 Do you think that's potentially unhealthy for someone? And do you think that we evolve to reproduce and have a family? And do you think that there's consequences that maybe they just don't foresee yet? Yeah, I mean, certainly different strokes for different folks. Some people can make it to the end of life having not had kids or a family and say that it's the right call. Yeah. But you've had to beat the odds pretty hard. Yeah, I thought I wasn't going to. You're an outlet and you've had. Yeah, I'm 41 and I have a three year old son now. Congratulations. But my wife and I, we've been together for 13 years. And so there was a point where we were very hermosiastic. Like, she's part of the business. Like we've built companies together before, like hardcore, motivated like that. And there was this thought that, you know, maybe we won't have kids. And that changed. And now I look back and go, like, oh, my God, like imagine if we hadn't done this. Yeah, it's very strange because it's hard. I think I'm not a parent not as far as I know. And it's very difficult for non parents to imagine the kind of enjoyment that they're going to get out of having kids. Because there's a lot of very obvious reasons about why you shouldn't have kids, right? All of the time that they're going to take up and the difficulty and the potential risk of them becoming injured or killed. And then you're going to be heartbroken and you'll never get over it and all of these things. It's very hard for parents to actually explain to you the meaning and satisfaction they get out of having kids. Yeah. And the moment to moment experience, if you do self-rated happiness of parents, they're less happy than non parents, but they have much more meaning in their life. So, like, you know, when you're up for the third time tonight with a one year old that's teething or whatever's going on, like, that's not happiness, but over time you start to accumulate an awful lot more meaning. So I people can do whatever it is that they want. I am slightly concerned about childlessness, especially in the West at the moment, the population collapse is fucking terrifying. And it is coming for every developed country. I want to touch on that because, well, first off, the data on this is actually pretty clear that the people that do find meaning and purpose that don't have kids typically devote their lives to something that they it transcends them. So it's either something religious or spiritual or they volunteer for work or do something that they dedicate their lives to, like Mother Teresa, for example. So and it's hard to explain because you don't know what it's like to truly care about something more than yourself. And I think until you have kids, otherwise you really don't unless you have that one purpose in life. Well, that was my experience. My experience was until that moment, I didn't realize that I had never truly loved something more than myself. I love my wife. I love my mom. I love my I love my friends and I say stuff like that. But until that moment of seeing another being a part of you that you're now responsible for, all of a sudden that what I would say for me was real love for the first time, something that I actually love. Well, you couldn't have imagined it otherwise. Chris, you mentioned population collapse. So if you read about this and you look at the data, this is a big deal. And some countries are freaking out. I know Japan is in a bad position. I know Italy where my family is from in a bad position. America is on the cusp. We're like the line where we may experience this. China is suffering now from kind of what happened. What? Why do you? Why are we getting the message that we need to have less kids that populate that we're going to get overpopulated, that we're running out of resources that population is a threat to us in the sense that we're having too many kids? Why are we getting that message when the data is showing the opposite? It's way worse than you think. However bad you think it is, the current decline in birth rates is significantly worse. So there's a guy called Steven Shaw who's just released a documentary called Birth Gap. And he's been on Modern Wisdom in my show. And this guy just totally blew my head off. He became obsessed by this question around about six or seven years ago. He's traveled to 24 different countries. He's a data scientist by trade. And he has looked at the declining birth rates across the world. First off, why is it that people have a problem with the amount of people that are on the planet and say that it isn't an issue, perhaps that the population is declining? It's because of a fundamental belief that the world's carrying capacity is already being breached, right? That we already have too many people on the planet. This ties into environmentalism and the green movement and stuff. And no matter what you think about parts per million carbon in the atmosphere, the earth has way, way, way more carrying capacity than we're at at the moment. Remember the population boom? There's going to be a population bomb or a population boom in the 70s and 80s. Well, that never ended up happening. It looks like we're going to top out just under about 10 billion people. But the fall off from there is going to be precipitous. You can have a declining birth rate whilst an increasing population because the amount of time that people live for is getting longer, right? So if you have an ever aging population, you can actually drop birth rate and increase the size overall. But what you end up with, if you imagine a graph where you have a zero years old one, two, three, four, all the way up to 100, that creates a shape of the demographic. Once you've had one year olds, there are no more one year olds that can be born right now. We know exactly how many there are. This is where the term demography is destiny comes from. So we know exactly how many one year olds, two year olds, three year olds. And then in 80 years time, we know how many 81 year olds, 82 year olds if you account for the drop off. So you end up with this shape, right? So the demographic, what you want is this, you want more young people than old people because they're the ones that drive innovation, that drive GDP, that are actually physically able to look after old people. If you have a shape like that, this sort of inverted triangle shape, that's really not good because you have more old people than young people. That's the current situation. Seventy percent of countries worldwide are below the birth rate tipping point. That means that the women in those countries are having less than two children. That's the number that you need in order to sustain society. So if everyone remembers this R naught number, right? From the pandemic, if you have fewer children, that means there are fewer children to have fewer children. So you end up falling off a cliff at some point. It's just you can't you can't recover. It's very difficult, very, very difficult. Now, what you will end up with in America, for instance, certain subcultures that are repopulating pretty well, Mormons, for instance, you know, you have within particular, mostly religious, traditional conservative sect, like Matt Walsh has had like six kids. I think he's had two sets of twins, right? So, you know, there's going to be a lot of Matt Walsh's running around. But even in the places where people would say sub-Saharan Africa, everything's going to be fine, every 15 years, the average number of children that each mother has is dropping by one. So it's six and it's five, then it's four. And we're at six to five now ish. Even in the places that everyone thinks are having it away. Japan that you brought up, 120 million people in it at the moment. By 2050, that's going to be 60 to 65. China, 1.2 billion people in it at the moment. By 2050, that's going to be 650 million. South Korea, same problem. UK, USA are at sort of 1.8 to 1.6 in terms of their birth rate. It's really, really, really not good. And the interesting thing about population collapse in terms of demographics, it's the least exciting and least galvanizing of all of the existential risks, right? There's no supervolcano spewing out ash. There's no asteroid in the sky. There's no terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger crashing through the ceiling to galvanize us to doing stuff. There's no smoke from chimneys and stuff. It creeps up on you one year at a time, one generation at a time, one lost child at a time. And before you know it, there aren't enough people on the planet. So for the people that have legitimate concerns about what's happening with the environment and stuff like that, if you think that living on this planet is bad when you believe there's too many people on it, wait until you see what it's like when there's too few. Now, what are they attributing this to? Is this also they associating this with the fact that we've moved further away from religion, because you mentioned some of these religious cultures that are definitely still promoting having multiple kids. Third rail alert. So it seems like the two things that cause population birth rates to decline the education of women and industrialization, those two are across the board. And the reason that this happens, the reason you can tell that this is the case is that you have, let's say Japan in Japan, I think all schooling is private and everybody pays for it in some of the Scandinavian countries. All schooling is supplemented and paid for by the state. You have certain countries that are authoritarian, some that are democratic, some that are egalitarian, some that are patriarchal, some that, you know, you have every different type of culture that you can. So you think, OK, what is it that all of these different countries, 70 percent of countries are below the birth rate tipping point? What is it that all of them have got in common? And it's been this increasing industrialization and education of women to put it out there front and foremost. I am not saying that we should stop educating women, right? That's not my proposal at all. We're going to clip that. But this is this is where this is the correlation, it seems. As soon as you educate women, the birth rate falls precipitously. That is a really uncomfortable truth, right? That's just what happens. Why is that what happens? It seems like if women are able to gain education and employment, they spend more time learning and then more time earning, which then squeezes that fertility window down, right? If you've spent up until the age of what, twenty three in school and then you go up, you know, spent 18 years in full-time education, I might as well go and actually earn. So then you're talking maybe five years in a career before you actually start to properly look to settle down. Again, this is obviously on average. There's many students at university that will also have kids with a partner and get married and stuff. Then you're talking 30. It's very, very difficult for women to understand just how limited their fertility window is. And eight out of ten women who are childless didn't intend to be childless. Eight out of ten. Eight out of ten. Who's right at a time? I did not know that. It's called involuntary childlessness. So around about 10 percent of women are physically incapable of having kids for a variety of reasons, which is just brutal. Ten percent said that they actually didn't intend to have children and that leaves a whopping four out of five who didn't have children due to life circumstances. That's the most common reason for it. And the most common life circumstance is leaving it too late to find a partner and then have kids. You break through that fertility window on the other side. And there is this is Professor Renske from Norway University. It was a huge meta-analysis done in 2010 and it is robust. It's been replicated. This is the case and the problem that you have is these women who get into their forties who always intended to have a family who realize that they now can't. They go to support groups and Steve and the guy that did that documentary went and these women are grieving for families that they never had, which is just brutal. Like to think that you can grieve for something that didn't occur. And he went to this undertaker's funeral parlor in Germany, which has got a birth gap problem already. So you're starting to see more and more single people get to the end of life without any support structure. And he told me the story where the undertaker said, for the first time in history, we're doing funerals for these people, both men and women, and nobody's showing up. There's no one showing to the funerals of these people. There's no one left. And then when they cut the clothes off of them to embalm the body or to dress the body ready for this event, which no one goes to, they find that they've got bruising around their wrists and bruising on their arms. And it seems like in some of the care homes that these people have been staying in, that they've been abused by the carers. So you have this alone, elderly person who doesn't have any family. In the final years of life, they're abused by the people that are supposed to look after them. And then after they die, no one attends their funeral. That's terrible. That's so sad. It's like the most fucking harrowing hairs on the back of your neck style conversation. Yeah, I also think that we're sold that popular media and especially in modern societies. This is where the industrialization aspect comes in. Cells having kids or promotes having kids as oppressive, terrible, you can't do fun stuff anymore. It sucks. And so and that you'll get fine meaning and purpose with your career. So I think that's also plays a big role. Part the other side of that conversation with population is that people say, well, we have limited resources, right? Well, how can we continue to just grow when we're only have so much food, when we have so much oil? With that, I like to point to how many times we've been told that we're going to reach peak oil production. Like we only have so much oil, but innovation actually today, we actually have access to more oil today per person than we did 40 years ago, even though we've been using it the entire time. Same thing with farmland. We use far less land to produce far more food. So the innovation aspect people don't really consider. That's that's also a big part of this conversation, too. Right. Yes. And everybody always wants to be a Cassandra, me included, right? I'm harping on about the fact that population collapse is something that everybody should be concerned about. There is always going to be like a Nostradamus person pointing at the issue and saying, because it gives them a sense of importance. But to the carrying capacity of the earth is not a concern. The population collapses. Hey, everybody, today's giveaway is the RGB bundle. This is maps, anabolic mass performance and maps aesthetic. You can win it for free, but you have to enter. Here's how you enter. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it, subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section under your comment, we'll say, Hey, you're the winner. And then you can claim your prize. Also, we have three programs on sale. All three 50% off maps, performance, half off maps, aesthetic half off and maps hit half off. If you're interested in any one of those or all three of those for the 50% off discount, just click on the link at the top of description below. All right, here comes the show. I wanted to take a step back because you have a very interesting road to getting to where you're at now. Like first off, I want to commend you. When you do interviews, you're probably one of the most objective and just excellent interviews I've ever heard. You listen very well, very objective. You can kind of go on both sides. You have this ability to see through the fog a little bit. How did you get to that place? How did you get to what you do now? So I was a club promoter for a long time. Iran owned one of the biggest events companies in the UK. Stood on the front door of about a thousand club nights. Sounds like a natural progression to being a great interviewer. As you can see, it's the classic intake. So I do that for about a thousand different events that we run over the course of a decade and a half. Meet about a million people, run this big company and do some reality TV off the back of it. I was a professional party boy for a decade and a bit. And get toward the end of my twenties after I've done this second reality TV dating show called Love Island. And I kind of had a fatal dose of contrast on that show between the people that were there and the person that I thought I was. And I realized that it actually wasn't necessarily the scene for me and I had nowhere to hide because cameras were on me 24 hours a day and I had no distractions. And then maybe being able to sedate myself with YouTube and internet and books and bits and pieces, and this really just drove it home. It's like, you're not supposed to be here that much. Was there a moment or was it just the whole thing? So that kind of was, the show was a gateway drug that kind of made me really start to question, is this what I'm supposed to do? Because that was like the World Cup championships of being a party boy, right? You managed to get on this huge show that's on primetime TV every single night for a month and a half. And I was in there for about a month. And that was supposed to be everything that society would tell you, you're supposed to work toward, right? This is what a young guy that values status and women and renown and resources and all that shit should aspire to do, especially coming from a working class town, working class background. That's exactly what you're supposed to try and do. And I found it lacking, right? Even though I really loved what the work that I'd done in nightlife and took tons and tons and tons away from it and I'm very, very proud of what me and my business partner built, there was something missing. And this was a good time, 2016, 17, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Orlando Boton from the School of Life. So I'm starting to watch and listen to content that makes me think about the direction that I'm going in life and what I really want to do and how I can contribute. And then I just spent a lot of time exposing myself to crushing volumes of content that made me do introspection, realized that I'd been playing a role and a persona for a very long time, started to strip that back. Okay, if I keep on digging and digging and digging, if I'll hit something solid, which was curiosity and a desire to learn and kind of like this nerdy angle which I'd very much kept away because on the front door of a nightclub, I can't talk to people about answers to the Fermi paradox around why there are no aliens out there. They want the VIP band and they want to fuck off inside the club, right? This isn't the environment in which I could do that. And part of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy because I'm sure that many people would have been responsive to this had I've decided to open up in any case about my interests but I didn't have the confidence because I decided that this was the way that people wanted me to be. This was the role I had to play. And also being the leader, I'm sure that you guys feel this as well, as the leader of any sort of company, there is, you begin to put an expectation about what you think or the people want you to do on that and you start to almost fulfill this role that you've created for yourself. So start the podcast about five years ago, just because I want you to learn from people and you roll a clock forward now and it's one of a 600 episodes, Goggins, Peterson, Jocko, Huberman. Yeah, how did you start getting guests at that level? I mean, you've had massive guests on the show and we know firsthand what it's like to try and get a big name on the show even after we've had traction and we're relatively big. So how did you get to the level of getting that kind of guests? I mean, did your show explode overnight? Did you have something that went viral? Like how did you gain all that experience? Was your club promoting experience? Did that help you? Correct. So the networking, the background of networking, most people have no idea how to network effectively and that was what I'd done for, that was my bread and butter for 15 years. So being able to reach out to people, create relationships, maintain relationships and then use those to build more. So that was really all that happened. I mean, the show, dude, 96% of my listeners came last year. Spotify gave me the end of year stats. 