ourselves. And if you compromise yourself in order to gain favor with other people, you'll know. Even if you think you're not keeping score, your subconscious is.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And given that you're the sort of person who listens to this show, you probably keep score a lot more accurately than is typical. How can you expect to have faith in yourself if you can't even keep your own word? So the problem is we sacrifice the thing that we want, which is self-worth, for the thing which is supposed to get it, which is validation.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Sacrifice self-worth to get validation in the hopes that if we have sufficient validation, we will finally be able to have some self-worth. Sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing that's supposed to get it. And yeah, this neediness insight that, you know, it's kind of, it's not too dissimilar to that point from before, from Sam Ovens, where you think, fuck,
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
We have these expectations, public expectations, familial expectations. People don't like change. There's also another reason that people don't like change, I think, is because we want to be able to predict, project out where somebody is going to be in future. And the more easy they are to predict, as in the more reliably they fall into our model of them,
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
the less we need to sort of worry about what's going to happen. You know, don't worry about Chris. He's a good guy. He'll be on board with the next whatever Trump policy, or he'll be on board with the next Kamala policy, or he'll be on board with the next whatever, because he was with the last ones.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
But if you start to deviate a little bit, whether it's political ideology, philosophy, life direction, career, temperament, in its extreme, this is sort of bipolar, right? It's, oh my God, I'm so scared of whether or not this person's going to be high or low or whatever it might be. But in smaller ways, the same discomfort comes through.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
It's because we're like, I don't know if they're still going to sort of be here in a year's time. What if they outgrow me? What if they outgrow our friendship? What if they start to disagree with something that's really sacred to me? So in that way, People who don't necessarily go along with the crowd are seen as a threat in many ways. So yeah, I think just something to consider.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
I told you so. And these unteachable lessons, I guess, play into a broader idea of the certain areas of life that you just can't expedite. I wonder whether it's because it's so alluring, you know, fame, sexiness, adoration, money, the distraction of doing something that isn't seeing your parents and forgetting how sort of time moves and that one day they're going to be gone.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
All right, some more dating stuff. This is insight from Chris Bumstead. Awesome episode with him last year. And I was asking him about how to choose a good partner, how to know when you've sort of found the one. And Chris said, find someone who you just feel safe being a burden to. You're not going to intentionally be a burden, but sometimes you suck, you know? Sometimes you're a burden.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And even if you don't feel safe being like that around your partner, if you have to withhold things from them and put on that show, you're never going to feel safe around them and you're not going to want to be there for them as much when they're being a burden as well. You just become these two people dividing and conquering all of your problems rather than taking on the world together.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
I think I always felt like I wanted to be great at everything I did and great at what I pursued. And I never expected to be as good as I was. So it would just be such an interesting relief to be able to give myself to think you are going to be great. You are going to have all these things that you want, but you're also going to realize that they're not as important as you think they are.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
You're going to come to the realization where your relationships and your values and everything you enjoy and experience aren't going to come down to spectacular moments on stage. They're going to be much simpler than that. They're just going to be these moments where you're being yourself and the people who love you for that are going to be everything. It's awesome.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
You know, this guy who has conquered the sport, has sort of defined an entire generation of bodybuilders, and then bowed out at 30, is able to say, completed it, but even in the process of completing it six times in a row. the big wins weren't the big wins.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
The big wins were the little ones and they were the shares and the opportunity for me to celebrate what I'd done with people who cared about me, who knew me. And it's great and magnificent and impressive and all the rest of it. But it wasn't what mattered. You know, a successful career in a terrible marriage can make your life miserable.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
An average career in an amazing marriage can make your life delightful. So you need to choose wisely. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, it's officially 2025 and that business idea that you've been thinking about for ages is collecting dust on the shelf. It is time to do the thing. Here's the good news.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Shopify makes it unbelievably simple to create your brand, open for business, and actually get your first sale. They have thousands of customizable templates, so all you need to do is drag and drop. No coding or design skills required. They help you manage everything like shipping, taxes, payments, all from one simple dashboard.
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#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they're best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with ShopPay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Basically, Shopify takes all the messiness of running a business off your plate so that you can focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling
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#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
an awesome product. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to start selling today. I saw this thing. On Reddit, actually, five questions to ask yourself if you're unsure about your relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
If someone told you you're a lot like your partner, would this be a compliment to you? Are you truly fulfilled or just less lonely? Are you able to unapologetically be yourself or do you feel the need to show up differently to please your partner? Are you in love with who your partner is right now as a whole, or are you only in love with their good side, the potential, or the idea of them?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And would you want your future or imagined child to date someone like your partner?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
I think almost everything in here, if someone told you a lot like your partner, would this be a compliment to you? Are you in love with just the idea or would you want your future child, imagined child to date someone like your partner? Those three are sort of taking you out of the situation and imagining that you're somebody else, you're something else. It's for a different person.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So that's creating a little bit of psychological distance. Are you truly fulfilled or just less lonely is a fantastic insight around the reason that we suck so much in relationships is that we're terrified of being alone.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And that means that we stay in relationships or we accept relationships that we shouldn't do because familiar loneliness or familiar partnership is more enjoyable than unfamiliar loneliness. And that's not good. Are you able to unapologetically be yourself or do you feel the need to show up differently to please your partner? I think that a lot of that
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And a lot of those lists, that list of questions and points, all play on things that we really, really want, stuff that feels urgent, that gets in the way of things that are maybe more important. And you... will reliably kick the tripwires of many of those throughout your life.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
is around uh the level of openness the level of comfort um that you have how much do you need to self-edit now the the question around uh the person that's your best friend is the one that you have the least filter with and that you can sit in silence with without having to fill it so it's the person you can talk the most with in an unencumbered way and the person you can shut up the most with in an unencumbered way um and if that's not your partner then you're struggling because
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Your relationship should feel like home. It should feel like a house with a sturdy roof and strong foundations and shit gets thrown at it all the time and rain comes down and there's weather and there's heat and there's cold. But inside of that house is the one safe refuge that you have. You can lose your job, status, your financial position can...
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
fall away your health can break down your friends can leave you but you have this one safe place and it's in another person it's in them and if you can't be yourself with that person the entire house does not exist it's fake So you need to make sure that you can be yourself with your partner or else you have no safe refuge from the world, which is fucking terrifying.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
On the dating line, Hal Mosley dropped a fucking slammer the other day, which I want to talk to him about the next time I speak to him. If you find a girl who believes in your dreams more than you do, who makes you want to be a better man, who's willing to work alongside you to get there and is grateful for whatever you have, just marry her. That's how you make marriage an easy yes.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
How you make marriage an easy yes is by having a girl who has those. Find a girl who believes in your dreams more than you do, who makes you want to be a better man, who's willing to work alongside you to get there and is grateful for whatever you have. Just marry her. The rest of the stuff will sort itself out, man. I really do get that sense. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age. I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
I guess there was One final element, I got asked a bunch of questions about the black pill and stuff and sort of incels the last time on a Q&A at some point recently. And it's kind of an unfalsifiable... philosophy in a lot of ways, because there's many kernels of truth in it.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Realizations about what women want physically in a partner and the fact that some men just, no matter how many pushups they do, they're not going to get them. It's tough. It's a hard biological limit. But there's a There is a very specific cohort of men, frustrating men, guys who have got nothing going for them, no drive in their life. They're uncomfortable in their own skin.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
They're endlessly miserable. They keep complaining about women having too high standards. It's like, bruh, your standards for yourself are through the fucking floor. Your friends don't wanna hang out with you. You don't wanna hang out with you. Why do you think a woman would wanna hang out with you? And how is this their fault that they've got too high standards? You suck. You suck.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Your friends don't want to hang with you. You don't want to hang with you. Why lay at the feet of women the fact that they have got too high standards? I am all for it. I will fucking die on the hill of fighting for more empathy for men, right? And I have been... thrown under the bus many times for doing so.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And I get the sense that this is a unique category of lesson that just comes along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older, that trying to expedite it, trying to get there a bit quicker. Maybe you can do it, but there's very few people I know who... who have been able to say, I don't want the pretty girl who's difficult to get. I don't want money, fame.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Again, be able to walk this tightrope where I'm so soy-cucked that the manosphere considers me to be blue-pilled, but I'm also such a misogynist that Guardian readers think that I'm Andrew Tate from Wish.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Like, I don't care about being misjudged by people who don't understand what I'm trying to achieve. And...
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
There's a group of people out there, maybe the large majority who are reasonable and who understand that it's not zero sum when it comes to empathy, who realize that you can raise up men without dragging down women, that you can support women without forgetting about the challenges of men, that you can tell men that they need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and actually do some work without forgetting that those men have got challenges that need structural support from society at large and we need initiatives and we need investment.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
and that some women do have too high standards. Some women do have skewed perspectives of what they're worth, but you're not going to get into a relationship with them in any case. What's your goal?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
We're screaming at these, these harpies on the internet, these like retarded women who go onto these dating shows and like, I'm going to get a guy who's got like six, six feet, six, and he's got like six figures and he's got a six inch dick. Like, what are you really, really going to go and change them? Are you going to U-turn them and turn that
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
chick into wifey no you're not you're getting frustrated because you think that they are a representation of women at large but that woman by design sucks so you're not going to hang out with her so just don't pay attention to her and move toward the chicks that are perfectly normal that there are so many fucking awesome women out there who want to get into a relationship who just want a man who's got those traits that we talked about before
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Yeah, that special category of men who don't have anything going for them, no drive, uncomfortable in their own skin, endlessly miserable, complaining all the time, and laid at the feet of women. Dude, point the fucking finger in the mirror. I will give you as much social confidence... training, diet, hairstyle advice until the cows come home and I will continue to do it.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
But if you're not doing any work and you're saying that it's the fault of women that you're not getting dates, fucking that's on you, guy. Anyway, what a fucking wonderful, positive tone for me to finish this 900th episode on. But I love it. I mean, some of these lessons today, I really adore. And I hope that you do too. And I appreciate you all. And I'm actually going to be in Mexico tomorrow.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So wish me luck. I'm getting some... treatments and stuff for the health shit that i'm fighting with the moment mold and ebv and lime and all of that shit so uh if i can pray for chris if you would uh pray for this mustache as well because it's probably not going to be here the next time that you see me but i appreciate you all roll on episode 1000 peace
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So the first one, I was trying to put a name to this idea for a while and I came up with Unteachable Lessons. It's a special category of lesson, one that you can't discover without experiencing it firsthand. So there is a certain subset of advice that for some reason, we all refuse to learn through instruction.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
I don't get distracted from seeing my parents. I don't work too much without burning myself out first. There's very few people who get to that realization without having been burned so painfully. And maybe that's it as well, that...
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
the allure of the success of these things or the distraction away from stuff that's important is so strong that it takes a ridiculously painful event to actually drive the nail into the coffin of whatever this lesson is but yeah unteachable lessons i think it's sort of when you see it you can't unsee it and um i'm watching them pop up everywhere i do think as well uh
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
The sort of audience that listens to Modern Wisdom is cool because the nuance and the ability to sit with this person who's rich is saying that being rich didn't fix their problems. That makes me who wants to be richer feel upset, which like everybody, right? Everybody wants to be richer than they are.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And there's only a few people who have said I've reached like fuck you money escape velocity post money life. But I don't see that. so much on the channel anymore, which is good and makes me feel proud of you. So hooray, well done. Another lesson, this was one of my favorites. I've been trying to put a name to for ages as well. I'd been trying to work out
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
what sort of friends I wanted to spend the most time around and whether they were charismatic or sort of engaging or what it was about them that made them magnetic to me. And I came up with this idea called reverse charisma. So,
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Jenny Jerome, who is Winston Churchill's mother, who was Winston Churchill's mother, dined with both Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his rival William Gladstone on consecutive nights back to back. And she got asked about her impressions of the two different men. And she said, when I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought that he was the cleverest man in England.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling like I was the cleverest woman. And I think most people assume that they want to be charismatic. They want their energy to be compelling and their stories to be electric. They want to walk into a room and everybody be impressed, magnetized to them.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
But when I started to think about the friends I love and want to spend the most time with, they didn't necessarily have charisma. They had reverse charisma. And I guess the question is, why do certain people make us feel boring, but others don't? Why is it that we feel full of stories and inspiration around some people, but around others we've got nothing to say?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And we try to assess other people based on how interesting they are. And because of that, we miss a much more important issue, which is how interesting they make us feel. Like how engaged is this person? And how much of us can they tolerate? And how much of our reality can they handle without us having to edit ourselves? How encouraging and reassuring are they?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
How much do they make us want to dig deeper and talk more? And how comfortably can we sit in silence without needing to fill it? Basically, how much of us do they get? And if it's not a lot, then we're inevitably going to be cautious.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And a person feels interesting precisely to the extent that they have become familiar and at ease with the things that are extreme and sad and dark and agonizing and shameful and joyous and exciting. And if they are at home with their own strangeness, then they help us to feel at home with ours. Where they have gone... we can follow.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it's going to be, for us to find out for ourselves, we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings that we get from our elders and songs and literature and historical catastrophes and public scandals. And instead, we think some version of, yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
What they have felt safe exploring in themselves, we will be able to safely unpack around them. And this was the sort of realization that Architecting your charisma is a nebulous and scrappy task that autistic pickup artists gave themselves existential crises failing at. But building reverse charisma is something that anyone can do by being curious and patient and encouraging.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Some people feel interesting. Some people make us feel interesting. And there's a place for both. But on average, our favorite people are the latter, not the former. And it's way easier to be someone who makes people feel interesting than it is to be interesting. That was the whole point with the pick-up artist movement, that they had these...
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
flow charts and five step plans for if she's going to, I'm going to open and then I'm going to twist the lemon and neg, neg the Kino escalation. And dude, all of this to try and come across as somebody who's interesting. Uh, there was this study done where they asked a, uh, a
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
study participant to take a flight in a plane and somebody sat next to them and that was one of the plants the plant was told that they needed to keep the person talking for the entirety of the flight but not disclose any information about themselves when they'd come off the plane they asked the person who had been sat next to the plant how was the flight oh brilliant actually really lovely so and what were the other passengers like we're just doing a little survey so it's amazing had these great conversations guy was so interesting oh okay can you tell us their name
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
oh, no, okay, can you tell us where they were from or what they did or anything? They realize, no, but some people feel interesting. Some people make us feel interesting. And maybe it's just a byproduct of the fact that
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So few people want to have a collaborative conversation and that a lot of the time it's this game of tennis where you're waiting for the other person to hit the ball so that you get your chance to hit the ball so that they get their chance to hit the ball as opposed to you trying to tee them up for the best shot that you can. We even tried to do this in a George Max 30th in Miami. So we had...
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Uh, the pickleball court in the house that we were staying where everybody was at and a football and George used to do football freestyle. I'm aware it doesn't look like he used to do that, but I promise you he was world-class at doing it. And, um, I thought, well, this would be really cool because we can do sort of a game of foot tennis type thing.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And everyone was getting, we were all getting super competitive, but it wasn't a very nice, it wasn't a very beautiful game. So I was like, yeah, why don't we change the rules for a little bit? Why don't we just try and make the most beautiful game we can?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
So the whole point of the game was to put the ball into positions that yourself or the other team or the guy that was on your side could do something cool with. So as opposed to trying to win, you were trying to make it interesting. And immediately, George's response was, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we can count how many we do and we can see if we can get more.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And I'm like, no, you're fucking doing the dopamine thing again. That... compulsion to sort of achieve or to win or to sort of drive things forward is really really good but it's not necessarily needed when you're sat around the dinner table with some friends so just
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
realizing that first off realizing it's not necessarily always your job to be the interesting one it's other people's jobs to make you feel interesting by opening up questions to you that cause you to think more deeply um Another one is that point around why to certain people do we have lots to say and to others we don't have anything at all. Is that your fault?
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Because you're the same person between these two different people. The difference is the people. So that suggests that there's something going on within them that is causing you to feel more or less comfortable with opening up about yourself. And on top of that, it means that...
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
We decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way over and over again. And unfortunately, they all seem to be the big things too. It's never insights about how to put up level shelves or charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party. Instead, we spend most of our lives learning firsthand the most important lessons that the previous generation already warned us about.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
The people who make you feel really comfortable are exciting and interesting, even though they don't actually need to be interesting. So anyway, I think reverse charisma, much easier way to be interesting. And we could all do with cultivating a bit more of it. Jack Butcher, another lesson from him. He came on the show four years ago, something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
He says, if more money wouldn't change how you spend your time, you're already rich. And a similar insight from James Clear to stop trading things that matter for ones that don't. So if you already live a comfortable life, then choosing to make more money but live a worse daily life is a bad trade. And yet we talk ourselves into it all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
We take promotions that pay more, but swallow our free time. We already have a successful business, but we break ourselves trying to make it even more successful. There's too much focus on wealth and not enough focus on lifestyle. And those two lessons, if more money wouldn't change how you spend your time, you're already rich, brings richness of being wealthy way closer to you.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
Now, there's some people that have got high materialism set point. Maybe the way that their families showed love when they were young was through gifts. Maybe they've got a sort of keeping up with the Joneses mentality. Maybe they're in a very high net worth neighborhood or something.
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
And if that's you, then if you can't deprogram it, you're going to have to earn a lot of money because in order for you to feel worthy, you're going to have to have material possessions that sort of match that level. But
Modern Wisdom
#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill
you're the sort of person who like me doesn't have particularly expensive tastes and really if my net worth doubled all i would do is maybe buy slightly nicer coffee machine i don't know like there's i don't there's nothing that's sort of in my mind where i think oh my god you know i'd really love that thing and that's been the case for
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Is Adolescence a bit too real?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, right. What's for anybody that wanted to try and be sort of educationally effective? Yeah. You end up in this environment that kind of does tend toward the lowest common denominator. You know, the naughtiest kid in class determines the pace at which the class moves.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
It's only going to be the top two years in the UK. Okay. You know, if this is the case, if they're going to, or if they go, oh yeah, 11 year olds are allowed to see this pretty disturbing series that's got some very adult themes in. Yeah. What about his family life? What about the background there?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I only watched the fourth episode last night. I got 20 minutes in, I started fast-forwarding, and I was like, this episode was totally fucking pointless. The final episode of that series, maybe, I don't know, dramatically it's interesting, but in terms of sort of driving the narrative forward, for me it did absolutely nothing in terms of educating me about...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
uh, any of the motivations for any of the characters really didn't deepen much other than it just said like his course, his case hasn't yet been determined.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Could it be the stuff online? Could it be the, the, uh, feelings of inadequacy sexually. But one of the things it wasn't was broken home, abusive father, kid falling behind.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Have you ever come across the dynamite thing?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
If you've been feeling a bit sluggish, then your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a massive role in your energy and your performance, and being able to see them charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. So if you have not been performing
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
in the gym or the bedroom, the way that you would like. This is an awesome way to work out what's happening inside of your body. Getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is only $500.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Because of exclusively because of in cell manosphere content coming from a good family, blah, blah, blah.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And right now you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I thought that was very, very interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And look, there's two ways, there's a million ways to look at it, but there's two ways that I'm looking at it, which is, one, it left lots of potential open loops. And you could say, well, how many lines of Manosphere-related...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Well, I mean, I guess there's an interesting mirroring going on, which is in the show itself, a lot of the adults seemed confused by what was happening with young people, specifically with young boys, especially with the lexicon and the emojis that they've got that are going on. And... It's been reflected in how confused the real world is when this thing has landed.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And it's like, you know, to lump all of these groups in together, to use these emoji thing, I would love, I mean, maybe someone will tell me, yeah, yeah, yeah. The dynamite thing is an exploding red pill. You are maybe the number one researcher of incels on the planet. And it's something that you've never seen.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I've been swimming around the world of sort of mating research and sexual selection stuff for half a decade. And I'm still like, I've never seen this. I didn't know that orange heart meant this. Now the orange heart like means like hot to trot, but not. And then purple meant good. I love you, but I don't love me or whatever the fuck. All of that.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I'm like, eh, that doesn't really have anything to do with the world that we're in. But most of the other stuff, I was like, I think this is largely, and if it's just a dramatic device, if it's like, oh, we're going to make it up. is this interesting sort of key to things, then fine. But it definitely seems to sort of lay a lot of stock and a lot of motivation at the feet. It's the only exposition
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
the only clearly stated motivation for why it would have happened. The rest you have to infer yourself. Everything else has to be inferred.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
It doesn't even say, all it does is talk about he was posting photos of women, doesn't say who you were following, doesn't say, oh, you were on this Reddit forum. We see that you've got Discord on your phone. These were the groups that you were a part of. None of that. Actually, he doesn't give them access to his phone.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So it'd be interesting what would have happened if they had gone on that and they'd have seen that. But even listen to us now. As we're discussing this now, we're analyzing this kid as if he's a real person. And it's one of the interesting...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
things about a drama that's kind of taken on a life of its own, that the reaction to it and the reaction to the reaction is now way bigger than the actual series itself.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
There's some degree of insight because they talk about blue pill being sort of not seeing the world accurately, red pill seeing the world accurately. And it's like, okay, well, where's black? Where's the black pill? Because that's the one that actually is adhered to by incels. And they fucking hate the red pill. They hate the blue pill.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
In fact, they probably just like pity the blue pill or kind of think of them as like... Normies. Yeah, they're just muggles. But the red pill, they actually think, oh, you kind of could see what it's like, but you're choosing to not see the full truth.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
psychologist? Why the fuck were you not called up to?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
fixed all of this, but also would have made pretty massive changes to the script. These wouldn't have been minor changes.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
On the 4D chess thing, there's an interesting take from Bill Burr where he says, ladies, if you could only support the WNBA the way that you support a fat chick who's given up on her diet and is no longer a threat to you. And what he's pointing out is a really fucking fascinating insight about intersexual competition.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
where you could say some less gracious areas of psychology research may say that one of the reasons that women are so in support of the body positivity movement is that it causes certain women to eat their way out of the mating competition. They size themselves up and out. It's like, no, darling, please go on. You look beautiful as you are.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Meanwhile, I'm not going to adhere to the same body shape and size that you are. Which means that you're at whatever level and I'm going to be at a level which is more typically attractive. And you could see the same if you did have the 5D chess guys in there that like, yeah, women don't want you. They're all sluts. They're going to break your heart. I lost all of my stuff in a divorce.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Meanwhile, they can actually go out. It's like, get yourself out of the mating pool of the men that are potentially in my competition.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Let's talk about young male syndrome and the male sedation hypothesis, which you guys very kindly put into a paper recently. What commentary, what contribution do you think the show makes to that?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I think so massively. I mean, this is my whole thing, that where is all of the incel violence at is a great question to ask. And the show... psychologically I think does kind of a poor job of creating maybe it's more shocking this is the thing you don't know whether it's 7D chess from the writers or if it's not and I guess again that's the beauty of art right it's open to interpretation but
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
If you come from a good family, if you have relatively good grades in school, you've got two real-world friends that you hang about with outside of the house. So you're not a stay-at-home basement dweller. You actually have these things. There was some stuff about he tried to do sports and he struggled with that and he didn't have typical masculine pursuits and things.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But largely, if you're from a good family and you don't have any of the sort of prototypical predictors of this kind of violence, it...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
that suggests that the online influence is a bigger deal yeah look it could happen to your boy too yes you don't know what he's up you think he's just going and playing tennis on the weekend and hanging out with his friends during the week and his grades in school are good but this is how nefarious the online content is that it could turn even your boy into a cold-blooded that's in my that's my reading of it as well and interviews i've read from jack thorne he talks about how uh
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Also, remember, I don't think that... Do incels talk about 80-20 that much?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
uh story to point to in my view it's complex though it's way more i mean it's great and there are some guys who climb that mountaintop and realize actually it's great i fucking love it up here yeah exactly come and join me uh like join my course yeah i like i mean you know neil's been on the show tucker's been on the show dan's been on the show andrew's been on the show even though i
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
A lot of these guys, they've got very interesting stories. I think Tucker's got a wonderful arc to him. Neil's arc's a little bit more complex. But I wonder what the story that a young... boy, young man would take away from that. What my body is telling me is I want more. I want more sex. I want more attention. I want more status. I want women to like me. I'm uncertain about myself.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And you're saying that I need to like transcend this thing that I've owned, this dynamic that I've only just begun to become aware of. I feel like, I mean, look, some guys mature very quickly. My ex-business partner from when I was running Nightlife met his to-be wife, In the start of second year, I remember dropping him off outside of a house when we were 19.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
They were together for six years, got married, dogs, dogs, kid, kid, kid, you know, and now they're 37 and still married together. So, you know, some people just kind of get that sense of where they're going. They have that level of emotional sort of self-awareness.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, I mean, that confusion, like I say, there is some real... like poetic irony in the fact that the reception of the show has as much confusion about the messaging of the show as the adults in the show do and that everybody is just...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Well, one interesting point, I guess, is had it been a mixed race family, had it been somebody from a broken home, had it been somebody from an obvious sort of underclass background, I think the headlines would be very different, especially if it had been, you know, a black boy that had done this to especially a white girl. it would have been uproar.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
This would have been playing into racist tropes. This would have been sort of completely unacceptable. And then if it was, this is one thing Rob Henderson said that would have been really interesting if they'd done it this way. If the boy had come from a single father home, Interesting. That would have been super, super fascinating. Okay. So what does this mean?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Oh, well, now we're getting into sort of role models, young men's role models within the house that you have one that isn't absent. You actually have one that's stuck about more, maybe you would say in some ways than a father that stays in an intact home.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I think looking at the motivation of this kid to kill the girl, if you removed the couple of scenes that refer to online manosphere content, what you end up with is a...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
boy who stabs his bully yes yeah and that was bold of the show to depict the victim as the bully and specifically about somehow culpable yeah at least initiating that because up until the point at which jamie confronts her and has a knife on him she's in the wrong right yeah right and again there is no amount of bullying that justifies getting stabbed yes a fictional girl being stabbed by a fictional boy in a
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, well, I mean... the young male syndrome and sort of male sedation thing of at some point there will be some incident which can be referred back to whether it's in one month or 10 months or 10 years there will be something that could be sort of related back to them and the sort of finger-pointing Cassandra Complex can come out appropriately.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Why do people care so much about incels?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I don't know. I mean, the way that it's shot, the one shot thing is really fascinating. And because of that, you don't get as much content per minute as you would if it was quick cut, because you have to track where the camera's going. And that means that there's way more Chekhov's guns lying around. There's unclosed loops all over the storyline. But...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I, similar to you, I'm like, okay, so what are the policies? If the policies were something similar to what Australia's got, so a social media ban for under-16s, I don't think that's a particularly bad idea. I think I'd probably be in support of that.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I remember I brought this up maybe a year ago. I think I told Rogan about this where it was like, uh, they've had to ban vapes in schools as if, as if that wasn't something that kind of should have already been banned. Um, but I mean, you and me both went to school when I think I got my first Nokia bullshit at five.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
14 or 15 I don't there's no way I would have even taken it to school yeah like I wasn't texting anybody off of it I wasn't like using it to call people yes so yeah I think I just guess with the interventions the danger is it uh
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
has anybody looked at why Andrew Tate isn't more popular among young boys? And, uh, I, that this isn't me saying, I can't believe it. Uh, but I don't know. I get the sense. What was it? Like 12, 13% of white boys. Uh, maybe they don't resonate with the messaging so much. Maybe they're way more mature than I give those sort of young kids credit for.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Uh, maybe they're sufficiently immature that that messaging doesn't yet land that like Bugattis and sparkling water and the bitches and stuff like isn't really hitting home. So that's kind of interesting. But,
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, I mean, the coordination, thankfully, I think we're protected, at least in the UK, in that the government is so useless that they wouldn't be able to get this together. So the rollout just straight up wouldn't happen.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I mean, there was a healthy masculinity, was this thing that me and George from the Tin Man were talking about, where schools had realized, or at least some of the people that were talking about this, had realized that using the word toxic masculinity had kind of become a meme of itself.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Kind of like referring to something as feminism when it covers a whole range of sins or toxic feminism or whatever. Toxic masculinity was used. So they changed being against toxic masculinity to being for healthy masculinity.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
The problem is it's the exact same set of policies. Okay. And like being pro healthy masculinity was just being anti what they called toxic masculinity. Yes. So I'll be... Very interested. I don't even think that the why are young boys struggling and where are all of the good male role models at conversation has got off the ground yet.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
You know, I was listening to an interview with the director, Thorne. Or is he one of the writers?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And it was, you know, one of those classic...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
bbc channel like radio 5 type interview shows went on for about half an hour and one of the ladies that was on the on the panel said you know there's a lot of women that feel quite upset about this about this conversation around how men of men are struggling because they're thinking and they had to bleep it it was the only swear word that was said in the entire interview which is about 30 minutes long fucking hell you know we've only just had a bit of attention paid to us how long ago was me too and i'm like
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah. And the world moves pretty fucking quick. Yeah. So it was almost the entire Not zero sum either. Yeah. The attention that's being paid to boys that are falling behind somehow takes away from girls that are outstripping them.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So that was that just really gave me another I don't know every time that I think ground has been broken and that sort of progress has been made and that maybe we're getting a really nicely balanced sense of what How the world sees the struggles of everybody, right? But specifically with my interests, those of boys and men. And every time I'm like, I mean, it's just, it's self-evident now, right?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Like you even look at, I would bet if you look at sixth form colleges enrollments in the UK, don't even go to university. Wow. Look at sixth form colleges. You're going to start to see that sex ratio skewed. I would imagine it's going to be 55-45, maybe 60-40, something like that. By the end of this decade, it's going to be two thirds to one third women to men on every pretty much campus.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Is she chirping away?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I mean, I think, you know, so much of the modern, whether it's Cosmopolitan or Elle magazine or whatever, that are talking about women's sex positions, you know, whether it's the sort of new flurry that we're seeing of attachments and childhood issues that are coming up and how to heal these things and anxious attachment, you know.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
A lot of that, I think, is providing adults with the education they were never given as children.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I was going to say, if you're looking to try and fix the neat problem of boys dropping out of school, remind them that it doesn't even need to be for their education. It doesn't even need to be for their earnings. But it can be for their future partner and their sort of eligibility to the women. Absolutely, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
There's something odd, I guess, that what women are supposed to be looking for is an honest signal of who you really are. So when I first started working on my diction for the show, I worked with a speech coach. And I remember thinking, I was like kind of surprised at the reaction of some of my friends when I started doing it. I'm like, hey, I'm working with this speech coach.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I've got a TEDx talk coming up later this year, and I'm going to start doing this thing. Like, why? Yeah. you speak fantastic. I'm like, well, I think I can speak sort of more accurately. There's certain conventions when it comes to communication that I think I'm going to be able to improve on. So, you know, just make sure that you don't lose your character. And I was like, huh, it took ages.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
It took like three or four years for me to actually realize what they meant. Um, What they mean is there is a sense of self very closely tied to the way that you speak, to the presentation of your thoughts. And for some reason, getting something like a speech coach doesn't feel disingenuous, but it feels like you're changing something that's very sort of
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, it certainly seems like people are confusing a work of fiction for a documentary.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
uh, innerly connected to who you really are. Uh, but for instance, if you were to say I'm a saxophone player and I take lessons to become better at saxophone and someone stepped in and said, but what about your true real saxophone ability? Don't be worried about, you know, w w what if they get rid of that?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And you go, well, there are objectively sort of better and worse ways to do this, but nobody looks at their saxophone playing ability or their football kicking ability as sort of a sense of self. So they're able to improve on it in this kind of a way. And I think that there's an equivalent when it comes to the way that men attract women.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
What you're supposed to be doing is having a natural outgrowth, which is a reliable signal of your real humor, your real charisma, your real conscientiousness. And if you game the system by becoming better at these things through a conscious process, that actually makes your signal less reliable.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And you just have to shut up about it.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah. Well, it's so strange. I just want to sort of sit on this a little longer and try and work out what are the areas in which this does and doesn't matter because Is it the same for a puny guy to go to the gym? Because that was me when I went to university. I was like 65 kilos. I remember when I was 20 years old and I was living in Edinburgh.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I spent about six months in Scotland doing my placement year with my business partner. And I remember the day that I hit 70 kilos. And I was like, I am fucking huge. Remembering that now I'm close to sort of 86. So I've gained, since then, probably a kilo a year. Pretty much linearly. And...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I remember thinking that's my, but then if you look at it, you go, okay, well, what about your true 65 kilo self? You know, going to the gym in many ways is sort of gaming that. You can even start to adjust facial structure. The thickness of your neck has a really big impact, I think, on how attractive a lot of men look. That's sort of much more. Yeah. What about when your beard comes in?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
What if you dye your beard? Well, girls can dye their hair. What about girls that wear makeup? But no one would look at a girl that wears makeup and say, that's an unfair signal. It's just more societally accepted. But then we also see those videos of surprisingly normal looking girls that turn into supermodels, the transformation, and they're painted on with all of this sort of stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
If you're talking about status as well, I would say that it's not easy to acquire, but it's not impossible either. And really, one of the main things there is just consistency. That if you keep hammering away on anything for long enough, you'll probably accrue some degree of it. And if we're going to say that
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
status is a non insignificant predictor of how successful a man is going to be in the mating market what you end up with is well For women, it's just like youth and fertility cues, right? Like it's sort of the typical beauty stuff, which is much more fucking ruthless. Like, yeah, sure, you can use enhancement and cosmetic surgery and stuff like that to kind of stave off this entropy.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But for a guy, I would say that if you were a low value male, you are in a better position to increase your likelihood of becoming sort of higher value than if you're a woman. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's... because, frankly, I'm dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day with Element.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
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Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
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Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, I think, you know, your point about masculinity and sort of where we're at with that is a really good one. And this is something... that I had this debate. It never got shown. I got flown all the way to Qatar. I think I was talking to you. We did a bit of prep for it. I did this big debate in Qatar. I flew from LA to Qatar, which is 16 and a half hours and was put up for a bunch of days.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And I did this debate and it's really interesting. And all this stuff happened. It never got shown, or at least hasn't been shown yet. And in it, my interlocutor mentioned that he felt like masculinity was in too tight of a box. And if you have too tight of a box, it meant that somebody like him, who was into performing arts and dance when he was a young, gay...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
lebanese man which i was like i just want to kind of recognize that's probably not an easy circle to square somehow uh that it didn't allow him to conform to any versions of masculinity and his goal was to blow the box open and as with the racism question as with the misogyny question if everything is masculinity then nothing is masculinity really good point and what you're saying to young men if you say well you can define masculinity for yourself yeah that is the exact same as you get no guidance on how to be a person yeah because
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
defining from first principles, discarding the wisdom of fucking thousands of years and going, yeah, work this one out for yourself, dude. It's like, hey, I don't have to do that when it comes to tying my shoes. I didn't have to come up with my own knot to tie my shoes with.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
That's true, but that's only one very small portion of a much bigger map that you want to get in there. What about masquerade? What about competition? What about the need for aggression, the need for protection? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I think you're really setting them up for a loss. Something tells me that the woman who commented on your Instagram does not have a son. Right. She may have a different intuition if she had a son. Because if you had a son, you go, well, I can do the whole luxury beliefs thing of rules for thee, but not for me and my progeny. But what are you going to do?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Are you going to permanently fucking tie your son's hand behind his back and say, yeah, you don't need to compete. You don't need to be bothered about that.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
We've had a bunch of Uh, artistic interpretations of this. Was it, uh, don't worry, darling. I had a character that was based on this in cell God in cell King or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, and, uh, red skull as well. You remember? Yeah. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So we've had a few of these and I do kind of get the sense that Tate is perhaps a slightly orthogonal successor to that position that you have a group that is traditionally in a position of preference and authority and some degrees of privilege.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But, you know, that Christine Ember article from about 18 months ago just fucking hits the nail on the head with this, where she says, modern men are being made to pay for the sins of a patriarchy they no longer feel a part of. Nails it, yeah. And you think, well, who is it?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
If you're going to use the Andrew Tates of the world to say, look at how they have all of this money and all of this power and all of this influence. Fraternity with their brothers and kin.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And you think, well, yeah, but what about the 14 million men in America who are like out of Nicholas Eberstadt's sort of silent generation of workless men, 50% of which are spending almost every day on some form of recreational or prescription drug? Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, I remember with the UnitedHealth CEO shooter that, you know, I don't think it really matters whether you thought he was an appropriate flaming sword-wheeling truth-teller or a person that...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
a murderer just a straight up murderer that wasn't doing anything right what you can definitely guarantee is that if you create a sex symbol and make an awful lot of attention around someone everybody that has a cause and everybody's cause to them is the most important cause because By definition, it's the most important cause.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
William Costello, ladies and gentlemen. William, you're great. I appreciate the fuck out of you. Where should people go? Don't want to keep up to date with that.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Fuck me, we need to get you a website, dude.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
You are going to end up in a world where people just think, well, if I want to get climate change or if I want to get immigration or if I want to get gun control, if I want to get health CEO, if I want to get hypergamy on the table, all I need to do is commit one of these acts of violence and look at how much positive attention I'm going to get or look at how much attention I'm going to get.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, they're a bigger risk to themselves than they are to anybody else.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Absolutely. It was pretty normal. The northeast of the UK plays famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in England, and then it lost that. So we didn't even have that title anymore. But yeah, very much so. I mean, you know, it was a zoo. It was a fucking zoo.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I think of everybody that went to school in my year at Grangefield, I would guess less than 10 of them went to the sixth form college that was about a quarter of a mile away. And... maybe out of the entire year group, two or three other people went to university except for me. And this is a big school. There would have been hundreds of kids per year. So it's just not got that.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And I mean, to be honest, looking around at that school, they even talk about, are you thinking about doing your A-levels? And he's like, this kid's 13, and they're talking about him doing his A-levels. I mean, yeah, the psychopath thing, I guess you have to play into tropes in some way.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And lots of killers have been portrayed as somebody that's psychopathic because we need to have, there needs to be an othering of not only how was this person sort of caught up and whipped around, but there needs to be some culpability on them. And I think that sort of some endogenous issue, like the personality of this person, he's a psychopath.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But I would be very surprised if somebody that's even mildly psychopathic would wet the bed when the door gets kicked in at night. They're not going to care. They're not going to be worried.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Whereas if you were to ask a question of, have you ever gone on a vacation with your partner and it's been emotionally difficult? Have you ever had that? Oh, totally. That's a great question. That was something that happened to me recently. And dude, it's weird because you've got this sort of bittersweet sensation.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
You're away in somewhere that's so beautiful, but you and your significant other aren't really getting on. And I don't really know. I mean, is that common? Like, has that ever happened to you? Oh, no. Like that's an interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
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#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Best of all, Dr. Andrew Cuban is their scientific advisor and Dr. Mark Hyman is their chief medical officer, so you can trust that the data and insights you receive are as scientifically sound as they are practical. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's $500.
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#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Right now, you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I think
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
I've been pretty fascinated by parasocial relationships and the incentives for online writers, YouTubers, podcasters, you know, influencers of any kind to try and growth hack or speed run this sense of relatability and authenticity and connection. And I think faux vulnerability, sort of performative vulnerability, maybe we could call it, is definitely one of the places that you see this happen.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
And, you know, at its extreme, this is kind of victimhood pedestalization in some ways. Victimhood pedestalization tends to not actually happen from the person. It tends to kind of be bestowed on them.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
by by everybody else in a way you don't tend to pedestalize yourself as a as a victim um but yeah that performative vulnerability that sort of tuning up of things that didn't really affect you all that much or maybe didn't really happen or are a surreptitious way if you're getting gossip in or maybe you're trying to vent to tell somebody something about someone else you know venting this have you looked into venting much as a adaptive mechanism
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
I've looked into office gossip, but not venting. Tell me about it. Venting is so fucking sick. So venting is very much a female, intrasexual, competitive trait. And the reason is, venting allows you to... distribute gossip about a potential rival under the auspices of you being a caring compatriot. So I'm able to say, Charles, I'm really worried about John.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Because, you know, he's just like, he's sleeping with, in fact, let me, I'll pretend we're going to be women. So I'm Christine and you're Charlotte. So Charlotte, I'm really worried about Johanna. Johanna's just, she's sleeping with all of these guys. And like, I'm really worried that she's going to get hurt. You know, like I'm just, she doesn't really seem like she's being herself.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
And then, you know, what am I, in that one sentence, what am I telling you? I'm telling you how much promiscuous sex Johanna's having. I'm positioning myself as somebody who is, you know, I would never. I would never do that.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Exactly. So implicitly, you're derogating her fecundity and her chastity whilst positioning yours above hers. But it's culpably deniable because you're not doing it to gossip. I wasn't gossiping. I'm just so worried. Joanna, I didn't mean to tell Charlotte. I wasn't trying to talk behind your back. I'm just so worried about you with all of this stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
And venting, it's a very unique type of manipulative. It can be a unique type of manipulative sort of social conversation.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Is that how you say it? Yeah. Parasocialism.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Talk to me about the difference between introverts and extroverts. Are there advantages and disadvantages that each have? Sort of off the top of your head, you'd think, well, extroverts have got all of the advantages here because they're the ones that are more outgoing. They're going to have more experience. They're going to find social engagements, less energy sapping.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
It's something which in the wrong hands, I guess vulnerability is something which is potentially destructive or embarrassing if put into the wrong hands. That might be one way to put it, I suppose.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Yeah, but if you start spreading the rumor that I bought a cool yacht, that does nothing except for making me seem cooler. Okay, what's the final skill?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
What did you come to learn about extroverts and introverts and communication?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Was this what the Dartmouth study was looking at? And that's something to do with a guitarist as well?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Yeah, it's interesting how one correctly positioned person can sort of change the dynamic of a conversation. And I often think about, I often think about I had this idea recently about why around some people, it feels like we have so much to say and around other people, we don't feel that interesting. I'm sure that you'll have read the story about Winston Churchill's mother. Me too.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Have you not heard it? Oh, you're going to absolutely love this one. So I wrote about this in my newsletter a couple of weeks ago. So Winston Churchill's mother, I never realized she was kind of a bit of a, how would you say? Like a socialite type thing. Okay. Sort of a little like a Hollywood socialite type thing. She's called Jenny Jerome.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
So she got to dine with Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone on consecutive nights. So it was the two rivals that were vying for leadership. And she got to dine with them on consecutive nights. And she said, when I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought that he was the cleverest man in England.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling like I was the cleverest woman. And it sort of perfectly explains why around some people it feels like we have lots to say and around other people it feels like we're boring. And I realized a lot of the time what people want, they want to be charismatic.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
You know, Gen Z even had to recreate it as Riz because charisma was too sort of boomery and uncool. Um, and everybody wants Riz, but when you actually think about, okay, so how'd you become charismatic, which is sort of energetic, outgoing, extroverted, likeability with sexiness, I guess. Um, It's really hard. How do you make an uncharismatic person more charismatic? It's really difficult.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
But reverse charisma, which is not trying to be interesting to other people, but trying to make them feel interesting around you, that's way easier. That's significantly easier to do.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
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#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
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#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
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Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Yeah, I mean, Adam Mastroianni has this great insight around everything is just vibes, basically, which is the same sort of realization you've come to. You know, he's a guy who I think is still in academia. He did postgrad, he did a PhD, he did all of this stuff. And I think maybe he did his undergrad 15 years ago, something like that. And he was on the quiz team, the quiz team. Oh, really?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
And he tested himself to just remember the names of the classes that he took in his first year of undergrad. Just the names of the classes. And I think he got 40% of the names of the classes. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Yeah, exactly. But he said he can remember how one of the particular lecturers made him feel when he explained about some of the different, I think he threw a packet of Maltesers into the lecture audience and someone caught them and then he talked about prediction and prediction errors and then he talked about disobedience and obedience when the guy threw them back when he asked
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
And, you know, he couldn't remember the name of the class, but he could remember the way that he felt. So one of the area, you know, we've sort of talked about the deep conversations, something which a lot of people have a mortal fear over is small talk. You know, the sort of awkward elevator, the water cooler thing, the sat waiting for whatever. How can people better survive small talk?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Well, I'm aware that a lot of people get worried about that level of opening up. I don't want to be seen as sort of too keen or too serious. That doesn't seem very fun. It doesn't seem very exciting. But to fight the fight as a person that likes deep conversations, who likes small talk? No one likes small talk, regardless of what it is. And people are very publicly castigating small talk as well.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
It's the worst thing in the world. We're talking about the weather. Somebody brings up the weather and it's like, I can't believe that's all they had to talk about to do the thing.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
How can people better start deep conversations in a less awkward way? And how can people better receive deep questions in a less awkward way?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
You mentioned astronauts there. Didn't you look at NASA? Did you learn stuff from NASA? What'd you learn?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know. What an odd sound that emanates. But I suppose that also explains why watching a recording of a stand-up set on Netflix in your house on your own versus going to a comedy club surrounded by 150 other people, the level of laughter is way different.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Oh, my favorite place for a theory to sit. As yet unproven, and maybe to be replication-crisised out of existence.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
That's interesting. This episode is brought to you by AG1. Over the span of about a year, I tried pretty much every green screen that I could to see which one was best. And I came across AG1 and I've stuck with it for over three years because it's the best. It's the most comprehensive, highly tested and rigorously formulated.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
They genuinely care about holistic health, which is why I've got my mum to take it and my dad to take it and tons of my friends to. And if I found anything better, I would switch. But I haven't. which is why I still use it.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
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Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
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Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. What about when it comes to couples, potentially the most fraught, most important communication, the genesis of your story as well? Yeah, no, absolutely. What are the best and worst ways that couples communicate?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Where does that sense of teammatesness come from?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
As opposed to I want to control you.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
What do you think online discourse has done to our expectations of communication?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
offline i'm pretty good at posting and ghosting so i'm not maybe the best uh avatar for someone who sort of gets into maybe the kind of interesting cantankerous style back and forth conversations that people are thinking of i certainly know that it's done one thing which is which is pretty interesting which is it's given people uh
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
a sense of surrealness when the real world doesn't reflect the world that they expected from what they learned online. For instance, let's say that you are a successful young woman and you have moved up within your industry and have managed to get yourself to a place where you feel pretty sort of competent and well-respected.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
And you keep hearing all of these stories online about how women are oppressed and there's rampant misogyny everywhere. And And you look at your own life and you struggle to see that. And you think, well, actually, to be honest, being a woman's kind of helped me in many ways. I've been given opportunities that I'm not sure I would have been given if I was a man.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
But the way that the discourse is put forward online, the type of conversations that rise to the top, the ones that are the most inflammatory... Obviously, it's edge cases, right? Edge cases are exactly what garners the most attention. It's never the reliable woman who worked her way up step by step and didn't encounter any catastrophe along the way.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
It's the one that had an awful predatory boss who... who was making them do terrible things in an attempt to try and climb the totem pole. And rightly so, that's newsworthy because it's interesting and scandalous. But you lose the vast majority of the bell curve, like the boring bell curve, and you just get these edge cases. But I think what that leads to... Any other...
