#930 - 3.5M Q&A - Dating Famous People, Naval Reflections, & Marrying Douglas Murray

Bonjour, friends. Welcome back to the show.
It is a 3.5 million subscriber Q&A episode. I ask for questions on the internet.
You give them to me, then I choose only the ones about the Gaza Strip and trans issues, and I talk about them for an hour and a half. So let's get into it.
The Mr. Wyatt, what's your favorite new sleep token, caramel or emergence? for the few people in the audience

that don't know who sleep token are they're a band they're a band that i'm a big fan of and i've been listening to for quite a while and they knocked chapel roan off the number one spot uh a couple of weeks ago which was pretty fun to see given that that song has actual death metal pieces in it uh i have got caramel on repeat dude i adore that xylophone at the start i think his voice is the lyrics they're super meaningful as well you know it kind of does track a little bit i suppose he's talking about the challenges and perils of fame and increased attention and scrutiny and not really knowing how to deal with

it. So yeah, if you need to listen to a new track, Sleep Token Song Caramel is muy bueno.

Paul Irish 1165, when will you be in Toronto next for a live event? I am about to announce

my first ever US and Canada live tour. That'll be happening at the end of this year and tickets will go on sale soon.
And if you want to sign up to get first access to tickets, first access to dates, VIP, VVIP, meet and greet, all of that shit, you can go to chriswilliamson.live. And Toronto is one of the cities that's on there.
And I'm not going to say what any of the others are because that's what the announcement is supposed to be about but chriswilliamson.live and you'll find out before anybody else daniel semper pico how do you deal with judging yourself for judging yourself in your latest vlog you talked about how you weren't kind to yourself after your Joe Rogan interview. Then you seem to be judging yourself for that.
Yeah, dude, it's so funny that you say that. I don't know whether this got left in the vlog, but I did a section.
I spoke to Max, videographer Max, about how I was trying to be unkind to my unkindness to myself. So how do you deal with judging yourself or judging yourself is a super smart question.
And it's tough, man. You end up with this infinite regress of feeling bad and then feeling bad about feeling bad and then feeling resentful about feeling bad about feeling bad and then getting frustrated at your resentment and then getting anxious about your frustration.
And yeah, these second, third, fourth order emotions that go all the way back, especially when the very thing that you need is the very thing you're complaining about, right? You weren't kind to yourself, and now I'm not being kind to myself about not being kind to myself. It's tough.
I mentioned on the vlog, if people haven't checked it out, it's pretty cool. It's probably my favorite thing we've done.
It's strange if you have a period where your confidence gets knocked, and mine certainly has over the last couple of months. Being ill, still trying to sort of hold on to the same work rate and output and mood and stuff, whilst just not really, really not having it in the tank.
It can chip away at your self-belief. And then someone saying, hey, dude, why don't you go on the biggest podcast in the world and then record the biggest podcast you've ever done within four days of each other? Oh the way you've got to travel in between to like two other cities uh that just really sort of pushed it that's also for the people that watch to the end i have a little sad boy moment um that's the first time that i think i've ever cried on camera which i was so fucking close to cutting it out I was so close to just saying get rid of

it it feels too uncomfortable I can't bear to see myself be such a pussy uh but it was real it was definitely how I felt at the time and uh yeah trying to be kind to my unkindness um is a skill that I'm yet to develop, but it seemed to resonate,

which was beautiful, and no one said too many mean things about it, or not many people said that many mean things about it. I get the sense that if I was a fan of this show, or I think about shows that I'm a fan of, fucking like Huberman, right? Let's say that I'm watching watching one of Andrew's shows and he gets a little bit emotional talking about the challenges that he faces and I think oh my god like he's so he seems so smart and well put together and he's got all of this stuff going for him and wow like he feels the same things that I do and um I'm proud that I was able to say it on camera and I'm proud that we left it in the vlog.
So if it resonated with you, then I appreciate you. But unfortunately, I do not have anything remotely appropriating a solution for this, because as you may have noticed, I'm still going through it.
So I will tell you when I find one. And hopefully, you know, the fact that I'm kind of growing with you

on this journey of self-discovery, whatever it is that we're all doing, hopefully that is reassuring because I'm on the same trajectory, growth trajectory thing that everybody else is. I'm just, I guess, doing it in public.
and if that makes everyone feel a bit less alone and helps me to work out my own emotions publicly then i consider it a win the magic lima you often say about all the millionaires leaving the uk but where are they going and why uh yeah this is stat from last year that UK was second in the world for millionaire exits

after China, but it's got 4% of the population of China, so per GDP by far the highest. There's

some fuckery with those numbers. Some of it is to do with non-dom expat people who don't live there

and then they had their income cut, this special carve out that they had where they were going to have to start paying taxes in the UK and now they've left, but they weren't live there and then they had their income cut, this special carve out that they had where

they were going to have to start paying taxes in the UK and now they've left, but they weren't

living there. But I still get the sense, even when you account for that, I get the sense that

the UK is losing brain drain, might be another way to put it. I get the sense it's losing some

talent and not only that, but some capital and some people that own businesses and those businesses

help to provide employment. And more importantly than that, as far as I can see, they provide role models for growth minded people within the UK to look up to, to think, holy shit, like that's somebody that made it work.
Like that's a, that's another Ben Francis. Or that's an Alan Barrett that started Grenade.
Or, you know, that's Ollie that started MyProtein. Like these are guys that really made, it doesn't matter how big the business is, you know, a small local gym or whatever, right? Where are they going? I would guess places like Bali, like Dubai, especially.
The US is a little bit probably less popular, just it's hard to get into. If you want to get a visa to come over here it's uh i was gonna say i was gonna make a joke about crossing the border illegally but that's kind of been clamped down as well since trump's come into office so yeah i would guess places in asia the sort of thailand's of the world the classic sort of boho work from anywhere thing uh dubai outside of, I'm not too sure why.
I would hazard a guess that the quality of life you have in the UK compared with the opportunity to earn and the laid on top the level of taxes that you need to pay. I don't think that's a particularly great cocktail.
So for the people that don't know the way that the UK works, especially if you're a business owner, there's something called VAT, which is a value-added tax. And that's a deduction of 20% on applicable sales.
Now, a lot of the time you can claim that VAT back, but that's 20% off the top and you can't claim all of it back all of the time. So that's 20% off a, let's say you have a pound sale, right? 20% comes off the pound sales.
That's like 83p or something left over. And then there's something called corp tax, which is on your net profit.
So let's say that you had, let's say it was all profit, right? Let's say it was the best, best, best, best case scenario. The corp tax was 25% on your net profit.
So 83p, 25% off, that's like 60p, something left. And then let's say that you wanted to draw that down as a personal dividend payment to yourself.
So you've got it in the business, you've had the corp tax off the top, you've had, sorry, you've had the VAT off the top, you've had the corp tax off the top you've had sorry you've had the vat off the top you've had the corp tax off the profit then you've had the dividend tax off the like additional rate taxpayer that you need to draw it down to yourself that ends up at 40 or if you earn more than i think about 150 grand 200 grand it's at 45 so you end up from one pound you have 38 pence left. One pound goes into your business, 38p goes to the business owner.
If you are the only person that owns it, if it was 100% profit margin, obviously, if you didn't get to claim the fat bag, all of that is to say it doesn't matter about the details too much, I guess. It's not that fantastic when you don't have particularly

good weather. There aren't that many places to go.
It's just not that big. The culture isn't fantastic.
It is becoming diluted culturally. I think that's a fair thing to say.
If you walk around most of the big cities in the South, I don't think many people would be surprised by that. so not good

and I don't relish

it might sound sometimes south. I don't think many people would be surprised by that.
So not good. And I don't

relish. It might sound sometimes like I relish in this sort of fleeing of the UK.
And I'm, you know,

I managed to get on some Titanic life raft and I'm over here having a great time. And I, you know,

just sort of pity or scorn all of the people that are back in the UK. Dude, I really tried for a long time.
You know, I employed between 1,500 and 2,500 people over the space of a decade and a half career. And they were all 18 to 25.
They were university educated, highly, highly motivated guys and girls. And, you know, these are little seedlings that me and my business partner tried to leave our stamp on.
And I hope that we did a good job with them. Some of them went on, many of them went on to do like amazing things, but there's only so much that we can do.
So for the, uh, you should stay and fix your country crowd. I, I spent my time in the trenches and, uh, I, I wasn't able to make that much of a dent so yeah it's sad it's sad and i don't know what the solution is wild 48267 how did you get your forearms so big yeah this is these things seem to be a um at the live shows the it's the invariably the first thing that people mention fucking hell they're really big in real life aren't they and um i don't know what to say it's just genetics dude it is i've never done i did direct forearm training once with mike isretel and it really hurt uh there's a lot of receptors in these bad boys.
I really don't know. It's the

same. Everybody's got one body part.
Every person has got one body part that just grows freakishly big. Mine happened to be maybe the most obvious one on your entire body.
So parents, I got my Forearms from my parents.

