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
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. It is a 3.25 million subscriber Q&A episode. You ask questions, I try and answer them and not do a Nazi salute. Let's see how we get on. Actually, before we get on, a lot of questions about books, book suggestions, Red Rising, which is this fiction series I've addicted everybody to and is amazing. I
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
That would be, that's the main takeaway. CP Griffin, why don't you include Spotify or other platform subscribers in your follow account milestones? We feel like we're not part of the team. You definitely are part of the team. I think the main reason that I do it is that the Spotify and Apple Podcast subscriber numbers are private. So when I can tell you it's 930-something thousand...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
followers on Spotify. I can tell you about it, but nobody else knows. So, I mean, first off, I could be lying. Secondly, by virtue of it not being public, there's less of a reason to sort of celebrate.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I've said to Spotify, because I'm a part of their creator council, I've said to them that they need to do public follower counts and they also need to do plaques like YouTube does for 100K and a million. Because getting a million followers on Spotify is way harder than getting a million. A million followers on Spotify is probably 5 million on YouTube.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
youtube i think it's probably about it's probably about five to one in terms of difficulty to accumulate them so that's what i'm saying but you are definitely part of the team and you're so much part of the team that we're uploading 900 episodes of video thing to spotify so everyone can watch Creator Kate, what is it like on the top?
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
greaves josh did you find some of the finn versus the internet stuff a bit close to the bone dude i loved it i that guy is going to be so massive for the people who haven't seen this i did it's kind of like a roast i guess it's like a friendly collaborative roast in a way uh with a british comedian called finn taylor and that's available on his channel you can go and see um
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Does it get easier when you win or problems get more complex and cost more? I guess it depends whether you're talking about personal or professional. Personally, it's more complex, but not necessarily more costly. Business-wise, it's both more complex and more costly. What it's like at the top, which I'm definitely not at, but toward the top, you need to develop a very different set of skills.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
What gets you... out of the atmosphere is really just hard work. You're just sort of gritting your teeth. You don't have enough experience to have unlocked any talent you've got. So really, no matter how talented you are, it only gives you a little bit of a leg up because you need the experience to really unlock the talent.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So without experience, your talent is sat dormant and you don't have experience to tap into experience. So all you've got is hard work. And that means you work super hard and then you get to the stage where you actually need to work way less hard. Like your job is not to work hard. Your job is to have good ideas. And that, for me, with my Puritan working class mentality, feels...
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
opulent and bourgeois and lazy uh and it doesn't give you the immediate dopamine that a lot of the time i've been used to because you know sending all of the emails and being frantic and having a busy calendar uh That's not the skillset that gets you from whatever, 95 to 96 or 96 to 97, but it is the skillset that gets you from nought to one. Yes, it's more complex.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Yes, it costs more and it's a different sort of skillset. It doesn't necessarily get easier. in every way, it gets more difficult in some. And are you going to work as hard when you're at the absolute top? Probably not. But all of the routines and habits that you built up of working hard, you need to not. Perfect example of this.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
If you're somebody that's type A, classic, insecure, overachiever, and you like to go to the gym, the hardest thing for me to tell you to do would not be to go and train hard. The hardest thing for me to tell you to do would be to sit on the couch and not train. Like that would be harder than than you having to go to the gym. Why? Because you're a driven person.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And what you've learned is that if you go and you work hard, you feel good afterward. So letting go of that. And then again, this is one of those problems that nobody's going to give you sympathy for. It's like, oh, poor person that's managed to achieve some success, whining about how they need to not work so hard and they need to focus on a different mode. They need to delegate.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
They need to learn to be a leader, not to be a boss. They need to learn to be like an idea person, not to be an operator. But it's true, at least as far as I can see, unless you want to cap yourself at just being a grunt who grinds things out over and over again. And if you do that, you're going to limit the pace that you can do this at because you can't work that hard.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
You can't run marathon pace for 24 hours. You need to take a break. And if you're going to try and do this for a very long time, you need to dial back off the gas. I've been using it all the time. Mixing it with ground beef turns any sort of ground meal into gorgeous beef stew thing. It's insane.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
It's the number one selling bone broth in the country, sold in almost every grocery store in the US, and it's got 50,000 five-star reviews. You should try it out. It makes cooking way easier. And if you're still on the fence, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If it's not for you, just get your money back.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Right now, you can get 20% off all of Kettle & Fire's bone broths, plus that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to kettleandfire.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's kettleandfire.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Cell 09, do you feel sad about being 36 and unmarried or without a life partner? Don't you want children? You would be a good father. Well, thank you for the nice tap on the back after you beat me up and thrown me out the door. Do I feel sad about being 36 and unmarried or without a life partner? Don't you want children? I can't wait to be a dad. I really do want children.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
The more that I think about it, the more that I spend time around them. A lot of my friends have had kids recently or are pregnant or whatever at the moment, and I'm fired up for it. But I focused on different things when I was young, and I focused on different things when I'm slightly less young as well. And I hope I don't look back and regret it.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I love what he... I'm a huge fan of that show, and I have been for seasons and seasons. George Mack first introduced me to him. I think he's great, and I really enjoyed it. I didn't find any of it too close to the bone. I mean, it's either true, in which case you've got nothing to... You can't push back, or it's so exaggerated that it's not true, in which case you don't need to worry about it.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I don't think that I'm going to, I'm intent on building a family that I'm really going to love, but look, you can't do everything at once. And, uh, I've hopefully done things that set up the future family that I create to be well-positioned materially, emotionally. Holy shit.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Even three years ago, if I look at the person I was, forget all of the objective metrics of everything, just the subjective way that I showed up and what I knew about myself and I've made a big difference and I don't know whether I would have been able to do that whilst learning to swim or fly with a family at the same time. Different people and different timelines.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
But I am aware and I am expediting the timeline as best I can. It's not just the sort of thing that you do on your own. So yeah, I'm moving quickly.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
guy fincham phd do you practice breathwork if so details please yes i do uh state app s-t-a-t-e uh is what i've used for half a decade now it's great i must have done i must have done thousands of sessions on that thing a bunch of different pathways it's super cheap i think it's maybe two bucks three bucks a month and um That's awesome.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
There's a couple of YouTube videos that I've done, holotropic stuff, two-part breathing, breathe to stomach, breathe to chest, breathe out, breathe to stomach, breathe to chest. Some of those have got gratitude stuff that works in with it. Some don't. But State App is the best one-stop shop. Cake. Which podcasters would you cast in a live-action adaptation of Red Rising? Fuck, that's good.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I don't know who would be the super... There's no super Chad podcasters. There's no insanely good-looking podcasters. So we're stuck. Leave that with me and I'll come back to you. That would be good. I mean, who's Mustang going to be? Fucking Whitney Cummings. I don't know. And also for everybody that hasn't read Red Rising, like what? Anyway, go download the reading list and you'll explain why.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
ChrisWillX.com slash books. Mary Broadman, to what do you owe your success? You started with no listeners and grew so much. Uh, just consistency, I think. It's the one thing that everybody who I know that's successful has got. Being consistent doesn't guarantee that you'll be successful, but not being consistent will guarantee that you won't reach success. And that's been it for me too.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I just didn't stop. And, you know, that's one of the funny things about getting criticized of, I don't know, some help up from the non-existent wealthy parents or, you know, whatever accusation that people give to really anybody that's spent a long time doing something. It's like, bro, There's 900 episodes.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So, yeah, they're great. The team's fantastic. It does feel a little bit like... I know, like you're in a school classroom with a bunch of naughty kids at the back that are just throwing insults at him to throw at you. That's pretty funny because all of the producers are in there as well, but process was great. And he's going to be massive.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
How are you lying at the feet of anything that isn't just repetitions over and over and over again? So it's just consistency. Coming out of Love Island, I gained 3,000 subscribers on Instagram. So it wasn't that. And Love Island was like... four years before I started the show. It wasn't me standing on the front door of nightclubs.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
It was just doing a thing, working hard at it, thinking about it, paying attention and not stopping. And I'm pretty sure that that's just the solution to everything else as well if you've got the raw talent. What's the crack for episode 1,000? Cheers. Yeah, we've been thinking about that. I want to do 999, 1,000, 1,001. I want to do three motherfuckers back-to-back.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I don't know what it's going to be, but we have got that in the back of our mind. It's going to be... October time, I think something like that will be episode 1000. So 900 is coming up shortly. Oh, maybe it'll be a little earlier. Yeah, it'll maybe be October, September, October time. We'll do something great. Steph Verhagen. Biggest thing you learned from Sebum?
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Man, I learned... I've learned so much from that guy. He's been really formative to me, I think. An important rebalance against Hormozy's influence on me. It's like Sebum and Alex are the good angel and the bad angel sat on either shoulder, like jacked as fuck angels. Um...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Alex is telling me, stop being such a pussy, just work harder, deny your feelings, you don't need to feel them, just keep going. This is the challenge that your future self will tell as a story. Chris is saying, embrace the way that you feel, don't flee from your feelings, tell other people, open up, don't work too hard, spend time at the beach.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I've definitely been in a Sebum era, not a Hormozy era for probably the last...
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
six to 12 months or so, this has coincided with me reflecting more about sort of what I want from life, certainly becoming more serious about wanting to have a family, wanting to settle down, wanting to set myself up for the rest of life, as in create the kind of cadence of living and working that I can do for a few decades, as opposed to having to find something new to do.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Like, this is the thing. If you work really, really hard, and you blow up, as in get the big exit or achieve the level of success, and you never need to work again, or you've got some sort of a business that allows you to really, really step back, if you're a driven person, you're just going to turn yourself inside out trying to find new challenges to do.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
and the other route if you were so that's if it goes right but if it goes wrong you're burned out and maybe you kick yourself out of the game because you've damaged your health or you've damaged your motivation or you've lost passion for whatever the industry was it used to be in so biggest lesson that i've learned from chris is emotions um to embrace them to listen to them uh and the
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I'm very confident that it'll be like, he's going to be so, so huge. So like the British charming, nicer version of Tony Hinchcliffe, maybe. But yeah, I loved it. Maxime 66. What are two important questions you would ask a woman on a first date to see if you are compatible? That's a good question. what does a happy life look like to you? I think is probably pretty important.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And bravery to be able to open up to a partner about them is, yeah, I mean, he's the king. He's the absolute king at it. Ricardo Pena R, tips for being more positive and optimistic, being less of a hater. That's a great question. And I appreciate that you asked it because I think a lot of people revel in their negativity and being positive online is very rarely rewarded.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
If you look at all of the... top comments, unless they're really funny, they're almost always like a piss take. It's either clapped her, funny, genuinely, or some sort of a piss take. So tips for being more positive and optimistic, just be around people that are positive and optimistic.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And especially if it's a U-turn in terms of values, you can try really hard and think about it, or you can just be around people like the person you want to be like. And that's a much quicker route, I think, to success. it'll expedite because you're going to have the social pressure of these people being like that.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And if you come in and they're always being positive about stuff and you just come in and you're disparaging and you take the piss and you're negative and you're backbitey, they're just not going to want to be around you. And you're going to feel so awkward. If you've got an ounce of social awareness, you're going to be so awkward. So you think, this isn't the vibe.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
This is a group that wants to big everybody up. And I keep coming in and saying these mean things. And then you're going to have whatever that French word is for staircase regret. where you leave a party and you go, damn, I really should have been kinder when he brought up that new project he was working on. But I wanted to get this quip in. I wanted to make myself seem really cool.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So I said this thing that sort of took the piss a bit, but no one really laughed. And I don't like me when I'm like that. So be around people like the person you want to be like, positive and optimistic and Godspeed. Mike Atleta. You mentioned about your autoimmune problems once or twice, promised a full episode and disappeared with it. Can you please mention how you tackled it on the Q&A?
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Some of us suffer exactly from that and don't know how to fix it. Your help is much needed. Thank you. All right, yeah. So... Being completely honest, the reason that I haven't done the big roundup to sort of explain what went on and what's going on is that it's still going on. And talking about A negative situation, when it's not resolved, doesn't make people listening feel hopeful.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
It makes them feel sad for you. And as much as sympathy is very welcome, I don't know. It feels weird to me to be... I don't know. Does it come across as if I'm a woe is me? Please look at help. I need some sympathy thing. I don't know. It just, it didn't feel right. It didn't feel right to, um, to talk about it until it is resolved, but it's been over a year now and it's still not.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So long and short of it, got COVID 18 months ago, was living in a house that had toxic mold in, didn't know. Turns out like 85% of people that I've got EBV, Epstein-Barr virus, which that got kicked off by the mold plus the COVID. Then America is very unforgiving to people
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
immigrants so uh the food system here just ruins anybody that wasn't born here um although it's bad because you've been exposed to red 40 and blue 3 and you've got adhd and autism uh it's good because your stomach's used to them but if you move here you don't have those things but your stomach has no idea what's hit it and it's sure enough two and a half years out two years in like everybody else every mexican person that i know that's moved here uh
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Ton of gut dysbiosis, candida, H. pylori, SIBO, roundworm and liver fluke from fucking Africa, maybe. I don't know. Tinnitus, memory loss, mood dysregulation, sleep. I'm falling asleep at 8 o'clock at night, 8.30 at night, every single evening. And it's like the most...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
salient part of my entire life the reason that i don't talk about it that much on the show apart from right now is it's a bit of a buzzkill this isn't fun you guys come here i don't know maybe you come here to find out about me but presumably you come here for interesting conversations and a good vibe and a good hang and i don't know i think i get worried about ruining that uh or not
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Not being a professional. Being a professional is sucking it up and doing what needs to be done in any case. And I'm proud that I managed to do that over the last year because it's not been superbly easy. And it's meant that I've had to dial back a lot of workload, spend a ton more time and effort and money and... thought cycles trying to fix it. But yeah, that's it.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Uh, and when would you want to have kids? Um, I think both of those help to ensure that you're both moving in the right direction, but what you want to basically avoid on a first date, and this may be moving too quickly, two important questions. She might run away, but it depends how serious you are, right? This is, this is what I would ask. Um,
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
In terms of how I tackled it, the same way that everybody else will have done with binders and cholestyramine and phosphatidylcholine and glutathione and red light therapy and saunas and ozone and high-dose vitamin C, IVs, and a ton of other stuff.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And I will detail the whole protocol of everything that I did, but to be honest, because I'm still balls deep in it, maybe the worst I've ever been from a health perspective, at least a felt health perspective, even though we fixed a lot of those problems, I'm hesitant to go, and this is what I did, because I also would go, this is what I did, and it's still an issue. So... I don't know, man.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I'm sorry if it's felt like I've opened the door and then abandoned everybody, but that's not because I'm off dancing in the moonlight having a great time. It's because I'm still down in the trenches trying to fix it. So that's the update on my health. I hope that's useful. I'll have more stuff soon. We've tracked a lot of it with Max, the videographer. So there will be, I guess, a... Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 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
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
But if you're serious and if this is you looking for a life partner, you want to make sure that you're both pointed in the same direction. So if a good life to her looks like regularly going on holiday and never really having to be around the house and not really building a home, but you want to be a homebody and you can't wait to make a family, that's not going to work.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
There are a hundred books, a list of my favorite hundred that I've ever read that you can get completely for free at chriswillx.com slash books. If you need new suggestions for fiction and nonfiction and real life stories, and there's descriptions about why I liked them and there's links, you can just go and buy them from Amazon or whatever. And it's awesome.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And the same is true vice versa. If you want to just be this sort of
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
dgen world traveler having tons of fun parties and and stuff until your 50s and she wants to be the four golden retrievers and five kids person that's not going to work and then i think the second big question is when what sort of a timeline are you wanting to make the next big milestone on you can't really ask when do you want to get married but you can most people have got an idea about when they want to have kids and by asking when you also get to ask the question of do you so it's kind of a
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Thank you. Thank you very much. , , , , , , ,, in P P P P P P P P P P P實 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a a And at the end of your life, no one is going to give you any applause or gratitude for saying she never made a fuss. It's just not going to happen. You can live a unturbulent life of sort of quiet, resentful subjugation.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
It's a little cheap. So way too intense, way too over the top, probably going to scare loads of women off. But you said what are the two most important, not the two most likable. So there we go. Lizzy Low 31. I'm a female and avid listener for the last six months. Curious how many women subscribe. So it's about... 30% of the audience is female on audio. On YouTube, it's less. It's about 15%.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Or you can still be just as polite, just as loving, just as caring. And you can have boundaries and you can set standards for yourself and for the people around you. And I'm scared to ask for more, even though I know I deserve it.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Please, please just tomorrow, try and ask for something, just a little thing, whatever it is, just a little thing, ask for whatever more it is that you think that you need. And, uh, The bottom line is, it sounds like you're doing this with somebody else as well. Somebody else, something else, an organization, a person, a partner, a dog, I don't know.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
If that other entity isn't prepared to help you, even if they know that you deserve it too... why would you, if this person isn't prepared to help you, why would you sacrifice yourself just to keep them happy? It's like, I deserve this. I would like this. It would make my life better and it would make me happy. No, you can't have it. Okay, no worries.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
In that case, I'll hurt myself by putting your needs ahead of mine. Please enjoy the rest of your life. No way, no way. Assertiveness, politeness, firmness, boundaries, very, very important. I hope it helps. It's Solimanoa. What proportion of your success do you believe came from luck, market, charm, etc.? At least a good bit of it.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
But YouTube skews super male in any case. Interestingly, when you look at the live shows that we did in Australia and in the UK and the ones that we did last year in America... It's nearly 50-50. It's 55-45.
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I think if I was starting now, it would be significantly more difficult. Have you ever seen those Indiana Jones movies and he's running for the door and the big...
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
wall is coming down and he slides underneath and then he gets his he reaches back and he grabs his hat and he pulls it in that's kind of like from a timing perspective what I feel like with the world of podcasting that if you look at really the only other shows that came after me that have been comparable in terms of size have been Stephen Bartlett
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#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Huberman and Sean Ryan, I think, apart from people that already had big platforms and then sort of pivoted them or converted them in one way or another. So timing, yeah, definitely luck. Charm, I'm not convinced that my charm has helped all that much. Looks...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
unfortunately don't help really at all when it comes to the audio side of podcasts you have to remember we do more plays on audio than we do on youtube so i don't know the pretty privilege doesn't it's like the face for radio thing it's not a massive draw people are just listening to you we've only just put video on spotify what three weeks ago so i'm But all of that being said, it's a balance.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
It's the same as everything. If you do not take shots at goal, if you're not consistent, you can guarantee that any residual luck of market and charm and whatever isn't going to be captured. So yeah, many legs up, some that I'll have seen, some that I wouldn't have done probably. But also I feel firm in my... foundation of saying, well, I think I deserve this too.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
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Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
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Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Now, can't work out how many of those are girlfriends that have been dragged along by the boyfriends, but you also can't work out how many are girlfriends that have dragged their boyfriends along. And I'm going to fight the corner for that. So it's a lot. And for all of the...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Right now, you can get 20% off and free worldwide shipping on the Chairman Pro package by going to the link in the description below or heading to manscaped.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom20 at checkout. That's manscaped.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom20 at checkout. Alan Toon, seeing all the Lily Phillips and Bonnie blue news is so depressing.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
What is your reaction to them? All right. Yeah. So, I mean, I, I haven't done a, Oh my God. Lily Phillips is sleeping with a thousand men in one day, bro. These sluts are cooked. Um, I haven't done this. Uh, makes me pretty sad, to be honest. The main emotion that I feel is sadness.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
It does feel a little bit like anyone who is highly critical of Andrew Tate from a cultural perspective and an influence perspective but not highly critical of Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue from a cultural influence perspective. I would be interested to know how they square that circle because it is the criticism for the lodged at Tate that he is all of the worst parts of toxic modern masculinity.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And you really should, I think, keep the same, uh, philosophy, the same level of scrutiny, and the same standards when you're looking at Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue. Like, is this not the most sort of extreme version of modern, liberated, toxic femininity?
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Using body for sex, basically being treated like you're allowing men to masturbate with your bodies, and then sort of proclaiming it as liberation whilst crying.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I know it makes me sad dude and I can't say anything that hasn't already been said um but it is depressing and it makes me feel it does it make the primary emotion that I take away from it is sad and uh it's a bit dour and um I mean if the guy who's whining about his fucking autoimmune problems thinks that what you do is sad you that that's the that's the worst review that you can get
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Daniel Morgan 1, having done the live show in London, has your view on the UK being counterproductive to ambition or success from tall poppy syndrome changed? You seem to have had a very positive reaction when you were there. I did have a very positive reaction when I was there. And, um...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Finn versus the internet thing of your podcast is primarily for men it's definitely not and it never has been it's male focused and I talk about the issues that interest me to do with men because I am one and also because I get accused of mansplaining if I try and do it for women but Yeah, it's a mixed bag, and I like that.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Unfortunately, no, it hasn't because there is always going to be these sort of kernels of inspiration and fire, even in sort of really cold tundras. And I was amazed. The show was so fantastic. The audience was so amazing. Everyone was so attentive, so respectful. The vibe was exact. I would have gone for a coffee with anybody in that entire auditorium, three and a half thousand people.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And then everyone at the meet and greet had cool things to say. I've got this book, I brought you a book, and I've traveled with this book around the world. It was fucking amazing. But those are the outliers that prove the rule in the UK.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
The reason that they're in the room, apart from the fact that they're fans of the show, one of the reasons that they're in the room is that there's nowhere else for them to go.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
in the uk and it's the same all over this isn't just a uk thing right it was the same in australia went out to australia everybody lonely chapter uh leaving friends behind people wanting me to do the normal trodden path even though i know i don't want it we dubai we had the same in dubai a place that people move to because they're already upward aiming and people still had that there in canada we had that in the us we've had that but the uk has it it's like ground zero for this and um
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Very positive reaction, but it's a minority of people. So when we do Glastonbury-sized stages and there's half a million people, then I'll say that it's become a mass movement. But for now, it's just an underground cult of people wanting to try and make their lives better because there's not really anywhere else for them to go.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
BigBob677, what is the proper balance between having social life and not drinking and smoking constantly? I think you can tell what I'm gonna say here. You don't necessarily have to drink and smoke constantly to have a social life.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
If you don't want to drink and you don't want to smoke, but you do want to be social, and the only friends that you have to be social with want to be around you if you're drinking and smoking constantly, you need to get better friends. You need to get different friends because they're not in the same place that you are. And this is exactly what I was just talking about.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Lonely chapter, leaving friends behind that can't grow at the same pace as you or don't want to grow in the same direction as you. You need to have people around you like the person you want to be like. It sounds like you don't want to drink and smoke constantly. It sounds like the social life you have revolves around that. You need new friends.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Or you need to get really, really selective with the ones that are there and say, hey man, I don't want to drink or rip a dart for the next three months. Are you in? Can we do this together? Will you do this with me? And You will always sort of regress back to the mean. With this and the mean is going to be the person that's the most degen, the person that's taking the easiest path.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
If you're on a diet and you live in a house with two other guys and both of them get takeaway every Saturday and Sunday, it's going to be really rough. But if you are trying to diet and you live in a house with two guys who are already dieting, it's going to be a piece of piss. So yeah, you need to change your circle. Rossi Gianni. Congrats, Chris. Well-deserved.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And thank you for your fantastic content. Thank you. Question. How do you find your thing in life work-wise? Sometimes I envy the people who have known since they were a child to become a doctor or a pilot, since I seem to struggle to get a grip on anything. My problem is that I get super into something and feel like it lasts for a few days or a week and then come up with a new thing again.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I certainly think that a lot of the episodes about men, men's mental health, emotions, opening up, all of that sort of stuff, in many ways is as useful to women as it would be to men because you get to actually find out something you have no insight into as opposed to something that's just aimed at you. So, yeah, there you go.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
My ultimate goal would be to just enjoy my time not to reach for fancy things. At the moment, I have a decent job, but everything feels too normal and sort of boring. Yeah, I feel this sense of envy toward people that kind of had that path.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Because when you know that you've got drive, but you're permanently being distracted and you're grasping and you're moving between lots of different things, it feels like It feels like all four tires of the car are going as fast as possible, but in opposite directions so you don't actually move.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
You know that you've got fuel inside of you and the capacity to go and do something, but because it's not being pointed in the right direction, you end up going kind of nowhere, and that's really frustrating. So first off, accept the fact that that's frustrating and give yourself a little bit of a pat on the back. Even if it's a champagne problem, luxury issue... It's difficult.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
It's difficult to deal with. And you're not the only one. This isn't a personal curse that's just being bestowed on you. This is, as far as I can see, an endemic part of being an individual who is maybe competent at a bunch of different things and also interested in lots of different things. And that is something to be proud of. That's something that you can use.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Now, the issue with you getting super into something and feeling like that lasts for a few days or a week... That is one of probably two things. First one is a planning problem that there is some hurdle that you come up against that was unforeseen.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
You really wanted to get into Thai boxing or you really wanted to get into playing pickleball or you really wanted to get into salsa dancing or you really wanted to start a business or you really wanted to start vlogging or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
but you didn't foresee some issue with one of those things structurally, operationally, in terms of the way that it's implemented into your schedule or what it's going to take out of you or the sacrifices you're going to have to make. So maybe you can get around that from a planning perspective. Sit down. Here's my inspiration. I'm excited, but hold on.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
What are the prices I'm going to have to pay? How am I going to make sure that I can keep at this? Then the second part would be just not being distracted and actually committing and using some discipline. So if you decide this is the thing I'm going to do, set a time. I would suggest 30 days, and then I would suggest three months. Those would be the two blocks.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Something that's a bigger commitment, like... something that has longer term sort of validity, creating a sub stack. Let's say that you want to write. Maybe I should be a writer. I've always kind of liked writing. I'm going to start a sub stack. You need to do that once a week for three months.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
But if it's, I'm going to try out Barry's Bootcamp or this new workout class or something, you can probably get away with doing that once a week for four weeks and then go, Barry's wasn't it, but maybe Orange Theory or maybe Solid Core or maybe whatever, CrossFit, BJJ. You can move through those things more quickly, but set yourself a time and don't quit before that. Plan,
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Use the enthusiasm to build the plan. Doesn't need to be super complex. Just what would make this succeed? What would make this fail? Why do I want to do it? Three questions. Next thing, commit to a time. Minimum of one month up to a maximum of probably six months. I would suggest three months. Reassess at the end of that and don't change and don't stop. Henry 6595, do you travel for work often?
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
freed chris you said that you got a comprehensive dna sequencing in one of the episodes with dr mike which company did you do it with also where are your glasses from that you've worn in some vlogs red tint gradiating uh in telex dna i think it's called uh the director medical director head lady is actually going to come on the podcast because i think it's super interesting um
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Seems like you're always on the move. Yeah. That's the additional level of pain on top of all of the stuff from the last year is so much travel and it's fun and I love it and it's amazing. And I've got to see Australia and Montana and Gatlinburg and Miami and Florida and all of these different places. But it is energy sapping.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And I mean, the people that like comedians, working comedians who, by the way, I don't know whether you've realized this. I only realized this recently. The way that comedians in the US do a domestic tour, they don't run a tour like a band does.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Because when you're in a band, in order to be able to set up the stage, all of the staging, the lighting, all of that, and because presumably there's quite a few of you together, They need to batch together the tour. So it tends to be between two weeks and two months long. And it's essentially back-to-back shows or one-on-one off, something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Comedians, at least in the US, will go Friday, Saturday, or maybe Thursday, Friday, Saturday, every week for 20 weeks. So there's this sort of weird...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
weekly cadence that they've got uh so for them my point being that's rough um but yeah it's been a lot of travel it's exciting and i love it and it's also energy snapping and when you're at home you want to be traveling and when you're traveling you want to be at home and Tis the inevitability of life. Travis Manning 9682, what's your training split looking like now?
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So I am following RP Strength. You can go to rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and they've got a discount. It's the way I've trained for over a year now. And I just, I do what the app says. I've got a PT that I work with three days a week. So I follow along with him and this session's a...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
roughly sort of a push per leg this she split it's kind of like that and um i love it and i've done it for over a year now and my gains have been the best they've been in probably a decade so all hail mike israel and go to rpstrength.com slash model wisdom JNAgoston436, relationship question. I love my girlfriend. She's super cute, funny, and kind. However, she's not intellectual at all.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I regret that she doesn't want to slash can't have deeper or more complex conversations sometimes. Some days, I think it's not a big deal. Other days, the thoughts reappear. I don't know if I'm overthinking things and I want to feel like my relationship has to be perfect. Not sure how to navigate this. Any advice is deeply appreciated. P.S. Thanks for doing what you do.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
My life has improved considerably since finding your content. Thank you. And dude, fair play for asking this question because first off, you've asked it publicly. And secondly, you know that it's something that's sort of playing on your mind. So you're obviously reflective. This basically comes down to what do you want to prioritize? So there are no solutions in the world of relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
There's only trade-offs. I mean, maybe there is the absolute perfect, funny, cute, kind, and intellectual girl who speaks your language, lives in your area, is available right now, is the right age, wants the same life outcomes that you do, all of those things. But You need to ask yourself, given the fact that that's not a certainty, you're not always going to necessarily trade up.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
You're probably just going to swap familiar problems for unfamiliar problems. And it's like playing blackjack, right? Are you going to stick or are you going to hit? Well, you know, you've got a 17 or whatever. Fuck, yeah, but I could get a 21 or I could get a 20. And you don't know. So I guess what it comes down to is how important is having deep and complex conversations to you.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Intellix DNA, you do a cheek swab, send it off, and they basically do your entire genetic profile and send back anything that looks interesting. It was really, really eye-opening. You get to learn so much about yourself, you know.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
One thing I would say is marriage, as far as I can tell, as a unmarried, never married person who wants to be married, marriage is one long conversation. What you're basically looking for is the best conversation partner that you can. who you could spend 20,000 hours speaking to and not get bored, because that's what your marriage is going to be.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Your marriage is going to be one huge fuck-off podcast that never gets broadcast anywhere. And you need to make sure that you can have a conversation that does not get tiresome, no matter how long it goes on for. You want somebody who you can open up to about the most difficult, darkest parts of your life.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I don't know whether if you have all of the things you can open up, you feel safe, you're reassured, your nervous system is dialed. You never feel dysregulated. She's understanding. She adores you. She worships the ground that you walk on. But you don't really feel that fired up about the conversations that we have. That's a fair trade to make to get rid of it.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And like a quarter of a million people have got it and you can too. And it's free. You can go and get it now. There'll be a button somewhere or chriswillx.com slash books. So go and upgrade your brain. with that. All right, let's get into it. Dude, it's Danny. What happens to the music intro? It always hyped me up. Good question.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
But you need to ask, what do you prioritize most? Because... It's one of those trades that you don't get to have a store credit for. You can't pull the pin and then get it back. At least you can't get it back the way that it was. So it's an irreversible decision. So think wisely, work out how important it is. But also consider that it's one long emotional regulation act
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
uh scenario with a conversation attached to it and um you need to make sure that you got both of those things wapa how have you dealt with cutting out friends from childhood do you have certain regrets around it i'm so hot i'm gonna have to take this hoodie off
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
modern wisdom much not yet available um how have you dealt with cutting out friends from childhood do you have certain regrets around it i have zero friends from before the age of 18 uh
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
zero friends no one that i'm particularly close to some of the people that i played cricket with from my old club uh i don't think i speak to a single person that i went to school or college with still um so that would be all of my formal education until the age of 18 and maybe a few people from the sport that i played As soon as I went to uni, a bunch of those people come along for the ride.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
a lot of episodes I've done have talked about the impact of behavioral genetics in that 50% of everything that you are psychologically is genetically predisposed from your parents. But as I knew that I knew that there were these things, these traits that I was inheriting from one generation to the next, but I never actually thought about the individual building blocks that that was made up of.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
But I don't know. I have no regret around it at all. I didn't particularly enjoy my time in school. I wasn't made to feel particularly welcome in school. And I have no desire to revisit that world.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
There's no reason for me to go back to it. So for me personally, but I understand that that's a slightly non-typical situation. So no. Alan Wickst... 91992. Have you ever bitten off more than you can chew work-wise? Literally my entire working life. probably from the age of 19, turned 19, six months into uni, probably from then until about six months ago.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I rode the threshold of burnout for the best part of two decades. And maybe some would say, well, have you considered that might contribute to the way that your health feels at the moment? You'd probably be right. So whatever. But it's common. You're a type A person. You want to maximize your time on this planet. You don't want to fuck about. You want to make a dent.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
You're going to bite off more than you can chew. That being said, do it in your 20s and a bit of your 30s and work out how hard you can work. And know that you've got that in the tank. And if the shit hits the fan, you can get back to doing it.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
But after a while, at least in my experience, and this has kind of been brought on by the chronic awareness of my own work mortality by having my capacity severely diminished over the last 12 months.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
um that fuel kind of starts to run out and you realize that the dopamine you get from just being busy doesn't necessarily move you toward the life that you want that what you're doing is you're healing existential loneliness and a need to feel important and a need to feel like you're making progress by being busy, but not doing things that matter.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And that's a very dangerous situation to be in because you can create an addiction to the dopamine of pressing enter on the email. And none of the emails that you've sent for the last hour actually move you any closer to the life you want. They don't actually even do anything for the business that you're working on or the project that you're trying to achieve. They've just kept you busy.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Okay? I'm going to be like David Brent in the office where he's going, 30s. I'm in my 30s. It's not soon. Okay? Got ages. Unless you're that guy asking about my wife that I don't have. Isaac Rogue, what are the plans with Newtonic? Okay, no new SKUs. I don't want to make no more products, right? James wanted the focus.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And, uh, Yeah, you get to see. You get to see literally the bricks that are used. Okay, that's me. And that's me. And that's one of the reasons that I have this disposition. And that's one of the reasons I have that disposition. It's fascinating.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
People might think that the conversations that me and James have on the Newtonic marketing are all for show or something. It's perilously close. It may be selected specifically, but it's perilously close to our real working relationship. And he wanted the Focus Blend because you can't get the cans in Australia. So he wanted to drink in Australia. I'm a huge fan of the brain capsules.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Those brain capsule tablets, the red pills, are fucking money. I think, you know, the cans are amazing and they're always going to be amazing because we worked so hard on the taste and they're enjoyable and all the rest of it. But caffeine-free, I challenge anybody to put something in their mouth that makes them feel better that is legal. Those brain capsules are phenomenal.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I just don't want any new SKUs because my point being, for I've whined and talked about that, I don't over confuse what we are as a company. We are brain health company. We are productivity, performance, and focus, right? But cognitive. We don't need anything else. We don't need a suppository. We don't need a sniffable powder.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I would be down for doing a Zinn style pouch because I think that would just be funny, but that would be a joke product. That wouldn't be a real product. And I just want to really, really dial in. We are going to do a raise. So we're going to be raising some capital because we want to go into retail in the UK and in the US. It's not cheap. Unfortunately, cans cost just an absurd amount of money.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
The margins on them are awful, which means you need tons of in order to be able to get the stock order, in order to be able to put the stock into the retailers, in order for them to be able to sell it, in order to get more cash back, in order to be able to grow. And you can do it by bootstrapping. It's going to take you forever.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So we're going to get an injection of cash, which means we're going through valuations and we're doing pitch decks and all this other stuff. And largely, I'm not involved. I get kind of wheeled out to sell a dream. But the...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
kind of can lead you I've noticed myself looking a little bit toward a kind of fatalistic approach because when you can actually see the individual elements that can contribute to you being you it makes it way easier for you to say well that's just because of my CMY 3AA fucking like allele or whatever it's not
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
coming up with the figures and all of that i mean i have input i guess i could contribute something useful if i was asked but well i don't know about like annual ebitda or an annual run rate multiplicatives and stuff it's not my it's not what i do So that's the plan with new tonic, put it into retail. Um, I want to do a variety pack by the end of the year.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So we'll probably release at least one new flavor, uh, on the cans. And then that would mean that we could do a four pack, one of each four flavors variety pack by the end of the year. And I think that'd be awesome. Um, The peach mango and the mixed berry on the focus blend, the stick packs, great, awesome flavors. We've got one more flavor that we might release with that.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And then brain capsules are just money. And I just keep on using those. So yeah, between those, keep growing, get more people on board. We've got subscriptions now. You can get discounts. We've got cool welcome gifts and stuff coming. So just do that and keep making cool marketing because I love the marketing for it.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
uh an inside story when will you have someone on to talk about non-violent communication i believe you said it's the best example of the worst branding i don't remember saying that but i agree with me non-violent communication is terribly branded uh because the what was implied is that all other communication is violent which may be true i mean who knows but uh
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I probably need to learn a little bit more about it. I got sent, I've been doing like a really deep dive into relationship dynamics recently. So Stan Tatkin's Your Brain on Love, or This Is Your Brain on Love. Fucking awesome. And then from that, I got Conscious Loving suggested to me.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And I think that Conscious Loving is half a step away from nonviolent communication, or at least nonviolent communications included in that. So I need to do quite a bit of research alongside all the reading to do for the show. That's like,
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
more more more more on top but i'll get there and uh i feel like non-violent communication is kind of like the cbt of the relationship world it's quite evidence-based at least from what i can tell evidence-based very well regarded people are impressed with it but just fucking awful brand and i haven't got around to it yet so hold on tight Oliver Norgrove.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Chris, how, if at all, has your personal money management improved over the years? I think the only thing that I've been particularly good at when it comes to money management is I don't have a big... I don't have extravagant spending habits. I'm not a particularly showy person.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I like nice things, but you know, I'm talking about nice things like a new pair of trainers or a nice car, but not an insane car or, you know,
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
a coffee where i don't have to look at the the price tag i don't tend to have particularly expensive tastes uh and i guess the other side has been even if investing like managing money as in putting in places and moving it around and etfs and all this stuff even if that hasn't been super dialed uh i've just worked sufficiently hard to accumulate money and um I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I'm not a credit card points optimizer. I'm not a cashback guy. I never have been. That sort of stuff just feels like homework to me. And I've always felt guilty about not doing it like I should. If I care about my net worth, I should be maximizing all of these different opportunities to do it. And I didn't do it when I was poor, and I still don't do it now.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So I guess I felt more guilty previously, but you can only prioritize on so much stuff one time. Honestly, the 90% of my investing strategy comes from Morgan Housel, which is...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Not necessarily great, but I think if you can get past that, which I'm doing, it's super interesting. So IntellX DNA. The glasses aren't red, they're pink, and they are moscots in blush, monochrome moscots in blush. They're not cheap. They're about 350 quid, but they're beautiful. And you can wear them by day, you can wear them by night, and they seem to go with pretty much anything.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
just dollar cost average into the S&P 500 and leave it for a few decades so he was the guy I trusted him so I've just followed that since I spoke to him four years ago or something I don't know how much I've got in the S&P now but it's gone up so more hopefully I guess Ben Boyd mindset. Has anyone farted on a Modern Wisdom podcast? Maybe Jordan Peterson from All That Steak.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I think Jordan's actually very far down the list from that because of how clean the pipes are going to be. I mean, look, regularly I can, but I have the opportunity to mute my microphone. Uh, so sometimes Dean, I will have to put a little note in like 24 minutes, 30 seconds, mute my mic if I forgot to. Uh, but I can mute it for the guests, but it doesn't mute the local recording.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So sometimes Dean's version. So he has had a laugh, uh, on particularly gassy days, but I don't think so. Mark Norman burps a lot, but apart from that, not much gas. Simone Tiluka, your channel is slowly but surely changing my life for the better. It's awesome to see you have so much fun doing what you love. I come to you to educate myself and this prompted my question.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
How do you handle it when an expert you're talking to directly contradicts another expert you've spoken to? Which do you believe and why? I find it important to have accurate knowledge of topics discussed in case it comes up in social conversation. Thank you so much, Chris. Well, I appreciate that.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And if you're working very hard so that you can have good social conversations, you sound like you should become friends with the bloke that wants to stop smoking because I think he needs that. Look, no two experts agree, even the ones that train together. They're all going to have different perspectives.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Direct contradiction becomes more difficult because if someone says you should be vegan and another says you should be carnivore, those are diametrically opposed and you can't do them both. Unfortunately, this is where you as the audience and me as essentially a member of the audience as well. I'm a member of the audience to my own show. This is the show.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I made this for myself and I bring on guests that I ask questions to that I want to know the answers of. You need to do some discerning. Well, does this fit me? Does this fit my life? Is that the sort of person that I am? Perfect example of this. Dry Creek Dwayne and David Goggins. Dwayne literally said, I see myself as the anti-David Goggins.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Goggins obviously sees himself as like Goggins is dark Goggins. So, okay, which direction do you want, Western man? Do you want cowboy wisdom with cigar in hand who will be happy that he just didn't mess something up today and that would be the total accomplishment of his 24 hours? Or do you want ancestral trauma, endurance running until your knees bleed, man? You have these two options, right?
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
But it's for you. Yes, when we're talking about science and health and sleep, should it be a little bit less open to interpretation? Mostly, but what you should be trying to draw out of it, and at least what I try and draw out of it is, okay, where is this relevant to me? What are the underlying dynamics that go on? Okay, is fasting actually better than going keto?
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Well, what you're trying to do is calorie restriction, and I don't actually like avocado that much, and I don't like it when I have that much fat because it kind of makes me feel a bit bloated or whatever. So maybe I'm going to try the intermittent fasting thing. Both of them could be true, even if the mechanisms that their proponents are suggesting are a little squirrely and maybe...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
They're getting out over their skis a bit. There needs to be some filtering. You know, the BBC dragged Bartlett about this about a month ago, having experts on that contradicted each other or said things that science disagrees with and stuff like that. Look, there's a threshold that you can reach where your size and the claims being made by people become ridiculously egregious.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So there you go. Greaves underscore... You've managed to get two of these in. You've managed to get two in. Okay. Where's the merch, mate? We're working on that very hard. It takes a long time to actually get merch done to the level that you want if you want to have really, really nice merch. So I felt icky about it for a long time because...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Has Stephen reached that? I'm not sure. But... It's so patronizing when those kinds of stories come out because it treats the audience like they're brain-dead morons. You're smart people. If you sit through the sort of episodes that go out on this channel, you're a smart person. You can think for yourself. You're discerning.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
you don't need me or the bbc to fucking spoon feed you what you should think that's the entire reason that the independent creator economy started so that you can pick and choose and if you don't like it you can go to a different channel guys you know it is like i i don't think that this is this i don't agree with this and this isn't for me you know huh i don't agree with that but it's really interesting that i've learned about it um
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
It's a tough one. It's a tough one. I would love there to be just a one-stop shop IMDB rating of the accuracy of what everybody's done, but there isn't. And the positions that scientists and health experts and everybody else has are going to contradict each other. And it is your job to try and be discerning as best you can.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
david baresi when you started out what vision did you have for yourself and the channel and how did you get through the first few months dude the first few months i was fucking flying all i wanted to do was record the show i was thinking about it 24 7 it was early 2018 i think i'd just gone through a breakup so i had that i had that like post breakup resentment energy and uh Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
In many ways, lots of merch just seems like kind of a nameless, faceless cash grab, shameless cash grab. But then I also realized that if I was a fan of a show and they had some cool designs, I would wear the living fuck out of them. So I got past my own fear of grift accusations and we are going to do it. So you will have merch within... Can't put a timeline on it.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Murph, a huge section of the podcast space is dependent on the culture wars and without couldn't exist. Not yours, but we can all think of some obvious examples. So they have a vested interest in perpetuating disputes about culture wars issues and will die without it. Discuss. True, so fucking true.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Within a few months, hopefully. AdamSteel4987, are you into hardcore music, metal music in general, or just Beartooth? Yeah, I mean, I've won Paris, I've won Sleep Token, I've won Misery Signals, A Day to Remember, lots of different t-shirts, which is what I'm guessing you've got the Beartooth thing from. Massively into Polaris at the moment, Bring Me,
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Yeah, Polaris and Beartooth are my two most played at the moment. And it feels like there's a resurgence coming along. Bill Murray, all of these different bands putting out like half throwback, very tuneful, very groovy, very sort of uplifting metal and scene-y music. I can't get away with Knocked Loose and like the really, really heavy end. But anything that's got a little bit of melody on that.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
The most important driver, I think, on YouTube at the moment is timeliness. So if Donald Trump gets shot yesterday and you do a breakdown right now, you'll do huge numbers. It kind of doesn't really matter how good or bad it is. If you've got enough launch velocity, subscribers on your channel and a good like algo placement, you'll do huge numbers.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Now, obviously, if you talk total dog shit, people are going to get pissed and all of the exposure will be negative to brand, negative to the way that people see you. But this is so true. That being said, Trump has been back in office for a few days. And as much as the mainstream media was so, oh, we can't have Hitler back in.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
This is going to be the beginning of the end for America, so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
without a doubt they are loving it their numbers will never have been higher cnn complaining about it loose women whining about him fox news promoting him like doesn't matter which side of the fence you're on trump shows the prevalence of trump and the amount that people are talking about him shows all the people care about is fucking gossip all they care about is gossip and that
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
vested interest in perpetuating disputes about culture wars issues is so true. But we have four more years. You don't need to even perpetuate it because there is just this nuclear reactor spitting out stories on what feels like an hourly basis at the moment. That being said, blowing it out of proportion, it will be in the back of a lot of podcasters' minds because they'll think, huh,
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I should talk about this. It'll get plays. And then if someone reacts to it, I can react to their reaction. So yep, they have a vested interest. And I try and avoid. Chudakakure. Chudakakure. Not bored with self-help themes. Will you focus more on culture and sciences? I did not put those two back to back. But I mean, this is just a perfect example of how...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
If you have a sufficiently big audience, even a very small audience, it's very difficult to please everybody. Not bored with self-help themes? Will you focus more on culture and sciences?
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Personally, for me, where I've been recently with the show, I really have just been loving this emotion stuff, feeling feelings, emotional connection, relating to others, building friendships, overcoming nervousness.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
uh performance but from a sort of a holistic lens i i'm really deep on that and that was you know where the show between productivity and and that that was really where the show started so you know the alanda bottons of the world sam harris when he's talking more about sort of self-help and and inner work um i'm in love with that so you know it's probably going to be a
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
There's probably going to be another season of that coming through. Culture, yeah, sure. It depends what kind of culture you mean. If I'm talking about ancient Roman culture or something, perhaps. But I really do have limited desire to sort of add to the slop that's out there about whatever Trump did yesterday.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
That's a really interesting question. So... I don't know what the mechanism is that people think porn is harming men on that romance novels wouldn't do the same to women on. Maybe something about it being more visually stimulating. Maybe it's something about you being less involved in self-generating the fantasy. But maybe there's an argument to be made that that's more damaging. Maybe it...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And I'm always going to get like dragged into it because it's interesting and engaging and it's easy. But I want a body of work that I look back on in five years time and I go, fuck, yeah, I should listen to that again. I cared about that then. I care about that now. How many people are going back for all that? He's a very impressive individual.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So we switched on audio from audio only to video on Spotify, but that means that we can't have a spoken intro with the music because there's no video to go along with that. So we got rid of the Blame Spotify for enabling video. Lots of people wanted video on Spotify and every new episode is now available in video. Plus the entire back catalog of 900 episodes is currently being uploaded.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
How many people are going back and listening to what Ben Shapiro had to say a year and a half ago? no one like it's it's you are permanently riding the crest of now just surfing on whatever the last 24 hours news story was and that's fine i mean more power eight million person youtube channel and however big daily wire is and all that stuff and you know But that's just not what I want to do.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I want an evergreen body of work. Sure, there'll be some smatterings of bullshit in there. But focus on sciences. Yeah. I'm open to that. We've got some chemists coming on. Got a couple of biologists. Got a couple of physicists. So, yeah. I'm going to leave it there, I think. 3.25 million subscribers is fucking insane. The last year has been tough. Sorry for being a bit of a buzzkill.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Hopefully that was insightful, made you feel like you resonated a little bit, gave you some reassurance if you're feeling bad, gave you some gratitude if you're feeling...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
well and have health i'm jealous of and uh we got huge episodes who've we got coming up soon alain de botton if you've made it this far i can actually just open up my skirt and tell you everyone who's coming out how about that let me open up the doc so who've we got here monday 27th of january piers morgan monday 3rd of february alain de botton monday 10th of february rory sutherland
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
Monday, 17th of February, Tom Segura. Monday, 24th of February, Rhonda Patrick. Monday, 3rd of March, Dr. Julie Smith. Monday, 10th of March, George Mack. Monday, 17th of March, Freya India. So those are the big ones. We've got Malcolm Gladwell coming on, got Louise Perry coming back on, got Young Pueblo, Vanessa Van Edwards, Tracy Vaillancourt, Sahil Bloom.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
We've got 900th episode dropping soon as well. Rick Hansen, William Von Hippel coming back on for the first time in like six years. So... Look at, see, stick about to the end. Stay through me whining about all bullshit. You get a little treat. Download the reading list, chriswellx.com slash books. See you next time.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
detaches you even further from what real life could be because this is purely a fantasy as opposed to at least you're constrained by the reality of watching two other people that were actually people at some point i guess until you get to ai but yeah that's an interesting question um i've had a bunch of conversations about this the sort of panic and the like porn harm thing from an evidence-based perspective seems to be up in the air i'm aware that there's this
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
like felt sense, this kind of ick, this naturalistic fallacy type thing that's like, it can't be good for guys to spend all of their time. And we know that some people kind of get behaviorally addicted to porn. Therefore, downstream from that, it's got to be bad for everyone. I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying that I'm yet to see any evidence that says that it is definitively.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And there is a lot of evidence on the other side of the fence too. But that's a really unpopular, if you want to campaign to be porn isn't as bad as you think it is, You are fighting an incredibly unpopular corner there. I'm an open book on that. But my point would be, if there are issues, if porn genuinely is a negative impact for most men...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I would be surprised to find out that romance books aren't having a negative impact on women because satiating sexual desire without having to leave the house, allowing fantasy to creep in, which may create an unrealistic expectation, both for your other partner and for what happens during the bedroom. So yeah, maybe we need to age verify romance books. So have they got a... They must have.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
There's no way that you could go and buy Fifty Shades of Grey and be 12 years old or something. That has to be an age limitation on books. Anyway, Texas's porn ban thing is in. So maybe they'll come for the books next. Joseph Thompson, congrats, man. Do you feel like you have more support or less now compared to when you started the pod? Yeah, that's a good question. I think...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
It's weird when you get to something that people would call success because you see you as the same person, but the world sees you as someone else. And when you're on the way up, everybody's happy to support you because you're just the young upstart making it, you know, it's spit and sawdust and cable ties and sellotape and you go, man, you go get it. And then you...
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
get to some kind of size or escape velocity and people then look at you and say that it's a position of privilege or that you are shilling for the government or that the CIA has come in and you're glowing and whatever accusation they throw at you, But you're just the same person. To you, you've just been one person throughout this whole thing.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And the way that people saw you at 10,000 subs versus 3.25 million subs has completely changed. And I think we have a tendency to want to root for the underdog. And this sense in the back of our mind that really, really large success, especially very public success, especially very public success that hasn't come by virtue of specific expertise.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
That is something that triggers a lot of people to be mean. One of the issues I think people have with the world of podcasting and YouTube in general, especially if you do what I do, I'm just a professional, stupid person in the room. I'm a good avatar for the layperson who didn't stop doing a thing and was able to communicate relatively well, and here we are.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
But the sacrifice we've had to make is you've lost me chatting shit for the first 90 seconds and the music. So I don't know, maybe it'll come back at some point in future as like a special Hall of Fame thing. But yeah, for now it's gone and we just get straight into it like we do on YouTube.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
But when you look at me, when most people look at me, I think what they see is someone whose abilities are probably kind of within reach. Like, yeah, you know, if not for the accent and the hairline and the timing, there could have gone I. You know, I'm not LeBron James starting a podcast. I'm not Taylor Swift starting a podcast.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
I'm not somebody who's got an unbelievable sort of untouchable amount of talent that
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
that is doing a thing i'm normal person doing a thing and i think that that maybe in the back of some many people's minds triggers this sense of well why that could have been me and in that sense of that could have been me and it's not and if there is envy there which definitely shouldn't be like it's not a fucking dream all the time this is an awful lot of work and uh yeah it's not exactly a breeze um
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
If you feel that, one of the ways that you can try and shorten the gap between why did that person get that thing that I want and why did I not get it is by dragging them down. So that's when the accusation of you must have had rich parents comes in. It's like one of the best ways to know when you fully reached some degree of fame or reputation is that people accuse you of having rich parents.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
And what are they saying? They're saying the only way that you did this was by unfairly getting a leg up in the beginning. And if I'd had that type of a leg up, I would have been able to get that too. So... What I'm saying is total amount of support is greater, but relative amount of hate is way higher. Million to one odds happen eight times a day in New York City.
Modern Wisdom
#896 - 3.25M Q&A - Marriage Plans, Beautiful Women & Chris Bumstead
So if you accumulate a sufficiently big pool of people watching anything that you do, you will accumulate a lot of haters. And given the fact that we remember the insults, but we forget the compliments, any increase in platform size doesn't feel like an increase in support. It largely just feels like an increase in hate. So working hard at doing that. So what I'm saying is pay me more compliments.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Sooner or later, you have to give up all hope for a better past. What's that?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
A quick aside, I've been wearing my Whoop for over five years now, since way before they were a partner on the show. It is the only wearable that I've ever stuck with because it quietly tracks everything that matters, my sleep, workouts, my recovery, my breathing, my heart rate, and even my steps. And now... The brand new Whoop 5.0 is here. Look at this. Sexy. And it's the best version yet.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
You still got all of the benefits that make Whoop indispensable, but now it is 7% smaller. It's got 14 days of battery life. It's got a heart screener for on-demand ECG readings, health span to track how your habits affect your pace of aging. And for the ladies, it's got a hormonal insights for personalized cycle and pregnancy guidance. I am...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
a massive, massive fan of Whoop, and that is why it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. Just dig a little deeper for me. I've heard you talk about this upending of learned helplessness to learned hopefulness.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Just that kind of turns the gravity of a lot of the way that people see... their efforts, um, their perspective on how successful they are. You know, the fact that I don't default to, uh, thinking positive sum to being, uh, agentic, I find it hard to overcome difficulty. Um, a lot of the time I feel like things are outside of my control.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
I sometimes get this sense that my past is marionetting me in the future. Um, Just sink a little deeper, because I really think that's I think that's just such a fucking powerful remover of guilt for people. They go, oh, I'm not I'm not broken. This isn't a personal curse. This is a inbuilt part of being a sensitive human.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
So just go a little further back that you mentioned people who are struggling because humans are so pro-social will tend to be helped up. They will be given assistance. This is sort of ancestrally, I guess. Have you thought any more about the EP approach, the adaptive reason for sort of how victimhood works, that dynamic, what it means?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Does that suggest then that modern culture isn't contributing to incentivizing victimhood? Because a lot of culture war conversations talk about how victimhood is now being pedestalized. It's allowing people to get completely contribution-free status and manipulate the system. But you're saying this is vestigial and has gone back as long as humans have had social groups. So which one's right?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Oh, I would say it does. It does. I'm trying to work out, is that a magnifying effect? Has it become a catalyst? What is it about modern culture that's caused that to happen?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Is there an additional level of incentivization or contribution from the modern world? Is it social media? Is it a desperate need to try and upend inequality? Why is it that there's a little bit of a catalyst going on?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
I have to say, I did twice weekly psychotherapy for about a year. Fascinating. It taught me more about myself than 1500 to 2000 sessions of meditation. You know, it's like inviting somebody into a house you've lived in your entire life, and then walking around and pointing out rooms that you didn't know existed. And those rooms connecting to other rooms that you didn't know existed.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Why would somebody be more included on the margins than in the middle?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Jonathan Haidt says, sympathy is investment advice. And ancestrally, what he's talking about is the fact that if you see somebody who's really down on their luck and kind of desperate and in need of support, that person will, you basically get a multiplier for every unit of effort that you give them compared to somebody who doesn't really need the
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Now, the person that doesn't really need the effort, you give them some berries, they might be thankful for some berries. But someone who's starving, if you give them some berries, they really, really owe you. Now, there's lots of reasons why we have sympathy. We're a pro-social species. We don't want to see other people suffer, et cetera, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
But, you know, deep down, there is going to be a bit that says, hey, you support this person, they're really going to owe you. This is going to be great for you long term. And I wonder whether...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Your opportunity to crowdsource that level of sympathy across the internet is a big motivating factor for people to do that because you have an unlimited size tribe of people who can think, whoa, God, I really should help this person. I don't really know why, but they really seem to be struggling and wow.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
In an internet filled with people that are being performative and not showing their true selves, look at this person. That's real vulnerability. That's authentic. That's relatable. I see me in them.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And as soon as you create this dynamic where people are incentivized to help and you stand out by having some degree of what appears to be authenticity, authenticity very easily, I think a good way to talk about authenticity would be, or to signal it, is to say a thing that typically would be costly to say otherwise. Sam Harris, I think, is authentic.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
You don't need to agree with him or disagree with him, but he pays a high price for a lot of the opinions that he holds. So you have to assume that he believes them because if he didn't believe them, why the fuck would he still hold them? Why would he talk about them? You would just say something that was easier than that.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Keep doing that. That's very important. But yeah, what do you think about that? What do you think about this sort of investment advice, authenticity, relatability dynamic? Is that contributing?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Incentivizing victimhood at large.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
I understand. Sam wasn't the example that I was using. The point being that Typically, people see a degree of vulnerability as being authentic. But the problem is if you can bypass the authenticity and just be vulnerable, that gives all of the benefits of authenticity whilst not having to do it, which is where performative vulnerability comes from.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And you're going, oh, the fuck like I wondered why the kid they threw the back of the kitchen and oh that's that leads into that leads into the living room and that's how that thing's connected to that thing and the veils really do fall from your eyes but it creates a fucking ton of open loops it's basically here is a thing that happened and
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
If you film yourself crying on camera, people think, wow, they're really sad. I didn't know if you were sad or not. Maybe you're just good at crying. Maybe you convinced yourself that you were sad. Maybe you over-egged your degree of victimhood in order to be able to show this online because you're going to be positively reinforced to do it because people are going to care.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Hmm. Okay. Our genes, our destiny, surely they're the most immutable parts of us. So how can people not identify with their genes?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Whatever you think is best, dude. Yeah, whatever you think is most salient from the genes side.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
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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#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
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Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And maybe this is why, and this is how it impacts you in the present. But if you're sort of action-oriented, if you're a bit of a ruminator, if you're a little bit sensitive, dude, the fucking temptation to become a victim is so...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
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Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Well, I mean, look, genes are everything, right? They are your height, they're your weight, they're your ability to gain muscle. I'm sure you've looked at, in some parts, the sort of incel, black pill ideology. A lot of that is, you know, genetic dead end. That's actually what they refer to themselves as. So...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
it's difficult for a lot of people to facial symmetry are you telling me i'm gonna have to people go and get leg lengthening surgery you know all of the different ways the compensatory mechanism i've gone bald early in life you know whatever you're and then you compensate you fly to turkey and get new teeth or get new hairline or whatever um genes in many ways are our destiny and it's hard not to identify with them because they are immutable in many ways
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
strong and i saw this i'm still seeing this in myself and that's why i was so excited to speak to you about your book largely so that you can uh you know detox me i need to be exercised of uh of the the stuff that i'm fighting with do you know what orientation your the psychotherapy was that you underwent yeah i could ask yeah it was like psychological yeah A little bit, yeah. It was a little.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Have a look. Dig into the research around that for me.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
No, yeah, it does. It does. Um, I mean, I remember you talk a bit about epigenetics and I can't remember who it was I was speaking to, um, might've been, uh, Roy Baumeister.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And he was saying that if a mother goes into poverty during pregnancy, so if a mother who's pregnant loses her job, which is a pretty reliable way to go into poverty, you get epigenetic changes inside of the baby that is being carried inside of it. So ancestral trauma
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Which is, I think, people talking about, I'm one 16th Native American, one 120th Native American, and I can feel the sort of pain of the ancestral land. I think that starts to get us outside of the realm of science and into the realm of woo a little bit. But...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Given the fact that if you have a daughter as a baby that's inside of you, that baby has every egg that she's ever going to carry for her entire life. So at one point, you were inside of your mother who was inside of your grandmother. Like that's the kind of position that you hold. I don't know how epigenetics works down to the level of egg cells inside of a developing baby.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
But I could see that you could quite easily create two generations of epigenetic change by having a really, really stressful event occur to the mother while she's pregnant.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
One final element here to try and curveball you. Epigenetic change, the increased activation of particular genes, expression of genes within someone. Surely, let's say that you start off child of a slightly neurotic parent. You've probably got the genes for a bit of neuroticism.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And then during childhood, you or even during adulthood, you go through a really, really protracted period of chronic stress. And this epigenetic change that was primed, you had all of the materials, you had all of the ingredients for this very neurotic soup inside of you, and they get turned on.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
How do people not identify with the fact that maybe they can even remember a time before this when they weren't this way? And now this epigenetic change has occurred. It's very, as far as I am aware... It's easy to increase the expression of genes, but it's very hard to decrease the expression of genes once they've begun to be expressed.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
But unfortunately, most people listening to this podcast are not going to be children.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Realistic. We're being realistic and hopeful.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Right. Okay. What's the research on highly sensitive people? I literally didn't even know that this was a thing. I thought it was just, I thought it would just be like a colloquial term. Oh yeah. He's very sensitive, but highly sensitive people is a, I mean, tell me what it is. Explain it.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
What do you mean when you talk about a victimhood mindset? Let's set our terms.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Right. Going into the highly sensitive people thing, because I get the sense that this sort of show is going to be very heavily trafficked by people who lie somewhere on that spectrum. They're introspective. They reflect. They do self-work. They consider whether or not this is the best use of their time. They want to be better. They're probably plagued with quite a lot of self-doubt.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Maybe they're dealing with a little bit of low self-esteem. They worry about what other people think of them. They care deeply about other people's opinions probably too much.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
All of that stuff doesn't sound very good. What are the advantages? Like how can people transform high sensitivity into a strength?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
I imagine if you get this wrong, you get perilously close to attention deficit disorder as well.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
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.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
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 for between one and two weeks of clothes.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
It's got a full perimeter expansion for even more space, and it's lighter, so no more panic attacks every time that you weigh 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 they'll last you a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee, plus there's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
So you can buy your new luggage, try it out for a month. If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Right now, you can get a 20% discount to see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modernwisdom. That's nomadic.com. slash modern wisdom. Right, what other advantages?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Great lead in there too. Actually, first off, how can you tell if you're one of these people? How can people...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
we don't want to get self fucking diagnosing but uh you know what i mean i don't i don't know go down that rabbit hole but how can people tell if they're highly sensitive and then on top of that if this is you if this sounds like you what are the challenges that people should be aware of what are the areas that if you can just get control of this and this and this your quality of life is likely you're really able to unlock the advantages of being more highly sensitive
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Do you think you might be a highly sensitive person? I think I am. Yeah. Based on what I've read, given the fact that I've known about this concept for about two days, I would identify with a lot of those things. I had a huge genetic test done at the back end of last year, and all of the alleles that came back that were interesting from a behavioral perspective would predispose me to this stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Very dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine. Sometimes struggles with serotonin. Very goal-driven. May struggle to come back to emotional baseline after a perturbment. Clears adrenaline slowly. Like, dude, it's fucking wild. Like when you look at...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Everybody has bits of that, though. So to say, you know, the entirety, you explain all of your, I think most people would go, well, that's not me. I don't explain all of my, even the most victim-y victim doesn't explain all of their things. Everyone has a degree of agency, right? I have control at least over this one bedside table.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Well, dude, look at what is it that drives people to do the things that they do to their career or to their body or to their mind or to their net worth or to their ability to communicate or these things. Like a lot of it is a need for control, safety, validation, desire for respect, a sense of something that was missing when you were a child. And yeah, certainly for me, I was...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
pretty lonely pretty bullied in school uh pretty unpopular and so really you're bullied
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
I was small in school. I was a late bloomer. I spoke differently. I don't have the accent of the place that I'm from, even though I'm the same working class scum that everybody else was. The town that I'm in didn't appreciate the fact that I spoke differently, that I used long words. My obsession with stupid vocabulary has kind of existed since I was like...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Yeah. Which also didn't help. I think from the school that I went to, maybe I think my year group would have had 200 kids in, 250. So it was a big school. And I think maybe one or two other people went to college. So sixth form. Continued into high school. Only maybe one or two other people. And of that... maybe those one or two other people also went to university.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
So it was such a low rate of people going on to higher education. Maybe the college number was wrong, but the university number was almost definitely correct. I think I know of one other person from 250 in the school I went to for five years that went on to university. So anyway, and I get to university and I start... being able to lift weights.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And I get this job that's kind of socially impactful, running nightclubs or helping to run nightclubs at that stage. And I realize, wow, if I become successful, then the world needs me in a way that it's never really needed me before. It seems like it respects me. I get validation. I get positive reinforcement. I've got friends. I've got people that seem like they've got my back.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
I have control at least over the color of socks I put on my feet or whatever it might be. Um, so dig into that for me a little bit, because I guess that most people are, uh, varying degrees of victim on different days based on how much sleep and their blood sugar and, and you know,
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
I don't even know what that feels like. And all the while, you're kind of building up this...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
version of you outside of you which is competent and successful and looking increasingly masculine as you're able to gain muscle and go to the gym and you're diligent with these things and you go to uni and you do one degree and you do two degrees and then you finish and then you build this business and you you know the classic insecure overachiever mindset is someone who tries to fill an internal void with external accolades and yeah i mean i know some of my favorite people are
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
highly sensitive super chads. Chris Bumstead. Chris Bumstead is one of these guys, like regularly cries on camera, weeps on the floor of his bathroom because of the stress and the buildup to his event, but is a six-time world champion in bodybuilding and maybe the greatest sort of bodybuilder of our era. Alex Hormozy, another guy who is...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
unbelievably introspective but also jacked out of his mind literally looks like a caveman and these are the people that I resonate with a lot because I think I see a lot of myself in them too and you know There is kind of an inverse of pretty privilege for men.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
There's like masculine dis-privilege in a way where if you present as somebody that's got it all together, well, you look healthy and you're all right looking and you seem pretty muscular and people seem like they like you or whatever. What the fuck are you whining about? Like, why do you find things hard? Why have you got a problem with this? Like, you know, do you not see...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
That person over there, look at them. They're only five foot seven. Look at how many problems they've got in their life. And he's like, yeah, I get that, dude. But he sees something bad happen and he doesn't even fucking notice it. Or he had friends throughout all of his upbringing. So you have this...
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Yeah, inverse pretty privilege, where it's the same when whenever anybody goes to the doctors in the UK, any of my friends that I used to train with in the gym, because it was a nationalized health service. If you walked in as a well person trying to get fit, the doctor looked at you and went, dude, there's five people in the waiting room.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
who are overweight, they've got angina, they've got heart palpitations, one of them is going to lose a foot due to their diabetes. I don't care about the fact that you slightly tweaked your back doing CrossFit. Getting from well to fit is not my job. Getting from sick to well is.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And you kind of end up with this same situation that if you present as somebody that's got it all together, if you start complaining about the challenges that you face or you start saying, you know, sometimes I get a bit of self-doubt or this thing's hard or I can't get over this stuff from my past or blah, blah, blah. People go, oh, like, how dare you?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And it almost feels I get a sense that there's a bit of an ick around that, too, which is look at how broken this man must be in order for him to not feel internally the way he presents externally, given that he presents externally in an elite manner and his internal state does not comport with that.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Well, I... it's definitely deep. It's definitely a high resolution way to view the world. Um, but it can cause you to move slowly because you don't make rash. I don't make very rash decisions. I sort of think through things very carefully. I tend to move very conservatively. Uh, I have sort of massive loss aversion, fucking huge loss aversion, huge fear of regret. Um, and yeah,
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
This is why the question that kind of got us onto this was, if you're someone who resonates with this highly sensitive person archetype, what are the things that you need to get under control to unlock well-being in your life as much as possible?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Oh, I feel things so very deeply. Please be careful with me, blah, blah, blah.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Scott, I can't let you continue to say the sentence HS penis.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Yeah. Highly sensitive person. Yes. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
This is a keep intake.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And what are the emotions that people typically fall victim to?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
I love it. Where do you think that I get any of the stuff that I talk about from? I'm not doing fucking original research. I'm going on to Psychology Today. I'm going on to the Psychology Podcast. I'm going to Psychology Soft O'Clock. I'm reading Rob Henderson's Substack. I'm listening to Jonathan Haidt, and then I'm shamelessly repurposing it as my own ideas. uh, with, with minimal credit.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's my highly sensitive person that's coming up. Uh, okay. So one of the things we've talked about a little bit, and I imagine that this is, this plays a big role when it
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
The role of internally generated safety, self-regulation, you know, if we're not saying if you're saying, hey, you can be tyrannized by your own internal state as well as you feel like you're being traumatized by your own external state. What's the role of safety, internally generated self-regulation, stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Yeah, what's the role of internally generated safety? I get the sense that when it comes to emotions, what people are struggling with is feeling out of control, feeling unsafe. This feels like it's beyond me, and I don't have the capacity to deal with whatever these emotions are, which to me suggests you need self-regulation.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
unfulfilled relationships how uh how can people cultivate better psychological flexibility in moments moments of deep emotional pain discomfort stuff like that
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
That's because I'm reading the ACT journal, Scott.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Because of both. It's been reinforced by you.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
I imagine there's a correlation or a relationship between self-esteem and victimhood as well.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
The issue I imagine with low self-esteem is that your sort of robustness to being able to deal with insults, both internally and externally generated, you're going to take them more personally. Like, you know, your base is less resilient in that way.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
How do you come to think about acknowledging past hurts and hardships while not identifying with it? It seems like on one end of the spectrum, you've got denial. And on the other end of the spectrum, you've got identification. Like this didn't happen to me, I'm going to completely ignore it. And this is the most important thing in my entire life and totally chooses my direction moving forward.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
How do you come to think about this tension? What's the optimal point? Well, yeah. How do you acknowledge the fact that you've been through tough stuff while not identifying with it, while not making it your entire sense of self?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Scott, I appreciate the heck out of you, man. Let's not wait five years before we bring you back on. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the stuff you're doing.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Damn right, Scott. I appreciate you, man. Until next time.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
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Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Give me some examples of times where people might be acting like victims that they might not realize it. The person who, you know, moderately agentic, upwardly mobile, I do my thing. But where does a victim mentality sneak in in ways that we might not notice?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
If you're kind of railing against something that happened in your past, hoping that you can enact some kind of control over it or alter what it was that occurred, you are fighting a losing battle. That's just not going to happen.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Where does a victim mentality come from? Like, why? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
So is this retributive justice? Is that what you think these people are doing?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
What's the difference?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
So most people's... Self-justice is a threat against one's own ego. But also their campaigns publicly are usually motivated personally. That I would get something, something would tell me that most of the people... Well, actually, I was going to say this, but then... this would kind of run against Rob Henderson's idea of luxury beliefs, right?
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Although I suppose that that's actually a hollow campaign. That's someone not really caring about defunding the police, not really caring about black people, not really caring about this.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
And I think that what really is- So they count a signal against, I am not part of the bourgeoisie. I am not oppressing you.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
I have. You put dogs in a cage, you shock them. Give us the full overview and explain how it's been debunked.
Modern Wisdom
#947 - Scott Barry Kaufman - How To Not Let Your Past Define You
Talk to me about the intersection of psychotherapy and identifying with our pasts.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
So, yeah, I think, like, really, really great.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And that reminds me of what your wife said.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Well, I mean, you know, that's a...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Speaking about challenges, why do you think...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Well, I mean, you have immediate response from the audience.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
the courage kind of hasn't come to them?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
And their intention. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah. Yeah. Novelty. Safety. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
What a great question.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
What are the most typical forms of leakage?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
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Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
, , , , ,, in the. P P P P P P G實, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a and a
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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...
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But it's actually happening at all, like in real time.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Yeah, because I was seen by them.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
But the reason being that if you are
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Dude, I can't wait to bring you back on.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
You're fucking great. Where should people go?
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?
Everyone should go and subscribe. Dude, until next time. Appreciate you.
Modern Wisdom
#920 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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 - Dr 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?
A quick aside. Do you ever wake up and look in the mirror and think, I could really use some bone broth right now? Me neither. But then I found Kettle and Fire and they make the most insane tasting, cleanest bone broth in the world. It's literally the number one selling bone broth in the US. It's got 19 grams of protein supporting muscle growth.
Modern Wisdom
#908 - Dr Shannon Curry - What Traits Should You Look For In A Partner?
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. Best of all, they offer
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?
Whether you want to put a little bit more effort 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 wake time.
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?
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
#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
#893 - Jillian Turecki - 9 Harsh Truths About How Relationships Work
And so that's it.
Modern Wisdom
#893 - Jillian Turecki - 9 Harsh Truths About How Relationships Work
In other words... That she had the choice?
Modern Wisdom
#893 - Jillian Turecki - 9 Harsh Truths About How Relationships Work
Law of familiarity.
Modern Wisdom
#893 - Jillian Turecki - 9 Harsh Truths About How Relationships Work
You cannot convince someone to love you as much as we try.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
A quick aside, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years now, and it just got even better. AG1 NextGen keeps the same simplicity, one scoop once a day, but now comes with four clinical trials backing it.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
In those trials, AG1 NextGen was clinically shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels within three months, and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in healthy adults. Basically, they've upgraded the formula with better probiotics, more bioavailable nutrients, and clinical validation. And it's still NSF certified for sport, so you know that the quality is legit.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
AG1 genuinely care about holistic health, which is why I've got my mum to take it, my dad to take it, and tons of my friends too, and why I put it inside of my body every single day. And if I found something better, I would switch, but I haven't, which is why I still use it. And if you're still unsure, they've got a 90-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for three months.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
If you don't like it, I'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get a year's free supply of vitamin D3, K2, and 5 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 modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And is that role of desire for this is where I am within the group, this is my social identity, this sort of mimesis, mimicry thing that I want to feel like I belong and that this is, is that all wrapped together at all?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Is it right to say that stories are identity manipulation in that way then? Manipulation is a strong word.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Does that mean, from a story perspective, stories overall, adverts too, but just generally stories, that they're a way that tribal preferences can be used, can be manipulated, in-group, out-group, the people-like-us meme?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Does that mean that misaligned messages and misaligned stories can threaten identity then if you get it wrong on the other way?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
I was about to say, yeah, I wonder what happens over that dinner table.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
It's vicious, isn't it? The power that stories have, because much of this, if you were to say reality, you said there's two things, we sort of live in the world and we live in stories.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Tesla's cars from, I don't know when they launched, a decade ago, something like that until now, have just linearly got better and cheaper and faster and more convenient with improved build quality, but largely are the same thing, right? So my point is that they haven't changed. Right. but the story around them has.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And that's made way more of an impact on the stock price and on their sales and on the way that people see them than the incremental improvement month on month, year on year over a decade to their full self-driving capacity. So in this way, the story is more real than reality is.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
What does the Theranos story tell us about group psychology and how that works?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
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.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
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 for between one and two weeks of clothes.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
It's got a full perimeter expansion for even more space, and it's lighter, so no more panic attacks every time that you weigh 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 they'll last you a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee. Plus, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
So you can buy your new luggage, try it out for a month. If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Right now, you can get a 20% discount, see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Do you know what that is? No, this is new to me. Cool idea. So this is from Brian Klass, who wrote Fluke, an outstanding book, nearly as good as yours. And he talks about the problem of knowingness. A lot of people in the modern world think that the biggest issue is misinformation. It's people being given poor quality information. He contends that a much bigger issue is knowingness.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Do you think that we overestimate logic because we sort of underestimate identity in this way?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Because if you don't believe, you can't be a part of the group.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Yeah, I had this conversation with Andrew Schultz a couple of months ago. Ben Shapiro's famous tweet about facts don't care about your feelings. But in reality, feelings don't care about your facts. And that's a much better way to put it. So I get this sense that facts are kind of, in some ways, they do become obsolete in a story-driven world.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Okay. So connection, identity, but also status. So how do we use story to gain status?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And knowingness is a belief that you already have. have the answer to the question before the question has been posed. It's a kind of reverse intellectual curiosity. So I know, no, no, no, no, no. The science is settled on climate change. Humans are not having any impact or whatever it is. And the interesting insight he's got here is,
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Is there a difference between high and low status influence and storytelling?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
What about virtue signaling? That's a very specific type of status and probably an involved story.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
If the issue was simply misinformation, and that is true, let's just imagine for a moment that misinformation was the biggest problem, all that you would need to do in order to counteract that would be to provide better, more compelling information. But it's not.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
How do – it sounds a lot like rivalry. How do the mechanics of rivalry play out in stories, storytelling?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
It's knowingness, which is this kind of Faraday's cage insulation where people don't... It doesn't matter about the information because they're not open to any new information, regardless of whether it's miss or real or dis or mal, whatever, pre-bunked mal information. And he makes this really great point that...
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Yeah, well, you need people to be able to capture the upside from doing a really great job whilst not detracting from the positive sum gains that you get by working in a team.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And this, you know, the tension between connection and capturing, I suppose, self-capturing of this status, like I need to show that I'm contributing to the group, but I actually want to capture as much, if not maybe even a little bit more, then I actually contributed, but I can't do too much because if I do too much, then people are going to know that I'm a freeloader.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
So, you know, I need to have a conspicuous productivity to the point where people will allow. I remember this is so funny. I haven't thought about this for forever. So during my degree at Newcastle, we had a consultancy project that we This is so fucked up. I can't believe I haven't thought about this in ages. We did a consultancy project for a company. It was a marketing consultancy project.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And we were chosen. I think it was the British Fly Fishing Association. And I remember we went down to Stoke-on-Trent. We all drove down as a group. And it was a group of five or six. I want to say six. group of six, and me and my business partner were in there. So obviously we were a super, super tight group and real competent. We were doing this professionally ourselves.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
We knew how everything was going. Went down, we did this consultation project and then we present it to the lecturer. Now, one of the ways that your grades were mediated was that everybody in the group had to give a relative rating that they thought about the contribution of everybody else in the group, which just, it was immediately going to allow us to get into coalitional bullshit.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And sure enough, there was a couple of people who hadn't contributed all that much. And I think, you know, we got the ranking correct, but we fucking twisted the knife for sure. Because we were like, and it just became a coordination problem. And given that me and my business partner were club promoters, All that we do is coordinate people into social groups.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
I was a professional social coordination manipulator. I got some absurdly high marks. I got a 1.5x multiplier on whatever the group score was for me and my business partner because of how much we'd contributed. And we convinced everybody else to give us this grade.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
um which i again i stand by the fact that we deserved it but uh yeah just you know perverse incentives so another thing on the on the rivalry point have you looked at venting much like the specific act of venting no i haven't i'm fascinated fucking awesome so this is a little bit of christina geranti a little bit of tanya reynolds a little bit of cory clark some evolutionary psychology lady super smart people and um
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Venting is a unique type of gossip. You mentioned gossip earlier on. Yeah. It's a very unique type. Venting allows the gossiper to couch their gossip under the pretext of empathetic concern for the victim. Ah, yeah. So me and you are having a conversation and I say, Will, you know, I'm just, I'm really worried about John. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
when you're thinking about the problems of the modern world, talking about misinformation, talking about you needing better facts, we need to deliver more information.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
because you know he's sleeping with all these girls and i'm just really worried that he's gonna get hurt because i you know i care about him so much and and i i'm just really can say he just keeps on sleeping around all the time and like i really think that you know he's worth more than that and he doesn't really understand that he's worth more than that okay so what what what community information have i communicated during that well i've told you that john's being a man whore
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
right uh but i've done it i i john i i'm just so worried i didn't say i didn't say anything bad about you i just care about you so much as a phrase yeah it's coming from a good place yeah yeah yeah i've i've positioned me as the sort of person that morally would well i mean if i'm pointing this out i can't be behaved engaging in the same behavior me like john i would never i would never behave in the same way that john behaves i mean this is you i mean like just like
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
about him so much so you've got all of this stuff it's a very unique form of gossip venting yeah yeah read it a novel um uh vector of attack that um it's specifically done amongst women which is why all of the people that i mentioned that did the research were female researchers um Well, I hate to bring it up, but I am thinking about Love Island.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
If you can't get past the problem of knowingness, if you can't get past the issue that people feel like they already know the answer, and this is kind of similar to the, every religion believes that it's the right one, but by definition, that can't be true. Like only one of them can be right, given that they don't all agree. He has this great line where he says,
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
It's performative empathy in that regard. It looks like a caring approach from the outside and probably feels like it from the inside. I mean, this is, you know, the best way to deceive others is to believe the deception yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And, you know, very few people that are venting are thinking, this is some 5D chess way for me to gain status or stand on the shoulders of this other person's rumor or whatever it might be. But yeah, the sort of barefacedness of revealing somebody else's shortcomings is this phenomenal Bill Burr bit where he's talking about body positivity in the WNBA.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And he says, ladies, if you could only support the WNBA the way that you support a fat chick who's ate herself out of her dress size and is no longer a threat to you. they'd be making more money than the NBA. And dude, I wrote an entire essay about it because it's such an accurate insight.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And I think that the body positivity movement in many ways is women encouraging their attractive but slightly chubby girlfriends to not diet themselves down into their mating competition pool. No, darling, you look great at any size. You don't need to lose weight. No, you're a queen. And if he can't see that, that's the problem. If he's not able to work out, he doesn't deserve you.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
You're better than him. Meanwhile, rules for thee, but not for me. It's a luxury belief, as Robert Henderson would say, that if you're a bigger girl with a bigger girlfriend, her dieting down or her hitting the gym and making herself more physically attractive, is you now no longer being able to keep up with her. And if you are a more in-shape girl, that is a huge threat to you.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
everybody acts as if the facts are already settled whilst no one can agree on what the facts actually are.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
It's one of the reasons why I believe that people who are... in shape BMI are more threatened by Ozempic than people who are plus size because the people that are plus size even though ostensibly they are the ones whose identity is being threatened they don't have anything to lose in the same way because My competition pool is my competition pool.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Maybe there's even fewer people at this size now, so perhaps I can access the people more easily. But if you're in shape and you see that someone's able to get there easily, unfairly, hey, fuck you. Stay where you are. You don't deserve this.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
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Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
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Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
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Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
What about sub stack badges? I saw that you looked at that.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Is it kind of ironic that in the modern world, a lot of the time we're told to take great heed of rationality and data and statistics and stuff like that, but you've got to disregard all of that personification and narrative and archetypes and religion and mythology. That's very unsophisticated. It doesn't really meet the criteria by which we judge what's happening in the modern world.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Did you look at how stories play out in the role of reputational crises? We're in the era of takedown and breakdown and accusation and stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Okay. So getting practical, what do most people get wrong about good stories, good storytelling?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Because if it was just, I like Luke Skywalker, he is likeable, you've made him unlikable, so what? But I identify with Luke Skywalker. I see me in him and he's now being mocked or castigated or whatever. That makes me feel mocked and castigated.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
I mean, you saw this with Chris Hemsworth as Thor, right? And you've done that across a much shorter timeline. I think the first Thor probably came out less than 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And, you know, across the span of maybe only four Thor movies, maybe like eight that he was involved in to do with the Avengers, he's gone from being slightly childish but lovingly heroic... god guy to person that does Jean-Claude Van Damme splits over flying dragons and is kind of always out of touch and the butt of every joke and totally unselfaware.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if someone was like, I see a little bit of that heroic energy, but kind of adult man-child thing in Thor. I think they would feel...
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
If you create a vacuum in terms of story, in terms of archetype, and you retcon, replace role models for any group, any group at all, and for a good while, maybe... the archetypal boss bitch woman who did want to be focused on their career, who did want to feel like they were high achieving and they had agency. Maybe that was an issue.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And maybe many women were left cut adrift and felt lonely because, well, I don't really see women with the sort of drive that I have in 1960s cinema. What's that rule? Somebody's law about whether or not a woman talks to another woman in a movie and not about a man. I mean, do you know this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's true.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Well, you also certainly end up with a situation if there is a vacuum, you know, there was a vacuum for the women... role model and that got filled got filled by a variety of better and worse examples of that and then it you know the novelty has been taken to complete parody with saturation and then if you create a vacuum around men you will have andrew tate and jordan peterson and and uh
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
bodybuild rich piano like pick your pick your alpha male guy or whatever like even beat a male guy of choice pick your whoever role model it is that you want from the left from the right libertarian authoritarian whatever um if there aren't any that are supplied that creates a gap in the market there's no coffee shop for three mile radius around this particular neighborhood guess what there's gonna be a fucking coffee shop that's
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Given that you've been involved in the writing and publishing industry for a long time, I can see that this is a point of passion for you.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
You shoved it down everybody's throats. Well, you know, for now, the podcast sphere is still male-dominated. And we'll see. Unless you're Mel Robbins or Alex Cooper, I think it's the top whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
That is a little bit of a meme. I actually did a, I recorded a live tour
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
video going on tour in the u.s and canada back end of this year and the entire crux of the joke is that i'm in prison i've been uh detained by ice in america and i'm i'm in prison because america's getting rid of all surplus white podcasters so you know the meme the meme keeps on memeing just uh on the the practical point around the stories you mentioned atomic statements before
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
yeah how do you make stories more sticky you know this it's all well and good you tell someone a story it's for you as the person that's written it or put it together um you believe that it's important but it needs to it needs to grab someone you know it needs to sort of get its teeth into their brains it needs to stay with them what what are the things that determine whether a story's sticky or not well i mean you know
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Are there fundamental questions that everyone's trying to answer with a story? Or are they so varied that there's no such thing as a unifying thread?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Interestingly, there was an article by Ethan Cross. I must bring this up fucking once a week. It's phenomenal. It's called Criticism Capture is More Dangerous Than Audience Capture. And what he talks about with audience capture being predicting what it is that the audience wants and allowing yourself to be puppeted by their desires. You feed red meat to the audience.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
You become increasingly predictable over time. It's that sort of regression to the mean of what your audience wants kind of would be a way to put it. Criticism capture is his belief that criticisms are much more warping than compliments are enthusing. So people who make content online, they start to compensate in a variety of different ways. They become firebrands.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
you know, they become very defensive or very aggressive about their position. They begin to create in a manner that pushes back or tries to sort of counter what it is that their perceived critics or their genuine critics say about them.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And I, at least in my experience, if you look at a lot of the sort of internet personalities and the ways that people have conducted themselves, and also I can see this in myself too, I get way more warped by criticism than I do by compliments. You know, I start to caveat more aggressively or I couch things or I steer clear of particular topic. All right.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
There's a temptation to do all of these, you know, in my braver, more equanimous moments. I'm like, no, fuck it. Like, just say what you mean. But pain is much more painful than pleasure is pleasurable. And yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
that that simple sort of fact about the way that we experience the world um it plays out too in the way that uh people respond to you you know if you uh were learning to do salsa dancing and you salsa danced and someone gave you a high five five five classes in a row and said oh man that was cool but then on the sixth class someone went dude you fucking suck why are you doing salsa dancing like you're gonna that one's gonna stay
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
with you and then maybe you're not going to show up anymore or maybe you're going to salsa dance more slowly or quietly or maybe you're going to come in and you're going to say I'm the best salsa dancer in this entire place you know there's loads of ways that you get warped by criticism
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
What was that smoker disgust thing, the story about changing habits around smoking?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
And then do you think binge drinking, the decline in binge drinking now, where do you think that's come from?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
yeah i think you know an increasing uh focus on health uh i ran nightclubs for forever so i saw this firsthand that the arc of probably the peak of larry british drinking especially young people drinking culture and contributed to it and and i profited from it in many ways and um yeah the advent of the smartphone the fact that this can just detect whatever it is that's going on um
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
we used to run this bar crawl called carnage and there was tasks on the back that you had to tick off with a marker pen, like pulled a pig, got off with three random swap shoes with somebody. And there's just no, this fucking, um, surveillance state run by gullible volunteers. That is the smartphone in your pocket and the subsequent like info that gets put up on the internet afterward. Uh,
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
it's like a panopticon, right? It's just that there is nothing you can do. There is no amount of embarrassment that can be forgotten about. Like you could deny it. You could say that someone misremembered it. You could say that they were lying, but if there's video evidence, you're fucked. And there's video evidence of everything now.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
hard to maintain that sense of status in the in the eyes of people and jesus if it's recorded indelibly and perhaps uploaded to youtube by somebody there's no way okay especially not if it's uh reacted to by the dominoes uh fucking ceo that would be a bad beginning well let's bring this one home mate i i love you i love your work i think that the things that you write are phenomenal uh where should people go they want to keep up to date with all of the shit that's going on
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
So you're asking people to get rid of the stuff which to them feels most real and is persuasive, which is story and archetype and mythology and personification and blah, blah. And to start to believe in the thing which is the most sterile and novel and sort of alien to us.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
So it's kind of like a coordination mechanism to get everybody onto a similar page.
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Why? Is this just that evolutionarily, if all you've got is the spoken word, humans needed to... The most obvious way to explain the world is to do it through personification, narrative, roles, characters, motivation. This is why the goddess that is the moon and the god that is the sun rises and the thunder and Thor and...
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
um is this just before you've got written word and before you can do statistical analysis the most obvious most common most sort of close to our experience of reality way to communicate information was to personify it into a sort of a narrative is that we're just the progeny of storytellers that told stories to pass down wisdom to tell stories to pass down wisdom um
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
What role does social identity and mimicry play here?
Modern Wisdom
#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
Yeah, I wonder, what was that Apple ad, the Lemmings thing?
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
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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, 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
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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
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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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#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
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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
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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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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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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Modern Wisdom
#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
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Modern Wisdom
#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
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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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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Modern Wisdom
#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
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
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. It is an end of 2024 lessons episode. I like to do these toward the end of the year, recapping some of the best lessons I've learned from the podcast and from my reading and from my newsletter and everything else. And I kind of bundle them all together.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Much more of the pushback online, at least from what I've seen, seems to come from people who aren't fat, but ones that are in shape, which got me thinking about why that might be the case. So why would someone who isn't going to be using a drug be so critical about its introduction? So I came up with a bro science theory using some evolutionary psychology underpinnings.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
People who have managed to get in shape
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
and stay in shape without pharmaceutical assistance have used some amount of effort and willpower and discipline and because there are limited easy ways to lose weight anyone who's in shape has got status associated with having achieved it it's a reliable costly signal it's a behavior that's so expensive for the sender that it can be used to communicate honest information about them
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And now the introduction of easy ways to get in shape derogates the prestige of this signal. It basically lowers the status of being in shape. It also makes it harder to work out the underlying fitness signals that someone's outer appearance usually indicates.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And I have been thinking about this an awful lot this year and kind of want to propose a radical new approach, which is assuming that things will actually go well. Basically, after a while, I don't think that the fear is aiding your performance. You're primarily running on habit and skill and experience. And maybe the fear was needed in the beginning to narrow your focus and create the obsession.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
You ask yourself the question, is this person hardworking and reliable and trustworthy and able to master their impulses by using their willpower to not overeat? Or did they just get a prescription for Ozempic? TLDR, fat people should not be worried about Ozempic denying their right to exist, but thin people may be worried about it hiding their fitness signals.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And I understand that losing weight doesn't necessarily mean that you're in shape. There's a lot more to having a good looking body than just not being fat, but it's a big fucking first step, right? To go from being... 300 pounds and living on processed food all the time to being 130 pounds and still maybe living on processed food all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Visually, the way that you're going to look is wildly different. And I think that there is more threat to people who are in shape from people who shouldn't be able to get in shape without this external assistance, being able to access that same level of body type or similar level of body type, just by taking a drug.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And I think that that is one of the reasons that people are... I mean, there's lots of reasons, right? People have got... Was it called Fen-Phen? This drug from the 90s I learned about when I spoke to Johan Hari earlier this year. Sometimes I think it's coming from a good place, which is there isn't a free lunch and there has to be some sort of side effects to these and so on and so forth. I'm...
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
cautiously optimistic about the lack of side effects, apart from the immediate ones that come through, the nausea, other bits and pieces. For the most part, it seems quite reliable as a drug and quite safe. That being said, I understand why people are cautious. I understand that
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
there's always this is something new no no don't worry this one's without the side effects and then something comes along and smashes you in the face a few years later or smashes you in the liver or the metabolism or whatever so I guess we'll wait and see on that but yeah I just thought that was an interesting piece of framing to think
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
What is it that's causing people who are in shape to have such distaste about people thinking about using a Zen pick? And I think that the fact that you can, it derogates how valuable other people's in shapeness is explains quite a lot. I had a conversation with Chris Bumstead this year while training, two and a half weeks, three weeks before he stepped on stage for his final ever Olympia.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And I was telling him this story about when me and a friend had had a polite conversation. debate, I guess, or disagreement, not quite a disagreement, but we'd had a discussion about something. And I rang them once I'd finished up and the dust had settled a couple of days later to make sure that they were okay. And he said, yeah, of course they were. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
I really appreciated the conversation. And then very quickly, I started... talking about how I wanted to stop having this compulsion, this people-pleasing nature, this sort of overbearing need to ensure that everyone else is okay ahead of myself.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And my friend sort of stepped in on the phone and said, be careful getting rid of that because the fact that you rang to check on me is exactly one of the reasons that I love you as a friend. So he warned me against pathologizing the kindest and best parts of my nature.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And I started explaining this to Chris Bumstead, the difference between choosing to do a virtuous act and being compelled to do it by your nature. And in some ways, him saying, don't pathologize the kindest parts of your nature, I didn't choose to check in on this guy, I had to.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And it asks the question, is it virtuous to do a thing, a good thing, if you didn't have any other choice other than to do the good thing? Well, the impact was good and positive, so kind of, but there's something about it being compelled and less effortful or conscious that seems to sort of derogate the virtuosity of So next question, is it more virtuous to do a good thing if it took more effort?
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
If it was harder to do something kind than it was to do something mean, does that mean that it's more virtuous? And that creates a really interesting situation. If your nature compels you to do something good, is it more virtuous to purposefully deprogram that compulsion and make you objectively a worse friend for a while instead And then to reintroduce the same act, but consciously.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
But now you've reached escape velocity and you're drifting in space. So why are you holding the controls just as tightly as you were when you're on the launch pad instead of actually enjoying the view? And it's a realization that we all need to come to that this is all going to be over pretty soon. And I need to remind myself to realize that, that this thing isn't going to last forever.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
But that seems like an unnecessarily effortful way to finally feel good about doing something kind for other people, given that you were already doing something kind for other people. And this is just a... Like...
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
an interesting debate about where actions come from and how much pride we should take and how much praise we should receive from doing things, even if it largely came out of a compulsion. That being said, what did I say on last year's end of your lessons review, which was focus on outcomes, not on inputs.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And this is turning the entire bar stool upside down and saying, you did a good thing, but the place that it came from wasn't as effortful or as good or as chosen as it could have been, which means that the good thing you did is less good. Anyway, there's this quote that says, no one deserves to be praised for kindness if he does not have the strength to be bad.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
similar to joe hudson this year saying if i can't trust your no i can't trust your yes that um setting boundaries and creating a kind of rigidity and structure to yourself is important because only within that container can you actually sort of lean forward like It's the same as a guy being vulnerable after he's shown a ton of strength is attractive.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
A guy being vulnerable because he doesn't have the ability to show strength is not. So yeah, I don't even know where I'm going with that question, but I do think it's an interesting one about... us derogating things that come to us easily and naturally and sometimes pedestalizing stuff that would be more effortful.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And yeah, as of yet, I haven't made myself purposefully a worst friend, but we'll see. All right, next one. Don't be ashamed of your effort. Midwits hate earnestness and sincere conviction because they can't stand being reminded of the thing they're capable of, but resist actually trying.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And Mark Manson's got a quote that's similar that says, people will try to put the same limitations on you that they put on themselves. Don't mistake their insecurities for your ceiling. And yeah, I think, especially on the internet, especially if you're British, fuck, you will know this very well. There is something kind of uncool about being too keen, about being too sort of excitable.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
It's not exactly in our... uh country's dna to be super excitable and being accused of being a kino um is not something that many people want but it really does derogate you the one thing that you should do which is effort and paying attention and trying um And that seems to kind of exist on the internet at the moment.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
A lot of people refusing to go out, a lot of people refusing to try things, the system's rigged against me, et cetera. And I don't know, man, like how's that working out for you? Maybe it's working out great or whatever, but if you don't feel like that message speaks to you and you are someone that wants to try and make things happen in the world, when you brush up against that kind of energy,
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
It really should be a reflex to just sort of disregard it kind of the same way as you disregard somebody that's speaking a different language. And you think, oh, well, they just speak in a different way to me. So that must be fine for them. And I'm sure that that works for them. But I kind of don't need that over here. And as far as I can see, sort of motivation and willpower and drive are so...
