talk to me about love island then mate because um

i ran it back i ran it back the difficult second album right you know i'd already i'd already done like it just it was more like an ep yeah to do take me out and then i was like fucking let's go and anyway the itv same company that does both um So they couldn't have seen you be a nutter on the island then because they would have blacklisted you, right? I think they would have probably, it would have actually been in my favor.

Oh, he's like exciting and he's going to go in this sort of a, maybe it might be a bit of a wild card.

So the same casting director that worked on Take Me Out did Love Island.

And he said, you know, do you want to just come and screen test? Because I was helping a lot of Geordie Shore and the production team around that to find people from Newcastle.

Because I was basically like the yellow pages for every party person, every interesting person that was going to go on the show.

And I helped to cast or like introduce them or get them, oh, we need a venue to film like a date in.

How do you, do you tackle that any differently to like if I came on your podcast?

appreciate the

effort that goes into it.

Is that the idea? That's what people propose, that there's this argument that a costly signal shows you are the kind of person that does this.

And I can infer from you...

Like if you're well-read or something, I can infer that something about, or if you're fat or if you're like good at fucking speed rapping or whatever it is, like I can tell you're good at Padel.

Like you have a lot of spare time.

Women that have got long nails.

James Smith is

Who's your favorite person to interview? Who's your favorite interviewer?

Interviewers, Rogan.

The guy is so good.

It's all about...

People from the outside will see someone that's got a very successful platform, but his use of cadence and silence in a conversation is, Unbelievable.

I thought I've worked very hard at this, done 600 episodes.

I get to sit down with this guy and it's like being a black belt and go, no, I get to roll with the seventh Dan.

Come on.

That's a very impressive post,

Chris.

What can I say? My point being that I think if someone...

We have a generalized risk aversion at the moment.

Young people are getting their driving license later.

They're having less casual sex.

They're drinking alcohol less.

Yeah.

Who's your favorite person to interview? Who's your favorite interviewer?

Interviewers, Rogan.

The guy is so good.

It's all about...

People from the outside will see someone that's got a very successful platform, but his use of cadence and silence in a conversation is...

Unbelievable.

I thought I've worked very hard at this, done 600 episodes.

Come on.

Is that also part of the secret cocktail of contentment or what's the answer?

The alcohol thing was interesting because I was a club promoter for a decade and a half.

I adored working in that industry.

I loved and was very proud of what I achieved.

But I got toward the end of my 20s and realized that all of the personal development things I wanted to do seemed to be held back by me electing to ruin... 36 or 48 hours, depending on how hard I went, every couple of weeks.

I wasn't a big drinker.

I didn't drink all the time.

Newcastle, I can attest to that.

Who's your favorite person to interview? Who's your favorite interviewer?

Interviewers, Rogan.

The guy is so good.

It's all about...

People from the outside will see someone that's got a very successful platform, but his use of cadence and silence in a conversation is...

Unbelievable.

I thought I've worked very hard at this, done 600 episodes.

Funny.

... or Stockton on Tees, and this version of Chris is that, that, that disarray is much bigger now.

Regardless of what the external achievements are, inside it's, it's strange.

There's this line from the Lewis Capaldi documentary, and people are asking him about what happens when you become famous or...

Which I'm not.

I've got like micro degen niche fame.

Like that's the, the maximum of my level.

Like if I'm in the right gym with enough white guys, I will have a couple of photo requests.

Firestone, always dependable, since nineteen hundred.

Take me to the moment you decided to leave the UK and move to Austin.

Been thinking about it for a while.

I used to go downstairs of my house in Gosforth, Newcastle, which I still have.

And in order to classic N terrace style sort of British house.

And as I come down from the bathroom upstairs, having had a shower at nighttime, I'd walk to go into my bedroom.

And then before I went into my bedroom, I'd go out to this little garden yard outside and there would just be night sky and And it'd be very quiet, super quiet, streetlight across the street, houses scrolling in front of me.

And I'd look up at the sky and just want to be anywhere else.

I think just how

Mm-hmm.

It was this thing that you did for aesthetics, it was a thing that you did for mental health, it was a training preference that you had.

Um, something I haven't seen, which I'm kind of surprised by, and maybe it's just because people don't have as easy of an outlet, is more of the, uh, stuff that I just did with you guys, the sort of hand-eye coordination, cognitive function stuff.

