“This Keeps 99% Single!” Chris Williamson on The Dating Crisis, Building Wealth, and Becoming The 1%

there is no safe level of alcohol consumption none zero every single drink that you take is moving you closer to death I wish I didn't think about things as much I wish I didn't care about things as much I wish I didn't worry I wish I didn't have as much anxiety guess what you do and the only way out is through your intuition is probably right about a lot of things and it gets perverted by other people how could guys increase their attractiveness the agel question so I think the best piece of advice is Chris Williamson thank you so much for coming on the iced coffeee hour this means so much I'm a huge fan of your podcast I absolutely love it it's a big inspiration for me and us here on the iced coffee hour so thanks for coming on man thank you for having me why should anybody listen to you that's a great question uh I came up with it thank you well that was my I guess I think a lot of people probably ask that question I'm not really too sure I'm a guy that follows his curiosity uh and I started talking to people on the internet and accidentally made it into a job I think that a lot of people especially guys toward the end of their 20s realize that they're a little bit confused about what they're supposed to want in life and about what they're supposed to like and maybe they have or haven't achieved success in a way that they think is supposed to fulfill them and they don't feel that fulfilled and that was me and then I decided if I'm going to do this podcast then maybe I'll find out kind of how the world works and understand myself and understand other people and then 730 episodes later I've managed to do that but I have no Authority like you largely shouldn't listen to me but the people that I speak to you probably should listen to I made a career of being the most stupid person in the room like 730 times in a row why do you think so many people resonate with you I'm a pretty normal guy in many regards and have very open about my own flaws and and shortcomings and uncertainty and stuff like a lot of impostor syndrome or lack of confidence or whatever it might be uh despite having done 15 years running the biggest events company in the UK and love Island and take me out and all of these reality TV shows and stuff maybe there's something reassuring about seeing someone go on the same personal growth Journey that you are Ali abdal has this great idea where he says that you don't want to teach someone who's 10 steps behind you because you can't remember the problems that they're dealing with you want to teach somebody who's sort of two or three steps behind you I've done this show for seven years now so I've just left this huge trail of breadcrumbs so I'm now I'm like fighting with meditation so guess what like what what listening to a meditation guy every other week for like four months and now I'm going to learn about dating or now I'm going to learn about evolutionary psychology and now I'm going to learn about AI or whatever and everyone's come along for the ride so I guess uh yeah everyone's following in my wake do you think now it's harder for you to relate to the people who are just starting out in some ways in some ways yes but I think the principles still remain the same sure like you need to be consistent you need to make it as easy as possible to do the things that you need to do which usually means finding something that's enjoyable you need to follow your instincts as opposed to trying to compromise them for what other people say that you should do and that works at episode 1,000 and episode one but through this process of personal growth I see you now obviously handsome man you got everything going for you got a successful business you got massive muscles by the way do you take creatine or no yeah of course okay five every day see you said of course we had hormos on here he said no he doesn't take creatine yeah that's true but he's also like a super Androgen receptor guy right like that's what he claims homeboy homeboy got like 125 testosterone levels and looks like an animal we want to know because you said that in the beginning you started out as like a somewhat insecure person you had the only child syndrome you didn't have friends and you got bullied and stuff like that the whole process of obviously getting to this point right now where everyone sees you and you're like the looks maxing guy he's got all the muscles and power whipping on the compliments I'm I'm just curious man fine honestly I really I should suck the podcast off and being an only fans that's do well yeah get through school being pretty unpopular uh just a lot of people out there especially only kids will not have the amount of socialization that they need so they don't learn the Finesse of how to play the social game particularly well and ultimately what you're trying to do is just relate to other kids around you during school but you don't know how to do that and you end up feeling disjointed in one way or another and that was me throughout most of school and I kind of got to University at Newcastle and finally got the opportunity you remember every summer you'd come back from being away and think I'm going to reinvent myself this year I'm going to be the cool kid or I'm going to be the sporty one or I'm going to be the smart one or whatever but this is like the ultimate version right because there's no one that's going with you there was no not a single person that I knew from the first 18 years of my life that was going to Newcastle which was the place that I went to University which gave me the ultimate opportunity to kind of reinvent myself and um I started doing Club promo straight away flying on the street so I sat down at a seminar my first ever lecture and said I've spent all of my maintenance alone which was like your spendy loan during Fresh's week getting drunk sat next to a guy and he said oh well I'm going to go and do Club F flying flying for nightclubs you should come with me and 15 years later that guy was still my business partner if this is a problem that most people go through specifically young men why do you think you suffered more yeah I don't know I maybe how painful something is probably is a motivator right that you can run towards something you want or run away from something that you fear and I think that I'd spent sufficient time getting toward the end of my 20s and realizing I don't really understand myself I have really fully connected with the work that I'm doing or the people that are around me and this felt like a legacy this was a trend throughout my life right that I'd had it as a kid and then I'd thought well I'll fix it by being successful and popular publicly and then go on reality TV and get a Blue Tick and and run this huge events company and put a million people into club nights and that didn't fix it so I'm like well like you know I've looked outside a lot and I've tried to fix it that way I guess I might probably be a good idea to try and look inside now why do you think you had had this like desire to understand yourself a lot of people that I've met and I don't want to point out any names seem to be fine seemingly mindlessly kind of just going through the motion why do you think you had all of these bigger deeper questions that you needed to satisfy because the pain of not realizing them was way worse there's this idea from senica it's really brilliant and he explains about a man who you would ask him as he steps out of the door on a morning what he's going to do with his day and he says I don't know I'll I'll see some people I'll do some things and he describes him by saying they do not what they intended but what they happened to come across and that to me sounds like hell that sounds like life happening to me as opposed to me happening to life so it's a difference of being a cork that gets sort of thrown into the sea and Bobs around for a year and then you take the cork back out and you speak to the Cork and you say what did you do and you say well I traveled to some places and I did some things that's being on a journey but it's not the same as being in a ship right being in a ship carves its path and it actually goes from place to place under its own agency so to me I wanted to be able to be intentional with the things that I do in my life and I wanted to have life stop just happening to me I wanted to happen to life so this journey is you went to college you started becoming a club promoter correct can we can we talk about how that ended up happening not everyone just goes to college and becomes a club promoter you to like a seminar to do it was a professional training course yeah how but how do you pick that was that was one of those things where you heard about it and you show up on like sat next to a guy I said I was I was completely broke and he said well if you want to come and uh give out flyers you know you live walk past nightclubs hey man free shots tonight come on in so I started doing that and then within the space of six months was a event manager within the space of a year got our first franchise it was a good time with a particular franchise we picked up that at 19 so I started doing that then at 2122 we started our first weekly and then we just built a portfolio of events out from there is there a catch cuz I walk down the Vegas Strip all the time and I see these guys they're coming up to me there's not a catch gr there's not a catch com to the club man com to the club like why why me it's I hate to say it but if I'm you must look like an easy target yeah but I think if they want guy look like a degenerate let bring him in here they want me to go to the club it probably is not a club worth going to but they're not discriminating you know sales are sale it click uh so for them they just they just want to get anybody in that they can so they want to make it look big bu of course of course yeah so here's something that's interesting about nightlife right we're here in Vegas like home of nightlife right events are one of the very few businesses where the other consumers of the product are the primary offering of the product itself so we've all got iPhones we don't have iPhones because Brad Pitt's got an iPhone we have iPhones because of fundamentally intrinsically what the iPhone can do and there's a bit of fluff in terms of branding and like status and [ __ ] like that yeah a little but but mostly it's because what it does right if I ring Jack after he's been to a night out and I said dude how was the night last night he goes bro it was insane there was so many girls there and I'm like I asked what the night was like not who are the other consumers of the event that you went to and it's this vicious sort of cycle that occurs within nightlife where the key feature of your experience of the event are the other people who are also cons assuming the event which gives it this like very mimetic upward trajectory which means that you can start something and within 3 weeks it's the hottest thing in town and thousands of people want to go and then also I've seen 200,000 pound of year businesses just go completely because they've been on the receiving end of the next new thing which is then coming taking all of their customers away so I'm someone who goes Comfort over style any day it's true I've seen what you wear in public and I'd be embarrassed all right Graham well at least with our sponsor vessie I can be comfortable and look good at the same time so on a serious note I've been wearing vessis since 2020 when they sent us a pair and no joke I've been wearing them almost every day since then I still have the same pair of shoes they sent me back then I still wear them they still hold up and what I like most about them and especially they're Soho sneaker is that it looks like a really expensive shoe like I have some shoes that are worth several hundred and this one in my opinion looks better it's more comfortable and it's waterproof so I got some shoes from vessie back in 2020 I still wear those shoes to this day these shoes though on the other hand they sent me these like a couple of months ago and they are my favorite slip-ons I've ever had in my entire life I wear them every single day they still look as good as new obviously the bottom it's going to be a little bit dirty because I I walk a lot in them but it's amazing how waterproof they are and also amazing how comfortable they are trust me I guarantee you'll love them in terms of style they also have the everyday Classics Boardwalk slip-ons everyday moves weekend Chelsea Sunday slippers and a bunch more each shoe also comes with a 365-day dry saww guarantee and if you buy a pair that doesn't quite fit not a problem vessie will exchange them for free so feel free to check them out down below in the description when you go to vessie check him out and try a pair for yourself by the way guys vessie didn't ask us to do this but we're so confident that you'll absolutely love them that if you buy a pair of vess's and then you post a story on your Instagram and tag the iced coffee hour which is linked down below we'll repost that story the first five people be sure to check them out thanks so much so let's talk about where exactly you were in your life during that time were you in the gym yeah yeah so I I trained as soon as I got to University I wanted to stop feeling I was bullied throughout school and I was like 67 kilos so I was like just tiny and I wanted to feel more self assured and I wanted to feel like a man as well I think a lot of guys like deep down when they start going to the gym at age18 it's them wanting to kind of speed up that maturation from being a boy to being a man because even though legally you might be a man and you know functionally you might be a man like physically lot of the time unless you're a unless you're Alex and you're like a super responder to testosterone or whatever it's still going to take you time so you're trying to speed that up so I was doing that how did you reinvent yourself in that one summer between high school and college what was that process like did you wake up one morning and just say to yourself you know what I'm going to change this and what did you do what were the steps involved so it took two years of high school of me I got my first girlfriend and started to hang around with people that were a little bit more like me and so I was I guess a slow introduction to that but there wasn't the heavens didn't open and I didn't go now you will be super chat club promoter extraordinaire that didn't happen um it was just one iteration at a time but even within that like I found strange weird quirks of Club promo like I'd not go out to the events that everyone wanted to go to to party and I'd stay in and read bodybuilding.com forums which was like the equivalent of like big back in the day huge the M Forum on but um yeah there wasn't nothing the skies didn't open that wasn't there wasn't like some moment that happened it was very very slowly I just tried to craft myself into the sort of person that other people would want to be around but that was also a problem that wasn't me crafting myself into me that was me trying to model what I saw other people wanting to be around and then becoming that guy which is also a problem right just more internal conflict but less external conflict so was it like a bit of a m you fake it until you f it sort of f just continue to fake it right and then realize that you've just built up this huge Persona about who you are this party boy this big name on campus well Chris is always there he's the guy that will run the and again it doesn't matter whether you are running club nights whether you are the sort of person that is around a group of friends that you don't really resonate with a lot of the time when you're with them you would sooner be you would sooner be accepted for a falsehood than be for the truth in many ways which causes people to Verge toward compromising themselves and playing a persona but it's not very fulfilling so you went through this transformation what is your answer to the people that are still stuck in Phase One of wanting to change but not actually changing what's your answer to the question of the age-old question I should say of like why do some people know that they should change and they know how to change but they still don't if they're watching this then they know that they should change like if you've got 2 hours to watch us three waffle on about like psychology and life and and things like that you already know right I I think it fundamentally comes down to people wanting to take action there are people out there who are just blissfully able to curse through life and it's fantastic there was this the first time I ever went to go and see Peterson talk live he um he got asked this question and this person said the depth of my Consciousness causes me to suffer is it a a blessing or a curse to feel everything so very deeply I was like [ __ ] give that person a podcast like whoever asked that phenomenal question right which is kind of tangential to what we're talking about here as well right like I know this thing but I don't do this thing is the pain of insight worth the the the the discomfort of being able to so on so forth and uh Peterson thought for a moment and he said the only way out is through you take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you I was like that's [ __ ] awesome you would say that God just like apocalyptic piece of Life advice it's brilliant right and it it really spoke to me because there will be a lot of people listening who think in some ways I wish that I saw the world in less of a complex way I wish that it was more like easy to me whatever that even means it should just be kind of I wish I didn't think about things as much I wish I didn't care about things as much I wish I didn't worry I wish I didn't have as much anxiety guess what like you do so how are you going to play the cards that you've been dealt and that's a huge Advantage tons and tons and tons of ways except for a couple and the pains are very obvious and all of the rewards are very hidden so you need to go through the only way out is to find them let's take it back to when you were doing the club promoting could you talk maybe about your income over that period and how it changed with the different levels that you were at and maybe your status as well yeah do you get paid like per person you bring in how does that work so very quickly uh originally you would have done it based on commission so homeboy on the street that's trying to finagle you to go into his nightclub he'll get paid $2 $5 $10 per person or whatever for the people that go in so first it's on commission then you'll get put on a retainer with commission for us God I think I I think my original manager's fee retainer was £25 a week and I was working like a dog like going around Halls knocking on doors but it it was status as well and there was this promise of uh promotion too and also you're 18 and you've got no money so 25 bucks or 25 p is going to go like not nowhere so originally you would be on commission then you'll end up getting a retainer you'll also tend to be paid for shifts that have worked so if you work on the till or if you work on the front door or if you work in VIP or you do whatever and for most of that stuff you're checking tickets you're checking wristbands you're shmoozing people you're doing whatever there are tasks that need to be done so you'll just get paid a flat fee for that I'm pretty sure it was £5 an hour when we first started doing it wow not a fantastic wage but again you're 18 and you're getting paid to drink like it's a dream in some ways um then we span that up into the franchise our first ever franchise was called Carnage which was a t-shirt bar roll anyone who is over the age of 32 from the UK will know this it was an institution it was a license to print money when we started doing it so you bought a t-shirt wore the t-shirt and that was your ticket and that got you into all of these venues and those tasks on the back pulled a pig swapped shoes with someone uh like you know a bunch of different things that you needed to do and you had to take off all of the different venues that you went to and this is 2007 to 2012 Larry British drinking culture so you're writing the first half of the alphabet down the left half of your arm and the second half down the right and you have to kiss someone that's got the first name of each letter so everyone's sprinting around looking for a Zara at like 2:30 in the morning trying to find someone with a name that begins with zed and um that was what we did and we did that for a long time and that kind of established us that was a franchise model and we were taking 15% of that so I think I was maybe making three grand a term so nine grand a year from doing that uh but that was doubling my maintenance loan from University so I basically had double maintenance loan which was phenomenal and uh that that paid my way through through uni how would you balance your life at that point because I'd imagine the club promoting would be really late college would take a lot of your time is no time at all is it dude is it easy it was a business degree it was a business degree anybody that tries that tries to tell me that a business degree an undergraduate business degree is hard shouldn't be at University like what are you doing it's the I within the first four weeks of being at University I completely fell out of love with Academia I was like I'm seeing in the real world what HR or marketing or accounting or B2B or b2c or like any of this stuff I'm seeing what it is and then I'm being taught something and what I'm being taught Bears no resemblance to what I'm seeing in the what are they teaching you in regards to that like Henry's models of Scientific Management lean Kaizen like all of the like just dog [ __ ] like I'm not dude I'm not going to go and [ __ ] design a Nissan factory right like and if I am am I going to remember what I learned at undergraduate there was nothing about the key skills that I was learning which were networking sales copywriting there was none of that stuff which I'm going to guess that you guys would agree a like real high leverage a huge I don't Japanese workplace culture lean manag and I'm never going to use it so I just was like all well I guess it became very transactional I did a masters I did five years at Uni I did a masters in international marketing and again I submitted I submitted my Master's dissertation completed in 36 hours by doing three grams of what was supposed to be cocaine but my dealer was having a bad week and a case of Red Bull and I still managed to pass that degree it it was a joke but I got the piece of paper ticked it off and it was done so why do you think college is just it seems to be more of a hassle and a problem than what it's worth where do you think that change occurred it seems as though maybe 50 years ago 40 years ago that college actually really taught you something do you think that maybe technology is speeding up faster than people could teach it but before we go into that as Crystal tell you running a business could be tough and it's even harder when you're using multiple softwares trying to compile everything together it's often in a waste of time and energy but thankfully our sponsor netsuite is there to help and all you have to do is remember these three numbers 37,2 and 1 37,000 because that's how many companies have switched to netsuite and stopped doing things like typing in manual data entry and searching through scattered information 25 because netsu has spent 25 years helping businesses drive down their costs and one because net Suite is an all-in-one solution that allows you to manage your kpis or keepy performance indicators with one efficient system netw we can help reduce the mistakes for manual data entry and trust me if you've ever done manual data entry there will always be mistakes and they'll