Expelled, Arrested & Somehow Winning At Life - James Smith - #1170

0:00You can spend your entire life solving your problems without ever feeling like you have fewer problems. And the more successful you become at improving your circumstances, the more absurd the problems you find yourself worrying about can become. So I had Martin Seligman on, positive psychology guy. There's this thing called conservation of dysphoria. So dysphoria, bad feelings, conservation of keeping them at the same level. So as your life gets better, some people look for worries with a bigger magnifying glass. They make small worries bigger so that the same amount of worries that they had in the past are what they have in the future. But because their life is better, there's actually fewer things for them to worry about.

0:39So they start inflating small things into big things. And I thought that you can spend your entire life solving your problems without ever feeling like you have fewer problems. I thought that was really cool. It's interesting as well. There's a concept that a single coin in a vase makes the most noise. So as you eradicate the problems that you have in life, if you boil it down to one, it's going to make more noise than all the others put together. So for instance, let's say when you're young,, you have your future to worry about, your career to worry about, finding a wife to worry about. You have all of these things to worry about. But then later on in life, when you've only got one issue, it is crippling because it's radiated

1:15and all your focus goes onto that. Like the purple elephant, the more you try to stop thinking about purple elephant, the more omnipresent it is. So there's another kind of synergistic thing there that, even you can have so much in life and it's very difficult because when i was younger i couldn't sympathize with people that had money i was like you've got money so you haven't got problems now i get a little bit older i'm like it's just one of the different categories you can still be wildly unhappy and have a good income i think one of the problems that people feel is who am i to be upset about this thing when there's people that have got it worse than me that like uh velvet prison thing champagne problems because not only have you got the should have put do not

1:57disturb on before i got started let's ride to war like the great romans did 11 labs reactions still Great Romans did. Eleven Labs reaction still coming in. I think people that don't have obvious problems externally don't get that much sympathy, and then they feel guilty about having problems, which is a weird one. It goes both ways as well, right? Well, I love to boil things down, and I'm not a neuroscientist. I'm not Andrew Huberman yet. The chemicals that you use in your brain for happiness and sadness, they're the same chemicals irrespective of circumstance now i try and say to people with happiness we've spoken about this before that you don't get an uber surcharge like a 1.7 ratio on serotonin or dopamine because you

2:36live in a bigger house or you are you know in a more privileged side of the world or whatever like a student having a laugh with their friends is having the same laugh and the same emotional uh thoughts feelings chemicals that someone is like a billionaire would but then the same so we will accept that we'll go yeah of course you know a happy student and a happy millionaire for the same same happiness but we don't have the same adequate thought processes to sadness or to grief or to agony you're like oh that person has nothing they're sad. That's terrible. Or this person, although they have so much great might in their life, if they've got anguish, oh, why are you sad for? Yeah. I love that uber surcharge idea that you were talking

3:17about the first time you ever made money online. Yousef has this great story. So my friend who I did a lot of podcasts with early on, he was a doctor and he was working a night shift in a hospital. And while he was there, there was a lady who was having bowel problems. She wasn't able to sphincterly contract to push what was in her bowels out, lots of discomfort. And the family was there saying, look, look at how much pain she's in. This needs to be sorted. There's something called decompacting and decompacting is putting a gauntlet glove on and getting into the rectum and manually pulling this stuff out. So he rings the specialist, the specialist, some South African guys and goes, um, no, no, no,

4:00I'm not coming in to sort that. You can, you can decompact it yourself. It'll be fine. So he does this thing, spends half an hour, family shouting at him. He spent all of this time. He gets out, like pulls the glove off, does all of the sanitary stuff, checks his phone, and he sold a PDF that he had written five years ago for £7.50 and realized that net after taxes, he'd made more money from that PDF in the last hour than he had from decompacting this patient. And your idea of the Uber surcharge, I think, where did that come from? PDF in the last hour than he had from decompacting this patient. And your idea of the Uber surcharge, I think, where did that come from? What was the first example of that?

