Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyjzyAwj0A
[Music] hi chris hi how are you doing good very nice to meet you man i've really enjoyed your stuff online thank you i appreciate that you're a very good listener you are one of the best listeners you're really good at that because you're really good at knowing when to talk and when not to talk that is a skill and that that is a rare sign of social intelligence so i was looking forward to meeting you thank you i appreciate that man you've been a big inspiration so it's nice to hear that oh thank you thank you appreciate that too we're talking about what like when someone's funny and when they're funny and not funny and why and i don't know like i've met this there's some people that i know that weren't funny for a long time and then they became funny like comics that were like they're starting out and they just maybe they were kind of okay i mean i think maybe you have if you have a spark like a little huh just a spark you could turn that into a flame but if you don't have the spark if there's no there's nothing there you're never funny ever you're [ __ ] well that's different to training like we were saying yes yes we can be the skinniest or fattest guy or girl the right training program and some good macros your effects you will definitely get stronger you would definitely get fitter particularly like cardiovascular cardiovascular uh fitness is 100 achievable all you have to as long as you don't have like some sort of a problem physically some sort of an ailment you could definitely get better better cardio is it true about comics needing a messed up childhood or that's a performance enhancer that they say the pain that they've gone through in the past is something that helps them to be funny when they grow up there's something there there's something there i think it's being ignored i think when you're ignored as a child kids figure out a way to get attention and so they act out and then in acting out if you act out in a particular way you get laughs and then you lean towards that you know i didn't have a funny family like my family's not funny at all like no one's funny like my mom's not
funny my dad's not my stepdad's not funny no one's funny you know it's like just for me it was i guess it was just having a weird childhood moving around a lot always having to make new friends and so just figured out what was funny about certain things and you ended up managing to get it right yeah but again it's [ __ ] lucky man either you're funny or not like i i got into comedy because my friend steve who i'm still good friends with to this day steve graham told me uh i should do comedy because i would make him laugh and i was like dude you you are laughing because you like me other people are just going to think i'm an [ __ ] like this is not this is not comedy you know but i feel like it is a skill i feel like it's a skill that people can develop but yeah if you've got the wrong spark i mean everyone's seen that comedian that's trying really really trying and it's there's just something not there and then it's the same i guess if you look at absolute elite athletes the best of the best of the best it's not just the hard work it's not just the training it's not just the skills that they've developed there's something else there as well yeah yeah but then you get someone who has all the things and that's how you get a michael jordan you get someone who has physical talent genetic gifts the mind for it discipline consistent work ethic and then you get greatness but also mental illness you need to be like like michael jordan with all due respect uh is considered you know absolutely one of the greatest if not the greatest basketball player of all time but is kind of mentally ill he's obsessed with winning to the point where he's an [ __ ] but that [ __ ] like he'll tell you like you just don't want to win enough and he's right he's right like he apparently like you beat him in a game of pool he won't [ __ ] talk to you for weeks like he's just a nut but that i've met people like that before like they have to win at everything they have to win at [ __ ]
playing [ __ ] parcheesi they have to win they're just winners they just like they're obsessed with that goal of winning this is why jealousy is such a stupid emotion to have i think because you never know the price that that person pays for the skills that you really admire about them so a good example of this would be tiger woods you know much about his childhood i know a little bit about the coaching jamie's a giant fan he's he's jamie's a big golfer yeah so tiger when he was growing up you know he was i think at one and a half two years old he was already with a golf club and then when did he go on that saturday night program jamie and he ended up doing some put on he was three years old three years old when he did that right but his father was racially abusing him on golf courses calling him the n-word saying that yeah here it is whoa that's him at three years old what show was this jimmy stewart mike douglas bob hope and jimmy stewart this is crazy wow what a little cutie look at him how old is it how old are you no [ __ ] way oh my god have you read malcolm gladwell's outliers yes well that is like an amazing example of that like having a golf club in your hand at two years old having a father who's maniacal and obsessed and forcing you to do this and then getting all that time in as your body is learning and developing so the thing about target that was interesting with his father is they would he would push him incredibly hard say these white people are never going to accept you on this course and he had a safe word the same way that you would do during rough sex it was called the e word and his dad would say to him if it's getting too much if it's ever too much just tell me just say the e word and everything will stop and tiger never once said it wow the e-word was enough wow so he would [ __ ] with him so the tiger would get better and he told him look i love you but i'm doing this to make you better yep too much roll the clock forward now so talking about
the price that people to pay to be the person that you admire everyone would look at tiger woods narrowly bound like i want to be as good of a golfer as tiger woods and you go yeah okay but do you want the childhood do you want to spend nearly half a decade out of the sport with injury because of how hard you've pushed yourself do you want to struggle with self-worth to the point where you basically can't have a long-term marriage don't be chased down this driveway with your wife in a golf club he fell asleep at the wheel he broke both of his legs not long ago he's been on anti-psychotics like that is the price that you pay to have that degree of greatness it's a onesie right it's not an outfit that you can pick little different bits about you don't get to choose one element of someone and say i want that it's like no no no all of these externalities all of the things that you really don't want they came along for the ride as well and that's why jealousy overall like do you want to take the whole outfit because you can't just have the one thing jealousy is kind of dumb well jealousy is dumb because it doesn't serve you any purpose it's that what is that old expression that it's the uh the only it poisons the vessel that's holding it how does that expression go there's some some expression like that like that it it doesn't work like jealousy doesn't work like jealousy doesn't work for you and it doesn't harm the person you're jealous of it doesn't do anything it just creates this bad feeling and it's it's a necessary feeling in human evolution because it forces people to compete for uh for breeding it forces people to compete for resources and it it makes people work harder in some ways but it's not self-serving you can have that feeling of admiration and of respect for someone's ability and inspiration like looking at someone's accomplishments and avoid the jealousy part but you have to treat it like it's a personal weakness you have to treat it like that thing inside of you that looks at someone and wants to diminish their accomplishments and wants to look at their accomplishments in an inaccurate light
because it serves you doesn't serve you in fact it it lies to you and it makes you feel like you're better than you are so you won't work as hard and you won't accomplish as much if you give into jealousy but instead if you look at someone even if you don't particularly like that person's personality or what you know what they stand for if you can look at what they've done even as someone that you like really despise you can find something in them and say that is like you can find admirable things about donald trump one of the things you can find about is the way he like brushes off criticism it's like he just like keeps going like like they were in the beginning of the the presidential campaign coming at him with every [ __ ] thing in the world and the guy would get out there in front of all his people he's like i'm the best i've always been the best no one loves the bible more than me and he was able to do that in a way that you know a lot of people i mean maybe he has a psychotic belief in himself maybe he's like literally on drugs but whatever it is it's it's admirable that the guy got through four years in the white house and doesn't look like he [ __ ] aged a day biden looked like he's aged 100 years in just the first year and a half i mean he's so [ __ ] old now he was old running for president but he looks older because of the pressure and the stress of the white house it's kind of admirable that donald trump didn't do that so like you can find things and even in people that you think are problematic human beings you can find things in what they do and if there's someone that's in your line of work and that person is achieving great success there is a human tendency a natural human tendency to be jealous of that person but instead be inspired but you have to make that choice and you have to recognize that jealousy is 100 a weakness on your part and it's a matter of self-auditing you have to be able to audit yourself and say where's this feeling coming from why am i feeling
shitty like what is this weirdness oh this is jealousy oh that's a weakness i have to i have to i have to parse that out this is one of the big differences i've found between the us and the uk since moving here so i've been in austin for four and a half months or something now one of the biggest differences is that in the us as far as i can see people really want to celebrate you when you're doing well yes yeah well i think collectively they do there's got to be a lot of individuals that don't but collectively overall i think there's more of a tendency to celebrate people here i have some friends from the uk and they have similar um feelings like when they came over to america like wow it's crazy like you're doing well people congratulate here whereas in the uk they try to keep you down yeah very much a scarcity mentality tall poppy syndrome is a huge deal in the uk and australia as well right yeah very much so as soon as you i don't know what it is i wonder whether it's because population density is so much higher we're water locked so everything kind of feels a bit more insular there's less stuff to do because the climate restricts us it's always cold and dark and wet which means seasonal affective disorder there's a bunch of different ways but culturally the end result is that people just aren't that supportive and if you start to deviate when you're young and do something a little bit different it gets it gets beaten out of you very quickly because the british ability for satire is born out of this fact that there's constant piss taking happening and although satire is fantastic it's not that great at encouraging people to go and do different things and be adventurous so when you roll the clock forward what you have is british people have very much got their feet on the ground probably too much they probably don't believe that they actually have a capacity that they can go and do things now the converse i think in america might be a little bit true for all that america is a cis heteronormative patriarchal superstructure that's misogynistic keeping everyone down when kids grow up the american dream still very much is a real deal i think and people are told that they can have
blue sky vision and helicopter thinking and be whatever they want to be the problem you have is when those people grow up and become adults and the world doesn't deliver them the thing that they were promised they feel a delta between where they are and where they could be they go ahead hang on a second i was told that i was going to get the blue sky and the white picket fence and the blah blah especially in a generation now that is the first one ever that's doing worse than its parents that's going to cause a lot of people to look around and go there's something wrong here structurally there's something wrong that's interesting do you think when they say that this generation is doing worse than its parents obviously that is collectively right so how are they looking at that and how they making that distinction that this generation is doing worse is it they're doing worse financially is they're doing worse in terms of their ability to buy a home like what i think that'll be two of the major factors right the fact that it's real living wages have stayed static since the middle of the 1970s something like that and getting onto the property market at the moment is pretty difficult but more than that as well a lot of the things that we use to have the traditions that we used to have for people guys and girls the roles that they used to take have been outsourced to the state so if you think about the protector provider role that men typically would have had you don't need that so much when you've got a robust legal system and you've got a government that's going to look after people in case they fall through the cracks you've got social safety nets and things like that here and there i think that what happens is people end up feeling wisterless and existentially lonely so not only are they materially less effective that they're unable to get as much money they're unable to find a house as easily but then existentially the role that they have something that makes them feel innate and of themselves that doesn't feel like it's helping either that's interesting so you think the the robust legal system and social
safety nets somehow make people listless i don't think the robust legal system is that robust i don't think the safety systems the safety nets that are in place i don't think they're that effective i i don't think that people have as much faith in them as maybe you think uh i know in the uk you have a better system in terms of like healthcare you people don't have to worry nearly as much about getting ill about getting injured i i'm a big fan of having some kind of social health care system and i think people in this country uh particularly conservative people are very they're they're very concerned with the idea of socialism in any form but i feel like socialism exists already in many forms that we accept like the fire department right that's clearly like a socialist idea like we all pay into it and it all it serves everyone we need it we all accept it we agree to it uh public education similar it's it sucks it's pretty shitty and ineffective depending of course upon the neighborhood that you live in and you know some neighborhoods have good public systems of education but in terms of like um a social safety net like this it's not that good like in america i don't think it i think in the worst case scenario it it's it's the worst worst worry is that a social safety net encourages people to not be ambitious and encourages people to like that's what people were concerned with when it came to things like universal basic income right they were concerned that it was gonna alleviate people's ambition and on the best case scenario side what i was i was like looking at it with rose-colored glasses i was like maybe to encourage people to go out and do something they actually want to do for a living and having their basic needs taken care of like food and shelter like maybe that will give them whatever extra motivation they need to go out and do a thing that they really want to do whether it's create music or become a painter or whatever the [ __ ] it is do
you think that's the way that people are going to lean i think you have to have that in you unfortunately i think there i know people that are just not [ __ ] ambitious they have they're just lazy and if they didn't have any social safety net maybe they would develop some discipline but if there is a social safety net they don't and the thing that you were talking about earlier like this um there there is a problem with generations that that feel entitled and they're given this there's this attitude there's a sort of overwhelming idea that the government is responsible for you in a certain way and if you're not doing well the government has [ __ ] you over the government it's your fault and then people start looking to people that have a lot like they start looking to billionaires and they're like we need to tax them we need to tax these billionaires and you know like there's people out there that are calling for a 90 tax of billionaires which i always feel like is at the very least what they're trying to do some of them for sure are just putting on a show they're just saying that because they want their constituents to go yeah they're fighting for us they're fighting for the working class like are they you know i'm not sure they are i think they're bullshitting and i think that capitalism is a game and whenever you're going to have a game you're going to have people that are like weekend players that go out there and put a little bit of effort into and they're kind of okay at basketball and then you're gonna have michael jordan and you don't get a michael jordan without massive amounts of effort and time and that's the same thing with capitalism if it's a game if we're all agreeing like even if you're a waiter right you're waiting on tables you do a good job they give you tips that's tips in america we get tips for for waiters when they do because they don't get paid that's why uh-huh yeah it's sneaky i had to adapt very very quickly to that yeah it's a sneaky thing oh you're right because you're not used to giving tips not at all ten percent maybe ish right and i did that in a strip club in uh austin and the waitress turned the thing
around and said let's try this again slide it across did you feel intimidated uh being bossed around it was kind of hot it's kind of hot oh she's hot i understand um so yeah i don't agree with that but there is a thing there i mean in terms of i don't agree with people uh getting paid less than minimum wage and relying on tips i think that's a [ __ ] up way to run a business you know i think it's way better if you got paid a living wage and then people could tip you on top of that if they say hey she was a really good waitress like i she she deserves more like and then tip on top of that one of the big differences between the uk and america i think as well is the way that the homeless show up so in the uk i've been a club promoter for 15 years right at 2am in the morning the only people that are out are club promoters the people that are going to our parties and homeless people and the way that they act their demeanor the fact that they're the us has so much more sketchy aggressive talking to themselves shuffling along the street they'll be much more forthcoming and i think a big part of that is the fact that you don't have a way to sweep up people that should be in mental health care yeah you know if you are someone that falls through the cracks in one way or another becomes homeless that means you're less likely to get a job less likely to get a job no medical insurance that means that if you do have any underlying problems they're not going to be looked after because you're not going to pay for it maybe you turn to drugs that makes the mental health problems worse and it just becomes a spiral and whereas in the uk step one or two of that you're gonna get picked up by the national health service and taken away yeah well that is ideal if it's good mental health service that's ideal and that's what they used to have in america they used to have mental health institutions that would take people off the streets but somewhere was it in the reagan administration jamie i know we've looked this up before right we've gone into this
there were some sweeping acts in the reagan administration that just literally like released people from mental health institutions that couldn't take care of themselves and these people were pretty [ __ ] up and so those folks wind up on the street jocko told me the number of beds per capita that we have in the uk versus the us is wildly different like one per hundred thousand people or something over here which is just way way way less than apparently than you need what is the uk way more i don't know but it'll i mean you know pretty much anywhere we'll be able to take somebody in someone that's in a e you know if somebody's having a fit if somebody's having a schizophrenic attack what is a e accident an emergency and that's at every single different hospital there will be somewhere that someone could get rolled into yeah well you know schizophrenia i think it affects one percent of the population so look at the united states says three million people that's crazy that's a lot of people you know and you look at the number of homeless people that we have and the number of people that really need help it's not good it's not a good way to run a society and there's this idea that these people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps like that is a [ __ ] really dumb way of looking at it and it makes a problem for everybody else so when you look at what's happening in los angeles this sort of attitude that you know we need to uh respect homeless people and let them just [ __ ] camp out whenever they want it's destroyed real estate prices it's forced people to move out it's made people feel very unsafe and it's not helping the homeless people it's not helping them at all if you just let them [ __ ] put up their tents at the beach now you have just people that don't want to go to the beach so all the surrounding businesses lose revenue because people don't feel comfortable going there anymore i mean i'm sure you've seen what it looks like on the beach in southern california it's [ __ ] crazy my friend bridget drove through venice and she sent me a video from her phone and i was like this is
insane it was like a mile of tents and i think they've cleaned up some places and not cleaned up others the real the dirty spot is downtown and that's the place yeah i mean it is madness if you've never been there before when you i i first went there this was a problem in the early 2000s this had nothing to do with covid i was there in 2003 or four or something like that we're filming fear factor down there and i went through skid row and i was like holy [ __ ] i couldn't even believe it i'm like why is this not front page news this is literally like multiple city blocks filled with people just laying around on the street shuffling around and going into these hospitals and and or you know not hospitals shelters to get food and then coming back on the street like they were there they moved people to these areas like there was a documentary on that um what was that hotel jamie where that woman drowned in one of the water tanks it was [ __ ] i saw the documentary yeah it was kind of a sneaky documentary right because the documentary all about that elevator thing but really the wool the cecil hotel yeah so the cecil hotel is like in the heart of this uh area and uh the documentary is sort of highlighting how these people got duped when they're coming from other countries and they're coming into america oh we'll stay downtown you think oh downtown's lovely downtown los angeles is a [ __ ] [ __ ] like a horrible [ __ ] hole it's so much worse than like say like downtown austin beautiful lovely nice buildings great restaurants downtown chicago great place to be downtown la is horrible nobody wants to go there i saw a listing for a property in portland that is being sold with squatters in it that's hilarious so it says in the description below it uh be warned this is being sold uh with current squad is tenanted in there uh the price reflects the current state of the insights what's the price free basically i haven't it didn't say on the on the advert but it is wild he's selling property that's it's such a headache that you can't get
rid of these people the police are not coming in to give you any assistance uh anybody want some free tenants that aren't paying yeah well the portland's the worst they're the worst because their own mayor bought into it hook line and sinker and he was out there with antifa and he was trying to talk to him they were like you [ __ ] need to resign he's like i am the most liberal mayor in all of the country he and he is and then after a while i mean he was at the front of the line for defund the police he was talking about like we need social workers to handle problems not police officers and he he was buying into all that [ __ ] until they beat him down they got to a point where they lit his apartment building on fire they broke the windows of his uh the front lobby of his building and tossed molotov cocktails through and [ __ ] and so then he started calling for them to be arrested and then he started calling for like individuals to be arrested and they like he's trying to turn it around his idea but he was like faced with a reality of these progressive liberal choices where you look at things with you know through the the lens of ideology rather than the lens of objective assessment of reality so the thing is an absurd ideological belief is less about the actual facts and it's basically a show of fealty to your side it's like you're waving a flag saying i am a part of this and the more absurd the belief the greater the show of fealty right if you're saying i will put to one side fact reason what my own brain is telling me everything that reality is putting back to me and what i'm going to do instead is i'm going to believe the ideology because that's why it's a threat display to your opponents it's a show of loyalty to the side that you're on yeah but the problem with that is at the moment all of these groups are bound together over the mutual distaste of an outgroup not the mutual love of an in-group which makes them inherently fragile so what everybody's doing is they're constantly circling the outside looking for someone that they can shave off who's the next person that is just not quite right that we can get rid of i