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
rare and fucking tenuous and on a knife edge that you should be very, very careful about how much you allow that to be insulted by stuff from the outer world. And yeah, Mark Manson's thing, people will try to put the same limitations on you that they put on themselves. Don't mistake their insecurities for your ceiling is lovely. Something else that I've seen, which has happened to a
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
This is one day you will do your final sports match or your final trip to give a presentation or a concluding project at work or whatever. And you can look back on a great run of miserable successes or actually try to embrace some enjoyment. perhaps even try to prioritize it.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
is a very real sign of success, how you can know when you've fully made it, which is people start to accuse you of having wealthy parents. The real sign of success is when someone says, I bet you had wealthy parents. I've kind of wondered where this... satirical for the people on Instagram that didn't get that that was satirical. I wasn't saying that it was an actual marker of success.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
So there'll be some greatest hits that you're familiar with and maybe a lot of stuff that you missed. Apparently, 66% of you only started listening to the show this year, which is pretty wild. Spotify rapped. Tell me that. So lots of new things. And yeah, I love doing these. I'm so fired up for today. I fucking love doing these episodes. They're so good. So yeah, let's get into it.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
I was saying that it is the sort of thing that appears to come along for the ride as a side order when you achieve something that some people would say of as being success. And I've tried to work out where this motivation comes from. I wonder whether it's that if somebody has achieved something that other people are envious of or would desire in one way or another.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And if they're not that different than they were, the reason that the other person observing them hasn't achieved the same thing is put more on them. It's more to do with their efforts, their agency, the way that they've shown up in life.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
But if it's because of an unfair headstart that that person had because they had wealthy parents, you don't need to do the same level of self-reflection to work out why you're not necessarily in the same place. Another lesson from Tim Ferriss this year. Wow, that... Stray Vista video wall shoot thing that we did in March around about Easter time was fucking fire.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And he had this great insight, which was don't aim for mediocre. 99% of people in the world are convinced that they're incapable of achieving great things. So they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for realistic goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy consuming. If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is too.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. I love that. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. I think if you're the sort of person who is regularly surprised by how well things go, that's maybe a good indication that that could be about you.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And basically, I think I'm certain that most capable people don't believe in themselves enough. and a lack of confidence killed more dreams than a lack of competence ever did. Self-doubt often seems to sort of be bundled into a package deal alongside potential. And I'm not too sure why.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
It might be that capable people are paralyzed by high expectations or that competence is correlated somehow with rumination and an introspective mind. Or maybe that the greater your capacity, the less accurately you can see your true potential. And as the end goal is simply much further away, it's harder for you to work out. I'm unsure on the cause, but I'm pretty certain on the symptom.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
More people are held back by their self-belief than are propelled by it. You can kind of think of confidence as a speed limiter that's on your system. You have capacity for more, but your self-doubt limits your ability to chase it. And it causes you to avoid taking risks, which means that you move more slowly than your
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And it encourages you to criticize your performance, even when you do well, which derogates your motivation. And it makes you compare yourself to other people's achievements, making you feel inferior by comparison. Basically, your mind is not helping you here. Placing insatiable demands on your performance doesn't drive more. It doesn't help you to get there.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
One thing that a lot of high achievers do, especially people that care a lot about their pursuit, is they confuse relentless, dour severity with seriousness and sophistication. I don't think it's more noble to treat your pursuits so sternly that the only positive element is the end result and absolutely none of the experience. TLDR, I think things will go well.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
it just makes you despondent at never feeling satisfied, even with a job well done. And George Mack, who has been on the show eight times, I think, maybe more, he said, there is a guy out there with half your talent, but 10 times your self-belief making five times the money. There is a guy out there with half your talent, but 10 times your self-belief making five times the money. And it's so true.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
People that just swing for the fences and are I don't mean to stick a middle finger up or castigate the self-doubting, competent person that sort of quietly cracks on in the corner. This is really me trying to give a bit of hope that, again, if you are regularly surprised by how well things go, something's up, right? You're not seeing your capacity in the world accurately.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
What if things were going to go better than you assumed? What if Things weren't always going to be a catastrophe. What if you didn't need to grip and concern and worry and coy and desperate and needy? What if you didn't need to do that? What if it was going to go well because you're talented and fundamentally the world ends up giving people what they deserve over a long enough time horizon? And...
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Yeah, the confidence thing, the speed limiter on the system is a big deal. And you should view it like an enemy. You should view it like something that is fighting against you to stop you from achieving the things that you want. And treat it with the requisite respect. Another one from... Jimmy Carr that I just fucking fell in love with last year. And I talked to Holmosy about the start of it.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Everyone is jealous of what you've got. No one is jealous of how you got it. And Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, no man wants to become something. Every man wants to be something already. And I know that sometimes I get a little bit of stick for quote, pawning. Instagram makes it seem like I do it more than I do, but I know maybe you listen to a lot of the episodes and you still think that I do.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
That being said, I want you to explain at least a little bit about why I'm such a massive fan of maxims and quotes and sort of pithy aphorisms and stuff. And the main reason is for me, it's kind of like a, you know, WinZip. Remember when you used to zip files or whatever to make them smaller or you get a bunch of different folders together and they're all zipped up into one.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
In order to be able to remember a concept, you need something. You need a little gateway into this, and then maybe it opens out into a broader concept. But it's kind of hard to remember the entire thing, or at least to have some trigger that is the entire thing. That's not really the way that it works. The way that it works is...
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
an entry point, a very easy to remember entry point, that from there, the rest of this idea sort of spreads out. And that's why mantras are so good, because it's a very short, pithy thing that you say to yourself that keeps everything going. And I found a quote, this is the most fucking me thing that you can do, finding a quote that justifies why you should use quotes.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
But a Nobel Prize winner, Andre Gide, said something Everything that needs to be said has already been said, but since no one was listening, everything must be said again. So that's my elevator pitch for two reasons, I suppose, why relying on maxims and aphorisms are a good approach. First one, it makes things very easy to remember and is a gateway drug.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
It's a thin end of the wedge to get people into these ideas. And secondly... Not everybody knows everything that you know, guy. And 66% of people found this show this year, even though at the start of the year, I was like, oh my God, the show's really big. So yeah, we need to say it again. I'm going to say it again. Next one. This is from Elon Musk on Instagram, actually.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
He got clipped doing an interview and talking about what it feels like to found a startup and to be a CEO. And I then got a quote from Marc Andreessen talking about Sean Parker. Sean Parker says, running a startup is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood. Right. Running a startup is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood. So hardcore.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
You will figure it out just like you always have. So actually go and seek some joy. And this was a reflection, I guess I kind of realized when doing the live show in Australia and then the one in London and realizing that everything had gone well and that the live shows, especially in Australia, were fantastic. And I'd been so...
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And Elon said, a lot of times people think that creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it's really not that fun. I mean, there are periods of fun and there are periods where it's just awful. And particularly if you're the CEO of a company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in a company.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
There's no point in spending your time on things that are going right, so you only spend your time on things that are going wrong. And there are things that are going wrong that other people can't take care of. So you have the worst filter for the crappiest problems in the company, the most pernicious and painful problems. So I wouldn't say... It's fun.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
You have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold. And there's a friend of mine who says, staring companies, starting companies is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. And there's some truth to that. The staring into the abyss part is that you're going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Like 90%, arguably 99% of startups, that's the staring part. You're constantly saying, okay, if I don't get this right, the company will die. Quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you've got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. So you end up working on that. You really wish you weren't working on it.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
That's the eating glass part. And that goes on for a long time. I think I did this 10 reasons not to work for yourself post toward the start of the year.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
This is one of the reasons that I've never fully got on board or even partly got on board with the doing a nine to five is for fucking midwit NPCs. You should just Lone Ranger your way through startup world and go work for yourself. I think it's really not that fun a lot of the time. Yeah, you get to capture a lot of the upside, and it's kind of adventurous, but there is a lot of pain.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
There's a big amount of pain threshold, and there are circles of hell significantly lower than the ones that I've had to go through. Some of my friends that have been part of different companies that have got investors breathing down their neck – They're liable for much more difficulty. They're under much more scrutiny.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Maybe they're publicly traded now and they've got this press obligations that they need to do. It's really not that fun for a lot of the time, but it's very meaningful. So if you're the sort of person that prioritizes meaning over joy… this may be a good path for you to go down. But I'm always hesitant around telling someone, oh yeah, sack your nine to five off and go just Lone Ranger it.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Because yeah, sure, you're going to have a lot of freedom in the way that you don't right now, but you're going to have a lot of pain in the way that you don't right now too. And that's a decision that not enough people remind those still doing a more typical sort of setup of jobs that they're going to have to pay on the back end. You're going to be your own taskmaster.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
You're going to be your own boss. So not only are you the person who has to do the job, you're the person who has to work out what job needs to be done. And then you need to tell the guy, you, what job it is that needs to be done and then check in on how it's done. And then you never know if you're finished. And it just goes on. It goes on and on and on.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Well, another homozy-ism that was related to this, one of my favorites that I kind of missed when we spoke and someone clipped it and put it on Instagram and I re-noticed it and just thought how great it was. He said... The world belongs to optimists because if you're going to do anything big, you have to believe that it can happen. Otherwise, it never will.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
focused on not messing up and on gripping the experience and on controlling everything that i didn't actually when i look back sure we did it the outcome was the outcome which was really great but there wasn't a massive amount of enjoyment during it because so much of it was swimming in this sea of concern and vigilance and you know ambient anxiety so i tried to split test it with london and see okay what happens if i just try and enjoy it and it went even better and
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Sean Puri says the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich. 99% right and 100% wrong. They're right, 99% of the time, but they're wrong 100% because the only thing that matters is the big one at the end.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Your family and friends will say that every girl you ever date is not good enough, except for the one time you find the girl that you're actually going to marry, or that this business idea won't work, and you might have nine failures. My first nine businesses didn't really amount to anything. Nine. As in, the first one, I spent time on it, it failed. Second one, this one will be different.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Spent time on it, failed. And then the third one, this one, failed. And then six more after that. And it's painful as shit because the whole time everyone is telling you, I told you so.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And they're right. Today. But not forever.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
I just, that resilience piece, you know, regularly going through failure, moving from failure to failure with no discernible loss of enthusiasm, I think is fantastic. Not only something that we should obviously look to cultivate in ourselves, but something that we should remind ourselves of when we do overcome failure.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
I think the fear of failure is way greater than the way that you feel when it actually happens. When failure occurs, yeah, sure, you're already on to the next thing. You're already moving. There's momentum. There's inertia. You're trying to find a solution. But when you're thinking about how failure is going to feel, that's when it's really, really scary.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And that's why the family or friends that tell you that the girl or the guy isn't good enough for you or the people that derogate your idea of trying to start something or improve your life or make changes or whatever, that's why I've got a real fucking distaste for those people. Because again, like I say, drive and tenacity is so...
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
gossamer thin and easily broken a lot of the time, you should have a lot of support. And if somebody comes along and you've managed to finally create this thing, you've got a tiny little ember burning and someone comes along and starts fucking blowing on it. No, that's not an energy that I like. And yeah, Bezos said in a shareholder letter that I really appreciate it.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
He said, we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can tell all of our grandchildren about. Such things aren't meant to be easy. But that shareholder letter was in 1997. So he's in the eating glass, staring into the abyss, period, right then.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can tell all our children about. Such things aren't meant to be easy. So I think accepting the pain, accepting the difficulty that's going to come along with whatever it is, that you're trying to do is probably the first or one of the most important things.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
It's something I wish that I'd done previously. Again, going back to that, there are no solutions, only trade-offs idea. But
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
railing against how hard something is or how much time it's taking up or the difficulty or the inefficiency or the fact that you don't know how to do it or the fact that you don't have a high that can sort it or the fact that people around you don't believe you or that no one's giving you the support that you want or that you thought it wouldn't take this long. The fact that that is happening
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
is par for the course. It is the price of doing business. It's the cost of entry for whatever the thing is that you're going about. Because if it wasn't, it wouldn't be happening. And so much of the pain, as far as I can see, is you railing against the fact that there are difficulties.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Great insight from Rangan Chatterjee was the more that somebody complains, the less accurate their perspective of the world is. So a complaint is you saying, why is the world not behaving in the way that I expected it to? which essentially identifies that you don't have an accurate model of the way that the world works.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
There are going to be problems continuously for the rest of time, and there will never be a day when you don't wake up and have to mediate or negotiate or cajole your way through something.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And I wasn't terrified every single moment. So maybe assuming that things aren't always going to go badly is a strategy that we can all use, basically. It's similar to this insight from Rich Roll, which is actually from 2023, but resurfaced. And I fucking love this quote. He said, I still find myself with this sense that success has to be earned.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
okay so given the fact that these things are fucking unavoidable why are you complaining about them and why are you so surprised when they happen uh so yes i think um such things aren't meant to be easy is a nice little reminder and you might remember if you watched one of the rogan episodes i did i talked about this region beta paradox thing this sort of
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
comfortably numb area where things aren't so bad that they're really bad and they cause you to change, but they're not so good that you're actually satisfied with life and you get stuck in the middle.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
I realized that there is an inverse of this, the reverse region beta paradox, which is being in an aggressively terrible working cadence or environment, but having such a tolerance for discomfort that you can endure it for a Lower resilience, less stubborn people would snap out and have to find a way to change things, but not you. You're basically the David Goggins of working hard.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Who's going to carry the workload? You are forever. And that's kind of a double-edged sword in some ways. There's a bit of me that thinks that's really romantic. You're able to do something that not many people are. Congratulations. But on the other side... It allows you to stay in a situation that any normal sane person would have pulled themselves out of.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
In some situations, that's great and that's resilience and you're doing fantastic. But in others, it causes you to stick about when you should have already moved on or pivoted or changed your approach or something. But because your tolerance for working hard is there, you just continue to press your nose against the grindstone. Anyway, next one. An ode to people who don't believe in themselves.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
What comes first, belief or action? Do you need to believe that you can do a thing before you can do it? Fake it until you make it is one option, but incredibly hard if you're introspective and have low self-belief and high standards. So what about make it until you believe it? Here are some lessons that I've learned. You can believe you're not worthy of a thing and still attain it.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
You can be adamant that your efforts are going to go badly and still succeed. You can grip and grasp and fear and it ruin the enjoyment and be totally unwarranted and things still go well. You can have no self-belief and show up anyway. You can want more for yourself without knowing exactly what that looks like.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
You can doubt the process, question your talent, be uncertain that you're making progress, disparage your accomplishments, permanently feel like you're not working hard enough no matter how hard you work, never give yourself a break, fail to fully feel gratitude, be terrified of never reaching your goals, and still end up in a place that your 20-year-old self could not imagine you'd ever get to.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Self-belief is overrated.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Generate evidence, says Ryan Holiday. And this
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
resilience of doing good things in spite of you not believing in them or believing that they're going to happen is pretty miraculous. For all that I can say, I'm questioning whether or not it's virtuous to do something virtuous if you don't feel like you had any other choice. Ultimately, you can get to a place that you'd be very surprised by regardless of how motivated you feel to get there.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
The world really only knows the actions that you take. It doesn't know about the internal state until that then shows up in the way that you actually perform. So yeah, some things to keep in mind. Number one, don't grip life so tightly. Being too serious creates a kind of brittle fragility, which a playful attitude insulates you against. Your goal is dynamic persistence over the long term.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And taking things seriously gives you a huge advantage in bursts, but chronic seriousness makes you rigid and at risk of blow up. A question from Joe Hudson from the start of the year was, what would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable?
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And the only way to earn it is to inflict pain on yourself. And if you're not in pain, you didn't try hard enough. And it would have been better if you'd suffered more. And I think that's a lie. And I want to find out if it's a lie or if it's true. And I think that it's a lie as well.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
When you're sat in a meeting, when you're having a conversation with your partner, when you're playing sport, when you're doing something that you love or something that you hate or something that's in between, what would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable? Matthew McConaughey said, make a sense of humor your default emotion.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Number two, don't be so worried about winning that you forget what winning is supposed to feel like. Is your presiding feeling when things go well one of happiness and satisfaction or one of relief? Is it joy or simply the abatement of fear? After a while of winning, you realize that how you win is more important than if you win.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
How you feel during the event is more important than the outcome of the event. how the people who read your work are impacted is more important than how many people are impacted. You can't be so terrified of failing that even the act of winning is made miserable. Number three, it's all vibes.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Ultimately, you are doing things not to say that you've done them, but for the experience of having done them. When you look back, it's the experience itself and not just the outcome that matters. Sure, outcomes are more important than inputs, but vibes are more important than all of that still, because... That's what you're going to remember, your felt experience of it.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And one of the big determining factors in how you feel will be the outcome. I'm not saying that you need to forget about winning, forget about your desires and your goals and just enjoy the moment under a tree on fucking psilocybin. You still need to go and do the things, but... do not derogate how important the actual process and making sure that you enjoy it is.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Oddly enough, optimizing for how you feel detaches you from caring about the outcomes, but is the very thing that will drive outcomes the most. And if it doesn't, what do you care because you're enjoying it? And number four, emotional pain is a hell of a teacher, but it won't kill you. Would life be easier if you didn't feel everything so very deeply?
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
perhaps, but the only reason you're getting the outcomes that you want is because of your depth of thought. And as bad as it feels, this that you're going through right now is the breadth of human experience and you're alive and your inner landscape is a fascinating world to explore.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
So act with curiosity and what you are doing right now, your goals, the desire for attainment, your attachments to this world, they're hypotheses to be tested, not ideologies to be proved. And number five is your goal to survive or thrive or flourish. Because you have probably dealt with everything that life has thrown at you so far.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
One of the most common questions that we got asked in Australia and in London at the live shows was, how do I give myself credit for my accomplishments in life? Why do I never feel satisfied or finished when the job has been well done? And this, as far as I can see, is another curse of competence.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Do you think that it's because of the way that you grasped and controlled and feared and ruminated? Or could it be because you're a capable, competent, gifted person and the world is fundamentally fair and over a long enough time horizon, most people get what they deserve? Number six, you're doing this for you.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
and this is something I've only realized relatively recently, but after a certain level of material comfort, the only person that you need to do this thing for is you. Your conscience knows when you're being honest and when you're not. I think optimizing to make that person happy, that conscience happy, is a really good idea. You should basically be the person that your mom thinks you are,
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
or the person that your younger self wanted as a role model. Brave, courageous, earnest, honest, virtuous, like on fire. There's this quote from the ancient Greeks that says, live as though all your ancestors were living again through you. I really love that, this sort of We judge people based on how much life they can tolerate, how much feeling they can deal with and carry and enjoy.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And that's something that we should all try and have more of in ourselves, being that... person that your younger self wanted as a role model, being the person that your mom thinks you are, I think is a good rubric. Another person that I've fallen in love with, another lesson that's just great from Oliver Berkman, question, how much should you care about things?
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Answer, I'm not exactly sure, but I know that it's not the absolute maximum amount all the time for everything. That, again, the classic insecure overachiever who struggles to distinguish correctly between the small number of areas in life which require every ounce of your vigilance and attention bringing to bear on them and the ones that don't. Not every situation is life and death.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And you don't need to optimize or win or perfect every area. you can pour your finite time and energy into something infinitely more absorbing than trying to keep life under control, and that thing is actually living it.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
I was reminded of this at the start of the year when I made myself pass out during a breathwork class because I figured that if two-minute holds are good, then three-minute holds must be even better, so I'll do that and then I'll win.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
win what and all that i won was a concerned look from the breathwork teacher as she was coming over me like this upside down rubbing the side of my neck trying to bring me back around i think a lot of us have this sense this worry this concern about doing everything perfectly especially things that you're supposed to be doing to relax like meditation or hobbies.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And in the process of trying to be perfect, you manage to thoroughly ruin the enjoyment of whatever you're supposed to be doing by turning leisure into labor. You don't go for a walk because you want to enjoy your time in nature. You go for a walk because Andrew Huberman once said that it improves your dopaminergic response so you can focus better when you get back to the office.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
If you're good at things and have high standards, you assume that you should always do well, which means that success isn't a cause for celebration, but it's the minimum level of reasonable performance. Anything less than victory would be a failure, and victory itself becomes nothing more than acceptable. congratulations, you might be very successful. You also might be very miserable.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
You're not spending time playing an instrument so that you can chill out and enjoy yourself. It's so that you can learn some new chords and maybe you can make a new record. Maybe that record, You have to remember that you're not fixing a problem. There is no problem to be fixed. There is no doing this wrong in many areas of life.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
There are a small number of pursuits that you should bring to bear all of your effort and attention and detail and rumination. But that's not everything, right? Question, how much should you care about things? Answer, I'm unsure exactly, but I know it's not the absolute maximum amount all the time for everything. Learning again, like what we were talking about earlier on this.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
helping to delineate the territory of where should I apply all of my effort and where can I learn to try and let it go a little bit more. And that momentum that you've got, the habits that you have, the way that your mind and body operate are going to be very difficult to turn off.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
but they're going to be even more difficult to turn off if you don't fucking know that you're supposed to switch them off. If you're like, hey, dude, it's pickleball, right? You don't need to. I told this story as well. At the start of the year, I was playing doubles, co-ed doubles, and I was playing with a girl that I'd never played with before.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And she was like young, 21 years old or something, and super bubbly. And it's two games, two games apiece. We're going into the final game and we're walking back toward the baseline. I'm like, right. Okay. So it seems like when we drive, we need to move up to the net a little bit more quickly. And that guy's really good on his backhand, but you'd be surprised.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
I think that we can, if we switch them over, actually you're going to, and she says, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's good. Let's not forget to have fun. I thought. Ah, yeah. Very good. Fun. But I had to be broken out of it because I'd just taken the same level of seriousness that I apply to lots of areas of life to an area where it really shouldn't have been.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And yeah, loosening our grip, I think, is a good insight. Carl Benjamin used to be called Sargon of Akkad, now does a lot to see this podcast. A surprising insight from him that I learned this year. Being mean doesn't change people's minds. Another one from Gwenda Bogle. Rude people are stupid people. A useful thing Twitter taught me is that rude people are almost always stupid.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
In virtually every case, when someone viciously insults me for something I said, they also misunderstood what I said. This makes sense because rudeness and stupidity share a root cause, carelessness. And this is, I had this idea of the soft signal of effectiveness, basically what Carl said, that if you really care about changing minds, you'll dial back the level of aggression in your
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
discussion in the way that you put your debates forward, you'll do that because you're more concerned about having the correct level of impact and getting somebody on your side than you are about looking cool or making them look silly. And yeah, being mean doesn't change people's minds is...
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
It's just such an obvious... When have you ever been patronized or passive-aggressed or mocked into changing your opinion? It just causes you to dig your heels in more. And what it shows when somebody uses that kind of rude, stupid tactic... It shows that they're more bothered about looking good than actually having a positive impact.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And I shouldn't say congratulations because that makes it sound as if you chose it and you didn't. So a few things to keep in mind. And again, this is largely me screaming at myself to remember these. First off, you're wired this way for a reason. because your ancestors are made up of the most goal-driven, insecure overachievers from history. So you couldn't have been any other way.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Who am I to say that you should be more bothered about changing minds than you are about bolstering your shallow self-esteem? But it does tell you a lot about the person. One of the big things it tells you about them is that they don't care that much about the cause. They care significantly more about themselves. Uh... Let's do two more. Let's do a few more. Actually, I got some cool ones here.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
So not too dissimilar to what I was talking about previously, this vulnerability coming from a place of strength as opposed to from a place of weakness. I talked about this at the live show, and I think people really love this.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
men need to accumulate sufficient man points before they can open up about their feelings basically feels like men have to earn the right to talk about their emotions Chris Bumstead as an example can talk about crying and fear and insecurities but only because he's the greatest bodybuilder of his era and a six time champion
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Only men who have achieved some degree of success in typical masculine pursuits like status, resources, attractiveness, muscularity, and strength can open up about emotions with credibility.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Once they've accumulated sufficient man points, some unspoken video game level unlock happens where emotions are allowed, but opening up before having the requisite man points is interpreted as feeble and weak. I think the world still has many icks around men showing their emotions, but far fewer if it comes from a place of prestige than one of poverty. And it's a vicious sort of
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
scenario for men to be in because the very men who probably could do with the most sympathy are perhaps the ones who have got the lowest number of man points. And they're the ones that are going to be derogated the most by women and also maybe even not raised up that much by men. So yeah, I think I'm right on this. And maybe it is just the case that
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
uh somebody who can't choose to do anything else doesn't really get as much prestige for uh doing the only thing they can like weakness when you can't be strong is nowhere near as uh interesting or seductive as weakness when you have the choice to be strong but
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
yeah there was a another interesting insight that i learned about the the duality of warning men about bad behavior the problem with giving men advice like don't be pushy is that the men who really need to hear it won't listen and the men who'd benefit from being more assertive will take it straight to heart uh this you know was backed up by david buss's book bad men men behaving badly in the u.s and um
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
that despite the fact that fucking like hashtag kill all men or hashtag like not all men but it's always a man which basically like is the same as all men it is all men uh the problem with having any blanket coverage uh broad group push like that
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
is that at least when it comes to these kinds of behaviors from men, it seems like it's one man doing a thousand horrible things, not a thousand men doing one horrible thing. And this seems to be borne out in the data, at least based on Bussey's research. But giving men advice, across the board, men, giving all men advice, like don't be pushy,
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
uh the the guys that are most likely to not be pushy are precisely the ones that are going to listen the most and the ones that already think that they're fine or disregarding any negative feedback from the people that they're doing it to they're just going to plow straight on um and then i guess
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Another interesting insight that I learned about divorce and marriage, this episode I did with Visa about a month and a half ago, he's got two fucking outstanding articles. One of them said, why do so many people divorce someone they thought was their favorite person? It's not really a mystery. It's mostly because good times are a poor predictor of how you'll handle bad times.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And handling bad times is much more important to the success of a marriage. But as a species, as a culture, we have not truly internalized this. It's the lows, not the highs, that make or break a relationship. A painful lesson of the past 20 years of relationships. In the medium run, it's exciting to feel hype about people who seem to relate strongly in specific ways.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
But in the long run, it's really how you handle misunderstandings, conflict, confusion, disagreement that go the distance. I think that's so right as well that, you know, you see couples together and you think, oh my God, how did they ever break up? They were so great. Can you not remember when we went to the theme park and they're having all this thing?
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Your brain doesn't care about you feeling good. It only cares about you being successful. In the past, success meant accumulating food and resources, and now it means accumulating money and accomplishments. And the number of ways that your success-seeking system can be hijacked is greater than ever. So it's not really your fault. Another realization, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
It's like, yeah, they cannot regulate at all as soon as some perturbment happens. Soon as some disagreement occurs, they're at each other's throats. One of them runs away. One of them can't stop bringing it up. One of them holds grudges. One of them can't communicate without being passive aggressive. One is unable to talk about their emotions. That's an existential threat to a relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And it changes, I think, where relationships should apply their focus. It shouldn't be on increasing peak experiences, although that's fun and obviously way more sexy. I think it should be on how do we avoid catastrophe as opposed to expedite success? Because
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
sure maybe a long-term marriage or relationship over time might break up because there are insufficient peak moments but it's way more likely to break up because there are too many very low moments that you haven't been able to regulate properly so i just think that's a fucking like a gorgeous gorgeous insight and um i was reminded when thinking about this charles darwin you know uh somebody who you might have thought given all of his research on animals would have had a
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
a very clear idea about whether or not he wanted to get married and the world of mating and dating, but he was unsure about whether he should get married. So he made a list and Russ Roberts covered this list. So this is just so good. This document has two columns, one labeled marry, one labeled not marry, and above them circled other words, this is the question.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
On the pro-marriage side of the equation were children, if it please God, constant companion and friend in old age who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved and played with. After a reflection of an unknown length, he modified the foregoing sentence with better than a dog anyhow.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
He continued, home and someone to take care of house, charms of music and female chit-chat, these things good for one's health but terrible loss of time. Without warning, Darwin had, from the pro-marriage column, swerved uncontrollably into a major anti-marriage factor so major that he underlined it.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
First one is the insecure overachiever mindset. When faced with a challenge, your nature might be to worry and obsess and grip
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
This issue, the infringement of marriage on his time, especially his work time, was addressed at greater length in the appropriate Not Marry column.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Not marrying, he wrote, would preserve freedom to go where one likes, choice of society and little of it, conversation of clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle to have the expense and anxiety of children, perhaps quarreling, loss of time, cannot read in the evening, fatness and idleness, anxiety and responsibility, less money for books, and, if many children,
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
forced to gain one's bread even experts in mating and evolution struggle with big decisions and uh look if it's tough for darwin then it's okay for it to be tough for you look i'm gonna love you and leave you um that was awesome this year has been just so phenomenal and the conversations are not stopping the lineup of guests for q1 for next year uh i can't believe it it's people that i've wanted on the show for forever some of them are already recorded some of them are coming um
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
I love you all to bits. I really, really do. All of the likes, the support, the shares, the messages, the emails. It really means a lot. And I hope you have a fantastic Christmas, a very happy new year. I'll see you soon.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
This outrageous lesson from Thomas Sowell. You don't get to live the comfortable life with recognition and progress and all of the personal development that you really care about. and also be able to switch off from that stuff whenever you want.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
It's like you think that you could be obsessive and driven in one area of your life, but be able to create a hard boundary where it doesn't bleed over into everything else. That's just not the way that it works. Your brain doesn't know oh, these are the pursuits that I'm supposed to really, really be obsessive about.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
But when it comes to my relationships or when it comes to how I feel about my progress in the gym or whatever, I want you to leave that bit apart, compartmentalize it. It's like, no, this is a nature that you're building inside of yourself or in many ways has been sort of bestowed on you genetically.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
You can't have these weird bits of territory where you want it over here, but you don't want it over there. So there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Okay, would you sacrifice all of the things that you care about yourself, your depth of thought, the development that you make, If it meant that you got to have a little bit more peace, for the most part, I don't think you would.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
So with that in mind, just accept it as the cost of doing business. Some stuff that you're not super happy about will maybe come along for the ride. Another one is you complain about not being grateful and you give yourself no time for gratitude. And I don't mean a daily journal, which becomes a chore.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
I mean, dwelling at the end of a successful experience for 60 seconds, like really sitting in it and considering the details and thinking about how good and satisfied you feel to have completed it. Rick Hansen in this great book called Hardwiring Happiness, he says, absorb the experience. Imagine it sinking down into you and becoming a part of you. And that's the type of sort of micro habit thing.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
tightly the sort of classic insecure overachiever mindset and because worrying is so common in every pursuit that you attempt your successes are seen as proof that worrying is a performance enhancer and your failures are seen as proof that you should have worried all along so you end up with
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
You give a presentation, you were nervous before, it goes well afterward, 60 seconds of just sitting and thinking about it. Like really allowing yourself to sort of revel in that as opposed to, right, get my phone out. There's got to be emails to do. There must be some slacks that I've got to answer.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Or, you know, you have a difficult conversation with a partner and instead of immediately moving on to distraction or cuddling or whatever, it's like, hey, sit with that feeling. Wow, that was a scary conversation that we were supposed to have and it went well and both of us regulated. How phenomenal. Like you can sit and allow that to become more of a part of you. And yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Yeah, ultimately, you were born into a world that you didn't choose. You were maladapted for the mind that you have, which you also didn't choose. You're in an environment that's replete with games designed to hijack your drive and your attention 24 hours a day. So basically, I'm impressed that you even made it to breakfast. And we all need to give ourselves a little bit of a break, I think.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Another lesson, one of my favorite ones, this was from Richard Reeves, great author, wrote the book of Boys and Men and came back on the show for the second time this year. We ended up going for three hours. He's just such an interesting researcher when it comes to sort of the masculinity question, men's roles, boys' roles in the modern world.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
He said, men aren't seen as having problems, but as being the problem. Suicide rates among men under 30 have risen by 40% since 2010 and are four times higher than among young women. Male suicide accounts for as many deaths as breast cancer. Male suicide accounts for as many deaths as breast cancer. Men are less likely than women to go to college or buy a home.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
They are more likely to be lonely and are more vulnerable to addiction. Young white men from lower-income homes are worse off than their fathers on almost every economic and social indicator.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
There is a bigger gender gap on campuses today than in 1972 when the government passed Title IX to prevent sex-based discrimination in education, but today the disparities in college enrollment and performance are the other way around. There is no strong evidence that young men are turning against gender equality, but they have turned away from the left because the left has turned away from them.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
The problems of young men are not the confections of reactionaries. This is the story of elite neglect, not voter chauvinism. The Democrats have failed to address these issues. Under the Biden administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to acknowledge the gender disparity in suicide rates.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
The White House Gender Policy Council has not tackled a single issue facing primarily boys and men. There have been initiatives to promote women in STEM and construction, but nothing about encouraging men into teaching on mental health. There are women's health research initiatives, but no office on men's health.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
unfalsifiable negativity, kind of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity, like Andrew Wilkinson says. You build this link between worry and performance, belief that your performance would have been markedly worse if you hadn't worried so much, and that the worrying is precisely what motivated and enabled the outcomes that you wanted.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
The Democrats and progressive institutions have a massive blind spot when it comes to male issues, and this was exposed in the election. At worst, men are seen as not having problems, but as being the problem. Remembering that Richard is the most gentle, researched, sort of lefty policy wonk type guy, DC type person that you could have saying this.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And that sounds like a fucking hammer blow that will have been dampened down an awful lot and the language will have been dialed back. It's not good. And a lot of the conversations that I've had this year have been around trying to effectively navigate the conversation to do with men and boys. How much do we need to caveat? How much do we need to
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
It's not to say that women don't have problems, but now that I've gone through this weird laundry list of a fucking land acknowledgement for sex and gender, I can now talk about the problems that I'm here to face. That doesn't happen in the reverse. If someone's talking about the problems faced by girls and women... And that doesn't occur.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Well, we must remember that men kill themselves at five times the rate that women do. And if men had killed themselves at the rate that women had, we would have half a million more men from 1999 to 2020. That doesn't happen. But I'd had, I guess another insight was I'd had a bunch of conversations about the challenges that men and women face in the modern world. And I realized how
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Rarely pro-male and pro-female activists are prepared to genuinely accept that the other sex may encounter difficulties without measuring it against their own suffering. There is an assumption that any attention paid toward men takes it away from women or some other minority group who is more deserving and vice versa. It's a zero-sum view of empathy. And obviously, this is not how empathy works.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Rather, it indicates just how broken the conversation around men and women is, that care for people who are struggling in life is seen as a fucking finite resource.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Women can point to how men don't need to fear sexual assault as much, and men can point to how women don't need to fear Me Too allegations, but men hold more CEO positions, but women are graduating college at higher rates, but there's more male homelessness, but there's more women in sex work. It's like both sides are trying to balance some bizarre simultaneous social justice equation.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
How many false allegations are worth a sexual assault? How many female graduates are worth a male CEO? The entire conversation is basically saying, my privilege is more oppressed than your privilege. It's like victimhood masquerading as arithmetic. And it's entirely based on a flawed premise because the complexity of the truth is inconvenient for both sides.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
There is no equating the suffering of one group to another. And perceiving the discussion in this way causes everyone to enter the framing correctly. as adversaries. Accepting the challenges of one group does not disable attention from being paid to another.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And similarly, it shouldn't be the case that a discussion about men's troubles should first be hedged with fucking groveling caveats about how we know that women face a myriad of problems too, lest the position be seen as myopic misogyny.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
zero-sum empathy is one of the most boring and narcissistic things that keeps on happening and it's done over and over again and it achieves nothing except for pushing both groups apart from each other and I can't do much for women but I've got some I think pretty reasonable and influential friends that could propel a better conversation around men and working quite hard to make that happen in whatever way I can but
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
even when you reach black belt status and you've got confidence in your capacities, there's a lack of enthused energy. I think it seems like maybe the worries left you, but it's not been replaced with excitable enthusiasm, just higher expectations.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
It's an uphill battle in many ways. Richard taught me this really interesting thing about how when people don't listen to your point, if you've been sort of campaigning for something for a while, you turn up the volume and the intensity ever more, especially if they say, no, it's not, or you don't feel like it's being welcomed, not only not being heard, but is actively being pushed back.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
And I can definitely see that
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
temptation that dynamic going on that gravitational pull uh for you to become ever more a firebrand when talking about this sort of stuff and uh there's definitely days when i feel a bit more fiery than others those are the days i try and stay off twitter but um i think i'm happy with the job that's been done this year i think the conversations i've had have been really great and i hope that they've helped a lot um but still more to be done uh speaking of which another conversation i've been having a lot another lesson that i took away was
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
trying to work out why lots of people have a big problem with ozempic use, widespread ozempic use. Unsurprisingly, there's been a lot of pushback from the body positivity movement, headlines that say anorectics, anorectics, by the way, is the technical class of drugs like Ozempic, but the class of drugs of Ozempic are going to move beyond GLP-1 agonists.
Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
So you need to learn the word anorectics because that's what they will be at scale. Anyway, headlines say that these drugs confirm society's anti-fat bias, and they claim that a future without fat is a dangerous idea. Basically, that appetite-suppressing drugs are a removal of fat people's identity and a denial of their right to exist. So, all the usual stuff. But...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Left-wing women are learning to love right-wing men. Political division has become a sexual fetish. Today, in online political fandoms, people behind enemy lines are often seen as potential sexual conquests. Right-wing men want a liberal art hoe, whereas some leftist women lust after the right-wing anon.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah, it's a... I always find that framing very interesting. And I think it kind of shows who is still considered to be on top and who is still considered to be on bottom. You kind of beg the question or you sort of reveal your priors when that kind of framing comes around. And yeah, dude, you know...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
If you, as a woman of the internet, perhaps, who tweets things a lot or retweets things a lot, has an issue with the dearth of eligible male partners, but also tweets about, like... Why these men are losers and incels? Why can't they pick themselves up by their bootstraps? Cause and effect are occurring in front of your eyes here.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
That if most groups are falling behind, we spend billions and billions in taxpayer funded money to try and work out what's going on and help them. And we put committees together and we create new social movements. We put Title IX in and we change the way that universities are structured and we do all the rest of it. we don't tell them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Like if women have a problem or if any group, except for men, have a problem, we say, what can we do to fix society? But if men specifically have a problem, we say, what is it that men are doing where they don't fix themselves? And this sense that sort of modern men are being made to pay for the sins of a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
and then also aren't getting the mating opportunities, perhaps, that they would have been used to. And much of that is laid at their feet, right? Their socioeconomic status is theirs to own. It is only theirs. But... When you're also being sort of lambasted, it's like, so you didn't get the benefits. You were told that you did. You fell behind.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
And then you were castigated for not having picked yourself up. And then on top of all of that, the women were like, I can't even date you. I can't even get myself to find an eligible partner. You go, there's like a lot of mental gymnastics going on there, I think, to just hide the fact that all groups can feel bad and all groups need sympathy and empathy. And empathy isn't a zero-sum game. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
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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#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
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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#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
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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#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
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. Can I give you my spicy, we're about, whatever, 25 minutes in, so people that get mad at me have hopefully dropped off by now.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
So I wrote this. I was too scared to actually post this. I wonder how often this happens with your newsletter, which, by the way, everyone should go and subscribe to Rob's newsletter. I read it every week and it's fucking amazing. I wonder how many times you write something and you go, oh, too hot, like too spicy. But this was one that was too spicy to go in the newsletter.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Men not erect, women most affected. There is an... LAUGHTER There is an asymmetry in the way the discussion is framed around men not being able to get it up versus women not being able to reach orgasm during sex. Women not being able to cum is often laid at the feet of the man. Men need to learn how to work with a woman's body more, make her feel more comfortable.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Lol guys just can't find the clitoris, slash just use your vibrator queen, men are trash. But men not being able to get it up is never the woman's fault. No one is saying your head game is weak, Julia, step it up. Both are the man's fault and neither are the woman's.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
So I basically, it's not quite the same, but I think it's the only equivalent that we can find that if a guy has got erectile dysfunction and is struggling to get it up in the bedroom, the only close...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
uh comparable um situation that women have to deal with is that they they can't reach climax during sex and if it's really hard or if you need to if there's like some fucking sequence of like rain dance things that needs that the moon needs to be in its sort of third fucking quarter and we need to make sure that miles is in retrograde and then but
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
That's laid at the feet of the man a lot of the time that you need to make her feel more comfortable. What about during the day? Did you send her flowers? And yet, if a guy's got erectile dysfunction, it's never laid at the feet of the woman. Although, to be really compassionate, I think a lot of the time in those situations, women will feel it's all about them.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
But if you look at the commentary that goes on online, and men will also take ownership of like, I'm not good enough. I'm sort of sexually... insufficiently capable to help my partner get to orgasm. But if you actually look at what's talked about online, it's guys, you're broken because your penis doesn't work.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
And guys, you're broken because you can't get a woman into this situation where she feels comfortable enough to cum.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
I notice that they didn't use right wing women are looking to date left wing men as one of the examples there.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah, that's an interesting one. I certainly remember looking at some stuff around Well, if you think about it this way, the bar, men coming is typically quite mechanical and that can be the case too for some women, but not all women. And if that's the case, the bar for I have been able, I have performed my duties as a woman in the bedroom is lower than it is for a man.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
You know, you have a full spectrum of happens at the gust of a wind to never going to happen at all, even on my own for women. Whereas for guys, this is actually, this is interesting. This is probably one of the few areas where male variability is reduced.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah. Yeah. That was Demi. And then there's sapiosexual, which is I'm, I'm attracted to your intellect or something else. Yeah. I mean, the demisexual thing was hilarious. Cause I think that was called just being a woman up until, or just being like a normal human up until not long ago. Uh,
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
It's hard to pin down discourse like this sometimes, but this trend is also substantiated in studies about the dating patterns of progressive women. What do you think about that?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
yeah i i'd be very interested the orgasm equity orgasm equality act thing um you do have the equivalent of orgasm billionaires out there which are women who are just able to have orgasm after orgasm after orgasm during sex and you know as a the guy's side of the fence might decide to fly the flag for that and go look i i come once and i fall asleep 10 minutes later so uh you know where's the fucking you're the jeff bezos of fucking orgasms darling uh
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
pass some of those back over our way uh but speaking of that uh kind of the i guess topic of the internet at the moment adolescence uh i only i was away traveling basically from when it came out until yesterday so uh i only got to watch i've seen a few episodes but uh give me your your take on that and then kind of the subsequent fallout that's happened um
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
yeah art masquerading as reality and uh yeah that was one of the things that struck me I mean what one of the other things that that struck me was beautifully shot adored it cinematography is fucking amazing it was shot in a DJI Ronin 4 which is a really cool piece of kit that's been around for a little while and um I thought that was great I thought
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
The acting was a little underwhelming, actually, especially from some of the kids. And the acting was its most underwhelming when they tried to shoehorn in anything to do with mating psychology, EP, sort of tangential... because it was so ham-fisted how they had to do exposition. The Manosphere, the Red Pill, what? Have you been watching The Matrix? You're like, oh, fuck, here we go.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
So it felt, you know, the exposition. But I understand, you know, this show's going to be watched by people who aren't terminally online like me and you, so maybe it needs that exposition. But that just felt a bit like, ugh. One of the interesting things, again, I was away for all of last week and hadn't watched it, but I must have been invited on to...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
five ten different panel style shows of varying levels uh including like mainstream british tv prime time spots and uh it was evident that they were just looking for somebody who could come on and sort of fight the fight for the pro men's side um first off i hadn't seen it
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Secondly, that is a fight that you only fucking lose by going on and trying to defend an imaginary child stabbing an imaginary girl about an imaginary slight. So what are we talking about? I thought about this an awful lot. What it seems like happened, they invited me on the first night after adolescence sort of hit the news headlines.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
And then we were able to track, oh, that's the person that got on instead of me because I said no. and looked at that, and that conversation was, you know, very placid and calm. And then they emailed again the next day, and were like, hey, yeah, you know, we really wanted a little bit more sort of different insights.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
And, like, what you mean is you wanted to create a firestorm, but who's going to come on and say, you know, we need more 13-year-old boys that are stabbing, imaginary 13-year-old boys stabbing imaginary 13-year-old girls? Like, it's not a position. And then, yeah, this fucking... It's supposed to be shown in the House of Commons. We want to be able to stream this in every school. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
As a cautionary tale? As a cautionary tale for who? Because by every metric, this fantastically shot, really beautiful, very well put together, but...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
like statistically pretty inaccurate i mean we there's fucking papers out there how many times have i talked to you about uh like the male sedation hypothesis like if you look at how radicalized young men could and should be how little sex they are having how isolated and lonely they are by every metric how much they're falling behind socioeconomically the state of their mental health the online subcultures that help to sort of ossify and make them feel worse about this
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Like, this isn't a request. This is not a request. And you're not allowed to cut this to make it into a request. But where are all of the incel stabbings? Like, where are they?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
House of Commons, high-ranking politicians. It's just insane. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. If you are still using an old face shaver from three Christmases ago, grow up. Join us here in the modern world. There are purpose-built tools for the job and Manscaped's brand new Chairman Pro Package is the best.
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#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
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#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
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#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
In the same way that You would say, you know, this is a cautionary tale against the problems that 13-year-old boys are facing. Like, by that logic, Batman should be a cautionary tale against orphans and people that slip into wells. Like, you're taking the actual situation that was narrativized and...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
I have heard that the original story that this was born out of was a different demographic for the perpetrator, that it was actually based on a real-life story, and that had to be changed, probably for a number of reasons. One, that it would be politically inconvenient, but another one being that Stephen Graham fucking wrote it, and Stephen Graham's as white as they come. So...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
if you want to be the main dad and have all of episode four be about you you kind of unless you're gonna he's a totally normal boy that comes from an interracial marriage like that you know but it was i thought it was interesting that they didn't have him come from a broken home they didn't have him come from an abusive father you know there was a lot of sort of pushback in that way but i watched episode three last night and that was the one i was particularly interested to get your take on because that was obviously them trying to sort of dig into what is the psychology what is the ideology the mentality of
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
these young boys. And I found that one really dissatisfying. The way it was shot, the fact that they held it together for a full 60 minutes, like a fucking scripted podcast was unbelievable. Um, but they tried to sort of touch on, so what do you think about masculinity? What do you think being a man is? And at no point did they find really any tension in the, the boy wasn't really able to give a
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
the broken home thing didn't work. There was some interesting stuff around the power dynamic between him pushing back against the woman and him typically sort of being able to play. But I didn't see that quite so much as some thinly veiled misogyny as it was just young, slightly shrewd boy or girl knows the limits of a person in power and is able to play with those to make them feel uncomfortable.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Uh, You know, he even sort of comments on the, like how flat chested she is and whether she's pretty and stuff like that. So, you know, there's always this, like, I know that if you do something to me, that's not, that's not right, that I can kind of get you on it. But yeah, what did you make of that, that sort of breakdown and the sort of masculinity, fragile male ego discussion at large?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah, what about the boys from bad homes? What about the boys that don't have that good upbringing? Why are they not doing it at three times the rate, five times the rate, ten times the rate? I watched a couple of behind-the-scenes on YouTube that Netflix put up themselves, and Stephen Graham's explaining the script.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
And he's talking about how he didn't want there to be an excuse that it was because of abuse from the family, which constrains this sort of explanatory mechanism straight down onto... this sort of aggressive subculture. But I've got episode four to watch this evening.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Unless they actually show how he becomes radicalized, like, you know, he was on Reddit and he was looking at these things and he's doing all of the rest of this stuff. It's like, okay, so where did he learn about this? Or is it just, is the point really just that
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
the male ego and sort of male sexual prowess and your mate value when threatened and specifically humiliated at large by someone is a dangerous object if that's the takeaway I fucking fully agree I fully fucking agree with that because I think uh Humiliation is unbelievably dangerous to anybody, but specifically to a young boy. And at least, again, only in episode three.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
If the story continues the way it does, it's like, guy didn't bring a knife, got it from his friend, just wanted to scare this girl. This girl had bullied him. Like, up until the point at which he brought a fucking knife to her, she was in the wrong. She'd been mean. She'd been saying this stuff online. She'd derogated his status in a lot of ways. And then this situation gets out of control. And...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
it ends fucking tragically again, fictionally tragically. Um, like we must remember at no point do we need to defend or like try and fucking prosecute anybody because nothing happened.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Um, but yeah, if that's the story and that's the takeaway, and maybe that's the reason that it was left so open-ended that you didn't have this sort of concrete explanation around masculinity around what were the subcultures, you know, that Andrew Tate shite is like a passing comment. Um,
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
If you know the word roster, you have a roster.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
But to anybody that has the fucking first idea about what the internet looks like, I would guess that most incels actually despise Andrew Tate because he represents an awful lot of everything that they don't agree with, that they don't think. He's just going to be a symbol of all of the shit that they can't get.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
So that plus red pill plus manosphere plus incel, it's like this is a fucking massive world. I'm sure it's the same when good-meaning feminists
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
hear oh she's a feminist you don't need to you can disregard her opinion because of you know other friend like that includes fucking pink pill and are we dating the same guy and r slash female dating strategy like all of them probably can get lambasted under the rubric of feminist
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
That's interesting. So I wonder whether we have an additional sense of contempt or disgust or resentment or whatever for the kid that was called it, but that we know they weren't. Now we're going really, the casting directors here, we're giving them an awful lot of fucking spare IQ points.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
but let's just assume that they made this decision consciously that you've chosen a kid who facial symmetry you know like a normal looking boy like fucking middle of the bell curve of a kid um
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
That kind of makes it seem like, oh, well, you weren't sufficiently robust psychologically to realize that all they were doing was teasing you and that it wasn't actually an accurate assessment of your future. You were almost certainly probably going to be, you had like two friends, right? Um, you had an expensive pair of trainers. You come from an intact home. You've got an older sister.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Your parents seem to love you. There's photos of them, uh, at this like party where they're all dressed up at the beginning of one of the episodes. So all of the things laid out there for you to sort of basically use your own sense of self to push back against these kids. And this is because you are deficient.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
And the reason that you're deficient is that your sense of self is being, uh, corrupted by these online, uh, platforms.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah, that's interesting. I guess as well, there is a question to be asked of... The amount of bullying you would need to go through to justify murder is essentially infinite. So it's kind of a moot point. But there is a question of, okay, at what point does online bullying and castigation and ostracization...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
and being disaffected and humiliated by your classmates, at what point does that in and of itself independent of what's happening on the internet and ideology and all the rest of it? Like, let's just say that instead of using this like special coded language of an exploding stick of dynamite and love hearts and all the rest of it, what if people had just been saying, you're ugly?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Or you're never going to get a girlfriend or nobody likes you. What if it hadn't been coded from the internet? What you end up with is bullied boy lashes out at the tip of the spear of the people that are bullying him. And that makes for a much less... But in terms of dynamic is kind of probably...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
80% of the way there like they talked speaking of 80% like the 80-20 rule you know 80% of women are only attracted to 20% of men it's like what like what how is that that's got nothing to do at no point does he mention it at no point does it like like other than it's this undercurrent of women are choosy which like shock horror like that's every fucking rom-com since the beginning of time I don't know it's very it's very interesting I've been and I think what's more interesting is to me
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
than the actual series has been the response online. Keir Starmer saying it needs to be played in the House of Commons. We're going to stream this in every school up and down the UK. This is a cautionary tale. Yeah, very, very interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
It's a useful popular political football that people can kick about. Yeah. Okay. Going to the other side of the spectrum now, what can psychology teach us about how to choose a good partner? I read this phenomenal article from you a while ago and then reread it recently. How can it help us?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah. I wonder whether there is a... He's set himself an incredibly high bar. If it was Andrew Tate or some fucking guy from the right, would people be quite as up in arms? Or is it the case that you've sort of proselytized about how pro-women you are and I'm softly, softly and look at my feminine bona fides and... Oh, hang on. You weren't living up to them.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
So there's a degree of hypocrisy between his public position and his sort of private communication. That's interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Surely, though, if most people are mating assortatively, you have a much smaller sample size of people who have mated unassortatively.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
You're also not seeing how many couples that were from different educational backgrounds that got together, broke up. and that shouldn't have gotten together and sort of fluked their way into it. That's kind of an interesting one. What about personality traits, similarities in being extroverted, being introverted, propensity for low moods, blah, blah, blah?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
people with with dark triad traits that they seem to find one another interesting and they're welcome they're welcome to each other you know everybody everybody that isn't dark triad is just going please for the love of god date each other that's a great way that's a great way to kind of quarantine yeah get them out of the dating pool yeah yeah yeah and uh
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
What's that thing to be worthy of a worthy mate, be a worthy mate?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
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#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
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#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
I'll just give you your money back and get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom.
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#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
If authenticity is a big predictor for relationship satisfaction, is that a vote in the box for oversharing, for being quite transparent about sort of what's going on?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
If you don't have that image that you project, what you have is... young pretty famous guy with lots of access to women gets lots of nudes from women and is a bit duplicitous like that's not a story it only becomes a story I think when you have somebody who has positioned themselves as not that Interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
What about the role of when we think we can't do any better?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah, Buss has got this line about mates once gained must be retained. So for all that it sounds fantastic to get into a relationship with some smoke show, especially when you think about – and this is Seth Stevens-Davidowitz's insight –
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
lots of people are selecting their partners based on the same criteria that everybody uses, but that criteria is not predictive of long-term relationship success. So if you choose somebody that signals very high on a criteria that you know lots of other people are going to be interested in, like hotness, for instance, but if you take the genuine red pill, which is
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Hotness has basically zero predictive power in relationship satisfaction long-term, as long as you're relatively sort of physically matched in terms of attractiveness. What you get to do is tap into a blue ocean as opposed to a red ocean.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
You get to be able to find people who are going to make you happy over the long-term and have the added benefit of other people kind of passing them by a little bit more. Or the other approach is I'm going to choose somebody that everybody wants and but all people would fucking hate to be in a relationship with.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
And I'm aware that there's like a ton of gray in between those two examples, but that is kind of the spectrum. Somebody that signals something everybody is after, but that's not predictive of long-term relationship satisfaction, high competition, low happiness.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
And then on the other side, you have somebody who signals things that genuinely do predict relationship satisfaction long-term, but that most people don't realize. You see that, you tap into that, and you actually get...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
I had a tie to Shiro on the other week and he was talking about, uh, openness, openness to experience and saying, you basically want someone that's moderate or low. Um, because as soon as you get above moderate, you're into sensation seeking and sensation seeking turns into, well, why don't we make this relationship open? Well, Or why don't we, you know, like the waiter's kind of hot.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Why don't we like add him in this evening? They're more tempted to stray. And I think it will be correlated with a bunch of other stuff. I'd heard you say before that impulsivity, dismissiveness, aggression, and being flighty and unreliable in addition to physical attributes like tattoos or piercings and so on are all indicators of sort of potential future mistreatment in a relationship. Why those?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Why that suite of physical and mental traits? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah. What about other red flags, managing emotions, guessing game, character assault, silent treatment, stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah. You know, Visakan Verasamy, do you know that guy? He's great. Yeah. Yeah. He's such fire. And he says, it's the lows, not the highs that make or break a relationship. Why do so many people divorce someone they thought was their favorite person? It's not really a mystery. It's mostly because good times are a poor predictor of how you'll handle bad times and the handling of bad times.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
It's much more important to the success of a marriage, but as a species and as a culture, we have not truly internalized this. It's also, it's the lows, not the highs, right? That make a relationship. Like it's really easy in the medium term to get hyped about a person who seems to relate strongly in specific ways.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
But in the long term, it's really just how you handle misunderstandings and conflict and confusion and disagreement because insufficient good times may be a reason for a relationship to break up. But I would wager that it's far more
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
too frequent and too poorly handled bad times like the highs weren't high enough it's like no no the lows were too low yeah yeah and and the way that you i think reveal um
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
What is it that you think that's sort of allowing these guys to get in with women? Is it a degree of safety and security? Is it that this person doesn't seem like that much of a threat? Is it that they align with my political beliefs, that they're going to be more sensitive? Is he signaling long-term investment? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah, you said clarity and inquisitiveness as well. Inquisitiveness, I thought was a really interesting one, but those two together, that kind of goes back to the authenticity thing, right? Like this is how I'm feeling, even if it might make you upset or even if it might make me feel vulnerable or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
So I can, and I guess that's a counter as well to the person that gets so agitated that they're unable to say, I don't know what I'm thinking. I don't know what I'm feeling. I can't talk about this. I guess clarity, And inquisitiveness are kind of the opposite of that.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Louise Perry told me about that article the other week, and she uses this really wonderful example where she says, if you buy a lamp before you move into a house, it's quite easy to find a place within that house to fit the lamp.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
But if you've spent a couple of decades creating the perfect house, finding a lamp that fits all of your priors, as in your life is the house and your partner is the lamp, It's way easier to build a house around a lamp than it is to find a lamp that fits the perfect house. And a lot of the time, if people have got deeper down into their careers, they're not growing with someone.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
They're trying to slot somebody into their existing growth. And you're more sort of cemented and sort of, I guess, in some ways stagnant. Like you think you know what you like. You don't develop what you like in...
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
uh partnership with another person you're trying to see will they fit this thing and this thing has become increasingly more complex increasingly sort of grander and bigger and and and uh i i'm less capable of being changed so yeah i thought that was a another interesting twist on that essay
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah. There's a question of, well, why is this restaurant got no people in it? Like if this restaurant was any good, it would be, it would be sold out. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, uh, flying the flag for both me and you, two people who, uh, maybe should have been married before we are. Um, uh, I think.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
And retrospectively, what you get to look at is what did I prioritize at what stages of my life? And there's certain people, at least I've realized this since being in Austin, who if you've got a lot of kind of upward mobility and if you've got things that you really want to do in the world,
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
you end up, or at least those people seem to be very, very good candidates for massive fucking midlife crises. Because what you end up with is this unrequited, unfulfilled lack of validation from the world. For me personally, And I had to give up so much of me in order for the world to, in order for this relationship to happen.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Um, but then on the flip side, you know, there's this, I asked you to send me that, uh, free press article earlier on. And I think it's a really, really good synopsis, which is, uh, do not mistake side quests for the main story and just side quests, uh, things like, you know, brunch with the girls and, and Vegas with the boys and, um,
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
the parties and the career and all the rest of the stuff like the main quest is the person that you're going to spend the rest of your life with because a great career in a shitty marriage results in a pretty shitty life but an average career and a great marriage results in probably a pretty fucking awesome life So ensuring that you get the priority of those the right way around.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
And then on top of that, all of the other stuff that people, I mean, you've seen the stats around why Gen Z say that they don't want to date, like just not ready, want time to work on myself. It's going to get like why women don't want to have kids, like can't wear cute heels. Like, you know, there's a lot of reasons. Those are side quests.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
I think there's a good argument to be made that the place that you live and the job that you do isn't a side quest. It's certainly one of the main storylines, but wearing cute heels or like fucking Vegas with the boys does definitely are side quests. So yeah, ensuring that you stay on the main mission.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Fuck. Yeah. Rob Henderson, ladies and gentlemen, Rob, you're awesome, man. Where should people go? They should read your writing because I read it every single week and then shamelessly repurpose it on my own newsletter. A lot. Where should people go?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Damn right. Rob, until next time. Appreciate you, man. Thanks, Chris.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
There was an interesting debate that you highlighted that I totally hadn't seen, which is a lot of men, especially sort of red-pilly men, would use evolutionary logic to explain how somebody like Sisson is sort of wired to sleep around with lots of women, but
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
the same evolutionary logic also explains about why women who had been scorned by a guy like this would use gossip and venting and interpersonal attack as a way to shame them and to also ward off other women. So I think you said, this isn't a bug in the system. This is the system.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
It's interesting how, if that's correct, and if it is this unspoken price enforcement mechanism to try and demotivate the high-value men from sleeping around, that this is kind of the opposite of a tragedy of the commons, right? Because only one woman... is going to be with him at least at one time, right?
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
It's a very, very small portion of women that are going to get to date Leonardo DiCaprio, but a very large portion of women who are shaming him.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
So, you know, you kind of got this huge contribution, a lot of women saying, this is very, very much bad behavior, but how many of them are actually going to benefit from the enforcement of men going, ah, maybe I shouldn't go full Huberman pilled on this one. I might, you know, I might, I might just play it safe.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
He better not behave like that and trade me up for some 21-year-old. So I had this idea looking at sort of the rise of sneaky fuckers, the Harry Sisson sort of thing of the world. I wonder whether the increase in, I don't know whether we're seeing an increase in that, but it wouldn't surprise me if we are.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
I wonder whether that's a counter to the growing sex ratio imbalance of socioeconomically successful women compared to men. That this is a way for men to begin to level the playing field of maybe not earning quite as much as their female counterparts and maybe not being quite as educated as their female counterparts. That they can't show up in the typical sort of protector provider role.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
So maybe they can get in there with like procreator propagandist. I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want
Yeah, you wrote about men floundering, women most affected. I love that framing, dude. I've got one that I want to give you in a second, which is even more spicy. But men floundering, women most affected was basically an explanation of sex ratio hypothesis, right? Mm-hmm.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Why do men have a bad reputation with emotions, do you think?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah, I think you're right. We don't exactly have fantastic emotional role models as men.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Hey, listen to this. You suck. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Actually, yeah. Let's go back from that one more. This is a better starting point. How do people know if they have a problem with their emotions?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Exactly. who's that who's the guy that used to be like ah and then would hit his wife like pretend to hit his wife on like some sitcom who is that american guy i'm not from this country i don't fuck i don't i don't think that's i think that's before my time i'm not sure very well maybe yeah you know it was the 50s it was a different time the hands were softer
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
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#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
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#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
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Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to start selling today. Yeah, it's funny, the desire, the masculine urge to try and reverse engineer emotions mentally and be like, I must be able to think my way out of this. Is this a thinking problem?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Um, so yeah, I think the role model of the kind of bumbling, unfeeling, largely useless, semi-useless kind of dedicated, but emotionally out of touch man. Uh, I think that's got a lot to play into it. I think as well, you know, it's, it doesn't speak to many of the ways that men like to think about being masculine. I think one of the most common, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Okay. Teach us what to do with that. How do people get started to feel their feelings?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
contributing factors when you ask somebody what is a masculine man would be mastery over their emotions or kind of a reliable and controlled emotional state, some version of that. And Feeling Feelings seems kind of at odds with that. So it's not particularly well portrayed archetypally in the culture. I don't think it is a...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
particularly proud thing either internally or rewarded externally by society you know for all that the world says we need men to open up more and talk about their emotions no one has any fucking idea how to deal with a man that's going through a very intense set of emotions because they're either very aggressive or even worse than that very soppy and you go I have no most of the time people have no idea how to deal with that it's scary
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
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#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
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#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
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Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Can you just take us through that process, those four steps again?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And then if you try to do that and you see as you're unable to regulate somebody else disgusted at your lack of regulation, you think, okay, I'm never doing that again. So yeah, maybe some more elements there.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
where do people get stuck the most and how do they get stuck the most during this process?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Talking about maybe the other side of the fence, energetically, from an emotion standpoint, stuff like sadness, anxiety, shame, depression. Is there a different way that guys should think about trying to feel those?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Let's talk about the anvil one.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Just on a point there, I think a lot of people will think, when no one's died, why would I be grieving? How does grief show up in ways that we might not realize it?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It needs to be done relationally with somebody else. Relationally.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Because it's denial. Because outwardly, the guy that has gone and worked through all of his shit and has completely transcended and included and integrated and alchemized all of the different things inside of him to the point where he can feel it but not let it out until it's the right time and do it in a controlled manner and regulate and so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So bizarre if you're sort of deep in a breath work practice like that. And there's just this thing starts bubbling up and you're like, what the fuck are you? Like, why are you, what are you doing that you're here? I'm just breathing. I do this all the time. I literally have done this since I was born. And this very particular pattern of it has caused this reaction to happen.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And the guy that's just fucking suppressing it, like they appear as the same person. I got to make a comment on what you said about guys that open up to their partners. This is a very common, it's like a trite talking point online about like, can you be vulnerable with your partner? So on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
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#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
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#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
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#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
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Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
common or most likely criticisms that I'm anticipating is that men have this desire to be consistent and reliable. And there is an expectation of mastery of your emotional state among men, from other men, from your partner. How do you think about balancing that desire for mastery with a desire to not suppress emotions. People don't want to feel ashamed about the things that they feel.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And what you've said, there's this great story about Tiger Woods where he had a bunch of inefficiencies in his swing. And he was good, but he was never going to be great. And one of the problems was that he had, I think it was too much movement on his backswing, and he needed to, from the ground up, rebuild his entire swing. But the problem is, he wasn't even starting playing golf from...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
yeah he had to get rid of all of the habits that he had brought in and make himself purposefully worse before he was then able to reach the next level that he was going to go to while also having all of the expectation on him and all of the comparison internally and externally of his previous performance and oh my god he's fallen off he's gotten worse etc etc um yeah i imagine that
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I want to propose kind of a radical solution that I was dating a good bit last year after a breakup.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It's a tough sell to get guys to think, okay, so you're saying that I'm going to actively make myself worse for an undetermined, as yet undetermined, perhaps sort of infinite amount of time, and it's going to suck. And I'm not going to be rewarded for it until who knows how far down. It's like ordering an Uber and having no idea when it's going to arrive. Yeah. You know what I mean?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
and uh i did this a couple of times with different pathways kind of like an emotional shit test very early on during the dating process because what you want to see is if this person and this is the same for women too like can this person handle a outside of the sort of bound of what would be typically acceptable or typically uh expected perhaps not acceptable um Can they handle that?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Guys have a fear of the loss of power. Yes. I'm powerful. I'm competent. I'm in control. And this thing stops all of those from happening. Correct. Correct.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It stops you from feeling powerful, at least in the first instance, as you start to go through things. I'm aware that the gold standard is to get to the stage where you use your emotions to inform you so that you're significantly more powerful. I mean, my reframe around this very much is a white belt at feeling feelings and the hopeful...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
wide-eyed desire to like actually make it to somewhere appropriating the top of the mountain um is that i i don't see denying yourself of your weaknesses to be any kind of strength correct that suppression isn't strength that denying yourself of it of what it is that you're feeling isn't strength and that true power to me is feeling the thing and being able to show up anyway.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Uh, like that's what courage is. Um, and the goal that everybody's trying to get to is to like, you know, like fucking experience the fullness of the, the, the, the human, the human world, uh, your inner landscape, uh, and not to nerf your way through this like weird self-programmed autism and a desperate attempt to, you know, like be able to fucking increase your, on your, Profits by 20%.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And even another question on top of that, who knows if you wouldn't give a single shit about the profits given that you now have direct access to the thing that you were trying to do in any case, which is an enjoyable emotional state.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So sending psychology articles or something and seeing if they've got anything to say back. It's like, that's something that's important to me. And maybe you're in the early days of the flotation stage and whatever, whatever, like sending a SciPost article about the neurobiology of depression is like not that.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It's like, hey, this is probably going to become important to me to be able to have a conversation about because it's shit that I'm interested in. So let's see. And the same thing, at least for me, that worked really well was talking about emotions early on. Like, hey, I'm going to open up. It doesn't need to be your chronic athlete's foot and the trauma around that or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Talk to me about that explaining, expressing dichotomy.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I remember you saying we never really encounter the world. All we experience is our own nervous system. And yeah, if you're not getting to the point where you can tap into what you're feeling... you're even another step away from experiencing the world.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
But my point being, if you're dating somebody, I think that over-indexing, if you're the sort of person that really wants to do the whole emotional openness thing... I think over-indexing on that as soon as possible, once you've got past the very, very early stages, just allows you to see, okay, is this person able to, like, sit with this? Are they able to hold the space? And if they can't, sweet.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
What are some of the ways that people can notice or protect themselves from slipping back into the cerebral world? Like if you've spent your entire life intellectualizing, reflecting your way through, you know, there's a four-step human process for me to, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
How can we stop our brain coming in and sort of clamping that down or explaining it away or coming up with some nice theory about it?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Like, I've learned. I'm not now three, five, ten years down the line opening up as all of these different videos happen. If a guy, like, once sheds a tear at the final scene of Interstellar or something, and the next day his wife leaves him for a fucking The Dude Next Door...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
um you kind of get this out of the way nice and early and ultimately what you're saying is like it's the problem of your partner if your partner can't fucking see you talk about emotions and open up you that relationship is supposed to be the safest harbor that you're ever going to have you should be able to deal with the darkest most difficult things in your entire life and for some guys they don't maybe don't have that much darkness but if you're a person that does i think that you need to try and find that out as soon as possible
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah. How much can men do all of this stuff by themselves? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
yeah sadly i am in a couple of group chats called iron sharpens iron which shows just how fucking basic me and the other guys that i'm with are no it's beautiful uh anything else to say anything that we haven't included here that's mandatory listening i mean i think there's just the the the statement i almost want to say the cliche thing which is like
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah, man. I mean, I know I feel like there is a corner being turned. It's so hard because the thing that you're working on is the most important thing in the world while you're working on it. So I'm seeing this everywhere.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You know, I'm seeing the CBOM meme reels of him talking about how he's embraced this thing and it made him a better champion and better father and a stronger man and all the rest of the stuff. And You know, Alain de Botton's fucking following me around the internet at the moment, all emotionally. And the same with your stuff. But I don't know. I don't care. Frankly, I don't care.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I think that it's an optimal way for a particular subset, perhaps a majority, perhaps all men. I'm not going to say that it is. But I certainly know that for somebody that has a constitution that's like mine and that I'm not that much of an outlier, there must be a non-insignificant cohort of people that also do it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
that it's better, that life's better when I'm trying to do that, when I'm trying to work with emotions as opposed to against them, when I'm trying to actually feel my feelings as opposed to deny them, when I feel connected to the things that I do because there's a sense of resonance between me and it, when I'm not trying to explain away
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
what's going on in life because I can come up with some clever sequence of letters and sounds that come out of my face hole and then you leave the conversation thinking at no point in that conversation was I there I wasn't there in that conversation. I did this really cool dance or whatever. And everybody there was really impressed by the dance, I'm sure.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
But there was no part of me that actually got seen during that. And yeah, the full breadth of human experience is there for us to go through. And I'm interested in finding out what's on the other side of it. So I think that this is...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
maybe an important redress uh maybe a massive fucking error and we're going to look back and realize that uh you know the suppression thing was right all along but you can't you can't look at the state of the way that guys feel in the world and say that whatever is happening is optimal like the one thing that you can't do is defend the current system now i'm aware that this system has an awful lot of different inputs to do with socioeconomic status and their meaning in work and
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
what what's happening to sperm counts and testosterone levels and dating and online porn and video games and social media and like yep yep all of those things are in there too but everything should be on the fucking table like if stuff's not going well everything should be on the table including the psychological and emotional landscape that these guys are inhabiting and um yeah for me it's uh it's what i'm working on it's what i'm interested in i think it's
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I like the, I like the group that I'm a part of. I like being a part of people like yourself and like Chris, who I don't know, like fucking for the people that have got a massive problem with it, or for the people that don't think that it's sufficiently masculine, it's like pick any vector of masculinity that you want. And somebody from my friend group will beat you in it. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So if you want to play that game, if you want to play the shallow, like, my dick's bigger than your dick game, it's like, I've got a fucking army of dicks behind me. And...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Honestly, precisely correct. Yeah, I don't know. It just seems petty and juvenile and immature looking at kind of previous versions of what guys are supposed to be. And I understand the whole... Like, I keep seeing these fucking atrocious videos or memes or whatever of, like, my husband did X and I got the ick and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the rest of this stuff. I'm like...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And to be honest, I feel like the more that this happens, women should be fucking shamed for that. In the same way as guys who abandoned their partner because something happens on their side, some common error or challenge that women come up against, something like that. It's like...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
you suck as a fucking partner and you don't deserve to have a guy in your life and I can't wait for him to find someone that is going to support him and I can't wait for you to be alone until you realize this. So that's what I meant about the emotional shit test that you want to find out quite early, earlier than you think you should, whether or not this person can handle it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And if they can handle a little bit of emotionality when they don't have the buy-in, they don't have the... The investment, the conviction, the attachments, the dependency that bodes really fucking well for the future. And if you if you just see this like run for the hills thing, you think, well, great, you've been saved.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You've been saved from having to invest more time into somebody who's so emotionally immature that they can't bear to deal with a guy who feels things.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Your job as a girl is to find somebody that, if that's what you want, go and find it. I mean, I think it's an insane decision, but if that's what you want, go and find it. And as a guy, if what you want is somebody that you can grow with, that you can
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
bear the most difficult and shameful parts of yourself and heal them together with somebody and feel like this is home and that you're the roof of the house together, that you guys are safe underneath this roof that you've built together.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
you need to find out if it's a chick on a podcast that wants to you know be mistreated for a couple of decades before she bounces off into whatever next relationship she's going to do or if it's a Vienna or a Courtney Chris's wife you know who want to genuinely see their partner and um Yeah. Event, the sort of birds of a feather flock together type thing.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Like people will get what they deserve eventually, but you want to try and find out if you're getting what you deserve nice and early.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And you're not going to be able to share quite the same things that you can in a relationship because you just don't have the same underpinning of attachment in that same way. And yeah, man, you can have a... safe and numb existence for the rest of time or you can switch the color on the TV and start to actually experience things fully. Dude, I love you to bits. I adore all of your work.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You know that I do. Everyone needs to check out everything that you're doing. Why should they go?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Everyone needs to go and check it out. Until next time, dude. I can't wait. I appreciate you.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Where should people get started with sifting through them, feeling their feelings? Should we sift through them before we feel them? Do we need to think about them first? Where do we even begin on this journey? It's page one.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
There has to be some sort of blueprint, right? There's a worksheet from Andrew Huberman.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
This is going to be a wildly unpopular episode, except for perhaps amongst all of the girlfriends of the guys that need to hear it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Exactly. That would be a great point. If you are a guy that's listening to this right now and you didn't put it on in the car or around the house and your girlfriend's put it on surreptitiously in a desperate attempt to try and get you to fucking listen to it, please comment below because I want to know how many of you are being slowly psyoped by your girlfriend into listening to this.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
You say anxiety always lies. Always. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
I wonder how much of it is people giving a name which sounds way more pathological to something which is a normal part of the human experience, you know?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Right now, you can get 20% off and free shipping on the Beard and Balls bundle by going to the link in the description below or heading to manscaped.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom20 at checkout. That's manscaped.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom20 at checkout. Yeah, what's your advice for people who have a negative inner voice in that way?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
And then you mentioned this KIST, which is loving kindness meditation. How long were your sessions? How frequently were you doing them? How long did you need to do them for?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
And then you said you learned how to hook your thoughts to a different type of spiral. So it seems like the first step is to befriend the negative voice. Then it's to try and turn the volume down on that a little bit by putting some other positive voices in a little bit more.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Dig into that. What do you mean? Anxiety only ever goes up. It never reverses.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah. Talk to me about this tension between creativity and anxiety.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
How do you throw your own leg out of the bed?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
What are your favorite ways? I don't know how to activate my left versus right hemisphere. What are some of the proximate ways for me to try and get that to get started?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
That's unbelievably impressive.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Very interesting. Okay. So that's one way. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
What role do you think courage has when it comes to pursuing your creative purpose in this way?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
What if someone doesn't feel very creative or like they have much room for creativity in their life? How do you think about awakening your inner creative if it's something that's been hidden for a long time?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Right. So it's a battle of attrition, of boredom, to give yourself so little to do that you've got no other choice than to become creative. Is that what we're doing here?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
What else is there to say about interventions that you found successful for the perennially anxious person?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Okay, so you're using the social pressure of being around people who appear to have already done that work to help you to do yours.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah, I think my joke version of social pressure was talking about the way that mirror neurons work. If you hang around with happy people, you tend to be a little bit happier. If you hang around with sad people, you tend to be a little bit more sad. But yeah, whatever you want to call it, mirror neurons, social consistency bias, just… The vibe of the room. All of those things.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
So one thing I've got, I think about this quite a lot. I wonder whether mastering anxiety is a game of control or a game of acceptance. 100% acceptance. It does seem to be the more that you fight it, the worse that it gets. That's where that anxiety spiral, the anxiety cycle comes in.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah. I didn't know that you'd had autoimmune issues for such a long time. Can you tell the story of that?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Was that because of the impact? Was that because of the treatment? Was it because of being sedentary?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
This episode is brought to you by Function. If you've been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus and your performance.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. What would be your advice to someone that's going through a protracted period of chronic illness? I mean, you were bed bound for a very long time.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah. I mean, that's it's a special kind of living hell with even less happening. So it's like boring hell. Yeah. Well, how do you get through that stuff? And in retrospect, what do you wish that someone had told you sort of during that period of your life?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
world in which your body lives it can be quite trippy and it's worth doing so you learn to meditate what about when it comes to uh don't uh rail don't sort of fight don't have violence against the parts of you that are the ones that are struggling or the ones that are falling behind what else what else sort of have you come to reflect on about that period
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Self-expression is in journaling, just being able to get your words out in a relatively judgment-free way.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah. For the people, whether they're sick or not, what are the most common limiting beliefs that the people who you work with tend to have? I think a lot of the time when we look at our
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
inner landscape is kind of like a personal curse or blessing in some way but no matter what we think of it as unique to us and uh upon hearing the way that other people think or feel you realize that this is probably much more of a feature of being a sensitive human than it is a bug of being broken and you so i'm just interested in what those common self-limiting beliefs are
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
I'm interested in why, and I agree, I think it would have been very maladaptive ancestrally for our great, great, great, great, great grandparents to have been stricken with anxiety and been unable to move and unable to think and permanently worried about going outside of the cave. But it does seem so universal to the human experience in the modern world. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
How do you advise? I mean, this seems like such a basic assumption that people have about themselves. So much so that it's not even an assumption. It's more like the physics of their system. You know, the thermodynamics of the inside of their mind. What sort of wormhole do you need to break through in order to change that?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah, it's strange thinking about... Digging a little bit deeper and working out sort of who you truly are, what integrity looks like, because I think it's very easy to distract, swipe dopamine your way out of hearing that. That voice in the back of your mind, I did a lot of therapy last year. And one of the best things that my therapist taught me was pay attention to fleeting thoughts.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah, it's gorgeous. And I don't think she means fleeting as in flimsy or as in fickle, but fleeting as in quiet, but typically repetitive, right? It's the same thing that you've heard a few times over and over again.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah, it's great. Pay attention to fleeting thoughts. But the problem is... And I noticed this as I was heavily caffeinated in a car, just having finished an episode. I'm on Slack, but I'm taking a call at the same time. And then I'd get in and there's just this huge deceleration. Okay, now I'm on the cushion and...
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
It almost seems surprising to me to think that we weren't designed to be this way. It almost looks like we were the anxious creature, you know?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
let's see what happens for 50 minutes uh and it would be you know there would the first 20 minute kind of like meditation yes almost all of the overhead that you're paying is getting into the process of meditation which is one of the yeah disadvantages of only doing 10 minute sessions or 15 minute sessions pay all of the overhead to get into it none of the sort of profit of being in it um
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
And then, yeah, after a little while, fleeting thoughts would be a little bit louder. But it's just that comparison between how I was when I was going in and how I was when I was first there and how I was toward the end of the session. Before I got, I tended to sort of run out of gas. It's so funny. You look at 50 minutes and you think, I can't achieve anything in 50 minutes.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
And if you're 45 minutes into a therapy session, you actually think, yeah, I'm ready to be done now, typically. So it is a good length. Yeah. But yeah, just that quiet voice in the back of your mind isn't able to shout all that loud. And I get the sense that if you have got to the stage where it is shouting quite loud, it was quiet for a much longer time before that.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
And you could have learned this lesson probably half a decade ago. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Heck yeah. Martha Beck, ladies and gentlemen. Martha, let's bring this one into land. That was so beautiful. Where should people go? Do you want to keep up to date with all the stuff you're doing?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Okay. Yeah, good. I like that. That's cool. Martha, I really appreciate you. Until next time.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah, that's going to be a slow, long wait. So the main difference here between healthy fear and anxiety is the duration of it.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah, that's not the... So I'm wondering, how do you think our ancestors... Because people would look at the way a gazelle operates and think, well, that's not us. That's our nervous system. So how do you think humans would have dealt with this ancestrally?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Spoiler alert. Sorry about that.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
This interesting... cocktail between our brain's predisposition and our modern society's reinforcement of that i suppose yeah i It's an interesting one talking about anxiety because it's become so pattern matched. People have used, I feel uncertain or I am worried. And the term has sort of concept creeped itself out to encompass all of this.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah. Talk about what anxiety does to our abilities in the moment.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah. Very interesting. Uh, It's strange to think about how much anxiety sort of reshapes people over time. If you keep doing that, this way of seeing the world actually becomes your personality.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
You start to look for it. You start to look for the red car that you just bought, but it's the equivalent intersocially with all of the people that are around you.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
Yeah. Something else that I think everyone is very common with is getting anxious about your anxiety.
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
The story that you tell yourself about how you feel and your frustration at the story that you tell yourself. How do you come to think about the sort of fear of anxiety and the anxiousness is anxiousness?
Modern Wisdom
#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
How do you come to think about interjecting into that spiral, about putting the brakes on it?
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
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
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#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
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
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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
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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
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
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#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?
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
Okay, so is social exclusion and the need to belong, is that sort of one of the fundamental components of how bullying works?
Modern Wisdom
#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%.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
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#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
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Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
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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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
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#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...
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#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
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
So you're saying that another pandemic would be great.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Why would anyone want to think like Leonardo da Vinci?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So he was a canny operator then?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
First one being, I wonder how rare it is for people to be repaid financially, existentially, for the quality of their thoughts. Most people have what are commonly referred to as bullshit jobs.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
right um they have bullshit jobs and uh it's it's you know um something that maybe they're even like kind of fired up by it but it's not necessarily the most creatively demanding job in the world or maybe it is but it's creatively demanding some of the time not most of the time and uh that would have been you know you're hoeing the fields you're a surf in you know at 12 50 or something uh in europe like it's the same it's all the same so most people i think don't
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
generate their primary source of value from the quality of their thoughts. But the goal, I think, that most people are trying to get to is to be repaid for the quality of their thoughts. So what you have in Da Vinci is somebody who is
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I think optimizing for a position that many people want to get into, not necessarily everybody is into, but certainly if you get to the stage where you're trying to be creative, you're trying to come up with new ideas, you are paid for the quality of your thoughts, that on and off thing is really interesting. And then...
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
when you think about, well, the modern world has kind of robbed us of the ability to be off a lot of the time, because even when you're walking, the phone's in your pocket, you're listening to a podcast, the podcast is at two and a half times speed, you've got people coming past you, there's so much stimulus, et cetera, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
The opportunity to have a full switch off is super interesting and lacking, I think. And I think I'm right in saying the ancient Greek word for work was not at leisure, right? So work was an aberration and leisure was the set point.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
They're my patrons. Yeah, exactly. You need an automatic backpack. Shout out. How much, you know, I love Italy. I've spent a lot of time in Florence and Rome. I recently came back from Venice. You know, the period of time, Michelangelo, da Vinci, you know,
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Whereas now people kind of have this, I don't know, work purgatory thing where it just infuses... France just released this new bylaw that said that employers can't contact employees after 5 p.m. at night or on weekends in an attempt to kind of create a hard stop around this. But yeah, just that... Quality of your thoughts.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It's kind of a specific use case, but one that a lot of people I think aspire to and would like to get more of. And then on the other side, the sort of mismatch that we have with the modern world compared with maybe what would be better for flourishing.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Teaching people who have money to make money is playing on easy mode. Teaching people who don't have money to not make money is playing on hard mode.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Okay. Seven principles to think like Da Vinci. What's the first one?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
politically very interesting in italy how much did this sort of political landscape the cultural landscape of italy at the time do you think sort of shape who he was his opportunities the way he saw the world the places that he placed his efforts sure well he had to move because of political turmoil his tenure his original tenure in florence
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm so fortunate that I have the opportunity to do that 100 questions a day, three or four times a week for now, you know, six, nearly seven years. My friends may disagree when we sit down for dinner and they just want to chill out, but whatever. I had a drive. We went to the Mike Tyson fight.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
We drove back and forth from the Mike Tyson fight in Dallas, Dallas to Austin, so three and a half hours-ish, 200 miles. And the fight was... Frankly, shit. But the trip back and forth between me and my old housemate, Zach, was just... It's like my favorite thing to do. I'm locked. I'm going somewhere. So it's not purposeless, right? I'm locked in a box. And we...
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
went everywhere every single question that we could ask or listening to music he's an amazing musician I'm like oh so why what's syncopation explain syncopation to me and why is this thing and blah blah blah and then he gets to ask dude I I don't know I I understand that not everyone necessarily is has that innate drive
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
But it kind of blows my mind that that's not what everybody's trying to do all the time. Because it's just, it's the most fun thing. To me, it's the most fun thing.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It feels like, what curiosity feels like to me, it feels like being pulled, not pushing. So much of life, I think you're forcing yourself into it. You're finding a wedge. You're pushing yourself into this space. Curiosity is the opposite. You sort of posit a vacuum, and the vacuum sucks you forward. And I really like that. I very much do. You've got the 100 questions. I like that.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Is there anything else tactically to consistently sort of keep this ticker over across time? People can't do the 100 questions every day.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
All right, cool. That's the first one. Second?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Can you tell people about that?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Yes. Yeah. As with most things, man, it's the golden mean. You know, I really think there's something to sort of playing with the extremes as opposed to finding a balance in the middle. And this is just where I'm at at the moment. I think for a long time I tried to, you know, like I'm going to stay in shape mostly, but like a little bit of the time I'm going to let it off. I'm going to
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Be skeptical quite a bit and try to be more disagreeable, but I'm also going to have the open, warm-hearted thing going on. And that's, I guess, kind of optimal for relational stuff. You don't want to be bipolar in all of the things that you do. But when it comes to more strategic or structural stuff, how you build your life together...
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I think it's much easier to just go all in in one direction and then periodize what you do. So to move from the open-hearted curiosity thing to I'm going to scrutinize incredibly heavily the stuff that I've learned, and then I go back. Because trying to do both at the same time is like trying to creatively write whilst you proofread.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It's the top of the roller coaster.
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I was reading Seveneves, this great book by Neil Stevenson. And in it, they have to try and repurpose the International Space Station to become a colony for all of human civilization in like two years. And then they get up there. But you end up learning... Neil Stevenson's a beast. You end up learning a ton about orbital dynamics when you're up there. And it's really cool. And...
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
When you think just trying to intersect two things flat, like a car hitting another car, quite a lot of stuff has to happen in order for that collision to occur, but that's only on two dimensions. When you then not only put it into three dimensions, but put those three dimensions moving around a spherical object, it is so interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So they're talking about, again, the orbital dynamics, and they use the terms zenith and apogee. uh there you go and uh it makes me think about the exact same but now in a another dimension i'm with you man that's cool um what would you say to the recovering cynics uh who want to kind of let go of some of their worldly scrutiny and and uh sort of dark day thinking
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I love the idea of how's that working for you. It's such a ruthless question. Naval has one that's similar where he says, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
and um it's crazy when you think you know i i have a bugbear with cynicism not only because i find it in myself but because it's everywhere on the internet and a lot of all of my work goes out on the internet and it makes me feel disheartened because i i love what i do and i think that most other people that are sort of normal are into learning and developing and doing stuff so then when i see the outliers which tends to be a lot of sort of
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
more shitposty comment sections, thankfully not usually on this channel, but it's still really, it's just not cool. And it's crazy how tightly people will cling to a life that they ardently don't like. It's like, I'm the flag bearer for a life that I'm saying is shit, but for some reason I'm also defending it. I'm defending it at the same time. It blows my mind.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
This is the Viktor Frankl thing.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And it's like, you know, the time that I've spent with neuroscienty people like Huberman or whatever, Sam Harris, talking about how almost everything is positive destination, move toward the destination, track the distance between you and the destination, get positive reinforcement, move the destination again, positive, you know, it's this sort of like how a, you know, a cartoon snail moves where it goes like this.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Yeah. It feels like that. And I think we can get disheartened by the adaptation. Oh, how awful the thing that I previously only wished that I could have had the opportunity to say yes to is now something that I take for granted. And we sort of give ourselves, we like whip ourselves because we say, well, you should be more grateful. You wanted this and you got it.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And now you've fucking forgotten that you've even had it.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It's that line, also I can paint, that I just adore. You know, this sort of huge, illustrious list of things, war machines, battle plans, technology engineering, also I can paint. So did he see his artistic endeavors as kind of second string in some regard? Or was that him just playing to the fact that this guy probably needed war machines and curating to the audience?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
You know that idea of us all being connected, and I guess if people are deep into meditation, they'll know about sort of permanent, non-abiding, non-dual awareness, et cetera, et cetera. A more rational version of that, which I love, and I've just checked ChatGPT to make sure that it's still correct. So I asked the question, do we all breathe in particles of Julius Caesar's last breath?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It's likely that we all breathe in particles from Julius Caesar's last breath because of molecular diffusion and the fact that every breath contains 10 to the 22 molecules. While the fraction of Caesar's breath in any given inhalation is minuscule, the sheer number of molecules and the passage of time make it statistically probable that every breath we take contains some of those ancient molecules.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I mean, of all of those, of all of the things, for me, it's, I think, the little ticker in the back of your brain that knows when you did the thing that you should have done, that gives you that sort of, as the kids would say, ick or cringe, that sense of like, oh, fuck, like I shouldn't have done that. And I know I shouldn't have done that. And... adaptively, evolutionarily, what is it?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It's you thinking if somebody in the tribe saw what you just did or what you just thought, you would potentially lose status or you would maybe even be kicked out or killed in the worst situations. But functionally, what is that? Well, it's you being pointed toward a direction that's probably good for you over the long term. It's the same reason that we have this tension between
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
pleasure, enjoyment, and long-term contentment and meaning. It's a tension between the two. And a lot of the time, stuff that we do in the moment that gives us pleasure can be negative for us over the long term. And stuff that's positive for us over the long term is negative to our pleasure in the current moment. And I really think that much of the balance with this, the first step
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
is just realizing this is a tension to be managed, not a problem to be solved. There's no fucking equation that comes out the other end.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Yeah, yeah. Isn't it cool, you know, like so much of this, a couple of the things that you've mentioned there, wine, maybe you want a bit more, but there's also a bit of you that doesn't want a bit more. Like wine's more full, but not that much more more full. Dark chocolate's a better example of something where I've never, has anybody ever gorged themselves on dark chocolate? I don't think so.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It's like after a while, it's sort of been. It's so good too, that you're fulfilled. Correct. So I think there's two ways to sort of look at this temperance, maybe would say some sort of self-control. One is develop self-control, right? Is to actually have the ability to do the willpower thing. So that would be you being able to press the accelerator harder, right, of willpower. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
But the other one is taking a foot off the brake. And that would be choosing environments, friends, routines, lifestyles, food choices. Like the reason that everybody loses weight most of the time when they switch to something like meat and fruit, right, or carnivore, is that there's only so much ground beef you can eat before you're like, I'm fucking sick of this.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Whereas the taste design of going to McDonald's is significantly more palatable. So you're going to eat more. Anyway, okay, so...
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Okay. Curiosity, critical thinking. Next.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Yeah, it's this, again, another one of those balances. I like the idea of the sharpness, but there's also this sort of element of savoring, which seems, patience, kind of. I'm going to wait and see what's there. Or I'm going to take another sip, or I'm going to take another moment before speaking or describing or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
As a wine drinker, I imagine that the savoring thing is particularly important. Okay. Sharpen the senses. What's next?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So interesting. I've watched a number of videos, YouTube videos explaining it. I think it's a YouTube channel called Great Art Explained.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
no understanding of art or how it works and then you have someone who has to be some sort of art scholar or whatever anyway people should go and check out a great art explained and um they do maybe an extended one i think perhaps on the mona lisa and um yeah there's what you was talking before about uh the particular style to bring light out but wasn't that that was because of the number of layers that he used like this obscene number of like one layer one layer one layer
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Yeah, very good. Okay, okay. So, sfumato, embracing ambiguity and the unknown.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
There's a program for Mac, which is free, called MindNode. It's not quite... It's more tiered. So it's basically, how would you say, like nested bullet points, but presented visually. And it's super easy to use, which is the most important thing for me. And I love MindNode. So I use MindNode.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I haven't used it that much recently, to be honest, but I used it in the past when I was planning out talks and other bits and pieces. I think one of the... Certainly, if I was to lay an issue or a pathology at the feet of modern society, it would certainly not be that there's too much art or imagination. You know, it's very sort of left-brainy. It's very rational.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It's tied in with the cynicism thing. Yeah. How can somebody that thinks, this sounds great, I'd love to inhabit my sort of creative, imaginative, artistic, da Vinci energy more. What are some of the things that can help to sort of pull people out in that way?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
The drive that he has to do the things that he does, it seems to come from sort of quite a balanced place. You know, as you go around the Vatican or wherever else, there's sort of two, it's Michelangelo and da Vinci, Michelangelo and da Vinci. Like that's what the tour guides are telling you about. But it seems, at least unless I'm remembering it accurately,
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So that, fitness, looking after the body, looking after the mind, but there's the elements of grace and poise. Yes. What are those specifically? Because that, I think, to me, is a very different sort of word.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Michelangelo was very much like a conflicted soul, sort of very pessimistic. He had a dark dog that followed him around. It seems like he maybe basically kind of had permanent depression throughout his entire life. Difficult to work with, rambunctious, disagreeable. And you can see where I think the drive for that kind of a person seems to be easier
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Okay. And what's the final one?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Yeah, intentionality. Intentionalism is a word that me and a lot of my friends are pretty addicted to. Like doing the thing that you mean to do. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Michael Gelb, ladies and gentlemen. Michael, awesome. There's this new Leonardo da Vinci documentary that's coming out. I think it'll be out actually once this episode is done. So I'm sure a lot of people will be wanting to learn more. So I really appreciate your work and the many trips and pages that you had to go through in order to be able to glean these insights.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the stuff you do?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
to understand in some ways that he's got this sort of fervent need to prove himself for validation, to put his work forward because the external accolades will fill the internal void, hopefully. Da Vinci's much more difficult for me to work out how he's motivated to work so hard. Does that make sense?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Heck yeah. Appreciate you, Michael.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
What was Da Vinci like as a person? What was his demeanor?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Which are shows of love, right? They're hope. It's upward aiming. It's the greatest that we can be.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Show me the other side then. If that's the light side of Michelangelo, what's the dark side of da Vinci?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
550 years ago was sharing for all of humanity what what do you wish more people realized that da vinci had done you know people understand lots of the work the well-known stuff what are the uh early records or like the the underground hits that should have had more plays on spotify
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Yeah, so you've spent this time deconstructing, reading an awful lot of his work. How much of his work and notebooks and stuff were retained? Is there more lost than was kept?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Wow. Oh, so I mean 6,000 or 7,000 survived? Yeah, so even though a lot lost, still quite a lot to get through.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
What was a typical day like for him? Do you know what a normal daily routine was?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I hear that I've got you onto creatine and protein powders.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
That's interesting. How would you distinguish between lust-driving traits and companionate-driving traits? Lust-positive traits and companionate-positive traits?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
What actually causes the degradation of that or what causes that to transition into companionate love? I'm wondering whether somebody that was in an intermittent long distance relationship, perhaps that might extend out because it's an amount of time. Um, or, or something similar, maybe, maybe, uh, contact is more intermittent than you might think.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
So the familiarity as well also doesn't proceed as quickly. I'm trying to work out what the mechanism is, the ticking clock that occurs that transitions you from passionate to companionate love and, uh, whether there are certain ways that people can speed run through, uh, Not that you necessarily would want to, or ways that people could extend.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Not that you would necessarily want to do that either, but I'm just intrigued.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I wonder why people who take on some more of their partner's interests and stay curious, I wonder why that helps to extend. I mean, it's very good for keeping relationship longevity because it makes you become sort of more attuned with your partner. You're almost speaking the same language in one way.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
How do you know if you're in love with somebody as opposed to just liking them or lusting after them?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Isn't it strange that you don't get to choose who you fall in love with and you kind of don't get to choose necessarily who you fall out of love with? I suppose you can do things that are predictive. Again, you cannot expose yourself to people that you don't think you should fall in love with. You cannot expose yourself to situations and you can...