4:31So I was saying, for instance, put it very simply, $10,000 a month. I was like, wow, this is going to be amazing. I can't wait till I hit it. And it was amazing. But then the first 100K a month, you would think on a linear basis would be 10 times the enjoyment. But I actually got about a 0.8 surcharge. The 10Kk made me happier and i've heard this before on my quote-unquote way up and i was like these people are mental they are all wrong and then i experienced it myself and i was like oh they're they're kind of right in some respects and there's almost diminishing returns as you go on but every person will lie to themselves and go oh but the the next thing will yield to the server you've already achieved goals that you said would make you happy.

5:07Yeah, I mean, it's obvious when you see it with money. And I think people have got a pretty twitchy relationship with talking about money, especially given how completely horrendous. I mean, we're in the UK, and I think I saw a poll that was put up earlier on. 74% of people in the UK say that they feel like their quality of life is worse than five years ago 74 of people say that they feel like it's worse so cost of living all the rest of it but like forget the money thing just talk about experiences but the first time that you got to take a trip abroad with your friends wide-eyed you're so excited you're having a beer at 6 a.m in the departure lounge early 07 yeah unbelievable and then did you have the polo shirts with the team

5:51like with the names on the back we couldn't afford polo shirts i'm from a working class family mine was jimbo i had 23 on the back jimbo that was my name until i went to uni okay uh i'm glad that went and then you go on holiday again and you need this sort of ever increasing dose. This is what habituation is. It's a tonic adaptation. I think talking about it kind of like a drug addict or seeing it like a drug addict throughout your life, before he made the hard right pivot into professional anti-Semite, I spoke to Dan Bilzerian about this. And he said, I asked him this question because he's like this guy who's maybe speed ran hedonism more quickly than anyone, at least in the public eye, right? Like all of the women,

6:31all of the drugs, all of the flights, all of the holidays and the houses and the cars and the guns and everything. And I asked, do you ever feel like you sort of went through it too quickly? Do you wish that you could have slowed down? Because once you've bought your dream car, or once you've been to the dream holiday, or once you've got the house that you've always wanted, where do you go from there? And the same thing is true at whatever level you're at. You basically want to try and stretch out your achievement of different things and goals. For instance, we're in Exeter at the moment. We're tour hello to everyone by the way it's a very unceremonious introduction to the tour bus look at that oh it's raining

7:09fucking brilliant so for the people that are just listening james has lifted up the window on the tour bus to expose an enterprise renter van uh to peugeot box that's a 26 model though that's nice um one two three four four biffer bins five non-recyclable non-recyclable though oh biffer bins out there and a yellow uh parking bollard bollard thing that's lovely also took oh hello that's someone throwing rubbish out uh it also took maybe over a hundred point turn to park the bus here this morning like we got to the parking spot on time and we were late for the rest of our day not because of traffic but not because of not finding a parking spot but simply because of not being able to get into the parking space because you've got a trailer

7:56on the back full of new tonic the point you're making before the hedonism thing yeah uh permission to be evangel. Run it. Having kids, and this isn't me trying to say to people they need to have kids. I have done every hedonistic thing to excess. Whatever amount, I've done more. Dan Bilzerian, like, he had the more, the flashier version. The Jets. You had the working class version. Mate, I had the front three seats on EasyJet. That was my Jet. You know, so I've run hedonism. I my jet you know uh so i i've run hedonism i never want you know if you if we sat here or even when we did the pod where i was laying in bed on a pregnancy pillow and you're at your house in newcastle if in that pod you said you

8:35want to have kids i go no i was like not really not really bothered then even at 30 31 32 at the books had the tours i had one of these buses not one part of my brain was thinking about kids then i've had my son since we last had this and i cannot believe the amount of happiness i derived from it usually you see me all i do is moan that i'm too far away from my son so there's people out there when you talk about a decline of happiness and i know there's a decline in birth rate i know the correlation things might be like yeah i like it obviously it's you can't point cause a causation but it's crazy to me how many people in their 30s feel a little bit lost i've never had that but having my son has been this like this homing

