#021 - Elliot Bewick - 21 Year Old Atheist: "There is a Rise in Performative Christianity"

- Elliot Buick, it is a gift to have you on the show, mate. Thank you so much for making the time. - Thank you for having me. - But it's interesting because I have this book in my hand called Dopamine, why I addiction to pleasure is causing us pain. But what's even more interesting to me is that the only reason I have it in my hand is because we used it to cover up the Bible. And what I want to know from you is you would identify as an atheist. Am I correct in that? - Yeah, atheist, agnostic, maybe. - Okay, what I want to know is, are you an atheist in pursuit of a God? Are you an atheist that's decided there is no God? - I think anyone that's decided there's no God or that there is a God, they're only following themselves and they're looking for comfort in certainty. When, if there's one thing I've learned in my experience as a 21 year old of life, it's that you can never be certain about anything. Now, you don't want to go over the top and get paralyzed by the fact that there's all this information out there and you have to decipher it and come to some conclusion and you just give up. But I do think there's strength in being able to go, Joe, I have no idea what's going on and that's okay for now. And I think the reason why we're seeing this rise in Christianity, sometimes the stats get inflated by Christians to help pitch their message. But I think there has been a rise at least in interest of Christianity. The reason we're seeing it is because it gives you answers. This Bible here, it is a spiritual prescription for those who are suffering an absence of meaning. That's why so many Gen Z's are flocking to the pews because we're living in a life where we're not lazy or never as some boomers would make us out to be. We're more lost than ever. We don't have this blueprint for life that we yearn for and that we need fundamentally as humans to flourish. How on earth are you going to get to the destination you want to go to if you don't even have a map? And you don't know what the destination is. You don't know what it looks like. Well, actually you don't need to have the destination figured out necessarily. You don't need the final destination but you need some stops on the way. And at the moment we don't have anything. We don't have this blueprint for navigating a modern world polluted by technology, by people trying to hijack your dopaminergic system which that books talk about and I would have much preferred to have that on top of the pipe. We don't have anything and that's the struggle. Arthur Brooks speaks about this brilliantly. He's a happiness scientist and he calls himself. One of the key pillars of meaning is knowing in a coherent fashion where you fit into the world. And when you're having different world views, different beliefs, different cultures, mainline into your system every single time you flick your finger. It's confusing. And I'm not saying that we should stop talking to others that we should stop exploring the world. But when it comes at you and you don't select it, it selects you. And it's specifically engineered and weaponized to engage you and maybe more cynically to fill you with fear because that's what guess the best. Engagement. When that's coming at you so fast, you have to sit back and think, damn, we're probably not in the best position to have meaning, to have flourishing and to act on what we actually want to do in our life. So I put this Bible to the side. I tried to hide the locate because I don't want to be lumped in with the Christians that come on podcasts and speak from Christian perspective or those that are even adjacent because even though I am seeking, I'm not a Christian. And I feel like perhaps that Bible would undercut some of my points if I actually had it there. - Yeah, a couple of questions then. The first is, what would your medicine for meaning be without any absence of faith? And another question that's showing up for me is you've interviewed some of the most popular influences of the Christian faith in the world. And I want to know how you came out of those conversations and what your perspective on their narrative is. - I don't think there's a single remedy for living a meaningful life. Otherwise, I'd be up on a stage right now speaking to sold out arena. I'm not. The big thing for me is asking yourself two questions. And this comes from John Viveki's work. What do I care about more than anything else? And what relationship do I have to it? What do I want to exist even after I'm gone? And what relationship do I have to it now? And when you do that, you work out first of all what actually fills you with meaning now as a human being that's alive on the planet. But more importantly, it taps into this thing that we all feel which is a desire to almost escape death and transcend it. We're all a little bit scared and dying and what comes next, even Christian. Maybe especially the Christian. And asking yourself how you are related to it and how you will be related to it after you are no longer here helps to make sure that you're not just making short-term decisions. So I think that's the remedy for meaning for me is shifting your focus from not just what's in front of you. That's important and you need to feel content in the present moment rather than just living for a future whipping yourself until you get there, but then you never get there. But then also you need to have your eyes on the prize which is leaving something that actually is bigger than just you in the present moment. In terms of the Christian influences I've spoken to, which is an odd turn, it feels like a bit of a contradiction at times. They vary greatly. And the people that I've spoken to, I haven't had any bad experiences with. I respect their work. I've spoken to Bryce Crawford. That's my best performing video on YouTube. The podcast got over 400,000 views on YouTube. And just like transcended my channel. And it's become bigger than that now. People without watching my content come up to me and tell me about the Bryce Crawford interview, which is really weird. I've spoken to the Connectly's Cliff and Stuart Connectly, spoken to Savannah Stone, who's a female Christian influencer. And the one thing that they will have in common is I enjoy being with them. I enjoy spending time with them. It's funny, like I'm probably the biggest atheist in the world that dislikes atheists the most. What does that mean? I don't enjoy spending time with them. I think you can smell it on someone when they're an atheist. You can see it in the way they carry themselves and they kind of discontent they have for anything bad that happens to them because it's not in God's plan. It's just an inconvenience in the way of them achieving the things they want to achieve, right? It sounds like that is not. And that version of atheism is not actually the belief in no God. It's the anti-belief in a God, which is more egotistical, it sounds like. You would think that, but I think even just the lack of a belief in God, it directs you down a path where you have to worship something in place of that God. Because we're spiritual animals. We are in need of some sort of spiritual remedy to our issues. I don't just think that science can answer everything. Because it can't. So what happens when you strip away more tried and tested models like Christianity or Judaism? You end up worshipping yourself, some sort of weird activism like throwing soup on paintings because you want net zero in the UK, being all pale with Greta Thumburg, or you worship material possessions. And I don't think any of those three options lead you to flourishing. And they certainly don't lead humanity as a whole towards flourishing either. At what point, and I feel like we are the humans arrived at this place, in which we're wondering what the meaning is beyond this human plane, in the absence of a God, where do you believe meaning exists beyond life? I don't know. And there's something fascinating that's called an "exponable statement." And it's when someone asks a question where the answer is already implied. And people use this a lot of the time in debating, where a classic one would be, "Does your mum know you're gay?" "Does she know you're gay?" "Does she know I'm gay?" "Yeah." "She doesn't know, I don't either." "She doesn't know you're gay." "No." "Okay." So there, I've already implied that you're gay, whether you answer, yes or no. And I think there's a similar thing going on with the meaning question. Where we're asking what the meaning of life is. Endless books and movies and comedy shows, serious, funny, whatever. Different pieces of media are geared towards answering that question. But we don't have a step back through the lens of what is the meaning of life. And question, is this even a valid question that we should be answering? Or is there just no meaning? And that's terrifying, right? It's really uncomfortable to sit with. Could there be a reality in which there is no meaning? And I would say maybe as someone who doesn't have a God to give meaning and purpose to our lives, an uncomfortable thing for me to wrestle with is like, "Okay, you're an atheist or you don't believe in a God." Where does that meaning actually come from? Like, can you tell? touch it. Is it somewhere out there in the world? Well, you can't, can you? So where does the meaning come from? Where does this idea that you ought to do something that you should do something? Actually emerge from. It's really hard to pin down. And even though I probably align with that belief, I've seen how much it's poisoned our society. Our culture has suffered from the inability to be able to say something's wrong. That you actually should do anything. Because when you live in a world where you've killed God, like we have done the last hundred years, there is no moral arbiter of the universe. There's no one telling you how you should act. There just is. And that's an issue because then the girl can go and only fans and sell her fucking brown starfish for $5 a month. And you can't say anything about it because you do you, man. And even it moves out. It takes away moral, moral, right, and wrong. Good and bad societies, narratives around what you shouldn't do. It seems to take, it seems to make everything now fair again. But I would subscribe to that belief while it's not showing up in that way. And I pride myself on practicing what I preach. I'm talking the talk and walking the walk. Say as you do, do as you say, right? But with this, I feel this pool towards operating in the world as though there is a moral code as though there is a real thing I should do out there. And I wonder if it's just hard-wired intimacy because if I didn't evolve that function, I wouldn't get on with society. Maybe that's it. Or maybe it points to the fact that actually there is a God. And he loves me and he's trying to get through to me. But maybe I'm not open enough yet. And that's something really hard to grapple with. I've been thinking about it nonstop for the last few months. Is there any part of you that enjoys the feeling of controversy that comes from being an atheist? Yeah, I mean, it's helpful for marketing. I would not deny that. I also think I could have a more lucrative career if I converted Christianity now and started seeing in the gospel or whatever, praising the gospels. But it is just honestly where I am at the moment. It's being an agnostic maybe more than an atheist. And even though it might be great for marketing atheist versus Christian, like, "A.I. haven't leaned into that as much as I could do." But even though it might be more profitable in the 2D world, it's very uncomfortable when you look at the 3D world. I feel this pool towards something much greater and I feel the unlikely nature of me living my life and it actually being one that I want to live long term without some sort of God to use. But I'm not quite there yet. I'm not there. And I also think it would be done to jump into something just because it feels nice. Yeah. It's interesting because you just said it being an atheist in some ways can be good for marketing. But you also shared and I hadn't thought about it like this being a Christian could be even better for marketing. And it presents this conversation around is Christianity a choice for people because it's an innate desire or because it is a fashionable way of being in the world. Like Christian content has never been popping off more than it's popping off right now. And in some ways, people falling in line with that way of operating in the world because they love Jesus or are they falling in line with that way of operating in the world subconsciously out of an ego-tistical desire to forward their own brand. Yeah. And I suppose it's tough to distinguish between internal desires and those imposed on you because you're always going to have a mix of different desires just from navigating the world. You're going to grow up, you're going to have genetic factors, you're going to have the food that you eat, the hair that you breathed in, whether it was moldy or not, where you've lived, who you've met, who you've been friends with, who your parents are friends with, who taught you at school. There are all these different factors that are constant inputs. But at the same time, we at least have this belief most of us that there is this true you inside, right? And when you make a choice that's bad for you, that you then later regret, that wasn't your true self making that choice. It was something else that kind of perverted and misdirected you, right? So with the Christian, and I like to call this new rise of performative Christians, exactly that, performative Christians where it's always show they're on a stage and they're dancing for the sake of the crowd. There are some people that I would suggest are just performing, theologically. If you were leaning towards a love for Jesus Christ, for example, and you saw that, how do you think that would influence your connection with the Christianity? Well, I think it's tough, and this is what I'm kind of getting at with not ever being able to distinguish between your different desires. I think even if we didn't have the internet, we would have other incentives for believing in Christianity or another God. And you can't be this hard line Christian that goes, unless this fully came from you and no one else, you're a fake, you're a sellout, you're performative, because that's just not how it works. So there's always going to be an element of selfishness and that's kind of okay. I don't mind if someone comes to Jesus because they saw Bryce Crawford preaching about him and they thought that Bryce was really cool and they liked the way that he moved around the world. That's not selfish. It's just inspired behavior. As long as then the connection is legit from there on out where they're actually opening up their heart to Jesus and they're in the moment, you can't ever get rid of that external element to belief. I don't think there's always going to be a level of social coercion, totally manipulation. So I think it's unfair when someone goes, she's not a true Christian, he's not a true Christian because they posted about it like totally. Nah, they posted about it because it's part of their life. Now, the follow up question to that is, do they actually love Jesus from there and walk in his footsteps or are they out on the weekend getting their back blown out? How do you reconcile that for the people that claim they love Jesus, but they are getting their back blown out on a weekend? Try harder. You don't love Jesus. If you're a Christian that says you love Jesus and you're sleeping around with multiple partners, you're saying, yeah, but I'll get forgiven. Yeah, but we're all sinners. Yeah, but we're in perfect beings. You're being spiritually lazy. You're being complacent and I don't think you love Jesus to the extent at which you could actually call yourself a Christian. I think the bar has been lowered. This is the biggest problem with this performative Christian movement is it's brought more people towards Christianity, but in the process and as a direct byproduct, it's lowered the bar of entry. Yeah, you don't need to be cased anymore where you wait to have sex until marriage. I'm holding it in this example just because it's an easy one, but it could be going to church. It could be genuinely praying to Jesus. All of those requirements that you would have done before. Yes, they've been stripped back and it's like, okay, have you watched the podcast or at least 10 minutes of it about Jesus? Well, you can now buy a cross to have around your neck from Sheen and call yourself a Christian. I don't think that's true Christianity. And I think that a lot of the time, Christians are too fucking pathetic to call those people out because they're just grateful that these influences are coming closer to God in some way. I would argue the opposite. I would argue that they're going further away and they're actually weaponizing the use of God's name for self-benefit. That seems worse than if they were hedonistic, they were sinful, they're all these things without saying the Lord's name and being. This is a fascinating conversation for me. Do you think there are more performative Christians than actual Christians? No, I look at America and how institutionalized Christianity still is. The fact that in the founding fathers' documents and the declaration of independence, it's in God we trust. We have these God-given rights. America is built on the foundations of Christian values and people sometimes forget that. I tour around the US doing my podcast. I go, fuck, you guys love Jesus still. In the UK, I think it's a different question. In the UK, as secular as we are, there is still this rise in performative Christianity in Gen Z. I don't know. If you just look worldwide, I don't know how many Christians there are, maybe one billion, two billion. I think it's still the number one religion. Two billion, three billion, four billion, whatever. That's a big range. There's no way that there's more performative Christians. I certainly think there's a trend right now that will fade. We don't know what's going to happen next, like all bets are off. Either some of those people will go. Well, actually, there was something in this that I want to cling on to that was valuable and that shows that God actually exists. Some of those people, I think, will swing back even further and they'll go, "I tried to be a Christian." No, you didn't. You were just performative. It didn't work. God didn't speak to me personally and appear in front of me in angel form or whatever. So I'm just going to be even more sinful. That's something that could happen to you. So how do you know or believe you'll know if God is real? I only think anyone knows that God is real. The Pope doesn't even know that the God is real. He just believes it's so strongly that the limited prism of words gives him no other option but to say he is. But I think if we're being pedantic, we're being really picky with our word choice. No one ever knows that God exists and that's kind of the point. If you could know 100%, I think there would be something very uncomfortable about that. It would almost be this celestial dictator that imposes his will on you rather than you discovering him for yourself. So I actually just think one of the unfortunate truths for anyone to deal with is that you will never know and that's kind of the point. The whole point of this religious complex is having faith and I think that's what's preventing a lot of young people from coming to Jesus where that's a good or bad thing. But what I'm hearing you say is that you don't yet have faith. I would say I have more faith than many people would think. I think I operate with a lot of faith that everything will work out and I feel a very strong sense of things falling into place. But that doesn't push me over the edge to go, "Okay, well, this must have been God." Yeah. I think that begs the question then how are we defining God? Because that brings in universe, source, energy, kingdom of heaven is within you, you know, type of sensation which I don't identify as a Christian either as a Catholic, was baptized, did my first Holy Communion. But in many ways I'm much more aligned to the belief that it's like I love the quote from Rambdas whose brother was submitted to a, an insane asylum for walking around telling everybody he was Jesus. And Rambdas walks into the insane asylum to see him and his brother says it's crazy because I walk around telling people I'm Jesus and I get put in an insane asylum. You walk around preaching God and talking about God and everyone adores you. And he said the difference is you believe you're Jesus and I believe everyone's Jesus. And I think that's a really interesting and thin line for the Christian influencers, but in particular, who are, whose sort of popularity is growing and their ways of being are being reinforced. There's a thin line between sending people to God and asking people to worship you. And I think some people cross that line and I'm curious your perspective on being a Christian influencer in a world in which we can't guarantee the truth of God. Well, I think the easiest thing to look at is going, would these people still be posting about this if it didn't gain them views or popularity? If they couldn't make any money out of this, if they didn't get any accolades and all of their followers vanished tomorrow, would they still post about Jesus just because they love him that much? If the answer is yes, then I don't think they're performative. If the answer is no, then maybe you need to look a little bit closer at their content. The famous philosopher James Smith of Newtonic talks about this a lot. You look at people's pages on Instagram and they'll cover an issue excessively. The moment it becomes popular. And then you look a week later and they stop talking about that entire subject, whether it's Israel, Palestine, whether it's Iran, whether it's transgender issues, whether it's Christianity for some people. It's pretty easy to tell and I think we're actually just too forgiving. We've kind of slotted into this new normal of caring about stuff for very little time acting as though you do, posting as though you do, saying as though you do, and then just walking away. That's like normal now, which I don't like. What's a relationship with a woman like in the absence of God? I'll tell a story of how I met my girlfriend who I've been with for three months today. Okay. Quarter of a year. Congratulations. Thank you so much. It's a long time in a world of two-week relationships. Yeah, we're basically married. I've been working on a documentary the last year, all about the untold impact of anti-depressants. I think 23% of women in the UK are on anti-depressants right now, almost a quarter. That's ridiculous. That's not a sign of a society that's flourishing. It's really sad. And whether you think anti-depressants are effective or not, the fact that you're taking them shows that you're not living the best life that you would want to live in. I talk about it a lot because I care about the people that are on them and I've seen that there are some issues and some side effects that are caused by them that aren't really mentioned. So, I had a debate with someone in Sweden when I was at a party last summer and we were talking about what depression actually is. And I promise we'll come back to my relationship with someone. Keep going, mate. It's fascinating. And we're like, "What is depression? What actually is it?" Can you tell me what depression is? The best way I could describe it is a numbness to life. I like that definition. What this girl said was it's a chemical imbalance where you lack serotonin and therefore you feel shit constantly. And I was debating her but I was also kind of using this perspective of it being a chemical imbalance and we were disagreeing and I came out that conversation with someone who's very disagreeable and who likes knowing things with certainty as much as I can going, I don't have a clue about depression and I have a Gen Z podcast that speaks about depressed people and anxiety and I can't even give you a definition. So I went on this deep dive and I researched what depression is, what the studies are on depression, what it's caused by and came across the work of this lady called Joanna Montcrive, Dr. Joanna Montcrive, and she did the largest study on depression and it's relationship with serotonin. Big umbrella study and what you found is that your levels of serotonin have no correlation with your lightliness of having depression. Nothing. So this chemical imbalance theory that 90% of people believed in 2023 in certain countries is completely made up. Who's it made up by? People who followed the evidence and happened to get it wrong? No, it's made up by big farmers because they wanted to make money and profit off of people suffering. And this was a big marketing campaign that happened over the last few decades and it's being very effective. But it sounds like it speaks to the victim mindset that most people already live with it. In the sense that if I can believe that it's nothing to do with my way of operating in the world, the fact that I'm absent of purpose, the fact that I'm out of integrity in my life, the fact that I don't take care of my health, I don't drink enough water, I don't get enough sleep, I don't get enough sunlight. Then I don't have to take responsibility for those things because I can put it on the fact that I have a chemical imbalance. And I want to cut straight to the chase for anyone that's watching this that's likely on antidepressants just by virtue of how prevalent they are. First of all, never go cold turkey off of your meds because that will be way more damaging for you. For example, this chemical imbalance theory, even though it comforts you and it tells you, if you take this pill once a day and look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself, I'm broken but I'm in the process of fixing it, that's a way less powerful narrative actually. And it does you a disservice compared to the reality, in my opinion, as a non medical professional, that you are a perfectly functioning human being. You are perfect and you're living in a broken world. And that broken world is showing up badly in your life. It's making you react. All of your alarm bells are going off and that's what sadness is, that's what persistent sadness is. It's not a fucking depression because you have a chemical imbalance, it's because you're having a normal reaction to an abnormal set of circumstances that are opposed to what makes a human flourish. So when those alarm bells go off and this is easier said than done, you shouldn't be upset. You shouldn't run to the doctor. You should go, thank God, my alarm bells are working, they're functioning and I need to change something in my life. I see this so often. I was being too close friend the other day and he's about to go on meds for bipolar and slightly different thing to depression, but it's in this psychiatric world of medication. And he's like, yeah, I've had a family history, my dad and my great granddad and my granddad, they both had minor bipolar and you know, I feel these ups and downs in my life constantly. I'm good. How's your relationship right now with your girlfriend? I saw that you posted the other day on the story and he goes, yeah man, I'm actually about to pull the leg. of a plug on the relationship, because it's not working. I've been with her for three years, and I wouldn't say his age, but I'm getting on now, and it's time to get serious. I'm gonna run out of time if I wanna have kids, which I do. So I'm about to actually end things with her, but I have no idea how to do it. And by the way, like this psychiatrist, he's told me I could get on these meds that have no side effects, and that'll make me better. And I'm just sat there, and I'm like, of course you're feeling ups and downs. The person that you love, you're about to mourn the death of without them having even died, because you're having to break up with her, and you have no idea how you're gonna go about it. How about we start by fixing that? - Yeah. - So back to Joannem on grief. I learned this from her, and I had an interview with her on my podcast, and it just blew my mind. I recorded this preface to it that she advised me to do saying, "Don't throw away your meds, don't go cold turkey. "It'll be more damaging for you." And I couldn't record it because I was crying. I kept on crying, took about 12 takes. And I don't know what it is about this issue that's so close to my heart, because I've had a lot of people in my life suffer with depression and taking meds and I'm not working and actually being worse. But like, I just don't feel that it's from that. I kind of don't feel like I've tapped into what actually pisses me off so much about this in Angus Me. Maybe it's the fact that it was a lie engineered. And so I explored all of these things around depression and mental health and how there's been this narrative, there's been spun. And two weeks after I had my interview with Dr. Joannem on grief, my first deep dive into depression, I get this message from this girl, who turns out she lived in California, and she maxed out the character limit on InstaDM's three times, three times, which is pretty impressive for an opening message. And I read every word. And I was devastated to learn that she, like a quarter of adult women in the UK, had fallen for the lie of anti-depressants being the most effective option for you struggling. - What was the message? - I can't remember the exact words because it was about 4,000, but she told me, I took SSRI's when I was 19. So SSRI's anti-depressants, specific form. She was put on Zoloft because she was an NCAA athlete, which for the Brits like me that haven't no clue or the fuck that is, it's a really good athlete. - I was an NCAA athlete, it's a good athlete. - Yeah, and I got anxious before games, which makes sense because they're a big thing if you're an NCAA athlete. - After many games of struggling, I went and saw a psychiatrist. And I said, yeah, you're depressed. You need to go on these pills. She was given Zoloft, and she went on Zoloft for a year or two, and she slowly started to feel less and less. In every single domain of her life. So she was with a boyfriend at the time that she could no longer love, and that she ended up having sex with for the first time, losing her virginity too, and she couldn't even feel it. She didn't know that it had happened. And what you see when you look at the research into treatment-based sexual dysfunction, so any treatment-based sexual dysfunction is basically sexual defects that you have from having something else treated. So if you have cancer and you get treatment for it, sometimes as a byproduct, you will have sexual problems. But you heal the cancer so it was worth it, right? But if you look at it, I think 75% of treatment-based sexual dysfunction in men and women comes from SSRIs. So what we're seeing is three quarters of the problems people are having from medical intervention. They're not coming from cancer treatment. They're not coming from surgeries. They're coming from these pills that are meant to improve our lives. But we also don't know how they really work because the chemical imbalance theory has been disproven. So she sent me this message, and she went as far as saying that in January 2024, she woke up one day after she'd gone off her SSRIs. And she felt as though her soul had left her body. She couldn't read from left to right and she was studying English at university. She couldn't listen to music and feel any pleasure. And she was having constant brain zaps, that kind of feeling like when you're cooking and you have oil flick up from the pan and it hits your arm, that, but relentlessly in her brain. All day, struggled sleeping, broke up with her boyfriend because she felt so traumatized by the experience she had with him, not be able to feel anything. And she was on the brink of suicide. And she couldn't take her own life. And wow, what she had was something called PSSD, so post SSRI sexual dysfunction. Have you heard of this? - No. - It's not even recognized in the US as a proper defect. Post SSRI sexual dysfunction. And it's a bit of a shitty label because it implies that the only problem you have is that oh, the guy that's taken antidepressants can't get it up every now and then. And it's a dysfunction so it's temporary. This can be permanent and there's no known solution to it. There's only alternative medicine. - So the only way to treat it is to take more medication? - No, that just makes it worse. - So you get stuck because if you're on these meds, you feel shit when you come off them and you might even have withdrawal or something that looks like withdrawal, but it's actually just an injury from the meds because they've reset your brain. Ironically enough, a lot of people give themselves a chemical imbalance by going on the meds that are meant to fix it. And so we're living in this world where we have TikTok diagnoses of depression, of anxiety, of ADHD. And back to where we started with certainty here and this feeds perfectly into what this girl was experiencing. She wanted certainty. She wanted a solution to her perpetual anxiety to do with her sporting career that she wanted to have. Well, yeah, of course you're gonna feel that if you care about the sport that you're playing, right? And you don't necessarily need a solution. You're not anxious, you're just passionate about what you do. You're not depressed. You're just living in a shitty set of circumstances that don't serve you and your human spirit. You're not autistic. You're just quirky and slightly different. And I think this is one of the biggest most pervasive issues our generation's facing is this overdiagnosis that everyone seems to get involved in. Whether it's the individuals like ourselves and like I'm not getting up on my high horse here, I wanna do this all the time. I have to actively fight the urge to compartmentalize myself as this type of individual, especially in the self-help world. Where it's like I'm a type A person, a type B achiever. Like fuck off. You're a human being that has certain needs and they're not being fulfilled. If it actually serves you to categorize them in a specific way, then go for a fill your boots but I don't think it does most of the time. So we go back to this girl and she's been feeling this exact feeling that everyone does in our generation where we have issues because we're navigating this modern world and the responsibilities of going from adolescence to adulthood. She wants a solution so she gets put on a pill. And it ruins her life. She's now texting me after just about working through wanting to commit suicide. And at the time, I happened to be in LA doing a podcast tour. So I'd asked her where she's based because someone's catch up and she said she was in California. So she drove up and we had a lunch and she wore her heart on her sleeve and told me a whole story again and I was just devastated by it. And I was like, we need to do something about this. So we started working on a documentary and that documentary was designed to expose the true impact and side effects of anti-depressants and SSRIs because people don't know and we need more awareness. And we've been working on that for a few months now and I came back to the US to film it and she was a key part using her testimony. And at the same time, I was navigating a really tough part in my life where the podcast was finally blowing up. The podcast was the most successful word ever been and I'd had the biggest guests on, I was getting millions of views on my long-form videos and I had zero dollars in my bank account. I felt paralyzed. I felt like I had no escape. I was in America and first of all, I needed to fly back if I was running out of money but I couldn't afford flights. But then also I had to keep the show on the road because I'm blowing up and you need to ride the momentum man. So I asked her, "Could I stay at your place?" for five more weeks after I stayed there for two in her guest bedroom filming the documentary of her. Yeah. I was like, "Can I do it for five more weeks?" 'Cause I didn't really have another choice and if she said, "No, I would have been fucked." Wow. I couldn't have even flown out the country. He had zero dollars in my backpack. And she spoke with her parents and within five minutes she was like, "Yeah, you can stay." So we started working on the documentary and I started doing more interviews and ended up getting a bit of cash, interviewed Michael Smoke, Bryce Crawford, after extending the trip actually, Savannah Stone, all these different people. And the channel blew up. And as a result of that, I'm able to sit here now with more money in my bank account, more followers than ever. And that restriction has been removed of feeling paralyzed. And there's all thanks to staying there for five more weeks. Those last five weeks changed my life and at the end of it, I went to the White House. And when I went to the White House, I ended up taking her as my guest because we were in DC filming some stuff for this documentary. And it was really weird. The White House, once a week, they have Marine One, the president's helicopter. It lands on the South lawn. And the president gets out and there's a bunch of press and photos and select few people. Yeah, once a week, I think, maybe even less often. There's a select few people that get to watch. And the day that I went and I got my tour because I was invited by someone through their social media team was the one day that the president was landing in Marine One. Donald Trump was rocking up in an hour's time. So they were like, "Yeah, why don't you stand by the White House on the South lawn and watch the president arrive?" And I'm this Brit in my rented tuxedo from Men's Warehouse because I couldn't afford a real suit. With this red tie that was so short, it like finished at my chest because I didn't know how to tie a tie and I had to buy a cheap clip on one. And I went with this girl that I'd been working on the documentary with and she's called Lauren. And we stood in the South lawn and we watched the helicopter arrive and we looked around. It was a beautiful sunny day. This was three months ago to the day. And I asked that girl to be my girlfriend that day. Oh my god, that whole story was leading to that. So the girl who DMed you who maximized the characters about SSRIs and how being an NCAA athlete and how she broke up with her boyfriend because she had sex with him and she couldn't feel anything is your girlfriend. Yeah. What? May you tell that story amazing. I had no idea. Wow. Congratulations. Thanks. And to her. Wow. So Lauren is your girlfriend? Yeah. As of three months ago. Wow. And the night before we were in a hotel room, there were two single beds so I felt comfortable sleeping in the same room as her because I thought this girl can't feel emotion. So this is kind of like a friendly play date. And we ended up kind of getting close to each other and the tension was very high. I just read Plato's symposium out loud, which is like the greatest love poem. And we'd done a breath work because she was like trying to heal her central nervousness with a breath work. So we super chilled out. And I ended up putting my arm around her. I just felt myself doing it. I was like, I'm sorry, like I shouldn't be putting my arm around someone that can't feel emotion. And she said to me, look at me in my eyes, went, yeah, but I think I can for you. Oh, wow. How did it make you feel here in that? One of the best moments of my life. Not going to the White House or hitting 200,000 followers or earning a certain amount of money or renting a Mustang for the first time and driving it through LA. It was that very moment. Looking into her eyes and hearing that. And if we take this back to what it's like having a relationship with a woman without God, the thing that the last three months have taught me more than anything else, are thus working through the problems that she's still going through that are very difficult. Still, she's still not having it. Yeah, it's filled every single gap I had left. And every wall I had up between myself and being able to have faith in God has been seeing all the issues that she's been going through, seeing the strength that she has. And the problems that undoubtedly lie ahead, they're just being like, fuck it. I feel this emotion. I can't resist it and I want to make this commitment. And my Christian friend said, that's everything you're missing from being able to believe in God too. So yeah, the last three months have felt weird, even just in the Christian realm too. I felt a lot closer than ever. Is she Christian? No. No. Is she, does she believe in God? I think she's similar to me where she's exploring. I think it's tough when you've had so much stripped away from you when you found nothing wrong. Yeah, when in some ways it sounds like she's been fighting for her life and other events. Wow. And how has that influenced your commitment to this world of SSRIs? Do you know, I've actually stopped working on the documentary for a little bit. Okay. Because it's just become so close to home that I need to recalibrate and kind of think about how I approach it. A lot of people would say that the point of God is and the point of this world and being here is merely to love. And anything that isn't love is fair. And it sounds like hearing from you that in some ways the closest you've ever felt to what some might call God is you experience with this girl with love and is that love? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I don't think you can put a piffy label on what love is. But if there's one thing that I've learned the last three months, it's no matter how strong the love is towards someone that you feel. That isn't ultimately what determines long term that you love them. It's not this emotion that comes from somewhere out in the ether and hits you. Actually, love is a choice too. And whether it's loving God, whether it's loving your girlfriend, no matter how confidently I can sit here now and say, I'm in love in ways I've never felt before. And I think I found the one for me for the rest of my life. I still have to put in place action to prove that because I'm going to have ups and downs, I'm going to be tired, I'm going to be moody, I'm going to be grumpy, I'm going to have shortcomings within myself that haven't unpacked. And that's what I'm discovering very rapidly. And it's on me to put the actions in place to actually ensure that this love can continue. And Bryce Crawford spoke to me about this. I don't know if it was on camera or off, but the fact that he realized that believing in God, it wasn't just this choice that you make once. He still has to wake up every day and choose to believe in God. Wow. And I think that's one of the best pieces of advice young people could take if they're looking to have a relationship. Now is that you make a choice every day whether you love or not. And that impacts the trajectory of your life. It's not just this one off thing that we like to believe because we've been indoctrinated by this romanticism from books and movies and songs that go, yeah, I found the one and then we rode off into the sunset. No, no, no, you found the one and they're the one because you partly choose to stop searching for others and make them the one, right? And I think there's something very powerful in that. That lesson of actually love being impossible if you're constantly looking for better options. True love is impossible if you're constantly looking for better options. What does looking for better options into someone from having? I remember who said it but they said that love now is like a revolving door where you're constantly just walking in and out this building and you're picking at this convey about of different options. And it prevents you from actually being present with someone. It prevents you from putting in the work having the faith that this is the very best thing for you. This is the one for you. They might not be the one for you. They might be multiple soulmates out there for you in the world. That's fine, whatever, but I don't think you're going to feel love, whether it's for God, whether it's for partner, whether it's for yourself. Unless you think they're truly the best option there for you. And what I'm hearing you say is that that's a choice more than it is a feeling. And oftentimes people are waiting for some feeling and they don't know what the actual feeling is that they're waiting for. And so they're constantly looking for the better option which is actually into upping peace and contentment and into upping them from the very thing they want which is to feel like they found the one which is less of feeling than it is a choice. If you're waiting for the day that you're going to feel that you've met the one and you can tell with a hundred percent certainty for the day that you experience something that proves you without a doubt that God exists. If you're looking for the day that you can prove to yourself that you're doing the job that you should be doing, you're going to be waiting till you hit that grave. And all it will say on your tombstone is that the day you were born and the day you died and there are going to be a couple of people there. There's going to be the priest, the church that's doing some sort of ritual. There's going to be the guy burying you. There's not going to be anyone else because you would have wasted an entire lifetime waiting for that moment of certainty. And in the process, abdicating any possibility to connect with other people with yourself and with God if he exists. And that's the direction that we're heading in as a generation. We're living in this information age where we have access to every answer to every problem. We have self-help. We have different gurus. We have different spiritual thinkers. And we'll operate with this belief that if we can just scrape together enough information from this online world, we can formulate this perfect recipe that will give us meaning, will give us certainty, will give us clarity on what we need to do. And I guess I'm just here as a 21-year-old that's been to the White House, this earned all the money he could possibly ask for in his 20s and that's met the perfect woman that could not be better. I'm here to tell you that that certainty is never going to come. It never will. And if you get better, you improve your life circumstances, you're just going to be doubting it even more. Was this really the right choice? So I think the number one action point for everyone at home is just a fucking dude. Just a fucking dude. If you feel that impulse to actually do something that leads you in some sort of direction that is aiming upwards rather than down, aiming upwards rather than to the side where you've got all these instant options of gratification and hedonism. If you truly feel in your heart that the actions you're taking are aiming upwards to some form, you're good. Just keep going. Keep digging. Don't stop. And you will find that goal I promise you. You just need to not stop. Everything else will work itself out. That roadmap will form and you'll be good. Is that what you're doing? Yeah. I'm confused as fuck right now. I've had a lot of change the last few months. Not just my first girlfriend in my adult life, but the show went from 80,000 followers on Instagram to 220k in the space of like three weeks. So our national TV got 40 million views in a month. 40 million views in a month. Just for those listening that I haven't seen that, what did you say that got you 40 million views a month? I told ignorant boomers the truth, which is that all the struggle, all the imposition on Gen Z is exactly that. It's an imposition rather than a choice that they've made. We are some, in some forms, victims with victims of literal trillion dollar industries that are engineered to hijack our attention, to make us scared, to make us feel uncomfortable emotions, to keep us scrolling so that they can keep on profiting off of us. That's why so many people are depressed, that's why so many people are anxious, that's why so many people are struggling. Does that mean that we shouldn't do anything about it and we should just sit there and cry all day? No, we should take responsibility for everything in our life and all we can do is fight. So I said that to some older panelists. It was Kay Burley who she worked for Sky News. I think she did. She was like the longest serving Sky News reporter for all the political stuff. And then it was another guy, I actually can't remember his name off the top of my head, but he's been on Jeremy Vine, which was the show a few times. And then it was Jeremy Vine himself who's the host of the show. And I was saying some pretty uncontroversial stuff. I got asked, well, isn't it that Gen Z are just all their phones? Isn't that why you're all depressed? Shouldn't you maybe just start by getting off your phones? And I simply said, well, who is it that designed the phones? And it went absolutely ballistic. It was like everyone reacting to it on Instagram. I think 23 million views or something on my own real bunch of variations of more views and went on to a bunch of different radio shows and TV shows after that. It was a pretty surreal experience riding that wave of momentum. For saying something that I kind of just instinctually believed and came out my mouth. It was the least I've thought about something ever. You ever seen the Spider-Man meme where it's like, yeah, it's like their boomers are pointing at us. We're pointing at them. You created the platforms that we're now struggling and suffering with them, but you're blaming us for being lazy. Do you think the some of the divide is that there is an absence of responsibility from the older generation for the struggles that have been inflicted upon our generation? I just get confused when I see all of this blaming of Gen Z and calling us snowflakes in article headlines and victims and pathetic individuals who are just lazy. Even if that was all true, I don't think the most productive thing to do as an older, responsible adult is to condemn younger generations who are just coming of age. They're just reaching the age of consent where legally we recognize that they can now make decisions for themselves. Why are you a 50 year old childless cat lady sat in your room typing out that 12 year olds are lazy and that it's their fault that they're suicidal? What the fuck are you doing with your life? Your part of the problem. You're not putting forwards a solution and that's what bugs me with this discourse so much is that it's so void of any solutions. It's just the blame game and actually I'm not that interested in who's to blame because I know it's the people that designed these apps. Yeah, some might argue that you in some ways you are interested in that because of what you just said about that one and what the fuck are you doing? Are you involved in the blame? Yeah, well that's a tough thing to pass out is because I'm in these intergenerational debates and I am firing a few shots at these older individuals but the way I'm doing it is something in service of actually bridging that gap and healing the divide and to a lot of people who have seen my clips out of context it might not seem that way but the thing I want to say is after that went viral and I was getting flooded with messages all generations were chipping in wow they were all backing me and they're all supporting me I got very few hate comments wow which was surprising I thought I was going to get way more and it was a real positive thing to see and there were all these people messaging me that were the same ages that childless cat lady though 40 or 50 and they'd be like yeah I'm so sorry for what older generations have done to you I don't know how I would survive if I was born in 2005 like I was so it's not the older generations although I think there is a question to be asked over the way we were parented and raised on that the biggest problem lies with a select few individuals that are profiting off of people's misery off of people's struggles and off of giving people more struggle because it serves what they want to do which is keep people host I think there needs to be a war that's waged on those tech companies on the founders on the people working there and I spoke to this lady called Jess Butcher MBE and she used to work in the tech space in San Francisco for years and she's a big dog that does big investments deals with all the biggest platforms and the one thing she told me when I met her in person she was speaking about her product that's counter technology and it's actually getting people to put away their phones she said the biggest thing I learned from being in the tech space being with all of these rich founders in San Francisco who are designing these algorithms and apps so that they They all know what they're doing. They know. They're all racked with guilt because they know that they're poisoning the world. That's why so many of them quit. So many of them are quitting and starting charities and different startups that help aid internet addiction, people quitting porn and that provide alternatives algorithmically to what we currently have. And it's because anyone that's working at these social media companies that isn't in customer support low down, they fucking know what they're doing to us. How could you not? If you know the design of how your platform works and what it prioritizes, you're aware of what you're doing to humanity. And I think those people should pay. I don't know how. I'm not inciting violence here, but I'm really hopeful that over the next few years we're going to see a bunch of lawsuits. We just saw the first one in Northern California, there was a girl that was about 19 years old on say 19, 21 years old, maybe, and she successfully sued Meta for the first time for being irresponsible and impacting her life in an awful way. And I think I'm going to keep on coming because she won. Wow. So now if we could flip it on its head and speak to the younger generation who we can talk till we're blowing the face about what needs to happen at the hands of change, but until that happens, we need to find ways to be able to manage with the screens that are in our face and some of the greater distractions and dysfunctions that are hacking our dopamine systems and wreaking havoc on our lives. So to the young people who are by nature of and by virtue of the dysfunction of some of these boomers who are creating these platforms, what would be your greatest piece of guidance for someone to create a purpose for meaningful life from this sense of numb void and disconnection? Your problem is not doom scrolling. Your problem is not the content you're consuming. It's proven. If you look at studies, you can doom scroll away, man. You can watch whatever content you want within reason. The problem is the fact that you're doing it without relent. You're doing it without pause. You might not be scrolling 24 hours a day, but you're doing it so consistently and so constantly that the real world is merging with the digital world for you. And frankly, your real world experience is being informed by what you see on your device. You can't escape it. You have notifications popping off every few minutes vibrating in your pocket, making loud noises. You've got alarms. You've got emails. You've got the little stickers on every app telling you how many messages you have to get through until you get down to that golden, satisfying zero. And the annoying sticker that's been designed that way goes away. So they did a study where they looked at the difference in impact on attention between people who watched annoying, funny cat videos and science videos, explaining the rules of science. And what they found is there was no difference in how that impacted focus between the science videos and the funny cat videos. The difference came when they switched from the way that content was being viewed. The difference came when they switched from long form content to short form content where you scrolled. That's what fucked their attention. Wow. And the reason is many different variables that we can get into in depth, but one of them is that you're not actively seeking out content when you scroll. It's being chosen for you, right? You're at the mercy of an algorithm. And what that does is it fries your brain. It fries your attention because you can scroll every time you dislike something. And it also funnels you into a way of living where you're only ever seeking answering questions rather than asking them. So I want to go into that because it's really valuable for people, but to tie a bow on all the other stuff. If you're a young person or anyone, but especially a young person because we're being impacted the worst, but if you're a young person watching or listening to this and you're struggling with meaninglessness, with your attention span being that of a fucking goldfish, it's okay. It's totally expected. And it shows that actually your body's functioning as it should. My number one piece of advice would be to compartmentalize your scrolling. If you want to doom scroll, fill your fucking boots for an hour a day at a certain designated point where you lie down on the sofa. You can scroll to your heart's content. You can catch up on messages. But once that hour is done, you're doing something else. And you'll immediately notice how hard that is. I struggle doing it. And it's this relentless onslaught on our focus. I spoke to Johan Hari recently about this and he's an award-winning journalist that's done a lot of deep-guiving into attention and he spoke to a doctor saying how it takes about 23 minutes until you actually get into a focused state and then you can hold it. But if it takes 23 minutes to get into a focused state and it takes two seconds to look at the notification that you just got in your pocket, you're going to lose every time. Wow. It could be 19 minutes into the deep work block, three and a half minutes away from finding the sense of flow state, pick up the note at their phone and it's disrupted the cycle and now it resets and they got it and they sell it. How are you ever going to do any work? How are you ever going to do your duties for the day? How are you ever going to get into the actual important part of life that gives you meaning and fulfillment which is asking questions not answering them? The thing that gives humans meaning, it's not asking chat GPT what the letter is, a certain fucking, I don't know what the letter is, what that's about example. How many spots there are on a lady, but it's asking questions that don't have one answer. There might not even be valid questions, what is the meaning of life? That uses a different part of your brain, uses the right hemisphere, left hemisphere, calculates stuff. It helps you when you're writing and you're choosing what words to use, it's very analytical, but the right hemisphere, that's what guides you towards meaning, purpose and it comes through creative endeavors, through music, through art, through love, and we have systematically been blocked by evil social media companies from accessing half of our brain. Of course you're going to struggle, so I don't want to even plug my sponsor here, shift, people can check it out if they're interested in a way of blocking their screen use for certain parts of the day. I don't want to speak about it because it feels like a perfect ad placement, but what you can start with if you don't pay for an app is turn off the labels on your apps, turn them off ages ago, so I can't see how many messages I have. That's an easy win for you. The second thing that I've put on steroids recently is I used to have a six digit password with no face ID because it increases the friction between the impulse you have to answer notification or pick up your phone and actually acting on that, right? I've going to step further now and I have like a 20 letter password with no face ID on my phone. Wow. I've never heard that before. But it takes me like 15 seconds just to unlock my phone. So you remove face ID and you made your password like 20 characters long, so every time you want to open it, you have to put that entire password in. Yeah, and when I'm driving, I can't do it because that was going to be my biggest one because my tests are self drives, so it's easy for me to just open my phone, go wherever I want, but that would support so much. By the time I've typed the password in half way, especially if I failed once at it, I'm just like, this isn't even fucking worth it, I can't be asked to open my phone. Bam, you've saved your focus, you know, so I think I actually learned this from a Benedictine monk that I interviewed in a church that studied the way of the desert fathers and he talks about delaying that link between desire and action. If you want cookies because you're feeling peckish, we'll make yourself walk 50 meters away to the shop. up instead of having it in your cupboard. You want to open your phone, delete your face ID, and give yourself a 20-digit password, because that link between the subconscious, the impulsive behavior, and the smarter version of yourself to the analytical, is severed. And I think that's going to be one of the biggest things that helps our generation in the coming decade. I think that's literally the number one thing, is impulse control, what is control in play? It implies that it's completely up to you, and that if you just will hard enough, you'll overcome it. That's stupid. That's like trying to drive yourself off with a towel, lost any in the shower. It's not going to work. So it's about putting more physical action in place. And people don't like that because it hurts their ego. It shows that the problem is strong enough with their will to just overcome stuff. I would say working through that ego is actually pretty impressive, and I'm going to respect you a lot more, then if you keep on trying to just will your way over the top of a trillion dollar industry. Sounds like change then starts with the willingness to admit that you are at the mercy of these platforms. I'm going to say something that hurts me a lot here. When we're talking about my will, my will is weaker than a trillion dollar industry with hundreds of thousands of employees that have been engineered and who have built their careers on beating me. My will is probably weaker than them. Well, that's pathetic. Well, a beta male I am. What a fucking pussy I am just will harder. Like no, no, you're probably not going to beat those guys. This is literally the same shit as trying to take on 100 guys in a fight and be like, yeah, I'm stronger than them. Yeah. No, you're not. Wow. You're going to get beaten black and blue. Wow. That's profound. There's a quote that says that quitting your worst habit will do more for your life than committing to your best habit. Do you think the worst habit of our generation is the addiction to social media? No, I actually think our worst habit is a generation is trying to find solutions rather than cutting out problems. It's exactly what you just said. It's weird. When you cut the string at the top of an elevator holding it up the rope, it doesn't go down. It actually goes up. Did you know this because of the weight? No. On certain elevators, not all of them. Don't try this at home. Try this at home. At your home elevator, if you're fortunate enough, some elevators by cutting the rope. One of them to actually go up because of the counterweight. Wow. Going on to the other rate. And I feel like a same thing needs to be done with humans. I've been thinking about this idea of inverse solutions for a long time, where oftentimes the best thing you can do is not pick up a new virtue but put down a vice. Can we stay there? That's a powerful quote. Oftentimes the best thing you can do is not pick up a new virtue but put down a vice. That is a banger. That is a banger. Oh my god. That's a fucking banger. Have you ever said that before? No. That just came out. Yeah. That is cold. What does that mean to you? Well, here's a life hack for you. If you're looking for virtue constantly, you're only aiming ever at stuff you don't have yet. If you cut out the vices in your life, you're actively getting rid of stuff. All you have to do is chuck away. It's there. You have a 100% guaranteed success rate of throwing away a vice if you go after it. You don't have that with a new virtue because it's uncharted territory. All you have to do is throw the weight off the boat. Throw the weight off the ship and it will sail better. I think a lot of the noise from social media and looking at people better than ourselves that are in positions that we would want to be in. It teaches us to aim at what they do rather than live a life now in the present that actually takes a step towards being that way. This is a really interesting life philosophical concept in that. I think we begin our lives. I was talking about it with Timmy before on the podcast saying yes to a lot and adding things to our plate so that we can discover what we want to do with our length. And eventually we realize that now we need to clear the plate and get down to the bare minimum so that we can focus our attention and energy and effort. You just mentioned that the greatest challenge is that we are not the social media addiction but that we are so solution or oriented rather than getting rid of problems. Peter Cron says that he doesn't solve problems. He dissolves problems and it sounds like one of the greatest philosophical spiritual, I guess you could say lessons in life. Life is not a process of solution of like trying to figure it out. It's trying to dissolving everything that's in the way so that we can recognize we already are everything we've ever needed. And we spend our whole lives in search of what we've always had from the moment we arrived here. So really interesting concepts. Yeah and I don't know if this contradicts what you say a little bit but I don't think so. But a big thing that I wish more people thought about is that problems are not an aberration, they're not a glitch, they're not something that's taking you away from that perfect straight path that you're walking upon. They're actually just a sign that you're alive and that you're operating in a world that's dynamic and ever changing. They're baked into the process, they're a feature not a bug. And when you're able to take that framing it makes problems, problems feel a lot less like problems and just part of the process. There are things that need to be worked out and you will. But more importantly it depersonalizes them. It makes them feel less like a problem with you and more of a common experience shared by everyone that's doing anything. If you don't have any problems in life, you're probably not doing very much. You should probably look to find more problems. I interviewed Massing Kip on the podcast and he said I'm going to stage my life in which I'm scared when I'm no longer feeling scared. Because he said part of growth and part of becoming anything in this world is to push your nervous system to the place in which it's so uncomfortable because it's a new moment. It's a new moment, your nervous system, your body, your physical reality has never reflected back to you that which you're stepping into right now. Of course you're afraid. He said I'm more worried when I'm not afraid. I think it was a really powerful reframe on life that part of life is problems. Part of life is fear. Part of life is finding yourself at the edge of that which you would call comfort and choosing to move beyond and recognize that you've found yourself in a new place, a higher level of success financially, a different level of intimacy when you choose of vulnerability in a relationship. As I think about this paradox of my own world and I would like to think people can relate to this, it's that for only in the past year have I dissolved this feeling because I recognized how silly and foolish it was and it was that every time I took a risk in my life, I thought about being at home comfortable in my bed, how much I would love to do this. And every time I was at home comfortable in my bed, I was thinking about taking a risk and I realized that wow it's because the nature of life is uncertainty and the calling of all of our lives is to push ourselves into environments that are going to force us to become more than we've ever been. And the greatest cause to go back to the narrative around depression is depression is in my eyes if I was to redefine it from what I said before. I think I said that I said numbness to life, like defined depression as a numbness to life, and if I was to develop a formula for that which creates a numbness to life, it's comfort, comfort creates numbness to life, comfort, comfort creates numbness to life, sitting here instead of going and pushing my body creates a numbness to life, choosing not to go and speak to the girl in the coffee shop and instead scrolling on Tinder, swiping on hinge creates a numbness to life, choosing not to go out to the party because I clearly claim that I don't drink, but really I have social anxiety, creates a numbness to life. And all the moments in my life in which I have been the most depressed, quote unquote, the most anxious and the most void of connection to myself and others is when I have been living too far away from the edge of the thing that's going to cause me to become more. It's what Michael Smokes says, "People choose the certain hell over the uncertain heaven." People go to university without knowing why they're studying. They know that, probabilistically, they're going to get a low salary that shows up in a bad way on the quality of their life for the rest of their lives with what they're studying, because they know their friends that are going to university, they know the structure. They know what to expect the next three years. Yeah. That doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. If you want to be happy, you probably need to face a little bit of uncertainty in your life. And every time you overcome it, you're going to build up this stack of proof that you can navigate uncertain, uncharted territory. I think the key thing is continuing to do things that genuinely feel uncomfortable and that you genuinely want to stop from. This is why running is so powerful for me because I suck at running and I want to stop every time with every bone in my body. With the gym, it was like, "Oh, this is uncomfortable, but I'm doing my sets and I'm happy about it." I think everyone needs to find that thing that they genuinely want to stop. Is this self that we all hear, I don't know about you, maybe it's just me, but that seems to anchor their life and go all the way through. There's this kind of secondary animal nature to us that can take over at times and make us make bad decisions. Taking action that the smart voice in your head actually says no to, says you should stop. That's the most powerful thing you can ever do, persisting through that. You've come back to that on a couple of occasions throughout this conversation, just do. If you were to underpin your thesis or philosophy on life with that fear, or is it something else? I think it's hard to boil down my philosophy to life in one sentence, but I think that is what Peter Crowe has said to you. The fear of doing comes from the assumption that if you mess up that task, it's doing wrong, right? When actually all we can do is try, all we can do is give our best, all we can do is try to fulfill our potential and whatever happens happens. The just do philosophy, again, it comes from deduction of not seeking out doing, but just eliminating the fears. Yes. We live in a world where people are too scared. They don't want to stand out from the crowd. They want to follow it until the entire crowd has jumped off the cliff. I hate that because I think it leaves a lot of happiness and flourishing on the table for a lot of individuals that are very competent. I saw this study. It's really interesting because my dad used to ask me a lot. When I was younger, the eldest of four, and sometimes my dad would ask me that he'd say things in reprimand of me, he'd say, "Why did you do that?" I'd say, "So?" And so did it. He'd say, "Well, if they walked into a fire, would you do it?" Obviously, my answer at the time was, "No, of course I wouldn't." But there was an interesting study I saw where they – I don't know if you've seen this study, and I'm going to butcher the exact way that the study went, but they presented questions to people that had a really obvious answer. But they split half the group up, there were two groups to this study, and one group didn't know that they were meant to choose the wrong answer. The other group were told, "I want you to intentionally choose the wrong answer." And they found that even when a question had such an obvious answer, people would choose the wrong answer just to fit in with the groups, rather than choose what they know is right. They started to actually question their own brain as a result of what other people were choosing. And it makes me – it brings this conversation to bring it home here, is the topic and the thesis and the philosophy, and I guess you could say the mission of this podcast is to create spaces where people can really discover what it means to belong, because understanding that study on need to belong in so many ways is an even greater need than I need to be authentic than I need to be ourselves. For somebody who has not yet defined what God is to them, for somebody who has found himself in many ways uncomfortable with uncertainty, but is developing a much more profound and powerful relationship with it. For somebody who at the very same time is in the most committed relationship he's ever been in, three months in, and it started with a crazy turn of events that have led to this deep feeling of love. It creates for this beautiful melting pot in which I want to ask you at this stage of your life, what does it mean to you to belong? I think for me – and we'll see where this goes, but maybe it's a super depressing answer. To belong is to have a function within the group of people that you are with, or the person that you're with. What that means is it's actually having something to offer, and it's taking responsibility. I don't like this idea that some people perpetuate that you're just enough yourself. Everything might be within, but that often gets conflated with, therefore you don't have to do anything. You can just be you, man. No, that's not actually what people mean. You still have to take action. You still have to do, and you still importantly have to think about more than just yourself. And we live in this world that's very individualistic where it's all me, me, me. And even if we're doing something, it's in service of the gratification of ourselves. So I think to the book to belong is to have something to offer, and that's not being a dancing monkey for the crowd to watch. It's not being the smartest or the hardest worker. I think it's offering that love for people and that genuine care. And that is what will tie you to other people. I think it's acting in service of thinking about someone else before yourself, and I find that very heart, and that's why I feel like I don't belong a lot of the time. But yeah, I think belonging is genuinely having something to offer people that isn't just off the back of making yourself happy. You just said that's why I feel like I don't belong a lot of the time. Can you elaborate on that? I don't know. I think I have a bit of a superiority complex at times where maybe I take my own advice too far, and I try to offer too much to the point where actually I won't even want to hang out with people to go, "Oh, I could be doing something better right now." I think I already just struggle with more superficial level conversations where it's a small talk, and it's a social script that's been handed to people rather than generated. And I guess this is what I'm getting at really when I talk about belonging is it needs to actually come from you, whatever you're offering. It can't just be taken from somewhere else and passed on, like passed the parcel. So I've definitely found, as the podcast has grown, as I've spoken to more interesting people as my group of friends has changed and my life circumstances has changed, I'm kind of just fucking done with hanging out with people that aren't actually showing up as themselves. I will hang out with anyone that's actually themselves. I don't care what you're into. If you have passion, great. I'm all ears. I only hear about you speaking about dinosaurs for the next five hours and the lost breed of tarot actor, like failure boots. But if you're talking to me and the intention is just passing on a social script because you're too scared to fit in, I'm not interested in you, I don't fucking care. Because actually I am interested in you, but you're not showing me you, you're showing me the script. I wonder if we were to give loneliness a definition then it almost seems as though the way that it's, we're coming to define it throughout this part of The conversation is that loneliness is the absence of authentic self-expression. And when you don't express yourself authentically in the world, you're lonely, not because you don't have people, but because those people aren't seeing the real you. And because they aren't seeing the real you and you're not showing the real you, you're lonely inside of your own spirit because what you've actually abandoned is yourself. And maybe that means that true loneliness has nothing to do with anybody else. And it has to do with the. I would have said courage yesterday until I interviewed Peter Crone. But now I would probably say the freedom inside of you to express the fullness of who you are. And maybe momliness actually has nothing to do with how many people you're around. Maybe it has nothing to do with being around people at all. Maybe you could be, and this would be an interesting topic of conversation. Could you be alone like the only person on the planet, but expressing yourself fully and not be lonely? I don't know, what do you think? I think we're social animals, and if we take it to the extreme, we would not flourish without other people. We need to lean on other people and they need to lean on us. But we've had this weird upscaling thing where we've got access to this global village. Therefore, the next logical step is to try and be friends with everyone in it. And that's just kind of not how it works. Like if you're living in a smaller area with less people, you're probably going to get on with a lot of them because you have common interests and you're all shooting in the right direction. Whereas when you're suddenly exposed to the entire world in every single belief, culture, opinion, you're going to piss off a lot of people if you're just showing up as yourself. And so people just don't, they just don't show up. Even if you look at something like the frequency of social media posting, it's like halfed in the last few years from people when consumption hasn't. And what that shows to me is that people are scared to even post because they don't want to fit into the wrong character type. So if you want to belong, you have to express the uniqueness of who you are. Correct. And if you don't feel comfortable expressing the uniqueness of who you are, that's where your spiritual evolution begins. Correct. Elliot Buick, I think that's a beautiful way for us to close this out. Your wisdom commitment to understanding and depth of knowledge on a variety of topics is fascinating. And I would love to continue the conversation and set ourselves up for around two or three or four or five because there are, I can just tell by speaking to you, and I've got flies all over my eye if I'm doing it. I can just tell by speaking to you that you, I think the beautiful thing about you as a podcaster and also as a guest is that it's evident to me that you are, you have a large commitment to expanding your depth of knowledge, which means that you in two weeks will have a completely different plethora of information to share than even you did today. And I think that's magical. So thank you. Appreciate you. Yeah. You mentioned, you weren't going to talk, mention your sponsor, but just because I think it's interesting for my audience. I would love you to just, if you feel comfortable, just what is it? Yeah, well, I just signed an exclusive deal with a sponsor. So then my only sponsor, which is something I never thought I'd do. The one red line for me was not signing the exclusive sponsorship and I have. And it's with a company called Shift and their URL is shiftyourphone.com. And they reflect everything that I've been speaking about today. It's funny, just as coming to this conclusion of us needed to compartmentalize our social media use and view it more as a tool rather than a part of life. They reached out and wanted to work with me because they'd seen my Jeremy Vine stuff and saw that we were aligned. So we jumped on a few calls and the founders are fucking genius, called Nicholas. And he's like a Catholic with very strong morals, but knows all about Aristotle and tech companies and is a filmmaker. So he's not from a tech background, which is the same as me. I'm a filmmaker. So we had a great chat and yet been sponsored by them, been using their product and it shifts your phone so that it deletes all the social media apps from it. And you can't reinstall them because you'll notice that the app store is actually gone as well. And as soon as you unshift it from your laptop, because you only have access to it on your laptop, the apps come back, which is sick. And you don't have to log in again. You don't have to put your details in and pretty seamless. And it's the only app because I've used a bunch of like porn blockers and site blockers and app blockers and screen time. Like is the only thing I've found that actually works. So you can't override it once you set a routine as well. You can't X out of it. You have a three minute break if you press on shift per day. But once you've used up that three minutes, if you had to override it for some important reason, that's it you're tapped out. And it's really annoying. It's really uncomfortable. And it's kind of what we should be speaking about today, how you should lean into discomfort. I'm using it right now. Like I'm in the first couple of months of using it. And it's still it's like it's weird to not have access at some point. So I feel so much more present. Wow, it's been pretty beautiful. Even just yesterday we filmed with Peter Crow and the power went out for a few hours. We didn't have lights. We didn't have Wi-Fi. We didn't have signal because we're in the middle of Malibu in the mountains. And it was pretty beautiful. We were just there present with Peter Crow and for a few hours. So yeah, that's cool. And I've been enjoying working with them and long day at last. Yeah, sounds like anyone who is if you're really committed to breaking an addiction to social media, if you're really committed to breaking an addiction to pornography. Like you spoke about throughout this podcast, your will is not greater than these trillion dollar platforms. And so putting pieces in place that can support you and be companions in this process is deeply powerful. Yeah. And you can go to that website. You don't need to use my link. I don't really care. If you don't want to do it, then that's fine. I'm just sponsored by them because I like their products and it's genuinely changed my life. So I'd also try if you can't be asked with that. The banner thing I talk about, using your notifications, I'm always on do not disturb as well. And then also changing your password from face ID to good one to four digits to six digits to 20 characters. It's pretty good going for someone that struggles, I think. Thank you so much. Appreciate you.