don't know whether you saw during pride month that there was white gay privilege is now a thing so white gay people have to like bow down to gay people of color correct yeah so you have to recognize that if you're gay but you're also not another oppressed group that you're kind of not that gay i actually mentioned this to douglas and douglas said that because he's white and conservative and gay he's basically straight again he's an honorary straight his gay card his gay card had been rescinded oh that's amazing um but yeah that's what they're looking for they're constantly looking on the outside who can we shave off it's a p it's called a purity spiral right you're constantly trying and everybody said that how long ago were people saying this sort of stuff about the fact that intersectionality inevitably leads to one person that is the most oppressed in the entire world and they're the only person that's allowed to speak and as soon as you see white gay privilege you think well that that's what that is that is an intersecting uh hierarchy of grievance and if you're only gay you're basically not anything anymore that's amazing isn't it it really is wild it's wild i mean that's what's happening to women in sports right women and women have always been protected right we've thought of that women being oppressed whether it's uh you know income inequality or it's the glass ceiling in the workplace or it's like we've thought like hey we've recognized there's an inequality with women but you know where there's a bigger inequality trans women so trans women trump women so even if trans women have a physical advantage in sports we still let them compete because they are women and ideologically disadvantaged yes it's to open them up to violence did you see that woman from berkeley uh she was at berkeley yeah she was a law professor and she was uh testifying in front of congress and they were asking her questions and uh it was this guy josh howley who's like a senator and he said uh that he thought like she said do you think that men can get pregnant and he said no
and she said i just want to recognize what you're saying is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence which is one of the things that they love to do that like it's not whether or not you disagree with something like you can't have if you disagree with the ideology then you're opening people up to violence like which is wild to say well first off there's something about the tenor that that lady spoke with yeah i don't know what i don't know how to cut it's kind of kind of smoke it's smug it's condescending she's laughing part way through she's laughing during the things you're saying which makes me feel like it's a little bit of a larp for them it's almost like a little bit of a game did you see a guy in the uk was arrested for sharing a swastika that was made up of the lgbt flag this weekend what so a guy called lawrence fox who was he trying to like repurpose the swastika like no so it's not it's not a very good game you might even be able to get this so it doesn't look anything like a swastika it's like just four things that are all turned around so laurence fox the guy that created the reclaimed party in the uk run for the mayor of london i think a little while ago maybe around for office and um he at the start of pride month decided to put together a pride flag that's all the way around and put it as new profile pic this guy colin o'brady who was a decorated military veteran i think shared it at some point the police said to him that he had to accept an 80-pound fine and go to a re-education there it is that's a swastika well that's as close as you can get apparently what see that way it's in the middle it kind of looks like it oh oh i wasn't even that's crazy i wasn't even seeing that oh my god how did i not see that isn't that wild that i didn't see that that is so funny because that is really like a little optical illusion thing because it is a swastika that's wild so i didn't see that well why didn't they just do it where it's like that way that way that way that way like where both of them are turned these uh upper right corner and uh lower left corner are turned sideways
you'd have to speak to the designer i'm not sure so anyway i didn't see that that's what's so crazy like i looked at that and i'm just looking at the flags as in their entirety but then i now i clearly see it that's crazy so yeah that's a swastika he he shares this right and i mean you've also got you've also got uh news articles at the moment saying uh military veteran jailed or arrested for gay swastika which is one of the best headlines so anyway the police arrive and they say uh they contacted him and they said um 80 pound fine and you have to go to a re-education course oh camp so he said he said no i don't i don't want to do this and they said okay well we're going to come and arrest you so he asked for a time when they were going to come around and he got laurence the guy that made it and also has a huge social media following online got him to be there so lawrence live streamed it as it was happening and as the police are there he's live streaming this thing and there's a clip that's 30 seconds from the middle of it which has gone super super viral online so like three million players over the weekend and they asked the police officer why it is that's the guy there that made it right why am i being arrested and he said well obviously it's because your post has caused somebody's social anxiety social anxiety wow cause we have these hate speech laws non-crime hate incidents i think they're logged as in the uk and yeah they were somebody on crime non-crime hate incidents microaggression managed by bureaucracy well you remember that guy that got told we have to check your thinking because he liked a post that was seen as problematic what was is that in the uk as well yeah correct who was that somebody miller uh so it was the guy that was actually there he was an ex-police officer also a lawyer understands the law very very closely he got arrested along with the colin o'brady guy the only guy that didn't get arrested is the guy that made it who's also happened to be there the two people one of them for obstructing arrest as he was saying you're not following this rule can you please show me your section 35 of the whatever whatever act none of
this is you haven't reached the threshold for arrest and blah blah blah so he got arrested wow and then the dudes that shared the post got arrested so he got arrested for reading the correct law to the officer saying that they were abstract he was obstructing arrest okay wow yeah england's not that's not good man well i mean it's it's a it's a trade right it's either guns in the the us good for protection not good for shootings or uh freedom of speech in the u.s but in the uk no guns no mass shootings but a lot of hate crime incidents a lot of people being arrested for doing dumb stuff but can't you have freedom of speech in the uk and not have all the guns yeah it seems like they they're not mutually exclusive very correct yeah i i don't know man i mean the uk is just it's an interesting place at the moment um we we definitely have imported a lot of the culture war that you've got going on over here yeah but i don't think i don't think that the uk has quite the same amount of capture that the us has people are still very spit and sawdust everything in the uk i think even constantine and francis said this to you last week it's very much a class-based system right you don't get outside of your lane yes with regards to your class yeah and i think a big part of that is we've just had longer to establish what different schools mean what different areas that you live in mean i mean dude we've got trees in the uk that are older than your country oh yeah right so well we have trees here that are all around our country too good point all fairness very good point yeah yeah yeah they've been passed on though they're inherited um my point being that people know where their station is and they're not they're told not to get outside yeah and i think that because of that that's the focus now it's more surreptitious it's maybe even a little bit more um restrictive in some ways but it means that we haven't been quite so captured by the new new stuff that that i think is interesting when you have a country that is established
and has been around for i mean england's a thousand years old plus right i mean if you really go back to and look at in other countries as well there's many other countries that have these class systems like china is probably the best example china is four thousand plus years old which is wild when you really think about how young america is and the way china is completely locked down and what the way the government has absolute control over their population in in terms of like what they spend money on how they spend money what they get to see on social media what they get to see on the internet what they get to say i mean even in terms of their most respected population they're billionaires and super successful entrepreneurs if they speak out against the government they either get eliminated they vanish there's people that are like high-profile billionaires that have gone missing no one else from alibaba yeah and then the tennis lady she came back as well did she come back she made a statement posted a photo with a wall of fluffy toys behind her which is just very bizarre but yeah that happened but they could have the same photo of you with those walls of fluffy toys behind you and it doesn't mean it's real uh interesting with cgi and do you think they've deep faked her they easily could have i don't know what the latest is if she's been spotted out and about i want to see i want to see someone get deep faked for tennis if you can deep fake a tennis player well you can clone raphael on the doll yeah you can't deep fake them actually playing but you most certainly can deep fake them talking or standing there the chinese government's weibo account posted prepare for war yesterday whoa six hundred thousand likes when i i checked last night this is uh yesterday afternoon or today biden's got a call and also nancy pelosi is going to taiwan taiwan yeah so the prepare for war was the official government account on weibo which is the like whatsapp social media app jesus christ that is terrifying to me you know that was the concern that a lot of people had about the response to [Music]
the russian invasion of ukraine that the chinese government was going to be watching how the united states handled that and planning accordingly and one of the things the chinese government saw was that we've instituted certain sanctions in place to penalize russia and that the chinese economy and the the chinese government was going to look at that and make provisions and make plans because that's how we may be penalized in future so here's a question for you do you think that the us government will have played four degree chess with the restrictions that they placed on russia when they invaded the ukraine knowing that china would be watching to keep some other sorts of restrictions and plans in place that they might be able to use and pull out of their pocket if they invade taiwan i would think that if the government was competent that that's what they would do i do not have any evidence whatsoever that the government's incompetent or that the government is competent rather when i see kamala harris on tv saying my pronouns are she her i'm the lady in the blue dress i'm wearing a blue dress like what the [ __ ] is that like that if that's not ideological capture that that way of talking and behaving that's the wokest of the woke signaling because that's what people do because the idea is that like you're you're stating your pronouns she's also wearing a mask which is preposterous and then she like aren't you tested isn't everyone tested okay you're all negative so what the [ __ ] are you wearing masks for they test them every day signaling signaling total signaling and then also you're looking you don't want to be ableist so you want to signal to all of your people that are colorblind and i'm wearing a blue dress i think it's blind rather than color-blind oh is it maybe i mean try explaining the color blue to a blind person the us is in a recession at the moment but it's not allowed to be called recession well the government's trying to not call it a recession but
it's wikipedia article got changed you see this really oh dude no so they redefined recession yep so recession used to be two consecutive quarters of negative gdp growth right not anymore not on wikipedia when was this jamie get the get the wikipedia thing up because this is wild how long ago they changed it this weekend oh god uh i saw it got well i saw it got locked because people were [ __ ] with it is what i read but i don't know how much of that was but this is the definition where you type in google which is the same thing so a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced generally identified by a fall in gdp in two successive quarters so in google it's still the same in wikipedia let's look at what it what it says recession is a business cycle contraction where there's a general decline in economic activity recessions generally occur when there is a widespread spread drop in spending and or an adverse demand shock this may be triggered by various events such as financial crisis an external trade shock an adverse supply shock bursting okay here it is a recession is defined by the national bureau of economic research has a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market lasting more than a few months normally visible in real gdp real income employment industrial production and wholesale retail sales so in the uk in the uk it's defined as that in uk it's defined as a negative economic growth for two consecutive quarters so that changed so that's what's changed that the united states used to define it as two consecutive quarters and now yeah we don't anymore and people have pulled it up on the archive so a bunch of advisors economic advisers have got quotes of them saying what a recession is especially when donald trump was in office there is a recession that's coming negative gdp growth for two consecutive quarters right and then this weekend people are asking them are we in a recession
because the second quarter uh economics just came out and it's 0.9 decline again have you seen the white house press secretary define the economy as being strong and the best economy we've had in over a decade have you seen her do that no it's hilarious it's like the wildest gaslighting because she's doing all of these political hand maneuvers that people do you know those moves that people do with their hands when they're talking and they're trying to display like confidence and control and there's like it's it's literally like political pantomiming it's it's weird to watch in the political tai chi yeah it's weird to watch because it's like sleight of hand it's like it's very bizarre i think they've been trained in that some neuro-linguistic programming if you put your hands here when you're saying this sort of a thing blah blah blah i don't know if they're there's clearly an indication that that's what you would do if you were trained but i think it's more mimicking it's mimicking like the great presidents and the great politicians who have done these very specific things like bill clinton famously used to do this thing with his fingers we'd take his thumb and do this and just so it's not aggressive and violent because you can't really hit someone with this but if you were doing this yeah it'd be a problem that's problematic that's angry right with the pointing the finger the fist is a sign of violence but this thing is this weird like a mushy so the bizarre thing about the uh recession situation is the fact that it doesn't matter what you call it right you can call it [ __ ] paradise if you want but it's still [ __ ] right like all of the criteria of what's happening yes indicates a recession yes and the reason obviously is that you've got midterms coming up and you need to make sure that is in a recession is not something that can be thrown at the democrats yes right it's a protectionist strategy yes so no don't use that word well it's not it's not because it's not defined in that way right that's not the accepted definition right but it was until very very very recently that's wild well
that's gaslighting that and just that alone you know is people would think that it's trivial because they are talking about this economic downturn but it's not trivial because we've always used that term recession and we've always used that term to define whether or not the economic policies that are currently in place and whether or not the management the government has done a good job of making sure that the economy stays in a good place that's they definitely haven't done that so in order to escape that in you know that sort of distinction they're literally changing the definition which is terrible and it should be pushed back against in a big way it should it should be something that people get angry about like hey you're [ __ ] with definitions in order to pretend that you're doing a good job well the reason that you attach a sequence of letters to something right is to represent what that thing is you don't change reality by changing what those words actually mean right but if you can't control the economy you might as well just control the language and hope for the best god what a bunch of weasels dude it's wild but again this is this is i think because everybody's opinions and their words now are what everyone's judged on not their deeds right we used to be judged on our deeds because they were the things with the most obvious but now because social media is one of the primary forms of communication people are judged on their opinions and their words far more and what that means is that your opinion is actually and the language specifically that you use is it's way more important than actually what's happening in the world and if that's the case what it means is that language should be the focus why wouldn't i lexically try and do some brazilian jiu jitsu to [ __ ] around with this a little bit of semantic [ __ ] why not well because that's going to actually change the thing that most people are taking notice of and also there's a concept called two-step flow theory and what it says is that there are precious few original thinkers in
the world and because most people feel like they have to have an opinion on everything because that's the world that we live in at the moment but very few people can be bothered to do original thought and do the research people just take on the opinion of whoever their favorite thought leader is so you could basically argue that the culture war is largely two armies of npcs being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers above them that's a great way to look at it and that is kind of what's going on with a great majority of people or a large number of people i don't know if it's a majority but it's enough to make noise it's enough to show you that there's a real problem with ideologies and with tribalism because that's what people gravitate towards they gravitate towards a group of people that they feel like they can fit into and then they can adopt those patterns of thinking and those thoughts and instead of coming up with their own opinions they form this sort of conglomeration of other people's opinions and then they fiercely defend them and you see that a lot on twitter and you see that a lot of ideological capture on twitter and you see a lot of people there's people that i that i'm friends with and that i follow that i go to their their thing and like all day long they're just tweeting about politics and they're tweeting about the democrats and defending the democrats and attacking the republicans and it's really weird it because it's some sort of a strange distraction because to a person every one of those people that i'm talking about has a disappointing career every one of them every one of them is pretty [ __ ] unsuccessful in their chosen craft what do you think that's is that because they're spending too much time on twitter or is it something that's deep seated below that are they focusing too much on status games are they unable to prioritize what actually matters i think when their life is not going well and their their chosen career is not going well they concentrate on
other things to distract them instead of focusing on the very thing itself and they think that they're justified in doing that because those things are really important it's really important to stop the g the gop it's really important to do that it's not so important that you know i sell out at the [ __ ] chuckle hut this weekend what's really what's really important it's not important that my jokes are good it's not important that the audience comes and laughs and has a great time know what's really important is that i i tweet bad things about republicans and and defend kamala harris there's kind of a compensatory control thing going on here right the fact that they they feel like they don't have as much control over perhaps their main pursuit in their life yeah but they do have control over their twitter sure i mean that's why cairns are almost always fat they're like they don't have control over their bodies they're yelling at other people there's there's something to that there's something to like the most complainy [ __ ] people that are really shitty that don't have a good they're never in shape no they're they're not comfortable with their own skin and they're generally speaking they're not doing well they're not doing well at the other aspects of their life i bet their relationships are probably a mass their their friendships are probably all [ __ ] up you know it's not they're probably owed taxes they're a mess why do you think it is that people are so concerned about politics at the moment well donald trump broke a lot of people he he broke he broke a lot of people's ability to objectively look at the other side as just having a different perspective on things instead of that it's it became your evil we're good you're evil it it got down to like a really binary view of the way the world works you're either with us or you're against us he was so he was such a problem in that he's so confrontational and he he causes so many arguments and he attacks his enemies even while he was the president he was doing this so it it became this thing where it ramped
up the resistance and ramped up aggression to the point where people like putting resistance the resistance in their twitter posts about him it's like i think people haven't they haven't uh recovered from that they haven't like com no one that no one has put forth any like and especially no one that's progressive has put forth any realistic argument for why that's bad for you why that's bad for your thinking why that's bad for even the group that you support you're encouraging the other side to attack you you're encouraging this sort of divide that i think america is stricken with at the moment and it's not to say that there's not negative things about the the republicans there most certainly are but there's negative things about the democrats too and i think that aligning yourself with a particular party is always going to be a problem because some people feel like they can't talk about things that are not aligned with their party's values like maybe they're a person who is very progressive but they're also a free speech absolutist and then they see people getting censored and they see like the hunter biden story getting censored by twitter and they see certain stories not making their way into the news because the actual results the the actual facts and statistics that points to this argument are problematic to their ideology and so they either ignore them or they push against them or you know you you run into these ideologically captured people and it's very hard for people to break free because then you you run the risk of being attacked by your own community and when you have this like very binary perspective on politics and social issues whenever you deviate in any way shape or form you run the risk of being attacked particularly right now because again people are so divided and i really think this started i mean always it's always been the case but from 2016 on it became much more aggressive in 2012 people stopped voting for the love of the side that they had and started