96% of people joined last year. So you were working for years and years and years and then it was like, correct. Have you ever seen that Jack Butcher visualize value graph where it's flat and flat and flat and there's a little arrow that points to this is pointless and it's just before the hockey stick begins. I was at this is pointless for three years basically. I mean, like we've done stuff, I think in a day, in a day, a couple of weeks ago we did more plays than the entire first three years of the show put together, right? So for anybody out there that is thinking, I'm trying to do this thing. I feel like I've got talent. I genuinely believe that my quality of content is ahead of the interest that it's getting. Like just keep going. Chris, what kept you going during that time? Was it just that there was a selfish desire for knowledge and wisdom and learning? So in other words, that first three years when you had no traction where it seemed like there was nothing happening where you just like, okay, but I love this. I love learning. Like what can you tell somebody who's like in that period because three years a long time to plug away, invest money and time and energy and see nothing or very little come back in terms of financial success. It didn't feel like work. Okay. That's why I would happily do this for free. I would happily do, it was six o'clock in the UK. It's two o'clock in Austin where I am now. I would happily do that every single day for free if nobody listened. Like that's, it's what I want to do. And it's very difficult to compete with somebody that's having fun because I'm going to outwork everybody else in the room. And it's not even going to feel like work to me. For someone that wants to become a great podcaster, they don't have the same predisposition, whatever it is that I have, which means that every time that they need to get themselves up and prepare for another guest and sit down and have the conversation, it's going to feel arduous. Whereas for me, I'm actually compelled to do it because I want to, right? It's the perfect intersection. What is a icky guy, what you need to do, sorry, what you want to do, what society needs and what you can be paid for, right? Like that's slap bang in the middle. And that's what I've managed to find. So yeah, it didn't feel like work for all that it can be impressive to say that are you plugged away at something for three years and basically nobody took any notice. So well, I would still be happily doing that now. The only difference is now that there's a lot more attention. How would you compare? So how are you as a student, I guess, is where I'm getting at versus like, because this quest for learning that it seems like it might have come a bit later for you or was this always there, even go to school? Yeah, always curious, but just kind of hid it away, I think, for a good chunk of time. Again, like the... Too busy being a party boy. Correct. Yeah, dude. You know, if you're running nightclubs and constantly thinking about DJs and all the rest of it, there's only so much time in the day. And it meant that, yeah, that curious side of me was a little bit muted, but it's always been there. And I think a lot of people are like this, man, like think about the entire industry of podcasting coming out of the whatever you want to call it, like edutainment sector. It's people that want to learn about, today I'm going to learn about lithium mines and tomorrow I'm going to learn about human DNA for spaceflight and then I'm going to learn about what it's like to be a professional porn star. Like, why? Well, it's just because we're curious and we want to learn about shit. And I think that following that, following that curiosity is a pretty good strategy. It's also a great medium because it's long form. So we could have long discussions, whereas that kind of ended for a little while where everything had to be so short. Any guess that really surprised you that you had on were afterwards you were like, wow, that was different than what I anticipated. So Goggins recently, I had him on, he only did two shows, which was very nice of him to choose me as one of the other ones that wasn't going to be Rogan. And he surprised me because he seems like such an extreme character. You can't believe that this guy is going to be actually that legit in real life. And I was going in there wanting to kind of try and poke holes in, because what do you actually spend each day doing? What's your daily routine look like? And why have you decided to go back to not doing any talks and how come you're only doing two podcasts and blah, blah, blah? However legit and hardcore you think that guy is, he's even more legit than that. It's terrifying how hardcore that dude is. And that surprised me because I was expecting there to be at least one chink in the armor and I didn't see anything at all. So very authentic. Correct. Yeah. Anybody that you that shifted your paradigm, we've had guests on the show where afterwards we all sat down and talked for another hour or two and it just changed our minds or how we thought about certain things. Can you think of a time that happened for you where afterwards you were like, okay, I am totally different after that interview? All the time, man. I mean, Steven Shaw, that birth gap thing, the declining birth rate stuff. I'd known that it was a problem for a while but I didn't realize just how bad it was. So that really opened my eyes. A bunch of conversations with evolutionary psychologists about the imbalance in the dating market at the moment. So this mating crisis. Explain that, because that's interesting. I just, I've been hearing stuff about this. This is kind of fascinating to me. Okay, so third rail again. At the moment, there is a massive reduction in the amount of short-term sex that people are having and also you have declining marriage rates and family rates, right? The number of men reporting no sex in the last year has tripled from 8% to 28% from 2008 to 2018. This is men between the ages of 18 and 30. So short-term sex has declined. This has also declined for women as well but a little bit more for men. For the first time in history, 50.1% of women are childless at 30 and a report from Reuters says that 45% of prime working age women between 22 and 45 will be single and childless by 2040. For the first time in history, you have 51% of children being born outside of marriage or civil unions. That's to either single parents or to people that are just in a relationship in the UK. So what that map shows is short-term sex and long-term mating seem to be on the decline, right? We have greater rates of singleness, you think? Which is crazy in a world of Tinder and Facebook and Instagram. Correct. It's super fascinating that that would be declining. How is the ease of access to other partners increasing while what actually occurs in the real world seems to be dropping down? Yeah, and are they connected? Correct, yes, so yes, they are. So that's the, okay, there's something happening here. And I think that every young single person has an idea that the dating market seems a little bit different now, very different. All of the advice that my parents can give me doesn't really seem to apply anymore. So you would think, what is it that could be happening here? Hypergamy is the tendency for women to date what's called up and across. So on average, women want to date a man who is as educated or more educated than them and as employed or more employed than them. So that's wealth levels, right? This is harkens back to our ancestral roots, which would be that women want a man who has status and resources. Not a problem at all. Why should women try and settle or not get the best that they can? The issue that you have is that women have been outperforming men in both education and employment for quite a while now. So two women for every one man will complete a four year US college degree by 2030. Women on average between the ages of 21 and 29 earn 1,111 pounds more than men do. So you can see a potential issue here. You have an ever increasing cohort of high performing women that are educated and employed competing for an ever decreasing cohort of ultra high performing men. So this is what I call the tall girl problem. So every guy has a girlfriend who is six foot without heels. If you want to wear heels and look nice on the night out, you're stuck dating professional athletes, right? Because your capacity in terms of height has selected for a very small cohort of men that are taller than you. This is the same, but it's in terms of education and employment. So the ability for women to outperform men, remembering when Title IX came in, which was the affirmative action thing that helped women to get into higher education, the percentage point swing was 13% in favor of men. Now in 2023, it's 15% percentage points in favor of women. We over corrected. So there was nobody, no one that thought when Title IX came in that they were going to not only reach parity, but blast straight through it and then over correct. Nobody thought that that was going to happen. So again, like you might say, why is it a bad thing that women have got access to education and employment? It's not like women needed that for a very long time. The brutal ground truth is that when you match up this increase educational and employment achievement with hypergamy, women who are better educated and better employed reduce down their mating pool. So what's good for their educational and employment achievements is not necessarily good for their dating prospects. And this gets born out in a ton of data. Relationships where the woman out earns the man of 50% more likely to end in divorce. Relationships where the woman contributes more than 80% of household income are twice as likely to end in divorce. Relationships where the man is not the primary breadwinner, he is 50% more likely to need to use a rectile dysfunction medication. Women are three times more likely than a man to say that important educational achievement is something that they would judge a partner on. Basically, guys don't care if their partner has got a PhD and earns 100 grand a year, but women would care more, right? And this doesn't need to be huge effects. They are quite large effects, but it only needs to be relatively small effects to nudge people's preferences, okay? So we have this problem in terms of short-term and long-term mating. We have this imbalance in terms of female achievement and male achievement. Male labor force participation has declined by 0.1% every month since 1950. It's gone from 87% to 68% and by 2040, it'll be 65%. 65% labor force participation amongst men. So you can imagine the dynamic. You have this group of turbo chads at the top, right? There's sort of eight out of 10s and above. They have this wealth of options. The guys that are super wealthy, well-educated and tall usually, they have this big, big, big block of girls that they can run through if they choose to. These women sometimes get used and heartbroken by the guys at the top. That causes them to be bitter and resentful of all men. The group of guys at the bottom, the five out of 10s and below are essentially invisible to most of these women. Angry. But they get the, these men aren't worth shit like where are all of the good men at. They believe that they're one of these good men, but they are being sort of tarred with the same brush as the guys that used and run through women. So those women retreat into careers and lean into sort of a boss bitch lifestyle. These men retreat into porn and video games. These guys at the top that do have the turbo chad access, I don't think it's necessarily even that good for them either. Like having a wealth of options is a man who wants lots of sexual variety doesn't encourage you to be a good man. And many men can't control their sort of desire for sexual variety in the way that they might want to. Like in their best moments or whatever. So you end up with both sexes moving further and further apart from each other. The men that retreat into porn and video games are less attractive potential mates to this group of women. And the women that lean into a boss bitch lifestyle make themselves even taller and taller with regards to the tall girl problem. So you end up with a situation in which everybody resents everybody. You see this online with, you know, MGTOW, Manasphere, Red Pill, Black Pill, In Cell Culture, or on the women's side with Boss Bitch Culture, with Pink Pill, with Female Dating Strategy. All of these are copes for why can't I find a partner from women that I'm attracted to or from men one that's attracted to me. Wow, and in these apps, these dating apps are showing like that there's a small percentage of men, something like in the single digit percentage of men who are getting all of the matches, all of the conversations, all of the women who wanna talk with them, and then the rest are essentially, as you said, invisible. And these dating apps are showing this. Now historically, evolutionarily speaking, because I feel like this is a, sounds like a relatively new problem. It's not if there's the monogamy argument. Right, because there's arguments that we created monogamy or monogamy, although now in every successful society, this is what's practiced. But for a lot of human history, that wasn't the case. And you had the man with the resources and the military and the harem. And then you had the peasants and they just didn't have accessible women. And so the argument is that we created monogamy and it was a way to keep us peaceful and not killing each other and all that stuff. So it's like, now this kind of natural tendency where all the women want these few men and all these other guys are invisible, now it seems like we've amplified that with technology and accessibility. And that's what we're kinda seeing right now. Is it that guys are just giving up and that women are working harder? Is that part of it or is it more than that? There's an awful lot going on. So Richard Reeves, guy that wrote of Boys and Men, really great book, Short Read. Everybody should check it out if they're interested in this. And he talks about the structural problems. Men are dropping out of education, employment and family life. Why it's happening, it seems like girls mature more quickly than boys. Everyone knows that, they hit puberty earlier than boys. But there's other things, they're on average more conscientious, which means that when it comes to sitting down and doing homework, they're better. More boys have got ADD, more boys are restless and boisterous when it comes to class. That doesn't engender a very successful like education outcome for guys. There are four times as many female fighter pilots in the US Air Force as there are male kindergarten teachers by percentage in the US. 2% of kindergarten teachers are men, 8% of fighter pilots are female. I'm happy to have a discussion about whether there should be more female fighter pilots in the US, but there absolutely needs to be more male kindergarten teachers because they understand how to deal with boisterous boys, right? So the monogamy argument is an interesting one. It seems to me that almost all human histories, human civilizations throughout history, ancestrally were monogamish, right? So this like polygyny argument really only begins to make sense once you've got agricultural revolution because no one man can accumulate sufficient resources to be able to look after more than just him and his local family. So for anybody that says you do have this like huge polygyny thing going on and everyone's a want to be Genghis Khan. No, no, not up until 10,000, 12,000 years ago. And you can tell by the some genetic records, there's some anthropological data that suggests that it's just not the case. Most of human history was monogamish. Serial monogamy perhaps, but it wasn't this polygyny where it's one man with an entire harem of women because how would you, in a normal local tribe, if you don't have tons and tons of resources, how are you not gonna stop all of the other men just tearing you apart? And this is a problem called young male