Guacamole Cridden 47.

How is dating being famous or a public figure? Is it harder to trust people's intentions? Do you get asked out more often? I mean, look, I'm not famous. I do think it's important to put that caveat in there that it's like niche degenerate internet micro fame.
Um, but whatever level I've managed to get to, it certainly kind of gets in the way of people behaving normally around you, which is not great. Um, because for instance, I saw this with Rogan, right? If Rogan walks into a room, let's say we're in the mothership or whatever, and you're downstairs in Mitzi's, which is the bar attached to the mothership, and sometimes they close that off, and just the comedians and their friends and family are in there.
And if he walks into the room, there's this distortion field that follows him around where people are just, most people are to behave normally and it's wild to see what just very very very high levels of fame and status have this odd warping effect on the way that people are able to show up and just be normal and what that means is that if you're joe everybody must seem weird to you everybody must seem like they're being a little bit contrived or obfuscatory or disingenuous in some way. And maybe some, maybe many of them are.
And then some of them are just looking at you going like, holy fuck, it's Joe Rogan, holy fuck, it's Joe Rogan, holy fuck, it's Joe Rogan. And they're trying to hold it together, and you don't know which one's which.
And, you know, in whatever micro-niche equivalent it is for me, I guess that that might be the same thing, that status and fame can be warping. And, yeah, it is a little bit harder to trust people's intentions, not necessarily because you're skeptical, but because people, in many ways, just struggle to show up in a a normal manner that there's things that they could get from you, or they have a preconceived idea about the way that you want people to behave or, or whatever.
And again, I, I'm fortunate, whatever period I'm in now, it's the perfect level of fame. People say hello once every 15 minutes on the street.
If I'm in a gym, there'll be, you know, 10 or 20 guys that'll come up and give me a fist bump and let me get back to my training session. It's really nice.
And everyone's got cool stuff to say, and I don't need fucking security or anything like that. But that's going to keep getting more difficult over time.
And I don't know what the optimal level of fame is. I know that, to use an example from earlier,

I know Huberman, he needs security outside of the lecture theatres that he's speaking at. I think

he's teaching undergrads this year or next year at Stanford and he needs two security guys.

That doesn't sound fun. That sounds kind of shit.
But you can't switch the tap off and

Thank you. Uh, that's, that doesn't sound fun.
That sounds kind of shit. Um, so, but you can't switch the tap off and you can't slow down the sort of rollercoaster that keeps going up.
And again, that's why to fly the flag for sleep token again, that's why the sleep token song resonated with me. Uh, you know, he's talking about the stage being a prison and sort of how he's getting bitter in the lens he needs to sort of he's feeling constrained and constricted by this uh reality that he's made for himself and again champagne problem oh boo-hoo poor poor person that's got too much fame uh but i've seen you know firsthand from some friends uh the prices that they need to pay to deal with this stuff.
And it, it is fucking rough. So, uh, unlike, I'm pretty sure Naval turned up to the episode in a Waymo, no security, no nothing.
So, uh, maybe he's got the optimal level of fame. What's his thing about you want everybody to know your name and no one to know your face.
Uh, perhaps that's the level that he's got got too. Anyway, the dating thing, do I get asked out more often? Definitely not.
I think there is a sense that you must have lots going on. Even this happens with friends.
How many times would someone, if you were at an event at pickleball party or something else how many times would people invite you to go and do something afterward but i think there's this metacognitive i don't want to be the person that says to the person other people want to say things to do you want to come to this thing after because that seems beggy and that seems like people just get in their own heads and I'm sure that it's the same for for girls too so um yeah I don't know I'm uh I'm not I'm not paying too much time trying to uh pay attention to that Carter Valasa as a fellow giant brow bone haver I was wondering if you know where it comes from genetically. I took a DNA test, and it turns out I have more Neanderthal DNA than 99% of people.
I heard you mention you had done one, so I was curious if you know what your Neanderthal percentage is. I do have a prominent brow.
Thank you for reminding everyone about this. You see, how can I? So the problem, oh, there we go.
There we go. For the people that are just listening, I'm kind of using my forehead as a solar panel.
Someone actually said, put a petition on a petition on the podcast to make Chris's forehead into a solar panel. Someone else said that watching that watching me and mike israel talk was like sealing two alien head races meeting for the first time which is very charming and we did need to actually change the lighting setup previously because it had a grid on the big key light that i've got here had had a grid on it and it was just forming a perfect um sort of reflective surface in the middle my forehead.
All of that is to say, the DNA test that I did just looked at pairs of alleles. It wasn't a 23andMe or an Ancestry.com.
So I actually don't know that number. I think I know everything else about my genetics except for that.
And whether I'm mostly Irish or French or something. So I should do that.
I would hazard a guess that I do also share in a high percentage of Neanderthal DNA. What I do know about the brow ridge for men is that the reason, it seems, men have got bigger brow ridges than women is that it would be protective if you were in a fight.
Same reason,

bigger knuckles, bigger hands, these are your weapons, this is your defense. So I don't know if you're suggesting that I, like you, I'm a high percentile Neanderthal descendant.
Does that mean, Carter, Valasa, that me and you are the descendants of men that were punched in the head a lot but survived. I'm not sure if that is the lineage that I want to be a part of, but alas, here I am.
Please don't punch me in the head, but apparently I can take it. So I might find that out and come and tell you soon.
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How do I get you to read The Will of the Many by James Islington? So I think this is the, it's sort of set in quasi ancient Rome Greek times. And my friend Ricky told me that I should read it a couple of years ago after I was lamenting the fact there wasn't another Red Rising book.
And I've been told it a few times. And I just saw on Reddit yesterday in r slash fantasy, someone else harping on about it.
But I tried. I tried

for the first chapter and I couldn't get into it. So I'm going to give it another crack, Darwok,

and I will report back. And if it sucks, I'm going to come and find you.