voting for distaste of the other so up until then people that were democrats were voting because they liked the democrats after that time both republicans and democrats were basically doing a protest vote how much do you hate the opposition versus how much do you love yourself yeah and it was more about i am not that than i am this and it goes back to that fragile hatred of an outgroup not mutual love of an in-group thing from before right right you're constantly looking for who can we shave off who can we get rid of but i mean why why politics because i can't remember a time mostly because i had my head at my ass but i can't remember a time when the news wasn't talking about politics but i know that there was one you know when it was other sorts of stories but everything now seems to be so captured and any do you remember was it nicki minaj who became co-opted by the republicans briefly when she was like vaccine skeptical a few years ago yeah and it's like anything any opportunity to co-opt somebody in to become a political football that we can click about yeah it happened with you same thing with you yeah you know i just wonder why everything is seen through the same frame of politics now what like was it trump was that the thing it just yeah that's that's a big part of it but it's also it's a very easy attack vector it's very effective if you can just point to someone having uh some sort of heterodox perspective that is problematic you can attack them based on you know wrong think this is wrong think it's or well it's like really what it is it's like you've decided this person instead of saying what is she saying oh she's saying her friend's balls swole up like which is kind of hilarious you know she was talking about the vaccine and her friend had some bad reaction and his balls swole up which is apparently rare but does happen to some people but you know the way they looked at it was like you shouldn't be talking about this you shouldn't be saying this because you're contributing to vaccine hesitancy and this is vaccine misinformation and you're you know you're a bad person and she was pretty she was like [ __ ] you you know she
pushed back hard which i thought was amazing yeah man she went hard at it and so whenever that happens there's then there becomes a problem right here's another problem then people get captured by the republican party and then they start talking about that and then they start saying you know what [ __ ] that i'm a republican now i'm red-pilled and then they they they just join another group they just join this other group that supports them and one thing that's really interesting about the republicans during this time is that whenever anybody does step out of favor with the democrats the republicans endorse them and take them in they've done that with me and i'd like to thank you for that fox news i love you too like they've they've been super supportive of me i appreciate it but look and the things that they're supportive of are things that we tend to agree with you know i don't believe in this sort of one-size-fits-all government mandated you know healthcare remedy for a pandemic when there's other ways to address it there's other way there's i think people should have autonomy about their body the same way i think that a woman has a right to choose you know it's like my body my choice except when it comes to this one thing this vaccine that i want you to take no matter what or i'm not going to let you work and you can't travel but that's problematic because you're now showing that you don't hold the wholesale opinion exactly the republicans also i was problematic because i was right because i didn't get vaccinated i got over it very quickly it turns out i had it yeah you turned it it turns out you had it you didn't even know yeah we gave you a antibody test today yeah well the new variant um for a person like yourself is fit and healthy is not that much of a problem obviously that's a blanket statement and i'm generalizing because some people have a harder go of it than others but that's based on how your immune system is reacting and there's a lot of variables to that right it could be it caught you when you were really run down and not doing well or maybe you had another issue already like flu rona you know about flu rona what's that let's people catch covid and the
flu at the same time yeah my wife got that and it was because she was doing a lot of stuff and traveling and just like she got run down and she caught the rona while she had the flu and it was you know nailed yeah she got it it wasn't the worst thing it was you know like a flu but it was uh enough that i i could see like my wife was very healthy and fit and for her to get it like that it indicates that there's you know some people it depends on like what is going on with your body at the time and there's times when your immune system is robust and strong where you've been working out a lot drinking a lot of water and taking a lot of vitamins and taking care of your mental health and your immune system is powerful and then there's other times where you know maybe there's a death in the family and maybe you lost your job and maybe you haven't been sleeping maybe you're you have some mental health issues and then you're worn out and then you catch it and it's really bad and they'll say well that's because the disease is really bad well it's really bad for you given that set of circumstances and the idea that you just need to get boosted no matter what like this is this is nonsense because this is not one size fits all health care policies are stupid because they don't address the fact that there's a wide range of different human beings in this country it's a wide range of reactions like children for example chil you know the idea that all children need to be vaccinated is crazy my children cut and i'm not talking about other diseases i think they should be vaccinated for other diseases but for covid it's not a problem for healthy children they get through it like that i've seen it firsthand with my children i've seen it firsthand with many of my friends children they got covered and it was almost nothing you know my one kid had a [ __ ] headache for a day and that's it and she never had a cough she was laughing that she got to stay home from school you know i mean it was nothing but you're not supposed to hold that view you're not supposed to be
uh accurate pro-gun vaccine skeptical i'm i'm not vaccine skeptical i'm propaganda skeptical probably understand i'm also skeptical of the fact that pharmaceutical companies have extraordinary amounts of money and influence and we have always thought of them as being deceptive and there's a lot of evidence that points to the fact that they have misled people on the dangers misled people on the results of their trials they have hidden trials that showed negative results and and highlighted trials that were pure clearly biased and that's always been the case we've always known that there's a [ __ ] ton of evidence whether it's their the release of vioxx there's many different drugs that they've been fined for in the terms of billions of dollars so that it's not that i'm a vaccine skeptic i'm a skeptic of undue influence of massive corporations and they have done this forever we know this the [ __ ] opioid epidemic is 100 caused by people who lied about whether or not these [ __ ] things are addictive these are the same people that are pushing all these other pharmaceutical remedies because they make un ungodly amounts of money do you see dope sick i did not see dope sick it's amazing so good and from someone that wasn't familiar with that we have a very different way of in the uk people are underprescribed rather than overprescribed right because it's subsidized right uh but yeah that was terrifying another thing that i was looking at was psychedelic capitalism so companies at the moment big pharma are realizing that down the line the psychedelic world and drugs may be opened up they may be legalized therapeutically and perhaps even recreationally yeah so a bunch of companies now are trying to synthesize patentable ownable versions of drugs so they're going in and looking at mdma and lsd and psilocybin and stuff like that now typically what happens is a drug gets created and then over time it becomes uh
generic right it just gets opened up and anybody can pretty much make it what you have here is the opposite things happening the opposite so you have the existence of a generic off-brand label drug and now companies big pharma companies are seeing down the line a company called compass i think is one of the big ones they're looking down the line and they're thinking we can own some of this we can somehow profit from this so they're future-proofing themselves by trying to create drugs synthesize them that's fascinating because the result it's going to be interesting to see if they do that what the results are because psychedelic drugs one things that they do encourage is they encourage compassion and uh dissolving of the ego and they encourage community and they encourage love this is j these are obviously mass generalizations and there's people who view psychedelics who have escaped all of those positive benefits right we know though i mean they become gurus and self-obsessed and you know there's there's it's not like foolproof but i think that in general the result of psychedelics is a more loving cohesive society and i think that's good so maybe we can have some sort of a brand of capitalism that encourages psychedelic uses because it's profitable and then because of that and through that people can abandon a lot of their aggressive tendencies and a lot of their ideas that are not suitable to a loving community because you're going to align something which is good for society with something that is good for the company yeah and maybe these companies in profiting off of these psychedelics would start to invest in community centers and start to invest in rebuilding neighborhoods and rebuilding [ __ ] up cities and why would they do that they would do that because they're looking at their overall their overall image if you're making insane amounts of money profiting off of psychedelics and you're using these
psychedelics as well you might feel i would feel that i had some sort of an obligation to enhance the community that was serving me dude if everybody in the company is on psychedelics i don't i don't know how much he's going to get done i don't know if this is ever going to make it to market i know there's a lot of people that are using psychedelics in in big tech and they're using them in in micro dosing and it's uh changing their perspectives it's changing the way they interact with the market and the mirrors it depends upon dosage yeah yeah well you know to get back to what you were talking about about embracing views like you know being pro second amendment but also being pro choice you know like that these things are supposed to you're supposed to not have that you're supposed to be able to uh join a group and that group is you know you've got oh i got all my my ducks in a line here what do i what do i think about this oh that let me consult the document yeah what i think about open borders oh yeah i'm for it i think i'm i'm liberal yeah and then you look at this and you you you realize that like there's some things on this side that i don't agree with and there's some things on that side that i agree with and then you realize like oh wait a minute i'm just a person i'm a person with my own ideas on things and i'm not a republican i'm not a democrat i'm a human and i resist these notions that i have to be classified in this very [ __ ] clear and specific box the problem is if i know one of your views and from it i can accurately predict everything else that you believe you're not a serious thinker you've just adopted somebody else's ideology and you've plugged it in yeah i think this is one of the reasons why whenever i see people online that always talk about the same stuff you know it's like an old leather pair of shoes you can almost feel where it's going to go you know what the opinion is going to be something new is happened the recession news about wikipedia or whatever's happened and you can tell what the take's going to be you're never surprised yeah that means that they're
not a serious thinker yeah or it means you know they're they're ideologically captured at least in that specific topic you know like um the abortion topic is what i call it's a very human issue and what i mean by that is it's very messy it's not it's not a it's not like a math problem when you look at abortion abortion this country and abortion rights in this country and that's what it is me call it reproductive rights but it's really abortion you're you're talking about when a con life has been conceived right there it is the potential to become a human being at what point in time are you comfortable with terminating that and who do you think should be allowed to say whether or not another individual not you not your your partner but another person when when they get pregnant when should they be allowed to have an abortion and texas has this crazy law it's like six weeks which is [ __ ] insane because six weeks in a lot of women don't even know they're pregnant and then it's seven weeks and now it's against the law so now you have to travel to get an abortion two weeks late for your period yes i mean [ __ ] wild that's wild to me um and it doesn't make any sense and it and it's mostly based on religious beliefs i think we don't have a christian right in the uk which is one element that's very different it's very very interesting it's amazing no one's come along and built one um yeah well i guess because it seems like they could get a lot of people with that yeah well you've got them over here but yeah i think um yeah we got a lot of them over here it's interesting thinking about the way that the abortion debate comes about i i got asked on a q a recently what opinion do you hold that most of your audience would disagree with and i said that both sides of the abortion debate feel to me like a kind of righteous side like i really find it difficult to work out like when
i hear a shapiro going like really really good on the pro-life thing i'm like [ __ ] hell like that sounds kind of compelling and then when i hear someone that's completely talking about the pro choice in a really really good way i think [ __ ] hell that's really compelling right and maybe that's just that i haven't done the work to get myself to a sufficiently robust position to make one call or the other but i think it's what you said earlier on this isn't a maths problem it's a very very messy issue and it comes down basically to sort of morality and a felt sense of what is right for a lot of people they can post talk it as much as they want they can say well actually we know that the cluster of cells and this level of survivorship and blah blah blah you know it's a moral issue it's mostly a moral issue it's how do you feel about this yes and now you're trying to verbalize it yes and i think um from my own personal perspective my thought on it is first and foremost i am not a woman i am incapable of getting pregnant and i don't think that i don't think i'm a woman but even if i was a woman i'm pretty sure i can't get pregnant so i might become a woman but i can never get pregnant at least in terms of like what science has figured out now like if medical science comes up with some new innovation and i can become a woman and get pregnant i actually read something where they were talking about um taking trans women and um transplanting uterus in in trans women and that this was at least theorized where'd you get a uterus from another woman donation yes someone doesn't want her uterus she gives it to you hey steve yeah you you could say you no he gives it to you presumably if you're getting rid of your uterus and it's still working it's because you might be going through transition as well no it could be a woman that doesn't want her uterus just giving it away yeah she doesn't like it like a yard sale yeah like i don't like my left hand you want it i mean there are people that do you know that there's there's people that um
i forget what the term for it is but they feel like they should be handicapped and they're not i know that there's a trans autistic movement at the moment which are people who aren't autistic but identify as autistic oh that's hilarious for the first time ever i felt like someone was using my culture as a costume are you artistic i don't know i just feel like i feel like five percent autism is like a competitive advantage oh yeah for sure that's what you want you just want you know the salt bay you want that much just a sprinkling of it right you want a micro dose adderall micro dosing autism good outcomes from first five years of uterus transplants what is this into men okay hold on a second but this is women yeah yeah yeah okay but this is problematic first of all because they're saying women so i i was looking forward okay no no you just go back go back uterine transplants and trans women ethicists sound in like right there click on that i was i had something i was trying to find newer stuff oh okay but let's just like see what this is but this is may of 2022. uterine transplants are not you knew the first successful uterine transplant was done sweden 2013 america boasted its first successful uterine transplant three years later at baylor but these were cis women born without a functioning uterus now an indian doctor is proposing uterine transplantation for trans women that's this is what i was talking about the reaction in the bioethics community is mixed oh you think i was trying to see if there was a result to this i want to find the people that are in support of it like yeah well it's not just a uterus it's not like a garage or a garage as you would say it's not just it's not just like having a garage it's not just oh let's just park your car in here and it'll be fine you can have my garage i can have your garage it's like there's more than just the vehicle that you park it in right hormone cascades and a whole bunch of other stuff someone got really uh criticized online a little while ago for replying to elon musk's problem about um under population and
population collapse that test you babies will fix everything it's like well it's the mother's heartbeat it's all of the the ways that you interact that the baby interacts in utero with the mother it's not just it's not simply just like a vitamin pill that you could take or a particular solution that you could leave this fetus in and then you get a child nine months later yeah who knows what happens if we actually develop a full child outside of a human body i mean a real test tube baby where there's some sort of a an artificial environment and then they all turn out to be sociopaths they have no connection with other human beings so they didn't develop a connection with their mother while they're in the womb it could be wild or excuse me it could be a father in the womb because men can get pregnant now i learned about the adaptive reason for psychopaths being in society so you'd think like it's about one percent not point one percent to one percent of people are psychopathic right and then you can filter that down to the ones that have got sufficient uh motivation to actually go and do something that's a bit wild but i was asking this guy the researcher and i was saying look what is it how do psychopaths even exist like why do they exist i can't understand why they're adaptive i know that you can be effective over short periods as a psychopath but over long periods of time it doesn't end up being very good for society and i thought it would have been bred out he said yeah you're right except for the fact that over the entire size of a population a few psychopaths actually make sense if you're a raiding party a viking raiding party that needs to go over and [ __ ] everybody up in lindisfarne which is near to where i lived in the uk you want some psychopaths you don't want them to come back with ptsd you want them to go over there burn everything down rape the women pillage come back with gold and supplies and grain and whatever else they take and not care about it you actually on an individual level psychopathy might not be fantastic for the people around them but in a tribe it's actually quite adaptive and quite useful it's like a weapon like a very
specific sort of weapon that you can use yeah break glass in case of war yes yes in case of raiding party it makes sense that it would be sort of a a legacy thing that exists in the human population that we've had it because it was very beneficial thousands of years ago but the difference is difference is now that you're not going to get pulled up as much for being a psychopath because you can move from town to town if it was a dunbar number of 100 or 150 or something in your tribe previously were you going to do go to the next tribe maybe maybe maybe that would have happened i don't know perhaps you could move from one tribe to another tribe it seems pretty unlikely probably just get killed but if you [ __ ] over people one too many times this is the reason that socially we're so careful of status it's one of the reasons why we are uh concerned about public speaking because one of the few times you would have done that is when your status would have been in um high focus and people might have said if this goes badly they're going to drop down or maybe you were defending yourself against the tribe of some kind right if you're not able to move on that would make psychopathy more difficult to manage and more likely to be punished i think but now you can just go from town to town to within a city you can go from suburb to suburb change your name not use your social media profile anymore i think that psychopathy people that are actively being psychopaths are significantly easier now to hide in amongst society hmm that makes sense it also makes sense that psychopathy would have been more common because it would have been more useful when you're constantly in tribal war correct yeah it depends on how you deploy it so it's interesting psychopathy to be a clinically diagnosed psychopath you actually have to have committed criminal acts so you can't be because of the way that the the current um psychopathic checklist it's called i think you have to be 28 out of 40 in the uk or 30 out of 40 in the u.s the us has got a higher threshold for psychopaths which is kind of funny and um there was this guy this researcher was
researching psychopaths and what you see is a particular area of the brain is down regulated right so you don't see as much activity when you see stuff like death or images that would cause you to have empathy so he decides that he's going to study a bunch of psychopaths many of whom i think are actually in prison because you have to commit a criminal act and then he needs a control group so the control group is going to be you're a professor you've got students use the students and he was running out of people to put in the control group i mean he even used himself as one of the people so anyways running through this control group and having a look at all of the people that are in it and he notices this person's got no activation when they're going through and he goes holy [ __ ] this is the brain of a psychopath in the control group i've found a psychopath in here i need to go and contact him it turned out to be him oh turned out to be the professor himself he discovered that he was a psychopath whilst doing a study on psychopaths and then he said actually you know what it all makes sense now because when people come around to my house and they're eating my food i think who the [ __ ] are all of these people in my house eating my food why are they here and they interviewed his kids they asked his kids and they said what is it like you know is there anything unique about dad he said well yeah dad he doesn't smile that much around us and he's not very warm and he's not very loving and blah blah blah but the point being that you can have the biological determinants of being a psychopath and it not manifest this is a fully functioning guy wife kids career didn't smile much wasn't happy when people ate his food but like broadly fine but he had essentially the same raw materials as the person that was murdering jail so what was what's the determination how do they what are they looking for when they find out that this whole big long checklist might even be available online i'm not sure but big long checklist of things that you need to go through a bunch of questions that you answer and they go through this
diagnosis but in order to breach the threshold of clinically being diagnosed as a psychopath you have to have used it to commit crimes so this meant that although this particular professor had all of the raw ingredients and it looked like he was psychopathic by the what is it the dns what's that thing the diagnostic statistical manual dsm uh the dsm wouldn't have categorized him as a psychopath very interesting that is very interesting so this guy did they contact his spouse well i think he was it was him doing the study right so i guess he contacted his spouse did he ask his spouse like him what's wrong with me why do you like me perhaps but then you also have to think the fact that psychopaths tend to be pretty effective in the world right so someone that has very outgoing traits they're super self-assured you know you have a narcissism as well as as long as it's not uh vulnerable narcissism there's two types grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism what's the difference so grandiose narcissists are the ones who genuinely believe that they are better than everybody else they are constantly proving this to everyone vulnerable narcissists manifest their narcissism in a similar way but it's to try and hide the fact that deep down they don't believe that they're anything so both types of narcissism will manifest in a similar sort of way both of them will be out there but one person is desperately seeking approval and needs people to tell them that they've done well and the other one doesn't they're just going to continue believing no matter what reality brings to them now the vulnerable narcissists are actually really dangerous and the reason for that is that if the world doesn't give to them that which they think they're going to get very very angry and aggressive because that taps into something that maybe they're fearful about that's deep down that makes sense that makes sense where a lot of people who have a distorted perception of where they should be in the world are angry at others who are doing well