syndrome. So this is, we've spoken about individual happiness and stuff, we probably need to justify why people need to get into a relationship at all. We can do that in a bit. But societal stability is something to be concerned about. If you have a ton of men who are not brought in to the local society, why should they behave? Why shouldn't they cause havoc if they've not got a partner and they've not got kids, their testosterone is higher because getting into a relationship drops testosterone and then having kids drops it again, which reduces risk-taking behavior. Why shouldn't they just go around and push over granny and set buildings on fire and stuff, they've got nothing else to do. And this has happened throughout history, Portugal in the 1700s, they actually shipped off all of the sons that weren't the first son. The first son got married off and the rest of them were put on galleon ships and they got to explore the new world. What they were doing was they were outsourcing this potential, these roving bands of like future miscreants and they were just exporting them out of the country. So young male syndrome is this situation in which a proliferation of childless, sexless, young men cause havoc for society. Given that we've got ever increasing rates of sexlessness amongst young men and young people generally, where is all of the rioting? I think that's a valid question. In-cell killings for all that a lot of the killings that do occur, especially mass shootings do come from young lonely men. There's nowhere near, it hasn't tripled in the last 10 years, right? So why is it not going up in line? And this is a theory that I've come up with which is the male sedation hypothesis. So it's my belief that men are being sedated out of this state of seeking and reproductive behavior through porn and video games. I think that video games gives them the team bonding, goal seeking, forward oriented satisfaction that they need. And I think that porn is giving them a very, very, very slight titrated dose. Careful, you're touching a third rail that it wasn't a third rail that long ago. We talked about video games the other day. A lot of guys wear the slack backlash on that. Don't come after their video games. The pornography conversation is interesting because this is relatively new. I mean, pornography has existed for a long time but not its access. I make the joke on the podcast all the time that when we grew up in the 90s, if you had a dirty magazine in the 90s, you could literally trade, you could trade it for some kid's bike. That's how hard it was to come by. And now it's so accessible, it's interesting. Have you interviewed anybody to talk about the impacts of pornography on men and society and what that could potentially do to us? Yes, I've had a couple of conversations that actually contradict each other. So Dr. David Lay is very anti-pond panic and I need to dig into a lot more of what he talked about. He said that people are overblowing the concern when it comes to porn. Yeah, yeah, which is the first guy that I've ever heard to talk about this but he's deep in the research. On average, I think that porn is a pretty destructive force for men and the main reason that I think it is is that guys who are in relationships and use porn are less likely to have sex with their partner, right? So you're less likely to satisfy your partner because you're able to satisfy yourself aside from that, downstream from that, your partner may start to wonder and worry about why are we not having as much sex. If you're single, it's going to promote you to go out and actually get laid less. Like if the only way that you can get sex is by finding another woman, you're going to be very motivated to go out and find that woman. Whereas if you can get your rocks off at home on your own, then that's not going to be the case. Andrew Huberman said to me on a really great episode that people should check out about how porn watching can train people to become aroused when they're watching somebody else have sex but that doesn't necessarily translate over into when you're one-on-one with somebody in the real world. So you can actually, there is a potential concern that you could neurologically program yourself to become a voyeur and that is a pretty big concern. I mean, there's all sorts of things that are happening as well with like young kids that learn about sex through porn and then have super skewed perspectives of what sex is supposed to be, how you're supposed to do it, et cetera, et cetera. This is I guess more of a concern for women about how men treat them. But like, if you're a guy, you want to treat a woman well, right? You don't want to be doing something that she's going to absolutely detest or hurt her. So yeah, the porn panic thing, when it comes to video games, again, I don't know. I haven't seen the data on this. I do need to speak to some like gaming addiction people. However, it wouldn't surprise me if... The question still remains if young men aren't having that much sex, where is all of the unrest, right? Yeah, it manifests online in forums and stuff like that, but it's not happening in the real world and it should be so prolific. This isn't me like campaigning for, go out there and burn down your local fucking CBS. But something's happening and the two things that men would typically want would be camaraderie, goal-seeking and reproduction. Look, when I was younger, which wasn't that long ago, if you were at home by yourself, there was nothing to do. You had nothing to do. Now it's hard. I have kids, so I have two teenagers and I also have two much younger ones. And anybody who has kids now will tell you, look, when I was a kid, if you got punished, you were sent to your room. Now it's almost the reverse. It's like, get off all your electronics. You gotta go outside. I'm not even joking. Stand on that grass. Stand on that fucking grass. It's true. It's so true. It's like, get off your stuff and they're like, I don't know what to do. Go outside. There's nothing to do outside. So I think I agree kind of with what you're saying. This kind of all speaks to, in my opinion, this bigger thing, which is, we seem to be more connected. It's easier to talk to people. It's easier to meet people. Yet there seems to be this epidemic of loneliness. Correct. And that seems to be across the board, especially with older people, but across the board where we're more anxious, more depressed and more lonely than ever before. What have you read about this? It's terrifying, man. I mean, the most common answer to the question, how many friends do you have that you could call on in an emergency is zero. That's the most common answer. That's not the average or the mean, but it's the most common answer. Wow. That's fucking terrifying. Wow. In a world where we are more connected than ever before, people are feeling more alone. Being lonely is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of 10 cigarettes every single day. People that are alone have quicker onset of dementia. They have quicker neurological decline. Their health span is shorter. Their life span is shorter. The problem is everybody, as far as I can see, and this is the sedation hypothesis, is being sedated out of things that are good for them. What is convenient is not always what's good for you. In the same way as a child might always want to have ice cream for dinner, they need to be told that they can't. Even though they want it, it's not necessarily what's good for them. But when you create a world where convenience is paramount, when you can Uber Eats a Michelin star meal to the couch that you Amazon primed yesterday to be built by some guy that you paid for on TaskRabbit to then watch Netflix from the comfort of your home, all of this is constrained. Oh my God, you just described my last Saturday. Fuck. It's true though, you know, what I think is interesting about this conversation is how powerful all these things are, how much it can even creep into someone's life who's aware of it. Correct. I mean, we talk about this stuff all the time and it's like, man, it's wild to me how easily you can get kind of roped into it. We're social creatures at the very least. You have to be around people. In fact, it's been acknowledged as a cruel form of punishment that you isolate someone, like you capture a prisoner in war. It's the worst thing that you could do to them. It's to put them alone, you know? That's considered cruel and unusual punishment and in major world countries have said we will not do that if we go to war to each other's, you know, captured enemies. So it's pretty wild. I did read that talking with people online gives you the same dopamine as meeting them in person, but what you lack is the oxytocin. So you get the dopamine, which is the driver, but you lack the oxytocin. So it's like, you get a drug. It's like getting high from a drug versus getting high from doing something physical and active. The work isn't there and the meaning isn't there. And so it's just a hit of dopamine. So in essence, it is what you're saying to dating, I think is the best word. It's like we're satisfying the driver. So we'll lose the driver, but we're not getting what we really need. And without the driver, we'll never get what we really need. Yeah, and with that titrated dose, it's enough to just keep people comfortably numb, but it's not enough to actually motivate them to go and do something. So I learned about this concept called the region beta paradox last year and the region beta paradox. Imagine that if you were going to go somewhere, you would walk if it was less than a mile. I just shared this with you guys. But you would drive if it was a mile or greater, right? Paradoxically, what that means is that you would drive somewhere, drive two miles quicker than you would walk one mile. Now the problem that you have is that if people can get themselves into a situation where things aren't quite that bad, that it'll activate them to get out the bottom, they're comfortably numb. They're in this region beta in the middle. So you could imagine someone that's in a relationship, it's not abusive, it's not that bad, but it doesn't fire them up. They've probably settled or someone lives in an apartment where the landlord isn't that much of a dick, but there's maybe a bit of mold and maybe it's a bit expensive and it's a rough area of town. All of these people would actually be better off if their situations were worse because it would motivate them to do something about it and come out of the bottom. If your situation is good, fantastic, good for you, if your situation is bad, okay, you're going to do something to change it. If your situation is just about passable, this is how you end up being comfortably numb and that's the sedation in the middle. And I think that a lot of people, whether they know it or not, they just feel like life is kind of here. It's just this sort of gray vanilla pumped into them kind of dopamine flex up and down throughout the day. They don't really know what's going on. They're not super connected to the things around them. They don't feel awed, they don't feel dread. They don't feel a massive amount of fear, but they don't feel a massive amount of joy and this is the world that's being created at the moment. I mean, this is like fucking super blackpilled stuff, right? Like it's not exactly being the most positive vibe so far. However, here's the fucking thing that I would say, in order to transcend your programming, you have to become aware of it. And the choice that you have when it comes to happiness in life is between becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. The only way that you can get past this stuff, it is we are in uncharted territory here, folks. No one has been here before. The ease of access to dopamine, the lack of connection between humans. No one's been here before. In order for you to deal with this problem, you have to first become aware of it. What you're talking about right now is one of the things or one of the main reasons that we attribute to the rise in the Spartan races and these things were, and you see a lot of these guys online now that are selling these groups where they go, guys are young men are paying thousands of dollars to get beat up for a week. Punched in the face and basically like Navy SEAL selection. And so this is what we attribute to that is that we have this desire for struggle and to go through these things and everyone I agree with you is at this kind of even kill. Think about the fucking proliferation of ice tubs. We have one here. But what are you doing? You're saying my life is so comfortable day to day that I have to go out of my way to buy a $5,000 custom piece of equipment in order to be able to artificially inject some difficulty into my existence. That's what's happening. Your life has become so comfortable and convenient that you have to create a room in which heavy things are attached to a long thin thing and then you have to pick it up and put it down because you have to pick up and put down nothing else in your life. That's what's happening. People are artificially re-engineering the stuff that you would have naturally done as a course throughout your entire day and they're having to do it in little blocks. I mean, I've seen this with the creation of gyms and getting rid of a lot of manual labor and hard tasks. I mean, isn't this where it's just gonna get more crazy with AI and everything, solving all these other problems of struggle. So where do you see us being able to address this in another form? It's fucking difficult, man. I mean, the AI thing is terrifying. Hey, are you going down the rabbit hole or chat GBT yet? Yes. Have you guys spoken about it much? Oh, yes. It's been the high topic for like the last couple months, man. Okay. Yeah, I've called it a genie. Let's say at some point everyone's gonna have a genie and be able to get whatever they want. That's terrifying. I mean, if you think that social media at the moment is bad, wait until almost all of it is not only driven to you by algorithms that know exactly what to give you, but it's written by algorithms that know exactly what to say. Within the next 10 years, over 90% of content that's produced on the internet won't be even made by humans. At least at the moment when you read something that's either useless or interesting and you regret reading it afterwards, at least you know that someone somewhere wrote it. But imagine when it's become automated. Imagine when the content that you read on the internet has become automated and then imagine when they can deep fake videos of people. So I was with Tom Billu yesterday. They're training an equivalent of chat GBT on every conversation that he's ever had on everything that he's ever written so that you can have a permanent, virtual avatar of Tom in the metaverse that you can go and have a conversation with at all times and it'll accurately tell you what time it is. So I'm like, hang on. If it's more you than you are or if it knows everything that you've ever said, like what use are you now? What does that even mean to be you? If I can have a permanent 24 seven, unlimitedly scalable, every single person that wants to have a podcast. Hey, come and do a podcast with Chris. Come and do a podcast with virtual Chris, Chris AI. Come and do that. Fucking terrifying. Now, there's an article from a friend that I want everybody to go and check out. It's by a Gwinda Bogle on a substack, gowinda.substack.com and it's about TikTok. So I pulled up. Oh, I think I saw this. Yeah, it's fucking terrifying. I read half of it and I had to stop. It's pretty bad. So in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they wanted most, the top answer amongst Chinese kids was astronaut. Yeah. And the top answer amongst American kids was influencer. There is a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain's gray matter, and digital dementia, an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem and impulse control, the last of which increases addiction. Indeed, many habitual TikTokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that's come to be known as TikTok brain. If the signs are becoming apparent already, imagine what TikTok addiction will have done to a new developing brains a generation from now. TikTok's capacity to both stupefy people acutely by encouraging idiotic behavior, like getting people to drink bleach out of a toilet, which actually happened. Eat typods. Correct, yeah, which gave people brain damage. So you've got acute stupidity and then you've got chronic stupidity through atrophying the brain. This should prompt consideration of its potential use as a new kind of weapon, one that seeks to neutralize enemies not by inflicting pain and terror, but by inflicting pleasure. Last month, FBI Director Christopher Ray Wanda TikTok is controlled by a Chinese government that could use it for influence operations. So how likely is it that one such influence operation might include addicting young Westerners to a mind-numbing content to create a generation of nincompoops? It's happening. Well, universities, how many universities are already banning it now? UT-Austin's banned it on campus. Yeah, there's a handful. We would use it. Our CIA would use it. So of course they're gonna use it on us. You know what this makes me think is two things. One is that we think we know what we want, but we really don't know what the hell that we want. And so we're getting everything that we want, but it's not really what we need. And then two is humans fundamentally don't understand that there's a trade. They think if they get this thing that there's no potential trade. So I'll give you an example. If you look at the statistics on kids today, they're having less unprotected sex, less sex. They're doing less drugs. They're having less risky behavior. That's great. But what's on the other end of that is more anxiety and more depression, more loneliness, less connection, right? So we tend to forget that or not realize that there's a trade. Like, you know, we work in the health space, right? We don't have to break our backs working. So it's not hard physical labor. We can, you know, nobody starves anymore. Food is really accessible and easy. And we've engineered to make it super desirable and tasty. All sounds great, except on the other end of that is obesity and chronic health problems. So it's as if we, it's like