R. Campbell 2321, do you ever pause interviews to pee that is an error on your part typically um i would say virtually as in like the virtual ones i do never in person very rare uh you know you talk about having the memory of an elephant what you want is the bladder of a podcaster because we're like the fucking navy seals of holding it in if especially if you're in the zone you don't you get up you come back where were we the flow's all broken um it's very rare but rogan did it mean rogan did it i think on the second episode um if this is the way that it works this is great this is a good one so if you really need to, what you should be doing is trying to encourage the other person to drink more so that they say to pee.
And if they say, then you can go with them. You're like, oh, cool.
I can't, I'll come with you. You know, I don't really need to go.
Meanwhile, you're sort of walking to the bathroom like this. Uh, but no, it's rare.
You've got to time the hydration properly, which I do. I actually try and drink a ton of water.
Also, this is from my speech coach, Miles, the way that your vocal folds get hydrated. It takes, I think, between two and four hours for them to be hydrated.
So you want to pound water for the morning, and then you want to cut it off about an hour before you go, and then out it is. And then, obviously, on the show, I'm just swimming in all manner of stimulants and hydration drinks and nootropics and new tonic and everything.
But, you know, I can usually hold it together for a few hours. George Swain 99.
You like outcomes over inputs. Top footy coaches say focus on inputs leads to best outcomes.
Discuss, please. Footy for the Americans listening is football with your feet, not your hands.
Outcomes over inputs versus inputs leading to the best outcomes. Okay.
I agree. And I think that the James Clear approach of not focusing too much on goals and instead focusing on systems, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, you fall to the level of your habits.
I think that's a good way to think about things, especially in something like football. The problem is if you are in a less bounded game.
In football, you are always just trying to get the round spherical thing into the square box over there. That's really it.
There ways that you can get there but largely you're working on individual skills and you've got a very tightly defined goal the reason that i like outcomes over inputs is in a much broader environment where your goals are more poorly defined so if you don't know whether you're sitting down with your instrument today to practice or to learn a new song that you're going to play on stage or to try and work out a new tune that you've been thinking of in your head or to refine and record that tune that you've already recorded, think about all of the different ways that this can go. And that's just a musical instrument.
Then you get yourself into a business. I want to grow.
I want to build a business. I want to run a business.
Okay, well, what are you going to do? You're going to build your brand. You're going to work on your supply chain.
You're going to try and hire people. You're going to work on your marketing.
Maybe you need to sit down and do your account. There's so many different things that you can do.
And if all you were to focus on was, I'm going to sit down and be focused,

you could be focused on completely the wrong thing and end up putting tons and tons of effort into stuff that doesn't actually yield any outcomes. You could spend your entire day

labeling your inbox. Well, I mean, that's lots of inputs and I'm sure that in many

worlds of productivity, that would be something that's really helped.

But what have you achieved? How much closer have you moved yourself toward your goal?

And at least for me, as somebody that really took the sort of James Clear red pill when his book came out, I just realized that growth without goals is kind of like having a super, super fast, well-tuned up car that you can be driving in entirely the wrong direction. And that sometimes you've got your foot to the floor and you don't realize that like the tires aren't on the ground.
So yeah, focusing on outcomes for me, like, cause even ultimately the football coaches say a focus on inputs leads to the best outcomes, but the goal is still the outcome, right? Nobody is doing inputs just for input's sake. Very rarely.
The only reason that you focus on inputs is to detach yourself from the emotional connection to the outcome and to not get sort of drowned in this movement toward the goal. Outcomes is ultimately what you want to do.
And I think that the broader the environment that you're working in and then wider the number of routes that there are in order for you to move toward what you would call success, I do think that maybe the more focus on outcome would be better. And a more bounded game, something like a sport, maybe something like working on a musical instrument, maybe you would be looking at focusing on inputs a little bit more because the outcome is much more tightly defined.
Maybe that helps. Jaffe Ryder, how come you haven't tried a new haircut yet? 3.5 million subscribers have all seen the same suspiciously Neanderthal hairline, said with love.
Any chance to grow it out and be a wild man? Love you. Well, I didn't realize that the prehistoric human noticing crowd was so strong today.
I haven't tried a new haircut. Remember this.
Look, this haircut is a COVID haircut. Okay? I am still really, really riding, rinsing out the coattails of COVID is happening.
All the barbers are shut. Just shave my head, mate, to my housemate that I was living with.
I am going to maybe try to grow it out. But the problem is I'm going from so short to a hair length that has got five embarrassing midpoints between it because my hair doesn't get longer.
It just gets bigger. And be you wish for man because this thing is unruly um but yeah i'm actually i'm interesting that you say it i'm in the middle you may notice it's a tiny little bit longer than usual uh this is three weeks three or four weeks perhaps uh anyway we'll see i may bail out you honestly i may get five weeks deep and go i can't deal with this fuzz anymore and just pull the ripcord and eject myself out of it but yeah this haircut's only existed for the last five years and the show's been going for seven so if you go back to pre-covid you will see me with hair chad preet good name like indian like fucking jacked guy chad preet when are you updating book list name some you would add uh good question so i have a reading list i'm really proud of it i wrote it four years ago it's 100 books you should read before you die and you can get it at chriswillx.com slash books.
It's completely free. And like 300,000 people have got it.
And a lot of people have asked for a second one. So many people that I actually wrote one.
So I've done it. It's finished.
So there is another Modern Wisdom reading list, volume two, with another hundred books coming. It's with the designer.
He'll be putting it together. And this will be available, I would imagine, end of the month, maybe, probably before May, start of May, something like that.
There'll be a different landing page. It'll be offered to people who are on the other reading list first.
So I guess sign up chriswillx.com slash books, and you'll get a hundred and then you'll get another hundred at the end of the month so yeah i'm updating it soon uh name some that i would add who is in there that's really cool um uh from vikings to tinder uh by mads larson so i've got some stuff in there i've got poetry in there for the first time i've got free books like mads. Uh, so most of it is stuff that you would buy, but I've got more shit that's on.
I suggest that you listen to on audible as opposed to just being a consumer, however you want. So I tried to refine it a little bit more, but, um, uh, I'm happy with it.
It nearly killed me to do it again. It's such a mind numbing task to do a hundred bucks all with custom written by me summaries about why I like them.
And then I create my own categories for them. And then I got to reorder them.
So I think they work. Yeah.
I realized partway through it, why I hadn't done it for four years since the last time I did it, but it's done with the designer and you'll get it soon. Chobra.
When are we getting the modern wisdom t-shirts? Yes. I know every time I do a Q and a, the same answer which is we're working on it but we're working on it and you'll get it soon and the first drop will be an exclusive you know first edition of what it is we're going to do it's going to be a slightly adjusted brand which i adore and i can't wait to release and i really really think is one of the coolest things i've done in branding probably since newtonic so uh it's fun I haven't got you know modern wisdom is kind of locked in and I really, really think is one of the coolest things I've done in branding probably since Newtonic.
So it's fun. I haven't got, you know, modern wisdom is kind of locked in and I don't get to play about with new ideas from branding.
I get to do copy for the episodes and the titles and stuff, but it's not something brand, brand new. And this is brand new.
So I'm excited. I'm really, really fired up to show you what we're working on.
But the answer's not yet. Maybe within a few months, hopefully.
Daniel Haraj 5218. Do you plan on getting your own pet Jamie like Joe Rogan? That's not nice to call Jamie.
He's an agentic, strong, independent woman who has a lot to add.

I fucking love that guy.

He's great.

We went to go and see Bill Murray play together at the start of the end of the summer.

He's not a pet.

He's great.

And unfortunately, if you realize how great he is, you will also realize that he is kind of hard to come by to find someone who's got that full skill set. That being said, I'm in the process of trying to find a location in Austin, Texas to use for a studio.
So I'm going to build my first studio here in Austin, maybe have an office on site, a little office on site too, but mostly it's going to be the recording spot. I guess, fuck it, we're half an hour in, I can break the fourth wall.
I got a few ideas for the show, like new things that I want to do. I'm really keen on the idea of having a little bit more of a hang with some of my friends.
I love all of the dusty academics that I speak to. I love how tight and lean the conversations are.
I love that we get straight into them. It's no fuckery.
I love that you know that you're always going to leave with something of value, even if it's a topic that you didn't think you were going to be interested in. I love that the conversation moves forward at a quick pace, but doesn't sound, I hope doesn't sound too sterile or sort of stripped of all personality.
But even I find sometimes when I listen to episodes, I'm like, fuck, like there's so much practical applicable stuff in this. I almost feel guilty if I don't start applying it to my life.
And I don't want this show to always feel like this homework on the other side. And I think when it comes to the Q&As, I know that these are some of the most popular episodes that people tell me about.
This Christmas episode that I do once a year with my friends back in the UK. And I just have this sense in the back of my mind that I'm kind of like giving you guys a palate cleanser every so often and also for me uh doing you know multi guest episodes that's just a little bit more slow pace doesn't necessarily have a tightly defined outcome before the episode begins i'm going to test some of those uh over the rest of the year but the problem is I want to do that.
I don't want to be flitting around building pop-up studios

and doing it with the sort of cinema style that we've done before.