Um, that hasn't really hit the mainstream.

I wonder whether it just feels a bit specialized.

What am I, a Formula 1 driver? Do I really need to do that? Ascendancy of cold plunge, and then the fall off of cold plunge must be studied.

Uh, it's kind of, kind of crazy, yeah.

Make it pop.

Is that also part of the secret cocktail of contentment, or what's the answer?

The alcohol thing was interesting because I was a club promoter for a decade and a half.

I adored working in that industry.

I loved and was very proud of what I achieved, but I got toward the end of my 20s and realized that all of the personal development things I wanted to do seemed to be held back by me electing to ruin 36 or 48 hours, depending on how hard I went, every couple of weeks.

I wasn't a big drinker.

I didn't drink all the time, but I drank enough to kind of reset my meditation streak or my diet or my training or whatever, and I decided to go sober, uh, elective sobriety, and, uh, it was very, very useful for me.

I found it un- unbelievably productive.

I can attest to that.

They move like a lion, striking when it matters, resting when needed, refusing to stay small.

Exactly.

Then comes suit up and show up.

Prepare yourself, fulfill a role, serve something beyond your comfort.

Fillion connects this to a masculine imperative of creating something from nothing, whether that's building a company, becoming a firefighter, or committing to a craft.

The mind can turn an object into proof that someone survived and made it through the fire.

Which ties into neuroplasticity.

It's not abstract theory.

Who's your favorite person to interview? Who's your favorite interviewer?

Interviewers, Rogan.

The guy is so good.

It's all about...

People from the outside will see someone that's got a very successful platform, but his use of cadence and silence in a conversation is...

Unbelievable.

I thought I've worked very hard at this, done 600 episodes.

Come on.

Fuck yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about how we assume that wisdom compounds over time.

So I guess not too dissimilar to that.

We have this epistemic privilege that we give to a future version of ourselves.

So we assume that us now knows more than us in the past, or that us in the future will know more than us now, and that sort of progress goes in that way.

But for some things, like matters of emotion or important life lessons, especially things around pain, I don't think that that's true.

And some people just aren't good at that problem solving.

Fuck yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, uh, I know, I've, I've been thinking a lot about, like, how we assume that wisdom compounds over time.

So I guess not too dissimilar to that.

We have this, uh, epistemic privilege that we give to a future version of ourselves, right? So we assume that us now knows more than us in the past, or that us in the future will know more than us now, and that sort of progress goes in that way.

But for some things, like matters of emotion or important life lessons, especially things around pain, I don't think that that's true.

Right

Mm.

You know, they're trying to prove something to that parent, that teacher, that bully, that group of friends or whatever from their childhood, that they actually are worthy of love or praise or acceptance or admiration.

And I think that you could track, certainly through my 20s, the fact that, um, I- I think my fundamental, like, framing of who I was was people might not like me or want to be around me because of the, uh, world I'd come up from, being really unpopular and bullied in school.

Mm-hmm.

There's tons and tons of stuff from childhood that I simply can't remember, and yet I'm able to call on this, like, worldview of acceptance or lack of- And, uh, it's very difficult to deprogram in that way.

I've spent a lot of time trying to deprogram stuff.

So, you know, for anybody that has suffered with bullying as a kid, uh, that felt lonely, that felt isolated, uh, that feels like they need to prove something to the world, like I, I feel for you 'cause that's me.

Do you think that affects relationship these days? You think people are getting married less because of that factor? Do you think there's another factor?

There's a lot of factors going on about why people aren't coupling.

Uh, certainly one of them is that women's standards have, have raised over the last few decades.

They have, uh, women on average want to date a partner who is socioeconomically more successful than them, as educated or more, as wealthy or more.

And that means as I think women now up to the age of 32 out earn men.

On average, women are getting two degrees for every one that a man gets.

And bundle all of this together and you have a very big group of well-educated and well-earning women and an increasingly smaller group of as educated or more and as wealthy or more men above and across, and the men have got a bulk of opportunities.

You made it.

Can you expand on that?

Yeah.

We naturally don't want to move down the hierarchy, right? Like someone, when you're in a group of people and someone makes a joke at your expense, that sensation where you feel kind of hot in the neck and in the face and your shoulders come up, you can almost hear it.

You can almost hear the embarrassment.

Here's a funny story.

