2M Q&A - Private Life, Future Of Podcasting & Becoming Religious

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. It is a 2 million subscriber Q&A episode. You already got to see me kind of do a touchy-feely thing with a behind-the-scenes vlog. If you didn't watch that, you should go and check it out. But, as is tradition, I asked for questions from Twitter, and YouTube community, and Instagram. We got a lot. And these ones are really, really insightful. I'm I don't think I've had as many awesome questions before. So, as the show gets bigger, the audience appears to be getting smarter as well. So, hooray. Let's get into it. Spunky Kumar. Spunky Kumar. How do you know who your real friends are? That's a good question. I guess I realized in my 20s that a lot of the people that were my friends were actually just drinking partners. They were people who went to the same events as me and drank at the same times as me. But, if I was sober, or if there wasn't something super stimulating happening, I I don't know how much I would enjoy I wasn't finding myself spending time around them. So, I guess a good question to ask yourself is, do you spend time around them when it's just you, when there isn't a ton of other stimulation? Because what if the only time that you can ever hang with people is if you go to a festival, or if you go and watch a movie, or if you something crazy's going on, how deep is that connection, and how much are they just an available observer that can accompany you to like a chaperone? They're kind of like a chaperone for each other. Uh your real friends are the people that you would happily spend time with them in the most boring situation possible. I think that's a a good judge of uh of how close you are. Benjamin Doran. How can you work hard and push if you don't see results immediately? Would love tips. Well, this is ultimately everything. When you start doing a thing, for the most part, the gains accrue very slowly. There's some things where it doesn't. Like, going to the gym is pretty good because newb gains are are pretty high, or skill acquisition physical skill acquisition is always pretty quick in the beginning. You start playing pickleball, and you're never going to be as good over the space of 10 sessions as the first 10 because you didn't even know the rules when you turned up. But, largely, when you start doing a thing, the results tend to be pretty slow. And then, as you get better and better and better over time, the results will come more quickly. My solution It's so trite to say it, but that motivation is the thing that gets you started, and then habit is the thing that keeps you going. Once you begin a routine of doing anything, stopping yourself from doing that routine, whether it's good or bad, actually becomes really difficult. I'm training first thing in the morning at the moment. If I don't train, my day feels off. It's It's genuinely harder for me to not go to the gym than it is to go to the gym at 7:40 a.m. in the morning. So, my advice would be use as much motivation, whether that comes from wanting to be better, resentment for the people that have scorned you in the past, this desire to prove yourself. Use whatever fuel you have, both good and bad, to get yourself moving, and stay as consistent as possible. And then, after you get to the stage where results will begin to come, you should have already got that routine thing going, too. So, for me, results not coming in the beginning is hopefully solved by the fact that your motivation is at its highest. And then, as motivation begins to wane, you should have the habituated routine to come and sort of take over from that. Spencer Coleman 4444. Do you think that the guests you have on could be supporting your worldview rather than challenging it? Uh yeah, actually. I I think so. I think we all find people who we feel like we're going to vibe with. You know, we we we get on with people who share our values, and who we think, "Well, this is going to be a fun conversation." You know, they they they think this thing, and I think this thing, and we you know, I'd love to teach them about this idea cuz I think they'd be really interested in it. As opposed to someone who has a completely different and you're kind of speaking different languages. Um do I think that it would be a better world where the show had more people on who challenged my worldview? I don't really know what that would mean. Like, I'm open to pretty much anybody saying anything at me. Um and I guess it specifically means what worldview we're talking about. Like, is the worldview evolution, because that's quite fundamental, or is it a subset within evolutionary theory? Is it uh to do with culture, or is it to do with a specific subset within culture? Is it to do with how we should deal with the media? Or is it how we should deal with celebrities? Or is it how we should approach fame? So, I think I'm certainly trying my best to bring on people who have differing points of view. Perfect example of this, Abigail Shrier, uh Bad Therapy, she wrote a book. Everyone's kind of keen about it because it's in the same ballpark as Jonathan Haidt's book, and uh Jean Twenge's book. It's this sort of critique of the fragility of Gen Z, which has been passed down in its screens and smartphones and all the rest of it. I actually quite disagreed with a lot of her takes, and I tried to be really challenging when I had a conversation. But, from the outside, it probably looks like it's something that I would be on board with. So, I'm trying hard. I I genuinely am trying hard to find a a more challenging approach to doing the show, to bringing on people with differing points of view. That being said, it's kind of hard to get people who don't agree with me to come on. It's not just a one-way street. I don't just get to choose people who come on, and and they they come on. Like, I've tried to get Hasan [ __ ] on the show for forever. Like, every time that I reach out to people who seem to be left of center, it's maybe like twice as hard, three times as hard to bring those people on. So, um I would love suggestions. If you guys are like, "Chris, you need to speak to this person. This This person would be great." Throw it in the comments. Like, I'll pick it up, or one of the guys will pick it up, and they we do see that stuff. So, if there's someone that you think is well-meaning and awesome and interesting and insightful, I I'm down to speak to any of them. So, yes. The Slayer Moody. Hello, Chris. Do 2 million subs still feel as good as the first 1,000 subs? Bonus round, how do you celebrate such a monumental milestone? Love from Montreal. Thank you. Uh 1,000 subs felt really good. Uh James Smith has this idea of all wins feel the same, and it's true. You don't get an Uber surcharge rating for hitting 2 mil compared with when you hit your first thousand, which is cool, actually, because it means that small wins give you a good sense even though they're not big wins. Small wins can be just as good as big wins. And um we celebrated by going to see the Texas Rangers play the Houston Astros, and going in, thought it was going to be an amazing game, ended up losing 3-0, and basically nothing happened. But, the experience was awesome. We got Terry Black's delivered. We got in a really nice van, and and and got driven up there and stuff. That was That was fun. Uh but, the game could have been otherwise better. Gu- Gu- Gur- Gurugos Pan. Nailed it. Any info about your upcoming book? So, yes. Um I have signed uh Penguin Random House Portfolio in the US, and uh Hachette Hodder in the UK. This will be submitted at the end of 2025's summer. So, it's about a year and four months. So, you're in three months now. That's all that I'm going to tell you for now. Delivery KP1. Do you worry that the flash that is your increased production value takes away from the substance of the wisdom that comes from your guests? This comes from someone who delivers all day and doesn't see your set except for the clips I see after I'm finished working. So, fair comment. We got a lot of feedback about this to do with And I knew that this was going to come, right? We spent a lot of money and tried to do something kind of experimental and different and cool, I hoped, uh cinematically for the most recent episodes with Ferriss and Naval Ravikant and all the rest of them. Um do I worry that the flash increased production value takes away from the substance of the wisdom that comes from your guests? I don't understand how it would. It especially if you're just listening. If you're just listening, nothing changes. It's the same presets that we used to master the audio. It's the same mics. It's the same mic quality. It's the same conversation. That's fine. For the people who are watching, I like to think that we held onto the purity of the conversation. It didn't detract from it at all. If anything, it made it more immersive for the guest. All of the guests said it really sort of fostered a sense of being in the moment, and it made it feel like more of a an occasion, and they really wanted to show up. And as the scenes change and move, which you'll see in the episodes that are after Dr. K, that even embeds it more. That makes it more immersive. So, I would like to think that it makes the conversation the purity of the conversation itself better. And like I say, if you're not watching, then you are not going to notice anything different. Uh I have no idea how it would take away from the substance of the wisdom that comes from the guests. And if you are watching, you still get exactly what you got before with some beauty laid on top. And I think that something done well with beauty and earnestness is never really wasted effort. So, hopefully, that's how it comes across. Also, one other point. Got to say it. Saying There was a few criticisms about this is narcissism, this is ego, this is all style and no substance. Bro, we did 750 episodes from a spare bedroom before we decided to try and use a video wall. Like, how is it How is it anything other than substance? Like, hundreds and hundreds of episodes before you even knew what the show was, with dusty academics with a [ __ ] unpronounceable surname. How is it How could it ever be anything that I could do another 750 episodes on a video wall in [ __ ] virtual reality and still have done more episodes in a spare bedroom. So, I don't think that that is a valid criticism. Axel Solvik Hold one. How to max out growth during puberty? Wow, I am the wrong guy to ask, dude. I was a late bloomer, small bloomer. Um mental growth I have no idea. Uh but if you're talking physical growth, I'm not the guy to ask. I was puny. I remember I was when 20 years old training at the Edinburgh University gym and I remember the day that I broke 70 kilos, which I think is like 155 for the Americans, and was like, "Yes, I'm massive." And uh that was 20 and it I'd been training for like hard for 3 years then as well. So, not the guy to ask. Sorry. Stefano James, how long can the desert be How long can the desert between old set of friends and new can last? Okay, uh you're moving I'm going to guess this is to do with the lonely chapter. So, you have an old set of friends that you've outgrown, the new set of friends that you haven't yet found, you're starting to grow, you're doing new things, and you're kind of in this middle section, the lonely chapter. Uh it can last for a really long time. I I'm not going to sugarcoat it for you. It really can carry on for a very long time and that sucks and I wish that I could make it shorter for you and I wish that I could land you at the place where you have a community of people like the person you want to be like. Um but it's going to take time. And the problem is that if you try and come into land during this big growth period and those friends that you find aren't growing as well, you'll outgrow the friends that you find in the middle section, if that makes sense. Um I the best analogy that I used, I came up with this while I was doing the live tour. Imagine a rocket ship and the pace of your personal growth is the velocity of your rocket ship. And other people are moving along as well. One of the problems is if your rocket ship's moving quicker than theirs, you start to outstrip them. And after you get sufficiently far apart, there's just fewer things for you to relate to. There's fewer things for you to talk about. There's a degree of tension between you and them and they can sense it and you can sense it and even if it's not spoken, it's kind of unspoken. Uh and one of the worst things that happens is, okay, you've outgrown one group and then you see, "Oh, there's a person that's ahead of me." And then your personal growth continues to go by. And this isn't making some value judgment. This isn't saying that someone who does more meditation or spends more time [ __ ] thinking about their emotions or whatever is better or worse. There's no value judgment. My point is just that being able to relate to other people is something that is hard if you are not moving at the same kind of pace and in the same sort of position as them. And I give you all the sympathy in the world, but it is worth it. I promise you it is worth it. So, hold on in the desert. Jack K0625. If you could talk to your 18-year-old self, what's