It needs to be in a spot that's mine.

And we would need to have a Jamie there

because it's going to be more complex to be able to piece together

and for stuff to get put up onto a screen if someone wants to reference it.

But I think you'll be seeing more of Zach.

George Mac is also moving to Austin.

So he'll be here and a ton of other friends. Huberman's moving out here.
Brian Callen's moving out here. So, uh, yeah, I don't know.
I'm going to test some of those and having my own pet, Jamie will be, uh, an important part of that. So if you happen to have a huge warehouse space in Austin that you want to give me that I

can build a studio in, hooray. Pete Cuddy, you've said that someone who is super successful should be pitied rather than envied.
Why? Much of the time, I think we should default to pity rather than envy not Not always, but very successful people have been

driven to create that world of success by something and looking at them as non-typical outgrowths of probably a pretty sort of mean, uncomfortable childhood, a requirement to be seen by the world, this requirement, need for external validation is not something that you probably want. I don't think that you would envy most of the richest, most successful people on the planet

if you could see the inner texture of their minds. And when you look at them, you should think, holy fuck, what had to happen to that person to cause them to build that business or that body or spend so long curating their writing ability or their speaking ability or their singing ability? and yeah, from the outside, what you see is a success, but from the inside, what you see is the journey that it took to get there and the motivation that started the journey.
A lot of the time, I don't think that you would pay the price that you need to be the people that you admire. And, you know, admiration is fine, but it should be tempered.
And I think a little bit of pity, especially if you're a happy person, if you're someone who is able to be comfortable in your own skin, holy shit, you have got it sorted. You have got the thing that successful people are trying to find.
They're just taking the long route to the top of Everest. And yeah, I think pity is not necessarily a bad default.
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That's surfshark.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Zachary Sparks 5078.
Is it better to hustle in your 20s and 30s to find financial stability and success in your 40s and on? Or should that energy be directed toward finding a healthy equilibrium early in life, even if it means less financial stability in your later years? All right. Usually I'd give some equanimous, equivocating, caveated fucking answer here.
My belief is that you should probably try and bury yourself in your 20s and your 30s. It's okay to push yourself as hard as you can when you don't have the same level of responsibility.
You have the capacity to bounce back from it. You can take bigger risks and move back in with your parents if you need to.
All of, I don't think there's ever going to be an easier time to hustle than in your 20s and 30s to find financial success, stability, to build confidence in yourself that you can, if the business breaks down, if the wife leaves you, if everything goes to shit, that you've got this demon mode inside of you that you can flick the switch of. I certainly know that it was very confidence building for me to see what I could do in my 20s.
Now, yeah, did I have a healthy equilibrium? No, I didn't. I didn't have a stable sleep and wake pattern until COVID ever.
My entire adult life, the first time I went to bed and woke up at the same time, seven days a week was COVID when nightclubs were shut down from the age of 18. And I was 32.
So it's not the most holistic. It's not the most healthy, but I think you can front load that pain and that hustle, and I do think that it pays benefits on the back end.
is there some survivorship bias here? Yes, of course. How many people in their 20s and 30s that hustled their ass off and then didn't get to the level of financial success and stability

that they wanted and also paid some prices in terms of their health and finding an equilibrium. Yep, those are going to be there.
But yeah, I get the sense that it's not okay to work your life away, but it is okay to work your 20s and your 30s away. And that's what I did.
So totally motivated reasoning. Fabuline7039.
What's your dream podcast set, location, and who is the best guest you would take there? Dude, I mean, this is total pipe dream, but first podcast in space would just be so fucking cool. You know, I don't think it's probably going to happen in my lifetime, but first podcast in space would just be so fucking cool you know like i i don't think it's probably going to happen in my lifetime but first podcast either in some floating vehicle in space or on the moon would just be outrageous makes me it makes me so fired i don't really actually even care if it's me that does it i just want someone to do it but i don't know how many other people would be bothered about it's like well you went all the way to the moon fucking did what are you retarded you were of all of the things you could have done i'm like yeah sorry sorry yeah fuck that was a bad idea um i've said this thing before i'd love to do graham hancock uh in front of the pyramids of giza um that would be i don't know just kind of epic uh i'm aware that everyone hates him because of his archaeology the spurious ideas and stuff but that would be one hell of an experience so the pyramids of giza would be would be pretty dialed i'd like to do that melaniac in knowing that you do not like to caveat yourself into oblivion about of course, women have their own struggles as well, but I'm talking about men right now.
Do you think there is a level of growth where you would feel comfortable just approaching a issue with no caveat and eating the backlash from people who obviously aren't longtime listeners or just looking to nitpick for the sake of nitpicking? Great question. Yeah.
I had it out with Richard Reeves about this, that I was kind of sick of this weird land acknowledgement that needs to be done before you talk about men's issues where you have to say, well, we understand that the gluten intolerant community is really struggling and we can't forget about the challenges that women have and people who have got a club foot and so on and so forth. And after we've got all out of the way then we can finally talk about men it's frustrating to me uh because the reverse doesn't need to happen nobody says we do know that men are killing themselves at three times the rate of any other group and we do know that there's half a million more men than women that took their own lives between 1999 and 2020 We do know that men are falling behind socioeconomically

at every age level, every class level. But after that, we can finally talk about, no one does that.
And it just feels clunky and unnecessary and unsophisticated. Problem is, if you don't do it, So what you're saying is nitpick crowd have a vector for attack and

i get the sense that if you had reached some kind of narrative escape velocity where everybody knows you and everybody knows what you're talking about and everybody knows that you're coming at this from a good faith perspective,

any criticism would very quickly be rebuffed

by fans of yours that were saying mate you don't why are you bringing this up you know that that's not what he thinks joe rogan n-word video uh joe did got pulled up about saying the n-word a lot it's like five minute montage um and said, you can see this is proof that he's the

racist, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, whatever that we've known that he was

all along. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but trust us, there's a big iceberg below it.

And everyone said, no, I don't believe you because I've watched 500 hours. Even a casual

listener of Rogan will have done maybe 50 or a hundred hours. I've listened to a lot of him and

I don't think he is what you say he is. So you get to this, let's call it narrative escape velocity.
I don't think I'm there, especially not on this topic and especially not given the way that I present as like fucking Andrew Tate from Wish. I don't think that I could get away with it.
It would be nice. It would be way easier.
It would be much more slick. But, I know I'm starting, I'm trying to cultivate fuck you energy.
I am. And it's going to be more important over the next few years to be able to have that I not actively that I don't care about what you think but that you willfully misinterpreted what I said and go fuck yourself because you know that you did that and it happens so much it already is happening and it's super annoying but I uh that's something that I need to build up the preparedness to not care about the opinions of people who don't understand what I'm doing and don't like me and don't care about making the things that are contributing to the stuff that I'm trying to create um but it is kind of stupid to think okay so this person doesn't understand what you're doing they don't care about you they don't have your best interests heart.
They're not one of your people and they don't want you to be better. And you are believing and putting faith and stock in what they say about you or to you.
Why? Why would you do that? They're not impressive people. They're not nice people.
They're not people that you respect. They're not people that care about you.
They're not doing this to try and make you better. They're simply doing it to try and stand on the shoulders of some supposed error or slip up or smoking gun of yours.
So really, when you think about it rationally, when I think about it logically, there's no reason that I should care about it. But it's something I'm

working through. And I guess you'll find out if it gets to a stage where I go, you know, we really need to be worried about Matt.
And I just jumped straight into it. You'll know that I've reached escape velocity.
So hold on. Dave Kiers, you mentioned feeling unwell in your last Q&A, how are you feeling now?

Uh, yeah.

It's all right.