So I'm in Bali and I'm riding a moped, like a 50 pence a day moped, which is like dumb.

I driving along a truck pulls out so i have to pull the brakes turns out that the back brake doesn't work at all and the front brake's the only one that goes that locks on so the bike's back end of the bike starts to slide same as you remember this is a kid if you ever did the front brake on gravel and the back end would start to come out and i'm thinking right i can either like hold on to this and slide underneath the truck or I can let go and straighten back up and hit the back of the truck.

How do you keep that balance between not slacking off, but equally not being owned by that concept of desire that makes you miserable until you get the thing that you think that you want?

Terms and conditions apply.

So here is a list of things that are not doing the thing.

Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.

Scheduling time to do the thing isn't doing the thing.

Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.

Telling people you're going to do the thing isn't doing the thing.

Messaging friends who may or may not be doing the thing isn't doing the thing.

And what's the consequence of that not enoughness?

Mm-hmm.

And it's very uncomfortable because it's tempting to go back to the old life that you're used to.

The old patterns, the old routines, the old friend groups, the old everything.

And you have to stop doing the things that you know bring you validation in the moment to start doing things that you have no idea about whether it'll actually work.

Like, you're gonna tell me that I'm not going to go out with my friends this weekend 'cause I'm gonna keep my meditation streak going.

Who even knows if meditation works, right? It's so much easier to just stay in the routine that you were previously, doing the same sorts of things.

For you to pull away from that, you're gonna have to do stuff usually that makes you more different, more easy to be mocked, and more alone.

Can you talk me through that? I've never heard this before, from you.

Yeah.

And, uh, dude, I, I, I get it.

Like, I, I really believe that existential risks, climate change included, are things that humans should pay attention to.

But if you were to rank...

Toby Ord wrote this great book called The Precipice, and he is from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

He wrote, uh, the best researchers in the world, he got them to rank what are the, uh, most dangerous existential risks to humans, and it's a one in 10,000 chance over the next century coming from climate change.

It's one in six from AI, or one in 10 from AI, one in 10 from engineered pandemics, like one in 30 from natural pandemics.

I missed everything.

Yeah.

Um, and perhaps this will be, uh, an addition on that side of the ledger, as opposed to one that actually compels men to go out.

But the other one, the other...

the other part that, uh, me and a friend, William Costello, thought about-... was the potential for, uh, guys to practice interacting with women.

So one of the problems that you have, many men have approach anxiety.

It's like, to the women out there, approach- approaching a woman is tantamount to life and death.

It's mortally, uh, uncomfortable to men because, "If I'm rejected, that's the end of my lineage.

Are you being s-

(laughs)

... uh, very fun country with lots of good stuff in it, but the environment is not particularly welcoming to people that aren't used to it.

So the food, the, uh, environmental stresses that are in there.

I lived in a house for two years that had toxic mold in it, uh, I had EBV, CMV, uh, candida, H. pylori, roundworm, liver fluke, heavy metals, Lyme disease, and then got COVID.

So for basically one- one month, one pathology per month, every single month last year I had to cross off one of these things.

And (clears throat) as Gary knows, when you have what's called complex illness, there's loads of stuff wrong with you, but we don't quite know who the culprit is.

You're kind of like Sherlock Holmes, going, "Is it the EBV? Is it the heavy metals? Is it the BPAs? Is it the mold? Is it the roundworm?"

Yeah, you do.

What's Title IX?

It was, uh, an affirmative action, uh, policy that helped to get more, uh, women into higher education.

50 years later, 2023, it's a 15 percentage point swing between men and women in university in the other direction.

There are two women for every one man at a four-year US college degree roundabout by 2030.

Women on average between the ages of 21 and 29 earn 1,111 pounds more than their male counterparts.

Women are roughly twice as likely as men to say that they will value financial prospects in a partner.

Roundabout 78% of women say that a stable job is something that is important for a partner to have, whereas roundabout only sort of 45% of men say the same thing.

What do you do?

change the subjects mindset and the interview itself, when they see how beautiful it is, when they see the investment in it, does it change something in the subject?

So I have this belief that at least in the world of podcasting, we're sort of splitting into two directions at the moment.

One of them is perhaps a little bit more elevated.

It's the modern wisdoms.

It's the Stephen Bartlett's of the world.

And then the other side is the more sort of low tech.

It would be all in.

Because I