the number one thing you'd say? It's a good question. What was I like at 18? [ __ ] clueless. I was absolutely clueless at 18. It's the same thing I'd say to myself now, dude. This is one of the things, like it's such a common question of, you know, you can go back in time and tell yourself anything and people often think that that insight is something which related to them then and don't realize that it's probably still the thing that they need to hear now. And it's don't fear the opinions of others. Like don't be concerned about what other people think about you. Not only are they probably not thinking about you, not only do you not care about what they cheer for because you see what they boo for or what you care about what they boo for because you've seen what they cheer for. Not only do you that they they're probably so wrapped up in their own life that they don't have time to think about you. All of the layers and layers of like why no one in the world actually cares about you. On top of that, it's only you. You're only here to experience things and the emotions that come along with them. That's all that's going on in life. So, compromising yourself in a desperate attempt to try and be liked or wanted or validated by other people is fighting a losing battle and it's probably the same thing that I need to hear now. Nick Lashers Herfeld. [ __ ] these names. Such good questions and such horrible names. How do you avoid getting stuck in psychological intellectualism to really feel your feelings? Bro, you see me. Um I don't know. It's This is a big This is something I'm really thinking about a lot at the moment and you know, I had this quote from Alain de Botton from forever ago. Um Loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to pay to atone for certain complexity of mind. And is it a blessing or a curse to feel things so very deeply? All this stuff. But what I realized was I wasn't actually talking about emotions. I was talking about the rationalism of what emotions do to us or about what they sound like, not what they feel like. And I think that intellectualizing your psychology is a protection strategy. It takes you It removes you by one step from having to feel something. And I I find this in myself during therapy when I'm I'm having a conversation and I'll explain the narrative of where this thing comes from. Oh, like it's because this is why and this is why it's adaptive and I can see how this would be the case because of this thing that came in my past and this fear that I've got about the future and so on and so forth. All of those things are ways to give yourself distance from having to feel the feelings. You're explaining them, you're not embodying them. And uh to be honest, dude, I don't know. Um as I said in the last Q&A, I'm chronically aware of all of my shortcomings at the moment. So, I'm not your guru. I am not going to like say that I have some answer to this. This is something I'm working through, too. But we can work through it together. Some stuff at least tactically that I found that works for me is when I catch myself explaining away feelings, intellectualizing them, coming up with some interesting quote or anecdote or whatever, either on my own or to other people or to therapist or friend or whatever the [ __ ] When I find myself doing that, I try and stop and go, "How does this make me feel?" And just say that. When this thing happened, I felt and even if you're imprecise, you don't need to bring this into land with a a bow on it and a beautifully boxed up and wrapped and pushed across the table. It made me feel strange. This is something Matthew Hussey said. Such a great frame, actually. Here's like another good piece of like tactical advice. Being allowing yourself to be imprecise with explaining your feelings because they're not transparent to us. They're not obvious to us. So, saying, "When this thing happened, it made me feel strange." Like it couldn't be more vague, but it's trying to put across this uncertainty that you have in yourself about what's going on. And I think that that's a really good starting point because intellectualizing is giving yourself distance. Just saying, "When this thing happened, it made me feel X." If you can work it out or even just strange or a bit odd or a bit off and I don't really understand. That's a good start. Arc quotes one. Do you ever get afraid that you will run out of content? This is the advantage of being a podcaster. I don't need to come up with the content. I just need to find other people that have got interesting things to say and then I just ask them questions. I will never run out of questions to ask interesting people, ever. I could do this for a a million years and that wouldn't be an issue. Thankfully, uh I don't always need to actually come up with all of the new insights. That's the That's the job of the guest. But no, I'm not. And I uh there's way more people that I want to speak to than time I'm going to have to speak to them in. So, I better hurry up. Ricksmas 11. What's the biggest animal you could beat in hand-to-hand combat? Wow. Well, biggest doesn't necessarily mean most vicious, right? You like a sloth. Some of those Like I'm pretty sure there was a giant sloth. Maybe that was megafauna that's already extinct. I'm pretty sure I could [ __ ] up a giant sloth. Um What else is big? I'm looking for some I'm going to try and hack this. I'm going to look for something that's big but docile. I'm pretty sure I could beat a cow. And a cow's a ton, couple of tons. Wouldn't back myself against an elephant. Wouldn't back myself against a horse, either. Horses are basically like jacked cows. Cow. I'm going to say it's a cow. Thank you. Marcus Filipsson, you have produced the most beautiful podcasts in the world. Thank you. What's next in terms of cinematic episodes? How can you push the boundaries further? We just did world first video wall thing. Um I am thinking about uh VR quite carefully. I don't know how we could do it. I've kind of got a couple of ideas about doing in parallax so that you can actually see the background move. Um I want to do some stuff on location. We've got this amazing new AI tool that helps us to clean up audio, which is why the audio is very butchered or being butchered. Um which is great. I would like to Those are the two. Those are the main two, VR and on location, I think, are two good directions for us to move in. But it it doesn't necessarily need to be new, you know, we can find an even nicer location. We can light things even more softly. We can find an even better angle. We can shoot things at an even more, you know, perfect uh the edit on the back end, the color grades, all of those things. There are ways that we can iterate without having to totally change what we're doing. And I think that the volume LED wall stuff was was one of those. It was a step change, but not totally, you know, ripped apart from what we've done before. So, but yeah, give me time. We just did one brand new thing. Need a little bit of time to come up with the next one. Chinese Tarzan. Hey buddy, great show. I wholeheartedly support you. Thank you. How do you keep your private life private? Um by not talking about it, by not spending time posting This is Douglas Murray was the person that told me about this forever ago. And he said, "Keep your private life private." Because once it's out there, there is no taking it back. And there is a degree of it's kind of like open season in some ways. You know, we saw this with Huberman, which is kind of strange. He was someone who had kept his private life private and then that got thrust out into the media. Um but if you're someone that's trying to navigate a a relationship or a marriage or or a family or whatever, that's hard enough as it is. And then trying to do that with a few million people watching. Like do you remember when um Logan Paul got into he got married to that chick that he's seeing, Nina I think she's called. I teared up at that uh him getting down on one knee thing. I thought that was beautiful. He's crying, he's blubbering like an idiot, like she's really happy. I was like, "This is [ __ ] beautiful. Like this is cool." But, you know, she's got a history and then the internet finds it and then they make a big deal out of it and then it's like you've just got engaged. You've got all of the eyes of the world on you. You've got all of this pressure. And then you've got all of these people commenting on your private life, too. So, for me, no, thank you. I will happily talk about the learnings that I have about my private life, but it's I don't know. I'm like I'm an I'm an introvert at heart. And the idea of people picking my private life apart makes me feel uncomfortable. So, the way that I do it is by not talking about it. And oddly by not talking about things, people get distracted by other stuff. Right? Like there's always going to be a Logan Paul or a Jake Paul or whatever who's got their entire relationship out there for the internet to see. That's way easier fodder for people to focus on. So, focus on them for that. And come to me and I'll give you like [ __ ] Aristotle quotes and and ways to improve your sleep. Mox Review Fun. Why do you not use the premiere feature on YouTube? Good question. Um I never watch premiere. Uh so, the only advantage as far as I can see, it basically allows people to see pre-recorded videos as if they were live. And it creates a live chat and people can comment and and have discussions about the videos as they go up as if they were live. Which I guess is great for community. It's just never really appealed to me. Um we do publish an awful lot of content as well. And sometimes uploads go wrong. There is a sound quality problem. There is a something else. Uh and if that is the case, I really don't want to have some countdown clock that we're beholden to. you know, we turn videos around in a really short space of time. Poor Dean's got, you know, banks and banks and banks of hard drives, everything plugged in desperately trying to find the footage that he's looking for. I think it would add a degree of complexity and not really make that much of a difference, but I don't know. I'm open to the argument on the other side of it. I know the trigonometry guys use it a lot. G Dog Brown. When you doing another UK tour? PS, love the content. Thank you. Uh we might do a show in the UK toward the end of this year. I'm speaking to Luke, who is my tour manager, about it. And we might get to do something really cool, but I don't want to go hard on touring until I've got more of a new show because I'm going to come back around to the same places and I don't want to talk about the same stuff exclusively. But we may do one big one. Maybe UK one big one US, UK, and maybe Oz. But we'll see. Brenda Brenda Gonzalez. Brendag Gonzalez 59. I feel like I've learned my lessons, but keep repeating them. What can I do to actually change? Yeah, this is this is kind of a vicious cycle. My my first the first place that I go to is you haven't learned the lessons if you keep repeating them. But I understand that that's not necessarily true because you can know something and yet not be able to get your actions to come in line with it. And I think this was probably the 6 months leading up to the first time that I went sober for a while. Uh that was probably what I was feeling. You know, I would learn and unlearn the same lesson every 2 weeks. Go out, get smashed, party, have a great time, wake up, feel awful, feel awful the day after, feel kind of a bit better the day after that, get back on my routine the day after that. And then, you know, 10 days later go and do it all over again. And that was one of those ones where I'd learned the lesson that you don't really enjoy drinking that much. Alcohol kind of sucks. It doesn't make you feel that good. It ruins all of the things that you really care about, which is progress and consistency and self-growth and connecting with people and understanding yourself. And then I'd go back and get get drunk again. So, I understand, you know, we're not masters of our own actions. And if you know something, but don't seem to be able to make the thing that you know manifest and adjusting your behavior, that's frustrating. So, I feel you. Um I One thing that could work that helped me was uh there's a workbook from Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. It's an hour and a half long. It's an Audible audiobook. And he talks about front-loading as much pain as possible and front-loading as much pleasure as possible. So, pleasure pain pain principle, the pleasure pain [ __ ] you. The pleasure pain principle is what uh motivates you to go and do something. So, if you have so much pain that you can't stay in the current situation, you will end up changing it. If the pleasure that you would get from making the change is front-loaded, you will also make the change. So, thinking about how much has the current thing that you're doing or not doing cost you in the past. Think about all of the bad scenarios that it's got you into. Let's use alcohol. Think about all of the times that you felt terrible. Think about all of the hours that you've wasted. Think about all of the money that you've spent. Think about all of the consistency you've lost, the health that you've