9:15beacon to something that never experienced and again there's got to be a part of it i've spoken to you about this before being adopted i've never seen a blood relative crazy so like never first time you told me that that when you pick your son up it will be the first time in your entire conscious life that you touch another blood relative yes it's mad insane and then when i look at him i'm like what what is what if this is for me what is it for my fiance it's amazing but like it's crazy it's actually made me a lot less ambitious in other areas of my life and i i really love it so i joke a bit uh with falling off joking with these boys everyone we talk to i'm like i used to be relevant or whatever but like success

9:56now for me is such a metric of like my son so uh i'm not really talking about this publicly but when i had my son we got pregnant straight away boom no problems no issues now we're going through secondary infertility yes I'm on TRT but my sperm numbers are good with an IVF clinic Tay's egg count is great we're in a beta-region paradox where if my sperm quality was worse or her egg count was worse we would have started IVF sooner but because everything's fine the IVF clinic are like yeah just keep going and so we're now experiencing difficulty in uh conceiving by the time this goes out it could be different hopefully but a lot of my friends now they're like 34 35 they've told me their whole life they really want to have kids and they're like oh but

10:34i want to buy a house first or i want to do this i want financial security and all of these things which i get and i'm not saying that their values are uh you know not worthy or whatever but i said to one of them if you knew it was going to take you two years to get pregnant would you start now they went of course i went well you don't know that you're going to fall pregnant straight away so why not talking talking as a man who's currently going through some fertility complications yeah and now i'm just looking at my friends and i'm like oh if you could relive my life and you could say to me like what could be the worst thing that could ever happen to me maybe imagine we do decide eventually to have a child and we couldn't there is no amount of and

11:10this is coming from someone that was indifferent about having kids yeah so the reason i'm saying this and kind of being vulnerable and talking about my personal affairs is there'll be people listening to this potentially teens 20s 30s maybe even 40s, if you're anything like me, felt indifferent to the idea of having children. I'm now telling you, and family, I would say, is my sole driver of happiness. Everything else is noise. I want to be wealthy for my family, for my child. I want him to be spoiled. Well, it gives you a purpose beyond just this selfish, self-aggrandizing, please, me, me, me, fulfill me more, fulfill me more fulfill me more i totally get it and yeah uh it's a a ruthless realization that there might be complications down the line again we spoke

11:52about those brain chemicals we got dopamine oxytocin serotonin endorphins now those we can get from video games we can get them from uh scrolling on tiktok we can get them from like a myriad of things but synthetically it's never been easier and I think that people are filling their cup with those things from and I'm not saying do you know what I was having a discussion with Will Storr and I kind of said to him like oh scrolling on social media at night's bad he goes explain that to me and I tried to explain to him he goes do you enjoy scrolling on your phone before bed I go yeah he goes what's the problem what's the problem and i think that so many people can get so much from their devices from

12:28their phones from movies from netflix whatever is that the reason that people if you sat in an empty house with just three tv channels and there's nothing else to do you're probably going to crack on and get some other stuff done speaking of that there's a line that i learned from dr k a couple of weeks ago growing up is abandoning what works over and over again growing up is abandoning what works over and over again i've got another one for you yep on this it's a quote and i'm probably gonna butcher it because i can't remember it it was a person looking at a picture of their parents who were the same age they are now and they were a child they go now i look at my parents and realize they were

13:06just old teenagers that didn't know what they were doing because they now as a teenager or they as a parent now for the exact same so myself as a father feel like a teenager plus 20 years just walking around i said we're in exeter today on tour this is the tour bus it's a bit of a shit tip sorry um we were walking around the university today and i look at students and i'm like yeah that's me that's me but it's evidently not it's me 20 years ago how old do you feel saying that i remember when i was young people like oh yeah just you wait when you get older lad in 20 years i'm like shut up mate i'm 20 i'm invincible quiet h, I am... Do you get a... I get this weird anxiety now where if I have a pain in my side...