prevent the busy work from scaling with your business so have a full picture of your business and help make better decisions faster right now you can download netsuite's popular kpi checklist for free at nets.com once again guys it's nets.com to get their popular kpis checklist for free it's absolutely free just try it out okay guys you don't have to spend a single Cent at netsuite.com thank you so much natu and back to the episode it seems as though maybe 50 years ago 40 years ago the college actually really taught you something do you think that maybe technology is speeding up faster than people could teach it yeah perhaps um the world of business is moving and the world of work is moving way more quickly than the slow lumbering institutions that are trying to play catchup and trying to teach people how to do it and like the best way to learn how to squat is to squat right and you can watch all of the videos in the world that you want but ultimately it's just go and do the thing and you will find out how to do it um for me at least when I was at University I wasn't engaged with the lectures the 300 people in the lecture super popular course right business management at Newcastle University which is what we would it's like a red brick University it's one of like the top six or whatever in the in the UK I just wasn't learning anything I didn't care about the lecturers I didn't respect the lecturers I didn't think I was learning anything that was interesting it wasn't engaging and yeah the world continues to move more quickly than Academia can catch up to it so it doesn't surpris me that people are disenchanted with it that being said I am way more Pro University than almost any of my friends I still think that I gained huge huge huge amounts of of uh progress from it but it was almost exclusively from the lifestyle that I had outside of it it's like you condense 10 Years of Living into three years you need to learn what it's like to have an argument with your friend at 3:00 a.m. in the morning when you guys have all traveled to some other City to go and to go and party or to do something or you need to both like the same girl that's on the hockey team that you're playing with or whatever like it's important to have those formative experiences and University condenses all of that together so for me that really sort of sped up my maturation although that might be partly due to the fact that I was so uh back like socially backward coming in that that ended up being my training ground that was like my Navy seale hell week that lasted for five years on how to be a social socialite I could see that how did you then go from doing that to being on love Island that seems so Random to be able to oh dude from being promoter club promoter to love Island pipeline is well known this is a common this is a common pipeline don't forget I didn't I was a commercial model for like a decade as well right so model DJ club promoter reality TV star that's the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse okay like that's the big four that you need um yes I did this show called take me out which is kind of like a more fluffy dating show that happens before the water shed which is like so there's no swearing there's no like LW [ __ ] um I did that when I was 23 I think and I had a huge afro white guy afro and um that was like fun I just wanted status I still was chasing so hard for people to recognize me for people to respect me because I realized that if people needed me that was the same as them liking me it's not but it's close enough functionally it ends up kind of being the same thing like if they need me to get into the nightclub or if they need me because they think that I've got a big Twitter following or if they need because I was on that reality TV show that's kind of the same as them liking me or wanting me and maybe those two crossed but that was me trying to reverse engineer I wasn't popular in school let's work out a way to be popular and a Rootin is to be a useful conduit between them and something that they want even if the thing that they want is to be associated with so did you purposely seek out a show and then apply to be on or did they come to you and say Hey you think they how do they find you modeling so they go to modeling agencies because they need to spend they need to look for people people who are comfortable being on camera who have got some level of looks that they think is like going to suit TV or whatever so take me out did exactly that and then the same guy that cast me on take me out three years later rang and said uh hey man I've got this new show would you mind coming and Screen testing for it and I was like oh yeah cool like I catch up with this guy that I knew that I respected and I thought was interesting uh and go to a hotel in Newcastle sit down in front of him he's feeding the answers behind the camera of what he knows that the producers and the exx will want to hear so it's evident that he wanted to put me on literally before I knew it I was in an open top jeep driving to illa in the middle of mayorca they've taken my phone off me they I've been on media lockdown for an entire week with supervision from a chaperon um and then yeah I was away for a full month no contact of friends family no distractions no books no TV no internet no nothing and you're like just how bunch of reality TV is real almost all of it my experience I can't speak for all shows and here's the litus test the reason you know reality TV for the most part is real is because all of the people that are on there are way too stupid to be able to act the things that you think that they're acting what you think that Joanna 18-year-old hairdresser from Wigan is going to be right Joanna thank you for that we're just going to run it again but can we get a little bit more emotion out of you this time dude no like no that the the people that are on there are there to just enact their life forward they're not actors they're not I mean maybe some of them are able to do like a little bit of turn it up turn it down do all the rest of it but they're not they're not contrived enough to be able to do that just on command especially if it's a show like love Island which is every single night I think it's 4:00 a.m. is the cut off the next day the full 24 hours is condensed into 45 minutes of like 100 camera angles and stuff what so they would be able to every single day like create some narrative and play some role like no way sure there's no so for me there's something called a villa producer which will come in and this will be the same on The Bachelor it'll be the same one whatever they'll come in and they'll say we think it would be a bit more exciting let's say that uh mean you like Jack right and I I fancy him and you fancy him and we're like the producer will come over and go Chris how do you feel about the fact that uh Graham's been chatting to Jack earlier on today you like I got to be honest like it really pissed me off I thought we were friends I really thought that he liked me you go well why don't you go and have a chat with him over by the fire pit and you go all right yeah cool and over by the fire pit there's a [ __ ] ton of cameras set up and everyone's like ready to go so they're there poking they can't wait three weeks for you to pluck up the courage to say like will you hold my hand they need it to happen now so they're like they they catalyze stories but they don't fabricate stories and the reason they don't fabricate stories is because people don't have the skill set to be able to be like oh and now I love [ __ ] like Jonathan and now I love like and now I'm out of love with everyone it's like you're just there doing the thing that you do but how do they get people to be so like confrontative cuz it seems like if they were to ask me that question very good selection process really so they justos pick people that are going to like on a dime Let's Lose It of course of course yeah like alcohol too cuz I noticed on Netflix they all have those golden cups and everyone you know there's always alcohol in that from what seems to be the moment they wake up until they go to bed drinking all day long one of the things I really respect it and I got in trouble I got in a bit trouble because I did this big podcast the first other one that I did that blew up seven years ago was what it's really like to live on love Island and this is when it was still a huge TV program and I like opened the door behind the fact that we didn't ever know what time it was they didn't give us watches and all the clocks inside of the Villa were the wrong time and when the sound guys came in to change your sound packs they changed their watches and when you got in a car to go on location they changed the time they never wanted you to know what the time was what yeah I think they wanted to control our sleep pattern more than uh it's like an inside of a casino they want you to like just and there was other there was a ton of other things right just like little [ __ ] but it was fun like that it's not malicious or it's whatever but anyway I did this thing they weren't too happy about it the alcohol thing is is interesting because it catalyzes the story which is exactly what they were looking to get done but the problem is it causes everyone's Behavior to kind of like gravitate toward the same type of stuff it's always going to be Larry fighting aggressive kind of sloppy and what I respected about love Island despite the fact that I got them in a bit of trouble was they limited everyone's alcohol to two drinks a day which is like a noble thing to do because they could have given us more alcohol and had like more story lines but it would have been this is coming out the back of our equivalent of Jersey Shaw was called Jordi Shaw that was where I was from that was Newcastle and they didn't want that they didn't want people to be fighting and puking and pissing on the floor they didn't want that that didn't look fun to them so they decided to make it a more like romantic love Island right they wanted to make it a more mature kind of thing and that was the same throughout one problem that they didn't foresee is I don't smoke so this isn't an issue for me but a lot of people who do smoke apparently when they get in the sun all that they want to do is just [ __ ] rip darts all day and one of the problems was as with everywhere you need to have a smoking area you can't have people smoking all over for health and safety and fire hazard and all the rest of it but it meant that like 50% of the scenes from my season were done in this one like 2 m x 2 meter smoking area because like half of the guys were going through a 20 pack a day as they were smoking these cigarettes uh but you also know if you are I was 27 when I did it like if you're 27 full of testosterone and around a bunch of girls all you want to do is like drink right like you're there a party but you're permanently being limited to two drinks a day like two 330 mil cans of stubby beer which was just like yeah it was in it agitated a lot of people in some ways so but it was fun it was fun and I fewer people have been to the top of Everest than have been in love Island wow I'm not equating the two but you know there's not many things you can do that not many people have done yeah and that's one of the things I'm like H okay at what point do you forget that there are cameras there because I hear a lot of people say that at first you're nervous that there's all these cameras but then after like a day you forget they're even there and I see some of these shows and I think why would you do that on camera but you know what before we go into that really quick I think podcasting over the next few years is only going to get bigger I mean when we started very few people were doing it a lot more people are hopping on the bandwagon but if you want to get started doing something similar to us you don't need to spend all the tens of thousands of dollars of equipment that we have you could get started today with her sponsor streamyard streamyard is a live streaming and content creation software that allows you to create highquality content with just the click of a button all you need is a camera and an internet connection and you can stream right from your browser and one of my favorite things about streamyard is they have a multi-stream feature that allows you to stream onto YouTube Instagram Facebook LinkedIn and all of these different platforms at the same time they also have a whole bunch of analytics tools that tell you exactly how many people are watching how long they're watching for when they're dropping off and all of these things are very helpful to keep in mind so if you want to start creating content just like the iced coffee hour and you want to get started right now and for free check out streamyard with the link Down Below in the description once again it's completely free we have been using them now for years we highly recommend them the link is down below in the description enjoy let us know what you think and now let's get back to the episode at what point do you forget that there are cameras there because I hear a lot of people say that at first you're nervous that there's all these cameras but then after like a day you forget they're even there and I see some of these shows and I think why would you do that on camera well the whole point of real it TV is to make things feel naturalistic right it's to so let's say that this was we were here and the pools over there they'll have like one of these light bulbs will actually be a camera and there'll be a little CCTV sort of swivel thing like a security camera you'd have and there'll be a couple of big booms but the guy will be on one of those bazooka thing you know like you get at sports matches where the guy like sits in it it's like a [ __ ] 50 cal machine gun there'll be that and it'll be that'll be my shot and then there'll be another one here and there'll be some other stuff and there'll be one inside of a bush the whole point is to make it feel naturalistic and people do forget um and after a while to be honest you kind of just get Stockholm syndrome you're like well this is life now I don't remember what life was like without this so I guess I'm just going to crack on was it weird for you finishing the show and going back to real life and seeing a clock and just looking around like no one's recording me it the first couple of days was strange yeah I think I was the I'd had one week of media lockdown where I'd had that chaperone uh I read Paulo quo's The Alchemist which this is a niche piece of advice but if you're about to go on a reality TV show do not read Paulo quo as The Alchemist before you go on because you just end up in this like psychedelic Fugue State and because it's all about this guy and he's traveling through the fields of Spain and I was in Spain and he's on his own and he's going on this journey of self-discovery so I was just thinking to myself the entire time that I was there it's just like me like I'm doing this like that was me um it was strange coming out uh thankfully thankfully and I say this with all honesty I gained 5,000 followers being on that show so it was nothing right it was like a a fully paid broadcasted dress rehearsal to what the rest of the seasons were going to be like season two was 10 times bigger season three was 10 times bigger than that season four was 10 times bigger than that now it's kind of plateaued out but it meant that I was very quickly able to go back to my my life helped the club business a bit people came down to see me you often get bookings of reality TV stars at nightclubs and we basically had one every night of the week for free which was me which is great but I was very quickly able to go back to my normal life which I appreciate because we lost a deal for the podcast with a large airline that was going to host uh our episodes so that people could watch them and in the final meeting the final final pitch meeting one of the main execs came in and Googled my name and one of the things that will come up if you go sufficiently far down or it might be a suggested thing on Google will be love Island and he put that in and immediately said why would I want to put the podcast of somebody that's been on love Island on as like a a philosophical psychological insight uh and that killed the deal so wow like just that one thing has been like I'm still wiping some of the reality TV slime off me in some ways because like at the time when you're 27 it's cool but there's also a degree of cringe and you can't kind of quite project where that's going to be what effect did alcohol have on on you socializing and did you ever use that as a crutch I watched your video about you and your relationship with alcohol yeah so I was like a like a classic club promoter drinker so it'd be once every other week hard very hard and then couple of weeks off get back into a routine and then send it again that's that was that was what it like for maybe a decade from 18 to 28 something like that um so I never had a dependency I never used it as a crutch for anything but I realized that I was basically resetting my progress each week so yeah when I was 28 I decided to do six months sober and now everyone's doing elective sobriety or what's called Lo and no um but then it was especially as a club promoter like as the guy right the guy that stands on the front door of all of the nightclubs to be it would be like me saying I don't believe in neut tropics and having a a [ __ ] neut Tropic drink um that was kind of a I think a shocking thing like quite a surprising thing to do um but I just I fell in love with what the progress I was able to make when I had focus in my life honestly for a lot of the guys out there and maybe the girls too if you're struggling to make progress especially in your 20s and you keep on thinking I keep on making these promises to myself about starting a meditation routine or journaling or improving my mindset or getting better sleep or going to the gym or doing whatever it's like you need to go sober because even if you're drinking once every 3 weeks it's not just that it's that day then it's the day day after is a wipe out right even if it's a like a only moderately heavy night day after is a complete write off but then you've already killed the streak that you were on So You Now need to like restart the engine of your momentum to go okay well like well yeah I'll do my meditation Sam Harris I I'll do the waking up I'll do that like on Monday you're okay so there's like two or three days and well you know the gym I'm still feeling a little bit like I'm a bit hung over I'm a bit whatever so I alcohol is a big part of my upbringing and I think anyone that says a night out can't be improved with alcohol hasn't had a sufficiently good night out like I'm still like a club promoter through and through MH but also as a tool for productivity and self-improvement going sober is like literally unrivaled like that and sleeping with your phone outside of your bedroom are the two highest Ro can do I'm terrible about the phone I sleep with it under my pillow so that that way I could hear the vibrations of what of the alarm in the morning just dude radio alarm clock Sunrise alarm clock there's like I like the vibration alarm clock cuz sometimes may still sleep next to me and I wake up early and I like that little all right so this will whoop will do a a vibration on your wrist uh eight sleep can wake you up by heat like there's a million solutions that aren't having your phone in your bedroom dude honestly if there's one thing that I can do with our new burgeoning [ __ ] friendship it's get that thing out of your bedroom I know it's it's it's check that and then it's go through emails and then it's checking what the stock market is doing now I don't check Slack it's always that stock market CNBC Reddit then texts back around sometimes no but then usually I'm awake at that point then I could like get up out of bed and then I feel but here's the thing I feel accomplished because I'm like I went through all my emails I've checked the market I see what's going on uh you know for work come up with some ideas and CNBC for video topics so like I'm planned out so that's how I kind of justify it but I would be interested to see what would happen if you could do like a 30-day sabatical and go okay I'm GNA get up and go for a walk y first thing you've got you know Sunrise is pretty early here it's nice and bright which is phenomenal nice 10 minute 15 minute walk come back then do it like just see what change you have there but the thing is I'm open the main reason the main reason that I don't like it is because of what it does on the night before that if you can't sleep you always know that you can roll over and YouTube's there or reddit's there or whatever's there and you go [ __ ] and then it's 3: in the morning and you hate yourself and you've ruined tomorrow before tomorrow's even begun yeah I have an easy time going to sleep the one thing that's honestly really helped me is a dog in the bed it sounds so weird dude but like Bailey goes to sleep consistently at the same time every night and the fact that she's going to sleep makes me go to sleep it's It's oddly calming because it's like 11: 11:30 she's asleep and I don't want to be like up there on my phone diing about well on top of that there's some pretty good evidence that suggests the sound of a fire or the sound of a snoring dog improves sleep depth for humans really yep yeah so think think ancestrally right yeah if you are sleeping in any environment whether it be one that you are familiar with or one that you're not familiar with fire will scare off predators and keep you warm dog will also be early warning system so those are cues that you human does not need to be as Vigilant during your sleep so during sleep there's these things called micro Awakenings right and you can judge the number of micro Awakenings as a a proxy for vigilance it's like this is one of the problems with uh Comedians and people that go on the road or me right now me and my team are on the road we filmed in Vegas yesterday we're going to LA tomorrow you can have the most dialed bedtime routine with the blackout lines and you've got the face mask and the nose strip and everything else but you're not in a place that you know well and that alienation causes you to be more Vigilant which means that you will do more micro Awakenings you were tracking some herd of whatever the [ __ ] 50,000 years ago and you sleep in an unfamiliar cave you don't know what's around you don't know if this predator's around or another Tri so it's in your interests to not go into his deep sleep this is the same thing that happens when you're away from your normal bed so you can optimize your sleep environment as much as possible but you can't really work around that problem unless you bring a dog with you and set something on fire so so I'm curious I listen to like sleep sounds in addition to the dog and the sleep sounds are like you know a nighttime Forest sometimes headon no just just one of those little speakers okay so it sounds like uh a forest and you hear sometimes like rain and stuff like that would you say it's better to listen to a campfire instead maybe um for me personally silence like really really good quality uh sleep earplugs which are only like 20 bucks on Amazon the ones that I use um that is just a complete Game Changer like absolute silence nothing I could never do that because I so I'm paranoid and I've always been paranoid that someone's going to break in at night dude you're an engag Community doesn't matter there's a scary man at the front does not doesn't matter doesn't matter so I like to be able to hear the alarm go off in my sleep he's a very high anxiety person just for the record so we only the paranoid survive man so it's yeah but we also have cameras also that that give me a notification if someone steps foot on the property within like 20 and you got a dog yeah so but