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
highly politicized topic online um i mean you've seen this in uh surveys right when uh people are asked how many x type of people are shot by police every year it's like thousand thousand percent ten thousand percent hundred thousand percent over x estimations because what is presented online and what is newsworthy if it bleeds it leads doesn't necessarily represent what i think is people believe like the number of people that get shot versus the number of people that die by cancer
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
What would you consider the component skills of communication if you were to bucket them together?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
or something and you're like well because people die by cancer every day and it's not newsworthy unless it's some celebrity or whatever um so we have this skewed perspective of how the world's supposed to treat us how other people are supposed to see us different social groups different classes different genders different races different positions within society and then when we encounter evidence in the real world which should be the most real thing that we have that doesn't agree with what the online world told us that we should do
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
There's a cognitive dissonance. Massively. And I realized this when having a conversation with Freya India, who's on Substack. She does a blog called Girls. Brilliant. And she was saying a lot of the time Gen Z gets sort of criticized for... well, the internet isn't the real world. And you say, these kids are spending eight to 10 hours a day online.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
They may be spending twice as much time on the internet as they are asleep.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Yeah. Yeah. Probably either Luke, my tour manager or George, who is a friend and has been on the show 10 times.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Dude. Awesome. Let's bring this one into land. What a great place to finish. I, uh, I, I love it. I've been very much thinking about communication over the last few years. And, uh, I think an interesting element is how closely tied it is to our sense of self that, um, what maybe some people have got in the back of their mind is, well, you know, it's all well and good.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
You saying that I can work on my communication and I can build up these skills, but I don't want to be fake. You know, I want to be me. And it's so funny how nobody attributes their natural God-given pickleball ability And if I was to say, well, you went and got a coach, didn't you? And you improved your dink game and you improved your serve.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
But did you not want to have your real – were you not worried about your real serve coming out? What about that?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
You've ruined it. Yeah, exactly. I started working with a speech therapist about three, four years ago, addiction coach. And one of the things that a bunch of friends said to me was, dude, I mean, you've got to be careful. What if you totally lose – all of the character. But nobody says that about, well, you're 270 pounds and 28% body fat.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
And you go, but what about all of that beautiful fat that you've spent all of this time building up? You're going to replace it with this muscle? Really? Is that the real you? Is that muscle really you? And it's just odd. And when you see it, you can't unsee it. There's certain things that we have that are very tightly tied to our sense of self, right?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Our thought patterns, the texture of our mind, the way that we speak, the language that we use, the way that we enunciate. And there's other things that aren't, like our waistline. And when you confuse the two, when you confuse, I mean, you get into some pretty hot water.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Yeah. Australia, I get accused of a lot, but yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
A little bit because... Yeah? Well, the cultural way markers that you rely on... It's interesting being an immigrant, which I am, to a country that speaks the same language as you because you forget that you're an immigrant. If I was in Mexico or Thailand, I would be permanently reminded of the fact that I'm not from there. People don't look like me. People don't sound like me.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
But you're snuck under the radar here and... it's odd because you're culturally displaced. If I want to use an example for a chocolate that everybody would have eaten as a kid, I can't really use Cadbury's because Cadbury's is a British brand. I can't really talk about Yorkshire tea or Newcastle brown ale or the in-betweeners.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
So I have to do this weird sort of projection and I have to think, okay, what is the equivalent sort of ruminative thing that Charles knows that is the parallel of the thing I'm trying to use. So you have to sort of go around the houses quite a lot. There's certain sort of lexical things. We have an interesting difference with plurals versus you guys.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
So we would say Manchester United are having a bad season this year. Whereas you guys would say Manchester United is having a bad season this year. Yeah. Trash can, sidewalk, you know, little bits and pieces like that. But I just sort of, I don't know, it's becoming more natural to me. And yeah, maybe this is what going native is like. And I'm going to have a Texan twang within the next few years.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Dude, so good. Where should people go? Thank you so much. With everything that you do and write and talk about.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Go forth, my pretties, and destroy his inbox.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Heck yeah. Charles, I appreciate you. Until next time. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
It's interesting thinking about the two guys that I mentioned because they would both a lot of the time drop into that. And I think there's a sense of being seen when somebody asks you a question about how did that make you feel? Because at no point are they denying the fact that you felt that way or should have felt that way, that it feels like a judgment-free zone.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
I suppose communication is quite tightly tied to our sense of self. It's our expression of who we are. So when we look at somebody that's a good or a bad communicator, that's because they are a good or a bad communicator. What was the sense of self-worth comes through as well?
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
No, just it makes an awful lot of sense that it can conversations. Bad conversations can feel like a game of tennis where everybody is just waiting that turn. Oh, the ball's coming over the net. It's coming over. It's going to bounce. And then, oh, no, it's my turn to hit it.
Modern Wisdom
#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Have you thought, have you looked at this from an adaptive lens through? Yeah. Okay. So can you give me the.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
What's the meta lesson that's being taught there? Dad... Dad spends time asking questions to which there are not necessarily an answer because there is something enjoyable in the process of learning and trying to decipher what's happening.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You've got like a rebellious sovereign child, sovereign as they may be, but sometimes they still need the...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, that was cool. I remember you saying, just thinking about sort of future and culture and stuff like that, I remember you saying that the left had won the culture war and now they're just driving around shooting the survivors. Right. After the last six months of change that we've seen and sort of where we're at at the moment, what do you think the future of the culture wall looks like?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Is it a battle to not care about the news in an age of news saturation? All of this stuff, headlines 24 hours a day stream directly into your consciousness through a device in your pocket. A lot of what we've spoken about today is freedom, freedom from having to think about things or care about things that you do not have control over or that you shouldn't or that you don't want to.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And yet people are just submerged up to the bottom of their nostrils, basically drowning in So how, yeah, is it a battle to sort of stay out of the news when you're saturated in it?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
The desire is a contract to be unhappy until you get what you want. But for the most part, that's something that is in your life. It's like, until I lose the weight, until I get the job.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, if it's until the carbon dioxide parts per million are below this particular number, it's like, that's a...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You mentioned historians before. One of my friends has a question, his equivalent of Peter Thiel's question of what is it that you believe that most people would disagree with? His is, what do you think is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, a lot of people do that, as you said. It's funny how people who have achieved such a level of wealth, you don't think, why do you need the status? Given that most people use status to then try and cash in to achieve wealth. If you've achieved fucking money already, if you're post money or asset heavy, as it's known, why are you trying to go in the other direction?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
As you said, because we've got an illustrious history biologically of wanting status and wealth is kind of,
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Does that mean the reason to play the game is to win the game and be done with it is harder to win and be done with for status than it is for wealth? That's a good observation.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Whereas, well, you always have this sort of sense, and this is what leaderboards are, right? This is the iTunes billboard chart. That's right. And... It is zero-sum. Right. And it is, I guess, you know, the Forbes richest people on the planet.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I wonder whether some of the pushback that we've got against rich, wealthy, powerful people is disincentivizing.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You don't just need to, in fact, actually actively avoid castigating people if you want their behavior to change when they get something wrong. Look at reinforcing it when they get something right. It's happening at a societal level as well.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Jimmy Carr has this cool idea where he says trajectory is more important than position. So if you are number...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Naval, I really appreciate you. I hope that this has lived up to whatever weird daydreams you've been having. What have you got coming up? What can people expect from you over the next however long? Expect nothing. That's the most Naval way that we could have finished this. Dude, it's been a long time coming and I really do appreciate you for being here today.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
We'll see. It might be even worse now.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books... that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's interesting when you talk about sacrifice because a lot of the time people say, well, I sacrificed so much for my job. It's like, yeah, but that was you sacrificing something that you wanted less for something that you wanted more as opposed to genuinely taking some sort of cost. And yeah, I wonder whether...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Is that a realization you think you could have gotten to had you not had some success in the first place?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
if self-esteem is you adhering to your internal, your actions and your values aligning, even when it's difficult or perhaps even more so when it's difficult, I wonder whether there is a price that people who are more introspective, high integrity pay because you think, well, you've got this, uh, heavy set of overheads that you need to pay in some way.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Would I go on a stag hunt with me?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah. Uh, Did you deal with self-doubt in the past? Is that something that was a hurdle for you to overcome?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, that level of self-belief, I suppose, allows you to determine what is it that matters to me. My self-esteem, should I chase this thing or not? I can make a fair judgment on that as opposed to being so swayed. But it's such a good point about even if you think you're not consciously logging the stuff out.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I had this idea, the internal golden rule. So the golden rule says treat others the way that you should be treated, you want to be treated. The internal golden rule says treat yourself like others should have treated you. And it was a riposte to maybe people that didn't grow up with unconditional love in that way.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I think it's quicker in some ways. You know, one of your insights is it's far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
The most expensive trait is pride. How come?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
What's pride in this context here?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And that's why it's an expensive trade because you continue to need to repay it in one form or another.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Talking about risk, something I've been thinking about a lot to do with you is Any moment when you're not having a good time, when you're not really happy, you're not doing anyone any favors. I think lots of people have become unusually familiar with suffering silently in that sort of a way. Not having... A high bar for your expectation for quality of life.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You've gotten it backwards. You unlocked one of my trap cards. One of my favorite insights is that we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that's supposed to get it. So we sacrifice happiness in order to be successful so that when we're finally sufficiently successful, we can actually be happy. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, another one of yours, most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term, I think. That's classic. Winning the marshmallow test on a daily basis.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But there's an interesting challenge where I think people need to avoid becoming a suffering addict, sort of using suffering as the proxy for progress as opposed to the outcome of the suffering, right? It's like I was in pain not eating the marshmallow. I was in pain doing this work. I have attached well-being and satisfaction to pain, not to what the pain gets me on the other side of it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
,,,,,,,. P P P P P PG gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu, ac , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a a . . . . . ., the, P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P,實 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a el a ,,,,,,
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That not registering it emotionally thing, is that a... It's fundamental. It's so fundamental to so many things in life. Okay. Can we dig into that a little bit? Because again, I've only seen you as you, right? I didn't know you 20 years ago. I didn't know you as a child. So I've only seen you with this... Holistic selfishness, the integrated self-prioritization, whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I don't know what we called it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, that emotional reaction. I also get the sense, too, that maybe people have... lived obligation life for so long that they actually kind of struggle to tap into what it is that they want. They've hidden their wants and their desires and their needs, and they've deprioritized themselves so much for so long. They go, what do I want, actually? What is it? Do I want to go to this thing or not?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Because all I've done is be fucking puppeted, right? I've been marionetted by other people's desires for so, so, so long. I can't even tap into that anymore. And saying no feels like a war crime.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
My problems have got problems and I have a real problem about fixing my problems.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, lots of people are addicted to solving problems, so much so that sometimes people create problems when we don't have any simply so that we can solve them.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's also wanting something that you don't want.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I haven't heard that word in about 20 years. Yeah, prizes that are just not worth having or that create their own problems. But if you're not careful, you can end up in a place in life, not only that you don't want to be, but one that you didn't even mean to get to.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
After you've done this many people, pick the best one of the next, however many.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, you end up with a series of miserable successes, right? The outcome may have been the same, but the entire experience of getting there... And the journey is not only the reward.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Which means that you need to bail out quickly and you need to be decisive quickly. You need to take opportunities quickly and bail out quickly.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. You mentioned there about the people who've got a nightmare going on at home and are trying to fix the world. But a lot of the time that cynicism and pessimism we find in ourselves.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
We see the world, whether we want to, whether it's because we've imbibed what the news or the negative people around us have said, or it's a bit more kind of endogenous than that. It's just sort of in us. It's the way that we see the world. How can people avoid cynicism and pessimism within themselves?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
How do you navigate that tension?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So it's a barbell strategy. It's sort of black or it's white. And most people are sort of stuck in this gray bit. I'm like half in, but I kind of don't really know if I am.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
moving on to sort of thinking about happiness obviously a topic of yours that's a it's honestly the one that i feel least qualified to talk about is it like a guy that's got long arms teaching you how to bench press or a dude that's really tall teaching you how to deadlift someone that feels like they came from behind the eight ball yeah is you're asking a crazy person about their thoughts so just thought it through is happiness still more about peace than it is about joy
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
needing something to change your current positive situation being contingent on an adjustment. I'm getting something from the outside world.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's interesting because in the chase is this sort of lack this contingency.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Surprises are really interesting. The sort of unpredictability, I think, total bro science here, but I'm pretty sure that that's kind of how dopamine works, that things are a bit better than you expected.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Within that, it means that if you, for the perennial insecure overachievers that cloy for control, that really want to be able to, the schedule is perfectly done and we know the itinerary, we know where we're going to be at this time. You're in some ways, I guess, reducing down the capacity for surprise because everything has become very contrived, prescribed, done in advance, laid out.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Your ability to be surprised actually diminishes.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You say thinking about yourself is the source of all unhappiness, but presumably you need to work on yourself and your weaknesses as well. So some degree of reflection is important. And if thinking about yourself is a source of unhappiness, is this a price that you need to pay? I need to sort of reflect inward.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I'm going to have to diminish this level of happiness for a little while, and then I can use this new level. I've got my brown belt.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Is this a justification for detachment, cultivated ignorance, distraction?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I remember Vinny Haimath, the founder of Loom, said, I am rich and I have no idea what to do with my life. And you replied, God, kids on mission, pick at least one. That's right. Preferably all three.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I kind of had a self-induced Stockholm syndrome from this sort of a thing. Because I like to think about stuff. And you provide you with an endless number of things to think about. So you're kind of... Yeah, you have this... You're the prisoner and the prison guard at the same time. And... I had Abigail Schreier on the show.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
She wrote this book called Bad Therapy, sort of pushing back against therapy culture specifically for kids. But there was a blast radius that covered pretty much everything, including kind of CBT. I'm like, we're getting perilously close to some really evidence-based stuff here. But...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
the more that I've thought about it and the more that I've looked at the evidence, there is like basically a direct correlation between how much you think about yourself and how miserable you are.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah. Yeah. How have your become happy techniques developed over time?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You position yourself as being in lack in order to attain.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I just kind of just do my thing. Again, another question.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
something that i continually realize especially as i get to spend more time around people that are successful and you hear um it's very important to prioritize work-life balance right that's one of the most common things that people who have attained success say that's not my experience but if you look at you shouldn't be asking somebody who is successful what they do to continue their success now you should be asking them what did they do to attain their success when they are where you were
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's that tweet of yours that was people who are good at making wealth or people who are good at attaining wealth don't need to teach anybody else how to do it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, I think I've heard you talk before about how sort of unclosed loops problems that you're working on can cause you to be sleepless. I'm not a good sleeper.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's efficiency again, I guess, aligning the thing that you want to do with the way that you feel about what it is that you want to do.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
As you get older, one thing that becomes harder to ignore is your testosterone levels. They impact everything from... your energy, to your mood, and how well you recover.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
However, there are science-backed supplements like Tonkat that support testosterone, strength, and recovery, and that is why I'm such a huge fan of Momentus' product, because they make the only NSF-certified Tonkat LE on the planet.
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#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That means it's so rigorously tested that even Olympic athletes can use it, and why I partnered with them, because they make the most carefully tested, highest quality supplements on earth. This is a huge part of my brain, body, and sleep stack, which makes a big impact on my cognition, my strength, and my recovery. And if you're still unsure, Momentus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
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#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout.
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#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
a modern wisdom a checkout you mentioned anxiety before imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time is one of yours and anxiety is the emotion du jour of the 21st century and lots of driven people very anxious very paranoid that's what's caused them to be affected it pays so much attention detail oriented not letting things go staying up at night thinking about it that's the paranoia coming in
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Just sort of tying that into the life is short, stop fucking about. If you're faced with a difficult choice and you cannot decide, the answer is no. And the reason is modern society is full of options. Yeah. Knowing this rationally. Sounds great. But having the courage to commit to it in reality, I think, is a different task.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And cutting your losses quickly in the big three, relationships, jobs, and locations, is hard. What would you say to someone who may cerebrally be able to agree with you and say, I understand.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Jeffrey Miller had a tweet a long time ago that I always think about, and he said, every parenting book in the world could be replaced with one book on behavioral genetics.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
If you want a securely attached kid, pick a securely attached partner.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
The emotional pain of fearing change. I have this thing, the job, the location, the partner, I'm going to enter or not enter this thing. For the most part, it's leaving. I think we have this sort of loss aversion that we really feel.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
How would you advise people to get past themselves with that loss aversion, that fear of change? Oh my God, am I going to...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
The more seriously you take yourself, the unhappier you're going to be. You learned how to take yourself less seriously?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I'd back you if you want to make that pivot.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
There's a special type of pain in realizing that the advice that you need to hear right now is something that almost always you learned a long time ago. And that, you know, you're basically sort of the same person you were as you were nine. And a lot of the time people ask questions like, what advice do you wish that you would give yourself 10 years ago? People ask themselves that question.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
There's a challenge, I think, especially if people make very loud public proclamations about things. You mentioned there about you're almost a hostage to the things that you used to say, that being able to update your opinions and change your mind looks very similar to the internet as hypocrisy does. The difference between me saying something in the past and saying something different now is...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Almost invariably, the advice that you would give yourself 10 years ago is still the advice that you need to hear today.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny how we need that distance to be able to be a little bit more objective, to have a little bit more perspective. And it's almost a little bit of a trick, right? Because typically when you do that, you say, what would you tell a friend that was going through this? Right. And then you try and turn the advice to the friend around onto yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You always think, well, I'm not the friend. Okay, you 10 years ago. There's enough distance in that. You go, oh, I actually am still that person. There's just a single line between that and me.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Is that a justification for more experimentation, exploration, experience in life, sort of trying to find serendipity because all of these experiences are going to teach you an inescapable lesson?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Why would you not have accessed it already?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Perhaps I've learned, perhaps I've updated my beliefs, but so few people do it in a legitimate way. I think that the grifter shill, you'd see, this is the smoking gun that shows that he didn't really believe that thing all along.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I want to just read you a two-minute essay that I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It's called Unteachable Lessons. I've been thinking about a special category of lesson, one which you cannot discover without experiencing it firsthand. There is a certain subset of advice that for some reason we all refuse to learn through instruction. These are unteachable lessons.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it is going to be for us to find out ourselves, we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings from our elders, songs, literature, historical catastrophes, public scandals, and instead think some version of, yeah, that might be true for them. But not for me. We decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way, over and over again.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Unfortunately, they all seem to be the big things, too. It's never new insights about how to put up level shelves or charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party. Instead, we spend most of our lives learning firsthand the most important lessons that the previous generations already warned us about.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Things like, money won't make you happy, fame won't fix your self-worth, you don't love that pretty girl, she's just hot and difficult to get. Nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it. You will regret working too much. Worrying is not improving your performance. All your fears are a waste of time. You should see your parents more.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You'll be fine after the breakup and will be grateful that you did it. It's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life. And even reading this list back, I'm rolling my eyes at how fucking trite it is. These are all basic bitch, obvious insights that everybody has heard before. But if they're so basic, why does everyone so reliably fall prey to them throughout our lives?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And yeah, I went to a retreat in LA a couple of years ago and there was a guy that I used to follow that a big business and productivity advice, content creator, really, really successful. And he just totally stepped back from everything and
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And if they're so obvious, why do people who have recently become famous or wealthy or lost a parent or gone through a breakup start to proclaim these facts with the renewed grandiose ceremony of someone who's just gone through religious revelation? It's also a very contentious list of points to say on the internet.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
If you interview a billionaire who says that all of his money didn't make him happy or a movie star who said that her fame felt like a prison, the internet will tear them apart for being ungrateful and out of touch. So not only do we refuse to learn these lessons, we even refuse to hear the message from those warning us about them.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And even more than that, I think for every one of these, if I consider a bit deeper, I can recall a time, including right now, where I convinced myself that I am the exception to the rule. that my particular mental makeup or life situation or historical wounds or dreams for the future render me immune to these lessons being applicable.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
No, no, no, my inner landscape would be solved by skirting around the most well-known wisdom of the ages. No, no, no, I can thread this needle properly. Watch me dance through the minefield and avoid all of the tripwires that everyone else kicks. And then you kick one.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
and you share a knowing look, the kind that can only occur between two people who've been hurt in the exact same way, and a voice in the back of your mind will say, I told you so.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
There was a Nobel Prize winner who said something to the effect of everything worth saying may have been said before, but given that nobody was listening, it must be said again.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
On that, I've heard you say, you talk about the difference between seeming wise and being wise, that you tried to appear smart as a kid by sort of- Still do. Wrote memorization. Masquerading as insight and wisdom. And I certainly feel that. You know, a lot of the show, for me, I think, has been-
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
was and still is a redemption arc from this you know decade of my life where I completely suppressed any intellectual curiosity it's like okay I'll be a professional party boy for 10 years stand on the front door of a nightclub and give out VIP wristbands and have access to all of the pretty girls or you know the cool parties or whatever it might be seems like it worked out okay
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It did in some ways. And you had fun. Look, it was a good way to spend my twenties, but to sort of come back above, put your head above water, two degrees, one of which was a master's. And then this like, just shut down any of that learning. I mean, I did that while I was at uni. While I was at uni, I was running the events. So it was actually a decade and a half.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I think there was a big redemption arc within this show. And I constantly have to kind of wipe the slime off me of this sense that I need to prove myself and so much of it. That's why it really resonates with me. When you're memorizing things, it indicates that you don't understand them or that sort of, yeah, rote memorization and regurgitation masquerading as wisdom because
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
People use fluency as a proxy for truthfulness and insight. They use the complexity of your language and your communication.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But there's an allure in that, though. This was one of the things I had to do when I went to therapy. It's kind of been interesting. I think I've talked about this before.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Um, I needed to turn off podcast Chris when I stepped into therapy because most of the time that I spend one-on-one in a deep conversation that's undistracted throughout the week, I trained myself over, you know, when I started doing it 700 episodes now, 900 and whatever. Uh, and I...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I knew what I could do to say to this therapist, some, you know, to just sort of veer off a little and create some nice story, put a bow on it, push it across the table and watch your eyes light up a little bit, like a little grin or a self-deprecating joke or whatever. I'm like, you're not here. You're performing. You're doing this.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You're doing the Chris Williamson thing with the sort of jazz hands. So I have my own version. Okay. Tell me. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I wonder if this will close that loop or further entrench it. I wonder if you've made it way worse now and you're just going to have, well, first off, it was a dream and now it's reality plus a dream and I can't get away from him.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, I appreciate you said on Rogan, and this was something, you know, to kind of pay it back to you. I had a five headed Mount Rushmore of guests before I started this show. And it was Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Alain de Botton from the School of Life, you and Rogan. And that was my Hydra of a Mount Rushmore.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And, uh, I knew, I think someone had asked you at some point, maybe it was a tweet or something after Rogan, or maybe even said it on Rogan where you said, uh, I don't like to say the same thing twice, at least not in the same way.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I really, really respected that. You know, that was 2019. You said it was, uh, eight or nine years ago.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yes. And, uh, I really appreciated that because there is something, the content game, you can continue to sort of, I'm sure I'll have said many things today that the audience will have already heard, but caring enough about having novel insights or at least having a new perspective on similar insights.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Say, oh, well, you know, in the space of six years since you were on Joe, a lot of these things, well, I'm coming at them. Actually, the first thing I said to you today, like, ah, I'm not convinced that I actually fully agree with that thing that I used to say, which is cool, right? That's you showing that the position that you put in the ground previously is not a tether.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's not you being held to it anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, you're seeing, you know, to kind of break the fourth wall a bit, you're seeing very much of some of the gateway drug insights that you had that You just don't get to choose. I'm aware that you kind of have an anti-guru sentiment in you, like a very strong, like, don't listen to me. I don't know what I'm doing.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Do not do any of the other things to me. But if you see resonance in another person, and I think this is what we're all trying to find, you know, people can complain about the mountains of content creation that happens and maybe rightly so. But
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
if you're able to find someone and you see in them a little bit of you, maybe not even much of you, but like, oh, that bit of them, their self-esteem or the way they look at relationships or what they want to do, the kind of life they want or the level of peace of mind that they want to have or whatever it might be.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
if you find in somebody else a little bit of that, it's kind of like what you're saying before. You can no longer be unconvinced of that. And it steps in and becomes a part of you. And yeah, you're maybe seeing reflected back to you some, you know, this sort of percolated, very meandering insight from however long ago that something's happened.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And maybe in, you know, five years time, you'll be like, you know that thing that you said about the lessons of the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, I don't know, it's cool. That's like... Synthesis, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That can be a gift, though, to people who are of that, because the higher that they climb up that hierarchy, the fewer and fewer people don't want anything from them. So in that way, you can be an even better friend.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Does this mean, sort of talking about that rote memorization masquerading as wisdom and insight thing, which I think... Perhaps, almost certainly, podcasts like this will have contributed to... You know, you hear an Alain de Botton who's, you know, like a painter with words. Very simple, very sort of unpretentious. But if you're intellectually curious, you see...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You only see the production of his thoughts. You don't necessarily see the work that's gone into the thoughts behind. So you confuse the presentation of them for the insight. Does that make sense? Of course. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I think that's, you know, your meditation practice at work, that mindfulness gap to be like, huh, there's that thing again.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You've spent a lot of time either creating wealth or thinking about how to create wealth. What have you learned are the best places to spend wealth. The spend wealth?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You spend this time creating this wealth, accumulating. What are the best ways for you to put it back out?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Look at how charitable my charity is.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, very nice way to change the final F. Very impressive.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Bullshit radars have become hypersensitized to try and work out whether or not this person means the thing that they're saying. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
They don't like the real you. And if they saw the real you, they wouldn't care. And the people who would like the real you don't get to see the real you, so they pass you by.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You've gone the debate with them. Is it a Taleb that has the ascending levels of like anarchism versus conservatism? Is that his insight? Like at the local level, I'm this, it seems like you've gone the other way. It's like at the child level, I'm an anarchist. At the societal level, I'm a conservative.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Status games, the allure of accruing, whether it's fame, actual fame, or just the competition comparison trap, it's always there. There's a real draw of being swayed by social approval. How should people learn to get less distracted by status games in that way?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You've done it the other way. You're being libertarian with the kids, and you're being religious, conservative, and societal.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I think modern AI... So just on that, one of my favorite takes is from Dwarkesh Patel, and he says, if you gave any human on the planet 0.001% of the consumption that an LLM has, any LLM, they would have come up with thousands of new ideas. Right. Give me one new idea. One fundamental new idea. That's been generated...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Okay. Yeah, it seems like... I don't know if you're from the Bostrom camp or whatever. No, I'm not an AI doomer.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But let's say that you came out of the lesswrong.com slate-style codec world, and there was this sort of lineage from computers... And AI gets more powerful, more powerful, more powerful. And then you end up AGI, ASI. ASI, yeah. And it seems like LLMs have been this sort of orthogonal move from that, which are you saying you don't believe they are a step on that?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's kind of a little bit of an additional branch.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I'm petty sometimes. My less equanimous version of me is petty. And I always want to teach it a lesson if it gets something wrong. Like, no, you were so confident. I'm treating it, but I'm anthropomorphizing.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You mentioned kids there and you had a tweet that said, I'm not convinced that declining fertility needs to be proactively fought. I forgot that one. You're going to have to. I dug deep. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
The incentive to now have a child because there's so few around.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I suppose if you could come at it from a pain side, which is you look at all of the other people around who don't have kids. Let's say that
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, Malcolm Collins says that having a pet is to children as using porn is to sex. He basically thinks that it's sort of a surrogate.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Than learn, learn versus goals. It's not necessarily what do they want? What do you want them to want out of life? Like, what is it that you had that idea around your number one job as a parent is to provide unconditional love to your kids.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Right. So I can be loved or I am loved unconditionally. Is that one of the things?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And downstream from that, there should be freedom. There should be a degree of freedom that comes from the self-esteem, that comes from the unconditionality.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You replied to my friend Rob Henderson. He was talking about how kids fall asleep more quickly when they're being carried. And you said cry it out and co-sleeping is dangerous. What's IYI science?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's just the most, the most novel solution.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So this is Twitter and this is, this is the how to get rich without getting lucky thread. So the first one.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
This is a long time coming, I think. Agency, since we've been talking, is the topic, the thing that we've both been obsessed with the most. So introduce people to it. What's high agency?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
From our insight into the British National Health Service through Yousef, we both know that the NHS still heavily, heavily relies not only on faxes, faxes between departments, and not only faxes, the whole thing is run on Windows XP. Mm-hmm. I don't even know how you have access. I don't even know how machines are able to run Windows XP anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
You sent me this the other day. What was it?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
We'll get back to talking to George in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Eight Sleep. Sleep isn't just about how long you rest, but also how well your body stays in its optimal temperature zone throughout the night. And this is where Eight Sleep comes in.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And that's why it's been clinically proven to increase total sleep time by up to one hour every night. I've been using my eight sleep mattress for years, and I literally can't imagine life without it. I'm on the road at the moment in London, and it feels medieval. to not have an actively cooled and heated mattress topper, it is a total game changer.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Best of all, they have a 30-night sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 days. If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. What about What about examples of agency? Both of us have kind of become addicted, I guess, to accumulating these stories of people that are high agency.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
For me, Sir Adrian Paul Ghislaine Carton-Douat, the Unkillable Soldier, Sir Ernest Shackleton that attempted the first Antarctic crossing in 1914, the Forgotten Highlander, Alistair Urquhart, you know, Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning in some ways too. Yeah. I had that recent one, that Emil Koivunen guy, the dude that took an entire platoon's worth of meth and outran Russians for a month.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
When he was stopped, his resting heart rate was 200 BPM and he weighed 50 kilos. Who are some of yours?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Well, I suppose the education system in both America and in the UK, I don't know if there's anywhere that it isn't, very much life is happening to you. There is no you happening. You're not... You know, until... When's the first time in the UK school system that you get to choose your sort of speciality? Sort of 13? It's after you're nine, I think.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Remember, you're going to pick your GCSEs that you're going to focus on. And then from there, you pick your AS, you pick your A levels, then you pick your degree. So up until that point, up until the age of...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
12 13 13 you're just on a set of train tracks you don't even get to discriminate what you learn let alone how you learn uh in broad strokes and then in specific strokes it's like well this is the sequence this is how the curriculum is put together and um Yeah. What's your thing about the behaviors that you were rewarded for in early life are the ones that you get punished for in later life?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
bells that ring. They used the same bells in British schools that they were using in the factories. Like the most Pavlovian early on conditioning. It's fucking wild.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Dedicated two hours a week for two years to it.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah, it's bizarre. I... I have an issue with the early on education system. I know that you've got a massive issue with university as well. Um, for me, I found university to be useful as like a crash course in socialization, uh, but.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
it feels like you've ordered a main course that tasted like dog shit and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but the gravy that came along with it or the plate that it was put on, the plate that this dog shit food was served on, that was an enjoyable experience. I took a lot away from that plate. It's very well designed, great quality. Really, I remember it.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But yeah, it does feel like if you're trying to create a highly agentic populace school isn't exactly the best preparation.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Don't question the question ever.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
No. Why do we need to learn this? What's the point of doing that? No, you'd be labeled a disruptive kid. You'd be a bad student. You'd be a bad student if you ask questions about the question.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Okay. So this is Sasquatch Music Festival 2009 Guy Starts Dance Party.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
A copywriter, a graphic designer, and an account executive step onto a plane together, and they open up the overhead locker, and a genie comes out. He says, God, I've been locked in there for so long. Thank you. Thank you for getting me out. I'll give you one wish each. So the designer says, I think I'd like to have Da Vinci's life.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Done. The account executive comes over and says, what would you like? And he says, I'd like those two guys back. We've got a meeting in two and a half hours.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
There's an equivalent about aliens come down to earth and they say, humanity, we can do whatever you want. You can ask us any question. And some idiot that listens to the podcast from the back shouts, what's your morning routine? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
fuck me okay good what about i mentioned some of my sort of real peak high agency people you've accumulated one with this guy that was self-taught is there anyone else that comes to mind
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
One guy's joined. He starts dancing with him. Yes. And slowly but surely, people begin to join the dance party more and more throughout the video. But before you know it, you begin to see the whole crowd who go from judging him to joining.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I wonder why that's the case. I want to know what those structures are made of. I want to know what those lines are. So for the people that are listening, the tears of grief are much more sparse. Whatever the lines, there's some kind of structure. It looks a little bit like...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
halfway between little cells and electrical circuits and then at the other end the tears of joy have a lot more activity a lot more structure in them there's lines everywhere and I wonder what that is we can dig deeper and come back to it let me go back to your question I rudely ignored so essentially
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Oh my God. Two minutes in, it's 150 people. And then toward the end, there's no one sat down. There's only a few people sat down.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
. . . . . ., the, P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P,實 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a a But it's largely an unnecessary step.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
If we assume that what you're optimizing for is outcomes, not inputs, if you can do the outcomes, regardless of how you got there, whether you believe that you were going to do it or not, whether you thought it would be 1,000 years or whether you thought it would be six months.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Someone could have been Wilbur, alternate universe, slightly different personality, and been like, we're going to get it done in three weeks. And it would have taken a year if he'd done the same things. it's not going to, the Cuban man won't fly for a thousand years and it's going to happen in a year.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So just, you know, me and you talk about, we obsessed about this a lot, your birthday this summer, but the more and more that I think about it, optimizing for outcomes, not for inputs is just, it sides through everything. And oddly is quite a high agency way to, to do this because the true, another element of high agency would be accepting that the
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
you live in an irrational world and that your psychology is one that is not built to be able to accurately identify how outcomes are going to come from inputs. So stop believing that you know how this is going to work. And just, okay, this thing seems to be happening in whatever way. Both me and you are on ridiculous diets. Do you know why it works? Kind of.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I can probably bro science, cobble something together. Some doctor probably could too. But I bet that there's maybe even more explanations for why it shouldn't work or doesn't or whatever is ridiculous. I'm like, yeah, but... I feel better when I'm on it. I'm optimizing for outcomes. I'm not bothered about the mechanism. I'm not bothered about the inputs.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
This is going to be your spot.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Abilene paradox. Abilene paradox, yeah. Somebody invites you to their wedding thinking that you want to go. You say yes, despite not wanting to be there because you think that they want you there. Yeah. it describes how in a system, especially a social system, people can arrive at a suboptimal scenario for everybody because everybody presumes that everybody else wanted it.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It's not too dissimilar to the Keynesian beauty contest that you spoke about previously, which is where you make a judgment in a
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
uh a beauty contest not who you think is the most beautiful but who you think other people will think is the most beautiful and then you can continue to scale this back right it's just an infinite regressive prediction all the way back so talking about low agency you know both me and you since with you first came on the show six years ago inversion is one of those really powerful tools uh so half maybe a third of what people should try to do is become high agency
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
but probably two-thirds of what they should do is try to avoid being low agency. So talk to me about how you come to think about that side of the equation.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah, I think specificity as well is something else that me and you talk about a lot, avoiding vagueness. And it's necessary but not sufficient to be in... to become high agency or to avoid low agency is to have intentionality, right? To choose what it is that you're going to do. If high agency is winning at the game, intentionality is choosing which game you're going to play.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Oh, so this was a test of compliance. Wow.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
We know a few people like that.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But it results in you being... very original and action-oriented in service of something that's a total fucking waste of time.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And, I mean, that would be kind of like a version of hell because you had all of the difficult raw materials, you had all of the skills, you had all of the networking, you had all of the capacity to actually bring to bear something on this fucking very hard-to-wrangle planet. And you were pointing in totally the wrong direction.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Well, there's two things going on there. There's the fact that you're in a new place, a new time of life, and you can always have an old thought in a slightly new way. It gives it a sense of novelty. So you're kind of a...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
kidded into believing that it's something new and the other part is that we're creatures of habit and old thoughts even ones that are quite uncomfortable are familiar to us and that familiarity gives us a sense of comfort and that comfort gives us a sense of sort of habituation you know you might not Obviously not with this show, because it's fantastic.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But many people will watch or listen to YouTube channels that they kind of don't really enjoy anymore, but they just know where they're going to go. It's very predictive. It's like putting on an old, comfortable leather pair of shoes. Like, slide my feet into these. I know what his opinion's going to be. This is sweet. And the algorithm just keeps you in this static loop. Of course it does.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So, yeah, rumination trap. So the rumination trap, I'm going to guess, is diametrically opposed to bias for action. Yes. It's the opposite of that.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah. I mean, this is a conversation I had recently about action being an antidote to anxiety and that the bias for action just... And you might think that by worrying and obsessing and ruminating and thought looping and fearing and gripping your way through this problem that you're
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
emperor's new clothes and then and then you die and you realized it was one giant larp live action role play the entire time yeah and i suppose the that's that mimetic sense has got implications that you can be the first mover both to start something which snowballs down or to stop something which is snowballing right now 100 so finally yeah
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
it reduces down the likelihood of it happening somehow, that it brings to bear more control, that it almost like impacts reality in some sort of a way. It makes no difference. Again, what are we focused on? We're focused on outcomes, not on inputs. And the people that have that bias for action, they end up just finding out whether or not this thing is going to work way quicker.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Both of us have done things where we've... spent more time making a decision than it would have taken to have worked out whether it was going to work or not.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It's more. It's more than that. This is one of the reasons why I'm not on Substack, but I'm an avatar for people having a Substack or some form of written, publicly consumed...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
form of artistic output or self-reflection specifically for self-reflection I'm a really good avatar for someone that would not have been able to keep up a writing practice for four and a half years or however long it's been now since I launched my newsletter and now we're like a quarter of a million words written in whatever four and a half years something like that
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But it's invariably the best part of my week. It's my favorite thing. The guy that does the podcast, his favorite thing is the hour and a half that he spends writing every week. Because of that precise reason, it synthesizes down the most salient thing that I've learned from that one week. And I know I only have, whatever, 500 words or 1,000 words to write this in. So I need to be...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
like high in brevity i need to be pretty precise uh i need to triage what it is i want to talk about so if i talk about this i can't talk about that so which one's it going to be which one's more important to you which one are you feeling more right now and um yeah you know big big fan of people having especially a public facing version of this i understand here we go Go, go, go now.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Um, in terms of the high agency, this is like show and tell one we've discussed a lot of times.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
We'll get back to talking to George in one minute. But first, I need to tell you about Element. For the last three years, every single day, I've started my morning with Element. It's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. You might not be tired. You might not need more caffeine. You might just be dehydrated.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And they have a no questions asked unlimited duration refund policy. So you can buy it, try the entire box. And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back and you don't even need to return it. That's how confident they are that you'll love it.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. People that journal, it's phenomenal in many ways because you're able to say things that you can't for public consumption.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But I get the sense that, at least for me, when I write things for public, I'm held to such a rigorous standard for precision to really, really clarify my thinking. that I'm sure I miss lots of advantages that proper journaling would allow.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But it also does other things, which is, I think it's easier for you to create structures and frameworks and ideas that you can then later refer to, as opposed to like referring to this messy thing that's kind of all over the place that's in a journal. So yeah, it's a mixed bag.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
There's no criteria for success. There's no criteria for failure.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So when I played cricket, when I was getting towards 17, 18, I was on the box to Durham, which is a top flight club team in the UK. Would be equivalent to whatever Manchester United Academy or something like that. And I remember that on a Monday, the coach would call and he'd ask how I got on. He might have checked the papers.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
He might not have done because my performance would have been in the papers in terms of numbers. But he would ring me and he'd ask how I got on. And I remember the weeks where I was really low confidence, which would happen quite a lot. The specific style of cricket that I played was kind of like a special match circumstance. So the conditions needed to be very right.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It was leg spin, which is like a complex type of bowling. And if the game wasn't at the right format, if it was too short, you didn't tend to get bowled. If the pitch was too wet... If the ground wasn't gripping, if wickets were tumbling or weren't tumbling sufficiently quickly, you were very far down the list.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
You were very powerful, but only to be used in specific break glass in case of specific circumstance. And there's something on cricket called a TFC. Thanks for coming. And it's when you don't bat, you don't bowl, and all you do is field.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Thanks for coming. Because that's what your captain would say to you at the end. Thanks for coming, mate. As opposed to well played or we can do better next time. And I remember I would get these calls and on the weeks when I wasn't confident, a lot of the time I'd just have a TFC and he would say, how'd you get on over the weekend, mate? And I was like, oh, dude, you know what it is?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Like I wish that I could have, I really wanted the opportunity. Secretly, I didn't. A lot of the time I didn't want the opportunity to have done it because by setting the potential for success, by having the opportunity for success, there would have then been a criteria for failure. So a lot of it was fear of failure. And that was something that largely now I've managed to get. I mean, once you've,