and if someone takes them down if somebody was to take the piss out of them the grandiose narcissist it would just be water off a duck's back definitely grandiose narcissist right he's not he's not got vulnerable narcissism in him someone that's a vulnerable narcissist everybody knows that friend that just can't not bring up the most recent brilliant thing they've done but they know that if they poked them a little bit too hard that it would really really hurt that's the vulnerable narcissism yeah interesting so when this study is done on psychopaths and they're looking for these traits are they able to do some sort of a scan of the mind is there like an fmri or something like that that they're yeah and they're looking for brain activation in particular areas that respond to imagery i think that people are being shown and the imagery is stuff like um war images dead bodies stuff that should cause empathy to come through because i think a lack of empathy is one of the main insights one of the main causes or determinants sorry that uh it's interesting like is there a difference between uh desensitization which is something that absolutely has happened with people being able to access horrific images and videos and stories online because your access to horrific images is so much greater than at any time in human history however for the most part our physical interaction with horrific imagery is down way way more than it ever was like in you know during times of war and during times of famine and in the past when thing you know things are way more brutal in history but our access to images like there's a certain argument that video games and violent films and all these things have desensitized us to imagery so everyone's maybe become a little bit more psychopathic in that way right
because like what do you if you're studying a person's reaction to thing it's not like you're taking them to a rape scene it's not like you're taking them like hey we're gonna watch this guy get murdered come with me we're gonna be like not just visceral right you're not gonna be right there like how do you react when you are like are there levels to this like if if someone was stabbing someone right in front of you would you not care at all or would you just not care if you saw a video um yeah the threshold is different the threshold is always but i mean this is the problem with any lab study right right any time that you want to try and talk about arousal response right right all of that it's it's in a lab so there's a conversation analysis is another type of science that's done and most stuff that's done to do with the way that people speak they'll bring them into a lab and then they'll analyze the conversation or they'll watch them perhaps under multiple cameras conversation analysis is actually done of of this it wouldn't even be this it would be even it would be us out for a beer or something like that and then they record that session they go away and they transcribe it difference being that you're able to get things out of a non-lab setting that you couldn't get in the lab setting just there's always going to be an impact right an unnatural impact and yeah you might be right i mean perhaps there are people that are totally fine looking at the images and not being there in front of the situation itself yeah i would really worry about that analysis today because i do think that people are so much more comfortable with seeing horrific things today and particularly things that are not quite real like violent video games like if you play grand theft auto you could beat someone to death with a crowbar it's a part of a game that's been played by millions of people there's a lot of weirdness to that there's a lot of weirdness to like getting accustomed to semi-realistic imagery that is not if you saw it in real life it'd be horrific but you're laughing at beating someone to death with a crowbar you
steal their car and shoot them how much crossover is there between what we do in video games and how we see the real world i mean this is like the billion dollar question right just how much impact is there of violent video games on the way that people show up in day-to-day life i think it might entirely depend on the resolve of your personality and how how you've how you've been raised i think if you're a person that doesn't get a lot of interaction with human beings maybe have uh negative interactions with family members and parents and you seek escape through these violent video games and you play these violent video games and the imagery is stimulating and exciting and you get feelings of of victory and of satisfaction by achieving these goals which include shooting people that could be a problem like say a person like yourself like a fully formed adult human being nice guy i'm sure video games are not going to turn you into psycho but if you're being raised on the internet and you're on [ __ ] 4chan all day looking at people getting shot in the face and then you go and play violent video games and then you don't have any interaction with loving people there's i mean there's people like that that the vast majority of the human interaction is through a screen to a faceless person somewhere else and you're get just getting data in terms of like text from posts and articles and you're reading you're laughing at horrible v memes and then you're playing violent video games like you are in some way i don't know if what the equation is for nature versus nurture but i would imagine that there's some impact that all of that stuff has on your your overall being but the question is like what is that what's that number have you had to look at behavioral genetics much so it's how heritable a lot of the traits that we have especially psychologically are so this guy called
robert ploman he did the biggest twin study ever in history every twin born between i think 1991 and 1994 in the uk he invited them to be a part of this study it's something like 60 000 pairs of twins they did and what he was trying to do was he was trying to tease apart the difference between nature and nurture how much of what we are is because of our genetics and how much of what we are is because of our environment and the only way that you can really do this is with identical twins and what you can do is identical twins that get put up for adoption you get to use the same genetics but you split test what happens in terms of the environment and dude the number the amount of impact that our genes have on us is absolutely terrifying pretty much 50 of everything that you are psychologically is because of your genes 50 50 wow so if your father's a psychopath and your mother's a psychopath oh psychopathy may be even more heritable um i mean so everyone would accept the fact that height is pretty heritable right i think it's about 0.9 so 90 is is the correlation between you and your parents weight is i want to say 50 there will be a a chart that we could get on the internet of of how heritable robert ploman's work says everything is but stuff like depression alcoholism all of this stuff is super super highly heritable and people don't like this because in a world that's a meritocracy you want to believe that you can be anything that you dream to be right if the people that are successes are worthy of their successes then what does that mean the people who fail are well they're worthy of their failures but this genetic research would suggest that there's a lot of restrictions that get placed on people before they actually end up even stepping onto the field of play and that makes people feel very uncomfortable it's you know just around the corner from talking about eugenics it's just around the corner of talking about determinism that there's racial differences in iq all of this sort of stuff it's in the same region as some pretty touchy subjects
that nobody wants to go close to but when you're talking about psychopathy a lot of that is coming through yeah maybe it's activated uh in the environment but a lot of this needs to be triggered in the parents and you go well that's difficult situation to work out who's morally responsible is the psychopath morally responsible or how responsible yeah that determinism argument the version of or the argument rather of free will versus determinism is when it's very compelling when you get down to the bottom of it and you really start thinking about like are you how much free will do you really have and what what does that mean you are you a combination of all of your life experiences plus your genetics or are you an individual with choices that you can make in the moment right now do the right thing like is that possible like who are you are are you are you a person or are you a conglomeration of ideas and thoughts and genetics and how much will and how much control do you have over the things you say in the things you do i spiraled one of my friends into a deep depression after i sent him the clip of sam harris talking about that on this podcast he didn't leave the house for two weeks it's like well if if everything's determined then it doesn't matter it kind of does yeah i'm i'm i think sam makes a very compelling argument but i do think there's something to uh external pressures that you get from the community that affect your choices because you you say and do things that people think are either a problem or are negative or you know have some sort of um a negative effect on others and so you realize that people don't like that and then it shifts the way you think and behave in the future and then when faced with a similar situation you then instead of relying upon this accumulation of data and genetics you also take into account into consideration the thoughts and feelings of others and that
is a version of free will because then you decide you know what i think i'm thinking about this wrong and i think my natural i'm compelled to act in this way but i think maybe i should lean more towards that and maybe i should try to do the right thing and that's free will it definitely makes people i think believing that you've got that impact it definitely makes them feel more empathic right if nothing if nothing matters then you're only two steps away from fatalism or nihilism right that doesn't seem like a very good way so i mean you could say that learning about determinism and information has it right that if you learn about it it may cause you to be less caring to be less diligent less conscientious with the things that you do it was interesting thinking about um the role model thing that we said earlier on a lot of the time or at least where i grew up in the northeast of the uk there's not a massive amount there weren't many people that were like the people that i wanted to be and i realized that i didn't have any role models or many that were fantastic for me to be around but having a negative role model so someone that you know that you definitely don't want to be like i actually think is maybe just as uh useful it's if you don't have anybody around you that you want to be like and you do have people around you that you like i don't want to have his relationship with his father his type of way that he shows up for his kids the financial uh setup that this person's got in their life that person's body image that person's relationship with their diet all of that stuff those are all flags that you can plant in the ground they're going to say okay i'm not going to be this i'm not going to be this i'm not going to be this and avoiding ruin is probably more useful than actually trying to achieve success like people can get themselves out of the game a lot more easily than they can get to the top and if you end up with a criminal record or dying in a car crash because you were drunk driving or getting a girl pregnant when you're both too young to support the baby like all of these things are huge problems and the downside of that is much worse
than the upside of being more inspired so i just felt like looking at negative role models is potentially a useful way to go about things like that yeah i think that's why a lot of people who are very successful came from a horrible environment like they realized that's not how i want to be that's a big factor with alcoholics children the children of alcoholics either become alcoholics themselves or really have a great disdain for alcohol yeah but if you grew up on an island this the um genetic predisposition for alcoholism is pretty high but if you grew up on an island that had no alcohol on it you wouldn't be an alcoholic so everything isn't fully determined by your genes right the environment plays a role i did a gig once on this place called block island and block island i think see find out where block island is i think it's off rhode island somewhere but uh i mean i don't know if the audience that i had was indicative of the rest of the population of this island but there wasn't a lot yeah yeah okay rhode island there's not a lot to do on this island and uh i think it's like mostly like fishermen or people who you know i i don't know but i've never encountered a more stupefyingly drunk audience in my life they weren't just drunk i mean they were [ __ ] obliterated and it was the whole crowd and it was me and this uh this guy scott that i was uh doing this gig with and uh i remember uh we went back to the place where we're staying afterwards and we're like never again we're never doing this gig again this is the worst gig ever we have to tell everybody is there a right amount of drunk that the crowd needs to be no no they could be completely sober and have a good time i mean uh alcohol is obviously a social lubricant and it helps a little bit for people to you know loosen up and have some fun but uh you know i mean i i go to shows all the time where i'm sober and i'm laughing you don't have to be drunk you don't have to be intoxicated in any way but being stupefied and these people were st just
it wasn't one of them it wasn't 10 of them it was all of them i've never encountered an audience like that where everyone was shit-faced there was no like there's got to be a table that i could turn to with like the rational group of people that are just out having a good time going what the [ __ ] is going on there was no people like that there everyone was just and keep drinking they kept drinking and it was just so depressing and i was just thinking imagine growing up and being stuck on this island maybe it's better now people i don't know block island maybe you got to go and get going on now you pulled it off got your [ __ ] together but when i was there in like 1989 it was horrific i mean it was [ __ ] horrific and we we couldn't believe it i forget how we got there probably like a ferry or something but i remember like coming back we were just going i'm never [ __ ] going back there because it's like you there was not there was no there was no humor there was nothing you could say it didn't matter what you said these people were obliterated i mean the whole audience was obliterated just i remember this lady like yelling out scott when he was on stage she was just like yeah and i looked over and like the people that were with her were like barely recognizing she was that drunk and they were just s plastered talking about funny stuff have you seen the new peter adverts about how meat can get in the way of your love life no jamie please yeah please it's going to get in the way of your love life so goodness you definitely don't eat meat then these adverts are some of the funniest things that i've seen on the internet it's a new campaign from 2017 is this meat will get in the way of your loved ones as meat interrupts your sex life yeah that's it it might be 2017. is this it yeah okay let's see there's a cow in the middle oh
first of all that guy has problems anyway with his [ __ ] man bun look at him easy i got one it doesn't look like that though shave it off [Laughter] that silly fella yeah scroll down jamie what's it saying there should be someone so yeah they put them on the side of the road how's it interrupt your sex life uh there's one with a pig there me and dary clog your arteries and can lead to erectile dysfunction that's not really true none of that go a little bit further down i think there's one that looks like two guys have had their mind blown by a chicken there it is meat interrupts your sex life two guys have had a threesome with a chicken and it looks like they've blown their mind i don't think that's what they're saying i know chicken is keeping them from [ __ ] each other that's what it's saying that somehow another chicken is bad for your sex life tell that to 95 of the world who eats meat it's probably more than that i think it's like 97. women see men who are omnivores is more attractive than men that are vegetarian as well is that that's true bunch of studies yeah yeah yeah they see men uh what about vegetarian women there's a lot of vegetarian women and vegan women that are disgusted by people who eat meat perhaps but that means that you've reduced down your dating pool right as a vegetarian man you're a disadvantage to all of the omnivore women right but perhaps an advantage to the vegan and vegetarian women potentially a high price to pay though just to get laid do not have meat again well unless it works for you i think for some people that's what they want you know i i mean i'm a strong believer that in biological diversity and i think there's many people that thrive on a vegetarian diet they don't even seem to have a problem with it at all they seem happy and healthy and have you ever tried it yes when i was fighting i i was uh i did a vegetarian diet for six months because i was trying to maintain a ridiculously low weight
and uh didn't work didn't work well for me but also i should say that i was 19 or 18. and so i probably wasn't doing it right but i was just eating vegetables i would go to like i buy chinese food and i'd get like you know buddha's delight and get all vegetables and i wasn't eating any meat at all what was your performance like changes i was just a little like lack lack of energy like listless it was just like didn't feel good just didn't but again i'm not saying that you can't thrive on a vegetarian diet i'm just giving my own personal experience with how i did it i don't think i did it well you know but when i started eating meat again i there's like a pier like i won the massachusetts state championships in taekwondo four years in a row and the first year i won it at 140 pounds and i wasn't 140 pounds i was probably like 150 something and i drained myself to get down to 140 in order to compete and it was you had to weigh in the day of the matches and i won but i was very tired i was i was drained and i won by knockout in two of the fights and it was very lucky that i did because i probably didn't have enough energy to fight like hard for you know all the rounds and then um the next year so between that year and um there was a few competitions before you know the state and national championships and so i said you know i'm having a really hard time maintaining this this weight and getting down to this weight was so brutal for the state championships i'm going to try to do something different so i tried a vegetarian diet and then i did it for six months and it wasn't good i didn't make i didn't make gains in terms of like my technique and my my ability i just felt like i was stuck and so my instructor said why don't you think about going up in weight just give it a try and so then i started eating meat like crazy and i gained 10 pounds like almost immediately like within two months i was 10 pounds heavier and
much better same condition i was faster i was stronger and i was winning in much more spectacular fashion like i was going to tournaments and just destroying people like i like really came into my own after i quit my vegetarian diet but again i don't think i was doing it right i think i was weakening myself i mean i think if i was like supplementing with other kemp protein and making sure that i got my b12 in order and then i was you know taking supplements and doing the doing it the correct way and getting my blood work done and making sure that my levels were all good i wasn't doing that much less education about it back then much worse uh supplementation in terms of helping people to do that yes yeah much less i remember i went to a nutritionist to try to talk to her about it and she was telling me i should eat cereal and you know like she's getting like you know have a bowl of cereal what about sugar she's like well you'll burn that off you're very athletic i was like this is a terrible nutritionist like what how hard is it because the jake paul fights just being cancelled you see that yeah yeah and that's been cancelled because his opponent couldn't lose 16 pounds allegedly most likely that was cancelled uh for numerous reasons that may have been one of them but the allegations that i'm hearing are that they sold so few tickets that it would be a real problem in terms of like financially to even break even because they what dana white said that he had heard they had only sold a million dollars worth of tickets if you want to turn the lights on in madison square garden it costs a half a million dollars you you have to sell a lot of [ __ ] tickets if you want to make some money in madison square garden and if you want to make money on pay-per-view there's a threshold like say uh up until like a hundred thousand buys depending on what the deal is you might not make any money and then after a hundred thousand buys then you start making money and who the [ __ ] wanted to see that fight i didn't want to see it nobody wants to see that fight except jay paul's family
and his friends his fans um i think and and rockmon's family and friends and fans but i think that if he had fought someone who was a uh like a r either a ranked opponent or someone with a big name like jake paul is obviously very popular and people and he's very talented like he knocked out tyron woodley who's one of the greatest welterweight champions in the history of the ufc i mean obviously tyron woodley's on a boxer his background was in wrestling but we're still talking about elite combat sports athlete and jake paul flatlined him with one punch he's legit i'm i i believe and i've watched him hit mitts i've watched him work out i've watched him spar i think he's legit i think he could be a legit pro boxer and i also think that if he he wasn't jake paul and you watched his performance like the way he knocked out tyron woodley if he was just an up-and-coming boxing contender i would say that guy's a [ __ ] killer keep an eye on him the way he knocked out tyron woodley is serious i like i would tell everybody have you seen this guy jake paul he's the [ __ ] he's real he's a [ __ ] that nate robinson guy that he knocked out the weight it's not just that he knocked out an nba player that's no big deal it's the way he did it he knocked him out like a stone cold killer he knew exactly what he's doing he slid away cracked him with a right hand and dropped him it's he's real he's got real talent you know the ben asker knockout it's not impressive to knock out ben askren because ben askren is just an elite wrestler he also had a hip replacement before that and kind of probably barely trained striking for that fight he doesn't have like this deep background in striking where he became we was like a really dangerous opponent but the way he did it he's cracking him at one punch and flatlining him like that's he's legit jake paul is legit talented but you gotta have a [ __ ] dance partner and even though rachman is uh haseem rahman's son and you know there's there's legacy to that and he's like 12-1 as a professional he lost his last fight but he's still 12-1 as a professional as far as
credentials go he's bigger than jake paul and they wanted him to be at 200 pounds so he's supposed to weigh in at like no more than 205 and he was like 2 15 and that's why they're cancelling the fight maybe maybe or maybe the interest in this fight was a lot less than they had anticipated he was supposed to be fighting tommy fury yeah tommy fury who's you know second time that tommy's pulled out yeah no it can be because of originally an injury i think back in last year and then this time it was something to do with immigration problems but in the last two fights that jake's had three people have pulled out yeah well it's because he's [ __ ] good he's good man just it's he run you run a real risk of getting knocked the [ __ ] out if you fight jake paul now he's got nothing to lose as well right you run a real risk of getting knocked the [ __ ] out by jake paul and that's like because of the way he acts and behaves and because it's so funny the way he acts like what he's done is really kind of amazing because he's like created this persona that's like easily mocked but you can't mock his [ __ ] skills so like these guys can mock him and talk all kinds of crazy [ __ ] but when you get in the ring with them that [ __ ] dude can fight he can fight like i'm a combat sports expert right i literally do that for a living i'm a martial arts expert i will tell you without doubt that [ __ ] dude can fight he can fight there's an interesting question coming up now especially to do with boxing that it's the sweet science and it was kind of held in very unique prestige there's a question about how late can you start and still become absolutely great uh who's the guy that fought uh tyson fury for the deontay wilder he's started super late right you want to say 17 18. yeah i think older than that i think he started when he was 21. okay he won a bronze medal in the olympics after a year and a half of training you need to understand what kind of special talent deontay wilder has he's got what you know what teddy atlas calls an eraser for right hand forget