13:50Cancer. That's... Yeah, I'm going to die. I'm dead. Yeah. I get toothache now and I'm like, that's probably a brain tumor. At 20, anything would happen. I'd be fine. Made of rubber and magic. I'll sniff it away. In Laos, you know there's people dying drinking the ethanol in Laos? I drank out of a tub with a dead gecko in it it was pretty much ethanol i got a free vest i was buzzing what you laughing at hey in laos i'd do anything the whiskey was cheaper than what are you doing in laos uh tubing not tubing no vn what's that oh i get to teach chris williamson something you go to this town there's going to be some old boys nod along to this so you um usually start in thailand then you go into laos the best

14:25way to describe laos is instead of chilling their beer they just put ice in it right you've got this area called vang vien uh anduang probang great words and in vang vien they're this tubing and you see people they've got like the the tubing vests on you get a rubber insert from a tire okay they pump it up you go downstream then you jump in the river the river goes downstream you're floating in a rubber like a lazy river yeah then there's bars shacks at the side they chuck out ropes you grab them they pull you in drinking games this sounds great straight arm in pints yep you get absolutely smashed but australia had to shut it down because too many aussies were dying i thought you were in laos yeah but the austria australia had to shut it down because too many aussies were dying yeah but the australia get and shut it down because the insurance companies the travel

15:11insurance companies they were breaking their backs breaking their legs you're a five-hour trip from the hospital there's rope swings but the river depth changes so as we're going downstream i'm catching my ass on rocks then the rope swings are massive so. So these Aussies are like, yeah, fucking hell, mate. Let's get a fucking tubing cat. That's what they're like. You see them in Bali, they're just going nuts. They were doing rope swings into shallow water, fucking themselves up. But anyway, as you go down, you look at the prices and like the whiskey was like almost free, but you drank it. The next day you didn't have a hangover. You felt like you'd been poisoned. But genuinely people have gone blind.

15:45They've died from drinking these concoctions. You know, like Thailand, full moon, you get the bottles with all the same safety tops. It's like that. But the funny thing you don't know about this town, the town where you're hungover, I don't know if it's the same now, you've got maybe like 20, 30 cafes, and all of them play Friends all day, every day. Why? It's just what they do in the town and you go in there for breakfast you have friends in this national sport yeah but you you sit down and then suddenly you're having a bit of food then you're there and then someone's like let's go out on my it's the lost rachel saga they're like you've seen it four times i don't care and then like you're in there but

16:22then the funny thing is all the workers in the restaurants have american accents and they can speak along to it because all day they've learned english from friends but then they mime across to it and they sound more like ross geller than ross geller sounds like ross geller so all the people they've done tubing so they shut it down because too many people were dying uh you went back and it was a lot more tame i remember one night i was so drunk it got dark i'm going down a river in the dark and these tuk-tuks are like, and you just get scared and you pull in, you pay whatever to get back into town. Because you don't want to be left stranded in the middle of the water. So quick story for you here.

16:53Come on, the Nutanix hit. I was backpacking six months. I did six months in Asia. I spent £3,000. Like it was unreal. And I probably spent that in Pret on this tour. You definitely spent it on Nando's. We get to Luang Prabang, and we've got to decide how we get to Hanoi. We're going to Vietnam for the first time. Who are you with? An ex. Classic. Fell in love with a girl from uni. She wants to go back to Asia. I said, I'll come with you. I sold my Renault Megane for this. Got it. R26? R26. Oh, no. Renault Megane R26 Formula One edition is26 formula one edition is the we both had the same car both had the same car if i can find that in left-hand drive i would import it to america today they'll have them in france i'll be able to get a french one that'll be that'll be the

17:37best thing you could do mate could you imagine camaro r26 f1 megane recaro bucket seats two cut yeah alcantara though i do worry if you went back it's not the same so we had to decide whether or not we're going to go across and you make friends uh funnily enough one of the friends that i made traveling sent me a picture drinking new tonic the other day i was like this is weird unreal but we decided we're going to fly but the flight was 51 pounds and that's a lot of money for a backpacker but i was like look let's just go i think it's like a 12 or 15 hour bus journey. And you get the sleeper buses when you go around. But a sleeper bus can be a nightmare. On the way to Chiang Mai, someone left the door open and all the mosquitoes got in.