I'm a little better in terms of brain function, which is good. And the Rogan and Naval weekend was formative for me because I felt so shitty going in.
I felt so, my brain was so slippery. I call

it slippery brain. I had such slippery brain where I wasn't holding onto thoughts.
I wasn't

recalling well. I wasn't precise with my speech.
All of the things that I really take pride in,

and I think I contribute well, just weren't there. And I was like, for fuck's sake,

the very thing that I'm supposed to be good at is has been taken away from me and i didn't i have no doing of my own all i've done for over 12 months now like 14 months maybe more all i've done is try and fix my health unlimited numbers of saunas and cold plunges and phosphatidylcholine and glutathione and 25 gram bags of vitamin C IV and blood cleaning treatments in Tijuana and peptides and gut detox protocols and everything. Like the list of things that I've done is huge.
And I will do, I know that a lot of people that suffer with sort of like complex chronic illness and tinnitus and all of the shit that I've EVV mold toxic blood all of the stuff I've talked about uh I know that I kind of owe in a way I do actually feel a little bit of a sense of a debt to be more open about it and be a little bit more of a plant a flag in the ground for how difficult it is so that other people feel a bit less alone um but i'm i just can't do it while i'm still in the trenches i'm sorry i can't be the person that's you know delivering this this message hopefully one of hope that you look at all of the things i did and i came out the other side while I'm still in it it's just it's too much for me to juggle and also something I've learned is that if you tell a sad story about yourself but there isn't resolution because it's still going on people don't feel hope they feel pity they feel sad for you and it's not the vibe that I'm trying to give off, certainly not at the moment. So I guess it's a long winded way of saying largely, I'm feeling the same.
I'm tired, I fall asleep at 8 or 8.30pm at night, most nights, my sleep's disrupted, I wake up not feeling particularly rested, I can't train at more than 50% capacity. I've got slippery brain, my mood's low um but i have bits of respite and the bits of respite are uh a little bit more controllable now uh but i've had so many times where i've thought oh yeah i'm out i'm out the other side like this is great i i'm on the up and up and it was just a brief upward swing before it gets lower to a new all-time low.
So we'll see. I got some big treatments coming up over the next couple of months.
Hopefully they will have a big impact. And I did an at-home sleep study, the only lab quality at-home sleep study that you can do outside of literally going into a sleep lab to do it.
I did that. So that was an assessment.
Really, I've done everything to try and work out what the fuck is going on. And it's not overworking because for the last six months, I dialed back how much I worked.
I stopped traveling as much. I did trainings at 50%, all of the things, right? I've covered all of the bases and I will detail it all at some point eventually.
But for now, I'm just plotting on. Hivanagibi, 1998.
I absolutely loved your episode with Alain de Botton. Thank you.
It was incredibly insightful. Is there any chance you'll have him on again in future episodes? So yes, I emailed him, I think, a week after.
We've been emailing for forever, maybe five years, six years, back and forth, back and forth. He was doing it.
I think he had some health things. He stopped doing podcasts.
He came back. He got rearranged, weren't able to do it.
I wasn't going out there. My dates changed, his dates changed, and then we finally got him.
And there was a bit of me that thought, that was so good, but fuck, it was 5% of the things that i want to talk about and it went for two hours so like i need a lot of time okay alan so i emailed him and i said uh hey dude i just wanted to say how much i enjoyed the episode how great i thought it was how impactful i think it is and he basically said yeah i'm ready to run it back when we're in the same city again. So you will be getting more Elan at some point soon.

J Vision TV 287.

When you were growing up and building the person you envisioned,

how did you go about breaking up those steps into more achievable goals in the meantime?

How did you go about keeping that same fire to improve

even when you weren't everything you wanted to be yet?

Yeah, I'm going to give you a probably quite unsatisfactory answer here, which is I'm really not good at having a long-term plan. I am a good avatar for the person who kind of just focuses on what's in front of them and doesn't have a big picture.
I know that productivity wisdom is to have a write your gravestone and then work it back in 10-year periods and then chunk that down into three-year sprints and then put that into 90-day goals and then break that into daily actions. I know that that's the way that you're supposed to do it, but it just never really seemed to work for me.
So building the person that I envisioned, I really didn't envision any outcome. What I actually thought was, I want to be more mindful and the most direct goal to being more mindful is to meditate.
I want to be more, I want to be fitter. I want to be more peaceful.
I want to have more gratitude. I want to be able to sleep better.
I want to be more consistent. I want to be a better speaker.
It wasn't necessarily this sort of destination I was moving toward. It was a very simple outcome goal and just one modality that helps get toward that, was meditation for mindfulness it was journaling and formal gratitude practice for gratitude it was breath work for nervous system regulation it was walks taking a lot of time walking to you know work out what was going on inside of my mind and um keeping the same fire to improve even when you weren't everything you wanted to be yet well as someone who although i'm battling through a ton of shit which is kind of new and novel to me right now but i guess i have reached escape velocity on at least some of the things that i wanted a lot of the things that i wanted when i was 28 when I started doing this properly, when I, you know, I went sober for the first time at 20, 28, and I stopped partying.
Oh my God, that was revolutionary. And now I don't think about drinking.
And every single thing that I wanted to do, build a meditation practice, blah, blah, blah, get better at speaking, build the business, move to another country, all of the things that I wanted to do, talking about keeping the same fire to improve, even when you weren't everything that you wanted to be yet, as someone who's kind of got to a place closer to where he does want to be, keeping the fire going now is probably harder because what's driving you? There's such a delta between where you are and where you want to be, so you keep pushing to get there. But gold medalist syndrome is fucking real, dude.
Like you arrive. At what point do you arrive? And even if you think I haven't arrived yet, but I'm kind of close to it.
Like, oh, fuck. What do I do now? For so long, I've been, you know, pushing and pushing and pushing to find this thing.
And then when you get there,

why do you need to keep pushing so hard? The reason you did it previously was this desperate need for validation and recognition and to actually make something of yourself.

Oh, you made something of yourself. Now what? It's a difficult one.
So I chose very simple goals

that were upstream of lots of things that I wanted to be better in. I wanted to be a more

Thank you. I chose very simple goals that were upstream of lots of things that I wanted to be better in.
I wanted to be a more peaceful person. I wanted to be more mindful.
I wanted to have a better quality of thoughts. I wanted to be able to think and speak more clearly.
And I just did one modality for each of those things and basically didn't stop for about the way the best now approaching 10 years. And here we are.
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Paul Irish 1165. Chris, I want to order newtonic in canada but the shipping costs are equal to the cost of the product is there any alternative yes i know i'm sorry fucking international shipping dude is rough with an rtd you know this is element and uh it's not good it's not easy to it's not easy at all to do that um we would get a 3pl or a fulfillment center in canada uh the canadian audience for this show at least for my audience is bigger than everywhere else on the planet per capita except for Australia.
So it goes Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK, the USA, in terms of per capita audience size. So I want to get it there, but it's a nightmare.
What you can do in the meantime is use the Focus Blend, the stick packs, or the brain capsules, because they'll be way cheaper to to ship which i think will be where most of the cost is coming from unless there's some sort of import duties and fuck knows what's happening with trump's tariffs dude maybe everything's going to triple so stock up while you can alante's 94 how long have you been married to douglas murray yeah that was awkward um for the people who don't spend much time on Twitter, somebody tweeted, if you said, in fact, let me see if it's still there. Douglas Murray, husband.
Douglas Murray, husband. Images, yep, okay.
So the top line is Douglas Murray, husband, him and Candice Owens. Second image is Douglas Murray and meen second image is douglas murray and me third image is douglas and dave rubin the fourth image is i don't know who that is uh sam harris is up there uh oh i'm up there twice how great well it's me and coleman hughes so that's like an interracial triplet marriage um yeah someone tweeted saying that i was his husband and that i was also like of a different name.
Uh, and I quote tweeted it saying that it was a skill issue and then all hell broke loose. So I've been married to Douglas apparently since 2022.
Tom Chappell, where's the glasses from? Okay. These are the ones from Rogan.
I'm going to guess. They are Moscots.
They are monochrome Moscots in blush. So Moscot is a British glasses manufacturer.
They do prescription stuff. And I went to Jimmy Carr's Savile Row suit menswear store.
He owns part of it, and we were hanging out, and we wanted to go for a coffee. coffee so i went there with him and i saw this pair of pink glasses two years ago and i was like those are sick i'm gonna buy them and i have and they are functionally useless they don't do any they're not blue blockers they don't help down regulate your melatonin um and then i took them off on rogan and he encouraged me to put them back on and then I wore them for three hours.