all the mistakes he makes he can just erase it boom with one right hand and he almost knocked out tyson fury i mean he [ __ ] him up and it's one of the reasons why tyson fury wants to retire because that fight he was concussed after that fight and like he was hurting for a long time because deontay wilder cracked him on two moments in that fight and dropped him and had him in really bad trouble and you know look tyson fury's an animal and a warrior and he got up and he won that fight he won by spectacular knockout but a lot of people would have went night night that day a lot of people most people but there's a question to be asked here of how late can you start you know depends on the individual because some people just have an inherent ability to learn athletic pursuits they just they just they have uh just a better understanding of their body they have a better relationship with movement for whatever reason and you can say like that it's important to have uh traditional martial arts or boxing training early on and for the most part that's correct but there's a lot of things that people do whether it's just [ __ ] around with their friends or whether it's other sorts of athletic pursuits that can enhance your ability to learn boxing and can enhance your ability to learn mma but to be the best of the best i think there's a real good argument that you need to start early because tyson fury obviously started early deontay wilder didn't but also tyson fury's six foot nine i mean the physical gifts that he have that he has are undeniable and the guy's mind i mean he's he's a [ __ ] animal like when he goes in there when he was talking to deontay wilder and they were doing the uh the pre-fight instructions he's looking at me you're a [ __ ] [ __ ] you're a [ __ ] you're a [ __ ] and he was saying that to him and you could see deontay wilder going what have i got myself into like that was i think for the third fight what he'd already knocked him out in the second fight and he [ __ ] him up in the third fight different man yep and it's also the
environment he grew up in you know obviously he's a gypsy he calls himself the gypsy king you know it's like you're around people that are fighting all the time there's a long history of bare-knuckle boxing in the gypsy community they're tough [ __ ] people jake paul called out canelo alvarez as well that's hilarious that's a death sentence yeah yeah but also jake paul's 200 pounds canelo alvarez really should have never fought at 175 pounds which is when he fought dmitry bivall he lost the title at 175 because bhuval is an elite legit world champion at 175 and a lot of people feel like that's why he avoided the rematch with bval and that's he's going down to super middleweight to fight uh triple g because if he fought again bival would have his number because beval had him in real trouble in moments of that fight where he had him up against the ropes and he was absorbing punches you know there's uh another guy at 175 he's even more terrifying and they were talking about setting up a fight with him and canelo his name is arthur bitterbeef and bitterbeef is uh the only boxer currently that's a world champion that has a 100 knockout ratio he's 18 or 19-0 with 19 knockouts and he [ __ ] everybody up and they were talking about setting up a fight with him and canelo alvarez there's a reason why there's weight glasses you know canelo alvarez fought floyd mayweather 152 pounds mayweather made him go down to 152 to weaken him right he really was fighting at 154 and then he goes up to 60 wins titles there wins titles at 68 wins he beats sergey sergey kovalev at 175 but sergey would already he was on the decline he was like going down in his career but bevall's not on decline and before vivald kicked his ass just how good's vasili lomachenko very good very good because he's not 130 pounds watching him from the outside it's such an impressive style of fighting some flowy beautiful technique footwork moving in and moving out genuinely does seem like a ghost is he that good oh for sure yeah he's one of the best alive he's just pursuing big money fights at a weight class that it's not his natural weight class like when
he fought tia fema lopez he fought lopez at 135. now lopez is a big 135 he drops weight to get down to 35 whereas lomachenko really should be a champion at 130 and i think he started off his career at 26. so he's like going up in weight class to fight these bigger power punchers and it's having an effect on him and also i think he went into that fight with compromised shoulders there was something wrong with his shoulder and he wound up getting an operation on it after the fight but his footwork was because his father who's his trainer told him to take two years off of boxing and just concentrate on ukrainian traditional dance did you know that yeah yeah yeah and through dance he developed this ability to move his feet in a way that you know footwork is everything it's a giant i mean punching someone the face is everything but footwork is next to that it's so important because it puts you in positions if you watch pull up lomachenko highlights vasily vasil lomachenko when you look at his highlights what he does is he'll stand in front of someone he'll hit him and then he does this step to the side hits him here and then spins him around and hits him at a different angle it's all his footwork his footwork is spectacular i mean he's always in a position to catch people like his movement like look at this look at that look at how he's moved to the right and he's off to the side look how they did that it's [ __ ] incredible who moves like that his footwork is the best in boxing but that's not being taught through boxing well it's being taught through ukrainian dance and the movement that he developed plus boxing honed three boxes yes i mean it's his ability to move his feet is is paramount it's it's huge in terms of like the impact that it hasn't had on his success but also he's an elite boxer on top of that there's so many things about him that make him special he's a micro second ahead of every opponent it's also it's he's not there to be hit man it's like he knows where they're going before they know where they're going and
he steps off and look at that look how he sets up he i mean he moves off to either side equally effectively too so if a guy throws a right hand he's moving off to the left if a guy throws a left hand he's moving off to the right i mean it's just special there's really no single punches here either this is three four five six seven combinations yeah it's he's spectacular he's amazing but like you know when you look at how he started off his career and the guys he was fighting and the size of them in comparison to like tia fema lopez the guy who he lost to last it's a giant difference in size and that is uh that has a huge impact because there's a lot of things he can't do when he was standing in front of lopez every punch that lopez threw in throughout him had disastrous consequences lopez is a ruthless power puncher because the size difference yeah it's just a big and also lopez super [ __ ] talented on his own and lopez rose the occasion and lopez beat his ass but there was moments in that fight where he was putting it on lopez like particularly like the 11th round where he poured it on you know because he was like realizing he was behind in the scorecards is that typical for fighters then in boxing days started a weight fight and then they go up and up and up and up it depends my favorite one of my favorite boxers of all time is marvin hagler and he was 160 his entire career never went anywhere stayed at 160 dominated everybody he's like come to me you guys are welterweights you want to fight come to me light heavyweights you want to fight me come to me come down here this is my i'm the king and he was he was a king for a long [ __ ] time at 160. i'm gonna guess that that's how people accumulate tons and tons and tons of titles though by moving up through weight categories and that's just as they grow as athletes as they accumulate more muscle mass generally with training age and also steroids yeah a lot of those guys that are going up in weight class like when you see a guy and he's a world champion in like eight weight classes yes like he probably had a little bit of help you think he's got some assistance 100 yeah
yeah there's uh always been a lot of shenanigans in terms of boxing and the use of supplementation well it depends on whether or not uh hunter biden's special powder is being thrown in there as well well that thing's that's not going to help you unless you're aaron pryor aaron pryor uh was the only guy who uh his trainer gave him something in between rounds and uh he went out to stop alexis arguello he stopped him after his trainer said to his trainer who's banned from boxing now for not just this his trainer was panama lewis who's a uh famous sort of uh sketchy character in the world of boxing but he said give me that bottle no the other one that i mixed and he says this in between see if we can find that and then he gives aaron pryor what's most likely cocaine and aaron pryor goes out and [ __ ] alexis arguello up in the next round and stops him you're kidding me yeah no no watch this let me see it jamie the one i mix yeah give me the other bottle the one i mixed so he's having a really tough fight with alexis arguello who was an absolute killer and so he's giving him the other bottle so he gives him the other bottle and keith comes out whoa having a great time yeah i mean it was a really good look look to be clear aaron pryor was a really really talented boxer on top of this but that has always been a point of contention like what happened to him how did he rebound like that and what was in that bottle that he said he mixed some of the devil's dandruff that's what it was and to add on to this that go back to right there you see that what you were just showing that's the beginning of the end and to to add on to that aaron pryor went on to have a serious drug problem in his life and that real battle with cocaine afterwards and i'm pretty sure he died recently oh [ __ ] yeah but he had a uh a real problem with cocaine afterwards and so it wasn't a secret look at this [ __ ] he's pouring it on him i mean and this is after hey
yeah there it is incredible my god come on well they let him go because it's alexis arguello but he stopped him [ __ ] son yeah what do you think about masculinity in the modern world this is something i've been thinking about a lot recently i've got young guys that follow the show and sort of ask a lot of questions to do with that we were talking earlier on about the fact that it's kind of it's a strange time at the moment culturally for men and women especially with how criticized it is of what a man and a woman means yeah but in terms of masculinity at the moment it feels like there isn't a very firm place very much for men to stand on you know a lot of the traditional roles that they would have had have kind of gone away patriarchal superstructure was something that was bad and then lumped in with that was masculine values as well and that's kind of been thrown out i mean do you think that this is something that's going to swing back around it depends on the circles you hang out in and you know i mean masculinity it's always going to be something that women are attracted to this is why it's [ __ ] like what women say they want in a mate versus what they actually want in a mate what they want is jason momoa that's what they want they want a masculine man who's also a nice guy all right that's what they'd like they don't want some super femme like uh guy who's you know only eating bean sprouts and he weighs 110 pounds that's not what women want they you know they'll they'll tell you they want that but they don't what they don't want is all the shitty things that go along with it you know they don't want misogyny they don't want abuse they don't want all those awful things that come with it they don't want people that uh have a genuine disdain for women but traditionally masculinity was always like having a respect for women having respect for your mother having respect being a protector and a provider yes that that has kind of gone away in the eyes
of a lot of people unfortunately that those positive aspects of what we consider to be masculine characteristics those positive aspects are no longer um considered when you're throwing out the baby with the bath water correct that's exactly what i would have said the fact that there was a lot of things that were bad there were men that needed to be called to account for certain things but unfortunately lumped in with that was the firm place that men got to stand that was actually beneficial right interestingly you'll notice that masculinity became very in vogue in the ukraine when russia invaded oh yeah and when men were considered as conscripts that needed to go into the into the army there was no question about what constituted a man or a woman when they got to the border about who was going to leave and who was going to stay yeah they actually didn't let trans women leave they like no no you're a man and you have to fight grab a gun yeah like whoa yeah well i mean the masculinity thing i just find very very interesting because it's strange for men at the moment to try and find a firm place to stand i think yeah what is it that i'm supposed to genuinely be proud of that's a part of me right i am i supposed to be a protector and a provider or is that part of the patriarchal superstructure which is keeping everybody down well the question remains like what are you protecting and people from well the problem is you're protecting people from other men like i had an argument with a guy once he was trying to he was trying to uh argue this really ridiculous point about rape and he said do you know that most of the victims of rape are men and i said yeah but you know he's raping him other men you [ __ ] idiot it's not like is that true groups of cheerleaders are running around raping football players is that true yeah it is but it's prison oh they're skewing the statistics yeah yeah i mean it's men raping men in prison yeah yeah or men uh raping boys you know men raping people that are you know weaker than them that happen to be men
yeah it is fat it is a fact but it's also a lot of rape is underreported right like uh it's it's hard to know it's hard to know from the masculine side like how many men are been raped that are underreported and how many women who've been raped that are underreported and also women that are sexually assaulted by other women which is also real it's like what is you know the the the unfortunate thing is that people with power over other people have always exerted that power over people and so when you're saying that a man is a protector okay but who you protecting them from you're protecting them from other men like that that highlights the problem right the problem is the men right it's not it's very rare that you're protecting women from other women it's more common that you're protecting them from other men yeah i think when you're thinking about what it is that men are supposed to do in the modern world and yeah the protector provider role is up against other people that are coming in but the status element of this is why i think universal basic income is such a strange a strange option because people are inevitably going to start competing with each other like you have to have an element of competition you want to keep up with the joneses but if everybody's flattened down that status hierarchy because earning has now been competed to the same the exact same level what are you going to compete on now right but that's not real because universal basic income is not a lot of money it just covers your needs and then people are going to earn on top of that i think so what about if you roll it forward to the point where automation comes in and takes out everybody's jobs think about into the medium to sort of far future if most people's jobs end up being automated and no one's got anything left that's andrew yang's perspective is that we we're going to need a universal basic income because automation is going to take away all the truck drivers and you know factory workers and there's going to be a lot of jobs that are just gone and we're going to have to figure out a way to not have society collapse and one
of the ways is to institute a universal basic income when people start competing on crazy things so i had this guy on the show will store who spoke about the status game and he was looking at how status comes about in loads of different areas ancestrally and in the modern world and he found that uh there was this tribe where the the men they compete oh is that coffee yeah amazing thank you uh well men compete based on who can grow the biggest yam so they have yams that's what is the most important element for uh determining the male uh hierarchy who's got the biggest yam and these guys grow things to be so big that multiple people need to carry it it comes over in a huge wheelbarrow that's what they're focusing their status on so humans will find ways to compete with each other especially when it comes to getting a mate right that makes sense kind of if you're in an area where you're farming and the size of the vegetables is that means like how many people are going to eat perhaps but i don't think that these are for eating this is kind of just a random display right but i think it's perhaps a legacy thing you know left over what is this here that they would give their big game to their worst enemy to make him obligated to grow an even larger one to have his status fall when he was unable to do so what what country is this papua new guinea the island oh well that place is a real problem you know papua new guinea is the place where they have the semen warriors papa new guinea is that that is the the most egregious version of toxic masculinity that we've ever established they take young boys when they're uh like six and seven years old and they take them away from their families and men essentially rape them and their they are they're in their culture they believe that the children need sperm in their body from grown men in order for them to grow and mature and so they call like they they go with what they call an anal father and this older man repeatedly has sex both oral and anal with these young boys and then it becomes a part of the culture and then
the as they grow older they do the same thing they take them away from their mother when they're like six years old seven years old why is it sperm wars sperm warriors to become a man here in essence a warrior these young men are taught how to detach themselves from their mothers and the women around them as a means of showing that they can live without them and prove their masculinity the six stage process of affirming one's manhood can take anywhere from 10 to 15 years until these young men father a child much of the initiation and training is characterized by what some have deemed to be highly erotic and sexual and the first stage is a sharp stick of cane is inserted deeply in the young boy's nostrils until he bleeds profusely the young boys are also also introduced to older warriors who are told that bachelors are going to copulate with them to make them grow throughout much of the six stages the act of having a the stick of cane inserted into the nostrils and the performance of fellatio are integral to the process of becoming a man while the former practice is often derided by many as inhumane and the latter is often referred to as homosexual behavior the zambia's understanding and purpose behind these two processes differs from our conventional understanding oh how woke so scroll scroll up here while much of a view the practice of inserting the cane stick in the nostrils being inhumane because the obvious infliction of pain and injury to the body for the sami it's a symbol of strength and his ability to sustain pain which is indeed a requirement of a warrior additionally the act of performing fellatio and the act of ingesting semen is seen as an integral part of manhood because boys are unable to mature into men unless they ingest semen and they adhere to the notion that all men have in quotes eaten the penis eaten the penis yeah according to zambia belief the semen of a man possesses the masculine spirit which young boys will be able to attain through the ingestion of semen yeah it's [ __ ] crazy well you've had michael easter on the show right the comfort crisis yes yeah yeah yeah i mean i love
his insight there the fact that we don't have rights of passage anymore yeah and that these are big deals it's something that marks a transition i think we can avoid that one you doing that one no no i think we should avoid that one okay fair enough okay that that sounds like you're not being open to other cultures joe you're right like perhaps you should be thinking about eating the penis a little bit more perhaps but yeah i think the the the lack of uh rituals and routines that get people to go through yeah something a rite of passage think about what it is when people go into the army you know you're bonding together over brotherhood i learned this the other day on the show about how men bond by doing things and it makes sense that men would bond by doing things because that's what they would have gone out ancestrally we're gonna take down that mammoth me you jamie grab spear go get my mom right that would be what we would do but interestingly it also creates a reason for why men's friendships are a little bit more shallow because if you were to die while we were out on the hunt and then i spend the next three months weeping at your death that means i'm pretty useless men need to be able to cycle through friends more so it seems like men have broader social circles but much more shallow really women have tighter social circles that are more deep i don't think that's true because the brotherhood that men have that they form in combat and the the brotherhood that men have when they're part of uh like uh combat sports teams and like people that do very very difficult things together that's an intense bond that's a brothership that's a that's a family thing that's a love bond that's uh it's it's very deep and some would say deeper than most female relationships that most females have with each other yeah perhaps but they're bonding over doing a thing there which is i think the important element that they've got going on they're doing something it's almost a simulacrum of
war right when you're being a fighter so or the warriors who are actually doing war yeah they're bonding over that they have to yeah and they have to rely on each other when you're talking about people in like elite combat sports teams like like the seal teams things along those lines not combat sports or you know combat teams like those guys are [ __ ] tight with each other like in a way that is you don't see that much in female relationships because they have to rely on each other they have to have their backs and they they also know that that person has gone through buds they've gone through like this insane difficult weeding out process of weak minds you know and people that will quit that those guys are different that's like the to to but that's a rite of passage right yes that's people that have gone through something where they've proven their their worth and value and they are they're also their their self-esteem is based on that that they have gone through this thing and they know who they are they have accomplished this thing and they've passed through this test it certifies that the people that are around you are worthy of being around yes yes and you can trust them and count on them and you value them very very highly and i don't think those are shallow relationships at all i would agree i would agree i think this is on average again um but one of the issues that you have here is this chasm of comfortable complacency that a lot of people are caught in at the moment so i learned about this uh this idea called the region beta paradox right so the region beat the paradox imagine that if you were to go a mile or less you would walk it and if you were to go more than a mile you would drive it paradoxically you would go two miles quicker than you would go one mile so that means that sometimes worse situations can be better than better situations and this is an issue when if you only decide to act after you cross a certain threshold of badness or whatever you can end up being stuck in region beta so for instance the friend that should leave his job really really needs
to leave his job but it's just about possible his boss isn't that much of a dick maybe the benefits are okay or whatever or the person that's in a relationship with someone that they really don't want to stay with and it's not that brilliant but it's not that bad they don't abuse them everything's okay the person that stays in an apartment that's got some mold on the ceiling but it's not too much mold and whatever all of these people would be better off if their situations were worse because it would galvanize them into actually doing something you understand what i mean you can get stuck in this chasm of comfortable complacency that sits somewhere in the middle if things are good great no problem if things are bad great activation energy to go and make them good if things are just about passable you end up being comfortably numb ooh yeah yeah that's not good so what does someone do when they're in that's do they have to have high expectations and high standards so that even like for a guy like yourself who now makes a living independently if you had to have a job and you had to be working around some boss who was kind of a dick and and took credit for your work and wasn't you know happy with your performance was always like nitpicking and [ __ ] with you and and you know you know how it works in in office environments and i've not had a boss for 15 years but yeah congratulations thank you so that's perfect situation because if you did have to go to that that place where a a large percentage of the population is in on a daily basis but bosses suck a lot of people have bosses yes a lot of people are in those really suppressive office environments we're dealing with office politics and egomaniac bosses that sucks if you got to go back to that now it would be horrendous yes but if you were conditioned to it if it was a normal part of your life it would just say this probably look i like playing softball on the weekends with my friends and i love my family i'll deal with it i can handle it but you're like suppressed all day long you're just feeling like [ __ ] and because things aren't that bad right the