if someone steps foot then I get the notification on my phone first and then if anything opens I get a beeping or an alarm and I want to be able to hear that so if I'm like totally tuned out I I never want to be in a position where it's like I open my eyes there's someone there one of my old business partners Dave who was the guy that was one above us so he lived in a place in Leeds which is workingclass Town similar to Newcastle he had a brand new Audi Q7 outside and it's what maybe like an 80,000 pound car 100 Grand car USD some guys managed to break into his house his bedroom was on the what we would call the first floor not the ground floor and then his brother's bedroom was on the top floor so these guys had spotted the car seeing that they had it went into his house had a look around in the kitchen couldn't see it in there went upstairs into his bedroom where he was asleep took the car keys from the bedside table be beside where he was sleeping but didn't go oh we've got a 100 Grand Q7 we can leave then went upstairs to the next floor to open his brother's bedroom door take the laptop out of there close the door go down put the laptop in the car and drive off that would be well actually that's not your worst nightmare because you wouldn't have woken up and no one would have been there you'd have just woken up and not had a car or a laptop yeah I don't care about stuff like that cuz everything is insured but for me it's more so like physic safety is always like that's that's Paramount if they take anything I don't care I'm sure that we can come up with a solution that doesn't involve that guy being into the pill ever we we'll work we'll thrash it out I have a question because for my sleep I've always struggled with sleep my entire life it takes me like an hour and a half sometimes 2 hours sometimes like four five hours just lying in bed because my brain is just moving so quickly to be able to calm myself down enough to actually fall asleep sometimes when I notice like you know cuz obviously I don't want to look at my phone and see what time it is how long I've been awake cuz then that makes me anxious that I'm losing sleep so sometimes after I know some absurd amount of time has passed four five hours or whatever I'll just be like you know what screw it I need to go on my phone so I go on my phone I open up Twitter I do something that's mind-numbing something that like decreases my level of stress or just like the deep thoughts that I'm having about my career my purpose why I exist how I'm supposed to do sponsor reads all of these things I'm trying to tune that out for something that is so superficial and just like surface level and that actually I've noticed decreases my heart rate and dummies my brain you tried reading fiction instead I've read fiction before on an evening time I I used to actually read fiction but I selected fiction books that are like I was reading dovi and that's not like you know that's one of those books where like or Crime and Punishment where you just think and you're like oh if I do kill someone I suffer a lot from that rather and you get all these like philosophical things going on in your brain you need to be more you need to go for like a midwit approach here and be more basic like the basic [ __ ] approach of like I don't know like a nice uh the Midnight Library by Matt hay or something it's like Chicken Soup for the Soul I don't know I I also struggle to get to sleep which is why it's something that I've paid a good bit of attention to Best Thing best stuff that I've realized for the people who are interested the 321 method so 3 hours before you go to bed stop eating 2 hours before you go to bed stop drinking 1 hour before you go to bed no more digital lights seems like e-readers uh don't have the same effect on melatonin production especially the new Kindles you can turn it very warm uh so they don't have the same uh issue that you would get from using a phone or using Netflix do you say drinking water two hours before no more water I've never heard about that yeah well I mean do you go to get up to the bathroom in the middle of the night sometimes I I try to go right before I go to bed and then just like pray that I don't have to wake up trying to cut your uh fluids consumption will help uh and then there's all the basic stuff about sleep hygiene going to bed at the same time but ultimately like what you guys do do are like high performance problem solvers that see issues before they happen like so ultimately there's always this degree of like paranoia that's happening and that is a massive competitive Advantage huge competitive Advantage as is portrayed by the like wall of plags uh what are your thoughts on melatonin or products that are designed to help you sleep Derek from more plat more dates and me had a discussion about this a little while ago one of his products from gorilla has melatonin in I said I thought that that was bad to take consistently he said that all of the studies from mice are or rats are completely overblown I use it still sparingly I do find that if I've used it consistently for more than a few days in a row to a week that my sleep latency time to bed to time to sleep that starts to increase so I go careful with that but uh momentus have got a phenomenal sleep product that's hberman supplement company they have a thing called a sleep pack it's like tear the strip off the top and it's got uh magnesium L3 and8 uh appenine and um l does seem to help but the main thing is like go to bed at the same time dark room cool room if you've got if you've not got a temperature controll mattress like an eight sleep or a an Oola cooler or something like that will make a huge difference yeah I worry that sometimes people are getting too reliant on like when they wake up I need a coffee to feel energized and then it's like I need to go to bed I need this to go to sleep corre and then people are like trying to find all these fixes and it kind of reminds me of uh the story I heard about Michael Jackson who like throughout his day needs like different things like one to bring him up and then want to kind of bring him down and want to you know hit the side effects of that but that has side effects so he needs another one and then it becomes this concoction of just like all these things just to function in a day have you ever looked at what uh Hitler was on during World War II dude anyone wants to go down a rabbit hole once you finished this podcast Dr Theodore Morell was Hitler's physician and this guy was a [ __ ] quack absolutely insane by the end of World War II Hitler's on uh injectable cocaine bull semen uh like he's basically on amphetamine and speed the whole time he's got a pre parkinsonian Tremor and he puts one hand out to shake and he can see the other hand behind his back so it looks like he was early Parkinson's but he had a always had bad gut issues and just found this doctor before he was fully Hitler and this guy helped him and then he brought him into the inner sanctum but they hated him he ate like a pig he was smelly he was very uncouth you know for a doctor you'd think he would have a clinical manner but he didn't and uh but Hitler was adamant that he was you know a complete wizard but yeah there are a lot of people that become very very reliant on them Alex has got this great Insight where he talks about routines become superstitions and as soon as it does that it's dangerous you should be able to perform no matter what the precursor is to the thing that you're trying to do you should be able to get up and do the podcast without a kind of newtonic right and that can make you better you should be able to get up and write for two hours without the the coffee or the elaborate morning routine and the cold plunge you should be able to do those things and then you get extra but a lot of people turn routines into superstitions and I can't do this without or and that's basically a form of fragility yeah you really really want to lean away from that like that routine fragility is something that I've had to learn the hard way it's amazing to me that something like cocaine was so prevalent back in those days and they just used it as a medication and you would even see for kids it's like they would use like put cocaine in the mouth and make cocaine great again man I'm [ __ ] telling you what products do you think we're using today that could be the cocaine of the future I think that we're going to see it's still the like front wave of alcohol hasn't hit most people as huberman said and I was there is a massive study from the Lancet that I used to medically justify to myself some of the additional reasons that I was put I did a thousand days without alcohol and if you can do a thousand days whilst being a club promoter without alcohol it can't just be like I want to improve my meditation streak it needs to be a little bit deeper than that the Lancer did the largest ever study on alcohol consumption and they came up with the result that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption nonone zero every single drink that you take is moving you closer to death at a more expedited way now is that a cost benefit analysis that you take yeah absolutely everybody does that all the time that cheeseburger that you just had like is that like is that going to move you closer to to health probably not but it was nice so I'm going to do it um so I think alcohol is going to be one of them I think an overreliance on caffeine is also going to be one of them as well I think that people are so dependent on caffeine I did 500 days without caffeine as well uh separately to the th days without alcohol doing those both at the same time would have been [ __ ] miserable um 500 days without caffeine and that taught me so much about When You observe other people's language they don't say that I'm tired they say I need a coffee so caffeine papers over the cracks of your poor restorative practice your lack of sleep and Recovery the fact that you're not actually looking after your Fitness and you never ask yourself the question well why am I tired at 11:30 in the morning like I shouldn't be tired at 11:30 in the morning maybe it's because you insist on having a massive high sugar breakfast every single day you get an alond quason every single morning when you go to to work and you spike your glucose up through the roof and maybe that doesn't make you feel good so that's one of the reasons why when we put neonic together we wanted to like not rely on caffeine most people just have that one lever to press right which then becomes a harder lever to keep doing because you become less sensitive to it which means you need a higher dose in order to get the same effect so that was one of the reasons that we tried to move away from that so I think that people will realize alcohol I mean alcohol caffeine are the two big ones will we see more popcorn lung and [ __ ] coming through from Vapes do you watch a big Vape about jeel seen it get that on Netflix you guys would love it yeah it's awesome awesome like just business behind the scenes tells you about all of their financials and uh but I think I mean what else are people taking those plunge yep that's what people there was this huge X threat or Twitter formally known yeah it got like you sent it to me did you see that got like 20 million views basically just hating on the cold plunge okay do you cold plunge yeah yes of course you do I I saw your morning not super regularly but we want we want to get you to react to this I would love to see you absolutely destroy I got it up here here's what they said cold punching daily is one of the dumbest things that you could do sure do it every now and then but it's not the P made out to be coold plunging is the most stressful thing you could do to yourself your body doesn't know you're in a nice La Studio C plunging if think we the Titanic sinking nature falling in cold water meant that we were going to die as a result it massively spikes adrenaline and all your stress hormones right when you get out of cold plunge it feels amazing just like how surviving a plane crash wood you thought you would die and then you didn't this is coming at a massive cost injecting animals with acute doses of stress hormones mimics aging you're basically aging yourself faster for a mood boost regarding being an inflammatory inflammation is a Bad Thing inflammation ins your body heals chronic inflammation is an issue and if you're and if you're chronically inflammed it means you need to remove something adding a cold punch to C up the symptoms we are warm blooded creatures for a reason our body needs to maintain a temperature of 9.6 Dees for everything run optimally and most people today are already cold the last thing they need is more yes when you cold punch your body will he up with brown fat but what that means is that energy cannot be used for other things like your hard function reproductive system Etc whof God bless the man is the poster boy for cold puning and I hate to say it but it's very evidently not Saed off Aging for him just blindly hop on this fand this guy's on fire and and then just just to top it off they had to throw in this [Laughter] photo oh my God those things can cut diamonds we we'll throw it up on the for you guys Poor Joe those are he's getting a solid like half inch on that on that length right there impr impressive what's the background is that a person in MD have they got any credentials or is this them just making a critique from technically they're verified on Twitter so okay okay so even better even more uh alpaca arulius followed by Joe Rogan and oh no it's Al alpaca aelius so he is a guy who's like pushing back there's a bunch of these different accounts one being carnivore aelius uh I don't know who alpaca aelius is they might that person might just be a Critic of this stuff look i i c plunge once a week maybe I think that the advice is to try and accumulate nine minutes of cold per week um there's a few things that you can't deny the benefits of uh fasting sauna and cold plunge and all of them are the same and it is the sense of accomplishment when you've completed something hard like being able to deal with difficult things is something that everybody needs as a skill like I it wouldn't surprise me if that same account will also lament the fact that everyone is like a soft [ __ ] nowadays and no one can deal with discomfort and everyone's got trauma or everybody's got some self diagnosed issue or everybody is a victim or everybody's externalized their locus of control okay well one of the ways to overcome that is to set yourself something difficult that you can do and then do it which could be a workout which could be sauna which could be fasting you know if you fast for 16 hours by hour 14 or 15 you're pretty hungry and like you need discipline to keep yourself going through especially if you do like a 24hour fast or 20 hour fast like that's huge the sense of accomplishment that you have around that what does that trickle into it tells you you can do other hard things outside of my domain of competence to start critiquing whether the hormesis effect is like the dopaminergic seesar is offset with the fact that you've got more stress hormone and cortisol going through your body I don't know not my not my place to do it I follow a few guys huberman being one of them and if until the people that I follow say stop I'll just keep doing it now and then so you just talked about everybody being soft in this these younger generations and I completely agree and I think that's realistically I would argue that could be the biggest problem for my generation I say maybe your guys generation as well you said that you thought it was The Mating crisis for the younger generation that was the biggest problem that they were facing yeah can you maybe differentiate between the two and like because I feel like it's hard to argue that being soft isn't the biggest problem everybody my age you know gen Z Etc they're just they can't do anything they can't suffer they can't suffering is bad suffering equals evil to them well the two are intrinsically linked right um what you have is a broad culture of risk aversion you could just call it that it's like people just don't want to do risky things largely people are getting their driver's licenses later they're moving out of the house later they're getting full-time employment later they're not having uh as much casual sex they're not having as much party time they're not going out and drinking like you know all of these things would have been moral panics had they' been the other way around but I think people are just interested about okay what does this Suite of traits this Suite of changes mean and I think it's pretty evident that it's called extended adolescence it basically makes adults into children for longer and people don't end up growing up how this relates to the mating crisis is that if you are still living at home which is the most common living arrangement for men under the age of 35 if you're still living at home with your parents it's going to be very difficult to date if you don't have a reliable job it's going to be very difficult to make you an an eligible partner if you don't have your driver's license it doesn't make you seem like independent person so all of these all of these issues are all interwoven but the m and crisis and victimhood culture are like two distinct problems that need two distinct Solutions but they feed into each other as well so why do you think it is that people are so comfortable constantly being comfortable and they can't ignore the elephant in the room that they can't put themselves in a position of voluntary suffering because you don't need to there's no reason to put yourself through suffering we can go from an air conditioned house to a heated seat car we can Uber Eats ourselves a well-cooked meal while we watch Netflix on the TV that we Amazon primed to ourselves like so many of the rough edges of Life have been eroded so why would I need to do any at what point do I find something difficult to do people have built buildings inside of which there are heavy things that you pay to have access to so that you can go in and lift these heavy things up and then put them down in the same place and it's called a gym that we've had to artificially create discomfort in our own lives because it's been completely eroded from our normal existence do that makes sense like life has been made incredibly comfortable and convenient and it's fantastic and why shouldn't it be like is that not what progress and and technological advancement is supposed to do to improve mortality improve quality of life but there's a difference between what you want and what is good for you and what people want is often immediate comfort and what is good for you is some degree of resilience training and also like I'm not a even though we're in his City I'm not like a David gogin Zite like never find time to watch Netflix never find time to chill out like that's not me that's not the way that I'm wired I think that it's important to have a a chill out practice as well as it is to have a training practice so do you think it's just people are becoming too complacent that maybe things are too good maybe they're not bad enough to change but you know situation just good enough it's it it comes at a massive cost to do what feels good rather than what is needed at a given moment right comes at a huge cost why can people not see that one is in the long run just overall objectively better for them and they're fine making that sacrifice how do people get fat one meal at a time like one day at a time where they eat 200 calories or 500 calories or 1,000 calories more than they expended over and over and over again over a very very long period of time and the same thing goes for this like you've read Atomic habits you know what you like you know how it is things that are good for you typically have pain immediately and pleasure in the long run the lead measure is discomfort and the lag measure is progress why would you not optimize for the other one you never actually see the lagging progress until it catches up with you and you've got 30 pounds overweight you can't fit into the old set of jeans that you used to have right everybody is going to optimize for what's exactly in front of them which is usually comfort and it's not going to be discomfort so I think that is it a byproduct of what I've like the male sedation hypothesis which I think works for women as well uh screens social media and porn sedating people out of what would have typically motivated them to go out and do things yeah I think that that contributes an awful lot because people can get titrated doses of community Through social media entertainment through screens and sex through porn so that they're not motivated sufficiently to go out and do what would have had to have happened 100 years ago which is entertain yourself or find friends yourself or have sex yourself so you always speak about casual sex or I shouldn't say you always but it seems as just can't stop talking about talk can't stop talking walk in it seems like you're speaking about it in a positive light that is something that's needed in some capacity H because the way that most people I feel like see it as like you know what it's me getting that instant gratification it feels awesome although it's probably not a smart thing they STDs there's a scare the risk of pregnancy there's also just you know putting knowing that that my eventual soulmate is going to know that I've been in bed with a hundred people you know what I mean like there are certain sacrifices that you make with casual sex but you always speak about it like casual sex is an all-time low casual sex isn't an all-time low that the solution to that isn't have more casual sex it's low so we got a big and high yeah yeah yeah [ __ ] casual sex great again um so no I'm not I'm bringing up and I do bring this up quite a bit that um 50% of men say that they're not looking for short-term or long-term relationship right like between the ages of 18 and 30 we have all been through a good chunk of that period and you know what reality Distortion field the male sex drive is like during that period I think it's an interesting comment on oh my God guys aren't looking for long-term or casual relationships During the period in which your sex tribe is maybe at its highest wow like isn't that an interesting cultural comment the solution isn't like just you know turn it into a play by Mansion freefor all and let people just [ __ ] on the street like that's not that's not what I'm proposing but I do think that if you were to look at the problem of victimhood and the problem of the mating crisis I.E people not getting together and not being bothered about doing it maybe victimhood is Upstream from The Mating crisis but I think the mating crisis is going to K kill people more quickly Dr Robert waldinger the guy in charge of the longest ever longitudinal study on what makes people happy the single biggest predictor of what keeps you living the longest are the number of relationships that you've got more than stopping smoking more than going to the gym more than changing your diet the single biggest predictor is how many close friends you've got doesn't that mean instead of focusing on let's say optimizing going to the gym or not drinking or no caffeine we should optimize instead on friendships and relationships absolutely absolutely I'm totally on board with that one of the problems that you have is you need another person to do that like you're not you can go to the gym on your own and you can do the ice bath on your own and you can do the sleep on your own but you need to find other people but I would wouldn't disagree maybe one of the things that was lurking below the surface what was it uh nicotine uh caffeine alcohol loneliness yeah you know maybe that would be something else that would get thrown in as well almost certainly where do you see the future of that because