degraded, the relationships and friendships and stuff that you've hurt by doing it. And then think about what it's costing you now. Like where could you be right now in a different situation if you hadn't done those things? Then looking in the future, what will it cost you in the future? Think about all of the times that you're going to spend, the hours, the days that you're going to spend hung over looking at the ceiling hating yourself. That's the pain. And then you want to ramp it up to 11 by going and reading looking on the internet for the worst examples of you if you kept doing that thing. To someone that's been a party boy for 20 years and then looked back and has written a diary entry on Reddit or something about what they wish that they changed or how bad that they feel that they'd done it or somebody that's got, you know, a great story about somebody that never actually grew up from being that sort of adult infant like hedonic lifestyle thing. And then think about the pleasure. Think about all of the ways that you're going to feel proud about yourself when you make this change, about how much better your life's going to be, about how much more fulfilled and more time and consistency and energy you're going to have to dedicate to stuff that you care about and how much more proud you're going to feel. Those two things, if you can front-load the pain and if you can front-load the pleasure of what would happen if you did the change, that seems to motivate me quite well. And I got that from Awaken the Giant Within the workbook on Audible by Tony Robbins. It's like 20 years old. Phone Punk. First off, I love your podcast. Thank you. With the recent hit piece on Huberman, are you prepared for a similar type of thing to come your way? Seems like they want to take everyone down in the self-improvement space. Much love. Yeah. Uh I think every podcaster kind of had they put themselves into his situation. You know, the the guys that are maybe single and dating put themselves into Huberman's position. And the guys that are not maybe put themselves into Jay Shetty's one. So, like Huberman's was private life and Jay Shetty's was his professional life. You know, a lot of scrutiny and criticism and stuff around that. Um to be honest, no, I'm not. I'm not prepared for a similar type of thing to come my way. I wouldn't I would I that would be very difficult to deal with. And I don't know how you deal with it. I I got to speak to Andrew last week. And uh I mean, he's older than me and more mature than me and maybe more resilient than me, but it doesn't matter how resilient you can be. Goddamn David Goggins and that is still going to affect you. That's still really going to affect you. I think Rogan's solution when the CNN controversy thing was happening was heavy kettlebell workouts, ice plunges, and 3 g of mushrooms a day. Uh I guess that's one protocol that you could follow. Um it does seem like there's clamoring from legacy media to take down people that they feel get above and beyond their station. Obviously, there's, you know, there's actual newsworthiness as well. But I think it would be naive to say that people in a dwindling area of public attention wouldn't throw shade or turn their eye towards people in a new ascending side of it in an attempt to try and sort of de-legitimize what's happening over, I guess, our side of the fence. Um I don't know. I mean, do I need a PR firm? Do I I someone that can give me advice on this? It seems like the the more expensive the PR company is, the less they tell you to say. Um like the the best ones just say don't respond, keep moving. Um but yeah, it would it would suck. I I really wouldn't like that. I again, you know, I said keep my private life private. I very much try to do that. I I love being open and honest about learning what I've done in my life, but I don't want people like getting into my business, right? Like that's that doesn't make me feel very good. So, hopefully it doesn't happen, but that may be a pipe dream. Fillum fill Fillum Kennedy 6653. You mentioned in your recent podcast with Eric Weinstein that Latin Rite Catholics are one of the fastest growing religious groups in the West. Have you or are you interested in speaking to anyone from that group or have gone to their services? So, I don't know much about them. I would love to go to one. If there is one in Austin, I probably should try and find it. I actually went to my first American church service on Easter this year at God dammit. Uh the Ridge the Ridge Bible Bible something. God dammit. Anyway, it's 20 minutes away from me here. And it was like a rock concert. It was what it was not what I expected. I don't know what I thought um a Easter Sunday service was. But it wasn't that. So, it it was cool and um I I think there's a lot to be said for having ritual, having a sense of community, doing a little bit of self-inquiry. I came out of it feeling nicely down-regulated. But like look at what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to I'm trying to intellectualize something which is faith to a lot of people. But that's because I don't have that faith. I would be interested in going. I don't know what I'd speak to someone from that group about. Although, an interesting conversation would be why do you think that lots of people are being attracted to it. So, maybe I will speak to someone from it. Louis Hardcastle, differences you have personally felt since switching from coffee to Neutonic. Good question. Hm. So, the mood change is the biggest thing for me. L-theanine seems to really help smooth out the jitters that I get from anxiety. And this has got like double the dose that you'd have to go to bed on a night time. So, when you couple that with the caffeine, it seems to work really well. I just I feel better. That's one thing that we've never spoken about. We still don't talk about it. The mood improvement, the mood elevation is so great. It just makes you feel good. And I'm like, if I feel good, then I want to work harder and I'll work longer regardless of whether the Panax ginseng is helping my like omission commission error rate and stress-induced fatigue reduction ratio from Rhodiola rosea. It's not necessarily about that. It's about I just feel better. And now I associate the taste of it with something that is I associate drinking that and that flavor with feeling good and being in a good place and going to the gym or sitting down to do a ton of work or it's nice. It's like a ritual. It's like flavor-based ritual, which is good. John 9F No, John 9 John QF9NR. Nighttime {slash} pre-bedtime routine. So, I've really tried to get better at this. 3-2-1 is the best method that I found. 3 hours before going to bed, stop eating. 2 hours before going to bed, stop drinking. 1 hour before going to bed, turn off blue light. The 1 hour is the hardest one because a full hour of just reading or listening to an audio book can actually make me feel more awake. Um but I've definitely got to like 3 to 30 minutes uh I've managed to get myself to. That's the easiest one. You know, there's a million other things you can do. I always have a shower on an evening time. I guess that's just something that's part of my routine. I don't shower in the morning, I shower in the night. Um eight sleep set on cool. I have it on a minus three. What else? Nasal strips. Uh what do I use? They're called Intake. I think they're called Intake nasal strips, the ones that I use. They're like a hard plastic shell that attaches to two tabs that sit either side of your nose. Uh and they're hardcore. They're really good cuz I my nose doesn't breathe too well. I got deviated septum. Read for a bit, fiction only, never nonfiction before I go to bed cuz my mind starts worrying if I don't. Um That's it. Magnesium sleep packs from uh Momentous. Uh but even them, I only need to use probably every other night. That's it. 3-2-1. That seems to be the sort of 80/20. Connor D When you were younger, did you ever have an internal {slash} subconscious belief or feeling that you would be successful in your life? Not in one specific area, but an innate feeling that you were destined {slash} driven to do something magnificent with your life. Uh to be honest, man, um no, I don't think so. I was pretty sure that I was a loser. And I still very well may be. Um but we all have a very strange experience of our own uh inner experience, right? I I the phenomenological nature of being you is orders of magnitude deeper than even your best friend, even your twin, even your partner that you meet when you're 16 years old and stay together for the rest of your life. You only ever get to see the tiny tiny tiny amount of their nature. And you get to see this sort of bottomless depth of yourself. And I think that that can make us all feel like we're special in some ways. We feel like we are unique because the depth of our own insight about ourselves compared to the depth of our insight about anyone else is so asymmetric that how could we not think that there's something different or strange or special or whatever about us? But when it comes to the successful thing, um destined driven to do something magnificent with my life, not really. I I I I'm a good role model or avatar for the person that was probably pretty unlikely to do anything. And that's not to say that running a podcast is really doing anything. But um whatever degree of success I have managed to achieve uh was not predestined by the way that I came up through school or my self-belief or anything like that. Like I've largely stumbled onto it by a combination of like solitude consistency resilience but not even resilience. It's like it's like sort of boneheadedness in my routine. Like that's kind of been what's happened. And then you sort of come out the other side of it and you go, oh, like we did a thing. A thing happened. Uh so yeah, if you don't have that much self-belief, you can still end up at a place where other people think that maybe you've been successful. So, I think that's quite a Hopefully that's an inspiring story. Like you can still think that you're going to suck and end up not sucking. So, hooray for us. Steven, in capital letters, Steven. Would love to know your further thoughts on the future of podcasting. I think you've got a great thing brewing with Unreal Engine power wall in your latest teaser. Thank you. Um future of podcasting. Yeah, this is kind of interesting. Like I I think it's probably going to go in I mean, it it could go in so many different directions. Certainly my area of the world, I think it's going to bifurcate into into two when we're looking at how it appears. You're going to have Matt and Shane's secret show um that secret podcast thing where it's one camera filmed on like an iPhone with handheld mics in on a couch surrounded by Cheetos packets and and Bud Light. And then you're going to have 4K video wall VR negative fill reverse contrast lighting, red cameras, anamorphic lenses, like my side of things. That being said, I don't think that there's I don't think that anything is more or less pure than anything else. There's definitely a legitimate pushback of that some people said that the whole point of what we were doing with podcasting was to make it less sort of encumbered and and and less uh high friction between the creator. We didn't want to make it feel like it'd been molested, right? That the conversation was what we were there for. And what's all of the fluff that goes around it? Um and I understand and I get that, too. But like if you can do the thing, if you can do the purity thing whilst adding the visual beauty and great. But then I also love me some casual bro talk on a a couch somewhere that isn't super curated. So, future of podcasting, I would say a lot of obsession over the quality of the guests and the quality of the conversation will be the best direction that anybody could go in. Doesn't matter how it's presented. It doesn't matter how this is presented. I could, you know, we did this when it The first 50 episodes of the show didn't have video. The same thing. I just want an interesting conversation. I think that's what people come for ultimately. So, what I know will be the future of podcasting will be quality of the conversation, um variety of guests, how engaging are they, how great are they at communicating their their points. Uh and then all the rest of this stuff's just sprinkles on top of icing on top of cake. And that's just like cool to play with. Jojo Perzy. Are we cooked as a society? Every day I think, what the [ __ ] is the point now? Everyone just hates. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of cynicism. I'm going to guess that you spend a good amount of time on the internet because I do think that everyone just hates is the sentiment. It's the the like cynicism set point that we see online. I would advise you to try and get offline a little bit more, spend some time uh IRL with people who don't spend that much time on the internet and you will find pretty quickly that they're probably they think that it's fine when probably not cooked as a society. Everyone doesn't just hate. You know, I was at an eclipse party yesterday here in Austin and spent the whole day just having interesting conversations about what's the likelihood that the moon is 400 times smaller but 400 times closer and what do we think about aliens? Like no one had no one was hating on anything. There wasn't any criticism. But there's something about the dynamic of the internet that causes people to just get so cynical and cutting and sardonic and zero-sum with their mindset. Um so I don't think we're cooked as a society. Humans are unbelievably adaptable and you know, one of the reasons that I love stories like that um one-eyed World War II veteran that I spoke about on Rogan or Endurance by Alfred Lansing about Sir Ernest Shackleton's crossing of the Antarctic or The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart. The reason I love these stories is it kind of reminds us about the resilience of humans that you think that we're close to the limit of what we can take of what how adaptable we are and then you learn about these sorts of stories and you go oh this there's like 55 degrees of black belts beyond where we're at. So um no, I don't think that we're cooked but I understand why you think that that's the case and when I spend too much time on the internet as well, I sometimes think that too. So I think touch grass. TLDR touch grass. Shaun Curran 2920, why do you constantly speaks I'm for yourself? You just plagiarize other people's thoughts. Well, I'll do my best to try and decipher what you mean there Shaun. I appreciate the comment that I repurpose other people's content and insights and quotes. That is fair. Uh I would say that citing other people's work that has impacted me is probably one of the most like tributing things that I can do. Here's a awesome insight that I've learned that I think other people would care about and I resonated with it. I'm not convinced that that's plagiarizing. Like it's not plagiarism if you cite the person. Uh and the other part is that no one owns the truth. No one owns the truth. If this insight is accurate about the world, the way that this person presented it, absolutely that they were the originator of this particular idea. But they don't own the truth. That is the way that the world is and no one gets to own that. So if I'm aggregating insights from other people and then presenting them, what the [ __ ] else is my job as a podcaster in whatever this version this sense-making space is? What what else should I be doing? If if you want me to come up from first principles, uh ignore insights from other people and come up from first principles exclusively with ones of my own, you're going to get 10% of 1% of the insights. So as long as I'm citing other people and then bringing into my life and thinking how does this work for me and how might this work for the audience, I don't understand why that would be something bad. But you know, the he just quotes other people's stuff. Something tells me this question maybe came from social media because like from Instagram or from Twitter. Lots of clips get repurposed and by design the best quotes are the ones that go the most viral. So I guess it does sound like I'm like a a jukebox for other people's quotes. But if you actually listen to an entire lesson, an entire episode, I'm probably not doing that. I'm trying my best to not only come up with my own ideas and then meme them so that other people quote me and then I win. Uh but more than that to actually try and fold them into a broader conversation. So uh I don't know about the sayings and riddles. Um I'm not sure that that bit was me. But anyway, I appreciate the the comment. Thanks Shaun. Rachel Devercelli, how can I date you? Get on Raya. I don't know. Karena7, what would you say is the mission statement of your podcast? Uh so from the very beginning it was understand yourself and the world around you. And the reason for that was I didn't. I didn't understand myself. I couldn't work out why I believed the things that I did, why I compromised my insights, why I folded at the first sign of social pressure, why other people behaved the way that they did, why they liked the things that they did. Um I I I I I didn't understand myself. I didn't understand the world and doing that is hard. And I really hope that this podcast helps. And that's kind of it. Um And the reason I like that as a statement I I I didn't go to some branding agency. This isn't part of some like you know, it's not written on a wall somewhere above a door. This isn't something that we've tried to synthesize down what's the actual goal of the podcast. It's just a a sentence that I kept having come up to me when I was thinking about what I wanted to achieve and given that this show is just an outgrowth of me, that's kind of what it is. And I said this in the last episode, my obligation is only ever to my own curiosity. So guess what? Right now I'm thinking a lot about emotions. So all of you are along for the ride and we're going to learn about emotions. And if emotions aren't for you, that's cool. Maybe you need to pick and choose your episodes over the next couple of months and then oh Chris is on AI and I'm an AI guy and it's like all right, cool. Like [ __ ] into AI you go. Um but I'll follow my curiosity. The single thread that has held all of it together is understanding myself and the world around you and uh I hope that that's something that's useful. Ryan O'Yannai, how do you handle it when you strongly disagree on a subject with the person you are interviewing? Um when was the last time that I really strongly disagreed? I really strongly disagreed with Abigail Shrier I think on a good chunk of her stuff and that was that was a really interesting challenge for me. I'll break the fourth wall a little bit. I don't like doing this too much cuz it kind of feels a bit icky and like it's contrived and it's not. But it'll be maybe useful for me to explain kind of what I was going through. Let's say that I ask someone a question. There's a couple of moments during that episode with Abigail where I ask her a couple of questions that are like a bit pointed and and probably difficult to slightly difficult to deal with. You know, stuff to do with stats or or um the replicability of certain studies and things like that. And if she struggles or if the guest if any guest struggles for a while, 5 seconds or maybe 10 seconds, you know, they're sort of floundering trying to find what it is and they're not too sure or the silence or whatever, I want to step in and save that. I want to sort of grab a lifebuoy and throw that in to pull them out because I want the conversation to flow nicely and I want them to have fun and I want it to be you know, engaging and I don't unlike a Destiny or a Shapiro or whatever, like I don't take joy in disagreement in that way. So I will tend to try and like hit some like pull an ejector seat button to you know, blow out the roof of some awkward exchange. But on the Abigail episode, I really tried hard to sort of just sit with that discomfort. Like all right, okay. Well, I'll let her get herself out of this or you know, with anybody the Eric Weinstein episode that we had a a couple of months ago where you know, I I fundamentally disagree with his idea about gender and sex and I I I think that he's wrong. So I need needed to learn to sit with that discomfort and um how do I handle it? And this is again trying to make it more tactical for someone who is a bit of a people pleaser like me. Knowing that it's not the end of the world and being curious about what that sensation feels like as it comes up. Okay, so I feel kind of this it's like I want to lean forward and it's kind of it's it's a bit of a ringing in my ears and I kind of get hot in my throat and I feel this desire to sort of lurch forward and and pull the person back in. Like that's kind of how it feels I guess emotionally. Isn't that interesting? Isn't it interesting that that's the emotion? Why why am I feeling that and where's that coming from and how can I play with that and is it as bad as I'm making it out? Like is it actually that uncomfortable for me to feel that thing? Or maybe maybe it's a little bit more and it's not as scary. As you start to crack it open and and feel it as it comes up and not shy away from it and not treat it like it's something that's scary, it seems to be the curiosity seems to be a really good salve for stuff that you're not happy about. And this works for I've at least so far I've found it works for fear and it works for anxiety as well. is an emotion that I don't enjoy. It arises inside of me. As opposed to even using the meditation uh strategy of like noting that it's there, uh releasing and allowing. You go, okay, well, let's just sit with this for a moment. Not obsess over it but like isn't that why am I feeling that and where's that coming from and what might that mean and is it as scary as I think? And all of these questions that curiosity helps you to kind of you're not hiding. You're not intellectualizing in the same way as before. But it you're not getting swept away by the emotion too. So sitting with the curiosity um realizing that it's not your job to save somebody else when you're having a difficult conversation with them that you can just ask your question and just sit and just leave it. Um those are two things. But again, this is like massive work in progress and I'm still very much a white belt when it comes to the the disagreeability side. Oliver S, congrats on 2 million. Thank you. The exponential growth is remarkable and well deserved. Thank Thank again. Now Modern Wisdom has grown to this extent, how has the guest selection process changed? I assume it has become easier to attract the guests you'd like. He's 2 3 million. Cheers, Oliver. Um yeah, it has become easier in some ways. It's become easier to get access to most of the guests that I want. There's not really many people now No, that's a lie. That's a lie. There's like I can get up to sort of double A level and then triple A level is still you need an intro, they need to like you already and be aware of the work that you do. It's not actually that easy to get the best best best guests in the world on the show. So, um that that's still difficult. One of the problems, I guess, that's interesting is there's way more people that want to come on and the if you can't get every person that you want or if you can only get a very small number of the people that you want, then most of the choice simply comes from availability. Like, what is offered to you is what you take. Whereas now, I actually need to say no to you know, a a few hundred people a week who reach out to come on the show. And if we had an an outright guest booking process, it would probably be way more. Um and then even for the guests that I'm bringing on, you know, I have way more people that I want to speak to than time that I can speak to them in. So, I need to triage down, okay, well, this is someone that I want to talk to, but do I want to talk to them so that they make up 1/150 of the show's inventory this year? Because that's what it is. I get 150 spots every year to speak to people. And I have 2,000 people that I want to talk to every single year. So, I how am I where does this person rank where does this evolutionary psychologist rank with this futurist rank with this strength and conditioning coach? And I need and how many of these have we done before? And what am I interested in at the moment? So, it's great, but you know, a wealth of options isn't always um easy to deal with. So, I'm I'm really enjoying it. You know, I I have a great network of people that send me amazing unknown uh like legends of communication and research and um that's great. That's one of the best things I've got. The network of people that send me people that I should speak to is outstanding. Uh but can be difficult to make choices sometimes. Good luck, Wolf. Do you ever think you'll slow down on the episodes? Three week is incredible, but how sustainable? Again, it's been sustainable thus far, but do you have an an end goal {slash} exit strategy? Yeah, it is a lot. Um I would be lying if uh I said that it wasn't a lot. And this is one of the other things, you know, to just round out some more criticisms we got about the Streisand stuff. We worked so hard, man. Like, I've done three episodes a week for 4 years and I've done this show for six. And we're not owned by a network. No one helps us with our production. It is all homegrown talent. Every single person that works for us has been recruited by us, is managed by us. Really, me. I like that. I like the fact that we we didn't get bought out by some huge media company. And and I I I that makes me feel proud that I've done it. That being said, there is you pay for that freedom. You pay for the liberation and the independence you've got with workload. Um it is sustainable at the moment, but I need to make some changes. I need to get more help. Uh I'm I found myself ignoring my inbox and even my like texts and stuff from friend not ignoring them, but feeling exhausted when I when it comes to replying to people and I don't want that's not the energy I want to go into my friendships with, let alone, you know, like business transactions or or guests and stuff. I want to turn up and be just full of even in my correspondence, I want to be excited to speak to them as opposed to having it feel like a labor. But, you know, to do whatever it is, 750 episodes, think