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
cut off at the knees issues, which will cause you in future to fall out of love. But the actual act of it happening, it's like being convinced that two plus two equals four. It's like, I can't unconvince you of that fact unless I unconvince you of that fact. And I kind of, it's not your choice to be convinced or unconvinced of something.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
And I kind of get the sense that love is a little bit like that.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Why do we like the things that we like in partners? How are we socialized into wanting the things that we do or inheriting the wants that we have?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Yeah, it really is. I wonder how many... Relationships, marriages, families even were born out of somebody falling backward into a lustful relationship. And before they knew it, they woke up with two kids and a dog and a marriage and a ring on their finger. Yeah. Yeah, at no point did it feel right to back out. You know, it felt good and then it felt okay.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
And then it didn't feel so good, but it was kind of more committed and you were in really deep and then stuff just kept progressing. And yeah, do you know what the Abilene paradox is? You're familiar with this? Please tell me. I don't think I do. It's a really cool idea.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
So Abilene Paradox, it's a situation where a group makes a decision that's contrary to the desires of the group's members because each member assumes that the other members approve of it. So it kind of explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots when they get together. So think kind of Emperor's New Clothes.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
An acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks that you want to attend. And you attend despite not wanting to because you think that he wants you there.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Or at a business meeting, someone suggests an idea that he thinks that the others will like, recruiting some spicy influencer as the face of the brand. And each other member has misgivings but assumes that the others will consider them bigoted if they don't agree. So everyone approves the idea despite nobody liking it. And I wonder...
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Okay, that's a very depressing way to begin a conversation about love. Look, it seems to me that I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this too. As fun as reading Sex at Dawn was, I don't think it's accurate. It seems to me that humans are sort of
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
how many Abilene marriages we've got where both partners have kind of fallen backward into this thing. No one really ever thought about it. Yeah, sure. The passionate love phase was great. And before you know it, you're in your forties with a couple of kids and you didn't actually ask for this.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
So I was at my best friend's wedding a couple of weeks ago. I gave a very successful best man speech as well, I think, which made him suitably uncomfortable. And I was... walking around outside. And it's the classic thing. I imagine that bridesmaids get this as well.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
You know, if you're a groomsman or a best man or whatever, one of the best men, the rest of the wedding, once all of the fawning has been done over the couple, is spent scrutinizing your dating life. And, you know, there's so...
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
And I mentioned, I said, like, I really am glad that I did the things that I did in my life to get myself to this point. But I also feel, you know, I feel... yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready to settle down. I'm ready to become a dad.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I'm excited for the prospect of starting a family and being a little bit less selfish and living for something more than just my own vapid needs for validation from the world. And one of the parents gave me a fucking awesome piece of advice. This is going to be seared into my mind for the rest of my life. So thank you. Shout out Zach's mom.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
She said, make sure that you fall in love with the person, not the institution. And I think what she means by that is you want to get married to the person because you want to get married to the person, not because you want to get married. Yes. And that's exactly what you're talking about.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
So, uh, always listen to the mother-in-law. Always listen.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
serially monogamous or monogamish something like that working on between two to seven ten year cycles with partners getting infants to the stage where they're able to remotely fend for themselves what's your perspective sort of uh anthropologically here
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
and not the checking off the box for the institution. And then be able to say the sentence, when you know, you'll just know, and be a total black box of advice that's useless to everybody else.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Correct. Okay, what should you look for in a partner if you want to improve the odds of finding enduring love?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Less, the answer, what traits should you look for in a partner is less, fewer traits.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Yeah. When you say return on investment, you mean how predictive is this of marital satisfaction?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
It's just when you ask a guy, how bothered are you about what your wife earns? How bothered are you about, maybe they would say education level, but I think what you're looking at With education level, it's sort of a proxy for intellectual capacity, curiosity, stuff like that. And yeah, sure, we can't judge those things immediately. So we use rough-hewn metrics.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
And from that, we sort of infer what this person is. Oh, my God, they've got a master's. They did a double. They did a double major in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. But yeah, you just... I think a lot of guys... I would be interested to know whether men are very, not ashamed, but are more likely to hide their desire for socioeconomic status in a woman than women would be for men.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Because women for men, it's cliche, and there's the fear of being a gold digger. But men for women, there isn't even an archetype for that. So I just think that's an interesting asymmetry.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I had Brad Wilcox on the show yesterday. He said that if a woman loses a job, there is no change in the predictive power for divorce. If a man loses his job, 33% increase in divorce. If a man wins the lottery... uh, no change in likelihood of divorce. If a woman wins the lottery, it goes up by, I think this was Norway or Finland or something like that. Hungary, maybe where that study came out of.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Um, look in, in some ways you could say that, uh, many women for a long time were, um, financial prisoners of their partners and, um, you know, the, uh, liberating them by a big windfall in one form or another, or, but the bottom line is that, um, women seem to be sensitive to resources in a way that men aren't.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
And that, to anybody that's ever studied mating, is the least shocking finding that we could say. And yet, if the wrong person got a hold of that particular segment of the podcast, entire swaths of Reddit would have a fucking meltdown.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Okay, so we've got those two at the top that are typical and interchangeable for men and women. What else on the traits we want that we probably shouldn't want before we get into the traits that we should want?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Dude, the best story around this, David Buss wrote The Evolution of Desire and he was telling me this story, this guy reached out to him and said, I wanted to thank you because your book saved my marriage. David said, oh, it's interesting. What happened?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Right. So avoid the psychopath, Machiavellian, narcissist as best you can.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
He said, well, you know, I've been happily married to my wife for a decade or so and everything's really great and I do love her, but I found myself getting attracted to other women. You know, I'd see an attractive woman walk down the street and I'd think, wow, she's hot.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Okay, what are some better traits that we should want?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
And I thought that that was an indication that there was something wrong with me or wrong with the relationship or wrong with my partner or there was an incompatibility And I read your book, and I found out that men especially have a reward circuit in the brain when we look at anything remotely sexual. A pair of rocks that kind of look like boobs to us, like, I'm in. Son of a bitch, I'm in.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Okay. Just briefly on that, how can people tell if someone is high? What is the sort of behavior of somebody that is high in neuroticism?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Tremendous. So I appreciate that. Think about how many better relationship outcomes are downstream from you being a bit more jacked over the last 12 months from me and Peter talking shit about how good creatine and protein powder is. The world is interconnected, Ty. everything is this big sort of mess.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Okay. So again, avoid neuroticism.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
There's also a degree of depth that you can have from that that people are able to see and empathize in ways, especially if it's been sort of alchemized neuroticism. Yeah, there's an additional level of depth which could maybe even be useful.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
And I realized that, oh, no, this isn't some early indication that there's a problem in my relationship. This is just... pretty effective, pretty old bit of my biology. Just making sure that I'm sort of keeping a weather eye on what the surroundings look like. Says marriage with the wife has continued to tick along perfectly fine. I don't feel guilty. I don't feel ashamed about this.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I feel like that's similar to what you're talking about.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Fascinating. Okay, just broadening out from personality, I mean, personality is an awful lot. What else should we be looking for in terms of green flags and red flags, trait-wise, behavior-wise, values-wise, life history, life future, et cetera?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
What do you say to the anxious or avoidant people? They go, all right, okay, I'll just be celibate then, will I, Ty? I'm a lost cause.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Is this why the in-laws matter in your opinion?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
What about life history, stuff like that, sort of what the breadcrumbs of how somebody has spent their time up until this point when you've got to know them?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I have been thinking about this a lot recently. The insight, it's far easier to avoid temptation than to resist it. And Brad Wilcox in his book, Get Married, he talks about there are certain high-risk environments that you can find yourself in if you're in a relationship. If you really want to be faithful to your partner...
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
What about similarity in personality? Should you be trying to find someone who's similar to you in that regard?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
You could say, well, you should love them so much that it shouldn't matter if you're in a nightclub drunk at 2.30 in the morning. And you go, yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe it shouldn't. But in the same way as I don't ever intend on becoming a heroin addict, but if I just left loads of heroin needles around the house and one evening I was bored, I'm like, eh.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
It's interesting that we don't rise to the level of the best partner. We fall to the level of the worst partner, best and worst, most optimal, most suboptimal, perhaps. You mentioned emotional stability there. David Buss must text me once a month reminding me about the importance of emotional stability.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I'd love to get your take on it because I know what his is, but how does that fit into what we've maybe spoken about already? How does it slightly differ? How does it present you?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
David's got this lovely idea around emotional stability. After some emotional perturbation of some kind, some dysregulating event, how long does it take a person to get back to baseline? If you are late for a flight, is that the rest of the holiday? Or are they over it by the time that you arrive at the hotel type thing?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Yeah, I think that's a lovely... Because all of this stuff, whenever I think about it, I think it's so... fascinating and so interesting, sort of in the abstract, but when it comes to functionally, what does this look like? How can you tell that, you know, unless you're going to get somebody to go and do a Hexico test or a big five or something, how are you going to judge this?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
You know, so I think that's very important. Another question, why do you think it is that people are drawn to relationships that are very tough, that from the outside look turbulent, difficult, challenging, the classic I can fix him meme. What have you come to believe about that?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
So, uh, yeah. Um, avoiding temptation rather than resisting it sort of environment design in that way, I guess like this relational environment design too, which is, Hey, look, I'm just not going to give myself the chance to become enthralled because I understand how, um, fast acting the lust system can be. And it just sort of kicks into high gear and you don't really know.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Do you reckon that's the same for sociosexuality? If you were the girl that was sleeping around a load in high school, you're still the girl that's sleeping around a load in the retirement home?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
It's interesting when you think about what people are doing when they first find a partner. They're kind of
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I get the sense, and you may tell me that my belief in personal growth and malleability is misguided and must be subdued, but you're trying to find somebody that is as close to the bullseye of what it is that you're looking for whilst making the decision rationally, before you get into passionate love, using evidence-based insights from somebody as educated as yourself, trying to find somebody that's close to the bullseye but also has...
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I would guess, as strong of a capacity to grow, to work on themselves, to be able to update their beliefs, the way that they operate as possible. And it seems like those two variables, how close are you? Where's the starting point? And how capable are they of running and maneuvering towards something that is more healthy?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Radical honesty, radical painting. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
You've got to be dead ass committed if you are going to actually do anything. I mean, yeah, you're right. I think the way to look at it is these forces, personality, whether it's infant upbringing, genetic predisposition, time, place, confluence, nature, nurture. whether it's personality, whether it's attachment style, whether it's values, whether it's ideological belief, all of that stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
So yeah, I very much think, um, designing your lifestyle and thinking carefully about what you expose yourself to is probably a pretty smart idea.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
No matter which of those you're playing with, it is a marathon to try and get that to be nudged. And that's where the 20%
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
sits right for the most part uh these are probably i imagine there's not many people that fluke themselves into lowering the neuroticism it's probably you know the people that listen to podcasts like this one you know the the uh insecure overachieving personal growth maximizers uh who are really sort of trying to better themselves within the world they're thinking very carefully they're very reflective um
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Look, dude, I hope that you've had your creatine this morning because I've fallen in love with your work. Dr. Shannon Curry, a couple of weeks ago, introduced me to you. And I think your stuff's so great. You know, this real evidence-based, science-backed look at relationships, attachment, love, what it is, what predicts effectiveness, red flags, green flags.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Okay, so I can fix him. Probably not, darling. Why else are people drawn to relationships that are tough, turbulent, challenging, stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Why? So is it us trying to salvage, close a loop, fix sort of a childhood wound? Is that what's going on?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
What are some of the common manifestations of how that would present itself? And then what about if somebody finds the opposite of that and why are they less attracted to those two?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Why do people have a difficulty in envisioning their romantic future?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Why is it that we're not drawn? So I understand we have this sense for completion. We go back to the absent parent surrogate now in a partner who doesn't show us love in the way that we wanted or whatever other compensatory mechanism we have.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Why is it that the opposite of that, somebody who does show us love, why is it that we're not drawn to the thing that solves the wound as opposed to reopens it?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
That's fascinating. I don't know whether, so I understand consistent than right. It almost seems like consistent than happy. Or we would rather, because it's we're proving ourselves right, right? I am the sort of person who is inherently unlovable. I am the sort of person who people eventually are going to leave if they get to see the real me.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
If I expose myself to somebody too much, then they're going to use that against me or they're going to find me totally disgusting or unspeakable or shameful or whatever. Therefore, I'm going to do things wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
which engendered that to happen so that I have this continuous sense of self because, yeah, we would rather have our inner fears proven correct than we would a novel sense of happiness that threatens our own sense of self-identity.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Have you got any idea with that? I'm sure that there's probably no, it's a very amorphous question, but how long somebody needs to sit in a new self-image, worldview, set of personality traits to, for that to be who they are as opposed to the old version of them? Are they more likely to relapse into the newer version or the older? Have you got any idea about longer is better, I would imagine?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
timing and randomness play a pretty big role in love uh you know i i saw her across the room and if only i'd not left with my friend who wanted to get a taxi i wouldn't for that you know one call to not irish goodbye it i decided to be there and we met and so on and so forth uh is it is there such a thing as optimizing serendipity when it comes to luck in love
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I mean, me and David both have talked about this so much.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
that's the single best bit of advice that i can i mean look i'm i'm also i'm 37 and unmarried so what the who the fuck what the fuck do i know but um i abstractly i can tell you exactly what you should be doing uh do as i say uh something something um you need to inhabit places that have people like the person you want to date in right like that's a that's Obviously, it's pre-selection.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
You have a set of filters when you go to online dating. It's crazy that we're having to use online dating as the example for this. And this is how you take the app out of the app and you put it into the real world. And you're really into physical fitness. You're really not into someone that gets up super early and is going out endurance running.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
It's like, well, a run club is probably not the place to find someone. Or, you know, you're not really into going out partying all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
So, yes, that's a phenomenal first one. What next?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I suppose when you layer on top the hormonal neurochemical cocktail of being in passionate love as well, that accurate prediction of anything pretty much goes out the window.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
The alternative is that you have to spend the remainder of your relationship editing yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Yeah. So inhabit places that have people like the partner that you're looking for in, be unapologetically yourself. That being said, you also do need to match that with a degree of ability to grow because being unapologetically yourself, like maybe you're a chronic farter, like being unapologetically yourself, we have to have a degree of decorum here.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
We have to understand there are sort of objectively worse and better ways to exist within a relationship. And
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
It's interesting, this battle that we have between the sort of bottom-up heart, how I feel, spark, love, lust, liking, and top-down, what it is that I know about what's good for me, avoiding the wounds in the past. And I think this tension between cognition and intuition is very prevalent when it comes to relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
As opposed to seeing it as wanting signs.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Yeah, Alain de Botton's got this interesting insight where he talks about people... People sometimes change, but rarely in a relationship and never when we ask. And I think he's sort of pointing at the fact that heartbreak is really one of the only catalysts that cause most people to make changes.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
And it sort of goes back to the I can fix him meme of maybe he can fix him, but he's probably going to fix him after you break up.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I fixed him. Yeah. It's one of the most ruthless things that I ever heard a friend say about a girl that he actually didn't get into a relationship with. He was going to, and he sort of bailed out. And he said, what did he say? said she'll be amazing after a divorce, uh, was his insight. He was like, she's, someone needs to step in and refine this rough rock into a diamond.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
And there's a lot of raw materials there, but he's like, I'm not doing it. So yeah. Yeah. Good.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Watch me dance through this minefield. I'm not going to trip any of the tripwires. I've got it. That's right.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Yeah. Good stats, nerd researcher man. Don't apply to me. I'm the main character in my life. Go fuck yourself. Ty, you're amazing, mate. I literally could keep going for hours and hours. I want to bring you back. I've already said to the guys to bring you back in July. We haven't even touched on within a relationship, developing values, the sort of habits, behaviors, all that sort of stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Heck yeah. Well, yeah, for anyone that wanted 30 seconds, they've got like one hour, 50 minutes more, 50 minutes, 51 minutes, 30 seconds more than they anticipated. Where should people go? They want to check out the stuff that you do.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Heck yeah. Ty, until we speak again later this summer, I appreciate you, mate.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I want to do a real full run through today.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Wildly irritating. I just love the way that she slurps her tea, and then that's the sound that makes you want to tear your own eardrums out only a couple of years later.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Awesome. Okay. Happily Ever After. How come it's so hard to find?
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
I mean, this is exactly the same as what I just said. It's easier to avoid bad temptations than it is to resist them. So I think you should be careful who you let yourself fall in love with. You should see...
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
Um, you know, I mean, even maybe from one week of spending time, I have a friend that went and spent, I think, 10 days, this sort of, you know, whirlwind romance, spent 10 days with this woman. And then at the end, both of them are, and they're happily married now and it's sweet. But, you know, you think, God, 10 days, 10 days, you're telling me that I can go from totally or relatively happy.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
rational, functioning human who can do cost-benefit analyses, who can observe red flags, who can plan their future, who can prioritize themselves, make their needs known to a useless blob of serotonin-less, dopamine-fueled sex hunger with one person. And here's the fucking wild thing. with no ability to perceive other mating options.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
That's the other thing that passionate love does, which I don't think many people realize. And again, it's a huge... price, cost, risk, maybe that people go through, which is you are essentially unable to see other viable mating options, which means you will stay in a relationship which is mistreating you, which is not good for you.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
You will be more scared of leaving one, which is unsatisfactory, no matter how short of a period of time it is, because just the way that your mating mind works is you have shut off other mating options. And that's real functional if you're about to make babies, but it's not so functional if your relationship sucks. So you're right. It's not just cost-benefit analysis.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
It's also you're unable to observe the market, right? You're not having to force yourself to avert your eyes. Your eyes are never strained. You're just locked onto your partner.
Modern Wisdom
#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life
of a state of arousal for any human to maintain just do a little bit more of a primer for the people listening passionate love system companionate love system transition between the two um how how people feel how they interpret and misinterpret that kind of journey
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
How do you dig behind a behaviour, given that it's quite hard to... We're not crystal balls to ourselves. We don't know why we do the things we do all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Not musical taste, just in the career choice. You've got the hair. You had a flourishing career as an Indian Bon Jovi. I look where I ended up. I know. Writing books and fixing people's health.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
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. Each grab-and-go stick contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no coloring, no artificial ingredients, or any other junk. Proper hydration isn't just about getting sufficient water in you.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
It's about having the right number of electrolytes to use the fluids that are inside of your body. You might not be tired. You might not need more caffeine. You might just be dehydrated. And proper hydration requires electrolytes. Best of all, they have a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So you can buy it and try it for as long as you want.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
And if you do not like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Now, 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. Just going back to the perfectionism thing, regret. Obviously, people are going to do things. We get toward the end of our lives. We grow up. We accumulate regret.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Do you think regrets are a form of perfectionism in that way? Yeah. If only I could have threaded the needle perfectly. If only I could have danced through this minefield without triggering one of them.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Yes, I like the idea that it's very equanimous to think I did the best that I could with the information that was available at the time that I made that decision. I can't go back and change it. There's no usefulness to me having that. I think maybe regret, this sort of sadness or wistfulness or nostalgia, wishing that things had been different.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Perhaps that was a slightly imprecise bit of language that I used. What I'm trying to refer to is that you will always have this open loop in the back of your mind that you wonder whether things could have been better, whether or not you could have done something just a little bit better, or whether that was the right decision, new job or a relationship, or...
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
go to the gym or go to the theme park or whatever it is that you should have done because opportunity cost demands that you do one thing to sacrifice another. And because you don't get to run life back and split test it, work out if the theme park was better than the gym or the gym was better than the theme park, you're always going to have that what if in the back of your mind.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
So for me, this was a way for people maybe to arrive at probably not too dissimilar of a situation as yourself, which is, look, some degree of... wistful uncertainty about the past is inevitable. Holding onto it is pointless because you don't get to do two of those. You don't get to run it back again. And when you're faced with the decision, when you think, which route am I going to go down?
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Consider which regret you could bear living with as opposed to which decision you couldn't bear living without.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Look at how lacking you are, a person that had two decades less of experience.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
How do you ensure that you're not just telling yourself a pleasant just-so story? Because it sounds all well and good, something bad happens and I say, that didn't bother me, and yet my heart rate's at 110.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
I think that that's the way that divers, free divers, often pass out underwater. They don't gasp and breathe air in. They just are going and going and going and then lights out.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
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
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
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 my sleep. Momentous are literally unparalleled when it comes to rigorous third-party testing. What you read on the label is what's in the product and absolutely nothing else.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Best of all, they have a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. And if you do not love it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Right now, you can get 20% off everything site-wide plus 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.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. You mentioned morning routines and stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
What is your perspective on non-negotiables now?
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
You've negotiated the non-negotiables away.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Like me. Adopted.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
No one wants to be that. Never go full Chris Williamson. Do you get what I'm saying? I do. It's something that I've spoken about for a long time. The fact that you don't get to pick parts of people's lives. You have to take the whole aspect.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
uh george mack has this great idea the the difference between call of duty and war says you look at a lot of people's lives and you assume that that's what you get to do but you're just watching them in the lobby of call of duty dicking about then they actually you get and see their life and it's ieds and it's dust and it's re like uh reloading weapons and it's like it's war it's not fun and um for the most part i think
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Yeah, we try to curate what we put out because we don't want to be a buzzkill, because we don't want to come across as somebody that isn't enjoying their lives. But yeah, I think, you know, we spoke about this last time.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
I'm kind of interested in this line that you've hinted at a couple of times, which is sort of between busyness and success, the sort of lineage between the two and this sort of need that we have to feel important and how a busy calendar can sort of be a hedge against existential loneliness, right? What have you come to believe about busyness and success?
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Yeah. I mean, the sacrifices that you make in order to get to the place that you want to be is... And it's an interesting one to think about what you need to do in the beginning. You're right. If somebody has 200 pounds to lose, having some non-negotiables might not be too bad of an idea.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
But if you're a little bit further down your journey, you're still whipping yourself into submission, even though you're already performing at a pretty high level. Why did you put all of that work in in the first place? Was it not so that you could actually enjoy this a little bit? Was it not so that you could be happy?
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
And I think that, you know, maybe this is part of the sort of phases of podcasting generally, or whatever you want to call it, personal development information on the internet, that... Lots of people were probably first introduced to this type of content about 10 years ago, within sort of five to 10 years ago. And there's this huge, big generation of people that have moved through it.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
And I do get the sense that the work until your eyes bleed, optimize every second of your life thing is getting a little old. Now, I've certainly found for myself that I'm less sort of compelled by that. I'm much more compelled by trying to find balance, by trying to find enjoyment in the things that I do. by optimizing for fun as opposed to just success.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
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Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
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Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
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Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Right now, you can get Function's expert blood work analysis and bypass their 300,000-person waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
you're doing a lot right i've sent it this year yeah that's one way to put it uh look i but you may be aware that you're making a trade-off at the moment i certainly am and uh you know at the moment no family no kids etc uh that's not always going to be the case uh so i have in many ways a competitive advantage and other people do too uh that if you don't have that many responsibilities then perhaps you can we had a lot of questions at the q a's the live shows i did in australia and in some in london as well you know i'm
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
22 and I really want to achieve a lot in the world but I also know that sort of life balance and all the rest I'm like bro you can aim for life balance when you're like in your 30s fucking end some worlds for a decade like go and see how much chaos you can create and and see how fast you can grow and see how much stuff you can do and maybe not everybody is built for that maybe you could say well you could front load all of the enjoyment early on I don't know but for me uh I am
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Why do people not let go?
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Yeah, priorities didn't exist.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. I mean, do you find it a difficult position to hold as a doctor writing a self-development book to say, don't trust the experts?
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
We'll get back to talking to Rangan 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... Nutanix, which is why I've partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
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. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do backend inventory management.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
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. 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 modernwisdom, all lowercase.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
That's shopify.com slash modernwisdom. to upgrade your selling today. In some ways, I would say that we're social creatures and a lot of what we're doing is image management, optics management, reputation management.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
And that means that a untrue and knowingly untrue and knowingly untrue to you accusation from somebody that you fear could be believed by other people, I think that's a salient thing to get angry about, even if you don't believe it yourself. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
That's interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Yeah, I like that. It's interesting, the line between taking offense and complaining in life, the great British pastime that it is. And I love an insight from you, which is complaining indicates that you're surprised at sort of the natural order of life. I've got this Thomas Sowell quote, like fucking tattooed on the inside of my eyelids at the moment, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
And I Yeah, the fact that a complaint, for the most part, is you railing against the fact that you haven't been able to fully optimize life and that you didn't expect it to be smooth sailing. There are inevitably going to be obstacles and things for you to navigate around and issues. That is the natural order of your day-to-day experience. Your complaint is you just saying, look, life again.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, ladies and gentlemen. Rangan, I appreciate the hack out of you. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything that you're doing.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
There's this interesting Jeff Bezos quote where he says, when the data doesn't agree with the anecdote, I usually trust the anecdote. The point being that I've had this in my mind for a while. If you can't explain the mechanism of how something works, the fact that it works is derogated quite quickly. It's like, look, that's not the particular way that this thing is supposed to occur.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
And you go, that's fine. But this person's outcome is exactly what they were looking for in life. They lost weight or they improved their mood or the lift went up in the gym or whatever it might be. That is the thing that you're trying to achieve. I don't think we need to overcomplicate what the inputs are. And we get so caught up on that.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
It's interesting, this sort of treating yourself like an experiment approach, holding the strategies that you use quite loosely, being prepared to move after you've had them either proven or disproven. That seems like a good approach. But yeah, I mean, health advice is pretty confusing, I think, in the modern world. More information than ever, but even less clarity.
Modern Wisdom
#887 - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change
Yeah, Rory Sutherland said yesterday, to economists, price is a number, but to customers, price is a feeling. And it's basically the same thing with medicine, right? That you can show me where this appears, show me the RCT on this, show me the double blind, whatever. And you go, I don't have that, but I do have, I felt better when I did such and such.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
How might child rearing look different if parents were educated in evolutionary theory? Well, I think quite a few ways.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Older people don't eat that much. I guess they need care eventually at some point, but I would imagine that that care wouldn't have been very protracted. The end-of-life stuff I imagine isn't that sophisticated ancestrally. Um, right, exactly. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Okay, so grandparents, pangenerational raising, alloparenting, stuff like that, mixed age play, younger boys and girls learning from older boys and girls, roughhousing, understanding how status hierarchies work, getting to expedite learning because the older kids know more and they get to teach the younger kids as opposed to everybody kind of moving and discovering at the same age. What else?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
How else is modern parenting out of sync with how we revolve to raise children? children? What is some of the least aligned child rearing strategies of the modern world, in your opinion?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Should we see teenage angst or anxiety or ADHD as adaptations instead of diseases then?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
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Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
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Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
How is modern child rearing and the environment that kids are brought up in potentially predisposing the anxiety, the ADHD, the teenage angst in a way that would have not occurred ancestrally? What are some of the contributing elements to that?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So it seems to me like one of the big changes is a level of attentiveness from... primary caregivers to babies and then children. It seems to me like you're suggesting it would be rare that children would be put down on the ground, sort of left all that much. Is that an accurate assessment? It's absolutely true.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Have you got any idea, just thinking on that, is there any data around the difference in skin-to-skin contact time from ancestral times to the modern world? I think we know we're probably going to be talking, what, 10% maybe, 20%? Yeah. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
It's literally an imprint of the floor that you were laid on for so long when your cranium was still malleable.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
think about all of the talk of, uh, attachment styles and attachment disorders, anxious attachment, avoidant, dismissive. Uh, I don't know. I mean, even the studies where baby is left in room, toys are strewn around, mom leaves room, mom comes back in, baby calms back down. Eventually, how far does baby go away from mom? Uh, uh, I'd be fascinated to see the ancestral equivalent of that.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
How amazing it would be for us to be able to run some of these split test experiments. So you mentioned co-sleeping. Where would babies have slept ancestrally? How would they have slept? What's the typical sleeping environment? Give us a breakdown.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Talk to me about the transport response in infants. The what? Transport response. I don't know what that is. When babies, they seem like they fall asleep more easily when they're being walked whilst carried. Oh, yeah. That was Rob Henderson and me were talking about it earlier on. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And if you want to put a baby to sleep, you put them in one of those, I guess, rocking, you know, it's like an automaton thing. And you're thinking, okay, so what are you trying to simulate there? You're trying to simulate being carried, right?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
They just don't. They want you up. What's the adaptive explanation for that? Why would that be the case? Is that safer? If baby's being carried and moved, it's less likely to be eaten?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
There are a meal on wheels as opposed to a TV dinner. And, uh, it's, it's harder to catch the meal on wheels, especially if the wheels are mom or dad. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So what about some explanations for why toddlers might wake up at night or throw food or act out? Why might those be smart behaviors in some way?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
That's why those things have evolved, I think. 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 for watching. while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite, and curbing cravings.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
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Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
As an only child, you are speaking my language here, struggling to learn to share, etc. What do we know about breastfeeding?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I was going to say, it could be a selection effect.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Both parties have been weaned off of breastfeeding.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
That's interesting. What about C-sections?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Is there such a thing as a part epidural? Can you reduce down sensitivity by 50% or something like that? Do you know if they can tolerate it?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I imagine that you have some concerns about surrogacy in that case then.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Childbirth, child rearing in the modern world certainly seems to have become very medicalized. I wonder whether this over-medicalization could contribute to fertility decline in some way.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
yeah it's uh be extra vigilant if you're a step parent you know this is going to be tough raising kids is tough and one of the ways that the toughness of raising kids gets ameliorated is by them being your genetic progeny so you're like they're crying again for the seventh night in a row but it's my cry so but if it's just the person that you're in love with's
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, much to the Internet's distaste, but... One thing that I don't think it's talked about sufficiently is the sort of mimetic desire to have children to that. Oh, wow. My next door neighbor, they just had kids and, or my sister just had her first boy and she seems really happy.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
progenies cry there's a lot less motivation to be there and you might get more frustrated so on and so forth and yeah i think it's a 100x increase in child mortality when there's a one non-biological parent in the household so some of some of the outcomes i mean the base rate for that's quite let's not saying that it's making a massive difference but it's a sufficiently uh significant difference that's something everyone should be aware of you mentioned there about grandparents
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And that's a good, maybe I should think about the, you know, fewer children, beget fewer children, beget fewer people seeing children, et cetera, et cetera. And, um, Yeah, it's the vicious other side of the blade of being a hyper-social species, as you said, or ultra-social species.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So moving on to, we've talked a lot about sort of development, child rearing, the more sort of psychological and social side of stuff. If we get into the more medical elements of the pediatrics, what are some examples of medical missteps that could have been avoided if we'd had some evolutionary thinking?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Uh, what's the evolutionary role of grandparents or what, why does it matter for raising kids back then? And sort of what's the implication for today? Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's huge.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Oh, of course. Because they haven't acquired memory yet. You've accumulated all of the different blueprints of all of the different pathogens.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
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Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Are there some evolutionary insights that you've come to believe with regards to that?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I mean, it's not, it's not just responsibility, right? It's hypernormal stimuli, calorie dense foods. Why not adapt it for the salty, sweetie, absolutely fluffy, crunchy, you know, all of the, all of the design. Uh, yeah, it's, it, Yep. We're up against all of that and trying to get people to change.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
When it comes to medication, do you think, are we maybe overusing medication in some ways for issues that might be biologically meaningful? Are we stepping into important processes that wouldn't have obviously been intervened with ancestrally?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah, that it's better to think there's a fire and then not be one than it is for there to be a fire and you not go off.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I would love someone to do a study, pay for older people to move closer to their grandkids and give the other group SSRIs and see which one's happier. Yeah, it's really interesting, I think, considering how modern interventions that are well-meaning and help and are needed in many contexts, I think a lot of the time it's the over-prescription.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
In the same way as it's not bad that we have cheesecake. I'm really, really grateful for the inventor of cheesecake and for the Earl of Sandwich and his invention of the sandwich. But it's the over-application of these technologies and these foods that cause the issue. What would... I'm interested, what would an NICU look like if it respected evolutionary design, do you think?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I'm all for it. I'm super all for it. I think all parents need to read a – in fact, all single people – need to read a behavioral genetics book as well. If you're, if you're intending on having kids at some point, uh, I think. All of the dating advice in the world and all of the child-rearing books in the world could be replaced with Blueprint by Robert Plowman, maybe.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Look, if you want to have a family at some point, it is made up of the raw materials of the person that you make them with, and it's the single most important decision in a child's happiness. You can't out-educate bad genetics. Bad, you know what I mean? Like a difficult genetic suboptimal in your choice. So you mentioned that... Evolutionary theory, you're a fan, I'm a fan.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
What are the risks and are there risks in misapplying evolutionary theory to social or medical contexts?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
uh, Yeah. uh, is, um, good at is protective against cancer growth because it, it burns that through. Whereas, you know, immediately you have a, uh, you have a fever and what are you doing? I'll regulate with air conditioning. I'll take something to bring down the temperature. I'll go in and see the doctor, so on and so forth. Yeah. It's, it's funny.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
The problems that are caused by being able to fix problems, you know?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Paul Turk, ladies and gentlemen, Paul, you're awesome. I think an evolutionary perspective on child rearing was desperately needed. And I'm really glad that Rob introduced me to your work. I think it's so great. Where should people go? They're going to want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do and get a hold of the book.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Well, I remember David Buss saying, oh no, sorry, Steve Stewart Williams at the start of The Ape Who Understood the Universe. He's talking about what is it that we are like maximizing machines or optimizing machines. I can't remember what it is that he says.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Well, I promise you that you haven't bored anyone today, Paul. And if your son is a fan of the show, that suggests even more about the quality of the genetics. I'm very good. I really appreciate you, Paul. Until next time. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And he comes into land that we are grandchildren maximizing machines or we're grandchildren optimizing machines, that it's not enough to just have a child. It's enough to have a child and make sure that your child has a child. And then we're kind of like, ah, okay, my work here is done.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
But yeah, to kind of put it in context for the modern world, one of the first things that everybody does is fly the nest. You're 18, you're off to university, you're 22, you get your first full-time job, you move away to the big city, and you don't really think about your parents in that sort of a way. You're liberated, you're a renegade doing it on your own. And then even in the modern world,
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Everybody has their own abode. Very few people are living in pan-generational cities, let alone pan-generational houses or neighborhoods.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And then even with all of those incentives, all of the opportunity to travel the world, all of the different places and things that could distract you, how many people, when kids come onto the horizon and someone gets pregnant, moves back to the city where one of the parents are?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
right it is so it maybe not anywhere near as common as it would have been ancestrally but to think you have all of this pull all of these dynamics distracting you to go out and there's still something in the back of your mind that goes i think we should be near uh nana and granddad i i kind of get the sense that we should be back there so uh maybe i don't know maybe evolution is still whispering in people's ears a little bit even it's a huge draw i i i think it is and and then when when they do it they're
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Okay. So, uh, one big, uh, mismatch, um, uh, pan-generational uh alloparenting um and then the sort of inclusion of of grandparents is this in your opinion does this explain the grandmother hypothesis why it is that uh humans exist after they're able to continue reproducing specifically uh mothers or grandmothers yeah i i do i i think um
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
What does that say about broken homes or un-intact homes increasing, single parents, step-parents? What are the implications of that when it comes to child development?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And so, um, if you can, if you as a woman can have a child at 71, uh, the, the potential chance just to, just to kind of break that down for people who might not be familiar with the grandmother hypothesis. Uh, can you give a, a, a basic bitch, uh, explanation of, of what it is, like why that's the case? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I suppose as well, limited resources, food, not only care, but if you are able to contribute, if you're able to be a net positive contributor to the survival of not only your children, but your children's children, and maybe your friend's children's children, and you get that reciprocally in return, the alloparenting thing. But you're not that much of a drain on resources.
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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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?
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Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
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#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
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#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?
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#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,
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#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...
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#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.
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#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.
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#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
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#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
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#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
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#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.
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#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.
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#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...
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#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?
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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...
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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
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#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.
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#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.
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#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...
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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#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.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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#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.
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#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?
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#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.
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#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?
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#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.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
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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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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,
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#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?
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#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.
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#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.
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#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
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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?
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#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.
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#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.
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#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?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
A quick aside, if you're struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime, stay asleep throughout the night, or not waking up feeling rested and revitalized in the morning, Momentus' Magnesium L3 and 8 is one of my favorite products, which I use every single night before bed. Magnesium L3 and 8 is uniquely able to cross the blood-brain barrier.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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...
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#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.
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#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.
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#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
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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?
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#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?
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#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.
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#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
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#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
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Dude, I am in love with your sub stack. I subscribe to a lot of different sub stacks and yours is maybe my favorite one from this entire year. You're absolutely destroying it, dude. It's so great. It's evolutionary lens on things, big picture questions that everybody's already asking. I think it's awesome.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So not only are they a wider social network than you've ever seen before and selecting for people that are more popular, but also on top of all of that, everybody's lying. So the ability for you to do accurate...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
assessment and then when we think about intergenerational competition theory i think it we almost use that model where are other people now as that's where mom and dad must have been and that i think is where a lot of this uncertainty comes up around well you know you look at um the reasons that people say about why they haven't had children yet uh i'm just i'm just not ready
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
uh not financially not in the position which is odd because the poorest countries have the most children and if you scale it over time we are by and large on average richer more affluent more comfortable than we've ever been but the sense is that we're not and given that our social circle's been expanded to the entire world and we have the perspective everyone is doing way better than they actually are it's just it's social anxiety all the way down
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Does this mean that people in high achieving groups kind of have a bit of a double edged sword here because they've got satisfaction from recognition in like outside of the group, but they've also got social anxiety from within their group?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, I love the term insecure overachiever. I think it captures this energy very well.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah. You don't get, or at least as of yet on Substack, I haven't seen you get super tactical around this. You're not coming out like the typical sort of personal development bro and saying, and here are my 10 steps for you to be able to overcome your imposter syndrome or whatever. But when it comes to the sort of social circle comparison thing, given that you're spending a
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
a pet interest in it, you must relate this to your own life and you must have tried to apply some strategy or some tactics to try and negate this social comparison impact on your happiness. So what do you do as an attempt to try and mitigate this effect?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Okay, another source of pain. Probably, I think, I've been doing these live shows. I was in Australia recently doing these live shows. And there's buckets that at the Q&A portion at the end of the talk, people ask. And one of the most common is something along the lines of, why do I set ever higher goals for myself? Why do I seem unable to be able to be satisfied with what I've achieved?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Why every time that I score a goal, do I immediately move the goalposts even further away from me? Why do I overestimate the importance of my next success for my happiness? So talk to me about sort of the role of goals and how it impacts our happiness here.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Oh, so that's why we overestimate the importance of our next success for our happiness. Because... If we didn't think, well, once I achieve X, I'll be fine. If we didn't have that thought, if we assumed accurately that each different destination is just base camp before the next destination gets unlocked and gets appeared to us, we would be much less motivated to go and do it.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So when it comes to, I guess, what are the problems about how happiness is typically thought about or studied? What is missing from that?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
What's the focusing illusion?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So how come we set goals to the highest level of what we think that we can achieve instead of finding happiness in lower aspirations? Surely that would allow us more direct access to happiness.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And the reason is that... You're not designed to be happy in life. You're designed to try as hard as possible. What an absolute...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
We are the progeny of the most anxious, insecure overachievers across time.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I've been thinking a lot about the difference between feeling happy when you succeed and just feeling relieved. It seems that there is a regular framing that success is the only acceptable outcome and anything short of that is a failure. So the achievement of success turns the achievement of success not from a cause for joy into just the abatement of fear. You know what I mean?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Oh, I avoided disappointment. Congratulations. But that's such a... Again, for the sort of high-achieving, high-expectation, low-confidence people out there, that... It's a lose-lose scenario. I didn't achieve the goal. How miserable I feel about myself. I did achieve the goal. Well, that's the only acceptable outcome.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, I love this line from you about how the attainment of a goal seems when the moment of triumph is over, almost like a letdown, because so few people sit back and enjoy it. And most people just create another goal that they want to strive for. But the sort of
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
the implication of that is presumably they prefer the process of striving toward a goal as opposed to the state of actually having achieved it, which seems completely backward, right? Because what... You're not saying, why are you pursuing that goal for the pursuit of the goal? No, you're not pursuing the goal for the pursuit of the goal.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You're pursuing the goal because you want to achieve the goal. But every single bit of evidence about the way that we behave suggests that we prefer the striving as opposed to the achieving.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, gold medalist syndrome, I think it's called.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Oh, no, I think gold medalists. So, yes, being bronze is happier than being silver because bronze is two steps away from winning, but silver was very close. I think at least my, again, bro signs.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
of the gold medalist syndrome was that a lot of the time when people finally achieve their championship that they want at the Olympics and they're left, like Andre Agassi, feeling significantly less fulfilled than they'd hoped or anticipated, that they then tell themselves, well, ah, right, it's because I have to do it twice. It's because I have to prove that it was a fluke.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
That's what the problem is.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah. It's, uh, It's so funny, the sort of curse of continuing to succeed. If you are a competent person and you break new ground, each new achievement doesn't feel like a cause for celebration. It simply feels like the next minimum acceptable outcome that you can have the next time you do the thing.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Have you ever looked at the research around when you ask people what their ideal level of annual income would be? So...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So I remember what the outcome was, which is basically it's almost always about three times what you earn right now. So people will say, well, I would be, you know, I own 50,000 pounds a year. 150 would, you know, that would really be. But the people at 150 say, yeah, I mean, 450 would really be. And then it just keeps on going and keeps on going. And it's very reliable. It's all the way up.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You know, the millionaires jealous of billionaires, the billionaires jealous of multi-billionaires.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Will Smith in the memoir that Mark Manson wrote said, when I was poor and miserable, I had hope. When I was rich and miserable, I was despondent.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
That's a good one. I like it. Yeah. It very much is the case that happiness is not achieving a thing. It's not being rich. It's being a little bit richer than yesterday. consistently over and over again.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah. The relationship between happiness and expectation of surprise is, it feels so ruthless because by design, you can't design surprise. Like if you knew that it was going to happen, it wouldn't be a fucking surprise.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, how interesting. So talk to me, let's expand this out a little bit more into habituation and sort of the adaptive explanation for habituation more broadly. Why didn't evolution just design us with the ability to feel greater and greater happiness whenever we do better?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Is there an implication then if sort of incrementalism, this step-by-step nature of us slowly getting toward our goals, is there an implication that sudden huge leaps in improvement of life circumstances are actually very bad for us in that if you win the lottery, how are you going to ever have a better day than the day that you won the lottery? Like it came out of nowhere.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, there's that idea of a homeless man isn't jealous of a billionaire, but he is jealous of a slightly richer homeless man.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
It sets this new unreasonable standard for you as opposed to the person who's maybe tormented by their daily grind to move toward their goals. But presumably, if you're already on that sort of path and momentum, you were only half a step behind yesterday and you can be half a step ahead tomorrow.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
The difference between that and somebody that just has a windfall ant that dies with $50 million and gives it to them or something, where'd you go from there? You don't even have any systems to be able to locate yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
do we habituate less to certain things? Are there any categories of accumulation that we have in our life that we seem to be a little bit more resilient to this adaptation?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
That kind of locks it in in a more permanent way.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So much of what we're doing with habituation in lower to, like, developed nations is...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
chasing down better standards of living but not removing ourselves from things that could be mortal threats to us and maybe our brain is able to detect okay there is you don't always have food on the table you don't always have a safe place to sleep you don't always have reliable water or whatever yeah and if you if you get out from that you lock in a particular so the bottom levels of maslow's hierarchy of needs i've always thought this about the um you know the
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
issues that many of us face am i actualizing my logos forward is this really me reaching my eudaimonia and making the most of my brief time it's like hey dude an existential crisis is a pretty fucking luxurious position to be in for all of human history until like 200 years ago people were terrified of whether they'd make it to the next day.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
They thought that they were going to get smited from above by a lightning bolt because they'd masturbated last night or whatever it might be. They're just on this permanent fearful world. And it's odd that, yeah, if you're asking yourself these deep questions about meaning, about fulfillment, about flourishing, about eudaimonia, about reaching your goals, you go...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
It suggests to me that much of the stuff that really matters, you would absolutely miss if it wasn't there, has been sorted. And that's why you're up here. It is no comfort. I'm aware it's no comfort because we habituate. But I do think it's an important frame.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Cheerful pessimist, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I'd seen somewhere that status is a little less subject to habituation than some of the other elements in our life. You got any idea if that's true?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
It can only be one.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Okay, another huge tension that a lot of people seem to have to deal with is this relationship between happiness and a meaningful life. Is it a tension? Is this a fake thing? What is there to know when it comes to useful definitions and differences between happiness and meaning?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
It seems like time is a really important contributor here, that sort of a good life versus a pleasurable life is a conflict across time, short-term versus long-term. And you've got this great, this gorgeous quote where you say, much of life's dissatisfaction results from evolutionary mismatches where short-term hedonic signals conflict with long-term ones. And it's just this tension.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
It's this tension between the two. I want to eat the cookie or smoke the cigarette or drink the beer today, but I don't want to deal with the fatness or the hangover tomorrow. And you scale this up over time. The thing that's super interesting, I've had this intuition for ages that certain people are
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
predisposed to take more pleasure from meaning and other people are more predisposed to take more pleasure from enjoyment i think people find their way they they do in life the thing that gives them the best hedonic signals so for me i i actually suck quite a bit at pleasure uh really fucking good at meaning like i will you know bury myself for three months and
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
in the hopes that something will come out of that on the other side. Suck at pleasure, good at meaning. I have a lot of friends who are the opposite. And this was that famous, you may know this story better than me, but this famous conversation debate, friendly debate between Dan Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman, where Gilbert was saying that a good life
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
It's so fascinating. It's like we're plants in an ecology and we sort of are able to grow toward the light that's nearest to us. And yeah, it's an uncomfortable realization that our feelings of well-being depend less on... absolute achievements than they do on just the comparison to other people in the social circles that we belong with.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
could be one where you spend every hour for the remainder of your days laid on a lilo, floaty in a pool with a cocktail. You said in retrospect, and you look back, would you have considered a life well-lived? Well, it doesn't matter because day to day, your experience was just pleasure. I'm in a pool. This is nice. The cocktail tastes good.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Kahneman said that, no, what you want is a true happiness or true meaning in life comes from a life which in retrospect, you're glad that you lived. And I think that, at least to me, this is my, again, another pet bro science theory, which feel free to tear apart, that I think that the more ruminative of a thinker that you are, the more you need to optimize to be Kahneman. not to be Gilbert.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Whereas I have friends who are able to just fucking be, they don't care about where they're going with this. They're not asking about whether it's this deeper contribution in the same way. And maybe they're going to have midlife crisis at 55 and they're going to come back to me and go, dude, should have buried myself for three months.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You were, or whatever, but not that I told them to change their ways or whatever, but I just get this set, like to tie all of that together, this tension over time. short-term hedonic signals conflicting with long-term ones. But I think that our predisposition, the frame that we enter the world with and the way that we're rewarded individually based on genetics and experience is...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I think it disposes us to focus on one more than the other. And I think that this is why one size fits all solutions to this. Most people will lie somewhere in the middle, but there's some people that are out on the tails. I have no idea what percentile I am. I could be 99. I don't think I am. But I'm definitely toward the long-term signals. They are more salient to me.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
They're more powerful to me compared with the short-term ones. That makes sense.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And I guess, you know, that game of relative comparison and the way that social circles, the ones that we choose and the ones that we don't impact us is, it's just, it's endlessly fascinating to me.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
That's so, that's so interesting. I love that. So what about the, the classic question, the meaning of life? What do you think that misses given your evolutionary lens, given your insights into sort of neuroscience? Cause it seems like what people are looking for is something outside of life. Why is life here? Give me something that transcends the thing that I'm asking the question about.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I suppose. Yeah, you're right. If all the happiness and meaning are signals produced by the brain to indicate if we're on a path that's aligned towards success, but the path gets calibrated by an ancestral past, there's huge opportunity for mismatch now in the modern world.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Lionel Page, ladies and gentlemen. Lionel, let's bring this one home. Dude, you are fucking awesome. I love your writing. I'm so glad that you're able to speak as well as you write. You are now officially on the rotation of guests I'm going to hassle every couple of months to bring on. I love it. People want to check out more of the stuff that you write. Where should they go?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
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.
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#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
That's chriswillx.com slash books.
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#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, I think for the sorts of people that listen to this podcast, introspective, reflective, curious people, Having a question, having a why that does not have a very well-defined answer is kind of like some version of purgatory meeting hell. And you want to know, and you're right, that there isn't this definitive sense.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Just going back to the social comparison thing, I've been thinking about this for ages, and I love that insight about how people with disadvantaged social origins might be more likely to be happy because they've got a lower reference point to judge life from. It's so paradoxical, but it makes complete sense.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
The advantage of disadvantage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
That's so interesting, because if you went into law or you went into medicine, there would be a direct comparison between where your father was at that stage in his life. I mean, look, the potential explanation
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
for kids from highly affluent backgrounds having disparate outcomes in educational attainment because they are riven and driven by this terror that they can't keep up with what their parents expected is like... I don't know of anyone that's factoring that into the base, right?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And sure, the material constraints, the resources, the access, the networking, the legacy admissions into these higher institutions. Like, yes, there's lots of structural things, right, that go on. But what about the drive for the kids? Why are they, you know... working themselves so hard to do this.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And, you know, the fact that you have higher expectations placed on you, and you are aware that anything short of Yale or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge or Kings, or whatever, is going to constitute failure, which is going to result in you being less happy. That I think explains at least part of the disparate outcomes that we see.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And that's also correlated with more sort of social risky behavior, drug taking, alcohol, fast cars, et cetera, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I've been fascinated with intergenerational competition theory. I learned about it about a year ago, this sort of comparison we have between where were our parents when they were our age and where are we now? And I think it really explains, maybe this is total bro science, right? But I'm allowed to do this because I'm not held to the same standards of an academic like you. That's fine.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
My theory, at least in part, is that even though objectively when you run the numbers, the current generation is better off adjusted for inflation than any generation before. There is this sense, this milieu that we are not. I think the comparison on social media contributes a massive amount here because we assume that everybody is doing better than they are.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And also we have expanded our social circle to now be so much wider. It's, it's, You're no longer selecting your social circle from who you grew up around, but you're expanding it to the entire world. And by design, the people that you see on social media pretend that their lives are better than they are.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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#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
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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.
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#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
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
There has to be a point at which an inherent good comes through, which is some sense of joy and play and lightness. And you end up being sort of very, very rigid and brittle in a very strange way. You're sort of stiff with the way that you go about things. You're not prepared to be flexible. You're not prepared to take on adventures in the same way. Even your adventures need to be fucking planned.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Your holiday needs a massive itinerary and you need to make sure that you work twice as hard before you leave so you don't feel like a piece of shit when you're there. And, you know, all of this sort of comes together. So, yeah, the sense of play certainly resonates with me or the lack thereof, the difficulty in finding joy.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'm going to guess, typically, do you find with people, please, as your clients, people that you've spoken to, that finding joy in life is something that they often find difficulty with? Tremendous difficulty.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah, permanently making yourself the second or third or fourth priority. Oh, yeah. After everybody else. So just dig in a little bit more to the real costs of being a people pleaser. Why is it a bad thing? What does it do to you? You mentioned well-being earlier on. What does it do to the pleaser themselves?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
How can someone distinguish between being considerate and sacrificing their identity to please others?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Is there a difference? You mentioned it earlier on, guys and girls that you work with. Talk to me about the difference in how men and women show up with their people-pleasing nature. Is it motivated differently? Does it present in different manners? Is the framing different in any way?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I was thinking about this. I wonder whether there's an extra level of shame for men around being pliable. You're supposed to be this sort of rigid, stoic, self-sufficient pillar of the community or your relationship or your friendship or your family or whatever it might be. And that's not to say that women shouldn't have a backbone as well. Obviously they should.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But the level of assertiveness that we just expect dispositionally from men tends to be higher. Men on average are more disagreeable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And regardless of whether or not the actual manifestation of it is more or less acceptable, I think the story that men tell themselves around their pliability, I think that there's perhaps some additional levels of shame in that.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I would fully agree with that.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah, I don't know if that answers your question. This episode is brought to you by Function. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or as energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Men want to be understood and they want their suffering to be recognized, but they also don't want to be pandered to or treated with kid gloves. And this is a really difficult balance to strike. It's superbly difficult balance to strike because you don't want to patronize guys because that's going to switch them off.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But the line between not patronizing and ignoring is actually perilously pretty close. And then that speaks into all of the fears that every guy has about, well, if I open up, I'm going to be shunned by my girlfriend or my wife or society. I'm not going to be seen as a competent man, so I'll just swallow it down.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But I'm also told that if I don't do that – and I also have the sense as well that that's probably not super healthy for me from a psychological standpoint. I feel like I should be able to feel joy and feel fear and feel pain and feel scared and feel excited. I want to embrace all of these things, but in order to do that, I need to –
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
concede the entire spectrum of human emotions and if i do that then i'm at the mercy of them and being at the mercy of them doesn't have the mastery and control and conquer of your inner landscape that is typically so it's messy it's messy and um you know this it's endlessly fascinating to me to kind of try and unpack this and and hopefully um i don't know
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
lay out some sort of a path or i don't know at least like some way markers of like here's some interesting things that guys can think about or that girls can think about for the way that they show up with the the men that are in their lives and uh yeah that extra degree of shame around being pliable for men i i think is is going to be something that they'll feel quite acutely i think that um
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'm still struggling a little bit to understand, despite the fact of being the recipient of it, why it's so hard for certain people to advocate for their own needs. We would think from an evolutionary psychology, adaptive survival and reproduction perspective, advocating for your own needs should be the first thing that you do, maybe up until you've got a
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
partner and kids like after that yeah okay perhaps there is something that's even more important than you because that's your genetic progeny or your family going forward uh i'm just trying to work out why it becomes so difficult to make our needs known and to advocate for our own desires i think there's a component of rejection
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
What behaviors should we look out for that suggest you might be a people pleaser? How would you get us to self-diagnose?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
simply not being used to it, not thinking that your needs are valid. Uh, definitely, you know, thinking if, if you grew up in a household where it was difficult for you to communicate transparently, maybe parents didn't communicate very transparently. There was a lot of passive aggression or shadow sentences. People didn't say what they meant.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
They said a thing and hope that the other person would arrive at the thing that they meant and then resent them if they didn't. Uh, At what point have you got the training for it? So, you know, for all for me to say, you know, to try, it seems very strange that we wouldn't be able to advocate for ourselves. We're the first person. And you go, well, I guess so.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But what it really shows is just how far from center your life has sort of taken you that you don't even think that advocating for your own needs is something that you should prioritize. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I imagine as well that there must come a stage or the more heavily ingrained people pleases, they must get themselves to a situation where they've people pleased for so long that they don't actually know their own opinion or what they believe or what they want. Like advocating for a need is tough if you've subjugated them for so long that you have no idea what they are anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah. It's a particularly, it feels like a particularly unfair curse to know that maybe you've begun to see the light. You've realized that I need to be more assertive. I need to stand up for myself. And then when you think, well, what does that, what am I standing up for? What is myself? presumably there's some concoction of things that I want. Well, what do I want? And you don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And you realize that the reason you don't know is because you buried it under layers and layers and layers of appeasing others as opposed to appeasing yourself and prioritizing others as opposed to prioritizing yourself. And you think, well,
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I know that I kind of need to do this thing and I don't even, I don't, I'm in a fucking dark jail cell and I don't even know which way, which direction the door is to get out to begin to think about my fucking escape plan. So yeah, I, um, I think about that a lot. I realized toward the end of my twenties that, you know, I'd, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'd spent a lot of time trying to do whatever I thought I needed to do in order to be able to make other people like me. So when somebody asked me a question, I wouldn't think, what do I think about this thing? I'd think, what does Nick need to hear in order for him to have the best impression of me? And there's a million problems with that.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But one of the biggest ones is that you never actually feel connected to any of your successes or any of the praise that you receive.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
because oh god that's a big one yeah any positive reinforcement that you get is not somebody seeing you they're just applauding this role that you play they're saying hey well done for doing the little dance that you did that is not you it isn't you so i would say you know maybe another at least from my past experience one of the identifying factors is do you feel connected to the successes that you do or do they feel like somebody else did them sort of on your behalf that is um
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You said, uh, you know, you said people, please, they're interesting. And I, I would agree, uh, not being fucking fellating myself here, but, um, I think the reason is that the only way that you can be a people pleaser is if you have some sense of depth. You are a deep thinker in one form or another. You care very much about others. You have an amount of empathy.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You have social sort of agility in a way that if deployed correctly could be really, really fucking useful, really powerful. It can make the world a better place. So it doesn't surprise me that you get fascinated by these people that you get to meet.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
This Thomas Sowell quote, which I can't stop thinking about, even though I've known it for ages, it becomes more true the longer I think about it, which is, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And you may sort of scream at the sky and shake your fist and say, if only I could have this thing without this thing. And you go, well, what if both of those things come together?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
What if that is kind of like a single meal as opposed to ingredients that you can make a dish from? And I get the sense that a lot of people... if they can start to transcend and include or alchemize the more pathological parts of their people pleasing nature, what they're left with is probably the things that they care most about themselves, that they love most in themselves.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
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Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I've heard of it. I've never read it, though.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
let's uh let's move down from the sort of first physical practices stepping in on diet presumably sleep training blah blah blah how psychologically in terms of reframing in terms of the sort of um psychological tactics and strategies what are the first steps that you get to take people through when it comes to their rehabilitation
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Is that, is that feeling of insufficiency for you, the sort of root cause that then the people pleasing nature is born out of? Yes. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Hmm. Yeah, dude. So fascinating. I really appreciate that. Um, you've mentioned a couple of times already today, boundaries, setting boundaries. Um, How do you come to think about that? What is it that people are getting wrong when it comes to it? How can they be useful? What's the process? Give me boundaries 101, the best and the worst.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Interesting. You've got a fucking radar that's searching for people pleasers on the internet. No, look, I'm very much self-diagnosed. I'm fascinated by your work. It's been something, you know, I've spent a lot of time this year reflecting on that. Yeah. I tend to put other people's needs before mine.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And in many ways, that can be seen as considerate, caring, altruistic, looking to bring other people up. And this must be, I guess, even the real gateway drug at the top of the avalanche is, well, lots of the things that you're talking about, when done properly, when done consciously and effortfully, come from a place of virtue. And they're good for the world in many ways.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
For the Anglosphere people, explain what a Bill of Rights is in this context, please.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Most of these aren't things that you're saying in the whimsical hope that they're somehow going to manifest one day. They're guidelines that you've put on the floor.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You say, hey, if you kick one of these tripwires, then if I don't know where the tripwires are, if I don't know what they are, and if I haven't made a commitment in advance, then I'm always going to negotiate with myself about whether or not that is a tripwire or not. And, you know, in the moment, trying to come up with any sort of a solution. I used to have this thing. Fuck, this is old.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
God, this might be 10 years old now. I used to have this thing about how it's basically impossible to come up with a solution when you're in the midst of the crisis. And if I told you... If I told you in a week's time that I was going to push you into some quicksand, you could spend the next week on ChatGPT looking at the best strategy and what shoes you'd need to wear. And am I supposed to move?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I sort of do this lateral like sort of shaking thing. It's called like, you know, the Hofler movement or some shit for getting out of quicksand. But if I just push you in some quicksand and I'm like, hey, fucking try and get ChatGPT out now. It's not going to happen. You can't think laterally. And yeah, another homosiesm. He says 20 minutes of preparation adds 20 IQ points.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I get the sense that with this, it's a much more protracted version. You're much further out in advance. You're creating these operating principles. And yeah, maybe it is kind of...
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
lame in a way to be like oh my god like you need to write out this list of rules about how to do things and you go yeah yeah I'm in many ways phenomenal and fantastic and competent and in a ton of other ways kind of useless and this is me compensating for my uselessness this is a solution for me to work around that and it helps me to mitigate the parts of me that I don't want to keep manifesting that these
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Like if you thought about how you wanted to redirect a river, you have a river and it's moving and it's sort of carving and it's eating away at the outer edge of each turn. It's like chopping away at this thing. I need to redirect it in this way. It's going to take a fucking ton of effort when you first start. You can take an absolute ton of effort.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But when it begins to find that thing easier than the other thing, that's when you move from system two to system one thinking, right? And that's the whole process. You start off in the deliberate and then you move into the automatic. So, yeah, I...
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But when you're compelled to do them, when you don't have any other choice than to do them, it takes away a lot of the virtue and it also doesn't allow you to ever advocate for your own needs. Joe Hudson, at the start of this year, and I know that you'll agree with this, he said, "'If I can't trust your no, I can't trust your yes.'" Oh my God, yes. Wow. I love that quote. I've never heard that.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Everyone's got an origin story. Right. I came across this quote the other day that I thought was really interesting. I wanted to bring up to you to do with boundaries. It says, don't try to fix people, just set boundaries. I've been kind of transfixed by that idea for quite a while. I It is a damning indictment about how poorly most people can change. And some people can.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Some people can make genuine, like hard left turns or right turns in their life. But I think kind of meeting people where they're at and just assuming that the person that's showing up in front of you right now
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
is the person that they are sure maybe they're drunk or whatever maybe this is a they had a really really hard day or their dog died yesterday or something like that okay like people have over you know a couple of sample points you do two three sample points you go okay i know who you are and is it really realistic for you to expect this person who is
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
you know you just you can't stop thinking about the shape of their eyes or the smell of their hair or the way that they walk or whatever it is and you're not falling in love with that person you're falling in love with the idea of what you could craft them into if only they were able to be sufficiently malleable and
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I think don't try to fix people, just set boundaries is a really lovely redress to those of us that are maybe like hopeful romantics in that way, or hopeless romantics. And this happens with friendships, this happens with family too. And I imagine don't try to fix people, just set boundaries probably resonates at least a bit with some of the work you do.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Joe's a fucking, he's a beast. But yeah, the fact that you're not saying yes to going to the party or your friend's wedding, you simply cannot say no. And I'm not on the gradation of fucking nuclear fallout from a people pleaser. I'm nowhere near. I'm not like the elephant's foot inside of fucking Chernobyl.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
No, I'm just – I'm really interested in – you have this sort of moment where you've maybe got your operating principles, your Bill of Rights. I imagine that this is a – a task that you should sit down, really focus on writing it out physically.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, what I'm interested in is the habits or routines that you recommend for maintaining those boundaries, because it's all well and good saying, you know, it's the first, it's the equivalent of the 1st of January, the day after you've written the bill. My diet's going to be on point. I'm going to sleep eight hours a night. And Sam Harris is waking up.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'm just going to get fist fucked into oblivion. I'm
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Talk to me about the, the way that people can stay resilient in their, their boundary setting, the habits, the routines for, for sort of maintaining that over time for getting back to it, if they feel like they've sort of fallen off.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But there's definitely a lot of those tendencies inside of me to put other people's needs before mine, to not advocate for my own needs, to subjugate my own discomfort in order to not make somebody else uncomfortable. This sense that if you're not okay, I'm not okay.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
speaking is just read it every day once you do it read it every day I've been a huge fan of post-it notes over the last year like the most 1930s fucking technology to fix things that I need to remember just little bits you know I'm a big fan of mantras because I think they're sort of like the wind zip
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
you know file sort of compression of of entire ideas and just popping things around is a really nice way to do it so i'm all in for the the laminating of the business card getting into the i guess what i think we maybe haven't fully covered yet that's probably one of the biggest sticking points is the felt sense when you need to do a thing when you need to say when you need to enforce a boundary when you need to say no when you need to sit in that
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Sit in that moment. It's happening. The discussion is occurring, whatever is about to go on. How can sensitive people become more assertive?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
that your emotional state is my responsibility and you know I mean this only came out kind of during therapy where my therapist sort of mentioned to me you do seem to sort of put other people's needs before yours a lot and you're kind of prepared to suffer unnecessarily even though
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
you could probably stop this, but the stopping it would cause a little bit of discomfort, but you're prepared to avoid a little bit of discomfort and just spread a metric fuck ton across, you know, days and months and years. And, um, yeah, that's my, that's my self diagnosis, I suppose.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah, what about just to add an additional layer of complexity? There's certain times where you just don't have any other choice. You need to address this situation in the moment. This isn't necessarily about a boundary. This is somebody asking you a decision. Are we going to do this or are we going to do this? And you have to have that moment of self-inquiry.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You need to try and tap into your desires. You need to be able to advocate for your needs. I'm going to guess that this mindfulness gap facilitated by what's... uh, contemporarily known as the Huberman breath, um, is, is, is a good stop. Is there any other tools for, uh, assertiveness when kind of under pressure like that?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Okay. You can tell him I said, so you can take, you can take the breath name back if you give us some more tactics.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
The fact that. there's this person there and I have this sense of obligation, this sort of, I'm so used to subjugating me below everybody else. I'm going to feel like I need to deal with being disliked. Maybe they're not going to like me. What if they don't like me? I feel guilty. I've chosen myself over this other person. I think that's probably quite a visceral emotion that people pleases feel.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Does life get easier or harder when you stop people-pleasing? Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah, James, my business partner in Nutanix, sat on a rock, took a ton of psilocybin in Australia and asked himself the question, do people love me for who I am or for what I do? And it was, I think, a difficult question for him to answer because the tougher question that he didn't actually get around to asking, but a friend gave me was, well, does the world love me for who I am or for what I do?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
What about you? Do you love you for who you are or for what you do? And then you realize that you're asking the world to love you for who you are. Meanwhile, your love is contingent on how you've shown up that day. So you're asking the world to treat you in a manner that you're not even prepared to treat yourself in. This is a good part of the foundation of self-worth.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
uh that if imagine that you had a friend and every time that you invited them out to lunch or or to a party or something they said that they were going to come but they arrived an hour later they didn't show up at all after a while you'd stop trusting they were going to do anything right you are that friend to yourself you you sort of have an intention and then your ability to deliver on that
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
is your self-trust and if you always say that you're going to get up on time but you hit the snooze button three times you say that you're not going to eat the cookie or break your diet but you continually do you say you're going to go to the gym you say you're not going to lie to your partner and all of these things continue to be broken it's like well where
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Where is the faith that you should be drawing from? What's the well of evidence that you should be drawing from to have any proof that you can do this? There isn't any. So one of the other words that sort of we danced around a little bit today are triggers and the role of triggers. What is that? How do they sort of factor into this?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
He's got a racist accent. Don't listen to him. Racist accent.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'm interested in the capacity to give up on people that... working out when you should actually give up how you know when someone has gone too far you know you mentioned earlier on when somebody shows themselves to you believe them I think the
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
noble part of some people pleasing is you will maybe give somebody a chance when nobody else would and sure you know that that's like very upward aiming every underdog movie in history has got some young right street urchin that gets the coach sees in him the fire that nobody else can and gives him a chance even though he's going to throw in his face a couple of times blah blah
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But some people take it too far. So how have you come to think about this capacity to give up on people?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Thinking about, again, not just where people are when they're at the beginning of their journey, but as they sort of continue to go on, continuing to hold boundaries, continuing to make progress, managing that lonely chapter thing in the middle, managing the pullbacks, the price corrections that bring them back down and then put them back up.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'm interested about what happens when people are a little bit further along in life. You mentioned, I think, the sort of avatar client that you work with is sort of like a 48-year-old guy who's very successful at whatever it is that he does, but has been wildly unsuccessful at ever advocating for himself. Mm-hmm.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
What additional complications come along for somebody who's trying to do this, who's trying to sort of enter into this world when they've got financial resources or when they've got some reputation or some status or some acclaim? Um, does that make it easier or does it make it harder?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
What was the second thing that you wanted to click on from what I said? The second, now I've forgotten. That's okay. Going back, so I really wanted, I have something that's more important. The fact that people-pleasers are liars, that there is a sense of inauthenticity, a malleability, a pliability that you have, which- means that you're not telling the truth.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
There's a self-assuredness that prestige sort of brings along with it. It's weird because I suppose people that have managed to reach some type of acclaim or renown or whatever reputation within their family, within their industry, whatever it is, people kind of have faith that they know what they're doing. So say, hey, you've managed to get us here so far.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You're the captain of the ship or the sous chef or whatever. We'll continue to follow you. And that faith is, even if it's come from a place that's been compelled and not well-balanced and not fully integrated and not alchemized and all the rest of this stuff, but it's been effective. And you go, well, look, We followed Nick into battle a good bit and he sort of didn't really steer us wrong there.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I reckon we just kind of follow. So, you know, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. And if Nick thinks that the new direction is to take a hard right, then so be it. We'll go and do it. So I wonder whether, yeah, there is a. there are more ingrained habits for you to overcome and there's maybe a little bit more to risk, but also you've got more ballast on the ship.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Like you've got more status, you've got more financial resources. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And it's uncomfortable because, again, you're saying that I should do something that upsets people more than something that's nice. It's like, well, if it's not the truth, if it's not genuinely what you believe, then which one's more virtuous? And if it's not coming from a place of...
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Absolutely. People need to keep you happy.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
genuine care uh and like you speaking forward what you actually want it is a lie like yeah you can wrap it up however you want and and say that it makes the world better and that it's coming it's because of compassion and all the rest of it's like it's a fucking lie dude right well and so if somebody was to come to you um let's pretend you're allergic to peanuts right and somebody says do you want peanuts
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I love it. I really appreciate your energy. I really appreciate the vibe. I think that it is an unseen epidemic that a lot of people are dealing with. And being able to do it from a frame that makes you feel proud to be able to sort of step up to do this, that kind of, in actually a very British way, admits self-deprecatingly that this is a...
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
both maybe one of the most difficult challenges and like some sort of weird mortal quest and also a totally internal battle that no one's ever going to give you any glory for completing it's sort of this the most boring and magnificent thing that you're ever going to do both at the same time uh
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
uh, you know, a champagne problem that only you are ever really going to be able to pat yourself on the back for, uh, even if it affects the world and the rest of the people around you. I really love it. You've mentioned a couple of times, I'm curious before we finish up, you mentioned a few times, uh, different books that were really, uh, impactful on you. Scott Peck was one of them.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, if you were to sort of think about, I know a couple of books that you gift the most or that you've reread the most are the ones that sort of from an accessibility perspective, really, really made a big impact on you. What would they be?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Nick Pollard, ladies and gentlemen, Nick, I appreciate the hell out of you. Uh, I really love your energy. I love your vibe. I love what you're talking about. Where should people go? They want to check out courses, social media, all of that stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Well, you deserve it. Thank you, man. Until next time.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah. Talk to me about this sort of lineage between play, self-invention, self-identity. How does this fit together?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Draw the line for me between that sense that we measure up, but people-pleasing isn't about us. It's about optic management. It's about how other people see us. It's about prioritizing their needs over ours. Why is that important? What's that got to do with it?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah, that's very interesting. I've been thinking an awful lot recently about trying to find more fun in the things that I do. And this sort of balance between joy and meaning, I kind of have it in my head that there's broadly two buckets of people. One are more hedonists and the other are David Goggins and lots of people...
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Lots of people that listen to this podcast will probably fall into the latter category. The people who like to take things seriously, they're earnest about their work. They apply efforts. They're rigorous. They pay attention. They're prepared to, you know, marshmallow test their way until the end of time. But. As Bill Perkins says, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And more than that, not only do you continue to sort of manana manana put off all of the things that you're going to do to a time that never comes, you end up forgetting the reason that you're supposed to do these things. You're not doing hard things so you can do more hard things so you can do more hard...
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Limerence. I didn't even know that it was a word that existed until recently. And after doing a little bit of research, it seems to be maybe one of the hottest topics on the internet, especially something that doesn't even exist in the DSM yet. What is it? Can you give an introduction to those people like me who have no idea that this is even a word?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah, that's certainly something, even in previous relationships, that I've been able to recognize in friends that get into relationships with girls where almost mistreatment is a kind of arousal response. I think it's very much seen in why, partly, you could lay at the feet of the bad boy. Why is it that the guy with the cut-off denim jacket and the...
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
biker boots and the motorcycle and the tattoos like really i mean in maybe it works in a dark romance novel but in reality i think if you're looking at predictors of marital satisfaction long term which is presumably what most people are looking for most women are looking for i mean you're you're selecting for a very particular avatar there and you know i look i'm not victim blaming uh everybody falls for the wrong person every so often but uh
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Emotions are a hell of a drug.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
How is limerence different to an infatuation or a crush?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
The thing that's giving us dopamine. You know what? You know, it was great. I had this conversation recently with someone who you might not... think of as a dating expert, but he gave a really wonderful explanation of how you can tell if someone's in a relationship with somebody that isn't right for them.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
And he said, well, when you ask them what it is that they love about them, they start to reel off a CV as opposed to a You say, well, you know, they got really great education and they drive an awesome car and they're just, they're cool. The way that they dress is really great. And, you know, they've got this like funky, funky, like I love the way that they smell.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
And it's like, none of that is actually about them. And all of it is sort of about what, it's not who they are, it's what they do. And you really want to try and fall in love with who somebody is and not what somebody does.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah.
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
The I can fix him meme.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah.
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Is there a sense of imbalance in value in the mind of the limerent, a sort of pedestalizing of this other person?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
This is interesting. Okay, so I've spent a lot of time orbiting content that would be Manosphere adjacent. Many people accuse me of being a part of it, even though they hate me and I'm not a massive fan of them. But you're right. There is a number of different ideas that come out of the manosphere. Hypergamy, so women dating up and across. But the idea of what's referred to as alpha widows.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Right. Okay. How is limerence different from unrequited love or codependency?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
So an alpha widow is a woman who has managed to either get into a... casual relationship or maybe even a short or long-term relationship with a very high value man but hasn't been able to hold on to him so uh in her mind she was able to use her youth and her beauty and her body and her personality and all how lovely she is uh to be able to sort of capture this man
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
but his intentions, it was kind of doomed to fail from the start because maybe there was a little bit of an imbalance in mate value or he just wasn't the kind, he was the guy with the cropped pants or the motorcycle or whatever. That's not to say that all people that drive motorcycles can't be good partners. He wasn't invested in the way that she intended.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
And the alpha widow thing, which is a really interesting idea, talks about how that skews the self-referential perspective of mate value moving forward. Well, I got this guy before, therefore, this is my value moving forward again. I should be looking for... What you realize is that this guy was prepared to maybe sleep with you or sort of have a situationship, but not really prepared to commit.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
And then you're setting into this sort of longing and I wonder whether that what we're looking at with limerence is some of the other sides of this story that this is kind of what some women can be left with or some men as well I imagine
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
No one wants to be friends with someone they fancy. Shut up. No, they don't.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so there's this sense of imbalance, perhaps, in the mind of the limerent. This person's better than me. They're sort of godly. I mean, getting toward the sort of even more crazy ends of this, they're divine. So it seems like rejection or unavailability increases limerent feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
The more distant or aloof that someone is, does that make the limerent brain want to double down more?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
So they're pattern detecting things that are not associated with... What's it called? What's LO stand for?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Right. So that's the other side of this equation.
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
So yeah, people are retrofitting, pattern matching incorrectly almost all of the time. Little signs and signals, whether it's a tarot card reader or the trail of a snail on the... garden path or the Instagram caption or whatever it might be and this is all evidence of the fact that the LO is actually secretly ready for this
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
What causes limerence? Like what predicts it?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
So, I mean, I'm interested in the sort of life situation of somebody who would start to feel limerence. I get the sense that boredom, sort of a lack of purpose, a lack of distraction and fulfillment, because you would basically, limerence would be an attempt to escape yourself through those feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
So are you suggesting that this could be a transference? So you might have actually been in a relationship with somebody that was really great that didn't work out. And now you port that over to other people in future?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Like if you were to just say, I'm aware that everybody can get it, but just middle of the bullseye for the center of the distribution of what you see. What sort of age, life, background do each of these people have?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Right, because the aloofness, the intermittent contact, the lack of ability to be reassured, the lack of physical touch.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
I listened to that episode. It was great. It was really, well, I mean, was it great? It was harrowing and fascinating.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah. It was really, really good. Um, you know, this, this dude who, I mean, it was a pattern because he then did it again. That woman ended up dying because of a drug overdose. And then there's some other woman who was in a, a drug, uh, like, uh, toiletry store and she couldn't get some stuff and then he bought them for her and it's this sort of savior complex. Yeah, he couldn't stop.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Right. What do you mean when you say it's not about the other person?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
This desire to be sort of seen as the hero. You mentioned sex there. I get the sense, would really great sex cause this to happen? That you just sort of break through some boundary that you had previously. You have really great sexual chemistry with another person. And that is the beginning. Well, how am I ever going to be able to find, you know, this was so transcendent. It was so divine.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
It was so whatever.
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Right. Because if you fall easily, but leave slowly and you're not sufficiently discerning before falling, you kind of need to treat yourself in love like a drug addict or like an unreliable crazy person. And you say, look, at some point, they're going to put rose-colored glasses on. But the problem is when you're wearing rose-colored glasses, red flags don't look that red.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah, I suppose subjugating your own needs for fear of them putting somebody off, like I'm not right. You think, well, is your goal to be in a relationship with this person or with a person who's right for you?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Because the more that you try and cover over what it is that you want, what it is that you need, the sort of life goals that you've got for yourself, the kind of way that you want to spend your weekends, all of that stuff, you're pushing yourself further and further into a potential relationship with somebody who isn't like the person you want to be with.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yes, yes. Very good point. Why do some people get limerence and others don't?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
That's such a lovely definition of freedom. Rick Hansen and Forrest Hansen have this idea where they talk about imagine yourself as a sort of person who can handle change well.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
And I think that sense of maybe if I had a bit of a chaotic childhood, maybe if I didn't feel like anybody really had my back ever, I was sort of chronically uncertain and a little bit mistreated and, you know, varying degrees or maybe a lot mistreated. I just fear change. I'm not convinced that I'm going to be able to deal with it particularly well.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
So it seems to me like there's this deep sense of sort of wanting to be rescued or validated by this other person in limerence. Is that right?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Okay, you mentioned a couple of times the sort of unrequited nature, the fact that that's almost a prerequisite for this. Does that mean then that a anxious avoidant relationship where you are. Maybe you even live together or maybe you haven't yet got together.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah, I've had a few encounters. Not many, I think. Maybe it's the way that I present. Maybe it's that I'm sufficiently uninteresting outside of what I do on the show. I don't seem to attract many crazies at all. But there's been a couple of situations that were a bit disturbing to me, and a few of them that sort of went on for a really long time.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Never anything that actually ended up manifesting in the real world, but just stuff where I could tell somebody's really... kind of got some mental distress going on. And for some reason I've become the object of that. And, uh, that made me, to be honest, the main reason that I tried to get that dealt with wasn't for them.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
It was for me because every time that it would pop up, I was like, fuck, like this person's really suffering. And, uh, I, I, I felt very uncomfortable, um, with that. So, yeah, I mean, fuck, but just going back to that, um, this sort of
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
deep wanting being rescued being validated by another person if we assume that there's a pedestalization uh this kind of imbalance um comparison to the thief of joy with regards to that yeah yeah and then if you also assume that the aloofness the distance the more that somebody pushes away the more that it causes this uh limerence to occur
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Happiness is what happens when you stop feeling like there's something missing in your life. So between the fact that comparison is stealing your joy and that happiness is really, really difficult to achieve if you feel like there's this big hole that's inside of it, the despair... And the anxiety that we talked about. So anxiety, I want this to be fixed. Despair, I feel bad.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Anxiety, if I can get this thing fixed, then the despair will go away. It's a vicious loop. It seems like a perfectly designed mental pathology for people that's self-reinforcing.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Does that mean that an anxious avoidant relationship that's committed and monogamous and sort of moving through the usual stages could still have this limerence in it?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
You know what it reminds me of? Have you heard of death by cop? You know what that is? Yeah. It's the relational equivalent of death by cop for avoidance.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
You know what I mean?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am going to, so for the people that don't know, sometimes people that want to take their own lives, instead of jumping off a bridge or overdosing on drugs or whatever, they'll do something that causes a cop to pull their gun out and then they'll push to the limit of where they end up being killed by the police officer.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
And, uh, this, yeah, they purposefully dating somebody that, you know, is unavailable in order to not have to face the potential for attachment. Genuine attachment is, uh, you're outsourcing your own sense of avoidance to somebody else.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Well, you've assured your failure privately by avoiding your failure publicly, right?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Dig into that disconnection weirdness thing for me a little bit.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Oh, right. Your capacity to make judgments. I have to assume as well. your ability to advocate for your own needs. If you were the sort of child who never really told mom and dad no, that never sort of pushed back in a way, they're adults, they know better than you. And you have this sense that, well, the problem is always going to be with Me. The problem isn't out there in the world.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
The problem isn't with the partner that's mistreating me. The problem is with my interpretation of their treatment of me. That's not mistreatment. It's poor reception. Oh, it's not. My boss isn't being that much of a dick. It's because I'm too sensitive. Oh, yeah. This house that I'm living in and the rent that I'm paying and the way that I'm dealing with my problems in my life. No, no, no.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
The problems that I'm facing in my life are totally normal. The issue is with my weakness. It's with my fragility. It's this odd kind of agency.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
It's control.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Well, the other thing is... I had this conversation. Do you know who Jocko Willink is? I imagine he's not.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Very big head, Navy SEAL man. Very scary. Gets up at 4 a.m. a lot. He was on the show. Great episode. Three years ago now. I asked him this question. His whole thing is about taking responsibility, that taking responsibility is a salve to pretty much everything. And he says, sometimes it might not be your fault, but it is still your responsibility. And I thought, I understand who this is aimed at.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
And it might even be most people, right? The sort of victimhood mentality, myth of martyrdom, woe is me, that kind of avatar. And again, that might be most people.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
But there's a very particular cohort of people that I would place myself in, and I imagine lots of them actually listen to podcasts like this one, for whom they actually need to take less responsibility for some of the things that happen to them, that they overburden themselves with responsibility so much that they start to see things that aren't their fault and aren't their responsibility as their problem to solve.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
And that's this sort of... You call it like pathological agency. This is my problem. This is my problem. It's like, how about it's actually them? What if they're the problem? What if they're mistreating you? What if they need to be put in their place? What if you need to leave that job or relationship or house or community or friend group? What if it's them, not you?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
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. Have you thought about whether or not limerence serves an evolutionary purpose?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Is it like nature's way of forcing you to pursue a mate with blind obsession because there's not many around? Have you thought about why this might be adaptive?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Thanks. Shameless marketing company. I'll take that as my life strategy.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Okay. Would you class limerence as some kind of an addiction? Because neurologically, it seems to sort of mirror those dopamine patterns of addiction. So are they addicted to a person or the feeling? How do you unpack this?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Oh, it's uncertainty to positive reinforcement. So it's like slot machines. It's like a slot machine. Variable schedule reward.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Right. Just indulging in whatever this person's issue is.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
I made you want to be a better person.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Isn't it a shame that you have that dynamic in us for the push and pull?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
There's an extent of being inauthentic, untruthful. It's kind of not too far away from deception. If this is how I feel, but I'm going to put up some variant of the cool girl or cool guy vibe.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
facade in an attempt to tolerate or temper how much of this because if i come on too strong then you pull away and i just it would be so much nicer if both people could just say exactly how i feel about this thing i know not you know passionate love the passionate love system is fucking insane and you have no serotonin so your ability to be rational completely goes out of the window and you're just totally driven forward by goal seeking but
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
If both people are feeling that, but both people have to pretend to not be feeling that because if either of them say that they are, the other one pulls away and it kills the track. It's like, this is just, I need to speak to an evolutionary psychologist about this, but I don't understand.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Apart from the kind of classic playground mentality that we all have, which is, I only want something that I can't get, that in the aloofness is allurement. Other than that, I'm like, I don't get what the fucking mechanism is. I don't understand what it is that's going on.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah. Okay. So how do people feel that are having, what's it, is someone suffering with limerence, a limerent? What is it? How do we refer to them?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Does this mean then that some people repeat limerence sufferers? Yes. That you've got this sort of common thread? It just happens and then you learn about it and then it goes? It's this repetition?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Okay. So how does a limerent feel?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
How do you think modern media depictions of sort of functional and dysfunctional relationships contribute to this, the myth of the wand, stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
The best, David Buss says this, the best relationships are ones in which both people feel mutually fortunate to be with the other. But again, in that, this sort of push and pull dynamic, this more juvenile, more immature, more...
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
untranscended or included part of you uh i guess one thing we haven't spoken about is there a sex difference i'm gonna guess that it's more women just because of how the attachment system works especially if it's been after sex but um i don't know is it more common in men than women or women than men
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Just not from that guy. What about, does limerence have any, does it always have a correlation with sexuality? Or could someone of the same sex be limerent even if they're heterosexual?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Oh, wow. So you could even, you're even saying forget the sex of the person, like the species, you might be limerent with a horse?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
How do people get over limerence?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Anna, I really appreciate you. I think this insight into a world that I literally didn't know existed until about a month and a half ago. Super fascinating. I was listening to Reregulated earlier on today, a couple of interviews you did about that. And your stuff's awesome. So people are going to want to check it out. Why should they go?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Heck yeah. Anna, I appreciate you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
What are the main emotions? It sounds to me like anxiety and despair.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
There was a – the previous business that I was a part of for a long time, we had an office in Newcastle, the northeast of the U.K., And next door to us was a Thai massage parlor. Now, a lot of the workers of the Thai massage parlor didn't speak fantastic English. They weren't there for their sort of like secretarial skills. They were there because they could give good massages.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
It was legit. I mean, look, we always made jokes about exactly what was going on. They seemed to be open quite late, but the women were always really nice. They were planting flower beds outside and stuff. Anyway.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
One of the women that worked there, I don't think that she was limerent around me, but there was certainly some odd reading into the crypticness of what were then Facebook statuses or would now be like Instagram captions or something. I think... I'd posted something about the fact that I think all cats are bastards. I just, I'm not a cat person, right?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
And someone had been talking about how much they loved their cat. And I remember thinking, this is a clever, worthy Facebook status that I should take up mindshare with. All cats are bastards, something like that. And she really loved her cat. And she messaged my business partner saying, I know that Chris has been talking about my cat. I know that he's got an issue with it. And then she apologized.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
She got me a USB drive that was shaped as a tiny anime version of me. And it had Chris written across the front of it. So it was really cute in some ways, but, uh, yeah, she would read into a lot of what it was that I was doing. So maybe that wasn't quite limerence, but was, I don't know, some cryptic strangeness.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Uh, that's a, I mean, she's Thai. She was Thai and, uh, 49 or, like, 50s, something like late 40s, 50s. And I was a 25-year-old club promoter, right, wearing skinny jeans and going out and sniffing unpronounceable drugs most nights. So I'm like, what is going on here? It was just interesting. The guys in the office, we used to have, like, a little giggle about it.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Right. Okay. So the rabbit hole goes quite deep. You mentioned there that everybody has it in small doses. Does everyone who falls for someone go through limerence?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
I didn't think anyone was too mean. It wasn't as if we were laughing at her, but it was like, huh, like, this is just a slightly unusual Thai lady that... That's what I mean.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
True. I wasn't leaving little clues around. Okay, so anxiety and despair with elation.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Repetition crisis. What would be the implication of that study? What would you infer as the mechanism there?
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Yeah, well, you have sort of proximate reward and you have ultimate reward for behavior. So this is from evolutionary psychology. The proximate reward for having sex is it feels good. The ultimate reward for having sex is it makes babies. The proximate reward for eating food is it tastes nice and makes me feel happy. The ultimate reward from food is I don't starve and my body keeps on functioning.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
And the interesting thing is that conditioned responses... i.e. you could, I think, replace that for proximate rewards, are much more powerful than the ultimate ones. So when you look at, okay, let's say that this baby monkey thing is true. I actually think it very much could be.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
Let's say the baby monkey thing is true and that a wire monkey that would give you sustenance is less attractive than a soft cuddly monkey that gives you nothing other than a sense of companionship and sort of mothering. The soft cuddliness is a predictor for the sustenance, right? That's what you've done there.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
What that experiment has done is essentially separated out the ultimate and the proximate reasons for behavior. Now, the proximate reason that you like your mother to be soft and cuddly is that you know that there's probably milk and safety and security and care and attention there.
Modern Wisdom
#935 - Crappy Childhood Fairy - Limerence Explained: Why Do We Get Addicted To People?
But when you're faced with just the raw, rational, stripped back, sterile version of, well, you'll stay alive or you'll be around the things that typically predict that you'll stay alive. It's like, I'll go for the prediction as opposed to the rationality.
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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#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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#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
How much mental RAM have you got to be able to, you're that capable of parallel processing that you're able to, with one eye pointing in that direction, see your son score a three-pointer and with this eye, you know, watch TikTok? In other news, Manscaped has launched their brand new and improved Lawnmower 5.0.
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
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. Let me give you my bro EP reasoning for why I think we shouldn't be as worried as we might think.
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
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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
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
I think a lot of entrepreneurship and even personal growth is training yourself on how you respond to hard. Because in the early days, hard was, ooh, stop. This isn't good. This is a warning sign. This is a red flag. I should slow down or I should pivot.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
But the more I think about it as a competitive landscape, as I'm clear on what this path is supposed to look like, and these rocks and these dragons are things that I'm going to have to slay along the way to get the princess or get the treasure, I get happier about the harder it is because I know that no one else will follow.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And I think if you can shift from this is hard to no one else will be able to do this, then it flips from being this thing that you're like, oh, poor me to oh, poor everyone else who's going to have to fucking try. And I think that is so much more motivating as a frame for the exact same circumstance.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
People only root for people who don't need it. Like the amount of times when I was on my lonely path where I was too different from the friends that I had, but not successful enough to be friends with the people that I wanted to be friends with. That's when you want people to root for you. That's when you want people to support you. Once you've already won, people are like, he's amazing.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
He's so good. But like, that's the time when you need it the least. And so... You always have to be the person who roots for you before everyone else does. And it's usually a single clap in the auditorium for a very long period of time. It is a slow clap. That's just you rooting for you. And that visual, I think, is one that you can kind of take because it is. People struggle to do things alone.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And the path of the exceptional person is one of an exception, which means that you are not with other people. And rather than fighting that or bemoaning it, see it as an indicator that you're on the right path. Because if everyone else were cheering you on, then it means you're not in the right place because it means you're just like everyone else and that's not where you want to be.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
I think a hopeful message that anyone can think about who's in that hard period or in that start period is that it won't get harder. Like this is the hardest part. And so if you can just make it through this, everything else is downhill. It's not that the things that the dragons are going to slay aren't going to get bigger. They are. But you become so much more equipped to slay them back.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And you have so many more allies. You have people in the stands cheering for you. You have the audience. You have all of these other things that are behind you. But in the beginning, it's just you with a stick against a bear. And arguably that fight is a harder fight to win than beating a dragon when you have a nuclear bomb and six nations behind you.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And so it's not even like the size of the hardship. It's just also the resources and how few of them you have and how so much of the beginning is literally burning the one thing you have, which is time.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
because you have no leverage you don't have the money to pay other people to help you you don't have the resources to go like get someone to to no one can learn it for you it's like there's a lot of the things that that we care about a lot like no one can work out for you doesn't matter how much money you have no one can learn skills for you and so in the early days like it feels so painful because you're like you look around to see who can help you and then you're like fuck it's me again and
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And I think getting comfortable with the idea that each of these things, kind of like Slumdog Millionaire, if you've seen that movie where he, I'll give you the TLDR, he goes through his entire life of randomness and he gets on the who wants to be a millionaire version in India. And it has 12 questions to make a million dollars.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And from only 12 random experiences in his life that seemed meaningless at the time, was he able to answer all of the questions and then ultimately win? The skills that you develop along the way, like Steve Jobs learning calligraphy that then became Apple Fonts that transformed how we type.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Those early days, that little trench winning in the weeds, oftentimes gives you these huge advantages later on because you have more context than anyone else. And so rather than lament them and hate the fact that you're going through it, remembering that these will be arrows that you put in the quiver that you're going to be using to slay the future bigger dragons. And so...
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
expecting it to be easy is what makes it much harder than it ever is.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
There's a quote that I love from Dr. Cash. I'll probably butcher it, but experts have more ways to win than beginners do. And so if an expert goes into any setting that they're expert in, they have so many faster feedback loops that reward them in the moment before the ultimate outcome.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So if you're a master video editor, there's so many things that you can do that while editing, you make one change and then it looks right, you have a positive feedback loop. And so I think when you're on the start path, you can't look at the outcome as the only positive because you will never make it.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And so the positive frame that I've always used is sure, you can have the external ones of like, I like thinking about my first videos had like 13 views. And I'm like, well, if I had an audience of 13 people, I used to spend years pitching, you know, weight loss stuff to rooms of 13. And that was fine. And so thinking about that way was helpful.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
The most helpful frame was thinking about who I was becoming as the asset that I was building. In real time, whenever I finished a long day's work, I was becoming more like the type of person who could work for five years without reward. That would be part of the story I would someday tell.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Some of the biggest reinforcers I've had in my life has been future casting the story that I would tell about the shitty period that I was in. I remember when I was sleeping on the floor at my gym because I didn't have enough money for two rents. And I was like, I will fucking tell this story. And when I lost everything for the first time, I have the screenshot of the bank account.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
When I show it, people are like, oh, look, there's that thing. But they forget that there was a person who screenshotted it to be like, this won't fucking happen again. And I think having a larger narrative of where you're ultimately going, one, gives you the vision of where you're like, knows where he's going.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
but it allows the dragons that you have to slay along the way the hard things that you have to overcome to feed into the larger narrative of who of the story that you'll someday tell and so like no one ever tells stories about the hero who made it all happen immediately and had no hardships no one cares right like okay you were born to a billionaire is there a story there not really but
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
But everyone loves the story because we can see ourselves in the character and how much we hope to be like them. And it's the being like them, not the having what they have that we usually like. And so reframing ourselves as the hero of that narrative in my harder times was what really got me through that and thinking, I will tell this story someday.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
I just got into business. So actually, I just made the investment in school. And I was talking to Sam, the founder. And I said, what? Sim. Sam? Sim. What's Sim? Sim, that's the way he says his name. Oh, yeah. And I was talking to him and I said, I want to give you the single easiest razor to predict my behavior.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And I said, whatever will be the most epic story is the thing that I will most likely do. And so oftentimes the most epic story is not the shortest outcome to victory. It's the long saga that results in this big thing later eventually.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And I was like, if you ever want to know, if you're like, I'm not sure what he's going to do in this situation, just wonder what the most epic story to tell would be. And that's usually what I will do. And. I don't know if that's self-aggrandizing, but that's genuinely my razor for even making the big decisions about, okay, I'm going to sell Gym Launch. I'm going to marry Layla.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
I'm going to slum it and live at the gym. I'm going to fly around and do turnarounds. I'm going to start this whole idea of a media company that just gives exclusively. They're like, how do I put all these together? It's like, well, what would be the most epic story?