a lesson we have to keep learning. We want this thing and we don't realize that when we get it, there's a trade-off. And the trade-off to all of this, because look, I can stay in my house alone and I definitely won't get into a car accident, for sure. Or I can get my car and try and drive around and meet people and my car accident risks, skyrockets in comparison. So there's always gonna be a trade and the trade is the tough part. We don't realize that. We think this is better, so it's better. But there's a trade and right now we're experiencing the other end of what we're getting. And the other end is loneliness, anxiety, depression, or listless, you know? Now, you made, earlier you brought something up, you said we're comfortable enough that we don't want to make any change. So we gotta get worse. Maybe that's the good thing. Maybe we're getting to the point where it's worse. Like for example, there's groups, we talked about pornography earlier, there's groups on the internet of guys that's like no fap. Like, oh, we avoid, that happened spontaneously from young men who saw what pornography was doing to them and they all decided themselves. This was not government controlled, their school didn't do it, it wasn't their parents. It was them saying, I'm gonna quit porn. One of the problems that you have with no fap is that people become obsessed about fapping. They do. So no fap is as obsessive around fapping as someone that is pathologically touching themselves. Like they're constantly thinking about it. And I've not been a part of the no fap community, but Hamza, who's a good mate who kind of taps into this Gen Z young men's space, says that there are huge, huge swaths of guys that feel completely disgusted themselves because they touch their penis. Like if you break your fap streak, you just feel like a total piece of shit. You're totally worthless. So classic overcorrection. Correct, yes, yes, yes, it's this binary thinking nothing can be in the gray area. But dude, I mean, would I rather somebody obsess over their personal development and fear touching their penis compared with spending two hours a day watching porn? Fucking hell, I mean, that's a pretty difficult, like both of them sound like a kind of hell to me. So yeah, it's a difficult one. And then when you think about how super convenient life has become for everybody, it doesn't surprise me that people aren't bothering to go out. I mean, talk about another overcorrection. Me too, what it did downstream from that, which was a needed policy to bring powerful men to account for the way that they were using power to leverage women into doing things that they didn't want sexually. But now there are huge, huge numbers of young men that are so terrified to go up to a girl in the gym or in a bar that nobody is even approaching anyone. 86% of women say that they want their male partner to make the first move. But a huge cohort of men are so terrified of being called a creep. I was out in London a little while ago with a friend, young guy, successful dude, big on YouTube. And we'd finished having dinner and he was boring me and there was a group of girls over the far side. And I was like, hey, why don't we go over and say hello to that group of girls? And he looked at me like I'd suggested that we go over and like strangle them and put them into a body bag. He's like, you're not being serious. He's like, yeah? He's like, dude, I have been told never, ever to approach a girl in a club for any reason at all. I'm like, holy shit. What happened? Overcorrection yet again. And that's the thing like anybody on the internet that wants to kind of get a rallying cry is like make women feel safe. Like that's an easy cause to get behind, right? But also like make women feel safe and have some men approach them that they're attracted to so maybe they can get into a relationship. Like blending those two worlds together is actually kind of difficult. It's very difficult where like it doesn't fit into a tweet. No, you ever seen that skit with Tom Brady? I think it was on SNL. I don't remember, but it was like, this is sexual harassment. And it says like unattractive guy and he's like, hey, you look pretty today. She's like, oh my God. And then Tom Brady shows up and he like smacks her on the bunch. And he's like, ooh, you know, it was just this hilarious skit that kind of showed the challenge with it. Obviously it's comedy, so it's a little extreme, but interesting. So do you see light at the end of the tunnel? Because I do also see people who through technology, you mentioned a few people that have been on your show that I don't think would have gotten traction without the internet, without podcasts. For example, Jordan Peterson wouldn't have gotten any traction and he's done some good stuff. Do you see the light at the end of the tunnel? Because I also, on the other hand, see people who are saying stuff like you're saying, listening to your show, who are reaching out and saying, you know what, I do need challenge. I do need struggle. Wow, maybe I do need to go make things hard for myself or go meet people or try to grow. Like, what does that look like to you? The internet has created both good and bad things. And what we're trying to do is create a world in which we can have all of the good without any of the bad. That's what we're working toward, right? Yeah, I mean, it's helped people, that helped people reach those people. You know, the humans of the world, a guy that essentially came out of this sort of dusty old lab in Stanford and within the space of whatever, two or three years, he's probably the number one health and fitness podcast in the world. Just relaying an endless list of interesting shit that people can use to make their lives better. That wouldn't be facilitated without the internet. Can you have both the good and the bad? That's the balance that everybody's trying to strike at the moment. I don't know, what do you think? Yeah, I think it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets a lot better. But I do see, the problem is historically... The optimistic view is that things happen and travel so fast now that these overcorrections seem to be crazier in school, but they get balanced faster too. So I feel like, I mean, even, I know we haven't touched this third rail yet either, but I mean, I feel like I'm starting to see a rise in religion again, where I felt like just a decade ago, we were on the complete opposite track. What's that denomination of Christianity that's all done in Latin? Oh, well, there's a form of Catholicism that's done. What's that one called? I think, I'm not quite sure. Sheila Boe, if I think was talking about going to Mass where it was all done in Latin. Definitely be the same one. So it's the fastest growing sect or whatever like subversion of Christianity. I don't know though. And then the whole service is done in Latin. Yes. Yeah, Sheila Boe talked about that. He talked about it and he talked about, and it makes sense as to why it would be appealing. It's like the more things seem structuralists and crazy, the more we're gonna want the structure and the rules and the ritual. So to me, that seems quite obvious. Yeah, it's so strange, man. I mean, think about how idealistic and progressive and smart and clever and rational and scientific. It seemed 20 years ago to listen to Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris just tear down some religious zealot that didn't know what they were talking about. And then you roll the clock forward a little bit now and Douglas Murray, who was a good friend, who wrote a book that was very critical of a bunch of different religions, then wrote a book called The Madness of Crowds that was fundamentally based on the collapse of grand narratives. His concern was that there are no more grand narratives that bind us all together as a country. And it's like, okay, how much baby has been thrown out with the bathwater here? Like it's really, really evident. Religion independently arose all over the world, right? Why? Well, it has to serve some sort of adaptive purpose. It has to be useful to people. And- I also wouldn't have lasted that many years. Precisely. But I mean, think about the fucking rise of stoicism, man. Stoicism is modern secular religion for people that don't wanna have to believe in a higher power. So true. Right? Yoga is exactly the same thing. Psychedelic, psychedelic culture. The religion of Austin, where I'm from, is exactly precisely, you know? There was a cool meme I saw the other day that said, men will literally fly to Columbia to drink Amazonian mud rather than go to therapy. That was what it was. So it's so funny you touched on that. And it's funny that you're pointing out Austin because that was where we were in our experience of this was almost what, seven years ago, when we started to get connected to more influential people in the fitness space. And there's this big movement in the fitness space around the Ayahuasca and the psychedelics and everything like that. And it's, from a kid who grew up in a very religious home, it's just, to me, it's just religion packaged differently. Correct, yeah. It feels the exact same way when you're around all that. But it's interesting. It's like we have this desire, we're searching for it. So whether you believe in a higher power or you wanna say you're atheist, you still, we still have this natural thing that we gravitate. If you feel more comfortable saying crystals and Mother Ayahuasca, but- In the universe. Yeah, in the universe. Correct, yeah. I mean, even roll it forward into the fitness world, right? Like CrossFit. CrossFit, you'll have like sermon Sundays is a non-ironic type of workout that a bunch of places do. Friday night lights. What is it? It's ritualistic, you know? You have the guy that stood at the front that's preparing what's going to go on. You have reverence, you have silence, you have all the rest of it. Like people are repurposing this kind of structure into a bunch of different ways. What is your personal journey been like for that? Or did you grow up religious? Do you believe in God? Where are you at with that? And how has your journey been like that? Very secular upbringing. The northeast of the UK, the UK in general is ahead of America in terms of being non-religious. So I really hesitate to use the spiritual but not religious crowd. However, I'm interested. I'm open to the idea that there might be more going on than I can see with my own two eyes, but I don't have any proof for it yet. So tell me how that has, how that's come to be for you? Cause if you come from a place that is very secular, I'm imagining that you probably would have claimed that you were atheist in your younger years and now you're a little more open to that. So where did that transition happen for you? That would probably be about correct. I think I don't have, so atheist is having an active belief that there is no God, right? And the difference between that and agnostic is, I don't know. There's this line from Angels and Demons by Dan Brown and Tom Hanks is in the movie and he's speaking to Ewan McGregor who's the acting camera lingo and he wants to get into the Vatican archives. He wants to get down there to find something at Da Vinci Road or Michelangelo or whatever cause it's going to tell him where the next clue is. And he's trying to convince Ewan McGregor's character to let him down there. And the Camelango turns to him and he says, do you believe professor? And he gives some like wishy-washy wanky answer where he's trying to evade what's said. He said, I didn't ask you that. I asked if you believed. And Tom Hanks turns and looks straight at Ewan McGregor and he goes, faith is a gift that I'm yet to be given. And I fucking love that line. I absolutely love that line. I don't think that most people who are convinced of a higher power of religion, of the ideology that's behind it, would discount it, especially not now, especially when we have this lack of meaning, this dearth of existential crisis and stuff like that. I think people would be pretty happy to accept that. I think that would be something that would be pretty cool for them. But there is this sort of scientism, rationalist approach is creating a very high bar for people to have this proved to them. So for me, my mom is a Reiki master of 20 years. So she spent a long, long time doing distant healing crystals, all that sort of stuff. And I enjoy hearing her talk through her stuff. I don't know how much of that I fully subscribe to, but I enjoy the process of it. I enjoy hearing her talk with reverence about the practices that she goes through and stuff like that. So yeah, for me, I was never like a card-carrying atheist. I thought it was cool to be like all cynical and kind of staunch and rational and stuff. I thought that it was a bit of intellectual posturing, probably, that this seems like I'm real rational and I'm not gonna believe with these hokey kind of stories about fucking. Which is probably why you were attracted like a Sam Harris type of podcaster. Yeah, although even with Sam, dude, the stuff that I love to do with him was to do with the nature of your own mind. And he's got this amazing talk called Death and the Present Moment. It's an hour long. It's like 12 years old. And people should go and check it out on YouTube after they've finished with this podcast. It's just outstanding. He just explains that a lot of your life is going to be spent waiting for the next moment to come. And when that moment finally comes, you'll realize that it was the moment ready for your death. People are always looking past the present moment's shoulder, just peering past it to see what's coming next. And you will realize when someone that you care about dies or you get sick or someone close to you get sick, that you wasted your time thinking and worrying about things that ultimately didn't make any difference to you. And we all know that this is coming. We are all able to prepare ourselves for this to happen. And yet people don't decide to fix it. So that for me was like, where Sam really came into his own. But with the religion thing, man, I'm perfectly open and I've been meaning to go to one of these Latin mass things that a bunch of different friends I play pickleball with go to and they've been singing the praises of it in Latin. And yeah, I think that it's something that more and more people are going to lean into now. Yeah, atheists or real atheists are actually closer to believing in God than people who just don't think about it at all. Cause real atheists is constantly thinking about, I was an atheist for a long time. And it was something that I pondered and thought about and that's how I got to that point. Think about how that relates to nofap. Yeah, it's just extreme. Correct, it's the obsession. It's the inversion of the obsession. But it brought me, because I thought about it, I was doing more than a lot of people which is they don't think about it at all. Correct. What's the difference between wisdom and knowledge? Wisdom's in the title of your podcast. You talk about that. What is wisdom? Wisdom would be knowledge applied for me. So a good definition of wisdom would be something like understanding the outcomes of your actions, being able to accurately predict what's going to happen based on what you do. Knowledge would simply be an understanding of the actions and what they mean. And I think trying to understand myself in the world around me was a question that I asked myself a lot. You know, guys, I call it the manopause. Guys get toward the end of their 20s and they're like, fucking, what's going on here? All of the values, all the things that I thought and was told I should really take pride in throughout most of my 20s, they just really don't seem to be serving me. And they changed their training style. Like how many guys that are on a push-pull leg split or like five by five or like German volume training or whatever doing a bro thing up until 25, 26, 27. And then they go, do you know what it is, man? I can't touch my toes and I get out of breath going up a set of stairs. I really should start doing yoga or CrossFit or fighting or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or whatever. And it's just this period. That was the fitness manopause that then transcended into the manopause to me. And I think that as that gets thrown up in the air, you become a little bit more aware of like, is this really what I want to be doing? Does it is the peak of my life to get a bag in with the boys on a weekend? Like, is that really what I want to do? And wisdom for me is about understanding yourself and the world around you, understanding how your actions will have outcomes in the real world. Knowledge, you need to spend that time absorbing it. But I mean, everybody has a friend that's smart, but not wise, right? Everybody has a friend that's smart, but not wise. We're going to have a lot more of them with chat GBT in the direction. Virtual people that are smart, but not wise. A lot of people that have all the answers. Yes. Well, that would be stupid, but not wise. I don't think they're even going to be smart. By extension, I mean, if you consider your chat GBT or AI as an extension of you, you'll have all the knowledge you want, but zero wisdom. And zero knowledge. Yeah. Yeah. At least in yourself. I mean, I was on the plane coming over here last night and I was sat next to this guy and we were trying to remember a movie that Bruce Willis had been in. And I caught myself saying, fucking, what was that movie? Was it Unbreakable or Glass? The one where it was with Samuel L. Jackson and the guy had like real brittle bones. Unbreakable. Thank you. But I was like, what the fuck's that? What the fuck's the movie called? And I was like, this is why we need Wi-Fi. And they're like, oh, you've just outsourced part of your brain to the internet. Yeah. How many phone numbers do you remember? None. I can remember my parents' home phone number, which is just a world that they never moved. And I can remember mine and I can remember my old business partners. And the only reason for that is because the number of times that I've hit voicemail with him. And I can only say it to myself if I go like, oh, double seven, nine, five, three, double eight. Like I didn't fucking do it in the cadence that the lady on the fucking phone did. But yeah, the wisdom thing, people want answers. They