So yeah, Moscats in monochrome, blush.

They've got them in blue, they've got them in green and they're pretty cool and they're super comfortable.

But they're not cheap.

They're about 250 bucks or maybe 300 bucks.

So go study.

JJ Thomas 10, if you could sit down and have a conversation with your 21-year-old self, what would you say? I guess it depends how long the conversation is, but I'd probably just say fearless. So much of my life, especially in my 20s and even still now, is driven by this fear.
It's driven by uncertainty. It's running away from something that you don't want is running towards something that you do.
And that will push you to do lots of great things and maybe become a very impressive person. But it's not the fuel that you want to be using for a long time.
So first off, I would probably say I understand that you don't feel very recognized or very validated or very seen by the world.

That's fine.

That's not some personal failing of yours.

That's kind of just a byproduct of being a 21-year-old guy that doesn't quite know what he wants yet and is struggling to connect with the people around him. I would say fall in love slowly and break up quickly

because fall in love slowly and break up quickly because much of your 20s, if you're not careful, will be spent in relationships that you should have left sooner for both of your sakes. Don't be guilty about disappointing people.
Don't fear the repercussions of putting yourself first. Don't subjugate your desires in order to keep somebody else happy.
Don't make yourself unhappy in order to keep somebody else happy. Buy Bitcoin and do 5-3-1.
That's what I'd say. Ramo Palmo.
Under what conditions do you feel the most mentally sharp and able to perform cognitive tasks? That's a good question. So I've got a pretty dialed routine now before the big episodes, which is no carbs at all.
So bacon and eggs, sausage and eggs, breakfast. Minimal caffeine earlier in the day.
maybe one coffee on a morning, go and train moderately hard, but not super hard. So RPE7, RPE8.
Then I want to be a little bit hungry. And then I want to have probably one Newtonic about an hour before and then sip on a Newtonic throughout whatever it is that I'm doing.
And if I get all of that in, and I've got sunlight in my eyes and gone for a walk and I've been moving, I'm pretty fucking dialed. And that can last, can hold on to that as long as I keep the Newtonic levels up.
I can hold on to that for probably about four hours. and then it starts to sort of become psychotic after that time because i'm you're fighting this tension between fatigue and stimulants but more more stimulants aren't necessarily fixing the fatigue uh they're just making more stimulated um yeah jd fits do you create for yourself or for your audience? That's a good question.
And unfortunately, it's probably the biggest middle finger, uh, I create for myself. Um, this show has always been a thinly veiled autobiography.
Um, whatever it is that is on my mind, whatever it is that I'm dealing with, whatever it is that I'm interested in, uh, what's happening to me professionally, personally. Um, much of that is the inspiration, not everything, obviously.
Um, but much of that is the, at least the beginning, it's sort of the spark of the direction that I take the show in. I fell in love with evolutionary psychology because I found it really insightful about understanding why you are the way you are.
It's really sort of seeing the source code of human behavior, at least from a sort of conditioning sense. And then obviously that gets coded into genes.
that was a huge part of understanding me because I wanted to.

It was a big period where i was into productivity so i was just rinsing through every productivity guy david allen coming on and getting tiago forte peter ackeys you know getting all of the the big names in productivity on to help organize my things three gtd process and and you know what's the best email client i should be using um it's just me and i think the best sure there are some artists like creators out there who can make content for an audience and really enjoy the process but me, the more that I don't follow my own curiosity and the more that I don't make it for myself, the less I enjoy it and the less successful it is. So I genuinely think, and maybe again, this is just Stockholm syndrome, I genuinely think that the best way to serve you guys is to just follow my own curiosity because I'm not that much of an outlier.
I'm not that different. I think a lot of the challenges that I face and a lot of the interests that I have are really representative of those that any other thoughtful, sensitive person has.
And that means that if I follow my instincts, some non-zero portion of other people are also interested or care about this thing that I'm thinking about. And it gives me a unique insight because everybody has access to what the audience says.
Every other creator, thinker, artist, songwriter, whatever, they all have access to what are the trends that are going on online. Everyone can see what's happening on Twitter.
Everyone can ask ChatGPT what the most search terms are on Google, right? So that means it's a very ununique body of work and not necessarily accurate. But if you follow what you do, I think that that really elicits a unique fingerprint and one that absolutely resonates.
And even if it doesn't, you pursued something that you found interesting. And the more that I try and reverse engineer, what will click, what will resonate? Well, maybe I should be doing the Q&A.
Maybe I should have someone ask me the questions on the Q&A. Maybe the Q&A should be done live or maybe I should be streaming on Twitch or whatever.
And if it doesn't speak to me, not doing it is the best strategy because even if it would be optimal, even if it would be better in some way for audience growth if it doesn't speak to me it's not going to be authentic and there's always this tension right everybody shows up and you show up differently when someone else steps into your room versus when you're on your own so when it's audience there's all of these perverse incentives and trying to be 100% yourself is essentially impossible

but you can get closer and closer to that and you can also get further and further away and you train yourself in either direction so for people that are wanting to create a body of work you need to play the game you absolutely need to play the game there is a game to be played there are mechanisms in place growth loops that you need to take advantage of so you do need to play the game. But you need to know

that it's not about the game.

Play it. place growth loops that you need to take advantage of so you do need to play the game but you need to know that it's not about the game play it but it's not about it i think that's really important and that's a strategy i'm holding on to sean spooner millions of people now have an idea in their head of who they think you are but it's still just you do you ever feel any pressure to live up to that imagined ideal even when you're having a tough week or going through your health challenges? Yeah, I mean, this is kind of actually what I was just talking about, that with the Rogan he walks into a room, there's this fucking reality distortion field that appears around him.
There is this sense of performance that everybody has, even if it's just you talking

to someone else over dinner. It's very difficult to be unencumbered.
That's a good definition, I think, of who your best friend is. Most people after the age of 15 don't really have a best friend, maybe.
But I think a good way to define your best friend is the person that you can speak to with the least amount of filter and that gets more and more insulted the bigger and bigger the audience is and the tighter and tighter the feedback loop so you know if you're an if you're a comedian or a singer or something and you're on stage fuck like you're seeing this feedback loop immediately it's so dopamine-y at least with what i, there's a little bit of lead time and I don't see people immediately. Now, in some ways that's crap because I get no motivation from positive feedback other than, you know, nice comments, which is good.
Please send more. But it's also less perverting, I think, in many ways.
I do, I have been trying increasingly over the last four months or so, I think since the beginning of the year, I've really, really been trying to lean into just being me as much as possible, whatever that means, whatever it fucking means to be yourself. I'm really, really trying to do that, opening up about health challenges.
Somebody asks me a question that I don't know. Someone on stage, i was at this health summit thing this weekend and i gave a chat and someone asked a question from the audience and i was like hey there's like a thousand people looking at me and i'm gonna give the answer that i know no one wants to hear but i don't have an opinion on that um which is just so unsatisfactory but it was.
I don't have an opinion on quantum energy and vibration consciousness. The question was something to do with that.
I'm like, perhaps unsurprisingly, this isn't my area of expertise. I don't have an opinion on that.
So I'm trying to release that pressure to live up to some imagined ideal now i definitely don't want someone that cares about the show to meet me and be like hey he was really fucking unimpressive dude like he was so but i don't i think at least as far as i can see getting to the stage that i have now and actually being able to hold on to some sense of humanity is kind of like a superhuman task. And this is an experiment.
I'm going to continue to try and be open. Jesus Christ, I let out a tear, I let out a single tear on a vlog a couple of weeks ago.
So that was real. It was true.
It was how I felt at the time. And I get the sense that if I don't have to live up to some imagined ideal, my longevity in loving what I do will be greater because I'm not going to feel puppeted by ventriloquized by a group of people that I've never met, even if they're ones that I love.
Matthew Bellinger. How long did you contemplate podcasting before starting? How long did you contemplate Nutonic before committing? It took six months contemplating podcasting before running it.
It was the back end of 2017. And then I launched it in February of 2018.
The name took