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And I thought of this idea of just like, when I think about who that story I want to tell is, is this billionaire that documented the entire thing the whole way and just gave. Because I always thought, I was like, I wish that Elon Musk and Warren Buffett and all these guys would have like, and Jeff Bezos would have just like, I would love to have seen 1997 Amazon content.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And a lot of the content in terms of like, it's getting five views. It's like, it's okay because when we make it, they're going to come back and watch this. So I don't need them to watch it today. I want them to know that it's here when I do. And I think that got me out of the loop of it. I have to win right now.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And then every one of them is just dropping a kernel or a breadcrumb for future me to refer back to.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
I'm glad you brought this up because I think that is in some ways, it's like the governing example for a lot of people, maybe just kind of neurotic people like me, I don't know, but of the way in which we try to
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
attain a kind of control over our lives that that is not actually open to us as humans so that sense of like it takes different forms right but it could be i'm going to get completely organized i'm going to get so productive that i never need to uh drop a single ball or fail to meet a demand.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Or it's going to be that I'm so talented at what I'm doing that I really feel the confidence of knowing what's going on in work, in relationships, in parenting. There's one that you never feel like you've got a handle on. And I think I'm sort of saying, if you pursue life with this idea that you're going to get to the point where it's all sorted out,
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
you're sort of constantly postponing the meaning of life into the future. You actually end up doing less because there's all sorts of things you feel that you can't really fully get involved in until the point at which you've sorted life out. And so in some ways, this new book I wrote is kind of like a manifesto for like, okay, what happens if we just accept that
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
You're never going to get life sorted out. Other people, it's like the news, the world, there's too many crises. It's just a really anxious time in the headlines. I want to wait until that's all calmed down. And it's like, what would happen if you abandoned all that and said like, no, it has to be now.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
It has to be now that you do interesting and meaningful and important stuff because this future point of smooth sailing and control is never coming.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Yeah, absolutely. That's really well put. If you're waiting, there's something fundamentally absurd for any finite human to wait to really show up in life, whatever that means to you, until a point at which you have greater sort of, yeah, like greater control. Like you've, you're, you're,
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
you're in the driving seat of the situation and so yeah just to put examples on i mean like absolutely one of the things that i get from one portion of people who engage in a very friendly way but slightly critically with things i write sometimes or talk about is is like well it's all very well giving this advice about how to handle too many emails but the problem is that we live in an economy and a society that that puts people in these impossible work situations you can't just choose to to um
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
to ignore your emails because you know you have to pay the rent um And that's sort of true, but also you've still got to make decisions about what you're going to show up for as a finite human. And that might involve neglecting some emails.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And then, yeah, on the other side of the equation, it's like people who are very, very in love with that idea that through any manner of philosophies or personal disciplines or the perfect daily routine, they're going to master life on their own and for themselves and which feels like a more independent way of living.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
It feels like you're much less, um, you know, indentured to what political parties in power and at what stage late capitalism is at, but actually it's still sort of giving all the power to like future you, who's going to be so great once you've developed all these habits you're going to develop. And, um, uh, you know, um,
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
put in place all the systems and achieve the financial independence and all the rest of it.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
I've never come across that line. It's exactly the point. Yeah, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
It's totally right. And I have, you know, obviously I'm writing about stuff and talking about stuff that I am a sort of archetypal sufferer of. Otherwise it wouldn't be interesting to me. But I think one other sort of point just to get a bit kind of self-referential and meta about it, obviously, is that it is also possible to hear all this.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And there are a few books and gurus who talk along these lines and actually become a different kind of perfectionistic about seizing the moment and being present. I think what we're talking about here, this feeling that real life hasn't quite begun yet, is in some sense almost universal and very, very natural because it's a protective mechanism against...
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Like doing all the feeling and all the realizing that comes from seeing what it really is to be a human sort of born on the river of time en route to death. It's terrifying and I don't think anyone necessarily is sort of fully reconciled to it. So it's not that you can sort of snap your fingers and decide, okay, now I'm just going to show up for my life right now.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
It's more a question, in my experience anyway, of getting better and better at seeing what you're up to, seeing what's happening when you get really, really invested in some new habit change project or some new goal setting technique or something. Not that any of these things are bad, but that if what you're doing is really investing in them because you're en route to the time when
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
life's really going to matter i think that is a problem there's a life cycle thing to this too right it's like it's a lot easier and more reasonable to think uh that most of life is coming later when you're 19 and kind of a little bit absurd uh i can i can relate when you uh when you're in your 40s right it's like that that's what midlife does to a lot of people it's like oh hang on
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
At a certain point, I can't carry on claiming that real life is going to be in five to ten years' time.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
What do you think about the story of the book Eat, Pray, Love?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
What's the incentive to talk left but walk right? Why is that the case?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
I noticed that you degendered a person because she pivoted from the guy in Bali to a woman for, I think, about five years. And then, really sadly, that person passed away. And then she started dating the woman's best friend, who was a guy, and then recently announced that she was happily single at 55 and had broken up with that. So, look...
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
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Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Do you think that's likely that it's going to happen again?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
I'm going to guess that that's not only because they're less happy, they're more subject to depression, they're less integrated, but that over a couple of generations, the kids that come along will be the kids of the kid-having type.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
And if on average it's conservatives and religious people as opposed to liberals and secular people, you end up inheriting the civilization of the people that came before.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Elizabeth Gilbert, fantastic book, did very, very well, super successful. But I do think it's fair to say that she makes for a tenuous role model for happy marriage and love. I don't think that that's a particularly controversial thing to say.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah, I'd love to speak to somebody that's been able to run the projections for what the next sort of 100 to 300 years looks like.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Have you thought about how mimetic marriage and family life is that if you're in the sort of environment or local ecology that doesn't have many marriages and people having kids, everyone's a solo entrepreneur just Tinder swiping their way through a couple of situationships.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
you don't necessarily have someone teaching you or showing you well actually this is a style of life which is really enjoyable and that means that maybe you could do it too and you end up with this like r naught number that spins down or spins up based on where you are yeah that's a great point chris i mean what we see in the research is that you know basically marriage childbearing divorce for instance are all incredibly contagious
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Oh, wow. So if your partner's best friend gets divorced, you should pay a little bit of close attention.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Sorry, honey. I do love you. I care about you an awful lot, but Amy, she just got divorced and I can't help, but I just think it's kind of the new fashion that's in at the moment. So we're done. Yeah. Yeah. Going back to the sort of talking left, walking right thing. A lot of the time, a lot of the conversations end up discussing... education, poverty, housing issues.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Why is what happens in the home never spoken about? Sort of how to actually move people out of poverty and get social mobility going?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Well, we saw this with Melissa Carney's book, The Two-Parent Advantage, Two-Parent Privilege. And before it even came out, Melissa Carney is as sort of policy wonk, DC, pilled, probably center left, I would imagine, a lovely lady, softly spoken, very well researched, and writes this book saying, look, there is kind of the freest advantage that you can give your kids.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Is it the golden sequence or whatever it's called? And... I think maybe even the book cover. I don't even think it was the chapter list. Or maybe it was the chapter list too. But at the very least, the book cover got released on Twitter.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
And she gets absolutely flamed for daring to write a book about this thing, which, as far as I could tell, was coming from a very sort of liberal, we want to raise people up, this is where social mobility can actually come from. But yeah, yeah. Not breaking up a household has become so right coded that writing a book that explains the freest way that you can help to give your kids a leg up, i.e.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
staying together, was seen as like, I don't know, Mein Kampf version two.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
What's a better foundation or framework to build your marriage on than feelings?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
If fewer people are getting married, does that suggest that the people who do get married are more committed to the institution, and that explains the reduction in divorces?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah. So people on the left say poverty, people on the right say genetics. What can you learn about the heritability of family desire, family stability, stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
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#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
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#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
It's interesting about the childhood environment being so impacted because a lot of the stuff that comes out about twin studies kind of says... There's a lot that you can do in the childhood environment that kind of doesn't really make that much difference.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
I think when you control for socioeconomic factors, even moving your kid from the worst school in the area to the best school in the area is not a huge change. It's not this, you know, vast, oh my God, it's all about, we've got to pick up the house and we've got to move to the new catchment area because this is the school.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
And if they don't go there, they're going to be on the street and they're on drugs and all the rest of it. And we have something here which seems to be very predictive and very powerful in terms of actually adjusting the outcomes that kids get.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
You know what I learned the other day, which I feel embarrassed about having looked at behavioral genetics for ages. Steve Stewart Williams wrote about the biggest meta-analysis that's ever been done. It's basically every twin study that was ever, ever, ever done. It's 5 million points of data or something like that. It's every twin pair since 1960.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
And it's kind of commonly touted about that IQ correlates 0.8 by the end of your life-ish. So about 80% of your outcomes in terms of IQ can be explained through your genetics. I didn't realize that for almost everything else,
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
psychologically, it goes in the other direction, the direction that you would expect, which is you kind of start off as a genetically predisposed but environmentally blank slate and that over time things happen to benefit and insult you and then you get toward the end of your life and things change. But that makes all of this stuff much more explanatory.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
It makes you less kind of genetically robust or genetically predisposed, which actually does suggest, well... Be careful what you do with your life. Be careful the people that you spend your time around. Be careful the stuff that you put into your eyes and your ears and your mouth.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah. So looking at, you mentioned earlier on about some of the different sex outcomes that we're getting at the moment, read an article from the Center for Social Justice recently, from the day they start primary school to the day they leave higher education, the progress of boys lags behind girls.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
The proportion of young men failing to move from education into employment or training has been steadily growing for 30 years. Since the pandemic alone, the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment, or training needs has increased by 40% compared to just 7% of females. For those young men who are in work, The much-vaunted gender pay gap has been reversed.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Young men are now out-earned by their female peers, including among the university-educated. What do you make of that?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
To fight for the other side. Surely,
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah, there's a lot happening all at the same time, which I don't think makes very fertile ground for young men to do well. It seems like when you take the brakes off women socioeconomically in this new sort of brawn-based economy, they're just really good. They're more conscientious on average. They're better organized. They do their homework. They're highlighter girls.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
They then go into the office, they turn up, they don't get drunk as much, they don't do risky behavior. Sure, that means there's going to be fewer female CEOs because they're not going to go and do the crazy, ridiculous, obsessive stuff that some of their male counterparts will.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
part of the job of being married or a good amount of the job of being married is not to suffer in silence in a relationship which is unfulfilling um you know you've got a slippery slope down to mistreatment here uh where somebody is genuinely being um forgotten about by their partner not treated in the way that they should and you know you can go right down to some really sort of nasty dark dark corners that women and and i guess some men as well get get stuck in um
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
But I think, you know, the middle roles, the relatively desirable middle class, good earning jobs, it already seems to be the case that they're going to be dominated by women, especially ones that have a prerequisite that you've got a college degree because it's two women for every one man completing a full year U.S. college degree by 2030.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
then on top of that, you would expect there to be, I guess, one of two things that would happen, either a sort of bottom-up or a top-down solution that would step in. If we see any group falling behind in society, typically we don't tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. What we do is we say...
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Here is a government organization and a fund and research that's going to work out what's going on. So that would be sort of the top-down thing, which I don't think is existing. And then the bottom-up, which would be, young men, you can do this. Here is a positive image for you. There was this really interesting... Reddit thread, I think it was in maybe r slash liberals or something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
It's a little old now. And someone had asked, who do you think of as being a really great positive role model for men? If we don't like Joe Rogan and we don't like Jordan Peterson and we don't like Andrew Tate, I think the top voted comment was like Aragon. from Lord of the Rings. If we have to go to a fictional fantasy character in order to be able to find someone, by design, what are you doing?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Well, you're being able to imagine a world in which there was a man that you were happy with and did have the balance of whatever it is that you think that guys should have. And Yeah. If anything approximating traditional masculinity is vilified and seen as horrible, misogynistic, right-wing bigotry, a return to old traditional patriarchal values that, have we not dispensed with this already?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
You want women to get out of the workforce and back into the kitchen. And you're not going to be able to get away with that. It's not going to go well.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
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. They
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
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 too and if I found anything better I would switch but I haven't which is why I still use it.
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#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
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#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
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#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
how do you square the circle of knowing when knowing when the feelings that you have about your relationship are a signal that this is something really really not good that this is a fundamental incompatibility perhaps this is before children have come along and you're thinking do i really want to bring kids into this this uh this is the model of of love of um uh
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. What do you make of the medium-term future for dating if things don't change?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah, there's a... It is interesting to me whenever I see women, particularly liberal women, sort of castigating men for falling behind, sort of, oh, poor whining patriarchy, sort of... almost scolding men for not performing the way that they should. And women are doing it. You can too. Look at all of the advantages you used to have.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
And then within the next couple of weeks from the same Twitter account or the same publication, asking where are all of the good men at when it comes to dating prospects. And you think you do understand that we're seeing cause and effect occur here, that men falling behind and them struggling in this new world in terms of the workforce are
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
is creating precisely the dearth of eligible partners that you're going to complain about in future. So, you know, it is of benefit to both sexes for both sexes to flourish. And it is of detriment to both sexes for either sex to fall behind.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Interesting that, you know, when title nine got introduced about 50 years ago, a lot of what was lauded as the sort of traits that women should take on were, um, drive, um,
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
agency independence uh desire for mastery and sort of conquer and upward mobility and all of that stuff and uh you know lo and behold 50 years comes along the glass ceiling has been fully blown off and they're now rising up and when you hear a lot of the advice from similar sorts of places now for men, it's the opposite. It's your problem is your masculinity.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Your problem is your desire for master and concrete and self-agency. And really, if you were able to be more like, look at the girls, look at how nice and placid and agreeable, but hardworking and conscientious, look at them. Like if you were just less masculine, your main problem with your masculinity is your masculinity. And if you were just a little bit more
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
feminine, if you're a little bit more female with it, despite the fact that that was precisely the roadmap that kind of got women out of the issue that they were in only half a century ago.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
I remember reading a study about maybe it was women who imagined their partner, there being some sort of altercation like the one that you spoke about, and then imagining them not standing up and not protecting them. And it is, I think it was more destructive to attraction than infidelity.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
So you're actually better off cheating on your partner than you are not standing up for her when somebody comes up to try and take her purse. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
That's another justification to be like, Hey, I'm going to sleep with your best friend, but I did stop that guy from stealing your purse yesterday.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah, it's interesting just thinking about what are the underlying fundamental traits that this is talking about. So I guess cheating is seen as a betrayal of trust, but it doesn't actually indicate weakness. It doesn't indicate cowardice in quite the same way. Again, not saying that it's got to be one or the other here. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
So I learned from you that young men are more likely to end up in prison or jail in the U S than they are to graduate from college. If they're raised in a non intact family setup, do you think that this men's session thing that we're dealing with at the moment could perhaps be due to a disproportionate impact of broken homes on boys versus girls?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
With this tall girl problem of socioeconomically successful women struggling to find a equivalently or more socioeconomically successful partner, is the stay-at-home dad model a workable solution? Can we just pivot the flip the dynamic in that way?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
I already know how this story ends, unfortunately, because I did my research. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah. You mentioned to me about the South Korean election with a twist. Why do you think that's a good analogy to draw?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah, well, a lot of people thought that the rise of black votes, immigrant vote, Hispanic vote, single vote would fuel the democratic sort of coalition, the emerging democratic majority. How come it didn't work out that way, do you think?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah, well, wasn't it? Trump's success was really, it was pretty much everywhere. Like his 46% of women voted for Trump, 55% of white women voted for Donald Trump, 45% supported Kamala Harris. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah, another really shocking stat. Trump gained support among every racial group except for white people, where he lost 1%. Wild. Right. Super wild. I mean, look, it's another case, I think, of rules for thee but not for me or the sort of talking left but walking right or the luxury beliefs thing from Rob Henderson. It's largely... the rubber meeting the road with this stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Okay, what's actually going to happen when my potential future is on the line? Am I going to behave or vote or procreate or design my household or move forward in my career in the way that seems to be fashionable? Or am I going to do something that I know, ultimately, people sort of vote with their efforts.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
And it seems like I don't know, a little bit of a falling away of the able to say this while doing something else. I don't know how long that can continue to go for.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
What is most interesting from a research perspective over the next couple of years for you? What are you gonna be focused on?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Interesting stuff. Well, I look forward to seeing what you discover. Brad Wilcox, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything that you do.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Heck yeah. Brad, I appreciate you. Until next time. Okay. Thanks, Chris. 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.
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#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free. And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah, it's this interesting balance, I guess, between kids coming from broken homes where the partners have separated or kids coming from breaking homes that just never actually break out. And how I think the last time that we spoke, it was... It's your belief that there's not no such thing as a good reason for divorce.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
It's that the barometer that most people are using in order to justify whether that breakup should or should not occur has been brought down to a level of Elizabeth Gilbert sensitization, which is too soon.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Okay. What's happening with this conservative happiness premium thing? My Twitter DMs are alight with different studies that you've been sending me over the last couple of weeks.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Why is this focused on women and not just conservatives versus liberals? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah, so young liberal women, very unhappy because, or at least in part, because church and marriage accounting for a big chunk of this gap. Was it only 12% of liberal women said they're completely satisfied with life compared to 37% of conservative women, self-described moderates, are happier than liberals with 28% agreeing that they're fully satisfied. And then...
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
So that's, I guess, structural. This is something that's happening in their life. But as you hinted at there, there's this issue that maybe liberal women see themselves at the mercy of societal forces and sort of less agentic. Maybe the world is happening to them. They're sort of a victim of larger structural realities in that way. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
Yeah, you had this interesting parallel that you drew between after the Donald Trump election where lots of young liberal women were in hysterics and saying they were going to shave their heads and swear off having sex with men because they laid Donald Trump's success at the feet of men and this was a way to get back at them. But
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
The equivalent thing didn't seem to happen on the right when Joe Biden got elected, despite, I imagine, people on the right being just as upset.
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
The question that comes to mind is like, let's say that you're somebody who believes in democratic ideologies and you think, huh, this isn't particularly good for maybe my life outcomes in the evidence. You know, that Brad guy, he seems to know what he's talking about. He suggested that people that are conservative. What do you suggest people do with this information?
Modern Wisdom
#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?
I should change my belief structure and start to believe something else.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Most people's lives are determined by how they choose to cure their boredom.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
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#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
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#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
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#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
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Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
isn't it strange we get even though when we're working on the problem we're kind of blinded in this way you're on a set of train tracks but maybe they're not quite the right ones and you've sort of got this weird momentum thing that's carrying you forward and you think well i'm doing the thing this is what was on the to-do list for today but you never actually step back and fully get up and above and look at the territory yeah
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Let's say that there's somebody listening who identifies with me as a recovering productivity addict. How do you design your lifestyle for peak creativity?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah, that is interesting. So just to round out the boredom thing, it kind of feels to me like if you don't have something to take up your time, your habits and your behavior will sort of default to the path of least resistance. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. Yeah, interesting. Okay, what about hard work? Do you think there's a delusion around hard work?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Isn't it interesting that in order to be able to get the creativity thing, even when you're in just letting the ideas come to me, I'm writing, I'm doing the social posts, I'm doing whatever I need, you still need to apply discipline because if you didn't apply the discipline, you'd have already checked Slack and that would have distracted you in the morning and that one email and that guy, fuck, I gotta have that call with that guy later on and I put it off twice already and so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So there still is an importance of discipline within the act of being creative. You need to sort of, you need to fortify yourself
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah, it's always pulling back across whatever your focus is captured by, whether it was an argument with your mom yesterday or whatever. It's weird. You are right. It's like a shape-shifting poltergeist or something that moves into the form. It fills the size of the bottle of whatever it is that you're doing.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You've got a tweet about discipline saying you aren't disciplined because you keep putting yourself in environments that give you a chance to be undisciplined. Is this about environment design? Yes, to an extent.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You're probably eat the foods that you don't have in the house.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You had another one as well, which kind of feels a little similar as we start to talk about direction in life and stuff. Your potential is determined by how much uncertainty you're willing to embrace. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
how should people figure out what they want out of life? You know, we have insights about, oh, you know, they can live with this uncertainty, but I don't really know, but there is an literal unlimited amount of optionality for everybody to choose the direction. And that's only getting more. Uh, what's your advice for people who want to figure out where they want to go?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
This episode is brought to you by Nomadic. Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing, which is why I've partnered with Nomadic. Their backpack and carry-on pro have genuinely made the travel process
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#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
almost 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 its place and if you're still on the fence that products will last you literally a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee and you can return or exchange anything within 30 days for any reason so you can buy your new bag try it for a month and if you don't like it
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#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I'll just give you your money back and get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I love the idea of writing out what you don't want your life to be like.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
George had this thought experiment years ago, which was, how do you make a miserable person happy? You're like, I'm not too sure. You're okay. How do you make a happy person miserable? It's like, piece of piss.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
so i think you know inversion is just such a powerful tool with things like that everybody knows uh well i you know go through this little list of things and disconnect them from their friends and remove them from any work that gives them a sense of meaning i'd mess with their sleep i'd mess with their food i wouldn't let them see any sunlight i wouldn't let them train do exercise you know okay those are the things that make a happy person miserable the very bare minimum like that okay there's there's the things that you need in order to so you know i
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
had this insight about depression, that basically if you're not covering those building blocks, how would you make a happy person miserable? You really shouldn't be looking at the serotonin balance that's inside of your brain and how much is this to do with being exposed to microplastics and so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It's like, hey, fucking dude, you need to form some foundation or else basically what you're doing is maybe laying at the feet of something far more complex, a problem which is way more simple and significantly easier to fix. But yeah, I'd never thought about inverting it for where do you want your life to end up or not? I did this annual review, the template that I gave out for free.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And one of the questions is, what would I do to make 85-year-old me miserable? Oh, wow. And that's not too dissimilar. That was good.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
What does 85 year old me wish that I did more of? What does 85 year old me wish that I did less of? And, uh, that's not too dissimilar to what you're talking about here. If I know what that thing about, uh, tell me where I'm going to die so that I can never go there. It's like, tell me, tell me the life that I don't want to lead so I can avoid doing it.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It depends how rigidly you define what it is that you do. You wouldn't let the person exercise. Well, there's a million different types of exercise. For one person, it's dancing. For one person, it's doing yoga. For another, it's lifting weights. Somebody wants to do it on their own. Somebody wants to do it in a group. Someone wants to do it at night. Someone wants to do it during the day.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Someone wants to do it outside. Someone wants to do it inside. There's a lot of different ways to slice and dice this. And it ends up, as with most debates, just becoming a semantic game. Like, what do you actually specifically mean by exercise? And what do you actually mean by enough sleep? Who even says what enough is?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
But I think ultimately, if you're not sleeping enough, if you're eating poorly consistently, if you are not getting some form of exercise that makes you feel good, if you're not going outside and seeing at least a little bit of sunlight or daylight, if you live in Iceland or whatever, and if you're not working on something that gives you a sense of connection to the world and sense of purpose,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
at least you're contributing to making the world a little bit of a better place. And if you're doing all of it on your own, like Godspeed being able to get through that. So yes, I would say maybe there's a, basically for the more of those things that you're not taking off the box of,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You need to become an increasing outlier on the tail end of not normal in order to be able to say that you are living a good life or in order to be able to be sufficiently resilient. Most people, and especially the biggest chunk of most people in the middle of the bell curve, they need most or all of those. And you need to be a supremely unique individual to be able to say...
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah, man, you know, I just crush it. I mean, I never see my friends and I eat Budweiser and Domino's and, you know, some days I sleep for 10 hours and some days I sleep for two and I don't really exercise at all. And I'm not that connected to my work, but life's good. You are a particularly unique individual if that's the way that you show up.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah, it's a ruthless realization that hard work doesn't fix all of your problems and that what you work on is significantly more important than how hard you work. And I've been sort of fascinated by this idea of telling people to work harder that already work quite hard or telling people that already chill out that they need to learn how to relax.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Oliver Berkman's got this prompt from 4,000 Weeks where he says, decide in advance what you're going to suck at. And it's a really good one because if you focus all of your attention on one thing, you make more progress in that thing than if you spent three times the amount of time on that thing, but with only a third of the attention. You sort of accumulate more.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It's not a linear progression of... more time on the thing and more focus equals the same amount it's spread with less focus over more time. That's not the way it works. If you focus exclusively on health and the gym for six months, you make way more progress than 50% of that attention for a year. And the same thing goes for businesses and skill acquisition and so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
There's this sort of weird compounding. There's a kind of obsession that causes you to focus on the little minutiae that you might have missed. Typically, you're allowing it to sort of become part of your personality. So the momentum is harder to slow down. After a while, it sort of keeps you going. It keeps you going. It's a part of you. You feel like it's very personal to you.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And yeah, you end up in this place where... So, so many of the results that you wanted to get over the long term can be achieved more quickly by focusing. But the problem is that you feel that fall away.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You feel the drop off of, well, you know, I said I was going to work on my business this year and I was going to get a promotion at work or I was going to build a family or get a girlfriend or do whatever it is. But my body's looking a little bit off. It's like, yeah, dude, you're doing 12-hour days at work. Or you're going out three nights a week trying to socialize and find a partner.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Or whatever it is that you're doing, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. And I think in advance, identifying to yourself, what are the trade-offs I'm prepared to trade? I want to do this thing. 2025, I want to get a promotion at work. I want to move out of the house. I want to move into a new place. Okay. What are the things you need to do in order to be able to do that?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You already thought about that. Okay, and what are the things that you're going to need to pay a cost of? Well, maybe I'm not going to be able to go out as much. So maybe I'm going to feel a little bit more lonely. Maybe some of my friends are going to stop hanging around with me because I can't pay them enough attention to sort of keep them feeling like we've got this connection going.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Okay, well, am I prepared to pay that price? Because... Most people stop doing things, I think, because of the pain that's come along with the byproduct of them, not the lack of progress that they're making. It's all of the other things that stop.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
The most salient thing is the discomfort of other shit dropping off, as well as the discomfort of what you're trying to do now that requires a lot more attention. And you need to manage both of those worlds at the same time.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
But you need to target the particular vaccine or the particular modality for the person that you're speaking to. And yeah, the hard work thing, I understand why, and maybe it was right. The last 10 years have really been dominated by discussions around gritting your teeth, avoiding a victimhood mentality, discipline, motivation, stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah, that is interesting. You've got another tweet that I liked. If you never contradict yourself, you're probably too attached to a limiting belief and it's holding you back from reaching the next level. People don't like contradicting themselves. The internet fucking hates hypocrisy. You know, it's like catnip. Well, you once said this, but now you've said that.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And we also don't like it being called out in ourselves, right? It seems it's half a step away from being called a liar. So why should we be contradicting ourselves more?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
How important is writing as a practice for you for sort of getting all of these realizations together? Obviously, it's something that you do professionally, but how important do you think those insights are, even for people who don't have a blog that they need to be publishing to? Hmm.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And on average, for most people, I think that's right. But it does... a lot of the time forget some other real high points of leverage. What are you choosing to work on? How easy are you finding it? What are you sacrificing over the long term in order to be able to achieve these results in the short term? If you say in the short term, results are determined by your intensity.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
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.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
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.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
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. I, uh, you know, started this newsletter thing that I do, um, four and a half years ago, I think. And, um, I think I've missed a week since then.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
In the long term, results are determined by your consistency. If you trade the latter for the former, you end up being kicked out of the game quite early. What would be another one?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So we're on whatever edition 250, some shit like that. And, uh, Even as somebody that speaks a lot all the time to people that are way smarter than me, the process of writing that newsletter has become better over time. It's reliably my favorite part of the week. And I'm aware this is every guy with a fucking Substack ever going like, bro, you got to get on Substack.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
But the reason I think for me was I struggled so much to... ever keeping up sort of a deep journaling practice beyond something that was very structured you know like a six minute journal five minute diary type thing artist pages or morning pages by Julia Cameron or whatever was just I really struggled with that and I need a lot of
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
social pressure to get myself to do hard things, especially new hard things. So CrossFit was a great example. Started doing CrossFit. You don't quit in the middle of the workout because there's 15 other people who are all doing it with you and they're going to look at you and they're going to look at you weird.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So you use the social pressure, you externalize and outsource your sense of motivation to the group. And if you say it's called Three Minute Monday and Tuesday rolls around and there's been no email, Well, what about all the people that were expecting email on a Monday? So given that, it was the first time that I actually had a consistent writing practice. And it's informed so much.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I think you're right as well. You're going weekly too, right? Once a week? Yeah. And for me, that cadence is really beautiful because... I always have something to write about. I never don't have something to write about. And sometimes I have more to write about than I want to write about, but it never feels arduous. I get to a Friday or a Saturday, I'm like, fuck, I can't wait.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
What have I got this week? I've got my note. And again, I can open my pants and show you what I've got lurking inside, which is just a huge, huge...
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
huge fuck off single note with random links and and bits of insight it could be way more organized i'm sure i could i could have a better system but this one works and it's lightweight and i've used it for you know quarter of a million words so sue me and dude i love it i love it it's helped me personally it's helped me professionally um it It gives me ideas and stories to talk about over dinner.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
For instance, saying that working harder results in better outcomes in life, which means that focusing on working hard and building up discipline is the only thing that matters when creativity, a step functions that can increase whatever it is that you're trying to achieve by, you know, sort of massive amounts.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It's made me reflect on things from my childhood. It gives me space to... So yeah, I had this rule that I came up with about five years ago that everybody should have a podcast in that for half an hour a week, put your phone on the table, press the record button and talk to a friend about a topic that you care about. Because... Very few people have a focused conversation on one topic.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And I think it's therapeutic. I found this kind of conversation when I started guesting on podcasts eight years ago. I found it really therapeutic in a way that was like being thirsty without knowing that I needed a drink. And writing is actually the same. So I haven't said it yet, but I'm slowly veering toward everybody should start the sub stack, even if they have no intention of sharing it.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Just because it's really, really good. If you're finding that your thoughts are messy, if you like ideas and you keep playing with them, but they're always up here.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I saw a tweet from you that was something to do with you're not making as much personal development progress as you want because all of your ideas for personal development are locked in your head as opposed to doing the one thing that could actually move you towards achieving your goals. And it's kind of the same with this.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You've got all of these ideas and they're just sort of lurking around here. And until you've got it to be able to reference somewhere, What are you going to do? You're just going to keep thinking about it. You know what it's like. I mean, this is the ruthless thing about missing persons, right? What do the family say? I just want to know. We just want to know where they are.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And your brain is saying, I just want to know where this fucking idea is. Like, I just want to know. And you go, it's still in the brain. You go, yeah, I know. So I need to keep reminding you of it in case you forget. Once it's down on a piece of paper, you sort of liberate it to think about new different ideas.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
All this to say, as a person who works really fucking hard, like I love it, but I kind of need to remind myself that it's not a panacea. It's not a one size fits all solution to all problems. There are very few problems that won't get better by working harder, but there are significantly better solutions than just working harder a lot of the time.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Dude, I mean, you know, one of the most common questions or insights that came from the live shows was something along the line of, how do I better remember the things that I learn and read? And, you know, the problem is you don't have a reason to fucking remember them. That's your issue.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Your issue is why do you need to remember them other than trying to be more interesting at the water cooler or for some vague sense of personal development? You have no outlet. There's no reason, there's no pressure being applied to the system to constrain it or cause you to do it. So if you don't have a reason to, why should I get fit and go?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
If you didn't know, or if, here's a good one, if it wasn't the case that training in the gym had any bearing on health or wellbeing or the way that you felt or how attracted people were to you, how many people do you think would do it? Almost none, right? Because it's hard and it sucks and there's basically no benefit.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So the benefit to you is way less salient when it's this vague idea of I will become a better, more mindful, more insightful, wisdomy person. No, I've got to write a thousand words this weekend. That'll apply some pressure to you.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Tim Ferriss has got an idea called the good shit sticks. And it's not too dissimilar, basically, that it's not your job to find a book interesting. It's the book's job to be interesting to you. And if you read 200 pages of some book, And you go, well, nothing stood out to me. I can't remember anything.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You go, well, maybe nothing was sufficiently impressive or interesting or resonant with you to warrant you remembering anything. That's not a you problem. That's a book problem.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And being able to hold those two thoughts in your mind at the same time is tough. It's difficult.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Heck yeah. Dan Coe, ladies and gentlemen. Dan, dude, I really appreciate you. I think this blending of productivity, creativity, discipline with sort of freedom and simplicity is a, it's good. It's a much needed redress. Where should people go? They want to check out the things you've written and the work you do. Where should you send them?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
No, my pleasure, dude. Until next time.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah, yeah. Talk to me about sort of handling the trade-offs between growth and maintaining simplicity, because those two things, I think, often end up coming at the cost of each other.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Talk to me about the emotion that comes up when you reach that new highest peak and then you're coming back. Yes, it sounds great to think, well, okay, every stock hits 80 H's and then we come back and we go, okay, this is the new base rate.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
But as you feel the trajectory begin to reverse, despite the fact it's just gone in the other direction, that feels like an emotional problem, not just an operational problem.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Maintaining simplicity, I think,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
reducing down complexity is something that a lot of people struggle with uh you know there's an unlimited number of things that we can choose to do with our time a lot of options uh even within one project you know little hobbies and oh maybe i'm gonna take up crossfit i've always wanted to learn brazilian jiu-jitsu or you know maybe i should maybe i should start doing improv on a
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
For the people who are competent and like to sort of acquire skills, like to feel like they're making progress, how do you come to think about ensuring that simplicity is prioritized so that you don't sort of dilute down your attention across too many things, both professionally, personally, socially, etc. ? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You'll know Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time given to it. This almost feels like it could be Coe's law, which would be life expands to fill the boredom given to it.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So you mentioned before attention that I kind of ignored for quite a while, I think. Maybe like a hammer that sees everything as a nail. I just assumed that basically all problems in my life could be fixed by more hard work, more discipline, more focus, more productivity.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Somewhere in between those four things, which is essentially sort of gripping more tightly, paying more attention, becoming distracted less. But
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
especially this year, I've realized that the creativity part results in changes, sort of step changes of insight about your own life, progress professionally or personally or whatever it is, doing something that's new and effective in a different sort of a way or coming up with a different kind of an idea. And then you can still iterate on that, but that
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I basically prioritized zero time for creativity in the past. I was very much sort of a blunt force trauma, hard work type person. And this tension between creativity and productivity, I think, is still, even with the Rick Rubens of the world and the Dan Coes of the world, I think it's still very much overlooked. So I really want you to sort of break that apart.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
Where did the moustache go? You grew a moustache for a while and it's been banished.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
This episode is brought to you by Incogni. up. Best of all, you can cancel at any time, and they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it completely risk-free, use it for 29 days, and if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
Right now, you can get a 60% discount on an annual plan by going to the link in the description below or heading to incogni.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. I'd always assumed that monks were sort of born into this life.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
I don't know where I thought they came from, but I didn't realize that people could have backgrounds like yours. You had a bunch of degrees, an MBA, and then gave that up to focus on this new life. Why leave all of that stuff behind?
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
If it feels like something's missing from life in the way that it seems like it was for you, where should people begin?
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
I think that is a cycle that people are very familiar with. I want a thing. I work to achieve a thing. I get the thing. Maybe there's some respite from wanting for a little while. Maybe there isn't. I want another thing and the cycle just repeats. How do you come to think about interrupting that, this sort of permanent loop of want, pursue, achieve, want again?
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
What are the areas that you think people are neglecting the most when it comes to their self-mastery? Let's start simple off.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
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Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
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Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
And if you're still unsure, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
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Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
You said that you're someone who likes to chase improvement, wants to achieve things even if they're very well designed, if they're very intentional. How do you come to think about balancing a desire for self-improvement with self-love? A lot of the time the need for self-improvement comes with a side order of disdain for yourself until you achieve that thing.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
And that I think is also another cycle that people go through as opposed to trying to achieve something externally, trying to reach something, whether it's a new job title, a new qualification, a streak on their meditation, even a streak on their meditation, right? You're doing something to improve yourself and there is a lack of self-love until you've achieved it.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
And if you fail at that thing, then there is a lack of self-love that comes along with it. And then you have regret as well about... having not been able to achieve the thing that you said you were going to in the promises that you made?
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
How do you advise people to deal with regret? A lot of the time we look back at decisions that we could have made. If only I'd realized that the balance between being and doing I'd come to earlier, I'd not done that MBA that I didn't need to. If I'd found meditation sooner in my life, if I'd let go of that partner and moved on to the one that was supposed to be for me.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
People can be very captured, I think, and that's a different type of cycle that we get stuck into. One where we're ruminating about the past. What's your perspective on regret?
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
Where does discipline and focus come from? That seems to be a huge part of your life of Shaolin philosophy as well. Where do you come to think about the origins of discipline and focus and how you build it?
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
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#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
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#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
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#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
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. How different is the texture of your mind now after all of this time in contemplation, in releasing, in mindfulness, in physical practice? You know, as somebody that
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
didn't come into this world completely untrained. It's not like you'd never seen any of this sort of insight before. You were probably practicing Qigong, Tai Chi, stuff like that, maybe a little bit beforehand. But I'm interested as someone who is a sort of normal level of mindfully aware.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
I don't even know if you can remember what it was like to have that mind previously or if it feels like ancient history.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
Okay. Okay. What do you mean when you talk about self-mastery? What are you referring to?
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
It is strange to think about how much noise gets created by people
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
panicking and sort of gripping and flapping at their unprocessed issues you know you're hearing people speak but what's actually coming out of their mouth is not what they necessarily even mean to say it's some strange secret code that their body or the way that they've dealt with their past traumas or the way that they've absorbed society's desires for them to follow uh
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
And it's very odd how a lot, maybe most, maybe nearly all of what people are actually doing is not saying what they mean to say. It's saying they're being puppeted by their own mind. They're being puppeted by their own past in that way. And I think trying to quiet that is not just a
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
gift that you can give yourself but it's probably a gift that you can give the rest of the world as well because they don't need to put up with what it is that you're talking about that isn't what you meant to talk about so primarily my work let's say for the past 13 14 years has
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
Where does the bravery come from to face that? It's going to be scary. It's going to be painful. How should people think about the courage that they need to face it?
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
Ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They're going to want to keep up to date with the things that you're doing, what you've got going on. Where do you want to send them on the internet?
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
I appreciate you very much. Thank you for today.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
We don't get to choose the things that we think. We can't necessarily predict the next thought that's going to come careening into our brain. So what do you mean when you talk about how we feed and focus on what's inside of our minds, given that sometimes, much of the time, our minds are outside of our control?
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
It's interesting thinking about how lots of the work that we do is able to take place when times are good, but is needed most when times are bad. That if you are trying to develop a meditation practice, if you're trying to become more aware of your thoughts, if you're trying to become more peaceful while you're in the middle of some catastrophe or challenge that's going on in your life,
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
you're playing on hard mode there. But when things are good by design, you don't want to spend so much time having to prepare for when times are bad. You think, well, everything's going great. I don't need to do that. And yeah, increasingly when it comes to a mindfulness practice or Journaling, gratitude, breathwork, anything that sort of steals your resolve.
Modern Wisdom
#945 - Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi - The Art Of Self Mastery
I think the best time to do it is when you don't need it because it allows you to be prepared for the times when you do.
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?
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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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Modern Wisdom
#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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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?
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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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Modern Wisdom
#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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Modern Wisdom
#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
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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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Modern Wisdom
#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
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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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Modern Wisdom
#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
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Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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,
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Bonjour, friends. Welcome back to the show. It is a 3.5 million subscriber Q&A episode. I ask for questions on the internet. You give them to me. Then I choose only the ones about the Gaza Strip and trans issues. And I talk about them for an hour and a half. So let's get into it. The Mr. Wyatt. What's your favorite new sleep token, Caramel or Emergence?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Carter Valasa, as a fellow giant brow bone haver, I was wondering if you know where it comes from genetically. I took a DNA test, and it turns out I have more Neanderthal DNA than 99% of people. I heard you mention you had done one, so I was curious if you know what your Neanderthal percentage is. Ahem. I do have a prominent brow. Thank you for reminding everyone about this. Let me see.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And Toronto is one of the cities that's on there. And I'm not going to say what any of the others are because that's what the announcement is supposed to be about. But chriswilliamson.live and you'll find out before anybody else. Daniel Semper Pico, how do you deal with judging yourself for judging yourself?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
How can I... So the problem... Oh, there we go. There we go. For the people that are just listening, I'm kind of using my forehead as a solar panel. Someone actually said put a petition on the podcast to make Chris's forehead into a solar panel. Someone else said that watching me and Mike Israetel talk was like sealing two alien head races meeting for the first time, which is very charming.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And we did need to actually change the lighting setup previously because it had a grid on the big key light that I've got here, had a grid on it, and it was just forming a perfect reflective surface in the middle of my forehead. All of that is to say, the DNA test that I did just looked at pairs of alleles. It wasn't a 23andMe or an Ancestry.com. So I actually don't know that number.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I think I know everything else about my genetics except for that. And whether I'm mostly Irish or French or something. So I should do that. I would hazard a guess that I do also share in a high percentage of Neanderthal DNA. What I do know about the brow ridge for men is that the reason, it seems, men have got bigger brow ridges than women is that it would be protective if you were in a fight.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Same reason, bigger knuckles, bigger hands. These are your weapons. This is your defense. So I don't know if you're suggesting that I, like you, am a high percentile Neanderthal descendant. Does that mean Carter, Vallarsa... that me and you are the descendants of men that were punched in the head a lot, but survived.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I'm not sure if that is the lineage that I want to be a part of, but alas, here I am. Please don't punch me in the head, but apparently I can take it. So I might find that out and come and tell you soon. Before we continue, if your workouts feel flat, your recovery slow, or you've just been feeling off, it might not be your training plan or your diet.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
It might be something a bit more boring like zinc. And while most supplements like Tonkat Ali can help, zinc quietly plays a huge role in testosterone production, strength, recovery, and energy. And most people are chronically low on it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Momentus' zinc because it supports testosterone, boosts vitality, and it helps keep everything running smoothly.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
like it should. Plus, it is NSF certified for sport, which means it's been independently tested and approved for purity, safety, and zero shady ingredients. Just clean, effective, science-backed goodness. And if you're still unsure, Momentus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it for 29 days. If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Plus, They ship internationally.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
In your latest vlog, you talked about how you weren't kind to yourself after your Joe Rogan interview, then you seem to be judging yourself for that. Yeah, dude, it's so funny that you say that. I don't know whether this got left in the vlog, but I did a section, I spoke to Max, videographer Max, about how I was trying to be unkind to my unkindness to myself.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and 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. Da walk. How do I get you to read The Will of the Many by James Islington?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So I think this is the, it's sort of set in quasi ancient Rome, Greek times. And my friend Ricky told me that I should read it a couple of years ago after I was lamenting the fact there wasn't another Red Rising book. And I've been told it a few times and I just saw on Reddit yesterday in r slash fantasy, someone else harping on about it.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
But I tried, I tried for the first chapter and I couldn't get into it. So I'm going to give it another crack, Darwok, and I will report back. And if it sucks, I'm going to come and find you. rcampbell2321 do you ever pause interviews to pee that is an error on your part typically um i would say virtually as in like the virtual ones i do never In person, very rare.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
You know, you talk about having the memory of an elephant. What you want is the bladder of a podcaster because we're like the fucking Navy SEALs of holding it in. Especially if you're in the zone, you get up, you come back, where were we? The flow's all broken. It's very rare. But Rogan did it. Me and Rogan did it, I think, on the second episode. This is the way that it works. This is great.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
This is a good one. So if you really need to pee, what you should be doing is trying to encourage the other person to drink more so that they say to pee. And if they say, then you can go with them. You're like, oh, cool, I'll come with you. You know, I don't really need to go. Meanwhile, you're sort of walking to the bathroom like this. But no, it's rare.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
You've got to time the hydration properly, which I do. I actually try and drink a ton of water. Also, this is from my speech coach, Miles, the way that your vocal folds get hydrated. It takes, I think, between...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
two and four hours for them to be hydrated so you want to pound water for the morning and then you want to cut it off about an hour before you go and then out it is and then obviously on the show i'm just swimming in all manner of stimulants and hydration drinks and nootropics and nootonic and everything but you know i can i can usually hold it together for a few hours George Swain 99.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
You like outcomes over inputs. Top footy coaches say focus on inputs leads to best outcomes. Discuss please. Footy for the Americans listening is football with your feet, not your hands. Outcomes over inputs versus inputs leading to the best outcomes. Okay. I agree.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I think that the James Clear approach of not focusing too much on goals and instead focusing on systems, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, you fall to the level of your habits. I think that's a good way to think about things, especially in something like football. The problem is... if you are in a less bounded game.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
In football, you are always just trying... Get the round spherical thing into the square box over there. That's really it. There are different ways that you can get there, but largely you are working on individual skills and you've got a very tightly defined goal. The reason that I like outcomes over inputs... is in a much broader environment where your goals are more poorly defined.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So if you don't know whether you're sitting down with your instrument today to practice or to learn a new song that you're going to play on stage or to try and work out a new tune that you've been thinking of in your head, or to refine and record that tune that you've already recorded. Think about all of the different ways that this can go. And that's just a musical instrument.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Then you get yourself into a business. I want to grow. I want to build a business. I want to run a business. Okay, well, what are you going to do? You're going to build your brand. You're going to work on your supply chain. You're going to try and hire people. You're going to work on your marketing. Maybe you need to sit down and do your account. There's so many different things that you can do.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So how do you deal with judging yourself or judging yourself is a super smart question. And it's tough, man. You end up with this infinite regress of feeling bad and then feeling bad about feeling bad and then feeling resentful about feeling bad about feeling bad and then getting frustrated at your resentment and then getting anxious about your frustration.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And if all you were to focus on was, I'm going to sit down and be focused, You could be focused on completely the wrong thing and end up putting tons and tons of effort into stuff that doesn't actually yield any outcomes. You could spend your entire day labeling your inbox. Well, I mean, that's lots of inputs.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I'm sure that in many worlds of productivity, that would be something that's really helped. But what have you achieved? How much closer have you moved yourself toward your goal? And at least for me, as somebody that really took the sort of James Clear red pill when his book came out...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I just realized that growth without goals is kind of like having a super, super fast, well-tuned up car that you can be driving in entirely the wrong direction. And that sometimes you've got your foot to the floor and you don't realize that like the tires aren't on the ground.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So yeah, focusing on outcomes for me, because even ultimately the football coaches say a focus on inputs leads to the best outcomes, but the goal is still the outcome, right? Nobody is doing inputs just for input's sake. Very rarely.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
The only reason that you focus on inputs is to detach yourself from the emotional connection to the outcome and to not get sort of drowned in this movement toward the goal. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Outcomes is ultimately what you want to do, and I think that the broader the environment that you're working in and the wider the number of routes that there are in order for you to move toward what you would call success, I do think that maybe the more focus on outcome would be better.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And a more bounded game, something like a sport, maybe something like working on a musical instrument, maybe you would be looking at focusing on inputs a little bit more because the outcome is much more tightly defined. Maybe that helps. Jaffe Rider. How come you haven't tried a new haircut yet? 3.5 million subscribers have all seen the same suspiciously Neanderthal hairline said with love.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Any chance to grow it out and be a wild man? Love you. Well... I didn't realize that the prehistoric human noticing crowd was so strong today. I haven't tried a new haircut. Remember this. Look, this haircut is a COVID haircut, okay?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I am still really, really riding, rinsing out the coattails of COVID is happening, all the barbers are shut, just shave my head, mate, to my housemate that I was living with. Um, I am going to maybe try to grow it out, but the problem is I'm going from so short to a hair length that has got five embarrassing midpoints between it. Cause my head doesn't get longer.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
It just gets bigger and be careful what you wish for man, because this thing is unruly. Um, but yeah, I'm actually, I'm interesting that you say it. I'm in the middle. You may notice it's a tiny little bit longer.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
than usual uh this is three weeks three or four weeks perhaps uh anyway i will see i may bail out you honestly i may get five weeks deep and go i can't deal with this fuzz anymore and just pull the ripcord and eject myself out of it but yeah this haircut's only existed for the last five years and the show's been going for seven so if you go back to pre-covid you will see me with hair
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And yeah, these second, third, fourth order emotions that go all the way back are Um, especially when the very thing that you need is the very thing you're complaining about, right? Uh, you weren't kind to yourself and now I'm not being kind to myself about not being kind to myself. Um, it's tough. Uh, I mentioned on the vlog, if people haven't checked it out, it's, it's pretty cool. It's
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Chad Preet, good name, like Indian, like fucking jacked guy, Chad Preet. When are you updating book list? Name some you would add. Good question. So I have a reading list. I'm really proud of it. I wrote it four years ago. It's a hundred books you should read before you die. And you can get it at chriswillx.com slash books. It's completely free. And like 300,000 people have got it.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And a lot of people have asked for a second one. So many people, I actually wrote one. So I've done it. It's finished. So there is another Modern Wisdom Reading List Volume 2 with another 100 books coming. It's with the designer. He'll be putting it together. And this will be available, I would imagine... end of the month, maybe, probably before May, start of May, something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
There'll be a different landing page. It'll be offered to people who are on the other reading list first. So I guess sign up, chriswillex.com slash books, and you'll get 100, and then you'll get another 100 at the end of the month. So yeah, I'm updating it soon. Names some that I would add. Who is in there that's really cool? Um... uh, from Vikings to Tinder, uh, by Mads Larsson.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So I've got some stuff in that. I've got poetry in there for the first time. I've got free books like Mads' book. Uh, so most of it is stuff that you would buy, but I've got more shit that's on, I suggest that you listen to on Audible as opposed to just being like, consume it however you want. So I tried to refine it a little bit more, but, um, uh, I'm happy with it.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
It nearly killed me to do it again. It's such a...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
mind-numbing task to do a hundred books all with custom written by me summaries about why I like them and then I create my own categories for them and then I got to reorder them so I think they work and yeah I realized part way through it why I hadn't done it for four years since the last time I did it but it's done with the designer and you'll get it soon
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
When are we getting the Modern Wisdom t-shirts? Yes, I know every time I do a Q&A, I give you the same answer, which is we're working on it, but we're working on it and you'll get it soon. And the first drop will be an exclusive, you know, first edition of what it is we're going to do. It's going to be a slightly adjusted brand, which I adore and I can't wait to release.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I really, really think is one of the coolest things I've done in branding probably since Newtonic. So it's fun. I haven't got, you know, Modern Wisdom's kind of locked in. And I don't get to play about with new ideas from branding. You get to do copy for the episodes and the titles and stuff. But it's not something brand, brand new. And this is brand new. So I'm excited.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I'm really, really fired up to show you what we're working on. But the answer is not yet. Maybe within a few months, hopefully. Daniel Raj 5218. Do you plan on getting your own pet Jamie like Joe Rogan? That's not nice to call Jamie. He's a agentic. Strong, independent woman who has a lot to add. I fucking love that guy. He's great.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
We went to go and see Bill Murray play together at the start of the end of the summer. He's not a pet. He's great. And unfortunately, if you realize how great he is, you will also realize that he is kind of hard to come by to find someone who's got that full skill set. That being said, I'm in the process of trying to find a location in Austin, Texas to use for a studio.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So I'm going to build my first studio here in Austin. Maybe have an office on site, a little office on site too. But mostly it's going to be the recording spot. I guess... Fuck it, we're half an hour in. I can break the fourth wall. I got a few... Ideas for the show, like new things that I want to do. I'm really keen on the idea of having a little bit more of a hang with some of my friends.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I love all of the dusty academics that I speak to. I love... how tight and lean the conversations are. I love that we get straight into them. It's no fuckery. I love that you know that you're always going to leave with something of value, even if it's a topic that you didn't think you were going to be interested in.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
It's strange if you have a period where your confidence gets knocked, and mine certainly has over the last couple of months. Being ill, still trying to sort of hold on to the same work rate and output and mood and stuff, whilst just not really, really not having it in the tank. It can chip away your self-belief.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I love that the conversation moves forward at a quick pace, but doesn't sound, I hope doesn't sound too sterile or sort of stripped of all personality. But even I find sometimes when I listen to episodes, I'm like, fuck, there's so much practical, applicable stuff in this. I almost feel guilty if I don't start applying it to my life.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I don't want this show to always feel like there's homework on the other side. And I think when it comes to the Q&As, I know that these are some of the most popular episodes that people tell me about. This Christmas episode that I do once a year with my friends back in the UK. And I just have this sense in the back of my mind that...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Kind of like giving you guys a palate cleanser every so often. And also for me, doing multi-guest episodes that's just a little bit more slow pace doesn't necessarily have a tightly defined outcome before the episode begins. So I'm going to test some of those over the rest of the year. But the problem is I want to do that.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I don't want to be flitting around building pop-up studios and doing it with the sort of cinema style that we've done before. It needs to be in a spot that's mine. And we would need to have a Jamie there because it's going to be more complex to be able to piece together and for stuff to get put up onto it.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
onto a screen if someone wants to reference it but i think you'll be seeing more of jack more of zach george mac is also moving to austin so he'll be here and a ton of other friends human's moving out here brian callan's moving out here so uh yeah i don't know i'm gonna test some of those and having my own pet jamie will be uh an important part of that so if you happen to have a huge warehouse space in austin that you want to give me that i can build a studio in
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Hooray. Pete, could he? You've said that someone who is super successful should be pitied rather than envied. Why? Much of the time, I think we should default to pity rather than envy. Not always, but very successful people have been driven to create that world of success by something. And
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
looking at them as non-typical outgrowths of probably a pretty sort of mean uncomfortable childhood a requirement to be seen by the world this requirement need for external validation and is not something that you probably want. I don't think that you would envy most of the richest, most successful people on the planet if you could see the inner texture of their minds.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And when you look at them, you should think, holy fuck, what had to happen to that person to cause them to build that business or that body or spend so long curating their writing ability or their speaking ability or their singing ability. And...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Yeah, from the outside, what you see is a success, but from the inside, what you see is the journey that it took to get there and the motivation that started the journey. A lot of the time, I don't think that you would pay the price that you need to be the people that you admire. And, you know, admiration is fine. but it should be tempered.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I think a little bit of pity, especially if you're a happy person, if you're someone who is able to be comfortable in your own skin, holy shit, you have got it sorted. You have got the thing that successful people are trying to find. They're just taking the long route to the top of Everest. And yeah, I think pity is not necessarily a bad default.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
A quick aside, using the internet without a VPN today is like leaving your front door wide open and hoping that no one walks in. Websites, apps, and data brokers are constantly collecting your personal information. What you search, what you watch, what you buy, where you are, it all gets tracked. And Surfshark protects you from that.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And then someone saying, hey, dude, why don't you go on the biggest podcast in the world and then record the biggest podcast you've ever done within four days of each other? Oh, by the way, you've got to travel in between to like two other cities. Uh, that just really sort of pushed it. That's also for the people that watch to the end. I have a little sad boy moment.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
It encrypts your internet connection so your activity stays private, even on sketchy public Wi-Fi at airports, cafes, or hotels. And it lets you change your virtual location with a single click. Their clean web feature also blocks ads, trackers, and malware before they even load, so you stay safer and your browsing is smoother.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
You can run Surfshark on every device that you own, unlimited installs on one account. And right now you can get four extra months of Surfshark for free by going to the link in the description below or heading to surfshark.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's surfshark.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Zachary sparks 5078.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Is it better to hustle in your 20s and 30s to find financial stability and success in your 40s and on? Or should that energy be directed toward finding a healthy equilibrium early in life, even if it means less financial stability in your later years? All right. Usually, I'd give some equanimous equivocating caveated fucking answer here. My belief is
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
is that you should probably try and bury yourself in your twenties and your thirties. It's okay to push yourself as hard as you can. When you don't have the same level of responsibility, you have the capacity to bounce back from it. You can take bigger risks and move back in with your parents if you need to, um,
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
all of... I don't think there's ever going to be an easier time to hustle than in your 20s and 30s to find financial success, stability, to build confidence in yourself that you can, if the business breaks down, if the wife leaves you, if everything goes to shit, that you've got this... demon mode inside of you that you can flick the switch of.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I certainly know that it was very confidence building for me to see what I could do in my 20s. Now, yeah, did I have a healthy equilibrium? No, I didn't. I didn't have a stable sleep and wake pattern until COVID, ever. My entire adult life, the first time I went to bed and woke up at the same time, seven days a week, I was COVID when nightclubs were shut down from the age of 18 and I was 32.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So it's not the most holistic, it's not the most healthy, but I think you can front load that pain and that hustle. And I do think that it pays off benefits on the back end. Is there some survivorship bias here? Yes, of course.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
How many people in their 20s and 30s that hustled their ass off and then didn't get to the level of financial success and stability that they wanted and also paid some prices in terms of their health and finding an equilibrium? Yep, those are going to be there. But yeah, I get the sense that it's not okay to work your life away, but it is okay to work your 20s and your 30s away.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And that's what I did. So totally motivated reasoning. Fabuline7039, what's your dream podcast set location and who is the best guest you would take there? Dude, I mean, this is total pipe dream, but first podcast in space would just be so fucking cool.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
You know, I don't think it's probably going to happen in my lifetime, but first podcast either in some floating vehicle in space or on the moon would just be outrageous. It makes me so fired up. I don't really actually even care if it's me that does it. I just want someone to do it. But I don't know how many other people would be bothered about it.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Um, that's the first time that I think I've ever cried on camera, which I was so fucking close to cutting it out. I was so close to just saying, get rid of it. It feels too uncomfortable. I can't bear to see myself be such a pussy. Uh, but it was real. It was definitely how I felt at the time. And, uh, Yeah, trying to be kind to my unkindness is a skill that I'm yet to develop.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
It's like, well, you went all the way to the moon. Fucking did what? Are you retarded? Of all of the things you could have done? I'm like, yeah, sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Fuck. That was a bad idea.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
um i've said this thing before i'd love to do graham hancock uh in front of the pyramids of giza um that would be i don't know just kind of epic uh i'm aware that everyone hates him because of his archaeology the spurious ideas and stuff but that would be one hell of an experience so the pyramids of giza would be would be pretty dialed i'd like to do that Melaniac.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
In knowing that you do not like to caveat yourself into oblivion about how, of course, women have their own struggles as well, but I'm talking about men right now.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Do you think there is a level of growth where you would feel comfortable just approaching a men's issue with no caveat and eating the backlash from people who obviously aren't long-time listeners or are just looking to nitpick for the sake of nitpicking? Great question. Yeah. I had it out.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
with Richard Reeves about this, that I was kind of sick of this weird land acknowledgement that needs to be done before you talk about men's issues where you have to say, well, we understand that the gluten intolerant community is really struggling and can't forget about the challenges that women have and people who have got a club foot and so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And after we've got that all out of the way, then we can finally talk about men. It's frustrating to me because the reverse doesn't need to happen. Nobody says, we do know that men are killing themselves at three times the rate of any other group. And we do know that there's half a million more men than women that took their own lives between 1999 and 2020.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
We do know that men are falling behind socioeconomically at every age level, every class level. But after that, we can finally talk about, no one does that. And it just feels clunky and unnecessary and unsophisticated. Problem is, if you don't do it, so what you're saying is nitpick crowd have a vector for attack.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I get the sense that if you had reached some kind of narrative escape velocity where everybody knows you and everybody knows what you're talking about and everybody knows that you're coming at this from a good faith perspective, any criticism would very quickly be rebuffed by fans of yours that were saying, mate, why are you bringing this up? You know that that's not what he thinks.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Joe Rogan N-word video. Joe got pulled up about saying the N-word a lot. It was like a five-minute montage. And people said, see, this is proof that he's the racist, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, whatever that we've known that he was all along. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but trust us, there's a big iceberg below it.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And everyone said, no, I don't believe you because I've watched 500 hours. Even a casual listener of Rogan will have done maybe 50 or 100 hours. I've listened to a lot of him and I don't think he is what you say he is. So you get to this, let's call it narrative escape velocity. I don't think I'm there, especially not on this topic.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And especially not given the way that I present as like fucking Andrew Tate from Wish. I don't think that I could get away with it. It would be nice. It would be way easier. It would be much more slick. But...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
i know i i'm starting i'm trying to cultivate fuck you energy i am and it's going to be more important over the next few years to be able to have that i not actively that i don't care about what you think but that you willfully misinterpreted what i said and go fuck yourself because you know that you did that and it happens so much it already is happening and it's super annoying but i uh
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
That's something that I need to build up. The preparedness to not care about the opinions of people who don't understand what I'm doing and don't like me and don't care about making the things that are contributing to the stuff that I'm trying to create. But it is kind of stupid to think, okay, so this person doesn't understand what you're doing. They don't care about you.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
But it seemed to resonate, which was beautiful, and no one said too many mean things about it, or not many people said that many mean things about it. I get the sense that if I was a fan of this show or, you know, I think about shows that I'm a fan of fucking like Huberman, right?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
They don't have your best interests at heart. They're not one of your people and they don't want you to be better. And you are believing and putting faith and stock in what they say about you or to you. why? Why would you do that? They're not impressive people. They're not nice people. They're not people that you respect. They're not people that care about you.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
They're not doing this to try and make you better. They're simply doing it to try and stand on the shoulders of some supposed error or slip up or smoking gun of yours. So really, when you think about it rationally, when I think about it logically, There's no reason that I should care about it. But it's something that I'm working through.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I guess you'll find out if it gets to a stage where I go, you know, we really need to be worried about Matt and I just jump straight into it. You'll know that I have reached escape velocity. So hold on. Dave Kiers, you mentioned feeling unwell in your last Q&A. How are you feeling now? Yeah. It's all right. I'm A little better in terms of brain function, which is good.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
For the few people in the audience that don't know who Sleep Token are, they're a band. They're a band that I'm a big fan of and I've been listening to for quite a while. And they knocked Chapel Roan off the number one spot a couple of weeks ago, which was fantastic. Pretty fun to see, given that that song has actual death metal pieces in it. I have got Caramel on repeat, dude.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And the Rogan and Naval weekend was... formative for me because i felt so shitty going in i felt so my brain was so slippery i call it slippery brain i had such slippery brain where i wasn't holding on to thoughts i wasn't recalling well i wasn't precise with my speech all of the things i really take pride in and i think i contribute well it just weren't there and i was like for fuck's sake i
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
The very thing that I'm supposed to be good at has been taken away from me and I have no doing of my own. All I've done for over 12 months now, like 14 months, maybe more, all I've done is try and fix my health.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Unlimited numbers of saunas and cold plunges and phosphatidylcholine and glutathione and 25 gram bags of vitamin C IV and blood cleaning treatments in Tijuana and peptides and gut detox protocols and... Like everything, like the list of things that I've done is huge.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I will do, I know that a lot of people that suffer with sort of like complex chronic illness and tinnitus and all of the shit that I've, EBV, mold, toxic, all of the stuff I've talked about.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
But I know that I kind of owe, in a way, I do actually feel a little bit of a sense of a debt to be more open about it and be a little bit more of a plant a flag in the ground for how difficult it is so that other people feel a bit less alone. But I just can't do it while I'm still in the trenches. I'm sorry, I can't be...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
the person that's, you know, delivering this, this message, hopefully one of hope that you look at all of the things that I did and did, I came out the other side while I'm still in it. It's just, it's too much for me to juggle. And also something I've learned is that if you tell a sad story about yourself, but that isn't resolution because it's still going on, people don't feel hope.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
They feel pity and they feel sad for you. And it's not the vibe that I'm trying to give off. Certainly not at the moment. So I guess that's a long-winded way of saying largely I'm feeling the same. I'm tired. I fall asleep at 8 or 8.30 p.m. at night, most nights. My sleep's disrupted. I wake up not feeling particularly rested. I can't train at more than 50% capacity.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Let's say that I'm watching one of Andrew's shows and he gets a little bit emotional talking about the challenges that he faces. And I think, oh my God, like he's so, he seems so smart and well put together and he's got all of this stuff going for him. And wow, like he feels the same things that I do. And, um, I'm proud that I was able to say it on camera and I'm proud that we left it in the vlog.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I've got slippery brain, my mood's low, but I have bits of respite and the bits of respite are a little bit more controllable now. But I've had so many times where I've thought, oh yeah, I'm out the other side. Like, this is great. I'm on the up and up. and it was just a brief upward swing before it gets lower to a new all-time low. So we'll see.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I got some big treatments coming up over the next couple of months. Hopefully they will have a big impact. I did an at-home sleep study, the only lab-quality at-home sleep study that you can do outside of literally going into a sleep lab to do it. I did that, so that was an assessment. Really... I've done everything to try and work out what the fuck is going on.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And it's not overworking because for the last six months, I dialed back how much I worked. I stopped traveling as much. I did trainings at 50%, all of the things, right? I've covered all of the bases and I will detail it all at some point eventually. But for now, I'm just plodding on. Hivanagibi1998. I absolutely loved your episode with Alain de Botton. Thank you. It was incredibly insightful.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Is there any chance you'll have him on again in future episodes? So yes, I emailed him, I think, a week after. We've been emailing for forever, maybe five years, six years, back and forth, back and forth. He was doing it. I think he had some health things. He stopped doing podcasts. He came back. He got rearranged, weren't able to do it. I wasn't going out there.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
My dates changed, his dates changed, and then we finally got him. And there was a bit of me that thought that was so good. But fuck, it was 5% of the things that I want to talk about. And it went for two hours. So like, I need a lot of time. Okay, Alain.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So I emailed him and I said, hey, dude, I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the episode, how great I thought it was, how impactful I think it is. And he basically said, yeah, I'm ready to run it back when we're in the same city again. So you will be getting more Alain at some point soon.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
JVisionTV287, when you were growing up and building the person you envisioned, how did you go about breaking up those steps into more achievable goals in the meantime? How did you go about keeping that same fire to improve even when you weren't everything you wanted to be yet?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Yeah, I'm going to give you a probably quite an unsatisfactory answer here, which is I'm really not good at having a long-term plan. I am a good avatar for the person who kind of just focuses on what's in front of them and doesn't have a big picture.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I know that productivity wisdom is to write your gravestone and then work it back in 10-year periods and then chunk that down into three-year sprints and then put that into 90-day goals and then break that into daily actions. I know that that's the way that you're supposed to do it, but it just never really seemed to work for me.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So building the person that I envisioned, I really didn't envision any outcome what I actually thought was, I want to be more mindful. And the most direct goal to being more mindful is to meditate. I want to be more, I want to be fitter. I want to be more peaceful. I want to have more gratitude. I want to be able to sleep better. I want to be more consistent. I want to be a better speaker.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So if it resonated with you, then I appreciate you. But unfortunately, I do not have anything remotely appropriating a solution for this, because as you may have noticed, I'm still going through it. So I will tell you when I find one.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
It wasn't necessarily this sort of destination I was moving toward. It was a very simple outcome goal. And just one
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
modality that helps get toward that which was meditation for mindfulness it was journaling and formal gratitude practice for gratitude it was breath work for nervous system regulation it was walks and taking a lot of time walking to you know work out what was going on inside of my mind and um Keeping the same fire to improve even when you weren't everything you wanted to be yet.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Well, as someone who, although I'm battling through a ton of shit, which is kind of new and novel to me right now, but I guess I have reached escape velocity on...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
at least some of the things that i wanted a lot of the things that i wanted when i was 28 29 when i started doing this properly when i you know i went sober for the first time at 20 28 and i stopped partying oh my god that was revolutionary um and now i don't think about drinking and every single thing that i wanted to do build a meditation practice blah blah blah get better at speaking build the business move to another country all of the things that i wanted to do uh
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Talking about keeping the same fire to improve even when you weren't everything that you wanted to be yet, as someone who's kind of got to a place closer to where he does want to be, keeping the fire going now is probably harder because what's driving you? There's such a delta between where you are and where you want to be, so you keep pushing to get there.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
But gold medalist syndrome is fucking real, dude. You arrive. At what point do you arrive? And even if you think, I haven't arrived yet, but I'm kind of close to it, Like, oh, fuck, what do I do now? For so long, I've been, you know, pushing and pushing and pushing to find this thing. And then when you get there, why do you need to keep pushing so hard?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
The reason you did it previously was this desperate need for validation and recognition and to actually make something of yourself. Girl, you made something of yourself. Now what? It's a difficult one. So I chose very simple goals that were upstream of lots of things that I wanted to be better in. I wanted to be a more peaceful person. I wanted to be more mindful.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I wanted to have a better quality of thoughts. I wanted to be able to think and speak more clearly. And I just did... one modality for each of those things and basically didn't stop for about the best now approaching 10 years. And here we are. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Gymshark and Skims and Allo.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And hopefully, you know, the fact that I'm kind of growing with you on this journey of self-discovery, whatever it is that we're all doing, hopefully that is reassuring because I... I'm on the same trajectory, growth trajectory thing that everybody else is. I'm just, I guess, doing it in public.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
and newtonic and that is why i've partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers they're best in class their checkout is 36 better on average compared with other leading commerce platforms and with shop pay you can boost your conversions by up to 50 they've got award-winning support that's there to help you every step of the way look you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do back-end inventory management and shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
which is designing and selling an awesome product. You can upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use at Newtonic with Shopify by going to the link in the description below and signing up for a $1 per month trial period or by heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. Paul Irish 1165.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Chris, I want to order Newtonic in Canada, but the shipping costs are equal to the cost of the product. Is there any alternative? Yes, I know. I'm sorry. Fucking international shipping, dude, is rough with an RTD. You know, this is Element. I know. It's not good. It's not easy to... It's not easy at all to do that. We would get a 3PL or a fulfillment center in Canada.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
The Canadian audience for this show, at least for my audience, is bigger than everywhere else on the planet per capita except for Australia. So it goes Australia...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
canada ireland the uk the usa in terms of uh like per capita audience size so i want to get it there but it's a nightmare um what you can do in the meantime is use the focus blend the stick packs or the brain capsules because they'll be way cheaper to ship which i think will be where most of the cost is coming from unless there's some sort of import duties and fuck knows what's happening with trump's tariffs dude maybe everything's going to triple so stock up while you can
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Alante is 94. How long have you been married to Douglas Murray? Yeah, that was awkward. For the people who don't spend much time on Twitter, somebody tweeted, in fact, let me see if it's still there. Douglas Murray, husband. Douglas Murray, husband. Images.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
yep okay so the top line is uh douglas murray husband him and candace owen second image is douglas murray and me third image is douglas and dave rubin the fourth image is i don't know who that is uh sam harris is up there uh oh i'm up there twice how great well it's me and coleman hughes so that's like an interracial triplet marriage um
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Yeah, someone tweeted saying that I was his husband and that I was also like of a different name. And I quote tweeted saying it was a skill issue. And then all hell broke loose. So I've been married to Douglas apparently since 2022. Tom Chappell, where's the glasses from? Okay, these are the ones from Rogan, I'm going to guess. They are Moscots. They are monochrome Moscots in blush.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So Moscot is a British glasses manufacturer. They do prescription stuff. And I went to Jimmy Carr's Savile Row suit menswear store. He owns part of it and we were hanging out and we wanted to go for a coffee and So I went with him and I saw this pair of pink glasses two years ago. I was like, those are sick. I'm going to buy them. And I have, and they are functionally useless.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And if that makes everyone feel a bit less alone and helps me to work out my own emotions publicly, then I consider it a win. The magic Lima. You often say about all the millionaires leaving the UK, but where are they going and why? Yeah, this is a stat from last year that UK was second in the world for millionaire exits after China, but it's got 4% of the population of China, so per GDP by far.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
They don't do anything. They're not blue blockers. They don't help downregulate your melatonin. And then I took them off on Rogan and he encouraged me to put them back on and then I wore them for three hours. So yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
uh yeah mascots in monochrome blush they've got them in blue they've got them in green and they're pretty cool and they're super comfortable but they're not cheap they're about 250 bucks so or maybe 300 bucks so go study jj thomas 10 if you could sit down and have a conversation with your 21 year old self what would you say i
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I guess it depends how long the conversation is, but I'd probably just say fearless. So much of my life, especially in my twenties and even still now is driven by this fear. It's driven by uncertainty. It's, um, running away from something that you don't want is running towards something that you do. And, that will push you to do lots of great things and maybe become a very impressive person.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
But it's not the fuel that you want to be using for a long time. So first off, I would probably say I understand that you don't feel very recognized or very validated or very seen by the world. That's fine. That's not some personal failing of yours.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
That's kind of just a byproduct of being a 21 year old guy that doesn't quite know what he wants yet and is struggling to connect with the people around him. I would say. Fall in love slowly and break up quickly because much of your twenties, if you're not careful, will be spent in relationships that you should have left sooner for both of your sakes. Don't be guilty about disappointing people.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Don't fear the repercussions of putting yourself first. Don't subjugate your desires in order to keep somebody else happy. Don't make yourself unhappy in order to keep somebody else happy. buy Bitcoin and do 531. That's what I'd say. Ramo Palmo, under what conditions do you feel the most mentally sharp and able to perform cognitive tasks? That's a good question.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So I've got a pretty dialed routine now before the big episodes, which is no carbs at all. So bacon and eggs, sausage and eggs, breakfast, minimal caffeine earlier in the day, maybe one coffee on a morning, go and train moderately hard, but not super hard. So RPE, seven, I'll be eight. Then
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I want to be a little bit hungry and then I want to have probably one new tonic about an hour before and then sip on a new tonic throughout whatever it is that I'm doing. And if I get all of that in and I've got sunlight in my eyes and gone for a walk and I've been moving, I'm pretty fucking dialed. And that can last, can hold on to that as long as I keep the new tonic levels up.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I can hold on to that for probably about four hours and then it starts to... I sort of become psychotic to that time because you're fighting this tension between fatigue and stimulants, but more stimulants aren't necessarily fixing the fatigue. They're just making more stimulated. Yeah. JD Fitz, do you create for yourself or for your audience? That's a good question.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And unfortunately, it's probably the biggest middle finger. I create for myself. This show has always been a thinly veiled autobiography. Whatever it is that is on my mind, whatever it is that I'm dealing with, whatever it is that I'm interested in, what's happening to me professionally, personally, And much of that is the inspiration. Not everything, obviously, but...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
the highest there's some fuckery with those numbers some of it is to do with non-dom expat people who don't live there and were then they had their income cut this special carve out that they had where they were going to have to start paying taxes in the UK and now they've left but they weren't living there but I still get the sense even when you account for that
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
much of that is the, at least the beginning, it's sort of the spark of the direction that I take the show in. Um, you know, I, I fell in love with evolutionary psychology because I found it really insightful about understanding the sort of why you are the way you are. It's really sort of seeing the source code of human behavior, at least from a sort of conditioning sense.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And then obviously that gets coded into genes. Um, that was a huge part of understanding me because I wanted to. It was a big period where I was into productivity.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So I was just rinsing through every productivity guy, David Allen coming on and Tiago Forte, Peter Ackies, getting all of the big names in productivity on to help organize my things three GTD process and what's the best email client I should be using. Um, it's just me.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I think the best, sure, there are some artists, creators out there who can make content for an audience and really enjoy the process. But for me, the more that I don't follow my own curiosity and the more that I don't make it for myself, um, the less I enjoy it and the less successful it is. So I genuinely think, and maybe again, this is just Stockholm syndrome.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I genuinely think that the best way to serve you guys is to just follow my own curiosity because I'm not that much of an outlier. I'm not that different. I think a lot of the challenges that I face and a lot of the interests that I have are really representative of those that any other thoughtful, sensitive person has.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And that means that if I follow my instincts, some non-zero portion of other people are also interested or care about this thing that I'm thinking about. And it gives me a unique insight because... Everybody has access to what the audience says. Every other creator, thinker, artist, songwriter, whatever, they all have access to what are the trends that are going on online.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Everyone can see what's happening on Twitter. Everyone can ask ChatGPT what the most search terms are on Google, right? So that means it's a very ununique body of work and not necessarily accurate. But if you follow what you do, I think that that really elicits a unique fingerprint and one that absolutely resonates. And even if it doesn't, you pursued something that you found interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And the more that I try and reverse engineer what will click, what will resonate. Well, maybe I should be doing the Q&A. Maybe I should have someone ask me the questions on the Q&A. Maybe the Q&A should be done live or maybe I should be streaming on Twitch or whatever. And if it doesn't speak to me,
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
not doing it is the best strategy because even if it would be optimal, even if it would be better in some way for audience growth, if it doesn't speak to me, it's not going to be authentic. And there's always this tension, right? Everybody shows up and you show up differently when someone else steps into your room versus when you're on your own.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So when it's audience, there's all of these perverse incentives and trying to be 100% yourself is essentially impossible. But you can get closer and closer to that. And you can also get further and further away and you train yourself in either direction. So for people that are wanting to create a body of work, you need to play the game. You absolutely need to play the game.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I get the sense that the UK is losing brain drain, might be another way to put it. I get the sense it's losing some talent and not only that, but some capital and some people that own businesses and those businesses help to provide employment. And more importantly than that, as far as I can see,
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
There is a game to be played. There are mechanisms in place, growth loops that you need to take advantage of. So you do need to play the game. But you need to know that it's not about the game.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
play it but it's not about it i think that's really important and that's a strategy i'm holding on to sean spooner millions of people now have an idea in their head of who they think you are but it's still just you do you ever feel any pressure to live up to that imagined ideal even when you're having a tough week or going through your health challenges yeah i mean this is kind of actually what i was just talking about that um
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
With the Rogan, he walks into a room, there's this fucking reality distortion field that appears around him. There is this sense of performance that everybody has, even if it's just you talking to someone else over dinner. It's very difficult to be unencumbered. That's a good definition, I think, of who your best friend is. Most people after the age of 15 don't really have a best friend, maybe.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
But I think a good way to define your best friend is the person that you can speak to with the least amount of filter. And that gets more and more insulted the bigger and bigger the audience is and the tighter and tighter the feedback loop. So, you know, if you're a comedian or a singer or something and you're on stage, fuck, like you're seeing this feedback loop immediately. It's so dopamine-y.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
At least with what I do, there's a little bit of lead time and I don't see people immediately. Now, in some ways, that's crap because I get no motivation from positive feedback other than nice comments, which is good. Please send more. But it's also less perverting, I think, in many ways. I have been trying increasingly over the last...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
four months or so, I think since the beginning of the year, I've really, really been trying to lean into just being me as much as possible, whatever that means, whatever it fucking means to be yourself. I'm really, really trying to do that. Opening up about health challenges. Somebody asks me a question that I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Someone on stage, I was at this health summit thing this weekend and I gave a chat. And someone asked a question from the audience and it's like, hey, there's like a thousand people looking at me and I'm going to give the answer that I know no one wants to hear, but I don't have an opinion on that, which is just so unsatisfactory. But it was true.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I don't have an opinion on quantum energy and vibration consciousness. The question was something to do with that. I'm like, perhaps unsurprisingly, this isn't my area of expertise. I don't have an opinion on that. So I'm trying to release that pressure to live up to some imagined ideal. Now,
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
They provide role models for growth-minded people within the UK to look up to, to think, holy shit, that's somebody that made it work. That's another Ben Francis or that's an Alan Barrett that started Grenade or that's Ollie that started MyProtein. These are guys that really made it. It doesn't matter how big the business is, a small local gym or whatever. Where are they going?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I definitely don't want someone that cares about the show to meet me and be like, hey, he was really fucking unimpressive, dude. Like he was so... But I don't... I think at least as far as I can see, getting to the stage that I have now and actually being able to hold on to some sense of humanity is kind of like a superhuman task. And... This is an experiment.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I'm going to continue to try and be open. Jesus Christ, I let out a tear, let out a single tear on a vlog a couple of weeks ago. So that was real. It was true. It was how I felt at the time. And I get the sense that if I don't have to live up to some imagined ideal,
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
my longevity in loving what I do will be greater because I'm not going to feel puppeted by ventriloquized by a group of people that I've never met, even if they're ones that I love. Matthew Bellinger, how long did you contemplate podcasting before starting? How long did you contemplate Newtonic before committing? It took six months contemplating podcasting before running it.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
It was the back end of 2017. And then I launched it in February of 2018. The name took a while. The logo took a while. The strategy took a while of how I was going to launch it. How long did I contemplate Newtonic before committing? The committing thing was actually relatively easy, but the building before launching took 12 months.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So I am, as anyone who's ever worked with me will attest to, painfully pedestrian in pre-launch and then kind of unrelentingly rapid in post-launch. So I kind of have this Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde thing where I'm I want everything to be absolutely perfect up until the point at which it gets shipped. And then once it's shipped, I try and iterate very, very quickly. It seems to work for me.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I do have a sort of perfectionist streak to me and sort of an obsession with detail, which is good in many ways. And I think here's my theory. There are certain things that you need to get really, really right once, and then you rinse and repeat it.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So the can design for Newtonic, I was kind of tyrannical, well, just tyrannical when it came to that, because this is the thing for the fucking rest of time. There is no getting this most of the way there. It needs to be perfect. It needs to be perfect now. It needs to be perfect in five years time. It needs to be perfect when we exit the business. It needs to be perfect.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
and the same thing with modern wisdom uh me and dean worked you know once he came on board after a couple of months so fucking hard dialing in the colors dialing in the sets this is how we want it to work this is how we want the pacing of the cuts to be everything but once we've done it you've got a signature style and you can sort of run that forward so um decision latency is a big deal uh but i think we're talking about sort of preparedness or launch latency here as well uh
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I would hazard a guess that most people in the audience probably need to make decisions more quickly, launch more slowly and iterate more quickly. So stop fucking about not doing the thing and commit to a thing as an experiment. Spend a good amount of time preparing it, getting it right, dialing in whatever the structure is, the brand, the style, the format, whatever it is that you're going to do.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And then once it's launched, go really, really fast and hard. So at least that's how it works for me. Stefanovic, how to deal with the anxiety when you're working hard versus the depression when you're taking an AC. That's funny. How to deal with the anxiety when you're working hard versus the depression when you're taking it easy. Dude, it's tough.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I would guess places like Bali, like Dubai, especially. The US is a little bit probably less popular, just it's hard to get into. If you want to get a visa to come over here, it's... I was going to say, I was going to make a joke about crossing the border illegally, but that's kind of been clamped down as well since Trump's come into office.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Your calendar is a lovely way to assuage your deep feelings of insufficiency. It's an anesthetic that sort of smooths over your need for validation because it keeps you busy. And then when you start to take it easy, you start to ask yourself questions. But you're right, when you're in the midst of calendar life, there is this sort of rush, but this rush comes along with a fear.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I think that's the anxiety that you're talking about. Look, I have found that periodizing is the easiest way to do this, that basically humans are absolute creatures. So if you put a packet of biscuits, Oreos in front of me, and you say, you can either eat all of them, or you can eat none of them, easy task. If you tell me I can eat two, go fuck yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Like I'm not, I can't, it's impossible. No one has ever in the history of the world has ever just eaten two Oreos. They've eaten all of them or they've eaten none of them. And I think that the same here with the working hard versus taking it easy thing, shock, horror. There used to be a thing called weekdays and weekends, and you would tend to work on weekdays and not on weekends. And
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
That's not a bad model. I think if you know that the working hard will come to an end and that the taking it easy will come to an end and that the working hard will come. I think that the anxiety and the depression both get ameliorated. They get smoothed out a little bit. If you know that they're time bound and it's not going to be like this forever.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And that allows you hopefully to lean in harder to your work because I get a rest on Friday evening. And it allows you to actually enjoy your relaxation because you go, yeah, I'm back at it. I'm back at it on Monday or whatever, whatever cadence you want to work at. You can do this. Fuck, you can do this one month on, one week off, you know, whatever it is that works for you.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
But I would maybe try periodizing. wanna be what's your five-year goal and what's your ultimate goal in life dude i said it before i suck at this at this long-term planning thing uh i know i want to be a dad i know i want to start a family um i know that i really want to fix my health um I want to keep on learning about myself and the world around me.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I want to keep doing the show and I want to keep writing. That's kind of it. Everything else will fall into place. I've got a good, most of us do. I really think that, and maybe this is just because I've gone around the houses so much with being deliberate, especially with the health shit and the productivity and the last seven years. Our instincts are such good guides.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Once you've sort of boxed them in a little bit, there's certain things that you need to learn to avoid, like fucking gambling. Just don't bother fucking about with gambling, right? It's kind of pointless. Same thing goes for heroin and Trank and fentanyl.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So yeah, I would guess places in Asia, the sort of Thailands of the world, the classic sort of boho work from anywhere thing, Dubai. Outside of that, I'm not too sure why I would hazard a guess that the quality of life you have in the UK compared with the opportunity to earn and the laid on top, the level of taxes that you need to pay. I don't think that's a particularly great cocktail.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Like there's certainly drinking to get rid of your problems, using stimulants to wake up in the morning and using sleeping pills to go to bed on a night. You know, there's some real red areas,
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Once you've boxed those off, once you've started to structure yourself a little bit, you're in your, you know, I think this is probably something you're going to struggle to achieve before you get into your 30s.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
But once you've been deliberate for a long time, you can start to ease off the deliberateness and have a few very small sort of broad goals, a few very big broad goals, sorry, the direction that you're going in, a small number of them. And just allow these trained instincts, I suppose, or you would say maybe curated instincts to just kind of carry you through.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So you would say, I want to keep traveling. I want to live a life of adventure. I want to have novelty. I want to contribute to something that I care about. Who doesn't want that? Who the fuck doesn't want that? Everybody wants that. So I don't think that you need to think about it. And I think that actually by thinking about it, sometimes you...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
You stick a middle finger up at the fact that you can look after you. You're the sort of person that can deal with change and with unpredictability and with circumstances that you didn't plan for really well. And you probably don't need to plan for them in advance. And that's, again, I'm speaking to me, right? This is me speaking to me because I'm someone that likes control.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I adore that xylophone at the start. I think his voice is... The lyrics, they're super meaningful as well. You know, it kind of does... track a little bit i suppose he's talking about the challenges and perils of fame and increased attention and scrutiny and not really knowing how to deal with it so yeah uh if you need to listen to a new track sleep token song caramel is muy bueno
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I like things to be planned. I like an itinerary. I like things to be laid out. and i know increasingly i've become more free-flowing and more at ease with that not being the case zane butler who's on your next mount rushmore of podcast guests yeah uh well i've actually had to turn it from mount rushmore into uh the infinity stones from avengers because i
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Alain de Botton, Naval Ravikant, Joe Rogan, right? Five. And I've got four. And then after the episodes that I did with Rogan, the day after he texted me and said, really enjoyed the chat, blah, blah, blah. Some bullshit about the chat. Don't forget that we need to get an episode done on your podcast. I was like, because I asked him,
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
two and a half years ago, nearly three years ago now, on his show. Really appreciated this man. I've got to get you on the show at some point. And he was the one that brought it up. I wasn't going to bring it up again. So once I get that and I do the snap and 50% of every living creature dies, I don't know what to do. Do you make another one? Do I make a second?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I guess I've got another hand, so I can make another glove, get another five infinity stones. But I kind of don't know... Who would be on there? Ryan Reynolds was on there for forever and now he's like the most hated person in the world. I guess he's on the shit list. I don't know. I really do have a bit of gold medalist syndrome at the moment, especially after the Naval thing.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
How the fuck am I supposed to top that? Not that you need to, right? I need to be better, bigger, more expensive, fancier, anything longer, more insightful, denser than need to be. It's like, it was beautiful. And then it was done. Um, but when you start to think on, uh, in terms of goals, outcomes, Mount Rushmore's you're like, fuck, well, it's a pretty good one.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Like I'd put mine up against pretty much anybody else's. Carson Hoffman, what was the hardest part about being broke when you first started from a mindset perspective? I'm going to guess that you mean money broke here, unless you mean broken mindset wise, which I was both. Yeah, I had, I think the poorest I ever was, was when I was 20, 20.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I remember I spent my last 10 pounds on petrol to drive from Edinburgh to Glasgow to see Under Oath play on my own because they were my favorite band. And I think they were doing, they're only chasing safety and dividing the great line back to back. So I went to go see a band. I went to go see a Christian metal band that I love.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
uh and i drove back and i remember looking at the fuel gauge and thinking that's all the money that you have and you just spent it to go and watch a fucking band play uh and i had a friend that was staying with me who had been used to being poor for longer than i had um and i remember him saying he just had he just instantly like as if it was so natural to him it was really kind of
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
disturbing he just said uh don't worry man like i'll just go and steal some food from the shop and i was like we're at the stage where we need to fucking steal food now the difference was i was probably too proud to message mom and dad and say hey can you send me 100 pounds please so i can eat this week
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
um, because I was doing this placement, you know, from university and we weren't getting paid until the events were done. This is one of the problems with running events that all you do is spend money, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend. And then finally you get this big injection of cash and you repay yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
That means that if you're running low personally on liquid capital to be able to actually keep the fucking lights on or keep the food in your mouth, uh, you end up in a, you end up in a situation which is pretty ugly. So, uh, I don't know. It kind of sucked, I guess, but there was something liberating about it as well. It was as close to financial rock bottom as I'd got, but I did have faith.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So for the people that don't know the way that the UK works, especially if you're a business owner, There's something called VAT, which is value-added tax, and that's a deduction of 20% on applicable sales. Now, a lot of the time you can claim that VAT back, but that's 20% off the top and you can't claim all of it back all of the time. So that's 20% off a, let's say you have a pound sale, right?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I've never really had money worries existentially or psychologically, and it's also not a very big part of my life. I don't really care that much about money. I like nice things. I like nice coffees, and I like being able to fly to places and not think about the dinner bill.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
But I really don't care that much about money, which is something I'm very grateful for because I think some people are kind of cursed with a high materialism set point. But hardest thing about being broke when you first started from a mindset perspective. Actually, with the show, I had to take a step back. So I was going to have to let go of the business that earned me all of this money.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
You know, this is now. a decade and a bit later, 31, 32, COVID happens. I'm like, right, okay, I need to make this decision about whether or not I'm going to go back to doing the nightlife thing or try and talk to people on the internet and make it into a job. But there's something cool about having nothing to lose. Paul Moseley talks about this.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
He says, you know, someone that's got nothing to lose is very dangerous because they can do anything. Your situation can't get worse. Um, so yeah, I guess it wasn't being broke sucked, but, uh, actually kind of liked it for a very short period of time. Although I'm sure that I would have fucking hated it if it had been protracted. Thickman 17 Pierce Brown on the pod. When good question.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Pierce Brown is the author of red rising and a fucking legend. Um, he actually DM me the other day. So we've been in contact for maybe three years now. I reached out and just said how much I loved the series and I'd love to bring him on at some point. And then I must have mentioned Red Rising on an episode. Maybe I said it to Naval or maybe I said it on Rogan.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I said it on some big episode over the last few weeks. And he DM me again. It's been a while. I think I was left on read or maybe even left unread a couple of times and I didn't want to push him. Like, you know, he's balls deep in writing this hugely complex fantasy series and there must be so much pressure on him.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
He doesn't need this podcaster reaching out and chirping him going, excuse me, mate, can you come to Austin? And he messaged and said, Hey man, thanks for shouting the books out. Sorry. I've not been in touch. I'm kind of balls deep in the writing thing, but I'm still down when the time is right. So we'll get to, I think we've got him.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I think actually he can be, Pierce Brown can be on the new Mount Rushmore. And the new Mount Rushmore is not going to be about sort of the biggest names. It's going to be about the people, the sort of niche underground winners. So Pierce, you can take the first spot on the next Infinity Stone is going to be Pierce Brown. I wonder who gets the middle finger. It's kind of an important one, I think.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Hank, health and fitness. How do you balance introspective thinking and learning, but not overthinking? Fucking perennial problem, dude. It is...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
it's the golden mean of this you need to do enough reflection to be able to actually work out what to do but if you get stuck in too much reflection it's trapping and you don't end up actually doing anything it's tough so it's a balance that you find over time um it is something that you end up coming into land with age.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
20% comes off the pound sales. That's like 83 P or something left over. And then there's something called corp tax, which is on your net profit. So let's say that you had, let's say it was all profit, right? Let's say it was the best, best, best, best case scenario. The corp tax was 25% on your net profit. So 83 P, 25% off, that's like 60 P, something left.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
At least for me, I've got better at balancing the thinking and learning whilst not being paralyzed thing. It's also fixed by being busier. And I know I'm kind of like the anti-busy guy at the moment. Your calendar is a better indication of your wealth than your bank account, blah, blah, blah. Like your productivity obsession is killing your productivity stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I'm very Joe Hudson pilled and C-bum pilled at the moment. But Even at this level of busyness, as you get busier, it squeezes out the inefficiencies in the way that you operate because you just don't have fucking time for them. You don't have time to scroll on Instagram that much.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
You don't have time to worry about whether or not this is the optimal diet or that's the best way to organize your email inbox because you just need to eat and fucking send emails. So you stop and... In my experience, creating constraints through pressure, through busyness, through time, duration, you know, when does this need to be submitted by?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
That's a good way to stop yourself from overthinking. You just need to ship it. So avoid Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time given for it. Put some deadlines in place and just sort of hold on. Keep on being deliberate about stuff, but... And eventually you will come into land at a right balance because you will either survive and thrive or you'll die. Those are the only two.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
You're going to end up either being kicked out the side of whatever project you're trying to do because you couldn't come to a balance of it, in which case it's no longer a problem, or you will and you will end up with a perfect balance. And
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Almost everybody that I know that's kind of of this world, this degenerate personal growth, self-discovery, wisdom, bro-wisdom thing, almost everybody gets it right. In fact, I can't think of anybody that doesn't. So you'll be fine. Hi, Patno. What was the process like getting the O-1 visa? Can you go into a bit of detail? It's long. It is.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I submitted a 700 page, three inch thick portfolio of every high relevance, statusful guest that had been on the show. two independent news stories showing that they were a person of note within the industry. And then for each of those news sites or sources, an independent verification showing that the news site was one that had high circulation.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So it was this tree, this branching tree of who it is I've spoken to, proof that they're important and proof that the thing that said that they were important is of note. And that just rinse and repeated that I submitted it again through the start of this year. And this was the last one plus the new one.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
So this one was twice as I don't know, I didn't even see it, how big it was once it was printed off. But yeah, I mean, forests have come down to create the O-1 visa process. I used an attorney, Lehach Philippa, I think throughout New York, L-E-H-A-C-H Philippa, F-I-L-I-P-P-A, I think, Lehach Philippa. And they were great, really, really good.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Mike, I think he was the owner there, was phenomenal with me, was phenomenal with me. And I started doing this in 2020 and he was phenomenal with me the next time that I did it too. And then you fly to an embassy after you've submitted, you go back and forth, you do all of these things, you submit this special form and then this other one. And then the website is so archaic and backward.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And then you go to an embassy, but it can't be an embassy in the US. And you don't want it to be an embassy in somewhere that's popular because the wait time is forever. So you end up in places like El Salvador or Guatemala, where I did my first one, or Kingston, Jamaica, where I did my second one.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And then you stand in a massive line with people that are from countries that don't have great passports, who can't necessarily get into the US. They're wanting to be workers. They're wanting to visit family. They're you know, friends dying, dying relatives and stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And then let's say that you wanted to draw that down as a personal dividend payment to yourself. So you've got it in the business. You've had the VAT off the top. You've had the corp tax off the profit. Then you've had the dividend tax off the additional rate taxpayer that you need to draw it down to yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And you're there going, yeah, I talk to people on the internet and I'd love, I'd really like you to extend this visa that allows me to basically lop in and out of the country a lot. So, yeah. Anyway, I'm going to love you and leave you. 3.5 million people on this channel is berserk. And I hope that it's not too sad to see somebody that you listen to whining about their health.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
But I am getting through it. And I genuinely do appreciate everybody reaching out and and saying nice things. And the live show, the US and Canada live tour is going to be announced within the next couple of weeks, including all of the dates, pre-sale tickets, chriswilliamson.live. If you want to sign up and be the first person to know about when those are and where you can get tickets.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And then the new reading list will be out soon. And that is a lovely little treat. Me, person dying. We're all dying. I'm dying more quickly. Person who's dying quickly. spent a week burying himself writing this new reading list and now it's with the designer so be grateful i'll see you next time If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
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. That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
that ends up at 40%, or if you earn more than, I think about 150 grand, 200 grand, it's at 45%. So you end up from one pound, you have 38 pence left. One pound goes into your business, 38p goes to the business owner. If you are the only person that owns it, if it was 100% profit margin, obviously, if you didn't get to claim the VAT back.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
All of that is to say, it doesn't matter about the details too much, I guess. It's not that fantastic when you don't have particularly good weather. There aren't that many places to go. It's just not that big. The culture isn't fantastic. It is...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
becoming diluted culturally I think that's a fair thing to say if you walk around most of the big cities in the south I don't think many people would be surprised by that so not good and I don't relish it might sound sometimes like I relish in this sort of fleeing of the UK and I'm you know I managed to get on some titanic life raft and I'm over here having a great time and I you know just sort of
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
pity or scorn all of the people that are back in the UK. Dude, I really tried for a long time. I employed between 1,500 and 2,500 people over the space of a decade and a half career. And they were all 18 to 25. They were university educated, highly, highly motivated guys and girls. And, you know, these are little seedlings that me and my business partner tried to leave our stamp on.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And I hope that we did a good job with them. Some of them went on, many of them went on to do like amazing things. But there's only so much that we can do. So for the you should stay and fix your country crowd, I spent my time in the trenches and I wasn't able to make that much of a dent. So yeah, it's sad. It's sad. And I don't know what the solution is.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Wild48267, how did you get your forearms so big? Yeah, these things seem to be a... At the live shows, it's invariably the first thing that people mention. Fucking hell, they're really big in real life, aren't they? I don't know what to say. It's just genetics, dude. I've never done it. I did direct forearm training once with Mike Israetel, and it really hurt.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
There's a lot of receptors in these bad boys. I really don't know. It's the same. Everybody's got one body part. Every person has got one body part that just grows freakishly big. Mine happened to be maybe the most obvious one on your entire body. So parents, I got my forearms from my parents. guacamolecriden47. How is dating being famous or a public figure?