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I've done a live show in front of three and a half thousand people. The potential for failure is, you know, you've looked it in the face. But I think I'm a good avatar for someone. I think his disposition would have been low confidence, low self-esteem as a kid. And now...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
largely that's that's not the same sort of problem that i have anymore and you think a large amount of that's down to specificity or being less vague certainly being less vague but uh largely it's just crushing volumes of testing yourself in the real world because again you can make it until you fake it if you just keep on doing things and stuff goes well
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
There's only so long that imposter syndrome or low confidence or low self-esteem or a lack of self-belief or whatever can exist before it just gets neutron starred out of existence. You're like, I have this fucking super dense body of work that self-belief is overrated, generate evidence, that Ryan Holiday quote.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And you just generate so much evidence that it sucks the living shit out of whatever it is that you're worried about. But talking about the vague trap, I was in the gym in London. I told you this story. I was in the gym in London last week, the day of the show. And it's the...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Kensington the gym unmanned like it's a it's a cellar it's a cellar that has a gym in it that's open 24 hours and there's no staff at all looking after it me and Z go in and a couple of people ask for photos which is really nice and one of the kids asks for photos young guy maybe 21 22 something like this and he comes up take the take the selfie or whatever and then as I'm leaving I'm on my way out and he comes up and he's got a I think he was recording maybe he had a mic in his hand or something he was recording it
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And he said, slightly broken English, hey, I know that you're going to be busy, but I just wanted to ask you a question. I wanted to ask, you know, I really want to become rich. And I'm 22 at the moment. I'm working in a full-time job, but I really want to have more money.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
self-discipline and I want to make more money can you teach me how to have more self-discipline and make more money I remember thinking Zach stood there and Max videographer stood there and this is kidding I'm thinking well you know he's asked there's obviously something that's important to him he's come up and he asked this person he's said that he appreciates I you know I've got I've got places to be and such I don't just give a flippant answer I remember thinking like
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
That's a shit question. It's a really bad, like, can you teach me how to have more self-control and make money? Language barrier, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, I think I told you this and your response would have been-
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
You would have said the first thing I would do is ask a better question.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah, there's also a degree, I suppose, of lack of specificity. There's a vagueness to it as well, that if you don't try, you don't have to fear the pain of failure. If I tell myself that all women are shit, then I'm never going to seek a relationship with a woman. And as a consequence, I never have to feel the pain of rejection.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
If I tell myself that things are never going to get better, then I'm excused of ever having to try. The cope is framing hope as delusion and optimism as embarrassing. And if you know that things are bad and that they're never going to get better, then it's the people acting like things can improve that are dumb and delusional on the problem.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah, the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
What are the values and worldviews that high agency people are going to focus on primarily?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
productivity 101. You write your epigraph, you work in seven-year seasons, you work in three-year blocks, you work in one-year sprints, broken down into 90-day chunks, broken down into daily actions, and minute by minute, you've got your life planned out.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And it's kind of trite because it's so obvious, but the smallest first step imaginable is how the Wright brothers managed to get their plane together. It's how you launched your marketing agency in a different country. It's how this podcast started. Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Both of us have done, you've got your max content raiser. Would you consume your own content? If not, don't post it. And I think that works for songwriting. Would you listen to your own music? If not, don't write it. Or for your own podcasts, would you listen to your own podcast? If not, what the fuck are you doing spending hours and hours? That's why I've never posted to Pornhub.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I wouldn't watch that. I've told you about this before, but I've never done it, but I'm still kind of tempted to do it. I'd do it if you did it as an accountability buddy with me. It's not porn, is it? It's OnlyFans. Was it 100 Days of Rejection? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've seen that, right?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Ask for a free coffee, ask a stranger in the street to give you 20 pounds, like try and get all of these different things that escalate toward ever increasing levels of social discomfort. And I feel like that from... Maybe it's not quite the same as disagreeability, but disagreeability triggers that... That sort of clamping. Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Well, you also don't get to take a snapshot of your mind unless you do the writing thing, right? And it's captured in the best way through writing. I mean, we've seen this even with the election in America that we had this political fucking superposition, this like quantum world in which it's going to be close. People could see it either way.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yet ardent supporters on one side, Rory Stewart ate a lot of humble pie. Absolutely to slam dunk. And presumably he said that because he believed it, not just because he was trying to influence the electorate or say something cool or popular or whatever. But in retrospect, it couldn't have been any other way because it wasn't. It couldn't have been any other way because Trump won.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And the ability, even I think back to where my mind was before that election happened. I go, fucking hell. Like, it could go either way. I'm pretty sure that a couple of months out, I think Kamala's got it in the bag. And then afterward, me trying to think... How did I think before that thing happened? I can't not see what the outcome was. It's impossible for me to not see that Trump won.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So all that I do when I look back at my rationalization prior to that is all of the ways in which I would have been right because I could have seen that the outcome that ended up being was the one that I thought.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Fuck me. Speaking of fog of war, we might as well bring this up. I was with you in...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
bozeman montana this summer when trump got shot oh yeah and uh that was a really formative experience because uh 9 11 i was too young january 6 was covered so i was in the house so what's really fascinating is uh rapidly developing news story with other people at the same time so the fact that i was with you and emily and we went for dinner and
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
you know, every five or 10 minutes we're checking Jack Pasovich's fucking Twitter or whatever to find out what news new room has been going on. And, uh, yeah, it is even in retrospect, one of the things that isn't fully captured is how chaotic, uh, news is. And I think the same thing probably occurs for ourselves that, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
In retrospect, we can look back and say, well, that was the outcome that occurred in any case. Morgan Housel's got this gorgeous story. He talks about how when him and his wife first got together before they were married, I think they were 23, 24, living in New York. They had no kids, no dependents. And he looks back and he said to his wife, wow, that really was living, wasn't it?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
That really was the golden years. It's just so amazing. We used to lie in on a Sunday and we could go for lunch and do all the rest of it. His wife said... You were miserable. You hated it. You hated all of those things. And Morgan's realization was, in hindsight, you're able to see that the fears that captured you at the time were not worth having.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But at the time, you have no certainty that those aren't salient. So what you see in retrospect is how you should have felt had you known what was going to occur.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
That's your thing about social networks, right? If you read it on Facebook, you're probably late. If you read it on Reddit, you're probably early. Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
That's fire. I love that. What about the Patels?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It's agency all the way down.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Owned by a Patel. So for the people that haven't driven through America, there are a lot of motels. Tons. When we were doing our road trip this summer, me and you nodding at most of them and going... Patel. Patel's again.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah. Uh... Yeah, I don't know, man. I think the approach that you have to this, the fact that you've been able to break it down and spend so much time writing this piece, which again, people can go and read. What are you hoping to achieve by sort of breaking this down? Are you looking to try and create more agency in your life? It seems like you're kind of swimming in enough already.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Why is it so important to you? It's an interesting definition. I can see why you happening to life, not life happening to you is important. Why do you care? Why is it so crucial? Why is it the most important idea of the 21st century to you?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
We're in a country that may be lacking, especially for young people, agency. Both of us managed to reach escape velocity to get out of that. What would you wish British George knew about agency or how to maybe embrace a little bit more of it?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So you've taken something from April Fool's Day here.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I love it. George Mack, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to read this essay of yours, which they should, and they also want to keep up to date with everything else you're doing. Where should they go?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
What are some good examples of high agency? Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
to be able to escape the planet. Just on the SpaceX thing, Bill Perkins introed me to one of the guys that works for Elon. And this guy bet his entire career on the belly flop maneuver. Have I told you this story?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So when these rockets reenter, because the purpose is for them to be reused, they're coming in to land. They're not going to land sideways. You're not going to put thrusters on the side of it. You're going to land it upright like this. But the problem of bringing it in to land like that is that this is aerodynamically the one that has the least drag.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So they thought, right, okay, how can we use air friction to reduce the speed of reentry whilst also still landing the thing upright so that we get to use the same boosters to slow it down that we use to get it to take off? And he created the belly flop maneuver. So if you watch it when it comes in, it's coming in sideways like this. And then only at the last moment does it rotate. It stops.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So this guy, apparently the first time that it ever happened, like if it hadn't worked and he'd left, I can't remember what NASA, some huge, you know, illustrious organization. Bet his entire career, all of his reputation and that this new company would have been a laughingstock of the entire industry and fucking cool. Wow.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What have you been interested in recently? You're always learning new stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What about BHT? I've heard about that. I don't know as much about BHT.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
uh saying they didn't have the red 40 they didn't have the blue three they didn't have the yellow four and they didn't have this particular type of plastic additive that was on the inside uh helps with preservation of the food makes it last longer does something else maybe it's cheaper i'm not too sure um so who are the big culprits what are the big ones
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So AGD is getting impacted, right?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Some boys have to sit... Warping the entire physiology.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Is it what they're consuming or is it what they're consuming is contained within?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
We just learned about the way that microplastics are making their way into our bodies. Yet another reason why staying on top of your health is vital, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over a hundred biomarkers and monitor for early signs of thousands of diseases.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from your annual physical. You receive insights from a team of expert physicians who provide detailed notes of their observations and and phone consultations for any critical findings. Getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is only $500.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Right now, you can get the exact same blood panels that I get by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Is there a sex difference between how men and how women are susceptible to plastics? Are certain types of plastics more? Are they making different kinds of impacts?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
And obviously, women can be pregnant. So I guess developing children in the womb, that's one thing. But yeah, what's the sex difference story?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Female privilege.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So 12 times more likely if you've got a ton of microplastics in you.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I also don't do maths very well. But anyway, yeah, it is. I mean, what is it? What's the saying? Males are nature's playthings. That there's just more male variability. There's more male variability in terms of IQ, in terms of height, in terms of all of these different things. And every fetus starts off as female as well, right?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Is this not the reason why men have got nipples? You need to have all of the individual bit. This is where we need to go. I'm pretty sure. Someone chat GPT it. Someone chat GPT it and tell me whether or not I'm right. I feel like I might be right here. But okay, sex differences. How does it impact men and women differently?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What about testosterone levels, energy, energy production, stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Well, let's actually before we get into that, you've sort of touched on them a few times, but just do a rundown for me of the most common places that people are getting exposed to the highest levels of microplastics.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Okay, microplastics. Teach me about them. What do they do?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
You're getting more, you're making the plastic smaller, which allows it to be permeating through the gut more effectively.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
How much is that compared with the normal sort of – that's a large dose?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
It might even offset the microplastics you've had to consume from your body.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Internally venting your dryer. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
How, like just how prevalent are these things? Like how difficult is it to avoid microplastics? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
You mean bits of plastic that are black? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Like this is just- It's purposefully liberated. Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Like when I was in the airport- Check out stuff and stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
How's it getting into the soil?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
You're doing that 500 times a day.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
And he goes, I mean, wish somebody had recorded this. Oh, my God. This lady is going through the airport. I swear. I met this lady earlier on today and she started ranting and raving about the receipts, said it's sort of covered in this magic dust that's killing me or something.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Some people are like, I don't want to get my hands on the thing.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Two-decade career of working in Target or something like that. So the first time that I ever learned about receipts, you won't know who this is, but Owen Schroyer, who is Alex Jones's sort of second-in-command. I went for dinner with him when I first moved to Austin forever ago. It was him and a bunch of other people.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
There was a couple of girls at the table with us as well, just downtown in Austin. And the receipt came out, and I was like, I'm sort of new here. I'll get the mail. It'd be nice. It'd be a nice thing for me to do. So I did it. And as I'm going to get the receipt out, one of the girls that sat around the table hits my hand away. I'm like, what? She's like, what are you doing?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
As if I was about to walk out into open traffic. I'm like, I was going to take the receipt and I was going to put the tip on. She's like, are you crazy? You're going to touch that? I'm like, so it kind of does show that the fringe insight from three years ago some of that stuff ends up being a bullseye and sort of percolates around.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So that's so small that they can go up with precipitation?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Now, I'm not saying that all of it is, but some of the stuff ends up being legit.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
They've got special ones that are like finger things. Have you seen those?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Individual. So maybe just the sort of your first two fingers and your thumb or something rather than having to wear sweaty gloves all day.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
And I imagine that's, I mean, it gets through latex as well.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
But like, you know, final final thing, I guess, on sources, you mentioned clothing going through the dryer. I don't know what this T-shirt's made of. It looks a little bit shiny. Maybe there's some polyester in it.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
i know that the brand of pants that i tried i shit you not 15 different types of pants uh until i settled on these are bamboo cotton but i'm like is that what about the light what about the elastane liner around the top what about the way that this is stitched across there's probably and dermal absorption in an area that i really don't want that to be too much of it how much are we getting leached in from the thick the clothes that we wear yeah that's a great question so again um
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Gore-Tex-y type thing.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
But I guess, I suppose the one advantage of outerwear being higher in forever chemicals is that by virtue of it being outerwear, there's usually some layers in between you and it.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I guess as well, you know, one of the, weird quirks of gym kit especially the sort of gym kit where people sweat is that it's polyester sort of fitted t-shirts leggings things like that that people are then moving friction which is going to liberate something you're sweating that's heat there's water pores are open larger aperture for whatever it is to get in exactly so i mean i still like
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
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Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
The dryer is, you know, it's putting microplastics... The dryer is atomizing your microplastics and pushing them into the atmosphere.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
It's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time, sleep phases, your HRV, your snoring, and your heart rate with 99% accuracy. And it'll even start cooling or heating your bed for you an hour before bedtime. This is why Eight Sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Best of all, they've got a 30-night sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for a full month. If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back and they ship internationally. If you have any respect at all for Dr. Rhonda Patrick, she uses one too. So don't just take the word of an idiot... take the word of a doctor.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Right now, you can get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
the one elephant in the room when we're talking about this, which is, and obviously everybody, including me, is now thinking, all right, okay, where are the places I've got plastic in my life? Well, I've switched all of my Tupperware out from plastic to glass. I use glass water bottles or I use like an AquaTrue reverse osmosis thing. That's good.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
That goes into a glass carafe and I'm using like, like a Yeti called blah, blah, blah. But, The food that we eat, even the best quality steaks, unless you're going to the farmer's market and he's chopped it off the cow and put it in wax paper, it's wrapped in plastic. I work with Piedmontese. They make amazing beef. My favorite beef in the world. It's the tastiest stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
arrives to me wrapped in plastic. So have you got any idea when it comes to packaging, packaging of vegetables, even the organic double washed spinach that's in one of those sort of big tray things with the plastic across the top and it's all around the sides, how big of a deal is that?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
As opposed to if you've got a bottle of Evian in Dubai that's been transported by a truck two or three or four different journeys and it's been hot and it's been cool again, then it's been hot and then it's been cool again, then finally gets into a fridge and you go, ah, it's been in the fridge. It's cold. Exactly. Exactly. What about the rest of the supply chain?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Obviously, blueberries – You can't have been in there for that long or else they'd be dead.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Are you using Greenfield for that?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
You know, his dad makes one of the most advanced water, in-home water things.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
It's like actually absolutely like father, like son, biohacker.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Oh, so you're getting it delivered. You're not getting it.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Okay. Right. I don't know exactly how they're remapping the whole house to have no plastic in the pipes.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Because the filtration is going to be close to the last point.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Right. Understood. Understood. Well, Ben will be listening. So I'm sure he'll, he'll, he'll tell me whether or not.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
This is a good question. What is your favorite remineralization protocol, presuming that you use some sort of reverse osmosis system?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I think most people, the most realistic solution that people will get will be some sort of tabletop type solution rather than re-plumbing their entire house.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Do you have any brands that you like? Do you know?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I was a partner with Aquatru. I think there's still maybe, you can try for the people that are listening, you can maybe try MW25 as a code. I'm not on commission, but I was a partner with Aquatru for ages. They also make Air Doctor. Yeah. I'm not sure if... So Air Doctor is a carbon and... There's two types of filter for your house.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Again, just a standalone unit that does... It's called Ideal Living is the company. They also did this... I didn't realize you may have looked into this, atomizers. You know, you put essential oils into them. The process that that goes through also pushes a ton of stuff that you don't want into the atmosphere. Yeah. Yankee candles and stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Also liberating a ton of stuff that you don't really want. I remember OGs of the channel will remember that where we very, very first started this podcast in my house in Newcastle, I had a candle obsession for a while. And the ceiling of this room had accumulated so much soot that it looked like it was moldy. It was a really nice house, really nicely decorated room.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
And we got shit on the internet for... six months more more than six months like a full year before i had to pay decorators to come in just to paint the ceiling so the people on the internet would shut up my point being i was i went through like a candle a month or something and i was like huh that's on the seat that's in my lungs like not good
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I actually think before that, before we get into how you get them out of you, Can you just do a run through of best tactics for avoidance? Like super simple. This is what we know. I know it's going to be imperfect. I know that everybody with health anxiety is just the heart rates, you know, 20% higher than it should be. What's the 80-20 on avoiding plastics in consumption?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I just had an idea that I've become addicted, keep where you are, but I've become addicted to Dutch Bros coffee and I kind of need to tell the internet about it. It's phenomenal. Yeah. I wonder if there is a way I was watching them make it because when you go and go through the drive-thru, you can actually see the process of them going through it.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
A lot of the time when they make an iced coffee, an iced latte, they're pouring it between almost what looks like a cocktail shaker, the steel thing. pouring it between that and pouring it between your cup. I haven't done this yet, but one of the things that I thought about, because the cup is typically filled with the ice, then they pour the hot liquid over the ice and that's what cools it.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I was like, huh, if I said, rather than you pouring it from the steel thing into the plastic, could I just get you to do two steel things side by side, put the ice in that one, cool it down and then pop it into the plastic thing for me? Obviously the gold standard would be to take your own cup, but
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
If you would say that you don't have that, I also have to assume that iced drinks are going to be better, even if you get a splash of hot hitting the cup that you can't get them to do some fancy cocktail trick with. It's going to cool it down more quickly, so it's not going to liberate for as long to as small.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So we've got reverse osmosis, not drinking tap water. Second up is avoiding bottled water. Third one is avoiding heating plastic, which would include Tupperware, reheating meals, Meal prep companies, stuff like that, I'm going to guess.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Oh, when they fill it?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Do you know what the inside of Tetra Packs are like? Those sort of more carton things? Do you know what I mean by Tetra Pack?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What's the sort of levels that we get exposed to? How much does that get down into being absorbed? Because... The Earth's a big place. It feels to me like the atmosphere has got loads of room in it. I don't know how much of the air that we get exposed to, even in downtown New York, is going to be filled with microplastics.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
That's not liberated in the same way? That wouldn't impact us?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I'm going to look into that for Nutanix. Okay, so what's next up after this? Soup, heating stuff, Tupperware. I mean, dear God, please just replace all of your Tupperware with glass.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Mm-hmm. I saw a comparison image on Twitter of one of those, the nonstick pans, but one of those that you've used for two and a half years and it's got loads of scratches in it. And that causes all hell to break loose and be liberated into the food.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What are... What are capsules, 00 capsules for supplements? What's that made of? What are those? You know, like a capsule.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Like any type of creatine capsule or something where it's capsulated as opposed to just a raw tablet. Is that what it is? Is it gelatin typically?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I was just looking at it and thinking, I bet that someone somewhere has realized that we can make it 50% cheaper if we use some sort of, but it's typically going to be like a gelatin thing.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I'm going to guess that there's, on the triage list of stuff to worry about, there's probably other stuff up there, carbon monoxide, high levels of carbon dioxide, stuff like that, that might be a problem. But yeah, in terms of how we get exposed to them, what are the sort of levels that we get exposed to? What do we absorb?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Well, that's the first place that I've identified that doesn't have plastics in so far. So I can breathe a sigh of relief around all of the tablets that I take every day.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Ventilate outside from the dryer.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What do you like to use?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Good start on an endlessly comprehensive list. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentous. Rhonda just mentioned that microplastics accumulate in the brain 10 to 20 times faster than other organs, which is a terrifying statistic, which is why optimizing your brain health is more important than ever. And one of the best science-backed tools for that is omega-3s.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
They support cognition, reduce inflammation, and improve your heart health, making them essential for your well-being. They literally are one of the most important supplements I take every single day. And with Momentous, you know that you are getting the highest quality omega-3s on the market. Momentous are literally unparalleled when it comes to rigorous third-party testing.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What you read on the label is what's in the product and absolutely nothing else. Omegas are a massive part of my brain, body, and sleep stack, which has a big impact on my cognition, my strength, my recovery. Best of all, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
If you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back, and they ship internationally, and you can get 20% off everything. by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Okay, so if we've got, that's how to avoid them. This is where they come from. How possible is it for our bodies to actually get rid of them? What are the ways that we can speed this up? Actually, first question, is it possible to test? Can I go and work out how many microplastics are in my body?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Same one that my that my doctor, Gabrielle Lyon, it's the same one that her team suggested. And it came back and everything was fucking red. So, yeah, I can vouch for the fact that it's accurate.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Brian Johnson's trying to develop one. He was tweeting about it recently. I mean, he's tweeting about a lot of things at the moment. But yeah, he was tweeting about some microplastics test.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Okay. So that's how we find out. How can I get rid of them? I've got too many microplastics in my body. How do I get rid of them?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Is that only microplastics that you're consuming along with it? Or is it able to pull microplastics, sort of detoxify them from your body?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So is that the biggest mover, daily fiber intake, do you think?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What about sauna?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
You can't supplement sulforaphane?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So if someone's eating broccoli raw would be optimal?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Dancing through this minefield is basically impossible, isn't it?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
You touched on something there. I don't know whether you've got any advice or whether you'd feel comfortable, but a lot of people will have been directly impacted by the fires in LA or indirectly just by it's happened around them. They've been more stressed and they've been breathing in this air, which presumably is still probably going to be in the local ecology.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
How worried do you think that people should be about what's being liberated into the air? And if you were someone that's been worried, is there a particular protocol or some things that you would consider over the next few weeks and months to try and just help yourself get back to a good place of health?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I hope that we haven't caused too much health anxiety for people with that. I'm aware that there's a number of vectors. Everybody can get worried about how much is, oh my God, not even the food that I need to be worried about. It's what it's wrapped in. And I had this story, a funny story from a friend that was telling me about, he goes to a farmer's market.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
and he wants to get raw milk, and the raw milk's in glass bottles, and it's got a cap on it. There's no point in any plastic anywhere near it. And he asked the farmer about how they get the milk from the cows, and they use an automatic pumping machine, which runs it through plastic pipes. He's like, that's warm milk going through a plastic pipe.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Even the most psychedelic, progressive farmer's market in the world, where you think, you know, this is basically, you might as well have sort of pumped the cow into a steel bucket and poured it into this. It's like, yeah, some plastic pipes were in between...
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
No one's worried enough.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What's a non-organic farm?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
It's not as if the wastewater and the sludge knows that this is the boundary.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Obviously, this is one of your many new pet research obsessions. How big of a deal, across the entire repertoire of things that people need to be worried about, how highly do you rank the plastics, microplastics, endocrine disruptors?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Okay. You said you were doing some research into ultra processed foods as well. I have been learning about this GRAS, G-R-A-S, loophole thing. Is this the pebble at the top of the avalanche that sort of wrecked the American food system? Is that why there's a big issue?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Every food has some form of processing in it unless you're eating it actually raw from the ground.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
A quick aside, what if I told you the only way to be successful in life is to wake up and eat a bowl of Wheaties? Well, I would never tell you that. But starting a day with Element, that is the real breakfast of champions. And that's why I've started every morning with Element for the last three years.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
You might just be dehydrated. And proper hydration isn't just about drinking sufficient water. It's about having enough electrolytes to allow your body to properly absorb those fluids, which is why it's used by everyone. Dr. Mike Israetel, Olympic athletes, Dr. Andrew Hubeman, and FBI sniper teams. Also, they have a no-questions-asked-refund policy.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box because that's how confident they are that you'll love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So we made a capsule version of Newtonic and we got rid of the caffeine and the althenin and we added in some Bacopa Manieri and Ginkgo Biloba. And I didn't realize this, but colored capsules were around in the 90s. It's like, huh, capsules, the most boring thing in the world.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What can we do to make them a little bit more visually exciting, turn them into sort of a marketing material, also create a little bit of an expectation effect in there as well. Why don't we use colored capsules? That'd be great. It's like, well, pills, red pill. If we make a red pill, people are going to think the jokes write themselves. Matrix, we did this Matrix theme.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
And we're there on the launch shoot. And Harry, the guy that runs the ops for Nutanix, came up and he's like, mate, got some good news and got some bad news about the capsules. It's like, what's up? They look great. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're colored with red 40. And I was like, right, you're telling me...
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
that the productivity focus product that we've tried to design has something that's been linked to ADHD in children. It's literally encased in ADHD causing color. Yeah, but we've got these vegan capsules. Okay, that's interesting. Let me have a look. He gets them out. He's like, that's brown. That's brown. That's a brown color.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I'm going to guess that if you've got a leaky gut of some kind, or you've got a more permeable gut wall, is that a risk factor for this?
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What we have here on set is this beautiful sort of bright red thing because Red Forty turns things bright red. So we had to get custom beetroot colored capsules. capsules. That was the way that we got around it because I wasn't prepared to do the brown one. I wasn't prepared to do the red 40 one.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So we ended up having to get... We've got some absurd number of empty beetroot colored capsules waiting to be filled for the next however long that we keep on selling these things. But that was the hoop that we had to jump through in order to be able to skirt around trying to avoid red 40, even in just the coloring of a capsule. It was crazy.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
While that was still in food in 2017. Yeah.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Right, brilliant.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
How do you know if your bacon's got nitrites in it?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Okay. So uncured bacon would be nitrite-free?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Oftentimes the bacon- Is this the BPA, BPS thing all over again?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So if I have a Barocca while I have my bacon...
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
What about the concerns with added sugar?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So you think maybe up to 2.5% of what we consume per day we might absorb?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
It couldn't have been 500 calories a week if they gained a pound per week.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Yes. That also can't be right. 500 calories.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So it was a 3,500 surplus per week.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Oh, that's so interesting.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
How much good research has been done? That study sounds pretty impressive, but is primarily the mechanism that I think most people come to agree on when it comes to ultra processed foods, hyper palatable, calorie dense, easier to eat more and per bite tends to be more calorific. So it's easier to gain weight, multiple different ways that it's easier to gain weight.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
When it comes to the ultra-processed foods, what's in them, how they affect us, outside of the palatability and the calorie density, what else is going on that seems to be evidence-based that's something that we should be concerned about?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Is that the biggest mover in all of this?
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
75 grams sounds like so much, but when you put it in terms of a donut and a Coke, that's it.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
You're chipping away at that grazing throughout the day.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
It's expensive to be healthy.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
There's also, this is Kali Means' whole thing, and Vani Hari's as well, about whatever the food stamp system is called.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Yes, snap. The sorts of foods that tend to be available on snap, trying to eat in a more healthy manner on that is very difficult, more difficult. So what you mentioned there about what are Americans eating? Typically, what are they putting in their bodies?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
How legitimate are the links to cancer when it comes to ultra processed foods and sugar?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Because they'll eat more of everything overall.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Where do plastics go in the body? Do they congeal in certain places?
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I think it's important to separate out the obesity side from what else is going on. Because... Lots of people that listen to the podcast will probably have a good indication of, well, where's my body weight at? And I probably go to the gym and I do all the rest of this stuff. What else is happening?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
How else can I motivate myself to pick the healthier option, even if I know that my waistline isn't going to be the determining factor for this? Obesity isn't that much of a risk for me. So what is it that could be happening? So I think it's interesting to sort of break it apart like that.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I guess another area that I'm particularly interested in is brain health and energy levels when it comes to the impact of the ultra-processed foods, the added sugar, stuff like that.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
They're angry and forgetful. Yeah.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
having a donut and a Coke an hour before you were supposed to do something important is probably a pretty good way to do it.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
You mentioned a couple of times today about leaky gut, permeability. At a high level, what can people do? I've heard the words. I kind of understand what it means. It's kind of in the name. What can people do to rebuild their gut and make it less leaky?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Lots of people are going to be hearing about this and have been eating processed foods forever. Everyone has an idea in the back of their mind that when you're faced with the apple and a Twinkie, that the apple is going to be better for you. But, you know, some people have been moving through different levels of wealth. Some people have been moving through different levels of convenience.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Some people are sort of really understanding their health journey. Other people are on the road so much that they have sort of these limitations that No one's going to be militant about it all of the time. Inevitably, you're going to go to a sports match and like, what are you going to do? You haven't pre-cooked your rice and beef and taken it in with you.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So what are the best ways to mitigate the impact of ultra processed foods given sort of a typical way that people are going to exist in the world? How much can it be offset?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
All of the bros that just want to do sets of eight to 14 are going... I need to sign up to Barry's boot camp. I'm going to be sweaty. I'm going to have to do all of this work. But you convinced me last year, and I've been doing the Norwegian 4x4 as much as I can remember and as much as I can tolerate since then.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Assault bike. After a year of testing, I've come to believe that the assault bike is the best place to do it.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Like it's so hard. Well, the reason I say assault bike is that with this, what you need is to be able to go very slowly, very easily. So you don't want something you need to strap into or strap out of. So a rowing machine is kind of a little bit ungainly when you've then got to go slow. The same, I guess a skier, you can pick up and put down quite easily.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
But running on a true form, speeding up, slowing down in that way is just so difficult. And doing it on a static bike, a carol bike or something else,
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
fantastic but you do have to work a little bit harder because it's just the lower half of your body right so my choice my preference is bike carol bike great assault bike kind of easier to be harder if that makes sense it does um but yeah i've i've tried i agree i i like i think the bike well i actually think the bike is harder than when i do the rower um
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I've found the 4x4 to be quite easy to stick to. It's definitely miserable because four minutes is a very long time at a high intensity. But there's a bit of me when I'm doing 20 on 10 off Tabata, unless it's a really demanding movement. That just think, I can't work hard enough. I can't sprint fast enough in this 20 second period. And I can't recover enough in the 10 seconds.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
That cadence for me, maybe it's just a psychological thing. That cadence doesn't quite seem to work in the same way.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Yeah. Sucking on water, trying to get it to go through. What are you working on next? What else have you got in terms of a research area? What are you going to be focused on for the rest of the year?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Tim Ferriss is currently, he has been practicing trialing 10 to 15 plus grams a day to see what that does from a cognitive health perspective. It's an interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Did you see what the top rated category of exercise movement was in one of those studies? It was dancing with music.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Yeah. So I think it was, it came out at the same time, but it wasn't the same one.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
But yes, when you compared it and they then ranked all of the different modes of exercise, I think one of the things, especially to do with dancing that you have is this sort of inherently pro-social, intimate, collaborative, partner-based thing that's going on, which is probably doing all sorts of stuff that's oxytocin, that's serotonin as well, vasopressin, like there'll be a ton of things going on.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Rhonda, you're great. I really appreciate you. I love getting to speak to you. So creatine, exercise, and cancer, we need to talk about toxic mold and mycotoxins. We can do that next time that you come on. But where should people go? Keep up to date with all of the things. Have you got any more PDFs going out?
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I downloaded that one straight after our episode last year. Where can people get the BDNF one?
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
People can go and PDF themselves up. Rhonda, I really appreciate you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
Thank you very much for tuning in. Your brain may have exploded with all of the facts and studies that Rhonda's just dropped, but let me explode your brain even more with three hours with Andrew Huberman right here. Come on. Watch it.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
I wonder if you would be able to run a study where you had people who, for one reason or another, were breathing in cleaner air compared, but were still eating the same sort of diet compared with people eating the same sort of diet, but breathing in less clean air. So people that maybe lived out in the countryside, but were still eating food that was wrapped in plastic.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
So you have that, which is the systemic through the mouth one, but then you also have the sniffing a line of plastic from your daily breathing equivalent that's coming from the people that live in
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
cosmopolitan metropolitan city something like that that'd be really interesting to try and to try and split that out I guess uh well you mentioned before the sort of types of plastics that we're talking about I've heard about what have I heard about BPAs heard about those what else are we worried about BPAs anymore or is that like
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
It's just got BPF or BPS in it.
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#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
It's the Delta-8 equivalent of getting around the weed law. It's like, oh, this isn't cannabis. This is Delta-8. Well, I mean, functionally, it does the same thing, but you've just changed some molecule that means that legally it's not an issue.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Why do you think so many girls are drawn to therapy culture?
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Have you read any Oliver Berkman?
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
He's phenomenal. Did you get his new one, Meditations for Mortals? Okay, it came out a couple of months ago. One of the best things that I got exposed to this year. Just talks about a lot of this. Very self-deprecating, very British, some might say. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
He really sees a particular cohort of human nature. Yeah. Very transparently, I think.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And for some reason, this is giving some kind of solace or comfort to order being brought out of chaos.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
There's a couple of traps for that. Alex Hormozy taught me a really, really good lesson as I started to do little bits of investing and stuff like that. So sometimes a company will say, hey, we're this interesting company in a world that you maybe know or like, would you like to put some money in and maybe come on as an advisor or whatever it might be?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And I was talking to him and he said, how many of these calls are you taking? So I don't know, you know, maybe had two last week or something. He says that the most dangerous calls that you have, because they all feel like work, they all feel like business and almost none of them result in anything. And it's kind of like that upfront.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
It feels like you're doing a thing, which is more dangerous than not doing anything at all, because it acts as a placeholder. It takes up the parking space of what could be work.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
If you're doing nothing, you would have this big vacancy and you go, I really need to step my game up or do whatever. It's one of the problems I think that people have with scam supplements, with training styles that don't actually do anything.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
The subtext that they understand is this thing is taking the place of something that would work and this thing doesn't work, which means that you're getting neither of the benefits.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
The system, not the outcome. Yes. Yeah, that is interesting. I suppose this self-pity thing gets wrapped up as empowerment in a way.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And that causes girls to suffer.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And lifespan. They track everything. from your heart health to your hormone levels, thyroid function. Plus, Dr. Andrew Cuban is their scientific advisor, and Dr. Mark Hyman is their chief medical officer. So you can trust that the data and insights you receive are scientifically sound and practical.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Getting your blood work analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's only $500. And right now, you can get the exact same panels I get, plus bypass their 400,000-person waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
slash modern wisdom well all of this stuff is instrumental there are things that you do in order to be able to do a thing yeah the the mode is not the end itself yeah and it's the same with the morning routine thing you know i hold my hands up i would i if not for a slightly different life and a different algorithm that could have been me the guy that went that trended on twitter i'd
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
I've said this a couple of times, but I had an absurdly long, very elaborate routine for about probably four years, three or four years. And my retrospective justification for it is that I had done so little in the way of self-reflection that I had, you know, from 18 to 30 or whatever, I had over a decade of
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
of catching up to do and it could have i could have spaced it out like a normal sane human and it might have taken some time or i could have done navy seal hell week version uh very intensely and uh get up on a morning and go for a walk and get back and journal and do breath work and meditate and do yin yoga and then prep my food and read and then start my day and i'm like how how
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
fucking opulent and luxurious and ridiculous and inaccessible all of these things I understand but I had a lot of low hanging fruit that I needed to get and then higher hanging fruit too but One thing that I am happy about is that I never confused the mode of improvement for the reason for the improvement. Yes. And very quickly looked at ways to apply that.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Okay, I seem to be able to deal with emotional perturbments a bit better now after a few thousand sessions of meditation. Huh. Maybe I should use that and start pushing myself into different places emotionally. Wow. I've learned some stuff about how human nature works or resilience or whatever. Let's see if I can find some situations that I can stress test that and see if it actually works for me.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Being held to standards of behavior, et cetera.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Or I've got new mobility because I've been doing yin yoga for fucking forever. Maybe I can start doing CrossFit, which I did, or a different training modality, something else. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
not confusing instrumental goods for the ends themselves I think is very important and it takes the placeholder the therapy culture takes the placeholder of something that could be functional work and very viciously encourages you to not actually go out and even try there is no such thing as a stress test of this It's unfalsifiable.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Anytime it gets stressed, it's an admission that the very philosophy itself was correct and that you should have never encountered this thing in the first place.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
It's kind of like the... Mental health, psychological health equivalent of the misdiagnosis of gender dysphoria among young kids.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
How many of these girls are in therapy, do you think?
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Does this can have it on? Yes, it does. Can you punch in on this, dude? Can you punch in? All right, so I'm not sure how tight that lens can get. If you look very, very, very carefully here, there's a follow us. For the people listening, I'm pointing to the back of a can of Nutanix. We've produced maybe a million of these, this particular version of the can in America. Follow us.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
There's the three social icons, and then there's Nutanix.com at the bottom. If you look really, really carefully just here, you'll see that the Instagram icon is probably one mil to one and a half mil to the left of the follow us and the left of the newtonic.com thing. And this little world is maybe two mil in from the us after the follow. I noticed that because I noticed things.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
and sent a photo in and immediately immediately after sending that photo in said the tism strikes again never been diagnosed with autism don't think I've got it hold eye contact with most people perfectly well even within that there's something and it's
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
self-deprecating it's mockery it's whatever but even in that it belies this like somebody made the joke about uh elon musk's department of governmental efficiency was less avengers assemble and more aspergers assemble um yeah so like even on the guy's side of things you know ocd oh i'm i'm obsessive yeah about this sort of stuff uh it's it's my like you know
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Why is autism? It's like it's it just always makes me laugh. I think it's kind of charming. It's definitely autism holds like a very unique meaning. In the mental pathology library that we can all take, it's the one that I think is sort of easiest to throw.
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#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Maybe it's because the autistic people aren't registering it, but the lowest amount of offense seems to be taken by people misdiagnosing that in some way. And maybe that's because autism in many ways is a disadvantage for people, but also bestows some of what some people would consider as advantages too. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
It's such a defining characteristic of how you relate to other people, the most important things that you do. And to be able to write off every time that it comes in, ah, that's my avoidant attachment again. Ah, that's triggered.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
I suppose also it... denies you the opportunity to it it stops you from having the opportunity to deny yourself from being at the mercy of that thing yeah that you say that's uh a pattern that keeps coming up in me i don't like it and i want to get rid of it yes well it's a part of me it is me yeah it defines me as a person
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
73% of boomer males said, no matter what psychological challenges I face, I will not let them define me. 72% of Gen Z females say mental illness is an important part of my identity.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Good for you. Yeah. As opposed to well done. Yeah. Those of us that have, you know, grew up with parents that caused us to have anxious attachment.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
That's actually a solution. I think that more people should be autistic and that would fix a lot of problems that we're facing. Yeah, I'd mentioned to you before, Lewis Capaldi. There's a great documentary on Netflix called How I'm Feeling Now. Highly recommend you watch it. I think it's super pertinent to what you're doing. It'd be great for the book, too.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
So you have this guy who, lots and lots of success, and the success causes him to develop a... He must have had...
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
genetic predisposition for Tourette's I don't know what Tourette's can't catch it I don't think so he must have had this predisposition and the pressure that he puts on himself and that's coming from outside too and the story he tells himself and the rumination causes his mental health to decline to the point where he's got this sort of tick and his shoulders sort of he's always doing this it's like a whole body is contorting and I think
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Maybe it's two years in a row now. At least one year at Glastonbury, he stopped singing. He came out on stage, began singing, and then partway through the song was unable to continue. Had to get the audience to help. And that happened at a show at the O2, I think, which is in the documentary. And then... They tried to bring this documentary into land at the end of 22 or 23 or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And he took six weeks off and started doing yoga and stopped eating McDonald's and look at him now. And then the updates since then are sad that a guy under an awful lot of pressure, the beautiful voice with really, really wonderful stories to tell that make people feel things.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
feeling so much and being unable to handle it to the point where the very art form that he was built to do he's unable to do on stage so is he like backed away from singing as a result I haven't checked in but the last that I saw was this summer there was some festival thing I think that he was at that he had some trouble on stage again yeah I mean maybe he had a bug or whatever but it seems unlikely it seems like it was probably the same challenge that he's been dealing with since the documentary and um
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Yeah, that kind of got me thinking about the mental health thing affecting everybody all the way up. Uh, you know, there's not really any hiding from it. And the way that he goes about it, you know, he's very self-deprecating, but he does not, he's, he's relieved when he gets a diagnosis in the documentary, you know, he finally, they say, turns out I've got Tourette's.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Yeah, so you're never able to switch it off. I think Alain de Botton was sat in that same seat as you. Big proponent of psychotherapy. I think trained as a psychotherapist himself, too. Owned a school of life, which isn't just a YouTube channel, but a psychotherapy facility here in London.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Uh, that kind of makes sense. Uh, and that thing I was having, um, where my heart rate went really high and I kept on breathing. It's like that, apparently that's called a panic attack. It's like, huh, that's a person finding a diagnosis, not identifying with a diagnosis.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
I can't not laugh at it. Is there a new story about why people are so addicted to social media? Is there any more that you've come to think about?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
What is everyone searching for or missing?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
the biggest proponent of it, I think would very much say that there is a time for therapizing. Yes. And then there is a time to not, in the same way as going to the gym, there is a time to train and then there is a time to recover. And I wonder whether one of the criticisms that's common that I put to him
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
There's even nothing more addicting. There's nothing more compelling. What else is there that's as fun to do, that offers everybody the same... Yeah, I mean, you know, I left my old life of nightlife three years ago-ish, and that kind of felt a little bit like exiting Bitcoin at 100K or something and being like, well, that was kind of selling at the top because...