a while. The logo took a while.
The strategy took a while of how I was going to launch it. How long did I contemplate Nutonic before committing? The committing thing was actually relatively easy.
But the building before launching took 12 months. So I am, as anyone who's ever worked with me will attest to, painfully pedestrian in pre-launch and then kind of unrelentingly rapid in post-launch.
So I kind of have this Dr. Jekyll, Mr.
Hyde thing where I want everything to be absolutely perfect up until the point at which it gets shipped. And then once it's shipped, I try and iterate very, very quickly.
It seems to work for me. I do have a sort of perfectionist streak to me and sort of an obsession with detail, which is good in many ways.
And I think, here's my theory. There are certain things that you need to get really, really right once, and then you rinse and repeat it.
So the can design for New Tonic,

I was kind of tyrannic, well, just tyrannical when it came to that, because this is the thing for the fucking rest of time. There is no getting this most of the way there.
It needs to be perfect. It needs to be perfect now.
It needs to be perfect in five years time. It needs to be perfect when we exit the business.
It needs to be perfect. And the same thing with Modern Wisdom.
Me and Dean worked, you know, once he came on board after a couple of months, so fucking hard at dialing in the colors, dialing in the sets. This is how we want it to work.
This is how we want the pacing of the cuts to be everything. But once we've done it, you've got a signature style and you can sort of run that forward.
So decision latency is a big deal. But I think we're talking about sort of preparedness or launch latency here as well.
I would hazard a guess that most people in the audience probably need to make decisions more quickly, launch more slowly, and iterate more quickly. So stop fucking about not doing the thing and commit to a thing as an experiment.
Spend a good amount of time preparing it, getting it right, dialing in whatever the structure is, the brand, the style, the format, whatever it is that you're going to do. And then once it's launched, go really, really fast and hard.
So at least that's how it works for me. Stefanovic, how to deal with the anxiety when you're working hard versus depression when you're taking it easy.
That's funny. How to deal with the anxiety when you're working hard versus the depression when you're taking it easy dude it's tough i mean like your your calendar is uh a lovely way to assuage your deep feelings of insufficiency right it's an anesthetic that sort of smooths over your your um need for validation um because it keeps you busy and then when you start to take it easy, you start to ask yourself questions.
But you're right, when you're in the midst of calendar life, there is this sort of rush, but this rush comes along with a fear. And I think that's the anxiety that you're talking about.
Look, I have found that periodizing is the easiest way to do this, that basically humans are absolute creatures. So if you put a packet of biscuits, Oreos in front of me, and you say you can either eat all of them or you can eat none of them, easy task.
If you tell me I can eat two, go fuck yourself. Like I'm not, I can't, it's impossible.
No one has ever in the history of the world has ever just eaten two Oreos. They've eaten all of them or they've eaten none of them.
And I think that the same here with the working hard versus taking it easy thing. Shock, horror.
There used to be a thing called weekdays and weekends, and you would tend to work on weekdays and not on weekends. That's not a bad model.
I think if you know that the working hard will come to an end and that the taking it easy will come to an end and that the working hard will come. I think that the anxiety and the depression both get ameliorated.
They get smoothed out a little bit if you know that they're time bound and it's not going to be like this forever forever and that allows you hopefully to lean in harder to your work because i get a rest on friday evening and it allows you to actually enjoy your relaxation because you go yeah i'm back at it i'm back at it on monday or whatever whatever cadence you want to work at you can do this fuck you can do this one month on one week off you know whatever it is that works for you but i would maybe try periodizing wanna be what's your five-year goal and what's your ultimate goal in life dude i said it before i suck at this at this long-term planning thing uh i know i want to be a dad. I know I want to start a family.
Um, I know that I really want to fix my health. Um, I want to keep on learning about myself and the world around me.
And I want to keep doing the show and I want to keep writing. That's kind of it.
Uh, everything else will fall into place. I've got a good, most of us do.
I really think that, and maybe this is just because I've gone round the houses so much with being deliberate, especially with the health shit and the productivity and the last seven years. Our instincts are such good guides.
Once you've sort of boxed them in a little bit, there's certain things that you need to learn to avoid, like fucking gambling. Just don't bother fucking about with gambling, right? It's kind of pointless.
Same thing goes for heroin and trank and fentanyl. Like there's certainly drinking to get rid of your problems, using stimulants to wake up on the morning and using sleeping pills to go to bed on the night.
You know, there's some real red areas. Once you've boxed those off, once you've started to structure yourself a little bit, you're in your, you know, I think this is probably something you, you're going to struggle to achieve before you get into your 30s.
But once you've been deliberate for a long time, you can start to ease off the deliberateness and have a few very small sort of broad goals, a few very big broad goals, sorry, the direction that you're going in, a small number of them, and just allow these trained instincts, I suppose, or you would say maybe curated instincts to just kind of carry you through. So you would say, I want to keep traveling.
I want to live a life of adventure. I want to have novelty.
I want to contribute to something that I care about. Who doesn't want that? Who the fuck doesn't want that? Everybody wants that.
So I don't think that you need to think about it. And I think that actually by thinking about it, sometimes you stick a middle finger up at the fact that you can look after you.
You're the sort of person that can deal with change and with unpredictability and with circumstances that you didn't plan for really well. And you probably don't need to plan for them in advance.
And that's, again, I'm speaking to me, right? This is me speaking to me because I'm someone that likes control. I like things to be planned.
I like an itinerary. I like things to be laid out.
And I know increasingly I've become more freeflowing and more at ease with that not being the case.

Zane Butler, who's on your next Mount Rushmore of podcast guests? Yeah, well, I've actually had to turn it from Mount Rushmore into the Infinity Stones from Avengers because Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris,

Alain de Botton, Naval Ravikant,

Joe Rogan, right? Five.

And I've got four.

And then after the episodes that I did with Rogan, the day after, he texted

me and said,

really enjoyed

the chat, blah, blah, blah, some bullshit about the chat.

Don't forget that we need to

get an episode done on your podcast.

I was like,

Thank you. uh really enjoyed the chat blah blah blah some bullshit about the chat um don't forget that we need to get an episode done on your podcast i was like because i asked him two and a half years ago nearly three years ago now on his show really appreciated this man i've got to get you on the show at some point and he was the one that brought it up like i wasn't going to bring it up again.
So once I get that and I do the snap

and 50% of every living creature dies,

I don't know what to do.

Do you make another one?

Do I make a second?

I guess I've got another hand

so I can make another glove,

get another five infinity stones,

but I kind of don't know who would be on there.

Ryan Reynolds was on there for forever

and now he's like the most hated person in the world. Um, I guess he's on the shit list.
I don't know. I have to, I, I really do have a bit of gold medalist syndrome at the moment, especially after the Naval thing.
Like, how the fuck am I supposed to top that? Not that you need to, right? I need to be better, bigger, more expensive, fancier, anything longer, more insightful, denser than need to be. It's like, it was beautiful.
And then it was done. But when you start to think on in terms of goals, outcomes, Mount Rushmore's, you're like, fuck, well, it's a pretty good one.
Like I'd put mine up against pretty much anybody else's. Carson Hoffman,

what was the hardest part about being broke when you first started from a mindset perspective? I'm going to guess that you mean money broke here, unless you mean broken, uh, mindset wise, which I was both. Um, yeah, I had, I think the poorest I ever was, was when I, 20.
And I remember I spent my last 10 pounds on petrol to drive from Edinburgh to Glasgow to see Under Oath play on my own because they were my favorite band. And I think they were doing, they're only chasing safety and dividing the great line back to back.
So I went to go see a band. I went to go see a Christian metal band that I love.
And I drove back and I remember looking at the fuel gauge and thinking, that's all the money that you have. And you just spent it to go and watch a fucking band play.
And I had a friend that was staying with me who had been used to being poor for longer than I had. And I remember him saying, he just instantly, as if it was so natural to him, it was really kind of disturbing.
He just said, don't worry, man, I'll just go and steal some food from the shop. And I was like, we're at the stage where we need to fucking steal food.
Now, the difference was I was probably too proud to

message mom and dad and say, hey, can you send me a hundred pounds, please? So I can eat this week.