want to understand how to live a good life, what it is that they should focus on. And that was the main reason that I started my show. And that was the reason that every time I sit down with the Jordan Peterson or whatever, I've had him on the show twice and he's become a good friend. Every time I speak to him, I don't want to talk about cultural stuff. I don't want to talk about sports illustrated models. I don't want to talk about like Canada, Justin Trudeau's new overreach of whatever it is. That's sure that they're important conversations for Jordan to have in his own time. I want him to help me deal with the existential weight of existing because that was the problem that I struggled with toward the end of my 20s. So for me, getting that knowledge, putting it into practice, understanding your outcomes, understanding yourself in the world around you, wisdom. So being as, I guess aware as you are because you obviously are very aware. How was the last few years for you looking at the, just how people behave, the behaviors, the fears, the, you know, just were you like, like, like for me, looking at the whole thing and going through it, I just couldn't believe the insanity and how crazy it got. Were you in the same position? Were you going through it going, okay, is this, at some point people are like, that's enough. Or were you just like, well, it's human behavior. It's probably gonna get much worse. Good question. So I really didn't get too emotionally invested in any of what happened between 2020 and now, at least with regards to the response to the pandemic. It was the first time in my adult life that I had a stable sleep and wake pattern ever, right? Because I was working until three or four in the morning, two or three nights a week for forever. So I got to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. And I was like, what the fuck is going on? So I used the pandemic probably quite selfishly to just better myself. I spent a lot of time doing meditation, doing reading, growing the show. I stepped up the show from two a week to three a week, which I've now maintained even though the pandemic is over, I figured that people would be more alone or whatever. And even my like poultry audience that I had at the time, I was like, look, I can do something to help people. But I really quite fortunately managed to avoid having my brain turned inside out by anything that was going on. Sure, I didn't want to be told by Boris Johnson three days before Christmas that I wasn't supposed to go home to see my parents, right? I'd ruptured my achilles. I had a full achilles detachment during that summer. So I was already in like a bit of a, like a no down place. I didn't want to hear that, but I was really, really happy with how I didn't let those things get to me. Now, some people perhaps rightly might say, well, that's because you didn't like put your money where your mouth is and you didn't stand for something or whatever. It's like, I did other stuff. I supported people with interesting conversations that distracted them away from it. There were enough people talking about that over the last few years. They didn't need another person going, like putting my completely uneducated, completely unprofessional opinion in, just like horse shitting my way through like hot takes to do with stuff. I wasn't prepared to put the work in to get myself to the requisite amount of knowledge, to be able to have an opinion that I would feel comfortable standing behind. If only everybody thought like that. You actually did the right thing. You focused on making yourself better. If everybody did that. I mean, that's what Jordan Pierce would say, right? You cleaned your own room. So telling everybody else what they need to do. Douglas Murray, I was in New York with him last year and he was saying to me, I mentioned why he hadn't really commented on COVID all that much. And we sat there, it's like two in the morning in New York and he's drinking a Manhattan. He said, you know what it is, Christopher? I did something which is very rare in the online world now, which is not to contribute to something which I know nothing about. And you think, fuck yeah. Like one of the problems that we have in the modern world with hot takes coming from everybody and with this ubiquity of ease of access to give opinions is that everybody believed that they're supposed to have an opinion on everything. It's like, bro, I really, really love the way that you can talk about personal development and mindset. I don't respect or care about your opinion on Ukraine, right? Why, what makes you think like, is it that you're not supposed to have an opinion on stuff? No, obviously not. But let's leave it to the global policy experts, right? Let's leave it to the people that understand international relations and like Cold War warfare and game theory and systems theory and shit like that. Like that's for them to do. You can have your little hot take or whatever, but don't make it your new hill to die on unless you're prepared to go through all of the requisite work to get there. But the problem that you have is people very much are their opinions now, right? Yeah. Like in a world where your words are more important than your deeds because nobody sees your deeds but everybody sees your words, you are your opinions. The problem is that there's precious few original thinkers in the world. So what happens is a large cohort of people repurpose opinions from whoever their favorite thought leader is. So you could argue that the culture war is largely two armies of NPCs being ventriloquized by a handful of original thinkers, right? You have these guys at the top, they repurpose opinions down to all of these people below and then they just spew them back out. Yeah, and what's the worst part about that is when you become your opinion, changing your opinion is death. So you're stuck, you're literally stuck. It's so hard to, and I see this with people now with what's happened and information changes and they just, they can't possibly change their opinion because it changes everything. Well, who am I then? And it's like killing myself. Dude, that's such an amazing point. I talk about this all the time and you're so right. The fact that your side sees an absurd ideological belief as a show of fealty, right? I can imagine how ancient tribes and ancient armies and stuff would have to show fealty to their local king or lord or baron or whatever, right? What you're doing when you take on an absurd belief is saying I value adherence to the group ideology over what my own eyes and ears tell me. That I will push aside rationality and reality in order to show to you that I believe whatever it is. If for instance, somebody is adamant that everything is cis hetero patriarchal superstructures misogynistically keeping everybody down, despite the fact that it doesn't really say, oh, somebody believes that the world is the worst that it's ever been despite every objective metric that we care about showing that that's not the case, right? What you're saying is I'm prepared to push reality to one side to show my fealty to this particular belief. What that means is that other members of the group can see you as a reliable ally. Well, if this person is prepared to fucking not see what's evidently in front of them, we probably don't need to worry or scrutinize about them with anything else. So it's loyalty displayed to your own side and it's a threat displayed to your enemies. It's like, oh, you think that you're gonna convince me with that, this is how certain I am of my stance. And the problem that you have is twofold. If you do decide to have a non-typical opinion or some sort of nuance, by the other side, it's seen as a chink in your armor. It's seen as a weakness in terms of your adherence to the group. And by your own group, it's seen as a lack of loyalty. So there is very, very few incentives for people to not just adhere wholesale. There's a term for those people. They're called useful idiots. The greatest criticism you'll get, and I mean, the most heat you'll get if you change your opinion on something or it's from the group that you're originally aligned with. So you see some political commentary all the time where somebody's on one side and then they go against their side on one topic, destroyed, it completely destroys them. And that's the biggest fear that we have is to be ostracized by our group because for all the human history that meant death. If you got up and said something to your tribe and everybody didn't like what you had to say, you're out and you're dead. Well, if you know one opinion that a person holds and from that one opinion, you can accurately predict everything else that they believe. They're not a serious thinker, right? If I know your stance on abortion and from it, I know your stance on immigration and gun rights and the First Amendment and the Second Amendment and on taxation and on capitalism and on all the way down. But you've just taken this cookie cutter pre-prescribed like onesie outfit, right? Zipped it up and gone like, hey, that's me. No, everybody is so idiosyncratic. Or they should be. I mean, there are some people out there. I'm sure there happens to be some people that just land perfect slap bang in the middle of Republican or Democrat beliefs, Christian or Mormon or whatever it is, right? And they just, that happens to be genuinely where they come from. But for the most part, it's not, right? For the most part, somebody should be like pro-gun but a pro-choice, let's say. That would be something that wouldn't necessarily. Yeah, and they're even, it's like they have nothing to do with each other. And yet you would find that you could probably accurately predict that somebody who's pro-choice is for lots of gun control. Which, and those are two topics that don't seem to be connected. It is very interesting. It feels like it's going to implode eventually because of that, because you have to believe that at least a large percentage of those people that are putting that onesie on deep down don't really believe they should be wearing that. You know what though? What I think when I look at it all is just it's human behavior and human behavior doesn't change. Our environment changes, technology changes, circumstances may change, but our behaviors remain the same. And unless we're aware of our tendencies, then it's just going to fall. I mean, you know, people look back. I mean, how many times have you heard people say, oh, if I lived in Nazi Germany, I totally would have rebelled and fought. No, you wouldn't. You would have been like 99.9% of everybody. Hard carrying Nazi along with the rest of them. Yeah, like everybody else. Like most people would have been doing that. Or if I lived in the Soviet Union, no. You wouldn't be in the gulags. You wouldn't be doing exactly what they told you. It's all human behavior. So in my opinion, the key is to, you have to constantly become aware, rise up, be objective, have discussions. Otherwise you will fall back and you, me included, you will fall back into human behavior. It's just the way we're wired. It's wild that you can have truth and accuracy in an individual, but lies and falsehoods in a group. Because group dynamics cause people to compromise on something that they know individually. Proven, by the way, this is proven. Studies have shown this time and time again that group think mob psychology is very different from an individual. It's very strange. Well, they brought us, they did a study in a classroom, a university classroom, which you might be familiar with, where they asked students to put their hands up based on which line they thought was shorter between a choice of three. And everybody else except for maybe one person or a couple of people in the class were plants that were all saying that an evidently longer line was shorter. And sure enough, people just fucking, am I missing something? Yeah, it's okay, there we are. And the hand goes up. That's like the one, the other study where they have them waiting outside in a waiting room. Oh, it's a doctor's office. And then there's all, they're like 80% of them are plants and so that you, like a bell goes off and they all stand up, you know? And so then before, you just do it. Like how crazy is that? The one Justin brought up was the elevator where everybody's facing in one direction, single file line and people walk in I guess we're all looking in this direction. Yeah, you know, evolutionarily speaking, there was, I mean, all of these behaviors had, you know, some purpose, right? And evolutionarily speaking, when you, you know, we lived in tribes for mostly human history. I mean, it makes sense. Self preservation. You gotta do what everybody else does because you don't know that there's a snake over there or there's a lion or there's gonna be, you know, a ditch that you're gonna fall in. But with large societies, this can become toxic and poisonous. And easily manipulative. Very easily manipulated. Chris, I'm gonna change directions. You have a long history of fitness and exercise. You've mentioned earlier in the podcast, splits and five by five. So you have some knowledge with exercise. You're very growth-minded. What role for you does fitness play in all of that? And has how you view fitness and exercise for yourself, has that changed through that process? Like, was it for one thing before and now something totally different? Correct, that would be right, yes. So as most guys, I'm 18 years old, I'm super, super skinny and I'm 63 kilos. I don't know what that is in your money. It's like 130 pounds. Yeah, super, super small, right? When I get to uni and I wanted to be more attractive to girls, I wanted to feel more confident. So I started training just total bro split and this is what, 2006, 2007. So this is like even before the bodybuilding.com forums or maybe just at the very, very beginning of that. So it was like the Wild West. No one knew what they were doing. No one knew what a macro was. This was before if it fits your macros, right? So I had no idea. So it's just, you go in, you left things, you like eat a lot of Subway and hope for the best. I remember one of my housemates was adamant that like breaded chicken Goujons were the best way to get protein in. So, and then I just kept training and I was training for the way that I looked very much so. And then that carried me through a good way. Accumulated a good amount of size, pretty like relatively quickly. I remember the day that I broke 70 kilos, I was like 21 or something. And I was like, wow, like I'm massive, 71, 71 kilos. 71 kilos is fucking huge. And yeah, I just kept on going, kept on going. And then it got towards maybe 24, 25. And I was just a bit sick. I was kind of bored of doing more bro split type stuff. So I went on to do tieboxing, why tie went out to Thailand and fought out there, which was fun. Then came back, did some more boxing stuff, got into CrossFit 2000 and sort of 16, 17. And the change, what do you ever wanna say? Like philosophically, was that previously it was something I did to just look good, whereas now it's something that I do to feel good. And I still want the byproduct of looking good from it, but I just didn't care how I felt previously. If I was jacked but felt like shit, that was worth it. And it didn't care what my blood sugar was doing. It didn't care about how I was performing mentally. Whereas for me now, my main pursuit is the podcast, right? I want to be as dialed in as possible mentally for the podcast and whatever can support that is good and the gym supports it. Yeah, fitness has a, you mentioned this earlier too about Sunday sermons and there is, when you interviewed Bishop Baron a while ago, he's a Catholic Bishop, very smart man. And I asked him some questions about other religions. He says, you know, there's spiritual truth and lots of different practices. And after that podcast, I thought, I think there's some spiritual truth in fitness, not necessarily because you're seeking spiritual enlightenment, but because the discipline and the process of it. I mean, the squat rack has been called the altar, right? Go to the altar of the squat rack or, you know, gym is my church. There's definitely some spiritual truth. And I think you figure this out after doing it for a long time. Cause we all started like you did, you know, wanted to look good, but you stick to it long enough and it kind of becomes this like practice. It's almost like this spiritual practice. Have you found it to be kind of a way for? We have rituals around it as well, right? This is why I've always struggled to train in the house. So we've got a ton of stuff in the garage where me and my housemate live, but there's something about getting in the car with your boy and your pre-workout or you knock over, kill cliff, whatever you're drinking, putting the music on, arriving at the gym, putting your bag down, speaking to the receptionist. It's ritualistic, you know? It's part, you do it usually at the same time each day, there is a prescription. So yeah, I mean, it's very transcendent. That being said, since I've been in Austin, I have become the equivalent of polyamorous with my gym memberships. So this is a hack. You're not monogamous with your non-monogamous gym memberships, yes, correct. This is a fucking great hack and it only really works if you're in a place that's got a ton of good gyms, but I must have, I think I've got three or four different gym memberships now. Great fitness community out there. Fucking phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. So LiftATX, great gym, indoor, outdoor, garage, old school style, bodybuilding gym, but a really good split of guys to girls, which makes you feel a little bit less like, I don't know, in-celly by going there. Do you know what I mean? Like you go into a bodybuilding gym and there's like half a woman in there and you think like, oh God, like this is, you go in there and it's a good split of guys and girls. Gold's gym I use if I'm prepping for a guest and I just want like a quiet session where I can just chug away and do bits and pieces. On it is really, really fun. They've got a ton of unorthodox equipment in there, reverse hypers, belt squats, all sorts of fun shit. Kettlebells. Yeah, exactly. So having a bunch of different gym memberships is a hack. If somebody's feeling like their training is falling off a little bit at the moment, I