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
There's some crazy stat about how by 2036, there'll be no nightclubs left in the UK. Yeah, so I think it's one a day or one a week or something is closing at the moment across the UK. Just that nightclubs are not only competing with brunch and with restaurants and with lane seven and with top flight darts and with... those ball pit fucking places where people get to take selfies.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
It's not just competing with other in-person events and other community-based events or pickleball or whatever. It's competing with Netflix, Amazon Prime.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
The answer to every question is either it's only one of two things, too much or too little autism. And I vote that it's too little and we need more. But, yes, I think you must have seen this trend the other day, this like slug life thing where people just want, I'm not going out, I don't want to do anything. It was a huge Substack article.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Oh, I don't have a life.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Yeah. I like Netflix. Yeah. I don't... Boyfriend? No, no, no, not for me. No.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
was lots of people online, more old school people, more sort of typical stiff upper lip type people would say, you're not fixing your past problems. You're dwelling on them. And by dwelling on them, you are ruminating too much. There is some evidence. I mean, a good bit of evidence. Rumination is not particularly fantastic for you.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
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Modern Wisdom
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Modern Wisdom
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Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
The boyfriends of Instagram trend has been around for a while, but has maybe escalated a little bit.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
How does this play in the optics of public life?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Soft launching. Well, I've seen people talk about the hard launch, which is just a couple photo that happens out of nowhere. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
I went to Gili Tea in Bali. It's one of these little islands about five years ago. And there's a famous beach club that's got a swing sort of out in the water. And it's gorgeous. The sun sets because it's so close to the equator. The sun sets in the summer at 6.30 p.m. and in the winter at 6 p.m. It's like 12 hours of daylight and it just wobbles a little bit like that.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And this girl wanted to get a photo of her on the swing, but she wanted to catch the sort of sun bouncing off the top of the water. And I remember thinking, like watching this guy and she was saying, no, no, no, you need to get lower. You need to like get sort of lower down, closer to the water. And this dude's sort of chest, shoulder, to neck, to face.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And finding this line between, yeah, mate, we don't want to deny that bad things happened and never alchemize them or transcend and include them into our life.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And by this time it's C, it's a C. So it's not being gentle with him. So he's like... trying to take this photo, the phone's out of the water, he's getting splashed. I remember thinking like, that really better be wifey because that's a big ask.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
It's a little bit of an indicator. I mean, unless this is your...
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
new album cover or whatever for your slam poetry or some shit that you do there is a little bit of like surely the person that you're trying to impress the most is yeah the one that's taking the photo so what does the photo need to be taken for unless it's for his private collection but it's it's become so normalized that like when i wrote about boyfriends of instagram people were replying like oh but you know i'm trying to get memories and stuff uh and like i had a picture in it
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And then on the other side, we don't want to wallow in them. But I suppose if you have the online environment that you exist within permanently using this language, you're permanently having these structures and these thinking patterns reinforced. And then it's how you begin to talk to yourself about what happens offline.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Is that an aspirational thing? Is that just that the power users of Instagram and TikTok behave like that because it's their job, which means that the people who are not, they have none of the same obligations, feel like they should behave in the same way? Or is there something more going on? Is this aspirational? Is this that people hope maybe I get picked up by a modeling agency?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
in ways that people don't realize has become that intense what do you make of the contribution of family breakdown to this of that you mentioned before about that sort of lack of guidance people looking for a little bit of guidance maybe filling the void with entertainment that typically would have been taken up by family what yeah what role does family breakdown have here
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And then you also have, you know, facilitation or medication or conversations with your friends. Further embracing all of that, you're just entrenched in this all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Yeah. Is there a lack of moral direction or adult guidance or something?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
That lack of guidance is, I don't know, the equivalent for the guys is pick your favorite podcaster or YouTuber or fitness bodybuilder of choice. And looking up to that, okay, well, it's the missing patriarch that I didn't have or didn't have long enough or didn't understand this world. And I'm going to surrogate that to this parasocial online relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Because it's playing into the weakness that they already have or the disposition. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
instant frictionless access to all information from experts that maybe even more expert than our parents would be ever and trained and all the rest of it, even if they're legitimate. And obviously there's a lot of room for illegitimate experts to sneak in. But it is still self-diagnosis and it is still self-treatment from that.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
If you're learning from TikTok, there is no part of, hey, why don't we sit down? I will give you something as opposed to you will learn from this thing and then go and have to work out what that means and apply it and not be able to ask questions and not be able to regulate with anybody. Yeah. And not have it contextualized even remotely. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
So she doesn't need to. Speak for your mom.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
You had this breakdown. One of the main causes of unhappiness in the modern world is a culture that presents other people as obstacles. Heal faster alone, work better alone, find freedom alone. It's such a lie. Loneliness is not empowerment. Is loneliness pedestalized by Gen Z TikTok?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Why do you think that is? What's the proposed mechanism?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
I wonder whether therapy language and therapy culture for girls is what gym language, gym culture, Psalms, testosterone, steroids at 17 is for guys.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Chaos in both domains is scary.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
the ground is like crumbling beneath you so you can't step off it um trust really is everything when it comes to supplements a lot of brands may say they're top quality but few can actually prove it which is why i'm such a massive fan of momentous they make the highest quality supplements on the planet three of the products that i use every day to support my brain body and sleep are omega-3s creatine and magnesium l3 and 8 dr ronda patrick and andrew hubeman have all
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
extolled the virtues. And honestly, I try to limit the number of supplements I rely on, but when I have these consistently, they make a massive impact on my cognitive performance and my strength and my health. Momentous are literally unparalleled when it comes to rigorous third-party testing. So you can be sure that what you read on the label is what's in the product and absolutely nothing else.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
If you're going to spend time and money on supplements, you need to make sure that they have what they say they have in them. Best of all, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy anything that you like, try it for 29 days, and if you do not love it, they will give you your money back. And they ship internationally.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
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Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
It seems like you've done a good bit of work on the attachment stuff, at least in terms of research. What have you learned about what's real and what's bunk from that?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Did Gen Z have a lot of abandonment issues in that way?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
I saw you tweet, kids as young as nine are addicted to porn. Girls as young as 13 are using fake IDs to post explicit content on OnlyFans. A third of those selling nudes on Twitter are under the age of 18. Yeah. Can you unpack that, please?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Over-embaring in all the wrong areas and totally absent in all of the wrong ones as well.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
A lot of chivalry went out with patriarchy.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
There was a great tweet I saw about telling all men to stop being so pushy doesn't work because the men who don't need to hear it will take it to heart and the ones who do need to hear it aren't going to listen.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Why are girls as young as 13 using fake IDs? Do people want money? Is there a status thing associated with this?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
I thought you were going to say OnlyFans. No.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
You don't think it's empowering?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Bonnie Blue. Zoella to Bonnie Blue.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
the arc. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, or any other BS. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health. Regulating appetite and curbing cravings. They'll give you your money back.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
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Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
pretty much all of the examples of toxic masculinity from the past uh promiscuity sexual entitlement hyper independence are all traits that are now regarded as boss girl yeah feminist power i don't know i think it might be like a revenge thing um i think i think
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
What's that stat that you mentioned there about girls from religious families seeming to do differently well and now 18 to 25-year-old girls are religious at different levels and stuff?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
this sort of nostalgia for a better time i don't know when it was maybe before you were born maybe when your parents were around or something yeah or i don't know Slightly older generations would have that kind of wistfulness, American dream, etc. Yeah. What do Gen Z think of the current moment? Do they think that it's liberating?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Typically, women would have been more.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Because it seems like there's two things going on at once, that life is horrible and terrible and I have anxious attachment and maybe autism. Yeah. And also, I'm fully liberated to be myself. I can be whatever I want to be. I can go boss my way through promiscuity and sell my body on OnlyFans and make loads of money and I don't need no man.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
is not because they have a disorder it's because they're the first to try and feel their way through a completely different world yeah with no rules or strategies or archetypes or stories with a generation that can't relate doesn't relate you've just taught them how to use the ipad yeah what are they going to be able to teach you about how to handle this
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
It's irrelevant as soon as it leaves your lips.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
That's a very good question. Freya India, ladies and gentlemen. Freya, I love everything that you're writing. It's really great to see you go from strength to strength. I think it's really important stuff. Where should people go? They want to check out everything that you do.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Exciting. Cool. I look forward to it. Thank you. Until next time. Bye.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And maybe therapy culture, therapy language is stepping into the void and also stopping them from perhaps going back to finding religion. I'm hesitant to say that therapy culture is getting in the way of religion. Religion is necessarily the answer to this, but that it's whatever...
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Better alternatives could be, including religion, are being precluded by this much sexier, newer, more comforting answer to everything that makes no demands on you as a person that doesn't require you to follow any edicts or refrain from any types of behaviors.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Is therapy culture less pro-social?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Yes. Yeah, that's very interesting, which is, you know, the best kind of relationships are the ones that make both people in them better. Yeah. That they enter the relationship and stay in the relationship, hopefully, or if they leave, they leave in an improved situation individually.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
What does a therapeutic worldview consist of? What does that mean?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Other people's inner worlds, which can become a sort of, oh, that's a nice thought pattern. Maybe I'll try that one on.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Everybody else is following along from them.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And any perturbment from feeling the opposite of that is not because of her. It's because of some insult that's occurred in one form or another from the world or from structures or from a partner or from a friend or from...
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
You don't need to hear this.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Have you contrasted this, I don't know whether you've been able to look at it, with what young guys see? Is there an equivalent for young guys?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
So talking about lockdown, how effective do you think companies will be at dragging people back into the office?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
We'll get back to talking to Rory in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Element. For the last three years, I've started every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
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Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
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Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
That's how confident they are that you love it. This thing tastes phenomenal. It's like a sweet, salty, orangey nectar first thing in the morning. And I love it. And that's why I've used it for probably a thousand days now.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What was that parable of three men getting onto an airplane?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
What's that thing about the Bezos has got when anecdotes disagree with data? Most of the time, I trust the anecdote. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
One of our mutual friends has a team that works remotely around the world. So they speak to each other on Slack, but they don't see each other in the office. And as part of a team building exercise, I think every so often they bring people together. And he thought this would be brilliant. Everyone's going to get to know each other. They're going to become friends.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
There's a number in the far right-hand column of a spreadsheet somewhere next to a person's name that says that was green this year. They made that number go up.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
It's going to bond the team together so much. The week after they had this in-person meetup, separately, three people asked for a pay rise. Because they all got together and had a beer. And they compared notes. And were like, so what do you want? Hang on a second. I was told such a – because you don't have that kind of non-critical conversation if you're just dealing with people on Slack.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Speaking of things going badly, Jaguar's rebrand. What do you reckon?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Get that in you, Rory. Yeah, absolutely. Not enough stimulants in us today.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
First off, there's a digital record of it. Maybe someone's able to check. I don't know. Can the admin check Slack? Maybe they can. I don't know. And secondly, it's like we're just here to do the job. This isn't sort of play around time outside of work. And do you really text the other marketing guy or whatever after work about stuff to do with that? Probably not.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Were they on some trajectory toward slow motion irrelevance?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Heretical, exactly. Yeah. I don't know whether you saw their Twitter was replying to people that were criticizing the campaign, whoever it is in the marketing department. They're being very... non-apologetic about what they were doing. We don't care about what it was before. This is a new era, et cetera, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
You know, really, no airs or graces about trying to bring along the heritage or the... Well, bear in mind, they have got an advantage.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
So there is, from a totally Machiavellian totalitarian state organization point of view, there is an argument to be made. Divide and rule. Silo off. Yeah, compartmentalize the staff. And then they never know if one of them has managed to negotiate a pay rise and the rest of them haven't.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Ah, that's very funny.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
It's interesting the resistance that people have, especially around vehicles, you know, I guess second to a house. A car is a type of identifier in a way. It's a status symbol. It's probably, in terms of purchasing, it's going to be second largest in terms of your capital expenditure.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Oh, God. Be careful the skills that you give to the staff. No, no, no. Be careful what you wish for.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
But the price is the same of a Jaguar in Newcastle as a Jaguar in
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
So I have single-handedly kept Uber liquid in Austin, Texas. But no, I have a, I think I said to you last year, I was threatening to get a Camaro and sure enough, I did at the start of this year. Yeah, the only way that I can non-ironically buy an American muscle car is when I live in Texas with an American driving license.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Well, yeah, I mean, it's par for the course. You know, if somebody drives an American pickup truck, a Ford Raptor or whatever the equivalent, a Ranger, I think they call it over here. If somebody drives that over here, you feel like they're cosplaying. If somebody drives it in America, you think, oh, that's cute compared to the Tundra next to you and the six bed, whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
It goes all the way up. Dude, in Texas, there's ones where Some guy will happily throw his kids in the back and take them to the park on a Saturday morning or pull what appears to be an articulated lorry behind him on a Monday morning. It's very versatile in that way. You haven't got a big motorhome yet. That would be one of my temptations if I moved to Texas. An RV would be quite nice.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
One other thing that I've been thinking about since I've been staying here, I'm at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington. And on the front door, there's maybe two or three doormen. And it's not so much of a, at least the places that I tend to stay in America, it doesn't seem to be so much of a trait. Yet over here, it could be replaced. I've heard you talk about this before.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
It could be replaced with an opening door. It could be replaced with a series of sensors and buttons and switches. But it's not necessarily about that. It's about the experience of the doorman being outside.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say they're top quality, but few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with Momentous. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet. Three of the products that I use to support my brain, body, and sleep every day are omega-3s, creatine, and magnesium L-threonate.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Honestly, I try and limit the number of supplements that I rely on, but when I take these consistently, they have a massive impact on my cognitive performance, my strength, and health. Thank you for watching. in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Talk to me about this problem with seeking solutions through addition rather than subtraction thing that you've been on recently.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
You were talking about feedback loops earlier on. The feedback loop is so slow and it's so molested from what goes in to what actually comes out, the amount of time. You're on 30 days. You're on 60 days. You're on 60 days from the end of the month. You got it. It's the big problem on the backend, for instance, with podcasting platforms.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
So YouTube has gamified not only for the audience, but also for the creators. You have this little number that's one of 10. So it compares where this video is now since published in terms of the duration of time, 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, however long, with other videos. And it tells you where it ranks. First of 10, wow, this is better than your last 10 videos at the same amount of time.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
At the same period after. Exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Some things pick up after.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Where it kicks in toward the end. But you don't have that on Spotify. You don't have that on Instagram. You don't have that on most other platforms because they're not quite as creator-focused. And yeah, the power of feedback loops is fucking unbelievable. Speaking of the... You mentioned there some inefficiencies within the system and some changes to do with Britain.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Obviously, 2 million people just signed a petition to... We are disgruntled with Mr. Starmer, Sir Starmer. We want to make some changes there. We've seen a lot of turmoil and stuff across this year, generally 2024 in the UK. What do you make of the state of British culture, the milieu that we're in at the moment?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Yeah, I'm not sure if you can be disgruntled with somebody that you didn't vote for.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
It's a bad country to be pouring.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Earning in pounds and spending in pesos.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
You live in Newcastle and get 10 times the house for the same amount.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
You also can be on the- It's a winner takes all effect. You can be on the receiving end of that too, though. You can benefit from that, which I have been in Austin. Why does any scene appear anywhere? Any scene appears anywhere because people go. No one's really too sure why. And because people go, more people go.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
And then before you know it, you've got the hottest new place in- I suppose it was Rogan in Austin.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
He made one of the big ones. But before him was Lex Friedman. I think before Lex was Michael Malice. Before him was Aubrey Marcus. You know, you've got to track it back to wherever you want. And now everybody has a fucking second holiday home from Jason Calacanis coming over from, you know, Investor Bay, West Coast bullshit world to come and now live on a ranch, wear a cowboy hat.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
So, yeah, it's a... Can I be really mischievous here?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Oh, so you've got a blend of the two.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Same in Austin. That's where everybody lives. Same in Austin. Honestly, the suburbs, the olden style suburbs, so what's up north, which is the domain, is kind of a... soulless hellscape that was created for people that work at tech companies to not have to go far to go to the office. A few things.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I think the rumor is that Austin and San Antonio are growing at such a clip that they're going to merge into one huge megacity eventually. Without traffic, I think it's only 50 minutes-ish from sort of the edge of one to the edge of another. And when you think about, we've got this land, we might as well expand it. Oh, you've got another advantage in Austin.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Well, I certainly know the way that traffic flows work, that if you hit a red light, you're more likely to hit subsequent red lights. That's it. Right. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
If you hit the first red, you think, I'm fucked here for every one that I'm going to hit. Well, you and your massive muscle car won't be... I can try and go as quickly as possible. which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
You receive insights from expert physicians who provide a detailed written clinician summary of their observations and phone consultations for any critical findings. Plus, Dr. Andrew Hubman is their scientific advisor and Dr. Mark Hyman is their chief medical officer. So you can trust that the data and insights you receive are as scientifically sound as they are actionable.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands, but with function, it is only $500. They've got a 300,000 person wait list, but every Monday, they open a few spots for Modern Wisdom listeners. Right now, you can discover where your health stands by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. Just going back to the UK for a second, let's say that Starmer brought you in or whoever it is that does tourism, brought you in to improve UK culture, sort of tourist destination type thing. Have you got any sort of branding or psychological interventions which would maybe be low cost that could make the UK more attractive across the board?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
For tourists? Yeah, for tourists or for people to stay. We've got the second in the world, the UK's second in the world for millionaire exits in 2024. China, fucking literal communist dictatorship, authoritarian hellscape, was first with about... You've got to watch the super rich because the super rich don't give a shit about democracy, okay?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
China lost about 13,000 to 15,000 this year. The UK lost 10,000-ish millionaires leaving. But we have 3% of the population of China. We have about 5% of the population of India. And more millionaires left the UK. Second in the world in millionaire exits. We have the same number. of universities in the top 10, as America do, but only 20% of the number of startup founders and entrepreneurs. So why?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
What is it that's going on? And one thing you could do, and the Portuguese are playing this game.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
What does that suggest from a sort of consumer behavior standpoint then that there is a kind of price that needs to be paid up front? It kind of makes me think that the first movers within that industry –
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Italy's got this new flat tax. You pay 100 grand and that's all the tax that you pay for the entire year. That's a new one from them.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Not so much that they cause a ton of havoc.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
There's a fascinating study that came out of Australia. Candice Blake did this. They correlated wealth inequality with self-objectification as measured by sexy selfies online. And wealth inequality is positively correlated. The level of inequality within a local ecology is is positively correlated with sexy selfies.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Yeah. So self-objectification, self-beautification, sexy selfies online is positively correlated with inequality.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Proposed mechanism is that in a high wealth inequality environment, women can see not only how high they can climb, but how low they could fall with a potential partner.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
don't necessarily have the best advantage because they presumably need to pay the most money in terms of marketing to break not only somebody into their brand, but break them into an entire new ecosystem of tap of vehicles.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
But the signal can be stress tested.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
There's another one that I'll give you. It's called the environmental security hypothesis. So this is human behavioral ecology, which is kind of twinned with evolutionary psychology. Got it. It's a little bit more concerned with... how we react to the local environment around us, how we sort of interact and so on.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
There is some pretty good evidence to suggest that men prefer bigger women when the economy is bad. So men under resource stress seem to prefer bigger women. And this can be tracked in a bunch of different ways.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Yep. Well, again, the proposed mechanism is that in a time of resource scarcity ancestrally, you would have wanted a woman that looks like she could survive a couple of months. A bad winter. Yeah, exactly. A couple of months without a good harvest. And that seems to have carried over now. So two really interesting ones.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Kind of as you've said there, as the economy wavers up and down, it seems to be that the preferred body size overall, the sort of ideal body that women have, also fluctuates. But they did a really great study on university students in the canteen hall. And before and after they ate, they showed them different women's body shapes. And prior to eating, they preferred bigger women.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
And after eating, they preferred thinner women, that there is something about even the sort of ambient hunger, resource scarcity, which impacts this, the environmental security hypothesis, as it's known.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I knew that you'd come and do a quiz at the end. Talk to me about your assessment of Trump's marketing campaign.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I would imagine that the other Latinos found that funnier, given that it's jibbing someone that's close enough to them.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
That's a really that's a really great point. If there's anybody sufficiently right wing that thinks that the UK is too open and free with the way that we give away.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I think that at least from a business perspective, because you can people will have heard I got my tax down to zero as an American thing, which is basically that you can drive profit down to the level where the whatever it is, 32 percent, 37 percent, depending on where you live. that the government would have taken, there is none for them to take because you've spent it all.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
So you basically get a one-third discount on anything that you want to buy. But what that... It sounds sexy. It's like, oh my God, he didn't pay any tax. It's like, yeah, but he did pay 60% of everything that was taxable that he had to drive down. It's not like he got it for free. He just got quite a big discount on whatever it is that he's talking about.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
But yeah, there is such an aversion to giving money to the government to the stage where people will happily... do this sort of seppuku, like Harry Caray thing.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Absolutely, yes. The hand will get chopped off in order to spite the finger. Yeah, exactly. Despite the IRS on the end of your middle finger. We'll get back to talking to Rory in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Shopify. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. They're the driving force behind Gymshark, Skims, Allo, and...
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Nutanix, which is why I've partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with ShopPay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Best of all, they've got award-winning support, which is there to help you every step of the way.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do backend inventory management. Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use at Newtonic with Shopify.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. today. But you had this thing about people that pay lots of taxes needing additional... It may be an idea to offer them extra privileges. I'm loving this, but you're slowly accumulating more flavors. This is great. It's brilliant.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Oh, it's a massive phallic appendage in one form or another that they can then fly with.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Oh, wow. Oh, my God. That would bankrupt most people, especially if you've got to pay it in fiat.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
There's such distaste, though, from anybody to the people that have got wealth, especially from the media. It's very much sort of demonized at the moment. It's very uncool, uncouth to talk about the level of wealth that you have, especially when we've got inequality, cost of living crisis, inflation, housing problems, etc. So...
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
It doesn't surprise me that it's hard to get people to be on board with doing something. You already have enough benefits as it is. Look at the wealth that you have. I had this idea with Scott Galloway where I suggested that presuming that some rich people are at least somewhat smart given that they've managed to get themselves to the stage of being rich.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
He would acknowledge that.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
There's a million other reasons why. But that some people in there will not be total idiots. Perhaps some of the people that are real power users when it comes to tax. I think Elon did this. I made a statement the other day that he's paid more money in tax than any human in history. He recently paid $10 billion to the IRS.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Yeah, nations. When you're competing with entire empires, perhaps that might be something different. My idea to Scott was, why don't people who pay some Uber amount in tax, you know, the top 0.001%, why don't they get to have some sort of consultant at the IRS or the Inland Revenue? And they can maybe talk about discriminating where their tax dollars are spent. You could say, I really like...
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Yeah, anything. But it treats your taxes. First off, it makes your tax money more accountable because I think people that have earned a lot of money understand efficiency, at least in one form or another, in that they've managed to accumulate the money. And they look at government and think, I'm going to give you these tax dollars. And I think that you're just going to piss it up.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
How many times has the Pentagon failed its fucking budget report here?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
A mid-roll podcast.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I wonder how many people have bought air fryers and Mustang Mach-Es off the back of you. I do think downstream it's had a marked impact on the Mustang Mach-E market.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I saw you tweet about this the other day.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I'm yet to find a good Indian meal in Austin, Texas, much to my dismay.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I'll crowdsource it.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Salted caramel in the dessert world. Yeah, you got it exactly. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Myopia in the bread world.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
That strikes me as something slightly weird. I've been thinking a lot about, we built the Newtonic brand and we're building another one at the moment with a guy called Mike Israetel. And a lot of the time what we're talking about is sort of coolness and credibility, two things that we're trying to aim for.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Now, with a millennial, Gen Z, degenerate, influencer-driven online TikTok Instagram brand, perhaps that's easy. Are companies in markets that aren't necessarily so customer-facing that don't need to have an Instagram account, do you think companies get too concerned with trying to be cool, with trying to create sort of a... No, I think that the focus on the consumer is...
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Because it's so effortful.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Yes, because it's just a small reception area where you'd look like a weirder. Yeah, I spent a lot of time on the road over the last couple of years. I've come to believe that the biggest determining factor about your enjoyment of a hotel is the quality of the pillows. And it's not the bed. Bad bed, good pillows, totally fine night's sleep. Good bed, bad pillows, fucked.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
So I, every time that I- You need a pillow sommelier, don't you? Well, look, I'm trying to work on this at the moment. I'm trying to find a Amazon Prime pillow, which I can get in most territories that I go to. So most like US, UK, maybe a Dubai or whatever that I can get next day delivery to any hotel that if I get there, And on the first day, when I check in, I go, oh, fuck.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
No, they've got one of those ones that makes the tsss sound when you lie in it. I'm like, quickly get onto Amazon, order it, and have it arrive.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Very good. Yeah. Very good. So basically it will deliver. That's the worst part. But I mean, yeah, interesting pivot at the moment.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Yeah, that's brilliant. There's a move at the moment in airports towards like health, wellness and stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
You also don't want to be in that all the time. necessarily. If you have the final proofread of this particular piece of copy that absolutely needs to be right, if you're writing a best man's speech, probably best to be in somewhere that's a little bit more chill. It's your final run through. You're trying to remember a presentation. You're trying to do whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Do you really want to be in the cafe? But yeah, I mean, you'll have seen this as well.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Well, Well, I mean, I think on average, it seems like open plan offices really, really damage down productivity. The difference even between noise canceling headphones and complete silence is marked. A mutual friend of ours worked at a place, a social media management agency years ago, and they had this huge Harry Potter fan page thing.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
And as a part of that, they were doing a time lapse of them building products. the world's biggest Harry Potter jigsaw puzzle. So they were going upstairs. They had an entire room. It was one of these many, many, many stories. And there was open plan office and fucking AstroTurf on the walls and ping pong Wednesdays or whatever. And he just couldn't work. He couldn't think. He couldn't focus.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
So he had found that they'd kind of given up on this huge Harry Potter thing. They maybe got stuck at some stage of the jigsaw. So there was a point where every morning for a couple of weeks, he went up and sat in amongst disused Harry Potter jigsaw puzzle pieces on the floor because it was the only place he could get any fucking piece. Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Need a little bit of chill time.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
It's one of the reasons that throughout history… armies have been encouraged to get drunk together a few nights before the first battle. Not because, sure, the bonding thing, the fact that it's more difficult to lie, the fact that you're a better liar detector when you're drunk than when you're sober. Do you remember that Carlsberg campaign, you know who your mates are?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Signal of friendship. I wanted to show you this. Europeans, according to a study by Simple Analytics, Europeans spend approximately 575 million hours per year clicking through cookie banners, the prompts which appear on websites asking you to accept cookies.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Right, so you've had to restart it.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
what was the famous thing in the in british india where they they created a bounty on cobra python yeah cobras poisonous snakes yeah and people started farming them to claim the bounty there was something to do with uh um trying to reduce the number of cars on the road so they did they uh logged the
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
logged the registration plates in one form or another, and all of the rich people just bought second cars. So they doubled the number of cars that were on the roads.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I'll swap you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
You can maybe pick the kids up at the end of that.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Meanwhile, we're still struggling with all of the problems everybody wanted to get rid of. And we've accumulated new ones and some of them have got worse. And now Keir Starmer's done a massive U-turn on immigration. That was surprising.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
You've got maximizing area under the curve.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I have no idea. It's just tap your card on the front.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Well, we have like fast lanes or whatever they're called, preferential lanes all across America. And that's basically the same. It's like if you've got the text tag or whatever, then you can go through this one. And by paying that, it's $1.86 or whatever in order to go through this particular lane. But that lane's got far fewer people on it. And you can, everybody kind of
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Because you can't.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Rory Sutherland, ladies and gentlemen. Rory, let's bring this one home. I appreciate you. Eighth time, ninth time on the show. I love it every time you come on.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
If Eric's made it to the end of this episode, I forgot to text you and ask what brand of shirt you wear.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
I will remember. And if not, I've just put it out on a YouTube channel.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
Jeffrey Epstein was the deal of the century. Rory Sutherland said it here. Rory, I appreciate you. Until next time, mate. Thank you very much indeed.
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
What do you mean when you say that we're too impatient to be intelligent?
Modern Wisdom
#904 - Rory Sutherland - The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology
They're not in Notting Hill.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
What a great day for Netflix. Yeah. Meghan Markle's new lifestyle series drops today.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. That was the only way I got into university. They reduced my entry requirements because they thought I was going to come and play sport. Little did they know that they just had an adult infant waiting in the wings who was going to completely... So you stopped playing the second you went? Essentially. I mean, I dropped down to just drinking, partying, and running events. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And what did you, or what have you come to learn about the most important basics when it comes to telling a good story?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
But then this happened.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
There's a good use of omission, which is something I learned from Mr. Borland. Okay, who's that? Strange, dark, and mysterious. So a huge YouTube channel, like 10 million, 15 million posts on YouTube. My bad, my bad, my bad. It's all scary, spooky story shit that people listen to. And one of the things that he...
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
taught me on the pod last year was omission is really important yeah so continuing to set stuff up but leaving out very key pieces of information would kind of beg the question or get there and you know there's things where you could have told a story within 15 seconds you can make it interesting for three minutes by not the payoff is at the very very end yeah holding that attention yeah yeah people want to know you know or the people who relate to it i think that's the
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. Or less of a man.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And they did that thing. Why are the Indians so good at that? They're not really athletic people. Well, think about all of the places that are good at cricket. places that we colonized. Australia, India, Pakistan, Canada. Canada pretty good at it as well.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I think I work hard. I don't think I've mistreated my body that much.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
That's nomadic.com slash. Modern wisdom. What's IVF like, the process of that?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah, that line about you don't have problems, we have problems. What a team was sort of taking on this battle together. It must be very reassuring. I have a friend whose wife went through IVF. She was 42, so she was really toward the end. And I think you can actually do this where you get to kind of this is the last harvest of eggs that you have.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
This is just squeezing the very last few drops out of the sort of sponge of fertility. And two stories, lovely woman, very smart, very balanced. One day threw a grapefruit at him so hard that it bruised his ribs when she was going through the IVF. And then a couple of days later, she opened the front door and there was 30 Amazon boxes on the front porch. It's like, what the fuck is this?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And they were all addressed to the house. It wasn't somebody else's thing. Brings them inside and starts opening them up. And it's like pink lace doilies and curtain ties and little...
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
coasters and bit like knickknacks and stuff like Dolores Umbridge from fucking Harry Potter sort of nicey nicey and in some hormonal fugue state fever dream thing she'd just gone on Amazon and ordered literally she'd like got wasted on progesterone and just gone crazy on girly shit what the fuck
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
So I've been looking forward to telling you this because I saw you do your show here in Austin about a year ago, almost exactly a year ago. That's right. And I went and got a sperm count done. Did you? Because of you. Exclusively because of you. And how was it? First one. So I got a whole fucking story for you.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Or someone who's been conned by the patriarchy into being a domestic prostitute somehow. Oh, sweetie, what a shame for you.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. Yeah. I don't work. I'm a mom now.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
There's a mimetic sense to this, I think, that you kind of do what you see the people around you doing.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah, I do wonder what can be done to kind of pedestalize motherhood again.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. Against it's not, I'm not voting for this thing. I'm voting not for that.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. I think that was one of the reasons that
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
your special again when i saw it last year and then again now it was really important to give people something that feels a bit more grounded real and meaningful and within their control yeah as opposed to coming out and going you know zelensky trump was the amber heard johnny depp of fucking 2025 uh which by the way i think is actually true like that reading should have fucking been done behind closed doors like why are the why the press they're watching this bullshit well they didn't think that's what was going to happen
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Didn't account for the wild card that is J.D. Vance.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
So maybe let's not do it here.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
He's going to be around for a while.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
let me fucking okay i'm sorry i got distracted by my wife's crocs on you i got a little intimidated this this is the this is my prophylactic okay this is my fucking this is my protection well if the sperm is bad you don't even need it bro that's right i can just wear the croc that's double protection anyway so uh do a malin one i do a malin sperm thing yeah have you ever seen how
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah, I was really, really surprised by that. As someone who... I didn't have any health insurance in the US until the start of last year because I didn't have a social security number and how many pages to get it set up and blah, blah, blah. And I didn't know how many medical claims aren't verified or accepted or rejected.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I didn't know how long it got pushed back for, how long people have to wait. Well, you can't go to that provider, the one that you want, you go to the one that we say, and then you can't do this and it's going to take six months and so on and so forth. And then you get to the end of this thing and sorry, you're out of pocket. The number one reason for bankruptcy in America.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me if we see the pendulum swinging back. I can already see some, you know, the anti-woke stuff that was like super cool for the last eight years, something like that. Yeah, that's over. So woke was over for a little while, but anti-woke was lagging behind it. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And now when I see this crazy bathroom pronoun-y thing online, it just feels like, dude, this was maybe- How much are eggs, yo? This was maybe interesting and cool when you were speaking truth to power as a rebellious anarchist that was outside of the system.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It doesn't matter about who you're having sex with. It doesn't matter about the color you stand.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Being a podcaster isn't always as glamorous as it seems. For instance, I just took a three-hour Uber ride from Houston, Texas to make this episode. And seeing that it is currently midnight and I just downed the equivalent of four cups of coffee, falling asleep will be at least a bit of a struggle. But thanks to Momentus' Magnesium L3 and 8, I should be able to sleep comfortably.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. You did a bunch of shows in the UK.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
On this last tour. Talk to me about what you learned, differences, similarities, UK, US.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Don't sound anything alike. Different lifestyles. It's crazy. Different football teams.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Knowing that your wife is on the other side of a wall.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
The saddest porno ever.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It was great, man. It was great. James, the other half of new tonic went to go.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's holding it down. Uh, he did fucking 15 minutes on Aussie shit. It's like, where the fuck did he get 15 minutes on Aussie shit?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Was there anywhere that you went... How many dates did you do?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Was there anywhere that sort of sticks out in your mind as being, holy fuck, the reaction sort of emotionally? MSG was the craziest.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And it's just like, all right, there's still some hangover from COVID. I think, you know, New York and L.A. put both of their feet inside of their mouths for a fucking two years straight.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Not got the length, man. Anyway, mail it in, comes back. That's not so good. I start chat GPTing, and they're like, well, you have to remember... The suspension liquid says, do not shake, right? This isn't a, it's not a fucking core power. You're not supposed to like make sure. Oh, did you? No, no, no. But the DPD guy that carried it for 24 hours doesn't know to not shake it, right?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I think you need a very particular type of nervous system to live in New York. You need to be okay with chaos at all times. Like, there doesn't seem to be much... And I guess you can be in different areas. New York is not just one thing, right? You can go fucking, like, upstate and whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
But if you're talking anywhere around Manhattan, it's like, you need to be able... You're in cocaine, first-line cocaine energy at all times. All times.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I asked Sam Morrell about this, and he said... what was it that you can walk down the street, bump into somebody and think to yourself, I hope that guy dies. But later that night you think to yourself, good day.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
He chucks it in the back with the Amazon returns and all the rest of the stuff. So anyway, then I go to Austin Urology.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Well, you have to be in order to survive or else you just get chewed up.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. The energy of New York kind of reminds me of what the news feels like at the moment. It's like unrelenting. And I was talking to Segura about this, that it's been, what, two months now? Less than two months Trump's been in office.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And I've already got such...
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
fucking news and like trump fatigue i thought we were over this shit it's so exhausting i thought this time around people would be like okay whatever i've seen it done it but no it's i'm getting really really like i just i can't i'm checking out so much and i'm aware this is a position of privilege not need to care about what politics is impacting your life like in some ways maybe not needing to listen to the news but once you have kids bro you none of this you don't care
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
In Austin. And it's, Way better. But? But. Still shitty. Varicoseal. Oh, yeah, of course.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I've got this theory that, uh, because people are having kids later, especially guys, uh, That a lot of the stuff that people invest themselves into, the personal development, the self-growth, the business, the muscle gain, all of that stuff, a lot of those projects are surrogate families because you haven't had one yet. Oh, wow.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
and all of the energy that would be put into protect baby, protect wife or protect baby, protect husband, like do the thing. Homemaking is, well, I don't have that, but I've still got this sort of sense to be agentic and make something happen in the world. But I don't have the thing. I don't have the little thing.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
So I'm going to put it into a business or I'm going to put it into a side project or into my body or into my mindfulness or into my political party or whatever it might be.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It's an inefficiency of vasculature around the epididymis.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Before we continue, if you've been feeling a little bit sluggish or you haven't been performing in the gym or the bedroom the way that you would like, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a massive role in your energy and performance. Being able to see them charted over the course of a year with actionable insights about how to actually improve them gives you a clear path
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Did you find that some of the more egotistical or self-centered concerns that you had and things that you used to worry yourself with dropped away? Was it almost like you sort of cleansed yourself of that because you've got something that is so dependent on you that worrying about, have I optimized my ice bath? Where am I at with such and such? It's like all of that fluff.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Gets stripped back because you're just looking after the kid.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Somebody threw up in your ball sack.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I just need to always be creating stuff in the world because you've already done the creation thing.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I absolutely can't wait to be a dad.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Perfect. Exactly. Both ends of the IQ bell curve understood what's going on. It means that you're not circulating heat away. Actually, heat's the issue, right?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It's weird dating when you're a little bit older. Like I'm 37. I was 37 last week. And that's an interesting one because the longer that you wait, the kind of high that your bar gets. And it's this sort of sunk cost fallacy thing where you think, well, I've waited this long. What's the point? You want to settle. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
The things have to become more perfect, which in itself is a difficult circle to square because you also know, well, fucking clock's ticking, dude. Well, think about that.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Well, there's a problem. Someone gave me this piece of advice not long ago. As they said, do you want to be a dad? And I said, yes, I can't wait to be a dad. They sort of wagged their finger in my face. And they said, make sure that you fall in love with the girl, not the institution. And the point being, if you want to be a dad or if you want to be a mom a lot. Great advice.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
You can, what was it they said? With rose colored glasses on, red flags don't look red.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Like if you just want the thing, I want to be a dad, I want to be a mom, I want to be married, I want to be not alone. Whatever the thing that you want, you're able to, not so big of a deal. And it's like, you're not getting married to marriage. You're getting married to a person. You're not having a baby with the process of childhood. You're having a baby with another human.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
That's a great piece of advice, dude.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Hoping that they'll like, uh, it's the equivalent of you can't find me. I quit, but it's trying to get the other person to realize that I'm not going to fire you. I'm going to make you quit.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I had a, yeah. I had a conversation with a friend a little while ago and he had this sentence where he said, all my life I was worried that I was a coward. And then he had a bunch of, a sequence of really, really tough events happen to him. He said, you know, I was like surrounding myself with hard men. I always thought I was a bit of a hard man.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And, you know, I did martial arts and, you know, I was like around people that were like special forces and stuff like that. It's like, but I never really, really tested myself. And then one day, like... The world came and it wasn't discomfort that I'd chosen. It was discomfort that was forced on me by the world. Maybe like having a fertility or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And he said, all my life I'd heard my better self clearing his throat in the room next door. And one day this thing happened and he was like, I wonder if he's going to kick the door in and fucking stop coughing and come through. He was like, he did. That's good. But courage. Yeah, I think you can pretty much...
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Your life is kind of restricted by the amount of courage that you're prepared to deploy. And I mean, how long have everybody listening to this stayed in relationships because they were terrified of breaking somebody else's heart that was dependent on them or losing the love of somebody that they felt it was unrequited and they needed the validation of?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It's noble and understandable and sensitive and largely driven by fear and cowardice. And if you had... You know what a cool question to ask yourself would be? What would I do if I had three times the bravery?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. What decisions would I make?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
If I was like three times as brave as I am.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
You two against the hard, not you two against each other. Yeah. What changes in a relationship or sort of what have you noticed about stuff that's interesting to navigate once there's a third participant?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And he was like, it was almost like a surrogate dad to a lot of my friends, you know, like he was just like so much dad energy that he had it spilling over around the cup.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Not necessarily a great husband.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. Well, I imagine I've heard you talk about this before, the role of thoughtfulness. Yeah. Relationships. Yeah. And how difficult it must be to be thoughtful because all of your fucking attention and energy is just being put into this tiny thing. That's totally this blob, right? It's a blob. It's a big blob of stuff. Yeah. You and her and, What thoughtfulness have you got?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Trying to keep it alive.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I listened to the first half of Andrew Tate on Patrick Bet-David's podcast.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Interesting one, dude. I mean, he's currently being subpoenaed, investigated something by the state of Florida. Yeah. Just opened up some warrant type thing for him. Yeah. I think it's a bit of a brave call from the US to do that at like this time to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on over when we're talking about worries about trafficking and migrant.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
The UK has got lots of concerns about grooming. You can say what you want about the validity of the case around tape. Yeah. Optics are optics. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
This is where Ben Shapiro gets it 100% backward. He says facts don't care about your feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
This one in particular.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
This was the point I was saying earlier on about, you know, you can speak truth to power and be that sort of... It was almost like... like rock starry, like kind of like rebellious, anarchistic type thing. It's like, it's just the kind of position that most people hold now around a lot of it. Yeah. We probably should be careful about what we're doing to teenagers.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
The morphology, motility, count, like all pretty good.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
You've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that is frankly because I'm dependent on it. And for the last three years, I've started every morning with Element in a cold glass of water. It's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Each Grabbing Girls Stick Pack contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, or any other junk. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing your brain health, regulating appetite, and curbing cravings.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
The reason that I keep harping on about this is because I genuinely feel the difference when I take it versus when I don't. And I'm going to continue to talk about it until you do too. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it for as long as you want to try it.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And if you do not like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
modern wisdom that's drink lmnt.com slash modern wisdom there's definitely a an amount of irony around saying because it's the best i love romania i love romania why did you move to romania when you first moved to romania i love romania because it's corrupt you can pay the police off the laws basically don't exist and you can get anything done you want and then five years later like or like uh
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Dude, I think that guys especially, it's so easy to just... Come in a cup.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
three seconds later, it being like, this country's so corrupt and the police don't really seem to care. It's like chickens roosting.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. It's going to be interesting to see what happens, man. Holy fuck. Like, I just can't. This goes back to what I said before about the pace of the news.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Like every single hour. Remember when Trump got shot in the ear?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Were you online? Were you like, I mean, everybody kind of got dragged online when it happened.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I remember I was in Montana. I was in Bozeman, Montana. Of course. Sat at dinner. You know, every single person is just like. Glued. Fog of war. No one has any... And I remember thinking, this is the quickest I've ever seen news move. And now, if you're offline for four hours, you come back on and you're like, holy... What? That happened?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
As opposed to sort of sticking it in the nose of everybody else, like how useless this is. Yeah, I had this... I had this insight a couple of years ago that if you really care about changing people's minds, you'll dial back the sort of aggression of your argument because very few people are patronized or shamed or passive-aggressed into changing their mind.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
So this sort of soft signal of effectiveness, dude, if you really, really care about changing people's minds, you'll actually go more gently, not more aggressively. And I don't think it's a really astute point to say that I don't think that we're seeing that. And what did you expect? Like you positioned yourself as the adversary to this other side. Yeah. And then said they should be on board.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
They should take me like whipping them and scorning them and laughing at them and mocking them.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And they should still come begging back to daddy.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
There's such an addiction to purity, though, inside of the left, right? Everybody's done the why I left the left thing, right? Sort of classic Dave Rubin arc from disaffected leftists to now a person that's on the right because I didn't leave the left. They went away from me or whatever version of that you want to do. Has anybody, can you think of anybody that's gone in the opposite direction?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
That's gone from like right of center and then being, I am now a spokesperson for the left.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
There probably are, but they don't come to mind in the same way, right? You don't have the same like RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon, Rogan, you know, and that's just like the fucking biggest names in the world of this.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And it's because... There is such a level of purity that you need to reach in order to be accepted by the left. The right will take you flawed as you are, this sort of political leper coming in with like a foot missing and fucking your ears hanging off. And they're like, you're kind of all right. I mean, we don't fully agree with you on that thing, but we'll take you.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
You know, the perfect example of this, remember when Nicki Minaj for like two weeks during COVID was anti-vaxxed?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
and the right was like come here fucking anaconda like bring bring the fucking bbl our way and they were like she's a fucking darling we'll take her so but if your coalition is held together firstly by finding people who do not have sufficiently pure opinions yeah pointing at them as scapegoats and saying that they're part of the out group yeah that's like
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
fucking seppuku or harry carry or whatever it's called that's like the most self-immolation because you're just finding an increasingly small number of people that meet an increasingly high bar of purity yeah that's you're like all you're doing is shrinking your fucking coalition over and over until it's like one person left yeah uh and the right doesn't have that problem well because they weren't in power
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
That's interesting. So you're saying that sort of the elitism, the exclusionary thing, it's enabled by being in power.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
That's it. I will be fascinated to see if that's sort of a right of center thing. permission, increased amount of permission that they have to accept people if that gets reversed.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
That was incredible. But that's, I mean, but that's kind of what you need. You know what else I think? If I was to just chuck a little bet on for something that's very, very reliably going to happen over the next three years before the end of this administration, the mother of all blowups between Elon and Trump.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
okay that's a take that i hadn't heard before but yeah but uh what do you now you know charlemagne is very democrat like obviously he's gonna have some bias that goes into this but uh but what do you what is your take and how do you see that relationship going i just think that when you've got two people with so much power and ego and i do from what i can tell uh elon's ego and that uh sort of
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
self-focused self-belief, like it's me, it's me. And like, I'm going to be the center of all of this, uh, seems to be ramping up. That is probably a pretty dangerous cocktail based on some stories and stuff that I've heard about behind the scenes from, from Trump, but some levels of vulnerability and then sort of like flimsy, uh, senses of, um, he doesn't like to be shown up.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It doesn't like to be sort of upstaged.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
But... What do you think is going to happen with Elon long-term with Trump?