about how many emails. Let's say it takes five to 10 emails for each guest to come on. And then for every five guests that come on, one or two don't. So, it's like 5,000 emails just about that one thing. And then all of the stuff to do with sponsors, all of the stuff to do with production, and all of the it's a lot. Um if I can get myself to the stage where I'm not as involved operationally, I could do three a week forever. I I would love to do four a week, actually, because that would give me another spot that I could speak to, you know, 2,000 people down to 150 a year. I could actually have 200 people a year. Like, that's another 50 people I can speak to, which would be great. Um but the main reason that I'm not doing that is because of the lift. It's how operationally how heavy it is. So, no exit goal end goal exit strategy thing. Um I just want to keep having conversations with people that interest me. That's it. Uh I do need to make it a bit more uh less painful behind the scenes, but for now, we're holding on. Main Man Mick, when we getting Modern Wisdom merch? Good question, Main Man Mick. And I've had a unmitigated nightmare uh having that happen. We got ourselves to the like final round kickoff call with this company with a mostly female mostly West Coast mostly liberal design team. And they had all of the production that we needed, they had the supply chain that we needed, they had amazing designers, they worked with other big creators. And we got to the kickoff call and there was a mutiny among the team and they said he's a I don't know what it was, something bigot, misogynist, xenophobe, I'm not sure. He's had people like pick your bad people of choice, Eric Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, whatever, on the show. If you make us do designs for him, we're walking out. Like, that was surprising. Uh finding out that I am so far beyond the pale. Me, Mr. 20 episodes of life hacks, performative autism, and and how to go to sleep quicker on a nighttime. That was a surprise. So, we got set back by that. That was something uh that threw a bit of a spanner in the works. Hopefully soon, um but we have other priorities. Kind of been thinking about like a community thing, but Discord always seems to just descend into kind of [ __ ] posting and low investment uh content, like low low investment engagement. Um so, I kind of don't really like the idea of that, but I also know that one of the things I wanted like what's so many of the questions that we get, so many of the the conversations that people have when they send the the Q&A's in is like, how do I meet other people that are like me? Um I'm I'm struggling because I feel alone. I'm in this self-development journey and no one else that I live near is going through it as well. I would love to make something like that. So, that kind of seems like more of a priority, but then merch is easy. Like, how do you make a I don't know how you make a community. Anyway, uh Modern Wisdom merch will happen soon. It would have happened quicker, but uh checks in the Bay Area don't like me, apparently. Oxymoron always. Is it a good idea to start new podcast now with so much competition? I understand where the question's coming from, but I think it is a flawed perspective. You are not starting a podcast to be better than everybody else. If your goal is to start a podcast so that you can win, you've already lost because the likelihood of you winning by whatever like to get to my level or above is very it's very unlikely that you're going to do that. And even more unlikely now than it was in 2018 when I started mine. Um but if you start a podcast because you want to have conversations with people that you're interested in and to use it as a personal growth vehicle, then it doesn't matter if it wins because you're going to be having so much fun and developing so much that you won't care. And that was what I did. I had no idea. It was a side project while I was running nightclubs. And I just loved it so much that I didn't stop. It's the same as the first question, right? The motivation is what gets you started and the routine is what keeps you going. That's how it ended up. So, I think it's a great idea to start a podcast if you're interested in starting a podcast. If you're interested in having a big media company that's going to win and make you lots of money and and then you get to go on Rogan or whatever, that's a high-risk strategy. You're going to have to roll a very rare set of dices to make that happen. But, if you just want to have fun and learn some stuff, then yes, start one right now. Rebeccativa, what's a belief {slash} pattern you're done with but struggled to let it go? That is a great question. Uh I have so many. Um what's one that's publicly acceptable? Uh I have a pattern that other people's emotional states are my responsibility. And this may be relates to what I just said about being in a a conversation where it gets a little bit awkward. You know, if I say a thing and that causes the other person to feel a degree of discomfort, I feel like I've wronged them or like I've done something bad that I now need to step in and fix. And my capacity to make myself the bad guy in any situation is like reality bending. It's always me that's a bad guy, it's always my responsibility. You can actually hear the genesis of this idea if you go back and listen to the Jocko Willink episode. And I basically asked him, he's the extreme ownership guy, right? You know, it might not be your fault, but it's still your responsibility. Uh and I didn't know it at the time, but I was asking the question for myself. It just like it came the question came up. I didn't know I was asking it for me. Uh and I said, is there such a thing as taking too much responsibility? And I can't can't quite remember what he said, but I don't think it was a a answer to me. Because I feel like I do and I feel like a good few of my friends do as well that there's things that we have no right to be responsible for. This isn't our responsibility or my responsibility and yet I'll find a way to make it mine. I'll find a way for me to be culpable for something which I wasn't culpable for. Like I ask a difficult question to a guest. You've come onto a podcast that's almost exclusively placid and really nice and and and I've done my research and you know it's going to be a great conversation and all the rest of it and then like there's one fence for you to get over that's not even got barbed wire on it uh and like that's my compulsion and then in my personal life as well, you know, it's oh god if I say something that makes a friend feel uncomfortable I can just castigate myself for days about oh you're such an awful person. How could you be so tone deaf? Why didn't you think about that? Um so that that's the this pattern and it all sort of ties into a bigger network of of people pleasing and and this sort of lack of safety around making other people feel uncomfortable because of my uncertainty around whether or not I've got reassurance and sort of security in the group and all the rest of it. Um so there's a two-minute brain dump on some stuff I'm thinking about. Tonin DM, how do you balance wanting to improve upon your faults whilst also leaving room to be human? Perennial question. Man, I mean this you know I asked Sam Harris this. This was one of the most common questions that we got on the live tour that I did last year. This balance between being and becoming on wanting more and to maximize your time on this planet and to leave it all on the field of play and to crush and high performance and go go go and optimize and I am going to achieve my goals one time in 10. I'm going to have a perfect day one time in seven. I am not the master of my own destiny. I am not the master of even my own mind or my own actions and yet I love agency and yet I want to be intentional but I also know that when I fall short I don't want to castigate myself. Like this is the perennial question I think for you know self-improvers like like yourself and and maybe lots of the people that are listening and certainly me and it's difficult. It's a challenge. That's the first thing. Like respect this. This is not a small thing. Okay? This is a large challenge. It is the question that most people doing personal growth have to get through. Some things that you can do that have worked for me from a tactical perspective to not just do the wishy-washy like pithy quote thing. Tactical stuff. I have posted notes around the house. One of them is on my bathroom mirror which I usually look at on a morning and a night. One of them says what went well today? And while I'm brushing my teeth for two minutes on an evening time I think about all of the stuff that went well today because you're going to focus on the stuff that went wrong. You focused on it the second it happened. You're going to keep thinking about it. And for two minutes while I'm brushing my teeth worrying away staring at this posted note just thinking like I really I I like that that morning walk is really beautiful because it was raining and there was no one else out and it was really I'm really glad that I went out even though it was raining I went out for a morning walk and that's something that that I should be proud. And I had a great conversation with my trainer and I I you know I really sort of sat and listened to him in between sets and and you know like I gave I thought I really gave him an interesting piece of insight around that thing. Like that's great. And that helps you to ameliorate this desire for more more more because it reminds you what you've already gotten what you've already done. I think celebrating your successes is another amazing way to do this, you know the two million thing. They're going to the Rangers game to get them watch them get fist [ __ ] by the Astros. Um that was great. I'm not going to forget that. We got balloons and we got barbecue and we went on a bus and we listened like amazing music and I was with my friends. I'm not going to forget that. So that I I think that celebrating your wins basically is is what both of those come to both in the micro and in the macro. Um that's a really good salve. That that seems to work really well for me. Um but dude it's hard. You want everything out of life and you want to allow yourself to enjoy the things that you've gotten out of life. It's tough balance. Rod Dammit last time last time at TupTup. So TupTup Palace is a nightclub in Newcastle upon Tyne where I used to work. We still run we my old company that my great business partner ex-business partner still does run. Uh we run the Friday night there Paradiso and when was the last time I was there? I mean dude I've spent I must have spent 300 nights in that venue. Uh I hosted with my top off dancing around pouring vodka into people's mouths for three or four years in my early 20s uh and then we ran a ton a ton of events there as well. Probably I guess three years ago. Probably like November 2021 would have been around about then just before I came out to would have been 2020? No, 20 November 2021 would have been around about then. I would have worked a Friday and I would have not known that it would have been my last time there. But it was. Noah J. Renfro, favorite player on the Texas Rangers. Adolis Garcia. Man, I mean you ha the guy is a walking Dominican man mountain home run machine and I love him and I will give myself to him if so asked. Chris Cavallaris, what have you done in extremely low moments of life to catapult catapult yourself out of them? Great question and I hope that you're not going through one. But if you are I've been through some low periods. They're what makes them so sort of shameful at least my low mood periods were that there was nothing ostensibly wrong with my life. I didn't have any catastrophe. I wasn't going through grief. I wasn't in poverty. I hadn't just lost a a family member or got out of a relationship. You know, it's just the weight of existence and it was some stuff looking back it was poor sleep and wake cycle cuz I was working late so much and it was an externalized sense of sort of validation and and self-worth on the world and a bunch of other things. But at the time it was like there's nothing wrong with you and there wasn't compare yourself to like [ __ ] anybody that's got like real serious problems that wasn't anything. And yet I felt terrible. So the first thing that I did that I tried to do was realize that my shame and my guilt around feeling low. Like who are you to feel low? There is nothing wrong with you. Look at how broken you are. Look at how feeble. Look at how vulnerable and weak and fragile you are to feel this bad about nothing. I had to get rid of that and that was hard. That was 50% of the battle was the story I told myself about how atrocious of a human I was, how lame I was for being broken by something that was basically nothing. So that was the first thing. Second thing was it has to start with action. It can't you cannot get yourself out of a low mood by thinking. Like trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction. And for me it it was always when I managed to get myself out of bed. You know, and it this sounds so stupid but I've written about this before. Like putting one leg on the floor of bed was like climbing to the top of Everest. Like I just don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to move. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want to see anyone. I don't have to do anything. Then I go okay, well what are the component parts of me moving? Okay, so covers need to come off the bed. Then I need to put one leg out and then I need to sort of turn myself around. Then I need to put another leg out and it was painstaking step by step to overcome and again all the while going you're so stupid. Look at how silly this is. You don't even have anything wrong with you. Like how how is it so hard for you to go and go for a [ __ ] walk? Accepting the fact that this is today's battle. Some days the battle may be a back squat of 500 pounds for three reps. Other days it may be getting out of bed. Today's battle is getting out of bed. And water walk good night's sleep gym session call with a friend. Those were the five things that I always went to and I think that 90% of problems can be fixed by doing that. Problem being sleep is one of the fundamental sort of bases of this because it so much impacts your mood and if you [ __ ] your sleep and wake cycle and if you start napping during the day and eating [ __ ] food you don't want to train. You don't want to go for a walk. You can't be bothered to speak to your friend and everything's ruined. So for me get up get out of bed get a glass of water have a shower go for a walk. Anyone can go for a walk and you can do it. It doesn't matter whether it's [ __ ] freezing cold boiling hot whatever. Go for a walk. That's a good place to start and uh from there you just start to slowly build up build up build up and then when you've got a little bit more distance it's pointless doing it at the time. When you've got a bit more distance look back and think okay, what were the things that I did in the couple of days or the couple of weeks leading up to that period of low mood. When was my last period of low mood before that or what are the other the other periods that I can recall and where are these things the same? Oh every time that I work too much and every time I don't sleep enough and every time that I eat bad food if I keep doing that for more than about two weeks I end up feeling like that. Okay, well if I can stop seeding that mood I can I I don't need to find a way to get out of it on the other side of it. Maybe the issue isn't that I'm broken mentally maybe it's just that I'm sensitive to my inputs and therefore if I change my inputs I don't need to be worried about what happens on the other end of it. So there's some stuff. Jess Pia 12, can you start a dating app so all your unreasonably reasonable subs can meet? God, could you imagine that? What a super race the Modern Wisdom fan base would be made of. Chris Williamson promotes eugenicist cult polycule. Uh, but I didn't I I'm genuinely thinking about the whole community thing. So, maybe I could do that, but I mean it would be it would be chaos in there, wouldn't it? Uh, I maybe we'll I'll put it on the pile. Uh, Subrickson12018, what is your go-to place for finding research papers? This is a [ __ ] cool question and I like it. Um, so Psych psychi.org p s y c h e .org, uh, [ __ ] awesome. Like just fantastic breakdowns of stuff. Uh, where else do I go? Uh, Psych Post p s y p o s t uh, .com .org. Uh, they have a mailing list. Psych Post are freaks. Actually, just go to Psych Post. Um, this is obviously only for psychology stuff. I'd say 20% of the stuff that I talk about on the show comes from Psych Post. Um, a lot of different substacks, uh, like aggregators, Adam Mastrioni, uh, Rob Henderson, Gwenda Bondel, Scott Alexander, Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, Freya India, Constantine sometimes. Um, and then where else? Psychology Today, also great. Twitter, good. But you you do you remember when you were maybe not for everyone, but I was kind of like big into music as still am, but really big into music when I was sort of 14 to 21 and I would just go down rabbit hole after rabbit hole after rabbit hole of who does this band Oh, who's that singer that's featured on this one band song and who's he a band of and Oh, he used to be and you'd just end up, you know, branching off and finding total hidden gems that you loved and no one else knew about. So, it's kind of like getting those bases that I've talked about Psych Post, Psych, etc., Psychology Today, good substacks and then once you're in there just following those through and you just come upon awesome insights. So, and that's one of my favorite things to do. Fredo the Wheelchair Guy, can you explain all the red pill, black pill, white pill analogies that you constantly use so I can understand what you mean when you use them? Thanks. Of course, I'm probably going to get this wrong, but I I'll This is the way that I mean them. Red pill appears to be supposed to be seeing the world as it is. So, it is understanding intersectional dynamics, understanding that men are going to be disposable, understanding that women are going to be protected. Black pill is what they say is the actual truth, which is it's just genetics, bro. It's only how you look and ultimately you are a genetic dead end if you're not a five out of 10 or above. This is all in the dating context and I'll come back around. White pill, there isn't one in dating. When it comes to culture, being red pilled is being based. It's seeing the world for what it is. Being black pilled is being nihilistic and basically having no hope for the future and being white pilled just is being hopeful. So, I'm like a card-carrying member of the white pill community when it comes to the culture stuff. MorganZHH, hey Chris, how can someone make friends without being needy? That's a cool question because neediness is kind of a bit of a turn-off and you can be the most interesting, cool person in the world, but if your demeanor is needy, there is something about that that seems too keen. And you know what it's like, like you meet someone for the first time and they're just a little bit over-enthusiastic or whatever and Oh, I don't know why it is. I should do some research, but I don't know why it is that we have such an aversion to people that are that are a little bit more needy, uh, even if it just comes across in enthusiasm and there's something alluring about aloofness. Um, I guess it's like mystique, you know, oh, like you fill in the gaps in their personality with your own speculation and your speculation often tends to be better than what their actual personality is, which is kind of funny. Uh, and yet when someone sort of shows more of themselves to you, which is actually, you know, quite an admirable trait, uh, there's something kind of icky about that. Again, I'm trying to, you know, um, fact check myself in real time as this happens I try to feel feelings. Uh, I would say one good way tactically to do this would be find a thing that encapsulates the friendship. So, let's say pickleball, you will bond with people quite quickly at pickleball, but it's not about the bonding, it's about the pickleball thing. So, the neediness kind of gets forgotten or or or even the enthusiasm or the desire to make friends. Like you have this big buffer, which is the experience that you're going through. Are you doing an improv class? Are you doing yoga or you you watercolor painting or whatever it is? Like you're there for a thing and the friendships come along alongside that. And the advantage you have of doing that is that you preselect people like you, presuming that you have selected a hobby which is like the sort of hobby that you would like. The other people that are there are also going to be like the sort of person that you would like to be friends with because they've chosen the same [ __ ] hobby. Um, but it is rough and again, this is why I'm thinking about this community thing. I don't really know I don't know what it is, but so many people at the live shows are like, how do I find more people like the 500 or 1,000 people that are in this room? Like I don't really know. Um, but like Reddit's not the place to go for it. Uh, and it's not that you need more online friends, presumably it's that you need more friends in real life. I would say find find a hobby, find a bunch of different hobbies. Like over the try one hobby a month for the next 6 months and just go to improv and pickleball and CrossFit and yoga and watercolor painting and and whatever [ __ ] sound design and do it in a class. Make sure it's in a class. And while you're there just anyone want to go for a beer afterward? And that's it and you'll find making friends pretty easy, I think. Nicesty Hicks, is really everything women's fault? Divorce, crime, {bracket} single mothers, decline of births, high body counts. If one out of three young men have no sex, why don't they improve themselves, but just complain and accuse women? Interesting questions and fair points, I think. Um, is is really everything women's fault? Divorce, uh, I think it's more divorces are initiated by women, but that doesn't say anything about whether or not they should have initiated the divorce, you know, if their partner is being unfaithful or being abusive or whatever. Crime, single mothers, well, uh, absentee father is a different way to frame single mother and, you know, one puts the onus onto the mother's choice and the other puts the onus onto the father's behavior. Decline of births, I do think that that is at least in part probably more on women. Um, high body counts is a really interesting one, uh, because obviously the only way that women can have high body counts is if there is a man for them to sleep with unless we're counting all of the like lesbian relationships or flings that women go through. So, that's a really interesting one because that's one to one, right? I suppose divorce is one to one, but the marriage is one to one, but the divorce stat isn't. Uh, I don't think women everything is women's fault. I hope that that's not what this show comes across. I'm hoping this is a hypothetical as opposed to an accusation. Uh, I certainly don't think that's the case. Um, you know, the crime downstream from single mothers is a very interesting point to make, too, that it is a huge deal. And the framing of I think the the better framing is single parent households, um, but when we say that, what we're really meaning is single mother households. I I have no idea what the stats are, but I would guess less than 10% of single parent households are single father. Maybe even like less than 3% uh, single father households with the mother being absent. Um, decline of births I think can be laid mostly at the feet of uh, female education uh, and um, like industrialization. As you give women specifically more choices. This is not for me to say whether it's good or bad, but this just seems to be where the data sort of lies. Uh, as you give women more opportunities in life, as you have society becoming more egalitarian, more industrialized, women becoming better educated, especially if you fold birth control on top of that, birth rates decline. They have other things to do with their life, you know, rather than just being mothers. And uh, that means that yeah, you get below replacement rate. You only get below replacement rate in certain cohorts though. So, you know, like the Mormons and and uh, fundamental religious groups and the Amish aren't suffering with this. Uh, if 1/3 of young men have no sex, why don't they improve themselves, but just complain and accuse women? Well, you know, this is a point I think I've made a bunch of times, which is you can either as a guy sort of rail against female nature or predisposition or choices or current culture or whatever and try and sort of claw down the clouds from the sky or you can try and do something that gets you up above them. And uh, I I think that it's a two-way street. I think that there's certainly uh, inflated desires, uh, inflated standards that um, women have now for partners as socioeconomically women are rising up through their own dominance hierarchy and uh, competence hierarchy and that's, you know, great for them. More education, more money, but the guys that are kind of being forgotten about. Uh well, if they're struggling, do we not want to kind of help them? Yes, we probably do. Would that help them improve themselves? Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, in the mid-1900s when we had campaigns that were for uh maligned or under-serviced groups, none of those Well, I mean, some of them, but not by anyone that was uh emotionally intelligent and rational. They weren't pushed back against It's like, "Hey, this is a group that's falling behind. We should do something to help them." I don't really see the same sort of initiatives. No one is saying, "Why aren't we getting young guys to go to university more? Why aren't we getting young boys to achieve better in school?" All that happens is autism and ADHD diagnoses and proclamations about how great it is that this percentage of women came this high in the class or went to an Ivy League school or became a CEO this year. So, I think that the reason that men are struggling to improve themselves is that they feel like the deck is stacked against them. I also think that it's a pointless exercise to complain about women's preferences, especially when you have your own preferences. This is a massive asymmetry. Uh guys will say, "Women that are hypergamous and choose to date up and across for socioeconomically more successful men than them, that's unfair and they should learn what their true value is and they should stop it." We'll also say, "I want to date a woman that's older than me." So, hang on. So, you have a preference as a guy for youth, which is a proxy for fertility. That's your preference. But, a woman who has a preference for socioeconomic success, that shouldn't be their preference. They shouldn't That That's something that they shouldn't do. So, I agree. I think, you know, as with all of these things, it's a two-way street. It does take two to tango and it takes two to make the decision about whether or not you're going to tango. And guys have it good in some ways and awful in others, way worse than women. And women have it good in some ways and way worse than men in others. And at the moment there is a zero-sum view of empathy, which is if we give even an inch to women, that's us taking sympathy away from deserving men. Or if we give even an inch to men, that's us taking sympathy away from deserving women. It's like, can we not [ __ ] chew gum and walk at the same time? Is that not something that we can do? And I hope that we can. And I really try. I really really try. Bro, for your India run, had this great conversation about how women are struggling in the Gen Z girls' mental health. Comments from people saying like, um you know, with all of the men today like this is disgusting conversation to have. Do you not know how many people are men are killing themselves in suicide? I'm like, "Bro, we did like 30 episodes on this and you bring it up once about the other side of the fence and that's a huge a huge big deal and you're you're ignoring the plight of men. Zero-sum view of empathy and it's stupid. But, those people aren't really a part of this audience cuz you're all unreasonably reasonable. Ray Ray Al Khan, what type of cheese would you give to fascinate a woman? Oh, this is a great question. You can fascinate a woman with cheese. If you don't follow me on Instagram, you won't you won't know, but you can fascinate a woman with cheese. I think a nice soft cheese would go down well. I don't know whether I'm allowed to use a cracker as well, but I think a nice a nice soft cheese on a good good quality salted cracker. Uh and you leave that out, I think, outside of the front door overnight and you come back and there's a woman there. I think that's how it works. Mason Peetling 5947, how many hours {slash} which podcasts do you listen to? Had times the last few years when I've had a complete unplug from podcasts when my idle time just isn't there. Wanted to know if it's the same for you. So, yeah, for sure. If I'm super busy, uh the only shows that I listen to are shows that I need to to prep for episodes that I'm doing. So, uh I I I haven't I've only just started driving again since coming out to Austin and single-handedly kept Uber liquid um the amount of journeys that I've taken. And now I'm back in the car, I'm always listening to podcasts. You know, 10 minutes to the gym, 15 minutes to go to the shops, whatever. And I'm like just chipping away, but I realized that when I didn't have that, I'd be doing other stuff on my phone that wasn't listening to podcasts cuz I wasn't, you know, hands weren't distracted and eyes weren't on the road. Um so, yes, for sure, if idle time is down, my sort of leisure listening for podcasting drops, too. Uh how many hours a week including prep for the show? It'll be a lot and I'll listen quite quick as well. So, total content consumed maybe between 20 and 30 hours probably of content, I would guess, maybe more. Uh actually probably almost certainly more because of like YouTube videos and stuff that I'll watch in between. Um but for leisure time, it it absolutely is up and down with the wind uh based on how busy I am. And I wouldn't worry, you know, like one of the advantages I think of of evergreen conversations, at least that I hope like they're my favorite kinds of podcasts, ones that I can go back to and and listen to even years later, uh is that it doesn't matter. If you're busy for a while, it just gives you a bigger backlog of things to select from from your favorite shows. So, it's kind of cool in that way. Fabulines 7039, will you ever do a podcast with Lex Fridman? Yes, I will. He is busy and and plugged into robots and and worried about Ukraine and um I think having a bit of a rough He's He tweeted saying he's having a bit of a rough time a little while ago. Um I'll get him eventually and it'll be cool. I don't know. I don't think he's guested in at least two two or three years now. So, uh yeah, maybe I can tempt him back out of the back out of his hovel. We'll see. Ted Wunderlick 2941, if you had to create a dating app, what would it feature that other dating apps currently don't? Super easy, super dangerous. Video messaging. So, I would have uh the first message that both people send to each other have to be a less than 60-second selfie video message because you would learn so much about that other person's And obviously this is a little bit rough if you're nervous on camera, but uh you would learn so much about that person's mannerisms and the way that they actually look and their voice and their intonation and what they're interested in. And I think it would just speed up the pace of matching and unmatching so much. I've stolen this, by the way, from Jeffrey Miller. Um but video, 60 seconds, talk about whatever you want. Maybe use the other person's profile. Maybe you could even have it so that you got to see their profile information. You press the record button and, you know, that profile information's kind of at the bottom of the screen is almost like cues or questions that you could scroll up and down of while you're recording the video. I I think that that would speed up dating online dating so much more quickly. That's my billion-dollar idea after New Tonic. Skylord Slay, where do you see yourself in 10 years? I'm I suck with long-term plans, dude. Like I I have never been good at them and I always felt embarrassed cuz productivity culture was what I came up on and you're supposed to have your 25-year epigraph broken down into five-year marathons and then one-year sprints and 90-day segments and blah blah. I just never I'm never able to plan more than a few years out. I know that I want a family. I know that I can't wait to become a dad and I know that uh I would like to do that before I'm 36. Sorry, 46, which would be in 10 years' time. Um with a family, having fun. Like am I in America still? Maybe. Are mom and dad out here with me, too? Maybe. Am I still doing the podcast? I hope so. Just having fun. Emotionally aligned and aware and comfortable in my own skin and happy and paying it forward to someone that isn't just me or uh fantastic strangers that I care about a lot, but strangers nonetheless on the internet. Me and Mortals Podcast, what gets you excited for the rest of the year? It's a good question. Uh So, we've actually kind of got a bit of downtime uh from a cinema perspective at the moment like the big shoots that we do. We have done one cinema episode every Monday since August, which is berserk. It was supposed to be when we first started it, we did the first year that we did cinema stuff, we did five four five five episodes. Then we've done 25 in the in the like the last 6 months. So, um little bit of downtime from the cinema stuff. Starting to write the book is going to be is going to be fun and cool. Uh New Tonic, also fun and cool. I flew out to uh the flavor house and we did a ton of flavor testing. I drank six cans in a day, then I had 50 shots of it in a day. Um that's cool. Like that's firing me up cuz that's new and different. Uh and to be honest, I'm really kind of excited to travel a little bit more uh and to dig into therapy. Uh to I'm I'm finding it fascinating to learn more about myself and it's adding another dimension to the way that I see myself and the world and the things that I learn and hopefully the show, too. So, I'm pretty excited about all of those things. I know they're not uh necessarily all that magnificent, um but yeah, like the inner work is something I'm actually really looking forward to. Simon Towler, when is Layne Norton coming on the podcast? Among many things, ask him about deadlifts sumo. Layne and me have been speaking. He will be coming on soon. He does deadlift sumo, which I'm pretty sure is cheating, but it's okay. He does that cool thing with with chalk where he sort of throws it down on the floor, so it's fine. Cough full stone micro dairy. Wasn't your tonic always a drink? Plans for other products. Uh yeah, we never we never intended it uh we never thought about it being you know, like a a a powder or pills or anything like that. The whole point was that you you would enjoy the experience of doing it. Taking pills is never fun. It's never been fun for anyone. Even the best pill taker in the world is is not enjoying it. And uh we always wanted it to be this. And I'm I'm very very proud of it. I'm very proud of what we've achieved. And plans for other products that are other things that the team are talking to us about. Um I am a curmudgeon when it comes to uh adding in new skews and new lines. I would much sooner just dominate one niche uh than uh spread ourselves too thinly. But there are huge opportunities to do that. And uh that's also exciting. The product development I I get really excited about that. Positioning and brand and stuff. Um we'll see. I I want to we haven't got any stock in America. For like the third time in 6 months since we launched, we sold out again. We need to fix that. We need to get more stock. And the reason we don't get it is because we keep on predicting projecting like 2x growth from last time and then it's 4x and it's sold out in 3 weeks. So uh plans for other products will come after we've got this product back in stock. Scott Matthew 1, have you ever ever considered a round table style debate podcast three or four guests? Yes, I have. Um we were talking very closely about doing this. But 6 months ago, maybe a bit longer. And I wanted to call it uncommon conversations. So it'd still be Modern Wisdom like Modern Wisdom Cinema, but uncommon conversations. And I wanted to have three other people plus me that you would never see in a room together. So Andrew Huberman, Jordan Peterson, and Mark Normand. And you think what the living hell happens when those three people like Mark Nor Jocko Willink with Shane Gillis and Peter Attia. Uh what happens then? Like that's what I want to know. Uh so we did consider it. Um I wanted to shoot it in a really beautiful way. Uh like like our cinema stuff. That makes it so expensive because for every guest that you have, you have all of these different intersecting angles in order to be able to get the shots that you need. Then you have the wide, then you have the lighting and all the rest of it. So actually that may be a third one, VR on location and then uh round table. Uh I would I'd be interested in doing that. Um my favorite group size to go out with is two people, me and another. Uh and I think the show reflects that. Even when there's But you may have noticed this, there'll be books that have got co-authors. Uh Mo Gawdat Gaw- Gawdat Gawdat he's coming on the show soon. And he's co-authored this book with somebody else. But I don't want to speak to two people. I want to speak to one person. And I I select one author typically from co-authored books. It's been a long time since I had two people on the show at the same time. I just prefer that one-on-one dynamic. It gets kind of messy and I I'm always thinking in the back of my mind, do I need to like specifically ask a question to one person because maybe they haven't spoken so much and there's a coordination problem and it's harder for scheduling. So one-on-one's my my goal. But maybe we'll see if I we might trial some of those uncommon conversations this year. Con McCloskey, tactics to meet quality male friends in your early 30s. Lots of reasons to make some sort of community thing coming through here. Uh I it's the same as it's the same thing that I said earlier on, which is get habits and go to places that have guys like the sort of guys that you want to be friends with at. So if you're into fitness, go to a CrossFit gym, go to play pickleball, go to do SoulCycle or Barry's or you know, whatever it is. If you're into cycling, join a cycling club or a run I think this is why run clubs have actually um proliferated so much that it's a glorified social club masquerading as a workout. And uh that would help. I don't know about mixers and conventions and stuff like that. It seems to me that the coolest people, like the real quality people that you want to find are people who have stuff in their life and want friends alongside it. If you go to purpose-built um cocktail mixers and stuff, all of the stuff at South by Southwest except for like the cool private and buy-only stuff all of the networking events are all weird because everyone's there for the purpose of making friends, which completely curtails how you become friends. You bond over a thing and you become friends about that. You don't become friends because you're there to become friends. So I think in habit places that have people like the sorts of people that you want to be friends with that's the way to do it. Kezduran, I'm a woman and realized that's good and realized recently that my role models are all men. Do endocrine differences matter? That is a fantastic insight. I don't think so at all. Uh I do think that we have a dearth of female role models at the moment. Mel Robbins, someone that I've started getting into, she's great. Uh but you're working much harder to find people that are role models, I think, for both men and women if you're looking at women. I don't think that the uh life of a degenerate content creator self promoter uh seems to lend itself to the female system uh as well as it does for men. It doesn't seem to allure uh or sort of seduce women in the same way. So no, I don't think that it matters at all. Um I do think that it would be great if we had more if we had a a few more sort of female role models uh because that would mean I could bring them on the podcast. But no, I uh I don't think I don't think that it matters at all. I think that you can learn an awful lot. Uh but yeah, maybe maybe keep on uh learning from all of the guys and then become a female one yourself. Pasilba, why has nine full-length episodes disappeared, at least on YouTube? Mm I they shouldn't have done. So that's worrying. 1% of the library has gone. Please message someone, go on the contact form on the website and tell us which episodes you think are missing. Uh they shouldn't have. We didn't. Un- unless someone on the the team has made a really really large huge error. Uh they shouldn't have done. IPGI, what were the improvements and optimizations you made in the past year that led to such amazing growth? Uh don't know whether you mean public growth or personal growth. I'm going to guess you mean public growth. Improvements and optimi- Yeah, I'm going to guess you mean like channel growth. Um what did we do? I think it's just compounding, dude. Like I've been having the same kinds of conversations for 6 years. Thumbnails have got a bit better, titles have got a little bit better. Uh we got rid of intros. Which was I guess a kind of a ballsy move. Um I know that Rogan's done it for forever without the intros, but um you know, there's this big trend toward coming up or like on this episode or whatever. And uh I just kind of got it in my head. I was like, I I think that I think it might be [ __ ] Or at least I don't think it adds anything. And we tested it. And peo- people seem to like it. Uh which is cool. It's like nice to have your ideas val- shocker, it's nice to have your ideas validated by the market. Um that was good. So more consistent clips, uh high quality guests. But even when I'm talking high quality guests, that doesn't mean big name guests. At least 50 guests last year you've probably never heard of. Maybe more, maybe half the guests last year you've never heard of before. Uh a huge number of them had never done pod- casts before ever. Uh I think it's just compounding. And I think it's faith from the audience as well. All right, if Chris says that this person's worth listening to, I'll give it a crack. And that's cool. When you've built up enough goodwill where you go I don't really I I didn't sound like a conversation about therapy for kids doesn't really sound like it'd be that interesting to me, but you know, I've got faith that Chris maybe knows what he's talking about. So we'll we'll give it a go. Oh, I really enjoyed that. So that's momentum. Momentum and consistency, I think, is we're just reaping the whirlwind that we sowed a long time ago. Nicholas Affenkamp Offenkamp would love to hear you reflect on the first few years of creating Into the Void. What kept you going in the months/years when the audience was small and growth was slow? What I said at the very beginning, man. I would have done this I did do this when no one listened because I enjoyed it, because I loved the conversations that I was having. And I found the guests compelling and I was learning about myself and the world around me. And I would have done it if no one listened. And I would have kept doing it if no one listened. If this channel was still 20,000 people, we would still be making content. Because I did it when no one listened because I didn't care about the growth. So this is why the niche down, dominate the niche, broaden out from there um subjugate your own interests in place of what works on the algorithm. It is fundamentally a broken method for advising content creators. Make what you are interested in and it will come across. I'm interested in the things that I talk about. So I don't need to motivate myself to have the conversations or to do the reading or to research or to think about the guest or whatever. And that will also mean that if growth slows or stops or it doesn't start for ages, you don't mind because you're doing something that you would happily do in any case. Creating into the void sucks, but if you keep going and if you keep enjoying the things that you are talking about, people will start to recognize eventually because that's the blue ocean. The blue ocean is following your instincts. The oversaturated awfulness is reverse engineering what the algorithm wants and what does the audience want the audience want to care about and nope. Nope. Thank you. It's not going to work and you're going to hate it. Daniel Hussey, how come you don't post your video to Spotify? Currently only audio. We'll we'll post videos to Spotify in the future. Love the show. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, look, it's it's a we get asked this a lot. To be honest, it's kind of like a technical thing on our side because of the way that we run ads and because of the way that we dynamically insert stuff and because of the way that we upload for YouTube and some of the aspect ratios that we use for YouTube and and the amount of time that we would need to get stuff up in order for it to be processed. It it's kind of just messy. It really has surprised me how much people have see Spotify podcasting as an audio first platform now thinking that when Rogan started his deal on Spotify, no one even thought twice about video on Spotify and now there's a lot of people that request it. If we did it, it would be a huge lift operationally and remember what I was saying earlier that like any large lift is basically a large lift for Chris. Any large lift for the organization is a large lift for me. Um we very well may come round to it at some point. There needs to be some more tech that's brought in on the back end on Spotify to be able to make it work the way that I want it to. Megaphone which is the the hosting platform that Spotify acquired that we use. Um it's just not quite there, but we're we're not far off and it's phenomenal. It's the best in the business, but there's a couple of things that I'd love. And then we would need to fix the operation to make it easier. So we'll see. Bradshaw, congrats. I've been a listener since day one. Thank you. Have you considered diving into and learning more about religious practices? As a devout Catholic, I love what you do and the aims you've incorporated into your life and daily practice. I see a strong correlation. Congrats again. Thank you. Yeah, I mean I like I say, I went I spent Easter Sunday morning in Bible church and watching a rock band kind of which was really cool and yeah, I I I I I would learn more. I have to say I was kind of switched off. You know, the kind of old stuffy puritanical approach to religion that I saw when I was growing up in the northeast of the UK wasn't very alluring. Didn't sound wholesome or or reassuring or or faithful or any of those things that you want really from a from a good religion. And yet now I've grown up a little bit, it seems a little bit different. And I also understand that this is like the classic podcast bro arc of going from rational extreme rationalist to religious fundamentalist. Don't think I'm there, but I I would be interested in learning more about it and I certainly think that there's a lot of wisdom I've probably dispensed and maybe a lot of people have as well dispensed at my peril and probably at my disadvantage too by getting rid of not listening to basically split tested wisdom from a ton of different traditions over a few thousand years. So yeah, maybe. Jed Davis, for young people, how do you strike the balance of living a disciplined healthy lifestyle, food, exercise, sleep, making money, friends whilst also enjoying your youth? Where is the balance and how do you not let the anxiety of perfection stand between you and who you can be? Great question. So the perils of over optimization like something that I think about an awful lot. Really, what is the point of doing all of this sacrifice and monk mode and working hard if it's not in service of going out and actually living your life especially when you're younger when you can actually deal with the hangovers or you know, you can mend the broken bone or you know, you can afford to waste the time or or risk the money because you don't have the dependencies or responsibilities or the family or whatever it might be. It's a balance. It's a delicate blend of the two. I I certainly think that treating things in moderation is important. So you know, you need to have a basis of good sleep, good food, good exercise, good friends and then you can go and do a period of I'm going to go traveling and this is going to be my block where I'm just going to think about having fun. I'm not going to think about making money. I'm not going to think about personal growth and then you can come back and really going to go monk mode and I'm going to work on my my fitness because I need to get I'm going to grow some muscle mass because I know that once I get past 40, 45, it's going to be really hard for me to grow it and I want to found a bay. And then I'm going to go and do a party holiday and I'm going to go and sniff my head off in Ibiza for for a week and then I'm going to come back and I'm going to do the thing. Like periodizing to me seems to be the best way to do it because what you want to do is basically have a you know, a perfect uniform distribution of fun and hard work at the appropriate ratio that you need smacked across your entire week. But that's really tough to do. Like to do it in the micro is hard, but to do it to periodize it in the macro is quite easy. You want to do three months That's why the six-month sober thing worked for me. It's like it's hard for me to go I'm going to drink four times a year and I will just choose when it's right or whatever. If you say I'm going to go sober for six months and then I'm going to try drinking and see how I feel about it, that's something that I can do. So I think periodizing is good. I think absolutely the perils of over optimization, the fact that your fears about not being perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections itself something that you need to know, something you need to be very cautious of. Also, you're going to get where you're going to go whether you're anxious about it or not. Like if you're listening if you're an hour and 50 minutes into this podcast, you are so far out ahead of most people's level of inquisitiveness and attention and focus and drive that one bad night of sleep because you went out to watch a comedy show or because it's a friend's birthday or one piece of chocolate cake at a wedding is not the beginning of the end for you. You are distorting reality around yourself and I don't think that you need to I don't think that you need to worry or be too anxious about about that. But it's something that I find myself. I left a party last night. I left a party last night at 9:30 cuz I had training this morning. I'm like, should I stay at this party? It's the eclipse day. It's like you know, it's a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It's like well, everything's a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but I'd been there for like eight hours so that felt like it was enough and it's permanently something that you just that challenge, that debate that you have with yourself I think is perennial and I don't think it's going to go away. And I think just like all right, I feel like that and just going for that. I feel like I'm going to try I really want to train hard in the morning and sure enough I had an awesome session today. Brilliant. I don't regret it. I could have stayed and if I'd felt like I should stay, it's like I'm going to have a dog [ __ ] session tomorrow. All right, cool. I don't regret it. And this is where me and my one ring to rule them all feelings and emotions. What do you feel? How can you follow that? Is it true? If it's true, follow it. Be good. All right, I'm going to love you and leave you. Really appreciate you. 2 million subs. How crazy. Lots of episodes coming out. Lots more cinema stuff. Huge guests. Faris, Ballen, Atiyyah, Gary V. If you've got this far, you can learn about Gary V as well. Not in a video wall, but Gary V's coming on. What else? That's it. Buy New Tonic. newtonic.com/modernwisdom. All right. Love you.