it seems as though we're not going in a direction where loneliness is getting any better it only seems worse and it seems as though different apps are really designed to keep you on the app as long as possible and they're only getting better like all the algorithms that I've noticed for shorts and Tik toks are only getting more potent and so it seems as though at this at the current rate that we're going they're only going to continue to get better and better better to the point where you're going to go on Tik Tok and it's going to be so perfectly curated that you can't possibly get off of it because the Cliffhanger after every single one is going to be so great I don't disagree it's it's scary man if you think that the algorithms are compelling now at least they're restricted by most of the content having to be made by a real person somewhere when you've got AI feeding the front end and algorithms pushing out on the back end you basically have an unlimited amount of ultim like infinitely split testable lyic hijacking content that will just continue to race to the bottom of the brain stem so yeah I don't disagree I think it's I think it's a massive concern huge huge concern how much time do you spend researching and remembering quotes and studies it's amazing your ability just to be like I got a quote on I just want to say like my reals feed my YouTube shorts feed back when I had Tik Tok that feed was just inundated every swipe it would show you in some like hyper granulizer face and you're like no and then it shows the guest and it shows you and you go oh that quote is so good there's a [ __ ] Amy of Vietnamese repurposes somewhere that we just recorded with hosi yesterday so that one's going to go out soon and we made a joke at dinner last night like the Vietnamese repurposes are going to be like winding up there oh they're going to be so getting ready for it yeah um I don't know I think remembering Concepts and remembering philosophies is hard and one of the easy ways to do it is to have mantras or little way markers in the ground and that's one of the reasons that maxims and aphorisms are so useful because it's not just this sentence right it's not just you don't become Confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are outwork yourself self-doubt that's hor mosi's conception for confidence right that you need to do the thing that's what you remember but what it means is this whole concept that sits outside of it which is I should focus on doing things and earning my stripes as opposed to just like shouting at myself about how brilliant I am when I wake up in the morning when I'm naked like that's not the rote to do it I was really embarrassed about my memory when I first started doing personal growth like eight or nine years ago because I was watching a Sam Harris or a r or a Shapiro or a Peterson or whatever and their recall ability just seemed to be unbelievable and I remember reading books and thinking why can't I recall any of this stuff but over time just crushing volumes like tons and tons and tons of exposure ends up with the good stuff rising to the surface and you can't not think about it Tim Ferris has this idea called the good [ __ ] sticks and basically it completely relinquishes any need that you feel of having to remember anything all you remember are the things that you care about like what was the thing that you had to send a screen recording to your friend about like that's the thing that's the thing that you can't stop thinking about so just remember that thing and forget all the rest of the stuff if you're a doctor training for medical school this doesn't work like you need to know all of this you can't just be like I'm only interested in the tongue and like the rest of the body gets forgotten about but for personal growth just allowing that stuff to rise to the surface but I don't spend I don't have a ebbing house forgetting curve anky flash card space repetition thing for anything that I do I spend a little bit of time reading a lot of time listening a good bit of time talking and then I write once a week so I have this little notebook that I write down some of the most impactful quotes that I've ever heard and one of them I heard from you and I think I researched and found the like where it came from and it was like a Stanford uh Stanford college professor or something like that and I'm going to totally butcher this but I want to hear you say it okay it's the have like firm convictions loosely held rather than loose convictions firmly held or something like that what is that quote strong beliefs loosely held not loose beliefs strongly held yeah I think that's one of the most beautiful things and I think every single person right now listening to this should 100% practice that I think that is one of the biggest faults currently at least that's facing Society yeah well a lot of people will die on a hill for an idea that they don't understand mhm but how do they know they don't understand it how self aware they don't but how but I feel like there's got to be like a like a point where you could say I believe in this but I'm self aware enough to know that I don't know enough about it how how do people just get this undeniable way more it's way more complex to be able to work out that you to not just parrot something and then say Oh I actually don't fully understand this I should maybe fact check this thing think about what what we're doing when we absorb ideology or when we absorb uh a worldview wholesale right what we're trying to do is signal our loyalty to the tribe trying to say so an ideologic IC belief is as much a show of falty to your own side and a threat display to the other as it is anything else and you can tell this I call it mono thinking so you can tell how shallow of a thinker somebody is by first off how predictable all of their perspectives are if you only know one thing that they believe and secondly how many different incidents they explain with the same phenomenon so if I know your perspective on gun control and from that I can accurately predict your perspective on abortion and immigration and the Second Amendment and the First Amendment and everything global politics you're not a serious thinker because all you've done is put this onesie on that is oh that's that's exactly my worldview yeah they'll correlate together people will tend to lean left or lean right and a good amount of that's genetically predisposed and the other thing is if everything is because of climate change or everything is because of capitalism or everything is because of Donald Trump you're also not a serious thinker because the demand answers outstrips your supply for them so you just retrofit the one answer that you have for one thing across absolutely everything else but for someone to ask themselves the question okay so why do I believe that like why do I think that thing you don't need to do that you've already done the show of fty you've got acceptance from your own side and this is why it's so rare to find people that sort of move back and forth left to WR most people pay an unbelievably high price by doing that because if you're all the way to the the right at least you guarantee agreement from one side or all the way to the left you guarantee agreement from one side if you're in the middle you guarantee disagreement from almost all of both but ultimately that's it's it's a much harder path so of the quotes I'm so sorry I'm so so sorry keep them coming when I ask for the one that made for you the number one biggest impact I'm so sorry had to ask it which quote made the biggest impact on you from back in day there's a book by Robert Wright called why Buddhism is true and kenp rimpoche says ultimately happiness comes down to the decision of choosing to become aware of our mental afflictions or choosing to be ruled by them and that to me explained why I was so compelled to work out why I am the way I am that if happiness is choosing to become aware of your mental afflictions are choosing to be ruled by them I'll like the only way out is through that all day long right like I'll take more of the thing that poisons me until I turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around me and that's like the the common thread in a lot of the different quotes and and and insights that I have which is your intuition is probably right about a lot of things and it gets perverted by other people this great idea called the abalene Paradox so the abene Paradox explains how people in a group can have their truth perverted even though on their own they believe something accurately so for instance let's say that you're getting married and you think that I want to be invited to the wedding despite not wanting me there so you invite me I accept your invitation to the wedding despite not wanting to go because I think that you want me to attend neither of us wanted either of us to be at the wedding together but both of us end up at the same wedding together because we both thought that that was something that we wanted to do same thing goes for North Korea right like everybody supports the regime and yet if you were to ask them on their own individually completely isolated they all probably have a lot of criticisms but they're all too scared that somebody else who they don't know also has criticisms is going to call them out about it and this is how people's intuitions become sede to one side or another but dude like the the Mantra thing and like the the quotes that I love change all the time like one of homos like this is what hard feels like like I think about that all the time this is what hard feels like did you think the thing that you wanted to try and Achieve was going to be easy no okay so what's the entry price of trying to achieve this thing well it's hard okay this is what hard feels like this isn't a bug in the system this is a [ __ ] feature like you are here to be challenged by things this is what hard feels like a couple of Petersons where he talks about be be precise in your speech he says as he misspeaks it be precise in your speech is one of the most important things that I've tried to do that and pay attention to I don't know whether they made it into the books but the original 12 rules for life was built out of 40 rules that he wrote in a quora post and it was like 120 I think it's only 44 we're going to fact check this send it um but anyway I I had 40 I had 40 on my wall and uh the two that always stood out to me were be precise in your speech and pay attention because they seem to be the highest Roi uh things that I have relied on alander Boton had one that that really really spoke to me sort of earlier on in my journey loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind that basically the more deeper a think you are the fewer people will be like you dot dot dot and that's fine these things are they're kind of like they make it in my mind I kind of feel like little little holes in in a membrane and the things that you can remember and then if you decide to open that up and go down whatever shoot whatever cave that is in there there's this entire idea that sits below it but it's reassuring to me especially as someone who had and still has a lot of uncertainty am I doing it right can I be doing it right can I be doing this better is this the the best way that I could do it um those things are little way markers in the ground that help to sort of remind me that things are going well how often do you trust your intuition is that something you always follow or just no way less than I would like which is why how many was it 120 40 go [ __ ] God dang it I thought I was I read the book three times go [ __ ] yourself you um no I it's something that I try to spend a lot of time like working on I'm actively trying to work on like bringing my intuition more yeah yeah because like the line between is this my Intuition or is this just an unthoughtful emotional reaction is a really delicate one especially for the people that are listening to this podcast theya respect their cognitive horsepower right they like the fact that they're cerebral they like the fact that they think about ideas and that they you know they get to listen to these interesting people have come oh what do I actually think about alcohol oh yeah that's cool I've never really thought about the thing like that like that's something that we're all proud of but we become trapped we become obsessed with that to the point where everything is so left brain if you've read the master in his Emissary by Ian mcgilchrist [ __ ] phenomenal book in ancient confus times there's this piece of advice for an aspiring confusion gentleman they say the aspiring confusion gentleman his mat should always be straight he must know the exact number of steps that it is from the edge of the room to the mat and his bow must always be done at the perfect angle all of this rigor and restraint however is aimed at cultivating a crafted but nonetheless spontaneous form of naturalism and what he's trying to do is basically work incredibly deliberately for a period of time until that deliberateness can completely get out of the way and he can just embody this stuff but the deliberate like learning the rules of the game before you break the rules of the game if you break the rules of the game before you know the rules of the game that's just not playing right like you can't be a Sant like Creator if you don't know any of the principles of a thing that you're doing you have to go through the deliberate F thing first in Daniel caraman language it would be like type one and type two thinking right that you have one that's very deliberate and you have one reactive and the goal is to make the reactive thing be the thing that was very conscious by working incredibly hard on being deliberate in the first place got it I want to talk about the difference between being alone and feeling lonely do you ever feel lonely having such such deep thought being so cerebral in the way that you approach life and being that that sailboat that crafts your own course and seeing so many other people all around you doing the exact opposite and being a cork sometimes it used to be worse now that you have the podcast I'm sure you talk to a lot more it's better you know it's like multiple hours per week where I get to speak to people that think like the way that I do and then I built a team out of people I'm starting to build a team out of people who think the way that I do too and also it attracts in like all of the people that listen to the show are people that would happily go for like a coffee with they're all interesting people so by being whatever the little Hub in the middle and all of these spokes coming off you attract the community of people like the person that you want to be like so it was a lot worse like I've got in my journal on my phone I've got like a multiple entries throughout my 20s just saying like I think I'm lonely that was it that was all I put because I didn't really understand but I wasn't resonating with with people and that was almost exclusively my fault because I wasn't being my true self right like standing on the front door of a nightclub isn't exactly the right time to work out whether the fmy Paradox about why we haven't seen aliens but there's a ton of habitable planets is like why is that not happening it's like they want to just get the wristband off you and go in the nightclub and start kissing someone you know what I mean and also I wasn't exactly putting that version of myself out there so yes it is uh not So Much Anymore how do you apply all these quotes in your own life and how do you test what works and what doesn't cuz some of these quotes sound amazing but maybe for some people they just it doesn't hit with them it's not for them right like you know the one from alander Boton about loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay for a tone for a certain complexity of mind if someone isn't particularly lonely they're going to go don't know what you're talking about well that's not for you right but it describes a very particular type of human experience but how much of that do you think is similar to like a horoscope where you tell a big group of people this and they find ways to relate that to their own life and it's like oh yeah you know what I'm a really deep thinker that explains it for me and they just find whatever it is you you tell them they're like oh yeah that that applies to me I don't disagree I think that there's many ways in which people can reverse engineer themselves to be in the center of almost all stories uh there's this idea I came up with a couple of weeks ago called The Narcissist bed post so when you're having a conversation with somebody listen to how many times they use the word me mine or my and that is directly correlated with how completely obsessed they are with themselves because they can't imagine any story that doesn't have them in the middle of it and I think for the most part people will try and find a way to make sense of what is in front of them and it's hard to be a critical thinker like it's not hard it's hard to not just like drink the Kool-Aid so to speak oh yeah like Alex hosi like this is what hard feels like like that's that's good but for the people that again it's the good [ __ ] sticks right like if it resonates with you you go oh holy [ __ ] like that really explains quite a lot of my experience then there you go that's for you and if it doesn't then just like let it slide now what is it about Alex horoi that people really seem to resonate with it is consistently anytime we go out especially at the gym people come up and say that podcast with Alex rosi I love that I've been addicted to Alex rosi since then we don't we have never had a guest that has that level of conviction like Alex rosi has why do you think that is what what is it that Alex rosi is talking about that resonates with so many people that just clicks it's a degree of self belief I think and hope that you can do hard things and he's very honest I think he's very very honest about the fact that he is fallible and flawed and it's empowering it's like it's in in the actual definition of the word it's like it's an inspiring message to hear that someone who is trying to do very very difficult things can go about them and like here's a road map of how they did it and it's synthesized down into a way that's easy to remember like Alex is basically an aphorism machine right but the reason that he's an aphorism machine is he's obsessed with words he's a writer first people think that he's like a businessman or he's a podcaster or he's a like a YouTube person but he's not he's a writer he was a writer in college he writes for six hours every single day and he's obsessed about words so he's worked out what words mean to him and once he's got that the ground truth of his reality is always based in something very very very solid which means that when he talks about something he has a first principles approach to like what do you mean when you talk about confidence he says well it's not that but is this right self-beliefs overrated generate evidence basically is his philosophy there's confidence for you oh okay well that's interesting but it's not being swayed he's also somebody that is highly disagreeable unbelievably disagreeable which means that he is able to arrive at conclusions without having to think without having to wipe off all of the opinions of other people quite as much as someone else might do so it's very first principles based it's those like a degree of Purity which I think uh people admire like something admirable about that you did a collaboration with David gogin one of the very few people that he finally agrees to go on and collaborate with I know that that's like a very rare once in a blue moon thing what was that like meeting David in person what was it like before what was it like after was he very strict with his time so uh about a week and a half before we thought the episode wasn't going to happen and then I basically said like I will move heaven and earth like if he wants to do it next week next month next year if he wants me to go to him if he want me to change the times I'll do whatever it takes to make this happen and there was only Rogan and me that he did for the never finished tour like the never finished tour was finished actually quite quickly and meeting him was was interesting I always try and look for inconsistencies in people's behavior like I try and work out is this person full of [ __ ] and I got pretty good at doing that like being on the front door of a nightclub you meet I'm at people so like high intensity people exposure and however legit you think David Goggins is like he's more legit than that the guy is just so straight down the line but also in like very giving so he said before we started that however long it takes I basically there had been some restrictions maybe in his calendar in like some scheduling email before and I was like hey man like I heard that you might have you got hard out today and he's like I'm here for as long as you need me oh by the way you can ask anything you want nothing is off limit we can go anywhere that you want it's like oh [ __ ] okay and then I asked him a question obviously he'd had this um like very bad childhood with his father physically abusing him and and and stuff like that and I said do you see it as part of your role um to not let that go onto the Next Generation you know if you were to have a a child would you choose not pass that down you're kind of like a a dam that stops this into generational mistreatment going on and he didn't need to but he just said I've got a daughter he's got like a 22-year old daughter and he just said it on the podcast and didn't need to but just did so yeah he's he's a very very legit human like people want to find ways that he's full of dog [ __ ] or whatever like I would I would believe that all of the things that he said he's done he's done now where they're coming from and like how healthy the motivations are and whether or not a there would be a a quicker route to him achieving the outcomes that he might want without like blowing his his knee cartilage out and all the rest of the stuff like but that's not his Solution that's not the way that he works he's a guy who is just built by like forged by discomfort and that's the solution that he's found so I have a theory on this and I want to know your opinion I think it would be really valuable certain people do things that by the general public they would probably ascribe the word extremely uncomfortable to those things so for example like Graham Works non-stop we just did a shoot uh we flew somewhere where were we New York and we shot two episodes uh we were off a very bad sleep and the entire flight back he was working the entire time and I was my brain was dead I couldn't work MH a lot of people would see that and be like dang Graham that's extremely challenging kudos to you you're a very hard worker you put yourself you put yourself in very uncomfortable situations same thing goes for David gogin he goes and just on a whim decides to 100 miles right for no apparent reason at all he just wants to put himself through this discomfort I have a theory that it would be more challenging and more uncomfortable for someone like David to sit and do nothing for a week absolutely I mean what would happen if you took like if all internet access was killed for for a week so so I might like it if the internet is out then it's out of my control oh okay yeah if it's something I could control that's different if it's like the internet's out and I can fix it I'm going to fix it so I now become a Wi-Fi engine for the days I'll but the point being it's like it's it's applauded because it's hard and it yields a positive result but the same thing goes if he goes and not works for a solid week or something like that he's challenging himself and putting himself in voluntary suffering correct in the same way so for him it's easy for David it's easy