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
he cannot the the laws dictate he cannot so inevitably you're gonna have to bow down at some point this is the highest you're as high as you can go that's only that's only based on the fact that you can put your the outcomes that you want for your project behind your ego yes and i'm not sure which one is going to be the priority the only other thing he could do is leverage the democrats
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Everybody that's associated with Trump is so unspeakable and toxic that they're never going to be allowed back.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
That's an interesting question. So no, at least, but the UK and Europe feel like very different places. Forget Brexit, forget the fact that we actually left the European Union. We just don't think about that. I think that people in the UK feel that they are much closer to America and are under the
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
uh they're on maybe not quite on par but that they're in that circle much more than we are with fucking norway or finland or switzerland some shit um yeah but i i understand that a lot of people are worried about in europe what does the potential support of russia or lack of support for the ukraine mean it's russia just going to keep on bowling through it's fucking donbass paris and then london yeah like what's going to stop
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I don't know. I think, to be honest, I think that the UK has got such huge fucking domestic problems at the moment that they're... They're not even worried about it. No.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Well, look, did you versus Meghan Markle today? That's it. She's in next.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
The fucking difference in volume, dude. Oh, what? You warned me. The fucking sperm sample thing.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. It feels like you've got an ace in your pocket and you think, what the fuck is that? Yeah. Like, why is it that you're not that worried? I don't know, man.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I mean, how quickly we forgot about the issue of Russia and Ukraine because everything kicked off in Gaza and then how quickly we'd forgotten about Gaza now that Russia and Ukraine are back in the headlines. Wow.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
What do you think is going on with the Epstein list? You see this? It's been treated like the fucking longest album drop of all time. People holding it like it's the fucking Wu-Tang Clan's unreleased mixtape. They're like, George R.R. Martin, when are you going to release the next Game of Thrones? Like, Jesus Christ, dude.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Well, I mean, look, People hold two very contradictory thoughts in their mind at the same time. One being government is so useless that we need this South African guy to come in and rip it apart. And they couldn't run a piss up in a brewery. And they're all spending all of their time speaking to donors.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And also, they are the overlords that are creating the New World Order and we need to be very concerned about them, the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and the three-letter agencies and they're trying to trans the kids. And you go, well, which one is it?
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It's like there's going to be some, sure, there'll be some really, really competent, really nasty, mean-spirited people trying to get stuff done. And even if, let's say that that's like a significant portion, who are the foot soldiers that are trying to do it? These like,
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
employed retards that have managed to like stumble their way into fucking government and you go okay are you really gonna trust him yeah john yeah john's gonna deploy your master plan to like new world order the global vaccine passport yeah really yeah yeah it's uh yeah it's freaky i mean the thing that i would like to do for the epstein list is i don't know if we ever get a list
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I think you could be strategically smart move.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
The last breath, you did something pretty cool.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
What would you do? Do you think we'll ever see it? Do you think? I don't know, man. I mean, I love the idea that We just need to close the loop so that we can stop talking about it.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
So that there's no more speculation for this. It's, you know, it's the 9-11 job thing. It's just this permanent, like, who was D.B. Cooper? Was it this person? It's like, dude, just can someone give us a definitive answer so that we can stop asking the question?
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It's not conspiracy theories. These are conspiracy facts.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Not sending them on Alex Cooper. The real arbiter of truth, isn't he? Speaking of that, did you see Brian Johnson on Keeping Up with the Kardashians?
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Well, him and human had a big bust up on Twitter. Ooh, what'd they say? Uh, Brian was flexing his leg press numbers, and Huberman replied and said, friends don't let friends do half reps, like kind of the range of motion being a thing, and then that caused loads of blah, blah. But I've got to assume... I didn't know Andrew is friends with the Kardashians.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
The scene where Brian's in there has got all of the Kardashians, but also got human in there. But this must've been filmed months and months and months ago, I have to assume. And it's only just come out. So I was watching that thinking, this is like my Zelensky Trump moment that this is these two people that have had fucking massive beef online finally coming together.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And I'm thinking, I'm going to get to why they're going to, they're going to like fucking, that wasn't a quarter rep. That was actually me doing it. It's actually a thousand pounds. It's not 950 pounds. Like, uh, Why are they beef? What's the issue? Because Andrew replied to Brian. It's like the most fucking middle school thing.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Andrew replied to Brian and criticized his range of motion on a water rat match.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
You stopped eating at 11 a.m. so you could get good sleep.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, the only thing that could have made that table better between all of the Kardashians, Brian Johnson and Andrew Huberman would have been like coked up Conor McGregor. wild cards that gets thrown in there. Who the fuck is this guy? Yeah.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I think that Conor McGregor's arc should be studied by like fucking anthropologists or something as just what happens when a guy who really wanted to be rich and famous gets exactly what he wanted and turns out was completely unprepared to deal with it all.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
What it makes me think, and that's a really beautiful story and very insightful. What it makes me think is that there's an error somewhere because if that's who you truly are, Why is that not being put out? Why is that not a part of your personality?
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
She's got genitals so potent that America finally managed to take down the United Kingdom, right? Not with war, not with bureaucracy, but with a woman who literally managed to suck the fucking privilege out of Prince Harry using her magical yoni.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Be ready for that to happen. Yeah, there's this idea called tilting at windmills. An online stranger doesn't know you. All they have are a few vague impressions of you, too meager to form anything but a phantasm. So when they attack you, they're really just attacking their own imagination. There is no need to take it personally.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
So that tilting at windmills things, I wanted to ask you this actually.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Right. And then that becomes, but what did you say before that feelings don't care about the fact?
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And unfortunately, what did we also say before? Optics really are sort of the most important thing. And if you have a story that fits people's priors, there is something that gets a particular cohort of people who are all distinct and separate, but they coalesce around their mutual distaste for a particular person.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And there is a very nice, cohesive, neat narrative that explains why they should not like this person. They go, oh, that's our new culture. That's our new thing. So I wanted to ask, you know, not everybody deals with the same level of scrutiny or criticism that you do. But what have you learned about how to care less about the opinions of other people, how to sort of take criticism well?
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It's one of the most meaningful stand-ups I've ever seen. Oh, thank you, man. I watched it again in the car right here. And I managed to not cry in the back of the car when the Uber driver was in front of me. But I didn't manage to hold it together when you did it live. So I want to ask, how does it feel getting this personal on stage? You know, it's presumably one of the most difficult periods.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Oh, wow. I didn't see it. I did when I started doing a little bit of prep for today. Yeah. And I was like, oh, Schultz got in some Super Bowl beef.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
If we can forget about October 7th because Zelensky sat down with Trump, we can forget about the Super Bowl.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Just sow the seeds of another fucking international incident. That's what they say.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I remember this was AS-level sociology or AS-level media studies before I went to university. What's AS? So in the UK, 16, 17, 18, you go to what we call college, which is before university. Got it. And you do AS level and then you do A level. AS is first year, A level is the second year. And that's what gets you your grades for uni.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And I was told this story about the day after, so September 12th, The media manager for a PR company who ended up losing a job because of this quote was caught saying the words publicly, it's a good day for bad news. And if you go and you look at the newspapers, September 12th, September 13th, September 14th, page 64, page 74, toxic spill, accounting error, fucking recall for dangerous product.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Building 7? Yeah. Very good. People just dumping this stuff out there. But yeah, I think I heard this really interesting sentence the other day. I just don't care about people misjudging me anymore. And I really love that sentence. So I don't care about people misjudging me.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And I think a lot of the time when it comes to criticism, what we're worried about is this person has an incorrect perspective, perception of me.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I don't like that. Let me go and fix, because I know I'm not that. So let me go and manage their perception of me. I'm going to step in. I'm going to fix this thing. You go, I don't think you can, dude.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And if you try and play that game, if you want to try and fix everybody's erroneous expectation of you or interpretation of you, and the other side is as well, it's often people that don't like you, don't understand what you're doing, don't have your best interests at heart. They don't like you and they're not nice people.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And you're saying that person, that particular individual or group of individuals... misjudged me. Yeah. And I feel bad.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Isn't it interesting how most people's projects have this odd Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, like you leave the place to come back to where you started. What is that? Explain that to me. You read The Alchemist? I've heard of The Alchemist. I haven't read it. It's a really beautiful book and it's a fiction book. It's super easy to read.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It's not a flex to say that you've read it, but it's kind of a bit trippy to read. It's this beautiful story about Santiago, this Spanish boy who goes on a journey and he comes back and Spoiler alert, if you haven't listened to it yet, skip ahead 30 seconds. The treasure that he's looking for is in the backyard of the place that he started.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And the story's takeaway is going on a journey to end up back where you began is not the same as having never left. Yeah, wow. I love that. My point being with something like stand-up or podcasting or writing or whatever it is that you're into... You start off doing the thing the way you want to because you love it and you've got this passion.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And yeah, you start modeling from other people because you want to learn from those that have gone ahead of you. And then after a while, different incentives come in and maybe you've got staff or you've got obligations or you've got competition or you've got momentum. Yeah. You start to sort of get skewed away from this a little bit.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And then over time, maybe you begin to get expectations from people and you've kind of got to, you're playing up to your own enigma, your own persona. And you're like, you've got to go, I'm going to go from infamous to doing life. And it's like a real change and scary to the fucking difficult second album, right? Do I just repeat what I did last time or do I try and pivot?
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And then after a while, you know, hopefully you're still stripping this. You're still trying to be true to yourself. But I think a lot of the time people end up in that post money world or, you know, post fame world, whatever it is, you end up back at this place where you're like, I can just say, fuck you. I'm going to do it the way that I want. I had this idea I wanted to teach you about.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
So you've heard of fuck you money, right? So I realized that I think there's three levels to saying fuck you. So the first one is fuck you money, which is you're not really that beholden to an employer. You maybe kind of can own things in a way that makes you not have to adhere to laws in the same sort of a way.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
There's fuck you freedom, which is actually more accessible than fuck you money because you can just like, if you've got enough money, You can live off grid. Maybe you don't even need to be reliant on supermarkets. You don't need to really like listen to laws if you've got a little bit of land or whatever. But then the third level is fuck you family. And I think a lot of the time,
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
People are playing these games. They want to be requited and validated, external success and all the rest of it. But I get the sense, and I see this with you and a lot of my friends that become young dads, that they kind of look back on a lot of the ways that they got validation and self-esteem as like, real juvenile, very immature.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Like look at all of these people who I don't know, who I don't give a fuck about. And I cared about their opinions about me. And really the only people whose opinions I care about are the ones that are inside of this household. And that fuck you family thing is the most accessible to everybody. And, um, yeah, it's a transition that, you know, if you're a high powered person, you
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
like man or woman and then you pivot into family life i wonder how many have like a retrospective existential crisis about like what the fuck was i doing yeah who was i yeah i did all of that and okay yeah cool like i just didn't know but holy shit like that my eyes have been opened and i see what the actual game that i was playing bro it is so cliche so much about having children is cliche but like
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I saw this quote earlier on today that said, it's not okay to work your life away, but it is okay to work your 20s away. And- I like this keep going on this because time is something that we should discuss yeah I think you know again I said for me and I really I just want to like re-highlight the fact that I think the new special from you is probably the most culturally
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
penetrative explanation of male fertility issues that I've seen. You said before, we always assume that the problem's the woman. And we have lots of stories about that. We have archetypes, right?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
The struggling woman, whether it's struggling to find a partner and the biological clock is ticking, trying to get pregnant, going through the IVF and the pain of the process and then the pain of it not taking and all of the stuff that you can learn about if you spend a bit of time on this.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And we don't have a cultural story about what it's like to be a man who is really desperate to be a dad but can't find a partner or has a partner and is trying to be a dad and has fertility issues. And that doesn't exist. And time for both men and women, even more than that, like I think about this now, so I'm 37, right? Like let's say that I managed to make the family in three years.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Let's say I have my first kid when I'm 40. Like I'll be 65 when my first kid's 25. Kids weren't on my brain at 25. I'm okay. So I'm 75 when my kids are 35. So I'm going to be like 77 when my kids are my age.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
I'm like, chop, chop. I want to be a granddad. Yeah. Like, well, you didn't fucking give your parents that same, like, where was the chop chop when you were doing this thing? So.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Everything that you say yes to is saying no to everything else. Yeah. So by committing to the argument on Twitter, that's a yes. Yeah. And you have said no to every other experience that could be possible. Yeah. At that moment.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
They are. So I've been, again, as somebody who as of yet hasn't reached the finish line with family, but is still in the race.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
None of it makes sense anymore. I am ready for the eggs.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
But I've been thinking about this, that how does somebody like you or, you know, somebody, maybe even more somebody like me who hasn't got to that finish line yet. How do you make sense of what you did to yourself for a couple of decades? Because I did something not too dissimilar with my work rate and it's still going and the grind and the drive and all the rest of the stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And I do get the sense that even if you retrospectively think, God, if I'd known what I know now about what's most important, I could have done that. What I should have could have done that earlier. But then there's another bit of you that goes, how much did I develop into the person that can be the sort of parent that I want to be?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
financially emotionally in terms of closing all of the loops of life and saying like I did the things I did the things I fucking toured hundreds of dates for this thing about you about you and I got to not only create this beautiful tribute to you
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Abundance comes, it doesn't restrict your ability to do stuff. It actually enables it.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It's a ring doorbell or maybe like the inside of a house thing. And this little daughter must be three or something. And she says, daddy, are you going to the gym? And he says, yeah, daddy's going to the gym. And she like turns away from him. She goes, wow, I'm so proud of you. And the dad just freezes. And he like picks her up. And I'm just like, holy fuck. What are we doing?
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
What are we doing that isn't just fucking, yo, this is the most pronatalist podcast.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
You've done it, man. I really, really am so proud of what you did with this new special. It's really, really fucking spectacular.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Me too. Life, stream it on Netflix right now.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Is it even fair to sort of call it like a comedy special when you get to the stage where... you're referring to archive footage and sort of interacting with shit that's behind you. And there's entire five minute blocks where no one's laughing.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Yeah, you guys think it's kind of like cricket or something.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
It's like a fucking artifact.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
What is going on with the health and fitness stuff? It seems like I looked at some photos of you from 10 years ago and you're like half the size.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It's like, this is just nonsense. It's weird with what people are doing, especially with the fat acceptance, body positivity thing. Like you don't want to,
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
fucking lambast or castigate or be mean to people that are overweight and that are trying no but also removing any sort of judgment on what is better or worse for you just that's bad for them but yeah there's there's this idea from isaiah belen called the inner citadel and it's basically if you can't get what you want you have to teach yourself to want what you can get so you sort of retreat into this so um i struggle to make monogamous relationships work therefore monogamy is a flawed system and everyone should be polyamorous right
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I struggle to lose weight naturally. Therefore, weight has no bearing on health and the entire world needs to accept me at any size and I need to be beautiful no matter what. I struggle to hold down a job. Therefore, I'm turning to a life of crime. And actually, this is like just as acceptable as a normal.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It doesn't feel so contrived, right? Oh, this is the purest artistic expression. They're on stage being themselves. They're a sack of shit being themselves.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Before we continue, Tom just confirmed what we all knew. Steroids in Hollywood are everywhere. But the reality is there aren't any cheat codes for losing weight and keeping muscle unless you want to end up on some Olympic doping list. However, there are science-backed supplements like Tonkat Ali to support testosterone, strength, and recovery.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And that is why I partnered with Momentus because they make the only NSF-certified Tonkat Ali That means it's so rigorously tested that even Olympic athletes can use it, and that is why I'm such a huge fan, because they make the most carefully tested, highest quality supplements on Earth.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
This is a huge part of my brain, body, and sleep stack, which makes a huge difference to my cognition, my strength, and my recovery. The evidence behind this is really impressive. It is completely natural, but has a profound impact on your testosterone, as I learned from Dr. Andrew Huberman. And if you're still unsure, Momentus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they'll give you money back. And they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 20% off everything plus that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom. And Modern Wisdom, a checkout. Did you see that rapper who was disallowed from getting into a Lyft car and she's now suing Lyft?
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Yeah. I identify as a person who raps.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Could you imagine, I don't know whether this is right, but imagine that she'd got in the car and there'd been some sort of an accident due to that accident. I don't know. I mean, it's 400 pounds. Like surely you could have like two or three other people in the car. That seems, unless it's because it's all in one space. I don't know. Anyway, I think it's an interesting one.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
But also, I guess on the flip side of that, this... I realized a while ago that people who were fat had a problem with Ozempic because it was sort of denying their right to exist. And it was this, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
But then there was a bunch of people that were in shape that had a problem with it too, because it gave people who didn't need to use as much hard work and willpower an easier route to being in shape. I'm aware that losing fat isn't being in shape because there's muscle tone and all the rest of the stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
But still, you would look at somebody that is half the size, that's 150 as opposed to 300, and you go, yeah, they're more in shape, at least with clothes on. And yeah, everybody is threatened in one form or another by shortcuts. Everybody is. Because the reason that you look at someone who's in shape and you go, wow, that's good. I feel some sort of sense of warmth and trustworthiness.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It's because it's a reliable signal of what they've done to have to get there. Whereas now you just think, hey, are you hardworking and consistent? Or have you got a prescription for a Zempik?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I mean, that's... Yeah, and now it's an unfalsifiable... It's losing weight either naturally or with assistance is the getting jacked naturally or with assistance for dudes. It's just a totally unprovable hypothesis.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I wonder if that'll change. People are coming out online, fitness influences and stuff like that.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It's all the fugazi. It's all people wearing makeup that got special lighting.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Did you see that you can reset your Instagram algorithm now? They just released this this week. So you can completely wipe your Instagram algorithm and start basically afresh. Wow. That would probably be healthy for me. Well, yeah, you have a death and cars, right? That's it.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I got it. You really need this. This was made for you. Wow. But yeah, I wonder if it'll purge all of the fitness influences that everybody followed when they first started Instagram in 2011.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I think that'd be fascinating. Reset your Instagram algorithm. There's like an actual button. Yeah, it just, it's in the app. They've released it. And it's like, start over. I think it said, want to start afresh? Is the page that you go to. You have to accept some terms and conditions. It feels a little bit like euthanizing someone.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
you're like okay are you sure that you're prepared to get rid of you know a decade of you building up this very carefully curated algorithm I wonder if there's a little bit that lingers there and they go well let him try but something tells us like we might just have to throw the old shit in a little bit until he gets used to the new stuff but that would be
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I mean, that'd be fascinating to see what I actually want now as opposed to what I've fucking compounded. I've ruined so many other people's algorithms, you know that? By browsing on their phone?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Ryan Long was doing some research for a bit and he was looking at quadruple amputees. Yeah. And he's now just got his entire algorithm.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
In a way, making effort is sort of detracting from you being you.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Oh, that's the shit you like. Oh, we'll give you more. I was doing some research, but now kind of I do.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I had a guy on that wrote the book on artificial intelligence, the textbook that was used worldwide in like 100 languages, something like that. And Stuart Russell, he said there's this really interesting thing. There's two ways that algorithms can be better at predicting what it is that you're going to click on. One is that they continue to feed you clickable content.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
But the other one, it's bi-directional. The other one is to nudge your preferences so that you become easier to predict. I was like... That makes so much sense because all that it's looking to do is maximize clicks. But there's two people in this. There's both the content that's being served and there's the preferences of the person that's clicking.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So over time, these algorithms nudge people's preferences and how easier is it to predict what somebody will or will not click on than by pushing them out to the fringe of any viewpoint. If you are, I know exactly what you're going to like and what you're going to hate because you're out on the right or you're out on the left or you're at the top or the bottom or whatever, super easy.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
If you're in the middle and you're like, I'm going to fall this way, I'm not so bothered about that, really, really hard. So it's like, huh, I haven't ever heard anybody talk about this other direction of how algorithms work by nudging your preferences to be more predictable, not by getting better at serving you stuff that it knows you're going to click on.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I remember this was on Facebook ages ago, but the power of saying, don't show me this page again or showing me fewer posts like this, a hundred to one, I think, compared with a like. So it's so rare, right? It's so much more effortful if you're not interested in this thing. So, yeah, I mean, that's the trade. Or you can just completely, you know, 500 days of summer it and decide to get back.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
No, I only found out about it yesterday. So I'd consider it. I think I probably will. Unplug? Oh, yeah. Well, no, just reset. Oh, reset. I'd spent a week in Jamaica where I didn't have my phone. Does that count?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I think a lot of people like that. But one of the things I realized when I was in Jamaica was if you don't have any... So this was the week leading up to TikTok ban, all of that stuff. If you have to self-generate things to talk about, it's really interesting because you get to places that are a little bit deeper, that are a little bit more interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
But on the flip side, like you realize how reliant you are on, yo, do you see that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah that happened this morning? Oh, have you noticed that Trump said this, this, this thing? You go, okay. So not only is it sort of capturing my time and my attention, it's even like getting inside of me and staring out through my own eyes and making noises come out of my mouth.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It's like you have to have the discipline to just be like, no. It's the advantage of being around people and it's the disadvantage if you spend a lot of time on your own because you assuage your feelings of loneliness by having a friend. You go, well, I'm not going to feel alone. I don't need to feel bored. I don't need to have the whatever. You're okay with the person's here.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It's like phone can fuck off. I don't think about it. Having a great conversation with a friend, I'm not thinking about it. That's right. The second that they leave, you're like, ah, bored again.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I got, uh, I got followed. It was a couple of weeks ago. Now there's a period for about two weeks where tons and tons of Latino and Spanish accounts were following me. And I was like, that's a fucking red flag. And like some things happened in Spanish somewhere and I can't read it. I can't decipher it. I don't know what has caught, but something upstream.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
No, no. It was just like maybe someone or something had got a hold of something that I'd said. And I'm like, this could be positive. This could be the beginning of me fucking starting some sort of war with like the country of Mexico. I don't know. But I just, I had no idea what was going on. I'm like, fuck.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Like being followed by, it was the same Whitney Cummings told me that after she did that CNN thing, tons of comedians texted her saying that was so funny. And she's like immediate red flag. If lots of comedians text you and say that the thing you just did on TV was funny. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
huge warning sign massive fucking warnings yeah yeah yeah like that was the wait did you figure out what no no still no i'm just like this is it's an open loop i'm flying in the dark here i mean yeah comedians complimenting you definitely makes you go like hmm i fucked up yeah i did something wrong I went to this daytime house music party in Austin on Saturday. It's called mushroom cowboy.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I don't know. I think they're kind of hinting at that, but it's in a coffee. Well, it was outside of a coffee shop of Congress. Yeah. So I turn up at half 10. It started at 10. and the queue is 250 yards long for coffee. What? And there must have been 1,500 people there. One guy brought a baguette, was raving with his baguette. There was dogs, you know, pretty sober looking from the outside.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Maybe some people smoking weed, but... I think this is maybe the beginning of us seeing the end of hardcore drink culture. If you've looked at how few of Gen Z now drink, it's, I think, maybe 20%.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
You know what I mean? Well, there's a difference between 2D lessons that you learn from someone telling you while you're reading it in a book and 3D lessons that you learn from experiencing it firsthand. A thousand percent. Yeah. There's a... A guy called Bill Perkins, who lives here in Austin, he came on the show.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
There's more daily users in the U S of weed now than there are of alcohol. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
He wrote this book called Die With Zero, which is about how to sort of make the most of your wealth. And it's written for people who struggle to spend money, even though they might earn a little bit more than they need to. And they're, you know, sort of skin thrift and they don't spend the money so much. I don't have that problem. No idea what I'm talking about.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
and I had read the book and then immediately after that from the podcast he said oh why don't you why don't you come and wake surf with me and I got to learn the lesson both from the book and then from the podcast and then I got to experience it with him first hand and there's a driver outside and there's a boat and there's a blah blah and I was like
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
huh yeah now i know what he's talking about and it's the same with this you can tell someone hey you maybe consider yourself a professional be presentable consider your health go to bed on time etc yeah but if you arrive at that realization yourself it's way deeper as opposed to being like yeah i mean tom said that but maybe he's full of shit i don't know yeah and and honestly also to make it like to on the money thing of like one thing that nobody ever wants to hear is like
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
We shouldn't have to tell you not to fly off the handle.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
to fix what you just did and they're like okay see how that worked i'm like yeah great but yeah i don't it totally resets you you're like what am i on my fucking mind here like yeah but it does work yeah dude yeah it's so funny uh this i got it we got to talk about this headline the department of governmental efficiency in this office of management finding 50 million dollars was earmarked to spend on condoms in gaza do you see this no
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
There's a category, a very unique category of lessons. I call them unteachable lessons. Yeah. And that's one of them. Oh, for sure. Another one is you're not in love with that girl. She's just pretty and difficult to get.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
In condoms? Department of Governmental Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget found that the Biden administration was about to send $50 million to fund condoms for Gaza. This was yesterday. This is the biggest thing on Twitter at the moment.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I don't know why. So there's two main theories for why it might have been. Okay. First one's money laundering. 50 million. Okay. A lot of money laundering. Second one is... A lot of Palestinians had been attaching IEDs to condoms that were filled with like refrigerant gas. What? IEDs. Okay. And then releasing incendiary devices in Israeli territory.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So it's like they can float these things over and then drop IEDs, drop incendiary devices. So those are the two main theories. The one that it's money laundering and the second one that it's improvised explosive condoms.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I don't know. I don't know how useful that is.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And it's how many times do you need to learn that over and over again? Yeah. Some people never learn it. Yeah. And just continue to chase the slightly unavailable, pretty hot girl. Yeah. And you go, dude, it's, it's, you're doing it again.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Oh, okay. Yeah, that's an altruistic way to look at it.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
You know what to do. You know what to do with the condoms.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Imagine that that's the fight. Condoms versus missiles. I mean, it kind of is. One person's throwing rocks. The other one's throwing an entire technological armory. It's fucking wiped out, man. Yeah. It's like the two stories that I saw yesterday. The first one was about maybe these condoms are being used for IEDs.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And the second one was the International Doomsday Clock Federation saying it's at 89 seconds to midnight. It's like the closest that it's ever been. And this is how close humanity is to destruction or self-destruction or something like that. I'm like... If it's like a day clock or something or 12 hour clock and you're at 89 seconds, maybe it was at 90 or 91 or something before.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Like we're so close now. We should just move it back to like 6 p.m. and then increase the increments between it. It's like 89 seconds. Like what does that mean? What does that mean? I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Well, it's basically that this decision reflects concerns over nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies like AI, indicating a dire warning about humanity's proximity to existential threats. It's the closest point it's ever been to symbolic global catastrophe. It's like, what does 89 seconds mean? What does that ever mean?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I don't know. I don't know what it means, but I... It seems to me like this period that we're in now has got definitely a lot more unpredictability, largely because of Trump. It's like, what's actually going to happen?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
No, no, no. It's not. And money won't make you happy is another one of those.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
you know the raw shock test yeah it's like an ideological raw shock test it kind of is you hey look at that tell is it bunny rabbit butterfly sunrise like what is it yeah and some people see one and some people see the complete opposite that's a it's a fascinating thing though right when you think about it that way about this person that he can exist and be who he is say the things he says has his resume has like
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Okay. And I didn't meet him, though. Didn't get to shake his hand? No. I saw this video of him shaking Gavin Newsom's hand. And there's a huge debate online about who out-Alfred who. Oh. Because Trump does the that thing. He does this move, yeah. But then Newsom knows it's coming. They must have prepped. Oh, for sure. They must have like practiced the thing. Like this is going to be. A big deal.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And as he pulls him in, Newsom puts his hand on his shoulder like that. So, you know, he's like sort of pushing and pulling like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, you know how you, you sort of tap someone on the, but he's gone on the front. So as he gets pulled in, he's able to leverage. It's so interesting. But I don't know, like the, there's a bit of me.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I mean, how long has it been in office? Like fucking two weeks or some shit. Yeah. It's very, very quick. Every morning I wake up to NPR because I like to drop my testosterone first thing in the morning. Sure. And it's just Trump headline, Trump headline, Trump headline, Trump headline, Trump headline. It's like just him. I'm kind of already a bit sick of it.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Yeah. Is this sort of gone are the days where you can fully live out the degenerate smoking, create a lifestyle? I did that.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Well, think about it. You're worried about the outcomes of the policy or whatever. Maybe that'll impact you. Maybe it won't. But you can ruin your day worrying about... Worrying about it. No matter, regardless of what happens. This thing does or doesn't happen. It doesn't matter. Your day's already been ruined by worrying about what it is that's gone on.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It's a difficult one with this, right? Because what you want to do, especially if you've hard won a lesson, you want to try and help other people. You go, dude, do you know how much I went through to get to this place of fame or status or fucking the hot chick or whatever? Realize the blood and the sweat and the tears and the sleepless nights and all of that stuff.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Like, I don't know, political anxiety or something.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Isn't it interesting that like our fear of fear is so much worse than whatever it is that we've got to fear? Yeah. Like just reliably. Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
You don't have needs. Subjugate them. Your desires aren't worthy. Yeah. There's no point in doing this.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Yeah. Neil Strauss says, unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. And people just have this sense, well, you should have known. Like, I wanted this thing. You go, well, you didn't fucking tell me. Yeah, how do you... But now I'm resentful about the fact that you didn't do the thing that I didn't ask you to do.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Please, please let me save you from the same sort of misguided assumption about life. And yet it's received not even neutrally. It's like negatively received.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
You have all of these resentments that build up over time.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It's strange that we... I have that too. Lots of people have lots of discomfort around advocating for themselves. Yeah. The only way you can serve anybody else is if you're... You can, whatever, serve people from the saucer that overflows around your cup. Like, how are you going to sort anybody else if your stuff hasn't been sorted? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And yeah, you know, there's this stat about it's the likelihood that people ensure that dog completes a course of antibiotics is 95%. The likelihood that they complete a course of antibiotics is 50%. We're literally better at looking after an animal than we are looking after ourselves.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Oh yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, but. Yeah, you'll really stand up for them. Yeah, yeah. But then you'll be encouraging to them. It's like, I'm going to fight on your behalf, but once we're done, I'll come. Don't worry, man. Like, you know, you tried your best. It's like the level of support. Yeah, that's the other.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Their team of expert physicians then takes the data, puts it in a simple dashboard, and gives you insights and actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, thyroid function, and even nutrient deficiencies.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. Getting your blood work done and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is only $500.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Right now, you can bypass their waitlist and get the exact same blood panels that I get by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Well, if you think that action really is the only thing that matters in the end and what you're trying to achieve, presumably by calling yourself a piece of shit internally, is motivating yourself to go and do the action. Okay. So what I think is independent of the action. So if I can just go and do the action, I don't need to make myself unnecessarily suffer beforehand.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
That's just an addiction to me always seeing me like the villain or like the loser or like the person that doesn't get anything done. And has there ever been a time when you've gone and done something without calling yourself a piece of shit for doing it?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Well, the total addressable market for people who want more fame or more hot chicks or more money is basically everybody. And the total addressable market for people who have got some amount of fame or money or hot chicks is basically zero. So you end up with this sort of weird privileged position. It's like, no, no, no, no. If I had that... It would be different, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Loads of times. Sure. All the time. All the time. You got to do stuff without first like fucking whipping yourself into submission. Yeah. Okay. So to try and continue to shortcut that, just try yourself a piece of shit thing and just go straight to, I'm just going to do the thing. Yeah. I'm just going to try and do the thing.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And yeah, there's an idea around, there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. And I think the same about the internal landscape of people's minds. There are so many people thinking so meanly about themselves and having so few outcomes from it. It's like, okay, so the reason you want to go and do something is presumably to make your life better.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And in the process of trying to motivate yourself to go and do something to make your life better, you make your life fucking miserable. It's like you're sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing that's supposed to get the thing that you want. And then you realize, well, the more that I call myself a piece of shit actually kind of doesn't really motivate me all that much.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It's kind of like a toxic fuel that doesn't last that long. Maybe it gets me in a really, really bad situation and really, really like down on my health or whatever it is, or I'm young. And you go, after a while, it's just habit and routine.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It's not your friend. It's not your friend. Your mind is not your friend when it's doing that.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
think that that's just them you know i mean like they just go like man i'm the only one with these like dude it's yeah your therapist has those thoughts like for real it's funny as well a lot of people i think that maybe have those kinds of thoughts um have high goals for themselves and they've probably maybe started to make some movement toward them so you go wow so you believe that you have agency
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
in the real world, you think that your efforts can cause an outcome to happen. And the fact that you moved out of the house a little bit younger than most of your friends, or the fact that you changed that career that you didn't really like, or when you acquired that skill that you really, really wanted, why do you think that happened? It's like, well, because I worked at it. I worked really hard.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Okay, so you're telling me that you and your agency can influence the world outside of you. Yes. Okay. Okay. You know, the texture of your mind, you know, the way that you think, like, do you think that you have agency over everything? And then that's for some reason stops at the boundary of your skull. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So like the only thing that you actually do directly have agency over, which is what's happening inside of your mind is the one place that you don't feel like you're a victim. Most help. Yeah. Most helpless in there. And it's such a paradox, right? So I think people have even been able to, um, save relationships, um, You know, my partner really wasn't sure that this was going to work.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Watch me dance through this minefield. I know that you kicked a couple of tripwires, but you're retarded. So watch me. Watch me do the pirouette through here, and my internal voids will be fixed.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And I proved to them that this was the right thing. And now we're married and we're so happy and all the rest of it. Oh, well, so it's not even like, you think that you have more agency over other people than you do over the way that you think.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
It just is. I remember you told this story about a friend of yours who got diagnosed with real late stage cancer. And he was like, I'm going to beat this. And you're like, dude, you tell that.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Yeah, the veils fall from your eyes. On the weight loss thing, I saw a study that said 37% of Gen Z plan on skipping the gym and just using Ozempic instead. So 30% of Gen Z women are intending to use GLP-1 drugs to reach their weight loss goals compared to 20% of men.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Before we continue, I've tried pretty much every green string that I could find trying to work out which one was best. And I came across AG1. They've stuck it. Stuck it. Stuck with it for years because it's literally the best. It's the most comprehensive. It's the most rigorously tested and best formulation. And if I found anything better, I would switch.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
But I haven't, which is why I still use it. I got my parents to use it. I got my friends to use it. And I put it inside of my body every single day. This is NSF certified for sport, meaning that every batch is not only held to strict standards for heavy metals, but also is tested for 280 banned substances. One scoop.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And on average, women are setting more ambitious weight loss targets, aiming to shed 23 pounds in 2025, and men are looking to lose 19.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
of AG1 contains 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, including a multivitamin, multimineral, pre- and probiotic green superfood blend, and more that all work together to fill the nutritional gaps in your diet. It increases energy and focus, aids with digestion, and supports a healthy immune system, all without the need to take multiple products. or pills.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And if you're still unsure, they've got a 90-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. And if you do not like it, they'll just give you your money back.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Right now, you get a year's free supply, vitamin D3, K2, and five free AG1 travel packs, plus that 90-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash. Modern wisdom. Have you ever seen the midwit meme? Do you know what that is? Oh, dude. So imagine a bell curve. It's an IQ bell curve.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And on the left-hand side, there's sort of Neanderthal looking meme guy with the heavy brow. And then in the middle at the top is the sort of raging lib guy. And then on the far side is the sage that's got his hood up looking like a Jedi. And the joke is that the guy on the left and the guy on the right always arrive at the same conclusion. And the guy in the middle tries to overcomplicate it.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So we've spent, me and George, my friend have spent, I'm not kidding, like months talking about this. He sent me another meme about it this morning. It's like the most, I think it's the most philosophically important meme because let's say it's getting in shape. Yeah. Lift weights, eat protein. Lift weights, eat protein. I must ensure that my pre-digested whey is consumed within 30 minute window.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I have to make sure that my blue blockers are put on before, like it's just the guy in the middle. Ruins everything. Is over-complicating things. Yeah. And what you've got, what you found is a bunch of people that are on the left. And here's the thing that people don't get about the midwit meat. And this is, we refined this over a million dinners. Every guy in the middle Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
. . . . . ., the, P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P, gener as. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a el... I wonder how people can kind of get out of their own head.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Tell you what's been interesting. So I've trained on it maybe once a week, something like that. Yeah. And for the last... Three months, four months, Tuesday morning, I've seen Alex Jones in there doing bear crawls. He's running around outside. He's flipping tires over. He's doing this stuff. Alex Jones? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So a lot of the different things that we've touched on to do with the self-loathing, the criticism, that internal voice, all of those things are putting limits on your self-belief and your capacity and making you think, well, maybe you can't do that. Maybe you shouldn't do that. Or maybe in the pursuit of even doing that, you should hate yourself a little bit more.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And I'm like, okay, how can we, I want to work out how to cultivate, how people that are intrinsic overthinkers can create a little bit more cultivated stupidity. I think that would be like, I don't know, hit everyone on the head, fucking microdose of mushrooms, smoke weed on them all. I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And then I saw the, I hadn't, I don't know whether I hadn't seen him up close or something. And then I saw this famous like Ozempic Jones before and after thing, and he's lost a ton of weight. And there's a bit of me, a lot of people on the internet were like, Ozempic's a hell of a drug. And I go, I get that. But I've seen him working really, really hard in the gym.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Yeah, that's so interesting. Well, there's a vicious spiral. You know, you sort of touched on it earlier on that when you've got good habits, they feed you good habits and then you believe in yourself more. But the same thing happens in reverse. Yes. And it's such a... I understand why people on the internet rail against anybody that appears to have had runaway success.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Because they go, if you're not that, if you're using the same dynamic, but in reverse, which is you've got runaway failure, that fucking sucks. And I've been there. I've been in the, I just continue, I reliably faceplant.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Every single thing that I try to do from the smallest to the biggest, and I need to use the, I don't know how to do it, but I need to like rip this 10 ton gorilla off the floor attached to a barber. I need to like find a way to reverse this momentum. Yeah. And then when you're on the other side of it, you almost have this sense of like survivor guilt. Like retrospectively, like, oh, holy fuck.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
This is me feeling the wind that that was the loss of. And I had this conversation with this guy, William von Hippel, fascinating anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist yesterday. He was telling me about how
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
two fundamental needs that humans have one is autonomy and the other one is connection and the thing is if you've got a hierarchy everybody needs connection and his belief is fundamentally that's what everybody's after they want to be warm they want to be friendly they want to be valued weird thing is in order to be valued autonomy allows you to build up some of that some of the capacities so you need to be selfish you need to go if you're good at comedy you're
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
there is a degree of connection you've had to sacrifice to do that because you don't do comedy in union with your wife or in union with your friends or whatever. You have to spend a lot of time. If you're Steph Curry and you shoot 3,500 three-pointers in training, I know that you've had to sacrifice some connection in order to be able to build up that autonomy.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And the autonomy then creates this capability. People value the capability thing. But what they really, really want is the connection. So there's this fascinating bit of research that shows that people who are more competent are seen as colder regardless of how friendly they are. And people who are more incompetent seem as more warm and friendly, regardless of how warm and friendly they are.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And there's this sense that, huh, I sort of infer from someone's capabilities and whether or not they're smart or successful or whatever. Hey, you're not very pro-social because if you're rich or you've achieved status or you've done a thing, you've lost all of this weight. Adele, Like you've lost all of this weight.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
There's this bit in the back of our mind that kind of knows like you were selfish for a while. Like you had to work on you. You had to be selfish for a while. Whereas you don't have the same in the opposite direction. I thought that was so interesting. This sort of tension between competence and warmth and the fact that we see them as opposed to each other.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Competent people are seen as cold and incompetent people are seen as warm.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And there's kind of now, if you lose weight through hard work, people are just going to say, dude, Ozempic's a hell of a drug. I know. I might as well use Ozempic. There's like some weird Russian roulette undeniable situation.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Well, the other, you know, Trump's kind of maybe an interesting example around that. You could argue about his level of competence, but he's not stupid. And I wonder whether a little bit of it is if somebody is really competent, there's this sense in the back of your mind where you go, are they really being themselves? Is this them?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Or is this some sort of subterfuge act thing that they're putting me on right now? Yeah. Secret squirrel society me and, and, and fugazi me. Whereas there's, I mean, I, you know, I look at, um, a bunch of different people, whether it's in sport, whether it's in entertainment, the sort of simple, lovable oaf type character.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
There is this sense of warmth to them because you go, hey, he might make some errors, but he owns those errors. And they're from the heart. They're errors that are kind of like a natural outgrowth. They're not manipulative. They're not being done for some particular reason. Which speaks to fear though, right?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
They're going to use this information against me.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Well, you know, I guess one of the, interesting areas of this is lots of people that listen to podcasts of the endemic overthinkers they're the people that are trying to learn more about the world and they're spending time doing that even now as it seems like the podcast election and everything it's like I think only about 50% of Americans listen to a podcast once a month.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And then you've got the power users that listen to the multiple hours per day. But you think, okay, so you're probably- Do you listen to podcasts? I do. You do? I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's changed. My listening habits have changed a lot since doing the show.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And I think in order to kind of be fresh, there's an amount of exposure that you need to limit yourself to or else you end up being too heavily influenced. I imagine that watching other comics is probably like this as well.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
That's Kill Tony. That is what Kill Tony is.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
But you've got a release valve. The difference with that is you've got a pressure release valve. True. So I wonder, the only totally bro-sign sickness, pulling it out of my arse, Um, this has to be the same. I would guess if you, to what, if you were a musician watching a musician not perform particularly well on stage, I continually miss notes and do other bits.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
In fact, I know that this is the case. I know that this is the case firsthand from being in Jamaica recently. Uh, I wonder whether there's a bit of it where you're starting to tune your own nervous system to this sensation that you're working really, really, really hard to avoid. You're watching this person do the thing that you do and going, I'm feeling... There's PTSD. Yeah, it is.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
There's definitely PTSD. Part of this is... Bringing it back into me. I've worked really hard to get rid of that. I don't want that in my world. Exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
a comedian who's done it yeah you start to feel what they're feeling yeah it's such an emotional area yeah I really do think that the that cultivated stupidity thing and trying to trying to simplify down trying to not to not not hold yourself to too high standards but just realize that The outcome that you're trying to achieve only really depends on the actions that you're going to take.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And all of this fuckery that you've got going in, all of the stories that you tell yourself, all of the fear of fear of the conversation, all of the concern about whether should I be assertive? But that's what they're going to say. So I had this really lovely question on a Q&A last week that said... I know that I deserve more, but I'm really terrified to ask for it.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I didn't specify what the situation was. Maybe something at work, maybe something in a relationship, maybe something with family or whatever. I know that I deserve more, but I'm really scared of asking for it. It's like, what an odd, but totally relatable situation to be in. It's like, I know that this is something that I'm allowed, that I can have, that I should have. And they probably know too.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And I'm still, I'm in my head about all of this. The same thing goes for your pursuits, your professional life, your personal life, all of that stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Dude, he looks great. I mean, you're right on the 66% thing. I think almost all of that can be mitigated if you just do resistance training. If you lose the weight and you train, but the problem is that people who don't have a health and fitness routine are taking an injection and suppressing their appetite and then losing weight and still not having a health and fitness routine.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I had Marissa Harrison on. She's the world expert in female serial killers. She's had a new book out called Just as Deadly. And only one in six serial killers are women, but because of the ways that they kill, it's way less newsworthy.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So a lot of this are nurses looking after babies and infants, carers looking after old people or disabled people, people that have got mental disorders, stuff like that. Some of them are...
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
what they called angel of death mercy mercy killing type things but they feel like that's gonna skew because if you keep doing it over and over it's actually for the thrill the methods are totally different as well that a lot of the time it's poison it's sort of surreptitious ways it's not like and that makes it way less newsworthy as well if there's like an axe and a load of blood everywhere that's a pretty big story oh my god yeah you know another infant dies in a ventilator or something it's like yeah we don't really do know but um
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, this sense that this person's really similar to me, and yet their outcomes in life have been really different to me, and the way that they behave has been so different to me. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
There's a great example that Sam Harris uses about Udayi Hussain, Saddam Hussein's son, goes on to be a pretty bad guy. Yeah, kind of a knucklehead. But you say, okay, so imagine that you're three-year-old Udayi Hussain and you're maybe squashing bugs in the backyard. but you've grown up in this sort of crazy honor culture. You've got the genetics of a literal fucking war criminal.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
You've got this sort of very odd reinforcement mechanism because everybody's bowing down to you and your family and no one's telling you that you can't do anything and you're watching your dad and do all of these things and maybe there's a harem or whatever the fuck. You go, okay, now you're seven years old and you're bullying the kids in the schoolyard. Now you're 15 years old.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
You go, like, at what point does that person kind of become the architect of themselves? You go, well, I don't really know, but it's an interesting question to think like from the very moment, from before the moment you were born, from the moment that you were conceived, your behavior was being shaped in this way. And then this interaction between the raw materials that you were made of
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
environment that you were put in, especially given that the environment you're put in is usually the same one that created the material. So there's this sort of, you know, two times boost multiplier effect thing going on because you've got the aggressive genes and you're raised in an aggressive household, which means, oh, that's the way that I deal with my anger or whatever it might be.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I've got the suppress the emotions down gene. And I saw my dad always suppress the emotions down. So I thought I never need to assert myself.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Who have you been fascinated by mostly in true crime recently? Let's see.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Your nervous system is just on fucking fire. Yeah. Like, it's just... I would love... I mean, this would obviously never happen, but I would love for Huberman or someone to get in and tap their cortisol and their adrenaline. See what's... What is going on under the hood? Because that would... Yeah, everything. All you're hearing is just this ringing in your ears.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
You've had the same thoughts over and over and over again. You're watching the interrogator, seeing what they're saying, thinking, what should I say here? You're four steps removed from being in the room. Yeah. You're thinking about how you should act based on what you know that the interrogator thinks about what you should be doing if you were the person that did that.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
There's too many hoops you're going through. But this is the other thing where, you know the Madeleine McCann case? Yeah. Yeah, so missing girl, three-year-old girl, I think from Portugal in the 90s, British girl who was there on holiday.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And one of the criticisms that her parents had, one of the criticisms lodged against her parents was that on the press tour, they didn't seem like they were behaving like grieving parents were. And you go, so I get that. And in some situations, that might be an indication of guilt. But also... What does a grieving parent that's faced with an entire press corps behave?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
What is normal in that situation?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
I have seen this. I have seen this. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So there's this really interesting idea called the Keynesian beauty contest. So in a Keynesian beauty contest, you're not asked to pick which is the most beautiful model. It's imaginary beauty contest. You're not asked to pick out of 10, which you think is the most beautiful. You're asked to pick which you think the other judges will pick as the most beautiful model. Oh.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So rather than choosing your own opinion, you're trying to outsource this sort of fake consensus using theory of mind to all of the other people that are in the room.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
And I always think about that Keynesian beauty contest thing in situations like this, because there will be a sense in the back of these people's minds, except for the person that's so stricken and sort of taken by their emotions that they... All of that second, third, fourth order processing is just like fucked off out of the room. But there will be people that are like, I bet they think it's me.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
How can I make sure that they don't think it's me? God, I'm so sad that this thing happened. I'm so traumatized from this thing. They think it's me. It's like just bouncing around. You go, okay, what's the... How do you get yourself... You're trying to be... the normal that both guilty and innocent. Yeah. I'm trying to be the version of me that I think they would want to see. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
If I wasn't guilty. And by doing that, I'm getting in the way of being the unencumbered version. It's the same as watching the, um, standup person on stage. It's like, I'm trying to be a standup comic that isn't nervous and isn't bumbling through his lines. Therefore I am. So I don't want to watch it.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So you lean into this weird, there's a fascinating insight around guilt. So this fucking broke my brain when I realized this. Our level of guilt is directly proportional to the likelihood that we think that we're going to get caught.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
So if you've ever noticed that you do a small indiscretion that you know that no one will find out about, you're way less guilty about it than if you do a larger indiscretion that you think you're going to get caught for. So it's like an early warning system that like, maybe you should behave in a slightly different way, or maybe you should own up to this before you get found out.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
But if you like, no one's around, it's late at night, you toss a Coke can out of the window. It's like, I don't feel that guilty. You toss a Coke can in front of a family that's walking past and the stroller's about to roll over the top of it. You're like, holy fuck. Like they know that the- It's going to sit with you.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Yeah, so guilt being in proximity to your likelihood of being caught is this early warning signal. I always think about that. Is that like a scientifically studied thing? It's a posited theory. I mean, you could observe it, but evolutionary psychology suggests that this would be one of the mechanisms by which... It makes a lot of sense. I mean, we just see it in ourselves, right?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
You can observe it within yourself. It doesn't necessarily need to be a law. It's just something that you can notice. But yeah, I always think about going back to times when I felt really, really guilty. I'm like, yeah, I was pretty sure that someone was going to find out about the thing that I did.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Well, think about what we were saying earlier on, that the lovable oaf type thing feels less threatening to us. In a way, I wonder whether the person who makes killings out of rage... feels less threatening to us than the cold, calculated killer. It should. Who's detached from it. Because you go, okay, well, if they're not enraged, if I don't enrage them, I'm sweet.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Very few of us have been Dexter.
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#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
But looked way better, probably a little bit of lean mass as well.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Yeah, exactly. But nobody sleepwalks into 200 grams of protein. Nobody does it. It's impossible. It's deliberate. The only way that you get there is by accident is if you've gone to some buffet and you've just decided to like cave on the Brazilian fucking whatever it's called, fog of the chow.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
On the Ozempic point, I think, was it the Golden Globes that happened recently? What was the award show that happened recently? Such an awesome take from someone that writes for the Free Press. And they said Ozempic and the body condition of most of the people at the Golden Globes shows that the fat acceptance movement was all a scam. I fucking... So fucking true. I hate the fat acceptance.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
The moment that you had an easy route out of being overweight, body positivity went out of the window. That's so true because they're such hypocrites.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
I love everything that you do. I genuinely can't believe it took me as long as it did to find your work. It's Charlie Hooper from Charisma on Command that said you'd been a gateway drug for him to a bunch of other stuff. And I get the sense you're kind of an underground hero in sort of the self-work world who's now becoming increasingly less underground. Because of you.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
But if my life support system is completely endogenous and I've got a solar panel on my back and I can just continue to track, even if I move more slowly, even if it's more miserable, even if I feel alone, even if I'm not supported and I'm detached...
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
yeah at least it can't ever be taken away from me i had this insight this thought one of the reasons that um people continue to prioritize their careers over relationships is because only they can leave their career but not only they can leave the relationship that somebody else can exit a relationship that hurts yeah yeah why does that hurt oh just that like um the idea that the lack of vulnerability will bring you happiness
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
I think it steals you against the potential for unhappiness, perhaps would be the way that people see it. Yes, exactly. But it ensures it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you guarantee failure privately by not exposing yourself to failure publicly. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
It's like, I know that if I if I stick to this particular and this is, you know, the person hard charging, chasing after their career, this is what comes first. And you think, well, what are you doing this for? What's the outcome that you're looking to get here? Yeah, you want recognition and validation and all the rest of it.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
But it's like, you've got it in the person that you lie next to at bed every night. You've got it in the kid that's 10 feet above you in the next room. Why are you seeking recognition
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
all of this validation from people who if you stopped doing what you did would stop giving a fuck about you whereas the people that are in the house around you don't care about what you do they only care about who you are and you're trading people who care about you for who you are for people who care about you for what you do yeah and i think the reason is that's what makes me sad that's the thing that hurts
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
I think it's a... And I understand it. It is an easy route to avoid...
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
something being taken away from you because it's only you that can stop driving on the mission right but you are playing when you're doing a career you're playing tennis by hitting a ball against the wall and for as long as the wall doesn't break which you know it's going to take a very long time for you to do that with the tennis ball you can keep playing and
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Whereas a relationship is you playing tennis with somebody else. And if that somebody else decides, I don't want to play tennis with you anymore, that there's a degree of vulnerability there that makes you think, well, I'm just going to focus all of my attention on the career side of stuff. Because that means that at least it can't be stopped unless I decide to.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Why can't you say them without mourning the end of the marriage?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because, frankly, I'm dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day with Element. It's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need, nothing that you don't.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
It's got a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, or any other junk. And it plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite, and curbing cravings. This... orange flavor in a cold glass of water is like a beautiful, sweet, salty, orangey nectar.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And it is the ultimate way to begin your day. And I genuinely feel the difference when I don't take it. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy. So you can buy it and try it. Use the entire box. And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back and you don't even need to return it. That's how confident they are that you'll love it.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Two of your insights, we often abandon ourselves in an attempt to prevent other people from abandoning us. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And if you're trying to manage other people's feelings, you're abandoning your own. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah, I think I had this idea of shadow sentences that a lot of the time people are scared of saying what it is that they want or what it is that they need. So instead of pointing at it directly, they sort of gesture in the direction of it. It's sort of it's over there. They sort of leave it to hang in the air a little bit, like sort of dropping a fart and then leaving the room, I suppose, or
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
You know, like people say this about La Croix, you know, the sparkling water. It's so lightly flavored that they say, if you're drinking the lemon one, it's like somebody shouted the word lemon in the next room while it was being built. And that's what the shadow senses make me think about. You know, the sort of... phrases said through closed doors and thick walls.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
It's like, hang on, what was that? And then you end up with the, well, I mean, it's culpably deniable. And the reason that I think it feels safe to be passive-aggressive in that way or to use these shadow sentences is that if you don't specifically ask for something, the denial of the thing doesn't feel quite as bad. You go, I didn't actually ask for it. So they've got culpable deniability in...
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
disappointing me in not giving me what it is that I want. And my needs don't feel quite as spiked at because they weren't fully rebuffed because I didn't actually ask for the thing that it is that I was after.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Defensiveness. You mentioned that. Why do people get defensive?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah, it's interesting. I suppose sometimes people inject themselves into situations. Well, you know, defensiveness when somebody is being attacked, so to speak, is... I guess, one level of it, but a degree of defensiveness, which is not even necessarily about that person. It's like, hey, this thing happened and it made me feel sad. And then defensiveness comes out from the other person.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
It's this sort of injection of them into you or into the situation. Yeah, that way. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah, the desire, the sort of tendency that we all have to whip ourselves into submission, to think, well, if I just beat myself hard enough, and again, that rhymes with the voice in the head. You know, if you're very self-reliant, if you're the sort of person that's got hard charging type A, insecure overachiever, you go, well, this seems to, it's got me places in other areas of my life. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
So maybe that's the way that I should show up in my relationship. Maybe that's, you know, as soon as the partner says something which kicks one of the tripwires that lay in my head, you go, well, you know, yeah, that is right. But to sit with the, huh, what if I am this thing?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Thank you. ,,,,,,, in P P P P P P P 100 gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu gu, g, g, g, ,, ,, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , P P P comp sol
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
I wrote this quote from Van Gogh this week in my newsletter that said, if I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning. Oh, I like that. That's so fucking good.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Say again? Are they coming for my Zen teaching? Tell me, Joe.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah, again, to sort of fly the flag for the insecure overachievers out there, the desire for control, you know, if I can prepare sufficiently well, if I can know every different permutation of every different outcome, then I reduce down the play within the system. So it's so precise so that what I think is going to happen and what is going to happen
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
end up being so tightly correlated that there's no variance at all. Ah, okay, there we go. There's a bit of certainty. Isn't that nice? Isn't that death? Yeah, I want this wholly under control and absolutely predictable existence.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Dude, I had this vision in my mind. I was like, why has he got bits of fucking lettuce leaf hanging across a string? I had a tightrope walk, but it's just individual leaves of lettuce hanging over a salad bowl. Holy fuck. Wow. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Is safety got anything to do with it here? Is there a degree of unsafety? There is no safety.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
If it feels scary to say, it's important. If it feels scary to say, not saying it will hurt your connection. If it feels scary to say, not saying it prioritizes their imagined reaction over your truth. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
I was trying to think about the difference between selfish and selfless. And this is a third one that's not either of them. So you're not being selfish because you're actually hurting yourself in it. You're not being selfless because you're killing the connection. And I'm like, what the fuck is this?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah. It's like, what is it? It's not, you know, it's one of those interesting situations where it's neither selfish nor selfless.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah. That's, that's really cool. Yeah. There's no, uh, it's just, well, it's, I, it's actually, it's kind of, it's destructive to the self and it's destructive to the other as well. I guess that's one way to put it. Yeah. Right. It's like, it's bad on all fronts. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Exactly. So I had this conversation. I told you about this episode I did with Naval, which will be out by the time that people are listening to this and hopefully many millions of people will have listened to it. And he... I came up with this idea, having watched him, and you haven't heard him speak, but I'll try and explain it as best I can. He is patient zero for what you've just said there.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
I've seen him at dinner parties. If we're partway through a conversation that he's just not interested in, he just gets up and walks over to another corner of the room. There's no airs or graces. There's no sort of apologizing for... him not being sufficiently entertained. I must, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to go. There's no excuses and nothing else. Yeah, lovely.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And I came up with this term of like holistic selfishness or a sort of integrated self-priority, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. He's, unapologetically prepared to put himself first and he is not concerned about the discomfort that that causes in other people or in himself, actually. And I just wanted to sort of sit with that.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
It feels like a lot of what we've talked about at the moment is sort of self-prioritization. It's like, okay, not selfish prioritization, but deciding that your needs are legitimate, not subjugating your desires or the things that you want from the world because of a fear of them not being requited or reciprocated or received or whatever, or retaliation for them. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
What would you say to the person who is unusually comfortable with deprioritizing their own needs, with not seeing their wants or their desires as legitimate, with regularly subjugating what it is that they would like to get from the world in place of not wanting to sort of upset the apple cart?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Over the span of about a year, I tried pretty much every green string that I could find trying to work out which one was best. And I came across AG1 and I've stuck with it for over three years because it's the best. It's the most comprehensive. It's the most highly tested and the most rigorously formulated. AG1 genuinely care about holistic health, which is why I've got my mom to use it.
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
I've got my dad to use it and tons of my friends as well. And if I found something better, I would switch. But I haven't, which is why I still use it. There is a 90-day money-back guarantee. So if you're unsure about trying it, you can buy it completely risk-free. Try it for a full three-month period. And if you don't like it, they will give you your money back.
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
So if you want to replace your multivitamin and more, start with AG1. Right now, you can get a Yuz free supply vitamin D3 and K2, five free AG1 travel packs, and a 90-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
slash modern wisdom this is you know when i tap into the the best part of me and i think it's the part of me that i hear when i listen to guys like yourself alanda barton from the school of life uh as much as he's like the least cool fucking guy on the internet sam harris when he's at his best i think you know he he really sees this and it is it's this weird blend of sort of compassion and
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
self-belief uh a firmness in your own principles and like a hopefulness that if you ask for it maybe the world will actually give you what you need and i'm sure there's a million other things that are going on there too but that's kind of where it triangulates for me uh which is huh
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Maybe if I just sort of say the truth in a way that's charming, hopefully, and not unnecessarily sort of mean or passive or sort of wrapped in sugar or wrapped in spikes and poison. Huh. Maybe things will actually go really well if I do that.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And then I'm railing against the fact that this world doesn't seem to fit me. Yeah. I managed to get myself into this relationship with someone who seems to like me for a person that I'm not. Exactly. It's like, who have you been? Yeah, not me. It's like, well, who the fuck do you think they were going to get into a relationship with then? Yeah, exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
You can't be accepted for who you are if you're not showing up as who you are. Yeah, that's right.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
My point being the unnecessary overture of like, oh, let's do the thing. It's like, dude, you're not accepting an Academy Award. Fuck off. Like, honestly, just go. I'm going to go and see what's going on over there or whatever. But yeah, that's so great that you need to, if you're not showing up as who you are, what the fuck world do you think you're going to create? Exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
They're completely dedicated to non-pretence as well. Self-compassion. Yeah, that's interesting that what we think we're doing, and it's like you said before, that we have this binary trade that we keep inside of our mind, which is either we can appease the world or we can appease ourselves. That's right. This is the same thing going on here.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Why do you think it is that this equation, this odd imbalanced equation of it can either be good for them or it can be good for me, but it can't be good for either. And if it's good for me, a lot of the time it's bad for them. What's that?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
just sit a little bit longer in the, this sort of bravery, you know, this, somebody listening who says, fuck, like that's me. I compromise myself all the time. I don't say what I mean. I don't, I've done it so long that I don't even know what I mean to say anymore. Don't even know what I need. Don't know what I want. Yep.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
I've subjugated it under, you know, fucking layers and layers of, of sedimentary rock. Now, uh, how can someone start to show up more bravely in the world in that way for themselves?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah. That someone's either too weak or too strong basically to take it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You cannot love fully unless you see that you are completely empowered. It is near impossible to love what you think oppresses you. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Is that the job of you? Is that the job of the person that you're trying to love?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Well, it's like you said about the depth of relationship that you had with that person. You said that thing and I tensed up in this way. As long as someone...
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
believes as long as it is true and someone believes that it's true what you have there is an unusually reliable person you have you have somebody it's like oh fuck i i can actually have faith that when this person says that this thing is good that they actually mean it and they're not just paying lip service to a blowing smoke at my ass yeah you can't trust somebody who can't say no
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
There's a cool lesson about this guy, Edward Slingland. He wrote a book called Trying Not to Try, which is about Wu Wei, which you'll be familiar with. And then he wrote another book about the history of alcohol. And he basically described alcohol as kind of the perfect drug for the human race. And in many ways, he's right.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And I'm used to be club promoter now, not really, really not a big drinker. I was like, I'm called rubbish. But he explained it in a really interesting way. And one of the things that it turns out is that when you're drunk or even tipsy, probably tipsy rather than drunk, you are worse as a liar because it's shut down some of your prefrontal cortex. But people are actually better liar detectors.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
when they're tipsy. So if you have a groom of people who are all tipsy, that totally makes sense.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
You look through history, a tradition of armies getting really, really drunk a few nights before the first battle. Now, there's also quite a few famous battles in which the guy in charge of the army has maybe mistimed that and they've woken up to be attacked the next day with a stinking hangover, which I imagine is probably the worst way.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
You can talk about long flights back from Vegas or whatever. It's like, dude, if you're not in mortal peril by a fucking Mongolian wielding a spear, there's been worse ways to do it.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
But what he talked about there was when you're drinking, there is in the back of everybody's mind as you go through this, there is this sense of, yeah, this is fun now, but we all know we're going to pay for it in the morning and you're still here with me. You're still doing it.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
So the idea of getting drunk as a, uh, we're going to bond over the pleasure and then we're going to bond over the pain as well.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Um, there was another insight as well, which I fucking fell in love with this really, really great, um, essayist. And he was talking about, I think he calls it the divorce paradox. He says, many people are surprised by why couples who in public are seemingly so perfect end up splitting up.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And it's because of a lesson that we haven't fully internalized in the modern world, which is, it is not the good times, but how you deal with the bad times that predicts the longevity in marriages. It's not how much fun and vibe you have when things are great. It's how well you move through rupture and repair and come back out on the other side. That's absolutely it. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Well, I kind of think about it like trading in a way that, you know, your stock can move fast. Intra-day, intra-month, intra-year, it can move an awful lot. But as long as you don't bottom out, as long as you don't actually end up getting kicked out the bottom of your trade, you're like, I'm still in the fucking market, baby.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
But if it decides to go to zero, and that is a we, we actually can't do rupture and repair particularly well.
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Talk to me about resentment. Where does that come from?
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And it's easy to get pissed at you than it is to get pissed at me.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
see them tell them take away the shame those there's like there's dozens there was a Neil Strauss was sat there not long ago and he had just this fucking slamming line one of the best insights which is very Hudson Pilled which is unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments oh yeah Holy fuck, dude. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Unspoken expectations of premeditated resentments. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And that, again, shadow sentences, I'm not going to say what it is that I want in case it means that you can't rebuff or unrequite what it is that I'm after. I'm going to abandon myself before you abandon me.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
You mentioned a bunch of times to me and also on this episode about opening your heart. Yeah, yeah. We had a call ahead of the thing that I'm going to go and do with you later this year, which was super exciting.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And there was this sort of trying not to try moment where the insecure overachiever that wants to get the A grade, like, right, okay, so what's this sort of five-step process to heart opening, please, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I do think that even if... uh, that can't be satiated, uh, a degree of definition of opening your heart. What does it mean? Where does it come from?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah, yeah, yeah. How the tables have turned. Exactly. You talked about the negative inner voice, that critical self-talk. Where's that come from?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
biomarkers and then they've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan if you've been feeling a bit sluggish then your testosterone levels might be the problem they play a massive role in your energy and your performance and being able to see them charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better so if you have not been performing
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
in the gym or the bedroom, the way that you would like. This is an awesome way to work out what's happening inside of your body. Getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is only $500.
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And right now you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, the other half of what we were talking about before talking about compassion, I guess, sort of oppression is pretty close to an opposite of that.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
It is near impossible to love what you think oppresses you.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Why does giving bits of yourself to somebody else create a sense of oppression in you? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah, it's interesting thinking about how kids, they can't change their environment, so they have to learn to exist within it. You don't have a passport and a bank account and the Uber app and Airbnb to be able to go and get yourself away. You don't even know what that means. What does it mean to do this?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
You don't even know if you're in the right when your parents say that you're not in the right. It's like, no, no, no, that's not what it should be. And you go, well... The case for the defense seems to be woefully underfunded here. The case for the prosecution has all of the benefits of being an adult and being the one that's in command and then being two of them and only one of you.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah. Talk to me about that sort of gold medalist syndrome thing. When people finally achieve the outcome, the destination, they arrive. I've arrived. Yeah. And that, cause I mean, you work, this is, I imagine the fucking middle of the bullseye of a lot of the guys that you work with.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
You see, is it Vinny Himath, the guy that founded Loom? Do you see what he tweeted a couple of months ago? He's like, I've sold my business. I'm miserable and I have no idea what to do. He tweeted that. And Naval, the guy I had on the show, he replied and he said, God, kids, mission, pick at least one.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah, it's interesting you use the term dirty fuel or toxic fuel. I definitely said, you know, for a good while, lots of the high performers that I've spoken to or become friends with or whatever, I would say somewhere in the region of probably 70%, 80% of them are running away from a life that they fear as opposed to running toward a life that they want. That they're driven by... Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
They're driven by two North Poles as opposed to North going towards South. Yeah. They're sort of having to push it as opposed to being polled. Yeah. Well seen. It is... Potent fuel, but toxic if you use it for too long. And there's a time where you sort of need to learn to transition through this.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And I must have sent this particular podcast episode of yours, I'm not kidding, to 10 people, 20 different people. So you did an episode called Your Obsession with Productivity is Killing Your Productivity. And holy fuck if I wasn't seen by that. But I wrote an essay about it and I wanted to give you this and I want to reflect on it. Because I think that this, hopefully this...
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Two Minute Read explains to the people that haven't listened to that episode should go and listen to it on Art of Accomplishment. Kind of what it's about. And then maybe we can have a chat about it. There's a very painful transition that everyone eventually needs to make in their career and productivity journey from operator guy to idea guy.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
The beginning of your career, the only advantage you have is your work rate because you have no experience to draw on. And any natural talent is capped by your inexperience. So you just work hard to get ahead. You answer all the emails. You take all the would love to connect calls. You send the invoices, write the copy, hire the contractors. It's all you.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
But eventually, that stage of your journey expires and you need to let it go. Maybe you have staff to delegate to now. Maybe you've been given a promotion and you need to be thinking more strategically at a high level. Previously, your job was to work hard, but not so much anymore. Your job isn't to work hard. Your job is to have great ideas, says Joe Hudson. Here's the problem.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
You've spent an entire career acclimatizing yourself to getting stuff done. You've built a monster which sucks in difficult, tedious tasks and spits out completed efforts. You've created a link between being busy, doing things you don't want to do, and success.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
The issue is that it's really hard to work out what you truly want and determine whether or not you're moving toward it, but it's easy to see the number of emails you sent or how many hours you spent on calls. Being busy is more satisfying than being effective.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
It's very hard to work out if your productivity efforts are actually useful or if they're just a dopamine fix that allows you to check the done box and feel like you completed something. Ask yourself, is your job to press enter on emails or to actually move this mission forward? The level of busyness also helps to make you feel important. A full calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
There's no way I can be an unwanted piece of shit. Look at how many calls I have today. Look at all the people who need my time and attention. I must be important. I must be valuable. Please, please, please assuage my deep feelings of insufficiency. You are hooked on the dopamine of, I got stuff done today, because even if this wasn't a great use of your day, at least you don't feel useless.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And you didn't have any time to consider that you might not be fully actualizing your potential in any case. Another challenge... is that conspicuous busyness is much more societally rewarded over quiet effectiveness. We want other people to see how hard we're working.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Even if the very best thing for your mission's outcomes was for you to go and lie on a beach and think today, who's going to congratulate you for taking on that challenge? Near burnout is worn like a badge of honor to show fealty to the mission. Obvious productivity is more praised than private efficacy. And here's the thing.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Almost everyone's life goal is where I just don't have to do anything I don't want to do anymore. But what happens when you actually get there? So much of your self-worth is derived from overcoming hard things and pushing yourself through difficult tasks that you don't want to do. So imagine that you do reach your goal. Where do you find your satisfaction from now?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
This is why it's so difficult to let go of doing grunt work and being permanently busy, even when your precise goal was to get right here. And finally, why is it so hard to take pleasure in our successes? Well, largely because you are constantly peering over the shoulder of the present moment to see what's coming next.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Even during the act of attaining a goal, you're already looking past it, getting ready to move the goalposts further away. We are all chasing a sense of completion, but we never actually allow ourselves to savor any tastes of completion that we get along the way. That's great. Is your podcast repurposed into a two-minute essay? But this obsession, this transition from
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Front-end busyness, signaling off of how much I got done, not asking the bigger questions, busy calendar, hedge against existential loneliness, obvious productivity. This transition, I write a lot of these things and this was one that just fucking snapped people in half. So I think this is something you're really onto and it's something I wanted to talk about today.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Can you just, for the people that didn't listen to our first episode, tell that story about when you tried to do an experiment where you were not going to do anything that you weren't going to enjoy and you stared at the bin?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Again, it kind of comes back to this, I need to brand it better. It's a branding problem, but there's whatever we want to call it, like holistic selfishness, this sort of integrated self-prioritization, this belief that, you know, the way- I call it compassion. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's not just compassion.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
It's an elevated version of what we... Because when we think about, at least when I think about compassion, I think about doing something nice for somebody else. I very rarely think about doing something nice for me. And I even more rarely think about how doing something nice for me is doing something nice for someone else and for everybody else as well.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
That's so sick. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the exact opposite in some ways of nice. Yeah. And best for him, best for me. Yeah. Yeah, but that definition of compassion, most of the time we think I'm doing it for somebody else. Not I'm doing it for me.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Because you're further up than all of the things that are going to come after that. All of the products, the branding, the way that they deploy this stuff. Yeah, that's interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah. Yeah. The rip you out of that. I have control. Here I am self authoring, making things go.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
We're often scared of the consequences of revealing who we actually are or what we actually think. But whatever that consequence is also happens to be a direct path to the life where we are accepted and loved for who we are.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And Alex Bell came in and said, hey man, you know, the world probably might accept you actually for who you are, but it's not going to accept you for not who you are. Right. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
it depends on how much you want to feel connected to this level of acceptance you know because yeah that's true fuck a good example you know what good hearts law is it's pretty cool so kind of like parkinson's law parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the time given for it and parkinson good hearts law says that when a measure becomes an outcome it ceases to be a good measure so yeah
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah. What about self-reliance? I feel like there's an issue of too much self-reliance. A lot of people want to be highly agentic. They want to self-author. They want to be able to take control. I don't need to be able to rely on anybody else. Yeah. But is this such a thing as too much self-reliance?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah. So it's kind of like... That's so good. So for instance, let's say this is something I'm doing this year. I really want to grow my email list. So I'm working hard and I'm trying to grow my email list. My goal is a million email subscribers by the end of 2025. So what I could do is I could... say, everybody that subscribes to my email list, I'm going to give you $1,000.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And then I could get a million email subscribers, but I wouldn't give them $1,000. And okay, so what was the measure that you wanted? Well, the measure I wanted was a million email subscribers. Have you got it? Yes. Well, why are you not happy with it? Well, what was the outcome?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
The outcome was a million people who care about what I write, who genuinely want to be here, who weren't conned into it, who don't resent me, who actually opened the emails, or a version from a business is our most important thing is reducing fraud.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
okay right so we want to reduce our fraud rate so all of the intercom workers that do customer service and and inquiries and stuff like that they begin to treat every customer like a potential fraudster right okay we've driven fraud down to basically zero yeah but the customer experience is fucking horrendous and the company's tanking so when a measure becomes an outcome it ceases to be a good measure yeah it's great and i think that the instagram of fame
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
thing is a an equivalent of that so i want all of the trappings of notoriety and validation and recognition by people that i respect and so on and so forth but it's like if you know that you were just playing a role do you know what it feels like to me it feels like dubai the city of dubai right
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
as Eric Weinstein described it he said it's like a gold bar that's been beaten down into gold leaf so thin that if you poked it your finger would go through that it's it has the appearance of gold from the outside but as soon as you go in you realize oh this is just sort of prefabricated like bullshit like this it was all manipulated it's all very contrived very contrived I think you know it'd be hard to do this without this sort of sense of manipulation this sense of like preparedness and yeah yeah
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
you should be very, very cautious about achieving the goal outwardly, uh, which doesn't actually represent the goal that you wanted inwardly. And I think that, you know, the, the thousand true fans audience thing that you can have, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
I reckon if you're doing something that you genuinely care about, showing up in your relationship with your partner, the level of promotion that you've got at work and the job title that you live with, all of those things, I think that you can be much more efficient with those if they're much truer to you.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
You don't need as many followers if the followers genuinely see you and if the work that you're doing resonates with yourself. You don't need as big of a pay packet, obviously beyond a certain limit. Your partner doesn't need to, you know, all of these things. It's like, oh, fuck, like this is there for me.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
And it's the reason why I think when we look at people that are super, super, super successful, we should probably look at them with more pity than we do envy. So you think, holy fuck, what is it that this person is compensating for? What is it that they're having to try and
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yeah, there's a kind of... I don't even know if this is the right word. I'm going to use it in any case. Like solipsism or sort of narcissism over self-reliance. It's like, oh, you know what's best for you, do you? Right.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
You're able to... In all the different permutations of the world, you're the fucking omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent fucking divine mystic. You know exactly what's best for you. No, you don't. Go fuck yourself, dude.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
People cannot be split up into parts you accept and parts you reject, a person as a whole. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Are we not allowed to have preferences in partners? Of course. Ways that we would prefer that they did and didn't show up?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
What do people get right and wrong about boundaries? Is it kind of a buzzword?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Yet, certainly the resistance and that sort of openness, everybody knows what it's like when some thought loop has been going on and on and on in the head. I think like, what if it does happen?
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Most people believe confidence comes from being really good at what they do or never messing up. But unshakable confidence comes from knowing your worth isn't tied to your performance. Yeah. So you can't.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
What would be an indication to somebody...
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
It seems to me, uh, looking at your work that a lot of the solutions or a lot of the answers come back to the same, uh, the same end point, which is some variant of soften up, open your heart.
Modern Wisdom
#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
I think for a lot of people in the modern world, they've steeled themselves against pain, against being open, vulnerability, this sort of fear of needing anyone. I don't need anybody. If I need somebody, then that means that they can take away from me something which is necessary. And how am I going to operate? That's my life support system.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Why are emotions so hard to understand for humans?
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#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You know, one of the taglines of CrossFit for a while was get comfortable being uncomfortable. And it was sexy or whatever, but I always felt a little bit, I don't know, it always felt a little hollow to me because the discomfort that people were getting comfortable with when doing a workout was something they'd elected to do. Like you chose to go to the gym. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You already do this because you like to do it. Yeah, maybe you've pushed yourself beyond a limit that would be reasonable to even almost everybody. But still, it's sort of within your control.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Cancer diagnosis is a degree of discomfort that you didn't choose.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
So... You know, reflecting, I guess, on the last year for yourself, what's your advice to somebody who is going through a tough time with their health, uncertainty, fear of the future? You know, this is the personal and the professional colliding for you, I suppose. Yeah. What did you, what would you say to somebody?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
feeling and then you have just this limited language which is constrained not only by the words you know but even by the like you know german has a ton of words that we don't have in other languages that almost unlocks your ability to understand emotions in that way are we uh fated to kind of always be scrabbling to try and understand emotions but never fully doing it
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
What would be an example of that?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Trying to contribute to your own future. Again, it's the action being the antidote to anxiety thing, I think. Every time. Yeah. You don't want to feel like life is buffeting you around and you're at the mercy of it. Yeah. You're already feeling a little helpless.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You're already in a little bit of hell. You know well that it's going to get worse.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
So yeah, trying to step in.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Well, there's better and worse coping mechanisms. And if one of the coping mechanisms is I made myself feel better for half an hour today, I did a thing that gave me some respite.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You know, it's a very low resolution way to look at what you should or shouldn't do, like a random judgment that you're making on it, which is, well, do you think that being sympathetically activated for 18 hours today is a good way to spend? What if you could get that down to 17 and a half? Okay. Is that worthwhile?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Are you saying that that's a coping mechanism or is that maybe you actually giving your body a little tiny bit of respite? So looking forward, what about looking back? How can people better understand their childhoods?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
What about if, I mean, everybody's parents will have made mistakes, some larger than others. How can people learn to get back to neutral with something that they can't go back and change. There is no time machine to go and fix whatever it is.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
They feel like they've inherited this version of themselves that their parents created, the pathologies, the thought patterns, the biases, the ways of seeing the world and themselves and the inner voice and all of that stuff. If our parents got it wrong and in the ways that our parents got it wrong, how can we become more at peace with that?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
That's just what I was about to say.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It's interesting that we see the lineage between our parents did this and therefore I am like that. How unfair, how could this be the case?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You just go back one generation, just move back by 25 years and you go, well, your grandparents were like that, which made your parent... How can you give yourself this excuse or this reason and not continue to... And then the great-grandparents, you go all the way back. So, yeah, it's... It is odd. And I think that you're right as well. Every generation thinks that it's unique.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And I get the sense that emotionally, maybe this has been the biggest change across one generation from sort of like boomer period to whatever, ex-millennial, Gen Z generation.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Just that the opportunity for people to ruminate the challenges that people have from an emotional stressor perspective, the information that you have to become aware of how much better things could be as well, which creates an ideal. And then you sort of compare yourself to, oh, well, if only I could get rid of my anxious attachment. If only I could get rid of my fear of the future.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
If only I could get rid of my overthinking or whatever it is. which has now opened everybody up to think back more. But our parents don't necessarily have that. They're just sort of dealing with the physics of their system the way that it was given to them without necessarily realizing quite so much or quite so viscerally that, well, things could have been a different way.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It's like, well, things just are the way they are. And you go, okay, so what do you want? Do you want to be largely unaware that things could have been different and to understand the way that attachment styles and child rearing and behavioral genetics and et cetera, et cetera, work to influence the disposition you have as an adult? Or do you want to have it this way? Like is ignorance bliss?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Because for me personally, I would much sooner be able to contribute a little bit to have the pain of the realization that there's something which is in my hands and that there are ways that this can be changed, but be educated on this and actually be able to make some sort of an impact as opposed to just being at the mercy of it.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Are you familiar with the Thomas Sowell quote, there are no solutions, only trade-offs?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Okay. So this year, it feels like that's been the quote of the year for me. And a lot of the time, what it means is, Trying to optimize absolutely everything and railing against things that are shortcomings is a surefire route to misery because you're not going to be able to get everything to be perfect. And in many situations, something is positive and something is negative.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And the negative thing has probably come along for the ride as the dark side of the positive thing.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And I think that it's the same with the parents. It's so right. You know, dad wasn't there for me sufficiently emotionally. I imagine that's a big sort of millennial complaint about boomer parents. You know, dad was sort of this classic still blue collar guy. And you go, yeah, well, he was at work. like 10 hours a day, five days a week for 18 years to raise you.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And before that, and for brothers and sisters and all the rest of the stuff. And you go, okay, so there are no solutions. There's only trade-offs. You had this level of security. Or maybe there's somebody else who... Dad was there for me a lot of the time, but we really struggled with money. And you go, okay, again, you... It came to me because...
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
i started i made a big pivot with my diet and that improved uh a ton of energy problems that i was having but i was finding myself waking up at 3 30 or 4 in the morning every single day for a week uh and the first day i thought oh this is just it'll be like it's a transition thing then the second day i thought oh no this has become a habit and then by the third day i was railing against it so i woke up and i was like god like why is this the case how come i'm waking up at this time this is so annoying i'm gonna be tired tomorrow etc etc
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And that Thomas Sowell floated into my head and he, the quote, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. I thought, right, okay, would you be happy to get up at 3.30 in the morning if it meant that your mood and your cognition throughout the day was better than it had been over the last couple of months? It's like, yes. Like, what are you complaining about then?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
What you're complaining about is why can't I have the entire world exactly the way that I want? It's like, no, no, no, no. Would that be beautiful? Yes. Is it in anyone's world realistic? Absolutely not. And the same thing, I think, when we look at our parents is a nice perspective.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I imagine that a lot of parents, I'm not one yet, but I imagine a lot of parents have the reverse problem, which is that they're terrified of getting it wrong for their kids as they're raising them or shortly after they've raised them. What is your advice there?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
That's interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
So it's not just the sensation, it's the story that you tell yourself. And you happen to be defaulting to a very particular story, which is because I'm a bad parent. I mean, look, the only thing I can contribute is sort of a bit of an evolutionary lens. But I imagine that mothers especially, but also fathers, have a pretty easy to activate guilt response to kids. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Well, because the parents that didn't feel guilty when they left their kids, their kids died. And we've selected for the most neurotic, overbearing, caring parents that we can think of. And those are your ancestors.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Okay. So this is going to arise. You leave. Like, you know, I'm sure that even just dad going to work, mom going to work on a morning, normal day at work, kid is sad. You go... okay, I understand that in order to put food on table to keep tiny child alive, I have to go to work. Do I feel guilty about that? Well, kind of no.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
But then if it's something that seems more elective, then it feels like, yeah, that is because it's, I don't know, less justified in some way or, you know, more opulent, more chosen. So you go, okay. I just need to work out, is this in line with something, like you said, principles, the life setup? Am I doing something that makes the world a better place that my kids can grow up in?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Is this something that they're going to be proud of? Is this something that affords us a different type of lifestyle? Is this something that they would want me to do? If they were in 20 years time, would they want to look back and say, do you know what it is? I'm really glad that you actually went and did that.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
But in the moment, you've got a crying child and you feel like a piece of shit because you're leaving.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Maybe I've spent a bit too much time in the book this week.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I suppose as well, an uncomfortable realization for... Look at me, bro-sciencing parenting, bro-parenting from the sidelines over here. But I imagine as well that there should also be a question that parents ask where they say, well, are my kids maybe too sensitive? Are they... too unfamiliar with me being away from them?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Are they unable to regulate even a small amount of time away, which is unrealistic and is making them fragile in a way? Maybe I need to step in on the other side. Maybe we need to do a little bit of training. I need to sort of bring them into land a little bit. I need to calm them down. I need to say, hey, this is what's going to happen. I'm going to be away for 15 minutes.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I've got to go to the shop. I've got to go and do whatever. So yeah, they're all signals. And I guess it's a good learning experience. And if you deny them, then the opportunity to learn is just out the window.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I wonder what we'll see in a decade's time from an attachment perspective, from a lifestyle perspective, from a psychological makeup perspective. We may find out that kids are largely so robust that a two-year period during their formative years didn't make that much of a difference. Or maybe it'll be really great, or maybe it'll be really terrible, and time will tell.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You mentioned before about people-pleasing. This is something that over the last year or so I've realized that maybe a pathology I'm more familiar with than I realized. What have you come to learn about people pleasing, people pleases, where it comes from?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
The desire for us to take something we do a little bit and turn it into a label that describes our entire personality is quite strong. The pathologization of sort of normal emotions in that way, which is odd, right? Because both me and you are fans of sort of emotionally informed therapy and people understanding their emotions. I also think it's very interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I think it's one of the most interesting things that you can do. Uh, and yet I imagine that you have a similar problem to me as the overuse of therapy speak online to describe like this person wasn't mean to me. They were narcissistic or they caused me trauma. Uh, you know, I'm not sad. I'm depressed. And, uh, the sort of the straying over into you crossed a boundary.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
That's, that's one of my bound, et cetera, et cetera. Um, yeah. So people a lot of the time will say yes to things when they mean to say no, or they want to say no. They want to become firmer at being able to disappoint those around them. How can they become better at that?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Why do you start? What are the skills?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And we're going to have an overnight hard ass.
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#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
That anticipatory anxiety thing is so funny because you're right, it's almost always your ability to turn the future situation into a nightmare is significantly better than it almost ever is. And the stupid thing is that all of the nightmares that you genuinely encounter in the real world are ones that you probably didn't see coming.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
So you're right, okay, so I have this unbelievable ability to predict things that aren't problems and not predict things that are going to be massive issues. Okay, brilliant, thanks. Amazing way that our brains are set up.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
But yeah, I think that that's right. And again, as a slowly rehabilitating people pleaser, that's a way that I found to be better as well, to learn to be able to make demands of other people to not subjugate my needs or believe that I don't have needs or think that it's noble to not have needs, to put somebody else ahead of me. Oh, this is like a sort of a sacrificial type.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It's a sort of odd, like emotional puritanism where you think, oh,
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
if i feel bad but someone else feels good net net that means that it's good you go what if both what if you could both feel good but you just need to sort of make a demand yeah yeah so true and often you're when you feel like you're being a nice person because you're making them feel good um actually sometimes what you're doing is just appeasing them
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It's also not very trustworthy. If somebody can't trust your no, it's very difficult to trust your yes. And, you know, you hinted at if you don't have any choice, it's not particularly virtuous. You don't even feel good about doing the virtuous thing because you didn't have any other choice.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
option yeah you didn't choose to be nice to this person you simply couldn't be bad yeah and um i had i wrote about this this week actually that uh a friend of mine a few months ago me and him had had a sort of well-meaning debate but i was worried that i'd upset him so i rang him a little bit afterwards and i was like hey man i just wanted to sort of check in and make sure that you're right so yeah of course like of course it was it was totally fine
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And then he heard me start to chastise myself for going, see, this is my people-pleasing nature coming out. This is me. I had to check in. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second. The reason that I love you as a friend, for one of the big reasons, is because you decided to put me first, even in this situation, even the one that was neutral, the fact that you did reach out and care.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
He's like, be careful. pathologizing something which is actually a really virtuous part of who you are and I'm like right okay so doing the thing was good it's a part of my nature that my friends are glad that I have yeah but by being compelled to do it as opposed to choosing to do it, that does kind of derogate some of the virtue that's behind it.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
So I was like, right, okay, so am I supposed to purposefully try and get rid of that, so briefly make myself a worse friend, to then relearn it again consciously so that I can finally get back to the place that I was in the beginning? I'm like, that seems unnecessarily effortful. Like to go around this whole loop to end up at the place that I started again, but this time it's caught.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You know what I mean? And I think this line between virtue from compulsions and virtue from choices and then this odd sense that we need to deprogram. Okay, so if it's hard to do, does that make it more virtuous? Like it's in my nature. Like that's just me speaking forward. What a lovely way to be. Would you rather be somebody that's mean?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
and you have to work hard to do that thing, would that make you a better person? If you were good, but you were naturally mean? I'm sure I'd be able to find a way to castigate myself and whip myself into submission and say, well, I mean, you know that you did the thing, but you didn't feel like doing the thing. The human desire to minimize our good points is robust, to say the least.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What's your advice for dealing with passive aggressive people?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Well, the culpable deniability is the entire reason for the passive aggression.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It never really points at the thing that someone's trying to say. It's this sort of shadow sentence that gestures in the direction of it, whilst also being able to be completely denied that it is that thing that we're talking about. it's quite a cowardly form of communication. I'm aware that it's coping mechanism.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
There's lots of reasons that people do it, but it's a very cowardly form of communication because it doesn't ever actually say the thing that you mean. It just sort of points in the direction and then gets mad at you if you don't realize it. So Neil Strauss says unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. And I think that's sort of passive aggression in a
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
in a nutshell yeah but yeah you know there's two at least for me there's sort of two broad approaches the first one being like call it out as gently as possible you're like look hey man uh it feels like such and such a thing has happened i'm not really too sure what it is um but i don't like this sort of lingering sense of something unspoken Help me understand to you what's going on.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
This is an open forum. I'm not going to judge you. Just let me know. And for me, with that, as long as you deploy it in the right way, that's a really open-door policy. That's an olive branch for somebody to go, okay, it's a bit safe. Yeah, do you know what it is? I I know that you don't even think about it, but you said this thing the other week and fuck, it's just got to me.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And I haven't really been able to stop thinking about it. And you go, awesome. Like what run to the bridge? And you can then round it out quite nicely by saying something like, Hey man, look, I just want to let you know, if this ever, ever happens, if anything, even remotely close to this happens again, just call it out. Like, just say it to me straight away.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I mean, I, like I say, illustrious career of dealing with passive aggressive people. And, um, But that's at least my current working theory of one of the better ways to deal with it.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And the second side of it is, look, like if you've put that forward and this person sort of behaved in this way, I think going, okay, like I trust what you're saying, but it still feels like there's something lingering there. And, you know, reliably now those situations, those people just got phased out of my life. So I'm like, hey, man. I overthink enough.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I don't need to be overthinking about your thinking as well. Like I've got enough of my own thinking to overthink about.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Yeah, I wonder whether there's more opportunities for people to consider and ruminate about what's going on in their life at the moment, because most of the base needs for most people that are listening to this podcast are sorted. They know where they're going to sleep tonight. They know where the food is going to come from, etc., etc.,
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It seems like, I think, talking about relationships, intimate relationships, there's sort of two broad buckets of challenges early on in relationships. One being you loving somebody who doesn't feel the same and the other being somebody loving you, but you sort of struggling to let them get in close. The sort of anxious versus avoidant, I suppose, the push versus the pull.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
What's your advice for these two buckets of people?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And oddly enough, an existential crisis or, you know, worrying about emotions, thinking about thinking is actually kind of a luxurious position to be in, in order to be able to get to that stage. I'm aware that for everybody that deals with it, including myself, it doesn't feel luxurious at the time.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
What about the person that doesn't love you back? I guess we're one step before the relationship here, you know, pining, pandering, cloying for somebody who just you want them and they don't want you.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Isn't it strange? We've got this sort of odd... balance when we get into relationships with people before we met them we were self-sufficient human perfectly fine most people maybe in many ways preferable uh to uh being in a relationship and then you decide to
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
But it's probably an indication that the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs has probably been sorted. And we're then moving on to what's next. But yeah, the threat detection thing, the fact that there is an infinite number of potential stressors out there and are biased toward looking at those ones as opposed to something a little bit more calming. The calm stuff, that's not salient.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You decide to let this other person into your life and you think, right, okay, well, I know that in order to fully love this person, in order to integrate them into my lifestyle, I need to not just sort of continue to do the independent thing that I was doing with the window dressing of like some companionship every so often, but they actually infuse themselves into it. I begin to...
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
take heed of what they say. I care about their opinions. There is a bit of them in me. And if that leaves, there is this void there. And you're sort of trying to create this balancing act. And then as things get more and more, you think, well, maybe even their opinion of me is more important than my opinion of me. And I am so concerned about whether they're okay, that I can't be okay without that.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And if they were to leave, I don't even know what would be left. But in order for you to hold on to the initial type of sort of ruthless independence that you had before, it feels like you wouldn't ever really fully be able to let that person integrate into your life. So yeah, this sort of delicate balance between you are okay, you can back yourself, you are not a fragile little mouse. And also...
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
If you want to experience everything that there is to enjoy in a relationship, you need to allow yourself, you need to open up that side of yourself in order to be potentially hurt. It's not a simple balance.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It has the highest protein per calorie ratio on the market, up to 53% more than grass-fed beef, and it is the only stress-free, 100% wild harvested red meat available. Their venison sticks are with me whenever... I travel. These are phenomenal. They taste unreal. Nine grams of protein. I love them. They're a complete life hack. You need to get more protein in your diet and this is going to help.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I suppose a lot of the time the sort of disagreements, I guess, before the relationship breaks down, the kind of arguments that people have. I had Ben Shapiro on the show recently, who's a good debater, and he mentioned that he has to remind himself that being loved by his wife is more important than winning an argument.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I don't need to worry about that, but I'll worry about the thing that I think I need to worry about. So what about in the moment, somebody's in that sort of, they're trapped in that cycle, that overthinking loop. I imagine this is something that your clients talk to you a lot about.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
because a lot of the time regardless of whether he's in the right or in the wrong he he's very well trained it's like saying i go into a fist fight and i'm an mma fighter um he has a very particular set of skills humans hate being so wrong so much i think that we can become myopic about this sort of stuff that we just don't want to lose the argument to our partner yeah even if we might be in the wrong even if the outcome results in us being more miserable or things being more sad yeah
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
what's your advice for better disagreements and for sort of letting go of this need to win arguments?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I always had this thing in my mind uh this is early bro science for me this is like early 20s bro science stuff uh where I noticed that the tone that was set at the very beginning of a relationship that I would get into very much sort of determined expectations down the line that um you know during the first you know six months or whatever three months where everything's amazing uh
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
what are interventions or what are the ways when you find yourself doing that, that you take yourself out of it as best you can?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
The expectations coming down the line, if you spend four nights a week together because you're besotted and you can't think about anything except for them, et cetera, et cetera, but really where you want to bring this relationship into land is you probably see each other two nights a week or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
The change, the pivot that then gets made, or this particular demeanor that you have in the beginning, maybe you're more aloof, you're playing it more cool, or maybe you're more lovey-dovey or whatever it might be, that that...
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
tone setting in the beginning is uh highly determinant of what is expected down the line and quite rightly so like this is the relationship that i got into what's this one like why is what what's happened with this sort of adjustment here um but i get the sense that with disagreement with attachment style with regulation co-regulation with the way that you um make up after you've argued etc and
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Setting the tone for that as early as possible as well is maybe even more important because that is going to determine, or at least my current working theory is that most relationships live and die not on how happy you guys are together, but how well you disagree. Because like insufficient happiness may be a reason for a relationship to break up.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
But what's more likely is too much disagreement, too much unhappiness, right? Like let's get past that first because that predicates you being able to access the happiness thing in any case. And yeah, the sort of direct communication that, hey, when X happened, I felt Y. I'm sure it wasn't your fault. I'm sure that you didn't mean to make me feel that way. But I don't want to lie to you.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I just want this to be out there. And this is a collaborative thing. process almost treating the relationship like a third person and being like look we have this thing which is the way that we're enmeshed together and i want to do things that allow that to flourish as much as possible yeah yeah and and also it's okay to um
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You learn to argue.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It's a great realization. It's a really lovely realization. You know, I would certainly put myself into the category of person who believed that his castigating inner voice was encouraging his performance for a long time. Kind of got myself to at least now realizing it's probably not helping, certainly not making me better.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
But then there's an even more sort of difficult question, which is, okay, it's not even useful. Dot, dot, dot. And it's still there. Right. Okay. So it's no longer performing the function that I thought it was, but you've got this, you know, lifetime of habit of that just being the default that you go to. I remember I used to do this thing when, uh, again, CrossFit world.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It was interesting that I use CrossFit a lot of the time when I'm talking about kind of like the induction to personal growth because both those things happened at the same time. So I kind of anchor a lot of the things that I was doing then to the training modality that I did. And if I was doing a workout on an assault bike, My heart rate was really, really high. It's 170 or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I've got the taste of metal in the back of my throat. Uh, I'm aware that 170 is not that high for some people, but it was high for me, uh, working on the assault bike and these sort of during that extreme stress, like acute stress, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
this sort of weird texture would appear this sort of landscape or whatever in my mind and it was always critical voices it was always and I have had it a couple of other times when I'm under periods of extreme stress the less gracious parts of my inner monologue come up and yeah I wonder it certainly got infinitely better but there's still work to be done did it help you at the time to perform yeah I think so I mean look
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
In my experience. most high performers are not driven by a perfectly balanced desire to enact their logos and actualize themselves. They are looking for validation from the world. They are looking for acceptance in a way that they never got it as a child. They're looking to prove the chip on the shoulder or the bullies wrong or whatever it might be.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
A lot of people are driven by running away from something they fear, not running towards something that they want. And, uh, It allows people to create very, very impressive lives, but in the only way that everybody else can judge it, which is outwardly. And, you know, I know that this is one of your pet obsessions too, which is the price that successful people pay to be the person that you admire.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It's probably been the most interesting question that I've considered over the last few years. And you speak to a lot of people that are very successful. Yeah. And you look at the price that they pay and you go, I didn't know if this is worth it. Like you have this cathedral of accolades and success and reputation and other people admiring you and so on.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
But look at what you've had to do to get there. And again, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. I'm currently sort of really, really trying to work about... what would this be like if it was more fun?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
What would this be like if I sacrificed maybe even, you know, 2% or 5% of the gripping and the cloying and the sort of like control in the real world to maybe unlock 50% more enjoyment internally. Uh, and I don't even know if that's a trade that needs to be made. It might be a sort of a false equivalence or whatever, but, uh, I've made a ton of progress.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
So for the people who've got an endemic critical inner voice, I think certainly there is at least a little bit that can be done to deprogram that. How much, whether you can get to the stage where it's the perfect high school coach that you never had, I'm not sure. But yeah, I'm moving in the right direction.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I think as well, it's very much a horses for courses thing that maybe at the beginning of your journey, if look, if you are 450 pounds. You're kind of getting towards the stage where you just need to use whatever you can. And if shame is the most salient sort of tool that can get you from there down to a more healthy body weight or, you know, pick whatever it is.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
If you're on the verge of a drug addiction or whatever, like you just get whatever fuel you can grab a hold of most easily. Yeah. But after a while, you have to think, right, okay, I've got myself into some degree of momentum here. Is the tool that got me here the one that's going to get me there?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And is this really, like, have I worked this hard to achieve all of these things to still call myself a piece of shit if I fall short? It's like, really? That's what you're doing. That's the that's the fuel that you're relying on. Like a guy with a hammer. You go, OK, there's only one use that I have for this. I only have one mode of inner monologue. I'm never going to be gentle with myself.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I'm never going to be caring. I'm never going to be reassuring. I'm never going to be supportive. Like, no, no, no. I'm just going to whip myself into submission. And it's always that's that's it.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Is this similar to the approach that you have for dealing with self-doubt?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
All of this is made significantly harder when you're overwhelmed and emotionally activated, though, I guess, which is, you know, to kind of bring it full circle, I suppose. All of the things that we're talking about in the cold, harsh light of a podcast studio sound achievable, rational, within reach, but you're just swimming in emotions. This thing happens. I'm overwhelmed.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
There's too much going on. What is a, what is a way that people can kind of come back to center when we've got, we've got these, we maybe even understand the tactic. I should be, I should be more supportive with myself. There's that inner voice thing again, but you're just, all you can feel is just this activation.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I realized that the sort of numbing of emotions, the fleeing from them, there are better and worse ways to do it. It's trite, you know, people to say, well, it's better to be addicted to the gym than it is to be addicted to fentanyl. And you go like, yeah, obviously.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
But one of the more sort of not insidious, but certainly subtle ways that people do that was meditation or breath work or, you know, what people would typically consider to be very healthy, very embodied solutions to this. So an emotion arises inside of you. And if you're good at meditation, you notice it, you release and allow it. Right, okay, brilliant.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You still don't know anything about that emotion. You haven't sat with where that's come from. And that's just going to continue coming up. Now, are there times when you need to just... Let it go. Yes, absolutely. But if this thing's going to keep on happening, it is permanently putting some sort of band-aid over the top of this, and again, and again, and again, and again.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
You go, after a while, you need to kind of admit, I just need to sit and investigate where this comes from.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Dr. Julie Smith, ladies and gentlemen. Julie, I appreciate you. I think the book's great. Where should people go? I want to keep up to date with everything you're doing.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction and real life stories. And there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
uh, assessment as a predictive tool. You go, Hey, this thing happened before. Maybe it'll happen again. That pattern's beginning to come up. Uh, so for me, when I'm underslept, if I'm underslept, my ability to sort of regulate just falls out of the window. Uh, so I go, okay, right. I'm, I'm tired.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Therefore I need to sort of adjust the site on my scope to be like, am I actually that bothered about this? Or did I just get four hours sleep last night?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
What about fear as well? Because I think that this is kind of a two pronged challenge that people have a lot of fear, a lot of concern about making decisions about whether or not I'm doing the right thing. Very visceral emotion. How can people better deal with fear?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
What was wrong with it?
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I had this realization toward the end of my 20s when I was trying to unpack three decades of not understanding myself. And I remember I wrote down, action is the antidote to anxiety. And the reason for that was I became way less fearful about the future when I was moving myself toward it, when I didn't feel passive, when I didn't feel like I was being blown around by the wind.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And yeah, there's this interesting sort of coming back to center moment, I think, with a health scare or with fear in general, if it's really visceral, if it's emotional fear, if it's serious. And it really does kind of remind you about this essence of yourself, at least I found that, that when I've got a big period of ruminative stress, I actually feel oddly more myself than I do at other times.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
I think it sort of strips away a lot of the bravado and momentum and inertia that you've got going on, compensating mechanisms and the ways that you can kind of hide things when everything's going well. And then you kind of come back to center and you kind of remember what that is. But yeah, action being an antidote to anxiety, I think,
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And it's ruthless because the action is the exact thing that anxiety stops you from wanting to do. The very last thing, I'm going to stay in bed. I don't want to get up. I don't want to be leaning in. I don't want to be sort of taking charge of the situation.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
In the deep end.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
It's a vicious cycle. You know, there's periods where momentum seems to be working with you and then periods where it seems to be working against you. And I think what we all, everybody wants is this sort of permanent upward spiral toward ever increasing capacity and ever increasing hope in ourselves. But, you know, there is a vicious sort of other side to that momentum too.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
And stepping in to kind of have a circuit breaker on that is something I think a lot more people need.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Are we doomed to fail in some regard there as humans that we have this very rich inner experience, which is very difficult to communicate, to measure, to understand, to export to somebody else? Hey, this is what I'm...
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
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The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
to tell you that the thing that you're trying to do, the taking up the martial art, why are you training this Taekwondo bullshit like, you know, fucking six nights a week? Why are you coaching all of these mums and all of these like old guys on how to do Tai Chi or whatever? Why are you doing that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Well, because maybe I'm sort of pulled to it and there is this temptation to go back to your old ways of thinking. Go back to the road that you already know how it's going to end. And I get the sense that this is not a bug. It is a feature. It's a part of moving from a place that you do not want to be to one that you do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
There's that question about – there's two options about life in the universe, that either we're alone or that we're not, and both are equally terrifying. Right. I feel like it's the same. When it comes to Western anti-Westernism and you say either we're doing it to ourselves or we're not. Right. And both are equally terrifying. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And for the most part, you actually need to live through this lonely chapter. And you look at it and you go, well, the fucking Rocky montage was 3.5 minutes. For me, it's been five years. Where's the championship ring? You know what I mean? I haven't won the fight. Where's Apollo Creed? None of this stuff's happened. The thing that I wish more stories talked about...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
If you watch it in the movies, yeah, sure, there's ups and downs in the journey of the athlete that's going to change his life around and get the goal. But his self-belief never wavers, right? He makes the decision, and it's one straight shot, typically. And there'll be some challenges, but he'll get there. His self-belief never wavers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I don't think that that's what the experience of doing personal growth is like at all. In my experience, it's... You're just swimming in uncertainty and fear and a lack of belief that it's even going to happen. You don't even have the promise of glory on the other side of it. I don't even know if this is going to be worth it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And I'm fucking doing Sam Harris's waking up meditation app and I'm journaling on a morning. I'm going to the gym. Why am I eating meat and fruit? Does this even work? Like, you know, you're doing all of this stuff, trying, scrabbling like a guy in a fucking well trying to find a handhold.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And this is most people, I think, most people's experience because if most people don't change, you are going to be an outlier if you're somebody who does change. I think about personal growth kind of like a rocket ship taking off. And as you take off, you've got a particular velocity that you're moving at. And what you want is to find other people moving at the same velocity as you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But the quicker that you move, the fewer people are going to be like you. So some people will be ahead of you. And you're in this lonely chapter, and then you catch up to them. And then, oh, no. And this isn't some comment on people that work on themselves are morally better or worse than anybody else.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But it's just a stark sort of fact about you talk to people and you resonate with people that are at the same level of life as you are. And that kind of makes sense. You have things to discuss. You're encountering the same sorts of challenges. whether it's in terms of your self-worth or your wealth or your relationship status, all of these things, birds of a feather, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And one of the, I guess, difficult realizations of people who want to change their life is that If you do it well, you might have to go through a period where you let go of all of your friends. But the really bad realization is if you do it really well, you might have to do that multiple times throughout your life. You find a group of people, finally, I've landed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
After, oh, that period where I was on my own and I didn't really understand. Oh, fuck. I'm still going. And I now need, you mean I got to do it again? I've got to do it again. I just thought that I'd found my group, and I've got to do it again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
This Lonely Chapter thing is a big deal, and I think that it explains why so few people make big changes, because the temptation is always going to be to just go back to what's normal, go back to what I know. And it's why America, for all that it's a horrible, cis, hetero, patriarchal superstructure that's misogynistically keeping everybody down, It's an enthusiastic and sort of excitable country.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You know, you're being puppeted by this nefarious foreign power or you're just turning around and kicking the ball into your own goal over and over again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And you guys have kind of got permanent first-line cocaine energy about everything. And for me, it seems to be a real enthusing environment. It encourages me to do things, helps me to take risks. Either that or get kicked in the head a lot. And I just love it. I love the fact that it makes me feel confident in doing difficult things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And, yeah, I wish that more people had that community around them. I think largely Reddit is just a website filled with people who couldn't find other people to talk about their niche in their hometown. Oh, there's a lot.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
warhammer 40k version or whatever um but yeah it's it's difficult and when you get to the stage where you're faced with some personal growth decision you're always going to have to make this value exchange of do i want to move forward on my own or do i want to go back with my friends it's a good point man chris always great to talk to you brother really appreciate your insight you're a very brilliant guy and you're always you're fun fun to talk to i appreciate you too man
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You're awesome too, dude. Thanks for being here. Every time that you bring me on, every time that we get to speak, I really appreciate it. So thank you. My pleasure. All right. Bye, everybody.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Wow. I think maybe a couple of people chose to go self-funded, but they were trying to get the open offer to all of the biggest flat-earth, influencers, commentators on the planet. I don't know what to call them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Brilliant. That's so good. Brilliant. Yeah, I remember... Pre-social media. Yeah. But the dynamic is still the same. Right. It's just amplified now so much so that it's a part of everyone's life. So many people's morality stands on the shoulders of somebody that's fallen behind. Right. It's look at how much look at how bad that person is. Don't you don't need to look at me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And I think that if people start pointing at outgroups and they bind their group together over the mutual hatred of an outgroup, that's usually an indication. I'm like, I should look a little bit closer at you. Like maybe a good example. Lizzo. Didn't think I was going to go there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Lizzo, talking about how she was in support of these bigger girls and she was going to help their careers and give them a platform, presumably a structurally reinforced platform.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
meanwhile behind the scenes she's body shaming them she's starving them she's not letting them have water apart from when she makes them eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam strippers Douglas Murray said that she thought that she could outsource eating fruit to somebody else and And meanwhile, you think she's portraying nicey-nicey out front what's happening behind the scenes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I remember this, this was pre... One cigar? Yeah, please. This was pre... Thank you. Pre-Trump Elon. Really pre-Trump Elon. And he was saying, thank you very much. And he was saying, what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it. And he's discussing performative empathy in this way. This sort of sense that what's most important is to protect people's feelings.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So they do this in the middle of our winter, their summer. They observe the sun above the horizon for 24 hours. So there's no explanation, apparently, with most of the models of Flat Earth about how the sun could stay above the horizon for 24 hours. So they flew down. They had drones flying in the air. They had... 24 hour 360 cameras. They had live stream of iPhones, all of this stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And I think that this really is a point. It doesn't matter whether you're on left or right. This is a point that you should care about because you want people to have some sense of transparency, legitimacy. They want to be telling the truth. You want to trust that what someone is saying to you is actually what they believe. And he said, what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
There are lots of people who are doing evil while proclaiming that they're doing good. And, you know, that's the same that you're talking about there with John Cleese. You're saying... these people's morality will stand on the shoulders of others who have fallen behind. It's the same reason why if somebody's in the middle of a scandal, look at who comes out and twists the knife a lot.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You go, huh, I wonder what's in your... It's the classic congressman that's got the anti-gay bill. Oh, yeah. Who's just... Gay as fuck. Yeah, yeah. Glory holes and, you know... Check his hard drive. That's the person whose hard drive you want to look at. Check his hard drive, yeah. So, yeah, it's just such an obvious...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Warning sign to me that what's happening inside of someone is probably not that good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You know what I don't like about that sort of level of aggressive criticism? I think I'm a – you could describe me as a criticism hyper-responder. I'm someone for whom it probably impacts me more than it should do, certainly more than it should do for someone who gets the level of attention that I've managed to get myself to now. Right. And what I don't like about it is it causes people –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
like me to be way less confident in their own positions because you think oh well most people if it was me i would only give feedback if i was really certain and if i had this person's best interests at heart and if i wanted them to do better and if i actually knew what i was talking about then i would tell this person what i think about them and what i think about what they're saying right and if you apply that rubric to everybody else that gives you criticism
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You give undue, unfair expertise and legitimacy to people who don't have your best interests at heart. They don't understand what you're trying to do. They don't care about you. They don't get it. And it causes a lot of people. Basically, I think that criticism killed more dreams than a lack of competence ever did. Because people are just, I'm worried about pushing these boundaries too much.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
This person, all of my friends tell me the truth. Why isn't this person on the internet? There's this idea from Ethan Cross called criticism capture. So you'll have heard of audience capture, right? Where a creator starts feeding red meat to the audience. It becomes very predictable. Criticism capture basically says it's not the compliments, but the criticisms that are more warping.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That over time, what you end up doing is changing the way that you speak. You become a flaming sword wielding, card carrying member that's as aggressive as possible to push back against it. Or you go the other way. And you begin to caveat very aggressively. You start to dampen down all of your opinions so that nobody can take offense to them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You have these unnecessarily long sort of diatribes, sort of weird land acknowledgement. Well, we must remember that women are struggling with the thing and we have to do the memories. But now we've got that out of the way. Let's talk about men's problems or whatever it might be. And yeah, I think. I just wish that the internet was a little bit more positive some as opposed to negative some.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And then they had the people that were on the ground. And the guys that were there observed the sun.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And I understand that people bind together over mutual hatreds about groups. But the oldest story in human history is that group of people are different to us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That's a good question. Do we care about the environment or not? Because those fumes that are being kicked out of that are not good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Lithium and all sorts of shit getting pissed into the environment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, so the final experiment. So those are apparently mountaintops. But they're submerged?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
A couple of times. Well, I fucking turned this around the wrong way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Some of them... You bring enough people together and they get vandaly?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I do think if you're in that position, if you've got this heritage coming in, just be careful with where you put your hands. Do you know what I mean? Don't do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You've seen that video comparing him and Trump's son. There's two different types of autism. Have you seen this? No, I haven't. Oh, my God. It's so good. I think it's at the inauguration. And they're both stood next to each other. And Elon's sort of fist pumping and loving it. And Trump's son's just like staring off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Well, they need to do how football coaches have got. They put the play thing over the front of their mouth like this and they talk into it. That's how it needs to be done now for politics with lip readers everywhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
There was a video from Forbes recently that got a million plays in a day talking about Trump getting, like, bopped on the nose by a boom mic. Yeah, by a little boomer. He just did a little boop on the nose. Yeah. I have to say, I have such fucking news politics fatigue already. We're what, two months into the sort of presidency? And it is the velocity of...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
of bullshit if you can get a million plays in a day because trump got bopped on the nose by a fucking boom mic it just the the appetite is it seems endless for it it just feels it's very it's exhausting i'm kind of having to check out and i know that people say oh well it's a luxurious position you don't need to pay attention to politics it's a luxurious position for you to be in people at the bottom they do need to pay to pay attention to politics
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's an interesting stat because actually the most educated, wealthiest people are the ones that spend the most time consuming news and talking about politics. It's the people at the bottom rung of the ladder that don't. So that's not true. I'm just fucking exhausted. I'm so- You're allowed to be exhausted.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You ever think that your career would result in you having typos for a headline, Jamie? Newsweek. I don't even know which ones we've missed. I'm sure there's been other ones.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Anything for clicks. That was something that I noticed, a trend that I've noticed over the last couple of years. Legacy Media is really struggling to garner attention itself. It seems like fewer and fewer people are listening to it. We saw that over the last election. It seems to me like the best way that legacy media can gain traffic is to talk about independent media.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
How many times are we seeing headlines about Andrew Huberman or about the right-wing manosphere pipeline and how it's getting people to do this? Or the other side, like why is there not a Joe Rogan of the left? Whatever the headline is, More and more, the way that legacy media is able to achieve traffic is only in reference to independent media.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So as opposed to us being downstream from them, they're now downstream from us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
This is interesting. I was at the top of the list.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Kill Tony 3.5. I still don't understand how that's a political show.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I managed to thread the needle of avoiding this. You're going to get on there now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's very funny. What do you think of the – if you've got a proposed reason for why this – is it just a judgment criteria that they're judging shows that aren't right-wing as right-wing? Or is it genuinely that for some reason the left is struggling to make progress in independent media?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
What are the left wing positions that you still hold?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Well, these are requests by you, so I can wear what I want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah. It's not like the fires don't... It's such a good example, but when you compare that to the way that medical access is done, at least in this country.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's the number one cause of bankruptcy in America, medical debt. I mean, coming from the UK where we've got the NHS, it feels fucking barbaric. It really does feel barbaric. I remember I went to New Orleans and I was getting this great ghost tour on an evening time. It's like fun tourist shit to do in New Orleans. I do those. And the guide was so good. My mother was a Wiccan.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And I don't know if that was true, but the tale was lovely. Anyway. And he was telling me I've got a chipped wisdom tooth. And my girlfriend got into a car wreck the other day. And he basically said he was explaining to me about how you can get bankrupted by this stuff. He's like, if you get hit by a car, you don't have insurance. You better fucking walk it off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Because if you don't, that could be the end of essentially the beginning of the end of your life. And that really, I mean, that was six, seven years ago now. And it's still like, that was the most haunting thing about the fucking ghost tour. Him telling me about the medical debt. And then I think the reaction to the UnitedHealth CEO killing as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
For me, somebody who didn't fully understand how many of the claims are denied. I think that there was an increase by about 30% in denial of claims over only the most recent period. And I just thought guy shoots person, typically the guy that shoots them is in the wrong. And the reaction on the internet just, I wasn't ready for it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And it really sort of taught me this undercurrent of dissatisfaction that almost everybody in America has with the healthcare system.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Waiting for some righteous person to come in and do retribution.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
The FDA ban on compounded Ozempic started yesterday. Oh, it's a ban.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Correct. Brigham taught me about this. I didn't understand how it works. If there's a shortage of a drug, compounding pharmacies are kind of allowed to just bypass patents in some way. It's like you can produce it and you can make it cheaper and more widely available because the supply chain is fucked or something like that. That would be a good thing for society.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
To make more drugs more widely available for cheaper?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, or can't afford it or don't have the insurance for it. So, yeah, I mean, that came into effect. I think tezepatide got popped yesterday. And then partway through April, semaglutide is going to go as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah. I think people use sort of complex language and fluency as a proxy for truthfulness and insight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Well, we need to think, you know, all of the people that are using these drugs, that are losing weight with them, whatever, we need to think about who the real sort of people suffering from this situation are, who are the stock owners of telehealth companies. Yeah. If you own HIMS or whatever, the stock's declined by a lot. But dude, I've been thinking so much about Ozempic recently.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And I think the introduction of Ozempic proves how much of a scam the body positivity movement was all along. You look at the Golden Globes and all of the women that were supporting their bigger sisters. As soon as there was an easy route to being able to become a skeleton. They look like this. Look like this guy here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, I do. It's like having an Instagram filter for the entire world. Right. So everything feels... It's a little rosy. I had a pair of rose-colored glasses before, and I got it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It just shows how flimsy your principles are that it was easier for you to say, I can't win this particular game, therefore the game is rigged. If you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get and then proclaim to everybody else that they should get it too. Yes. And yeah, the Golden Globes, you just got these fucking skeleton motherfuckers walking around.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, I mean, women of Hollywood are now facing the same dilemma that dudes who go to the gym have had for decades. Because it's pointless losing weight naturally. Why would you lose weight naturally? Because everybody's going to accuse you of having used Ozempic in any case. Same thing as a dude.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
If you gain weight as a guy and you get jacked, really jacked, if you really discipline yourself, you know, multiple years... progressive overload, time under tension, hitting your protein goals, getting enough sleep. What your friends and the people of the internet will say is, yeah, dude, easy if you take Trenbolone. And it's the exact same.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So what is the incentive for anybody to lose weight naturally? Now, apart from I have some concerns about the drugs and the side effects and so on and so forth, uh, Socially, there is no incentive for you to lose weight naturally. Remember when Adele lost all that weight? I think I'm mad at her. She did it in the before times, dude. Right, she did it hard.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah. Oh, this is just on Google Maps. Yeah. Jamie, you've just gone to Google Maps to find this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, she did it the fucking, yeah, exactly. The hard way. Yeah, exactly, extreme difficulty. Yeah. But yeah, now. Now she's hot. Do you remember when she did that Jamaica thing? She came out and she had all of her hair done like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But yeah, there's this odd like Pascal's wager that you have to make where you think I can either lose weight Normally, or without assistance, it's going to be more difficult and people are going to accuse me of using Zempik in any case. Or I can just take it and it'll be easier and they'll accuse me of it and nothing changes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That's how they got fat in the first place. Right, right. So Johan Hari did a really great book on this. You've had Johan on a bunch of times. He wrote this book called Magic Pill. And he's got just a really nice takeaway. He says, if you're under BMI of 30 and you're trying to lose weight, go fuck yourself. If you're between 30 and 35, there's probably a value judgment you need to make.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And if you're over 35 BMI, the cost-benefit analysis seems to sort of work in your favor. Yeah, people are losing more muscle and bone mass from using Ozempic than you would typically if you were not using that. But I think that that's just largely a selection criteria for the sort of people that are using Ozempic to help them lose weight, that they're so heavily calorie-restricted
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
that they don't need to have a fitness program. They don't have to really change their diet. I learned this. Johan taught me this thing. It's super interesting. Gastric band surgery, after people have that, the suicide risk is pretty high. And sometimes it's because of these surgeons that leave the gauze in or leave a scalpel or a fucking cigar end in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
There's complications that can happen physically. But the other thing that happens is these people used food as their coping mechanism for how they would feel better. And their ability to eat and their appetite has gone away, but their psychological issues have not.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, so this final experiment thing sent the world into a spiral. There was this dude, Jaron Campanella, who was one of the biggest influences, and he said, I saw the sun above the horizon, I think the Earth's round. And he's immediately been, the Flat Earth Society's just gone into a head spin. They're saying they didn't really go to Antarctica.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You lost one at a time. You're not getting it all back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
If you stack it in mind. Yeah. Yeah, if you reflect in the odds where we're at financially at the moment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, it's a strange. I think another thing with Ozempic, I have this theory that I think thin people are more prejudiced against people that use Ozempic than fat people are. So typically you would say – stay with me. I think you're right. So –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You would have imagined, and this did happen, some areas of the body positivity movement said that it was denying their right to exist, that it was like erasure, that you're losing your bigger brothers and sisters, I don't know. But they're not actually threatened in the same way as in-weight people are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So I'm aware that losing weight through a Zen pick is not the same as getting in shape, especially if you don't do the health and fitness regime, if you don't do the resistance exercise, you end up gaunt, skinny fat, you know, jowls, big cheeks, all that stuff. But... The signal of being in shape, let's just take that as being in shape, right, like a normal BMI.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
The signal of being in shape is usually a reliable indicator of what you've done to have to get there. Disciplined, reliable, able to do hard things, self-motivated. Consistent. Consistent, stick to a routine, conscientious, industrious, all of these things. So you look at somebody who's in shape, And you think, I can infer from your body a lot of things about who you are beyond just your body.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I actually think that this is one of the huge benefits that most people don't realize about getting in shape if they want to attract a partner or whatever. Sure, the body looks great when you take the clothes off. But what does it signal about your personality, about your underlying values and personality? Right. What you do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Now, the problem with the introduction of easier routes to being in shape is that it's completely derogated the signal. The signal is now no longer reliable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Because previously the signal said, I've had to jump through all of these different hoops. Well, now, how do you know if they've jumped through all of those hoops or if they're just shooting a Zen pick once a week?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And I think that this explains why a lot of people who are in shape have a real... visceral reaction. Now, sure, lots of people are concerned about the drugs. Fen-Phen was this thing in the 90s that fucked people up. It was speed. Yeah, I mean, it's a good way to lose weight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
They went to the sphere in Vegas was one of the accusations. They did it at the sphere in Vegas, and they were tracking it around. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
There's been no free lunch in weight loss ever yet. No. And I think that people are looking at the GLP-1s and thinking— What's the side effect? When's it coming? What's it going to do?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
On it? I've been watching him train. I've been watching him train on a Tuesday. Not watching him train. He trains when I train. I'm not following Alex Jones around. And he's getting after it. I know that's exactly what someone from the deep state would say. Do you know him? Did you see him there? I spied him over the far side.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I once saw him when I did Tim Pool's show in the RV outside of the...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
info wars car park oh yeah i did that yeah it was the same week that was the first week i was ever in austin it was three and a bit years ago i remember that live stream uh that was fun alex is a lovely person he really is he's working really hard in the gym if he just had that one thing that he didn't talk about that's it it's that one thing everything else has been mostly right about you know what i should have said alex jones is like the fucking patient zero for if you lose weight by going to the gym and working out and changing your diet people are just going to say it
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I don't know. I don't know. They had a bad time. But yeah, that's been pretty wild. Talking of pyramids. Dude, this new pyramid shit that's just come out? Oh, this is insane.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Did David Icke have a pop at Alex Jones recently? Did he? Who did David Icke get in trouble with, Jamie? I feel like there was some... It was somebody else in that sort of a world. But yeah, I mean, if the reptile people, it gets a bit reptile-y when you get down to the lower body fat percentages.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Even if you don't believe in the ideas, what's interesting is how does somebody arrive at them? That's what's fascinating to me. When I do my show, I speak to someone and I'm like, I want to understand the psychology of how you have arrived at this particular position.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, and go sideways like that. Yeah, fuck. Do you know what a Boltzmann brain is? Have you ever heard of this? No. Okay, so in an infinite universe, infinite, there is only, let's say, the size of your brain. It's like, whatever, 20 centimeters cubed or something, maybe 30 centimeters cubed. Inside that space, there's only so many ways that you can put matter together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
so that it creates anything. There's a limited number of ways that matter can come together with different elements, different structures, different everything like that. So Boltzmann brain suggests that across an infinite universe, there will be a brain the exact same as yours, the exact structure as yours, that comes into existence for a moment and then goes away.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And the reason that you could be experiencing the world that you are now, all of your memories, your past, your history, the person that you think you are, is that you are a Boltzmann brain that just comes into existence and then goes. Oh. Ludwig Boltzmann.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Why don't you just exist somewhere else? You could exist somewhere else, but this brain appears just spontaneously because in an infinite universe, there are only so many different ways that you can piece matter together. Right. And it's the monkey's typewriter thing. It's the exact same as that, but for the way that matter is constructed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's basically like a brain in a vat idea, but using infinite physics to kind of explain it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That you wore red instead of blue. Yep. That you turned left instead of right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It is better this way. It is nicer. Yeah, yeah. It's like a full... Dude, I need to show you this. Okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I got into super voids. Oh, yeah. The Buettas super void. Yeah. So areas of the universe that have big absences of matter, way more than there should be. Thank you. The Buettas supervoid is the biggest one. I think a ton 6118 or something is one of the biggest stars or one of the biggest black holes. And then this Buettas supervoid is because you would expect homogeneity across the universe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Things would be distributed pretty evenly. So what's this big hole here? Jamie, can you try and find a Buettas supervoid thing?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You realize just how fucking insignificant you are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Well, looking at the night sky gives you a really wonderful piece of perspective. It reminds you just how puny and insignificant you are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
The mysterious hole in the universe that's billions of times larger than the Milky Way. So go one left, a list of voids, Jamie. Yeah, that one. Just big holes. Yeah. So you should not have, it should be more evenly distributed. And yeah, the Buettas void, you know, this huge lack. Yeah. In the middle of...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, 600 meters descending down those cylinders, and then there's more stuff below it, and then there's additional structures inside of it. Yeah, that was crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah. Dude, I had Matthew McConaughey on the show toward the back end of last year, and we talked about Interstellar's 10th year anniversary. That movie is still my favorite movie of all time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Nolan's a fucking king. He's a wizard. Everything that he does. What's the new one? What's his new movie?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Oh, God, really? I don't know that story either, so I'm kind of... Yeah, I don't either. Part of me knows that I should have read it, and part of me is glad that I didn't, so I get to... I don't know how it finishes. I don't know how it ends.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So fucking good. I have to say, man, that Schultz's most recent special is one of the best things. I got to shout out Andrew Schultz. That was one of the best things that I've seen in so long. I thought it was fucking phenomenal. It made me cry when I saw it live here in Austin. Twice. I cried twice. Wow. And then I saw it again before I had him on the show the other week.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I was like, in the back of an Uber, trying to not let the taxi driver see that I'm welling up. He's talking about... His wife says something to him where she says, the thing is, honey, you don't have problems. We have problems. I was like, oh, it's just so lovely. And him talking about his experience trying to get pregnant and all of that stuff caused me to go and get a sperm count done.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Do you have a number where you'd like to start breeding? No. Breathing. Within the next few years, I want to start a family soon. Do you have a gal? Yeah, at the moment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Well, I think six months might be a little bit early just yet.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It was when I actually did do a week-long trip in Jamaica. And had to go from Montego Bay to Kingston twice to get my visa renewed. Now, traveling through Jamaican traffic with somebody will really tell you an awful lot. So, yeah, you're talking about like a Navy SEAL hell week of trying to throw difficult shit in that. So that worked.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, I mean, we need somebody that's an expert here, not me and you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Gotta be careful. I put these glasses on, that's why it happened. But yeah, I decided to go and get a sperm count thing done. You know what a varicocele is? No. Okay, dude, this is something that I think every single guy needs to know about. So it's basically when you go through puberty, the way that the veins sort of form that blow heat off from your balls,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
They can form in a way where they just don't get rid of the heat that efficiently. Not enough. And it's in 15% of men, so it's super, super common. But 50% of men that go to a urologist have got this. And I go in, and I've had these balls my entire life. I've had these balls. Thank you. They're not transplants. I've had these balls.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
since puberty and i found out at the age of 36 oh you've got a medium varicocele so the mad thing about this is mo you'll know this if you take testosterone it plummets your sperm count so typically testosterone and sperm kind of work against each other in that kind of a direction so This is the one thing where if you get it fixed, both go up. So the mean change in testosterone is 180 points.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
They just, it's surgery. It's a small surgery where they do an incision in your groin and they just fix the vasculature.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's like tossing a coin. See whose kids make it. Oh, it was Lefty that day. Lefty was the one that came out that day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Dude, the ethics of surrogacy are really interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Pregnancy doesn't just make a kid, it also makes a mother. And it's dangerous. I'm so confused. I mean, test you babies. What happens if we can just create artificial wombs? You know something that's weird? I know that people don't get, they don't choose to be born, but somebody chooses whether or not these two sets of DNA are going to come together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
If you've just got sperm donor after sperm donor and egg donor after egg donor and artificial wombs, it gets to the stage where people kind of aren't choosing who's coming into reality that much anymore?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I have a little open of that. So you'll remember that I sent you a photo on iMessage a couple of months ago. of a friend of mine who was in Antarctica.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
A third of all children globally are going to be obese by 2050. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That's the current trajectory. And one billion people worldwide are obese. So the number one form of malnutrition globally is obesity, not starvation. There's twice as many people that are obese than are starving. That's crazy. If that's not a comment on problems of abundance as opposed to problems of scarcity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But there's nothing in that one, right? Which is why it's a diet.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
The big gulps. The average American is fatter than the average American pig now. It's true. It's true. Average American man, 28% body fat. Average American woman, 40% body fat. Average American pig, 15% to 25% body fat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
For guys? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess it's offset by like Brian Johnson and all of the Olympic people that are just super shredded. Yeah, exactly. And then there was that other thing about you talking about kids. It's some huge percentage of 18 to 24 year olds couldn't join the military. Like 70% because of mental health or obesity or drug use or something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And half of them had two or more of these excuses for why you couldn't do it. And I think if you track over time the amount of military service that people have had, so much less. It's so much less. And I wonder how many of the issues that we're seeing, even women being attracted to guys, I think that what you want to do as a guy is try and signal women Again, the same as going to the gym.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Reliable, orderly, conscientious. I can be on time. I can do hard things. This is one of the proposed explanations for the baby boom was that a lot of men that did come back from war were signaling their eligibility, signaling how reliable they could be. And it made it easier for women to be attracted in that way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's interesting to think about the – you mentioned earlier on about going to the gym is right-wing and liking fast cars is right-wing and all the rest of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
The number of liberal women that are struggling I think to find an eligible partner is going up because they just can't find a guy that will hold the door open for them, that will treat them like a lady, that will try and be the protector, provider, procreator thing. You go – You're talking about a conservative. You're talking about somebody who's more traditional in that way. And I get worried.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I sort of talk a lot about this stuff on the show, and I get worried about not helping men to improve in this sort of zero-sum view of empathy, that if you give some attention to men and the way that they're struggling, that it takes it away from some other more deserving group. So a lot of the time, if someone's falling behind, 50 years ago, Title IX gets introduced, right, for women.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's not enough women in higher education. It's not enough women expediting them through socioeconomic status. 50 years later, they've blown the fucking roof off the glass ceiling. It doesn't exist. Two women for every one man completing a four-year U.S. college degree by 2030. Women earn way more than men do in their 20s. Way more. And now...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's going to be difficult for you to find an eligible partner as you begin to climb up your own socioeconomic ladder as you get higher and higher up. You look across and there are fewer and fewer men over there. And what you think is, okay, well, typically if a group is falling behind in society, we don't tell them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
We spend billions of money in taxpayer-funded charities and think tanks to try and work out what's going on and to try and bring them along for the ride. That's not happening with men because vestigially for so long, men had it so good. And now it's, I don't know, it feels like twisting the knife in some sort of karmic retribution in a way. Like this is penance that you're paying.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But a lot of guys, you can look at the number of CEOs and sure, guys that outperform on the top end. Yep. But that's not necessarily due to privilege. It's because putting yourself in that position to do what you need to do to get yourself to the position of being a founder, being a CEO, running a successful company is so fucking insane that most women would just choose to not go and do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You're talking about outliers. Evolutionary psychology says that men and natures play things, that there's more variability. There's more male geniuses, but there's also more male retards. And It's all well and good pointing to the number of CEOs and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and all the rest of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That doesn't help the guy who is really struggling and has had that run of bad luck and has been really struggling trying to work on himself. And yeah, if women have a problem, a lot of the time we say, what can we do to fix society? Any other group. But if men are struggling, we say, what is it that men are doing where they can't fix themselves? Right. And in some ways that's inspiring.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Like guys want that sense of like, I can fucking do this. I can do this. But it denies that the structural problems, I think the education system for young boys is really, really tough. Getting them to sit in a classroom still for six hours a day. It seems like females are just better at doing that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Young girls are more effective at a sort of brain-based economy, highlighting and planning ahead of the homework that they've got to do and the assignments and stuff like that. And you just roll that forward to women for every one man completing a four year college degree. Then I'm not saying let's rip women out of the classroom and out of the boardroom and put them back into the kitchen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Like, obviously not. Obviously, that's not what either of us are saying.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I think that the current environment does not necessarily lend itself to the disposition that men have got. So they're less conscientious than women from a personality standpoint on average. That means that it's really difficult comparatively on average for you to be able to remind yourself that you need to do the sort of homework.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Men are more predisposed to addiction, they're more predisposed to using recreational drugs, they're more predisposed to being in jail, to all of this sort of gang stuff that people get drawn into. It's just more likely for guys. There are more routes that men can be pulled away in that sort of a manner. And on top of it, I don't think that there is a particularly inspiring vision for what men is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But you said earlier on about fitness right wing, fast cars right wing. There was this... thread on Reddit, I think in a left-leaning forum that said, people of the left, can you give me a good example of who you think a positive male role model would be? The top voted one was Aragon from Lord of the Rings. What about Fabio?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You've had to go to a fantasy land in order to be able to find somebody who's sufficiently pure. And I think that this is one of the issues that we see on the left, which is, There is no level of purity or the level of purity you need to be able to get to is so high. It doesn't exist. How many people have gone from left to right? I left the left type thing like that. Quite a few.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
How many people have gone from right to left? Very few. Why? Because if you have got a slightly fettered past, if you maybe said things in the past that didn't agree with where we are now, the right will welcome you with open arms. But the left won't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I think that there is a level of puritanism on the left where they are unprepared to accept people who have had positions that they don't agree with. There seems to be this odd purity spiral where they're constantly trying to point out people who are no longer agreeing with the ideology du jour of the modern world. What do you think? Why do you think it is?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I love the music. And geometry, so you know it's real. Gotta appreciate the dramatic intro.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah. Oh, you've been conned by the patriarchy into being a domestic prostitute. So I was talking to was it Schultz that said this? I think it was. He's telling me on the show. He said that his wife used to work at Google. I think she's like super high powered, real smart lady. And she used to bump into her old colleagues in the supermarket when they were together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And the classic question that somebody that's in the career trenches asks somebody else is, oh, so what are you doing now? You left work. What are you doing now? And Schultz said this sentence that his wife replied with would fucking kill him. She says, oh, I'm just a mom. He said it's the just that really hurt. I'm just a mom.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That fucking hurts, dude, to derogate the people that are literally raising the next generation. That's another point, actually, about sort of men falling behind. I think it seems like young boys are more negatively impacted by fatherless homes than young girls are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So any boy that grows up in an intact, a non-intact household is more likely to end up in jail or prison than they are to complete college. in the U.S. Any non-intact that's adopted, step-parent, single-parent, any non-intact home, they're more likely to end up in jail or in prison than they are to complete college. And the same statistic is not true for girls. And this, again,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So what do you say? Are you saying that we need to hold girls back? It's like, no. You do not need to hold one group back in order to be able to raise another one up. We spent 50 years really pedestalizing and helping take the reins off of young girls so that socioeconomically they can look after themselves. They're no longer financial prisoners. Of their partner, which is a big deal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You look at the divorce statistics from the past and proclaim it as some amazing cultural outgrowth. And you go, how many women stayed in those relationships because they fucking couldn't afford to leave? They had no other option to do that. That's scary. That's scary. That's why women are so picky.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And he flew a Comedy Mothership lighter out to Antarctica. I've been reliably told that that lighter was used to smoke weed in Antarctica. Yeah, and it's touched, it was dropped a number of times, so it's touched ancient permafrost.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's the greatest metric in the world, though. It's the most easy to optimize thing. I can tell you the size of the house that I live in. I can tell you how much money I own. I can tell you what the car is like that I drive. I can't tell you how much peace I have when my head hits the pillow at night.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I can't tell you what the quality of the relationship between me and my wife or me and my kids is. I can't tell you how much time I got to spend in a hammock last week. You know, these are the things I think that if you were able to metric it, if you were able to make it a game, people would be able to pay an awful lot more attention to it. But the money is the best game in the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's literally currency exchange. You can exchange it. I know what your wealth is compared with that guy in Japan, compared with that dude in Russia, compared with this person that's Australian.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
There's a lot of problems, I think, that people that are driven face that don't get that much sympathy. So I had this idea that type A people have type B problems and type B people have type A problems. So insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and lazy people need to learn how to work hard and be more disciplined.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And, you know, most people that listen to shows like yours or mine are probably some version of type A, like a kind of walking anxiety disorder harness for productivity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It is. That's really accurate. I think the thing that type A people realize is that if you're type A, you get very little sympathy because an outwardly successful but miserable person is way less, always appears to be in a much more preferential position than a content being lazy, but on the verge of bankruptcy one. You know what I mean?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So problems of opportunity will always get less sympathy than ones of scarcity. Like one feels like a choice and the other feels like a limitation. One is like a bourgeois luxury and the other is like a systemic imposition, you know? I need someone to teach me how to switch off and relax, feels dopaminergic and opulent and addicted and privileged.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I need someone to teach me how to work harder, feels noble and upward aiming and like you're supporting the downtrodden. Like every underdog movie in history. has a training montage of some guy down on his luck that gets saved by the right woman or a Japanese dude that teaches him to wash cars or whatever it is. And through grit and spit and sawdust, he sorts himself out and he fixes his life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
No movie explains how to log out of Slack at 6 p.m. or spend a day at the beach without feeling guilty. And so, yeah, I think... In that sense, type A people may objectively have better lives, but subjectively, they're ravaged by the sense that they've never done enough. They wake up every single morning feeling as if they're already trying to repay some productivity debt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And only if they dance through the day completely perfectly, nail every single task, can they go to bed not feeling like a waste man. That's where they're at. Congratulations. You might be very successful. You also might be very miserable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I think when you look at people that are super outlier performers, your first emotion should not be envy. It should be pity. You should think, what's it like inside of that person to drive them to do what they did to themselves, to put them in that position? What's their background like? What happened in their childhood? What do they think about their own sense of self-worth?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Or how much Adderall are they on? The old performance enhancer. The testosterone for the businessman.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, you haven't done cocaine for the same reason, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
What was it that drove you? Why this drive for so long?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So you had this gateway drug through martial arts that was a proof to you that you could self-author?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I've heard you say that before about the loser thing. Where did that fear come from? Did you feel powerless as a kid at some point?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It doesn't matter about what you tweeted. It doesn't matter about your beliefs stepping onto the mat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So on that, I think that's a very common pattern, especially for young people who feel a little bit helpless in their life. I find a vector that makes me feel worthy. The most common story of high performers, I think, is that I needed to do something to get the world to recognize me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
One of the problems, I think, as people grow up is that they internalize this belief that the only way that the world will value me is if I can continue to perform at this high level. And I think that there comes... Some people can... imbibe a type of insecurity in that, that if I stop doing these things, if I stop being as impressive to the world, it's going to deny me its love.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That it is, I'm going to be unwanted, unworthy. And I think that this, talking about the high performer thing, talking about the pity of the CEO, go, how much are you running towards something that you want? And how much are you running away from something that you fear? That this not enoughness
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Your capacity to fix the very problem that's been taken away from you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You think that was a physical thing or a mental thing?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I saw it on a stair machine with David Goggins. And Goggins is screaming at him to keep going. He gets off, throws up in a bag, and gets back on the stair machine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
What does your friend think about it? Which friend? The one that said it's bullshit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Have you ever felt any TBI stuff from your heritage of doing striking?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, there's a special category of lesson that I've been thinking about. It's one that you can only learn by sort of having gone through it. And I think that bombing on stage or having a poor performance, I think that that's one of them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Cocaine is a performance enhancer. Yeah, it's strange. No matter sort of how arduous or costly or effortful it's going to be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
for us to find out these things for ourselves for some reason we insist on disregarding the mountains of warnings that we have from our elders and historical catastrophes and public scandals and film and tv and we think some version of yeah that might be true for them but not for me but it's the like watch me do this mom mentality
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And yeah, we decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way over and over again. And unfortunately, it always seems to be the big things. It's never about how to charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party or put up a level set of shelves. It's never that. It's always... We spend most of our lives learning firsthand the warnings that previous generations gave us over and over again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And then you will know about that. But that's one of them. Money won't make you happy. Fame isn't going to fix your self-worth. You don't love that pretty girl. She's just hot and difficult to get. You will regret working too much.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
worrying isn't aiding your performance yeah um nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it like over and over again you should see your parents more all your worries are a waste of time like these yeah it's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life like these are so trite they're such basic insights because everybody has heard them before
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But if they're so basic, why does everyone who ends up arriving at them talk about them as if they've just had religious revelation? You know what I mean? Like they have this fervor to them. about why it is so important for you to listen, that we couldn't have seen this coming. How could we have seen this coming? It's like it is in every single fable and story from the rest of time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And I think that one of the reasons this happens is if you don't have a thing, looking at somebody who has that thing, they have the solution to your problem. If you don't have money, you believe that by having money, all of your problems would be fixed. If you don't have fame, you believe that fame is the thing that's going to get you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
If you don't have the goal, you think that getting the goal is going to do those things. And it is only by getting there and looking back and going, The issue that I thought would be fixed by getting the thing wasn't fixed. Fuck, I need to look deeper.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So not only do we refuse to sort of learn the lessons, if you talk about this on the internet, if you have a rich person on who says, you know what, man, I earned a couple of billion dollars and I'm still pretty miserable. You bring some actress on, she says, you know, all of the fame and stuff like that, it really didn't fix my self-worth. The internet hates that. It's a very contentious...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Point to bring up. And I think that we believe our particular mental makeup would allow us to dance through this minefield. Yeah. Right? No, no, no. My unique inner landscape would be solved by this problem. Especially men. Watch me dance through this minefield, avoid all of the tripwires, do a couple of pirouettes, and I won't kick any of them. Yeah. And then you kick one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And you realize, oh, fuck, this worry of mine was so much more deeply rooted than the thing that's from outside. But I genuinely believe that you kind of need to learn it yourself. I don't think you can. I've got Naval on the show on Sunday. He's great. He's fucking phenomenal. I think that, by the way, the one that you did with him in 2019 is the best podcast episode of all time. Really?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That two hours. Yeah, it's just one I've gone back. Maybe it's just personally meaningful to me, but I must have listened to that, I think, more than any other CF.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's like the mothership making people put their phones in the bag, but you can reopen the bag. If you could reopen the bag. Yeah, but you can reopen the bag. It's like, I'm allowed to do this and just take it. It's like, everything's... It's a real interesting one, but he's got this quote where he says, it's far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's much easier for you to drive a beat-up Chevy truck if your last car was a Ferrari. Sure. Because you've closed that loop. That what if. I wonder if it is the money. I wonder if it is the fame.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I was thinking about why I'm attracted to some of my friends. Why I like to spend time with some over others. I sort of
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
realized this this interesting dynamic that I hadn't really heard get talked about much which is we think that we want to be charismatic like we think we want to step into a room our stories are electric uh energy the aura everyone's super impressed by us I didn't actually notice that that was the sort of people that I was choosing to hang around with there's this story about Jenny Jerome who was Winston Churchill's mother and she gets to dine with uh William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli the prime minister and the um uh
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
opponent one night after the other and she says after i left the dinner with gladstone i left feeling like he was the smartest person in england and after i left the dinner with disraeli i felt like i was the smartest woman in england and i think this really helps to explain why we're why we gravitate towards certain people some people feel interesting and around some people we feel interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And that's my favorite sort of person. I think charisma, being charismatic, being energizing, it's the sort of thing lots of people are seduced by. They love the sound of it. But it's kind of like developing real charisma, like Matthew McConaughey, sit opposite this guy and he's fucking oozing charisma. But it's way easier to be interested than it is to be interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And it gets you probably 80%, 90% of the way there just by caring and asking questions. Thinking, huh, I want to know what you think about this. That's cool, Joe. Tell me more about that. And why do you think that you're built that way? And it helps. I mean, people just love to talk about themselves. And the other thing is you know everything that you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You know barely anything that the other person knows. Right. And I mean, this is why our job is largely the most selfish one that we could do. Hey, smart person, come on here and tell me about your entire life's work. Tell the least educated person in the room about what it is that you've spent your time doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Good question. You know what it feels like? It feels like watching a sports game sometimes. I think the best conversations, whether they're around a table or a podcast or whatever, it feels like watching a sports match and the two teams are kind of working together to get the ball in the goal. And you go all excited and you're like, oh, he's going to do this. Oh, the head kick.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Whoa, that's what I wanted. And yeah, if you're ever listening to something, I'm sure that this maybe happened to people listening to this episode. They go, fuck, I hope he asks him about the thing. Hey, ask him about the thing. Yeah. And, yeah, there's this sense that there's a third participant, not just Jamie, in the room. Where's Carl? I just realized there should be a fourth participant.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah. I told you about that man crush that I had last time, that unkillable soldier guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it sent me down a rabbit hole. I fell in love with stories of crazy bastards from history. So I found this other dude called Amo Koivunen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
The Finnish soldier. Yeah. Yeah. So he is out on patrol with a bunch of Finnish soldiers, small group, and they come upon a Soviet force way bigger than they are. They can't fight them, so they have to flee. As they're fleeing, they're skiing away through the snow, and the force is way bigger. Emil is at the front.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
He's trailblazing, trying to break free from this group, but he can't go fast enough. If they get caught, they're going to be captured or killed or worse. So he needs to speed up. He doesn't know how. He's carrying the entire patrol's supply of Pervitin. Now, Pervitin was a German miracle drug that was used to keep soldiers awake during the war. Math. It's otherwise known. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
as methamphetamine and he decided I mean you might think this wasn't just any normal meth right this was pharmaceutical grade wartime human horsepower right it was the most intense so you might think tolerating the dose could be a good idea there's a rumor that apparently it had melted in his pocket but whatever he did he took 30 people's worth he took 30 soldiers worth of meth the entire packet just ate the entire packet whoa
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Unsurprisingly, he manages to break away from the pursuing Soviets, and he leads his group away. So they chill out on the far side once they're finally free, and they notice that Amo's behaving a little bit oddly, and he seems to be a danger to himself and to them, so they take his ammo out of his rifle, and they take his knife off him, and they're sort of putting stuff away in the pack.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
They turn around, and he's gone. Like, fuck, where's ammo gone? He skis for 63 miles on his own. Just skis away, doesn't really know what he's doing. He's in this sort of fever dream thing. Lays down, goes to sleep, wakes up the next day, no idea where he is. Doesn't know where his group is, doesn't know where the squadron is, doesn't know where he is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Immediately sees a Soviet soldier over the far side, raises his rifle, click. Fuck, they took my ammo. Hurls the rifle at this Soviet soldier and he explodes in a cloud of white dust. Turns out that it wasn't a Soviet soldier, it was a tree branch with snow on it, and that he's actually hallucinating. So he's in a full-on fever dream now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Imagine this Soviet soldier throws the gun at him, he explodes. He's like, fuck, okay, I need to find my squadron. How am I gonna get back to them? So he decides to just try and navigate around for a couple of hours, and he sees them over the far side. He sees a fire, and he sees his group over the far side. It's way far away, so he skis for another two hours.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Turns out that it wasn't his squadron. It was more Soviet soldiers. So he just skis straight through the middle of the camp. All of these guys immediately chase after him. But there's no chance. He's the fucking LeBron James of meth, right? You're not catching this guy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So he goes straight through again, second night, finds a hut, finds a wooden cabin in the middle of the snow, decides to set a fire. But he doesn't set it in the fireplace. Sets it in the middle. of the wooden hut. And throughout the night, he sort of shuffles himself further and further away.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
For some reason, his back's getting a little bit warm and he keeps on sort of shuffling himself further and further away. He wakes up the next morning on the outside of the hut and it's completely burned down. So he's burned the only bit, the only structure that was gonna give him any safety, he's managed to burn it to the ground. And as he wakes up again,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
sort of may have noticed that this is a recurring theme, a wolverine attacks him, 65-pound wolverine, fucking fangs, yellow eyes, attacks him. So Amo uses his knife, kills this wolverine, fight to the death, kills it. But then he realizes, I don't have a knife because my soldiers took it from me. It was his compass, which was the only thing he could use to navigate himself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
He'd smashed his compass to bits. And then he looks down and it wasn't a wolverine. It was a tree log. So he smashed his compass on a tree log thinking it was a 65 pound Wolverine. He's still just deep, deep in the hole. Continues to ski around. He's trying to find someone, trying to find any way marker that he can. Now with no way to navigate, he's got no compass. He's got no weapon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I don't know. Apparently liberal. Do they have any laws? Fuck knows. I don't know. There's nobody there. Have they established laws? They were 400 miles in. Whoa. So this was part of the final experiment, which was this attempt to try and disprove flat earth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I mean, the rifle that's got no ammunition in it. And he finds a Soviet forward operating base. But you'll know this, a lot of the time when armies left these behind, they booby trapped the fuck out of them. They booby-trapped everything. So he walks onto the middle of the forward operating base, immediately gets exploded by a landmine. Foot gets blown.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So he's laid there in the snow, kind of waiting to die. And one day later, he's not dead. So he's like, well, fuck it. I might as well try and get into the forward operating base. Gets up, continues to go forward, opens the door to the forward operating base. He has no foot? It's damaged. It's severely damaged. gets toward the front of the operating base, opens the door.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
There's another booby trap there that explodes him and the door like 20 yards backward. He just lays there in the snow waiting to die. He lays there for about five or six days waiting to die. He's melting snow in a little tin can thing, like melting it so that he can drink a little bit of water. He's got this door on him. He thinks, well, someone's going to find me. It's going to be the Soviets.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
They're going to kill me or I'm just going to die. So he waits. Death doesn't come. Three Finnish soldiers come upon him of all of the different nationalities, of all of the different people. Three Finnish soldiers come upon him and he thinks, finally, through all of this time, after being confused, after getting lost, I'm going to be saved. They say, it's okay, we can take you back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
We can save you and take you back. And the front guy of the three Finns steps on a landmine, blows himself up. And the other two are like, hey man, there's kind of a priority list here and you're at the bottom and he's at the top. So we're going to take him back, but just hold on for another couple of days. We'll come back and we'll save you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
They go away and he just thinks, they're not going to find me again. They're going to forget. They're not going to be able to come back. Someone's going to kill me before they do or I'm going to die or whatever. But they do. They manage to come back. They manage to get him and they take him back to the medical bay. 14 days was how long he'd been traveling around. He'd moved 250 miles in this time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
His resting heart rate was 200 beats per minute. And he weighed 98 pounds. Wow. He'd survived this entire time on meth. water that he'd melted down into a tin cup, a couple of pine nut things that he'd melted to, and a single Siberian jade that he beat to death with his ski pole and just ate raw. And he lived until he was in his 70s, died in like 1989, and just lived a great life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I fucking love that story, dude. This meth-fueled Finnish maniac, just like skiing through everything, setting shit on fire, hallucinating, getting blown up twice. Survived it, meth's a hell of a drug. Maybe you should have done it. Maybe I should try now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So you need to be the most risk-averse. Yeah. The least risk-averse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I wonder, you know, it's kind of a debate around how much of Hitler's behavior was because of Hitler and how much was amplified, worsened by the drugs that he was on. That Theodore Morrell, that crazy kooky doctor that he had, was injecting him with bull semen. He's getting fucking cocaine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I mean, I don't know what you do to get people to go over the top to certain death. I mean, you motivate people by everybody else doing it. I suppose it's sort of crowd behavior in that way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You don't want to have fun? What, are you the fucking fun police?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I mean, cocaine will make you go to the bathroom as well. To accomplish our goals. Yeah. You know, you said... You said before about sort of that self-authoring thing, like taking control of my own life. My friend George has got this great question where he says, you're stuck in a third world prison and you get one phone call to ring somebody to get you out. Who do you ring?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And that idea I love because it helps you to identify who the highest agency person is in your life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Who is it that can think on their feet, that doesn't need permission to go and do anything, that'll overcome obstacles, that is this sort of, yeah, permissionless reality bender? Who would you call? I don't know, man. That's a good question.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That's true. That's a problem. Can I Instagram DM them? Is that all right? Can I log in? Actually, can you give me my phone? Because I've got two-factor authentication on. This is going to be really awkward. Is that all right? I need to do that. Yeah, I mean... I would be tempted to ring Tim Kennedy. I think he would probably be quite high up on my list.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Correct. Yeah. I mean, it might be a bit gratuitous. I get the sense that he would take more pleasure in getting me out than would be necessary. You know what I mean?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, the association of other people that we don't like talked about this thing, therefore anybody else that talks about this thing is immediately attached to them. Just seems like a very lazy way to sort of smear people. It's lazy thinking.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, I think that's, we spoke about this last time. That was just as they'd been created, these football stadium-sized monstrosities.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
it says it all that El Salvador has got a reputation for being so good at prison and law enforcement that they're fucking importing people over there. And it's like, oh, we need to, you said before, if I've got a bad knee, I want to go to the guy that looks after the Lakers. It's like, you're the Lakers PT doc of the rehabilitation world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's not even rehabilitation, I suppose, just incarceration world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So then he won't... This is like that thing, you know, if she sinks, she's not a witch, and if she floats, she is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, your record, your perfect record of this many convictions. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's a shame, isn't it? You talked about the fire service earlier on, three emergency services, fire, police, and ambulance. When the fire service turns up anywhere, I don't think that there's any issues. I don't know how often firefighters find themselves up against a crowd that's unhappy. Maybe, I guess, if it was a riot of some kind, perhaps. But for the most part, it's...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
a hero that's coming to save the cat stuck in a tree, the house that's on fire, the baby that's upstairs. Like, hooray, well done for you. A medical service turns up. Somebody's really badly hurt or somebody's broken, some kid at a sports match has broken their leg. Thank you so much, please look after them, look after them. And then the police turn up and the reaction could not be more different.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And I don't know, I understand that there's a particular type of control that cops have that sort of firefighters and EMTs. Firefighters and EMTs are doing stuff exclusively sort of in service of others, whereas cops are doing something that sort of subtracts away. But it must be tough.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Like if you're a good cop, especially now, especially after the last few years, it must be hard because you want to feel proud about your job.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You notice that that's largely dropped off now. Yeah. No one's really talking about defund work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
in the areas that were the worst affected as well. It's a luxury belief. It's something that's held by the upper classes that only impacts the lower classes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Do you think you'd be able to switch off if you had a job like that? You'd be able to partition compartmentalize.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
There's a lot of ways that you can put your foot in it. There's this woman, Corey Clark, who sent a survey to every psychology professor in the US and asked them questions like, what is more important, the truth or ensuring that equity is promoted? And a lot of professors basically said, I self-censor. I would prioritize making people feel good over necessarily telling them the truth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Well, that's one of the disadvantages, I suppose, of the way the algorithms work, that edge cases that are unbelievable and shocking are the ones that catch the most fire. Right. And what it creates is it moves the fringe to the middle because most of what you see by design is the stuff that's the most outlandish.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Correct. You mentioned about Biden and Kamala. What do you think you do if you're either of them now? Trump's just running ragged, flying high, having all of this fun. What are they doing? What do you do when two people have lost a campaign in the space of six months?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That was kind of the redress, right? That was the attempt. It was like, the symbol of masculinity on the left is going to be Tim Waltz. It was Aragon from Lord of the Rings and Tim Waltz.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Like, bro, you misled us. We were misled by ourselves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Do you know why that happens? Do you know why people hoard stuff? It's an interesting way that their brains work. So looking around this table, you're able to discern between stuff that is useful and stuff that isn't useful. There it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
There are certain opinions that people should be reported for. There are certain topics that basically shouldn't be discussed. The usual suspects, stuff like behavioral genetics, so heritability, evolutionary psychology, as in anything that kind of relates to sex differences. And yeah, it really is... retarding the progress of everything. And you think, well, trickling down from this,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's strange that everything is concretized on the internet for the rest of time. I mean, people can go back and try and retrograde, remove stuff that happened, but there's always Internet Archive is fantastic for this. Yeah, for the most part, you can find it if you're inspired.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So how is it that so many U-turns, regardless of what it is, regardless of which side it is, this sort of permanent state of amnesia that everybody's in, there was this... WhatsApp message. You ever have one of those WhatsApp messages where it says forwarded many times at the top? And you're like, oh, this is going to be good. It's just an advert. It's just a banner. Forwarded many times.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And it was a single squaddie, a guy in fatigues, walking down the street in London. And a screenshot, I think, of a text saying that someone had said that the army was going to be deployed on the streets of London to keep everybody in the house through martial law, that this was how intense that the lockdowns were going to get. And it was going to happen on this particular day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It goes crazy on Facebook, crazy on WhatsApp. Never happened. And, like, all of the people that shared that, that were adamant, that created all of these stories and theories around it, like, no one ever actually went to go and call those people out about what it was that they'd pushed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
All of the people that were adamant, global health passports, the vaccine passport, that's going to come, that's going to happen, all that. I mean, the unfalsifiable version of it is because we knew that it was going to happen, they weren't able to do it. So actually, we were the righteous resistance in doing the thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And the same with whether it's lab leak theory, whether it's Joe Biden's mental decline, no matter what it is, you can put this position out there. It's fucking fortified on the internet for the rest of time. And after long enough, you're like, I don't remember that. You're like fucking the most gaslighting partner that you've ever been with. I'm not... Are you sure? I don't think I did say that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I do this fucking fugazi switcheroo, some lexical Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and I don't have to atone for my previous sins anymore.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
what sort of educated society you're going to have in future. It's not going to be particularly good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
How much do you think New York Times with articles like that, Bezos coming out recently and saying that there's this sort of balance thing that he's got going on at The Washington Post, Zuckerberg's recent sort of pivot with regards to fact checking on meta platforms. How many of those do you think would have happened if there hadn't been a Trump victory in November?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
How much of this is blowing with the wind, do you think?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And it uploads it so you can just see who did what?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
The video isn't published by the rioters. The video is published by the victims. Exactly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I don't know what, I mean, I guess it's a way of trying to protest against some person that you don't like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Mike Benz is like the most prophetic person of all time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It must be an odd situation to be in because most of the time the level of scrutiny that you're under and the level of security threat that's likely is kind of – it goes in line with status, fame, and that also goes in line with maybe some resources too. So as people get more likely to be a target –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
they're also more able to perhaps be able to protect themselves with living in a nicer house, gated community. Like Elon. Yeah, having security and stuff like that. But this is one of those weird situations where your knowledge, your particular insight,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
makes you so uniquely vulnerable or such a heavy target, but it hasn't come with the concordant increase in status and resources that would allow you to be able to actually protect yourself. And this is, I guess, the crisis of a whistleblower. Yes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I was just about to bring up Ross Ulbricht. Yes. You guys must have tried to reach out to him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Isn't it funny that we always think about conspiracy theories, all of this stuff, as always being in the past, and that when something is unfolding right now, I wonder how much stuff is being ignored by the media but will be studied by historians.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
That's one of my friend's favorite questions to ask. What is being ignored by the media but will be studied by historians? I certainly think that smartphone use will be one of those. There was that five deathbed regrets of the dying. I wish I'd kept in touch with my friends. I wish I hadn't worked so much. I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I wish I'd lived the life I wanted and not the life that other people had for me, blah, blah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I would bet everything that I'm worth that within the next couple of decades, I wish I'd spent less time on my phone would be one of those.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
We were talking about this before we got started, that you have the same number of hours that somebody did 100 years ago. But the average amount of time that Americans spend on screens is eight hours at the moment. Is it eight? Eight. Eight. On screens, all screens. The average time they spend to sleep is 6.5.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So people are sleeping for one and a half hours less than they spend their time on their phone. And what are you getting out of it? Nothing tangible. It's so hard. It's so hard. It's so addicting. It's designed to be addicting. I mean, you've had Tristan Harris on here. The way the variable schedule reward that tempts you, that keeps you there. You don't know what's going to happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
This is so interesting. I had a... The guy who wrote Stuart Russell, he wrote the original AI textbook. It's translated into 70 languages around the world. And he taught me this really interesting thing about how the algorithms work. So we know the job of the algorithm is to predict what you want to click on, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So what it wants to do is get better at working out what Joe likes on his YouTube feed or on his Instagram feed or whatever. But there's actually two ways that it can become more accurate at being able to predict what you're going to click on. The first one is to be better at providing you with things that you'll select.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
The second one is nudging your preferences so that you are more easy to predict. Because if you just give something the optimizing function of cause Joe to click on a thing and stick about, click through and watch time, if you get it to do that, it'll just find any route. It's not bounded by... And you must make sure that it's his existing preferences. You can't change his preferences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But this is one of the reasons, I think, why polarization has increased. Not just that... Edge cases get used. It pushes people further apart. They get put off into their silos, echo chambers, recursive stuff, blah, blah, blah. I think a big part of it is just the algorithms find it easier to be able to predict you, which gives them an incentive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Now, it's not like a conscious incentive, but it gives you this incentive to be pushed out to the sides. And there's this worry about... I learned about this idea called knowingness. So polarization, everyone thinks it's a big deal, and I think it is. It's a big problem. But knowingness is like a... an uncurious intellectual insulation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So four flat earthers, four globe-ies, globe-earthers, get flown to Antarctica. It's $35,000 per person. Oh, my God. This guy called Will Duffy put the project together, flew everybody down there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So people believe that they know the answer to the question before the question has even been asked. I know what the outcome is. I know what the answer is before you've even asked me the question. And what's interesting about this epidemic of knowingness we have at the moment is if the problem is poor information, you can fix it typically with better information.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I will give you a better quality of information, but if the problem is knowingness, you are insulated from ever updating your beliefs because no amount of existing new information is going to actually help you. There's this really cool quote that said, most people think that they are thinking when all they are doing is rearranging their prejudices.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And I think it explains why the culture war is so boring. Culture war is largely super boring because both sides act as if the facts are already settled whilst not agreeing on the facts. You know what I mean? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
So how is it that we've got to the stage where people's prejudices just get moved around until they can come up with the outcome that they already wanted before you even ask the question about the thing that you're talking about?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
that's the situation we end up with and I think it explains why I think it explains why the culture wars feel so samey and nothing really ever seems to move like it's not moved forward it goes at such a snail's pace the news is operating at light speed and the way that we move forward with our conceptual understanding of the world is moving forward at a snail's pace how are these two things happening together
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You don't need to be the one doing the first pass scouring.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Did you see that? It was a guy who removed people's phones from their hands. The photographer who went around, I think it was maybe New York City, and he took photos of people and then CGI'd the phones out. You know, you're talking about, imagine if there was this thing and it made you stare at your hand. He actually did it. So it shows just how absurd it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You know, you've got an entire train carriage on the subway on the underground. And everyone's staring at their hands. And it's just people staring down at their hands like this. And it needs that to sort of throw the absurdity into it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But then on the flip side, if you don't live with your parents, you're in a different city, you work a job that you're not that enamored by, maybe your health's good, maybe it's not so good, you're a little bit worried about stuff, you're kind of bored a lot of the time, you need to be sedated.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Isn't it the number one job that primary school kids want is to be a YouTuber or an influencer?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
Yeah, unboxing in some ways I actually think is quite satisfying. I quite like watching the people that have got, here's the new MacBook M4 thing and it's shot all nice. MKBHD. Yeah, he does a great job. Watching him do his stuff is really great.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's not just, here's me playing with a new MacBook.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
I think when it comes to desiring a life, looking at, okay, what is it that I want? You need to be very, very careful about what the process is in order to get the outcome that you want. Because if you want the outcome, but you're not prepared to live the life needed to get it, you're just asking for disappointment. Yeah, well said. My friend talks about call of duty versus war.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And he talks, you know, you think about this is what going on holiday to a place is. And this is what having to live there is like. You can go to somewhere and go, it was lovely for a week. We were in the Congo. Yeah, it was so nice. But you go, what's it like if you can't leave? It's literally the difference between going camping or being homeless, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
One is an imposition and the other one is a choice. I think that more young kids need to realize what the reality of being an influencer is like. It's not just going to the Seychelles and uploading a selfie or getting, I don't know what they do, like Play-Doh, fucking jelly, new video games. That's not what it's like. Look at the Twitch streamers. Look at most of the Twitch streamers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
They have got, they are like the fucking grunts of the content creation. They are factories of content. Eight hours a day, five days a week. Just fucking stream of consciousness. Someone puts something in the chat and you go, oh, well, let's watch this thing. Let's watch that thing. It's like, it is, it's not...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
If you do not want the life that you need to get in order to get the outcome that you're looking for, you need to be very, very careful about, because the reality is war. It's not call of duty. It's the same thing with being in a band. It's like, I love the idea of traveling the world and playing to these big crowds and doing all the rest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
It's like, okay, you're going to have to live in a van with four other sweaty dudes for like half a decade first. If you're lucky. And that's if you've managed to break through. You're going to have to spend so long, a decade learning to play guitar. You're going to have to write songs that never see the day of light. You're going to have to do all of this stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
You know that question that people ask about – Find out how much you got. I don't want to get sued by a dead man. He doesn't know what's going on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And you have no idea if it's going to work. I think about the gap from where people are in a place that they don't want to be until they get to a place that they do. And I think of it like a lonely chapter. So everybody that has got from a place where they don't want to be to one where they are, there's a point where they're so different that they can't resonate with their old set of friends.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But they're not yet sufficiently developed that they've created their new set of friends. And there's this temptation to go back to the old patterns, the old ways of thinking. And I did this live show in London last year, my first big headline show at the event in Apollo in London. It was pretty cool.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And this idea, I think, was one that really resonated with a lot of people because everybody's trying to grow. And there is an incentive for you to stay in the same place because not that many people grow. Most people don't change. They make little changes. They'll cut their hair or they'll lose five pounds or they'll switch from one company to another.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
But how many people do you know that have lost 50 pounds or moved to a different country or have genuinely changed the way that they see the world? It's pretty rare. It's not that common. And we are such mimetic creatures. We're so shaped by the people around us that we can't help but be tempted. You're going to have to do something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
If you want to go from where you are to where you want to be, you're going to have to do something that makes you more different. More weird, more easy to be mocked, especially if you come from a country like the UK where I'm from. Being different is not particularly celebrated in that way. It's the sort of thing that's quite easily mocked. There's a big culture of piss-taking.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2293 - Chris Williamson
And if you start, what are you talking to people on the internet for? It's fucking weird. That's stupid. That's not going to work. Why are you going to do that? So if you don't have that level of enthusiasm, there is no support around you.
Your Mom's House with Christina P. and Tom Segura
Tom's DMT Voyage | Your Mom's House Ep. 798
There we go.
Your Mom's House with Christina P. and Tom Segura
Tom's DMT Voyage | Your Mom's House Ep. 798
Why should you never hold in a fart? Let's go. You know, a fart is a gas. You know, it's a chemical. It's a bunch of chemicals. And when you hold in a fart, there's a percentage of that fart vapour which will diffuse through the walls of the colon, through the walls of the intestine. The colon? And eventually it will go to your bloodstream.
Your Mom's House with Christina P. and Tom Segura
Tom's DMT Voyage | Your Mom's House Ep. 798
And all the blood circulates and eventually goes to the lungs where the waste products are then exhaled out. So there's a tiny percentage of your fart...
Your Mom's House with Christina P. and Tom Segura
Tom's DMT Voyage | Your Mom's House Ep. 798
which if you hold it in will go to your bloodstream go to the lungs and then be exhaled out so you will have to breathe it you're going to breathe it instead of farting it if you don't fart it you will exhale fart so you will literally breathe out fart fumes if you hold it in it's physiology it's science science baby this is what we're here for
Your Mom's House with Christina P. and Tom Segura
Tom's DMT Voyage | Your Mom's House Ep. 798
Oh, shit.
Your Mom's House with Christina P. and Tom Segura
Tom's DMT Voyage | Your Mom's House Ep. 798
Yeah, of course.
Your Mom's House with Christina P. and Tom Segura
Tom's DMT Voyage | Your Mom's House Ep. 798
$7.11.