18:12I love Chiang Mai. You're just getting attacked by the mosquitoes, cooks anyway. So we arrived there and I look at the people that got the bus. And I was like, oh, did I make a mistake flying? They look at me. They go there with these two beautiful French girls. But they had a stomach bug on the bus mad diarrhea they kept shitting in the toilet they blocked the toilet supposed to shit on the bus the bus driver comes back locks the toilet they had to shit themselves in their seat and i'm talking for like 15 hour bus journey surely you can't keep going i guess it is thailand they don't give a between lang probang and hanoi it's like mountain roads everyone talks about how dangerous the cliff roads are the drivers just try and not

18:48to get you killed so he's like i don't give a fuck if you shoot yourself so they had to sit there with beautiful french girls that shut themselves for hours some people could be into that i did uh chiang mai to pai which is best place to learn a moped one of the most northerly uh cities towns i guess beautiful town good did you do pi oh yeah so that that's where you go to learn a moped one of the most northerly uh cities towns i guess beautiful town good did you do pi oh yeah so that that's where you go to learn how to ride a moped because you fall off and then you're in pipe the bus that you take up there what is it it's called a vomit alley 350 turns in a six-hour journey so just hairpins all the way up and then when you're

19:20coming back you'd think that the going up would be worse, but it's not because it's slower. It's the coming down in an 18-person shithouse sprinter van, some Thai sprinter van. And on the way back, I was with my business partner's sister. We were going back together, so we were sat together, and there were two Chinese students behind us. And they were, I could hear, like that. And all that happened, bus driver sat there. You know the classic bus driver underhand pose, like holding the bottom of the steering wheel? You know exactly what I mean. Like this. Like Donald Trump. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like somebody that's got like saucers giving out hors d'oeuvres, but he's just controlling the bus.

19:57All that he did, didn't even look back. He just heard the, like that. One hand off the steering wheel. Just grabbed two plastic bags. Just went like that. Just put them behind. just grab two plastic bags just went like that just put them behind we passed plastic bags back and they just threw in thailand for month and a half so there's this rumor when you're there that the big chang bottles to be careful because they're stronger beer and have you heard this you heard this thing so i didn't know if it was true but one day test it this girl that I ended up going traveling with. By the way, if you're thinking of going traveling with your girlfriend, absolutely do not do it. Destroy the relationship.

20:30My mom told me before I went, she's like, James, you are making a big mistake. I was. I'm sorry, mom. You're right. So we just argue all the time. Moms are always right, dude. So if we're arguing, I just get hammered. So we're in Thailand. I think we're in Koh Samui and I'm just necking these big bottles of chan. The next thing, I black out. But I wake up or I kind of remember, you know, when you black up, you just suddenly you just got memory. I'm walking down the side of the road. They found me. And the first thing they say to me is you've been in a moped crash. And I'm like, what? And then I look and all the skin is off my shoulder, all the skin's off my leg. They're getting the idea now.

21:03They're rubbing me down. They're like, you've obviously ridden your moped and you've crashed and i'm like oh shit but like i don't really remember anything no helmet nothing this is crazy then we get back and we find my moped there's not a scratch on it and we have no idea where i've been or who i've been with they just said you just walked out the hotel you've been gone like two hours i must have came back missing half of your skin but the craziest thing it was kind of scary in thailand you go drinking for a bit that i could have broken a leg lost the leg got concussed crazy the amount of times i've done stupid shit like that i made it out alive then the locals come out with the iodine and get it on you so you don't get infected i had to leave bali for