it's comfortable to go around 100 miles maybe not right he would probably argue the contrary what are your thoughts on that people always choose things that are difficult but usually within their control right like you're totally right the crossfitter that says I'm going to send it this is an unbelievably hard workout double day trainings triple day trainings whatever but if you were to tell them that oh you need to lie on the couch for two weeks there's a degree of discomfort outside of their accepted zone of comfort right like they can get it's I mean it's literally the tagline of CrossFit get comfortable being uncomfortable so yeah I mean people have things that they do that are hard that other people applaud them for and in retrospect they give them props for like that's exactly where people find the intersection of what they love to do what Society needs what they can be paid for and what they're good at right like that's literally the middle of the ven diagram that's what they're trying to aim for but do you think that it would be productive for your own personal growth and development to step outside of that and do something that is extremely uncomfortable that may not be seen as something that's productive or rewarding I guess it goes both ways so for the person who loves working is it good for them to put themselves in discomfort by not working and for people to don't work is it worth it for them to try to do something uncomfortable by working it's a good question man like a muscle to eat is that even worthwhile to like try well I mean you know you could put yourself through a lot of discomfort by sticking pins into the back of your hand like is there anything good on the back of it what we're looking for is an effort to return ratio and what are the returns that you're looking for like just arbitrarily doing hard things for no reason at all you know let's say that um you you are a protect a competitive powerlifter and you decide to also start running 5Ks on a weekend like that would be hard especially if you're 300 and used to deadlifting all the time that would be really difficult for you but it doesn't actually contribute to the result that you're looking to try and get now if there's some anciliary benefit where oh well by running 5Ks it teaches me it gets me out of my own head or it helps improve my HRV or it gives me time away from the gym or it does whatever like those things oh yeah that's interesting I would be interested to find out like what the person that lies on the couch for two weeks would get but I do think that it's just useful and humbling to remind us all that the thing that you do that you think is really really hard is usually something that you've chosen to do that's really really hard it's within your control by Def defined by the fact that you chose to do it and most people don't broaden that scope as much as they think and I don't even know if you need to like you have a goal you're doing a thing that is an intermediary between here and there just keep moving through the idea would just to be questioning your goals and to get a fair assessment of like how happy are you truly right so if like a big part of Who David goggin is is going and doing these incredibly challenging things from an outsider perspective I should say um questioning that and trying to chill out and do something and seeing what life is like on the other end and also voluntary suffering I think it's very important for people to put themselves through well it's the the question would be how much is David going to enjoy the other thing but we don't know until it's challenged the part that makes David I think you just you know you know what you know you know what you like know what you know until you try something different I look forward to you telling David that he needs to spend more time on the couch and seeing how that goes that's Jack tells me all the time he's like y gra you're working a little too much you just takes some time off and I tell Jack dude you're taking too much time off you got to be working a little more but the thing is like recently Grandma's been taking a little bit more of a backseat approach to his whole career and he's been drawing and painting and he's been thoroughly enjoying it and this is something that he would have never considered outside of the scope of his daily life are you trying to get better at drawing and painting are you taking classes are you follow no I'm learning on YouTube to be honest with you so one of my friends did a training course thing of some kind he's got a coach yeah and the coach said that he needed to do something that he thought he would enjoy but would suck at and painting turned out to be that thing and he gave a caveat which is but you're not allowed to try and get better at it because what he wanted to do was just do something for the sake of enjoying doing the thing not do something so that oh well if I get a coach if I get a painting coach and then actually what's the exact best kind of brushes that I need to it's like that's just another [ __ ] Pursuit you know what I mean that's not a restorative practice that's you just becoming obsessive about a new thing and adding and layering that on top I was talking to Alex about this thing yesterday as well which is [ __ ] awesome it's like 15 years old it's called 100 days of rejection so every day for 100 days do something different that you're almost certainly going to get rejected for one of them is ask for a free coffee so you get to the end of the line in Starbucks and they say that's £1 please and you go can I have this for free I I would just do that regardless and just see what happen oh yeah true Finance bro um but then 100 days of that and it just made me really think oh yeah that's that's that's a really interesting way to get over some of the uh predispositions that we have that we really don't like but yeah um I would be interested to see what happens if David goggin spends spends two weeks on the couch I don't know what goes on it could be transform imagine if he just does a 180 it's like guys I'm done with everything running po chips and reality reality TV just goes full Charlie hoopet and starts taking psychedelics and playing Dungeons and Dragons on an evening time yeah you had mentioned that you had gotten really good at reading people as a club promoter how do you read people and what signs do you look for and what could the average person take from that to imply in their own life you're looking for in congruities between what somebody says and the way that they act so paying attention is the first thing um I did a podcast a while ago long time ago like five years ago with this guy that was kind of interested in was curious about for a while I don't know if I respected him or not but he was an interesting guy and we've done this entire episode and there just little sort of glimmers of like narcissist bed post came in a little bit a lot of lot of stories that didn't need to be brought back toward him were and then the the very very end of the episode after we finished recording I said uh dude just wanted to say like you know followed your stuff for a while and you know really it was really great to meet you and there was this sort of half microsc like flash where obviously his ego got really really inflated and then he Ted it back down again because he didn't want to show me that what I'd said had inflated his ego I was like huh I don't trust you I don't trust you you're trying to play this strange role and it wasn't coming out of some degree vulnerability or whatever it was like I've got friends that are [ __ ] at taking compliments it wasn't that there's people who play a role because they're trying to get something on the other side and those are people that you need to be really concerned about for me like I struggle to be myself I'm still discovering what that means to actually be myself that's a process of discovery and I'm trying my best to move forward toward that thing there are other people who want you to see them in a certain way because they want particular outcome and everything below that is contrived and those are people that you need to be really concerned about paying attention to body language paying attention to rigorously scrutinizing whether or not the things that they said previously align with the things that they're saying now that's interesting you said that thing there but this seems to really contradict what you just said and you haven't called that out and you said that with loads of certainty and you're saying this with loads of certainty like just be really the strong beliefs loosely held not loose beliefs strongly held like be concerned about anyone who says everything with conviction M like you should have some degree of caveat or uncertainty just baked into the system of you there's you know Peter Zion you know him no geopolitics expert fascinating guy being on the show not I don't have the geopolitical expertise to be able to assess how accurate he is about all of these things but that man has the most conviction of anyone I've ever heard like just [ __ ] everything is the way that it is this is the way that this thing is and I was just found myself being so seduced by this the the way that he put things across and if he's right and if what he's saying is backed up with the stats blown and I have no reason to presume that it's not I'm like wow like that is the way that you want to get this thing across there was no ifs ands or buts there was no caveats there was no nothing it's like this is the way that this thing is but if someone who maybe knows the industry is able to be that convincing someone who doesn't is also able to create a simulacrum of that like to do the posturing thing without any of the research done before so you just need to be really really careful about people like that how are you cautious about people coming onto your show and saying certain things with super high conviction on something that maybe you haven't researched a bunch and you can't really fight that perspective because we've had people on this podcast before um for one fresh and fit they came on the show they were saying a bunch of things about dating that we had no idea about they have all these statistics and studies and resources and Etc we can't combat that because we don't have the data at what point do you draw a line do you think that you need to know the other person's argument inside and out to have them on your podcast that's unrealistic you're always going to be the most stupid person in the room when it comes to pretty much any topic unless it's your wheelhouse like someone comes on and starts talking about like real estate in Las Vegas and you're like hey la like step into the step into the [ __ ] ring my friend like step into my office um it's unrealistic to expect anybody that hosts a general show to be an expert in any of those things in my experience like if you give people enough rope they'll end up hanging themselves people will say things they're like I don't feel like that's true and if you've got an even remotely smart audience they're able to scrutinize that stuff for themselves now it's your job to say things like huh like where'd you get that from like what stats that what is that is that a Pew research is that GSS data that's interesting hm and like what ways might you be wrong like here's a few things right to work out whether or not the Creator that you are slightly skeptical about or anybody that you follow me included is telling the truth when was the last time that they publicly admitted that they were wrong when was the last time that they changed their mind on something when was the last time that they surprised you with a take like R versus Wade happens and you go wow wasn't expecting that that's interesting or Israel Palestine occurs or Ukraine or like some those in the news and you go huh that that's a surprising take from that that's interesting even if it's like not something that you agree with but it wasn't what you predicted and the reason that that's important is it shows that they're thinking for themselves and you can have high conviction that that person is actually doing some work as opposed to again the mono thinking just let's put this ideology on as a onesie and just proceed forward like that's not what you want the problem is you can't really argue with anecdotal experience so if they come on and they say we've spoken with 2,000 women and from our experience that we've seen firsthand this has been true in the overwhelming case and I could say well maybe that's not a scientific study but from your perspective that works from my perspective uh you know my experience works and then there becomes a bit of a stalemate to whoever sounds more confident wins and it seems like and no matter what you talk about whoever's more confident even if they're wrong wins the argument in the eyes of the audience the debate fluency is a proxy for truthfulness right if someone is able to just deploy words in a slick manner it's the classic like salesman charlatan that like encourages you to get your drive paved even though you don't need it doing it's like oh it'll F protect from the frost and blah blah blah blah blah so I mean with that there are certain things that you could do you could ask a question like do you think that um the show that you're doing is swayed At All by being in Miami and by you sourcing a lot of the girls from a city which is known for uh partying and and stuff like that we did ask that yeah what did they and they said no we fly out women from all AC the world withg of education but the selection criteria is still usually they've asked to come on to this sort of a show it's the same with Brian and the whatever podcast right like it's the same that cohort of women there is a very spec I don't know what the unifying thing is and it's not like there's a single unifying thread that ties them all together but there will be a number of things that motivate girls and guys to go on to these sorts of shows so you it's the same reason what makes someone comment like why are YouTube comment threads always kind of the same they always have the same tenor well we don't know what causes someone to be motivated to comment but we know that it's happened to all of these people and that can't be an unlimited number of things because it's like out of hundreds of thousands of views only a very small number of people comment okay so there's something which is a selection criteria which encourages those people to comment and the same thing goes for that but yeah with anecdotal experience and stuff like that you're oh well that's interesting that that's the way that you see it but for me in my experience that doesn't seem to be the case like do you think but asking people like what ways might you be wrong when was the last time that you admitted that you're wrong when was the last time you changed your mind when was the last time that you said something that surprised your audience in terms of a take those are really good ways so I want to turn that back on you when was the last time you were wrong about something I've had a couple of big ones so for a while I was parting I was regurgitating GSS dated from 2018 from 2008 to 2018 the number of men that reported did not having sex in the last 12 months age between 18 and 30 went from 8% to 28% right so massive increase new GSS data came out and it completely reversed that Trend it's like way fewer men were sexless so I put a post out on Twitter and I was like I was wrong about this I've been quoting old data I didn't see the 2019 data and the 2020 data was skewed because it was covid the 21 22 and I think 23 sure if that's out yet that the trend doesn't seem to be there anymore I'm like all right well this is interesting this shows that something else is going on uh I was very Pro hormonal birth control for a long time came out of the nightlife industry a lot of casual sex so on and so forth like you don't want people to be having uh unwanted kids and then there is like some real nasty [ __ ] lurking in hormonal birth control that impacts uh girls psychological Behavior their physiological Behavior Uh their preference for mates [ __ ] have you seen any of this do you know what I'm talking about you go into this because seems a lot more prevalent it seems as though the Tik Tok algorithm has taken this and has just birth control yeah birth control um and has just magnified it and I'm not sure I I have a really tough time telling the difference between what's being magnified on social media and what's coming out from Harvard and Yale studies on this and and it seems as though the stuff sounds really good on Tik Tok it sounds really good and you know but then I'm research I'm actually doing some research on this for like Harvard studies and it as well yeah this is true but when you look at it in context it's not a big deal like I think one of them was it increases the rate of a certain type of cancer by like 200% and the Harvard study says yeah well it goes up 200% because it's like one 500,000 people gets it and now it's like two and in a big it's not like that big of a deal yeah so what is your perspective Dr Sarah Hill wrote a brook wrote a book uh this is your brain on birth control and that's kind of the One-Stop shop for this as far as I can see she's an evolutionary psychologist uh there are some things to be worried about like when it comes to especially young girls taking hormonal birth control it can lock in a certain type of protein folding in the brain that predisposes them to anxiety and depression for the rest of their life even if they then choose to come off so these formative years of brain development seem to be particularly susceptible to these sorts of drugs and what age is that uh throughout puberty I think for girls um so you know let's say age 12 to 18 or something like that would it solve it to start birth control let's say at 25 when a brain's developed well you would at least I think evade that issue okay which is this sort of lock in and it's this isn't for every single case but there's a risk of that happening um I mean there's some pretty good evidence that suggests that women on hormonal birth control opt for different types of men they opt for uh providers rather than protectors so they tend to deprioritize the masculinity of the men that they're dating and they tend to over over optimize for their ability to provide for them so levels of wealth and uh academic achievement one of the things that everybody that's listening to this if you're in a relationship with a girl who's on birth control or if you're a girl who's on birth control and you're thinking about getting engaged come off birth control for six months and see if you still love your partner this sounds so stupid right if you want to have well it's such a great match and all the rest of it but your hormones literally create the physics of your system like the internal experience is completely dictated very largely dictated by the hormonal Pro profile that your body is going through and every girl listening to this knows because what's it like when it's that time of the month and what's it like when it's not you know that your mood and the way that you feel wax and Wayne but birth control is something that's just this sort of permanent underline that you can't you can almost not remember what it was like before that uh so that's something else that people should be concerned about because there's an awful lot of data from natural cycles I think it's called Uh which is like a cycle tracking that you put under your tongue so that you know when you're ovulating and when you're not as a woman it links up with your phone and all this stuff and uh women who met their partner when they were on birth control and are now off birth control have the same level of sex drive but much lower levels of attraction to their partner the women who met them when they were off and they now still off so they're selecting for a type of mate that when they get released from this hormone induced stuper are not quite what they want and this can be like how many relationships have fallen down the pan that someone's gone through six years of dating then they get engaged then they get married then let's try and have a kid and you stop taking birth control and you're like huh part of me thinks how many variables are there though I mean just getting to the point of you know getting married to someone you've been with them for a long time at what point does maybe the excitement and mystery wear off at that point that also contributes to that having a child is that a stressful thing I think 30% of uh pregnancies end in a miscarriage toll does that take I think there's so many things coming down on people it could also be the pressure to have kids after getting married you know when all the comments from Friends uh and family so how how could we isolate it to just birth control well that's that's precisely what natural cycles did right they've isolated the other variables my point is that that path of Engagement marriage then come off is very typical I think uh so you have this uh coinciding of reduction of birth control and then huh but that's what natural cycles precisely did how attracted to your partner are you like level of sex drive was the same between women who met when they were on and are now off and women who met when they were off and are now off but the level of satisfaction with their sex life was significantly lower which suggests that there is something about mate selection under the condition of hormonal birth control which is suboptimal when you then come out of it on the other side regardless of relationship status regardless of how long you've been together regardless of marital all the rest of the stuff that's something so that was something else that I was pretty wrong about what else I have uh last year was epigenetics like I thought epigenetics was dog [ __ ] I thought it was like the god of the gaps of like behavioral genetics and I thought that what do you mean you're telling me that like my behavior changes my genes and downstream from that it's going to impact like my kids when I have kids like it's the way that I behave like no that's it's just it's raw DNA data and that's it but since having a bunch of ations this year Dr Robert spolski Dr Paul Conti I am on board with that like women who enter poverty during pregnancy negatively impact the trajectory like natal development gets negatively impacted compared with women who don't because being in poverty is such a huge stressor and it's very hard to get out of it you're always thinking about where's the next rent payment coming from and so on and so forth and here's the ruthless thing while a woman has a daughter inside of her remember that every female baby is born with all of the eggs that she will have for the entirety of her life so a girl's behavior and her genetic predisposition can be influenced by the way that her grandmother was living her life when she was pregnant with her mother does that make sense that's crazy wild absolutely wild that's something I've never even thought of before yeah yeah yeah so while that grandmother is pregnant you have this growing girl inside and that girl has every egg that she's ever going to be able to give birth to so you like first second generation person down are at the mercy of what grandma did while she was pregnant and what she did throughout her life it's wild man so behavioral genetics that was probably the one from three and a bit years ago I'm big into agency I like being able to believe that I can take control of my life I like through sheer will being able to make changes to the things that I do and yet 50% of everything that you are psychologically is based on your genetics have you ever a look at have you seen Ty Lopez was very big on this and we had a really interesting discussion with him about how much of you is genetic versus how much of you is the environment and Tai I think even