activation energy isn't there to kick yourself out of it yeah you're upper middle class you've got a nice house it's dangerous you know this this is the way that people are being sedated into a life that they really don't want to lead yeah it's so dangerous man it really really is and i i don't know i don't know what the answer i mean what do you want to say do you want to say that you need to make your life actively worse so that you're going to be more excited so that you're going to have the the activation energy to kick yourself out at the bottom i mean think about the things that a lot of people do to make themselves feel better actively going out of your way to sit in a hot circular wooden chasm right or going and putting yourself going and putting yourself in 39 degree water yeah like what are you doing because the world has become so comfortable we're having to go out of our way to actively seek discomfort we inject it into our lives we artificially inseminate it into our lives without training and hot and cold and meditation and all of the other things that we do reading doing deep work all of those stuff without that if you didn't actively go and seek it you could easily just breeze through life right i guess but i think you'd be overwhelmed by anxiety oh for sure but that's why that's where a lot of people are yes yes and then unfortunately people don't recognize that that that's why that stuff exists you know and people that i care about i've tried to talk to don't recognize that and i think sometimes sometimes when i give advice to people that i care about my my personality's so overwhelming and i'm so crazy like with what i do that it's like people they're like i don't want to do that doesn't map across onto other people well it just seems like it's too for some people it's attractive and they go i want to do that too like you seem pretty [ __ ] happy despite all the stress you're under like how are you doing that and i'll tell people that because i create my own [ __ ] and my own bullshit's way harder than whatever i'm facing in the world and that's how i mitigate the stress of success and pressure and criticism and all that
stuff like i do to myself way worse than they're ever going to do to me so that's that's how i mitigate it also i calm my body i calm my body through i calm my mind through calming my body and i calm my body through work i make it work and i make myself do things that are very uncomfortable that i don't want to do and by doing that i develop this strength and perseverance and some people hear that i'm like i don't even want to do that i don't take a [ __ ] nap you're exhausting me like i'm not you i don't do that and they just like it takes them away from that and i'm like you don't even have to do that just go for a [ __ ] walk every day it sounds like it's easy to do but you're gonna when that walk comes and look your clock oh it's eight o'clock time to go for that walk like i don't want to walk i'll just try to play video games i don't want to walk i'd rather like read emails i don't want to walk i'd rather like scroll through tick-tock but if you just force yourself to go for that [ __ ] walk every day you will develop mental persev perseverance you will develop some tenacity you'll develop the ability to force yourself into work it doesn't have to be grueling just has to be a thing that you have to do this is the problem i think of how mimetic we are and where the culture is and what people are told about what life is supposed to be like and it's a massive advantage that podcasters have that there is a direct source from an individual who has managed to get themselves to somewhere that's worthy of having an audience to speak to these people and say look maybe the local community and the values and the norms that they've given you aren't all that's out there this is a different way that you could live life so this is i guess kind of what happened to me toward the end of my 20s so i went to uni and i became a club promoter started running nightclubs and it was very successful and i guess had achieved success in the way that modern culture might tell you that you're supposed to so being a club promoter constantly being around lots of women and always having money and everybody knew who you were and there was status and a claim and all this stuff
but then it felt like i was thirsty for something and i didn't know what i was supposed to drink there was something i i thought like is this really all that life's got to offer me hmm standing on the front door of a nightclub and getting people drunk on one pound jaeger bombs not that that's nothing i loved the business that i ran i had a great time doing it but it felt like there needed to be something more and i went on reality tv blue tick on twitter and free charcoal toothpaste and all of that stuff right like i got the did the full thing and then came off and thought is this really all that i've got to offer the world and the problem was that i'd taken the rules of what life is supposed to be of how you're supposed to enjoy yourself of what is supposed to be valued that it's supposed to be weekend warrior it's all about the girls that you're sleeping with or the money that you're running or how many people know you and it turned out like i'd reached the top of that tree i'd i'd completed that game right and it wasn't fulfilling to me it hadn't answered any of the questions that i had deep down it really really hadn't so i started asking different questions i said well look if i've done everything i'm supposed to do in terms of social norms from a working class guy the northeast of the uk what are you supposed to do you're supposed to go out and do all this stuff and then i went and did the champions league world cup final which is going on love island one of the biggest reality tv shows in the uk and that still didn't satisfy okay like there's something wrong with that so i started consuming stuff like this is a great time 2016-17 this is the advent of jordan peterson you with conversations with people like sam harris alanda bottom from the school of life massive influences because for the first time i was being told as a young guy that there are different things that you can value stuff like truth right virtue integrity honesty doing something that's hard and
worthwhile not just doing something for its effect i think for a long time i'd i judged the value of my work based on how other people interpreted it so i'd outsourced my sense of self-worth to everybody else i was playing a role right and it's kind of like uh i i didn't feel love i only ever felt praise one of the reasons for that is because the thing that i was doing was just me playing a role like i wasn't being chris hemsworth i was being thought i wasn't being gladiator right i was being russell crowe and it took a long time for me to deprogram all of that it took me a very very long time and from the outside you go it's a guy that's got the club stuff and he's doing modeling and reality tv and things like that and from my side it was so vapid and hollow and there was nothing there for me there was nothing there that i wanted at the end of that that really really mattered and then i started the podcast modern wisdom like four and a half years ago because i wanted to speak to people that might have the answers like hang on if i'm getting this from listening to other people's conversations maybe if i get to sit down with other people that i think are interesting or useful i have insights perhaps that will move me a little bit closer to where i'm supposed to be and over time four and a half years and 500 conversation more than 500 conversations or whatever every single time there's just like a little one percent that just moves you a little one percent here's an insight here's an insight here's an insight here's something that comes up during a conversation is some discomfort about you mentioned about listening earlier on i always wanted to interrupt if i didn't speak on a show if there was silence ever i would presume that it's because i wasn't interesting or the guest wasn't interested in me or maybe the audience would think that i was stupid or whatever it's always outsourcing my sense of self-worth to what
other people were thinking about me and that was a byproduct of how i'd lived most of my 20s and it took a long time for me to deprogram that to think okay find somewhere firmer for you to stand i think that's why i brought up the masculinity thing earlier on as well so i'm like look i can feel very comfortable in myself chasing something that i want to do my intellectual curiosity right finding people that i resonate with having conversations that i really care about about how to engineer human dna so that it can survive space flight because there's tons of radiation never going to use it right probably not going to get to go to space probably not going to re-engineer my dna [ __ ] fascinating i want to know about that and every single time that i leaned into something that i wanted to do a little bit more it reminded me of the direction i was going in and that was the drink that i was thirsty for you know the first time that i got a message that says hey man just wanted to let you know i listened to the show and like i'm a rugby player from the northwest of the uk and i don't really have anyone around me that understands me but dude when i when i listen to you and your friends talking it feels like i've someone gets me feels like i'm in the room with you and i was like holy [ __ ] there was this uh guy came up to me at uh body power which is like a fitness expert like the arnold classic or whatever fitness exposition and it's all of us without tops off lifting weights and [ __ ] about and doing stuff this is a while ago now he came up and i'm trying to be the you know super masculine weightlifting guy still just doing his thing this guy came up and he said hey i just wanted to have a conversation with you this uh this podcast that you did it made me realize that i hadn't really dealt with the death of my father and this guy breaks down in front of me and said i just you know i i was lost i was alone my wife and me didn't have a connection and blah blah blah basically this one insight that he got from a conversation changed it and he's weeping and then i start weeping i'm like [ __ ] sake i'm
supposed to be like the super testosterone guy that's you know the love island thing and the blue take and all of this stuff and then continual interactions like that made me realize that all of the bravado and all of the front that i'd put up and all of the who did you sleep with last week or what's the girl that knows your name or how many followers you've got on instagram they were hollow but there's so many people that are chasing that there's so many people who see that as their primary source of value and other people's heads are a wretched place for your self-worth to live absolutely wretched you're constantly taking your sense of self-worth as an abstraction of what other people think about you and it took you know it's still an ongoing process but it took four four and a half years of constantly speaking to people three times a week every single week having a conversation researching looking at whatever it is that they might have that would help me a little bit and it's been such a huge change and dispensing with those previous values has been a a big deal for me well it's a beautiful thing that comes with the the the conversations it comes with this uh inadvertent education that you get from podcasts you know having these conversations with these people and absorbing like i love that you said like maybe it's like one percent with each conversation or one percent with each profound conversation i i i uh always use the analogy it's like you're making a mountain with layers of paint like every day you paint another layer and it's like it's slowly but surely over time and for me it's somewhere around i mean it's like 1800 episodes but there's also a bunch of other ones that are like mma episodes and there's doing other people's podcasts and through these conversations you do develop a better sense of what what's authentic and i think what you're really selling
what you in particular selling is authenticity right these are genuinely things you're interested in and you've found some things that you thought you were supposed to be interested in but they ultimately proved to be hollow and not satisfying and one of the things about pursuing um status like look at the car he's driving and look at the watch he's wearing and look at the girl he's with that's unattainable to many people so it seems like it's valuable but then you attained it and then you realize oh this is not valuable this is just difficult to get and there's a difference there's a big difference with what's valuable is something that fulfills you intellectually emotionally spiritually lovingly right like having a great relationship with someone is very valuable and it's hard to achieve it's hard to be worthy of having a great relationship it's hard to be worthy of having a great friend and to be a great friend is very valuable and to be friends with people that are intellectually stimulating is so valuable the people that are around you the people that you can have conversations with you that ignite a curiosity and and change your perspective and a person whose point of view and ideas are they're enriching to you they literally are fuel for your own curiosity and fuel for your own perspective and you could admire that person's thoughts and take some of what they've said and apply it to your own life and we're doing that you and i are both doing that and we're doing that through conversations that affect you know who knows how many people out there who knows how many people have listened to your conversations with people and developed a newfound perspective developed a different way of looking at their own life that is now serving them and helping them get out of whatever unsatisfying shallow life that they're living and move towards something that's more aligned with who they want to be and who they can be and they realize it through you and through you saying these things that you had all those things all
the trappings of fame and success what people look at because they're so hot it's hard so hard it's so hard to be wealthy it's so hard to drive a very nice car it's very difficult so when people see a person who's done it they say oh i want to be like him and you can either be that guy that flaunts that all the time and has that all over instagram with a bunch of girls in bikinis hanging on you or you can be the guy who says you know what i did that and it wasn't anything special and now i realize that this was all just a flaw in my own way of living and thinking and i'm much more in line with uh what seems to be natural and healthy and i'm growing and learning and i'm a more more successful in that way than i ever would be just like showing diamond jewelry and big houses and all that stupid [ __ ] dude i love the insight that it's not valuable it's just difficult to attain and the difficulty in attaining it is a proxy it masquerades as value yes so naval has a quote that says uh it is far easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them and i do think that there is a an element of that that we can say this right and lots of people consume lots and lots of content online and you can tell someone look this is what the top of the mountain looks like oh this is what further up the mountain than you are looks like and yet they still need to trudge all the way up there get up there have a look for themselves and go [ __ ] you're right yeah that guy you remember that guy that i listened to five years ago he was right so there's an element of not futility but i feel like a lot of people still need to learn this uh first hand you know how do you have consumed the right amount of stuff online you could have i could have front loaded a lot of the lessons and mistakes that i needed to make and not needed to do them myself i would have just been able to go yeah you need to figure it out yourself you can help it can help your journey by learning from other people's mistakes just like we were talking about learning from alcoholics never be an alcoholic but there's a certain amount of mistakes
that you have to make yes you know there's a certain amount of really stupid decisions that you have to feel the pain of those failures it's valuable it's good it's good for you but it's also good to hear someone say it yes so that when someone else comes along and they start on the path maybe that you were on and then they run into you having conversations about the shallowness of these pursuits and then they realize in their own life maybe without having to go all the way to the top maybe they just make a couple of steps up and they go hey i see where this is going yeah this is fruitless it's not it's not worthwhile and i understand that the reason that culture and wisdom previously existed was that you would take on what other people said was valuable because for the most part it was something that was valuable right cultural uh mimetic evolution meant that the stuff that stuck about like don't put your hand in that fire don't go to that cave over the far side like that was useful information but now because we've got so much luxury to laugh our way through the world in comfort and convenience people are being told to value things that genuinely aren't that valuable and yeah there's a big part of it that young people need to learn you do not need to chase down the things that your local area is telling you that you need to this is what i think you create online you know the people that you consume the people that you read the people that you listen to they become your new community yes they become the new good influence that you always wanted and this is why people have such an affinity with the stuff that they consume and this is why the the fans and the audience is so compelled and so bought in because it very much is like a it's a friend ship right between you and the person that you're consuming they are an advisor they are somebody that's helping to direct you in a particular way yeah and subsequently but you also can get stuck in the wrong way you know the the things
that you consume online can lead you into these echo chambers and the the the path that you travel you could run into a bunch of people that are also stuck and you feed off of each other and if you have negative friends and if you have negative interactions online one of the problems with social media in general is that you're absorbing like what uh you would call like a a very condensed version like avi lavinovitz calls it uh calls it processed information like your processed food is bad for you process information is bad for you as well and this sort of constant interaction with people in a shallow way online and also antagonistic interactions with people which is a large part of what the algorithms of both twitter and facebook and a lot of these places unfortunately because of our nature they enforce because it's not really the algorithms the algorithms just support what you're interested in and if you're interested in arguing about abortion you can argue all day long because it'll direct those things towards you because those are the things you seek to interact with but if you're just interested in sports cars and watches and [ __ ] you know watching rugby that will be your algorithm it'll be all that it's really like what you choose to interact with for the vast majority of people the thing they choose to interact with more often than not is things that upset them and a lot of that is because they're unsatisfied with their own life their actual life the people that they interact with the thing they choose to do for a living the way they exist in the community of actual human beings that they are around on a daily basis is not good they don't like it it's unsatisfying it's unhappy and then they get into these [ __ ] these groups online and they they find conflict in that and they avoid the problems that they need to resolve in their real life and just try to resolve these sort of external situations in these weird twitter gangs it gives you a simulacrum of a community right but i mean i guess so does every online community the difference is is
this one genuinely valuable to you yes is this something that's actually making your life better and that's the problem that the distinction between the two is very very difficult to work out because you have all of the trappings right the one this is belonging it's a shared sense of ideals it's all of this stuff yeah on both sides yeah but if it's not directed towards something which is genuinely virtuous i mean you see this i'm not sure you're familiar with mgtow have you heard of that men going their own way so there's so there's a bunch of um groups within the manosphere right which is men trying to sphere manosphere yeah so men trying to work out what to do online and i i resonate with this because i was somebody that got to the end of his 20s and was [ __ ] clueless i mean i still might be a man child now at 34 but my point being that i'm less of a an idiot than i was back then so there's a whole bunch of different groups red pill black pill mgtow in cells all of this stuff and what they're trying to do is they're all different flavors of people trying to work out how the world works and men going their own way are people that have been scorned by women usually are having difficulty with women and have now renounced them entirely we don't need them i'm not going to be involved with them anymore men going their own way a lot of them are people who maybe were previously married the tangential to men's rights which is you may be familiar with their kind of like justice for guys who don't have access to their kids after divorce and stuff like that and what's happening here is they've got the simulacrum of a community in fact they have a community but some of these areas especially the black pill forums for guys can be a pretty bad place to be in it they discourage something called ascending which is going from where they are to now being something more to actually getting into a relationship with a girl that would be seen as betraying basically the ideology of the group and i understand there's a guy that was
looking for conversations it's fortunate that i fell upon school of life and jordan peterson conversations with you as opposed to that community because both of them would have given me the same sort of influence the same kind of satisfaction but long term would have given me incredibly different outcomes hmm yeah that whenever someone's discouraging people from loving relationships or engaging in happy loving relationships or the idea that that's impossible or that you should stick with us and you shouldn't go off on your own and find a woman that you're compatible with and that you enjoy being with that's a ridiculous community that's not good for you that's not that's like no better than saying don't have good male friends that's no better than don't have a good relationship with your children it's stupid like good relationships are great it's a part of what we're doing we're not we don't exist in a vacuum you know no one is happy on their own people like to think of themselves as individuals i'm a rugged individualist okay i'm a loner are you really like there's a reason why the worst punishment they can give you in prison is solitary confinement we need each other we are a super organism we're just trapped in this idea that we are uniquely individual on our own and if your group that you associate with is saying don't associate with the opposite sex give up on them don't have a loving happy relationship that's just because they don't think it's a qua it's attainable to them that's that's the same thing as saying you should never have a nice car because i can't get one you should never have a nice house because i can't i can't afford one it's not it's no different so there's this concept called the inner citadel by assaya berlin and what he says is when the world outside of us has denied that which we truly want we retreat into ourselves into a kind of walled off garden to protect ourselves from the fearful ills of the world my buddy gave a great example of this where he said you can imagine that you've injured your leg right and you can try to treat the leg but if you can't then you chop the leg off and announce that
the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued and you see this everywhere right how many people do you know that have got into a polyamorous relationship and said that monogamy isn't ancestrally compatible fundamentally because they struggle to hold down a relationship that works well or you see this with the body positivity movement saying that weight has no genuine bearing on health and that we need to be much more accepting basically being fat is just as healthy as being normal-sized good bmi and that the world needs to change to your views because they struggle to lose weight or criminals that have turned to a life of crime and say that jobs are for suckers because they struggle to hold down a job these are all their inner citadels they're constantly retreating basically if you can't win at a game then you change the rules and announce that you never wanted to win in any case yes if you cannot get what you want you must teach yourself to want what you can get um yes yes the body positivity is a great example too because they actually get angry at women that lose weight like adele adele i was going to bring her up yeah it's perfect example because she's gorgeous now it's crazy yeah that beautiful like healthy woman was trapped inside an overeater and she figured it out and she but you're no longer part of the tribe exactly not only that but they're angry at her she's betrayed them i mean they've said that about lizzo too they don't want her to lose weight like angry at her for trying like a pretty big girl as well right probably be healthy for her to lose some weight but that you're no longer able to uh make me feel more comfortable about the life choices that i've made yes and if you don't identify with them anymore you know they they think that person is another now well you're just another beautiful healthy sexy thin woman and i don't like you anymore you're cast out of the kingdom purity spiral yeah bonded together over the mutual hatred of an out group not the mutual love of an in-group they never loved adele they loved the fact that adele wasn't what they hate right right well she was also an amazing