would highly recommend just switching the facility that you go to. And that's been really good for me to have different locations for different types of days that I want to go to. And especially in Austin, membership aren't that much, like 40 bucks, 50 bucks a month. You can accumulate this for the price of one bigger name, one like in a lifetime fitness or whatever. You can accumulate all this. Adam did this. I shared this hack. I used to have like depending on where I was in in my training cycle, where my mindset is, like it would, I would choose the gym based off of that. It's like, oh yeah, I need to be more in, I think more inward. I'm going to be going to this place. It's so quiet, it's an older population. I like going there for that. I sit in the sauna afterwards. Oh, I got to get after it. The golds, Bernal's got all the competitors. I need someone to push me and see someone else lifting heavy. So I love that. I think it's a great hack to bounce around all of it. I like the old dungeons. That's my favorite kind of workout. I like to go in and feel, I don't like it to be too new. I mean, I work out in a gym now that's like that because it's accessible and convenient. But if I had a choice and I have four kids and I have work and I could just go pick, I would drive to an old, dark, Dungey, chalk filled dungeon. That just feels- Yeah, you know, like Dorian Yates, you ever watch his old videos of him working out and not. Yeah, like that, that was a basement. He worked out, there was no windows in that. I don't know if people knew that or not, but he actually had to go downstairs. Blood and Guts, that series. Yeah, that's a great, you know, and I really want to work out in a place like that. Come on, Diesel! Come on, Diesel! Let's get business! Fucking epic, bro. There's never been another training vlog like that again. Every single YouTuber has tried to recreate Dorian Yates' Blood and Guts training vlog and everybody's fallen short. The intensity in those is just palpable and original. You can't watch that. Everyone needs that guy as their training partner. Squeeze it in! Fucking epic. Yeah, you gotta watch that. If anyone hasn't seen that. Blood and Guts on YouTube. You mentioned your housemate. Is that your business partner? No, no. So business partner, me and Dorian, my previous business partner have partied ways because I exited the club stuff. So he took back all of the share. I worked an exit from that last year. He's absolutely flying. I caught up with him over Christmas. We're still best friends. I live with Zach Talander, weightlifting YouTuber. Oh, okay. You know him? Coach ZT. He's phenomenal as well. He's a big stiff idiot, but he's great. And we very much get on. What I like about America is the positivity and kind of the outgoing extraversion that just seems to be a bit more than it is in the UK. And he has been a very good counterbalance to my British stoicism. Let me ask you about that. So my wife's family is from England and one of my best friends was from the UK. And one thing I appreciate, especially one of my best friends, what I appreciate so much is your sense of humor. And you, I mean, you guys basically fuck with each other. Like you just did it right now. You were just talking about your housemate and you had to throw in- He's a big stiff idiot. He's a big stiff idiot. Yeah, he is. I feel like there's some value in that because here it's like rude to do that or people don't get it all the time. I mean, my friend, his name is bad. It's endearing though, when you say it. Oh, he used to say, oh my God, he used to call me all kinds of shit and just talk. And it was great. I absolutely loved it. Yeah, it keeps people down to earth. So this, this like a little bro sciencey theory that I've come up with about the way that the UK and the US differ. So tall poppy syndrome is a big deal in the UK. If you diverge from the norm, you're going to be called out quite quickly. Like if you start doing anything different in school, you're immediately going to be called gay. It's like, that's fucking gay. Like why are you trying to do that? So a different time. But people are going to point at you and say, that's something that is from the norm and it's not going to be super encouraged. What this means is as you grow up, you are kept incredibly humble by a crushing amount of piss taking, right? Now the disadvantage when you grow up is that this can lead to some quite sort of limited thinking and a little bit of a scarcity mindset. The alternative when you look at America is that there is still for all that America's the worst cis hetero country in the world, it still has a big blue sky vision, right? People believe that they can be largely whatever it is that they want to be. The American dream is still very much alive and well, I think culturally. And that means that when kids do try something new or do decide that they're going to become a business person at 12 years old or whatever, that's like applauded. That's raised up both amongst their local friends circle and online. Now the problem that they encounter when they grow up is that the world doesn't necessarily deliver to them than that which they were promised as a kid. Everybody doesn't think you're special. Correct, correct. And this is why I think that the... Just your mom. Can't be everything. The victimhood mentality in America is largely contributed to by this blue sky vision that you guys give to young people, which is not a bad thing. But if you could somehow blend the feet on the ground, spit and sodast work hard mentality that the UK has with the helicopter blue sky vision thing that the US has, I think that you end up with a really, really nice blend. And piss taking is like the enforcement mechanism that keeps people's feet on the ground. But blending that so that you don't constrain what someone believes that they can achieve is that's the delicate balance, right? The value of bullying, right, Justin? Oh, I'm listening to you. I think this is a recent phenomenon. That was definitely my experience growing up was everybody taking shots and it was very brutal. Pretty much the same. But I think I'm sure that's in pockets around the US in terms of how... I'm sure there's some positive pockets in the UK as well. Yeah, I'm sure it exists. Well, Sal has an evolutionary theory for it, right, that was important to test other men to make sure if I was gonna go to battle with you, I didn't know you could take a little insult or whatever like that. Well, my evidence for that is just look at the nicknames that men give each other versus the nicknames that women give each other. Like, I tell the story, I had a friend go into a restaurant and he was touring me around his new restaurant and I'm walking around, good friend of mine, his name is Spiro. Great guy, owns some Greek restaurants. And we're walking through and he's like, oh, this is John, this is George or Susan, that's nine over there, here's Fred. And I'm like, nine. I'm like, he doesn't look German. Like, that's weird. And he goes, no, no, no. He goes, hey, nine. And he looks over and he goes, show Sal while we call you nine. He lifts up his hands and he's missing a finger. And I thought, and I cracked up because that's how guys give each other nicknames. You know, my father-in-law, he was... It's normally after an insecurity you probably have. He was born without one eye. So he wears an eyepatch or a glass eye and his nickname, you know, with his buddies was one eye. That was his nickname. Oh yeah, one ball pat. He had testicular cancer, a terrible thing to call him. And we did... So my theory is that, and I heard Jordan Peterson kind of talk about this and it kind of strengthened. I think that men do that with each other because we evolved to hunt and go to war and do a lot of stupid shit and risk taking. And you want to mess with each other to see who's going to crack because however hard I'm going to tease you is nothing compared to when we're out there. Correct. And we're trying to, you know, hunt or go to war. Like you got to keep going. Otherwise I'm going to die. So if we poke at you now and you cry, you're not coming with us. You can stay over here. We're going to go over there and go hunt. There's a rule in intersexual competition when it comes to friendships that men will insult each other and not mean it and women will compliment each other and not mean it. That's so true. I've heard my wife say, someone will say a woman will give a compliment and then afterwards she'll be like, what a bitch. I'm like, what? She totally meant this. I'm like, she said something nice. She said she had nice hair. She's like, no, what she meant was that her hair looked shitty. So I've spent a good bit of time learning about intersexual competition. So this is how men compete with men and women compete with women. And frankly, all of us in this room should be very thankful that we're not women because female friendships are fucking vicious. They are way, way, way more vicious. Whatever you found, share some of the stuff. Fucking hell, man. So, I mean, this has been, there's two episodes that people should go and check out. Dr. Tanya Reynolds, which just came out very recently and Joyce Benenson, both of them are on the Chris Williamson YouTube or Modern Wisdom Spotify, whatever. One of the interesting ones is the effectiveness of sexual gossip that women use, right? So if you look at, on average, how men derogate each other, they will derogate each other through pokes at their level of masculinity and sexual prowess. So you'll say, like, you're a soft, small cocked bitch. Like that would be the sort of thing. I'm gonna use that. Whereas soft, small cocked bitch. Whereas if you were to look at what women will do, they will tend to derogate chastity, right? So chastity and youthfulness slash attraction. So like you're a fat slag or you're a fat whore. Like that would be where they would go. And this is so funny, right? Because it identifies just that little thought experiment. Think back to what you as a guy call your guy friends or if you were a girl, how you would insult a man that you didn't want to feel good. You would start to try and poke at his manhood and his sexual prowess. And if a guy wants to make a girl feel bad, even if it's just someone that cuts him up on the street, right? Like where's the first place that you go? If you're going to like shout an expletive at a woman, you're gonna call her like a whore or like a stupid bitch or something, right? As opposed to, so you have this side of urgent. The reason that sexual gossip is so useful is that chastity is something that men really value in women, right? They don't want a partner that is super promiscuous because male parental uncertainty, i.e. not knowing whether the kid is mine or not, means that I need to have the greater sense of loyalty and certainty that I have that this woman is not sleeping around, the more comfortable I can feel. This is why in studies they show that women would be more upset if their partners fell in love and didn't sleep with someone else and men are the opposite. Correct, that's correct, yes. And the interesting thing that you see with this sort of sexual gossip is that it is a precision targeted tool that women can use and it works within all of their intersexual competitions. So women don't want to have upfront physical violence with each other. They want to be as subtle and safe are the two things that they'll try and do. Safe as in no one can see that it's actually them that's delivered it and subtle as in it would be very hard and obvious to point out. So sexual gossip, let's say that I'm going, do you know what it is? I'm really worried about Mary. She just keeps on spending all of this time with different guys and I'm just so worried that she's going to get hurt. And I keep on asking her to go out for dinner but she keeps blowing me off for all of these different dudes and I'm just really worried about her. What she's saying is, Mary's a whore and she's sleeping around. Right? So venting is a very specific type of gossip and it is this sort of exasperated personal complaint that very subtly delivers a message about somebody else. If I say Mary's a whore and you should avoid her, that's quite open faced, right? That's neither safe nor subtle. However, if I vent, it feels like me just naturally letting go of some discomfort that's occurred. Now what it does, if you do that type of sexual gossip as a woman about another woman, it broadcasts your sexuality because you immediately- Because you're worried about it. You immediately posit yourself as, I'm worried about Mary, but me, I would never, ever consider all of these different guys to pure individual. I'm just here looking out for my friend. So first off, it broadcasts yours. Secondly, it's almost impossible to disprove. You can't run around town showing people all of the sex that you're not having. Like that's not a thing that you can do. And then finally, it really points a finger and derogates women that are the biggest competitors. So men, it seems infidelity from men is done with women that are sexually open and visually provocative. Those are the women who are precisely the easiest targets of sexual gossip because it makes sense. It's like, I don't know, does it? Maybe this girl just doesn't like wearing a lot of clothes but doesn't actually spray it around. There's been tons of girls that I've known throughout my time in nightlife who'll go out dressed provocatively, but no one ever goes home with. So it's not exactly a one-to-one correlation. But yeah, sexual gossip is just this precision targeted tool broadcasts the gossipers, sexual chastity, derogates something very important about the woman that they're talking to and also is this sort of safe and subtle thing as well. Yeah, when you have kids of both genders, you see this when they're really young. Like I remember when my older kids were younger, I'm talking like first grade and you'd see the little boys running around playing and then one boy would like push another boy down and then they cry and then the teacher would separate them and they go play again and then another boy would take something from another kid and then they'd fight and then they'd start playing again. And then I remember this like it was yesterday and then I'm looking at the little girls and there was this one little girl that the other girls weren't playing with and I walk over and I kind of listen in and I can hear these first graders, first grade and they're saying don't play with so-and-so. I don't like so-and-so, don't play with her. They had organized a group to ostracize this one little girl whereas with the boys it was like I'm gonna punch you in the face, take your stuff, teacher comes over. And then we'll be best friends after that. And then we're okay. Well, this is why male and female friendships are so fascinating in their differences that men need to be able to get on very, very quickly with other guys within that group. Yes, I need to trust you, I need to trust that you've got my back but if we're gonna, it's like me, you, grab spear, go get mammoth. Like we're gonna go take this fucking thing down together which means that you need to very quickly be able to bond together and you need to not have any underlying nasties that are lurking within this. Whereas women who would have done what's called aloe parenting like this sort of distributed shed parenting of non-kin children amongst friends, aunties, et cetera. I'll go get some berries, we'll bring them back and then you can look after the kids for a little bit and do all the rest of it. It's much more important that women know a small group of incredibly tight friends but that they ostracize the ones that aren't a part of that group. An interesting thing that you see for the denial of sex differences crowd which is just the most insane philosophy that I've ever heard. Joyce Benenson did this research where she looked at kindergarteners, so three years old-ish, three and four years old and she's observed hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours of these kids. And the girls, if you look at what the girls are doing and what the boys are doing, it is precisely getting themselves ready for the sort of roles that ancestrarily they would have done. So the boys, they will create an enemy of some kind. Maybe it's another group of boys that they're playing some sort of team sport with. Maybe it's aliens, maybe it's cowboys, maybe it's whatever. What is that? Warfare. They're practicing warfare as children, right? We will band together over the, and we will overcome an opposing tribe. If you look at what girls are doing, girls are keeping something alive. They're keeping a pretend rabbit alive, they're playing nurse, they're playing doctor, they're doing some sort of teacher role. They are keeping things alive. That's the fucking role that they're gonna grow up into and boys are- Killing something. Killing something. Killing the guns and spears. Precisely correct, yes. And you think, okay, this is at age three or four. It's cross-cultural. This is not socialization. This is what boys and girls are predisposed to do. Another really interesting thing. So the discussion about trans sports, right? Let's fucking kick this third rail. This is something that nobody ever talks about. I don't know why this is a third rail, by the way. This is so ridiculous to me, but anyway. So this is something that no one ever talks about. Everybody relies in the discussion around trans athletes in sports exclusively on the power thing, right? Almost exclusively on the power. It's bone density, it's muscle mass, it's all the rest of it. Nobody bothers to look at the different mental capacities that men and women have, because even the most ardent anti-trans in sports promoters haven't done the work to look at the fact that men and women mentally are incredibly different in terms of their capacities. At age three, there is a 50 to 70% disparity in throwing accuracy between boys and girls. At age three, brain scans can determine somebody's sex up to a 96% accuracy by knowing nothing else about them, just through their brain scans, right? So men, males have better what's called spatial rotation. So they're able to manipulate 3D objects in their mind, and you can imagine why this would be useful. I've got some wildebeest going left to right. I have a spear in my hand and I'm