took it to an extreme and said that almost all of you is genetic and that you're going to get a lot of the same traits from your parents and grandparents um very little is actually influenced by that around you all right so I want to do an experiment with you so uh I'm going to give you a bunch of traits right different things and you are going to tell me the difference how much are these traits influenced by genetics and this is out of Dr Robert plowman's book blueprint okay okay so what percent do you think this is influenced by genetics eye color 100% yeah 100% 95% height 100% say 85% 80% wait 50% H 65% 70% so 70% of why you weigh what you weigh can be explained by genetics now this isn't to say if you get born in a desert island where there's no food guess what like you're going to be thin but on average 70% of your BMI correlates with your parents and they've done this the way that they've been able to do this is by do by doing uh twin studies that are separated at Birth so you managed to keep the genetics the same but put them into different environments so let's keep going okay breast cancer oh I have no idea 60% 10% stomach ules 30% 70% schizophrenia oh that's that's got to be pretty high say 80% 50% autism I think that's kind of genetically 35 70 oh I was going to say 70 I'm sorry yeah uh School achievement 60% I would say low 60% okay all right verbal ability eight no 40% 70 60 remembering faces oh my gosh so 70% 80 60% spatial ability like navigation say 60 I'm going say 80 70% and the big one general intelligence IQ oh wow they have data on this 85% say 75 50% but by the end of life your IQ correlates with your parents 80% wow so that's all the school all the prep work all the nutrition all the late nights all the reading all the coaching all the everything for 20% that's unbelievable remembering that height is 80% how is height 80% is that is that also like your diet of course and stuff like that of course of course so how well how how well fed are you how well rested are you think about all of the things that impact like I think sleep correlates with height actually quite significantly almost definitely but so are you saying I could theoretically be taller had I eaten better and slept more yeah but what if I did both of those perfectly and I still end up at the do you think then I would be even shorter so H yeah maybe you you might be at the upper bracket of exactly how tall you can be but this is the interesting thing right and this is why people that learn about behavioral genetics become despondent the reason is they realize that there is a bracket that they exist within and that no matter how well you'd eaten and all the rest of it something tells me that you couldn't have got yourself to 66 right so oh my god there are restrictions placed and in a world that's a meritocracy that feels unfair it's like hang on I I thought I was supposed to be able to be anything that I wanted to be I'm big into agency I don't like the fact feeling like the world happens to me I want to happen to the world so people feel sometimes disempowered by that it's difficult Destiny was the guy that actually framed this the best for me which is there is a range that you can exist within and that is usually determined by things that are outside of your control but within that range it's all down to you exclusively down to you so your personality is 50% inherited by your parents including your happiness set point is around about 50% genetically determined boo that means that 50% of me is genetically determined well yay that also means that 50% is in your hands now how much of that truly is genetic versus being brought up by your parents who act a certain way genetic genetic outright genetics predisposition and they've done this by separating out so you get you get two twins and they're adopted into different households you have let's say one that gets adopted by a family which is quite fat and one that's adopted by a family which is at a healthy BMI neither of them correlate with their adoptive parents both of them correlate with their birth parents despite the fact that they've never lived with them why well because there are lots of different things that influence the way that you go about the world like what if your gin release is just High that's the hunger hormone what if you really don't like exercise all that much what if you need more sleep to feel rested all of these things are going to contribute to you being the sort of person that is going to gain weight more easily living in an environment where you learn healthy habits and all the rest of it yeah these things are important and amazing but the most important decision that you can make for your future child's outcomes in life happiness and everything else is who you choose to have them with and not because they're going to influence the environment that they live in they will do that which is super important and shouldn't be Mis mated but mostly because they create the raw materials that this person is going to be built out of there's this great story from aland Boton where he talks about the trajectory over time of the ancient world to the modern world so in the ancient times the people that were the Beggars on the streets would be referred to as the unfortunates lady Fortuna hadn't blessed them and the reason that lady Fortuna holds this set of scales is that she gives and she takes away right they were seen to be a scale that somehow balanced the unfortunates on the street now who is someone that doesn't fulfill their dreams they're a loser mhm right it's no longer because lady Fortuna hadn't blessed them and because there are a large blend of different ways that people can Comm in into this world it's because if winners in a meritocratic system are worthy of their successes the people that lose they're also worthy of their losses and we all know that people that try hard and continue to do things in an effective manner get great outcomes but it's a hard Circle to square as a bunch of people that want to say I'm in control and yet there are things that are outside of my control and some of those are genetically predetermined like this is really difficult and it's messy and I still haven't found like my position on like how do you Empower people how do you teach them about behavioral genetics and say that 50% of your personality including your conscientiousness your industriousness your neuroticism your openness to new experience all of those things your political ideology is like 50% influenced by your parents your politics how do you teach someone that and then still give them this sense of agency over their own life it's a difficult Circle to square but it's one that that was 2020 that was like the thing that kind of like came and hit me in the back of the head then like 2021 was maybe birth control and then 2022 was epigenetics or whatever so how do you approach that with if I'm assuming maybe one day you want kids like who you would have kids with and what do you look for in that and do you approach it in the same way that you approach this data and just say like you know I want someone who is you know all this down the list so that my kids have the highest chance of being like the best that they could be I think the best piece of advice and this is from plen as well is choose carefully like choose carefully choose your partner very carefully and that's not just for some utilitarianism macki EV valan raw genetic data thing right it's that you need to spend the rest of your life with this person and if you care about your kids it's going to be 50% of you you know that it's going to be 50% of you the other 50% you get to you get to choose what that's going to be one of the best things I think that everybody should look for in a partner and this is pretty much Universal is something called psychological stability pretty self-explanatory but the best way to gauge it it's kind of hard to do the best way to gauge it is after you've had a disagreement or um an emotional perturbant of some kind how long does it take for them to get back to Baseline just get back to normal if it takes them a day and a half that's not someone that's not particularly psychologically stable because things are going to continue to happen you can't stop the psychological perversions coming in you can just deal with them more quickly like if there's an incident if something happen you're late for a a flight or something like that and that's the rest of the holiday completely wrecked because this person simply can't get over it that is going to be a very difficult relationship and it's very poorly predictive of relationship satisfaction so psychological stability is not only something that you should select in other people but it's something that you should aim to cultivate in yourself it's going to make you a better partner it's going to make you a more attractive partner it's going to actually improve your own life as well like the most altruistic selfish thing that you can do and make myself better and enjoy my experience of life and it's also going to help make you better as well but yeah when it comes to choosing a partner like you have to choose carefully so what if you pick someone that's not super psychologically stable but you both work together to improve that yeah well that's the Michelangelo effect which is in a relationship both Partners craft each other into their desired version I see in you the person that you could be and I help to bring it out of you and you help to bring it out of me and together we become something which is even better that's what you want from a partner which is why having a growth mindset is another one of the best predictors right like somebody that believes that they can change and someone that's prepared to work at changing and help you to change as well you're essentially unbeatable right because any problem that you come up against it's okay how hard do we need to work at this in order to be able to overcome it now if the thing is we need to be able to get grahe to like 6 fo six like that's going to be a very difficult thing to get to but there are presumably that's not going to be one of the challenges that you need to try and get over so you're like might though yeah well you know people are going to Turkey and getting their legs chopped in half so they can get femur extensions or whatever it is so there's something that goes on there quick side tangent what do you think of that surgery by the way I seen gnarly videos on this it's wild dude it makes me feel sad like it makes me feel sad that we have got to a stage where the culture has convinced men maybe in some regards rightly but I think it's been overblown that height is one of it's so important to your outcomes in life that this super dangerous dangerous very new very experimental surgery is something that you should go for because it's extending I'm pretty sure extends the shin both and the FEMA yes they break both of them and they could extend both I think it's like 3 in each so you can get 6 in of height yeah it's it's pretty substantial now I because I I I don't want to say I looked into this but I was very curious and I went down the rabbit hole of exactly like how much it costs like I wouldn't do it just hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on what you want to do I think the cheapest ones are like 50 60 but it also depends bro if you're getting the [ __ ] if you're getting the cheap leg extension that's not where you should be scri it's not cheap it's it's cheap in the sense of like it's it's a big difference increasing your height by an inch than it is by six inches and the because you basically separate you break the bone and you separate it just a little bit gross and you kind of let it heal you break it again separate it let it heal but it's breaking it in such small segments that over time it could be over years then you get taller so like the more height you want the more expensive it's going to be what if your torso is already short and like all of your Heights in your legs and then all of a sudden you turn into like a SpongeBob or something like that where like you know your legs are like 5 feet tall in your torso is like a foot and a half I don't think people are doing that well if you're adding 6 in that's an extreme but who's to say you can't add 5 in or 4 in or 3 in your arms are going to be like what would that be like hanging super low so I'm a good example of this my torso is the same as Macy's her legs are longer than mine so like I'm losing height because of my legs oh so I I think some people yeah you their legs might be long torso really small but I think for a lot of people it's mostly in the legs it's just a I mean you know it seems like height is one of the things that women want like on average women want to date a man that's 21 cm taller than they are and what is that in inches like seven seven in taller no that can't be right what's 21 centimeters an inches no that actually sounds about right 8.26 what on average men want to date a woman that's on average 16 cm shorter than they are which would be like four and a half I think uh now again like this is it's a little while since that date has come out so it may have updated a little bit but like the bottom line is that guys understand what is it I think out of every presidential election only one of them hasn't been won by the taller candidate interesting almost like some insane disproportionate number of CEOs and millionaires are over six foot heard right that can't be a coincidence I heard that if you're over a certain height you're like 7% more likely to make over six figures a year like there's so many correlations it seems with um income and height and confidence and height height and respect and height and authority and height there's I think there's a lot of things which direction is this going in is the question is it that tall people are sufficiently confident that they can ask for that raise and be commanding or is it that because the the world respects tall people in a way that they just give stuff to them I think is a second because it's also with attractiveness that attractive people tend to get their way more and they tend to yeah exactly and they tend to make more money because they get more opportunities because they are attractive one of the big things that no one really ever talks about is uh dominance and intimidation so it seems like a lot of what men are optimizing for isn't necessarily attractiveness it's their ability to intimidate other men so there's this really really interesting study done by David putz and they brought uh men and women into the lab to look at photos and videos of guys and they ask the women how attractive they thought they were and ask the men How likely they thought would be that they could beat that man in a fight 12 months later they assessed the men that were on the iPad and asked them how many sexual partners that they'd had the female rating of facial attractiveness had zero predictive ability in how many mates they had but the man's intimidation metric was very correlated so men who are most successful in The Mating Marketplace at least in that regard are doing it through dominance rather than through attraction so a lot of the things that guys like um when men are in the presence of other women and other men they lower their voice because a lower voice larger voice box uh vocal folds is a sign of uh High Androgen response so like more aggression and being bigger like just being bigger is good and protective for you so David the same guy told me about when he was in graduate school and he was waiting at the checkout to be served at the supermarket and he could hear these two guys behind him and they were speaking super low and he thought oh my God like the jazz singers behind me is this two old men he turned around and it was two guys that were around about his age you know like early 20s or something but in between him and them was a really hot girl and both of these guys's voices were super low because that's this sort of this posturing thing but you also see it very interestingly um men when they're in communication with other men that they think are more intimidating or dominant than they are they'll actually add they'll raise their voice up a little bit and speak around about here and that's because don't you don't need to worry about me I'm not I'm not going to threaten you at all and it's just baked into the way that we see the world like we don't want to get on the wrong side of the hard guy that might piss us off I'm one of your allies you don't need to worry about me but we got nothing to worry about but it's not always the same when it's the reverse yeah for the sexual partners I think you saying dominance was a big correlation on that or intimidation couldn't those be the people though that are more likely to make moves and more likely to go up and talk to the girl this is only the way that they look this is literally just the way that they look no I understand that but when you say when you come back a year later and you you correlate that to how many partners they've had the people who looked a little bit or the people that were more what we saying more intimidating they looked so the the men said do you think that you could beat this person in a fight right that was the and the more people that did say that they could beat him in a fight presumably they look less intimidating fewer people that did presumably they look more intimidating it's just the interesting thing is that you think oh my God how is like male ratings of intimidation more predictive than female ratings of attractiveness like how is that how does that work and it just seems like I mean Peterson has talked about this for ages right that you have a dominance hierarchy where the men compete between each other and then the women pick off the top okay and that's why wealth is the best mating game ever created because it's one single unit number that's like oh that's how competent you are women don't care about the money some care about the money most women aren't in it for the money what they're in it for is the predictor that allows men to achieve that amount of money which is their competence and their hard work and all the rest of the stuff this what I think about the gym like most people think that going to the gym and building a big body is it's just about the way that you look but I think the signal of I'm someone that is able to make sacrifices I'm someone that's reliable I'm somebody that cares about themselves I'm someone that can overcome hard things I'm someone that can deal with discomfort and pain that's kind of sexy like Upstream from you being in good shape are all of these other traits that people probably want in a partner right that's why like it's do you know the difference between proximate and ultimate reasons for Behavior no [ __ ] awesome such a good frame okay so um the approximate reason for having sex is sex feels good the ultimate reason for having sex is we make babies right so there is a outcome that you're looking to get and there is a motivation for why you do the thing um why do we eat sugary fatty foods because it tastes good approximate what is the reason our body wants us to eat those they are calorie dense and usually rare in ancestral environments so approximate and ultimate reasons for behavior and as soon as the veils fall from your eyes and you realize that the reason that you think that you do a thing often isn't the reason that you actually do the thing and that you've got this sort of set of jeans that are pulling the strings and marting you that's why I think evolutionary psychology does the two most banned or the two most distasteful subjects in all of psychology and this was an email sent to every psychology professor in the the us and not everyone replied uh the two topics that you shouldn't speak about the most as rated by psychologists in universities professors in America behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology they were the two why because it takes the sense of self-authorship out of your hands it proves that people aren't infinitely malleable and in a meritocracy that's something that people really don't like any kind of determinism whether it be genetic in terms of somebody's sex in terms of somebody's uh race in terms of somebody's background in terms of somebody's anything they hate that idea and that's got weaponized by like some pretty [ __ ] nasty philosophies but there's also a ton of ground truth in it and like telling you the only reason that you aren't a basketball player that's 6 foot6 is because of something that you did is not true and unfair and disempowering but like feeding someone Chicken Soup for the Soul and saying no no no no like you you you you can get there and the reason is because of something that it's this structural issue or this whatever I don't think that that makes people feel more empowered I think it makes them ultimately feel more fatalistic that's crazy that in Academia they were optim in for empowerment rather than truth that sounds so contradictory I could see a perspective where they think we're not going to teach people that they can't be in Direct Control of their life and that we want everyone to believe that they have a chance at achieving whatever there's they've set out to do and that maybe there's some some power to that in making people believe that they could do anything that they want to and not feeling restricted like saying I can never be a doctor because my parents are not smart and therefore I am destined to be dumb and why should I even try because both my parents they they never amounted to anything they're stupid so I can never do that like what what does that serve Society how is that better I agree but the converse is also unkind in in a different kind of a way which is oh the reason that you didn't become a basketball player is exclusively because of you like that's your fault and pick your other professional outcome equivalent that people wanted so it's this is Cory Clark that did this particular piece of research one of the other reasons that she puts forward is that you have an increasingly feminized uh higher education system very very high number of two women for every one man completing a four-year us college degree within the next couple of years and then who become the lecturers well the college students so you are having an increasingly female dominated staff in higher education as well and if that's the case women tend based on Corey's research to opt for things that outcomes that don't make people feel uncomfortable even if they have to skew the truth a little bit whereas male teachers seem to disregard the way that things make people feel and optimize for truth instead and this is where especially behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology get get a really really bad what's the what's the outcome of that what you're saying is more female teachers and maybe skewing things to not make people feel uncomfortable where does that us where do we end up if that continues at the same at the same R well you optimize for not necessarily telling the truth all the time and there's tons and tons of caveat caveat caveat like there's lots and lots of female lectures out there that are bothered about the truth that prioritize that and all the rest of it but based on the data it seems like you begin to skew toward a world that doesn't want to upset people and that eventually like you can't repurpose reality in order to fit what you want it to be like the facts are the facts and if you start trying to couch things ult like it's not happened but everyone claimed that the reason that door came off the Boeing jet a couple of weeks ago was because they'd had like a ton of diversity highs I'm not saying that that's I've never heard of that before there was like a was it what was it LA to Vegas there was a flight from LA to Vegas door coming off but the ended there the point the point being that