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Is it harder to trust people's intentions? Do you get asked out more often? I mean, look, I'm not famous. I do think it's important to put that caveat in there that it's like niche, degenerate internet micro fame. But whatever level I've managed to get to,
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Paul Irish 1165, when will you be in Toronto next for a live event? I am about to announce my first ever US and Canada live tour. That'll be happening at the end of this year and tickets will go on sale soon. And if you want to sign up to get first access to tickets, first access to dates, VIP, VVIP, meet and greet, all of that shit, you can go to chriswilliamson.live.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
um it certainly kind of gets in the way of people behaving normally around you which is not great um because for instance i saw this with rogan right if rogan walks into a room let's say we're in the mothership or whatever and you're downstairs in mitzi's which is the bar attached to the mothership and sometimes they close that off and just the comedians and their friends and family are in there
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And if he walks into the room, there's this distortion field that follows him around where people are just, most people are unable to behave normally. And it's wild to see what just very, very, very high levels of fame and status have. this odd warping effect on the way that people are able to show up and just be normal. And what that means is that if you're Joe, everybody must seem weird to you.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Everybody must seem like they're being a little bit contrived or obfuscatory or disingenuous in some way. And maybe many of them are. And then some of them are just looking at you going like, holy fuck, it's Joe Rogan. Holy fuck, it's Joe Rogan. Holy fuck, it's Joe Rogan. And they're trying to hold it together and you don't know which one's which.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And, you know, in whatever micro niche equivalent it is for me, I guess that that might be the same thing, that status and fame can be warping. And yeah, it is a little bit harder to trust people's intentions, not necessarily because you're skeptical, but because people in many ways just struggle to show up in a normal manner that there's things that they could get from you.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
Or they have a preconceived idea about the way that you want people to behave or whatever. And again, I'm fortunate, whatever period, I mean, now it's the perfect level of fame. People say hello once every 15 minutes on the street. If I'm in a gym, there'll be, you know, 10 or 20 guys that'll come up and give me a fist bump and let me get back to my training session. It's really nice.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
And everyone's got cool stuff to say. And I don't need a fucking security or anything like that. But that's going to keep, getting more difficult over time. And I don't know what the optimal level of fame is. I know that, to use an example from earlier, I know Huberman, he needs security outside of the lecture theatres that he's speaking at.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
I think he's teaching undergrads this year or next year at Stanford, and he needs two security guys. That's...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
that doesn't sound fun that sounds kind of shit um so but you can't switch the tap off and you can't slow down the sort of roller coaster that keeps going up and again that's why to fly the flag for sleep token again that's why the sleep token song resonated with me uh you know he's talking about the stage being a prison and sort of how he's getting bitter in the lens he needs to sort of
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
he's feeling constrained and constricted by this, uh, reality that he's made for himself. And again, champagne problem. Oh, boo hoo, poor, poor person. That's got too much fame. Uh, but I've seen, you know, firsthand from some friends, uh, the prices that they need to pay to deal with this stuff. And it, it is fucking rough. So, uh, I'm pretty sure Naval turned up to the episode in a Waymo.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
No security, no nothing. So maybe he's got the optimal level of fame. What's his thing about you want everybody to know your name and no one to know your face? Perhaps that's the level that he's got too. Anyway, the dating thing... Do I get asked out more often? Definitely not. I think there is a sense that you must have lots going on. Even this happens with friends.
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
How many times would someone, if you were at an event, a pickleball party or something else, how many times would people invite you to go and do something afterward? But I think there's...
Modern Wisdom
#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray
this metacognitive i don't want to be the person that says to the person other people want to say things to do you want to come to this thing after because that seems beggy and that seems like people just get in their own heads and i'm sure that it's the same for for girls too so um yeah i don't know i'm uh i'm not i'm not paying too much time trying to uh pay attention to that
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Just lingering on what you said before about the difference, a lot of people, I think, will use purpose and meaning almost interchangeably, even though when you think about it, it's not quite, but the two kind of come as a package pair. They're a twin pack of values that a lot of people talk about.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
When you were mentioning about how if you use the word purpose, if you don't achieve it, your life is worthless. And once you do achieve it, if you do achieve it, what do you do next? It seems to me the difference between purpose and orientation is the same as between destination and journey. That one is moving you in a direction and it's kind of an endless game. It's an infinite game.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Whereas the other, by design, the purpose is this thing. Unless you do some jiggery-pokery with your purpose and create some sort of instrumental purpose. My purpose is to show up every day in a manner that's like, yeah, whatever. Don't litigate me out of what most people mean by purpose. Yeah, it feels like that. Attachment. Attachment to outcome.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. What do you make of the recent uptick in depression and anxiety, how this sort of relates to the work you've been looking at?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I'm interested in the role of the individual on their own. And even beyond the sort of connectedness, interconnectedness thing, the fact that seeking meaning as a purely selfish pursuit. And I heard a quote the other day, which I loved, which was, after a while, you just get sick of yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
and uh it really made me think um about that step change that a lot of people go through from just living for me just thinking about me to trying to serve a pay it forward perhaps and pass it on and that that perhaps comes along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older but yeah i'm interested in the the self versus uh um selfless element here
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
How can people work out if they're being self-deceptive? By design, we're good at deceiving ourselves.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
We sort of touched on it earlier on, but I'm interested in how contemporary of a problem a lack of meaning is. And you also said about how as people become more affluent or as nations become more affluent, problems of meaning seem to increase. I mean, what use is there in us all trying to attain or chase after affluence if all that comes along is a heavy side order of meaninglessness? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. You mentioned there about kids, and I'm going to guess that most people would say a source of great meaning or one of the greatest sources of meaning in my life has been kids. Have you guys considered the base rate reduction in the age of people becoming parents and the number of people becoming parents? I've got it in my head.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
A friend messages me semi-consistently when I do Q&As on the show. And he's very interested, but he's a dad of two, an old school sort of Irish guy. And he says, so many of your audience just need to have kids. They're asking questions, and as am I, about fulfilling my higher purpose, about enacting my logos forward, about why can't I give myself a break?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Why is it that I never really seem to be connected to the achievements that I have in life, etc., etc., etc.? And I think what the sort of subtext of his point is lots of those problems are fixed or pale into insignificance once you have children. Right. I guess two questions then. First off, meaning crisis and associated with declining levels of people becoming parents.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And then the second one, is there something wrong or shallow or compensatory about leaning on your children to provide you with meaning in life?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
um yeah the i had uh dawkins on the show maybe four months ago something like that and we had a live event we had a discussion in uh in austin texas where i hosted him and he was lovely uh but i i got stuck we both got stuck twice in two nights in a row first live on stage in front of his his audience and then again the next day when we did the podcast and i mentioned how
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Derogating the story behind religion, whatever it is that people choose to follow, because you can't prove it or it can't be proven in the manner that you want it to be able to be proven, doesn't reduce its effectiveness. It doesn't make it any less useful, even if the level of truthfulness, the bar that you want it to reach, is something that it can't do.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And I've been obsessed over the last couple of years with things that are literally true but figuratively false and figuratively true but literally false. And... Yeah, I kind of feel... I get a sense in the zeitgeist that people are sort of turning away from the very hard, cold, sterile, well, it doesn't matter, it has to be literally true at all costs.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
That doesn't seem to quite be the case, and I wonder whether that is born out of a... We kind of had a crack at this. We tried to simultaneous equation our way through... coming up with answers to big questions and maybe I just need something that works, even if I can't describe to you why it works.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I wonder whether that's why long distance relationships are often difficult. Exactly. That's exactly right.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
What about people that think meaning is a thinking problem? A lot of us spend a lot of time in our heads. We're learning. This is somewhere between philosophy, psychology, sociology, all of these things. I think the only place I have to experience these things is in the head, a little bit in the body, and that gets fed up through my head as well.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Can we fix this by just thinking our way out of the problem?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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. I remember you saying that some truths are only knowable through transformation. Oh, totally.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I was having a great conversation last night, and we came up with this term of unteachable lessons. And an unteachable lesson, one of the best unteachable lessons, I think, is money and success won't make you happy. And it is a unique category of lesson where nobody gives the people trying to teach it sympathy. They're derogated in a manner that no teacher would typically accept.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And I'm yet to... I know of nobody who has arrived at that realization logically. They've arrived at it experientially. I was trying to think about some other ones that are not too dissimilar. I think... don't be swayed to falling in love with somebody who looks very pretty but has no morals or anything sort of deeper to do with you. You know, it's very much... The thing that I kind of...
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
came to realize, at least with some of the unteachable lessons, I'm sure there's a million, but the ones that I'd found were ones that sort of limbically were very seductive in one form or another. They were about status, they were about acclaim, they were about resources, they were about sex, they were about power. And that was so salient that what you end up with is this You're at war.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
There is one higher version of yourself that goes, I remember the last time that I got into a relationship with a girl that was pretty and kind of didn't really have much to say and we didn't really have much to do or whatever. And, you know, that didn't end too well. But, you know, she's just so hot. I can't not think about it.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And then, you know, the same with everybody else says that sort of money and success didn't change any of the internal voids that they had. But that was them. I will be able to thread the needle in a different way
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I thought it was so funny that unteachable lessons came to me last night, knowing that I was going to speak to you today, and the some truths that are only knowable through transformation. I thought that was a nice parallel.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
That's a beautiful story. And I've been thinking a lot recently about... Why do you think that you know what's best for you? Why is it that you had this assumption? I have a type. I have a type. I have a type. And there's a need for control. There's a desire for control there. I have a predictive model of how things are going to unfold. I can therefore have a good example of the trajectory.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I know exactly where this is going to come into land, kind of, ish. And I know that maybe a couple of times this evidence has shown... You're actually denying evidence, especially if you've had a couple of these things occur and you go, well, those ones didn't...
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
the way that i wanted to uh and this is something different well maybe different could lead to a different sort of an outcome it's like ah no i i'm pretty sure that the same will somehow lead to a different kind of an outcome and um yeah as in a world where people want to control they do not like the idea of not being able to fully predict where things are going to come into land uh
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Reminding everybody, myself included, that you are not necessarily the best judge of what is best for you. You don't actually always know. You can't always predict what's best for you. And that's a lovely example of a time where perhaps you were right to be wrong in that regard.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
This is one of those moments. My background when I first started the show was a sort of productivity bro world. I was very much trying to wrangle chaos and have the right notion template and the morning routine and time blocking and the calendar and all of this stuff, trying to create some sense of organization out of what had been a pretty sort of messy 20s.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And it's funny that even in things like this, you know, we're talking about transcendent, we're talking about, you know, accounting for the various machinations and ways that your ego is going to pervert the incentives and, you know, your higher calling and how do we really pay this forward in the best way and so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And what it comes down to in some ways are an operational set of principles, right? like that you need some hard and fast rules. You need to actually put some bright lines in the sand and sort of draw those around you. And I've got it in my head sort of thinking about people for whom that approach is very seductive.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I would probably put myself in that category that, again, if I just have the perfect to-do list template, then all of my problems will be sorted, etc., etc., Let's say that somebody is operationally pretty effective when it comes to that sort of stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
What are some of the practices that you like, that you use the most yourself to get you out of that kind of mode, to get you out of the mode of logic, of reason, of rationality, of logistics, of operations, and get you into a more embodied or dread joy kind of sense? Because I feel like that's important.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Where can people go? Where should they go if they want to check out more of that?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
John, I appreciate the heck out of you. I really have to say as well, it's beautiful to see you smitten. It's really lovely. It genuinely is, mate. I think good people deserve good relationships, and I'm very glad that you've managed to find yours. So what can people expect next? You've kind of rounded out this chapter. When was the first Meaning Crisis video put on YouTube? February 2019, if
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Okay, yeah, so a good half-decade journey on one thing.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Well, I'm glad after taking on such a medium-sized topic, you're taking it a little bit smaller for the next one. Very reassuring that you're going to keep it nice and niche. John, I appreciate the heck out of you, mate. I can't wait until you get whatever you've got coming out next out. And I would love to bring you back on whenever you're ready.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Everyone should go and check it out. I appreciate you, mate. Thank you. Thank you so much, Chris.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Not at all, not at all. The realness point, I think, is very interesting. Maybe it's a contemporary problem because of how much people are mediated by their screens. Maybe this is worsened by the fact that we're atomized and isolated into our little droid boxes and we spend a lot of our time on our own. Maybe it's because of a lack of connection to nature and awe and dread or whatever it might be.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
But... I would guess that a lot of people have this sense that their life is surreal and not surreal in the, I can't believe how amazing it is. I'm so blessed. Everything's going right. But in a, I don't necessarily feel fully connected and grounded to the experiences that I have day to day. My mind and my feet don't rest in the same location all that much. You could maybe call it presence.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
But it's sort of, It's more than just presence. Presence is necessary, but not sufficient. It's the connection to it. It's being able to feel like I can reach out and grab it. Like things are happening and the things that are happening, they're important.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And I have some sort of agency and they affect me and they're actually going on as opposed to kind of like everything being a sitcom and it all just sort of playing out in front of our eyes. So I want to really dig into sort of... things becoming really real and sort of where that comes from?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Can you think of an example of that?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
So good. So good. And intuitively, everybody knows that there is this sort of sense of honesty, the honesta, that you need to, that you expect. And, you know, who was the experience machine? Who did the experience machine?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Yeah, it's not too dissimilar, I guess, to the experience machine, but it's a much more salient example that everybody knows. How would your experience change? The Truman Show might be another example of that, where you're going around living a good life and everything seems fine, but what if everybody else was an actor? Well, I wouldn't want that. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
To you, this sort of felt sense, nothing would have changed. It's the exact same. There's something about sort of intention. There's something deeper. There's something beyond not just the sort of utilitarian, what do I get out of this situation? It's what is the intention behind that? What's the meaning? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
I didn't know that you nearly got expelled from West Point.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
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#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
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Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Can you just explain why was that the case? Tell the story of sort of what was happening to standards in Vietnam and how that was contributed to.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Yeah, you need four times fewer members of staff to be able to make the same command units work.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
I like the fact that you can use the quality of the haircuts as a litmus test for whether the standards across the armed forces are working well. We often hear about the difficulty of Navy SEAL selection that seems to kind of at least have captured the public's attention in a way that maybe the other selection haven't. What is it about the Rangers that is preparing them in this manner?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
What's giving them this predictive power? Is it just that they were the first movers in the 70s and the 80s, or is there something else going on?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
One thing I've got in my head, more sort of from a personal development perspective than a team-based perspective, one of the most common tensions that I talk about and that people who listen to the show I think are interested in is balancing high standards for yourself and with gratitude for what you've achieved.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And you don't want to look back on a career, whether it's a career of personal growth or a career in the military or a career in a sales job, a career as a parent and as a husband or a wife, and see sort of a series of miserable successes. where I achieved the outcome, but I never really gave myself a moment to allow gratitude, enjoyment, pleasure, a moment to rest when I go through this.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And I think many people, as soon as you posit an ideal, which is your standard, you then begin to compare yourself to that ideal and inevitably you find yourself lacking. And the more of a perfectionist you are, the more obsessive you are, the more detail-oriented you are, the higher that standard can be.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And even as you get closer to it, you're able to sort of continue to move it away from you, which is a special type of hell. How do you come to think about balancing high standards with gratitude and enjoyment in the moment for the things that you're achieving?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
I like that. I think it points to one of the weaknesses that maybe a lot of people in the requirement for camaraderie in driving you and encouraging you to do difficult things that if there was only one ranger, that one guy would really, really struggle. He's like, I'm doing all of this work and I've got this stupid haircut and I've got to go through this election. And for what?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
There's no shared sense of suffering or celebration. Whereas when you do it as a team and when you're part of a wider movement and when you're able to wear something on your chest that sort of says who you are and you know that that means more than just the words that are there. And I wonder whether a lot of people who...
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
like the sound of the solopreneur, lone wolf, sigma male, I'm going to lift it and do it on my own. I don't need the help of anybody. No one's around me that's supporting me thing. And maybe that's true in the beginning. It probably is. And maybe you can use that sort of resentment and that chip on your shoulder and this sense of being ostracized or left behind as real good fuel.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
but I get the sense that if you hold onto that fuel for too long, it becomes inefficient. And for even longer than that, it becomes toxic. And, um, that's certainly something I've noticed. I noticed it with training, with going to the gym, you know, for a decade and a half, I was able to go into the gym and bury myself. And it, it didn't really matter. I didn't care.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And then the last three years or so, I just want to train with my friends or with my trainer, who is also a friend. And I can push myself really hard, but doing it on my own, I just feel like I've emptied that tank a little bit. And it was good. And it got me to a really good place. And I'm proud of that version of me for doing it. But I've kind of
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
I think evolved beyond that, or that's just not the same sort of fuel that I can use anymore. And the same thing, again, sort of speaking for myself, for a long time ran this thing, this project, just me and a video editor with a mullet and a Facebook messenger chat, and we're in different cities, and then we were in different countries.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And now I'm thinking, huh, like I can still do it, but I'd rather do it with a team. I'd rather do it with a squad of people that have got my back and we can high five when things go well and we can support each other when things go poorly. And yeah, I wonder...
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
whether the sort of pedestalization of the lone wolf person going and doing it on their own is maybe encouraging people to stay in that mode for too long and just how important the camaraderie and the sense of teamship is.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Yeah, that's a lovely way to put it. I mean, gold medalist syndrome. Sure, would it be bad or would it be painful if you worked really hard and didn't achieve the thing that you wanted to achieve? But don't pretend like working really hard and achieving the thing that you want to achieve is bliss either. Because when you get to that point, you have to ask yourself, well, what the fuck do I do now?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Like, that's a difficult question also. And it's even with that, there's an additional level of pain because you're in a position that no one is going to give you sympathy for. It's a champagne problem. Oh, you reached your goals. How unfortunate for you. You became a general and you were through 34 years and all the rest of it. And you go, yeah, I know. I get it.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
But it's still an existential crisis. It's still a question of what do I do now? Who is my character? Who am I after this?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
What did you learn from that? What were the lessons that you took away?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
How do you come to think about character? Why is it so important?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
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#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
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#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
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Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Is it something that you develop?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And I like that. When you say everybody laughs at it, how many people are seeing your underwear in your drawers?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
I wonder whether there's a sense that leaders sort of struggle to balance character a lot of the times, as we've mentioned, stubbornness as maybe one of the traits. A lot of the times leaders become leaders because they have personal ambition, right? They want to be the person that leads the charge.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Now they can want to do it because there is this sense of giving back of service to everybody else. But let's not pretend like there's not a sense of kind of shallow need for recognition that goes into that. Like what drives somebody to be the absolute best?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
rarely would it be always just unmolested desire to serve and hand out to other people so i'm interested in how people who want to become leaders people who want to drive forward can balance personal ambition with this sense of service and and this sort of greater good and this and this giving because there is it seems to me like there's a tension between these two things
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
You've got this line, leaders must do what their people need, not what they need. Just dig into that a little bit for me.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
So one of my favorite books is Endurance by Alfred Lansing about Shackleton's crossing of the Antarctic. Spoiler alert for anyone that hasn't read it, he doesn't do it. In that, one of the things that I really loved is a lot of the guys had diaries and a lot of the guys were writing in the diaries. And what you get to hear is what happened and what everybody else heard from Shackleton
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
But then you get to see what he wrote in his diary. And it's the first time that I saw the sort of Bruce Wayne and Batman duality of a leader in a time of real crisis, mortal peril. And, you know, in his diary... Shackleton is writing about his sort of chronic uncertainties, just swimming in self-doubt and fear. And he has no idea what he's doing.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And then you hear from all of the other men in their diaries about what they hear from Shackleton when he steps out onto the field of play, so to speak. And he's just commanding and he's got it together and he's got a plan. He knows where we're going and how it's going to work. And we're going to eat the dogs and we're going to kill the polar bears. You know, they've got everything put together.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And I really looked at that as quite a formative example of the price that only leaders pay. You know, there is this sort of silent self-doubt that you can't let leak out. And it is a cost. It's how you want to be in charge of this thing. You want to run a business. You want to be the captain of a team. You want to build a family. Okay, well, that's great.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
But there are going to be certain things that you basically can't share with anybody in your organization and you need to swallow that yourself and you're going to have to deal with it and then you're going to have to go back out there.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
That's interesting. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot, reflecting a lot on our ability or inability to learn particular lessons. And it is strange how... What we would like... in the perfect world of sort of philosophical equanimity would be, regardless of the outcome, I am able to take the virtuous and useful truths away from any situation.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
having had those doubts get rid of them and then convince people to go forward even though they will have the exact doubts that you've just had to overcome yourself and uh yeah i just i really loved that book and i loved seeing a raw uh expose of what it's like to not be certain but to kind of show up and do the job in any case yeah it uh
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Can you tell Stockdale's story for the people that don't know?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
What role do you think moral courage plays here?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
But you're so right to say that had you have been thrown out, it would have completely colored the entirety of that, despite the fact that everything up until the point of which you were thrown out was exactly the same, right? So... I think it's maybe in some ways reassuring for people who have gone through a hard time and sort of fell flat on their face.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
the difficulty of that decision. Yeah, the loneliness of command is a lovely way to put it. Something else that you spend a good bit of time talking about is conviction. What do you come to think about the role of conviction?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
What did you learn from Edison? He seems to be a guy that had quite a bit of conviction.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
So they struck out in one form or another and they go, God, why is this so hard for me to alchemize into a, well, I'm glad that that happened. It's like, well, because... What we want as humans is a redemption story. We want to feel like a difficult thing happened, sure, or maybe I was good and then a difficult thing happened, but I bounced back and I got myself to a place that I wanted to be.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
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.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
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.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
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#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
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#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
what i like and this it comes back to that stubbornness thing because conviction kind of has well it's got many meanings but one of them being uh you could say uh an unwavering commitment to the mission right could be would would be one way to put it and you're right maybe uh edison if you're going to use him as your uh
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
philosophical guidepost might not be optimal but if you were to think about the the stubbornness and the resilience piece i mean how many how many different attempts did he have at the light bulb thousands and thousands of experiments try and do this thing i'm pretty sure his factory burned down at one point and him and his son was stood next to it looking at it and edison just had this
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
this psychotic belief, this sort of unwavering stubbornness. And it wouldn't do to have an entire organization or country of Edisons, but it's probably pretty important to have them. It's important to have Tom Brady's, right? It's important to have them too. But yeah, it's interesting how different people with weaknesses and strengths can end up in sort of magnificent places.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And it explains two things. It explains, first off, why it was difficult for you to learn the lessons during it, because you're still in the eating shit mode. You're not in the redemption bounce back mode. And it also explains, I think, why when people have had a string of
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Well, look, the price that people pay to be successful is... It's an interesting tension. It's an interesting question I always like to ask because in some ways it's worth it because we're social creatures. We need validation. We want to conquer things. We want to achieve stuff. We want to finish our lives feeling like we're validated. But on the flip side...
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Lots of people get toward the end of their life and realize that not only did they manage to climb up a ladder that they didn't mean to, but the one that if they were given the choice, they end up in a place they didn't mean to get to and one that they don't like as well. And you go, the goal is to...
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
The goal is to make sure that whatever it is that you're trying to achieve, whatever your conviction is applied to, is something that you're not going to look back on with regret. And that requires... actually a degree of a lack of stubbornness. It requires a little bit of mindfulness. It requires some perspective. It means that you need to drop some of the intensity.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And, you know, you look at any normal bell curve of traits. And although most people would say muscularity, for instance, you say to most guys, how muscular do you want to be? More. The answer is there is no amount of muscularity that's too much.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
But if you get up to the 99.99 percentile, you're talking about dying early because mTOR is on and you're carrying a lot of weight around and stress on your organs and high blood pressure and drugs and all this sort of stuff. My point being, and the same for being under-muscled, right? There are some girls that would just like, how thin do you want to be?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Thinner, thinner, thinner would fit into a smaller dress size, etc. When you get toward the absolute extreme of any trait, you end up in a situation where And the outcomes you get are pretty unpredictable and you end up paying weird prices. How committed do you want to be to the cause? More, more. I want to be more committed.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
It's like, well, if you end up being too committed to the cause, you can never have any perspective because you never question yourself. You never actually step back and go, is this what I should be doing in my time? Is this the best way that I should be spending my time? So, yes. Yeah. this is why we have a range of characters within a team, right?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
We don't just have one person that's copied and pasted multiple times because you would end up with an entire team of the same strengths and the same weaknesses. And the point of a team is to have lots of people with different strengths and different weaknesses.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
either bad luck or failures that are their fault or somebody else's fault or whatever, that they can start to feel like the world is against them in a manner which is really, truly unfair. Because they think, I'm not even learning anything. I haven't even alchemized or integrated anything from this because...
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
I think this is why not taking yourself too seriously can help too. There are times to, to be serious, but yeah, if you can be a little bit playful with it, I think, um,
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
seriousness is is great and i really do applaud seriousness seriousness about emotions um seriousness in your pursuits in trying to be the best and trying to you know get things done uh but seriousness is also when taken to the extreme again the 99th percentile thing it's a kind of brittleness as well because it doesn't allow you to insulate yourself from little uh
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
challenges and and insults and damage that end up coming in uh and it also makes you seem way less approachable so yeah a humility with a good dose of humor i think is a a nice a nice way to offset that drive you know that sort of psychopathic forward motion that unrelenting desire for more absolutely Yeah. General Stanley McChrystal, ladies and gentlemen.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
It's been five years, maybe more, maybe five or six years since we last spoke. And as we said before, we've both gotten younger, which is great. So I really appreciate you. I love your insights. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything that you're doing.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
People say that first impressions last, but I really think that last impressions last even more. There's even an idea which you're probably familiar with from psychology called the peak-end rule, which suggests that the most emotionally intense and final moment of any experience are the most salient. They're the ones that seem to sit in memory.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Heck yeah. Stanley, I appreciate you. Thank you. You're kind.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
So if you were to have a colonoscopy, which is what the study was originally done, I think it was maybe a colonoscopy or an endoscopy, The most painful point and the end are the two that sit in memory for the longest time.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
So interestingly, if you are getting a colonoscopy or an endoscopy and they leave the device inside of you for an additional period of time but at a much lower pain threshold, even though the overall amount of pain and discomfort has increased because the duration is longer, your recalled amount of pain is less because you finished the end of your peak end was lower.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
So I think all of that together just explains why during an uncomfortable experience, it can be hard to have the perspective, the 30,000 foot view. I see how this is a part of my bigger picture. And also why if you've had a string of bad, a bad run, bad series of luck moments that it's difficult to work out how you should be grateful for it.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
Yeah, I imagine so. Did you get any closer or did you glance off the bottom of discipline many more times in your career?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
So I'm going to draw an analogy between the sport of CrossFit and your challenge here, but stay with me. I promise I'm going to bring this one back. So in CrossFit, if you want to make it to the games, which is their annual elite, you probably know this, annual sort of elite competition.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
You need to go through the open, some form of regionals or sectionals competition, and then typically you make it to the games after that. Maybe there's another one in between. And the way that the three different competitions are structured is that they have highest work capacity and intensity in the beginning, but lowest load because it needs to be millions of people. do these workouts.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
So they can't load them at numbers that only 1% of CrossFitters can do or else everyone feels like a failure. So at the very, very beginning, you end up with this quite sort of broad, but very intense workout, less technical perhaps. And then you get to the middle and there's some slightly more technical, slightly heavier weights that steps up.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And then you get to the very end and then you're talking about paddleboarding, you're talking about Olympic pools, swimming, open water, swimming, biking, rope climbs, very high rope climbs, complex objects, flipping stuff. My point being, a lot of the time you can be an athlete that would be phenomenal in regionals or the games, but you have to make it through the open.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
And if you say, hey, you know, I'm just really strong, man, like I'd crush it in the games. It's like, dude, it doesn't matter how well you do in the games. You have to get there. You can tell me all you want about how you're deadlift stronger and you'd be able to flip that object and I'm great on a paddleboard or in an Olympic pool. Awesome.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
But you sucked at the first workout that everybody on the planet did. So what do you expect? And I think remembering as well, the steps that you've got to go through, you've got to earn your stripes. And sometimes that you actually have to earn your stripes at something which to you is more difficult before you can get onto something which to you is going to be more applicable.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
What do you think makes discipline such a powerful predictor of success? Why is it such a selection criteria? Is it that most people don't have it? It seems to be something that's accessible to almost anybody. Discipline is essentially just consistency, right? So why is it such an outlier predictor or an outlier trait?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
I wonder, and I've been thinking about this recently, I think from the outside, some of the stuff that I've done in the few careers that I've had probably looks a lot like discipline. And in some ways, there'll be some discipline. But when I reflect on it really closely, there's quite a lot of stubbornness.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
in there and it's sort of stubbornness masquerading as discipline or appearing as discipline and uh i've sort of got it in my head at the moment that the two are pretty if you can channel stubbornness in the right way it gets perilously close to discipline you know you're talking about this this consistency that's not giving up so on and so forth so um yeah for the people who are stubborn uh in many ways perhaps your uh boyfriend or girlfriend is gonna uh
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
They're not going to be a huge fan of it, but I think you can channel it in a useful way.
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
What was that story about the standards of the U.S. Army Rangers influencing the more broad military standards?
Modern Wisdom
#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline
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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#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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,
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
We like people who are easy to predict. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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
It's been designed from the wheels up to be lighter, stronger, and
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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.
Modern Wisdom
#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
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. You can track over 140 different habits and behaviors.
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
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.
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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#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
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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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It's got a hole in the bottom.
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#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
How much of a new timeline are we on right now?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
This pivot from saying good or appearing good to hang on, but what actually happened? It's stress testing the outcomes and people optimizing for actual effectiveness as opposed to like optical slickness, I guess, or popularity, reputational stuff. I think that pivot seems to be one that was quite overdue.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But still. Equally absurd and unfair, right? Going back to sort of where we're at at the moment, I know that you've been heavily involved in a lot of meetings over the last month or so. How much... Having been... on every side of the fence and above it and inside of it, how much governmental efficiency is there to improve on, in your opinion?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
How is Elon so productive? Have you ever deconstructed this?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
They're a black hole that sucks in the best talent. If you're the best in the world, you want to work harder than anybody else. Come here.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So detail-oriented. focusing on everything from A to Z in terms of the business, sort of intimately familiar with it, and prepared to get his hands dirty from a, I will get in there and actually look at solving the problem myself. So is that, you know, that suggests to me, although this can't be the case because you couldn't run this many companies if you were doing it this way,
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Um, there may be some challenges in learning when to delegate, uh, when to hand off tasks, because in order to get that level of, uh, resolution to be able to see things with that, that much finitude, uh, you also need to spend a lot of time on it. And then if you're solving the problems, how do you choose the problems that are yours to solve and the problems that aren't so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So that must be, that must be a challenge, uh, delineating between what is my problem to solve and what is somebody else's.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I can call on the guy that owns the company.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
right and so it's like how do you possibly like how yeah and this is the thing it's like okay you're like a normal ceo running a normal company like how can you possibly compete with that what are the other reasons that uh ceos of similar companies or comparable companies don't do that technical uh understanding i get that that you need to be able to get your hands dirty from a specificity perspective but what else
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
It's a very straightforward thing. My dad went to go and test drive a Model S maybe a couple of years ago. And he's sort of an old school car guy. And he's used to the sort of banter back and forth, the forecourts, the discussion. Please sit down. Would you like a coffee? Would you like, you know, what is that? And he said that he walked in and it felt like he'd gone into an Apple store and
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And there was some, as he called it, teenager in a hoodie that came out. And my dad started to do the whole classic boomer parent negotiation thing. And this guy was like, the price is the price. And I don't have any fucking coffee for you. So he left me. He left feeling like this is the new world. And now he has a Range Rover. Well, that's the thing.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
People can just identify it from how good it is.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Pouring some kerosene onto the fire as you are. I saw a clip of Elon speaking. I don't know whether it was a recent clip, but the clip only came up
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
the other day he's talking about his thoughts on being a ceo a lot of times people think that creating a company is going to be fun i would say it's really not that fun i mean there are periods of fun and there are periods where it's just awful and particularly if you're the ceo of the company you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in a company
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, I think any group that's bound together over the mutual distaste of an out group, not the mutual love of an in group, the only way that you can continue to bind that together is to scapegoat and shave off the people on the outside that are insufficiently pure, continue to point the finger at them and say, well, at least we're not dot, dot, dot, that thing over there.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There's no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong. And there are things that are going wrong that other people can't take care of. So you have like the worst. You have a filter for the crappiest problems in the company, the most pernicious and painful problems. So I wouldn't say it's...
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
fun you have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold and there's a friend of mine who says starting companies is like staring into the abyss and eating glass and there's some truth to that the staring into the abyss part is that you're constantly facing extermination for the company because most startups fail 90 99 fail that's the staring part you're constantly staring okay and saying if i don't get this right the company will die quite stressful
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then the eating glass part is you've got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. So you end up working on that. You really wish you weren't working on it. That's the eating glass part. And it goes on for a long time. What's your assessment of his post-mortem on being a CEO?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But yeah, I mean, it's the reason... I've had a bunch of conversations with people on the left, Annika Sparian, Cenk Uygur, Dave Smith, people who... So varied political standings. Anna, the fact that you can only move from left to right, you can't go from right to left. So it's a one-way valve, you know, it's a one-way street. And guess what happens?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You're now the agony ant. to the people who are eating glass and learning to try and enjoy the taste of their own blood. Do you feel more like a therapist than an investor sometimes?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The sense in the air, the ambiance has certainly taken a hard pivot. Lots of people that were happy are now unhappy. And lots of people that were unhappy are now fucking ecstatic.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The street that allows you to move in one direction is going to be more welcoming and better populated.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Going back to the governmental efficiency thing, how much do you think the huge swaths, the platoons of useless middle management inside of the government are shitting themselves at the moment?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Mutually agreeable accelerated retirement, the most diplomatic way to say get the fuck out.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah. What happens if Trump can't deliver change? He's got all of the things, House, Senate, popular vote, Elon, unlimited funds. blah, blah, blah. He doesn't even need to worry about being reelected. What's the implication for America and the West if he can't make sizable change?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Talk to me about this Willow Google quantum computer thing. How big of a deal is it?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
That we're using for our RAM.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
right and it you know this result is yet another evidence that no actually god really likes playing dice with the universe seems like he is doing it between that i mean this this last period there's so much going on in tech uh sora ai as well what's your uh post i mean they've closed now signups and stuff because it just went ballistic so for the people that don't know this is the video equivalent of open ai's uh image creation uh service and now you can do video too although
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So many people signed up. It's restricted to particular territories, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What do you make of the way that that went?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Right.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I mean, you must be knee deep in projections for robotics, for AI, for where we're going to get to. What's the meteorological artificial intelligence forecast for the next few years? What do you think people can expect sort of 25, 26, 27, etc. ?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Oddly enough, the autonomous submarine just feels like one that you could have done earlier. There's far less traffic. There's far fewer things to crash into.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
What do you think of the adoption of self-driving, sort of en masse self-driving? I don't know whether there is a more... highly kinetic, high risk and heavily involved area of human life that is ready to be outsourced to AI. You know, there's other things where you can help you cook or it'll keep your food fresh or do whatever. But there doesn't seem to be the same sort of moral consequences.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You know, people have a very strange relationship between car safety when it's done manually and when it's sort of pivoting to that. Is this just some conceptual inertia thing that we're moving through over time, slowly, as usual?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
How big of a civil war do you think is unfolding at the moment?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
What about personal autonomous vehicles like drone? I remember I was in Leonardo da Vinci Airport years ago, and there was one gyrocopter thing out front, this can fly itself, etc.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
That feels like a much bigger problem in that you're not retrofitting a new piece of technology onto an existing infrastructure, that this is basically an entirely new thing that you need to have where they can float around.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I've seen someone boarding a tanker type thing, and they've got their hands in gauntlets. But that's not electric. That looks like it's jet, some sort of fuel jet-powered type thing.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You don't want a bullet in the wrong location if you've got one of those things strapped to you.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
It really is a different timeline. Speaking of which, I was in the UK last week. I was there for a couple of weeks. I went back home. I had this live show thing. Give me your opinion on the sort of state of free speech and regulation on that side of the world. We're talking about the excesses, the overreaches that hopefully may be coming out of over here.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
What's your opinion on the other side of the Atlantic?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I don't know what's going on. I went back to the UK and I was quite disheartened by a lot of this stuff. I spent my time in Kensington. The diversity is our strength thing in the UK, which is a message that you're greeted by. by as you enter the country. I don't know whether there's such a thing as too much diversity, but it just didn't particularly feel that much like London.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I'm aware that that just sounds like the most Brexit sentence that I could have ever said. I was like, huh, this just doesn't feel very much like London. Maybe it should be a cosmopolitan place, so on and so forth. So that was kind of a little bit strange. It's just something that I hadn't noticed previously, like that level of diversity. What else did I notice? The level of service.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Every Uber took 20 minutes to get to you. It's like, why is that happening? I was slap-banging in the middle of the city. Every bit of service in every restaurant was either a long wait or there was some sort of a problem. Uber Eats seemed completely determined to just destroy whatever food or coffee.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
We actually started ordering twice the number of coffees that we needed to order in an attempt that we could maybe combine them together to have residual amounts of the right amount of coffee that we needed and we still didn't get... I don't know. I can just whine on like the fucking opulent returning prodigal son or something. But it really was quite disappointing in many ways.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then on top of this, you know, this upside down world where Keir Starmer is saying that immigration is too high and that this is a problem that we need to deal with. And at the same time, you've got these still unbelievably bizarre non-crime hate incidents that are being reported. It's odd. And I feel bad about my old homeland.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I don't know whether Europe's in the middle of a downfall or what at the moment, but you know, between all of the different parties that are going in this vote of no confidence that just happened recently. It's like whatever the timeline is, maybe this is actually what happens when we get used for the RAM of another fucking universe's computation that they just start to speed up all of the drama.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
That's the side effect. I don't know. But yeah, there's something happening and it's being expedited, whatever it is.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Uh, I don't know. Who are they? Whoever it was before the fucking Normans came in.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Right. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I think that's certainly true. Looking for a direction, looking for what your contribution is to the broader world. You know, it very much is a little bit of attention is being paid to Russia. Most of the attention is being paid to the US and some attention gets paid to China. And everybody else is playing second, third, fourth, fifth string behind that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And I wonder whether the UK is feeling like a jilted lover at the moment where it's just like we used to be important. We used to do a thing. I actually want you to bring this up. I've been sort of harping on about the
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
differential number of entrepreneurs coming out of the UK versus coming out of the US, despite the fact that we have similar higher education levels in the same number of universities in the top 10 worldwide. The UK has got the same number as the US do, but we put out only 20% of the number of entrepreneurs. Based on your assessment, culturally, commercially, what do you lay that at the feet of?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You work with a lot of founders, CEOs, tons of your friends will be in that position too. What do you make of the response to the Brian Thompson killing and the situation more broadly?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Cut us off at the knees just in case we were going to contribute to this new fledgling industry.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah. I don't know, man. I really hope that we can bring ourselves back around. Maybe not like old school colonialist glory. I'm not hearkening back to the fucking East India Training Company. But something... I don't know. You're right. The identity crisis and the direction is a big part. And then you layer on top.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I'm sure you've been seeing Dominic Cummings going full fucking scorched earth recently. He came on the show about six months ago and everything that he said, even like Rory Stewart, someone that you think of as... you know, being way less of a firebrand than Dominic Cummings. And he has this really like visceral description of the type of people that inhabit the halls, Whitehall and Westminster.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And he describes the way that they smell and the way that they talk and the things that concern them. And he realized, you know, the governmental efficiency thing needs to be scaled out beyond just the US. This is the sort of thing that really needs to be probably put everywhere. Yeah.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, the path dependence. We always talk about the wonderful heritage of the UK, but you don't necessarily think about the Einstein effect that has got you beholden to all of this bullshit that came before. I learned last year that the distance between the two front benches in the House of Commons is a broadsword held out at arm's length from either side. Which...
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Just tells you kind of everything that you need to know about what our current government and political institutions in the UK are inheriting. Like if you've got a country that's a thousand years old, a couple of thousand years old, you're like, bloody hell, like there's a really lovely history there. And you say, yeah, but what else comes along for the ride?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And sometimes it's stuff you want to get rid of. Mark, let's bring this one home. Dude, it's been a long time coming. You're so great. I'd love to bring you back on at some point soon. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Mark, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So the blast radius of the good vibes is wider than people might've anticipated. Yeah.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I shouldn't laugh.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
What did they think that they're doing? That sometimes people that run healthcare organizations don't pay out when people should be paid out, therefore it's okay to kill the person at the top?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah. And nuclear energy.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
What do you think that is? Is it just some sort of generalized skepticism, generalized scrutiny over rich people that they don't have the best interests at heart of the common folk?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
What do you think is the most unsettling idea about consciousness that keeps you up at night?
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#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
The conscious experiences are happening. It's a much less sexy sentence, unfortunately. Yeah, that's true. And yeah, if split brain studies suggest that we've got multiple consciousnesses, the idea of a single self ends up being pretty broken.
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#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
But if you were to do it temporally, right? Like you're not the same person that you were 10 years ago.
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#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
That's what it really comes down to.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
So one thing that I had in my head was some... states of human conscious experience feel more or less than others. It's like love feels more conscious than boredom, let's say. Heartbreak or grief feels more conscious than relaxation.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Maybe. I just, I don't know whether there is something about how much our attention is forced to attend to the thing that's going on and the kind of volume of it.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
I don't know. But the question is, is it more conscious, less conscious?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
So there's an interesting question there, which is what is the lowest possible amount of consciousness that you can have before one step of consciousness eroding would mean the consciousness no longer exists?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
i suppose there's you know if we've got this overton window of consciousness you would ask yourself okay well what's the maximum amount of consciousness because there's no reason to assume if we think that there's a gradation right between a bat or a flower yeah i just don't think there's a gradation of consciousness i think there's a gradation of content the types of things that are experienced so i think even the most minimal experience we could imagine you know just a
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Okay, but if you were an amoeba and you have that level or a bat or a flower or a mycelium network or a blue dolphin or us, would you say that the range of consciousness is greater? No. Okay, so across the board. Oh, that's interesting. Well, even then, if we're just talking about contents, then the ability for our consciousness to experience more, more depth, more...
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
I've heard some theories that consciousness might just be a malfunction of the brain rather than an essential feature. Like it could be just a side effect of energy efficiency in the same way that a light gives off heat and light and you to look at it and say... When it comes to the more sort of adaptive explanation, is it just us being able to model the thoughts of our Dunbar number 150 tribe?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
And I need to know that Annika and John are no longer friends, but that John and Joe actually have become friends now. What's your...
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
So are you saying that consciousness is largely surplus to requirements for us?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
If we can get to the stage where AI is able to outthink us, does that suggest that consciousness is overrated?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Well, whether or not, if AI can outthink us and it's not conscious. So if it's functionally.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Yes. And it's functionally able to do.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
How likely do you think it is that progress in AI will unveil some interesting insight about consciousness?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
How do you experience magnetic north?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Please, mom, don't forget me. Don't leave me on the school bus. Magnetic North, how do you experience it?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Be careful. It felt so good.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
You do not want that at all. It would be very dangerous.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
It would be very dangerous.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
You've mentioned plants a couple of times today. What have you learned about plants?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
I've heard people say before that if we didn't experience it, the universe would give us no indication that consciousness exists. How true do you think that is?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
I wonder whether, well, actually, where have you come to land on the where consciousness comes from question, all of the different schools of thought? Are you a neo-panpsychist now? What is this? Do you fit into some broad bucket?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Are we asking the wrong people?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Are we asking the wrong people about consciousness? Should we be asking mystics and meditation experts instead of scientists?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
You mentioned quantum physics there. There's kind of a
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
god of the gaps quantum of the gaps entanglement down at the quark level etc thing that goes on have you got what there is it's like you know these words just get fucking snuck in like yeah like where people don't really understand like it's normal they say oh yeah it's the quantum fluctuations and we can't explain about we don't understand any of that before you know you're reading the three body problem
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Have you got any sense of whether quantum physics, I mean, quantum physics is playing an important role in everything in that it's a part of physics. But is there something extra special, extra salient about quantum physics when it comes to consciousness?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
What are some of the other interesting examples, experiments, insights from neuroscience that sort of reveal how unintuitive consciousness is?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
What do you think the future of consciousness research looks like, should look like?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Heck yeah. Annika Harris, ladies and gentlemen. Annika, I love the fact that you went and did a unnecessarily complex audio documentary series to try and answer these questions after writing a book on it. Where should people go? Do they want to check out the documentary?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Thank you. Annika, I appreciate you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
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 books. That's chriswillx.com books.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Well, I guess we don't really need to know the underlying reality, right? We just need to be effective within the environment.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Adaptively, if we just spend all our time contemplating whether or not this is really the way that a tree looks, we might not have got as much done.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
Okay, so binding is this sequential processing and time delay adjustment in order to be able to make things feel to us like they're happening in sequence and that other things get moved around in a way that helps us to feel them happening cohesively. If that's the case... what does it mean to say live in the present moment as a sentence?
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
out in the universe um and so that it's that impression that that's not right is it right to say that consciousness is behind our eyes if if it seems like it's in our head right and our eyes are a bit of our brain that gets extruded out through the front of our skull during uh gestation you follow the eyes back and then it's in here right somewhere in here
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
It is very counterintuitive because there's nothing more real. Very.
Modern Wisdom
#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness
A little. But there's nothing more real to me or anybody that's listening than the sense of being me. You know, the sort of, I think, therefore I am, am I a brain in a vat? Well, at least I know that I am this thing. You go, oh, fucking hell, is that gone as well? Like, I don't even know if I am this thing.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Why is memory important?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
It seems to me, I've had it in my head as you've been explaining so far, that memory feels a little bit like the breath, the breath being one of the few windows that we have into controlling the autonomic nervous system, that you actually do it unconsciously, but can step in consciously and make some amendments to it too. You can kind of tinker a little bit.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Is that a fair analogy in this regard, that memory is going on, we don't necessarily get to choose, and then we also have this degree of conscious control over how much stuff gets put into memory at the time, how much we pull it back out, etc. ?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and 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. a checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. Why do we forget things?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Is it just a real estate demand problem inside of our brain?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
How can we make ourselves forget? Is that possible? If there's something where you think, I don't want to keep that in my mind anymore. I've been able to dispense with my 16 digit pen across the front of my card that I've been desperately trying to remember for the last three years. Is there such a thing as making ourselves forget?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
I get the sense, and I certainly know this for myself, that if I look back across a trip that I've taken or an evening that I've spent with friends or an episode or a book that I've read or whatever, and I don't feel like I've recalled enough there's this sort of odd sense of guilt. I think, well, what was the point of doing it?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
What was the point of going through all of this if it was just the passage of time and I've got no memory dividend that my future self is able to tap into so that my remembering self can actually sort of extract it? Is there an issue with this attempt to try and memorize more, this sort of never-ending overdraft of wishing that you could recall more of the things that you did?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
What are the fundamentals of training memory? You know, we've spoken about kind of how the environment cues our brain to tell us the things that we want to remember. This is how you breathe and why you breathe when you're not thinking about breathing. But if I was to start thinking about breathing and I wanted to breathe better, how should people come to think about training their memory?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
It sort of suggests to me that the if there was a way for the remembering self to remember everything the experiencing self experienced, that this would give us a fuller picture. Maybe we would be choosing from a deeper, more rich data set to be able to make our decision about the vacation, whatever it is.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
What should they do if they want to remember an experience while it's happening? What are the fundamentals of that?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Right. Okay. So avoiding doing the things that get in the way of you recalling the things is a good place to start.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so error-driven learning, something that kind of hinted at earlier on.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Explain that to me.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Oh, well, we once had a conversation with somebody about going to Tulum, but I forgot about that conversation about Tulum. We went to Tulum and Tulum sucked or it was great or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Does that suggest that we learn more from pain and difficult life circumstances than enjoyable ones? Do we have the negativity bias present in our memory as well as in our sort of noticing, our reticular activating system?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
No, no, no. You're you're you're on the money. Keep going.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
So this must create a kind of recursive loop for people whose lives are going well or lives are going badly, for people who are depressed or people who are happy, because your current state... creates a context, and that context predisposes your brain to viewing and interpreting and recalling and focusing on past experiences that match with where you are right now as an experiencing self.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
So sad people think about more sad things and happy people think about more happy things. Is that a fair assessment?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
So funny, man. I've been spending a lot of time this year really trying to get into neurobiology a lot more. Rick Hansen, if you're familiar with Rick from Hardwiring Happiness, I think he's just so great. He's got this unique intersection of Dharma, Buddhist mindfulness stuff, and then the hardcore science behind the neuroscience things, sort of your work as well.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
And the more that I realize we have this fascinating... window into the structure of our own brain and you do have some conscious control over it even though you can't predict the next thought that's going to come careening into view you do have some conscious control over it but unlike going to the gym you can't see if you're actually doing it
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
You can't really fully tell whether or not you're doing gratitude right. Did I do 10 reps of gratitude there? You can't say that with the same level of certainty that you know if you did 10 repetitions of a bicep curl. You don't know, is this actually making me better? You get a pump. You get a preview in the gym. There's no brain pump.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
All you do is just have a degree of uncertainty about whether or not that thing was the way that you were supposed to do it. And I think it was, and I'll just keep on doing it. But it is really interesting that we do have some control, not entire control, but we do have some control, and this control gets tuned up over time. Just on your point about choosing the good sandwich,
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Oliver Berkman has the idea of a done list, which is the opposite of a to-do list. As he goes through the day and he crosses things off like cleaned shoes and walked dog and stuff, he likes to do that. And I adapted it to a well-done list, which is basically what you're talking about. So toward the end of the day, or as stuff goes on throughout the day, I think... Oh, fuck.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Like, that was a really good walk. I had a really good walk earlier on today and the sun was shining and I got to see a dog. That was nice. The dog was pretty cool. And, you know, I was listening to this song and that song makes me feel happy and that was good. And it, you know, it's little things.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
But yeah, I just, I'm kind of fascinated about what you were saying there, this sort of interjection, maybe for people with a low mood or a catalyst for people that are in good mood. There's two worlds colliding here, and one of them is top-down, which is reframing things as they're happening.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Do I want to really be present, as present as possible, allowing this to sink in, and then a little spaced repetition, which I'm sure we'll get onto. Mm-hmm. But then there's also the bottom up, which is, well, go and find good experiences. Go and spend time doing things that are worthy of memory.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
And yeah, for people that are in good moods they want to maintain or bad moods they want to get out of, It feels like those two things need to work simpatico together. It's not enough to just think your way out of a living problem or think your way out of a feeling problem, but you also are missing out on some of the gains if you never think about your good experiencing experiences.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
No, for sure. There's certainly an issue of being taken out of the moment, trying to bank it to remember it whilst also trying to experience it. You know, Oliver has this beautiful, really interesting blog post where he talks about one morning, he lives in the Yorkshire Dales in the UK countryside. And he talks about one morning, beautiful snow, the sun's risen and the birds are chirping.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
And he says, is experiencing this thing and loving it. As he's experiencing it, he's thinking, you really should remember this. Like, this is really the sort of experience that you should be remembering more of. And in the act of trying to enjoy something, he's whipping himself about not remembering it in future, which causes him to not even enjoy it in the moment. And I think...
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Lots of people have that, you know, this is so beautiful. I better hold on to this. I better be able to remember this in future. If I can't remember this, I'll feel guilty. It's like, dude, you're making yourself feel guilty for not remembering a thing that hasn't fucking finished yet. Like, it hasn't even happened.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
You mentioned there about emotions. Yeah, you mentioned there about emotions. What's the relationship between emotions and memory?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Probably think about similar trips you took in the past, might imagine what this trip might be like and try to work out what it could be that would be required.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
That's interesting. Let's say that it's something good. What are the areas that an emotionally strong memory is going to focus on there? Is it focused on more good things or is it just negativity bias all the way down?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
What's the difference between remembering and imagining?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Is it possible to learn something if we don't remember it happening? You know, you go through... You talked about... LeBron James, knowing games. If he can't remember shooting that particular three-pointer, how does that particular three-pointer get added to the corpus of experience that he can draw on to become a better basketball player?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
I can't remember this very move from when I was 12, but it has contributed to his capacity. Is there embodied learning? Is this such a thing? How does this work?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
And your dog's going to wake up tomorrow and be 2% faster because it's practiced it during its sleep. You need to be ready for that. Possibly, yeah. Give me the... So it seems to me like novel experiences...
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
pretty reliably placed in into memory this is new this is something that's that's different and intense experiences as well uh this is you know this is really again which i guess intensity is kind of like uh volume novelty and what we think of as typical novelty is is uh the categorical uh newness i suppose
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Well, if intensity is something I may have done before, but in a manner that I haven't experienced it previously, which I suppose is a kind of novelty. But I think when people think about novelty, they think about something that's categorically new. I haven't been to this particular holiday destination. I haven't skied on this particular mountain before, let's say.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
So let's use skiing as an example. So one might be, I've been down this mountain a hundred times. I know the route. But this one time, there's an avalanche behind me. Okay, so I've been there previously, but the level of intensity... Or this time I go faster. Or this time I do a different trick. Yeah, it's a kind of novelty. But I think experientially for most people...
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
We need to sort of work within the confines that most people's lives are rather routine. You know, you can say, hey, maybe if you want to make your day go a little bit slower, take a different route to work. And you go, yeah, but there's like there's only five routes I can take to work. You know what I mean? So and the same thing goes for skiing down a mountain and so on and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
So, yeah, novelty and intensity just seem to be sort of two levers that common threads that have come through today. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
What's the relationship between memory and sort of subjective passage of time, the sense that we have of how quickly or how slowly time is going or time did go in the past?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Yeah, I think they probably went by pretty quickly. Okay, so this is interesting, but let's go back to it.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Just lingering on the super-remembers for a second, what's happening inside of the brains of these people? Are their brains structurally, functionally different? Do we know why it happens?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
What else, or what is it that you, you wish more people knew about memory? If there was something that, uh, is regularly complained to you about how the human memory system works or about some misunderstanding, some common myth that people have around it. What is it that you wish that you could dispel?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Yeah, crazy. Charan Ranganath, ladies and gentlemen, it's fascinating. The idea of how human memory works is something that I've been really interested in for a long time. So it's nice that you've got to do a primer today. Where should people go? They want to check out all of the stuff that you do online.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Sure, I'll talk for another time. Sharon, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. All right. Thank you very much. Take care. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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. And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Okay, let's say we're talking about a normal human now, not a never-rememberer, not an everything-rememberer. How does human memory work typically in our brains?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
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#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom. a checkout. That's interesting. So why do we remember some events so clearly and other ones vaguely or not at all? What predicts whether something will enter memory?
Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Yeah, so you've sort of touched on something there. You've got a self that experiences stuff and you've got a self that remembers you experiencing stuff. What is the relationship, the difference, the tension between these two selves?
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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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,
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Is there no one like who's who is responsible?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Whose job is it to look after health?
Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Or they'll make you pay over the odds. Boom. Wow. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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,
Modern Wisdom
#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
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Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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?
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#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?
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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...
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#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
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#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
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#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
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#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...
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#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.
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#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?
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#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.
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#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
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#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?
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#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...
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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
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#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
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Why does tribalism exist? Why did it evolve?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Apparently everybody's got senility or dementia now.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, I think it's good to move on from just focusing on sort of political divides only a week or so after the election, still in the blast radius of that. Um, but yeah, when I think about, uh, tribalism and I keep on getting it in my head, it's not just tribalism, it's polarization. And I think that the word is being used interchangeably.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It seems like you maybe have a more sort of scientifically grounded definition of what tribalism is and that what the media is using the word tribalism for is maybe to just highlight polarization groups that sometimes with each other.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, so I think, again, to fight for the, hang on, I thought everybody hated each other.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I'm trying my best. Thinking about breaking it down, yes, racial lines. We've seen an awful lot of movements. A good example of this, BLM, a lot of the time, movement called Black Lives Matter, defining itself around the in-group. But what did much of that movement, what did much of the communication end up being? It was a demonization of the out-group.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
A lot of that discussion was around pointing the finger outside. The Me Too movement was around protecting women. Title IX, around protecting women. But how was the communication? What was the sort of language that was being used? A lot of the time, it seems to me, and again, that might be the
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
more nefarious edges, the spiky extremes of these movements almost certainly will be the newsworthy ones that capture the sort of crazy Twitter reposts and whatnot. But still, it seems to me like a lot of even in-group movements defined around an in-group communicate themselves as being not an out group.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And I've seen the stats that said in 2012, people stopped voting for the in party and started voting against the out party. The messaging that was come around, was it 30% of Trump's campaign budget in some states were only spent on that one Kamala Harris is for they, them, Trump is for you thing.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So tribalism is predicated on culture, that without culture, there can be no tribalism. Is that a fair...
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I wonder whether that's a natural outgrowth of just the pushback of anyone disagreeing with your in-group proposition. You make a proposition around us, a group that isn't you pushes back against that. So what do you do? You lean in against the argument. So I guess we've spoken about a number of different ways that people can get split up in terms of tribes.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
What do people become tribal around, mostly? Is it accent, appearance, familiarity, gene pool? What are the core characteristics that compose tribes?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I'm so glad. I'm so glad you said that because I have been spouting this people are more racist against accents than they are against skin colors thing for a while. It may very well be some of your work from a long time ago that I've been harping on about Um, but if that's true, then I'm, uh, no, it's, it's, it's totally true.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Fantastic. Well, dig into, we've got these three instincts, peer instinct, hero instinct, ancestor instinct. Let's run through those.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
One point here, I guess, you've mentioned is this sort of taxonomy, this breakup of different types of instincts. But I can see a world in which peer instinct would be restricting because conformity limits creativity. If you're sort of following a lot of the time, I imagine that breaking out of the box is something that then becomes more difficult.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
What were you briefly supposed to say that you're not supposed to say anymore?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Equally safe or equally canceled.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You can insult the meat all you want, but what can I say?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
That's an attractive man carrying a good antelope and I'm going to take him to bed.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
But also, think about it this way. If there was no reward for working that hard beyond the caloric input that you get, you're working... You have this... Excess output, there's additional risk. You know, if you're the one that takes down the antelope or the whatever, it's you that's the one that's potentially going to be killed by it. You've got to drag it back.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Presumably you're carrying it for a good chunk of the way, if not all of the way. Why? Why are you doing that? Is it just because you want to bestow your caloric excess surplus onto the group? Or is it because you think you're going to get laid?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Or is it because you think that your children are going to be better protected or that people are going to revere you or that all of the downstream benefits that come from status are going to be bestowed on you? Obviously, that's going to be the case.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You've got to prioritize the person that's providing all the food.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Hmm. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what the conscience is, right? I've been thinking about this a lot more recently. I did a ton of therapy over the last year. And if you do tons of psychotherapy and you're talking to someone face to face, your conscience, apparently just the volume gets turned up and you can't hide things from yourself anymore. So, yeah, I've been really thinking about that.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You have this sort of, I don't know, it's like a representative of the group, right? sat on your shoulder, your better self sometimes, just judging you. Should you have done that? Should you have said that? Is that a virtuous behavior? Is that a non-virtuous behavior? What is that? If not, this sort of sense of social obligation to the rest of the world.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Now, if you're religious, maybe it's your virtue speaking up on high. It's something a little bit more transcendent than that. But at least functionally, adaptively, why would it work? Well, it's to ensure that you know what other people would have thought about the thing that you just did or said or thought about doing.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
In a more socially complex group structure where status bestows on certain people, the people that achieve it, benefits, that requires a degree of experimentation, adventure, risk-taking, divergence from the peer instinct, which would be more conformist. Exactly. So someone's going to go and do this thing.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
We then have benefits bestowed to that person, which is the reward for them taking the risk effectively and well and pulling it off, doing the dance, killing the antelope, whatever. And then downstream from that, because you now have this kind of...
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
social capital capitalist system where everybody is trying to accrue as much social equity as they can, I look at the person that's done really well and I think, okay, well, he did that. What are some of the principles that I can take from that, maybe specifically or maybe even sort of more philosophically?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Well, he did something different, or he was courageous, or he was honorable or whatever it might be. Is that a good framing for hero instinct?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You don't have time to dream. You're too busy with tasks.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, I'm going to have to ask you if I imagine that you do know. I want to have a conversation with someone about the psychology of courage and bravery. I'm sure that there's somebody out there that's done it, but it's something I've been pretty fascinated by recently. And it sounds like that, you know, you posit an ideal. You find yourself falling short from that ideal.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And it's not due to something structural. It's simply due to your own commission, your own lack of willingness of effort.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Why do you think it is? Because I've noticed this too. And look, I'm going to fight the fight for the... It seems like people hate outgroups more than they love in groups today. I'm going to try and stress test it as much as possible. Thank you. But... What do you think is so alluring about this sort of myth of martyrdom, this woe is everything, it's all sort of broken?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You're saying that the key to bravery and courage is social pressure.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I had Edward Slingland on the show.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
He's phenomenal. So he did that book about alcohol over time. And he told me this really great story about how it's a very common initiation slash bonding ritual for armies, troops to drink together. Maybe not the night before the battle, but at some point, not too far off. And it's the impact of alcohol fascinating.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Why is it that that's a tempting, seductive talk point?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It makes you worse at lying because it downregulates your PFC, but it makes you better as a lying detector. So it's this sort of truth serum milieu that gets thrown through everything. But even more important than all of that is the fact that you're going to feel like shit the next day. It's the suffering, the shared suffering that you go through.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So when you're on the battlefield with your buddies in a week's time and there's a ton of horses charging at you and you've got your pikes in the ground or whatever, there is this sense of shared camaraderie because you have been through something already that was difficult, albeit maybe just a rough hangover. Yeah. Yeah, I just really love that idea.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I love, you know, we often... And I think this is something that's potentially robbed from modern generations who get too coddled, too cotton wool helicopter, snowplow parented, that if you don't... Not only do people not...
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
create the ability to be anti-fragile and resilient against life individually, but they don't get the opportunity to go through the really important formative bonding processes of sharing in that suffering, sharing in that discomfort with other people too.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And, you know, as somebody who has spent a lot of time in solitude, I'm an only child, this business and everything that I've done is in one form or another been on my own.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
The more that I'm able to let other people in, the guys that work with me now on the podcast, the people that I worked with in my events company previously, the more that I can do that, the more I feel like I've got sort of stabilizing wheels to sort of weather the ups and downs, the turbulence that comes along with stuff. Because I'm like, fuck, we're in it together. Like we're in it together.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
They're doing it for me. I'm doing it for them. Isn't this cool? And yeah, it's good. It's noble. It's definitely functional as well.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Okay. And then we've got the ancestor instinct.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Give me the adaptive reason, because this just seems like superfluous, archaic bullshit.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Are there any other seemingly superfluous cultural artifacts that you've fallen in love with during research for this that ended up being quite adaptive or just had a kind of interesting use?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
To you, it may just seem like a whimsical story, but it's actually geology and meteorology masquerading as a tale from the past.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
This is one of the fascinating things. I had a great conversation with Alex O'Connor, who is an atheist, skeptic-type person out of Oxford, but very open to the idea of religion. And he was arguing for the side of religion and saying that basically in the modern world, what we told was for people to let go of the thing that they found most easy to believe, which was story.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It was a persona and personification. It was narrative. And to start to believe in the thing which is the least believable, which is data and stats. And it's very sterile. And we have to put ourselves into this very different type of...
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
This very different type of mindset in order to be able to go, and this many people will be saved by a mosquito net or et cetera, et cetera, as opposed to what we lived through for our entire human history. And yes, the problem with that is that you can't, it's unfalsifiable. It allows all sorts of fuckery to be spread.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
slipped in here and there but yeah I always think about that frame I always think about things that are figuratively true but literally false or things that are functionally true but literally false and things that are literally true but functionally false and that myth story you know very well may be one of those things that's literally not that true but functionally is like perfect
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Okay, so what are the levers that pull on tribalism? What causes cultural tribalism to ossify more or for it to change or become more contagious? Yeah.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Would an anthem be something similar?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
The perverting incentives of clicks. I wish I had a more sexy answer because it just seems so cliche and so obvious for me to say, well, people need to get attention and this is how the attention economy works and blah, blah, blah.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I suppose that's one of the vectors of weakness that cults, cult leaders take advantage of too. Exactly. Make people more suggestible. You are a part of the bigger thing. Do you not feel this sense of connection to the wider world?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And then downstream from what people say, other people believe because people believe what others say, especially people who have been chosen by the media or whoever to be the proselytizers about our current level of culture. So I think an interesting framing is, Is tribalism an us thing or a them thing? Like how much of tribalism is in-group favoritism versus out-group persecution?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
What about factors or situations in the environment that cause people to focus more on either collaboration or on competition? You know, I kind of have it in my head around warfare, peacetime, wartime, a threat, etc. Surely those sorts of things, but there must be a ton of these.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
How much of that do you think is playing into the modern world, the polarization side of tribalism? Lots of headlines, very scary news out there, threat.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
There's threat to your ideological mental model purity because you're going to brush up against and push up against other people that say you're wrong. That thing's not right.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, I mean, this conflation between emotional or intellectual insults with physical ones, and even the ratcheting up of emotional insults as being something that you're never supposed to encounter is a really interesting...
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
uh pivot so i guess you know we've laid out a nice paradigm so i want to kind of come back to where we started sure which was uh your compelling science that proves that we don't hate outsiders that it is an us thing not a them thing uh like i say you know the internet unfortunately and again you are you've chosen a hell of a time to release a book given uh the The recent election.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
But a lot of people will just think this can't be the case. I've heard all of these stories about how people aren't voting for their own side. They're voting against the other. Look at the messaging. Look at the fear. Look at the etc.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yes, maybe less sexy, but hopefully a lot more inspiring and more accurate as well. Dr. Michael Morris, ladies and gentlemen, I really love this orthogonal approach to tribalism. I think that we need to try and draw back some of that. And it's so interesting to think about the positive outcomes that you get from having this, from having access to...
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
teamwork, from having access to aiming up, from having access to your history, trends, archetypes from the past. It's cool.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Thank you. Michael, where should people go to keep up to date with all of your work?
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
That's right. Michael, I appreciate you. Thank you.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, understood. So just to linger on that, I want to get into peer, ancestor, et cetera, instinct in a bit, but what does it mean to have an us instinct in absence of a them instinct? What does that mean? Surely only by there being a them can we define an us.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Interesting. So I'm thinking about, again, ancestrally, let's think about some of the stories that would have been told about what the weather is, about the moon being a god or a goddess, about the sun being some sort of either benign or malevolent or assistant force in some way. We have all of these personified stories that we have, which created them.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
The them may be different species, different astral plane, different dimension, different whatever.
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#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
um but we have a them and an us is it your opinion then i'm jumping way ahead but this is just too interesting to ask what has been so perverting about the modern world to cause tribalism to happen in the way that it is is it simply our exposure to the number of different ways that we can slice and dice and fracture and fragment society yeah
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Is Adolescence a bit too real?
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#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.
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#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?
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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
Because of exclusively because of in cell manosphere content coming from a good family, blah, blah, blah.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Also, remember, I don't think that... Do incels talk about 80-20 that much?
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#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?
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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
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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.
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#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
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#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?
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#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.
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And you just have to shut up about it.
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#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.
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#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...
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#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?
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#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.
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#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.
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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
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
#885 - Adam Grant - How To Overcome Your Fear Of Failure & Unlock Your Potential
Mm-hmm.
Modern Wisdom
#885 - Adam Grant - How To Overcome Your Fear Of Failure & Unlock Your Potential
It's hard. Good luck. It's really hard.
Modern Wisdom
#885 - Adam Grant - How To Overcome Your Fear Of Failure & Unlock Your Potential
Very rarely. When they have, what's different about those events? Hmm.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
from episode 46 to episode 916, something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
It's very important. That was the level of tank emptying that I went through just having a straight up conversation with you. It's great. I was saying before we started, it's really cool to watch the arc of people who you get to collaborate with and how that sort of progresses over time.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Is there some link between dopamine and our sense of the passage of time?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
All right. Talk to me about uncertainty. What's the role that uncertainty plays?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Presumably, there has to be a sweet spot, though. Too much uncertainty would just feel like chaos.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
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 24-7 via a little device on your wrist.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
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. I'm a massive, massive fan of them.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
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.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
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. I remember learning about a study that was done showing the faces of different sheep, newborn babies. Have you seen this one?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you were to show me, are you 10, 15 sheep? Unless they were very obviously different, we'd probably go, that could have been the same one over and over again. It seems that infants have the ability to discern between different animals and that this is a cognitive process that kind of drops away, like our ability to move our ears.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I think that all humans have the ability to move their ears a little bit, but again, the muscles sort of atrophy a little bit. Yeah, no, not with your fingers. You can move them manually yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, it's the difficult second album, especially if you've had some success with what you did first.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
yeah it's not working um and uh after you get to a certain age i don't know what the threshold is maybe it's sort of eight months maybe it's a year and a half something like that this um ability to be able to discern between different sheep or different cows or something it sort of falls away and it kind of makes me think about this too that you have uh
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
if we can't discern between different sheep, even if they are different, the level of uncertainty doesn't cross a threshold. Even though there is uncertainty there, it's that we're not able to detect it and that it needs to be above a particular threshold for us to go, huh, yeah, different sheep. That'd be interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Well, reducing down predictability is going to help, but a lot of people get locked into their routines. I often think about this sort of tension between the enjoyment of serendipity and uncertainty and the reduction in the speed of the passage of time when things are novel and intense. And then also on the other side, the thing that everybody's trying to do, which is be optimal.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And by optimal, what you mean is refine down all of the degrees of freedom to a point where you know the best path through a regularly traversed terrain. Like this is a situation that I come up against typically. It's morning, it's going to work. What's the best route to go to work?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Well, I actually don't want to go past that set of traffic lights because if I hit it wrong and I try to go right, it takes ages. Google Maps doesn't even account for that. So I'm going to take this route and I'm going to work around it.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So you end up with all of the degrees of freedom just like collapsing in on a very small number of very effective, very efficient, but largely unnovel and unstimulating and uncertain or very certain pathways through life. And yeah, I guess that's the sort of perennial curse of the optimizer that you end up with a uninspiring but quite efficient existence.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
There's a coffee shop that I like.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
What about effort? Talk to me about the effort paradox.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I wonder whether that plays into relationships sometimes, the classic, I only want them if they don't want me dynamic.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
It didn't even need to be tension or strife, right? Effort. If it's just always there. And I mean, look, peace is the most important thing in my life. So for me, the more peaceful, the better. But even within that, you don't want something to be, again, so predictable, no uncertainty, no intrigue.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Um, so with this uncertainty and effort, um, sort of dynamic that's going on, how do you advise people to better embrace struggle?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Can that—tying that back to your first book—can that help us with resilience, endurance, suffering, hard times?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Okay, why are humans drawn to explore then? What is it that's in us that causes this to happen?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Have you thought about how people can avoid seeing all of life instrumentally? If everything is done in service of what you get out of it in the future, you actually end up spending all of your days, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. It's like winning the marshmallow test over and over again every single day, but never cashing it out.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
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Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
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Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
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Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. How can people better navigate that explore-exploit trade-off?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, dig into regret minimization a bit more for me.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah. You know, like. That would be nice. So, you know, it's sort of, I guess, talked about Environmental, lifestyle, sort of external exploration. What have you come to learn about cognitive exploration, thinking patterns, our seeking of new behaviors, our seeking of new information, algorithms, modern world, stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
In this context, is exploration and curiosity the same thing, similar thing, related? I think they're very closely related.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I see you talk about humans becoming smarter but less creative.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, the sort of adaptive reason for why humans need to explore. And I imagine as well that there's a big distribution when it comes to how exploratory people want to be, because it wouldn't work for an entire tribe to just be full of people that want to climb up that hill over there. You need some people that are going to stay behind. You can go up the hill.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I need to dig into some of your other stuff just for a moment. The cognitive thing sort of got me thinking. Talk to me about recent data. You must have looked at this. Exercise, activity, physical activity, and mental health. Where are we at with that current world situation?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I mean, I'm going to make sure that we don't all die.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah. How much of it is the pro-social, getting yourself out of the house structure of your day? How much of this is, I guess, just straight up selection bias for who it is, what's the cohort of people, who are the sort of people that are prepared to do that? Exactly. In other news, you might have heard me say that hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
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. It's been designed from the wheels up to be lighter, stronger, and more durable. and hold more.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
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.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
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 they'll last you a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee. Plus, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy your new luggage, try it out for a month. If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Right now, you get a 20% discount to see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. And what about the link between exercise and brain health? Is that something else that's been sort of reassessed?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
If you were to lay at the feet of a particular style of exercise, what you think gives the most benefits to brain health, what would it be?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
What's the truth on zone two at the moment? There was a period... Everyone was super into Zone 2. That was the hot new girl in school. Now it's VO2 Max training and Zone 2 is out the window. I imagine that this is like a Kardashian getting divorced in your world.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
The territory of Zone 2. The territory in and around the blast radius of Zone 2.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Okay, cool. Getting back to exploration, did you make any changes to your life after looking at this book? How's this netted out practically? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Does that suggest, as more of the world has been explored, that the world is now owned by the people who aren't explorers?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Think about my hippocampus, okay? Yeah, exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
What would you say to people who...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
like the thesis that you're putting forward but still are met with a degree of discomfort when it comes to the prospect of exploring novelty uncertainty no fuck you alex i i quite i quite like my certainty i don't want i don't want to where would you go sort of existentially philosophically mantra wise like what can people use to rely on to help them feel more comfortable in their new world of exploration
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, I have been trying over the last couple of months to live the philosophy that I don't necessarily know what's best for me all the time. I typically do, but there's a degree of, what do you say, self-knowledge, self-management, lifestyle design narcissism. It doesn't affect anybody else, but, you know, it's just, no, no, no, I know what's best. I know what I want to order from Flower Child.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I don't want to try that new thing. I know the best route to get to Gold's Gym at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday. And, yeah, I'm... trying to, as somebody that quite likes control, somebody that likes to reduce down uncertainty, I would say I have maybe like probably quite a lot of people. I love adventure. I have a lot of curiosity inside of me, but I also like control.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I don't like to feel like stuff's out of control. I like order. I like structure. I like having a routine. And these two things, you know, the tension exists between the ears.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Alex Hutchinson, ladies and gentlemen. Alex, dude, you're awesome. Whatever, seven, seven and a half years, parentheses, on the show. And yeah, I mean, the stuff that you write, what is it you write for Runners World?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
All right, talk to me about the genetics of exploration then.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So I want to be- Not here, Alex. You're among safe friends here. That's right. We've all taken the behavioral genetics red pill.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Precisely correct.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, well, we'll see if I can keep you... No pressure, no pressure. I was going to say, so the pleasant uncertainty today abound. We'll see what I can achieve. You've got interested in explorers. Why? What's interesting about explorers?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So I did a huge DNA analysis at the back end of last year, and I've run, I knew that I was going to speak to you today. So I asked ChatGPT to go through my DNA report. Yes, you have a variant of the DRD4 dopamine receptor D4 gene. Your specific result is CA for the DRD4 C8887A variant.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
If you had two copies AA of this variant, you would be more likely to respond to stimulants due to lower baseline dopamine activity. Since you have one copy, CA, you are less likely to respond to stimulants.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Let's say what's the truth and the BS behind dopamine that you've learned.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
How can people design their lives so that they use dopamine more effectively or so that they can get more dopamine without having to do something insanely extreme or get addicted to meth?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Can people become too addicted to dopamine? Is that something that you've seen?
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
From your heart health and hormone levels to your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies, they even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you would get from an annual physical.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
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#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.
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#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?
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
That's what we tend to remember. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. Gymshark makes the best gym wear on the planet. Their hybrid shorts in onyx gray 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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#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
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#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.
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#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.
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#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?
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#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?
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
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#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.
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#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.
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#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?
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#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.
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#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators
Yeah. Australia, I get accused of a lot, but yeah.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
How many elite performers do you think have got the talent to be able to become world class, but don't actually have the inside game to actualize that potential?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Even more than Ryder King.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And then presumably looking at your successes before, is that better than looking at your successes with a coach or with a friend? Is that even better than looking at your failures?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
I think he's like a wonderful, kind, funny guy, at least in as much as you can tell from someone through the internet. But I always think about him as having this really unique blend of insane talent, gorgeous voice, wonderful songwriting ability, real insight into the human condition with what he sings about and how he puts it into words and lyrics and sounds.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
A performance of some kind.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
I'll just give you your money back and get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. So this is a very permeable window. Well, probably an hour, maybe before to an hour after something like that.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Is there anything else I really want to get into, you know, how people can prime themselves more effectively, how we can interject, what we can do in these moments before and during a performance? Is there anything else to say on the sort of neurobiology of what's going on?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And then this other side, which is his performance, his inner game and the challenges that he faces and the fact that his inner game is limiting his capacity. And I think for most people, we assume, well, people just aren't good enough. They're not good enough at the thing that they're trying to do.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
The only recent analogous situation that I've had is I was doing some live shows. I've done like solo live shows. It's two hours of me on stage in front of audiences from... We started at 40 people and then we moved up to three and a half thousand. So I really ran the full gamut where you can see the whites of their eyes and you basically can see nobody. And...
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
One of the things that I needed to do as part of preparation is I need to get my tongue warmed up. I need to be thinking about the material. In terms of the physiology of the mouth, I need to actually be warm. And a couple of times I tried a series of vocal warmups given to me by my speech coach.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And then one of the nights, I think it was one of the London shows, I just had a dressing room filled with people until five minutes before I was going to go on stage. And we were just talking, shooting the shit, coming up with ideas. Oh, what do you think is going to happen with Trump and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, fuck, I forgot to warm up.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
I went out and everything was the most lucid it had been.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
because i achieved the outcome that i wanted that was my hype song that was the equivalent of my hype song and uh i've got some friends in bands and they can do precisely the same thing they can have sort of a very like isolated hyper autistic broken down vocal warm-up thing or they can just put a playlist on of songs they love and sing to it as they get dressed and
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And yeah, I think that equivalent is true. On the framing thing, or I guess the story that you tell yourself, this is such a funny story, but I think it's funny. I was on an assault bike about three months ago, and I'd finished this workout doing a Norwegian 4x4 thing, and heart rate's coming back down. It's at sort of 150, 145 or something now, peaking at whatever, 160, 170.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
So I'm coming back down and then like, bam, it's as if someone put a piece of burnt toast directly under my nose. Like I remember that from school. It's like burnt toast, you're having a stroke. And I felt really dizzy. I had this ringing in my ears and obviously very, very panicky.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
So I got off the bike and I sat down and it this smell of it was the strongest smell of toast I've ever had directly. And I was like. I'm dying. This is it. This is how I go on the floor of Onnit Gym in Austin, Texas. This is how I'm going to be a fucking vegetable for the rest of my life or whatever. And anyway, it passed. I went in to get CT scan.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And so many people have got the desire and the drive and they want and they try hard and so on and so on. But they're kind of just not that good. They're not world class.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
I went in to get like a brain angiogram with contrast, all of this stuff. And there was nothing. It wasn't a transient ischemic attack. It wasn't a stroke. It wasn't anything. It seems like it was maybe a migraine with aura. And the aura for some people is visual. For some people, it's olfactory. For some people, it's sound, whatever. But it was really, really scary.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And I have this thing in the back of my mind. I'm like, well, maybe it was. Maybe it was a stroke and they'd missed it. Maybe it was a TIA and they'd missed it or whatever. So I'm in a car. I'm in the back of a London cab in November. one day before the live show, a couple of days before the live show last year, in the back of a cab and like, bam, I just smell popcorn.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
The strongest smell of popcorn. Immediately my heart rate goes through the roof. Like, holy fuck, it's happening again. I knew that it wasn't some weird migraine thing brought on by whatever me training. Like, I know that I'm broken. Like, this is the beginning of the end for me. This is how I die. I die in the back of a London taxi cab smelling popcorn. And then I hear this sound.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And it's the fucking taxi driver rustling his hand in a bag of popcorn hidden between him and the door. And is that popcorn? He says, yeah, sorry. Would you like some? I'm like, no. And immediately my heart rate comes straight back down. All of the panic I had, I found it hilarious. I'm like giggling to myself in the back thinking, I thought that was dying.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
But there's this very unique and kind of particularly vicious category who've got it the other way around, who are better than they need to be to be world class and yet don't have whatever it is, the constitution to be able to handle the pressure, the performance, the anxiety, the stress. Absolutely.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
This bloke just wanted to have some butterkist or whatever it is. And yeah, the story that you tell yourself, highly determinant of what's going on physiologically.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
We don't really experience the world. Like we don't experience it directly. What we experience is our own nervous system telling us what that world means. And yeah, it's fascinating. You mentioned as well before, I'm opening my coat to find that I've got no knickers on underneath biologically or medically today. In any case, I did a full genome test a little while ago. Awesome. So fascinating.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And then I actually fed it into ChatGPT And I'd already had a consultation with the doctors and stuff like that. And it was really interesting. A lot of it's to do with psychological disposition, how you clear dopamine, adrenaline, cortisol, all of this stuff. And I've been having conversations with ChatGPT learning about the building blocks of myself.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And yeah, it turns out that I clear cortisol very slowly, very sort of dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine dominant. So the classic overthinking overachiever, very driven to do stuff and terrified he's not going to make it work. As you were saying there, there's certain people... I asked ChatGPT what would be an awesome job for me to have and what would be a terrible job for me to have.
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And for the terrible job would be something like a sniper or a frontline infantryman. Because just the ability to get yourself up to that level of arousal and then bring yourself back down, it's not there for you. And I... I completely see what you mean that we have certain people are built for certain things and we often find our way there in any case.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
You don't know why, but you just tend to enjoy slightly slower music. You don't know why, but you always tend to sort of jiggle your foot when you're sat and you're happy and you're chilling out in an evening time, but somebody else is sat completely static, whatever it might be.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
our nervous systems and our bodies seem to just be able to arrive at the place that is most efficient and kind of normal for us. And yeah, sometimes we try to force square pegs into round holes. Go, hey man, if you want to be cool as a cucumber when you've got to take a three point shot on the, you know, as the buzz is counting down, Your body, you're kind of not built for that.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Tell you what you are built for though, X, Y, and Z. And yeah, it's ruthless when you kind of get that, I don't know, like we could call it the Capaldi effect. You know, somebody who wants a thing and their nervous system really is not built for the thing that they want to achieve, even if their talent is.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
The classic five-foot-five person trying to be in the NBA.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
OK, dig in. We need to interject. Everyone's screaming, saying, this is me. I get nervous before the presentation for work. I keep choking when I'm playing softball, local league softball or whatever it might be, because there's a hot girl that plays on our team and I'm terrified that she's going to think I'm a wimp. What are the most evidence based strategies of how we can reframe this stuff?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Take us through it.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
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#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
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Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
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Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Okay, dig into some more practices in those for me.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
I mentioned I'd been hanging around with some bands recently and I was on tour while they were on tour. And it was so interesting because I had a tour manager and I had the videographers and all the rest of the stuff, but they're busy. They've got shit to do. And they're not on stage with me.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And with the show, the team and the editors and stuff, it's cool or whatever, but it's largely just me steeping in my own neuroses, looking at notes and thinking about what I want to ask Steve later on today and whatever. And you don't really share that burden, the weight. You don't laugh at the difficult times. You don't cry at the sad ones.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
There's no sort of collective effervescence or whatever going on. And then my friends that are in bands... They're just living and breathing it together. They haven't showered for 36 hours. The sound kit didn't arrive until one minute before. They were about to go on stage and they didn't even get to sound check, but they styled it out. Dude, that was so sick.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
That was so cool that we did the thing. And it just really made me think, huh,
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
bands have really sort of got this locked in from a creative perspective because you know how many people are elite athletes that are listening but i think people are kind of closer to bands in that they maybe have some sort of projecty presentation shared kind of outcome goal thing that's maybe not actually super physical it's maybe a little bit more creative anna Yeah, they've got it dialed.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And I guess as well, this also kind of explains the beauty of the clubhouse after the game that you get to bring in to land the either successful or difficult experience with the people that were on the sidelines and the coaches and the rest of the players and maybe some family members.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And you get to work out what did this all mean, as opposed to just telling yourself stories and allowing your own nervous system to run away with itself.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
So maybe... Well, I mean, you know, I think this... an integration at least i tried to make a change with this and i'm trying to do it more with the show as well which is to create that sort of social cohesion you know i'm it's kind of weird because you don't want to mandate people it's like hey come hang out with me so i don't feel too nervous or whatever but that's kind of what you're saying
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
You're saying, hey, we've all got a bunch of things to do. Everybody's feeling the pressure in this situation. Let's go and do it. One other interesting element. I don't know if this ports across, but I was reading a book called Your Brain on Love by Stan Tatkin, Neurobiology of Attachment and Relationships. And in it, he talks about why it's very important to resolve conflict very quickly.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And he basically uses this example that when your threat response is elevated for an extended period of time, it moves into long-term memory. and that kind of gets taken down into the body. And I have to imagine that there's something similar going on here, which is you have a bad game, and then you think about it for ages, and you never dissipate it using that social support system.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And then next time that you come along to play, you've got this...
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
predisposition to that kind of arousal and that's what's in your head as opposed to just being like hey man shit happens you know fuck like you were tired or whatever this this and this you you thought you played bad do you see me when i did that thing um so yeah i i imagine that that moving from quick resolution to long-term memory thing is is also important
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
I imagine the implications for the well-meaning but over-enthusiastic and overly critical sports parent here are just, like, replete.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
From your primary caregiver.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
dude so interesting i love this area of conversation to what an unseen price of success it is your own expectation about yourself you know we talk about the price of success is the loss of privacy and um not knowing whether people are with you because they want to be your friend because they want to be around the new hot singer or whatever whatever it is but your own expectation
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Yeah, little Timmy is going to come back in 10 years with an AK-47 and actually shoot up this entire school, I'm afraid, father. You've caused this issue to happen. It wasn't him. It wasn't him being radicalized by 4chan. It was you. It was you and how hard you pushed him when he was eight years old playing soccer. Yeah, dude, I've seen it. I've seen it a number of times. And it's strange, right?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Because you think, well, I'm passionate. I want my child to do well, or I want my team to do well, or I want my whatever. And it's one of those situations where if you're in a position of leadership, authority, if you're a coach of some kind, if you're a caregiver, you need to put your own nervous system to one side. It doesn't matter about how you feel.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
right now what are we here to do we're here to facilitate the performance of that person that's in front of you and if you're stressed you can deal with it afterward or you can deal with it behind the scenes the person that needs to go out there and perform you need to get out of the way and help them and that permeable membrane period that you have an hour before an hour after something like that if you're in the car i mean the classic back seat of the car conversation you're driving home and what do you remember they they know that they failed
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
They know that things didn't go well. What are you going to do?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Talk to me about the role that failure plays in shaping our true identity.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
The fact that really what it seems like is in life, trajectory is more important than position.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
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
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
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Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
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Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
And if you're continuing to just get a little bit better and get a little bit better, and then you have, I mean, two authors, I don't think they'll mind me saying this, like Morgan Housel and Mark Manson, both of whom have told me this and said, yeah, I'm kind of fully prepared for the rest of my career to feel like a failure. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
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Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. What are some ways that people can, I mean, again, we're talking kind of about reframing, but are there any other strategies where, in fact, here's another one, the fear of failure. It's not only dealing with failure, but dealing with the fear. So you haven't even failed yet, but you've got this very visceral concern that it might happen.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
What are some ways that people can step in before and can be better at reframing after?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
It's like investing your entire stock portfolio into one company.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
I'm never going to write a book that does more than the subtle art. I'm never going to write a book that does more than the psychology of money. So even though Mark's second book did obscene numbers, you know, top 0.000001% and whatever, whatever. It's like, yeah, but it's not subtle art numbers. And Morgan's second book, same thing, same as ever. Really, really great. Did great numbers.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
But it's not the end of the world. It brings your level of focus down into that Goldilocks zone, the amount of pressure that you've put on yourself. Yeah, fascinating, man. I mean, God, how counterintuitive in many ways as well. And this is where...
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
um i have i'm increasingly sort of becoming disenchanted with the hard work fixes all ills approach that just working harder bro a lot of the time results in you making your performance worse and creating these odd psychological scars or or perspectives of how you see the thing that you do and what you actually need to do is to smoke some weed and play nintendo switch
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
That would be highly rejuvenative for you. Or you need to take up some sort of a hobby. You need to diversify that self-worth. Tim Ferriss said something similar. He said that the moment where he started to feel better about himself is when he realized he wasn't just a podcaster or an author. He was lots of these other things too that came along for the ride. And even more than that,
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
how much of it gives you a perspective on the world that even if it's not just, this is where I take my source of identity from, it reminds you that there's other things out there, even if they're not your sources of identity. So it reminds you that, look at the huge range of different lives that people lead.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
and I mine's kind of good I told you I just got back from Jamaica and Kingston Jamaica isn't exactly the most salubrious of surroundings there's a fair bit of poverty there and some crime and I wasn't going to use the ATMs in downtown for fear of whatever and You're looking around and thinking, wow, look at all of the different routes that people's lives go down.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Look at how varied things could be. And I kind of like my life. That's pretty good. Whereas if you're just permanently stuck in Instagram real comparison degen mode, you don't get that same kind of perspective. You only get it moving in one direction.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
He's going to do another one. That'll do great numbers. But he's like, yeah, but it's not psychology of money numbers. And yeah, this, The reframing of any rapid success, any massive success is not a cause for celebration. It's a new minimum bar by which your next performance will be measured. And it is now a higher ledge from you to fall back down.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
What does it look like to move from a mindset of protection to one of exploration?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Yeah, what do you want to read? What do you want to write about?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Yeah. What's the role of values and goals and sort of the clarity around that stuff? Is that important?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
So instead... Oh, wow. Yeah. You posited an ideal and then you compare yourself to that ideal and inevitably you find yourself lacking.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
There's a beautiful summary of a philosophy article I was reading recently that said, goals are intentions, not attachments. They provide a direction, not a destination. And I thought that was just such a wonderful reframe. You know, the... process over outcome thing has been popularized ever since James Clear sold a billion bucks.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
But it's something that we regularly need to kind of, even with myself, you know, there's so much dopamine available when you think about a big goal that you're working toward and it's all excitable as opposed to one step toward the goal is... Nothing. It's smaller than nothing.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
So I guess one other element that is kind of interesting that's much more normal is perfectionism and self-sabotage in just normal daily life, the way that we go about things. Kind of the micro-insults that we bestow on ourselves that I imagine do sort of... damage our self-worth and our confidence, and maybe they bleed out into the big things.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
But how can people overcome that self-sabotage and that perfectionism in normal daily life?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Mm hmm. So is that just a mental reframing? Is that just the story you tell yourself? Are there other sort of interventions?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
I'm still here. Nobody died. The world still hasn't thrown me out. Yeah, fascinating. Steve, you're awesome, man. Your depth of insight into psychology is sick. And I'm so glad that you're doing your work and continuing to get it out to everyone. Where do you want to send people? They're going to want to check out everything that you're doing.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Dude, you're great. You're really, really fantastic. So let's run this back soon. I appreciate you. Good luck with the rest of everything. Good luck managing two small nightmare girls that are presumably running rings around you.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Godspeed, sir. See you next time.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Yeah. Do you know who Lewis Capaldi is? British singer? No. Okay. I mean, you'll have heard his tracks. He's done billions and billions of streams. And he's having a tough time mentally at the moment. He found a lot of pressure in between his first and his second album, as it's known, the difficult second album. And
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
How much of this do you think is internal biological neurochemical systems? And how much of this do you think is sociocultural sense of self-identity, more kind of relational stuff? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
had this pressure to perform, wasn't really too sure whether he could live up to his own expectations and what was needed by the label and what was wanted by his management and so on and so forth. And he had Tourette's and he developed kind of a Tourette's tick, which was his shoulder, which is very common. And a lot of anxiety came along with it. And a couple of times now, on very big stages.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
Explain, dig deep for me on how pressure impacts performance. You know, we're talking about choking here, which I define choking. Let's get into the weeds, neurobiology of pressure, performance, all of that stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
What determines the direction that that goes in?
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
I think he did this at Glastonbury last summer. He's certainly done it in a couple of his own live shows. He's choked on stage doing his own songs. And the anxiety has gotten so bad that he hasn't been able to get the words out to the songs that he's written, doing the very thing that he wanted. And I feel so bad for him because I adore his music. And
Modern Wisdom
#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure
What was that study that they did with rugby players where they manipulated people that spoke to them before the event, before a match, something like that?
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
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 and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. The worst outcome in the world is not having self-esteem. Why?