Because I was doing this placement year from university and we weren't getting paid

until the events were done. This is one of the problems with running events that all you do is

spend money, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend. And then finally you get this big injection of cash and you repay yourself that means that if you're

running low personally on liquid capital to be able to actually keep the fucking lights on keep the food in your mouth uh you end up in a you end up in a situation which is pretty ugly so uh I don't know.

It's,

it was,

it kind of sucked,

I guess,

but I,

there was a bit,

there was a bit, there was something liberating about it as well. It was as close to financial rock bottom as I'd got.
Um, but I, I did have faith. I've never really had money worries existentially or psychologically.
And it's also not a very big part of my life. I don really care that much about money i like nice things like i like nice coffees and i like being able to fly to places and not think about the dinner bill um i really don't care that much about about money which is something i'm very grateful for because i think some people are kind of cursed with a high materialism set point uh but hardest thing about being broke when you first started from a mindset perspective.
Actually, with the show, I had to take a step back. So I was going to have to let go of the business that earned me all of this money.
You know, this is now a decade and a bit later, 31, 32, COVID happens. I need to make this decision about whether or not I'm going to go back to doing the nightlife thing or try and talk to people on the internet and make it into a job.
But there's something cool about having nothing to lose. Paul Mosley talks about this.
He says, you know, someone that's got nothing to lose is very dangerous because they can do anything. Your situation can't get worse.
So yeah, I wasn't being broke sucked but uh i actually kind of liked it for a very short period of time although i'm sure that i would have fucking hated it if it had been protracted thickman 17 pierce brown on the pod when good question pierce brown is the author of red rising and a fucking legend um he actually dm'd me the other day so we've been in contact for maybe three years uh i reached out and just said how much i loved the series and i'd love to bring him on at some point and then i must have mentioned red rising on an episode maybe i said it to naval or maybe i said it on rogan I said it on some big episode over the last few weeks. And he DM'd me again.
It's been a while. I think I was left unread or maybe even left unread a couple of times.
I didn't want to push him. He's balls deep in writing this hugely complex fantasy series and there must be so much pressure on him.
He doesn't need this podcaster reaching out and chirping him going, excuse me, mate, can you come to Austin? Uh, and he messaged and said, Hey man, thanks for shouting the books out. Uh, sorry, I've not been in touch.
Um, kind of balls deep in the writing thing, but, um, I'm still down when the time is right. So we'll get to, I think we've got him.
I think actually can be, Pierce Brown can be on the new Mount Rushmore.

And the new Mount Rushmore is not going to be about sort of the biggest names.

It's going to be about the people,

the sort of niche underground winners.

So Pierce, you can take the first spot on the next,

the next Infinity Stone is going to be Pierce Brown.

I wonder who gets the middle finger.

It's kind of an important one, I think.

Hank, health and fitness.

How do you balance introspective thinking and learning, but not overthinking? Fucking perennial problem, dude. It is, it's the golden mean of this.
You need to do enough reflection to be able to actually work out what to do. But if you get stuck in too much reflection, it's trapping and you don't end up actually doing anything.
It's tough. So it's a balance that you find over time.
It is something that you end up coming into land with age, at least for me, I've got better at balancing the thinking and learning whilst not being paralyzed thing. It's also fixed by being

busier. And I know I'm kind of like the anti-busy guy at the moment.
Your calendar is a better indication of your wealth than your bank account, blah, blah, blah. Like your productivity obsession is killing your productivity stuff.
I'm very Joe Hudson-pilled and C-bum-pilled at the moment. but

as even at this level of busyness

as you get busier

it squeezes out the inefficiency I'm seabum-pilled at the moment. But even at this level of busyness, as you get busier,

it squeezes out the inefficiencies in the way that you operate because you just don't have

fucking time for them. It's like you don't have time to scroll on Instagram that much.
You don't

have time to worry about whether or not this is the optimal diet or that's the best way to

organize your email inbox because you just need to eat and fucking send emails so you stop and in my experience uh creating constraints uh through pressure through busyness uh through time duration you know when does this need to be submitted by that's a good way to stop yourself from overthinking. You just need to ship it.
So avoid Parkinson's law, work expanse to fill the time given for it. Put some deadlines in place and just sort of hold on, keep on being deliberate about stuff.
But eventually you will come into land at a right balance because you you will survive and thrive or you'll die. Those are the only two that you're going to end up either being kicked out the side of whatever project you're trying to do because you couldn't come to a balance of it, in which case it's no longer a problem, or you will and you will end up with a perfect balance.
And almost everybody that I know that's kind of of this world, this degenerate personal growth,

self-discovery, wisdom, bro wisdom thing, almost everybody gets it right. Like, in fact,

I can't think of anybody that doesn't. So you'll be fine.
Hi, Patno. What was the process like

getting the O-1 visa? Can you go into a bit of detail? It's long. It is.
I submitted a 700 page

Thank you. what was the process like getting the o1 visa can you go into a bit of detail uh it's long it is i submitted a 700 page three inch thick portfolio of every high relevance statusful guest that had been on the show two independent news stories showing that they were person of note within the industry and then for each of those news sites or sources uh an independent verification showing that the news site was one that had high circulation so it's this tree this branching tree of who it is i've spoken to proof that they're important and proof that the thing that said that they were important is of note and that just rinse and repeated that i submitted it again uh through the start of this year and this was the last one plus the new one so this one was twice as i don't know i didn't even see it uh how big it was once it was printed off.
But yeah, I mean, forests have come down to create the O-1 visa process. I used an attorney, Lehach Philippa, I think throughout New York, L-E-H-A-H-C-H Philippa, F-I-L-I-P-P-A, I think, Leach Philippa.
And they were great, really, really good. Mike, I think he was the owner there, was phenomenal with me.
And I started doing this in 2020, and he was phenomenal with me the next time that I did it too. And then you fly to an embassy after you've submitted, you go back and forth, you do all of these things, you submit this special form, and then this other one, and then the website is so archaic and backward.
And then you go to an embassy, but it can't be an embassy in the US. And you don't want it to be an embassy in somewhere that's popular because the wait time is forever.
So you end up in places like El Salvador or Guatemala, where I did my first one, or Kingston, Jamaica, where I did my second one. And then you stand in a massive line with people that are, you know, from countries that don't have great passports who don't, I can't necessarily get into the U S and they're wanting to be workers.
They're wanting to be, they're wanting to visit family. They're wanting to see, you know, friends, dying, dying relatives and stuff.
And you're there going, yeah, I talk to people on the internet and I'd love, I'd really like you to extend this visa that allows me to basically lop in and out of the country a lot so yeah anyway I'm gonna love you and leave you this is all 3.5 million people on this channel is is berserk and I hope that it's not too sad to see somebody that you listen to whining about their health, but I am getting through it. And I genuinely do appreciate everybody reaching out and saying nice things.
And the live show, the US and Canada live tour is going to be announced within the next couple of weeks, including all of the dates, pre-sale tickets, chriswilliamson.live, if you want to sign up and be the first person to know about when those are and where you can get tickets and then the new reading list will be out soon and that is a lovely little treat me person dying we're all dying i'm dying more quickly person who's dying quickly

spent a week burying himself writing this new reading list and now it's with the designer

so be grateful i'll see you next time