that that talking point can be weaponized by look at all of these diversity highers that the reason that you can't make a door stay on a plane that's not necessarily the truth I'm not saying that that's the truth but the point is if you continue to optimize for making people feel good as opposed to okay what does reality say you can imagine where there will be a time where you need to make a choice between those two and if the implication is we don't tell people about this psychological study it's like probably doesn't matter if somehow the implication was the door on the plane doesn't fit right that's a big deal Something tells me that Boeing is sufficiently smart that that's not what's going on and also who's to say that you can't get like perfectly competent people that are diversity highs and all the rest of it but yeah when you optimize for uh not necessarily telling the truth and trying to make people feel good with insights like that you can quite easily see how it's a slippery slope that could end up with basically research not telling you about the world just telling people what they think they want to hear how could guys increase their attractiveness the agel question so look there are some immutable facts about the way that you look that you can't change shy of snapping your legs in Turkey you're not going to get you're not going to get much taller I apologize um I think that some of the easiest ways to do it is to go to the gym it seems like a man's ability to protect a woman which is seen through uh dominance intimidation uh muscularity the Vaper um those are really really strong predictors of female attractiveness female attraction to men so go to the gym three times a week for a year like you're in the top percentile of all Fitness people on the planet if you do that like that's how low the bar is right also the average American man is obese Divorced with less than 1K in the bank that's the average right that's such a high bar man dude I have no idea how I'm going to be able to you know like women don't just want average yo that's average is that an unrealistic bar for you get for you to get over obese divorc less than 1K in the bank um go to the gym three times a week I think spend time around places that have women in low stakes uh CrossFit gym pingpong club Buck Club comedy club like yoga Pates raiki whatever you are painting watercolors whatever you're interested in because if you painting if you can finger painting is that what you're doing um if you can have low stakes interactions with women I think that you will build up the ability to communicate with them and not feel the pressure a lot of the time like Destiny again really great piece of advice from him like a lot of people said like how come you seem quite confident with women despite the fact that he's not like some you know like big hulking dude you so I had a lot of female friends when I was in high school and college and that resulted in me just learning how to talk to them I think that for guys just learning that and not quite as scary as you think is really close to a proxy for confidence like it's not that you're not confident around women although it might be a lot of the times just you're [ __ ] terrified of them and if you can get rid of the terror the confidence whatever confidence even if it's a small amount should Blossom an awful lot it's like lots of guys are just so scared of talking to women it's like spend time around women find a place where your unique characteristics are an unfair competitive Advantage so people like competence right people that are competent are sexy whether it's man or woman let's say that you played tennis when you were a kid for like six years everyone did some sort of a sport usually say you played tennis if you go and play pickle ball now that muscle memory will kick in and within eight weeks you'll probably be one of the best pickle ball players at your local park or whatever guess what hot chicks in skirts play pickle ball go play pickle ball is that true Jack no I mean but then again I are you derating the Las Vegas pickle ball talent I don't want to say anything playing pickle ball in Las Vegas is hanging on every word here first of all I want to apologize to all the ladies that play pickle ball at Sunset Park pball complex here in Vegas uh not my cup of tea I don't find that there's a lot of girls in skirts that are attractive playing pickleball there however move to auson when there are I would love to maybe when there are girls that are attractive they're accompanied by a harm of men oh interesting so a lot of the times like I will see like on the occasion I do see an interactive girl there she's got like six dudes okay that she's playing so what do you do in that circumstance do you I go in and I swoop the girl and I say no guys work on your drive and drop shot for 6 weeks and then come back possibly it can't be improved at this point you could be her friend until she breaks up with her boyfriend and then you can get in there that's years genius that's a that's a long that's a long play um yeah so go to the gym uh spend time around women like you think no one expects they're going to be good at doing something without practicing but one of the weird things about dating is that there's no such thing as gam tape right you don't get to practice chatting up a woman it's like the the competition flaw and the sandbox practice thing are one and the same so if you can remove some of the pressure by just like having conversations with women at work or when you're at a bar and not trying to chat them up just being like hey did you see that whatever whatever thing like you're not there to try and get the outcome because I think a lot of the time the the reason that guys get nervous about trying to talk to women is that they feel like there's this very binary success failure thing it's like either I got her number or I didn't get her number but what you're looking to do is accumulate the skill of just communicating to women in a way that doesn't make you seem like a weirdo and you can do that with way less pressure if you just get rid of the binary of that oh this is now like actual practice this is me sandboxing whether or not this is going to work inhabit places where people value your unique talents right you're uh really great at yoga like or you whatever finger painting pickle ball CrossFit whatever like go do that thing because people respect people that are competent and you're going to oh like yeah Jack's like real good like I really love the way that he plays pickup he's yeah he's kind of sexy or he's kind of whatever like that's the sort of thing that I think you don't really think about and everyone has something that's in there everybody has some of these unique assets that can be valued one of the ones for women that I think is like not spoken about is learning to be receptive to guys so in a post me to era let me give you this one 86% of women say they want a man to make the first move 76% of men say that they are terrified of making the first move for fear of being seen as creepy 20% of gen Z say that a man approaching a woman in public always or usually constitutes harassment square that Circle 86% of women want a man to make the first move 76% of men are terrified of making the first move so what that means is guys know if they don't make the first move nothing's going to happen but that if they do make the first move they're going to maybe be seen as creepy and they're terrified of being me women know that they want a man to make the first move but if they like they only 14% of them are actually going to go out and do it on their behalf so women cultivating receptiveness I think is a good way to do this there was this idea from uh like Renaissance uh Europe and the aristocracy in England where ladies would drop a handkerchief like in front of them oh Mom Mom and go back over oh thank Jack thank you so much and that would begin that would instigate it I think in a post me too world it's important for girls to realize that like guys are on like it's not no means no it's anything that isn't [ __ ] yeah with a A Sign held above their head this is for any normal respectful guy is just terrified of being on the wrong side of some like [ __ ] me too drama so like cultivating receptiveness I think is something that would make it way easier for guys to come up like treat every guy like a golden retriever like total idiot and probably needs like broader signals than you think that they do linger the eyes for longer and then yeah they'll end up eventually coming over this could be dangerous but what do you think about the people that say it's only harassment until you're an attractive guy well I think it's very shortsighted to presume that someone who's looks like Chris Hemsworth and someone who looks like a normal guy in the street is going to get the same reaction when they go up and start talking to anybody a guy or a girl right harassment I think is like at least in that regard cat calling whatever yeah but that is like it doesn't matter whether you're Chris Hemsworth or not the the culture has now said that if you wolf whistle at a girl on the street regardless of who you are that's beyond the pale if you just treat people like people and go up to them and say hey I just wanted to say I I hope you're having a really great day and night I I'd like yeah exactly yeah it's working it's working it's working already you RIS me up man um anybody that does that anybody that responds to that in a way that this made me feel unsafe presuming it's not in a dark alley at 11:00 p.m. at night and you're the only guy with a hood up or something again like context matters anybody that has a problem with that like it's unreasonable Joey swall did like a a service for the world when he started calling out those crazy gym Tik Tok things some girls were saying a guy glancing over three times in 90 seconds constitutes harassment and that went out on the internet and the internet said we don't think it does we think you full of [ __ ] so now guys are like oh okay well there is a I know that if I glance over no more than three times in 90 seconds that's probably okay and girls also think I'm not being harassed unless the guy glances over four times in 90 seconds or you know he created a barometer it created a box for this sort of a thing but that was the world saying this hypens concern that you have about guys looking over to you during your training session is unwarranted and that guy did nothing wrong like that to me shows that if someone isn't being creepy for the most part and yes is this mediated absolutely you're going to get if you come over and you're Alan richer from [ __ ] Reacher like this just jacked dude 6' five looking like a Greek God are you going to get more leeway yeah absolutely of course you're going to get more leeway but if you just presume don't do something stupid and don't do it in a Ali yeah see I was saying how much of that is social awareness where people are losing that touch of being able to tell if someone else's uncomfortable there's some situations that I could just intuitively feel this person isn't feeling it right now uh maybe they're not as receptive to what I'm say I'm going to back off and it's just a you know I guess a body language thing or you just kind of sense it and it seems like some people are completely oblivious to this and I could just I could look at the conversation say I know this person's not enjoying the conversation this person has no idea how could they not see that but I'm looking at thing is so obvious so do you think it's just a lack of social awareness that maybe people are can't pick up on these cues I think definitely Downstream from spending a lot of time on social media and video games and porn and stuff we're just not as Adept socially like everyone's become 12-year-old Chris in some regard right just like I ungainly and I don't really know what I'm doing socially and stuff like that and yeah like flirting especially and making new friends too it's like a delicate dance there's this sort of push and pull and there's like teasing and there's not and there's you know it's like it's a real delicate skill to build and if you don't have that if you're not sufficiently dextrous with that you can quite easily find yourself in I didn't I didn't even mean to do anything wrong what did I do and it's like people didn't see it necessarily and it's that that's the concern that's the fear that people have people are more clumsy socially than they've ever been before and the world is more sensitive to their clumsiness that if you do something which you didn't mean in a bad way but it oversteps some sort of a mark socially or or romantically or whatever it is like you're going to know about it it's the most sensitive we've ever been and maybe everyone's the most clumsy they've ever been like it's literally Bull in China shop not necessarily good what are some of the red flags you see for dating when it comes to both men and women psychological stability is probably the biggest one but that does take someone that's psychologically unstable does that mean that they're unfit for a relationship how do they fix that there has to be some sort of solution well they can self-regulate right there's no reason that the person who's psychologically unstable I'm not saying like oh you if you're psychologically unstable you're Unworthy of a relationship like that's not my point but what I am saying is they're ready once they stabilize well no like I mean dude people again the Michelangelo fact like people get into relationships all the time it's not that they're not going to get into a relationship it's going to be painful for the person on the other side of it and probably them as well right but then you take a P Cycle olic unstable person and what does that mean for them in their dating life does that mean that they will just continue to get involved in toxic relationships or how do they like recognize the fact maybe that they they should stabilize like are we saying psychologically unstable as though they're just not mature enough to stabilize that it's just how long does it take them to get back to Baseline right but let's take someone that takes a long time to get back to Baseline so they're not psychologically if you are the person that's choosing I would move on that's what that's what I would say unless you are like I'm head over heels with this person I can't like there's just everything else about them is so great that I can't not see them as this phenomenal human being maybe that's the maybe that maybe that's the person for you I've got uh an interesting study here that I want to take you guys through research has pulled over a thousand registered us voters aged 18 to 34 a majority of both women and men consider far rightism and far- leftism to be red flags in a potential partner 76% of women and 59% of men consider ident ifying as a Maga Republican to be a major turnoff 64% of men and 55% of women said they'd also swipe left on someone identifying as a communist 55% of women said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag 35% for men 41% of women said the same for a woman being into astrology 20% of women 33% of men say they say black lives matter 14% for women 53% of women for they refuse to see the Barbie movie 31% for men so basically there are lots and lots of very arbitrary rules that people are putting in place about dating it's like they listen to Joe Rogan whatever 50% of women say that that's a red flag the real ones are psychological stability uh for me I think a very important one is how much do they value intrinsic versus extrinsic reward so like are they doing something because they want to be seen by other people they want to gain status they want the Adoration and the validation of the crowd versus how much they just want to do things with you for their own reason like do they want you to be on their arm as the guy or the girl so that they can show you off to everyone else or they want to be with you in private because they just love your company like those are two huge like huge predictors and you can go down oh does body count matter and like what's the level of like actually one other one that I think is almost like universally agreed on is what are their um core values like you can have two people with the same values and different interests that get into a great relationship if you don't have the same values it's almost impossible because you're permanently going to be coming into conflict what sorts of values political ideology would be one but isn't a political ideology a like on top of your value system so like the value born out of the value system though right like if you but it could be misguided it could but then you're going to have to be like hey have you ever considered that your far- leftism isn't actually what you believe and you're basically rehabilitating this person my belief around dating is that you meet the person where they are if this person has got amazing raw materials and you think I'm pretty convinced that I can turn this person into the sort of person that I want them to be and they're not that far off fantastic but if you see someone and you're just like they're hot but crazy and I mean it's a meme I can fix it I can fix it it's a [ __ ] super meme because people know that on average it's not true like I think meet people where they're at like try and find some they don't have to be the finished St they don't have to be absolutely perfect but you have to see something in them where you're like yeah this is this is good dude if you marry somebody you have strong political views and their political views don't align with yours you're in for a rough ride you're in for a really rough ride because it's born out of your values it's like what do you think about the sanctity of life like let's say that someone gets pregnant like you're literally going to have that argument front and center at least if you guys both agree you're not going to have that conflict on top of what is already a pretty like difficult conversation that you're going to have about what's going to go on the same thing goes for literally everything else in your life like do we think that our kids should go to private school or be homeschooled like that's something that's pretty important what do we think about child rearing what do we think about gender roles in the household what do we think about Breadwinners what do we think about um go financial goals what do we think about that like all of these things are born out of your values and if you've got value alignment pretty much everything else psychological stability all the rest of the stuff as long as you've got those things you can usually work through most of the other stuff but if you haven't got those and you're just like we both like playing pickle ball good luck now it seems like from that study a lot of it really comes down to someone's agreeableness or disagreeableness and I know you talked about this in another podcast where people want someone who's malleable in the Middle where you're not going to hold these extremely firm beliefs either way and it's more about the person being able to see the perspective of another side mhm so how much of this for men and women comes down to whether or not they're disagreeable and they're going to be difficult in a relationship well don't forget disagreeability can be sexy right like disagreeability is it's like push back that's what what flirting is kind of a little bit about right like someone doesn't quite fold to what you want and they go no like you like you do it it's like oh right okay that's kind of there's something there's something exciting about that um in my experience guys will tend to have an easier time with women who are agreeable like if every single thing that you do is a battle to like um why don't we go here for dinner I don't want to go there so okay why don't we go there for dinner oh I don't want to go there I guess you're just going to choose every okay why don't you choose I'm like you want me to choose that and that is just the predisposition of certain people right and that the same can be true in Reverse as well if every single thing that you do with your partner is a battle every single thing that you do is a war that's not fun right conversely if that person is so Placid that they always just fold to whatever your desires are why do you want to go for dinner tonight oh I don't care what do you want to do tomorrow oh you choose like why don't we do this thing yeah sure like well like give me something here because if someone is permanently just agreeing with what you say it's basically the same as not being in a relationship with anybody so again as with everything it's like where's this nice Spectrum that's in the middle now there's some people that prefer Jeffrey Miller evolutionary psychologist he's uh married to Diana Flashman Diana is like one of the most disagreeable people like she is a self-identified like female tetrad so like dark Triad uh psychopathy machiavellianism uh and narcissism although I don't know how much she's got on the narcissism but she's like kind of waved her finger in the air a little bit and being like yeah like I'm pretty high on psychopathy like wow like that's but that's what Jeffrey likes Jeffrey likes the fact he's got this really high IQ quite disagreeable woman that he like contends with right he contends with his wife but that's because of him like he's this like even like more crazy IQ like super super smart dude so that's what he's about but I would say on average like agreeable especially agreeable women seem to be like my friends that are in relationships with them seem to have like an easier time and it's that if everything is a battle for all of the decisions that you have to make not very much is fun you're always working pretty hard to try and just get the smallest thing across the line you want to have battles about the big stuff not about all of the stuff that's just like that's literally just being in a war and that doesn't sound good why does it seem like masculinity is shunned lately I think Modern Men are being made to pay for the advantages that their fathers and grandfathers had and in a world in which we've moved from a Brawn based to a brain based economy and you don't need protectors and providers that much we've allowed women to access education and employment and become socioeconomically viable on their own they don't literally don't need no man for many of the women two women for every one man completing a four-year us college degree women aged 21 to 29 earn 1,111 more than men on average so they're literally like ahead by most of the key objective metrics that people under the age of 30 care about what's the role for men in that and it's also there's a current trend of it being cool to dunk on whoever was seen to have had the advantages in the past right it's like straight white male syndrome like straight that had advantages in the past because people who are homosexual were mistreated [ __ ] Alan churing was chemically castrated uh White slavery wasn't that long ago like yes also had some benefits male women women weren't allowed to go to university until not not so long ago they would etc etc etc but it it uses errors of the past to make compensations in the present and that fundamentally means that like men as one of the biggest groups that have seemed to have had some kind of benefit immediately get dunked to the bottom of the pile and yet if you look even remotely closely at the outcomes that lots of guys are getting I don't think that there's much evidence that guys are flourishing at the moment like I think it was the first quarter of last year like 33% % of new CEOs were female and that was heralded as like New Frontier but until it's at 50% it doesn't matter it's like God do 50% of women want to be CEOs like really is that a life that you aspire to I don't [ __ ] aspire to be a CEO and I owne my own company I don't