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
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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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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
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
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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
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
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You mentioned you'd just been with Peter there. I was explaining an idea from a friend earlier on, George. He talks about non-fungible people, like N of ones. Mike Israetel, good non-fungible person. Yes. Who are some of the most non-fungible people that you've met across?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You're shackling coming out and saying, we know this is the direction. Don't worry. Don't fear.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
How do you advise the guys that need to keep their feet on the ground? Is it going to hang out with some of your friends from school and tell them to shit talk you a little bit?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You know, speaking of mentors, university, Boston. Yeah. Our new place came from their new place of residence. What motivated you to co-found that?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What do you think... other institutions are getting right at the moment?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And I'm aware that it was a hot topic to be spoken about either as a virtue signal or push back against as, you know, sort of a flag that you plant in the ground to say no further than this. And that seems to have died at least a little bit. There's always a sense that those sorts of news stories catch fire when the rebellious outer party is the one that's pushing against it.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And I think that, you know, if you're inside of the tent pissing out as opposed to outside of the tent pissing in, it does give a different dynamic. But I kind of got the sense that how can these, after the Yale scandals, after a Harvard issue, you know, all of the things that we saw over the last 18 months, forget going back further. Like, is this really still continuing to ramp up?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What's your perspective on this?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah, just because you can say the word retard on Twitter without getting banned now doesn't mean... I know, it is. We're so back.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Ah, very good. I learned about Sullivan's Law earlier today. Have you encountered Sullivan's Law?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I'm going to have to outsource it here. What's Sullivan's Law?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So what are the, other than the ideological leaning, what are the other biggest problems you see in higher education at the moment that you're trying to fix?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What is the advantage of being able to function in the real world? I think there's a lot of glory placed on the reclusive madman genius working away in the back room on his own.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Right. So I think there's always this sense of practical application versus a sort of classic education.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What else is there to say on dialectics? Give me a 30,000 foot view of how you use them.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So you're holding both of these in your mind at the same time?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah, I suppose you need to be, the product needs to be as good as it can be. It needs to be perfect. You need to obsess over perfection and quality. And also you need to ship at a rate that's sufficiently quick that you can iterate and start to learn.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah, you need to narrow your focus, but also be open to new opportunities at the same time.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
right so you're never going to be able to necessarily be a team leader if you don't have those people skills skill sets you might be able to be one of the leaders within the team or one of the leads right the tech lead or whatever it might be but uh and i guess you're going to be pulled up in front of fucking congress or some board and you're going to have to defend yourself and if you're in there blinking too hard it's just not going to look right
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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. My friend Alex and his wife talk about this is, um, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
problem to be managed not a paradox to be solved and uh i think that that's that's kind of like an interesting frame where you go um scott alexander refers to it as thinking in super positions so you know you have sort of these these two positions that exist at the same time cat is both alive and dead yeah and people try to collapse them down into a single position but that's actually where stuff often goes wrong because these two things don't exist together exactly we're gonna exactly and then there's a lot of things like that where you have to keep it separate
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What else? What are some of the other dialectics that you often sort of see appearing in your life? I should have re-read my piece online before I came here.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
No, no, no. Well, there might be something that pops up in a bit. Anyway, AI in education. So the party that we were both at during South by Southwest, we went to that big dinner party. And I was sat next to...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
this fascinating guy and he was giving this what might as well have been a 90 minute long fucking ted talk it's probably joe lamont correct um i was keeping it i was keeping it uh sorry keep me i mean you're you're better friends with him so you can say what you want um he's great i really appreciate it as well that he wants to sort of be doing the thing behind the scenes without putting himself in front of the scenes no matter how much i try and bring him on the podcast yeah i shouldn't i shouldn't i shouldn't talk about it
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
No, he likes it. I mean, it was a fucking dinner party. But me and the sort of four people that were within earshot before the next, you know, whatever territory of conversation bubble that took over each one, each person had a territory grab.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Can you explain what it is that he's trying to do?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Being designed by the guys that did Fortnite, I think.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah, I found it very interesting. He was talking about the massively reduced prevalence of ADHD in these schools, because if you're running around for four hours a day and you're only strapped to something which is probably a bit more engaging and is at your level of education and is helping you.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Is this Department of Education stuff? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Is there a place for AI in higher ed?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Where can't it interject? What will it struggle at? You know, you've thought a lot about the university experience. You guys are trying to give a more classical sort of approach, I suppose.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I mentioned, uh, university for me was kind of like Navy SEAL bootcamp for socialization, but it lasted five years. And, um, it, you know, it, it, it is, it's the people skills.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Have you seen what Jordan Peterson's doing with Peterson Academy? A little bit. Tell me about it. He's trying to give a university level education online. And he's got some really, really interesting lecturers, teachers, I suppose. And they're trying to get certification and they're trying to sort of assess whether or not people have gone through the course and all the rest of it.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And I think it's great, but kind of like the realization that maybe many businesses have come to understand post-COVID that there are many intangibles that are born out from water cooler talk and from... Being around other people, for me, at least if you're trying to do something that's like the...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Can you explain to me what the fuck's going on with these tariffs, Joe?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah, I can't work out. It feels like I'm in a, I don't know, opposites day meets groundhog day back to back to back. I'm like, is this a 7D chess move? Is this an error? And I'm unable to fucking decipher what's going on, which maybe says everything you need to know about me and mine.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Right. What do you learn from your time with PETA?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
How important is this to U.S.-led global order continuing stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Let's think about the intersection between two of your worlds, one being maintaining some US-led global dominance and the other one being war and sort of what's going on with the sort of destabilized current state of what feels like everywhere except for us over here, I guess just because there's two really fucking big oceans on either side. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What concerns you and what do you think is overblown when it comes to people's worries about sort of global stability and stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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. What does the future of warfare look like on the ground? I'm hearing all manner of different stories about, you know, it's just going to be drone versus drone.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's going to be magic bullet versus magic bullets. What's your perspective on this?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Is this the quickest moving that sort of warfare technology has ever gone? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What was the offensive capability advancement that the defense is now trying to push back against? What happened over the last four decades or so? What was it that were the innovations there that we're now trying to push back against? Oh, gosh, there's all sorts of these things in different ways.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So the EMP solution is a way to stop using million-dollar bombs to take down $500 drones?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah. That's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, I had a, I've had a bunch of conversations. Eric Prince was on and he was explaining to me about what sort of what's happening in Ukraine at the moment. And it's so funny how we've got a sort of
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
evolutionary mimesis happening in warfare where you have tanks the tanks have some vulnerabilities and weaknesses the drones are created so that they can be flown into the particular weaknesses on the tanks the tanks weaknesses get patched up the drones get a little bit bigger a little bit more sophisticated they can fly further the tanks but netting up
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Do you find it difficult to not divide your attention in that way?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
the drones have like sharp things on them that can cut through netting and you... I'm not bullish tanks five years from now because there's too many things coming at them.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What... Is the likelihood that in five or 10 years, there's that many troops on the ground as well? Are human personnel going to be that important?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's so interesting to think about most military vehicles as being just missile carriers.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Some degree of intermediary, whether it's the thing that carries the missiles, takes off from, whether it's the thing that carries the missiles, whether it's the missile itself.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Oh, yeah. Well, I wonder... I kind of have this sense in my mind of... People not wanting to show their hand and different nations understanding that you almost have this trade-off. In fact, this actually happened, I think, in World War II. Once the Enigma code had been cracked, there was a value judgment that needed to be made.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
We know that they are going to try and attack these three ships, but if we always avoid all of the ships from being attacked… they're going to know that something's up. So you're tolerating how much of this do we decide to use? How much do we show of our knowledge? And I kind of get the sense when it's, China does something in Taiwan at some point.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And you go, okay, if 10 is unleash everything, how far of that can we go? Because yes, maybe it's really, really good in pushing back this particular assault or defending yourself or whatever it is, but also completely shows your hand in this is the technology and this is the capability that we've got. So that...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Right. So an advice for talent is to not divide your focus at all.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I mean, you can talk as much as you want about the introduction of AI, the sort of retreat of physical soldiers from the battlefield. That is a value judgment that really just, it's done by committee, hopefully a very smart committee, but it's done by people that go, fuck, go to town or go to eight or go to whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
These are the technologies that are available. You choose which ones you go.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
That's so interesting. Yeah. What do you know about us? And what do you know about what we know about you? And the vacuum of information, the uncertainty is a deterrent in and of itself.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What you sort of identified before, the primes, is that like the Raytheons and so on?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I didn't know much about sort of the background and how they work, but that's such a fascinating situation to get yourself into where you're... the preferred partner, the preferred supplier or whatever. But that if you have a vacuum of talent that gets sucked out of you to a place that's able to be more exciting, more sexy, pay you better.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Undeniable. I mean, what is it? The percentage of payloads being put into space by SpaceX. It's 80% or 90% or something.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
This is the same as the, uh, foreign country that says the. Exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
How do you come to think about risk? It's sort of built into the conversation around courage is fear and uncertainty and risk and dealing with risk and stuff like that. How do you assess it?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
kind of bug because they could use that feature to control it for themselves and control access yeah i it kind of blows my mind that there's a couple of areas that i think about this in the first one being uh medicine anything that's with regards to keeping people alive like there's literally no more important job than keeping people alive uh and in warfare you go this is
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It has to be bureaucracy because if it wasn't cutting the Gordian knot of all of the issues, if there was some sort of really serious threat that came along, people go, okay, this has been a nice lop for a while. The pantomime's fucking over. All right? Like, it's time for us to...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What's your opinion around the sort of great men of history in the modern world now? Is that something that can still exist or the bureaucracies and the red tape and the complexity?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Have you got any idea of China's space capability and really hard.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's when you think about intellectual property, and this is one of the things that Trump's been bringing up with regards to tariffs, right? That it's not just the difficulty in getting products there. It's the replication and the copying of our products over there, which means we don't even need to ship them.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Have you got any idea what that system is? what it is that they're doing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
The difficulty that you must face at holding on to commercial patents, at not letting people get a hold of your inventions, that's one thing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
But when it comes to, oh, this is kind of the technology that keeps us safe from a national security, or one of the key technologies that keeps us safe from a national security perspective, the level of security that you must be talking about when it comes to stuff like SpaceX, when it comes to Raptor engines, when it comes to Falcon 9 heavy rocket stability, all of the belly flop maneuver, all of this shit,
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
that must be locked down as hard as you can get. People talk about Area 51 and being able to sort of keep secret secret. And you go, I don't really know if the Chinese would be that bothered about using aliens against us, but they'd fucking sure as hell love one of those rockets that can get stuff into space cheap.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah. Have a chat between yourselves, guys. Work out who's going to sue us or not, and then come back. Well, isn't there all of these rumors? Obviously, this, I think, will have stopped now that the southern border has been tightened up significantly by the sounds of things. But wasn't there a lot of sort of military-age Chinese men coming across the southern border?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Oh, right. Okay. Imagine that. Imagine being the Chinese government and thinking, fantastic, we've actually finally got a ton of military-age... God, they're fucking... They're criminal. They're selling fentanyl. What use is that? We need you to steal the secrets of Palantir.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I met... I think, the main guy who designed the belly flop maneuver for SpaceX at Bill Perkins' house last year during the Eclipse party. And I was just listening. It's similar to your friend that was giving the soliloquy about artificial education. And he was just explaining. It was such a fucking inspiring story that I think he'd been at...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
a very big space company previously and had moved to SpaceX. And he basically bet his entire career on this belly flop maneuver. The fact that if you have any vehicle coming in from space, you wanted to try and accumulate as much air friction as possible. And if you've got a tube, there's not much air friction to play with in the first place.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So you try and put it parallel to the ground, you bring it down, and then at the very last minute, you swing it. And yeah, he explained, he said, dude, this was a... As I'm watching this thing happening, I'm basically watching my own career and legacy sort of slowly rotate by 90 degrees to see if it's going to work. But I just loved it. I thought it was so cool.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And it really sort of spoke to me about the... We spoke about fearlessness, sort of courage earlier on. It's a very unique kind of fearlessness, you know, to sort of back yourself to be innovative. But I just thought it was such a cool story. I loved hearing it.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Space, looking at that, I'm fascinated by the world of astropolitics now. So the politics of space, who gets to own and refine space, things that are going past us, areas on the moon, bits of territory, whether it's geosync above particular countries. Is this something that you've looked into much?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, there's also, there's a book called Seven Eves by Neil Stevenson. And in the first line, the moon explodes. So spoiler alert, the moon explodes in the first line. And they've got, let's say, 500 days to get as many citizens off Earth and to the ISS. And they basically build out this new habitat of the ISS.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And they say, there's going to be a hard rain as the moon breaks out from the seven pieces, seven eves, the seven pieces that it's in. and it's going to basically shower down on Earth. Everything's going to be fucked for about 5,000 years. And then after a while, if we can survive it, we'll come back down and we'll see how all of this stuff goes.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And they're talking about when you're in, I can't remember what the particular altitude is, if it's even correct to call it altitude when you get to something like the ISS or distance from Earth, that lots and lots of the satellites sort of sit at this particular distance away. And it only takes, there's quite a bit of junk up there, but that's kind of well-positioned.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It doesn't take much to cause a pretty negative chain reaction of this thing broke, which broke this thing, which, and before you know it, and entire sort of swaths of real estate and useful technology that's up there can all be damaged. So yeah, I think anything that involves fucking around in those areas, it seems.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You know, you're talking about our map of how land works, kind of not working when we think about space, three dimensions, or whether you're looking at sort of the way that orbits occur. I promise this is going to, I think this is going to work. Every time I see a squirrel on a tree. right? Hold on.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Every time I see a squirrel on a tree, I think about the way that their map of terrain must work because what they see is being able to run forward to move themselves away from something that's on the other side of the tree. So they're moving around this cylinder. And if you walk, you'll see it and it'll have its head out like that. And as you come around, it'll scoot this way.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I've always been fascinated about what it must be like to have the map of terrain that a squirrel has because it's permanently thinking in spirals, right? It's thinking I can go up and down. So it kind of is a 2D plane, but this 2D plane is wrapped in a 3D way. And when I read Seveneves and I think about that and they're talking about fucking orbital dynamics, dude, holy shit.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Like trying to think about the zenith and the apogee and the way that, oh, well, we've got to do this two more loops in order for us to come back around at the right angle because it's not only the distance, the angle, the height, the altitude, the speed, all this shit.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
like oh yeah i just walk forward and back like you know you think you know you first drive a car and you go oh my god this is so complex i'm never going to be able to do this you realize no dude this is like the simplest fucking thing you can do look at the squirrel if you play the 3d video games you kind of get it good build intuition but it's pretty fun it is weird up there yeah yeah it's interesting uh what is the future for you what are you what are you most interested most excited about at the moment we just had our sixth child so that's a lot of kids
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You are single-handedly, maybe in collaboration with Elon, reversing population decline, yeah.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I was waiting for you to say less something. I was waiting for you to say less.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's a much more direct route to getting universities to do the thing that the customers, students of the universities want. I would wager that 99.9% of students are not going to university to get a degree that sounds interesting and is functionally useless. Even if the degree is functionally useless, they want that functionally useless degree to function usefully.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
How do you avoid that from holding you back? Because perfectionism can be procrastination, sort of masquerading as quality control. It's true. You know, the classic...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So I saw, do you know Dwarkesh Patel? Do you know who he is? Yeah. Yeah. Clever kid. Really lovely guy. Yeah. He had this really interesting tweet with regards to AI that I'd love to get your take on. And he said, if you gave any human one...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
millionth one tenth thousandth of the corpus of information that any ai has ingested you would have received thousands of new ideas lots of new novel insights about ways to do things yeah I don't know if this is true, but the criticism that he was repurposing was we haven't seen much new innovation that's necessarily come from AI at the moment.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Have you got any insight about whether this is a limitation of LLMs at large, whether it's a processing problem, whether it's a sophistication problem?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Oh, like unsolved theorems and shit like that?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What would you, for a muggle like me, everybody else that's listening, what should we expect, do you think, from AI over the next half decade?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's a difference of kind, not a difference of degree.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I was going to say, you've been wrong and ignorant before around AI.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Damn right. Joe Lonsdale, ladies and gentlemen. Joe, you're awesome. I really appreciate you, man. This is fascinating. So much cool stuff to go through. Where should people check out whatever it is that you've got going on?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Heck yeah. Joe, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thank you.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah. Well, I'm still interested in this sense of not getting distracted and trying to keep the main thing the main thing, especially if your main thing becomes a varied thing, right? Like built into a lot of people's lives, especially as they end up getting to the kind of place that they want to, is where you don't have to do things you don't want to do that much anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
No one tells you what to do. So you end up in a world where you think, well, I get to choose, but with that comes a lot of responsibility because I have to choose now, as opposed to before where I just sat on the set of train tracks. It's got, do I want to go left? Do I want to go right? The same for yourself. Do I want to invest in it?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Or should I sit down and spend six months working on a thesis? What about the skill set of learning to sort of let go of what was there, of how you operated previously, the sort of courage to do something new, even as you've got something that's given you success in the past?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's almost matching up with what you said about being sort of the 99th percentile within an industry, accumulating the 99% of your brain power onto this.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Joe Hudson, who has just become the head of human performance at OpenAI, he's like kind of an underground hero coach type person. I'm aware that coach has got a lot of icky associations with it, but this guy's fucking legit. Really, really great. And he says, enjoyment is efficiency. And that's kind of...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Have you ever read Endurance by Alfred Lansing? It's about Sir Ernest Shackleton's crossing of the Antarctic.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So it's the best, I think the best retelling of that. And it's really interesting because all of the guys had their own individual journals or diaries that they were writing in. And what you hear from everybody else except for Shackleton is what Shackleton's saying. But what you read in Shackleton's diary is what Shackleton was thinking.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And it's this really interesting dichotomy between what he... and how he needs to show up as a leader and what he's thinking privately. And it's almost like a Bruce Wayne, Batman type split personality.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
He is just swimming in self-doubt and uncertainty and fear. He has no idea if it's going to work. He doesn't even know if this is the right, but he goes out there and he needs to say to the guys, this is exactly the way that we're going to go. And we know that this is going to work and we're getting such and such. And, um,
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It was the first time that I'd ever really thought, because obviously the consequences are so dire, but it really made me think about, huh, there are prices that leaders pay that nobody else pays and that you can't share the burden of. And everybody has main character energy in their own life, right? Everybody is the lead star. They're the front man, woman of their own existence.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And I think that a lot of the time we want to port that across onto the teams that we work in, the organizations that we're a part of. We go, okay, There's going to be some prices that you're going to have to pay for that.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Hmm. How do you come to think about identifying people with that talent and that drive? It was something that helped you before you were successful. And it's obviously something that you need to do now. You need to assess founders. You need to assess businesses. Yeah. Everybody can pretend to not be a psychopath for 30 minutes.
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What are the most common challenges, aggregated challenges that the leaders that you work with are suffering with? Oh man, it's just...
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
But yeah, it's interesting that some people coming out of the UK have sort of disproportionate results, especially given how poor the sort of entrepreneurial spirit is in the UK. They tend to leave.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, they're just ruining it. How much is this is top down versus bottom up? Because the culture in the UK, the approach that people have to risk their preparedness to kind of break free from the trodden path, that also seems to contribute as well.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, it's interesting coming from the northeast of the UK, you know, very blue collar. There was not much, by the way, of entrepreneurialism. Maybe someone would own a window cleaning business.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Stockton-on-Tees was where the first steam engine was actually constructed and it went to York.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I guess it just shows how... These little phases, you know, you talk about empires falling and but you have little microcosms of industries falling and bubbles falling as well. And, you know, currently SF is still kind of it for tech. But if you keep pushing people into like stupid stuff, the living standards.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
If you don't clean up the street, I walked through downtown San Francisco and San Francisco is this wonderful blend of fruity and homeless. Like those are the two ends of the spectrum, like super, super liberal and really, really sketchy.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Is that the fundamental changing nature of work in your opinion?
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
A lot of the time, I think people are pretty disparaging of working for anybody else. There's sort of two camps on the internet and one of them doesn't talk at all. And that's the one that most people fall into where they have a job, where they work for somebody.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And the only one that anybody else ever talks about is, well, you should solopreneur your way to your first 10K a month and so on and so forth. How do you come to think about the relative usefulness of working for versus owning? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, you've taken a ton of businesses from zero dollars a month to a million dollars a month or more. Where do you start with that? Is it always the same process?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I started at 18. The first ever seminar that I sat in at uni, I sat next to what would be my future business partner for a decade and a half. It was very serendipitous. It was really weird.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Dude, I mean, it was the baptism of fire. But my flag, I'm aware that I have a lot of motivated reasoning here, not least that one of my best friends and ex-business partner still runs his in Newcastle. But if you're an 18, 19, 20-year-old kid going off to university in the UK or the US or something, Go work for a club promo company. You'll see everything that you need to. You will see B2B.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
You'll see B2C. You'll see hiring, firing, accounts, marketing, advertising, social media, tech. You'll learn how to organize logistics, operations, supply chain stuff. You'll have to deal with different vendors. You'll have to be able to negotiate.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Everything is on a very, very, very tight timeline. Everything. Because the event's happening on Thursday. There is no, oh, well, we'll do the event on Friday because it's not ready. It's fucking happening on Thursday, whether it's an absolute car crash.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And a lot of businesses are problems focused.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
did nightclub party promotions well that says one of two things either that nightclub partying is a good training ground or that lots of people that are successful entrepreneurs used to be degenerates it's one or both it's one of the two yeah exactly um i mean look there's one of the main lessons that i took away from running nightclubs and i still see this i think in no matter how big the business gets
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
There was two types of people. One were people who loved to party and realized that, holy shit, I can get paid to do what I like. I can get paid to do what I would do for free and for fun. And then the other side were people who had looked at it as a particularly profitable vector that you could treat professionally and sort of crank a bit of leverage and operational efficiency into.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, it's a weird one, dude. You know, I don't like always sort of crapping on the UK, seeming as if I'm some guy that got on the last lifeboat off the Titanic. And that's not the case necessarily. But I don't know the... The future doesn't seem to be particularly bright for people that are entrepreneurially minded.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And this actually turns into a legitimate business. And you still see this now. You've got your idea of sort of lifestyle business versus profit maximizing business. And I think that those two things largely kind of map onto that.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Correct. Scarcity, limited access. I mean, I... Bit of hustle. You're right. And we're doing this raise at the moment for Nutonic and it's very, very sort of private and we haven't listed it anywhere. And it's just me texting a few people in my phone book and some people that I think, oh, they might be interested. So I'm like, yeah, Bartlett, like got this thing. Would you want to see the deck?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Like, yeah, sure. I'm like, they really fired me up because it made me feel like I was 20 years old again. Yeah, exactly. But the difference is, you know, you're not asking for five pounds on the door. You're asking for 25 grand checks. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
How do you come to think about the way people go from an idea to a business launch, that process? A lot of people got lots of ideas, very few people launch businesses.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
What's the principle that's underlying that beyond, I just need to test whether or not there's 150 people that are interested in this? What's the dynamic that is sort of pulling people in and makes this an interesting structure? Yeah.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
That's drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. Just lingering on the idea point for a little bit longer. What are the reliably best and worst areas that you see people focus on? I imagine lots of people get seduced by the same dead ends. And what are those?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Bly chain, perishable, tethered, can't ship worldwide.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, I wonder what the sort of near-term future has in store and whether or not policies are going to move in one direction or another. What were your reflections after your discussion with Gary on Stephen's show? What have you sort of come to realize after that?
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
What do you make of the state of the UK at the moment?
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Right. Yeah. Because you don't put any liability down before you actually have guarantees that people are going to want this thing.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
So it's the waiting list with financial commitment.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Okay. What gets you from zero to 10K a month?
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Can you do this on your own?
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
No.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, just a... British desire for suffering, I think. No, I got within 19 episodes, I think it's episode 17 or episode 19, Dean came and shot, my video guy came and shot an episode because he was like, oh, I see you doing this podcast. That's kind of cool. Have you ever thought about shooting it in a little bit higher quality?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Maybe me and my friends have got, you know, fancy cameras and we understand how lighting works and framing. Maybe we could come film one. Okay, well... if we're going to do this, I better come up with a big episode to do it. So I did what it's really like to live on Love Island, which was the first episode we ever did that hit 10K and it got us over 1,000 subs and did all the rest of this stuff.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And then I said, okay, well, let's work together. Let's do this. See, I mean, that's the real story.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I think the interesting point there, and this is something I'm increasingly thinking about now, is you may be able to grit your teeth and use the chip on your shoulder or the people that doubted you or the desire to prove that you should be validated by the world or whatever. But it's way easier to just have some boys with you That are kind of cool to work with. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And you will get a lot more longevity, I think, out of your career by finding people that externalize that motivation and give you a bit of a sense of, yeah, you did it. Like, dude, we did this.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Okay. And then 30.
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Because you've hired people that are at a higher skill level than they are and they haven't been able to keep up.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Just going back down to the sort of twos and fours and eights, how do you come to think about finding, hiring, training, retaining the best talent?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
What are you optimizing for when you look at, when you're assessing members of staff? You're not going to have the level of expertise. They're not going to have this illustrious history.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, the UK, I think, struggles. The weather's not fantastic for most of the year.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And what about when things get a little bit more sophisticated and you can be a little bit more discerning with talent, with hiring, assessing?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
What about 10K to 100K a month? What's the difference there?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
That's the one thing that the UK needs more of, rain. There's insufficient.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Better story, more heritage, great buy-in.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Just to interject that we saw this problem with, within nightlife that if you, as the owner of an events company made any of the event managers, um, too independent when it came to managing, looking after the front door, cashing the till, dealing with the manager of the venue, the venue, the GM. If you ever did that for too long, and again, this is, I'm not, I always felt weird. It's so funny.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
We had this really sort of unique set of principles and algorithms that we went through when it came to nightlife. And I was always so hesitant about ever talking about them on the podcast because I felt like that was the playbook that my old business partner, Darren, was still using. I actually think he's become more sophisticated now.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
So this is like archaic, dusty shit that Indiana Jones would have to go and get. But one of the main rules was you never let anybody except for you cash the till. Because if someone else starts cashing the till, they're in the office with the GM at 2 in the morning, 2.30 in the morning. So where's Darren? Where's Chris? It's like, oh, they're at home. What do you mean? They're at home. Oh, okay.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Well, who looks after most of the stuff? Well, you know, I'm the point of contact. Who pays the DJs? Oh, well, you know, like it's usually me or one of the boys will do that. And after a while, the GM goes, hey, we can fucking cut Voodoo events out. They're on an 80-20 or they're on a one grand flat fee. I reckon we can do a dry hire a little bit more expensive. Give it to this new kid.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
He seems to know everyone in any case. And that guy's like, well, I'm cashing the till. I'm the one that's up until 2.30 in the morning. I deserve this. You're like, dude, you're fucking 21 years old. And the only reason that this gig exists is because of what we did. Certainly that level of, not compartmentalization, but to a degree, that sense of, look, people have your best interests at heart.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
They have the business's best interests at heart. Until the offer becomes too good to say no to.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Every single time that someone did that, every single time you stopped seeing an events company owner on the front door of one of their events and it was just the event managers, they had, it was like a ticking clock. Between six and 12 months before that kid left and started his own business company.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
That's the only logical explanation.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
So strange. You know, the first time I even knew that we could geoengineer clouds was Dubai. When I was in Dubai.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Presumably the absolute top, top, top end stuff is a little bit bigger. Probably. Yeah, but not by much.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Well, they did it sort of gently. And then, yeah, they can, I guess you can. There was that massive flood and it was like, oh, sorry, guys. Yeah, push the button. That was us. We left it on too long. Yeah, crazy. But the idea of doing that in the UK seems absolutely wild to me. But yeah, you know, weather's not particularly fantastic.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And you ladder people along.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Imagine that you were a musician. I'm trying to think about people that are sort of a little bit more spit and sawdust and stuff like this. So I spent, I've just come back from New York and I was around a bunch of musicians there. So a lot of them do weddings, they do brunches, you know, someone's a percussionist, but then they also have a manager.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
So they've got a member of staff in that regard that's handling this. Uh, but maybe they have a little bit of much too that's on the side and they do, uh, gigs, but they put music out too. So, okay. So I'm putting music out and I've got a page and you can see my content. Yeah. But then they also, if they're unable to do a gig because they're already booked, they stop booking other people.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And then they take it a little bit off the top. Then they go, well, actually, I mean, I can just put the whole gig together and then maybe I can book myself. I don't, you know, the manager actually becomes an administrative assistant as opposed to a gatekeeper that's in between me and the clients. Yeah. And you start to sort of build this out. The same thing presumably would be for comedy.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
It would be if you organize dances and nightclubs, if you can do pop-ups for different coffee shops and stuff like that. Oh, I can get you the events.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Maybe they're doing tutorials online that
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, Kigabi or Teachable or something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
There isn't just that many exciting things to do from a lifestyle perspective. So if you are someone that's managed to reach a bit of escape velocity with having some disposable income, where do you put it? I'm going to get a bigger TV to watch more Netflix. You know, there just isn't the same level of adventure. And it's a small country. There's not that much going on.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did it in reverse.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Fucking epic, dude. I mean, I went to your home country of birth, my ex-country of ownership, and... It was fucking sick, dude. I wanted to do a land acknowledgement. I wanted to say that we were on stolen land, precisely stolen from the British. Oh, you're a comedian now. Yeah, yeah, I'm trying. It was great, man. You've been hanging around Jaguar.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
One of the problems that you have, and being a degenerate internet entrepreneur where you can work from anywhere on the planet and you can have a team and you don't need an office and all the rest of it, that sounds great, but it becomes a very sterile way of running business. And to have immediate feedback from an audience, to be able to do something that gets that, you know, dopamine firing.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
It's really important. You know, I've got, I'm about to announce, in fact, we may have already announced it by the time this comes out. I'm doing the US and Canada. We're doing 12 dates around the US and Canada. It's a proper domestic style tour. So I'm on the road every weekend for like three months.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Right. And back and forth here to wherever. I can't say the dates yet because I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And, you know, I think at least in my experience, I'd be interested to know if this is the same for you. People's sort of business lives occur in sort of between five to nine year epochs or eras. And typically around about every seven years or so, something starts to pivot a little bit. I noticed this in nightlife for me. I got to about 29 having started the weeklies at 22. It's like, oh.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I'm just feeling a little like a crab hitting up against its shell. And with the podcast, it's a little bit like that now, which is for so long it was me and Video Guy Dean. How long have you been doing the podcast? Seven years.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
This could be the last episode. This is your right. It could be. So look, it's mostly around this. It's the way that I'm thinking about structuring the business. I still love what I do. But the way that it's put together needs to change.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Because they've got way more leverage.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
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Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
What aspects of business should we be outsourcing to AI right now?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
One area that I think a lot of people find is a sticking point is pricing, increasing the price specifically. How do you know when to increase the price?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
A queue outside of your nightclub.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Why do you think Gary's message is resonating so much at the moment? It seems to be very popular online. He's getting lots of plays.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
What are the best ways to create transparency?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
How do you overcome the discomfort of increasing the price? That's something I think a lot of people, this is what I used to charge. It's a very similar product. Maybe it's the same product. I'm in more demand.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
There is just this, especially if you come from a more sort of blue collar background and you're now trying to sort of climb up that entrepreneurial ladder, maybe again, you're in direct contact with whoever the client is. But at the time it's you, it's you that they're getting some sort of service, maybe high ticket could be high ticket, but it's like,
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I used to charge 500 bucks and I have work coming out of my ears. Yeah. This needs to be more. It's 750. It's like, dude, this needs to be $3,000. Yeah. How do you help people get past those blocks?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
It's a low entry equivalent.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
You've got someone else that can do it. You can't get me, but you can get this person.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Okay. So we've talked about pricing, hiring. What about firing? How do you know when to let people go?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Constructive dismissal.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
You've contravened something.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Dancing through this weird sequence that we both have to keep on doing.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, that's a painful business call. Okay, so your best advice is to have a prophylactic in between you and the firing process.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Okay, so you've got a hired gun. What about selling the business? We've got all the way through the different processes and then the final point of, I'm going to exit this thing. Have you sold a business? I exited my events company, which involved... And impossibly trying to work out what it was worth, where there's zero assets beyond the brand equity and the contacts.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And I was a key person of influence within that. And I was taking that.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
We would have been doing probably somewhere in the region of a quarter of a mil GBP a year.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Is there a difference between building a business to sell and building a business to generate cash flow?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
It's interesting with stuff like this. I don't know whether it's growing up as a business person. I don't know whether it's being a little bit less personally associated with the brand. I wonder whether it's being less personally involved with the day-to-day operations. But if you ask a lot of people about, would you sell this business?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And I think they'd struggle because their identity is very much wrapped up in that thing. Modern wisdom, for instance, there's no amount of money. Yeah, that is so personal. It's an extension of you. Of course. But I think in the past...
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
something like this might have felt like that too and i'm trying to work out i'm trying to decipher what it is about certain projects that allow people to treat them more rationally with a little bit more objectivity and what it is about other ones that has a you know a real sense of personal belonging to it the
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
slow life strategy, sort of extended adolescence as it's known, people moving into houses more slowly, people getting into relationships, starting families more slowly, lower birth rates, stuff like that. Do you think that businesses are surrogate families for a lot of people in that regard?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
How do you ensure that running a business is fun? How do you ensure that you enjoy the process? Because I imagine that you've worked with people and seen people and maybe at some point it's been that person yourself where you have reached a string of miserable successes. And in retrospect, you think, well, I got the outcome, but the actual process of getting there was kind of sucked a bit.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And then you think, well, I've got the money, but... Does that compensate for the amount of time that wasn't enjoyable? What are the things that predict running a business is an enjoyable experience?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
What has been your experience watching founders and watching yourself? I think a lot of people that are career driven, they have big aspirations monetarily, commercially, in terms of their status. They look at the prospect of starting a family as a A governor, speed limiter, are they going to put on their capacity to do that stuff? What's been your experience?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I wonder whether that's a bit of ballast against the tides, the buffeting that you're going to end up having.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
How do you think about developing your mindset or the kind of mindsets that are useful in as much as... resilience against difficulty, insults from running a business, from having your self-worth tied to this commercial enterprise.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I imagine lots of people will get kicked out of the game by going bankrupt, running out of liquid capital, starting a business that was never going to be profitable in the first place. But some non-insignificant number of people too will end up leaving the game because they just can't take it. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah. It's funny. You know, we often hear about, uh, it's the objectively the best time to ever be alive, but it's funny to couch it in your own lineage to think about, yeah, but what about your great, great grandparents? What would they think about it? Not some random caveman from 10,000 years ago. Like what would they think specifically about this situation?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
So structurally, the changing nature of work is creating inequality.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny, man, trying to have a little bit of perspective on the luxury or opulence that you have, even as someone that's still on the ladder or the climb, wherever it is that you are on your journey. The more that I give myself that perspective, the more that I do inversion.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
George, who's just landed in town, I don't know whether he still does this, but he was doing it for a long time. Once a month he laid in bed and did a really, really hardcore meditation that he had no legs. Um, just to be like, okay, what would life be like if I had no, okay, so I've got to get up. I got to go to the bathroom. Like, how do I get to, how do I get to the bathroom?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Like, what's the way that I get?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
No.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I, I, uh, Doing that inversion stuff, dude, realizing just how different life could be. And then also realizing that whether things go well or whether things go badly, your happiness is going to get back to the same point that you're probably at now.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, I think I have a disposition toward negative affect for sure. That's definitely why. Always? Have I always had it? Because objectively, you got it pretty good. That's true. That's true indeed. But you have to look at, you know... I have this little bit I say about how you should look at successful people with more pity than envy because what is it that's driven them to do this thing?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Well, most people, in my experience, are driven by fear of insufficiency, not a desire for greatness. They're running away from something they don't want and that they fear as opposed to running towards something they desire. Yeah, filling a void. Yeah, yeah. And I think typically that's the case. And that's not to say for everything.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And, you know, objectively, it is way, way, way better to be successful and rich and, you know, be able to afford healthcare and go on holiday and do stuff like that than it is to be poor. But when you look at, you know, real sort of outlier performers, a lot of the time they're driven by stuff that is a little bit more sort of dark. But yeah, I can be very tough on myself.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And it comes in sort of waves, I think. One of the challenges you have is a little bit of gold medalist syndrome that you have a big goal that you're working toward. And then when you think that this is going to be a thing and you have all of the dopamine, you have all of the positive, and then you go, okay, well... What do I do now? What's next? What's next? What's next?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And there's sort of two ways to deal with that problem. One is continue to find next to what toward. And the other one is to realize that the what next game itself is fundamentally broken and to try and transcend that. And I'm torn between the two pretty regularly. But yeah, I think I can be tough on myself. I can drive myself forward to do really great things.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
What you want is a dashboard for the things that you truly care about.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
You know, how peaceful were you today? How many moments was your mind resting where your feet are? How connected do you feel to your friends around you? You've got to work at that too, though.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah. Well, I'm balls deep in CBT at the moment for that exact reason, to see, okay, how much can I step in and sort of purposely reprogram to make sure that this works.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Get you to click on ads.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, avoidance is way easier than resistance.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, I think... So looping back to what we spoke about at the very beginning and this maybe rising sort of socialist light tenor that we see in the UK, maybe it's going to come out in the US. I think this sort of capitalist American dream thing is very, very strong over here. So I wonder whether it would catch hold.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
It'll come in quite the same way.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I wonder whether, so the thing that a lot of the UBI and a lot of the sort of socialist light policies look at that I don't think fully capture the human experience. And this was shown out. You see, there's a big study done on what happens when you actually just pay people. They did a UBI sandbox, a couple of them actually.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And the results came out probably about a year ago, maybe a little bit less than a year ago. And the outcomes that people had, even including the health, didn't improve that much. Really, really didn't. I'll send you the studies to have a look at.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
One of the problems, I think, especially when it looks at life satisfaction and happiness, is that the reason that humans value money, first and foremost, yes, you need to be able to pay for things. You don't want to be starving on the street. You don't want to have to steal food. You don't want to not be able to pay for the medical stuff like that. But even when that's still a problem,
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Money itself is a status indicator. And if you get money without the associated status that comes with it, it's the same reason that no guy flexes the number of OnlyFans goals that he subscribes to. Because anybody with the price of a cheeseburger per month can subscribe to it too.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
It's the same reason, I think, that...
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
ai girlfriends and robot girlfriends will never be high status it fundamentally misses and i'm totally open to being wrong and i probably will be but my current working theory is that it'll work for uh guys maybe that like super tactile in the way that they need to it'll be like porn it'll be something that they do but don't want to talk about yeah there's the the reason that men
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
like to be in public relationships in that way is that it shows that they've been selected of all of the men. And there were many more men available than just this one. I was chosen.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Look at what that says about me.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
They're the highest, one of the highest risks for drugs, alcohol.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
All the vices. Oh, hang on. Is it the working class, underclass kids that have it?
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
dark because it's like what am i meant to do and how am i meant to handle this and i heard uh eddie hearn on a podcast and somebody asked him about you know if he could go back what would you change how would you do things differently and you know what what do you what are your sort of regrets one of his biggest regrets i didn't realize the way that he
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
his um boxing promotion had come about i didn't realize his dad was a legend in the sport he was he says you know what i just wish that dad hadn't done it because i never got to do it first
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I wonder how much of that explains Elon's kids at least I think one of them maybe a few of them are pretty rebellious publicly totally they've got to carve I'm going to make my own path and my own path is going to be diametrically it has to be yeah or else how do I I can't win this game that he's playing so I'm just going to break it
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Yeah, yeah. He's slowly reversing population decline. Dan, dude, you're fucking awesome, man. It's been great. You're really, really, really great. Where should people go? They want to check out everything that you do.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Heck yeah. Daniel, I appreciate you, man. Cheers, mate. Ooh, made it to the end of the Daniel Priestley episode. Well, Joe Hudson, who is kind of like an embodied, emotional business coach type guy, similar to Daniel, a bit different, really great. Fantastic episode with him, which you should watch. It's just that. Go on.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
And a message talking about how this is unfair, this is a game of inequality is going to resonate because it does reflect what's happening sort of structurally.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
So if you push people too much, you're going to get brain drain. The talent is going to go elsewhere. It's going to go to Bali. It's going to go to Thailand. It's going to go to Italy, which Portugal had tons and tons of incentives for.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I wonder whether... I don't know. I have a bunch of friends who have also left the UK. Jack Butcher, who's over here from Visualize Value. George Mack, who literally landed here yesterday. He was in Dubai for the last four and a half years. Now he's in the US. I'm tempted.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I don't know. It's... It is one of those things where you don't want to feel like you're dancing on the sort of smoldering remains of some place. And that's not to say that the UK is doomed. But I do get the sense that it wouldn't surprise me if Gary and Jimmy the Giant, you know, both of whom have consumed a good bit of their content and I find interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
I don't know whether I'm not smart enough or know enough about economics to work out the veracity or successfulness of their proposals. But I can see the popularity of them. And I think, okay, well, are you going to end up moving further and further toward a more socialist style construction when it comes to the way that the country is going to be put together financially?
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.
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#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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#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.
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#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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#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.
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#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
They come preloaded in little pouches, which means if you're on the road, if you're traveling, or if you just can't be bothered fishing around inside of all of your different pots on an evening, it's perfect. I've got them with me here while I've been in London. I've been using them every single night. They're phenomenal. They really, really improve my sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Also, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it completely risk-free. Try it, and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Right now, you can get up to 20% off everything site-wide 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. Those are traps. What about beliefs?
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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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?
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#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
Each Crab and Go stick 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 brain health, regulating appetite, and curbing cravings. You might not need more sleep. You might not need more caffeine.
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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.
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#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
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#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.
Modern Wisdom
#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health
They're angry and forgetful. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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,
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. It is a Christmas special. For those of you who have only joined the show over the last year or the last few years, you might not recognize this room, and it is my old living room in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where we first started the show, joined by Johnny Youssef from Propion Fitness and George Mack, stopping off en route from Glasgow to Manchester, of course.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
uh actually no uh mine has been low sugar high protein ice cream made with the exact protein powder that i want right so pretty much the same thing that you're doing yeah do you put topping in it So I've encountered a problem with that, which is when you have to make up the mixture and then put it in the freezer for it to freeze.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I really want to watch this thing. I'm sure that me tomorrow will want to watch it. I'm not convinced that me yesterday is the best adjudicator of actually what I want to watch.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
None of which you think is interesting, but because you now don't have to pay the price, you tomorrow has to consume it. You kick the can down the hall, you watch the relevant thing.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
All right, Johnny, you're up.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
How immersive can it be with one AirPod in?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
The issue is the viscosity of the liquid when you put it in the freezer versus the viscosity of the liquid when it becomes ice cream is different. So if you put chocolate chips in, they all just sink to the bottom and create a layer. What's your solution?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Do you find that you turn, that you can just...
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
so fucking fancy so that red rising fall asleep it's a series by pierce brown pierce brown um sci-fi sci-fi series the most addictive set of novels but they'd redone it as a movie in your mind and uh yeah helps you get to sleep dolby atmos full audio cast you know they're not just saying what's going on back and forth to each other they're fully acting it out the sound effect yeah beautifully soundscaped it's awesome it's brilliant i'm glad i'm glad you like so that to fall asleep
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Manta eye masks make a Bluetooth eye mask. Do they? That is built for you to sleep on.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Snoozies or some shit.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
They're just not AirPods, are they?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Oh, about its non-ionizing radiation.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
And it was a Chernobyl ear. Yeah. I mean, it's already going through. But I've only got one in. So is that okay?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Drive with your seatbelt on.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Sort it first. Straight away. I like that. Just to add another one on there from Lifehacks four years ago, you can bulk buy your Audible every year. Can you? So you don't need to pay monthly. You can pay yearly, annual, and you'll get all of your credits up front and it's cheaper. That's brilliant. Was that a Lifehack?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
we've just done a lot i mean i reckon we've done a thousand life hacks that's like top tier though but you'll save you'll save probably 30 or 40 and you get all of your credits immediately so you don't have to wait until next month if you've got a bunch of book or you're on holiday and you want to download four you've got all of your credits for the next 12 months ready to go does red rising stop being good because there's like there's several books right uh i'm on book
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Six or seven now, I can't remember which one it is, and I'm still going. Same storyline? Yep. Same protagonist. Wow. And everyone that I know that's got onto it is hot.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Book two and book three are just obsessive. So, Red Rising. You should go and download it. The graphic audio, whatever it's called.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
It's kind of like a mind walk thing, right? Out of your own head, you're not thinking about your problems. Good, very good. All right, Seth. the heuristic of what can I remove?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Oh! Have you not encountered that? You've seen it. That's not for me. If I'm being completely honest, it's not me that uses it. Oh, God. What a bougie problem.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Have you got another example?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Shiny new thing. Shiny new thing. Something new to solve this problem as opposed to looking where you already are. What's your one of you don't need new lessons? You need to relearn your old ones. Yeah. I mean, most of the stuff that you already, most of the answers to problems you have now, you already know, and you probably learned five years ago.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
But you're the same person, that's why.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
like the common thread between all of that is you and lots of stuff changes on the surface but fundamentally the same challenges that you have the same emotions that come up the same worries and concerns you do oh my god so much has changed in life you know i'm a dad now i'm in a different country now a different career now whatever it might be and you go you're still the same person so all right my next one uh one that we've done a long long time ago but continues to pay huge dividends clip the curtains together in hotel rooms using the trouser hanger
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I challenge anybody.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
to take me on with that you get into a hotel room and these curtains for no reason i've got you know a three inch or a two inch gap between them and you've tried to sort of do that weird thing where you push them and see and then they sort of settle and they settle a bit better sometimes and you're like oh is that good should i leave it and you go i'm gonna go again you do it and it's further apart you're like fuck uh set of trouser hangers from the uh wardrobe pin it at the top if you've got two trouser hangers one two and then three four at the bottom and
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Pitch black, beautiful. Why not just wear an eye mask? You could, but sometimes even with an eye mask, you're rolling around, it comes off a little. It's just, I think you should always optimize for environment first and then other stuff second.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
The back of your knee can actually wake up. So that's that. And then I guess the other one, which is related to sleep. I spent a lot of time on the road again this year, a lot of time in hotels. Yeah. Good pillow, bad bed, good night's sleep, bad pillow, good bed, bad night's sleep.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Basically, the pillow is the most important thing because it's the most sort of obvious experience of you interacting with the bed is whether or not it's this sort of. One of those ones that fucking has a... Yeah, and then you end up with... I'm fucking sleeping or drowning here. And yeah, that's it. Pin the curtains together in a hotel bedroom and optimize for better pillows.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
And the way you can do that, what you want to do, is find what pillow do you like and then how available is it on Amazon Prime worldwide.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
And then if you can find one that you like that's available like that and it isn't an insane price, you can add, you know, 25 pounds or whatever onto a stay, but improve your sleep quality by maybe 30 minutes or an hour a night by just ordering a pillow to the hotel. You get in, you're like, ah, fuck, it's one of the ones. Get the order done next day. Get a good night's sleep.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So I followed that, but I just put another pillow in between the two top arms. So the pillows are crossed? Yeah, so one's behind my head and then I turn over to like spoon.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Okay. What is the best recipes that you've come up with?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
But it's not for the legs because I found that if I had one... Too hot. It just, if you've got, you've got to do this Brazilian jujitsu, you know, like sweep the legs and then pull it up and over. If anyone that uses a pregnancy pillow consistently, very impressive, but you can't move side to side. So normal pillow. G, what you got?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Slouched over.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Posture pilled. Yeah. No, I'm a big fan of it. I will say the height that you have it at and the closeness that you have your laptop to yourself. I would come down the stairs when we were both living in the Colton house in Austin and you don't see a person. What you see is this massive MacBook like this. And because it's spread out as well, it's covering his entire body.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
And then there's just a set of AirPod Pro Maxes poking out the top. You know, George is behind there somewhere. It's terrible for day game.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Meanwhile, he's reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity with ChatGPT open again. Fuck. All right. Should we do a lesson? Bring it on.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Uh... This is a life hacks, lessons from 2024 and best New Year's resolutions episode. So if you haven't seen these, we'll go around in a circle coming up with whatever we've discovered over the last year. And then the rest of us will rip it apart or say that it's good. And maybe there'll be some ideas for you for what you can implement going into the New Year.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Do you want to sum them in? Do you want to do one more round of hacks? I can do another hack. Let's do another round of hacks.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Don't worry.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Walking pad.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Is that why you stopped running?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Why? Oh, no, it could be. At that pace, yeah, probably about 4,000 an hour. Because you thought that was too many. Originally, but now I've repurposed. I realise you're wrong.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I would imagine you walk quicker than these two.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
But it actually means they're walking a little bit more quickly.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
You all like the same speed.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
But there's that Kelly Starrett thing about when you're on a phone call that's getting intense, you stand up and start walking around because we're meant to locomote while we think.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Have you been able to get the sort of gelatinous stickiness that you want? That's something that... I've struggled. Do you like it to be more sticky or less sticky? A little sticky. A little more sticky. I think that's about how long it's frozen for.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
That's not bad, but purposefully doing social media usage because you're an inclined cardio feels like... You end up fitter, but also a bit... Yeah, it's weak.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I mean, Johnny used to try and record podcasts whilst going on. So I was going to say that.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
It very much depends what sort of a meeting it is as well. If it's you just, okay, you like recap me on this way. It's kind of sort of standard stuff. Okay, like, here we go. I'll have a little plod.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I think you'd have a little bit of, Shift.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
That's two great things.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Like 300 quid. 200, 300 quid.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Well, I don't know. I don't know what it is.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Well, you'd just experiment, wouldn't you?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
That's true. Because you've got something that works sort of 80% now. Exactly. Okay. So white chocolate performed. White chocolate and raspberry whey.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
What is it that you're looking for? To get outside? To get outside.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Yeah, that's not bad. Good. All right. Which one am I going to choose next? Last year I said Sleep Token, this year I'm going to say Beartooth, and it's going to make you very happy that I've finally come around to listening to Beartooth. Really phenomenal. Most recent album they just put out, the London vlog, the song at the end that we had and the sort of the tune that was threaded throughout.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Shout out to Caleb, the front man who sent me the stems from the track. So he sent me the track broken up into its individual component parts so we could really, really dial that in. That was very kind of him to do. And I just, they were my top played track of this year. I felt like important to give- That's alive. Alive, yeah. We heard Attention. Yep, of course. So good. Good.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Bit mincy compared, but it's all right. No, good. That whole album's fantastic. It only came out in October and I think they still managed to get into my Spotify wrapped. So- Place of... I'll do another one, given that that one was just music. Mitchum deodorant. So Luke got me onto this last year, and there is no deodorant that's anywhere near as good.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
This isn't just... The smell of it is fantastic. The price of it's great. The quality doesn't leave any white marks. And everyone's sort of looking for what's the best sort of deodorant. I'm not a fucking medieval peasant. I don't use roll-on deodorant. But...
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
spray mitchum and they also have in every boots of uk airports they'll have the travel size so you can actually take a 50 mil travel throw that in your bag pretty sick mitchum and beartooth so what's good about it smells good doesn't leave any white marks and you don't sweat it just seems to be all the boxes it's yeah and as of yet most of them have a lingering smell like dove
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Dove deodorant you can smell somebody wearing it from like fucking a few miles away and I don't like that it's like it basically odourless but does the job so unbeatable naughty naughty
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
And you see one of those off in one go? Yeah. Dessert? Lunch? You can tell you're not running anything. Usually like last meal of the day. That's pretty dialed. So good. That's very good. I'm a big ninja. I mean, ninja are just between the air fryers, all of the different air fryers they've got. They've got this air fryer crispy thing now, which is a glass tray at the bottom.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
For the LLM non-monogamous out there, what do you use each platform for? Have you found certain things are better on certain platforms?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
It's being updated much more quickly, but it's also being updated by people who are on Twitter. Highly dangerous data set there to use. Lesson, Johnny.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So you can see how it sort of crisps and you can make lasagnas, you know, where you have that sort of the filtering on the top. I've not got an air fryer.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I mean, it's really good. It's not too dissimilar to what we spoke about last year.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
And I think what all of us are kind of zeroing in on, which is accepting that things are going to be tough, but not necessarily white knuckling our way through it and not assuming that there's any additional nobility in white knuckling it and trying to increase the difficulty or sort of the hustle pawning your way through things.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
It's like, look, if there's a way that I can make this simpler or easier. Find a gummy. Yeah, exactly. How can you have a creatine gummy for every different thing? And yeah, I think,
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
It's particularly satisfying.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Mark Andreessen was on the show the other week and he gave me this quote from Sean Parker that said, running a startup is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood. And I think that's the acceptance that after a long enough amount of time, problems are always going to be there. You're not going to get to a point where there aren't any problems.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
As the CEO or founder of a business, your only job is to work on the hardest problems, the problems that nobody else can fix. And they always stop with you and there will always be pressure.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Yeah, because if that challenge came back up to you again now, fine, no worries. Yeah, that's very interesting. That's cool. I like that. Good one.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I think an air fryer for you, I mean, this isn't even one of mine, but I think an air fryer for you would be nothing short of life-changing. What would I use it for? Do you ever eat steak at home?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
liquidize it yet maybe you will be in the future for illiquid wealth you're already a billionaire which is a wild thought the insight around the thing that you desire most is the thing that you assume will fix all of your problems I came up with this idea the other day of unteachable lessons and I think one of the unteachable lessons is money and fame won't fix all of the problems that you have in life because the total addressable market for more fame and more money is basically everybody and
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Andrew Wilkinson is a billionaire coming on. It's so done. It's so done that when he even comes on, there's a bit of me that thinks we can't go down that road because I know of the antibody response system on the internet. I also know that it just doesn't, it seems to not land and maybe it wouldn't have landed with me and it probably still doesn't land with me.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So that's the level. Who was it that taught us that lesson about how when you ask people what they want their annual income to be, it's always- Sahil. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to tell that story? Can you remember it?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
2.5 to 3x. Rebase lines. 2.5 to 3x. Yeah, it's so funny.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Okay. Would you eat steak at home if you could have from frozen amazing steak in 20 minutes? Is that your best suggestion? A steak? It's fucking unbelievable for steak. Yeah. This is a Peterson hack. As a woman who eats a lot of steak, she knows how to cook a steak. If that's all you're eating. Yeah, which I am. So it's important. All right. I like that. Ninja creamies.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
But a lot of that as well is framing because you can't cash the future in right now. Like the fact that nothing is promised beyond just this moment right now. And sure, your felt sense of it as you're older, maybe you can do less. There's less you can do with this moment right now. But tomorrow at 80 and tomorrow right now are the exact same amount of time.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So beyond the health impact of it, there is no difference. The only thing is, you remember when you used to go back to school or a Monday for me, it's a good example on a Monday. For me, I go to bed on a Sunday night, I reliably have good sleep and I'm fired up for a Monday because it feels like the whole week is ahead of me.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
But I get to sort of a Friday or a Saturday and I have this sort of retrospective energy to me where I'm thinking about the week. And then it gets to Monday morning again, and I'm sort of excited. And it almost feels like that, but with age.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
It's like there's no real reason, if you can do the full non-dual fucking attachment thing, there's no reason why a day now and a day in 20 years' time is worth any more or any less. In fact, you should... We do it at all timeframes, don't we?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
At some point, it's going to flip, right? At some point, it's going to be like, oh, if you're not careful about it, that you're going to get older and start thinking wistfully about what was behind, not hopefully about what's to come. Is it not multiplied by like physical ability?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
by a big margin like enjoying anything is magnified when you can walk there's no pain there's no you're fully mobile alright my first one that was fucking awesome that was a good one too that was a good one this again from your birthday outcomes matter more than inputs And you've been on this flex for quite a while. It's not too dissimilar to I look for effectiveness over efficiency.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
But outcomes matter more than inputs. A lot of the time, especially as you get sort of further into black belt territory on the productivity bro optimization world.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
you do this sort of weird rain dance this sort of productivity rain dance of lots of things that maybe you needed them previously or maybe they never served you or maybe they did serve you but they don't serve you now but you keep doing them you have these sort of odd uh attachments to ways of working and things that you do or members of staff or systems or processes or or whatever it is and uh
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
What's that quote about people working so hard and achieving so little? Who's that? Andy Grove. Andy Grove. There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
The suffering thing is probably a part of it, but this is probably even more zoomed out than that, which is a lot of the time people focus on how hard I've worked during the day, regardless of whether it was suffering or not. It's what I did all of this stuff. Look at all of the effort that I put in. He goes. What did you do on the back end of that?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Because we've all had jobs, projects, things that we needed to finish. And the very thing that you're putting off is the most important thing that you're supposed to do. And you go, dude, I worked all day. You go, track what you did today. You cleaned the kitchen. You had this huge email to write and you spent 45 minutes cleaning the fucking kitchen. Why do you do that?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Well, I worked really hard today. And it's like, yes, yes, yes. But what were you trying to achieve? And it's also, I think, just a reminder that effectiveness is really the only thing that matters. You can continue to put your foot harder and harder and harder on the accelerator. But if you've also got your foot on the brake or if you're driving in the wrong direction, it kind of doesn't matter.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So outcomes matter more than inputs, as in, A lot of the time, because the feedback loop on when am I going to get the output is usually a little bit down the line. Maybe it's going to be tomorrow. Maybe it's going to be next year. Maybe it's going to be in five years' time or whatever. The only thing that you can bounce off is inputs. How much work did I do today? And then...
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So you're not having creamies? That's a previous Chris thing. Correct.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
For instance, you wake up on a morning and you've slept in by three hours and immediately you feel like a piece of shit. You think, I'm a piece of shit because I slept in. And you go, right, okay. You're looking at such a brief window, like the entirety of your life. But I'm in the lower quartile of the window. Your fucking sleep regularity. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
The entirety of your life and you've taken this one moment and be like, because of that one thing that I did. It's like, what if that allows you to get way more out of this week? What if this allows you to get closer to your goals much more quickly? Or what if this is just something that your body needs so that you can be happier?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
This is Ernie, actually.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
That's it. That's it in a minute.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Your calendar is a better indication of your wealth than your bank account.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
All I need to do is book. Parkinson's law, the breakup out into three hours long. Right. So we've got. No, no, no.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Kind of related to this one, it's a very cool one. It's so funny how all of the hacks and all of the lessons end up... We haven't coordinated this before. We don't talk about doing it before.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Also, if you haven't done a New Year's review, the exact template that I use and have crafted very delicately over the last decade or so is available right now for free. at chriswellx.com slash review. That's tradition. Something else which is tradition is you getting hot potato and going first. Hot potato. A festive potato for you. Festive potato. Jonathan Watson, what have you got for us?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So even there with- That's unless you whip yourself into doing a thing that you didn't want to do. And then after the fact, you didn't- It's my value. Yeah, it's your reason.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Nice. Should we do some resolutions? I basically had this idea that... Coming up with resolutions for yourself a lot of the time, whatever it is, by March, some ungodly percentage of people have already stopped doing the thing they said was the most important thing at the start of the year.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
A good part of that is maybe habit change or behavior change is difficult to do, but maybe a bigger part of it is, well, they chose the wrong things. The stuff that I've chosen that stuck with me for the rest of my life, and I figured, I don't think I've ever seen anyone do this before, but what are the highest ROI results?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
resolutions or new habits or behavior change things that you've done simple things given that you know this is going out on christmas eve eve and people are going to be thinking about it this might actually be a nice little finger food buffet that people could go actually the boys said that this one really stuck so i'm gonna go with that so have you got any i do i for the last i didn't do it last year i did like three years in a row of a version of 75 hard
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Well, one of the problems of it is that it doesn't agree with a varied lifestyle. Exactly. 75 hard is brilliant for the first sort of autistic two, two and a half months of the year. But as soon as you get into it, it's wedding season. Yeah. It's like, good luck, mate. Yeah, where you have to go sit down and meditate. You know, me and the boys flew to Australia.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
You're on a plane for 17 and a bit hours. Where's the banana? You couldn't plan the banana in advance?
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So it's the meta lesson, not the individual.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So you would, you would basically say that a good resolution is to do some version of 75 hard, but adapt it into stuff that you really, really value.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Yes, yes, yes, yes. But it wasn't. Not the Old Testament. Nothing to do with that. No, he didn't build an ark and try and get two by two. Hi, it's good. Welcome back to the show. This episode, we have a man who's going to live. Licking pebbles at an M&S. Bummers. What a derailment.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
He's got a lawsuit at the moment.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
The only reason you're here, the only reason you're here is to do that. That's cool. I like that. So I had two. I guess you brought up sobriety, which is one of those ones that's so sort of taken for granted now that I've forgotten about it. That used to be quite contrarian when you first started it.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Wow. Okay. So my two highest ROI resolutions that I've done, they've stuck with me. Number one, sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. And number two, go for a walk first thing in the morning.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Yeah. Radio waves. No, no, no, no. It's just being so far away that you can't use it on a nighttime and that it's not the first thing that you do in the morning. It's basically intermittent fasting for your phone with environment design. But you just take the charger for your phone and you put it outside of your fucking bedroom. And it's like, I can't believe how many people still have it.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
It is sapping. days of sleep out of you every year, days and days and days, even if you've got the best relationship with your phone in the world, because if you can't sleep, there is always the most compelling device in human history, only within arm's reach. And even if it's over the other side of the room, the problem that I would encounter is I'm like, well,
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Well, you know, like it's just there. I'm going to get up. I'm going to go downstairs into the kitchen. I'm going to unplug it from the place that it lives, where it sleeps overnight. And then also when you wake up in the morning, it's not there for you to see. What were you saying about Mark Zuckerberg or whoever it is? You know, all of us, we open our phone and there's just bad thing.
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#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Terrible thing. Issues.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Yeah, whether it's framed well or badly, what's your one task now? Go to fucking sleep. So go to sleep. And then the morning walk thing, just, you know, this was something that I'd started doing probably from some shit I'd learned from us researching things forever ago. And I just noticed that if I woke up and I was feeling a little...
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
nervous or sort of anxious energy or whatever whatever i was feeling in the morning by the time that i'd done a 15 minute walk by the time i came back i just it just felt less strong and less important and there's all manner of huberman explanations about whatever it is the ventral dorsal stream and you're locomoting through while you're doing lateral eye movement which down regulates the way blah blah blah it's like i like the midway the guy on the left says morning walk makes me feel nice and uh those two things i think you know the two that i've done
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
In every different hotel, every different place that I've stayed, every different country that I've gone to, those are two things that I really, really try and rely on. The phone outside of the room when you're on the road is difficult. It's like plug it in in the bathroom and then go into the bedroom. But morning walk, phone outside of the bedroom has been two of the highest ROI.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Do you still do no caffeine first thing? Yeah, yeah. So I'm avoiding that.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Don't take money for it. Yeah, but it's an interesting realization that you need, especially now this super rational, hyper evidence-based world where experts are only the people that are allowed to comment on stuff, that you need someone to justify something that you already did that already made you feel good.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
It shouldn't be the case that I need Andrew Huber to explain to me why the thing I do and like and is good and effective for me is something that I should do and like and is good and effective for me. So that's why I brought up caffeine.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
What are you trying to have empathy for the other person? Or are you trying to sort of do inversion on yourself? What are you prioritizing?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Just be more happy. Yeah. It's pretty pro-social. I like that. Okay. Uh, This is one from George's birthday this year in Miami, which Dickie Bush decided to do. And it's Uber Black XL.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
All of that is said.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
She's big Apple Notes for everything. One size fits all.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
One size fits all. Should we do... What have you got left? Should we do one more round of life hacks? What have we got?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Okay. I have a lesson. Are we doing fails? We can do. Let's do another lesson and then we'll see where we come in at. Okay. Have you got another lesson?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So Uber Black XL, I don't know how available it is in the UK, but especially in America and probably in the biggest cities in the UK, you can order a seven-person Escalade with a driver that's always dressed quite nice and formally. And it's basically you having a private driver, but... you just order it on Uber. And it's about maybe two to three times the cost of a normal Uber.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I'm going to have to leapfrog ahead of you because it's my lesson. Add your podcast. True. Trajectory is more important than position, which is a Jimmy Carr-ism. But that being number 300 in the world, but last year being 350 feels better than being number two in the world, but last year being number one.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Because you're so tightly attuned to what is the direction that I'm on, not what is my absolute position. Happiness is relative. It's not absolute. And yeah, I spoke to, weirdly enough, got this theory co-signed by Dan Bilzerian before he went all anti-Semitic. Old Testament Dan. Old Testament Dan. That's what he calls himself. Old T. Dan.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I basically said, like, you've sort of gone to the top of the hedonic mountain, so to speak. In some ways, do you wish that you'd...
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
dragged out that progress a little bit more because it would have allowed you to have had more places to go to that basically every new record you set especially big step changes in terms of success is just a new higher bar for you to now yep so uh what you would say success isn't more uh Success isn't a better vantage point to have a view from. It's a higher point to fall from.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
And it becomes increasingly difficult to get those, you know, to improve your lifts when you're first going to the gym by 5% is maybe 5 kilos. But after a couple of years in the gym, it's a significantly larger amount. It's a significantly higher level of pressure. So, yeah, trajectory more important than position. So Chris Sparks'ism as well, direction over speed. How is it?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Yeah, I don't know whether that's quite the same. Trajectory over position. Trajectory is more important position in that your growth is more important than your absolute location.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
And also the 400. So James Smith says all winds feel the same. But there's no uber surcharge for going 395 to 400 versus going 210 to 250. Any revenue level, any bank account number. Dopamine is dopamine, isn't it? So the problem is, are you suggesting that you purposefully throttle?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
So it's special occasions only for the most part. But the way that you feel when you get into it and when you get out of it is lovely. And the experience is easily three times nicer than being in the back of someone's Kia Forte. Especially in America, this is a big America problem because it's less expensive. It's less, more expensive in America.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Yeah. Always. Good insight. Nice. Seth?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
And the depths that your normal UberX can descend to in America, as you learned firsthand this year, it's like the back of some Nissan Altima, the 30 year old that you're sticking to the seat. It can go really low. So if you've had a tough day and you want to treat yourself, a journey home in a blue Uber black XL is nice.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
How would you summarize that lesson overall?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Yeah, I guess it's weird to think, how can you say that you value a thing if your actions show no indication? Yeah, actions versus words. In that way, yeah. Look at your calendar to find your priorities. Yeah. It's all shit that we learned fucking 10 years ago. 10 years ago. Yeah. But now you're like, oh yeah. Gee.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
If you're out on a date and you sort of want to make something feel a little bit nicer, big fan.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Awesome. Yeah, I think I called them second order emotions. Oh, I like that. That like infinite regressive.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
It's lower. It's lower.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I actually, that was exactly what was next. It's that and then chicken. Boys, I love you all. I appreciate you. Merry Christmas. I'm sad that we don't get to spend as much time together as we used to. No fails. No fails. Why don't we save them for next year? We can keep everyone coming back. But no, I really do. I'm so happy and so proud of what all of you have done. It's fucking fire. It's great.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
I'm very glad that you're in my life, even though we're apart from each other.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Fire. Ladies and gentlemen, Merry Christmas. I'll see you next time. Should we... Oh, yeah. I actually can't raise my arms, but... Ready? Are you going to take us through this?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Very low, correct, in America. The UK doesn't seem... I think Americans generally have lower standards for what they keep their cars to. If anybody's got a small dink in the UK, it's almost immediately taken to... I've got a small dink. You're always complaining about it as well. I know. It's terrible. But you take it to the shop or whatever and you get it fixed. Most people would.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Come back with an XL. Black XL. I think it's a... I mean, you've been a big proponent of that as well, like using Uber Black XL. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Is it life hacks first? It is.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Was it you where someone was trading? What was it?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
at all he's the opposite of the guy that we had in Iceland so driving back the final the final coach out of the Blue Lagoon in Iceland because the alternative was to stay there for nine and a half thousand pounds for the night and
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
some hurricane-level winds were coming in, and we managed to make it onto this bus, and we're at the back of the bus, and it's tilting up onto what feels like just its side wheels because of the strength of the breeze coming along.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Johnny's solution, which was fucking genius, actually, at the time, was, I'm going to go up to the front and look at the bus driver, and if he's not concerned, we shouldn't be concerned.
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
Another day at Graff, isn't it?
Modern Wisdom
#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions
He's Jocko, a bus driver. All right. I'm coming in hard.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I think if I was to give myself the three traits that I've managed to hold on to, I pay a lot of attention to detail. I have an unusual capacity for suffering or doing a delaying gratification might be an easy way to put it. Uh, and I'm just consistent. And those three things seem to be like pretty fucking potent fuel, no matter what industry you try and get into.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Rush obsession.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Is this the most insane part of falling in love?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
three dudes that year really you're reading into text message why was there no kiss at the end of that message she was last online yeah at four in the morning but didn't message me until eight a.m why why why was she exactly right and with with sufficient serotonin you'd be like means nothing okay she just writes okay you said so i'm gonna i'll see you at eight she said okay
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Those two letters. I don't like the tone of those two letters. Yeah. So I did, um, this is really cool. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. Intellex DNA. Cheek swab, put in a tube, send it off full genetic profile. Um, and then mapped onto what is the likelihood or what is the prevalence in the wider population of this? And what is it predictive of? Right.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So MTHFR gene, you know, you like things that are to do with, um, your processing of gluten, your predisposition for different maladies, for heart stuff. But the interesting shit for me, obsessed with human nature, was how is this predictive of different things in my psychology? And the particular suite of
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
genetics that my parents decided to either bestow or curse me with are all the same cluster and they just pile on top of each other. It is all dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, does not clear cortisol or adrenaline particularly quickly. It's like may struggle to stop tasks once begun. It's just like if you wanted to construct an obsessed human, you would just give them that.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And you're an anxious person. Yes. Yeah. I have a tendency. I would call myself an insecure overachiever.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
How do you sort of square the circle of the fact that there seems to be some data that comes out around the more that people focus on trying to be happy, the less happy they become?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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. They've got compartments for everything, your laptop, your shoes, your sunglasses.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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 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 nomadic.com slash modern wisdom.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Oh, fascinating.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You've said you want to...
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I would guess... Well, Democrats... I would assume are more open to experience as a personality profile. But they're more likely to not date a Republican. That's my point. But they're more open to experience as a personality profile.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So that seems to be, so they're not only having to, whatever it is, whatever the effect is that's going on, it's having to compensate for their openness, their increase in openness. So this is even more strong. Mm-hmm. I could try and pull out as much bro social science as I want about purity, spiral, sense of ideological rigidity.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Like, yeah, exactly. How Democrats? How Democrat are we talking?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
19.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Do you think that that's a psychological representation of the way that we look for immune profile difference?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Uh-huh. Can you just explain sort of those five steps there with a bit of an adaptive lens? Like, what is our... What are our genes' ultimate reasons for behavior trying to get us to do here? Presumably, it's become attracted to something very quickly, all the way down. What's the reason for those five stages?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Okay. Talk to me about the fellow dopamine norepinephrine addicts out there about how they can... It sounds to me like biology is psychology. We're along for the ride here. We don't really get to choose much of the time who we fall in love with. If you spend enough time around the person and you go, fuck, all of the things I said I wasn't going to fall for and
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's horribly manipulative. Could you get it past an ethics board now, do you think? An IRB.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Dude, you're so awesome. I hope you take a moment to reflect on just how great it is that we've got scientific insight, fantastic communication, illustrious career of teaching this to people, and then the ability to communicate it. You're so fucking great. I really appreciate your work.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Have you heard of workplace plus two? Do you know what this is? It's that she's a five on the street, but she's a seven in the workplace. And it refers to precisely this, that there's something about working with this person in the office who you... Might not really even think twice about looking at in a bar or a restaurant or something. They wouldn't get past step one in the cascade.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But workplace plus two turns them from a strong seven to a nine.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Isn't it interesting, you know, There is this sense of self and sense of attachment and something transcendent and greater than just the neurochemical cascade that's going on. It's not just neurobiology. It doesn't feel like it's just neurobiology that's going on. And yet... You can manipulate people into that situation largely through neurobiology. Totally, totally.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And you need to account for it. And you think, well, what, so you're saying that my partner doesn't actually love me that much? That you can just put them in this, you can ask these fucking 36 questions and put them on a lazy river and there's a 50% chance, 30% chance that he's going to cheat on me. You're telling me that that's the depth of our love.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's what this transcendent, what about the, you know, until sickness and health. Right. You know,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You actually know what you're talking about. That's correct. I'm slowly taking off all of the list. But yeah, I just think this... You were saying it before we got started, whatever we want to talk about this, this intersection of life advice, philosophy, science, research, insight, wisdom, like the contemporaries, you know, is this, it's hardly the fucking Roman Agora, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Do you know that well? Can you explain?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
He loves everything that I do. He's my number one fan. But one of the cool things that he explained, sort of talking about you don't get to control the cascade quite, but you can, I suppose, reframe what you tell yourself it means if that starts. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
This guy reached out to him after he read The Evolution of Desire, and in it, David talks about an area of the brain that specifically gets turned on in men when men look at something that resembles anything sexual. pair of rocks that look remotely like boobs. It's like, you should be looking at that. That's why, after reading that, I contested so heavily this idea of the toxic male gaze.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But, you know, the opportunity to go jump from Mark Manson to an Alex Hormozy to an Naval Ravikant to an Arthur Brooks to a Dr. John Deloitte, you know, like it's, Epic. It's really cool.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I'm like, these are mostly accusations that are being made by a particular sex of people who do not have the same circuitry that men do. All of that to be said, men shouldn't make people feel weird by staring at them on trains and in the tube and all the rest of this stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But I did think some pretty deep rooted fucking brain circuitry going on here that's incentivizing men to look at you in those leggings that have the thing that goes up the middle of the ass crack. Like, come on, play the game. Anyway, this guy read the book and messaged David and said, I just wanted to thank you for saving my marriage because I found myself looking at other women
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And I was attracted to them. I thought that they were hot. I didn't do anything about it. I love my wife and I love our kids. But I thought there was something wrong with our marriage because I was attracted to other women. And the story that I told myself about the fact that I was attracted to other women was there was something wrong with my partner.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And I read your book and I realized that I'm just kind of designed to find attractive. Shock, horror, man finds attractive women attractive.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Did you look at the over-perception and under-perception bias of attraction? Have you seen this?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the smoke detector principle working in both directions. Yeah. And this is why, you know, for all of the girls, they're like, my boss, no, he's just friendly. He's just nice with me. It's like, you don't see him the way that he sees you.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
What would be your advice to the insecure overachievers out there? Get some of the dopamine, norepinephrine under control.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Well, for instance, if you are someone that finds yourself, uh, ruminating more aggressively, uh, then you're really struggling to get that under control. Yeah. You, um, um. The serotonin has dropped. The rationality is out of the window. You find yourself moving through this at a pace that maybe your partner can't keep up with.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I'm trying to. I wonder what I would be like. You've got a choice of something caffeinated and non-caffeinated.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
No, I realized, I realized this a few years ago. No.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Time for more. Time for salt. Time for more. Yeah, I really wonder what... I wonder how different... This would be a cool experiment to run if you could split test the universe. Yeah. I wonder how different people's experience of the world would be if that burgeoning industry sort of hadn't kicked off for some reason.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's really cool. You mentioned about some of the challenges of digital dating enabling on the front end. You also said that getting to stage five, getting to kin,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
which I imagine pen-palling back and forth is less common than somebody who lives in LA and someone else who lives in Wisconsin and they're dating and they text a lot and all the rest of it. But the eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin is precisely what you said takes you. You'll crave the oxytocin. Yes. So does that suggest that long-distance relationships need... a different type of work.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You know, how much of it is window dressing and how much of it is really making an impact in people's lives? How do you think about that? Because it was very formative for me. Yeah. I know that. But yeah, I wonder just how much of an effect it's having on mass.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
They need to compensate in different sorts of ways.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & 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
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You've got to have that to play the game.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & 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 modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash. Modern wisdom. You mentioned two parts, finding the right person, falling in love, et cetera, et cetera. Staying in love.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
What about that?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Best friend, best friending. Yeah. Turning a partner into your best friend. Right. Not your only friend. Very important. How can you tell if you're... a compatible romantic partner, but not a compatible best friend. Because you don't get to the best friend stage. You test by finding out that it fails.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
yeah because otherwise you have that to play the game but then when things are slow at the very beginning that's when you stop your podcast right and you didn't a lot of a lot of questions come through from people who say stuff like um hey man in the beginning when you didn't have any plays or anything like you know what motivated you to keep going that to be honest my motivation waned way more instead of your three and four and five because you're getting bored yeah it's like well i've been there this isn't
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Is there any way then, given that we're in this... Psychedelic hormonal fugue state for between six and 24 months. That's really nice. It's true. You're kind of insane for half a year to two years. Psychotic break. Correct. Yeah. You can't be trusted. Do not run with sharp objects. Do not drive heavy machinery. Don't buy a house. Yeah. Don't go to Vegas. But...
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
you are what you're basically doing and i've been thinking i had tied to shiro on recently it was fucking fantastic and um we were talking about this passionate companion at arc yeah we go through and how clever human biology is in sort of tricking us into doing this thing you know getting attached to this person who we've got nothing in common with like yeah they've got a nicely shaped nose and they smell kind of cute or whatever i'm not fell in love with a girl who didn't speak a word of english okay not a word of english
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I think, didn't you, didn't you say, did you drop something and go to Spain?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Psychedelic hormonal fugue state.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yep.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So... There is this unique period of insanity that everybody goes through. Some people more quickly than others, some people out of sync with their partner. But what you're really trying to do is not, you cannot use the front of the funnel, the shop window, even experientially, even if that shop window lasts for six, 24 months.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
As something that is necessarily predictive of what you're actually trying to get to. Right. Which is month 25 through month 500. You don't know. So what are the ways, you know, if the goal is best friendship through romance. Right. But all you get to experience is romance. But what you're supposed to be assessing based on is best friendship. Right. What can be done?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Louise Perry talks about this. She uses this example of a lamp. And she says, if you haven't yet moved into a house, buying a lamp that you like is pretty easy. But if you've built the perfect house that you want and you've got the color schemes and the decoration, trying to find the perfect lamp for this very well-established house becomes more difficult.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
um that usually doesn't work high-risk dice roll yeah yeah you need and you need more experience on that and that means you need more failure and you need more learning typically james my business partner in newtonic he uh used to work for n power gas company and he'd go door to door trying to convert people from british gas or whatever northern grid and and put them onto onto his and uh
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
His boss one day said, how many more sales do you need this month? He's like, two. And he's like, how many sales do you do per door? And he's like, about 100 doors one sale. He's like, okay, 200 doors. And that reframing is exactly the same, which is, okay, you have a failure rate. This is the failure rate.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But what you're looking to get toward is to beat the failure rate and get to the success, the big one that matters.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Why is it that guys find pregnant women so attractive?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's all the things. Have you looked at the environmental security hypothesis? Do you know this one? No, tell me. This is fucking awesome. So... males' preferred body size for women has fluctuated across time. The waist-to-hip ratio, I think, remains at about 0.68, typically. It's quite constant. Got follow, got follow figures, smaller figures, but the waist-to-hip has always remained the same.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And the human behavioral ecology stuff that's going on at the moment, which is really fascinating how humans interact with their local environment, This study looked at when particular body sizes, not shapes, because the shape remains the same, when particular body sizes are preferred. And it seemed like during periods of an economic recession, bigger women were preferred.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And during periods of economic prosperity, smaller women were preferred. So there was a study done on students, because that's the only people you've got to do it to. And they did it in their canteen. And they would show images of bigger and thinner women to guys before they ate and after they ate. And before they ate, when they were hungrier, they preferred the bigger women.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And after they ate, when they were fuller, they preferred the thinner women. And the argument being, if you were in time of resource uncertainty and you see a bigger woman, you think, oh, she'd survive a tough winter. And this seems to be borne out economically across time. If you go back and you look at the chart, you can track it. Economy's good. 10 to women. If economy's bad, take your women.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's a bottle of vodka so big that you couldn't drink it in two lifetimes in a nightclub that you have to leave in three hours.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's like, it kind of just attracts chicks.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You said this sort of startup or founder mindset when it comes to building relationships. How should people think about project managing the task of finding their future husband or wife, especially given that we are living in a world where people are more risk averse than ever before, slow life strategy, less risk taking behavior, less risky behavior, endemic everywhere among young people.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Do you know who Dr. David Lay is? University of New Mexico.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. Yeah. He's in the circuit. It's a Diana Fleischman, Jeffrey Mallory type person. And I had him on the show and I've really been kind of conflicted. So I'm super interested to hear what your sort of position is and what the data suggests.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Well, you get to create your own education piecemeal. I was always very wistful that I didn't do philosophy or psychology at uni. I did a bachelor's and a master's in business and marketing, neither of which I can remember any of.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So the suggestion is that if you're training yourself or if you're practicing stage one over and over, and then the time comes in the real world for you to go from stage one to stage two, that's... It's going to be harder and it's maybe not even possible.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Can I give you, so this is just the... Chris Williamson bro science hour here. You're pretty good.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Bro science in many ways is actually superior to real science. Well, part of it is just because it's broader. Correct. Yeah. Temperature plays a huge role in how well you sleep, but traditional bedding often falls short. Just add the brand new Pod 4 Ultra to your mattress like a fitted sheet and it will automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
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 modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. This actually came up in a paper.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So David and William, number one researcher of incels and Dr. Buss himself, they wrote a paper based on a conversation that we'd had, which is where is all of the incel violence? So you'll be familiar with young male syndrome in societies where there is a high number of young, unmarried and unpartnered men. They tend to become disgruntled.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
They push over cars and they set things on fire and they abuse granny and It's not good. And in certain societies in our past, I think Portugal had the first male was allowed to marry and the rest of them were put on ships to go discover the new world, which is not fuck up the homeland was really what they were talking about.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Look, Newcastle University is prestigious and fantastic in the UK, but I was disenchanted with academia within about six months of being there because I was running a business and I wasn't seeing anything in the real world that represented what I was learning in the classroom. Right. You know, I was operating... It's a big nightlife business. And I was HR, marketing. I was accounts.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But in an era where we have, you know, this sort of silent epidemic of needs, not in education, employment or training.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
um men who are largely living lives many of them living lives mediated through virtual worlds there is a question of if young male syndrome has been this very present dynamic throughout all of human history and we're in an unprecedented time of sexlessness specifically among young men especially if women are tending to date up socioeconomically they're outperforming men especially up to the age of sort of 30 or so so one of the ways that they can compensate from that is just
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
sort of skew that dating age up a little bit, or a bit higher, and they can actually bring a man in line socioeconomically. One of the biggest predictors of wealth is age, so that's pretty easy to do. You think, well, Where is the violence in kind? Where is the subsequent, uh, uh, concern? And it was mine and the guys, I think.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Belief that men are largely being sedated out of status seeking and reproduction, uh, through porn, video games, screens, social media. And, uh, yeah, this male sedation hypothesis, I think is something that the, I think is very compelling.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And there's some way to sedate guys that are... Here's the really ruthless implication of it, which is, you know, a group of men who are... useless and sedated, maybe, maybe, on balance, is better than a group of men that are dangerous and anarchistic. But not by much. And those two choices aren't particularly good.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I was doing the advertising. I was B2B. I was B2C. I was vendors, all this stuff, licensing, local councils. I was like, why am I learning Henry Ford's theories of scientific fucking management? I don't care. I don't care. And I get the sense it's pre-social. As Facebook was coming out, I think the year that I went to uni, you needed a university email to get Facebook. I remember thinking,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, I saw a stat last week talking about, I guess, some of the challenges of remaining best friends. If a male grows up in a non-intact household of any kind, any kind at all, There is a high likelihood of them going to prison than completing college.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
How is that defined?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's so sick.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, I was thinking about... this generation, both millennials and Gen Z, are the progeny of parents who didn't have the tools to sort of relate or navigate in the same way as an infinite number of evidence-based relationship coaches and the podcast world and the self-help and all the rest of it. I think I wonder how they should go about thinking, well, I didn't necessarily have the best
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
example in front of me because there was challenges here and we did have changing dynamics and motivations around the acceptance of divorce. And maybe I did grow up in a non-intact home and such, but that sets expectations for what a good relationship is supposed to be now. And there's this interesting not a burden, I suppose, but a responsibility opportunity to be a circuit breaker. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And to think, you know, Goggins talks about this. So, you know, he explains about how his dad hit him a lot as a kid. Right. And he had a brother and sometimes Goggins sort of took the beatings in place of his brother. Yeah. But he also found out that his granddad would make his father stand in front of an open stove. And if he moved, he would hit him with a belt as a kid.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I get the sense that this is not going to be useful in future. And sure enough, Kaizen lean management strategies and stuff have not come up despite the fact that I've run businesses for two decades. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So you have this lineage, this like ancestral, literal ancestral trauma, but physically being passed down. Plus also probably epigenetically being fucking passed down as well. And I asked David, I didn't even know that this was the case. It was really kind of beautiful of him to say on the phone. On the podcast, I said, if you had a child, how would you hope to raise them?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
He said, I do have a child. I've got a 22-year-old daughter. He'd never mentioned it previously, and he brought it up on the episode. And he said he basically sees himself as kind of like a dam, sort of a breakwater, this circuit breaker thing, in between the series of mistreatments of people, like, no more. I often think about that example when it comes to stuff like...
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
your parents didn't necessarily have the tools, you do. You didn't have an example, but you have the opportunity.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
lurking in your limbic system and being epigenetically expressed from the misbehavior of people six generations ago or some crazy thing like that we should not be prisoners of that yeah this is gorgeous idea from uh robert writes why buddhism is true that's a nice book fuck dude blending evolutionary psychology i know with buddhism uh because the book that got me into uh ep was um
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
The Moral Animal. Yeah. From 1991 or 1992 or something. And it's still, there's some of the stuff, little replication crisis, but most of it's shit hot. And I loved it.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I mean, I'm sure I could. Some motivated reasoning by a researcher there. Darling, darling, honestly, I only did it. Not only did I not love her, but I did this for us.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Okay, okay. Anyway, why Buddhism is true by Robert Wright. In it, there's this quote from some Buddhist teacher that says, ultimately in life, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of our mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. And I just love that idea of the, because it's the first step, the knowledge is power. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Uh, and, uh, I think in many ways that is why this burgeoning industry, whatever we want to call it, wisdom porn of wisdom porn. Yeah. Uh, there's, there's some Reddit threads. Um, I think that that is the gateway drug at the top. I think that that's what people are looking for.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
The question that I have, the potential problem I can see is for the ruminative, cerebral, insecure, overachiever type people who enjoy content like yours and mine. to get stuck in just the first step, knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, just sucking it in.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
How do you advise, and I imagine that many of your students are like this too, you know, the academic-y, intellectually people, praying at the cognitive horsepower altar. How do you
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
uh bits of input this sort of uh fomo next thing type idea the intellectual porn thing of this is new i must try this new right because this is a different type of growth maybe it's breathing maybe it's breath work that i need to be doing maybe it's some other maybe it's prayer what about the prayer thing right so um is it commit an advantage how many rubrics that you get people to follow when it comes to this yeah well people are substituting stage one for stage two
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Well, I love the thing that I really love about the teaching element is it wraps more of your identity up in this thing because you become an advocate for it. That's you. Which deepens your practice of it.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
you mentioned resentment there so we've talked about all of the ways that dating and then making a long-term relationship can go right right resentment contempt uh some of these sort of real trap doors uh in relationships how can people better overcome contempt you've had john gottman on your podcast right not yet julie and john gottman i've actually um i've talked to them before they're phenomenal they're they're visionary they're actually heroes
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my business education was slightly different to that. I would say that's unrepresentative of what I learned. You do something about how to fall in love and stay in love?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I got to interject. I had this insight a couple of weeks ago about why people... commit themselves to their careers more than they commit themselves to their partnerships. The reason being that only you can leave your career, but not only you can leave your partnership. And there is this sense of safety. It's like, if I just keep grinding away on this, I'll probably get better. I'll probably grow.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But the same isn't true because my career isn't going to leave me, but my partner might.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You're saying that people who make a trade where they get a job that is an additional hour commute there and back five days a week because it's a better job title or they think that it's going to give them fulfillment or validation or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
15.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Right. They've kind of become adrenaline junkies or whatever the particular hormone of neurochemical of choice is, junkies. And the relationship is no longer able to compete now that you're out of passion and into companionate. it's not giving you quite the same rush. The progress isn't there.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You know, you've kind of, you've retired from the growth, the rushy growth, but the career can continue to give you that.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
you're trying to inject novelty into what you do and you're trying to, even less than that, you're just trying to not let it get stale. And, you know, how many books deep are you now?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Talk to me about this balance. It's a tension that has come up an awful lot. I did these live shows last year. You went on tour. I did. Did you like it? It's fucking awesome, dude. It's sick. Did you sell tickets? I sold out the event in Apollo in London, 3,500 people, which was pretty cool.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So I did four dates around Australia. No, sorry. Three dates around Australia, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney. We did one big show in London and we were about to announce Canada and the US. This is... Boston, New York, LA with a plus one. So we could double up on that like matinee across the weekend, Nashville, Utah, Toronto, Vancouver, Austin, uh, Chicago.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Uh, so we've got a, we've got a good run and we're going to try and do a world tour next year. So that would be like Jakarta, Delhi. Yeah. Um,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
After a performance in front of people, more. What I do find a little trying, this is an interesting question. I'm aware of the sort of, where do you get your energy from? Like, do you get it from being a neuron or being around people? Anna, I've been thinking about this a lot. Maybe you're the person to speak to about this. Only child. Spent a lot of time in solitude as a kid.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Spent a lot of time in solitude working throughout all of my 20s. Parents together?
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yep.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And I... Really enjoyed my time alone. Really, really enjoyed it. Put me in a room with a laptop and some slow-moving deep house, and I'll just grind until the caffeine wears off and I'll just keep going. I said before, one of my skill sets is maybe dealing with discomfort, like being able to sort of keep going, delaying gratification. Very, very good at that. But recently, especially the last...
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I'd say five years in training, lifting things, and probably three years or so psychologically with the way that I work, I found myself wanting to spend less time alone.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And I got a trainer about two years ago here in Austin because when I used to be able to just happily AirPods in, listening to a podcast, prepping for a guest, listening to an audio book, listening to some music, go in, just crack out a session at, you know, a nine out of 10 effort and then go home and not think about it. I just found that I really, I just didn't want to do that.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But if you put me in front of a trainer or you get me training with a friend, flying. And kind of the same things happened a little bit with work where I just take less pleasure from working on my own now, you know, when it comes to doing the live tour. I could happily go on without an opener. I don't need an opener. I'm going to take an opener. So I want to have one of my boys there with me.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I don't want to be experiencing this on my own, despite the fact that I kind of get the sense that Chris of 10 years ago would have been like, no, Lone Ranger this. Like, this is cool. Like, it's a solo adventure. And I don't want that. And that's been a transition that I've noticed in myself.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
As opposed to holding on to past glories.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
They want to let go of this sense that I'm the rock star.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Well, I mean, given how long people would have lived ancestrally, it makes sense. If you're 40, you're probably a grandfather by that point. So you need to be bestowing some wisdom. It's not really about you wanting to take down that gazelle on your own. Granddad, get back here. Teach us about how you make that hot thing that has flames.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Better.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
More optimal.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Well, I did build a unpronounceable nootropics company. So maybe we're on, I'm on track there. I'm just avoiding, it's the 2025 equivalent of chain smoking.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I wonder how many people struggle to let go of that previous version of them.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Talk to me about the brain science, what's going on with love.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Isn't it fascinating? I'm, I'm, Using the wrong terminology here, but I would use this sort of EP equivalent, which would be proximate reasons for behavior and ultimate reasons for behavior. But there's a behavioral science equivalent conditional conditioned stimuli. And what's the other one? I don't know. Anyway, the point being that
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
When you spoke about it earlier on with regards to turn the anxiety into fear, make it more concrete, see it for what it is, get to the end, and what will happen, and what will happen if that happens, and how likely is it that it's going to happen, as opposed to the proximate, which is, I feel this thing. I am worried, I am scared, I am whatever. It's kind of the same with the specialness. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Which is, uh, if I don't continue to release three podcasts a week, then the world's going to forget about me and people are not going to think I'm interesting. I'm going to be homeless under a bridge and you have a gluten intolerance. I'm going to lose my foot and you go, right. Okay. Well, let's just dig a little bit deeper. So why, why, why, why do you think the world needs to see?
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
What is it that you want from the one? to be liked by people. It's like, okay, do the people that like you, is that contingent on the amount of work that you put out each week? Is that contingent on the amount of shows that you do or the amount of, like, does your wife care about whether it's book 16 or book 17 or whatever? It's like, is it something else? And you're like, Yeah, actually.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
No, you're right. And it's just so interesting when you bring it into the light.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Why?
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
How do people, if they're not at Harvard Business School with a particularly one-track mind of where most of the fear probably comes from, how do people more easily investigate what theirs is?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Let's finish it there. Arthur Brooks, you are so great, dude. I already can't wait. I've got so much shit I want to speak to you about. I can't wait to see you again.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Austin, Texas, baby. Home of the podcast. That's where all the cool kids live. Well, it is as long as you're here. Where should people go? They want to check out all the stuff you've got going on.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Okay. I just want to get, I don't want to forget our train of thought here. So You'll have seen Adolescence maybe on Netflix. I haven't actually. Everybody's talking about it, but I haven't seen it yet. Yes, I had William Costello sat in that seat last week. He's the number one researcher of incels in the world.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Interestingly, he, as an academic at David Bussey's lab here at UT, Austin, had to repurpose his introduction of how he described himself. He says, I'm an incel researcher. He says, I'm a researcher of incels. Very interesting way that you formulate the sentence. And in that, one of the
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
claims one of the challenges that some of the darker areas of the sort of manosphere and black pill movement online have is that you basically can't fake attraction. And that there is, in their opinion, a certain class of men who do not reach a particular threshold of attraction that is going to cause them to be, as they would refer to it, genetic dead ends.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Now, I and many of my friends in the scientific world would believe that the bar that they claim that that's at
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
significantly higher than it actually is and we see all of the time people who are able to uh punch outside of their weight right um but you are suggesting that hey even the people who are there they're just raw academics they're just their noses in books all the time if they're going out to a party on an evening they're going to try and make themselves look nice because we have in the back of our minds this sense that sort of uh
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I'm so fired up for that. I've been thinking about me. I remember I read this Roy Baumeister.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
the advertising boarding upfront still does have an impact no matter how deep and meaningful and looking past the skin and the hair and the rest of it.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Uh, buddy of mine. Uh, essay article, a journal post from like,
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Trudeau is out. Talk to me.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I think a lot of people get stuck in that. messy middle period that sort of lonely chapter maybe they're doing something that's a little bit different to what their friends around them are maybe there's some pressure from family girlfriend everyone society yeah to do something that feels a little bit more safe
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
What would you say to someone who's sort of a little bit younger and has those dreams of breaking out from the mold but is kind of uncertain? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
What was the scene in LA like? Because you guys were there pretty much in sort of the golden era of D-Gen influencer partying.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And then you go to Orange County.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I saw him correct somebody's language for saying mankind. Shit like that.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Do you miss that LA period, that LA scene?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
We don't want to use that. We need to use people kind.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I always forget about how long it is.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
If you do LA to New York, it's what, five hours? Probably six, five and a half. Right, plus three.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah. But you're locking in a little bit more in Miami as well.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. You've probably heard me talk about Element before and that's because I am frankly dependent on it. And every single morning for the last three years, I've started my day the exact same way, which is with one of these and a cold glass of water.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
This orange flavor in a cold glass of water is like a beautiful, sweet, salty, orangey nectar that I can't wait to start every day with. And I genuinely feel the difference when I take it versus when I don't, which is why I'm not shutting up about it. Best of all, they have a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So you can buy it and try it for as long as you want.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
If you don't like it for any reason, they will 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. 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 modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
There's a bit of low-key resentment that maybe the audience or the wider world has for somebody that appears to have achieved so much fame so quickly. Yeah. Because they go, huh.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
If you get picked out of obscurity because you said a funny sentence on a street interview. Yeah. Everybody knows that if not for the chance of God, that could have been one of a hundred thousand other people.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, man. It is kind of like everywhere there's America and then every other English-speaking country is kind of coming second at the moment. The same with Britain, the same with Australia. Their stock went down an awful lot after COVID and sort of this overreach and lockdowns and stuff like that. No one has really had a fantastic four years when it comes to branding.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
You just say yes to the first person that pops up in your DMs, which is usually the one that's the most sharky.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
You've come close to a couple of catastrophes.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
So what's the overall lesson there? Is that move slowly? Sort of don't make rash decisions?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, I get the sense that, especially in the fast-moving world of internet content creation, whether it's brand deals, even if you're trying to build a business, there's always this sense that somebody else could be doing this. What if someone else is starting the same business at the same time as me? Oh my God, I must get it moving and so on and so forth. But
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
The risk of ruin of getting it wrong is 100%. I agree. And the risk of being second or third or fourth to market, the likelihood of somebody else having the exact same idea and executing it as well as you can if you take your time seems way slower. I agree with that.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
10 years they're not going to remember like oh they took a month off or whatever it is so from the business side what's the most revenue that you guys have generated in a day
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
But I think it's a good, I understand what you mean. And it's nice that you're like sufficiently humble that you don't want to flex the biggest number that you can. But on the flip side, what it teaches people is what you can drive in terms of just raw traffic, right? In order to take 30 mil, you need to be able to have- 350,000 people on the site, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it could be 52nd if Greenland goes first.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
So this is before John, your now business partner manager.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And you were able to still spin this up just all internally.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
What did that, what does the sort of structure of that stuff look like internally?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Because you needed something that was partner program because the partner program didn't exist.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I think there's something cool and probably another important lesson there to just linger on about focusing on one thing. So you need to learn how business works, what a good deal looks like, what a bad deal looks like, what a good release and build up scheduled, building the anticipation, all of that stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And if you try and do it with too many things at once, it's difficult to learn what the lesson is because you're so distributed, you're so spread across all of these different projects that you're not actually focused. You're not drilling in the learnings from this one thing. So for me, it was nightclubs.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
and for running 15 years of all of these different events and i would really really dial in what a good build-up sequence looked like and i would understand how to use anticipation to get people to really care about what the outcome was going to be and then i'd understand what the drop-off in terms of interest was and then how you can then restart that with more things and more things and more things and that now gets ported across when we did the launch for newtonic
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I did exactly the same thing. It might as well have been a club night. If you changed it from productivity drink to new club night Fridays at whatever club, it would have been the exact same process, the exact same thing that I'd learned. And I'm going to guess that it's the same thing that you learned from the merch that you then poured across onto Happy Dad that you then poured across.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Oh, we've got a new guest coming out.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Talk to me about the principles that you sort of think about when it comes to building up hype around either a drop, new video, new podcast episode, new happy dad collab. Like what are the main areas that you're looking at?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, I mean, there was this really interesting study that was done that I loved because I was starting to learn about psychology, but I was still in nightlife. And they got people to track their level of happiness throughout the entire day and night of going out on a night out. And you'd think, at what point would happiness be at its highest?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Maybe 12 midnight when you've got a good enough buzz on and you're with your friends and the music's amazing, but you're not too messy and so on and so forth. It was way before that. The time when people were happiest. The best part of the night's the pregame. Getting ready with your friends. Pregame's the best. So what does that tell you?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
It tells you that the absolute bullseye of human pleasure is things are about to be awesome. It's anticipation, right?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
it's not about the payoff it's about waiting for the payoff like the hottest part of sex is not the sex bit it's the bit as you're taking your clothes off before sex yeah that's the hottest part yeah because it's the anticipation of what's about to happen and i think that you know what you guys have landed on and certainly what i've landed on it's the same reason that we release clips from this podcast before we release the full episode so this will have a tuesday clip and a friday clip
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And then the episode goes on the Monday because it builds up that anticipation. And sometimes people say that it's cruel, but I think it's just effectively utilizing the human reward system.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Talk to me about the other side then. So if that's the most revenue that you've made in a day, what about the most money that you've spent in a day?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
What does that mean? What's what is Trump's himself?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
shit like that i'm not super into that i don't hate it that's a good i guess yeah memories is the best i was gonna say it's the fucking best is the lesson from that that as somebody who's come into young wealth you've tried i'm gonna guess buying expensive car you just got a new car uh new watches clothes but steve will do it he bought me my first car i showed out steve so i've actually this is actually the first car i've probably ever bought
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
But yeah, the overall lesson there is as you start to accumulate some spare wealth that you think on balance, spending it on experiences, especially experiences that you can share with your friends is the best way to do it. I love that. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
What are some of your favorite memories from the last few years? Maybe ones that haven't been captured on camera.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Well, all right. Include the ones that have been captured.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
A quick aside, if you're struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime, stay asleep throughout the night or not waking up feeling rested and revitalized in the morning, Momentous' Magnesium L-Threonate is one of my favorite products, which I use every single night before I go to bed.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Magnesium L-Threonate is uniquely able to cross the blood-brain barrier, boosting memory, focus, cognitive function, while also improving sleep and reducing stress. This is a huge part of my brain, body, and sleep stack from Momentous, which makes a massive impact on my cognition and my strength and my recovery.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And if you're still on the fence, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can try it before you go to bed every single night for 29 nights. And if you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. And they ship internationally.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Right now, you can get a 20% discount off everything 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. Modernwisdom. A checkout. Talk to me about what you've learned since being friends with Dana White.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
What about the way that you've observed him sort of operate from a business perspective, the way that he runs the UFC, the way that he sort of deals with his own interaction with press, with exposure, with scrutiny, with stuff like that?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
What have you learned since being around him, watching the way that he operates, watching his systems, his staff, his demeanor? Was there anything that you took away from spending time with him?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
It's wild to think that that's able to come across. I haven't met Dana, but from conversations that I've seen him have, from stories that I've heard behind the scenes, from stories that I've heard in public, it is absurd to have somebody that's kind of the head of an organization like that, who's the one that seems to have the most
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
credibility, this sort of unwavering commitment to his word, like even to a fault a lot of the time, even when he fucks up and he just decides to be as upfront as possible.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Well, I think what people are really desperate for is authenticity.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Like they're really, really hungry for authenticity. One of the problems is that if you realize that authenticity is something that people like and resonate with, you can try to sort of speed run it or growth hack it somehow, which is the exact opposite of authenticity. You can't inauthentically be authentic. Right. You know? Yeah. And I think people can just tell.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
They know when you're playing a game, when you're trying to manipulate them. And even if you don't know why, even if you can't say what it is, we've got this weird sixth sense that exists behind the back of our head somewhere. And you go... I don't know, man. There's something up here. I just don't get... Trudeau, perfect example of this with Trudeau.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Tell me what it is about that guy that makes you not trust him. Maybe you can point to specific statements he's made and all the rest of it.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Largely, it's just the fact that he's got this...
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And then you come back with the W. You come back with the dub. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting energy.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I know exactly what you mean by it. Yeah. It's a, it's a really interesting energy to think about how.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Well, dude, proving people wrong, I think it's a fucking potent fuel. Yeah, it's an incredibly potent fuel. And it's one that you can use very, very effectively, especially, you know, I've heard Dana talk about this a couple of times, especially with regards to Trump, you know, that he is happy to burn everything down.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Dude, this is it. This is the biggest thing that's happening.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I mean, he said there's a story that he talks about to do with Rogan, I think, where somebody didn't want Rogan to be a part of some something moving forward or he'd been maybe it was one of the scandals.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah. The CNN thing or whatever it might be. And Dana was prepared to burn everything.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And you think that's in some ways, that's really not good business acumen, but what you're up, you're, you're working off of such unbelievable loyalty. that the business gets ripped along for the ride. And what does it tell people? What's the subtext that it tells people about the business? This is a business that is going to do what it says. And you can have complete and utter faith in it.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And especially, you know, the world of fight sports, we've seen it how many times over the last... Couple of months, Tyson and Jake Paul and the number of criticisms. Oh, it's a thrown fight. It's the three fight clause, et cetera. Usyk, Fury, rematch clauses. They're not actually fully throwing punches, all of this sort of stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And I think that it's really important to have for something like the UFC where, You can trust it. Even the fucking sniff that this wasn't legitimate. The entire organization. I'm sure there has to have been some fights that have been a little manipulated here or there because the UFC is done.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
But you've got to have the guy...
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah. Can we talk about the Bob situation?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
That full arc thing. So give us the, give us the 30,000 foot view of Bob Manor.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
He started the pod.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And everything went nuclear.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
One of the things that we were talking about in the gym earlier on is keeping your private life private. And the... You can run a business and have people talk about the business, but having people talk about how you run your business, having people talk about how you run your podcast, I think not good. People are talking about the wrong things.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
It's interesting. I've heard a lot of criticism around a sort of shallow, fragile ego thing, not necessarily wanting to hear other people that tell him no or that say things that he doesn't fully understand. But on the flip side, I've also heard a lot of that, that he's always asking servers in restaurants and the golf caddy for what their opinion is on stuff. So you have this odd...
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
degree of operational exposure was that... For what? When you and Bob are having this sort of fallout and then there's all of this kind of exposure of internal backbiting-y type stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
How much do you lie at the feet of Trudeau? What do you mean? How much is he directly responsible for what's happened?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
It's my least, it's my least favorite.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I just, uh, I dunno, there is, we're really kind of in the era of criticism.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
They said this thing, oh my god, this singer with that girl and she's released these texts and so on and so forth. Yep. I don't know, man.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
It's all about beef. It's just that energy.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Well, the biggest thing that you can get on YouTube is timeliness. So we realized this last year. I'd known that it was a big deal for a while, that you're sort of basically being a news-ish channel, but as mainstream news is...
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
declining people are looking to youtube for their news so much more and search volume is such an important driver so trump gets shot and then 36 hours later i bring tim kennedy on whatever it is 72 hours later i bring mike baker on so i've got one green beret one ex-cia guy who's still involved in intelligence stuff
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And it was nice or whatever that people are interested and that I have people that have got a genuine expertise and we can talk about this sort of stuff. But it was almost in some ways, a little bit disheartening how much those episodes blow up because you think, Oh, there's no reason. The episodes were great, but they didn't need to be great. It was just something that was timely.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And what's the most timely thing that you can do be start drama and be involved in the drama and just keep talking about it back and forth. And, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
There's some really interesting potential evidence about why the human brain grew to be as big as it did, which is that it wasn't so we could use tools correctly or so that we could remember the location of plants, but because when you have a 150-person tribe broken down into 30-person pods or whatever...
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
For me to be able to remember Kyle and Kyle's relationship with Dean and the fact that Kyle and Dean used to be friends, but they're not anymore. And John has actually come in and John is now Kyle's best friend. So Dean's kind of feeling about that. When you start to scale that up is really computationally difficult, which is why you need a lot of ability.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
But it also means that that is so important and salient to you. Like if you, I don't think humans are particularly good at working out. This is some dramatic social information.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
that I need to pay attention to versus some dramatic social information that has absolutely nothing to do with me it's just drama therefore I must be able to pay attention and therefore it's going to um pull me in it's going to suck me in and um
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
If you were to look back, I think, across your week's watch time history, your pie chart of that, I would doubt if anybody looks at the however many percent, 30%, 50% more that they look at drama farming stuff and go, time well spent. Who's saying that? No one's saying that.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
No one looks at it and goes, really glad that I watched that Brianna chicken fry takedown summary video again for the third time that I've seen from two other different channels beforehand.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Of course, we all watched it. You can't not watch it. It's like the black hole of content.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
A quick aside. Travelling should be about the journey, not... Send it. The chaos... All manner of nightmares have occurred. Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing, which is why I'm a massive fan of Nomadic. Their travel pack is the biggest game changer that I've ever played with. And it makes the entire traveling process significantly more enjoyable.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
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 will last you literally a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee. So this is the final backpack that you ever need to buy.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Plus, you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy your new bag, try it for a month, fill it with your possessions. And if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. And they ship internationally.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Right now, you can get a 20% discount off everything from Nomadic and see all the products I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com. slash Modern Worcester. I got him. Talking about YouTube and stuff, is it weird having Steve, I mean, we bumped into Steve this morning in the gym.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Is it, how odd has it been playing that balancing game now?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Or our channel will be deleted. The editors on the back end must permanently have this Steve filter.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
You were told specifically that he can't be in videos.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
It's like somebody being unpersoned.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Well, let's talk about Zuckerberg, Chad transformation.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I'm conflicted about this Zuck thing because part of me thinks moving in the right direction, nice to see a return to freedom of speech, et cetera. But another part of me thinks this is just blowing with the wind. You were cucked when the cucks were in office and you're bigoted now the bigots are in office, like judgmentally. Only half joking. And I don't know. I get it.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I get that people like the idea of it moving in the direction that they want. But it does seem like kind of a pretty thinly veiled now that the free speech people are in power will just do whatever they think is cool. Does no one see that? I see it.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
To go further down that road.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
That transformation is crazy of his visually, ideologically, in terms of the way that he presents. Suck? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, well, I tell you what's weird when you're thinking about the ecosystem of social media, that you don't have an equivalent front and center person on YouTube. You know, you don't have, I mean, is it still that Susanna lady? Maybe Steve will do it soon. Wow, I mean, that would be an absolute U-turn. But yeah, look, I... Yeah, she's gone.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I like the fact that Facebook... Even Twitch has someone now too, right?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I like the fact that Facebook, and that obviously means downstream from that, WhatsApp and Instagram. Instagram's a big, I'm still shadow banned. I've been shadow banned since the week before the election on Instagram for sharing. You remember Kamala Harris had the phone up and then showed it and it was her camera?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I'm still, since then, whatever it is, down-regulated in feed, all of the little yellow-orange circles on the back end. I've got tons of orange circles that I can't get rid of because it's a story, so I can't delete the thing. And it's because of the fact-checkers.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
So the exact thing that they just brought up is the reason that I've been... I'm thinking that I am glad about, and overall it is a good thing, but I'm just a little, I don't know, skeptical about the... Purity of the motivations for why... There's no purity.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
It's funny that the two topics that they highlighted as well were gender and immigration. Probably the two most, at least from a campaign perspective, the two most aligned talking points when it came to what the candidates were driving home from ads, right? There was that ads that the Trump team, Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
One of the most successful political ads in the recent history. I think a third of their budget was spent on that one ad, some absurd amount of the budget. And then immigration was the flag that was planted in the ground by the Republican side as this is the thing that we're pushing back against. I think interesting that those are the two flashpoints that you're enabling now on Meta.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Well, when they talked about these are the sort of topics, there were two topics that they specifically called out as being ones that would be discussion would not be censored around as much. And it was gender and immigration. They also happened to be the two biggest talking points when it came to the campaign trail as well.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, it was part of the big announcement. A couple of the guys, some representative went on Fox and was talking about it, but I think it's actually written.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I'm interested in what keeps driving you. You've mentioned- Proving people wrong is a part of it. But that only takes you so far. I think doing something for a decade, however many hundreds of uploads, thousands of uploads, including all of the shorts and all of the work and sourcing and creating, spinning something up internally, I don't think people realize just how much work that is.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
What is it that keeps you motivated and keeps driving you forward after doing this for so long?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
It is bizarre, the crossing over of independent media with mainstream political discourse.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Happy dad in one hand, child in another.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
What are you more passionate about at the moment?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
So you can trust that the data and insights you receive are as sound as they are actionable. Usually getting these lab tests would cost thousands, but with function, it is only $500. 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.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's a strange one, I suppose, that you made a name for yourself and still now sort of continue to as being the fun older brother, or I guess a younger brother and then now older brother for most of your audience.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
But because you're the front man and the leader and one that's under a lot of scrutiny and one that has to make a lot of the decisions and stuff like that,
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
uh there's a sense of obligation as well so balancing i want to have fun with i want to be the fun uncle fun fun older brother type thing with the i also need to be the responsible leader figurehead thing that's something i feel it never used to be like that too much but now i find myself doing that more than ever but you're the boss i know but i never like it gets fucking annoying sometimes too to be the buzzkill
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah. There's a few, um, I think Elon's probably a pretty good example of this, but I read, uh, sci-fi and novels and stuff like that. And, and in, in those books, a lot of the time, uh, the person that's the figurehead, that's usually the protagonist in the, in the book or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
You get to observe inside of their own mind the price that they need to pay in order to be a leader, the fact that they need to do things or say things or make sacrifices. Ernest Shackleton, the guy who attempted an Antarctic crossing in the sort of 1910s, he had so many self-doubts that he wrote in his diary.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
He had so much concern and didn't know if people were going to survive, didn't know if they were going to be able to make it through multiple Antarctic winters. And you sort of see him writing these things down in his diary and then stepping out there to put on this brave face that inspires everybody around him. And it's kind of interesting the
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
the unique cost that a leader has to pay, uh, in order to keep driving something forward. And there are sort of certain very unique challenges that only maybe within, even within an organization, maybe only two people or one person or a couple of, you know, very, very small group of people actually have to deal with. And everybody else kind of gets to come along for the ride.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Everybody else gets to be coached along. And, um, Main character energy and sort of assuming that you're the most important person in the story is kind of how everybody sees their life, right? Everybody sees their world as the main character. But if you actually look at anybody else's world, at best, you're a side character. At best, you're like some ancillary dude that came in partway through.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
But if you really want to be that main character, if you like the idea of being the leader, if you like the idea of being a figurehead, the person that's driving this thing forward, there will be prices that you need to pay. Very, very particular, unique, lonely prices. But you can put a brave face on it or you can grin about it as much as you want. But ultimately, there is a lot of shit to eat.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And you are going to have to eat it.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
What's the, uh, what's the toughest part of your job?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, it's odd. I think I take for granted a lot of stuff that to me seems like a normal assumption. Obviously, this reaches a lot of people. Obviously, 18 to 35-year-old guys are spending more time on YouTube than they are on CNN or MSNBC. Who wouldn't have thought that? And the fact that there's people...
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
but do you lose motivation or do you get have low points it seems like you you have this sort of quite upbeat mentality a lot of the time not only that that's your disposition but also that you need to be that for everybody else they're going to look to you yeah well kyle's got to bring the vibe to this thing yeah um but i think no i definitely i think i definitely lose i think i lose motivation sometimes i mean i think everyone goes through points where
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
to whom that is a revelation, really made me realize just how split off and echo chambered, not only the messages that you get within social media, but even medias themselves now.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I've been spending more time around bands and I think, uh, a lot of what is happening in new media is reinventing what already happened in old media. So there's ad breaks, right? And sometimes there's a little transition sounds between ads and there's regular guests that come up and sometimes there's segments. And so it's like all of this existed in radio, all of this existed in TV.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
But when I was thinking about how people that travel a lot, what is an existing artistic endeavor or project that has some degree of travel in it, some degree of sort of difficult sleep and wake schedule. Maybe there's some partying, there's an obligation for performance, all of this stuff. Like, well, comedians and bands are two good examples of this.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
So I've been looking quite closely at how bands sort of maintain their motivation. And one of the fascinating things around that is you can have somebody who is an amazing musician who would perform phenomenally on stage that the audience might love, but they're a shit hang and, or vice versa. There's someone that's an amazing hang.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
That's great for the morale behind the scenes, but can't deliver what they need to do when it comes to this. And basically my point being that even with comedians, A lot of them will have some sort of tour manager or a warm-up act that goes with them. And yeah, sure, the TM's got a job to do, checking into the hotel, dealing with delays, etc. The warm-up act's got a job to do.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
They need to make sure that the crowd is nice and ready for you to come on stage and they'll give you a hand. But what are they really there for? They're there for morale. They're there to keep your vibe good. And yeah, I think that's something that I...
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
being the solopreneur type dgen thing working away in his room in solitude for a long time i think that's a lesson that i kind of overlooked that i've done this on my own for you know seven years now i don't need anyone the fuck it i'll just keep doing this and go yeah you're gonna get yourself to the stage where you need to lean on other people because you're just gonna your tank's gonna be empty and um
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, that's something, especially observing you guys and seeing how important that group dynamic is. And everybody's here. It's your house.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Right? It's our house. Yeah. But everybody's in here. Everybody's there for the hang. It's unorthodox. Something blows up. You know, someone's coming for you. Someone's criticizing you. They're there to help support you. Something goes well. They're there to celebrate it with you. And we glorify the sort of Sigma male Lone Ranger, I'm going to do it on my own thing.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I don't think that that's the best way to do it to enjoy the good times. And I don't think it's the best way to do it to weather the bad times either.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, it's funny, the need for Slack and calls and check-ins and updates and where are we at, project management.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, the impact.
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#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah. It's a really interesting challenge. And it's part of the thing that people don't see where behind the scenes people The energy that you bring to something, this is something that Rogan's got so right. It's so seamless. Going and working, he has just removed all of the friction.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
There is zero friction involved in his entire process and the team that he's got around him and the guys that he likes hanging with are just fire. He's got his little squad and you turn up at the studio and he doesn't need to think at all about anything that's going on. He gets to turn up and do his thing and then he goes away and nothing saps that energy from him. And I think that
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
yeah observing you guys i've learned a lot from sort of seeing how you've held that energy together and i think it's uh it's really impressive and obviously as well the proof's in the pudding you've kept going for 10 years so it's been a while evidently works yeah yeah it's been a long ass journey for sure what would you like to do next like what's from a content perspective from a business perspective um i want to this year i'm pretty fucking motivated right now me too i think uh
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Do you think about, have you got to the stage where there's this sense of responsibility or obligation with sort of what you're doing, what you're saying? We
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Who gets to go with you? Because you must have a limited number of tickets.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
He's in charge of suits?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
How do you come to think about what makes a good NELC video? Or what makes a good piece of content in general?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
So what's the watch time on a 40 minute vlog for you guys?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Lots of completion though.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
yeah there's um i wish that there was a way that we could see more sentiment on youtube than just click through and watch time and i guess likes kind of contribute a little bit to that and comments kind of contribute but getting a lot of likes is nice too it is good it doesn't do shit i tell the audience but it just it fires the whole team up yeah to just see like a lot of like yeah this isn't going to make it go any further but thank you it makes everybody in the office um
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, I wish there was this idea that Twitter had X, I guess, about golden hearts or super likes, I think they were called. And what they had was you maybe got three per week or one per week. And it meant that because there was a limited number that you had to use, you had to be really selective about what you gave it to. But that meant it was a really big deal.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
You know, like on Reddit, you can kind of gift people stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
No, because if you watch three videos in a row from the same creator, whether you've subscribed or not, you're now going to be delivered that.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I wonder if they'll follow suit. I mean, we've certainly seen, you know, the person that broke through was Elon with them, what he changed with regards to Twitter and to X. And now with matter as well, I wonder if that's going to put some pressure on, on YouTube. And, um, that would be great to sort of, I think X X has been putting pressure on YouTube because they've got the video uploads.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, well, they rolled back the language policy thing that they brought in about a year or 18 months ago or so. It was within the first two minutes of a video. Am I going through and thinking, oh, God, someone said shit within this time. We've got to get rid of that. Found out that the C word is just an instant demonetization.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
No matter how deep it can be, an hour and a half into a three-hour long video, it's like you're getting popped. But how much are you tracking this world of kick now? and Twitch and Rumble and whatever the other ones are, streaming stuff. Because I kind of see... It's huge, right?
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Who is it that's orchestrating the stuff behind the scenes? Like you say, hey, it would be great if we went to go and see an uncontacted Amazonian tribe. Yeah. But flights need booking and licenses to get filming rights and the kit needs organizing.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Because you've got the systems in place.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Dude, I appreciate the fuck out of you. Yeah. It's awesome. It really is. It's cool to see what you're doing. I love seeing someone that's passionate about what they do and is able to scale it and get out of their own way and just hand stuff off. And yeah, I'm excited to see what 25 has in store for both of us. Let's crush it this year. Appreciate you, man. Appreciate you, brother. Let's go.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
I mean, you set such low expectations.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, that's funny. I remember Rogan saying something along the lines of, everybody should always do a comedy set. Everyone should do a comedy set once so that you can go, hey, what do I know? I'm just a comedian.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
And you get the comedian ejector seat, get out of jail free card. Yeah. And that's the same with you guys.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Yeah, because everybody's waiting to find out that the holier-than-thou squeaky clean image is actually broken in some way. I mean, the reverse of it being like, you know, Kyle actually went to church on Sunday. That's not a scandal.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
But the guy that was going to church on Sunday ripping a gator tail the night before is. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
is uk and canadian like i don't know i guess i guess it's just scumbag working class party people right uh and it's a universal language i imagine it's pretty niche oh yeah i suppose so yeah uh anyway it's i imagine that the aussies are exactly the same everyone's got their own their own slang there's only so many different ways you can talk about sniffing cocaine yeah or girls exactly but yeah yeah um
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Talk to me about that sort of trip out to LA and sort of what you learned about LA scene. You've done a few, you did the like LA full D gen mode, then the orange County thing. Now the Miami thing. What have you learned? Like take me through the different eras of stages of scenes. Yeah, exactly. Fuck.
Modern Wisdom
#892 - Kyle Forgeard - The Rise Of NELK, Donald Trump & Global Chaos
Which one felt like real life?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Dude, how high and how hard did CrossFit drop the ball over the last few years?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
How did you learn to get past your self-doubt? Have you got past your self-doubt? How much does it still creep in?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And sometimes it can be all shiny, shiny and perfect out front. And inside is just a total mess. It's just a dumpster fire. And it feels like that might be the case.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing, which is why I am such a huge fan of Nomadic. This backpack has genuinely made the process of traveling so much 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 the Marie Kondo backpack. of luggage.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Everything's got its place. And if you're on the fence, their products will last you literally a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee. So this is the final backpack that you'll ever need to buy. Plus, you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy your new bag, try it for a month, and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 20% discount and see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash Modern wisdom. It's an interesting one. So I resonate with a lot of the points you made, certainly the spending much time on your own.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
The uncertainty, the self-doubt, there's something I want to do, but I don't know if I can do it. Am I the person to do it? I think it should be here. I think this is something that's important, but is it my role? Do I have the capacity to bring this thing into existence? I certainly feel that.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And I think this is, regardless of how many brothers or sisters you had, I think this is a pretty perennial problem. People who are growth-minded and have high standards, insecure overachievers, they position an ideal and then they compare themselves to the ideal and they find themselves falling short by design because that's what an ideal is.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Or you set big goals or you have a dream or you have whatever, whatever it is that you want to do. And it also sort of programmed into just the typical cadence of how this stuff works is you have something you're chasing toward and you're uncertain about whether or not you're going to get there right up until basically the moment you get there.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And then the second you get there, you move the goalposts again. So there's no point at which you feel like you've arrived. So you very rarely actually sit in accomplishment and gratitude. So if you're permanently doing this iterative sort of, I get close and I move away and I get close and I move away and I get close and I move away. If you're permanently doing that,
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
at what point are you not going to feel like you're lacking? You're permanently in lack because you continue to push it further away, continue to push it. I think all of this sort of combined together creates this soup that's probably pretty fertile to grow self-doubt out of. But at least for me, I realized this last year, I did this live show in London.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It was kind of a formative, a little bit of a formative moment. It was three and a half thousand people at this big theater. And I was like, holy fuck, like I'm on stage in front of three and a half thousand people. This is insane. And someone asked me, we do these, people can come and watch the soundcheck that are in the first few rows. And someone asked me a question and I said sort of,
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Did you think, is this part of the plan? Did you think you were going to get here? Because I'm the poster child for imposter syndrome in a lot of ways. Chronic self-doubt, a lot of uncertainty.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But I think kind of in the same way that you said, which is if you believe that this thing is supposed to exist in the world, and if you really like the thing, and you kind of, you almost outsource your own self-doubt to, well, this has got rocket fuel behind it. And I'm just going to keep seeing if that thing can come. And I can't tell anybody else to bring it into existence.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So I might as well have a crack at it myself. And if you're sufficiently stubborn, kind of before you know it, you don't fake it until you make it. You sort of make it until you believe it. And then you go... oh, this is a thing. This is a company. Like there's a tracker and it actually tells people that, all right, this is a podcast. Oh my God, I'm on stage in front of all of these people.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Or, you know, this is, I've managed to get the degree or I managed to move out of the town that I hated. Or I managed to find a partner. I managed to build a fat, whatever it is that you thought, like this thing is supposed to exist. I don't know if I'm a person that can do it, but I'm just going to keep sort of grinding away until it happens.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And then when you actually turn around and look, you go, oh, I guess this is what arriving is.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Turning people that whatever consume your product or are a user into an evangelist for it. I mean, it, everybody's new fitness pursuit is their most exciting thing. Every vegan wants to tell you about veganism and every CrossFitter wanted to tell you about CrossFit and every High Rocks athlete wanted to tell you about High Rocks.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It's very difficult to have an orderly company and a chaotic founder.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I hear the same thing from the people that I work with, yeah. Maybe a little bit of only child syndrome showing through that.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, from both of us. My business partners would agree. I really resonate with, and this is something, you know, No matter what your pursuit is, if you're scrabbling a little bit for meaning in life, which almost everybody who's a bit sensitive and introspective is when they're young, because who the fuck are you? Like, how many people arrive at 20 or 23 and are like, yeah, I know who I am.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I've got a good, strong sense of self. You know, things don't sway me. Shut up, dude. Of course stuff does. The weather's bad and you feel bad about yourself because you just haven't had enough time to get those sort of stabilizers down. And I ran nightclubs for all this time and exactly the same. The weird thing about running events, it's kind of like being a baseball player.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It's iterative, right? You have, especially for us, we had this big Saturday and that was our big event from the age of 22 until... It was the Saturday that was our big moneymaker. It's the big game, so to speak. Yeah, that was the big one. And if the event had been successful, I was worthy. I was good. I was validated. And if it was bad, then that was a reflection on me.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But then I managed to get it to this much more pernicious place, which was... I dissociated working hard and pain and difficulty with good outcomes. Because typically, when you worked a little bit harder, there was some pain that came along with it. But when you worked harder, the outcomes were better. But my brain, you're already grinning, my brain had shortcutted the link.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And then now every run club person is trying to get you to go to their run club on a Saturday morning and do a 5K. But yeah, the level of adoption that CrossFit had and the pace of change. And I think I get the sense that the only reason we're seeing High Rocks instead of hybrid training
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And it ended up being if we had an event that went well, but I hadn't suffered, that I didn't feel good. And I started to make a direct link between Chris suffered, Chris is good and worthy. So the event had to go well first, but I also had to have suffered. So if it went well and I hadn't suffered, that wasn't good. If it went badly, whether I'd suffered or not, that didn't matter.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So the only key that unlocked my self-worth for like a good bit of time was... success objectively and pain subjectively. And if I'd done that, then hooray, maybe that's okay. So it's a really interesting twist, I guess, on the Puritan work ethic.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It's like a capitalist Puritan work ethic where you know that you should be grinding and you are just so driven by dopamine and chaos and caffeine and in the nightlife industry, other substances too, that you end up in a place where
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
you signal off of how hard this thing was and then you get into your 30s and you go hey i want to have a family or i want to chill out i want to be able to go to bed on a night time and my thoughts be a good quality you go oh you need to let go of the entire pathway catalyst fuel that you were using previously good luck trying to unwind that and that's been a task of basically best part of a decade now for me to try and unwind that that little linkage
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
How have you learned to navigate those two things, given that there's still things you want to achieve and you still do want to be driven, but you don't want to look back on a series of miserable successes as a career?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
come through is because of the hole that has been left by sort of the exiting of of crossfit there's some new things it's a bit it's lower impact maybe it's a little bit more accessible to go and do a high rocks event than it would have been to have tried to go to sectionals or do a local crossfit comp like i'd rather do burpee broad jumps than try and do a snatch or a handstand walk but uh yeah i don't think i think high rocks is ascendancy can be laid at the feet of what crossfit dropped i
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
operating a fast-growing business when personally you've gone through something like that i think a lot of people have to show up to whatever their job is whether they're the founder of a big company or they've just got a normal position or they've got to be there for the kids or they've got to be there for their partner or whatever it is uh when they're kind of going through it how did you come to i'm sure that you've reflected on this how do you come to split brain yourself into actually being a functional human
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, it's the classic male denial of any emotional issue.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I'm just going to lean into knowing myself to where I can keep moving. This is what they would have wanted in any case from me. Yeah. You know, logically, emotionally, psychologically, however you want to try and rationalize. Yeah. I just, this kind of sucks and I don't want to feel it.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Interesting that doing a eulogy is in itself a form of therapeutic release in some ways.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
The most hardcore type of public journal entry that you're ever going to do.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. I think just going back to the two points that you raised earlier on, sort of working out what you want and then working out how to get it, I would hazard a guess that most people get stuck Think they get stuck in problem two, but are actually stuck in problem one?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
How did you investigate what it was that you wanted? What's some advice that you have for how people can better define that?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, I did a lot of therapy last year. And one of the best things that my therapist reminded me to do was pay attention to fleeting thoughts.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Specifically, it was when I was on the cushion, but also throughout the rest of life. And fleeting thoughts are quiet. You know, they sort of appear and they come and go and quite easily ignore them. And if you have some distraction in your pocket, the volume that you need the rest of the world at to be able to hear fleeting thoughts is so low.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And the volume that kind of comes out of your phone proportionally or mentally, whatever, cognitively is so high, it's so loud, that it just, you're right, it doesn't have any room, doesn't have any space to appear. And yeah, the ability to pay attention to fleeting thoughts and to think, huh, But then you need to be careful, right? Because the mind's slippery.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And sometimes it'll say stuff to you. You go, yeah, that's bullshit. That's bullshit. So that's a fleeting thought that's bullshit. Sometimes they are. But sometimes it's a, I don't know what it is. I don't know where it comes from. I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And what about getting what you want? Let's say that somebody's managed to sit. They've developed the ability to pay attention to fleeting thoughts. They're actually working in that way. Where have you noticed with the people that are around you, your team, yourself, what are the pitfalls that people find when it comes to actually getting what they want, assuming that they've managed to define it?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
You don't just go in and have a gentle CrossFit session.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Most people aren't that bothered by rejection. I think most people are bothered by the fear of rejection. The idea of failure or rejection hurts so much more, I think, than actually being rejected.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, you can go and plod along in a 5K, but you can't do that in a CrossFit class. Yeah. Yeah. What are you seeing from a fitness industry perspective at the moment? What is sort of the broad trends that you've been able to track over however long you've been watching everything?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
We outsource to our family or our friends, what is it that I should want? Yeah. And then when it comes to trying to go and get it, we don't go and ask for it because that insulates us from failure.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about framing it that way, but I think it's, I certainly think it's correct. I mean, cynicism, I think a lot of the cynicism that we see in the modern world is people assuring failure privately so they don't need to face the risk of failure publicly. Uh, if I don't, basically, if I don't try, then I can't fail. And, yeah, that's true. Uh,
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
there's always sort of one foot a lot of the time when people commit not going 100 in to a relationship it's like you know if i don't give everything to this if i don't fully open myself up if i sort of you know keep my eye wandering a little bit more if i convince myself that this person isn't quite my person or whatever it's a good point then if this doesn't go well then
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
You know, like it's not a comment on me because I wasn't in it. I wasn't fully in it. It's like most of me or a bit of me, but the bit of me that I care about gets saved over here.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Oh, did you get rejected?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
modern wisdom i'm outsourcing my sort of wisdom to these people around me that are supposed to be people who are in the know i'm supposed to have some degree of expertise or you know i went to them so they're not total idiots totally they are or maybe they just don't see it or maybe yeah i i think i think one reflection is that
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. So I remember, again, to use my equivalent, the world of nightlife, I would have been 19 or 20. So I would have been in my second or third year of university. We would sit down with these grizzled old leisure company owners who've got portfolios of many nightclubs and they've been in the industry since the 90s or the 80s.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Some of them, and me and my business partner are there, it's 2008 or 2009, and we're saying, well, look, you have a fantastic venue and the way that you stock and staff the bar is great and your contacts with breweries are fantastic. You know, your service, your ingress and egress are fantastic. Doors team, solid, needs a little bit of work.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Sometimes they get a bit heavy handed with the, but you know, all in all, we think it's a really, really good place and DJ booth's in good position. We can move people around quickly. You don't know anybody that wants to party. What the fuck are you doing with this empty venue? And we needed to say that to someone that was going, you're one third of my age. I don't need you.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And I always remember thinking, you can't see perspective in problems while you're in them, right? It's only in retrospect that you're able to go, oh, that's the lesson that I was, you don't learn the lesson while it's happening. It's one of the sort of ruthless things about people saying, well, you know, it's either a blessing or a lesson. You go, yeah, but the lesson comes down the line.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So it's kind of like either a blessing or a curse that has delayed onset to become a lesson in future. And, uh, Yeah, I'd sit with these guys, these grizzled old northern club promoter gateway keepers between us and the venue. It's like, look, I don't own a venue. You're right. I don't own a nightclub. I don't want to tie up
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
half a million or a million or five million pounds of capital in bricks and mortar and stock and staff and bars and licenses and stuff like that uh so i don't have i have lots of people that want to go and party and i don't have anywhere to put them but you have a big fucking building and it's really expensive and you don't know anyone that wants to go and drink that and that was a
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
to just have someone who was so much younger, you know, if you're a 60 year old leisure company owner and you've got a 20 year old sat in front of you going, you need me. It's like, go fuck yourself. I don't need you. Go. So, and I always felt indignant. I felt very indignant about the fact that I knew that what I was saying was right. And I had belief in the product.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Maybe even if I didn't have belief in myself, I had belief in what we could achieve. I knew what our track record was like. And yeah, maybe the same with you. You,
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
and this is kind of, I guess, an insight for anyone who is performing or shooting for goals that are kind of beyond their age a little bit, that we talk about ageism as discriminating against Joe Biden being old and Nancy Pelosi and stuff like that. But ageism happens in reverse in the world of business too. There is a, you know, if you're... Too young, yeah. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
If you're 38, no one's really got a problem with you doing anything. It's like you'll slap out until you probably get to like top, top level VC shit where you maybe need to be a little bit older or you start getting into government stuff. But like really, if you're mid to late 30s to probably what, 60s, everyone's just like, oh, he's just in the mix, right? He's in the mixer. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But before that, there's just this sense of, yeah, all right, that's nice, but you really... Skepticism, like maybe undue skepticism that people have around this. I remember being so pissed off by it. Didn't want to be treated like a kid. Uh... Because you know what you can achieve, but sometimes people can't quite see past what's in front of them, the age of what's in front of them.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And if you're trying to build an orthogonal, wearable company with tech that as yet doesn't exist, there's going to be some hurdles for you to get over that.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, it was fine. Yeah. Well, that's a special type of pain, right? To look back in retrospect and realize that this thing that you felt really aggrieved by was actually maybe justified a little bit.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And you don't know until you get there. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. I think we... because of the ability of people to use leverage, we maybe over-index, over-glorify the solo lone wolf, crazy genius entrepreneur. And obviously you end up with a ton of survivorship bias because you don't hear about all of the people that tried their crazy new idea.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And yeah, you remortgaged your mom and dad's house and
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
didn't work yeah that's that those aren't newsworthy stories what's your take on on on failure because i feel like failure has gotten very romanticized i fucking hate failing yeah i hate failing so much and uh i don't have a particularly good relationship with the idea of it uh i failed very few times across my entire professional career which suggests that i'm moving too slowly
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And I would tell somebody else, if they're like, hey, man, I basically never failed at anything I've tried professionally. Go, that's just an indication that you're playing within the bounds. Your safety tolerance and comfort is too much. You need to push further. Yes, exactly. Because you're waiting until you've got basically 100% confidence in whatever it is that you're going to do.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And is this based on the number of activities tracked?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
The confidence interval has collapsed so much that there's no chance it's not going to work. Essentially, no chance it's not going to work. which means that you could iterate more quickly, maybe break a few things, but move significantly faster. That's me. I knew I wanted to move to America three or four years before I actually finally made it.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I probably should have left the world of nightlife at least a couple of years before that. No, we're talking not huge amounts of time. But when you're 28, three years is fucking 10% of your life. It's, you know, 30% of your adult life. So it's... The failure porn thing, I get where it comes from.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And it comes from a place of wanting to reassure people that if stuff doesn't go badly, if stuff doesn't go well, if it does go badly, you'll be okay. I understand. I think that's a noble place to put it in.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So you guys are kind of like a fitness trend aggregator now.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That's such a good point. That if... if people were to learn more from failures than they were from successes, they still don't know what they're looking for. You don't actually know what it is you're looking for. You just have a series of things you know you're not looking for.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And I agree with what you said earlier on, which is that avoiding pitfalls can sometimes be more useful than expediting success. If you learn a really, really important lesson about not... reducing down your fucking cash flow to the point where one bad week kicks you out the bottom of your business like yeah that's a that's a lesson you're only ever gonna hopefully only ever gonna learn once
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But that still doesn't actually tell you the lesson that you're trying to get toward. It just tells you some of the ones that you're trying to get away from. And I wonder whether this is why we see consistent winners in the world of startups and in the world of business. And in some ways, maybe in the world of life too. You end up with, you know, the Matthew Principle.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
to those who have everything more will be given, to those who have nothing more will be taken, in the Bible. And it's true in everything. It's true in compounding and wealth. It's true in astrophysics, in the size of stars and black holes. You know, almost all of the gains, almost all of the mass accrues to a very small number. It's the same in rivers, in geology. It's the same in business, right?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Like being number one is 10 times better than being number two, which is 10 times better than being number three. And being number 100 is basically, unless the market's insanely huge, but it's like dead. So yeah, I think... understanding what is it that I'm actually trying to get toward. A perfect example of this. I've been through 15 failed relationships so far. I really know what I don't want.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It's like, great. What about what you do want? What do you want? Yeah, because it is important to know what the red flags are. But the only reason for avoiding red flags, whether it's in business or in your personal life, the only reason for avoiding red flags is to expedite you getting green flags. Like don't make the gain be avoiding red flags.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But it also dampens down the pain of having to deal with the failure.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Right? You're like, oh, fuck. I had to eat shit there. But I learned a lesson.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
At least I learned a lesson.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
yes the same my my friend passed and that sucked and and i had to do this eulogy and that also sucked and it was in front of loads of people and that made it even harder and i was struggling and that made it but i learned a lot about myself and i got to expand my you know there's ways that we try and alchemize even the most difficult situations to to become that yeah that's well said the um
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But the line is so tight, right? I mean, I guess another 5% of cash flow, another 10% of cash flow, maybe even less.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And you'd have eaten shit and that would have been the takeaway. This is such a good point. And retrospectively trying to take lessons from someone who had a close to a victory that was at least in part dependent on something like timing, on something like luck, on something like first mover or early mover advantage. uh, on the stars aligning.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I mean, of the four traits that you said earlier on, luck was one of them, which you can largely with consistency, uh, and like a high work rate can, you can almost create your own luck in many ways. But the, External circumstances are largely out of your control. You can just sort of be in the best position possible. But it ends up with people post hoc rationalizing loads of shit.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And you go, I don't know if this is an evergreen lesson or if this is just a quirk of the specific time and space that you were in when this thing happened. I don't know what to make of this. And everybody only experiences life the way that they experienced it. They don't get to go back and see the other ways that only a hair's width left or right could have happened, would have been different.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So how universal are the lessons that you took away from this? If it was so close to not being the thing that happened, how can you say that the lesson that you took away from that was a universal rule? Because it was almost not. It was almost not by design. It was so close to it being a completely different sort of outcome.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And especially if it's something, you know, existential, like the end of a relationship or a friendship or a life or a business or... a trajectory that you were following on? It's really hard now, even for us.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, you're also training yourself to be the sort of person who reflects on their experiences.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It's hard to try. I've said this for a long time that as soon as you begin using any fitness tracker, the first thing that you learn is you're not sleeping anywhere near as much as you thought you were. Yeah. It's a very painful. You're like, no, I got eight hours. It's like, no, dude, you were in bed for seven and a half and you were asleep at 645.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before. And that's because I'm frankly dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day with Element. Element is fantastic. a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't eat.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
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Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Who else, Rory is one of them, but who else are some of the athletes that you've got to spend time with and you just think, holy shit, this person's mindset, their approach to the game is a different level?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I mean, this is, you've activated one of my trap cards and, um, The question of what is the price that people pay to be someone that you admire has been one of the most compelling ever since I grew out of being an adult infant. I started to be a little bit more of a grown-up, I guess, intellectually. It's one of the questions I've been fascinated with to look at. What's it like to be that person?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
You want to be that person. You want to be Rory McIlroy, do you? Okay. Let me explain all of the prices that he's had to pay to be Rory McIlroy. You like the look of Patrick Mahomes of Michael Jordan. Perfect example. Like fuck the, you know, uh, the last dance, um, still now, uh, what is he probably 50, something like that. I don't know how old he is.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Sorry if he's in his forties, but yeah, like 50 fifties doesn't look happy. A man who is,
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
tormented by drive and perfection and obsession he was the greatest okay but that's the that's the price that you need to pay elon was asked on lex's show three years ago said uh he says something like how are you doing and he takes a little moment he goes most people think they would want to be me they don't want to be me they don't know they don't understand my mind is a storm
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
He's the richest guy on the planet. Sending rockets to space, building world-changing cars. He's on stage in Japan doing robot dances and shit, fathering a million children.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
The thing with at least The problem with looking at anybody through the lens of a narrow pursuit, like the success in business or the success in the sport, is that you only see the one vector that they've channeled their outputs into and you don't see any of the other fissures that their costs leaked out of. Right. Well, what if this guy hasn't had sex with his wife in like two years?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
What if they're drugging themselves to go to sleep and stimulating themselves to wake up in the morning? What if their relationship with their father or their mother is just non-existent? What if they hate themselves? What if they can't bear to look at their body in the mirror? You know, all of these things happen and you go, okay. but they're the greatest, they're the best. But you want that.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Is that what you want? Because you don't, as you said earlier on, it's kind of stupid to just look at one element, either of a business or of a person and say, I really want Rory McIlroy's master's thing. Not being able to sleep on a nighttime because he's obsessing about that shot he missed. I don't really like the idea of that so much, but the green jacket, that sounds great.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It's like, you don't get to piece this person together. Someone is a whole, right? They're His level of obsession, I'm totally just throwing shade at Rory's mental state, but I imagine his level of obsession, inability to let go of things, is the reason that he's got to there. It's not some weird bug on the side of the code that makes him Rory McIlroy.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It's a feature that is a part of his performance. And yeah, this question of what is the price people pay to be someone that you admire is fucking endlessly interesting to me.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I had, was I talking to this? I can't remember who it was. Uh, cultivated stupidity. We called it, uh, that, uh, Matt Fraser, good example of this, I think, actually. So Matt, in Ben Bergeron's book, Chasing Excellence, he tells this story about Matt was an engineering student, I think. And he would make himself wrote, memorize entire textbooks word for word.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And he would then sort of play them back in his head, or maybe he was writing them out. If he missed one word, he would just make himself go back to the start. So this guy was very, very smart and very, very driven and very, very obsessed. But there is a kind of... boneheadedness, and almost simplicity that you need to turn up and do 90 minutes of Zone 2 work.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Because you think there's got to be a better way. I just need to sit on the rowing machine for 90 minutes? Zone two, I'm not going to go that hard. You just want me at 135 BPM. Really? That's what I'm supposed to do? Yeah, it is. You need to go in and have this, just follow the plan. Don't overthink it. Don't spend too much time ruminating. Can you chill out? What's your recovery like?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Are you able to sit on the couch and play Xbox after a big training session? And yeah, we often... celebrate a really good work ethic and very rarely celebrate a good rest ethic. And both of those were a skill.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Let's see if it gave them an edge. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that you were talking about earlier on, the sort of fear of failure, this, you know, obsession with detail, but not beyond a point.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I'm sure this is something that you consider the sort of health anxiety that's downstream, the perils of over-optimization, being able to see why, you know, I didn't sleep very well last night, say is my whoop. I feel kind of okay, but then I get in my head about that and I didn't hit my 10,000 steps today. There's a fucking step tracker on there now.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
You, the new dad. Yeah.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
How do you come to think about using data to assist, to improve people, but not to be an object like a taskmaster or a prison that people can get trapped in?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, alas, I know that some people do.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
struggle with that actually there's a uh i can give you an idea from my friend george um and this is uh specifically from when he was wearing whoop and uh focusing on improving his sleep he wished that there was a way that you could set and i know that you guys do a weekly review monthly review end of your review as well but that uh all notifications could be turned off except for a check-in on a weekly basis or that you could hide your data from yourself hmm
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
until a particular day of the week to sort of interrupt your ability to be able to see. I'm aware that journal, like you need to do that on a daily basis. It restricts a lot of the, I can turn fucking activity on. Like, how am I going to do that? But I do think, you know, the general position he's trying to get himself to is to focus on signal, not noise.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And a daily check-in on daily metrics a lot of the time is useful. There's a lot of noise in that. If you look at your week-long trend, the bad Monday doesn't look so bad because it's spread across seven days. If it's Tuesday and you look at your Monday, you go, I might as well kill myself. Like, this is horrendous.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Now that Whoop has 14-day battery life too, like you can... How long can it store stuff without being connected through Bluetooth? 30 days. Oh, wow. Okay, so you could actually just run the sucker for ages and not even have it connected to your phone.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That would be a solution. It's a slightly more low-tech solution, like just disconnect.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Sick. What's the hertz frequency now on a night time?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, it's interesting. I've been digging into sleep stuff. I did an at-home sleep study, which was pretty interesting. Nalia had the... the diodes on the face. I had the tubes coming out. I had this thing. This was pretty interesting. It's a real get-up. Oh, yeah, I look great. They put a sensor on your soleus on the outside of your leg, outside of your calf. And this was super interesting.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
People who got... Restless leg syndrome, move their legs a lot when they sleep. But you can have restless leg syndrome and not move your legs. So what this sensor does is it detects whether or not your brain is sending a signal to your legs, but below the threshold that moves them, but above the threshold that it's nothing.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And that's still classed as a minor form of restless leg syndrome, even if you're not moving your legs. Because your brain is still saying, maybe we should do this, but it doesn't breach whatever particular line there is where you would start moving around. Don't have restless leg syndrome. That was pretty interesting. So you don't have that? No, I don't.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I have REM-induced sleep apnea, which fucking sucks dick. So you bounce yourself in and out of REM a lot. You go REM to wake to wake to REM to wake. So I need to work on that. And then as soon as you learn about any apneic events, you then go down the rabbit hole of dentistry and biological dentistry. And you start to think about palate size and airway opening.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And then you learn about how wind instrument players... have no sleep apnea. So the new device, it seems that one of the new devices that are good for, uh, apnea events, uh, eight to 14 weeks of 15 minutes a day. It sets a five by five, which to me, like given a, a sort of, uh, heavy weightlifting background. Yeah. Five by five to me, slap bang in the middle of what I'm used to.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And, um, it's kind of like the read from a saxophone, but without the saxophone attached to it. And it's got a lot of resistance in it. When you do a special, um, blowing very hard through this thing. The original study was done on marching band performers, and they found that none of the horn or wind players had sleep apnea, and a lot of the others did.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I said, well, there's got to be something to do with the way that they play. The only difference between these people is the way they play their instruments. And yeah, I think it was not an oboe. What's the other thing that's like an oboe? A didgeridoo. The original study was done on a fucking didgeridoo sleep study.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, it was dude. So I think this is going to be, this is real frontline stuff from Andy Galpin and Matthew Walker and some guys I'm working with. So you're now going to start doing this? Yes. So I've got, it should be in the air. It should be arriving this week. And between mouth tape and nasal dilators and not sleeping on my back and using tracking and all this other stuff.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I had Dr. Matthew Walker sat here and he was telling me about how for some people. that are, I think they're like circadian sensitive. I actually, unfortunately think that I'm one of these people. Sleep consistency and regularity are more important than sleep duration. Yeah. And that means that the classic, well, you know, I get good sleep during the week, but I kind of send it on a weekend.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But one of the big things is going to be this... so yeah I should just learn to play the saxophone that'd be way easier and I'd be functionally you know saxophone's cool I played sax when I was in like fifth grade not particularly well but well maybe your lack of sleep apnea is contributed to by a brief stint as a saxophonist
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
You do want to pick your pursuits, but that's also the drive that you were talking about from Rory and from other guys that you've worked with. And also the one that you see in yourself very much doesn't allow you to do things that you're not particularly good at. At least I find this. I was talking to a friend who was working with a coach, and the coach said, I need you to take up a pursuit.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
What would you like to do? Anything. Pick something that you think would be cool for you to do. And he said, oh, watercolors. Watercolors sounds like a cool thing to do. You know, outside of his high-powered, degenerate business pursuit that he could do. Watercolors. He goes, okay. You get yourself some watercolor stuff, but there's one stipulation about your pursuit of watercolors.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
You can't try to get better. And he was like, oh, fuck. Like she just wanted him to just play, to just like be in the joy of doing watercolors. She's like, because I know what you're going to do. You're going to go on YouTube and you're going to start watching videos and you're going to start refining your technique.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And then you're going to find the person that made the YouTube videos and find out they've got a course online. Then you're going to see they've got a retreat in Costa Rica. And before I know it, you have another business that is about yourself or another aggressive pursuit. So that idea of you're going to try to do a thing you're not going to try to be the best at it.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And in many ways, your progress toward becoming better in it is only ever going to be emergent. It's only ever going to be bottom up, not top down. You're sort of not going to dictate yourself into betterness. You're just going to practice yourself into enjoyment. And, uh, I may try and use this as an excuse for why I have a woefully low pickleball rating. I don't know. You don't understand.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I'm just in the flow, dude. You may be a better pickleball player, but I'm actually more flowy than you are. But yeah, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I remember him telling me and thinking it was interesting as a framing.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Realistic pursuit.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It does. And I wonder, you know, this sort of balance between yoga is a really, really good example because there is no such thing as winning. Right. There is no such thing as winning at yoga. There is getting better and there is, there is pro.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It is actually not, you can't do that. You can't accumulate sleep debt Monday through Friday and then pay it off on Saturday or Sunday or do the reverse. And that, you know, dicking about with the time that you go to bed and the time that you wake up is actually like pretty detrimental.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yes. So for the perennially metric obsessed.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Baseball, pickleball, you know, there's a literal rating next to your fucking podcasting, YouTube, you know, you know. A lot of numbers. Where you're ranked, you know, business.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Oh, well, you know, you're on your quarter on quarter. Where are we?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
James clears got this new fucking slamming insight, which is if you desire the life, but not the lifestyle, you guarantee disappointment. So you want the outcome, but you're not prepared to do the things that get you toward the outcome. I love the idea.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I want to be in a band. Love the idea of playing on stage in front of thousands of people. Okay. You need to be in a van, a very small van playing, but fuck nowhere shows for a decade. Yeah. That's what, that is the lifestyle to get you to life. Do you want to do that?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I have seen videos of, not Taylor Swift, who is Miley Cyrus before the Super Bowl. Have you seen this video?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Epic. epic video so I think Miley Cyrus performed at the half time in the Super Bowl not long ago or maybe I'm pretty sure it was Miley Cyrus and she's on a treadmill singing and it's the sort of build up and she's just you know heart rate's going to be through the roof and she's like belting this thing out and she's obviously trying to work out this
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
energy this sort of nervous anxious energy she's warming her body up she's warming and uh yeah it's crazy in a not too dissimilar way my equivalent the only equivalent i've got uh going to do rogan like as you're on your way you're driving from my house to rogan studio it's 12 minutes should be longer it'd be better if it was longer i should drive further away and then loop back around that would make my life easier and uh it very much does feel a little bit like sort of going through the players tunnel toward like a pretty big match yeah you're a little stressed out yeah
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And there's, you know, you need solutions from that. So I've got a, and this is now the same thing I've used for every big episode, Peterson, Naval, Sam Harris, Rogan, whoever, um, You have a pre-match ritual in that way. What is it? So wake up on time, regardless of how tired I am. So I don't let myself sleep in. I would rather be up and in a good mood.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Sleeping in tends to put me in a bit of a bad mood. It makes me feel like my day started off on the back foot. So I want to kind of win the pillow. I think about winning, like owning the pillow. It's a good name for a book. Win the pillow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like I've... It's a big predictor for me of how well the rest of the day goes.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So get up, do my usual morning routine, walk, journal, breath work, meditate, read, go to the gym, train. I'd like moderately hard. I've done it too hard previously and I end up crashing partway through the episode. So that was a lesson from failure that I only ever needed to learn once. One coffee, one coffee, no more than one coffee, one coffee max. Uh, breakfast, but no carbs.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So typically eggs, bacon, sausage, something like that. Uh, then go back any notes, whatever it is that I'm reviewing. And then the sort of final hour is just listen to really great music, have a little sing along. If I'm going to have a shave, I'm going to have a shower. If I'm going to like, you know, whatever I'm going to wear out.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Do that and then get in the car and then on the way there, more good music, having a little sing-along. So maybe Miley Cyrus had it right all along. I should get on a treadmill and start belting out Miley Cyrus songs. It's relatively stripped back.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
At least my sort of current working theory is it's a combination of all of the things that feel like home to me that are very comfortable, the things that I do on a daily basis. It's the perfect morning when chaos doesn't occur.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Do they lock in for a period?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And that happens maybe only once every week to me where I get the full run of all of them perfectly done without, fuck, I've got to take a phone call in the middle of this. Oh, shit, what's happened with the most recent upload? Whatever it is that goes on. But it's not so...
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
novel that it's sort of disquieting to your systems this is comfortable and this is comfortable and this is normal and this is whatever there's stresses in that experience that you walk through I mean that sounds like a great routine in general It's awesome. It's awesome. And I get to midday and I'm just locked in.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I'll usually have my optimal mutonic consumption is like one can on route in, one as I'm starting. And then I'm like, fucking, I'm at 30,000 feet just grew locked in. Yeah, that's it, dude. I can, if I go more than about one an hour for three hours, I start to
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
fucking hear colors and see sounds it ends up being good but a little bit activating and the mindfulness that you want to just be able to sit back and give things a little bit of room to breathe um Yeah, it's interesting. I love learning about people's pregame rituals as well.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Baseball, one of the most superstitious ritualistic sports, maybe the most, I would guess, in perhaps all of sports because it's so iterative, right? And it's so replicable. So you see players that will tap the bat on both feet, undo and redo each glove. Like, why? They haven't come undone, but it's all just part of this, you know, very, very consistent schedule of how they... What about you?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
What's a morning look like? I guess you've got a six-week-old, so fucking chaos, I imagine.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Avoiding that rollercoaster.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
How often do you hit that?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Very much think about starting the day on the front foot. I think that's a good way to think about it.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
You look like a nerd. Shut up, wife. Yeah.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
One of the worst things, and this was a lesson learned from going to bed at four in the morning a couple of times a week for a decade and a half. was realizing that tomorrow is ruined before tomorrow has even begun. There's a special kind of hell there where you go, fuck, it's 5 a.m. This morning, thankfully today hasn't been ruined. I had a really great day.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
But my body just decided to wake me up at 3 in the morning. Fuck you, dude. Got up, I'm like, right, okay, I'm going to do all of the things that CBTI tells you to do, so I'm not going to get, I'm not going to stay in bed. All right, you want to be awake? Be awake.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
What do you attribute that to? So late night food, shisha, bars?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
You're going to have to walk around, you're going to have to look, you're going to have to keep your eyes open, but your body doesn't want to do that either. I'm like, well, pick, right? Do you want to be asleep? No. Okay, would you want to be awake? No, I don't want that either. Like, you are a petulant child sleep brain. Anyway.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. It fucking sucks. And get back to bed at 4.30 AM, 4.45 AM. Oh my God. Do I try and drug myself into sleep? Because I could, but that means that when I get up to train at seven, I'm going to be pressing the brake and the accelerator at the same time. I'm like, okay, so let's say I took an Ambien three hours ago. I'm like, right, okay.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
yeah yeah I felt great this morning dude maybe the that was this morning the ambient nutonic combo yeah yeah yeah and I felt and then I went and did this photo shoot with your guys so I trained twice before midday I think had probably less than five hours of sleep I feel fantastic have you seen that meme I post this meme all the time
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
the meme of the different hours of sleep and the way that this guy looks. And one hour of sleep is just like a shadow with his face falling off. And it goes all the way up to eight hours where he sort of feels like a god. And then, but for some reason, six and seven hours of sleep, the guy's face is falling off too. But two hours of sleep, the guy's like transcended.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
There's something about two hours of sleep. I get the sense that it's one full sleep cycle, that it's one full 90 minutes. You're still in a nap. Yeah, there's one full 90-minute cycle, and you're going to eat shit at 3 p.m. that day, but up until midday or so, you're like, dude, I fluked it last night.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I danced through that minefield, and then it gets to 2 p.m., and you go, oh, no, it's hitting me.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Even if you take your own food?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
What's your hydrogen water of choice?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That's fucking go, dude.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
They're fire. Have you got the new one, the square one? Or have you got the slightly older one that's cylindrical?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
uh i think i have the older one the new echo flask is it's got this this new one's got a screen on the side and there's an app that comes with it everything needs an app apparently yeah mine doesn't have an app cool this new one so the the new one is is fucking sick but yeah dude hydrogen water is i so if i could i was saying this i picked that up from gary brekka and he's like all about hydrogen water and turns out he's totally right electrolytes too
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So good justification for letting alcohol into your country to just bring that bedtime.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. No, I mean, circulating that through would be a bad idea. Yeah, I was with Gary. I was at the Health Optimization Summit here in Austin this weekend. And I went to... There was a dinner for the speakers. It was like a meetup or whatever for the speakers. And it was...
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Mark Sisson, Gary Brecker, Ben Greenfield, Max Lugavere, Dr. Dom, the world's leading biological dentist, like every different... Dr. Stephen Gundry, like... Some very forward thinking. Yeah, it was fun. And I'm absolutely the token stupid person in the room. And I'm just sort of listening to stuff that I'm like, maybe that's true. That sounds plausible. That sounds plausible.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That sounds like it might be fun. But one of the things that pretty much everybody zeroed in on was hydrogen water. And if I was saying this at the start of the year, if I could make some bets sort of on the roulette chip table of health, I would have done... three or four years ago, I would have said four-stage reverse osmosis, water filtration for drinking.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
I think everyone's really worried about the municipal water standards and water quality and what's in your drinking water. I would have said sleep trackers and liquid-cooled mattress toppers, probably six or seven years ago, I would have said that those would be.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And now I think hydrogen water, including hydrogen baths and breathing molecular hydrogen, that's a little bit more, like a flask that's 200 bucks and will last you until you break it. pretty good investments, like pretty accessible to most, most people, uh, redoing your entire bath so that you can have hydrogen water pumped in and dermally absorb it through your skin.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
That's like a higher, higher barrier.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
What else? What is some other outlier countries that are interesting with some odd metrics?
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, you've got two. The problem with hydrogen, I think, look at me talking about fucking hydrogen. I spent half an afternoon with Gary Brecker and I talked about hydrogen. That's actually a meme, yeah. I think the problem, but this is a commercial insight, is...
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
At the bottom end, there's no way, except Echo actually have patented their bottle and their technology, but you can get hydrogen into water relatively inexpensively and it's not patented. No one can patent putting hydrogen into water. The levels that you do it to and the functionality and the durability and the battery life of the device, all of that stuff is.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So at the bottom end, it's unprotectable, largely. And at the top end, it's not accessible. So I think you have this weird market where you go, well, what's the incentive to push on the bottom end given that anybody can do this and there's no protection. Not anybody can build the device that's on your wrist, but pretty much anybody can make a comparable device at the bottom end.
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#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
And then at the top end, it's just so fucking expensive and hard to get. And what you don't want to do, the other thing is even if you had a hundred grand, I think you can get like a equivalent one for maybe 20 or something from Echo. But you also need to have water filtration in your house because if the water's not of good quality, you're pushing...
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
austin municipal i had an email this morning from echo because they're going to send out some sort of a unit to do hydrogen baths in my house and i was like oh i've heard about worries to do with water quality oh give us your postcode will area code will tell you uh whether your water's up to scratch and said oh no you've got 17 markers that are outside the advisory oh wow for whatever it is that we would do and they've just been a ding ding ding just searched it online like oh fuck
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Oh, we'll do a survey? Yeah, that'd be sick.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
With a slight disadvantage there is you're just going to create a number of reasons for people not to buy your product. Although for the drinking stuff, I would go as, I mean, everybody knows this, but you need to watch your water quality. It's pointless hydrogenating your water if it's full of all sorts of bullshit.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
So I think four stage reverse osmosis, something or any kind of Berkey filtration, something similar or plummet in underneath is like, that's the first step.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
What was the second thing? So you said, don't eat on planes, drink lots of hydrogen water, pound the electrolytes. Yeah. Was there a second hack for travel?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, I did Australia toward the back end of last year and that was... 14 hour time. I think you're supposed to have one. Supposed to. Whoever came up with the one day for one hour time change thing, dude, that's bullshit. No one has that much time to do stuff. I was in Australia for two weeks.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Basically that you should give yourself, you should account for one day per hour of time change. I... Remember reading this online, I have no idea.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Okay. Yeah. Interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but Australia hurt. That was... Yeah, that's hard. That was a real painful one. What should people expect from you over the next, apart from new child, dad life, presumably a change of wardrobe and body composition over the next couple of months? What else is coming up?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah, I mentioned I was with your guys earlier on today, and I just had to bring up the fact that Stephen Bartlett got an advisory position, but he's got smaller forearms than me. And I thought that that was not necessarily relevant or important, but something of note. And I just, you know, I'm going to sort of leave that to...
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
to linger in the air, but dude, congratulations, you know, launching a human and a new product in the space of a couple of weeks is no, is no small feat. So, um, yeah, it's awesome. I've been a, you know, a huge fan of the product for forever. I was grandfathered into the monthly from the buy it once.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Uh, yeah, like thousands, thousands and thousands. Um, which is fun. And before that, I actually totally forgot about this, but I use sleep cycle. Uh, you know, that app. It's an alarm. So one of those things you stuck on your bed and like, it was just a phone app and you put your phone near your bed. Yeah. I use it as an alarm, but it also does a little bit of tracking stuff too.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
It uses the mic. So it's like rustling around, I guess it's real raw, like rough stuff. But yeah, I've been in one form or another, I've been tracking sleep for a decade now, which is pretty crazy to think that I've got that much data. But yeah, dude, I really appreciate what you do. I think it's awesome. The fact you're enabling these athletes and
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
helping everyone to realize just how much little sleep they're getting is cool. And I appreciate your mind as well. I think it's nice to see somebody that's committed to one thing and limiting desires, whether they're personal or corporate, is pretty sick. So I'm really glad to meet you today.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Well, it's also freezing cold and wet, so I don't think people want to be out on the road. Why is there no bodybuilding on the app?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Neither of those are bodybuilding. Me and all my bros in the gym are like, fuck, I've got to pretend that I did snatch and fucking clean and jerk today.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Bodybuilding? Excuse me, bodybuilding versus powerlifting. A normal push-pull-like split, a sort of 8 to 14 rep range, not working to the goal of strength and not working to the goal of specific movements, but working to the goal of hypertrophy. It wouldn't be intense enough to be called functional fitness or varied enough to be that.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Weightlifting, the sport of Olympic weightlifting, right, is the snatch and the clean and jerk. Powerlifting is SBD, squat, bench, deadlift. And if I go in and I do, you know, four by 14 on bicep curls, what do I log that as? So I put it in as weightlifting, which I assume is what most other people are doing too, because you are lifting weights.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Probably 2018? Something like that? Like absolute peak CrossFit?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
My gym bros, I've done it. God, it's only taken me five or six years to do it. I found out something during my research. I found out that you're an only child too. and this is going to be kind of like an immovable object and an unstoppable fucking force as two only children meet.
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Have you ever reflected or do you reflect much on how that influenced you, sort of how it shaped your personality, the things that you expect, the way that you were socialized, how you showed up as a young man and now an older man?
Modern Wisdom
#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness
Yeah. If you'd said then what the next seven, eight years had in store, no one would have believed you. It's outrageous. And I think it... A lot of people, when they look at businesses from the outside, they see sophistication, they see popularity, they see a rate of adoption. The thing that nobody sees is what the internal operations of that company is like.
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?
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Have you read any Oliver Berkman?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
And that causes girls to suffer.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
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
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.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
Being held to standards of behavior, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#916 - Freya India - Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever
How many of these girls are in therapy, do you think?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
#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
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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
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
Right now, you can get 20% off all of the 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. What have you learned?
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.
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#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
You might not need more caffeine. You might just be dehydrated and proper hydration requires electrolytes. Best of all, they have a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So you can buy it and try it for as long as you want. And if you do not like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box.
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
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Douglas Murray, welcome to the show.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Okay, right. Well, the performance-enhancing effects of different mental maladies, I guess, can work quite well in the military, but most of them would be like psychopathy, I think.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Yeah, I don't know. I think it'll be very interesting to see what the next... sort of two years has in store, especially for what did the Democrats do in reversing some of the positions that caused them to sort of fall behind so much? How much faith has been lost? You know what it kind of feels like a little bit to me?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Well, a lot has happened. 78 days.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
The period that we had during COVID where kind of the veils fell from people's eyes a little around, huh, the mainstream media don't really... know what they're talking about and they roll back their positions and the institutions that are supposed to be in charge of this stuff and people that are supposed to know what's going on in terms of virology or epidemiology or public health or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Huh. I actually think that there's no adults in the room. I don't think there's any adults. Well, the thing is there are. It's just the...
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
You described the West as a civilization trying to erase itself. Do you reckon we've got any better over the last few years?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
And if you do not like it, they will give you your money. 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. Say more. How are you feeling about the UK at the moment?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Yeah, it's kind of like a Gary's economics monologue just being played on repeat. But like that sentiment of you're broke and your children are going to be broke and no one's going to get a house and you're going to die destitute.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
I caught this all level and had come into line with everyone else. Yeah. You said I've seen a lot of, plenty wars up close, but it's the UK that I'm most concerned about.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
I don't know why I feel pride, but I just... Oh, you definitely contributed to it. I think I managed to get you to take a dice roll many, many years ago. Five years ago, six years ago.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
How much is bottom up and how much is top down, do you think? How much of this is sort of structural, bureaucratic because of the leadership, because of things that need to be changed at an institutional level? And how much of this is, as you mentioned, the sort of culture of the people that they're sort of reveling in their own, I guess, binding together over their own sort of shared discontent?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
There's a sense of sort of the move-fast-break-things thing. Oh, yeah. That... I think it's kind of sexy in Silicon Valley and tech and building businesses and stuff. Not convinced how perfectly it ports across onto governance.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
culture of a step up a lap appears to have been sort of
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Very interesting. Yeah, if you think about...
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
who americans are the progeny of i'm aware that immigration recent immigration uh waters this down a little bit but they're the they're the descendants of people who said eight week journey at sea limited chance of survival not really too sure what i'm going to count me in yeah i know that there is an explanation of that yes but there's also you know there's
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
It just seems like there's a, at least in the UK, and not among most of the friends that I spend my time with, but that's because I, you know, very carefully sort of selected my group of friends to not be those people. But when I hear the sort of commentary that happens online, I do think, huh,
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
this shared reveling in discontent, in, you know, if you were to ring one of your friends and say, in the UK, get that in you. Thank you, Douglas. Time for you to do your first ad read. There we are. Newtonic. If I become wildly ill from drinking this, it's bad for you, isn't it? It would look bad, but you can hold it together. I'm sure you've taken worse across your illustrious career. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Very good. Come on. There we go. Cheers. Chin, chin. Cheers, cheers. It's delicious. Very good. That's good. Yeah, you were paid to say that. I always remember I rang a friend and I said, hey, what are you doing today? Tell me about what you've done today. Oh, man, living the dream. Took the bins out this morning. It's been raining all day.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
You know, that classic British sort of... That's a banter, though. It is, but it feels to me like it... Be careful sort of what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be in some ways. And rarely, that's Kurt Vonnegut, rarely you, it's hard to reverse that.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Like people bond in the UK over this sense of shared suffering, over this sense that things are sort of a little bit crap and not necessarily.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Although we're doing a bit at the moment. Well, we can bond together over that. Conor McGregor, Saviour of Ireland. Interesting figure. Interesting figure. Big fan of stimulants. Really? Oh yeah. Okay. Oh yeah. I've been reliably told. Yeah. What sort of stimulants are we talking about? Uh, the prototypical nasal delivery system, the patented, he, Conor McGregor likes his cocaine. Oh, I see.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Have you tried to tie any of these threads together, sort of what we're seeing?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
I've been fascinated by the pace of the news and how quickly there's a lack of stickiness that they've all had. Is it disturbing that we regularly just forget or sort of look away from catastrophes or is it just sort of par for course in the modern world now? Because like, remember when Trump got shot? No, me neither. Yeah, I know. That disappeared within days. It was amazing.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
And it just seems like... I haven't even got much of an explanation about the shooter. Yeah. And I don't see anybody really, because there's always something new. The velocity of news. I remember in AS level media studies in Stockton Sixth Form College, I was told this story about a lady on September 12th, 2001, who's a PR agent.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
And she advised all of the companies that they were working with to dump every piece of bad news that they had.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
It just, you know, you've spent the last few years not in the US that much. You've been traveling. Not maybe the way that most people would consider traveling.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Shame. But with that, you know, we've had a lot of, an awful lot of turmoil over the last few years and it just, it doesn't, very few things seem to stick now. Even causes that people were once unbelievably ardent about.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
sort of manana manana something new something more sexy something more recent and um yeah the ability for anything to be lindy is is increasingly difficult to be what lindy uh the lifetime life cycle of a non-perishable good like an idea it's a talib sort of uh repopularized it basically the classics of the classics for a reason.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
If something's been around for 500 years, it's probably likely that it's going to be around in future. The problem being that we are living in a never ending now where almost all of the content that you consume today was created in the last 24 hours. In fact, that's exactly how Instagram stories and Snapchat and stuff like that work. Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
If you see something today that's on the trending side of X and And it's still there tomorrow? You think, fucking hell, that's a big story. It's still here tomorrow.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
The criticisms from people who are getting pinged on their iPhone a few too many times per day seem a little bit dickless.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Are you familiar with her? No. A young blonde girl, writer, very good, on Substack and doing some stuff with the free press. Oh, yeah, yeah, I've seen the byline. I had this conversation with her at the start of last year, She was talking a lot about how people criticize Gen Z for taking stuff that they see online and turning it. That's right. Come on. Keep fueling yourself. Very good.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
And they see it as reality. And people criticize Gen Z for turning the virtual into the real in this way. And she said, well, you have to realize that a lot of these kids are spending, you know, eight, 10 hours a day on screens, far less asleep, far less around other people. So I understand it makes sense sort of...
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
And rationally, if you were to just sort of explain the situation, why are you over-prioritizing what's happening digitally over what's happening in the real world or your real world? Again, news stories from outside of your territory, of your domain of control, externalizing of agency, all this sort of stuff. But yeah, she said the online world is the real world for these people.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
And I kind of get the same sense here. I kind of get the same sense that People who don't know what's happening on the ground, who don't understand sort of the implications of what this is, they get to lop within the sort of narrative. And then you're in the trenches with these people. And they say, well, I've got a job to do. So I kind of can't afford to.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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 don't know whether you know that Canada owns Pornhub. Does it indeed?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
I say Canada and you go... Yeah, Pornhub. No, you haven't... Wait for my 300 IQ move here. Yeah, I'm watching this with interest. The secret weapon in the trade war that Canada needs to use is to restrict access to Pornhub. That's how they fight back. You want to talk about tariffs? Ah, we'll see what happens when you don't have as free and easy access to millions of... Yeah, exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Honestly, this comedian came up with the idea. I think it's a strong solution. Strong.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
It was because I had... As I explained for a long time, it's because I had a Yankee candle addiction, which also actually is something to be embarrassed about, not quite as bad as mold. And I had to get it repainted. After our episode, the internet shamed me so much that I had to get the ceiling of my old bedroom repainted. And now you're here in Austin. Look at me now. It's great to see you.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
There was an issue in El Salvador when the president came in and just decided to go scorched earth with everybody into these football stadium-sized prisons, these new things. I remember I did some research on that, and one of the concerns was the collateral damage of...
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
What have you learned about what wartime does to people?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
the the brothers younger brothers of people who are criminals uh and you just sort of sweep everybody up you you have a smoke detector principle of either you pattern match incorrectly when it's not there or you don't pattern match when it is there and i think in these sorts of situations people tend to over index on being a little bit more uh sensitive to the pattern matching
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Do you know anything about tariffs? Do you know how they work?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
And right now you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their wait list by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. I've been pretty fascinated by the reaction online over the last, I think with the Ukraine, with the Middle East, with sort of a broader conversation about
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
the Jewish community at large generally. Uh, I wonder how much Elon's opening up of X has contributed to outgrew tribalism now that maybe some of the guardrails have been taken off with regards to that. Uh, Yeah, it feels to me like the world has reached some new fever pitch of sort of out-group passion against whoever they see as a scapegoat, whoever they see as being in the wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
And nobody can agree on who is in the wrong, which is one of the most sort of interesting observations, that everybody acts as if the facts are already settled whilst never being able to actually agree on what the facts are. So I say they're settled... You say they're settled. We don't agree, but both of us act as if they are.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Unbelievable. Yeah. I think there's a masterclass course about that. But no, all I know is that I got a message from my accountant saying, might be a good time to put more money into the S&P. Might not. We'll see. That was a message that I received this morning. Thanks for that.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
And, yeah, just the reaction, especially in the West, to a rapidly developing kinetic situation on the other side of the planet.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
It seems like the sort of scapegoat, outgroup, finger-pointing,
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
It's strange that a lot of people who would maybe complain about a cost of living crisis and quality of jobs and employment, opportunities for progression and student loan debt and housing and so on and so forth, also, I would guess, are the same profile of people that shop on Timu and Shein.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Are there lessons for the wider world from the Ukraine, from the Middle East over the last few years? What should people take away from the way that these sort of conflicts have unfolded and the response? Because it seems, and a lot of people sort of say this,
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
ever escalating kinetic engagement the sort of burbling below the surface you mentioned before about the only job of the politicians and government is to keep the economy going there's maybe some fertile ground to sow seeds in with regards to that, which is going to raise tensions.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
I watched a video from the PM of Singapore, who, as far as I can tell, I'm sure there's critics of Singapore out there, and I'm not a geopolitics expert. As far as I can tell, Singapore's kind of a shining light of some areas of growth, governance. Oh, for sure, of economics. And he said himself, you know, that
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
economic, uh, turbulence like this has proceeded a lot of pretty big conflicts in the past. And, uh, if you've got a few Petri dish examples of this actually happening before you've got the economic pressure happening as well, globally, the era of free trade is over, you know, could be, yeah. Um, traveling should be about.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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. They've got compartments for everything, your laptop, your shoes, your sunglasses.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
They'll give you your money back. 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 modern wisdom. And they ship internationally. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. What should everybody keep in mind, given what you've seen from the front lines of the two most recent...
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
You know, there's an industry called the rag industry and these are, a lot of them are engineering. That's right. Get yourself charged up. Yeah. They're working in manufacturing, working in engineering, and they use rags, used T-shirts or whatever. They've been washed, but they get trickled down.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Maybe it goes to charity shops, something like that, and to clean off grease to do all of this other stuff. The rag industry in the West is dying because the quality of the clothes that people are wearing are disintegrating so quickly that they can't even be used to mop up oil and water.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Is that sense that things would be better if we were more like them over there? Is that a dynamic that's sort of fueling some of this... Which bit do you mean? The fact that if only we were a little bit more like, well, the Middle East, they're living a little bit sort of closer to simplicity.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
You too. Trump's been in office for 78 days. What do you make of his efforts so far?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
There was one that used to go past in Stockton upon Tees. A guy sort of- Wheel in a thing.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
How have you avoided becoming, or maybe you have, more...
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
nihilistic despondent down I'm interested in what the sort of personal prices that you pay to be on the front lines of these things I've seen an interview with you and Piers Morgan where there was a brief interlude for a rocket to go overhead and then you sort of brush yourself off and kind of got back to it uh I'm interested in sort of what it's been like for you over the last couple of years um
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
and if you tell the young now they won't believe you fucking prehistoric Don Lemon said there's a name I haven't heard for a while people love AOC Jasmine Crockett and Eric Swalwell I think the Democratic Party should put people out there who the people want who they're asking for
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
and uh i i yes i've um i've i've got far more uh optimism actually funnily enough than i have uh pessimism despite everything does it make dealing with criticisms or accusations of motive or whatever from the internet does it put those sort of things into perspective I never gave a shit about that, as you know. I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated by how few shits you give.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Yeah, as said, everybody that is fantastic at something that comes naturally to them. What do you mean? Well, just, I think you seem to have a big fuck you streak. And Ryan Long taught me this, a comedian. He said he always... Oh, I like him. I did his podcast. Yes, I introduced him. Yeah, yeah, he's great, him and Danny. He said he always sort of discredited the things that came easily to him.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
He always assumed that there was more value in something that he had to work harder at. So he's really great at sketch comedy. Yes. He's naturally very funny. He's fucking fantastic. And to him, sketches just fall out of him on a daily basis. So he always looked at other twists and art forms. Maybe they were comedy or maybe they were tangential or maybe they were totally separate.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
And he always assumed that those... were the ones that were really valuable because he discredited the thing that came so easily to him. He always thought, well, the sketch comedy thing, like, you know, everybody's got access. He said, no, no, no, no, no. Not everybody has access to that. You're a freak. And you have that skill. So do you have something like that? Things that come easily to me?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
I, we're always, at least for me, I'm my own worst critic. Stuff that comes easily to me that I think other people don't.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
assume that that's the case is networking i i that was something that uh as an only child who then becomes a club promoter you are perfectly you're perfectly positioned to sort of observe social networks and see how they go it's never anything that i've sort of practiced myself it's just something that kind of came out of right of life and and programming um and yapping
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
always been good at yapping, you know, from a kid. Right. But so do you think you look down on those things as skills? I certainly, I don't look down on them, but I do assume I've, because they come easily to me, I'm not convinced that I value them in the same sort of way. I value them in myself and it's something I'm very happy that I've got, but.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Oh, that's a good question. Fuck you energy would be one of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, instead of getting mad, I tend to get sad. I'll sort of turn... I know. Oh. It's true. It's true. Really? Yeah, in many ways. I think you can work past that quite easily. Interesting. Or at least operationally you can. But there is an initial hurdle where I will tend to...
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
I'll tend to blame myself for something. So it's one of the reasons I asked about the criticism, actually. I would say I'm a criticism hyper-responder sometimes. And I created a list of different ways that me and perhaps other people have dealt with criticism with varying degrees of success. Oh, yeah. Get bitter. Think of any critic as a hater, just throwing envy in shade.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Recite the quote, don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from. Number two, channel your inner David Goggins and use it as fuel to prove people wrong. Number three, get equanimous and see every criticism as a gift, which you can learn from. Number four, get psychoanalytical and think of criticisms as a window into the mind of other humans.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Bonus points for inferring sweeping generalizations about the public at large from whatever you read. That's very good. Be incredibly precise with language, so no spare words which could be misconstrued are present. Front-run potential criticisms by caveating before speaking. Hey, I'm just an idiot spitballing a bro science theory here. That one's awful. Acknowledge both sides.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Hey, look, I think climate change or women's mental health or poverty in Africa is an important issue we should focus on. But... That's a weak one. Avoid exposing yourself to it. Never search your own name on Twitter or Reddit. Don't read the comments. Oh, that's definitely true. Yes, of course.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Dampen down the edginess of your opinions and statements so the point gets made, but in such a gentle way that people can't find anything sufficiently objectionable to get mad about. That's not great advice always. This isn't necessarily advice. These are just strategies that I've gone through. Yeah, interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Deny that it gets to you and just breath work, busy, meditate, scroll, Brazilian jiu-jitsu your way to distraction. Or, final one, take it to heart, doubt your abilities and fear that you're not cut out for any level of exposure at large. Ha ha.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Let's say that you were an advisor to the left. And in many ways, I imagine that you do have desires to have a burgeoning, flourishing left that doesn't make everybody sort of shuddering, cringe in that way. What would you advise them to do?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Adolf Hitler, world leader, failed artist. But yeah, it's an interesting list. What happened with you in The Guardian?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Yeah, that's fair. I don't know. I mean, I only sort of spied it. I knew there was something happening and I didn't really understand what it was. And then I went and had a little bit of a look. And then the way that these libel things are written out as well, they're so odd.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Is there a proposed use for the proceeds from this?
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
What do you think... I know you don't care, or it seems like you don't care. What do you think people commonly misunderstand about sort of your worldview, your positions? I don't really know. I mean... It fascinates me how little time you sort of spend in self-critical self-reflection. Not that you don't see where sort of failures and stuff come from, but that there's just so few shits given.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got other fish to fry for. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
I look forward to seeing it happen. I appreciate you, man. I always love getting to speak to you. It's really, really lovely. Likewise. Right back at you, as I discovered to say in America. While you're here for a little while. Until you fly off again. Douglas, I appreciate you, man. Take care.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
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
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
Well, it certainly seems like one of the things that everybody's probably noticed is How much is the blowing with the wind that we're seeing at the moment of Mark Zuckerberg, not only a sartorial rebrand, but a meta policy-based rebrand, getting rid of fact-checkers and opening up conversations specifically around, I think, trans or gender identity was one of the points.
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
You get rid of it. But you've seen that, right? Lots of different companies seeming to move in that direction. So BlackRock, they exited climate groups, eliminated diversity targets, ends its ESG stuff. Hexeth says he's eliminating DEI within the military. And then even European companies like Aldi and Santander are rolling back their DEI programs over here. So it does feel a lot like...
Modern Wisdom
#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?
I don't know, everyone's blowing with the Trumpian wind, whatever the sort of direction is that things are going in at the moment.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I can't believe it's been two years. I can't believe it was two years since I was with you.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Right. That sounds like a very sort of litigious way to get around. I've been told that I can't run, but they didn't say anything about war.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
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Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
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Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
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Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
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Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And right now, you can get a year's free supply of 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 modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. Yeah, dudes, I... We need to have a chat about Truett. What the fuck is... What is he built of?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
What I was concerned about was whether or not you would have wrecked me so much physically on day one that when it came to like my bit, which was the sit down and spout nonsense stuff that I would be sat there. It's so much fucking pain. I can't even focus.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Did anything stick with you from the few days that we spent together?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I think it's such a delicate balance to give your kids the life that you never had and the life that you worked so hard to be able to afford them with whilst also knowing where most of the important realizations that made you into the sort of person who could provide
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
came about due to restriction and difficulty and tough times and toil and a little bit of, maybe a bit of resentment and a little bit of unfairness in childhood that galvanized you to sort of do something great with your life.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Every single, look dude, every single parent that I know and even more, tell you what, be fucking grateful that you had your kids in your 20s because if you'd had them now, imagine how much of a differential your lifestyle is materially, in terms of resources, in terms of status and notoriety and opportunity and all of this stuff, you would be like floating out in space. You would have no idea.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
The total frame of reference would be out of the window. There's not a single dad that I know who has sort of crawled out from the place that they were as a kid and made something of themselves. who doesn't have that exact concern about their children. I think it is one of the most common worries. Ben Francis, he's the guy that founded Gymshark. Gymshark's completely bootstrapped.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
He still owns 70% of it. Gymshark's worth over, it's nearly $3 billion, a three billion pound company. This guy's worth like two billion pounds, like $3 billion, and he's 31. He's got twin boys, but he grew up Like as rough as they come in Birmingham with a granddad that made him go and work in like a clay mine or so like a pottery barn or something like that. And I've asked him this question.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I'm like, how do you intend on navigating this one? How do you intend on teaching your kids the lessons that you learned from a very working class grandfather, their great grandfather? whilst also not throwing away the entire reason for working as hard as you did, which was to be able to afford your fucking family the life that you never had.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
So, you know, first off, I think you did the best that you could, so you need to give yourself some grace with that. And look, If 50% was like the middle of the bell curve of how much toughness versus easiness you could give kids, I would guess that most kids and most parents are too far on the easy side. I think snowplow parenting, helicopter parenting, gentle parenting, whilst...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
noble in its intentions is usually kind of over pattern matched and results in soft entitled adults, narcissistic, soft entitled adults when they grow up. Given the choice between the two, sort of being pushed a little bit further on the other side is a very strange kind of gift. I think what would be interesting would be to know
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
how much of that is actually because of the way that you raised them and how much of that is just your genes. The more that I learn about behavioral genetics, heritability of different traits, and so on and so forth, this should be comforting. As far as I can see, There is no such thing as really getting parenting right. There is only getting it wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And getting it wrong, kids are pretty fucking resilient. Like they're really, really tough. And you see perfectly balanced adults that grew up in horrendous childhood environments. Mm-hmm. And I think as long as there's no really extreme, well, maybe you would say some of the climbs with the rock were slightly extreme.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
My point is, I get the sense that if they're made out of the same stuff that you're made out of. They didn't really have a choice whether you made them go up the mountain or not. I think that there is a lot more built into you. You know, you're talking about consistently running for four decades and thinking about framing that up against what that meant in your childhood.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Eugene, Oregon's a fucking cool place. I loved it. You know, there is a lot of differences growing up in the northeast of the UK, growing up in Oregon, but I think the principles end up being the same. You know, this sort of
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And, you know, this sort of relentlessness that you approach. Even the pod, when you started that, I think it was episode three, two, three, four, something like that. It's now like, what, 160? Some shit. Like, even with that, that's...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
not that's a level of work rate that most people don't hold up it's just a minor little area then in the hunting and then in the lifting and then in the bow stuff and then in the running and then in the so you know maybe there is maybe it's contributed but what I would if I could sort of bet a couple of chips on the roulette wheel of a couple of other universes in which you'd approach your kids differently I think they'd be
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
probably 90%, 80 or 90% of the way there, just with less experience about how to deal with it. And one of the best things you can do for your kids, I think, as a fucking, look at me, spouting nonsense as a non-father. The internet loves when I do this. One of the best things that you can do is set a good example. You can read all of the books about
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
healthy attachment and child education and socialization and all the rest of it but they will learn more from the way that you and your wife show up for each other around the dinner table than every lesson that you try and force into them like you can top down try and tell them how they're supposed to behave this is how you're supposed to treat girls you don't hit girls and you don't do this and you must hold the door and you got to be this way and be blah blah blah blah
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It's like, all right, but then when you're around the dinner table, you're a prick. You look at your phone instead of looking at your wife. Or you ignore her or you don't laugh at her jokes or you guys don't relate well or they never see you be physically affectionate to each other or whatever it is. It's not for me to say that you need to like force a relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
But the point is, I think that kids learn by seeing a lot more than they get learned by being told. And that's what you're doing. Even if you hadn't made them go up the mountain, you were like, I'm off to go up the mountain. Dad's going up the mountain. Can I come up the mountain?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
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Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
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#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
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Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
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Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
there's a very special type of distaste and envy that the internet has towards, uh, certain types of successful men. Uh, I still haven't kind of fully worked out what it is. Um, it's kind of like the inverse of pretty privilege that, uh, girls have. Yeah. The girls get, but you know, dude, chicks do not have it easy, uh, around other women.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Like if you're an attractive woman, you better watch your back because holy fuck, they're coming for you. Yeah. Like they are coming for you hard, but in the same way, uh, Men, masculine men, guys that certainly seem competent, especially if you're young. If you're a bit older... I think guys are a tiny little bit less threatened.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
belief that suffering was in service to god yes right that that's it um they're hoeing the fields and the sun's beating down on their back and uh you know this is kind of the same as like you know like whipping yourself um to the the actual suffering itself was a tribute and uh It's in some ways it's noble because you're building up your resilience to difficult things.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I think a lot of this, you know, from both sides just comes down to mating. That if you're a hot woman, then you, with your hand in your boyfriend's hand, thinks, you better not be fucking looking at her, bitch. Like, what's she wearing a skirt that short for? And the same thing in reverse. And here's an interesting stat. The only... One of the most predictive...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
traits around enhancing attractiveness is masculinity measured by muscularity. So if you're a guy and you are a five out of 10 and you get yourself in the gym for a decade, you're probably going to be like a six or a seven, you know, assuming that you don't fuck your face up in the process by dropping weights on it. Basically, there's this fascinating study done by a guy called David Putz. And
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
he got, uh, women to rate the attractiveness of men, these images of men, and he got men to rate the same men as how likely do you think it is that you would beat this man in a fight?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
So you have a female rating of attractiveness and male rating of formidability. Right. And then 12 months later, they brought the men that were the photos into the study and they said, how many sexual partners have you had over the last 12 months? The female rating of attractiveness had zero predictive power. The male rating of formidability almost exactly predicted their level of sexual partners.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
So what it seems is But formidability, especially as sort of shown by that typically masculine, and this isn't the only way to, you know, get into a woman's pants or whatever. It's not the only thing, you know, cool, artsy, heroin-looking fucking guitar player can be hot too. There's exceptions. Typically, this seems to be one of those things.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And I wonder whether if you look at someone like a Truett, who is a young kid, who's full of energy, kind of doesn't give a fuck, who is only going to get better. In some ways, it's inspiring, but it's only inspiring if you're remotely close to his level. Because if you're looking at someone who... doesn't have anything special about them.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Not in the same way that Usain Bolt has something special about like he's godly, right? And he's in a sport that feels a bit untouchable.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Everybody's tried to do a pull-up.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Right? Everybody's thought about running a marathon slowly in jeans. Maybe, maybe not. Um, I wonder whether the closeness that people feel and the fact that there's nothing ostensibly special there, it throws into very harsh contrast. Well, why is that not me? Why can he do that and not me?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And the easiest place to go to would be privileged upbringing, silver spoon, unfair assistance, enhanced genetics, enhanced hormones, cheating with form, whatever. I don't know what the criticisms are. Um, but it helps people to close the gap between somebody they would want to be like and themselves.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
But in other ways, it's fucking pointless because the suffering is not in service of a thing. Now, obviously, if you theologically minded, then you're like, yeah, the tribute is that. But yeah, I think even though very different.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Well, just to sit on that for a little bit longer, I think it's a really, really good point that this sort of narcissism of small differences, the fact that you don't, you haven't come from a different place, you're not in a sport that's untouchable or unreachable. And there's two ways to respond to that. One is, holy fuck, this normal person did something extraordinary. That means I can too.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
The other one is this normal person did something extraordinary. That means that I am expected to too. And the expected to thing, shows you all of the places that you're falling behind because you know that if not for my discipline and my consistency, there could have gone I, right? That could have been me in principle, but it's not. Why? And when you get to the why question.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Yeah, that's a problem. You have to face facts that, well, because I didn't not miss a training session for more than two days in a row. You're not going to like the why. Yeah, it's an ugly realization because the realization is boring. Yeah. And the realization points... the finger at you. And I see this in myself, dude.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I see, you know, especially when I was a bit younger, this fucking bitterness that used to come out in me. And it still does now. Sometimes in my more juvenile, less equanimous moments, if I've not been fucking meditating enough, I'm like, fuck that guy. Like he had this thing or this was unfair. That's not it. And it's just ego.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It's just you trying to protect yourself from this weird status game. Because previously we knew we were in 30 people pods in 150 person tribe. And you knew the best hunter and the best everything else. And you were probably not that bad at a couple of things. Yeah. Which meant that you had some value. Compared to the small little group. Exactly. Whereas now we're...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
places a lot of a lot of similarities i was very surprised with that and then probably in retrospect totally shouldn't have been working class you know limited opportunity towns probably end up producing similar sorts of mindsets yeah that way yeah probably yeah it's yeah even though it's other side of the world similar in some ways but uh
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
even though we know that we're not friends with Truett Haynes, uh, we don't know that we're not supposed to compare ourselves to him. So our like status mapping ability has just spread out across the entire planet, which is why so many people feel inferior. Um, and you can take it as inspirational. You can take it as a threat. And, uh, I see why people take it as a threat.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And then if you've got fuck you energy and you're doing it in glasses, you know what I mean? If you're going to twist the knife a little bit, people are going to say, go fuck yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I've just realized that the world's marathon record for wearing Crocs just got broken this weekend. Yep. Fourth time's a charm. That was the UK's Tommy Tree's mindset as he made his fourth attempt to put his name in the Guinness Book of World Records, and finally he came out successful. Sunday's London Marathon, Tree's put his Crocs into sport mode and clocked a 2.48.48. Pretty fast.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Surpassing the previous record for the fastest marathon wearing foam Crocs. 41 new world records. Over the past year, the record for the fastest marathon in Crocs was broken four times, so this is really heating up. Whoa. The London race marked Tree's 12th marathon and followed three failed attempts to...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
break the fastest marathon dressed as santa claus which stands at 233 23 and uh he's also got 229 41 when he's not in crocs uh so he pivoted from uh dressing as santa to doing it in in crocs so i think crocs and jeans is that's the perfect blend they what's happening with his what's happening with his jeans the marathon thing what's he doing next
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Oh, he broke the banana and the fruit world records. Like it could be the quickest banana, but an orange beat you.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I break this down by fruit type.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I think the banana, as far as fruits go, the banana is probably pretty aerodynamic. Yeah. You know, you want to be pretty, you know, slicing through the air.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You don't want to be a pear. This is real slowing you down. No. Or a watermelon. No, also bad. Yeah. I don't know. It's fascinating, dude, watching this thing unfold. And obviously after getting to hang with you and kids at your house and get to meet everybody and sort of watching the last two years, it's been kind of unsurprising, you know, to be honest.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Unsurprising. Oh. Totally unsurprising. It's like the least surprising thing that could have happened.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It's like I said, dude, it was not... It was like the least surprising thing that happened.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Yeah, I've collected the best of what other people have already figured out and repurposed it onto the internet. So I guess, like I say, I get to turn the tables today. And we missed each other on the first book, on Endure, and then you've got Undeniable, which is a new one, which is fucking awesome, by the way. Thank you. I wanted to ask this when we nearly spoke the first time.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
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Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
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Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
This orange flavor in a cold glass of water is a Beautiful, salty, sweet, orangey nectar. And I'm in love with it. And I'm going to keep talking about it until you use it because it makes a massive difference. Also, they've got a no questions asked refund policy. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You don't even need to return the box and you can drink it all. 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 slash modern wisdom. That's drink.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
lmnt.com slash modern wisdom you've said i've seen you say that you think love is the most powerful form of motivation what's the role of love and passion in this a lot of what we're talking about so far is it's like aggression it's gripping some resentment in there there's you know sort of wanting to prove people wrong and then you talk about love and passion where's that come from
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I'm interested in what drives you because you've done some pretty stupid, pretty extreme things to yourself across a variety of domains. Uh, I'm just intrigued into where that sort of relentlessness comes from.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It's interesting thinking about that. How hate is a better motivator or a bigger motivator for you because it puts anybody that wants to bring you down in a very awkward position that they have to compliment you in order to not drive you further. They have to say something nice if they want to slow you down.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
hate that's usually pretty real it's real yeah that's a good point that's a good point people are flippant with their love but they're not that flippant with their hate if they hate you that that means something that's deep that's why it's like I think that's why that drives me that's fascinating yeah I've never I've never considered that uh
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Maybe because it's sort of socially desirable to sort of say that you love something. Typically, you don't want to be seen as a hater all that much. That there is maybe more emotional activation in someone's hatred than there is in someone's love. And you're like, holy fuck, like I got to this person.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I did got to this person.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I, this is one of the things that I, one of many things that I learned spending a couple of days with you, uh, having, uh, must be nice written in the gym and poser written on the rock. Um, and I've, you know, I've mentioned this on the show a bunch of times like, huh?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Like, why pose a... I asked you about this, and you explained that 72 pounds is 72 pounds, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can say what you want, but come and carry this fucking rock up the hill and see if you think that it's all for show after that. I didn't realize until now that that's because you were... fueled way more by people's distaste than people's support.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I've been thinking about this for a while. I haven't written it out yet, so I'm going to try and play with this idea live with you. There's a quote from Viktor Frankl that says, when a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And his point is, I think, that if your life is bereft of a higher purpose, you look at hedonism and short-term gratification and stuff like that. I think there's an inverse, and I think that you and maybe me as well are good examples of the inverse, that when a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning. And that if your day-to-day experience of life
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I don't know, just sort of joy and like play and ease and fun and lightness. If that's just not what you grew up being taught, or that's not sort of your psychological set point or disposition, or it just doesn't come as easily to you as it does maybe to other people. I think I've seen a lot of the people that are like overachievers in the
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
winning the marshmallow test of life, just permanently delaying gratification. I think I see that as quite a common archetype that, oh, how easily do you switch off smoke weed and play Xbox? It's like fucking impossibly. Like it doesn't happen. And how much sort of play and ease and grace and joy, you know, how easy does sort of enjoyment and lightness come?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It's like, oh, you know, sometimes things are kind of heavy and I apply pressure to myself or even when it's not needed. And sometimes I struggle to give myself a break and so on and so forth. So I think that, yeah, that, uh, when a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Um, you know, instead of just having a fun Saturday morning with the kids, it's like we're taking a big rock and a couple of small rocks and we're going up that fucking hill again. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
A benchmark? Just another little destination, I suppose. What is the goal? Do you have a goal? Not in terms of money or follower count or anything like that. I think I did originally, even though I didn't have a number in mind, I think I wanted to become really proficient at something. I wanted to be able to say that I was... I'd reach something close to mastery or competence.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I was competent at this thing, and people respected that and recognized that, especially people that I respected and that I admired.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I love that too. I think it's a good way to bring some control into a messy world. Um, I, I have just tried to sort of put a bit of a speed limiter on how much I rely on it because. At least for me, it is not the most important metric. The most important metric is something that's pretty intangible, which is how much did I connect with the guests?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
How much did it impact the people that were listening? And
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
a lot of the time the episodes that do sometimes the episodes that do the most plays are the ones that are the most impactful and they certainly reach the most people right but i don't know how you know deeply that really changes people um and i'm at the stage now at least with this particular art form where i'm trying to really really connect with the person i'm
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
sitting opposite and I'm really really trying to understand why they are the way they are or what it is that people should understand or learn about them and none of that is going to appear on a YouTube analytics spreadsheet it simply doesn't and the The measurement stuff is good, and it ensures that you're at least keeping an eye on one or a few things.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I'm the sort of person, I think, that would become very obsessed by it. And I need to be aware of that, and I need to account for that, because it's not all that matters. You know, what would be something else? A lot of people trade intensity... In the very beginning, they use intensity, but the thing that keeps you going is your longevity, right? That's what we said, the consistency thing.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And they trade longevity for intensity. And if you're just chasing the numbers, you're able to see the immediate effect of your work. This is the same with powerlifters, let's say. So you're a powerlifter in the gym, and you're pushing yourself RPE 9, RPE 9.5, RPE 10, RPE 10.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
over and over again you're not periodizing you're not taking weeks off and you're going dude my numbers are going up i'm fucking crushing i'm crushing i'm crushing it snap yeah you okay well what was the goal what really what was the goal the goal was to get the numbers to go up but the goal was to get the numbers to go up steadily over 10 years and all that you can see is such a short amount of time in front of you and i think that you should be careful about trading longevity for intensity because and at least with the show for me
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
The more fired up I am when I wake up on a morning, and I think this is just the best judgment of sort of where your life's at at the moment and how much joy you're getting out of life. When you wake up, when your alarm goes off on a morning, how excited are you to get out of bed? I think that's a pretty good rubric for how's life going right now. It's not going to be like that forever.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You know, it's going to be better and worse and sometimes really worse and sometimes even better. Yeah. And if I wake up on a morning and I go, fuck yeah, I get to speak to Cam today. Like that's really exciting. Tomorrow I've got Will Storr, like science of storytelling, fucking awesome author. He did the status game. I'm fucking fired. I can't wait.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And then, you know, there was periods in the show where I wake up and I'm like, oh, who am I talking to today? Oh, yeah, that'll be all right. You know, maybe the episode would be great. Maybe it would even be a really great performance, but if it didn't speak to me. So very much in that sort of, I don't know,
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
post-growth thing uh where i've already got at least with regards to the show so much further than i ever thought i was going to yeah fucking move continents and came over to this this new country and made all of these friends and you know have lifted myself out of a
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
area of the UK that's it was literally only famous for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK and then it lost that so it didn't even have that anymore I I've already won. I've already won. So trying to find ease, grace, joy, and just seeing how that works for a little bit, because I've very much applied the sort of Cam Haynes Goggins mindset for a while.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And I can totally see me turning around in six months or two years or whatever and being like, all right, time to really fucking grip the bar again. I'm just seeing, okay, what happens if I try and have a little bit more play with this? And what happens if I go back in the other direction?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I did. I really, I really think that you can look back on a body of work that was like disembodied, disconnected successes. Or you can look back on something and be like, yeah, that was me. Like that was really me. I put myself out there. And there's some people, let's say that you're in a sport, right? Let's say that you're a powerlifter or something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You want to be the best in the world. You want to be the best in the world. It's not about...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
manifest manifesting your fucking artistic expression on the lifting platform pick the fucking weight up okay you know what i mean can you pick it up or not can you pick it up or not and the goal is to pick the fucking weight up and however you get there is how you do it now you may feel transcendent you may feel like this is you really sort of actualizing your potential and doing it in the world
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
But my goal is to look back on this period of life and look back on the library of work that I do and go, yeah, that was really me. That was exactly where I was. I really tried to be open and honest with myself. It's a selfish project, and I think that the best ones are. And not everyone can do this.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Not everyone can be selfish with what it is that they get to do for art because if you're a trader – Oh, please tell me about how your artistic fucking expression helped you lose money on that USD-JPY trade. No, you have a very, very tightly defined outcome. But in some other writing books and stuff like that, you could write a book
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It would sell tons and tons of copies, but you weren't connected to. And you'd get loads of success. How do you feel after that? And for some people, they may take a ton of well-being and satisfaction and joy and all the rest of the stuff, meaning from it just being successful. They just wanted the success.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And I get the sense that maybe the first few books or the first few projects or the first few businesses or the first few years of the podcast or whatever might be playing that game. But then after a while, you go, okay, well, kind of satiated my desire for status and maybe money or being recognized by all of these people.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I made this joke with regards to the show that I kind of had the five infinity stones from Manos' glove. I had Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Alain de Botton from the School of Life, Naval Ravikant and Joe Rogan as like the five infinity stones.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
yeah people that i wanted and i've got four of them and joe texted after the last episode and was like don't forget we need to do an episode on modern wisdom so i'm like right okay well once i do that if all it was was about when you're done being i've got gold medalist syndrome why do you go from that and that's a genuine question and that's still something that's true every time that you complete a new goal you have to ask yourself okay well what is my life now that i've completed this thing that i was working toward for a long yeah and that's the danger of goals right you know
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
James Clear got this right in Atomic Habits where he said, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So you just need to iterate and keep going and keep going and it helps with longevity.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
But there is no growth without goals because you need a goal to give you a fucking direction to move in or else you're just like growing outwardly but not moving toward a particular thing. It's not great for the way that motivation works, dopamine, positive reinforcement, all that stuff. So again, it's this tension, it's this balance between the two.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
But I get the sense and it'll be interesting, you know, in a year's time, a couple of years time when we chat in your episode 300. Hmm. for me to go, okay, and what's driving you now? Like, how do you feel about the show? And I would guess that you're going to say, you know what it is, like, actually, I'm kind of taking my eye off the ball with regards to the metrics a little bit.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I'm really interested in having conversations with underground, I'm really platforming people that, you know, no one knows about, or I've really enjoyed delving into this area of whatever. And I think that is a realization that lots of people come to. I think they come to it maybe with even raising kids. That you think, I'm going to get the kid into the Harvard, the Ivy League University.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I'm going to get them to be the captain of this team. Are they going to be the top in this particular pursuit or whatever? And then after a while you go... I just kind of want them to have fun. I just want them to be happy. And I thought that I could get them there through that, but you kind of need to it's far easier to achieve it than it is to get rid of it.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Uh, because if you haven't achieved it, it's always in the back of your mind is, wow, you know, that might've been the answer.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
So you need to do it to see that it isn't it. Like Naval says, uh, the reason to win the game is to be rid of the game.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It sounds like you're saying that you find sort of doing the podcast is one of the more or most difficult things that it is that you do. Before we continue, if you've been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
in your energy, your focus, and your performance, but most people have no idea what theirs are or what to do if something's off, which is why 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, they run lab tests that monitor over a
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
100 biomarkers and their team of expert physicians will analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. Seeing your testosterone levels and dozens of other biomarkers 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
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And 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. So what are the most difficult things that you've done physically? You've got this long, illustrious career of doing fucking stupid things to yourself. Yeah. What rank in the top few?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Are there any in particular that come to mind from the hunt or the races perspective? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
So those experiences stand out. The first guy I ever had on the podcast, episode one, that people should not go back and listen to. But it's an interesting episode. It's a guy called Stu Morton who was training to row the Atlantic solo. So this is the Talisker whiskey race. It's a pretty common thing. But it's very extreme. You go from... I think the coast of Portugal to kind of the Caribbean.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And the interesting thing with that is that
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
people that do it in groups of two or three or four are really no quicker than the person that does it on their own because for every additional person you need a bigger boat and more supplies and another person which is more drag yeah so everybody kind of nets out at the same pace you can go at now obviously i guess uh physically it must be a little workload probably a little easier but uh Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I know the difficulty of trying to put yourself in the mindset of somebody before a trait became a habit or before sort of an effort became a habit. Yeah. In my experience, I think... where most people get stuck. And this is why consistency is such an unsexy topic. What people are looking for, for the most part, is getting from zero to one.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I remember speaking to him and I, I can't, he's like something like 14 million or strokes or something he needed to do to get him. So it's just 14 million.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You go across that thing. It's so funny when you break down races, like 200 miles into five, like it's 500,000 steps. Yeah. You got to take 500,000 steps.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And, uh, it's so hilarious when that happens.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I love the idea of these backyard ultras. It was the dude from the Barkley marathon that invented it, right?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Yeah. And just his insight that he hated the fact that sometimes people won. Yeah. He wanted to race when no one won. Yeah. Yeah. Like everybody loses. Everybody loses at this race. There's just some people that lose less than others.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
They still don't beat the race though.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
That's the current record for this thing? Wow.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
What's the sort of pace that people are doing? Because you could do eight miles an hour, right? You could move at eight miles an hour and get done in half an hour.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I'm sure it's going to do one of these.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
What's your perspective on genetics, pedigree, talent, and hard work, and how all of these things fit together? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
So I'm not... A lot of the habits or a lot of the ways that I show up in life and a lot of the things that I'm doing aren't going well. Please explain to me the first few steps to get to a place that I want to be. And that's great and pretty doable. You can go and explain to somebody...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Yeah, it's, it's weird with, I guess, talent.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
something like motivation or enthusiasm and and consistency or discipline because at the very beginning you're no matter how talented you are you haven't spent enough time and attention to unlock that talent now sure you begin the race a little bit further ahead than the other guy that's also starting but you're you know the most virtuoso keyboard pianist ever right the first time that they sat down at a
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
piano, they fucking sucked. So even if they had all of the raw materials to learn very, very quickly, this insight that you kind of unlock your own potential, you unlock your own talent through the only thing that matters, which is the consistency. Now I will say, do you know who Craig Jones is?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Yeah. He's a, uh, Craig may be the most He may be the biggest outlier, I think, in the entire world of sort of elite sports in that he doesn't train consistently. He doesn't have a strength and conditioning routine. He doesn't care about his body or what he puts in it. He sometimes cares about what he puts his body in. And he, as far as I can see, is a professional partier. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
who still is probably top five grapplers on the planet. And, you know, Nicky Rod, who trains here at B-Team in Austin, will eat, sleep, lift, train, recover, study tape, do all of the things. And Craig will roll back in from a session with a cigarette in his hand and still give him as good of a run for his money as anyone and oftentimes win. And that...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
In some ways, it's just like really fucking cool. But in other ways, it must just be so disheartening if you're in that world.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Yeah. Could he be the best?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
He's a legend in certain disciplines that just not.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
how to uh effectively run a 5k warm-up pre-race preparation here's some good shoes that aren't too expensive and here's a cool down process and but what's really difficult to explain to somebody is how you do a 5k three times a week for five years yeah like you kind of can't explain how to do that uh the same thing with going to the gym mike is retell uh who you should have on the show i think he'd be a great guest i'd fucking love to see you two together actually um
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Pretty, pretty, pretty much apart from when he's injured. But even with that, like there's a degree of, of commitment during your injury. Yeah. Right. If your stomach's upset and you kind of got to focus on yourself. But yeah, I think for a lot of people, What they end up realizing is it doesn't really matter how talented I am. The consistency and the hard work really is the only, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
it's the only pathway I have to sort of capitalize on this stuff. And I think that's one of the reasons, again, why somebody who largely is pretty untalented is such a trigger for a lot of people because there's two ways you could look at it and you could say, holy fuck, like, there's nothing special about them. Why did they get that? Holy fuck, there's nothing special about them.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
There's nothing special about me either. That means that I too can do it. I could make it, yeah. Yeah, because what people want, I think, a lot of the time is... What is the super secret squirrel technique or what was the unique combination cocktail of upbringing and genetics and whatever it was that this person had in order to be able to get them to this place?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And the more boring the answer, the less satisfactory it is. And I think...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
part of the reason that it's not very satisfactory is that it actually it doesn't take it further away from you right it brings it closer to you because if you say well what's the reason that Usain Bolt's the fastest man on the planet and someone explains about how his fast twitch type a muscle fibers have a particular like ATP output and his lactate threshold and his limb length and the way that his body biomechanics and spinal flexion and all of this stuff yeah and you go
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
That's beautiful. Like what a romantic, what a gorgeous distillation of the fastest man on the planet ever. How the fuck am I supposed to replicate that? You said, well, I just sort of, I just trained for a decade and a half and I didn't stop. You go, yeah, that's fucking lame. But it's also enlivening because you say it's at your feet too.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It comes back to authenticity. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It was a natural outgrowth. And I think this is where you can hopefully give yourself a break, even though I know you're terrible at doing that. you did probably what comes most naturally to you, which was your way of showing love, which is world's tough. You need to be tougher than it is at least.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And ideally about between five and 10 times tougher than it is. Yeah. And this is the way that I'm going to show you that I love you because I'm going to prepare you for the world and I'm going to make sure that nothing can hurt you and that you're going to be resilient and that you're going to have, you know, this is my, this is my, my showing of love. And, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
If that is not how you actually want to show up sooner or later, there's going to be cracks and things you can't force stuff long enough. It's, you know, the trite old thing about the man who loves to walk will walk further than the man who has to, um, Because eventually, over a long enough time horizon, people end up just regressing to the mean. They just go back to what their patterns are.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And now maybe you can change your patterns over a very, very, very long time. But how many people do you know that have really made changes in their life? It's so few. People lose five pounds. You know, they'll go from one company to another. Right. They'll, you know, read a book about arguments and change their communication style.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
He can explain how to do the perfect tricep pushdown, the maximum muscle hypertrophy, and all of those things. But he can't explain how you do that with progressive overload once a week on that cycle and two other muscle groups on other cycles for a decade to get the physique that you want. And when you look at someone like you, who is very consistent, who is disciplined in that way, you almost...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
But how many people do you know that have lost a hundred pounds or moved, changed their career at 40 or gone to a new country, right? Or got out of that abusive relationship and entered a new one that was flourishing and taken all of the things that they learned. Like that's alchemy.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It's like taking something that was awful and useless and pointless in your life and turning it into something that's beautiful and valuable. And it's so fucking rare. Just doesn't happen all that much. And again, to kind of bring this back down, one of my favorite realizations and one I think that you share as well is, well,
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
In some ways, that's kind of terrifying because, oh, my God, look at how many people don't end up actualizing everything that they could. And it's not that the only thing to do in life that's great is to actualize your potential. A lot of it can just be flourishing and living it fully and maximizing your time on this planet in experience and presence and all that sort of stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
But most people don't get that. Fuck, that's terrifying. Or most people don't get that. Holy shit, how low is the bar? The average American is obese, divorced, and with less than 1K in the bank. That's the average American. That's nuts. How low is the bar?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
There's a difference between doing something because and doing something in spite. Right. I achieved this in spite of the way that my wife hates that I go out for a run at 530.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Right. Yeah. I did this because my wife encourages me to go and do it. Right. Okay. And I think it's a good point to talk about that I do worry about the romanticization of suffering too much on men, especially that there is a certain type of personality. I certainly have this. Maybe you do too. I definitely get the sense that Goggins has this. That is someone who...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Like the priest's hoeing seeks out suffering beyond its utility, right? It's like, I've taken everything that I can from this. Mm-hmm. And I'm making it harder than it needs to be. So a great cue that one of my friends gives in the gym is what would this be like if it was easier? So you're carrying the rock, right? There's a perfect example.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You've got to carry a 72-pound pole as a rock up a hill. There are a variety of different ways. I learned all of them with you. You can have it in bear hugging, on the shoulders, you can have it in the center of the back, you can have it there. Why not carry it on the top of your head? Genuine question. Why not carry it on the top of your head? Because that would be harder.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
That would make the 72 pound rock harder. Well, you know, I'm calcifying the top of my skull. Yeah. Like this is real suffering. You go, well, you don't do that. So we're always making a kind of value judgment around how hard should the hard thing be. Right. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And I just get the sense that a supportive wife or, you know, if you really want your kids to know what suffering is, break up with your wife when they want your old. You know what I mean? Leave them. Don't pay the alimony. Leave them in a broken home. See if you can leave some needles around. This is for you. Yeah, exactly. A nice systemic infection will really toughen them up. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
So we understand, but we just make value judgments. Like all of this is like, I feel like this is about the right amount. Right. You didn't make the kids do the mountain three times. Right. Okay. So why one? Why not one in a bit? Why not three? Why not five?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
it's such a part of your being the habit is what's kept you going and whatever the fuck it was that got you started this fear of insufficiency this desire to not be nothing this need for validation not to prove yourself this desire for control over your environment you know this sense that things are maybe a bit destitute or a little bit hopeless but fuck like in the gym I remember this dude when I
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
So with that, I just get the sense that if you have the choice of flying with the wind behind you, giving you a little bit of a push, being like, huh, the thing that I want to do that's really fucking hard is made easier by By my partner. So I can run, let's say you can run 100 miles on a day. If I have a partner that's a total arsehole, I can get to like 95.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
If I have a partner that's a total hero, I can get to 105. I want a partner that gets me to 105. That doesn't mean that the thing is less virtuous or any easier, but that my capacity gets unlocked because I'm not wasting it carrying a rock on my head. I'm carrying a rock on my shoulder.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
We need to take a 72-pound rock up a hill, you carrying the rock, and me spouting nonsense. That feels like we're specializing in where our skill sets lie. You know what I mean? Yeah, I see.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I mean, if Truett was in a relationship and his wife was permanently saying, fuck, I wish that you could do any exercise but pull-ups. Like, I just hate them. Like, I'm mortally offended by pull-ups. You'd be like, hey, darling, come here. Let me have a... Let's have a little chat about this. Like, can we just fucking ikne with the pull-up talk? Yeah, exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
He's trying to break a world record here. So I do think that's important. And as well, the... learning when to actually just go, I'm going to enjoy this. I'm going to fucking enjoy the end of the race, right? Like you've run the marathon, you've run the ultra, you've run the 250. And it's like, well, if you went 3% faster at the very, very end, then you'd shave four seconds off your time.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It's like, okay, but why did you do this? Did you do this to get the fastest time possible? You didn't win. Someone else fucking won, right? You didn't win. Or did you do it so that you can take a tiny little bit off the top
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
and be like yes yeah i crossed the finish line i fucking felt that that's positive reinforcement that's why i'm here i'm here to experience it and maybe this is why i'll never be a turbo billionaire or you know like the absolute world champion at some super difficult pursuit uh because i i just sort of value other things and this is not natural so it's very much me like
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
dictating it to me not expressing it out of me if that makes sense yeah i'm like uh saying what i want to be true and how i want to show up not how i show up it's still very much just like a fucking japanese torture chamber inside of my head me telling me that yeah i'm not good enough and that could have been better and i shouldn't have done that thing and so on and so forth is that like is that mostly a man thing like uh being being judged on performance and worth and um
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
No, I don't, I don't know that much. The biggest house in Austin that was ever sold actually is owned by a friend and that was built by the founder of Bumble. Uh, it was a, a, a woman and I do, I don't know what her partner does or whatever, but like you didn't build a fucking $40 million house.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
When I first started training, I started lifting weights when I was 18, when I went to university, the Center for Sporting Excellence in Newcastle University. And I remember I had this idea in the back of my mind, which was everything in my day can have gone to shit, like everything. And I've woken up and just face planted from attempt to attempt.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I know that unless you were also like a total freak business person, but there is a little bit of me that goes like, I wonder what it's like to be with someone who, uh, outwardly is that high achieving, you know, and that's not to say that's the only way to achieve.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
There's many, many other things that are more valuable than, than how much money you bring, but definitely the dynamic typically is, you know, protect a provider and then helping, um,
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And even if that's not the way that the dynamic needs to be, or even like structurally quite is, even if you've got two breadwinners in the household, there's still this sort of expectation that the guy's going to show up in that way. But one of the saddest things to me is to see somebody who's won the game and is still playing it.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
a 70s-year-old businessman who is now a grandfather, high-powered, CEO of a company, founded a bunch, built and sold, and still going to the expos and still walking around hustling and grinding and giving out their card and staying up late and scrutinizing all the stuff. It's like, dude, you've got a legacy that is so fucking far beyond this business thing that you did.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Now, maybe, in a minority of cases, it's your passion. It's just a door...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
printer ink or whatever turnip farming whatever the fuck it is that you're great at for the most part what I see is people that just want to be validated by the world around them and they just need that that and I would say I've got a lot more grace for the people who haven't yet achieved it and are still chasing it you know if it's I want to become but this is the problem with not having milestones and with the game being infinite that you can
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
get to a situation where you never feel like you've arrived. And I think this is exactly what these people are struggling with. They're like, no, no, no, no. It's when I get to 10 million subscribers on YouTube, but no, no, no, no. It's when the business hits, I sell it for 3 billion because the first one that was at 1 billion, that just wasn't quite enough. I need to repeat it twice.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It's not just doing it once because that could have been a fluke. I need to do it twice. Well, no, three times because I timed the market because of COVID. Like, you know, there's always a excuse, excuse, excuse. And after a while you need to kind of Admit to yourself that this is just an addiction to wanting to be validated by the world, and it's never going to be enough.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And you're trying to fill a hole internally with accolades and love externally. And that's, for the most part, not the way that it works. But in slight part is. If you never run a fucking 100-mile race, you'd be like, come on. I've got to do it. I've got to do this thing. Look, you did 240. What's the next one? Yeah. It'll be 250. I know. It has to. Where is that? Arizona.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Okay, what's the, we're in, it's going to be the 1st of May soon. So it's what, like the 5th of May or something you're running it?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
What's the temperature like in Arizona at this time of the year?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Uni went badly and girlfriend and me had an argument and this thing went wrong and that thing went wrong. But I went to the gym and it just felt like this area that I had complete control over and that was absolutely in the first instance what got me there and I decided to be stronger and feel a little bit less weak and vulnerable and you know be more attractive and gain confidence in myself and
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Yeah. I mean, that's gold medalist syndrome. Yeah. Right. In a small regard. I know my mom and dad felt the same. One of my dad's proudest things is, you know, I was mortgage free. Yeah. I didn't know that happened. Yeah. Well, I remember you showing me when we were driving around Eugene. It wasn't like a trailer park. It was like a barn, like a mobile, like a single small thing.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And you were saying, you know, when I grew up, I thought, wow, that would, you know, one of those in a truck, like, holy shit.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Yeah, they will do. I just don't know what the name would have been.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Internally, it's still the same. It gets set down.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You remember we went over that bridge that your sons used to jump off and there was a logger that was pulled up by the side of the road. Yeah. We had a little chat with him.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Truck driver. I'm... interested in how you've navigated success or your relationship with success warping sort of the original mission and not getting a set of velvet handcuffs or a you know sort of champagne problem prison or whatever where uh you want to keep your foot on the gas. You want to keep pushing hard.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You also, you know, materially have a very different life to the one that you were used to and that you expected and that you grew up with and that even your kids grew up with. You know, you've sort of arced this across time. How does success warp your relationship with the original mission in that way? How have you found navigating that? Um...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And then now it's just, why do you go to the gym in the morning? It's like, I don't know, it's 7.40 a.m. That's where I am at 7.40 a.m. I'm in the gym. That's what happens, yeah. So yeah, something gets you started and then I guess habit keeps you going.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I got a question and I don't quite know how to phrase it, but I want you to try and think about it quite deeply if you can. What do you think, how do you think you would feel if
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
What if the next mountain that you need to climb is to be able to feel resonance and connection with the things that you've achieved in life?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Look at what I did. Yeah. I am good enough. I raised some fucking kids. I raised kids that are world record breakers and protect our country.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You're like the Gordon Ryan of taking compliments.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Oh, okay. So it was an obligation.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Right, in some ways. It was a minimum accepted level of... To them.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
But I mean, you know, you could argue, well, why is it not two world records? Why wasn't he a SEAL and a Ranger?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Yeah, you've got to carry it on your head. It's very important. No, look, I really... I'm very, very impressed with everything that the fucking Haynes household does. And I just wonder what, I wonder what, I wonder whether you could fly with a little bit more breeze behind you, like internally with this stuff. Go fuck. Yeah. Like, you know, just little glimmers, not all the time. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I don't think it's going to kill your edge, but, uh, I'd love... And this is, again, me very much speaking to me, which is why, again, I'm saying it how I want it to be, not how it is for me. Yeah, I'd just love for you and for Goggins as well, these guys that are really, really driven, you know, hatred and a chip on your shoulder and this bitterness and the resentment and stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Great fuel, but I just wonder if there's, you know, can this be a hybrid car as opposed to just a diesel one? And I'd... maybe that's an interesting mountain for you to, or an interesting race for you to assess the difficulty of.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Because in the same way that spending a day on the couch would be incredibly uncomfortable in a manner that running 250 miles isn't for you, I wonder, okay, well, let's look inward. What is there that I can do
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
here with regards to this like how can I oh fuck congratulating myself no dude give me 200 kilos to deadlift a few hundred times you know like that's that's what I want to do I understand that it's that's that is really hard um
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I wonder, have you got grandkids yet?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Congratulations, Tanner. I wonder what granddad life is going to be like for you.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Run it back. We'll do it again. Fucking one generation down. Look, dude, that's one of the things that you would typically hear about the maniacal solo ranger guy that, you know, keeps working. Ah, but he's softened by kids. Like, no, no, no, no. His kids were a vehicle for it. Like, you know, it went even harder. But I don't know. You... it'll be fascinating.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Like you're a fascinating guy and I'm going to be really, really interested to watch what happens over the next few years is presumably more the Haynes household grows more and more and the grandkids thing. And you go, fuck, like I'm revisiting this babying childhood thing. I'm running this back. Hmm. Where was I at the last time this was the case?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And how do I want to show up this time for grandkid?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Cam Haines, ladies and gentlemen. Cam, you're awesome, man. I'm so glad that you got to come on.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Well, fantastic. Tell people about your book, most importantly.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Good, good, good, good. That's what we need.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
First chapter and on the back.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
So you're in the middle of this fucking run. Yeah. When your book releases. I know. So your publisher will be chasing you down.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
To run away from the book?
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Okay. Well, I love it, dude. Not just because I'm plastered throughout it. It's fucking awesome. Thank you. And I appreciate the fuck out of you.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You made me run 11 miles. Go fuck yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I know about books that have been written to do with discipline and motivation and overcoming hard things and resilience and becoming undeniable and stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I actually think that Consistency would be such an unsexy book. It'd be a pretty short book. Yeah. Keep doing the thing. Don't stop.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Keep doing the thing. Don't stop.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
At least 10 too many. So that's the furthest that I've run so far. Maybe ever was that with you. And that was trail running. Yeah, it was great. I actually felt great the next day. Sometimes, I mean, you'll know this. Or maybe you won't because you're always running. But the non-runners will know this.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Yeah. I think this is one of the reasons why injuries for people just feel like such an unfortunate curse. You know, it's this weird fucking irony that all of the people – who sit on the couch and don't have a health and fitness routine have perfect spines.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
And it's all of the people that have tried to do CrossFit and yoga and jiu-jitsu that are all bulging, hemorrhaging, degenerated, disc, you've lost half an inch in my heart, blah, blah. And... This was something toward the end of my 20s that I had to deal with where I had, you know, five-year period where I was pretty much always injured in one form or another. So annoying.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
Bulging disc, second bulging disc, ruptured Achilles, hurt shoulder. You know, my entire identity, a lot of my identity was wrapped up in being, you know, like the big muscular guy in his 20s around other big sort of dudes and that giving me confidence and making me attractive and then...
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
I had to be in the corner doing bird dog rehab in the CrossFit gym while everybody else was sending it and getting after it. And I was watching myself get fatter, slower, and skinnier all at the same time. Yeah, that's rough. And an interesting thing there is, okay, so where do you take your sense of self-worth and well-being from when your coping mechanism, because it is a coping mechanism.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
That's what training is, yeah. Yeah, for a lot of people. If you wanted to be really, you know,
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
rx plus super difficulty level resilience it's okay how good can your mindset be when you're not allowed to train because to you the thing that's easiest is going out and going for the run right the hardest thing would be okay for the next two weeks you got to sit on the couch on a morning yeah like what no you can't meditate either you can't use it to do something else productive right it would tear people up inside
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
You've always got one body part if you've taken a big break from running and you're not conditioned. There's one body part that always hurts. Like, fucking for me, it's my ankles and my calves. It's like just, it is always on fire. And maybe it's because we were trail running. Maybe it's because the pace was right. Maybe whatever. But I felt great. fine the next day.
Modern Wisdom
#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance
It's quite quick walking, I think as well.
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?
A quick aside, if you're anything like me, traveling is great, but packing is like staring into the abyss while chewing glass, which is why I've partnered with Nomadic because their backpack is literally the greatest piece of luggage that's ever been invented. This 20 liter travel pack is what I used to fly around the world for four weeks and this and carry on was all that I needed.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
They're actually designed by someone who knows what it's like to pack a for a trip. The bag is so good, it'll have you packing things you don't even need, some sort of weird flex. Best of all, if you're still on the fence, their products will last you literally a lifetime with their lifetime guarantee. So this is the final backpack that you'll ever need to buy.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Plus, you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy a new bag, fill it with possessions, try it for a month. If you don't like it, they'll give you a new bag. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 20% discount, see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom.
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.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
like a corpse, because L3N8 is uniquely able to cross the blood-brain barrier, boosting memory, focus, and cognitive function, all while also improving sleep and reducing stress. And if you're still on the fence, Momentus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for 29 nights.
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
If you do not love it, if it doesn't help your sleep, I'll just give you your money back and the ship internationally. Right now, you can get 20% off everything site-wide 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.
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
Modern Wisdom
#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Thank you. and lifespan. Getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's only $500. 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
#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.
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#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.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
And they should still come begging back to daddy.
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#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?
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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?
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#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
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#913 - Andrew Schulz - Why Does Modern America Feel So Insane?
Me too. Life, stream it on Netflix right now.
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#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,
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#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
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Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
Yeah. I identify as a person who raps.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
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Modern Wisdom
#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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Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#901 - Tom Segura - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?
You know what to do. You know what to do with the condoms.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
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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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
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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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Ned Brockman, welcome to the show. How are you, mate? Good. Thank you for coming last night.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Did you see Ross failed his long distance swim twice? Yes. Before he did the one recently in- In America.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And yeah, with that, I think he's got, of all of the endurance people that I've spoken to and that I know, I think he's got the best mindset around it because he's very- Well, first of all, he is a freak. He's depersonalized so much of this. He talks about resilience as suffering strategically managed.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Terrifying human. But what I like particularly about his approach is that he doesn't He doesn't tell himself a story about it. It's not about him. It's not about his capacity, his worth as a human. It doesn't make him less or more for doing it. He sees himself like a science experiment. He is a sports scientist at heart.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
It's interesting thinking about the situation that you were in where you've got... The mental capacity, which is the exact thing that you need to use to make good decisions, is the very thing that the situation you're in is depriving you of, which means that your difficult decision becomes infinitely worse. And then you can't even step in to help other people make decisions on your part.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
You can't even tell other people that you need them to make decisions. You don't even have that level of self-awareness. Yeah. So I mean, the sleep deprivation thing while doing these sorts of events is I think must be one of the most difficult things. The reason that Ross is so good at what he does is his digestion because he can eat and then be horizontal. I don't know about you.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
If I eat, I need to be upright for about half an hour. I need to, gravity apparently needs to help me digest shit. Right. But he can happily chug down, you know, best part of a liter of porridge, piping hot porridge that burns his throat on the way down to warm him from the inside, like a fucking internal edible hot water bottle. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And then get back to not only being horizontal, but face down in water swimming.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So I wonder if, I wonder if there's a person out there who's like an elite sleeper who might be a worse runner, who might be a worse lifter, who might be a worse swimmer or whatever. They could win by sleeping.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
They can just, the same way Ross can digest at any point. I wonder if there's something that can be done by training sleep more effectively. You know what I mean?
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
In other news, this episode is brought to you by AG1. You are not eating enough fruit and vegetables, and you know it. And this is going to help. I tried every green string I could get my hands on over the space of about three years, and I settled on AG1 because it is the best.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So get back to, what are we now? Day five, day six-ish? Yep.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Is this because of the pace? That if you were to push the pace much more quickly, it would be too fatiguing?
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
You hadn't found any joy in the suffering up until that point?
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Talk to me about the training preparation.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
What were you angry about?
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Talk to me about physical pains, challenges, such going through it.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Accumulating an awful lot of time and attention.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
What do you think? that's really interesting because i would have expected hormonally something to have been going on if you're lying in a bed and you're resting heart rates at 110 and you're only getting half an hour or an hour's sleep and you've got to do all of this work i think a lot of the time because the only thing that we have access to are our thoughts right so we know what the uh
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
inner world is for us. I can't detect what my hormone and estrogen and progesterone levels are. But if your bloods have come back and they're normal, relatively normal, what that shows is the power of the framing that you've got inside of you, because it's not something systemic that's going on, or at least not something that could be measured.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Free radicals, other like blah, blah, blah in the blood. I'm sure that there'll be areas that weren't fully tested. But it just really shows what power you have mentally to be able to make a relatively okay performing physiology totally fucked.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Cause you know, it's going to be another source of stress for you as well, by the way, get in, let's, let's pin you. Blah, blah.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
What does the ultra running community think of you?
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
You're saying that you're the Jake Paul of endurance racing.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So you find the people that don't and work out a way to try and do the thing that will make them love you.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
It's like a social change organization masquerading as a fitness pursuit.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Yeah. Do you know Will Gouge? I do.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Yeah. So Will, I've known Will for years and he did his thing across America. He did an interesting UK one before that was the counties, different counties, different.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
No, no. So this was maybe even before that, where he ran, I think it's a marathon in each county in the UK. Maybe every day it was like the 60, 55 or something.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
It was before all that. Yeah. And then he did the thing where he ran across America and not too dissimilar. He's probably maybe like 30, only a few years older than you or something like that. For the people that don't know him, fucking good looking kid. Handsome, big dick. Anyway. I haven't seen the dick. Yeah, you're not British.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And he doesn't, I was talking to Rich Roll about this and he said, what did he refer to it as? He said that the endurance races are a bit of a granola crowd. they're sort of a bit crusty and, uh, you've got Will who's trendy and he wears flares. Yeah, exactly. You know, like skincare routine.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And, um, he ends up doing really well on a number of like pretty fucking extreme events, but it ruffles some feathers.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Do you think his granolary beard has helped him with that? I'm being serious.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I remember this is the guy, again, for the people that didn't know that he ran the length of Africa. First person ever, I think.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And I remember I was watching him on his Instagram stories halfway through it. And I think he'd managed to get some sort of food poisoning. And he was running down the road with shit pouring out of his shorts, throwing up.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
and videoing himself just saying that they're trying to stop me yeah they yeah they're trying they're trying they're trying to stop me but i'm just too fucking fierce i'm just still here chewing pavement yeah chewing tarmac eating asphalt and uh i i don't know it's not i really wish that that was the way that i'm built in those situations and maybe if i dedicated myself to it there's something that i could activate but fuck me i love seeing someone that is
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Like seeing somebody that is dealing with suffering with a smile. And I don't know, it's noble and like cool. It is.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I wonder if that's part of the reason that you were maybe a bit angry when you finished the race as well, that you have this opportunity to not only be you for your own experience, but also this is what I want to put out. One of the big reasons of doing this is to set the example. This is how you can deal with suffering with a smile.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
This is how you can go through some adversity and be jovial and add levity and And maybe that was a, as much of a missed opportunity as not completing the race would have been not just doing the thing, but how you do the thing.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And that's what's quite- He plied himself in a very specific way.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
In other news, this episode is brought to you by Function. I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Function has been an absolute game changer. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor everything from your heart health and your hormone levels to nutrient deficiency and stuff like thyroid function.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Talk to me about what you've just finished doing recently. This is the first time you've actually got to sit down on a podcast and talk about it since you completed everything.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
300 000 person waiting list but every monday they open a few spots for modern wisdom listeners and you can get your expert blood work analysis and bypass that 300 000 person wait list by heading to the link in the description below or going to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom that's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom you were you were saying before this is something i've been thinking about an awful lot and especially you know i'm here in australia i've been on tour uh
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
the first night I've done three shows in very close succession and each one was the smallest show of this tour and also the biggest show I'd ever done each time. So it was like a thousand people, then 1700 people, then two and a bit thousand people. So each one had escalated up and, um,
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I, especially at the first show, there was a lot of like gripping from me to make sure that I didn't mess up and it went great. All of the shows went really perfect. You know, I couldn't have asked for them to have gone any better.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
For two hours, yeah.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Yeah, I miss Arthur Shackleton. The problem is, Ernest Shackleton... is the guy that did, uh, uh, went across Antarctica, but Alfred Lansing is the guy that wrote the book endurance. And I managed to split the difference between Shackleton and fucking anyway. So, sorry, no, no, no, uh, Quite a lot of prep. You know, I ran half of the show last year, maybe 20 times.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I did work in progress shows this year in Austin. So I did the, in front of 40 people, like a comedian would do working different bits and what story do I want to keep in and which story do I want to get rid of and stuff.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
What did people like? What didn't they? Which jokes landed well, which didn't? And refined it and refined it and refined it and then went through this run. But I realized, especially after the first one, that I was gripping very tightly to the experience. Very, not fearful, but very on edge. I just wanted to make sure it was very precise and sort of laser focused on the thing.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
But it's very difficult, I think, to kind of be taking in what's happening whilst focusing on the thing that you're doing, right? It's very difficult to hold those two positions at once in your mind, like with maybe your most recent race, that you're so laser focused and obsessed on what is this particular thing? You know, the type of race that you're doing is so unvaried. There's no novelty.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
It's very constricted and constrained, right? It's like running in a lap. You might as well have fucking ran it on a treadmill. And I realized- Chris Bumstead talked to me about, it's not just about winning, it's about how you win and the story that you tell yourself and the experience that you go through.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So not just winning and being a gracious victor or losing and being a gracious loser or whatever. It's like, and how did you feel when you did this thing? Because when you look back,
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
yeah sure you can say i ticked the box i did the tour i completed the race i did the whatever but really what was the reason for doing the thing what is for the experience yeah it was for the way that you felt the energy the vibe right intensity yeah all of that yes so um one of my friends before i did the show in melbourne was like how are you feeling for tonight i'm a bit nervous so i've got some uh propanolol if you want some beta blockers and uh i thought i could use those but
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I've got myself here. The entire reward is to feel the terror of hearing a few thousand people outside murmuring, murmuring, murmuring, murmuring, and then the music comes on and you have to walk out. So, yeah, I just think it's really interesting hearing you talk about this experience as one where...
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
you maybe did this incredible achievement and raised all of this money and stuff, but internally, the experience maybe that you had left something to be desired from your presence, from the way that you tuck it in, from all the rest of it. And I think that, you know, that's another frontier to try and conquer too. And to talk about that and to say, hey, look,
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
it's not necessarily just about winning or losing or completing it or not completing it. It's also about how you do it outwardly and inwardly as well.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
This is how bad it could have gone.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And this is how good I want it to be.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Well, didn't you do, was it 50 marathons in 50 days while you were at work?
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Well, it's not just within events you'll have ups and downs. I'm sure even on the Australia run, even on the marathon after work competition. Even within those, you've got good days, bad days. But I think if you broaden the time horizon, you know, we talked about this last night as well, that, okay, well, maybe across events – There's going to be some that are better and some that are worse.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Not while you were at work. You went to work and then did the marathons after as well.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And some of the worse days within events will make the better days feel better. And some of the worst events across events will make the better events feel better. But what can I take from this? Because fuck knows what the next... reason is that you need to galvanize yourself and steal yourself against some sort of a challenge. Maybe it's something in your personal life.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Maybe it's something that happens professionally. Maybe it's some fucking press story that comes out. Maybe it's the next physical event that you do or one down the line, and you need to draw on that. And without that, without it going bad or worse, maybe, than would have been ideal, the next one, actually, you can't survive. And it's that odd thing where...
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
ironic tragedy that life has to be lived forward but only makes sense in reverse yeah of course and you don't know the lessons from exactly what you're doing until you've done the next size it's why you know you'll have heard that story about the uh farmer's son who gets a horse finds a horse it runs away it comes back it breaks his leg yeah the soldiers arrive and then they say how how unfortunate the horses run away how fortunate to come back with a herd of them
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Yeah. So, I don't know... There's something, you're right, there's something relatable about doing it while you've got the other obligations because it's all well and good and very impressive still. Ross Edgley swims around the UK, fucking unbelievable feat, but he slept six hours on, six hours off, six hours on, six hours off for the best part of a year.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
how unfortunate it's broken your son's leg, how fortunate it means he doesn't get conscripted into the army.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And over a broad enough time horizon, I think people generally get what they deserve. Yeah. You don't need karma or spiritual energy to deliver justice to people. They just need to keep repeating their patterns and habits over and over until reality just gives them what they deserve. Yeah. And I think that's kind of... That's why ultimately I have so much faith that good people end up out on top.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
It's a great question. Very few bits of sympathy are given to people who have lots of options because most people have fewer options than they want. And when somebody says, well, there's lots of different directions that I could go down,
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Of course, of course.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
You said it last night. Problems of abundance are always going to be given less sympathy than ones of scarcity. Of course. Right? So in some ways, you think, well, what a luxurious position to be in. How great that you've got that. But then on the flip side- you have all of this optionality, which means that you, the pressure is on you to go down.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Is it more virtuous for me to spend all of my time fundraising for homeless people? Is homelessness even the best charity that I should be doing this for? I could be raising it for a more worthy cause. Maybe I should be swimming instead of running, or maybe I should be doing whatever. So in my experience... I've always been bad at long-term planning.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And I kind of came out of the productivity bro world, at least initially. So in that world, you write your epitaph and you've got what's on your headstone and what's written in your obituary. And then you break that down into 10-year chunks, periods, into three-year sets, into one-year goals, into 90-day sprints, into daily actions.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And you have this perfectly coordinated, this is how I'm going to get there. I always struggled with that naturally. And then laid on top, any sufficiently quickly growing situation means that optionality breaks out in ways that you couldn't have ever imagined.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So for you, five years ago, you didn't even know that things that you could be doing were things that you could say yes to that even existed, right? So in my experience- It's very difficult to have rigid long-term plans, which is why principles and rules are much easier. So for me, I just try and follow my curiosity. I want to keep on learning about stuff I think is important.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And he had a support crew and he had all the rest of it. And although it's unbelievably inspiring and obviously the pinnacle when it comes to sort of human achievement for distance swimming, Another side of you discounts it because you go, well, that's so different to my life. If I had the support crew and if I had that thing, maybe... So the relatability, I think, gets pulled away.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I want to follow my instinct.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Yeah. Honestly, man, I... Everybody is idiosyncratic and varied. And they're into distance running and fucking 80s jazz. I hate distance running, by the way. Warhammer 40K and blah, blah, blah. They've got all of these different things that they've got going on. And I kind of get the sense that people like...
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
in interested curious people like life is a intellectual buffet right and sometimes they want to hear mark norman shit talking doing gay jokes sometimes they want to hear about this really intense war story sometimes they want to hear about the psychology of female serial killers whatever blah blah blah yeah and uh yeah the job that i have is just to keep satisfying my own curiosity and if i keep doing that i think downstream from that everything will go well yeah um
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
The only guiding principle at the moment is just trying to do stuff that I think is interesting. Yeah, that's interesting to me. And I think next year I'm going to start doing some stuff on bullying interventions.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So I happen to have a couple of friends, Tracy Vinecore, who's the head of the Canadian Anti-Bullying Association, and Tony Volk as well, who's another evidence-based bullying intervention guy. And I really want to see, I don't know of anybody that's talking about bullying.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
people come and go from jobs so much they don't spend that much time in the office around the same people but in class you see the same people every single day for five years often 11 years right if you follow them through like one big school or whatever so that's how you get locked into these hierarchies and the pecking orders so it's easy to do the intervention there but really interesting thing that no one is talking about and there are interventions for is um helping
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
ex-bullied adults to overcome that bullying. We heard about it last night in some of the Q&As that some of the people have got chips on their shoulder about people that didn't believe in them when they were kids or people that were mean to them or whatever in school and trying to
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
liberate adults from that because it's very shameful to, you know, to be in your twenties, your thirties, your forties, and still realize that you're driven by this thing that this devil on your shoulder, this kid that probably maybe doesn't even remember doing it to you. And for you, it's still something that fucking crushes you. So. Were you bullied? Yeah. Badly in school.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Uh, I think when you're in primary school, when you're super young, kids are just like, they're just blobs. Do you know what I mean? So they're not really doing bullying.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
But then when we got into secondary school, uh, it was never extreme physical violence, but it was that this sort of very mundane social exclusion that in some ways I think sticks with you for longer because it tells you a story about your position in the world socially about, um,
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
how you get the love of other people about how safe you should feel around other people as well yeah can you trust other people do you need to offer them something in order for them to accept you or want you or or be friends with you uh do you have a um backup like do you have a reinforcements ever do you feel like you're
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So although it must have made the preparation more difficult, the fact that you've got Slack... to answer and emails and calls and artwork to sign off or whatever the fuck you need to do. I think, especially if you're talking about that, there's a degree of relatability because everyone's got to pick the kids up. Everybody's got to walk the dog.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I do. I don't disagree. And this is one of the ruthless things about anything difficult that you go through. Again, what I spoke about last night, right? Like all of your greatest growth is germinated from your lowest points. But you can't tell someone that when they're in it.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
In 10 years' time, this is going to be the thing that's going to propel you to actually do whatever, to be the strongest person that stands up at your father's funeral. You're like, that's not... But it sucks. Yeah, exactly. Because in the moment, people don't feel good about it. This is one of the most ruthless things I think about difficult life experiences, which is that lots of the...
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
things that you're most ashamed of, the dark sides of your personality, your insecurities, your fears are just the other edge of the strengths that you love most in yourself.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So for me, solitude, hard work, my ability to keep going and not need support of other people, all of that sort of resilience and agency and intentionality is definitely born out of the fact that I didn't have anybody else to rely on.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So in some weird way, and I think this is, to be honest, how most of the chips, or maybe even all of the chips from my shoulder, at least the conscious ones, I'm sure the subconscious ones are still fucking running rampant. Yeah, yeah. But the unconscious chips on my shoulder, I realized, well, if... the things I'm proud of are the light side of the dark stuff.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And the dark stuff wouldn't have come about had I have not gone through the difficult stuff. That means I need to be grateful that I went through those things, which maybe means in a weird roundabout way, I actually need to be grateful for the people that did it to me or for the situations that I was in.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Because if I take so much pride and value in those, but the only other element that I'd add in here I always had a problem with people who said it was meant to be like this sort of retrospective storytelling of.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And the reason I don't like it is let's say that you're in a car accident and you break a leg and in the hospital bed, despite the fact that you're on a ton of morphine and you're supposed to be miserable and life sucks and loads of bad stuff's going on. you meet your future partner and the nurse that's caring for you or something like that.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And you go, see, it was meant to be, I was meant to break my leg. And I'm like, okay, that's one story. Another story is you were in a fucking shit situation and you alchemized it into something amazing.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
like i think when we retrospectively say it was meant to be yeah it removed the agency that we had from that situation which is exactly where we should take all of the lessons and all of the pro what's the lesson that you take from it was meant to be yeah just doing things keep doing things until it keeps me yeah it's like no no it's like i can find this out by doing it exactly you went through something hard yeah and you made something good out of it congratulations
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
We can bully ourselves.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Yeah, no, I like that. Yeah, that's a bit wild. You might have heard me say that I took my testosterone level from 495 to 1006 last year, and one of the supplements I used throughout that was Tonkat Ali.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I first heard Dr. Andrew Hubman talk about the really impressive effects that tons of research was showing, which sounds great until you realize that most supplements don't actually contain what they're advertising. Momentous makes the only NSF-certified Tonkat Ali on the planet, which means it's tested so rigorously that even Olympic athletes can use it.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And that is why I partnered with them because they make the most carefully tested, highest quality supplements on earth. So if you're not performing in the gym or the bedroom, the way that you would like, or if you just want to improve your testosterone naturally, Tonkat Ali is a fantastic research back place. Yeah, I really want to just linger on that.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
how you're doing the thing, not just doing the thing. You have the opportunity to... get the promotion, get the new car, have the marriage, do the whatever. And in retrospect, sure, you will be able to maybe have the photos and all the rest of it.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
But the only person that could have experienced whatever it is that you're going through, the only person that could have been on that track that was going to do all of those laps and all of those miles was you. The only person that was going to run across Australia or was going to swim around the UK or was going to run across America or the fucking length of Africa. You go...
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
anybody can watch the videos. Even you can watch the videos of you, but only you gets to experience what it's like to do that. And it's this odd blend between, do you want to be the absolute best in the world at a thing, which I do think can cause you to need it. If you want to be the best, All sacrifices are on the table. Everything. Fucking health, life, enjoyment of the event, relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Yep, exactly. Family, bank accounts, reputation, everything, right?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
But if you are doing something for not being the fastest in the world, if it's not a sports competition or it's not a zero-sum game where there's only one winner and you want to just be that one winner... I feel like there's a little bit of tolerance, just a bit of give at the top. And it's like, where can I sneak in something there? Can I sacrifice 0.5% performance to gain 50% presence? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And that's what I think is fucking interesting about all of this stuff that you guys are doing, whether it's Russ, whether it's Ross, whether it's yourself, whether it's Will.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So preparation for the 1,000 miles. Yep. How strategic are you with this? You said that you kind of pull the ripcord and just jump into stuff. But I know some of my friends that are training for marathons, there's even free apps online that are like, this is how you break down your mileage per week and this is how you do it. So it's relatively structured. Mm-hmm.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Like you need to work at being authentic. There's so many...
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Why is it easier to not be you than it is to be you?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
But, you know, so much of what we do, our social lives, especially people that don't have to have long conversations. Like, when you think... I don't know. I would love to know what the longest average conversation a person who doesn't need to record it and put it on the internet has.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Apart from outside of work, maybe like stolen 20 minutes here and there over dinner with the kids or the partner, like little bits here and there. Just the opportunity to ask yourself questions. I had this like prescription. My equivalent of Ned's uncomfortable challenge was record a fake podcast with a friend once a week.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So you put a phone on, record it, put it on the recorder mode, pop it in the middle. Because a lot of people want to... become better communicators. They want to really understand themselves. If you're a fan of a podcast, you probably like having interesting conversations anyway, but you don't need to go and fucking publish one. Not everyone's got the time or the inclination to go do it.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I was like, if you record it, then you're forced to be rigorous in the way that you think, be precise with these things. But authenticity, oddly enough, is something that has to be discovered first.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Because you've got to dig away all of the fucking layers of social expectation and bullshit and decorum and politeness and bullying and past fucking traumas and patterns and tiredness and caffeine and all of that. But you got to like get rid of all of that to be like, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. And then finally you hit something. You hit something solid. You're like, oh, fuck, that feels like me.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
That feels really true.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And it's weird because it's like, how is it easier to not be truthful or authentic or honest than it is to do the other thing? Well, because of all of the social expectations.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
You mentioned the PTSD. Talk me through, we've got up to the end of the race now. Yep. Finishing, at least punching the fucking thing was a little bit angry.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Recovery, next few days, psychologically, physically, all the rest of this stuff. What was that like?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
How structured are you and sort of scientific, evidence-based, formalized with your process for this kind of stuff physically?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I'm just like staring at- So you've now been awake like 28 hours.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
In other news, this episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn about 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 a cool product.
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
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#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
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Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I started realizing this to do with meditation a little while ago that... Do you do it every day? I try to. It's difficult when I'm on tour. But yeah, I try to. And...
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
It seems like running might be a pretty good proxy for that for you. Relief. But what I realized was people have a variety of modalities. Maybe it's fucking weightlifting. Maybe it's running. Maybe it's meditation. Maybe it's breathwork. Maybe it's whatever. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
A lot of the time when you feel an emotion that arises inside of you, especially one that you don't like, you have some sort of coping mechanism that makes it go away. Now you can alchemize it into something beautiful, right?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
You know, running a thousand miles around a track or doing whatever Ross did, you know, that I feel something and I'm going to lean in and I'm going to grip my teeth and I'm going to do this. Really fucking phenomenal. Great way to turn something like pretty bad and useless into something that's really magnificent. But the same thing with meditation. Emotion arises inside of you.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Release and allow it. Okay. You still haven't actually got to the root of where that fucking emotion is coming from. And this is only something I learned since doing therapy over the last year that it's like you can keep doing that and you can have really beautiful coping mechanisms. The one that makes you run. The one that makes you lift the weights. The one that makes you swim around the UK.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
The one that helps you to be more mindful or a peaceful person. But it still doesn't get to the actual core. At no point are you going... you're finding a way to get it up and out of you, but at no point are you actually looking inside and going, yeah, but why does that keep coming up? Like, why is that thing there? And not everything actually needs assessment in that way.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
There's some stuff that just is.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
There's stuff that just is. You do this very intense thing. You dedicate yourself to something for a long time, out the other side of it, What the fuck did you expect? Of course. You've been monomaniacally focused on this one thing for months and months and months, and then you finally do it. There's a fucking existential crisis coming. It's going to happen.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Always going to happen to every person that does that sort of a thing.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
But on the other side, the stuff that's oddly more mundane, I think the patterns, the assumptions you have about yourself and about the world, your relationship, your place in it, it's like, hey, if that thing keeps coming up, even if you've got a great, beautiful coping strategy, you can either continue to keep on coping and coping and coping and coping for the rest of your life, or you can get rid of it.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
But here's the fucking dangerous thing that a lot of people probably think, which is, well, if I get rid of the emotion... What about the useful coping? What if my desire to go to the gym or to run the races or to be mindful or to be peaceful, what if that goes away? What if that goes away? Because what if the only reason I do the good things is because the bad thing that's motivating it.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And that's sort of honestly like a fear of peace. It's very much a fear of novelty. It's like, well, I've kind of got some kind of stasis here. And even if it's like a little bit out of balance, I managed to get it back into balance. If I take something away, even if it makes life better, I'm now out of balance again. I've got to all compensate.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
No, I have very much a need for control in my life. I'm very sort of structured, very organized, very routine-ized. And getting more used to being sort of free-flowing in that way might be useful. But then on the flip side, people are constructed differently. And we find solutions that work for us. And this is one of the reasons why I'm so...
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
hesitant about anybody that gives one size fits all answers to success or mindfulness or what you should do in life and stuff because what most people have done that are successful is they have found a very specific way that works for their mental pathology and their fucking construction exactly
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So Matthew Syed, sports reporter in the tennis world, really interesting. Djokovic, Nadal and Federer all were world champions at the same time, but all of them have massively different training styles. One's super aggressive, one's super fun, one's super robotic, but all of them traded places. So you go, if I want to be a world tennis champion, which one do I do?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And you go, well, it depends who you fucking are.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Every one of them has been a fucking tennis champion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of them have different approaches.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
What did you make of that Jill Stark article that was written about you?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
tainted a really it was just not needed yeah because it didn't do that for the people that didn't uh read it men's mental toughness is just toxic masculinity rebranded cult hero ned brockman's grueling 1600 kilometer charity run has aussies talking but now everybody sees it in a positive light basically that uh doing hard physical things denies you of tapping into your emotions in a way it's a coping mechanism etc etc look
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I think that the modern world has a multiplicity of problems. One of them is victimhood. One of them is people needing more resilience. They need Goggins screaming in their face. Another group of people are the ones who do push too hard and that do need someone to say, hey, man, maybe you should slow down and read some poetry outside or go for a walk or do whatever. And I think...
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Horses for courses with regards to this. If you are someone that is doing something very, very good and very, very hard and very, very inspiring. So not hell like, yeah, it's very, very different and very difficult. There's really interesting study out of the U S and Taiwan that showed men who suppress positive emotions, how
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
have worse mental health outcomes than ones who suppress negative emotions. So, you know, when we're talking about all of the dangers of men not opening up and all the rest of it, I've spent a fucking ton of time in the live show that I've done here talking about opening up and opening up on stage
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
But very few people are saying, what about helping yourself to achieve some glory and some pride and to conquer something and get mastery and feel really fucking good and positive? What about like, oh, guys listen. I'm sure that there's an article out there that says this. Guys listening to heavy metal music in the car whilst on caffeine is like right wing coded or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
You know, there's all of this silly thing like fitness is right wing coded. Yeah. You go, yeah, but what if it makes them feel happy and fucking full for the day? What if that's their favorite part of the day?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
What's the sleeping on the street thing?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Wow. That's one of the.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Why is, uh, homelessness such a. Big thing for me? Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
All right. So you decided to get to the start line and what's the process you need to break it down. If you're going to try and do a thousand over whatever, 10 days, you've got mileage that you're trying to hit per day. Talk me through what a typical day was like once the races came around.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
There was a Prince William documentary about homelessness. Do you see this? I haven't seen it.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So Prince William was criticized for a big new documentary saying he will show the UK how to prevent homelessness. The main critics said that he should leave it to the experts and non-government movement leaders aren't needed. Very strange.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
It's interesting, man. Bottom-up social change campaigns for stuff that everybody broadly already agrees with. It's like, well, why did we need this much motivation to get this thing moving in any case? No one wants more homelessness. No. The homeless people don't want it. No. The housed people don't want it. Yeah. No one wants more homelessness.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
But I don't know. It kind of makes me think, well, maybe that was a... It's evidently a worthwhile effort if it takes still a lot of work, but relatively like a minimal amount of work in order to cause this big sort of snowball moving downhill.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Yeah, it is cool. What else would you be interested in looking at?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So they kind of sit at the top and then.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
This is going to be an October thing annually.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Dude, I love it. I appreciate the fuck out of you. And I'm really excited to see what you do next.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
My pleasure. Where should people go? Keep up to date with the charity stuff, your stuff, everything else.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
The ultimate price that you have to pay.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Appreciate you, man. Appreciate it, man. Good man.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Is that how you tried to break it up?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Oh, because you accumulate a little bit more distance by going out to the edge and it keeps variety, which probably mentally... Exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
500 laps of each eight or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
And then back down again.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
I know this sounds weird. Much more consumable. Yes. I know this sounds funny. Did you have a favorite lane as you were running? Was the one that you looked forward to?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Were you reversing direction?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
That seems like a good way to mentally- Break it down. Yeah, exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Oh, uh, fucking day after tomorrow or something.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
Why decide to do that particular event?
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
So talk me through the degradation of your body and legs across this.
Modern Wisdom
#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness
It's from the beginning of the 24 hours to the end of it, but you're using.
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
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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?
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#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
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#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.
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#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...
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#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.
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#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.
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#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?
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
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 patients.
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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?
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#925 - Joe Hudson - 23 Lessons For Being Kinder To Yourself
. . . . . ., en P. P. P. P. P. P. P,實,實, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a Laboratory a ,,
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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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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
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#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
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Are you sick of people asking you how you are?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
But, uh, That would have been a real double whammy.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Did you have a practice? Meditation? Oh, yeah, yeah. Did you have this prior? Yeah. Right, okay. How do you think this situation... Would have been different, or how well do you think that your practices in advance contributed?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
It sounds like you've got, I don't know, a little bit of a nervous disposition. I think I would say that that's my kind of background too. Thinking, sometimes overthinking, looking for potential errors and issues and maybe being a little bit sensitive to the energy of what's going on around you.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentous. If your workouts feel flat, your recovery slow, or you've just been feeling off, it might not be your training plan or diet. It might be something a bit more boring, like your testosterone.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription 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. E-N-T-O-U-S. L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom at checkout. How long did that 45 minutes feel? Well...
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Yeah, it felt like drowning.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
So it wasn't, no one was, I mean, CPR would have.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
What does, I've always wondered this. What does looking at your own eye look like?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
And then you get it.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
You didn't have a blueprint beforehand.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
It's fascinating how much mental clarity you had.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
You're so high up in the mountains that even breathing normally, I imagine, is a little bit more difficult than most normal people.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
And what are they trying to reinflate the lung?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
But it's the guy that's choking on something and they put the big pen in the neck. Yeah, it's kind of like that thing.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Is there a challenge with wanting that level of openness, that level of emotional connection, vulnerability, but also having an additional level of scrutiny? Lots and lots of attention, press, people caring, so on. You just kind of two things that are a little bit at odds there.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I mean, someone else's.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Kind of like alchemy. Yeah. To take something like that and to see all of the love that came pouring back in.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
And then you come back around in the ICU, presumably.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
So what I'm interested in is when, and you've sort of hinted at this already, when the pain starts to kick in. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
When my skull cracked and my eye came out.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Yeah, explain this 28-day cycle.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
How do you know when to listen to it and when to tell it to fuck off?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
It's the volume that it reaches.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Watch the whole thing. We'll get back to talking in one second, but first, this episode is brought to you by AG1. I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years now, and it just got even better. AG1 Next Gen. keeps the same simplicity, one scoop once per day, but now comes with four clinical trials backing it.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
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Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
my dad to take it, and tons of my friends too, and it's why I put it inside of my body every single day. And if I found something better, I'd switch. But I haven't, which is why I still use it.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Plus, 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 full months, and if you don't like it, they will give you your money back for the lot.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Right now, you can get a free year's supply, vitamin D3K2 and five free AG1 travel packs and 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. Just sink into that reframing, that mental reframing around pain a little bit more for me.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Again, somebody, I've, again, not run over by a snowcat, full Achilles detachment. Yeah, yeah, fuck, get out of here. That was a motherfucker. Well, here's the thing.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Did it feel... It sounds like one of the byproducts of movie stardom is a bit of constriction then. A level of constraint that must be day-to-day. Hello, sir, you need to be awake in the trailer at this time. We need to have you in hair and makeup by then. These are the lines. These are the scenes. This is sit in the seat. Hang on. Sorry, the DP's fucked it again.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
With that, for me, I resonate an awful lot with the loneliness. I think this is one of the things I really want to get an insight from around you. The role of patience and how you deal with loneliness, how you remain sort of mental fortitude and you sink into that.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Mine was cricket, which is a much more British way to do it, but yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Isn't it strange that we find it easier to do something for us for other people than do something for us for us?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Isn't that a strange quirk of humans work? Yeah. It's the same thing. You've probably been in movies where this is actually a scene. The bad guy wants to get the information out of you. So they're torturing you and they're doing stuff and you're like, no, it doesn't matter. Then they bring in someone you love.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
You're going to have to sit back down for another 90 minutes while he tries to fix the lighting. But then as you spread out into the public world as well, this is pretty carefully controlled. We need to be focused toward the movie, like box office, box office, box office.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
And that always breaks everybody, right? Yeah, yeah. And there's an interesting stat around the likelihood that we ensure that we complete a course of antibiotics. It's around about 50%, maybe a little bit less. The likelihood that we ensure that our dog completes its course of antibiotics is like in the 90s.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
So we're significantly better at looking after an animal than we are looking after ourselves, despite the fact. that if we are not functional, the animal's fucked.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, with this, it's so interesting that we can use somebody else, other people, group of other people, as the motivation for our recovery in that way.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Even if you are doing this because you're going to help to heal your family, you don't want this to be the defining, lingering memory of what happened, et cetera, the recovery is still on you. Finding the solutions is still on you.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
In that way, has this been a sort of break glass moment that's allowed you to sort of really step outside of yourself and not feel so constrained by just being the movie person?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
You're laid awake at night a couple of weeks, a couple of months in. It's just one of those normal days. It's been an all right day of rehab. It's been an all right day of whatever. But you're just... You're kind of deep in the hole. Where was your mind going to keep your motivation, to keep driving you forward?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Were you using power plate stuff? Power plate, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
And the reason why when you bang, when you stub your toe, like you said earlier on, why do you rub it? It's because it's really difficult for the body to receive multiple signals at the same time. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Yeah, what was your relationship? You know, a lot of people have injuries way less bad than this, and that's the beginning of their road down the dark path.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Yeah, what's the bit of advice I was given after my surgery? Never chase the pain.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
You've got to get out ahead of the pain.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Take me through the big recovery modalities, sort of what contributed to your rehab. Because you seemed to recover very, given how intense and sort of catastrophic the injuries are, you recovered really quickly.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Mm-hmm. What peptides were you using? Thymus and alpha, thymus and beta, BPC.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I love MOTC. Huh? MOTC is great.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
It's not nice. It's not nice. SubQ NAD is... I feel that, dude. It's like a shot of coffee.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
It's nice once it goes. I had this theory about NAD that one of the best parts of NAD was it finishing. It wasn't actually the effect. It was like, I've just been in so much discomfort. Yeah, exactly. Precisely, precisely. Yeah, exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
It's the you, not the character.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Yeah, well... But it'll mess up with the mics. How is it that your face looks like your face? Why does your face look like your face if so much destruction... Well, interestingly enough, nothing...
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Oh, yeah, my face. Why does your face look like your face?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
That's still the same case now? Yeah, yeah, forever. Wow. Yeah. They can't palate expand?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
You got to be careful with what foods you eat then.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I've put a gun on my mouth. What a price that you're going to have to pay.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
It's the best way that this could have happened.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health, and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, your thyroid function, and nutrient deficiencies.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
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 drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is only $500. And right now, the first thousand people can get an additional $100 off, meaning it's only 400 bucks to get the exact same blood panel that I use.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Just go to the link, In the description below or head to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. I'm interested in how you avoided becoming a victim of this.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Well, you've had this thing happen to you, which you didn't choose to.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
You understand how this narrative plays in people's minds.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Sometimes they're not right. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
How has this changed your outlook on life now, moving forward? It's quite the same.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Just do the things you love and don't worry about it. I wonder how many other guys and girls from your industry... have this sort of odd cathartic daydream of something happening to them that kind of relinquishes them. What is it that you really admire about Jeremy's career?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Is that different to how you were before?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I'm interested in... The way that your mindset changes going from having to be so self-focused to selfless-focused and then sort of moving between these two, right? Because there's a tension. It feels like there's a tension here. You're showing up to make yourself better, to help to heal everybody else. You've got you that also needs to be served an awful lot. And yeah, it feels like there's a...
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
a dynamic that's going on here between.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Well, you know, the Avengers thing was all right, but that bit where he got ran over by the snowplow, that really was peak moment.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
It's interesting what you said about the hamster wheel that you get on the priority of a job, of a calling, of something that's really important to you. My friend Bill wrote a great book, Die With Zero, and in it he says, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. And I think a lot of people that are super, super driven, they get caught in that trap.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I get lots of positive reinforcement from the job that I do. I get accolades, I get recognition, I get validation. It keeps you hooked along. Correct, yeah. I'm spinning on this hamster wheel, waiting for the day when I arrive. At what? At something. I'm going to continue to manana, manana, filling my cup. I'm going to keep on pushing down, taking a little bit of time.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
And I wonder as well whether a good bit of that is that a very busy life, a very chaotic life, doesn't actually force you to turn inward and go, is this actually what I'm supposed to, am I spending my life in the best way that I can? It's like, well, look at how important I am. Look at how busy I am. I can't be wasting my life. Look at how back-to-back the calendar is.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I've got my toilet break scheduled in, 12.05.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Way more cigarettes.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I am relieved. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I'm frankly dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day with Element. Element is... tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Each grab-and-go stick pack contains a science-packed 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
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
It's basically a magic elixir, and this orange flavor in a cold glass of water is how I've started every single day for over three years and And I can 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 and try it for as long as you want.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
And if you don't like it for any reason, they give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. Plus, they offer free shipping within the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first 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
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
How do you think about balancing your desire to be professionally a very competent actor pushing your limits creatively in terms of the way that you show up? Because that does require obsession with the micro. Sure. You win in the weeds when it comes to stuff like that. Especially, I'm sure there'll be more movies.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
And like, why not do it with these people? There's a kind of fragility associated with that focus on recovery that never actually leads to you going back out into the real world. You know what I mean?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
What would you say to someone who is deep in the hole, some sort of recovery, complex illness, injury, and they just haven't got that same fire that they need?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I don't know what I'd do. What were you actually trying to do? You were trying to stop it from hitting... To crush, from crushing my nephew. Nephew.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
To treat your body like something that needs instructing?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
So you jumped up to get the cockpit? I jumped up to try to stop it. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up what, at least to me, as a total noob in this world, a muggle outside of the industry, looks like maybe one of the biggest productions of all time, which was the Avengers series. Yes, yeah. Like, looking back on that, what was being involved in that production like?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I was going to say, what's it feel like when you step out of each, your respective trailers and you come in and everyone's got the, it is the kind of, yeah, that's when we are.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Can you remember what your last scene was in the filming schedule for the entire sort of franchise so far? What was the last thing you did or the last day that you were on set? Were you there for the final day of filming overall to give the big...
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Yeah. It's strange thinking about these people that come up to you and they see you. They see something that's really true to you. And... I don't know. I wonder how many people, how many other people, even if it's not as performative as being an actor, have this sense of having to show up as someone.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Was there ever a sense of poetic irony that Hawkeye, given that one of your eyes was out of your head and on the floor, did that pass? Probably other stuff to focus on during that 45-minute period.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Yeah, it didn't come to my head. So what are you focused on now? What's coming up next for you? Well, I stick really quite present.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I'm happy for you, man.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Jeremy Renner, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you're awesome. I think being able to see somebody sort of publicly go through a challenge like this is really important. It really, really is.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
And when someone comes up and says, well done, there's a degree of hollowness to the praise because this is me, but it's me as a performer. It's not me. Right? Right. I'm aware that this is an artistic outlet for you. It's a calling that you have in life. Somebody's a musician. Somebody's a presentation, a coach that goes into businesses. Somebody's a PT or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
That's just the beginning. Write the book, do the interviews.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Maybe don't do it again.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Jeremy, I appreciate you, man.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Ooh, tasty. Jeremy Renner made it all the way to the end of that episode. Well, why not watch the Indian Hawkeye, Naval Ravikant, right here. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
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. That's chriswillx.com slash books.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
I really loved what you did with my wife's transformation for her wedding or whatever. Thank you so much. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, What about me?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Yeah. So, the kind of elephant in the room, I guess. And I didn't know that you'd gone through your accident. I didn't know that that had happened. I was like, you know, yeah, Jeremy must have, he did the series, and then the Avengers finished, and then maybe that came back, and there was a series for that, and Oh yeah, just, you know, you kind of weren't there and then you were.
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
So if you hadn't seen this bit in between, if you'd just been watching like the wrong kind of headlines, nothing would have occurred. So for the people that sort of weren't aware of what happened, there's something to do with the snowplow. Can you give the overview?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Why do you think that is? No time to obfuscate or sort of play the social moray game?
Modern Wisdom
#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life
Right. Typically, people aren't hopping in, hopping out, and hooking a whatever. It's a shift.
Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
Why are emotions so hard to understand for humans?
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
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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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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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 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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
We'll get back to talking to Julie in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Maui Nui. Not all meat is created equal, and that is why I partnered with Maui Nui. Not only does their meat taste amazing, it's actively combating the environmental destruction caused by Maui's axis deer overpopulation.
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
You can get the healthiest red meat on the planet delivered directly to your door by going to the link in the description below or heading to mauinuivenison.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's M-A-U-I-N-U-I venison.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout.
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
uh was really kind of a smokescreen 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 honestly i try and limit the number of supplements i rely on but when i take these consistently they have a massive impact on my cognitive performance my strength and
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Orlando Botton, welcome to the show.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Okay. Trilogy of children's books, ostensibly, I guess. This was my favorite series when I was a kid. And in it, the protagonist, Lyra, finds this truth teller. It's called an alethiometer. And for some reason... This particular device, it takes an entire lifetime of study to be able to read it. And as a child, she can do it immediately.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So it's this beautiful arc, and it's the first time I ever thought about it. And Pullman takes you through unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence. And one of the final scenes of the entire book at the very, very end She goes back to the nunnery where she was being raised five years ago before the story begins.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And she's lost the ability to read it. She hits puberty and it's kind of this fall. It talks about kind of the awareness that her and her partner now have. And she says, I can't read it anymore. And the nun turns to her and she says, my dear, it's going to take you an entire lifetime. But the depth of knowledge you have will be greater than it ever was before. And it's that arc.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Conscious incompetence, unconscious competence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence. And that finishing side, something that's been earned, you found your way there through effort, agency, self-authorship. It's special.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
to not have an actively cooled and heated mattress topper, it is a total game changer. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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 and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Why do you think we struggle to connect with our emotions fully?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's very interesting to think about how much we try and push away the thing that we're also wanting, like how we are complicit in creating the scenario that we're so terrified of having happened. I've been thinking a lot about second-order emotions, third-order emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So you have a thing that happens, you feel agitated, and then you begin to tell yourself a story and you become stressed at your agitation, and then you become resentful at your stress about your agitation, and then you become anxious about... And that additional layering, this kernel that we began with, with regards to the emotion, sort of explodes out.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And before you know it, you're feeling an emotion that's not only the thing that started, but it's an entire universe away. And this is now the problem, not this.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I think this is why we have certain signature emotions that feel like home base. There's ones that we're intimately familiar with, and there's ones that scare us a lot more. And a...
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
unsatisfactory but familiar emotion is often more safe to us than a slightly novel more exotic but scarier one and also I think happier one I mean you know just a minute ago people escaping love people also escape love
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's interesting thinking about how language shapes our experience of emotions and our experience of the world that German, for instance, has a colorful number of ways to describe certain emotions that you can't in other. He said, well, does the fact that we have the word for it almost unlock that emotion in a way that allows us to do self-investigation? Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I suppose if... Reality is not delivering our model of the world, our expectation of the world, our prediction of the world. We have discordance between the two. And there are two things that we can try and do. We can try and bring our model of the world up to reality, or we can try and bring reality back down to our expectation. Exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
beautifully put is there a danger of intellectualizing challenges of emotion for smart people people that like to read and consume youtube channels like yours or podcasts like mine and we like to investigate ourselves we want to understand ourselves and the world around us and maybe we've even got the theory from evolutionary psychology that explains why this is adaptive and and that we're ancestrally we are made up of blah blah blah blah
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
How much is that a prophylactic against us actually having to feel things and how can we better break through this intellectualizing of emotions and rationalizing of them away?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So great. I'm interested just taking that one step further in the difference between knowing ourselves intellectually and knowing ourselves emotionally. I think Even in my less equanimous moments when I do journaling, I find myself writing more of an essay than a personal inquiry.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And yeah, the difference between knowing ourselves intellectually and knowing ourselves emotionally, again, for the cerebrally-minded, praying at the altar of cognitive horsepower people, it's a coping mechanism. It's a way to distance yourself from this. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
What would you say to the obsessive person who wants to learn to let go a little more? A lot of what I see in the circles that I move in is a need for control, a desire to limit down the potential paths that the future could go down, to constrain how unpredictable reality could be. And I think the optimization, life hacking, productivity world is very much a part of this, plus a denial of death.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
If I can fit more life into less time, then maybe it's kind of like living longer. But yeah, that need to control, that obsessive sort of requirement to be able to wrangle reality as you wish. Can people learn to take their hands off the wheel a little bit more easily?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah. The coping mechanisms that we have and the inventive ways.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
that we come up with alchemizing and and justifying well a lot of the time people will say it's better to be addicted to the gym than be addicted to drugs i don't think that's a particularly controversial yeah if that's if that's the binary choice yes of course um but then i realized recently but maybe over the last year or so i spent a lot of time meditating toward the end of my 20s and i'm trying to
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
turn myself out of the adult infant into maybe an adult adolescent. Most people would look at meditation, an emotion arises inside of you, you notice it, you release and allow. That's a common tempo that you have. Brilliant. You are no longer as at the mercy of this particular emotion.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But it was only when I started doing therapy as first ever suggested by Charlotte, one of your ex staff from your school of life. It was only after doing quite a lot of that, that I realized that even meditation or maybe breath work or going to the gym or whatever it might be is still another way of not having to actually investigate where that emotion has come from.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And meditation particularly, or something more like breath work perhaps is a, Not nefarious, but it's so close. It's internal. It feels sort of self-investigative. It's mindful. This is brilliant. You go, yeah, but that is going to continue to come up. And you now have a coping strategy. It's not drugs. It's not even as obvious as you running 50 miles a week.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But there is another strategy, which is not... forcing you to turn the eye back down to where's this coming from and why does it keep on arising? And if you have this very good strategy to release these things as they move through you, that cycle will continue. And I think that those emotions are worthy of investigation.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I mean, I did twice a week psychotherapy for the last year or so.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I've said this before. I learned more about myself in a year of twice-weekly psychotherapy than I did in 1,500 sessions of meditation.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You have another party investigating your statements, the language that you use. I use the analogy that it felt like... living in a house your entire life and then one day just inviting somebody else in and they're walking around and they start pointing out doors in a house that you know intimately well every inch And they start pointing out doors that you never even knew existed.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And you go, what's that over there? And you open the door and you realize that the back of the kitchen actually leads into... I always wondered how those two things came together. And it's this sort of odd... It's very humbling. I found it a very humbling experience to see somebody else who knows me for a hundred hours point and say... What about that?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You said, talking about the emotion thing just from before, and I think that this sort of comes into when you're opening up with someone, whether it be a therapist, a friend, a partner, or whatever, the sort of need for comfort and reassuring kindness. Look, you can say these things. I'm not running away. I don't find you despicable. It's actually kind of interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Maybe it's charming for you to do this.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
That was one of the realizations that Charlotte first taught me and then I learned through my therapy over the last year. One of the very unique things
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
parts of a therapeutic relationship is that you're allowed to be as small or boring or petty as you want and those are areas that with a friend or a partner it's really difficult to do yeah because you're managing optics in some way you're thinking well it's my job to kind of entertain this person even if they're there to sure to sort of sit and listen with me like not that yeah
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Not the fact that the way that the lady in the canteen ladled my beans today seemed a little bit disparaging or dismissive or something. And like, oh, my God, how shameful for me to think that that's something that should play on my mind. So small. The story I tell, the second, third, fourth order of emotions come in. And that is one of the very few. It's that and your mum.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Just lingering on that balance between transparency, emotional openness, and you said kindness, but I think that there's other reasons to add it too. Is there a place for editing yourself in a relationship? Should we not be open, honestly communicating all the time? This is how I feel. You want to see the inner texture of my mind, don't you?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
There's a very slippery slope with that, though. A lot of people, especially if they have started doing therapies and self-inquiry, some emotional work, think, God, I should push the amount that I'm emotionally open. I should improve my transparency for so long. I played a role.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I was terrified of making my needs known, my desires, putting myself first, realizing that I even have needs and putting those out there. And now... There's these odd bits of territory that I shouldn't stray into. What happens if I stray over there? And the tendency for you to overcorrect and go in the other direction. Neil Strauss says, unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And we have this balance between the two.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's very ephemeral, right? You've got these thoughts up here moving around, floating about, and then they have to be concretized. And it almost feels like it squeezes it through an aperture of some kind. You say, okay, this is what I meant by that. It's not this notion. It's not this sort of ambient sound. It's somebody shouted a noise in the next room. It's like, oh no, it's here.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
What would be your advice to people in the classic anxious avoidant relationship, the two polarities coming together?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I can touch it. You can see it. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Right now, you can get up to 20% off everything site-wide 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. How malleable are our attachment styles? Are the foundations of them able to genuinely be moved?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Or is it a case that the best we can hope for is to just compensate for them in adult life?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Lots of people envy the other side. If only I could have a little bit more of that anxiousness. If only I could actually lean in a little bit more. If I could feel a little bit more easily. If I could communicate. Or, God, if I could just be a little bit more distant. If I didn't need the reassurance in this way.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
If I didn't have this requirement to feel safe in order to be able to feel comfortable. If I wasn't externalizing my own sense of self-worth onto somebody else quite in this sort of a way. Yeah, I think it's a question. Attachment styles are kind of the hot new girl in school, psychological, emotional work at the moment. It's very trendy.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I looked at some really interesting stuff recently that attachment styles, like everything psychologically, genetically predisposed, not necessarily predetermined, but predisposed. And given that you are raised in the environment, which is probably the breeding ground for for that very predisposition, it gets reinforced.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So not only have you got the raw materials to make this thing happen, but unless your parents have somehow managed to sort of pivot in the opposite direction, you then get this additional boost, which is, oh, well, the environment, nature came along and nurture then enhanced it. Yeah, it's... It's interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's going to be interesting, I think, over the next few years to see what sort of interventions we have to be able to help people to ameliorate.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah, your attachment strap has piped up and said, notice you're a little bit stressed at the moment. This might be because of X, Y, and Z. And, you know, it sounds supernatural and strange.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
One of the most shameful or humbling realizations of going down a personal development journey for a while is that the tool that you're looking for to the problem you're encountering now is not only something that you know. It's one of the first things that you ever discovered when you began this journey. It's maybe something you wrote about.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's maybe something that you practiced for a very long time. I often get asked, I was doing these live events recently, and one of the most common questions is, what advice would you give yourself 10 years ago?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
The interesting thing about that question, I think, is that the answer that you give, what you would tell yourself 10 years ago, is almost always invariably the answer that you right now need to hear as well. Because the big problems remain the big problems because they're so fundamental to who you are. If they weren't fundamental to who you are, they would probably not be the big problems.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
If you were able to detox that, it's the ancillary stuff. It's the extraneous outsides that you end up tinkering with. But the core, you know, the middle of the cake is this chocolate, is it strawberry? That's really where it is. And yes, to think.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
not only is this challenge that I'm encountering to break the fourth wall, I've used a number of videos from the School of Life over the last decade when I've encountered the same situations. Not only have I watched this, there's been periods where I've learned entire passages from this as a little mantra that I can reflect on. I go, I'm going back to the same situation
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But you're right, this temptation novel, new, there is a better answer. We're five years hence. There must be something that's come out in the last however long. And I guess this is what art and heritage history does, that it helps to sort of strip that away. What's stood the test of time? What's been sufficiently lindy that it's still with us now?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah, I want to try and linger on that as well. I think, again, the sorts of people that listen to the show, the sorts of people that read your work, they'll probably take life seriously. They think it's a thing that you're supposed to apply earnest pressure to, perhaps a kind of sort of dynamic persistence, but maybe more persistent than dynamic. And what's your advice for people to
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
try and embrace some more playfulness when it comes to life's serious, serious things. I want to be taken seriously. I want to do things. I want to make an impact in the world. I don't want to grip too tightly. I know that when I grip too tightly, it kind of ruins the entire point.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I've heard you refer to melancholy as tragedy well handled. Absolutely. Tragedy well handled. I adore that. I think it's so great. Sam Harris says something very similar. You have to smile at the absurdity of life. These situations, just as things were smooth, something comes along and completely sideswipes what you had planned. And an interesting insight, I suppose, that
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
The volume that you complain is probably proportional to the amount that you're unable to see life for what it is, which is not at your whim. Life is going to have problems thrown at you.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I've heard you say that adult relationships are a litmus test of our emotional development, that they're a moment where your past catches up with your present. How so? Why is that the case?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
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Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Seems like deciding whether to stay in or leave a relationship can sometimes be a protracted decision, which might be surprising given that we have this short time on earth and we don't want to waste it. I think a lot of people have problems breaking up with someone even though they might not make them particularly very happy. Why do people get stuck in unhappy relationships in that way?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah, what about the people who are in a relationship but don't have the courage to leave? They probably have this, they feel stuck, sort of stuck in this unsatisfactory not abusive not terrible but just they have that fear pulling the pin making that move you know you talked about primary secondary emotions let's not shame these people
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah. I think it's unrealistic. You know, there's a lot of people who just don't want to make a fuss that there's this sort of fear, this question, is it fair to want what I want? You mentioned before, how do people that from the outside, you go, why, why,
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
her with him him with her why why would that union happen and um we don't get to choose what we love in many ways you know absolutely not we are we are you know we think we've done away with the arranged marriage no we haven't it's just become an emotionally arranged marriage internally arranged rather than arranged by our parents yeah i think uh again for the cerebrally predisposed
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You kind of rail against that. Why can't I, why, if only I could, can you not get in line with you, please?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Do we need to build or create the capacity to give up on people? In that way, does that help?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Getting perilously close to people-pleasing here and that sort of tendency to put other people's emotions ahead of our own, make their emotional state our responsibility. If you're not okay, I'm not okay. How can we better alchemize that and understand that tendency?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
What's your advice for how people can heal a negative inner voice? We've got this odd artifact that we've carried with us, this inheritance of our life, but kind of almost some previous life of ours. Where should people begin if they want to have a more friendly inner voice?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
What are some of the best and worst ways to tell somebody that it's over in a relationship?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
How do you come to think about the balance between fixing our patterns, investigating them and dwelling on them? It seems like a lot of criticism is thrown at sort of reflecting on our past as akin to indulging in it in a way, not allowing us to move forward. This is a common debate that I'm seeing online at the moment. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Broad strokes are very difficult with stuff like this. I understand that. But yeah, I think dealing with an unhappy childhood, retrospectively not resenting things that happened to us then, and we're now at the mercy of wanting to be able to investigate why we are the way we are whilst not allowing that to define us. I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
There's, there's an interesting movement at the moment, almost towards denial. We've got, you know, the horseshoe was horseshoed back around. It's been rotated a couple of times. And, uh, I wonder whether this is just a, a requisite push back to some of the over pathologization of normal human emotions. You know, the use of therapy language online that somebody hasn't been mean to me.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
They've caused me trauma that that person isn't selfish. They're a narcissist. And, um, Yeah, I'm starting to see now a little bit more of a lean away from reflecting on why you are the way you are. And again, it's very much, this is just one cohort of people saying that cohort of people over there, their strategy doesn't work for me and the vice versa. Look, I mean-
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
My friend Gwinda has this idea called the golden hammer. When someone, usually an intellectual, who has gained a cultish following for popularizing a concept becomes so drunk with power, he thinks he can apply that concept to everything.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Exactly. We think it's the hammer that… The one-size-fits-all. Yeah, and this is everything looks like a nail that slots into your very specific, very fancy, gilded piece of work. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I wonder whether… this helps to constrain some of the complexity of the world as well. But if I have one book, if it's meditations or if it's, If it's some ancient Chinese text, if we're looking at some Lao Tzu or something, you think, well, that one thing answers everything. I don't need to look elsewhere. And the problem is that we're finite creatures surrounded by infinite complexity.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So the battlefield is stacked somewhat. The deck is offset against our favor. And if we can constrain down the complexity that we're fighting with, we say, well, we've got this one person and he's got all of the answers. One guy has all of the answers.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Was it Goethe on his deathbed pronounced, nobody really knows me. I don't really know anybody else. Nobody knows anyone really.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Surrounded by friends and family. What a way to cut and call. See you later on. Speaking on that, do you think it's inevitable for deep thinkers to be more lonely? Is the deep or sensitive thinker kind of fated to have a bit of distance?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You're going to have to work harder in order to- I would say that's fair enough. Yeah. That's fair enough. Yeah. We sort of touched on it earlier on. I think it's maybe worth just revisiting a little bit. The deeper thinker, the more serious person, the earnest person, how can they find more fun, inject a little bit less of that energy?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I'm interested, you know, having followed your work for a very, very long time, and it's been one of the most reliably influential things, I think, on my intellectual journey. So I want to thank you for parasocially guiding me through an awful lot of situations.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I'd like to say that I remind myself of your work when things are good, but it does tend to be the sort of thing that I go to when I need a little bit more guidance. I'm interested in what drives you, the sort of primary motivating forces that are behind your studies and sort of thinking over the years.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I've found an odd resonance with what I've done with the show as well. In many ways, there is a temptation to do what may be popular or trendy or accumulate the most exposure or status or make you look good. And that's always there. And neither of us are immune to those incentives.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But I think one of the reasons that I resonated with your work, and hopefully some microcosm of people resonate with mine, is research very much is me-search in this situation. And the fact, you're right, how could you have seen? The human experience has been really sort of shown to me that it's like you've turned the mirror around on myself. Yeah. it's almost like you're speaking to me.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's, well, because there's broad buckets of people that sort of fall into similar kind of cohorts and it would appear that perhaps me and you are in a non-too dissimilar cohort. And this, I think, is a reason for confidence in our own work and in listening to our instincts rather than trying to work out what the market, the audience, the reader wants.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Just saying, okay, well, what would be useful to me right now? What would have been useful to me previously? Especially given the fact that the thing you need to hear right now is probably the thing that you would tell yourself 10 years ago. So it's still, it's the same lessons over and over. It's looking at that circle.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And I think it is the best justification for selfishly following your instincts when it comes to an intellectual investigation of yourself, of the world around you. Because if you think a thing, if you feel a thing, if you're challenged with a particular issue, it's probably reliable that some non-insignificant majority, perhaps, of other people are feeling the same. How...
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
The word grift is thrown around on the internet a lot. And I've asked people to define it. This person is grifting or shilling for a particular product or company or ideology, whatever it might be. And I asked the best definition I've ever heard, one that I actually accept. I don't like the word because I think it gets pattern matched incorrectly almost all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Isn't it interesting that we're talking about maybe the thing people identify with most, the texture of their own experience, the landscape of their inner mind, but you're then saying, well, This may not fully be self-generated.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But the best definition is somebody promoting something that they themselves would not use or believe. I see.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
How much better have you become at understanding yourself? over the years? How much have you been able to nudge those fundamental physics of your system?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I would say that one of the biggest contributions, at least that I've seen from your work, for me personally, is that... stark assessment of the human condition uh a very sanguine uh some would say british slightly self-deprecating honest admission of how flawed how insane how irrational uh how silly shameful we can be a lot of the time and uh
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
This might be something which you've absorbed from the past, from society, from norms, from cultures, from the way that you've compensated for past traumas, et cetera, but just habits. But it brings up an interesting question, which is, okay, so Who are you? Where are you in this? Are you that voice? In some ways you are because you're inexorably linked to all of the experiences you've had.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
yourself, Oliver Berkman, if you're familiar with Oliver as well. Again, sort of really embracing that British melancholic sort of tragedy well-handled type thing. This has been a very long time coming. I've wanted you on the podcast since before I began it. I went back and looked at my first ever set of notes that I had that has your name in.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I'm sure there's stuff that's a little bit earlier than that. And that was 2017. So it's late to the party, but
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
perhaps in the broad scheme of things but very early to the party in my intellectual trajectory and uh making people feel less alone in the challenges that they face the day-to-day machinations this personal curse that huh i didn't know anybody else felt like that at least i'm not at least it's not just me yeah at least i've not had this thing sort of thrown down on me from above and uh
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
When I find myself embracing that with the show, with the content that I create, with the thoughts that I have, with the way that I try to direct things, with the way that I try to push people forward, especially at my age, I'm 36, and there's a number of different directions that I can kind of go down. And the one that's pulling me the most at the moment is a much more
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
stark assessment of the silliness and irrationality and shamefulness of the human condition. And I just wanted to say thank you very much for helping to be a role model for me to be able to do that more. Thank you so much, Chris. Lovely words. So generous.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I appreciate you so much. Thank you, mate.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But then we have this sort of transcendent us, which is better. It's the better us. If only I could. It's the me without the compensation, the trauma, the et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I love the idea of children being unencumbered by sort of expectation in that way. And yeah, trying to find the balance between what would the mature childlike version of ourselves do or say in this moment, where we found ourselves to... swayed by the opinions of others, by expectations, by societal norms, etc.
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.