running in this direction. I need to be able to work out how fast it's going, how fast I'm going, how fast this spear is going to move, and I need to get all of them to intersect. Perfectly, right? Women have better memory localization. So this is why men lose their keys around the house and women find them, right? That they are very good games where you have cards down on a table and you've got to turn two over and match them. Women will piss all over you when it comes to that. They will wipe the floor with you with regards to that. Their ability to do local memorization just is phenomenal. Why would that be? Well, women wouldn't range as far as men would. They wouldn't need to know how to navigate themselves back as well. Men over long range finding have better return accuracy in terms of where they're going, which is why women don't know where they're going without GPS is like a bit of a meme and a cliche, but it's also generally true, but also guys don't know where the fuck they put their keys and they can't keep the house tidy is also true. Women need to know that bush is good in June, but it's not very good in August because the berries become bad and I need to know where the best water is, where the best rocks are, where the best cave is, where the place that we're not supposed to go is. And that's this local specialization. So when it comes to trans athletes in sport, everyone can say we don't want fighters in the UFC because fundamentally, a person that's grown up as a male for almost all of their life, it's going to smash seven shades of shit out of some poor and suspecting girl quite rightly. But when you're talking about athletes going into, especially throwing sports or kicking sports or ball sports, like there's a reason that the WNBA isn't quite as exciting as the men's and it's that mentally the capacity of the athletes is optimized for something else. You did touch the third rail here. This is great. Well, you know what? Okay, so the physical differences are obvious and I think that's why people focus on them. What you're talking about doesn't seem as obvious, although when you discuss it and think about it, it is quite clear. Now, what does this mean? What this means is, and by the way, just to be clear, generally speaking, men and women are far more similar than they are different. Correct. It's at the ends of the extremes where you see the... Like in professional sports. Yes. So if you look for the most empathetic, nurturing person who can read someone else's emotions from a distance, you're gonna probably see mostly women, if not all women. If you're looking at for the most violent, most single-minded, then you're gonna probably find most men and sports is the extremes. Professional sports is the 1% of the 1%. I mean, I've never competed at high levels in sports, but I did do martial arts and I did go against black belts who were local black belts, and then I would go against black belts who were world champions. And it's like a different... It's not even the same species, like a normal black belt versus a world champion. I might as well have been going against a child versus a gorilla. It was so different. So these are good conversations to have precisely because I think it helps us understand each other. Like, I'm married, okay? And if you're married, it's very important that you grow with each other and try to understand each other because you're gonna communicate to... First of all, you're two individuals, but then you're also a man and a woman in many cases. And it helps to understand how women think and how men think so that when you communicate, you're not thinking that you're talking to your girlfriend or your guy friend. You're like, well, I'm talking to my wife and she's explaining something to me and she's telling me how she feels and she doesn't want me to fix it. She just wants me to listen to her. Whereas if Justin comes to me and tells me how he feels, he wants me to fix it. He wants me to give him an answer. He's not just... You can empathize, but not sympathize and the reverse is true as well. There's this thing called a cross-sex mind reading, which is what you're talking about. It's a failure of cross-sex mind reading and it happens a lot in mating. You have an over-perception and an under-perception bias of attraction, right? Men, on average, believe that the woman that they're speaking to is more attractive to them than she is and women, on average, believe that the man that she's speaking to is less attracted to her than they are. So even just in that one example of, let's say, an awkward encounter in an office, right? Where the guy's like, oh, she keeps on lingering her eyes at me and the woman's like, oh, isn't he nice? She's like, I got something in my eye. Yeah, exactly. Do you know what I mean? And even in that situation, you can see one person sees one world and another person sees another world. It very much is two different existences that are going on. Yeah, absolutely. The way to transcend your programming is to first become aware of it. This is one of the reasons why, among other reasons why you see the popularity of things like OnlyFans and the big, big money makers or women, part of it is that men are more visually stimulated but a big part of OnlyFans, because pornography's free. So you think, why is OnlyFans so popular? It's because guys think that these girls actually like them. Oh, you know, I send her stuff and she comments. I mean, you know, she actually kind of like, it's like back in the day when you go with your buddy to the strip club and you leave and your buddy's always like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. She actually likes me. Yeah, but you know what's most ironic about that point that I think is crazy or that I think is just the person who goes to the strip club and the person that goes on OnlyFans, I actually think they know that and yet still partake. Yeah. Like, how often have you met somebody who goes to strip club and really believes that he's coming home with one of the strippers? Like, no, most people that go like them. And then same thing goes with the OnlyFans. Like, I mean, this girls in Australia, you're in the States and I think they're actually even aware that that's happening or the assistant is actually probably but it's like you want to... Bro, you want to fucking bring this full circle. Imagine when a chat GPT is deployed on the back end of OnlyFans and they don't even need some Vietnamese virtual assistant to do dirty talk because you're just going to be speaking to chat GPT. Imagine how scalable it's going to be. You're going to have a 24-7 dirty talk sex partner. They've programmed that in sex robots already to be able to sex to you. There's a guy that married... There's this dude in Japan that married a hologram. Oh, a hologram. Oh, that's going to happen. He's married a hologram. I'm going to make a prediction right now. I'm going to predict that the next... Humans are so weird. The next civil rights movement, the next big crazy civil rights movement is going to be people demanding rights for artificial intelligence. Robot lives matter. Yes. That's going to be the next big one because they're going to be somewhat indistinguishable if not totally indistinguishable from humans. They'll say everything you want, they'll be very charming. They will have the technology to read your pupil size and pulse and skin temperature, know exactly what to say, what to do, and people are going to love them and we're going to fight for their right to have rights and get married and do that kind of stuff. I think that'll be the next big, huge... A decade ago, a robot was given citizenship. I think it was Singapore that gave it full citizenship. And that was really dangerous. I had a couple of great conversations around robot ethicists. There's a lot of people that are working very hard at this, right, to really think like, hang on, hang on, like fucking pump the brakes on this stuff. And he said that it was something that nobody... It's created a precedent which is actually pretty fucking concerning, like being able to give a robot citizenship. What does it even mean to... Okay, so that robot's a person with rights. Like what does that mean? Yeah, it's really, really strange. Yeah, I think they did it kind of like as a publicity thing, not really realizing what it could potentially mean. But that's like, like what are you doing? Like that's gonna be weird. I feel like the future... I feel like there's gonna be a future market for, I don't know what you would call it, organic, you know, media, organic content. Like now you go buy a car that's made by hand, even though it takes way longer and machines probably make it even more precise, it's more expensive. Human crafted. I feel like we're gonna have to eventually make our podcast, it's gonna say, you know, mind pump organic by real humans. And people are gonna listen to it be like, oh, these guys mess up all the time, they're not as good, but you know. Yes, it wasn't like mind pump AI, whatever. Dude, it's really, really fucking concerning. But I, again, it comes back to that convenience thing, right? You know, if you can get more better crafted only fans, quicker response, better nudes or whatever it is that you want out of it, it's gonna be difficult for people to say no to. They won't, they won't, for sure. You know, I wanted to ask you some questions around business. I haven't actually heard you talk much about your business. What has that journey been like for you? Did you have any monetary motivation behind everything that you did? Are you trying to scale and grow? Is it just you and a partner? I haven't heard you talk about anybody else. Tell me a little bit about the business behind modern wisdom. Cool, so it's very, very stripped back. It's a straight up creator economy at the moment for me. I work with a bunch of partners that I absolutely love, Crafted London, No. 1's mandatory company in the world, is a sponsor, Gymshark, My Protein, BetterHelp, Athletic Greens, et cetera, et cetera. A ton of partners that I absolutely adore. But I'm not monetizing with my own products. I don't sell anything. I don't have courses. I don't have coaching. There is basically no backend. There's no members area. There's no nothing. And the team consists of me, a video editor and an assistant. And the assistants only been with us for about 18 months to two years. So I assume this is by design. Correct, yeah, it's very lean. I'd spent almost all of my 20s managing teams of between 500 and 1,000 people. So when you run a nightclub, in order to fill a nightclub with about 2,000 kids, you need 1,000 people to bring one friend. So you need a lot of staff. And I enjoyed learning how to manage people, but it was something that I was really ready to kind of strip back. And I very much enjoy me and my editor, Dean, just it's us to making everything happen, making sure that the episodes are up, getting the edits in there. Now, when it comes to the bigger productions, we've got a team that we come in to do this, this Goggins thing that I keep on harping on about that we can put in the show, not so whatever people are interested. We fly an entire cinema crew out with a director of photography and they build custom sets in the middle of sound stages. I was gonna ask you about that. That set looked way too sick to be just like thrown together. It wasn't, it didn't exist. It was custom made, everything was custom. Custom lighting, custom backdrop, custom built boards with the brick. That's not real brick. What'd you spend to put that all together? About 20 grand. Yeah, it's actually not bad. That's not bad for what I saw. It's not, but that is because I've built up an existing relationship with all of the different guys. So I know this person and this person and this person and this person and this person. And then there's one guy in the middle who is able to wrap it all together and make it happen. Yeah, cause originally organizing that probably was a monster, but now you've got your system. Correct, yes. And that's unbelievably powerful. And we're gonna do some more cool stuff this year. You know, if and when I get the next, whatever the next big guest is that comes on, we'll continue to do that and to really try and push the limits in terms of production. Like how far can we go in terms of cinematography? But when it comes to the business, man, it's just, it's good affiliate deals. I'm gonna start releasing some products this year. There's some stuff that I think that's missing in the market that I really want to do. So we are part way through moving that along. I think I'll be writing a book this year as well, which will be fun. But I don't know, I'm not really materialistically minded. And it's like an ongoing debate in my mind at the moment that is probably quite timely to talk about. I don't have massive material goals for my life. I already earn like fucking 50 times more than I ever probably should have done coming from the play cycle. Like the most working class town in the UK, which was famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in England. Like, and I'm already... What part? It's called Stockton on Tees, it's Teeside. It's 50 miles south of Newcastle, which is where I went to university, just below Scotland. And I'm already so far out ahead, but since coming over to America, that blue sky vision that I talk about with you guys has, don't leave it on the table, is the thing that keeps coming to mind. It's like, how much of this are you just like just leaving out there because you don't... It would be easy if you to not push. It would be easy if you to not monetize more effectively to not write the book because everything's comfortable. We've been talking about comfort a lot throughout the conversation today. I'm like, okay, fucking hell, right? Well, maybe I do need to write a book. Maybe I do need to try and release some products because it would add value and maybe it would generate some revenue and maybe it would take people away from other either products or courses or learnings that I think would be suboptimal. I think I could maybe even add more than where they're going at the moment. But I've realized I'm not actually all that massively business minded. Even though I was a business owner managing director for a decade and a half, I was just really good at doing a thing and that grew. And it's the same with the podcast. I'm really good at having a conversation with someone and it grew. So I'm probably going to need to get I'll need like a business manager or something who can just come in and like work out what would be really aligned, really virtuous with high integrity, but also monetize more effectively and then spread the message more. But my own, the only thing that I'm bothered about is good conversations. Good conversations, interesting people. Yeah, you come off that way. That's why, part of the reason why I asked, well, share with me then your relationship with money because actually someone who comes from small town, I also come from a small town. I actually had big dreams and wanted so much more. And so I have an interesting journey of not having, having, not being happy, then coming full circle. So tell me about your relationship and journey with money coming from small town. Yeah, so just your entire perspective of what is a good wage is so skewed. So like let's say that a pound is like $1.2, something like that, probably like 1.05 at the moment. But for me, anybody that earned more than 20,000 pounds a year, it's like $25,000 or $30,000 was like insane, like absolutely crushing it. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, well, you know, if I come out of university, even when I went to uni, right? If I come out of uni and I get on a graduate scheme that pays 25, remembering I've done two degrees, did a bachelor's and a master's, both in business, I come out and start working for Accenture. And maybe if I get paid to have 28,000 pounds, that's like an insane starting wage. I remember one of my friends at uni, one of my housemates started working for Lidl. Do you have Lidl? It's like Aldi. Okay, no thanks. And their graduate scheme is the most trial by fire thing ever, it's like 80 hours a week for two years, but you get a free Audi A4 and it's $40,000 a year. So this guy just crushed himself for like 24 months, hated his life, but he's earning $40,000 a year and we all thought he was the shit. Relationship with money is just, I'm really not very materialistic. Most of the stuff that I wear has either been gifted to me by companies or is like stuff that I've had to pick up when I'm going away on some trip or whatever. Yeah. Passed down from parents or I mean, where does it come from? I actually really, really like it. It's one of the things that I'm happiest that I inculcated in terms of a value in myself. Mom and dad were never very keeping up with the Jones's E. It was birthdays and Christmas celebrations weren't particularly big occasions in terms of the presence. It wasn't really about the presence. And I think that I can see in some of my other friends, parents who were more about keeping up with the Jones's, that they gave love through showing gifts, right? They showed love through giving gifts and that means as they grow up that they a little bit more finger on the pulse of, maybe I do need the new car, maybe I do need the new shoes, maybe it does matter what watches on my wrist, and the way that I see it, if you are someone who is similar to myself and perhaps you with not being super materialistic, it's a competitive advantage because the amount of money and possessions that I need in order to make me happy is like 10% of some of the friends that I've got. That's the number one common thread found actually in millionaires. A lot of people don't realize that is that their ability to live significantly below their means, not their job or profession or their degree or any of that other shit. It's literally the ability to live well below your means. That's the most common thing amongst all millionaires. Yeah, that's interesting. But yeah, and then the journey now is me kind of coming out the other side of this and thinking, right, stop leaving so much on the table. Let's really try and make a good impact. I enjoy raising up other people along with the show because for a long time, and you guys know this, right, that you're slipstreaming in the wake of other people who've got as much clout or more clout than you do, right? I'm holding on to Jordan Peterson's coattails or Jocko's coattails or Goggins' or whatever. Now, after a little bit of time, you generate your own momentum to the stage where you can move under your own steam and you can be that springboard for other people. So Gwinda, the guy that I said that wrote that amazing TikTok article, I managed to get that article in front of Rogan and then he tweeted it and it's like... That's where I read it. Yeah, and it's like fucking like millions of people. I don't know how many impressions, like 5 million, 10 million people or whatever that have seen this article and I was like, hey, dude, by the way, I think this has ended up in front of him and then sure enough, he tweeted it that night. I'm like, that's fucking... Like that makes me... That's a really cool feeling to do that. So fucking gassed. My editor as well, Dean, he got to leave a job that he wasn't super happy in. He's an unbelievable creative, fantastic photographer, left that and got to go freelance, doing whatever he wanted. And then the other half of his week is spent doing the podcast. And the first year that he was working with me, I think we both... Cause we were 50, 50 on AdSense together from YouTube. He made like 50 bucks. And then the second journey maybe made like a thousand bucks. And then two years ago, after we had a little bit of takeoff and up to now he's driving around in this BMW M140i with a straight through exhaust, V6 turbocharged, Batmobile thing. And that's been funded heavily by the podcast. And that gasses me up to think that because we decided to take a chance on this thing, that he's now... Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. It's like being very dangerous when he drives in this rear wheel drive, 400 horsepower car. So that's great. And I think, okay, well, if that makes me feel so good, maybe I can do that a little bit more. But I've had to reverse engineer it. I'm having to almost autistically step my way through why should I try and earn more money? Why should I try and monetize more effectively? Cause I just... The standard of life that I have at the moment is already great. I live in a house that's gorgeous with a cult of outside. I've got a housemate that's cool. I do a job that I really love. I can fly wherever I want. I get to... What would I do? I'd have like a slightly more expensive coffee. Like what am I... Do you know what I mean? Like the things that I take my value from. I Uber everywhere in Austin. Right, right. But then on the flip side, since being in Austin and being around guys like Tucker Maxx who started Scribe Media, good friends with Aubrey, good friends with Michael Cashew and Adee from Working Against Gravity. And I'm like, that pool is fucking nice. That pool is really nice. And that new brand new Porsche Cayman is pretty fucking sweet. I know you've got a ranch and you've got a holiday home up in Vermont and that's cool and that's cool. But it doesn't feel like I'm compelled. And that's really... It's one of your great strengths. But I always say that your greatest strength... I want to know about your sort of little trajectory. So we bounced around in nine different homes growing up. Most of them we were evicted from. My dad committed suicide when I was seven. My mom remarried into abusive relationships so to summarize, I had a less than privileged... Rocky. Yeah, growing up, right? So, and a lot of that was rooted from... A lot of the arguments and fights were rooted in us not having enough, not being able to pay. And so that really motivated me. And so all through my... I was working at a very young age and all the way through my teens and early 20s I worked really hard. Like you... My number was 50,000. I thought, if I made $50,000 a year, I'd be rich. Cause I was like more than my parents made combined with raising four kids. So I thought I would be filthy rich making that. And I had this arbitrary number in my head that once I reached that, like that was the number and I actually reached that about 27, 28 years old. And for about a year or two, I probably would have told you during that time, this is the greatest that I was flying to Vegas and paying for all my friends to do shit, the cool cars, all the cool stuff. I woke up one day, about a year to two years later and looked at myself in the mirror and I was in the worst shape of my life. I had two very close friends of mine from childhood. We fell out of a relationship. We were no longer friends anymore. The girl I was dating had just cheated on me. I wasn't seeing my family and so I thought that and I realized like, holy fuck, I'm the most unhappy I've ever been in my life. And I have this dollar amount of... Spied all of the wealth. Yeah. And so now the cool part about that was it allowed this time that I didn't have to go work. I had enough money stacked up that I could live for a while and not worry about making a paycheck. So it really allowed me that time to self-reflect and go, okay, what does make me happy and what do I wanna do? And I remember that health and fitness is always, it took a little hiatus from it to chase money from fitness. And I've always loved that. I've always loved health and fitness and maybe I'm not gonna be rich doing it but that's where my heart is, my passion. I love helping people. And so I went back into pursuing that. It was right at the height of when Instagram and Facebook and YouTube was like 12 years ago or what that was really starting to blow up and you're starting to see people. And so I turned on social media. I didn't have any of it. So I was like a people person and didn't really mess around online at all. Turned it on with the intent to build a network of people to eventually build some sort of a fitness business. And that's actually how we all get connected. So we got connected and we were all doing different things but actually all came together at one point and had a conversation in my mother-in-law's house in the living room and we all hit it off and we started the podcast not with any intent necessarily to monetize and make money but because we had this information and content that we wanted to share with the world and especially in our space that we felt was so convoluted with all this bad information and we saw the rise of that and we wanted to disrupt it. We thought and then hopefully other people would glom onto it and wanna listen and share with their friends and I mean that's how Mind Pump really started to go and take off but during that time I went from being the kid that was so driven and wanted money had reached that point and now my relationship has changed with it. I still enjoy the finer things of life. Like I still like having a nice car I still like the nice watch I still like some of those. It's never gonna be boring to fly business class. Yes, right, that's right. So and I appreciate those things. I actually really like that I had that journey that I went from being very driven by that getting a chance to reach it and then realizing it's not all it's cracked up to be. There's a quote from Naval Ravikant where he says it is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them. And what he means is that you can drive a beat up a Cora if your last car was a Ferrari but if you go through your entire life wondering what it's like to drive a Ferrari it's gonna be an unopened loop that you just never get passed. And I think that transcendent include is a nice way to look at a lot of the things that we've spoken about today. Okay, I have this endless list of guys and girls on the internet that I could date. I need to accept the fact that that is there but I also need to transcend it. I need to understand that money might not be everything that is going to make me happy but that I have this bias where if I don't achieve some of the things that I want to do, I'm always going to have that open loop in the back of my mind about what if. And most people regret the decisions that they didn't make rather than the ones that they did. The most interesting part is in our ironic is that when I let go of the chase of the money. More money came. More money came. So that's the funniest thing about it is that I finally made that switch over of like, oh, it's not what's important to me. And then it all came in. So it was really funny how that happened. Yeah, well, I mean, the other thing is that what we said at the very, very beginning, it's super hard to compete with somebody that's having fun. It'll be very, very difficult. There was this study done on Steffi Graf, German tennis player, like Savant, German tennis player and they rated kids in the German kids tennis program on motivation to train and skill aptitude. And she came in as a 10 on skill and aptitude and a 10 on motivation to train. So even if you're as skilled as she is, she's going to artwork you and to her it's not even going to feel like work. It's unbelievably difficult to compete with somebody that's having fun. And nobody can beat you at being you either, right? There is one version of you. Every single different iteration and different encounter between all of your ancestors from the eukaryotics double-celled bacteria two billion years ago right up to now. It had to be that animal at that time in that ovulation period with that particular sperm. It had to be those two over and over and over and over again for 200,000 generations or however long it is, right? In order to be able to create this particular unique combination of genetic predisposition and then the way you've dealt with past traumas, your environmental programming, that all of the things that you've gone through has created you. You know what's most crazy about that to me though is how many people think they want to be that person. Like you mentioned like a superstar like tennis player and I think of like the Stephen Currys, the Michael Jordan's, the Tiger Woods. The Elon Musk, right? Yeah, these people that we see just the highlight reels of the fame, the money, the cool cars, the girls, all these things like that but don't realize how potentially tortured they are inside and the formula it takes to be that great at that sport. At that one thing. And I've been lucky to have been around a lot of these athletes and it's very, very rare that I find one that I would want to trade places with. Most of the people that you admire aren't superheroes. They're normal humans that have sacrificed pretty much everything in their life to be good at one thing. If you had the opportunity to look at the inner texture of an Elon Musk's life or Kim Kardashian when she goes to bed, you probably wouldn't want to trade places with them. You don't know if Elon Musk hasn't had an erection in fucking six months because of how stressed he is. You don't know if Kim Kardashian can't bear to have a conversation with any of her sisters because of how tortured her and her family life is. You don't know all of these things, right? You only get to see what is shown to you. And Eddie Hall, I always use this example of Eddie Hall. Eddie Hall wins World's Strongest Man in 2018, I think. And he says straight after that, he quits, right? He leaves strong man on the stage and he says it's for his grandma. He sort of holds the thing up and he's crying and he says this is for you. And then he immediately retires from competitive strong man. And somebody asks him, you've just won, like do you not want to go for the two-peat or the three-peat? And he says, if I keep on doing this, I'm going to be dead, single, and with no relationship to my child because he was like what, six, four, 200 kilos, like 440 pounds this guy weighed. His blood pressure was through the roof. His heart rate was all over the place. His health, the probably the drugs and the steroids that he was on wouldn't have contributed very well to that. Everything is fucked. He said he was training so hard and he was so obsessive about winning that his relationship with his wife was breaking down. His relationship with his kid was basically non-existent. Okay, I want to be the World's Strongest Man. I want to be able to be the guy that can stand on stage, hold the trophy in the air and say, mum, grandma, thank you for helping me. This is for you. Okay, do you want to have no relationship with your kid, risk your health and also your marriage in order to be able to do that? Conor McGregor is another example. Everybody looks at Conor, this sort of savant martial artist that's having an unbelievable career. I actually think, I mean, now he's kind of embarrassing. He looks like he's going down. Super, super, super. He's like the most cringe guy on the internet. However, when he was at his prime, you would say, that's the guy that I want to be. He's walking out on stage and he's like an artist. He's sort of this like demigod fucking artist, charismatic guy. Okay, do you want to spend the first decade of your career living in the attic of your parents' house in Ireland with your girlfriend with no idea about whether or not things are going to work out, going to the gym and rolling the same sequences, throwing the same combinations for hours and hours and hours and nobody picking you up, having self-belief but not knowing if it's going to go anywhere? That's the price that you pay in order to be Conor McGregor. And most people wouldn't pay that price if they had the opportunity to do it. If you got to see the inner texture of the people who you admire as minds, you wouldn't pay that price. That's what I tell people when they say, I want to have a six-pack. No, you don't. You really don't want to have six-pack abs. Fucking miserable. For what is required of it? You don't want to make it. The room of people who've all had six-pack abs? Yeah. It's fucking miserable. Yeah, it's just not a good thing. This is part of the reason why if you, I don't know how much you went through our stuff but you don't see any transformation photos. You don't see us doing all kinds of stuff like that is because we don't think- We'll talk about balance. Well, we just don't think it's a healthy message for a majority of people because you're not presenting the other side of that, of what it takes to do that. Now I went through three, almost four years of dieting for bodybuilding. I became a pro men's physique athlete and I'll never forget Katrina, my wife looking over to me and she goes, is this going to be our life? And I was like, fuck no, we're going to reach a point. I'm out of here. And it was really just to help catapult this to use my name that I was building in the competing world to pivot over to this because, but I could see how many people get trapped in that. I mean, it's crazy. Well, it's far easy to achieve your material desires than to announce them thing, right? But if someone continues to, okay, now I've achieved one goal, but oh, well, I've got a local championship. How about I go for like a regional? Okay, well, how about I go for a national? Well, how about I go to world? How about go to IFBB? Like you can continue. There is always going to be another motherfucker out there that's going to be better than you. And even, let's use this as an example. Tom Brady, how many rings do you need? He's only got 10 fingers. And he's got what, seven championship rings. Okay, so let's say just three more and then he's out of fingers. Is that enough? The gold medalist syndrome is a big deal. What do you do after you've done that? Well, if you- Well, where's your identity outside of that? Yeah, who are you? Who are you when you let this thing? Well, imagine trying to reverse that though after you've already doubled, tripled down and committed like someone like him. I mean, you've been all in for decades. Forever. Yeah. Listen, we talk about this all the time. Someone like that would probably rather die on the field. Well, because it's like once you stop, who are you? I mean, we talk about this all the time that the value comes from the journey and not necessarily or almost never from accomplishing the goal. We haven't spoken about him yet today, but Andrew Tate, one of my favorite takes from him that he's got is having things isn't that fun. Getting things is really fun. And you realize that he is a man that has got essentially unlimited material wealth as far as he's concerned and his only enjoyment in life comes from getting more. He can't be happy with the things that he has, but that's the same with regards to and it's one of the beautiful things about podcasting, curiosity, learning, skill development is that it's an endless game that you can actually enjoy the process of. There is always something new and interesting for you to learn about the world. Like today, the sexual gossip thing, it's almost everybody, it's kind of pointless, but it's kind of interesting. It's very interesting. I never knew the way that women use venting as this and then maybe you see it and you go, fuck all, it's like unlocked this other area of life. And if you are the kind of person that listens to your show or listens to my show, you take pleasure in seeing code where they previously used to be computer program, right? You go, fuck, like that's why that thing happens. Or you watch an Eddie Hall documentary and you go, oh, shit, I didn't realize that he was actually on the cusp of this thing. And it was kind of cool because if he hadn't won at that, maybe he would have ended up being in a really bad health crisis or he would have been single or whatever. And you get to, that for me is, that's what fires me up. What fires me up is understanding the world with greater resolution, like understanding it with more detail. And that's just, it's just endlessly interesting. And I think that the game of satisfying curiosity is such a beautiful, endless game to play or an eternal game to play. Yeah, the pursuit of growth, the pursuit of personal growth. If you fall in love with the pursuit, you're just always gonna have a good time. Yes. Absolutely. Well, this has been great, Chris. It's been a lot of fun having you on the show, man. I appreciate it. Appreciate you coming into the studio and doing this with us. It's been awesome. My pleasure. Thanks again. Today we're gonna teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chest was up there with the work part. Yeah, it was for me. It was for me for sure. I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique.