#1063 - Charlie Houpert - How to Survive the Death of Your Old Self

You're in a very different place now to when you started doing your thing online. What's the unifying thread? Is there one between sort of all of this stuff? What do you see it as different chalies? How do you come to sort of construct the narrative of what your interests have been and your personal growth over the last decade and a bit? Sure. The terror was not having a thread. So there was a time about three years ago where I could not form a story that connected who I had been in my 20s to who I was becoming in my 30s. I was thinking about this. I've heard you talk about the lonely chapter where you go from, "I'm just blending in to I'm going to take control of my life and I'm going to dial in these optimizing things. I'm going to start my business getting shape, eat the right food, etc." I discovered a second lonely chapter, which is when you bottom out on the optimizing thing and your friends are still very much in that optimized zone. And I did not know where to go, but I just knew that it wasn't working. So the common thread for me was that there was this problem in my life that started with, "I'm too shy. Nobody wants to talk to me." And you start off in victim consciousness, which is, "This is just who I am and I will just deal with this for the rest of my life." You read the game, which is what I did. You have this breakthrough. You read Dale Carnegie, read all these other guys, "Oh my gosh, I can change my behavior. Get different results." But then once I had all the different results, which was I was 30 years old, had this business that I dreamed of, the girlfriend that I'd imagined myself dating, bunch of friends, money was coming in. This mostly shea thing happened, which is there was an emptiness that I could not pinpoint or explain and things. I started unconsciously breaking things because I didn't know where to go from there. So to answer your question, the thread has been, "I try to attend to the greatest problem in my life and figure out who I can learn from to solve it." What does breaking things look like? It looks like I'm in the business that I love that I dreamed of. There was one day, it was like, "If I could just make $2,000 a month, live in Latin America and do work that I found meaningful, that's the dream." And I hit that and then I moved the goalposts and I moved the goalposts and all of a sudden I'm complaining and I go, "I have to make one video a week. Three years prior was I get to do this." I became so annoying, these people are asking me and I have to hit all these targets that I'd set for myself to surpass views and all sorts of things. I started having issues in my friendships. I started having issues in different kinds of relationships. I did not know that what was happening, I would say, is like my soul was waking up. I had no concept of a soul. I was in a religious person. But the lack of emotional and spiritual nourishment that I'd allowed myself to experience for the last decade plus had caught up with me is what happened. Was the success and the pursuit materially antithetical to spiritual connection? No. That's the tragedy. I didn't need to sacrifice one together. I didn't need to. The reason I was, I think the temptation is when you have unresolved emotional issues, which I think we all do from childhood and you've spoken to people about trauma, I know, and the ways in which we have these events in our past that happen and we make vows to ourself that I will never experience that again and then our entire life bends around not having that particular experience again. We all have these unconsciously in our lives. I started off with this business that was just it. I was learning in every video. I made this Donald Trump video. I learned so much in doing it. End people liked it. I had both. I was filling myself up and helping the world and making money. And then that people pleaser kicks in and then that you could be doing better kicks in and it became I have to top the last thing that I did, which was never the early motivation. The early motivation was always how can I solve my own problem and help people that are like me? But it devolved into can I have another video that is better than the one before? Can I make more money this month than I did the prior month? And that endless loop became deeply depressing to exist. Yeah. Well, you know, when you are at the start of your journey, you have all of the hope that somewhere on the path from the bottom of the mountain to the top of it, you will find a thing that fills the void that you're trying to fix. But when you get to the top of the mountain, you've achieved all of the stuff and the void still there. Yeah. You go, oh, fuck. And this is, have you heard me do my unteachable lessons, essay? I may have, but please. Okay. So this is the most robust. I chatted a lot of shit, right? I come up with lots and lots of ideas and insights and stuff like that. Some of them are more scalable and like replicable than others. This is, this is maybe like the most robust of any of them and it just keeps coming up. And I think it's because of my age and where I'm at and why my friends are at people like you or, you know, Dr. K or whoever it is. This is unteachable lessons. Hit me. No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it is going to be for us to find out for ourselves, we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings from our elders, songs, literature, historical catastrophes, public scandals and instead think some version of, yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me. We decide to learn the hard lessons, the hard way over and over again. Unfortunately, they all seem to be the big things too. It's never insights about how to put up level shelves or charmingly introduce yourself at cocktail party. Instead, we spend most of our lives learning firsthand the most important lessons that the previous generation already warned us about. Things like money won't make you happy. Fame won't fix yourself worth. You don't love that pretty girl. She's just hot and difficult to get. Nothing as as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it. You will regret working too much. Worrying is not improving your performance. All your fears are a waste of time. You should see your parents more. You'll be fine after the breakup and be grateful that you did it. It's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life. Even reading this list back, I'm rolling my eyes at how fucking trite it is. These are all basic bitch obvious insights that everybody has heard before. But if they're so basic, why does everyone so reliably fall prey to them throughout our lives? And if they're so obvious, why do people who have recently become wealthy or famous or lost a parent or gone through a breakup start to proclaim these facts with the renewed grandiose ceremony of someone who's just gone through religious revelation? It's also a very contentious point to say on the internet. If you interview a billionaire who says that all his money didn't make him happy or a movie star who said her fame felt like a prison, the internet will tear them apart for being ungrateful and out of touch. So not only do we refuse to learn these lessons, we even refuse to hear the message from those warning us about them. Even more than that, for every one of these, if I think a bit deeper, I can recall a time, including right now, where I convinced myself that I'm the exception to the rule, that my particular mental makeup or life situation or historical wounds or dreams for the future render me immune to these lessons being applicable. No, no, no, my unique in a landscape would be fixed by skirting around the most well-known wisdom of the ages. No, no, no, I can thread this needle properly. Watch me dance through the minefield, avoid all the tripwires that everybody else kicks. And then you kick one. And you share a knowing look with somebody else, the kind that can only occur between two people who have been hurt in exactly the same way and a voice in the back of your mind will say, "I told you so." Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. Yes. So I've wrestled with this because you close with, "I told you so," and I actually think that is a part of the trap, which is you're not supposed to make the same mistakes that everybody else makes. You're supposed to listen to your elders. And what I've seen is that it's kind of like grades. Like you're not supposed to skip counting on your fingers to jump to mental math. You are supposed to bump your head. You are not supposed to listen to other people tell you that it hurts to bump your head or burn your hand on the stove. As much as it hurts to have done, I think there's something beautiful about the process. And part of the most difficult thing for me was that I kept beating myself up for exactly the reason that you don't need to see it. Why did you just say it? Everyone told me this was going to happen, right? Why didn't I catch it? Such an idiot. So there's a model that is, it's not uniquely mine, but it helps me understand it that I think of as a pyramid that I think is appropriate here and is somewhat related, which is we start if this is a pyramid at the very top thing, which is with our attention on results. And this is sort of victim mindset, which is to say we're in junior high, high school wherever and we go, man, I wish I had that girlfriend or I wish people liked me. And we talk with our friends and we pontificate about what we would do if we had a hundred million dollars, but we do nothing to make it happen, right? When you leap from that to the lower level, which is foundational to it, which is behavior, you don't get to bring all your friends with you, right? Because some of them want to just stay there. And this is what I think you were talking about with this lonely chapter idea. As you shift into I'm going to take action. I'm going to start going to the gym. I'm going to start counting calories. I'm going to start making sure that I do enough work every day. And I'm not just going to go, did I get the result that I want? I'm going to go, how are my inputs, my behavioral inputs? You lose people, but you gain some. something, which is as you focus on this, this stuff just, it occurs. It's secondary to that. But then the journey that I think I started probably 10-ish years ago was, you have everything you want. And the whole is still there. So you start paying attention to the emotional layer, which is underneath that. Because at the action level, it's all about discipline. Don't want to go to the gym, just do it. Feeling sad, turn it into rage, and make, and propel yourself forward, right? But you start to realize that those corrosive emotions are a type of fuel that just hurts. And you can get all of the actions in place, and all of the results can flow, but you will feel crappy. So you start tending to your emotions. Joe Hudson shows up in your life, right? That's true. And it's ready to take you to the fuckers. And you start sitting with shame, and you start sitting with helplessness and grief, grief, rage instead of just anger, right? And so as you get in touch with all of these, your emotional fuel starts to shift. You're taking not exactly the same actions, but you're still taking effective actions. And then over time, your results come back, but there's a dip in between every one of these levels. When you switch from results to actions, you're the loser who's going to the gym and is still skinny. When you switch from actions to emotions, you're the guy whose business is shrinking while everyone else is kicking butt. And why are you lagging? They're having so much fun conquering the world and denying how they feel. And yes, and the problem that I did and everybody else does is you try to drag people who don't want to take that journey. So I was, I realized now at each stage, I have been very aggressive with the people closest to me in trying to incentivize and pull them to the level of development that I feel called to. And it's not appropriate. There are people waiting as you achieve these levels, even though it feels like there's not. And I say, I say achieve that's even a different mentality. But what I'm seeing, and there may be many more beneath this, is I spent years now on the emotional place. And the unlock for that is obviously you have more joy and you can operate from that. But the thing that I have not said before that scares me to, I'm afraid to say it, is that there's a level beneath that which is spiritual religious. And it's terrifying to acknowledge that the deepest wound that I've been able to find inside of myself is there. It is a separation from life, a separation from God, a separation from all of these things. We don't, everyone has their own story in the west of how that came to be. But culturally, if you look at us, we are all recent immigrants in America. You especially sell, right? There was something going on with our family in our homeland where it was like, it's kind of crappy or it's not working here. We're going to cut ties with our ancestral lands. We're going to cut ties with our extended family. We're going to cut ties with the sense of belonging to a larger community to try to form a better life for ourselves. So a lot of people, particularly in America, I have found our ancestral disconnected, spiritually disconnected, disconnected from the land. They found convenient ways to get everything from food to friends to whatever they need. And they can't, myself included, identify the location of the pain, the location of the whole because you would need to have a soul in order to feel that pain. And if you don't have a soul, you just need more stuff or you just need better behavior or even you just need to feel better. But as I've dropped into this layer, it's like, oh, the relief, the gift, the joy, the beauty is, I don't even want to sell it too much. It's staggering and humbling and beautiful. And so that's been my arc lately. Well, he was not there yesterday. He basically said the same thing. So you're in good company. This God Pivot. The God Pivot. You can call it. It seems to be reliably happening to people who get to a certain place. So I'm interested in, there's a bunch of ideas that are being mapped here. So I love what you said about the Untitiable Lessons thing that it's kind of your job to burn your hand. And the reason that I like the term Untitiable Lessons, and one bit that's probably missing from that essay is to reassure people that the voice in the back of your head that tells you, I told you so, that's a prick. And you shouldn't be listening to that. The reason that these lessons are Untitiable is that nobody learns them. So the fact that you supposedly know that it's going to happen, you disregard it, it happens. That is the lesson. The lesson is that everybody doesn't learn the lessons. That makes sense. And that should hopefully rid you of at least a little bit of that. I told you, I should have told you so shame. You should have known this thing was going to happen. Okay. That's first thing. Right. I love your hierarchy of results, actions, emotions, spirituality. And that at each level as you try and pull somebody through, there is a lonely chapter that comes along for the ride. And there is a pullback in terms of real world results. Because you have moved ever out of outcomes and ever more inward, ever more from the world from the material to something that's a little bit deeper, a little bit closer to self, a little bit more central, increasingly turning you inside out. And at each level of this that you move through is interesting. For me, few things come up. The first lonely chapter, which I think is accurate, your friends are going to leave you behind because of that pivot. There's another side to the lonely chapter, too, which is your actions throw into harsh spotlight other people. So the looking glass self, right, that you are observing yourself through the influence and the expectation and the perspective of other people. And they have an incentive for you to not change because it's effortful for me to update my opinion of Charlie's the charisma guy. Like Charlie, you know, he's like Russell Brand videos and Donald Trump and like, you know, fucking Robert Downey, like that's, I know Charlie, Charlie's the charisma guy. Oh, fuck, Charlie's changed. I don't like that. First off, it means that if he can change, I can change. And his change throws my lack of change into harsh spotlight. Also, that's effortful. Can you not be, because I already, I had to do a bit of work to work out who you were. So fucking changing, right? Another part is, well, if I really care about Charlie, especially if I've been a relationship with him and he keeps changing, well, maybe what if one of the bits have changed that he does means that I'm, he sees something in me that's, that can't come along for the ride. What if, what if his evolution results in a discarding of me as his friend or as his partner or whatever? Well, that's not bad. So the people around you have a lot of incentives to keep you where you are. And this isn't, sometimes it's malicious or, you know, sort of conscious, but for the most part, it's just someone going, please don't abandon me. Like you're changing so much. And it's wonderful for you, but like I feel inferior, I feel insufficient, I feel behind, I have this sort of sense of lack of not enoughness and this fear of abandonment. Please, like, just, can you not, like, just, any leaks out of us? And all of these different ways. So I'll pause there. Yeah. No, I mean, it makes me, I'm, it's not, you're not making me sad. I'm reminded of my grief over so many of these and I'm reminded of there's the people and the perspective they can often be talked about of people holding us back. But what I look at is the terror of being the one who is changing and recognizing, oh my God, you're staying the same. I'm the one who is forcing our relationship into a new structure and the shame and pain and grief of that. I see in you person who isn't changing the pain of watching me person who is changing change. I might stop changing in order to. And it's hard for me to be around you. So when you're in a liminal space and I've seen this many times, when I was in this in between space of still really wanting material success at it in a way that just hooked me and also sensing that it was unsatisfying, I would have these days where I'd like, start working and then like, oh, get away from me. And so when I sit down with someone who is firmly in that achiever phase and they're rock solid in it, it is more congruent than I am. And I find myself frustrated and angry with their congruence. And so I think this is an interesting way to analyze someone, we don't have to go deep into this, but like a Donald Trump or an Andrew Tate, they are deeply congruent at the level of ego. They are fully on their own, and I don't mean this judgmentally, on their own egos side. There's not a waiver, there's not a flinch, there's not an anything. When you enter into an in between paradigm space, you're flinching all over the place. You're not sure. I'm not sure about this. I kind of think, what do you guys think? You're testing the waters. Will anyone come with me? And so when it's very difficult to be around high conviction, highly congruent people in a different stage that is particularly a stage that you're coming from when you're in that thing. And so I look back and go, I had to internally and sometimes externally demonize people that I had been close to because they were external representations of the thing that I was growing out of. You were trying to shed this? Not even trying. I wish I was trying to stop. It was happening at this point. I couldn't undo it. That was the most frustrating part. I was like, if I could go back, I would. 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Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save 100 bucks by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. Yeah, I mean, the first time I ever saw Peterson live 2018 and someone says the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply? And he says, you take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you. Very apocalyptic from Jordan. But then he said, you can try and regress back into a sort of more animalistic state. You can try to sort of devolve. You can put pandoras, toys back into the box and try and pretend that you don't know what's on the other side. And it's too bloody late for that. It's too bloody late for that. And that's what you're talking about. I fuck like it was so much easier when I was just on my grind. I had congruence. I had conviction. And my conviction looked outwardly like confidence, even if it was ignorance. But it presented as certainty. And people really like that. And they seem to be attracted to me because my aura was energizing and electric. And I had like shit happening, man. And I didn't doubt myself. I didn't doubt. And it didn't tarnish the whole process. And now I'm like trying to evolve. And my evolution is making me miserable because on the, I don't have the certainty that what I'm doing is what I'm supposed to be doing anymore. Yeah. I mean, you said a couple where like confidence comes from confide, trust, right? It's the ability to have trust within yourself. So you're in these stages of high conviction, high confidence. They're authentic to a particular time in your life where for me it was, I know it's important. I'm in pursuit of what's important. When I look someone in the eye and I tell them this is what I believe, it's congruent for me. And the terror that happens when your sense of self expands outside of that congruence where you no longer feel the ability to fully trust this new piece of yourself that you're becoming aware of. Perhaps not a new piece, but a piece that you're becoming aware of. And as someone who teaches charisma, I have long recognized the conviction is, if I had to say one thing, it is the backbone of charisma is the is the ability to be congruent on your own side and internally aligned. But it's not the end all be all because if you it doesn't allow for growth in that phase. So you look at like Conor McGregor, super high conviction has had some emotional issues that he doesn't seem to have been able to integrate well because that would require him to doubt, hey, maybe I haven't been behaving in the best way lately. But the conviction has what's taken him to where he is. So why trade it in? Right? Yep. Yep. You're asking somebody to get rid of the thing that they have evidence is effective at getting the results in the real world and respect and admiration in order to do a thing which loses all of that and feels like shit and puts them back to before a white belt. Is it any surprise that people choose to not take that trade? It's no surprise to me at all. It's shocking that anybody does otherwise. That's the bigger surprise and it only and if I've heard people talk at Joe Hudson's has something similar which is you enter into increasingly a state of choicelessness. This is not what I would elect from a strategic choice. My mind does not see the value of this so clearly. But some other part of me and we could talk as your sense of awareness moves from I have my thoughts. I am thinking about things. I have strategies, plans, ways of engaging with the world. I locate myself up here too. A bit more embodied. I feel my butt on the ground, my feet on the floor and really the central column, the heart, this piece right here. This is the tender piece. This is the piece that can do vulnerability. This is the piece that can weep and cry and love and hug fully. This is the piece that has wonderful strategies and it's really cool and I don't want to throw it out. I think that was something I also tried to do for a period of time which was a mistake. What did that look like? This is where I think part of the reason that I think people, men in particular, have negative associations with sensitivity and vulnerability is because some of the early stages of arriving there where it's not more fully integrated can look like you're just a raw nerve and anyone who touches you, you just cry and there's a lack of containment. There's not a full embodiment of the vulnerability. Part of what helps you have some consistent thread of past future is your head. It's the part of you. You need it to strategize but I think the big shift and again, I'm very much a student in this. I'm learning from people far ahead of me is that this switches from the master to the tool, right? The mind, the strategy, all of that sort of stuff becomes something that you can deploy from time to time but not something that when you sit and meditate, chats the entire time. It's been to a quiet or felt place more often. Again, I'm a bit above my pay grade here because I don't live there. I'm talking about the thing. How many people have the choice with this? This is another thing that upsets me is I had the impression that there are so many guys that are similar to you and I have hit achievement thresholds and moved goalposts so many times. I admire them and I look up to them and I've learned a ton about business from them and I see so many of the influencers like you and at in the space. I feel like they're there. I have this conversation with a lot of people and what I've heard before is like, "Oh, wow. The hair on my arms is standing up as you're talking about this stuff. I feel it. It's, yeah. There's some demons that I'm running away from. Some stuff in my past that I thought that I could bury that I'm willing to verbally acknowledge but not necessarily dive into." I do think that there is a choice at the edge of all of these thresholds, just like there's a choice at the edge of results, which is, "Hey, I've seen that people who take these actions start to get in shape start to earn more money. Am I willing to let go of the safety and comfort of not trying in order to apply myself?" I think similarly there's a question of, "Am I willing to let go of the certainty and control that I have by completely managing all of my actions all the time and to enter into this irrational, feminine, emotional space where I am not totally in control?" I think that there's a lot of people have that choice today. I think we all have choices. The raw nerve thing, I think, is an interesting analogy because almost all cross-cultural definitions of masculinity include emotional control or some variant of that. You can shortcut it. The way to, I think the depth of masculinity is to feel everything but to have a vessel that can contain it, so that it is not just immediate instinctual. "You hurt me, I punch you." It's not, "You hurt me, I just dump on you, I cry." That you're still feeling intensely, but there's a system that can feel it, tend to yourself, not abandon yourself. Be vulnerable in front of the other person which would be to show them that you're hurt without dumping it on them and then choose how to behave. You can shortcut that though, but just not feeling. You can just go, "Somebody insult me, I don't care. That's a hater." Like, you can get mental models and all sort of stuff to just cut everything beneath this off and just say, "Well, that wouldn't be practical for me to listen to what the hater say." You can just lose all of the feeling. What you gain from that is an incredible efficiency in terms of getting stuff done. If you look at the wealthiest people in the world, they are very good at disconnecting from their feelings most of the time. It's tough to make billions and billions and billions of dollars and stay in the game for that amount of time at that intensity level without abusing your own feelings. Right? You're permanently having to suppress. Yes. You can make a lot of money. But it gets in the way. This is one of the reasons why an interesting definition of vulnerability, Joe Hudson's definition of vulnerability, telling the truth even when it's scary or speaking your truth even when it's scary. That is very much a lean-in definition of vulnerability. But especially as you transition from results to action and then action to emotions, your outcomes in life are reliably going to get worse and you're going to feel worse and people are going to treat you worse. Why would I do that? Why would I. I'm going to sacrifice the only observable metric that anybody cares about and that I can flex on Instagram and in an increasingly meritocratic rationalist materialist society is the only one that people can judge me based on outwardly. No one knows the peace of mind I have when I go to bed at night and I can kind of forget that. I don't know if I haven't had a peaceful night of sleep in it three years but like, "Yeah, like fucking look at my car." So I think an interesting Unifying thread that I see between at least some of the people Trying to come up with well, so there are ways of conceiving and I think you're raising a really good point here that is you If you just to become a monk is not available to many people technically you could fly in a poll and and wear a loincloth and hold a cup But that's that's not a likely outcome for a lot of people so there is this need to exist in consensus economic reality where the opinions of other people affect you they matter they have a direct impact on your level of survivability and also just your ability to be social and happy in life so that's real all the things that you're saying but then there's also The unique spiritual calling that everyone has which is that it's the little voice that you can learn to drown out It's not in it. It's not a loud voice, but it is a persistent voice and it's always there like Weren't you at the beginning of the relationship? Weren't you midway through the relationship? It's there at the end of the relationship, right? It's just it's just there and I think I know that what I'm trying to do is to find a marriage of those two things where I am honoring the need to function and live in the world and produce stuff that other people want and like and having attention outwardly focused and to respect your own Evolutionary programming which is your social creature of course you need validation recognition You don't want to be abandoned by the tribe. You don't be so weird and fucking esoteric that nobody can relate to you because That's probably going to be pretty tough to handle. Yes, and I think a huge aspect of communication and empathy is the ability to go Where's this person at meet them whether and meet them where they are and that requires external focus? Then there's the internal focus which is can I shut it all out and if if no matter what anybody says or does or things or cares What's true about me and this is hardest in the realm of like why am I here for some people? It's what is my sexuality? Right there's there's these very very Challenging questions and there's always this tug. Well, how are people going to respond to it? What will they like? Ah, that wouldn't work financially and I think to become able to Hold or allow both of those currents to exist in you at the same time is the work and there's not like a checklist that I can give you in order to do it I'm still learning it myself But I'm waking up to the tension between those and I'm also waking up as you go. I think the cool thing is You can follow either one and they will lead you to one another eventually Because if I had this period of if I look at the beginning of charisma and command was very external focused How are people like what I'm doing does does the girl to bar happy with what I'm saying right all of that stuff? I'll make a video But it actually took me at this roundabout route to this beautiful creative Thing that I got to build especially early on in the business and so in pursuing this External egoic dream of living on the beach with my friends doing work that I wanted while doing yoga I found myself like I found this internal guy and then I lost him And then the last couple years You can also lean to the internal side Which is you go deeply internal and for a while I mean, I know we don't want to do too much personal stuff But I was like I'm gonna do these weird projects. I'm gonna make it dungeons and drag and show and I'm gonna make I love to Gonna make stuff that nobody wants to watch right and I don't care. I don't care This is me me me me me me and then you go. Oh, this isn't a satisfying like I want to serve I want I actually do want to give of myself but in a way that is meaningful to other people And so I think if I look at the arc of what charisma it meant to me there was this Who do I have to be in order to get what I need from the world was is a foundational question? I think of every child every adolescent and I think entering into maturity is About recognizing oneself as capable still interdependent But the love comes from me the love is who I am and I radiate that it's not how can I get love? It's how can I return to the love that I am and when you do that a different kind of economic activity Comes online which is service and I feel like I'm at the precipice of this like for the first time the Energy of the questions that I'm asking isn't merely how can I people please and serve and yes, I'll get some money from that it's It's that level of service. It's What's the most honest true way that I can meet this person where they are and still tell the truth in? 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This is phenomenal I really tell the difference between when I drink it when I don't and you should try it too Best of all, they've got no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration return So you can buy it for as long as you want and if you don't like it for any reason they'll give you Damn it You don't have to return the box they're confident that you're gonna love it and You can get a free sample pack of their favorite flavors by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink Elementy.com slash modern wisdom that's drink elementy.com slash Modern wisdom What about the one that's in between so you've gone how can I get the outcomes that I want in the world? Mm-hmm I've assumed that there's one that's in between those two which is how do I serve the people which is how do I serve myself? Yeah, like how do I learn about me and do the inner work thing and I think I get the sense that that's the last seven six years or whatever it is for you So is is that right to say that there is a kind of a middle? I but I think that serving oneself is a wonderful point at any stage anyway because they they eventually become the same On your journey though with this I want the outcomes I want in the world Got some fuck that didn't get it. Yeah, you don't go straight from there to service correct You do correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they're all levels of self-surface at the level that you're capable of Doing it so self-service looks like when at that level of awareness if you will I need something they have it Who do I have to become and be to get it? That's me serving myself now. It's an interactive way of doing it Then service becomes I'm tired of doing that. I want to be more honest about my emotion So self-service is taking a break Selling down withdrawing for a period of time going inward. There's this dark night of the soul if you look at the heroes journey You know if you look at it like a clock There's the lower half of the clock, which is the trials and tribulations We can talk more about that but that Those mythic stories have this period of time as Jordan Peterswen would say the belly of the whale where you are compelled to acknowledge The darkness inside the pain inside of yourself and so that is what self-service looks like is something is Keeps tapping me on the shoulder telling me that I got to pay attention. I'm gonna go attend to that and we could talk about Specifically what that might look like, but I know you're talking to Joe Hudson. He's wonderful for this sort of thing I want to get your perspective on on both of those things the How do you say the 3 p.m. to 9 p.m.? Yeah 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Yeah, so first off I love mythology these days. I think Carl Jung is Perhaps the most brilliant man of the 20th century and I think deeply underrated even his thing I look at Jordan Peterson and the impact that he had on society and like there must be a union Giving us some lessons somewhere like we we crave it as as a country in the West because I think it is the synthesis of the Analytical mind Thing that is so popular in the West materialism with the Eastern spiritual side I think Carl Jung like is that bridge for many people so then you have Joseph Campbell who comes and creates this hero's journey arc I'll talk broadly about it But what I've seen is that these occur in 12-year cycles roughly. I'm not saying this But I noticed the first 12-year cycle for me was starting charisma on command and the entire idea of the hero's journey Is that you enter into a part of yourself that you didn't know existed? You come out with a treasure and you bring it back to the world And so the entering into the hard part the first time around was I have to dig deeper work harder take finance or risks All that kind of stuff and what I bring back is this way of being with courage I would say that was like the gift that I had to share which is you two can go to Brazil and start your own business and talk to that person that you're attracted to and it was this It's a spiritual gift that you're giving and it can come through the medium of YouTube or whatever Descending into it this time I would say the gift that I'm finding is Through Reconnecting with all the split off parts of myself if you if one connects with as many of the split off parts of their self Which means going into the times that someone was cruel to you that you were cruel to others the pain in your life the grief that you haven't processed all those sorts of things As you bring more of those together you find in a biting Love That is there and that's for me was the turn from the emotional inquiry which is like really it's tough to sometimes describe the value of it because you're like this is really Challenging But I would say the other side is it's like oh, I know peace. I know I cried All listening to a song on the way over here twice because music is beautiful. I watered flowers the other day and they came more back to life than I would cry because it was so beautiful to participate in something so lovely. And the world is just more stunning. And it's not like, oh, that's stunning if I get a 10 million followers or it's stunning if I win the prize or if the girl likes me. It's like, no, no, no, like, it's all stunning. I told you, sitting here with you today, watching your growth pass is fucking. - The word that comes to mind is like, "holness" or "enoughness." - Thank you. First, speaking it more clearly than I did, that's exactly it. Yeah, it's wholeness. It's if we fragment ourselves in order to effectively fit in as children, right? So we've got this eclectic, weird interest or we have a sexuality that doesn't fit in with our. So we go, that's not me, that's other people. And you see it come through in all kinds of projections. So often in some of the most strict, religious communities, they have, as we know, these pastors are these priests and I'm not saying all priests, but are some of whom are most likely to be vocally anti-gay, but have secret dalliances on the side. Because they've split off that piece of themselves, because they believe that their community and God does not approve of who they are, right? So we all do this in different ways. Our community does approve of our sadness, it doesn't approve of our sensitivity, of our artistry, whatever it is. And so when recovering all of that wholeness, you get back more of yourself. And what that looks like is more creativity, more connection, more joy. You stop trying to impress the people that you've been so caught up on for the last 10 years and actually start hanging out with the people that have loved you all along and are there. You become aware that there are more people like that all around you. I know that I spent a lot of time focused on the person who was just that of reach, but like as you described in your. - Zone of proximal development socially. - Yeah, exactly. - Yeah. - Relationally? - Yes, yes, yes. So the question that I have, and I think is kind of an important one, is to try and get people to think about what their definition of success is. Like what does getting the outcome that you want look like? And at each level of resolution or depth, or the outcome that I want is to be financially secure. The outcome that I want is for the people that I admire toward Miami. The outcome that I want is to be achieved with my emotions and be able to feel things. The outcome that I want is to truly know God, whatever it might be. And the conflict that I see comes between people who have differing definitions of the outcome that they want for their life. So the person that's action oriented is saying, well, you are trading the thing that I want, which is outcomes for the thing that you want, which is emotional presence, connectedness, sense of peace. And I think the reason that we have this bit of self-doubt in the back of our minds, as you're the person that's moving through it, is you turn around and look at the person who is congruent, who has the thing plus the confidence and conviction that you used to have. I like, I've lost all of those. I've had to let go of all of those. My real world results are fucking falling backward. Yeah. And I no longer appear as certain and I don't have the certainty myself to carry myself through. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they don't respect me as much and I'm less effective in the world. And I also have self-doubt about whether or not the thing that I'm doing is the thing I'm supposed to be doing. He goes, well, where in there is the reward in each level, it the same as, you're telling me that I'm not going to sleep in, which is something that's comfortable for me to do, in order to get up and do my meditation or go to the gym on time. And I'm going to be ostracized by my friends because I can't go out, my drinking buddies aren't my drinking buddies, 'cause I'm not drinking no more. And I don't have my gym buddies yet because I haven't gone to the gym enough to get respect from the people that go to the gym and I haven't worked out how to speak to them and what their culture is. Yeah. So at each different fucking level, you're becoming less effective in the paradigm that you know on the sort of plane of existence that you're aware of. To go through dark night at the soul, to then come back out the other side. And do you remember when Jordan talked about King Arthur and the Knight to the Round Table? No, I don't know this one. Oh, dude. So they have to go, King Arthur and the Knight to the Round Table, they need to go and get treasure from the dragon. They all set off on a journey. In order to get to the dragon, they have to go through the forest. Each man enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him. Hmm. Hmm. Oh, fucking love that visual. I think it's so sick. It's so cool. Okay, what is your particular pathology? What is your particular fear? Because that's the thing that you're going to face. Is it, you know, people pleasing is it the inability to sit with silences? Is it the fact that you desperately need the validation of other people? Is it, you do, pick your, you know, mental malady of choice? Hmm. That's the thing that you end up facing. No, no, no, no. Yeah, I just, I really want to like, plainly call out what the pain is for every level there's a devil. Yes. And what is the devil that you're, to try as best as we can to be like, okay, I think this is probably what it's going to feel like to go through each one. So for someone moving from action to emotion. I mean, you just nailed it, which is I am at every level you are giving up success in that thing to get something that you have no promises. Brian Wettin has an interesting framing, not just around this, but he says a travesty is when you give up the hire for the lower. So travesty is when you trade your inner piece for money. Sacrifice is when you give up the lower for the hire. And so you give up the utter freedom of being a bachelor to start a family or something like that. And so I think this is, this is, it's, you know, to point another myth. This is Abraham. This is the sacrifice. This is the willingness to give up the lower for the hire. And that story's pretty horrifying in a lot of ways 'cause he ties up his son and it's about to kill him. But the underlying idea is that there is a hire. There is, there is a command inside of me that I'm not going to deny. I'm terrified of it. I don't want to do it. Soren Kierkrickhard wrote fear and trembling, which is exactly what you're expected to feel when you have that divine call tell you, leave your job. I did this relationship. Get married her. That's terrifying one. Have a baby. Like when that call from this place is you get familiar with it calls, it asks you to trade in your identity of who you were and it is an ego death every time. Every single time that little identity must die. And something else is born. And there's not like the guarantee, even though we can rationally, "I'm still gonna be alive and all these things." But that's the feeling is ego death. - Yeah, dig into the fear and trembling. So I think a lot of people, the sort of people that have made it this far into this episode. I assume either going, "What the fuck in here?" Or they say, "Oh, there's something here. There's like, I'm resonating in the something here." - Utanic, no. - There is something here. - There's something here. - Evidence-based, Veritasi Zero Calary Energy Drink. That fear and trembling, that, appearing over the precipice, that sort of existential vertigo, where you go like, "Yeah, yeah." You're like, "Holy fuck." Like that's, what more is it to say about that sensation and about stepping into it and about the first steps and the biggest steps? - You don't have to force yourself, it will call. It will call you. And if you're going sitting here and you probably haven't made it this far, but if you're going, "I don't know, I kind of just, I really encourage and love people being where they're at." So I think a mistake that I had made, which is everybody needs to move as quickly as possible through these phases. That's all the optimizer idea. Your time will come. If what I am saying is true, this is not something you have to do. Like your ego, it's not gonna be the one doing this. It's going to, in many ways, you have to participate and say, "Yes, at some point, you have your choice," as we talked about earlier, but the call will come. And you can ignore it about 10 million times, it will keep ringing for you. And the consequences will get more and more dire. You ignore it once, you know, you go out, it's a little bit of a difficult relationship. Ignored for 20 years, you're in a loveless relationship and you know, you got kids in a divorce on your hands, like all of that sort of stuff. The consequences of not listening begin to erode the actions, the results, the emotions anyway. So the good news is, you don't have to do anything. - Yeah, one way or another at this. - It'll get you. - Realization is gonna all right. What do you think is going on there is that, do you come to think about it in material terms, do you come to think about it as the universe, having to ramp up the volume of the lesson until you go like, "Hey, Charlie, now please." - If all of this is right, fundamentally, you are so much more than you are aware of. And we all recognize this implicitly, which is if I were to say, you know, what's your blood pressure right now? What's happening in your liver? Obviously there are pieces of you of which you are unaware and do not need to be in charge of them. When you go to sleep, they just keep humming along, keeping you going. There are massive psychological pieces of us, spiritual pieces of us that exist, that we're unaware of. You just don't have to be aware of. It's taken care of for you. But it's still you. So the idea is that this always has been the case. It always will be the case. You're just waking up to it and becoming more aware of it as you can swallow it. because if you were to be We dumped into it as some people do with intense psychedelic experiences. You can crack. You can break yourself if you go a little bit too fast into these sorts of things. So actually rather than speeding through these, it's like enjoy. Enjoy the ride. I remember believing that optimization and getting everything, like 25, 26, 27 was at the end all be all. Some of the happiest and most joyous times of my life was doing that stuff. You just can't go back. You can't step in the same river twice. Right? So where I want to help people and you asked who's there, it's when you're like, I remember it was so good. Like, why can't I make it go back to that? It's you can't go back. You know too much. You have learned too much. You've got to move forward. And so what I hope to do with the rest of my career and I'm learning in this conversation and others is to really help people at those paradigm shift points. There's lonely chapter moments to move gracefully into the next phase because it is a bear. For all the reasons that you said, it's not fun to do. Nobody is really encouraging you to do it in your current sphere. I would just love, love, love to hold space for people to make those leaps. It's such a privilege to watch somebody as you've seen. If you've ever seen someone exit out of victim consciousness and start to go to the gym and start to dial in because of something that you've said, it's like, oh my god. It feels so good. It's true at every level. The next one, the problem is the movement from action to emotion is so unsexy in a way that the movement from results to action is not. That every underdog movie ever in history has a montage of a guy sorting his life out by learning to be disciplined and up with aiming. Very few of them have a guy deeply learning to get in touch with the inner child inside of him and crying at Christmas parties. Very few. Very few. If it is, it's wrapped in this redemption of a person who was too far on one side in terms of their masculine. This was a righteous correction that was like comically needed in order to rebalance the people around them. And the most part, a man specifically getting in touch with his emotions is not in service of him, in service of the people around him. In some ways, that's beautiful, but the way that Hollywood portrays it is not that. It's not this sort of existential gift to the world. It's like, no, his wife needed him to be more attuned when she was on his phone and filling an Excel spreadsheet when they were at dinner. Like, yeah. Okay, that's a pretty low resolution way to look at it. Yeah. I mean, you're very right. I think we live in a, and either childlike or adolescent culture in terms of most people's development. And even the term unsexy is like, that's really what adolescents care about. Adolescents are trying to be sexy. That's the thing. And into your 20s, 30s, it's fine. It's not to say that you can't have it, but it's not sexy. It's loving. And there's a difference that like, like, you're not trying to be sexy is do other people find me attractive and want to more towards me. Something is do I feel love and am I rating it to myself and to other people? So you're right. It's not sexy. It's loving. And even I think those words are apt because the quality of romantic interactions that you choose in this period shifts from what's sexy, who's cool, who's physically attractive, who can help me with my status to who do I love and what do I love? And that changes the quality of your romantic relationships dramatically. Before we continue, if you think that all protein powders are basically the same, congratulations. That's exactly what they want you to think. 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Right now you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com/modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom checkout. That's live m-o-m-e-n-t-o-u-s.com/modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. What if I know that you mentioned basically the volume of the lesson will get turned up until you start to hear it, would be a way to maybe say that. Or you die. Or you die. And say that there's someone who goes, "I feel like the volume's like kind of loud already." And the fleeting thoughts and the little whispers are kind of. I feel ready to pay attention to them. But I'm still scared of making that transition. You mentioned that you want to be kind of a careful shepherd. Who was the boatman that helped get Dante across the river? Who's that? You know Dante's in Ferno. It's not Karen from this mythology. Yes, yes. So he's blind, I think. And I say, "I've got my freaking mythology to us." You want to be this like boatman, gentleman thing. You're like, "Hey, you're going from this bit of land to this bit of land here." And let me make it at least a little bit less scary that this is a journey that you can do with grace, right graciously. I think was one of the ways that he said, "Someone is like on the precipice. They're on the cusp of. " Yeah. "I feel like this is an evolutionary step that I'm prepared to take and I'm kind of like ready." Without pushing and without going like, "Wait for the volume to be turned up." What are some of the things that you would say to that sort of a person? Yeah. One, what I hope to convey for the first chunk of this is this is normal. This is, you're not broken, that this is happening to you. In fact, if you want to take some spiritual pride in it, like you're advanced, you're moving quickly. And even though it's hard, nothing's broken. The second thing that I would offer would be you're going to enter into a stage probably if you're coming from the optimizer stage that is far more irrational and feminine and intuitive than you're familiar with. And those two words probably terrify you because they're associated with the victim stage, which is, I just, I'm tumbleweed and like just happens to me and I have no command of anything. It is evolution, but feels like the evolution. Correct. And that's, I totally get the optimizer, see somebody who is doing work intuitively and they're like, "That's who I used to be 10 years ago and my life was miserable. No way am I leaning into that." But there's a difference between listening to craving and listening to intuition. So we're trying to turn up experiment with and explore the feminine, irrational, intuitive callings that you feel. So there's a number of ways to get closer to this and there's degrees of safety and risk involved with all of them. So some of them are, go with the one intuitively. It seems interesting to you first, what do you want to say? So you've got standard meditation practices. You have breathwork practices, whim off and otherwise stand gruff. You have therapy. You have men's groups. You have psychedelics. You have sound healings where they play the balls and you just allow the vibration to wash over you. You've got long walks in nature. You've got strenuous physical activity that is not rigidly structured. I think that the gym where you're pushing yourself and you have to do it, but even you could still drop into like a zen-less zone state and that sort of thing. But I would say like more sports, recreational, those sorts of things. Like all of these sorts of things, find the one that hits you and I've done all of these singing dance. All of these kinds of things are this intuitive flow, feminine, reconnect you with joy, feelings, emotions. And then from that, what you'll start to realize is if you do a breathwork or a therapy, like, oh man, I need to have a conversation with my dad. And so then. Came here to do breathwork. Yeah, I came here to do breathwork and sometimes I just need to call this person and tell them I love them. I need to apologize. I need to say that that upset me and hurt me. You're going to start cleaning up the messes that you've left untended. Things that you pretended were okay that are not okay, actually. And be gentle with yourself. It's not like I did the breathwork. I got, okay, calm right now immediately after. This is going to be a time span of like, I'll do breathwork again tomorrow and a day or two. And if I still feel that way, I can call them when I'm a little bit less raw and I have a little bit more of that containment. So I'm able to have this conversation in a way that is both emotionally vulnerable without emotionally exploding on this person. Yes, yes, yes. And so as you start to do these different intuitive feminine practices, you're going to get little hits of, I want to make a dungeon to drag and show. I want to make this phone call. I want to do this thing. I don't care how much it costs. You know, like that sort of stuff. And you want to experiment in little ways. And this was crazy, but I was playing a video game two weeks ago. I know crazy. But so I'm playing a video game. And after every little level, it's called Hades 2. It's got my Greek mythology. I love it. After every minute or so, you have to make a choice between upgrades that you get. And as I'm playing this game, I'm like doing it. And I am optimizing my upgrades 'cause they have percentages associated with them. I'm doing the math in my head to see which one is gonna output the most damage to do the thing. And for some reason, fine, I think God, it clicked to me. I was like, "What am I doing?" I've turned this game into a test where I am every time picking the same upgrade. I'm not exploring, I'm not having. So I went, I want the purple one. And it's like that was objectively worse. I want the purple one. (laughs) I start doing random things in this game and there were a number of things that happened. One, I remember that I was meant to have fun. That like I was playing a game that I had made a job somehow. And this is what I did with my business, but this is just another apograffal story of, yeah, I do it even in video games. So I started having fun. I unlocked, I escaped my local minimum. So what happens when we're optimizers? Is we optimize around the world that we understand and know, right? So if you're optimizing for muscles or for whatever, you've got an idea that this is what people like, that maybe women respond to it and it's best for my health. But if you explore it a little bit further, maybe you'd find other modes of exercise that better served your deeper want and deeper need. - Or longer leave as that you're just not aware of. - Exactly. But if you can't explore, 'cause you're such a hyper optimizer, you can't figure that out. So I actually got better in this game after a dip. I was like, "Oh wow, I found these new build paths." And then third was I started looking at the artwork in the game, which is stunningly beautiful. And again, this is meant as a metaphor. Smell the roses. Look at the artwork in the game that you're playing, right? I had gone through life trying to get to the next end as fast as I could and it had permeated even to my recreational video game point. (laughs) And so letting go of that, I was like, "Wow, and then I'm looking up myths of Aphrodite "in areas and all these things." And I realized, "Oh, I didn't want to play the video game "to veg. "I wanted to play the video game to get inspired "about these myths so that I could sit down later "with chat GPT and just reflect on them." And I was like, "Oh, that's where my intuition was taking me. "It was taking me to the game, to the artwork, "to the deeper exploration of this myth, "but you have to remain in contact with your intuition." One other thing on this that I think is worth mentioning is that a lot of people give their intuition a horrible reputation because at one point, they knew they shouldn't have gotten into that relationship with the girl, but they said, "No, I need to. "Like, I feel it. "It's calling me." Three years later, it explodes. She cheats on them and I'll go sideways and they go, "That was the part of me "that didn't have a checklist because my intuition "pulled me there, my instinct." Well, they don't realize is that, "Yes, it might have pulled you into the relationship." But then at month one, it was dingy saying, "Okay, something's off here." And at six months in, it was saying, "The time to get out." So the problem is we listen to intuition a tiny, tiny bit, and then we try to bail, but intuition doesn't work like analytics does. Our mind sees the end that we're headed towards. I want a physique and then it backwards breaks things into steps so that we can achieve the desired outcome. Intuition starts at the next step. It keeps you foggy as to the actual place that you're headed. You don't know and it's greater than you could possibly imagine, but it only tells you play the video game. But if you wanna use intuition fully, you've gotta stick with it through these various steps and let it take you to its desired end, which is terrifying for people who want control. Because you're playing a video game this way, so time, and I don't know why I'm doing this, but my intuition is telling me too. And now I'm looking at a artwork in this dumb video game, but if you stick with it, I have found, this is a deeper layer of self-trust is, "Oh, I can trust my analytical mind and I can trust my intuitive, flowing, feeling, thing now." Which is a really cool something to have come online. The perennial over-optimizer insecure over-achiever thing, walking anxiety disorder harness for productivity, like Andrew Wilkinson says. The reason the people are hyper-optimizers, at least in part, is if you know every different permutation of every different potential outcome and you have prepared for it, you have constrained the uncertainty of the future down. You've created order from chaos, right? I don't need to worry about the potential branching futures because I have obsessed so much that 99.9% of potential future universes are once I've already predicted, accounted for and been ready in order to be able to deal with. This leaves me with just, "I'm ready. I'm ready for this, right?" Uncertainty, anxiety is uncertainty. It's ambiguity about what is going to happen. Anxiety is expectation versus outcome. I do not know what is going to happen. And this is how much our minds abhor uncertainty that we would rather create a nightmare in our mind than we would deal with a more preferable level of uncertainty. We would prefer to imagine the worst possible outcome because at least that collapses the choice architecture down to a single place. Now the place is the worst, it's significantly worse than maybe we'll even be physically capable by the universe. We imagine things that would break the laws of physics. But fucking, someone comes back from the dead to torment us in this version of something. But we prefer that to uncertainty. So when you've got this choice space, you can think about thinking in superpositions, right? You collapse the superposition down, you observe it. And you're like, "Okay, I'm going to make. This is exactly what's going to happen." The overoptimizer decides to have as many branches open in their mind as possible, prepare for each different one of them. And that is antithetical to. I trust myself. I'll be okay no matter what happens. I'm whole now and I'm enough. And whatever comes in the future, I will be okay and whole then too. - Yeah. - And if you have come from a situation where you go, "Well, I happened to life. I had agency and intention. And I took myself from a place that I didn't want to be to one that I did through intention and agency and action and leaning in and making a fucking dent in the world." That's the strategy. And that was the big first. Like this is literally every first level, archetype, movie, underdog, rocky, fucking cutscene thing, ever. Like that's literally what. That is the hero's journey. And it gets you to like three o'clock. - There's a masculine thread, which is the one you're talking about, which is order out of chaos, analytical, structured. I happen to life initiating. And then there's the feminine thread, which is receptive, listening, what does life want for me, feeling, flowing, et cetera. And so it's not to just be feminine. I think this is very important. It's not merely because if you see people that don't have this masculine piece, this is almost like the LA woo-woo. I'm a spiritual coach at age 23. I just follow my bliss and follow my intuition and I can't pay my bills. There's something that they have there, which is a willingness to go with the flow, but they lack the ability to unify these two. And so Carl Jung talked about the high-ros gamos, which is the sacred marriage of the divine masculine and the divine feminine principle. I think as a society, this is perhaps what's going on with men and women at some level. What we've done is said, okay, look, men, you're gonna do the masculine piece. Women, you're gonna do the feminine piece. The union is gonna come at the level of both of you guys getting together. It works. It's been stable for a long time. There's problems with it as we've sort of seen, which is women aren't countering the problems that men have had. Now that they enter into the workplace, they're finding meaninglessness, which men have known for a long time, right? Just slaving away to take care of the family that you don't get to really participate in or be emotionally connected to. That's been hundreds of years of men in the West have known that and now all over the world. Men are experiencing the difficulties of women, which is, hey, when I get in touch with my emotions, it hurts. It hurts like hell. So now I'm realizing that I would like people to consider me and take care of me. And I'd like more systemic issues to make things a bit easier for me. And women are going, yeah, we've been saying that for a long time. So I feel like there's been this initially painful, but beautiful flip that is occurring culturally, where women have entered into masculine roles and are getting the benefits of it, but also are beginning to see the costs and the things that the men in their lives have shouldered that they have not understood. And men are getting into the feminine realm of starting to get in touch with their emotions that go, oh, wow, this is a lot harder than I had recognized. And my hope is in my personal relationship and more broadly, instead of having the primary unit of masculine and feminine togetherness be husband and wife, I think there's an increasing opportunity for more integrated individuals to be integrated inside of oneself and then to meet the other person and to form something greater. Because when you are dependent upon the other person for feminine access, meaning you have a wife, you are the breadwinner, you're the guy, but she's the one with all the positive emotional feelings and she's connected to the kids. There's a sense of dependency and resentment and frustration and control. Why do you get that thing and I don't? Yeah. And because I'm doing all of this, I'm in charge. I get to tell you what to do. You see the woman side of it, which is, I'm completely dependent on this man for survival. I need to people please him. I'm frustrated. I'm gonna cheat with the poor boy. I'm going to, you know, I want to escape this, even though I need him to survive. I'm frustrated that I need him to survive. So the idea that we've talked about for a long time, that old cliched advice, which is, don't get into a relationship until you are whole in yourself. I think a really useful way to think of that is how are my masculine and my feminine threads integrated inside of myself? Am I capable of achievement, initiation, structure, analysis? And am I also capable of flow, receptivity, intuition, and feeling? So good, dude. So good. If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. H-Sleep just released their brand new pod 5 Ultra, which includes the world's first temperature regulating duvet. Parot with their smart mattress cover, which cools or warms each side of your duvet by up to 20 degrees, and you've got a climate controlled cocoon built for deep uninterrupted rest. New base even comes with a built-in speaker, so you can fall the sleep to white noise or stay awake listening to me. And it's got upgraded biometric sensors that are running health checks every night, spotting stuff like abnormal heartbeats and changes in HIV. It even starts warming or cooling your bed an hour before you get into it, which is why 8-Sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night. Best of all, there's a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they will give you your money back, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the pod 5 Ultra by going to the link in the description below, or heading to 8sleep.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom. A checkout that's e-i-g-h-t-sleep.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom. A checkout. What have you learned about the language of masculine and feminine is not one that I am super familiar with, and I think maybe part of it is that there's a good amount of shame attached to that as you suggested. Like, what mad? It's cool to say a tuned connected dropped in, aware, transcending, including, like, will bury in language type stuff as a guy. Like, that still feels, it's the same as Joe's vulnerability definition, right? It still feels like kind of strong, but to say, "Oh, I need to embrace my feminine energy." Like, "Go fuck yourself." My irrationality. That's a big one. Irrational. This is the critique that men have of their wives and girlfriends. She's so irrational. We are irrational. I think this is one of the big tricks that men play on themselves. They pretend that the women and their lives and they project all of the irrational to them. How irrational is it to try to get more and more and more money and more and more status past a certain point? That is hyper irrational. Like, to what end are you? You have proved to yourself that the thing that you are attaining is not the thing that makes you happy and yet you're still trying to attain more of it. Deeply irrational. Well done. Super, super, fucking clever. So those pieces of feminine, irrational, singing, dancing, flowing, enjoying one's body, right? I think even for what I hear and have experienced with myself, part of what men get out of their sexual relationships is many times they're able to be with someone that is more capable of pleasure than they are and they're able to vicariously participate in the pleasure and they're making it happen and that's good enough for them. Now they're not experiencing it at the same full body level that their partner is perhaps capable but they're close to it. Well think about that. If you want to really fucking point the finger at guys, how many guys during sex, treat sex as another business that they need to successfully exit? Well, if I can go through this particular sequence of steps and in the past I've managed to build an exit as similar business. In this particular way, so I've got a blueprint and I got a few tricks up my sleeve that I can deploy in this way. It's like, oh, not only did you turn your video game Hades 2 into a business and that you had to optimize, but you turned this thing which is supposed to be like loving presence into a business that you're supposed to build needs it. And what I've seen in myself that I believe could be a pattern at least with some and is the part of what drove early Charlemont command and early Charlie was deep people pleasing that was particularly directed at women. Like I was okay if some of the guys didn't like be, but I desperately, desperately wanted women to like me and was willing to shape my habits, my exercise routine, everything to like bring in as much female attention as I could. And I know that experience in sex of like trying to make it good for the other person at a at a high level, which I didn't realize you do that for long enough. You just you just want to get out of there. You'd like I'm tired of just trying to make this other person happy. And it can create you don't realize it or I didn't realize it. Shadow frustration, shadow resentments, shadow of things because you don't know and I've heard you talk about this. You're so obsessed with meaning that you don't know how to access pleasure. Yeah, that's I mean the Frankles inverse law. Yeah. I think is so fucking prevalent. That's another one that's robust. It's a little bit harder for people to grasp and took a real long time for me to look at. But yeah, if pleasure doesn't come easily to you say that pleasure is basically for suckers and you focus on meaning. It's like I will grind set my way through life because the slow accumulation of progress towards something which you're supposed to be a well-meaning goal is kind of more reliable. Actually, I think to a lot of men. It's like it's it's more objective. It's like, huh, I see where I was on graph yesterday versus today. It's it's preferred projected. The outcome is the meaning in many ways. Like I'm fighting for the freedom of my country. It's it's this. I know what I'm doing. I'm going to break it into smaller steps. We're going to have these little battles on the way. This this is persistent and clean and I'm directed at that thing limited chaos limited uncertainty. Pleasure is right now. It's right now right now. I could be left right now. It could be right. I have to I'm going to follow this flow and it and it doesn't provide any long-term guarantees context or anything. It's gone the next moment. And so it's it's this obsession with the masculine thread. I think in many ways of a future orientation and driving in towards something rather than can I just be present and understand that I can't control it. It's going to leave. And that's okay. Two examples from my my life of your Hades two thing. George Maxx 30th birthday in Miami last year. We were playing like foot tennis over a net and we were playing this game and I realized that it was competitive but not very beautiful and I said okay well why don't we change it to be even though we're on opposite side of the net. We'll be part of a team and the goal is to have like the fanciest tricks like two of the guys are X champion freestyle footballers but neither of them are using their skills. Both of them were trying to win the game. I'm like I don't want to see who can do this. I want to hand the ball off to the guy that can do three round the worlds in a row and like watch him do something and go fucking sick do yeah yeah and then and then watching pass it across the net. So we did that and as soon as I said it one of the guys was like yeah yeah yeah and then we can like count how many we do and that can be I'm like no. I can't even do anything again. You're a reverse engineering and the second time it seems to happen around nets I suppose. The second time I was playing pickleball a co-ed game with this girl who was 21 and Austin Texas me and her versus another guy and girl and it's one one on games going into best of the final game and we're like we've done the little thing where you tap paddles over the top of the net and we turn around and we're walking back to the baseline and I'm like okay so we need to remember that like when he comes up to the net he's really bad in his backhand so he can force that in but we need to play into the kitchen the dinks need to be a little bit wide room we go to do this and like look I'm loving your says we can go with being a little bit deeper in this she turns to me and she goes yeah let's not forget to have fun. I was like yeah yeah very good and that moment of I can just enjoy what's happening right now. Sure there are times if you're a neurosurgeon probably the in-moment enjoyment of what you're doing that's not the time for it but and this is where I think the definition of success that I mentioned earlier on it is a really important piece. You can go through life trying to optimize for maximum outcomes like maximum objective success like other people can see it I can touch it feel it put it in a photo album or a bank account or a follow-up number or whatever online but you will peer over the present moments shoulder a lot looking for what's coming next the hyper vigilance will cause you to never really have your mind rest where your feet are yeah I'm seeing this with my live shows I'm on tour at the moment playing a region theater this Saturday in LA and I can go out on stage and do my show like as close to perfect as I can get I never be there I'm not there I'm not at the show and in some ways maybe that's part of a flow state but I think even within like the flow stateness like when you lose yourself in it you're not you're not fully like this rules like this fucking rules so you have to I found for me the moments were in the set I can pause and be like for just like two seconds like fuck I'm there I'm gonna look back this is how I kind of know that it's working at least a little bit this is super white belt like fresh clay shit but that's what I remember I don't remember delivering the lines I don't necessarily even remember the laughs or I'm I remember incidents where that break the pattern so the sound went out in New York. And I was working with just the stage where she was pointing at me, bouncing them off the back wall to 1,500 people while they tried to fix the sound. So I had to like freestyle some bullshit on stage. And I remember that and that was cool. But the only other bits that I remember are where I've gone like, and seen inside of my own mind and gone, here I am. I'm walking back to the baseline and we're about to have fun. We're playing foot tannis and we're going to try and make it beautiful. And I get the sense this is where the success thing comes in. That I don't know if this is true. Maybe it gets you from 100% of performance to 150 or 101. Or maybe it gets you to 95 or even 90. But regardless of that plane of success, outcome-based stuff, it's like how much more presence and how much more joy and awareness have you got of what's going on. And ultimately, why are you doing these things? Presumably, you're trying to achieve success to create some sort of an emotional state that is sufficiently enjoyable for it to be worthwhile. Or else, why would you be doing it? Like even if you ask the why question enough times, it ends up being like, because it feels good. It's like, why do you need money to get the house, to get the car, to get the girl, to get the-- because it makes me feel nice and enough? And you're like, well, what if you could access that more directly, by just going, oh, fuck. I'm here. Yeah, I'm here. I'm fucking here. Like, holy shit, we're alive. Yeah. That fucking rule. Like, you know what I mean? That's it. That's it. Yeah. How-- I'm so curious. You've asked me without trying to say it for this conversation. Like, where are you using maybe some of the models that we've talked about? Where does success honestly lie for you, these days? Yeah. It depends how juvenile I'm being and how brave I feel. Yeah. So for me, a lot of it is around courage. It's the courage to step into listening to that intuition. There's fleeting thoughts and those whispers in the back of my mind. It's the courage to let go of patterns that I know have given me things that I desperately wanted in the past. Validation from people, recognition, a sense of mastery, admiration from people I admired, respect. No, it's crazy. I just heard it interrupt. The feminine thread is so important here because it's the feminine thread that is capable of receiving. So there's part of the reason that we keep pursuing validation and money is because we haven't been able to receive what has already been heaped upon us. Because we haven't well developed the ability to go. And yeah, without forcing it on you, man, I mean, I come in here. Dude, you called me. I'll just, you call me four years ago, five years ago. I had three million. You had less than a million. Oh, it's like less than 100,000. Yeah. And you were way too confident for your size. And like, really good carry isn't friendly. Like, let's get on the phone. We did it. Assumed a bunch of familiarity with you. Yeah, it was great. Like, finesse you into being my friend. And you were, I think you probably had your computer on a bureau. Yeah. Yeah. Just like, my God. Like, you've made, you've manifested. But this isn't arriving, dude. What is? And it's strange because the line between high standards and satisfaction or enoughness is delicate because you go, I want to further refine my art. I want to become better at the things that I do. I want to continue seeing creativity and finding opportunities and ways to progress and deliver things that are cool and different, like filming in a fucking garage in the middle of LA for no reason other than it's pretty. That's the feminine thread. And you do have, because you actually can't get this far without some of it. And I've been, I've been all or nothing people. I mean, like, all of these people have this intuitive hits. You can't get very far without it. But your guys attention to detail. The unnecessary nature. Completely unnecessary. That is, why do we need a big rock, honey? I don't want to. That's a lot of money. It's like that is to see beauty in the unnecessary and to be energized to participate in, create, cultivate that sort of beauty that maybe no one else recognizes. That's like for you. That's a beautiful intuition to lean into in your business. And I think it has, it has paid you dividends, but not in the immediate sense that a lot of ROI options that you might have chosen. Well, I mean, we just put out this, the first to a diary, which was tracking the trip to New York and then Toronto and then back home over there. Honestly, I think it might be one of the most beautiful things we've ever put out. It was so fucking cool. I watch it back and it's just this gorgeously shot, very slow pacing on the edit. The cuts take fucking ages. There's payoffs that don't occur until like the end of this over our long vlog. There's entire scenes that are just left untouched, like seven and a half minutes. And I'm like, this is so fucking cool. I'm so proud of it in ways that I'm not of the best performing TikTok that we've got. So okay, you asked about what the current stage of evolution is that I'm at. And I mentioned that on the days where I feel the bravest, on the days where I feel the most in tune, on the days where I've picked my phone up the latest and gone for a walk and done my meditation and done my breath work and stuff, not from a place if I need to overoptimize, but from a place if this makes me feel good and I just like doing it. Like that's how that's my preferable morning. I would say I kind of took the emotion, red pill, probably about just under a year and a half ago, like summer of last year and getting ill and like eating shit with that was probably partly needed. Maybe this is my like, no, no, that's that's very common. It has to break. It has to stop working. It was a market correction on a stock that had a fucking serious ball run. You know, I moved to America three, not four, nearly four years ago now. And the channel was like 200,000 subs and we're going to hit four million this month. There was me Dean and a Mormon in a Facebook Messenger group chat that was like the whole team and you walked in and you can't even remember the names of everyone that's here today. Not that any of those things are like markers of validation or even efficiency, but what they do show is that growth has happened in like a relatively short space of time. And the slowing down of momentum, like the curtailing of that inertia, like that forward momentum thing, stops you from hiding a lot of patterns and whispers and fleeting thoughts in bravado. And you know, this is how the rock star that just continues to release fucking slammer after slammer after slammer after the album after the album after the tour after the and they end up developing all of these patterns that they've never had to reflect on because the world is just the volume of success from the world is so great that the fleeting thoughts and the whispers in the back of their mind just can't compete at all. And yeah, it takes you getting to the stage where the world turns up the volume of that of the repercussions and the consequences. So that was a big part of it. And then I kind of made this, I think if people went back and looked at the podcast at the back end of last year, I said something to the effect of like I'm really interested in emotions and really interested in trying to be less emotionally decapitated, like feel things below the neck. Okay, I'm going to work on that and I'm going to ask a bunch of questions. I would go as far as to say that your, I would say that that video, the first video that you did, Theo von Sean Strickland, was probably 20% of, to maybe a little bit more, maybe even a third of like, oh, there's some there there. Like I see something in what Charlie has uncovered in the way that he's speaking about this in the patterns that he is sort of unearthed. Oh, that's like a, that, that is nourishing to me in a way that reading atomic habits for the first time was nourishing to me or listening to Peterson Taitel, the truth was nourishing to me and stand up straight with your shoulders back in clean your room. I'm like, okay, so that was moving from like results to action and then this is moving from action to emotions. I'm like, okay, there's another level to this and the fact that it was at the time where you go, you know, things are going pretty well. But like, huh, there is something here that is not whole. I have learned a teachable lesson number, fucking 54. And then this year has been me trying to increase the bravery to step into that stuff. It is a challenge when you have planted a flag in the ground. And I love this analogy of planting a flag, especially if you've got expectations from people around you because you say, this is me and this is what I stand for and this is who I am, especially if you've got a public platform because what you thought was a flag you'd planted in the ground on a piece of territory is a tether that you're attached to. It's a stake that you've driven in and you're like, oh, this wasn't a flagpole. This is something with a fucking leash attached to it. And I'm on the end of the leash and I can't really run away that much without upending it all. And people going, well, who the fuck is this guy? You said this thing previously and now you don't believe in it, like spending the first three years of this podcast doing life hacks, optimizer episodes about the best note taking like space repetition, ebbing house, forgetting curve flashcards. I'm like, five steps to talk to a girl. Yeah, yeah. It's the same fucking arc. And then this sense of, well, people came for that. And then also the potential of the thing that I previously thought was the solution I've realized is maybe the problem. And you go, well, I'm going to have to, like, undo not only my own thinking, but I'm going to have to publicly state. I thought that if I was able to remember everything I learned that that would be the answer. I've managed to do pretty much that. It's not the answer. Fuck. It's well seen in yourself. Really well seen. So yeah, now at this stage where it's quite precipice for me doing the retreat with Joe was challenging in a way that I've not been challenged in a beautiful in a way that I've never really seen before. So that was like a sober, but psychedelic dose. Yeah, that's another thing I hadn't said, which is these with the right person, those sorts of weekend or week long retreat things. Very powerful. Yeah, that's kind of stuff. Yeah. So that kind of, that was the equivalent. They say that, you know, like whatever meditation or the level zero, consciousness altering stuff, taking psychedelics, heavy dose of psychedelics is basically taking the stair left to the top of the mountain briefly. And then you come back down and you're like, okay, I kind of got an idea about where it is that I'm going. That was a way of seeing that soberly, I think there were a few experiences there, which I again, I hadn't taken anything. I have no explanation for what the fuck happened. I literally have no explanation for one for what in the Theo Vaughan video, one of the things that I hadn't realized when I did that that I've reflect on now is that you know what me chan cry in that Theo Vaughan video. For those of you who haven't watched Theo Vaughan is interviewing Sean Strickland and I Sean breaks down in tears talking about his abuse and Theo beautifully just with him and a big strong UFC guy. Do you remember the sentence that he said before? It's okay, but we don't need to talk about the shons, but it made Sean cry. No. Okay. He says, I stop believing in God. That's the wound. Like he was talking about the abuse that had happened to him and hiding under his dad's bed and yeah, yeah, yeah, and he goes stop believing in God. That's it, man. Like that's, yes, the abuse is horrible and terrible and isn't that, but the wound wound is there. And it's there for everybody and I just to get my atheist bonafide is in I had the chapters of a book that I was going to release before Christopher Hitchens release. God is not great. That was my atheist book. I was going to go in line with Chris and Sam and deeply admiring and Alex too. Love what Alex is up to. Yeah, man, ripped. I didn't want my skull ripped off either. I wasn't hoping that that would happen with me, but it did. Yeah, I have those mountain top experiences. They're beautiful. And then the question is, did I take me still years? I'm sure like, how do I live like this? Like, how do I function and live and with this integrated into how I treat people and how I treat myself and how I can conduct my business? The first time that we left the farm that we were on, so we'd been left, you know, seven days, pretty much 12 hours a day of unrelenting, very deep emotional work with this one group of people, 11 other people plus four facilitators. The first day that we left, we were advised, go and do the actual first day we left, we went to the beach, we went to the beach and I cried at the sun, cried at the moon, cried at the dog and then nearly cried at the seagull. It's a super moon tonight. It's going to be rad. There was something happening last night. It was super fun. It was super fun. Yeah. Tonight's the full moon. Okay. Fucking well, we'll be ready. We'll be ready. But you know, but you just started to interrupt. The separation from the stars and the moon is a profound nationwide, mostly citywide, travesty. Like the inability to locate yourself in something that eternal, which isn't eternal, but it's like that indurable. Oh my God. Yeah. I was watching. That's actually another, look at me just, this is my crying diary. The blood-red super moon that happened in 2021, of 2022. I remember I was in the Airbnb that I lived in for three months when I first moved to America and I was watching Peaky Blinders on my own. So I could not be more engaged in this historic period drama thing. And someone texted me and was like, have you seen the moon? And I got signed onto the balcony of this Airbnb that I'm staying in and I look up and it's this huge bright pink moon and just immediately I'm like floods, like floods of, like sobbing floods of tear. Like what the fuck is a while ago now? So I don't think I'm necessarily had the language. What is going on? Why is this happening? Like shame around like, why am I crying at the fucking moon? Like am I broken? Is there something up with me? Is this weird? Am I feeble? Is this like weak? What is this? I'm glad there's nobody here to see it. And then when we finished the retreat, cried it everything. And then the next day one of the pieces of advice was you should go and get some bodywork done. Like maybe nice, like some gentle bodywork would be like a good way to kind of reintegrate. Me and one of the guys was there, we were like, okay, nobody wanted to drive. Nobody wanted to get into their car. So like I don't feel, I don't feel particularly human. What did they call it? Not karma sick. Fuck. Not dope. It was something sick for how like emotion sick or something which was basically like an emotional hangover that you'd had from that week where everything was a little spacey. It felt very psychedelic. Yeah. No one wanted to drive. But one of the people did and drove us into the local town. We went into this Thai massage pilot place. And the front desk was the classic little running waterfall and like very gently playing music and one woman behind the counter. We had to fill this form in and mean the guy that were there. We're like, we need, we're going to wait outside. Is that okay? Being inside of this very calm, very normal one other person reception area to a massage place that we were going to go in and enjoy was like too much, too much stimulus. People didn't want to drive. People didn't want to talk to people. Someone went into Whole Foods and left without having bought anything. They were like, I don't, I can't, I don't know what to buy. I don't know where to go. I have to put just people in that it was just too stimulating and overwhelming. And the main thing that I realized coming out of that was how many of the patterns I have in life that compensate re mechanisms for a world that is not very gentle with somebody that is an open vessel. Yeah. I think this is, this is, this is, this is okay. So now we can get into the final my my my intuitive crackpot theory. Okay. Here we go. I think that as I watched Love on the Spectrum and I've been going through this stuff myself and I see the the stimming that these autistic people are doing is they're dating and they're rocking and they have the noises are too loud. I'm like, oh, this is someone that doesn't have the coping mechanism to deal with the world with the following is turned up way too loud. And the gifts that are often connected with autistic people, which is like, I can just like play music like nothing. He's just in it. The way that that person is obsessed with buttons like they see something that the rest of us don't see. They they struggle to fit into a world with it is just not sensitive. Right. And so I think what you're experiencing and you'd ask at the beginning and one of the questions that you'd sent to me was sensitivity. I think what happened as you take your armor off, you're like, oh, this is me. I'm sensitive as hell. And in order to function effectively in a world that is too loud, too broad, and bomb-syndomy, all these kinds of things, I've got I've I've learned effective armoring coping mechanisms to make me function well, but at the cost of the beauty at cost of some of my deepest gifts. Can I need to I need to interject. Sorry. Yeah, please. I don't break the fourth wall around like the way that the business operates basically ever, but I think this is a particularly revealing conversation. It probably makes sense. And it's also related to something that happened today. So as a perfect example of being sensitive, open and sort of transparent being a transparent vessel for this sort of stuff is antithetical to operating in the world. somehow or at least it requires a degree of openness that you're not Typically rewarded for in the past which means it's hard to do in the present So this morning I told you maybe one of the most beautiful things and I've like got all excited about this And we've got this edit like use some of my favorite tracks and we did all of this stuff And then during the episode that I recorded this morning There was an error on the upload. I didn't meant that after 10 minutes of it being up It that got taken down we had to re upload and so you're notifications and everyone's paying it They've tried to watch it's taken down like and I'm like we've flubbed the release for this thing that was really beautiful Mm-hmm and during the break of the episode with Matthew when I go to the bathroom to have a pee like the episode go up And someone's like that thing happens and instead of me saying like what what I felt was like fuck Why did this happen? We need to find a solution. It's the objective metric to me. Should anything and I'm gonna what I should have said is like Ow yeah Oh fuck Look I'm sure nobody meant for this to happen, but like oh that hurts like I really loved that thing And I'm also proud of it I know what it other people to feel feel the way that I feel about it and now I'm worried that not as many people are gonna see it I didn't do that. I didn't say that my initial response was like Why would he need to do any to come up with the solution? We're gonna have a five step process to get through the thing It's supposed to be just sitting people now and going like Ow that hurt mm-hmm and Fuck Hope it doesn't happen again. Whatever like I'm maybe not even that and that pattern that that I realized like this armoring that you have of yourself because if you're always this open like you're getting out A lot there are lots of hours of the outers. Yes. Yes credit to Joe a Fantastic developmental thing to deepen into this is to say out loud when you are hurt by someone That's where I took the out from I was saying out the entire ride over based on a phone call that I had this morning Ouch Ouch and I got to it was this anything I could have powered through it I behave totally you know it would have been simple to just this was not a big deal Yeah, but as it did the out just I got to oh my god I didn't feel love from this person and that hurts it just hurts like and they don't have to give you love it just it hurts anyway and We have a choice we can feel the pain and not cut off that aspect of ourselves that and what you describe like the sacrifice and not Feeling the pain is that you lose that that I really wanted people to feel the way that I felt about this Mm-hmm And the net has down some effects of maybe the way that you treat the next blog is more efficient and less beautiful and it's and You lose the essence of the thing to avoid Experiencing pain around its fragility and that is just yeah, that's everywhere keep going through your developmental cookie world My cookie world. Yeah, where were we with? You'd said oh autism yes Autism is related to I really think is people entering the world with an intense sensitivity and I think we can look to people Autists autists of ants for not how we will become at all but like for some of the pains of sensitivity and some of the gifts that are associated with sensitivity and what we can still do is we can still have our Armor that we can put on when necessary we can have our containment for our board meeting and other set and the other thing But the ability to just go oh my god. It's so loud. It is so loud even right now You know there's planes in this and our attention is able to dial in and tune everything out But when you tune everything out you miss the beauty of the flowers and the cars and the the cicada that is making noise and how Awesome everything is so that's one piece. This is a hard tangent, but whatever we've been all over the place today so we talked about mythology mythology is a beautiful connection between emotions and That like God thing and because mythology often deals with gods, but it deals with this archetypal realm that is I find More understandable approachable. And this is what I said Carl Jung is like so great because he bridges that emotional level with the divine and So a beautiful bridge is mythology and I already hear that some of them you've talked about Cassandra and that sort of thing These myths, I mean, I don't know which one is let me see if there's one that is particularly relevant to you There's not one that comes to mind immediately, but using chat GBT to just be like hey, what's the myth of so and so if it if it pops up Really really powerful thing that I have experienced and what do you what do you think about sort of mythology is it a It's not the full dose of religion with some of its sort of Stodgyness and inaccessibility. So here's here's my broad field of religion, spirituality, et cetera There are these mystics all around the world Jesus Muhammad Rumi, you know They get it at various levels. It's tough to translate. It's like how do you say it first off? How do you how does it come out of your mouth in a way that is honest to your experience? Extremely challenging and that for somebody who hasn't had that experience They're going to write it down now in a book and codify how everyone else needs to be so I think that's what's going on with a lot of the big It books is that there is a mystical insight from somebody who got it at a very very very deep level difficult for them to speak difficult for other people to write down 60 years later and then we're a lot of people that aren't Directly connected with that experience projecting their mother and their father onto the creator of the universe that he's upset with me He wants to punish me and a lot of that made it into the text, you know So I don't treat the Bible as Literally every word is true. I but I treated as a repository that has been mis-translated some of the time of a brilliant Mystic like somebody who was who got it and I'd retreat other texts like that like there's some level of Understanding integration that the person who came up with his had that's why it survived so long That's why it was so meaningful to people even if they couldn't describe why it was so meaningful to them so Greek Egyptian these pantheon gods are really useful for relating to you the Architipial emotional patterns of life So for instance the story of Aries Aphrodite and Hephaestus Hephaestus is the craftsman God. He's got a lame leg. He's a craftsman. You might call him a brainiac He's not a physical powerhouse. He's the only God that is crippled He is betrothed and wedded to Aphrodite the goddess of beauty But she cheats on him all the time with the Alphan of Chad Aries right so they have a bunch of kids but the story of Hephaestus and Aphrodite and Aries is that Hephaestus learns that he's being Cuckolded he creates a cage above the bed Aries and Aphrodite he go at it. He drops the cage on them and then brings in all the other gods to laugh at them and It's like an archetypal exploration of the pain of the academically inclined guy who is Try who is hurt by the aggressive masculine man who takes something that he loves and then Moves into his zone of power which is intellectual and shames him and you see this play out I've heard Brennan Lee Mulligan who you might be familiar with who's a Dungeons and Dragons guy very smart tell his very personal story of He was a smart kid the tough kids pushing around made fun of him But he got really good at insulting them so he could just cut them to the core because he was smart enough to do it And so there's these patterns that if you look at these archetypes almost like Rorschach tests which is Which one is calling to me? I don't know. There's something about I'm curious about Aries I'm curious about this you look up the story you read it What do I make of it is a beautiful way to start to Recognize some of these archetypal patterns in your life because they have existed for thousands of years before you And I could go on and on and on and about all the different ones that have been valuable to me, but so symbolic this the story is more than just the story. It's less the literal is that kind of the What's the key? Okay, so the key that Jung Peterson etc. would say is that these are these are like The physically real in a way that is not just metaphorical or symbolic that there are How how can I describe this that there are near universal Structures in human psychology for instance for father and for mother that we do not come in utterly blank slate And there are recurring patterns based on you'd call it evolution or if you're spiritually based just like this is what it is to be human that By relating to these archetypes seeing how they strike us we can learn the pieces of ourselves that are missing So maybe we didn't have the world's greatest mother or greatest father But if we relate to an archetypal story of a good mother or of a good the wise father or something We can get we can Recome into contact with the piece of us that we felt should have been there when we were kids But we couldn't put our finger on we couldn't describe and so we can't explain the pain that we're experiencing of the loss These stories help us reconnect with that in the same way that the heroes journey inspires young men to go out be heroes Understand that there's a sacrifice and a rocky montage that they have to go through these stories give you steps and and relationship with oh that's what was missing or oh that's what's up next for me I'll give you one small example of this is I was really Joseph Campbell has this heroes journey that he charts out and it's basically a clock where you start up here It's three o'clock you meet the mentor you descend into the underworld. It's the belly of the beast It's the garden of the gets semi at the bottom you come back up you get the divine revelation you come back to the community I had been charting where I was and he's got like basically I think 12 to 17 different states stages. And I found myself, I was like, oh, this is belly of the beast. I am lost, utterly lost. And shortly after that, I was like, what's up next? Temptation of the woman. So in the story of the Odyssey, and saw me of them. No, dude, I want more. Okay. More myth. Okay. More myth. In the story of the Odyssey, Odysseus has gone through everything. He had 600 men. They're all dead. He's washed up on this island. He still hasn't arrived home after nearly like 13 years after the, after the Trojan War. He still can't get back to Ithaca. And he's defeated. And he lands on the silent. Every island he's gotten to has been torturous. And there is a beautiful nymph named Calyxup Calypso, a goddess who just wants to marry him, have sex with them and keep him there. That's it. Just stay. And so he gets to the end of the journey. And he's offered, just stay with me. He's with the goddess. And he stays for a while. But he ultimately makes the decisions like, no, I have to go back. I know it's going to be hard. I know it's been brutal to get here, but I have to continue. And this is what Campbell calls the temptation of the feminine, temptation of the woman. And I found myself here, went through the bottom of this arc and a bio for comes in for charisma and command. And it's dude, you just ride off in the sunset. You could just put it away. It's frustrated with it. It's not working. Just you could take the money. I'm dividing it up in my head. How many years? How much of this? And I knew where I was in the journey. And I was able to go, I know this. And this isn't what I want. Even though it's going to be hard, I want the struggle. There's something. There's a home that is calling me. And so I was able to navigate that with a bit more understanding. And then I knew after that comes a tone with the father, right? And so there's this other stage that I had to go through when I could go on and on and on. And then I knew after that comes a pathiosis, which is the connection with the divine. And then the ultimate boon. And right now I sit at the return, which is the refusal to return is basically where I'm at right now. So after you get the grail, the lamp, the thing, and you've done all that work, oftentimes the hero's like, well, that was really hard. I don't think I want to go home. I finally made myself comfortable in this other secluded inner world. I don't think I want to bring this back to the community. And sometimes there's a chase. Sometimes someone has to pull them out of it. But I was like, oh, maybe that's what this podcast is for me. This is Chris. And fighting me back to you. I have a question. How the fuck do you talk about charisma anymore? So it was really hard. And I said at the beginning, I'm sorry that this has been so disjointed. One day I'll have the smooth. I had understood charisma to be what do people like about me. And I still will make videos like like, how do they? What steps do I do say, think, et cetera, yada, yada, to get someone to like me? It was all based on if I was behaving in a way that was approved of. That was my understanding of it. But as I get deeper into myth, charisma is a Greek word. The etymology of charisma is from the same word as charity and the charities which are the goddesses. But charisma is a divinely given gift often associated with speech. But associated with someone from the God moves through. And so you can speak charismatically, but you can dance charismatically. You can paint charismatically. You can like love and hug and you can live charismatically. So as I go, oh, wow, I picked the perfect word. I picked the perfect name for this company for me to grow into. I just didn't know it at the time. And so I am learning now how to serve the core audience that wants tips, tricks, all this kind of stuff. But I need to expand it into how does God move through you? And for me, that looks less like here's the phrase, here's the thing to do. But finding the intersection of radiance and authenticity. I think in the past I had been like, look, I want to be authentic, but I'll just give you an example. The first day of the course, charisma university that we have, I think a lot of the stuff could be used. But is when somebody asks you how you're doing, don't say I'm fine. Don't say busy. Don't say good. Be better than that. Be phenomenal. Be wonderful. Be, you know, and you can treat that at any level of the pyramid. You can go to the results level, which is, I, no matter what I'm feeling, I am going to say I'm phenomenal. And I can betray my emotions. I can take actions to start to take steps in my life that I've worked out that day. And I've gotten something done. So I'm more likely to actually feel phenomenal when someone asks me, I can treat the underlying emotional level, which is have I been with my shame, my grief, my et cetera. So no matter what I say, I'm like, dude, it's kind of a rough day. There's still something emanating from me. Or I can do it at the spiritual level, which is like, oh my God, I remember God, I feel fucking incredible. And I can radiate it that way. So for me, it's more about just like I had to grow out of the shell that I was in. It's, it's yes, the core, the same piece stays, but it's also more than that. And so that's how I have come around to being like, oh, I did want charisma on command. I wanted to grow it into much more than it was and had to mean something significantly more than it did. And there's a challenge of bringing the audience with me and leaving some of them behind. And I'm a weirdo and all that kind of stuff is a stress. How many subs you got? 6 million, 7 million? 6, be just 6.9 or something? Right, 7 million subs. Yeah. The market for I want to say cool things to get girls to be attracted to me and the market for I want to get in touch with my feminine and be able to dance without shame to music in my bedroom. Not quite the same. Yes. And look at Jordan Peterson. Look, core, core. He's a union psychologist who the first thing, yes, he came on the scene for politics, but it was Genesis. It was all of this unsexy Pinocchio Genesis Lion King. I truly believe that the public needs a union, a speaker for Carl Jung to be present. Like we need myth. Is this a pivot that you potentially you would burden me would potentially be yourself? 100 I would deeply be honored, love to pray for that opportunity. I end I am trying to learn how to gracefully make that transition. And I have put out videos where I'm more experimental, they don't do as well, but I'm still in the zone of sorting through how to talk about this stuff. And perhaps I should have come in here and just been like, I got my list of myths and I'm going to. No, no, no, no, no, this is this. I mean, this has been one of the most intimate conversations I think I've ever had on the show. You've got something you're there with something and Dr. K is there. Mm hmm. Well, let me ask I I think you're you're there too. I'm I'm edging your edge. I've been edging for a few months now. So let me let me ask because if you were able to take that stake out of the ground and didn't have that tether and the cameras could disappear for a moment. Do you and it's okay if the answer is no because I know I didn't for a long time. Do you have any direction of where you would head walk do without the expectation? There's a few. I'm pulled toward fun at least in part at the moment and that love that for you by the way me too. I love things that integrate ancient past which for you is being a client promoter like I love things. Yeah. The way that that will come through is multi-guest episodes. So me, George Mack, Zach and another person are going to do a sort of regular probably monthly something like that. Hang style episode working title is smoke break or office hours or whatever drop in or some shit. I like the idea of that because it is part of a releasing of a lot of the control like what is the outcome that we get from this. Well, I'm not too sure. And what is it we're going to talk about? Well, I'm also not too sure. Yeah. Well, that but it doesn't need to be you know, fucking last 24 hour new sloped Tucker Carlson's in a beef with Nick Fuentes and Ben Shapiro and we need to how it is. So that will be a little bit of relinquishing of control. That's part of it. And that gives me an opportunity to put more personality across as opposed to this thing that I've done for so long which is be a vessel and a pedestal for people who are have great ideas. People I'm interested in about things I'm interested in. Like what is it that I can distill from you and then make you look as amazing as possible and that's been great. But I've subjugated myself a lot throughout that. I see this. Yeah. And it's like, okay, if not now then when like and it's the same for the success thing. If not now, when have you arrived? If not after a thousand episodes and a quarter of a million words written in five years on my newsletter. Like when do you feel like your ideas have sufficient veracity or legitimacy or authenticity or whatever the fuck to be able to go, I think maybe I can contribute a bit maybe I can make it a little bit about me and I never wanted to make it about me. And part of that was a defensive tactic because I found in my past, especially when I was getting bullied as a kid, that if I made myself small, if I didn't make it about me, if I didn't make myself too loud or too big, that the eye of sour on sort of didn't get pointed at me. One of the things that I'd learned I think as a child was if I'm too smart in class, I put my hand up and get the answer right or perform too well in whatever, sometimes the bullies would notice me more. Whereas if I do something like people, people can mistake smallness for a lack of a, people can mistake like humbleness, smallness, self-deprecation for a lack of a threat. And the internet is the same with regards to this. So one thing, more fun making it a little bit more about me. Here's some ideas that I've got I'm going to actually like move toward that. Something Patrick, David, to me a long time ago actually. Is there a core idea in there that is around which year? - There will be, so this is the next bit, I guess. The problem that I'm having at the moment is I only just arrived at accepting that emotions were an important thing to work on. And now I've got this, it feels like I took psychedelics and saw something I wasn't supposed to see. I'm like, I was like ready to map this next bit of the journey. Or a better example, I love this, I'm gonna think about this a lot maybe, it's 'cause like Elon's kind of crushing it with space exploration. It's an old style of rocket, right? Remember the old school Apollo-style rocket? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So when you're on the launch pad, there's a particular fuel source and a particular engine that gets used. And then after that, - Let's try this. - Goes in and get it. And then after that, it's booster rockets and they kick in. So at a particular altitude, there is a particular fuel source and type of propulsion that's used. And then you get to another one and another one kicks in and then you get to another one and those fall away. And then another one. And I'm like, I was just about accepting that the booster rockets had come on online. And now there's this, I'm like, I'm like, where am I? So that's thrown a little bit of a factor into the works for me like trying to map stuff, which is why it's real useful to have this conversation. But the thing that I'm kind of prepared to, at the moment, like really, really lean into, is the pride of sensitivity, like trying to find strength in sensitivity and in emotionality and really asking questions around, how do you navigate the things that you feel and still get the outcomes that you want? Like balancing real world results with an inner sense of an offness. Okay, how does that piece together? I think that probably for the next 12 months is gonna be a real core theme for me. Funny story on that, you know, Myron Gaines from Fresh and Fit. I don't know him, but I love that. We went for like, Shwama or like some, Middle East knee food thing in Miami, maybe two years ago, something like that, or 18 months ago. Just before I'd started thinking about this, but I was like tapped in a tiny, teeny tiny, little bit, and we sat down and he's, you know, like kind of gregarious guy, like sort of talking about all this stuff. And I was just interested to find out about him. And like, you know, where does this, like particular firework like spiral around to? There's like ideas and stuff and it passed in the future and all this, you're talking about this stuff. And then he said, he was telling me about this experience that he'd gone through and like, this thing happened, this thing happened and this thing happened. And I just went, oh, how did that make you feel? And it stopped the conversation. It totally stopped the conversation. And he, like, must have paused for maybe five seconds. Look at him. I've never really thought about that. Wow. Like no one's ever, I've never really thought about it. No one's ever really asked me or something like that. I was like, oh, that's cool. That's really cool. That's cool. That's a credit to him. Yeah, for seeing it. Yeah. And I was like, huh. And there was a bit as well. Like when everyone, like that sort of like super forward lean in dopamine energy thing, there is a little bit of like, how do I get through this? I've got to be a bit more person in there. Like I want to excavate it. And like that, I'm interested in that. Over the first five years of the show, I wasn't as interested in like the shell. I was interested in the outside, like the action and the results. I'm like, okay, like how do I like poke in? Not because I want to see cry. Not because I want like some like over overly unnecessary. I'm not Steven Bartlett. Yeah. I mean, Steven, Steven's got skillset. No, Steven's amazing. I love Steven. I'm not sure, I think for him what he's wanting is like the expression of how that made somebody feel. Whereas what I'm interested in is like, what is the marriage between the outcome that happens and that feeling and how is that? I'm like fascinated by tension. So I'm like, okay, how does the tension between these two things happen? Also, sitting with somebody crying and this is a failing of mine in a strength of Steven's is, and I learned this during ground breakers with Joe, if somebody else cries, I cry a lot. Like if I see someone in pain or discomfort or I ask somebody a question and it's either the sadness or happiness and like they go, I go. And I have shame around like that. So I'm like, okay, in order for me, the number of times that somebody's cried on Steven's show and like, I'm not sure how many times I've seen him cry. Certainly in response to somebody else, he seems to be able to hold space. Now I don't know whether, I'd love to, I should, we were talking this weekend, I should have. - That's going on inside, yeah, you're so serious. - Are you numbed to it? Are you insulated from this? Or are you so dropped in that you've like, alchemized it and you're like, I'm able to like, fold Joe Hudson view framework. - Either, my experience of it, I cried. It was, I felt as presence. - Yeah, that's a fucking, I mean that's like, to be able to do it, to sit with somebody in that and to hold space in that and to not, I mean, some people I guess are just like less emotional in that way, like their emotional trigger, they don't present it in the same sort of a way. But if you're able to hold the space and not have, like, this is the impartiality and the empathy thing, right? Like, I'm not going to try and change you and I'm with you without being in your emotions. That's like black belt shit. That's like very, very, very impressive. I don't have that, whether it's a skill or whatever you want to call it, I don't have that trait. So for me. - Dude, there's like a super team that we can make, I think. (laughing) - I was like, I was like, say, you, Dr. K. - No, that's your Hudson. - Dr. K called me a year ago, credit to him. He's like, something's happening. (laughing) He's like, something is happening around masculinity and it's not time yet, but it's gonna be time soon. And I think he said your name and he was like. - He spoke to me about this. - Yeah, he's like, and he's just like, I don't have any takeaway, but keep your phone on. - He said something similar. He's like, look up for the fucking bat, say, dude. - Look, there is, here's a couple of frameworks. There's a couple of frameworks that might be interesting for you. As far as I can see, we've had two waves with the Manusphere so far. First wave of pick-up artistry was Neil Strauss, the game, mystery was negging and like, have you seen the midget fight outside? And it was, - Which was also like, that was a switch from results to actions with regard to being attractive to women. 'Cause prior to that, it was just Yura's handsome and as wealthy as you are and that is your outcome with women. And it was like, oh, you can behave in a certain way. - Then second wave Manusphere was post-me too, because pick-up artistry was never gonna survive the wave of sort of calling to account men for using position to coerce people into sex. And then we got a kind of sanitized, slightly adjusted version of it and it was Red Pill, Black Pill, Blue Pill, Soy Boys, Cucks, it was like, Simps and beaters and Alphas and it was like that whole world. - Which interesting, and I'm kind of projecting, but these guys started to feel upset about the things they were getting bothered and they said, they took a almost more feminine approach is we're gonna talk a lot about our problems. - Well, don't forget, ask the world to be different. - Don't forget, don't forget the, like, in-sale, Black Pill, Red Pill community came out of PUA Hate. Like PUA Hate was the original Reddit and PUA Hate was people who had done pick-up and had found that the strategies had either not worked or worked and made them aware of their own shortcomings. Look at how much I need to perform in order to get women to like me. - That's really frustrating. - Yeah, fuck, like, I am I at core and so far away from what women want, the I need to construct this elaborate fucking cathedral of bullshit in order to get them to like me. That is another comment on myself. - And I do wanna pause because I think these are huge spheres and I don't, I've spoken to people in it and there are well-seen cultural commentaries that do come from the Red Pill community. I broadly, yeah, all this. - Yeah, and I broadly disagree with, I think the emotional undertone of it is pain, but yeah. - Who's it that said? - I think it was Dr. K that was like everybody in the Red Pill is a hopeless romantic. - Yeah, I think there's, it's like cool. It's like pretty kind of night anyway. And I'm like, okay, that was second wave. But one of the things that it denied was sensitivity because sensitivity didn't show up front. The dimension of masculinity that was supposed to look commanding. And I'm writing a lot about vulnerability and about emotions at the moment. And I think you're right, like whether it's my current working title for the Manel Paws or the like third wave manosphere stuff, Mackin Murphy, William Costello, Rob Henderson from like the academic sphere of this, Alexander Dates' site. Like they're kind of pointing at it from a more like academic lens, all post-grads or doctoral students or whatever the fuck. And then Dr. K. Joe Hudson kind of marrying master coach, Eastern West stuff, modality focused, you coming in with like psychedelic sort of lens to it. And then I guess I'm unciliorated that in kind of like the bro sphere type stuff. - You're credible in a bro sphere, which I think is really important. Really, really important. - But there's something going on dude. And I don't know what it is. and uh. I, the conversation I had with Tucker Carlson, I think, correctly identifies a lot of the problems. One other thing just to add in on the men piece, when I first, the arc of me working through a lot of the mating stuff, which inevitably ends up just pointing back at yourself, like whatever it is that you enter at it ends up coming back to you. You start off going, wow, there's some stats around sexlessness and matinglessness that are kind of at scary. I wonder what's going on. So you go to evolutionary psychology. You say, what are the underpinnings about motivations, approximate ultimate reasons for behavior, make guarding, jealousy, male parental uncertainty, resources, intersexual competition, intersexual competition? That's interesting, but that's not all the whole picture. Then you move down to environment mismatch. You say, okay, so how is modern environment and ancestral programming coming together to create these odd mismatches? That's interesting. I currently wear a lot of the red pill and a lot of the conversation from both men and women, mostly men is at. But the next step down from that, which is kind of where I'm at currently, this is my model, is even if you know what's happening in the world, demographically, in terms of stats, you know our ancestral programming in terms of what are the underlying motivations and incentives for how we work. You then marry those two together to get modern mismatch. No point in anybody's relationship ever has anyone directly interacted with their environmental mismatch. They interact relationally. Okay, so what is the emotion that I feel when my partner out earns me and I'm a man? Got it. Got it. Yeah. That's the vanguard. Like the tip of the spear of how the shit works is. It's mediated by emotion. Yeah. Emotion. Bingo. So that's where I'm at. Yeah, well, she makes more than me and that's a problem. It's a problem because of how I feel. She feels. It's a problem because, yeah. Yes. Got it. So the tip of the spear of this shit, and this is Gay Hendrix worked. Fucking awesome stuff. And in part, no, I missed a nice guy, Robert Glover. Like he's sort of like a looking at a part of this and wing of it. So yeah, there's like some fucking autistic Avengers thing. Yeah. Where there's cool, there's cool information and vibes that if combined correctly, I think could make for like a really fucking good holistic bit of development. Let me, let me ask because this is, I think love my dad and I didn't feel like I had. I didn't want to be my dad in a lot of ways. When I look around and I see a lot of people that as cheesy as it sounds, did not have male role models, I don't know if they'd happened in your neighborhood, but I couldn't find a marriage that I wanted. I still struggle. It was a role model desert for me where I grew up. Yeah. I think it's a role model desert of a world for our thing. I don't know how many people are familiar with like male female relationships in suburbia that work in a way that feels good. And the complete lack of that meant that my generation and my, we were like loss boys. I was the farthest ahead. I was the old one. And so I think there's a huge opportunity because we've decried the loss of ritual and the loss of male connection is for you, me, et cetera, to be both digital five, 10 years in front mentors. But I also think there's some possibility for a digital physical hybrid, which you experienced with Joe, where you were in person with people of, oh my God, the missing older brother, the missing younger uncle, the like that archetype is just we're starving for it. But this is why the live shows, this is why the two of them, yeah, it's like just like Jordan. And that's what Jordan Peterson was. He was everyone's dad. He was the guy who said, I believe in you, but you can do better. You know, he like, he filled that father role for people all over the world. And it's not ideal that he had to do it, but it was in tremendous service to those people. And I think that there's a, he was so much older. I think there's an older brother, younger uncle thing that is like, but also there's an issue with sort of selling it that I don't know how many people want to be Joe Hudson. I want to be Jordan Peterson. I don't even know how many people want to be Joe Rogan. And he like, fuck, if your main audience is 34, like, can they look at someone that's 20 years, the senior and be like, oh, that's where I like, that's where I might want to be. But not right now. So yeah, bringing it the fucking distance a little bit closer. He was. Jordan was able to talk at a high level about male female dynamics in a way that was helpful, but he wasn't five, six, seven years out of the dating pool. He met his wife when he was like, elementary school or something. Yeah. So, so how do I do it on Snapchat or TikTok is like that, that tactical level was not available with him. And so that's what I think is really, I hope that people can find my content at the level of what do I text her and stick with me all the way through the things that I haven't gone to, which is like, how do I propose? How do I be with her? How do I be a good dad? I think there's a really potentially beautiful ladder of male development that is being broken down and reconstructed so that people can enter at various levels, but also see that, oh, there is another stage coming. I may have to leave some people behind. It's not the end of the world. I see that my older digital brother, uncle has gone through this before and that, what I want to do that, that's what I didn't have. Like, you know, being Tim Ferris. Even with, yeah, yeah, yeah, even with the people that we did have the appearance to be with. Yeah. And it still wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. It was, yeah, it was with him who I love and saved me was here's how to do it. You know, here's, here's how to do it, but it wasn't like, I see you. I'm there for you. I get it. And this is what it's going to feel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Bro, this has been so much fun. I feel oddly exposed as well. I feel very like the tide's gone out in my pants a lot. Well, you control over the edit, so you do it every once. That is true. We will see how much it makes it in. Thank you for sharing with me. Yeah. What can people expect from you over the not too distant future? What can they expect? Chaos. I don't know. I'm really excited. I don't. I won't even put my stake in the ground. I'm excited to find out myself. Unreal. Charlie Hooper, ladies and gentlemen. Doug, I love you. Thank you. Thank you, man. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found in the descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free. And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com/books. That's chriswillx.com/books.