example of an incredibly talented woman who was also obese crushing it despite the fact yeah or in spite of the fact so yeah i mean that's but how is it that the person that's overweight and is an inspiration to people is an inspiration for as long as they stay that way but losing the weight isn't even more inspirational right because it throws into harsh reflect the fact that they haven't done that bit they're also not adele the singer but they knew that they never could be right adele did the weight loss thing that fundamentally everybody knows that they could achieve and this is the problem with the the black pill as an example uh i had to go what is blackpill so blackpill is men who consider themselves uh evolutionarily and with regards to women basically lost causes they would say that they are never going to have a relationship with a woman and they bond together over their mutual despondency at this fact and the problem that you have with the black pill community is that it's this ascending thing which would be moving from that to a functioning man that may have interactions with women now this lady named hates on the show and she did a ton of research into in-cell culture and stuff and within these forums if any of the guys were to say uh she told me if any of the guys were to hint at ascending that they would be pushed out of the group and i went oh so if they got a girl's phone number for instance or something like that she says whoa way less than that if they went into the starbucks and the cashier was female and her eyes lingered on them for more than they thought that they should have done and they posted that in the group they would be pushed out and it's for the same reason it's the same reason that adele is a a bad example yeah because it gives them hope for as long as there is no hope that anybody could do the thing lose the weight that means that you have an excuse what adele hasn't done it i don't need to do it right this no one else within the particular community has ascended and found that they're able to get in a relationship with a woman or be attractive to a woman or have a
conversation with a woman therefore i don't have to but the delta is felt they say that true hell is when the person that you are meets the person you could have been ooh ooh i like that i like that yeah caffeine's kicking in yeah that's good though that's that that is really what it is it's like this understanding that you [ __ ] up and that you've committed to this ideology you committed to this lifestyle these these choices that you make this rigid pattern of behavior that is ultimately not serving you and you realize the flaw in it that you could have been something greater and then you see someone who has done it who's gotten better and is healthier and you realize like oh no what have i done there's two types of responses to that right one of the responses would be i want that yeah that's inspiring the other response to it would be that is a betrayal that's a betrayal of the group and the tighter the ideological group or the tighter the identity around that particular group that that person's come from the more it feels like a betrayal this is why tribalism's so dangerous man as soon as you decide you know you were saying earlier on about uh right and left democrat and republican are kind of stupid ideas because as soon as you do that you agree to adopt wholesale all of the views of the group and as soon as you begin to deviate that's seen as a lack of commitment by your side and a [ __ ] in your armor by the other side so it doesn't allow you to be a person it doesn't allow you to fit into the very unique shape that your life is supposed to take you're supposed to put on the onesie but you're also highlighting two options there's one option that makes you feel terrible for your own choices and you feel angry and you don't want to associate with that person who has changed and grown and then the other option is for you to be inspired and to do that and become like that person and and look at that as a motivation but you also can realize that just because you [ __ ] up and you've made this bad choice you've run into the
person that you could have been it doesn't mean you can't change paths doesn't mean you can't course correct the problem is people don't like course correcting because it requires them to admit that they've been on a bad path and they've they've [ __ ] up but course correcting is beautiful it's important it's important it's a part of growth it's like it's very valuable to be able to understand that oh my god even though i've like lived 12 years as a mormon and i've committed to polyamorous marriages and all this that's not good like i this is a it was written by a con man joseph smith was 14 when he wrote this [ __ ] [ __ ] you know like you can get past bad decisions but you just have to admit that there are bad decisions you have to admit that they're not self-serving they're not beneficial and that ultimately there is other ways to go about living your life that would probably be better so change this loops in with the uh importance of how people attach themselves to their opinions that we were talking about earlier on so the fact that a big bunch of people on the internet and in the real world feel terrified to admit that they're wrong yeah if we are judged by our opinions not our deeds then admitting the fact that you have a wrong opinion is tantamount to destruction right it's destruction of the ego people that can't admit that they're wrong are at the biggest competitive disadvantage in the modern world of anybody else as far as i can see you need to be able to admit that you're wrong one of the problems of playing a persona which i was doing for a very long time this big name on campus guy in front of a club like hi mate bye mate how are you mate blah blah blah was that the persona was contrived i was always thinking about who is it i'm supposed to be what would joe want me to say right now for me to get the response from joe that i actually wanted right and what that means is when someone asked me my opinion i didn't actually have a truth i had a sequence of roles like a bunch
of different algorithms or scripts that i'd run like a chat bot or something and i'll be like okay if this then all of the people i've spoken to are kind of similar to joe therefore i will come out with this answer and maybe that'll have the response that i want but i wouldn't admit i i struggled to admit that i was wrong because that would be admitting that all of the models that i'd created were ineffective somehow whereas the version where you're much more humble and you realize like i'm a flawed terrible creature that is constantly still trying to get things right and i am open to in fact i'm seeking being wrong as much as possible the more that i can be wrong the more that i'm going to identify all of the different pitfalls that are going to go across yeah that's what you need to be looking for and if you can't admit that you're wrong if you can't get used to the discomfort of holding an opinion feeling someone push up against it feeling you notice it arise inside of yourself right you go oh [ __ ] that sounds compelling that sounds that sounds like my i might have had a blind spot here yeah and if you're not able to accept that to come through you are at a huge disadvantage yes you certainly are and it's also there's this this idea that your thoughts are you right so when you keep saying i was wrong you're wrong but really the ideas are wrong like adopting ideas is a part of you like saying these are my opinions and i will defend them to the death is the most ridiculous thing because ideas you can have a thought that is incorrect and you're still the exact same person you just got to be able to understand that that was an incorrect thought and you then you have to back engineer it and figure like why did i have that thought why what was i misinformed was i biased did i did i look at it in a shallow way did i not do a deep dive into the subject like what was causing me to have these opinions that were incorrect but people defend opinions as if they're defending up their liver like they're defending a part of their body and
that's silly because you are not your thoughts you're not your opinions you are you and you have various opinions and various thoughts that bounce around your head all throughout the day but if you don't base them on absolute reality and truth and honesty you're [ __ ] because then you're never going to be able to grow you're never going to be able you're going to defend things that are untenable you're going to defend ridiculous ideas because you think you're supposed to do that because other people do that and they never admit they're wrong they're like politicians right politicians never admit they're wrong and that's a part of the flaw of that system it's a part of the reason why people don't trust them it's scary to see online how few people are prepared to admit that they're wrong i think i think a big part of this is that if you are to admit that you're wrong it's maybe a dangerous uh cascade downstream well if you said that you were wrong about that then what else are you wrong about on the internet and admitting that you're wrong as far as i can see is one of the best signals that somebody could put across because you go oh this person isn't preoccupied with the ideology or with committing to previous opinions that they've already had what they are concerned with is the truth yes updating the operating system yeah and in what your business is in my business as well that's so valuable if you're one of those people that can't admit you're wrong or can't address like a problem that you have created in your mind you know adhering to a very specific thought process one that it proves to be inaccurate ineffective unproductive you're going to you're going to project that to all these other people and then they're not going to listen to you anymore they're not going to want to hear you because they know that you're full of [ __ ] they know that you or you or you have a weak structure in terms of the way you address things some people are very very good at playing that persona though some people have buried the person so deep down that they've
been subsumed by the persona itself you know there are people online that i think are playing roles people that have made entire careers out of playing roles and everybody knows everybody knows deep down that this person's still doing a grift or still doing a shill of some kind yeah there's there's definitely some people like that but i don't think they ever developed the sort of rabid following that you have or that i have you know i think that's where it comes from i think the the authenticity that you're selling is very very very valuable because it's real you know and authenticity is not something you can fake you either have it or you don't and the only way that you can exhibit it is through like clear conversation like real thoughts expressed in an honest and articulate way where you're saying these things and you're consistent with it so people go oh this is really how chris thinks oh i see how he's thinking i see how he's working through this i identify with that this is beneficial to me because i also seek truth and i'm also seeking to try to figure out what's right and what's wrong and what serves me and what serves other people and how i can sort of like live life in a more compatible and cohesive and satisfying way this is one of the problems i think of a lot of people not having someone that they can have a genuine deep conversation with on a regular basis yeah i try and prescribe to as many people as possible to do a fake podcast so to just put your phone down put your phone down with a friend once a week it can be the same friend or a different friend and just press record simply because it means that there's an external uh how do you say a record of what was said yeah and just have a conversation phones are awake except for the one that's recording on the table half an hour once a week that's a great piece of advice and the reason for that is what i loved about having conversations where i was going to be held to a rigorous standard is that if there were any breaks in my thinking over time that would be called out hang on a second you said
three months ago that this was an opinion and now you've said the opposite thing or this doesn't this doesn't right you're constantly being fact checked it means that you have to be incredibly rigorous with your thinking you need to be precise with your speech all of this stuff and that for me has been one of the biggest growths that i've seen over the last four and a half years i've really zeroed in on what it is that i believe and you can't hold up a persona for uh three hours four hours however however long the conversation goes on for you can't do that right even just a half hour conversation you have with your friends once per week get it on record and then okay go back and have another anything whatever it is you want to talk about yeah do that because so few people are able to have deep conversations that are uninterrupted by their phones by other people buy responsibilities and yet it's for me it feels like therapy it feels like a mental workout and even if you are doing it with your friends i mean we've managed to make a career out of being the most stupid person in the room for the most part you bring on somebody that is an expert in the industry and you've read the book and you're now trying to hold ground with this person and you go okay like here we go i'm going to have to amp up my evolutionary psychology understanding or my jungian archetypes or whatever the [ __ ] it is that i'm talking about today but even just on a small scale with somebody else i think having that half hour conversation is is really really valuable i think that's great advice and i think that i have inadvertently found that out through doing podcasts because when i first started doing podcasts it was just me [ __ ] around with my friends and having conversations and just being just having just for fun it was just for fun and then along the way i started interviewing people and having conversations with people like you know graham hancock and talking about ancient civilizations and randall carlson talking about asteroidal impacts and the effect on society and whether or not there's been a restart of civilization and then you talk to people
that are experts in evolution and rocketry and genetic engineering and you know you through that process you d you develop this understanding of the world that you i don't think you'd get any other way you're never going to have an environment in today's day and age where you sit for three hours with no phones and just look at each other and have a conversation and that's what we do on a daily basis and i think that's a an incredible opportunity to grow and learn and also to address your own thoughts and you're not just addressing them you're you're exhibiting them to the whole world you're putting them on display this this is how i feel about things and people will go you're a [ __ ] idiot or oh my god i learn from you and and through that you grow and learn and it's not something that is uh traditionally valued or taught as a form of education of a form of uh being able to understand how you think about things by recording them and then releasing them to the world so that you know the scrutiny of uh a hundred thousand people comes down on whatever [ __ ] idea you have yes and how stupid and how ignorant you were and how there was inconsistencies beforehand yeah but i mean you can create a community of people around you in that way by curating the content that you consume right this is one of the things a lot of the time audiences especially at the stage that i'm at now which is still uh getting feedback from the audience and it's not so unbelievably massive that i can't get any sort of kickback the audience has a role i think with helping creators to create the sort of content that is good and to also encourage them to think better in a more rigorous way a lot of the time the audience may have something genuinely valuable to contribute to what someone's thinking or saying but the way that they put it across is just in this reactionary
lots of exclamation marks you've got this wrong or whatever if i get an email or a dm from somebody or whatever that's really well thought out they say hey man i listened to such and such an episode with this person on dna and you said this here's a couple of things i think you should you should really check out here's an article or a news story and this is where i think that you're a little bit off the mark i'll read that what i won't read is someone just flying off the handle about a that's a complete reactionary now audiences have the opportunity to craft the direction of the people that they listen to by contributing in a well-meaning way like if you genuinely care about the creators that you listen to you can help them be better if you think this person is pretty close to the best thing that i can listen to online help you can contribute to their direction but what they won't listen they're going to switch off if you just have some outlandish sweary exclamation mark capital letters comment they're not going to listen to that right you have to think about what is causing what what it selects for in the people that are in the youtube comments right there is something that it selects from we don't know what that is maybe it's anger maybe it's outrage there's certainly a particular type of personality that is always being selected for in that so if you want to separate yourself out from that you actually need to do something that shows that you've taken more time more care more consideration you could think about it that way but the way i think about it is that each individual person that's commenting is uh on a different stage of their own journey and if you're at the stage of your own journey where something you disagree with you have to insult that person and add homonyms and swears and [ __ ] you and you [ __ ] idiot and you're at a very early stage of this idea of exchanging information and you don't have to communicate that way and some people when they see someone's idea they disagree with they just want to insult that person and diminish that person and demean that person and it's a
very ineffective way of getting your ideas across you might think that you're damaging that person and then in so doing you're propping up your own ideas but what you're really doing is you're exposing this bitter angry unhappy version of yourself there are many people that i disagree with but the way i try to engage with those people is by saying i don't think that's correct and i don't feel the same way because of this and this is why and i try and i try to never attack people try to never insult people unless they're so [ __ ] preposterous i think that it's necessary to get a little bit out there like cnn anchors and [ __ ] like that because they're propagandists and i think that ultimately they're doing some danger in the way they communicate in some ways but most of the time when i talk about things i try to talk about things in a way where i look at their side i steel man them i look at their perspective and i try to see why do they have these opinions why have they formed this why have they been captured by this very particular ideology why do they why do they support this why why are they like vote blue no matter who why are they like you know trumpers to the bitter end like what is causing that and and i try to put myself in their thought process how much was that the case before you started the show very little really very little before the show i was like [ __ ] him he's a [ __ ] [ __ ] this idiot you know i learned how to do that from doing the podcast i learned how to do that initially from gauging the reaction other people had to my conversations but after a while the volume of comments was just too much correct that's what i'm feeling a little bit now as well yeah you're gonna get there it's it's impossible and you're probably gonna after this show it's gonna be rough it's just you just can't do it and also there's a reality of being a human being that the negative comments stand out more than the positive ones and if you read the negative ones and you internalize them it's damaging it's not good for you and it's not necessary i got a story about
the negativity bias that malice taught me about a couple of weeks ago i mean alice was supposed to go to russia do you remember he mentioned it a couple of times yeah he's going to go to russia and we're going to vlog it and stuff and then kovid and then uh war yeah so we are still planning on doing that he told me about um the brighton hotel attack i think it was 1983 and 1987 so margaret thatcher right is going to a hotel for a conservative party conference and this is when the ira island uh terrorist group was they had a big problem with what was going on in the uk so they set a long-time delay bomb to go off in this hotel oh wow and there's tons of conservative party members that are there mrs thatch is there she actually ends up being in the bathroom when it goes off had she been in her main room there would have been shards of glass everywhere but she probably wouldn't have been killed but would have definitely at least been damaged right and afterward she puts a statement out saying we will not be deterred we are not to be pushed around and blah blah blah the ira puts a statement out and they say uh mrs thatcher today you were lucky the thing is you have to be lucky every day we only have to get lucky once um so that is the fact that life has to win every day and death only has to win once right that's the reason why the negativity bias exists but that story you have to be lucky every day we only have to be lucky once that's a deontay wilder one punch philosophy because he only has to catch you once the eraser yeah the eraser the eraser man but that's that's that's the thing and i think that realizing just how how easy it is to change how easy it is to change the things that you think the way that you behave the norms that you follow this uh quote from aristotle he says uh if a man knows not where he goes no wind is favorable it's like if you haven't considered what it is that you want to want in life basically you're just the cleverest rat in the room right your
your desires are determined by the confused chemical signals of your body and the way you've dealt with past trauma and social norms and paths of least resistance all of these things that's what's determining your behavior right now if you haven't lived a consciously designed life and the main thing that i've learned is that look life doesn't have to be lived by default you can design it you can go out of your way to assess okay what's underneath this stone oh [ __ ] hell that's really ugly i would rather not look at that and then you give it a bit of a clean right you clean it away and you go okay right let's have a go again for every 20 stones that you turn over to have a look and do some introspective work 19 of them are disgusting and have something terrifying that sits underneath yeah maybe one of them's good you actually do you know what it is my curiosity i really like that or my empathy i really like that right most of them are desires that other people have given to you the things that you don't actually want to do for yourself and that's why it's scary work it's scary work to admit that you're wrong it's scary work to look at assessing why i do the things that i do there's also the burden of having to make a living right and that requires so much of your day think about the amount of time that if we were talking about before that most people who are living there's a large percentage of people that are listening to this right now that are living their life doing something for a living that they don't want to do and it's not enjoyable and it's burdensome well that's eight hours a day plus commuting that is most of your day so most of your day is spent in an undesirable way so because of that it leaves very little time to course correct yes the more you develop responsibilities whether it's a family that you have to support or whether it's a mortgage you have to pay off or a car loan or whatever it is the more of those things you accumulate the more difficult it is to course correct and that's very very important for
people to understand is that the further you go down this path like you might have this job and it might suck but then the boss pulls you into the office and goes hey uh mike i'm uh we're gonna give you a new responsibility new raise but we're gonna require more hours you know it's a 10 bump in pay but i want you to understand that you know this is you're gonna have to do a lot of overtime you've got to do it and you start thinking well i'm moving up but you're not deeper into the trench you go yes yes that's that's so important to understand is that the amount of time like the amount of focus the amount of the amount of hours your mind is spent doing something you don't want to do that's not going to [ __ ] change unless you make it change you're going to have to do something about that and the more you commit to that and the more time spent doing that the harder it's going to be to make those changes and you're going to start to cope yes outside of that that's where these kind of conversations are so valuable because you have done some things you don't want to do anymore and you used to do them and i have been the same way and most people are that way we're not born into this job this is not something that was bestowed upon us by someone else we've we've we crafted it we figured it out and through step by step you go back and listen to my early podcast they're [ __ ] terrible you know like if you went back and watched my early podcast say one day this is gonna be the biggest podcast in the known world like the [ __ ] are you talking about this is horseshit exactly and that's why it's out there still i like the fact that they're out there yeah me too i love the fact that it's still there but another thing to consider is the fact that if people are succeeding even slightly in a job that they hate think about how good you could be if it was something that you really really cared about right think about how amazing you could be if you pursued something that you genuinely had existential uh simpatico with right as opposed to something that you detest yeah or are just not that fussed about if you're in the chasm of competent of uh comfortable complacency just how good could you be if this was
something that you loved yeah holy [ __ ] it's just so hard for people to course correct and it's so hard for people to have like sort of a top-down objective view of where they're going and what they're doing and how they're thinking and whether or not they like it most of the time people need some sort of a catastrophic event some kind of sort of a near-death experience or a life-changing event or a breakup or being fired or a psychedelic experience like something that just blows the paradigm completely into a million pieces and you're you're forced to look at it again that's falling out at the bottom of the region beta paradox right you go through the bottom and you bounce out of there yeah right that's what you're looking to do but i think that when you think about how locked in to people's lives they are and concerns about making changes i'm 34 now i moved to america when i was 33 right 33 years old that would have been you know past the time when you're supposed to have responsibilities now yeah i didn't have any restrictions or whatever to to be able to come out here in terms of uh family and kids and stuff like that but still moving to a new country on your own at 33 is something that most people would have been that's a little bit of an odd decision to make perhaps there are opportunities and there are people that reach out that have made huge changes in their lives i'm sure you've seen them as well way way way into late life there is no trench that's been dug so deep that you can't get yourself out of here yes but it is easier the earlier that you do it that's way easier that's just a sad a sad fact that if you're able to nip something in the bud before it becomes too entrenched before you have too many responsibilities that make it harder because you've got to keep on grinding in order at the shitty job that you don't like while you've got to side hustle while you've got to raise the kids while you've got to pay the mortgage while you've got to do all of the rest of the things in the adulting
it would be easier but it's never going to be too late it's never too late if you're alive you can get better if you're alive right now you can improve your your condition you can improve your situation and it starts with improving the way you think that's the most important thing the way you think of things the way you think of things the way you address things you've got to change that and you got to look at things objectively and you got to be brutally honest with yourself and the more you [ __ ] yourself the more it's going to be difficult you're you're literally throwing weights on your back and making it harder to to move forward um yeah it's because people's opinions are so highly highly held as the most important thing that they do that's the concern though the fact that in order to say that i've been wrong it feels like destruction but it's it's not true your opinions are just a thing that you're bouncing around in your head and you can't you can't think of them as your lungs or your bones or your eyeballs it's not this is a another sam harris thing right where he says uh what are you going to think next you don't know you don't know what you're going to think next right right right so okay so does that mean that you're in control of your thoughts well you kind of are but you're also kind of not right and if there was somebody that was walking down the street saying things and you couldn't predict what they were going to say next would you trust what that person says probably not and you can't predict what's coming up next your thoughts are no more of a part of you than the weather is to the sky right um the weather flows through the sky and you know that the sky is there above it but the weather is just a current state it's not the sky it's just a part of it but you do develop momentum from thinking in a specific way whether it's good momentum or bad momentum you can get good momentum by choosing good paths in life by course correcting by adding beneficial and healthy
activities to your life and you grow and change because of that you know i've talked to so many people that have started doing yoga and they're like oh my god it's changed my life it changes the way i think about things change the way i interact with people but by forcing yourself to do a thing you now develop momentum and that can be applied to all sorts of different aspects of your life and also by finding something that you deeply enjoy and that becomes satisfying to you you enrich your overall experience on earth and that in turn enriches the way you communicate with others it can enhance your relationships it can enhance your job performance your it just changes your choices because you have less frustration we're rolling the clock forward as well thinking about how you could impact other people yeah what would the world be like if you showed up one percent better okay who would that impact how far would the ripples go yeah you know listening to your show was a big part of the reason why i started mine then 500 episodes later modern wisdoms got me out to america and it's done all that and how many people has that impacted and then how many people have they impacted yeah so there's kind of a almost a compulsion or a necessity for people to do what only they can do so i learned about uh salvador dali and just how weird that guy was so salvador dali his parents about 10 months or 11 months before he was born had a kid called salvador and it died died very shortly after being born and they very quickly got pregnant again and called the new son salvador and they were adamant that he was a reincarnation of the baby that had died that's where you've started okay that's where he began and then he used to throw himself down the stairs as a child because he was a masochist he used to enjoy the pain of being thrown downstairs he once got locked in a deep-sea diving suit while he was giving a talk and he had to be wrenched out of it mid-talk because he was suffocating he do you know about what he did with his wife have you got no i don't know anything about salvador's amazing mustache yes serious facial hair so he fell in love he was
married and he fell in love with another woman who was also married and he was adamant that she was his muse that she was almost divine heavenly and she left her uh husband he left his wife he immediately bought her i finished that coffee sorry oh no worries let's get more coffee now we're good man um was adamant that she was his muse he bought her a castle and immediately started treating her like royalty oh boy so he used to send a formal request to go and see her his wife in the castle that he bought her he used to treat her like royalty and she would have to accept it like my royal decree or something my point being that salvador dali was an incredibly odd human and as brilliant as he was michelangelo didn't do dali right da vinci didn't do dali if salvador dali had been anything short of his truer self the world would have been fundamentally less that work would not have come out had he have tried to be his version of leonardo da vinci or his version of michelangelo the world would have been robbed of darley's work yeah so you are this very unique combination of genetics and experience and past traumas and social norms and your funny lisp and the fact that one foot slightly bigger than the other all of that combined together gives you the opportunity to have a very unique offering to the world yes and it is incredibly difficult to compete with someone who's being themselves how am i going to be a better joe rogan than joe rogan is the best that i can hope for is being the second best joe rogan in the world if i decide to do that so if you decide to lean into the thing that only you can do that is where your competitive advantage lies and that doesn't mean that you can't progress forward that doesn't mean you can't enhance yourself and develop new skills and but i do think that there's something to do with embracing the uniqueness that you have that will allow you to direct yourself towards something that is more
fulfilling that's more in line with you that is competitively more effective socially people are going to resonate with you we don't love people for how much they're like other people right no one's ever fallen in love with someone and said you know what it is i just love the fact that i can accurately predict all of their opinions without having heard their thought on something beforehand i'm just i just adore how predictable she is no no it's because of how unique they are yeah the same thing goes for competitiveness in a job market like we want people who have unique skills that cannot be matched by anybody else and then if you think well i want 7.8 billion people on the planet all being the very best version of themselves what is it that only you can do and you can break because i've got people that can already do what they're doing if you try and do what they're doing then what's it like they've already got that do the thing that only you can do the thing is what you're saying by leaning into yourself and and saying what is it about you that is unique that only you can offer the world some people don't feel like there's anything that is unique about them that they can offer the world because they haven't done anything that shows them that and one of the things about difficult pursuits whether it's with salvador dali it's art whether with me it's probably martial arts and some other things and stand-up comedy and podcasting and through doing difficult things difficult things they establish your human potential and by going through these things you'd gain more confidence and more of a more of an understanding of your thought process and where you error and where you do well and what lessons that you can take from that and be a little bit better next time and the accumulation of all this data is it makes you understand what is unique about you and who you are but that's why i think difficult pursuits are so important for humans
i think we live in this shell of a body that has this ancient primate dna that is all about problem solving and survival it's about figuring out where the threats are it's about recognizing your enemies it's about accumulating resources in food and about your dna carrying on well most of those problems have kind of been solved by civilized society so in order to examine your own unique human potential you have to have a pursuit whatever that pursuit is whether it's golf like tiger woods whatever it's basketball like michael jordan whatever it is you've got to find a thing and through that thing you learn about yourself whether it's yoga whether it's writing there's a there's a way that you can interface with difficult complex problems that will you will gain insight into how you operate and how your mind plays tricks on you and how accomplishing things is deeply rewarding and how learning how to be a more empathetic and kind friend is also rewarding and about when you recognize that in other people it's inspiring all those things you got to get through something in life to acquire them and it bleeds into those other areas right yeah the single pursuit becomes the vector that everything else comes from right it's a gateway drug or the pebble at the top of an avalanche the first step is the hardest one though and i think that that was what i was stuck out for a very long time you know i knew that there was something wrong i didn't know what and i didn't really know how to fix it either and that is that's the the first step being the most difficult in terms of starting that momentum you know you look at it takes 10 years to become an overnight success that you all of the people that you admire are just the end result of hundreds of thousands of tiny little interactions and iterations on doing a
lot of different things the way that they show up for their friends the fact that they turn up on time all of that stuff the tiny tiny tiny little things and then that is how you look at somebody that's incredibly impressive but trying to reverse engineer the impressiveness without thinking that okay what is the thing that i can do today the tiny little action that i can take that will move me slightly closer toward my goal even if i don't know what the goal is so a lot of the time i think people have a problem that perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control right so they decide i'm not going to do a thing until i know exactly the direction i'm going to go in right and that means that no step is useful until i know the end goal that i'm going to get to but what they don't understand is that any commitment that you make is a step in the right direction anything that you decide that you're going to commit yourself to peterson's got one of these rules where he says uh commit yourself to one thing as hard as you can and see what happens right like just write a blog post once a day for two months see what happens right even if blogging turns out you you suck at it and you hate it and it doesn't end up getting any traction and it gives you no sense of joy or whatever what you've learned there is that you can do a thing every single day for two months yeah that is a really [ __ ] valuable lesson it's a vehicle for developing your human potential yes yeah yes that's exactly what it is and the more that you can lean into just committing to doing stuff right far more people than realize it just need to commit to doing a thing just do a thing yes that's it anything it doesn't matter especially if you don't know what to do because anything is better than no thing yes but one of the problems you've got is that people can be anything that they want but they can't be everything that they want you have to pick a small narrow window of stuff that you're going to compete on right you can't be
the leanest person in the gym whilst starting a new business whilst going out every single night and socializing trying to find your partner whilst starting a podcast and a blog and a bunch of other things it's like no no no it can be anything you want it can't be everything that you want right you have to pick what is the highest point of contribution that i can go to and then over time you gradually gradually refine those down now sometimes you can find things that kind of um mutually beneficial so let's say that you end up being good at podcasting which is conversation you also end up like commentaries kind of conversation and comedy's kind of conversation okay so these things kind of intermingle and the audience and into selling shows and blah blah blah so sometimes stuff overlaps but more often than not it diverges right if you want to be a great businessman and make as much money as possible you're going to have to sacrifice time with your kids if you want to be the best dad that you can you're probably not going to be able to earn as much money quite as much as you could do usually so these things are mutually exclusive it's an idea oliver oliver berkman has where he says decide in advance what you want to suck at because a lot of the time we believe that we can do anything that we want to do be anything that we want to be and as soon as we start to commit to one thing we feel the pain of the stuff that we've started to let fall away i used to be in condition now that i'm focused on my family i've noticed that i'm getting a little bit out of shape even though i train i know that i'm still doing stuff as much as i can but i'm just i can't go to the gym as much as i could when i was 25 right and i had no girlfriend no family but if you've committed in advance to wanting to be the best father that you can be you know downstream from that okay what are the things that i'm going to have to suck at in advance my body condition's probably going to take a little bit of a hit maybe i'm not going to be able to see the boys on a
weekend quite so much but i'm prepared to suck at that because these are the things that i genuinely value i want to be the best father that i can be i want to be whatever it might be but we feel the pain of that as it falls away we feel the pain and that's what stops us from making progress because you can be anything you want you can't be everything and as soon as you start trying to spread yourself out and remember as well this is something else i wonder whether you had this a lot of the things that i do i've always presumed they're going to last forever so if i'm going to be into training in the gym now i forget that it's just periodization i can focus on training for the next six months and then after that once i've locked in a good routine or i've built up this particular thing after that it's going to be something else and after that it's going to be something else i always presume that what i did that what's happening now is just going to continue to stretch out into the future forever and this means that good things feel like they're going to last forever and then inevitably they end up disappointing you because they're not going to and bad things feel like they're going to last forever which makes you despondent but realizing that whatever it is that you're doing now is only going to last for a little while right you're going to have this particular training style you have this little project and then what else you're going to add in after that well you don't know but not just feeling like the now is everything that there is and that things are going to change over time and they're going to iterate i think that's quite an important realization i try to just enjoy what i'm doing while i'm doing it and i don't think too much about whether or not i'm gonna be able to do something forever i just think am i doing it now am i enjoying it now great let's do it again tomorrow and if there comes a reason why i can't do things anymore like i had to give up on video games because i'm too obsessive there's a few things in my life where i've had to go okay this is not a good thing let me stop that
but generally i just try to find things that i enjoy doing and do them as much as i can but if that's why i don't understand why people say i'm bored oh i'm bored like i could live a hundred lives simultaneously if there was a hundred versions of me i'd have a hundred different occupations i would try to be a professional pool player i'd try to be a professional chess player i'd be a professional fighter i would try to be a [ __ ] singer i would find things i am endlessly fascinated by things things to do things to learn from things pursuits and i think that if you could find things that resonate with your particular personality just enjoy them and treat them as what they are with what they are is they're they're sort of a replacement for all the things that gave you human rewards the human reward systems that are built into our primate dna you need those you you can't just go through life just showing up eating sleeping and going to sleep you're going to get depressed like your your organism the human organism needs problem solving it needs complex problems it needs stress it needs some sort of difficult thing that you have to overcome and through that you relax you can't just have happiness all day like oh i just want to be happy like that's not real like you have to face discomfort for you to appreciate happiness if you live in southern california one of the things you realize is like the sun doesn't feel good anymore you know it's there every [ __ ] day i went on a um a hunting trip once with my friend brian and my friend steve we went to um alaska and we were in uh prince edward island and it's like the rainiest place in all of north america it rained every [ __ ] day we're there it was pouring rain sounds like england it was crazy but it was way worse i mean it's crazy it's like constant rain like and we're sleeping in tents right so you think oh well i'll get into ten it'll be dry
uh-uh there's moisture inside the tent there's you see moisture droplets like in the air when you turn your headlamp on at night you see like mist like moisture mist because everything is moist your sleeping bag's wet your clothes are wet you never dry off when i got back home i called my friend steve because i was in the car i was like dude i've never been happier the sun is shining on my face i feel so happy it's amazing because my happiness was greatly enhanced by the fact that i was miserable for seven days like you don't get one without the other you don't get true happiness some of the most depressed people have ever met live in l.a and they're in the sun every [ __ ] day and the people that live in places where it rains all the time when the sun comes out they're in ecstasy they're having fun they're laughing they're at the park you you don't just be happy all the time and people seek these pharmaceutical interventions that are going to step in and change your brain chemistry and make you happy and like yeah maybe i mean i don't know what's going on in your head or it might be that you need more physical struggle you need more exercise they've proven that physical exercise in particular cardiovascular exercise is just as effective as ssris if not more effective on most people dude it's it's so strange thinking back to my my 20s because i always thought that i was a depressive person like that was i was really bad i would get burned out at work i would spend days in bed i'd feel ashamed about the fact that ostensibly there was nothing wrong with me right so there was later seemed ashamed yeah laid on top of the fact that i was sad and didn't want people that i was we had 500 people that worked for us at this events company and we were supposed to be the party guys and we were supposed to be the ones on the front door that was getting everyone up and we've got this dj and we've got these cool people and this is the night aspirational inspirational like outgoing gregarious extroverted people and i couldn't get myself out of bed i was like holy [ __ ] how embarrassing is it that i the person that's supposed to be in charge of this
can't bring himself to go to the kitchen to get himself a glass of water and i looked at what was happening i was going to bed at 4am two to three nights a week right dude the first stable sleep and wake pattern i ever had was covered as an adult really first time i ever went to bed and woke up at the same time consistently since the age of 18 when i lived at home with my parents was covered how much better did you feel it's indescribable it's indescribable the difference because of my sleep and weight pattern and then that allowed me to really sink into building up a great morning routine i already had a good morning routine i was meditating a lot and doing stuff but it was at changeable times and my mood was always all over the place and obviously if you're sleeping late that means that diet is kind of hard to really dial in and then over time you start to see holy [ __ ] the momentum that you can build up when things are consistent sustainable replicable it's the difference is so profound that i can't put words on it and that's what you see that's that one percent each conversation each day each little time that you do something each interaction the fact that you turn up early the fact that you tell the truth as opposed to telling a lie every single one of those a mountain built and layers of paint yes every single time man and that's how it felt to me making a pivot committing myself to doing something i really cared about committing myself to saying that i was wrong when i'm wrong committing myself to telling the truth even though it's inconvenient all of those little interactions and it's that first step i think that a lot of people get stuck on i just want that that momentum to begin i want to push myself down that hill yes chris let's end with that i love it i really enjoyed this conversation i think we could have a hundred more and uh i really appreciate what you're doing i really appreciate how you communicate and the way you express yourself it's awesome your podcast is
great so please tell people how to get that tell people where it is uh modern wisdom you can search on spotify obviously and uh apple podcasts youtube wherever else you need to search just modern wisdom is there and dude i appreciate the hell out of you big inspiration big reason why i started the show i'd love to have you on whenever you're free thank you i'd love to do that too thank you uh and tell people your social media too so they can call you there chris will x on twitter and instagram and everywhere else that you go okay beautiful we did it thank you bye everybody peace [Music] [Applause] [Music]