want to be a CEO it sounds like it sucks I'm looking forward to the day when someone else steps in and takes that role so guys have had it guys had it good in some ways for a while and it's just like it's like cultural reparations for men to pay this fine that certain areas of the world believe that they owe to people and that means that like mistreating them or considering them to be in a privileged position is something that everybody should focus on how do you navigate that as a guy not self-pitying I think like would it have been easier as a guy to have been born 50 years ago maybe like maybe because you would have been able to out earn and out educate most of the women in your local Village or whatever uh pretty easily because 50 years ago was when Title 9 was introduced which was to get more women into universities so it would have been you would have been the highest performing person in hypogamy would have allowed you to have risen to the top and women more women would have found you attractive but it's not and pitying yourself or pitying the world or like screaming and and creating a victim mindset around yourself is literally just giving the power to somebody else this is Alex's thing right it's like wherever you point the finger of blame or wherever you point the finger of responsibility is where you point the finger of power it's like if you do that it's like this is you this is you it's only you that's going to come and save you with regards to this so navigating it is difficult I think that being open and honest as a guy as well like look it's [ __ ] tough it's tough in in many many ways and even if it looks like guys have got it all sorted from the outside I I think that there are so many that are struggling and that's something that that needs to be a like a big cultural shift around a massive cultural shift so you talk about suppressing men right that's where what's the word that you use what you mean like how masculinity and men like you go into war mode and then when you're not in war mode you're suppressed or something like that I'm not sure if that's me well you used a different word rather than supressed how like masculinity or whatever is diminishing okay or how it's in a a point right now where like it's kind of being hidden okay I would say it's being eroded yeah for sure eroded yeah yeah yeah sure so that is a product of the environment that we're inh so if that is the case you can't necessarily change the environment no government body is going to step in and change the environment and that's just going to be a byproduct of the environment that we are placed in how do you then necessarily like change that like are you supposed to just accept the fact that it's an issue okay it's an issue and it's because of external factors that we can't necessarily change and if you look at data it shows that like you said test or you've claimed or whatever testosterone is like decreasing and masculine decreasing and stuff like this what do you do about yeah testosterone's dropped 0.1% every month since 1950 that's czy that's the way that people get uh prescribed trt from doctors so a lot of the time there's a a bunch of places in Austin that do this doctors will use the normal range for testosterone levels for men from 1950 to gauge off whether or not you've got low testosterone could they have just been high in 1950 or is it like no it's just well maybe I don't know I guess we we we didn't have the the levels in like 1850 but I would want to know what happened between 1850 and 1950 for us to be like oh and that menle had this huge surge in testosterone that doesn't seem like it's going to be too likely but yeah dude I don't disagree like if any other group has a problem we ask what can we do to fix Society if men have a problem we say what is it that men are doing where they can't fix themselves like we spend billions and billions in taxpayer funded money to set up Charities and initiatives and research to try and help groups that are struggling like the biggest risk to a man under the age of 30 in terms of his own mortality literally the hands that he has like you're more likely to die by Suicide than any other way under the age of 30 by 18 to 30 like that's a big deal it's a [ __ ] big deal that doesn't sound like privilege to me oh well you know guys have had it good for so long yeah well like [ __ ] apart from the war and the dangerous jobs and the like 40% of us only 40% of us reproducing it's like 60% of men not reproducing like that doesn't sound very good in in terms of how you can at least begin to change the the culture around it I think that accepting that guys are struggling and like changing the narrative like the dead beat dad like the Homer Simpson the Peter Griffin the like sort of stupid father role if you ever watch any kids TV show as well it's always that the boys are kind of boisterous and and and clumsy and and try to sort of cheat or or use their size or their group numbers in some way and the girls are smart and like clever and and more dexterous and and they end up winning because they're more like noble and and uh um inventive the way that they come up with stuff it's like all right well what's the subtext that that tells young boys not to say that like girls shouldn't win [ __ ] like they should but I'm not convinced that like an entire generation of people that were brought up on Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin have got like high expectations for themselves again if you're taking your role models from that and this is one of the other things that come across like look should you really be looking to Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin for your like father role model advice probably not but in a world that's got more single parent households than ever before and more absent father figures than ever before where should they look all of the people that had problems with Jordan Peterson's Ascension or Andrew Tate's Ascension where should the guys that followed them got their role models from genuine question where should they well they should have got it from Dad what if Dad wasn't at home cuz that's a huge percentage of young boys they should have got it from i' I'm yet to hear from the people that are usually critical about that stuff like a good answer yet to hear someone say h yeah like whatever [ __ ] initiative this is sports stars or superheroes or something it's like all right well like that's what people see their public figures on the internet as they see them as like thought leaders in some way or another or a surrogate father figure you talk about the tall girl problem can you elaborate on that I said before women are out educating and out earning men the problem is that women are fundamentally attracted to men who are more educated and wealthier than they are this amounts to a ever increasing group of high performing women competing for ever decreasing group of ultra high performing men right if more women have education levels of undergraduate or above or even college level or above if high school or above and of a uh high level of earning you have this decreasing group of guys that are above and across from them women have this vestigial hypergamy which is like an ancestral hangover they want to on average date men who are at least as educated and at least as earning as they are this causes a problem because it results in this group of men kind of being invisible to women results in a large group of women competing for a small group of guys who don't need to commit so they can use and discard group of women who end up being uh either chasing guys down for a very long time or Melancholy and just exiting the dating World entirely couldn't you say the same thing with guys just in general wanting to date someone who's more attractive than they are do you find anything like that and wouldn't the same apply to to women that guys would say I want the most attractive women they want the most attractive they want the most attractive women that they can but on average men and women end up matching off in terms of uh like out of 10 rating they tend to be like five State fives and eight State 8s that seems to be the way that they match off but we're not talking about the way that people look we're talking about something which is much more malleable than that through culture like it hasn't been that as women got socioeconomically more successful guys managed to get more goodlooking or something you know what I mean yeah you were talking about motherhood MH and you were saying that it was very underappreciated and I tend to agree with that it seems as if people were shunning motherhood or not taking it as seriously as they should and thinking why would you want to just be a mom you could have a career you could do this and do that think about that sentence just be a mom like literally creating the future of our species isn't a big deal yeah just be a mom yeah man I mean that's how powerful the patriarchy is the patriarchy is so powerful that they've managed to convince women that they can both be the bread winner and the mother and that we just get to stay at home and and play Xbox day like that's [ __ ] that's impressive like that that that that's managed to occur but dude like come on Modern women believe that true freedom is having sex like their brother and working like their father I'm not convinced that that's true they're not culpable to their husband in the way that they would have been before this is something that like the manisan never talks about and a lot of dating online never talks about look at how low the uh divorce rates were 50 years or 100 years ago look at how uh more effective it was for people to get married and stuff like that yeah but how many women stayed in relationships with men because they were literally Financial prisoners like no one really ever talks about that and it's like women have now been liberated to make that choice but they've also been encouraged to believe that motherhood makes them a second class citizen I don't think that that's true there's very few women that I know that have said having a kid was like the worst thing that I ever did or I'm so glad that I worked more and spent less time with my child very very particular woman that says that now maybe you could say wow that's because like who's going to say that they hate their kid I don't know like there's a few people on Tik Tok that do that was like that girl with a list did you see that I didn't I've seen a lot of ones on Reddit though dude it's [ __ ] weird there's like literally women taking videos of their newborn child and saying like I can't believe that I brought this thing into the world like I don't like it it like this girl made an 8 page 350 item L it's called hashir with a list you can go and look at it on on Tik Tok right now yeah she made an8 page list of all of the different reasons why she didn't want to have a kid including like can't wear cute heels anymore won't be able to go to brunch with the girls literally a parasite growing inside of my body and then the list of reasons to have a kid was like half a page long so there's just this very like averse to Motherhood culture at the moment chelse conibo wrote an article for the New York Times maternal instinct is a myth that men created okay is that the same across the entire animal kingdom are we like what what do you mean here like just how powerful is the patriarchy that we manag to convince women that they want to have kids how the [ __ ] do you think we got here like how do you think that we manag to survive all this time very strange it's very strange seems like we're coming back to that though it seems like a I've noticed a traditional movement that I haven't seen 10 years ago that's coming back to people saying you know what I don't want the career I want to be home I want to have kids I want to raise a family and it seems like now people are really standing up to that and saying I think that's really Noble I think it's that's it's not easy to do it's very difficult uh and the sacrifice that that would take I think is is significant well Downstream Downstream from anything new like something that's new and novel people get excited about oh my God like women have got access to the workforce and you test it for a good while and again we don't always do our own sense making we have to learn by failing and you Outsource some of that to the rest of the world that's the abene Paradox in some regards right so like lots of women being told this is something and again the loud the CEO boss [ __ ] like leanin sort of girls like maybe it is great for them like maybe that's the perfect life they could lead and if they were a mother they'd be [ __ ] miserable totally fine but you can't use that and whitewash the entire rest it would be the same as saying every Dad should be a stay-at home dad like no like like no very few people would agree that that's the optimal life setup for every guy but yet it may be for some but you don't use like even major cases like majority cases to smear the entirety of a group you use like each different person tries to work out what it is for themselves but yeah man the um I do think that the motherhood thing is swinging back around uh but this is still the Aftershock the after effect of the introduction of reliable contraception do you know that after the introduction of the pill single mother pregnancies went up not down and why is that because prior to Reliable contraception an out of wedlock birth was seen as the man's mistake and after reliable contraception it was seen as the woman's choice so shotgun weddings went down single motherhood went up the number of abortions went up after the increase after the introduction of hormonal birth control like who could have predicted that I don't think that there's anybody on the planet that would have been able to work out like the down I before then the consequence was so big that if you're going to sleep with somebody there's a very high likelihood of ending up pregnant and because of that you're very careful of who you're with after that you don't have to have that same level of care and accidents happen uh not only the same level of but also the same level of obligation sure like do you know why it's called a shotgun wedding well because the dad sits there as like you better get married to my daughter yeah dog gets kicked down yep when's it happening son yep well and you go hey hey hey hey she could have taken the pill do you know that she could have did she decide to she's decided to keep this like it made it the woman's obligation and and not the man's mistake or the woman's choice and not the man's mistake so yeah dude we're still playing with an awful lot of Technology like reprodu technology what does this mean what does it mean to split off and bate having sex from making babies and then what does it mean to do it again and split off having sex from being in love having sex from being married having sex from having feelings there's articles in L and Cosmopolitan how to sleep with him and not catch feels like how do I disembody myself from literally one of the most sacred things that I can do with another human like that's what that article could be Rewritten as and again like dude I come from a nightlife background like [ __ ] that's what we literally what people were going out for for the most part you would lose entire networks of people because some key guest Lister had got into a relationship it's like oh for [ __ ] sake like Jonathan's back in a relationship again God damn it like we're going to lose wait in four months time we'll be out of it and it'll be fine and we'll like get his group of 15 friends that would come out every Thursday back whatever but yeah I I think that the trends are moving in the right direction overall I think that we've got Reason for Hope and I don't think that people should be too cynical about the way that the future's going to end this off I have a few personal questions what is your biggest insecurity that I'm not good enough period that I'm not good enough that's a thought at everything at everything okay the same way as you being driven by the paranoia of whether the S&P is going to move like aggressively tomorrow or whether someone's going to like break into the house one of the one of the thoughts that I have a lot of the time is like what if I'm not good enough like what if what if this failure is some sort of judgment on me as a person what if that lack of performance what if that lack of recognition what if that uh lack of actualization what if that poorly spoken sentence what if that all of those things I'm like what if I'm not good enough I'm working through it what if well if actually run it down I mean it's completely illogical fear like because the fear is if I'm not good enough I'll be cast out and no one will like me and no one will care about me and I'll be on my own and I'll die like that's the that's the embodied sense right that's the like limic feeling but if you actually step in and fact check it you go nothing nothing but overcoming the way that you feel when that thing happens and actually allowing yourself to have that Equanimity to be like like ah I'll be fine like there's nothing to worry about but yeah that I'm not good enough is is a a big one and when is the last time you cried oh dude I had I shed a tear yesterday when I told Alex's story on the podcast um therapy week and a half ago watching clouse the Christmas movie watching an adaptation of uh A Christmas Carol I cry pretty regularly I'm pretty emotional person I would love to hear that story but I'm afraid we which the one you cried when you were telling Alex it wasn't anything big it was just like me I think it I think it was something that I really cared about it's like I was reminiscing about some some like person that inspired me and uh I cry pretty regularly I'm still like that's another degree of like I still haven't got to that stage of being able to do it on the show like I just it makes me feel so like weak and vulnerable and I hate it I hate that like oh [ __ ] like yeah my emotions are rising to the surface again because having emotions to me is at least in some way seen as being like oh this makes me weak or vulnerable or or or less do you think guys should be forthright about their crying should they cry in girls I think they should be forthright about whatever they are because anything else is just [ __ ] posturing anything else is just you performing and is that what you really want like to look back on life and go I was never myself but at least no one ever saw the the failings of me is that really like [ __ ] heroism to you cuz it's not to me and that's one of the things like if I could change one of the things if I could give a piece of advice to me from 10 years ago it would be fear less because I fear a lot I feared a lot and that's still one of the like recurring themes even now [ __ ] 2 million person YouTube channel and and Peterson and Goggins and Rogan and all the rest of the stuff still there I'm like right okay like how can I continue to impact is and maybe that you know we asked at the very beginning why should people listen to you it's a really good question that haven't been asked before like I guess first off I didn't ask anyone to listen to me like I just did it because I wanted to learn and then people seemed to like learning along with me too but the other reason maybe why they do listen at least in some regard is like I'm failing forward learning out loud practicing in public like I'm doing all of this in as open of a way as I can I could still be way more open I'm not Destiny open but I'm like I'm as open as I can be about this and maybe people like I don't know see a version like see someone going on a journey that they can resonate with and and and maybe that helps I guess amazing quick thing that I saw on Twitter that I wanted to get your opinion on because it has to do with therapy uh this is quote unquote a super hot take it got millions of views and it says the normalization of therapy is becoming a bad thing for society I'm seeing more and more people one use the fact that they are in therapy as a get out of jail free card for awful Behavior two believe everything their therapist says as gospel truth with no further research required three equate the act of going to therapy with the actions of being a good person I'm not saying therapy is bad for everyone but I am seeing a trend of less people less personal responsibility for bad behavior and a lot more talk about therapy as the only solution and it got commented and replied to by an Elon Musk and this is what he said the D Emoji dude I think that's a great take I don't like I don't think that's particularly hot take at all I think that therapy culture and the the normalization of therapy language is is dangerous like people have mistaken going to therapy for doing the work like even your therapist will say it's integration after you have these conversations right uh for me it's been very very very Illuminating I've not been doing of therapy throughout my entire life and I maybe should have done more it been very very Illuminating there's very few places and this is like I'll fly the flag at least a little bit there's very few places where you're allowed to be boring you're not even really allowed to be boring around your friends like if you're having a conversation and your thoughts are messy one of the things that you learn in therapy is to pay attention to fleeting thoughts and to not believe that you're supposed to have a cohesive narrative or sentence when you open your mouth like you're trying to get stuff which you haven't formed an opinion about or haven't really understood you're trying to like get it into something that's out there and that results in you making lots of u-turns and and messing up and and not really knowing where you're going and maybe circling the same point for like 20 minutes even the best friend in the world is going to be like dude this [ __ ] sucks like I'll sit here but like it they would say is this a therapy session there's very few places that you're allowed to be boring like emotionally boring and repetitive and messy and there are very few places in which you can actually be completely 100% this person would be [ __ ] canned by their psychology Psychiatry Board license board if they said the things that I'm saying to them like being petty about stuff or talking about things that are unbelievably embarrassing like those things are important and it's not for everyone it's not a Panacea maybe I'm going to find out maybe I I'll change my opinion and like five years time or one year's time or six months time I don't know but at the moment it's interesting and uh especially if you spend all of your time talking to other people and like like being on being in a place where you don't have to like oh and Winston Churchill once said like this [ __ ] thing like is is really really really important and good so not for everybody but neither's a knif bath cool thank you thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee I really appreciate it you have to remind people to subscribe cuz they're not subscribed we're to raise to a million subscribers we got to beat Caleb Hammer Caleb Hammer he does the financial audits on YouTube okay he's got a cooler name mhm but a worst channel name I like it okay so subscribe to the ice coffee hour and uh Graeme will sneak into your house late at night all check out Chris he'll be linked Down Below guys also got a shout these These are really good you sent me some I absolutely loved it I was America at the sold out sold out Across America sold out in some flavors in the UK uh go to new tonic.com you can wisdom on podcast Spotify Chris Williams on YouTube boys I really appreciate you I love massive of your channel massive of the podcast been [ __ ] awesome to catch up we're going to go Po and then I've got an hour and 40 minutes to get on a flight we got to go thanks oh yeah just