21:39that my first time in bali i came off a moped after seven days, laid up in a bed taking trazodone, which was not trazodone, tramadol, which is fucking lovely. That was fun. But apart from the fact that you get really acclimatized to it, I can see why people get addicted to that stuff. Came back and I couldn't get it anymore. I was like, oh, well, that's an easy way to get it. It was like the Vietnam vets that were on heroin while they were away and they came back and they're like, but yeah, I got infected and had to fly home. Momentous just made one of my favorite products significantly better and $50 cheaper. They have reformulated their sleep packs with a better and more research-backed form of magnesium, making the new formula even

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22:47Plus they ship internationally. 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 livemomentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. You know, we're like Ankh status now. Right. Where we were just helping a guy pick his future. Peak Ankh. We've been walking around with students, giving them life advice for a lot of today. But I now, when I'm in Bali, will find people getting on their mopeds and starting to wear a helmet. Where the one time in Vietnam. You're the least cool person in Bali.

23:23Yeah. The funny thing was, in Vietnam, I'm in bali yeah the the funny thing was um in vietnam i'm pretty sure it was the i was turning right yeah my driving lesson vietnam i can't remember but anyway i was packing bags to get to a bus to to move on in vietnam so i'm on my ipad i'm shuttling back and forth i put all my bags on me and then i had to put a bag under the seat and my helmet was there that i never wore so i was like oh for fuck's sake i'm gonna have to wear my helmet on this run so i put my helmet on a local thought i'd left my indicator on so i'm slowing down to turn he's overtaking me as i've turned and t-boned me and i remember just cracking my helmet on the floor i was wearing all the

23:58backpacks as well which worked out like body armor yeah like body armor i get up i'm screaming at this local guy and these americans come out and they're like, bro, you're fine. My moped was written off, petrol all over the floor, people putting sand on it. The one time I needed a helmet was when I put it on for safe, safe keeping. I didn't want to lose the helmet and pay whatever it was. But now every time I go around, I just imagine if there was no helmet on for that, my brains would have been over a road in Da Nang on the train. Talking about advice for relationships, do and do not do, George from the Tin Men posted this thing, which was asking a bunch of men who've been married for quite a while,

24:36advice for guys on how to navigate your relationship. And lots of them were quite silly and quite cute. And I thought that one of them was really interesting, which is when you're trying to help your girl decide what to wear for the evening, a lot of the time there might be a fashion show that happens. And after a while, it can delay you to the point where you're late for the meal and that's not good and she might get frustrated. So one of the pieces of advice was when your girl comes out in the first outfit you say darling that looks you look fantastic this is this is gorgeous but i i do want to see another one like can i see can i see what your second choice would be then when she comes out in the second one say i mean this is this is stunning but i did prefer the first one

25:21save yourself three more outfit changes you do realize that every single time a man does that now, they've listened to this podcast. I know what you're doing. You're manipulating me. Yeah, if you're listening to this in the car, it's not going to work. A lot of couples listen to this either in the car or separately. We hear this a lot at the live shows where they'll come up and they go, we listen to you all the time. Like when I go to work and he goes to work, and then we talk about it over dinner on a nighttime. And if you now try and use this. So basically, boys, if you've listened to this one before your girl has you need to say don't listen to that one with chris and james it's actually it's kind of bullshit they're sat

25:52on the bus it's a yeah it's a mess it's a bit of a mess the guardian's going to do an article about it you don't need to listen to that one get her to skip over that and you can keep that hack for you but i do think what was what was some of the other ones? My dad's got one where he said, the key to a long, successful marriage is accepting you're wrong even when you're right. That sounds dismissive, though. Chicks don't like it. But then it's not just accepting that you're wrong even if you're right. It's making it convincing that you actually think that you're wrong. Because otherwise, you're just being dismissive. You got 52 years married. Can't argue with the outcomes. I had a bit from the last show where I was talking about death row meals.

26:30Where I was saying, it's kind of mad that you do the most heinous crimes of rape and murder and whatever. And when we do execute you, we're going to let you pick your last meal. And I joked that my dad's been married to my mom for 52 years. And he doesn't get to pick us for dinner. So, like, why is it the people that... Anyway, so like, if we're going to kill... Sorry, mate, we're going to kill you because you're a heinous murderer. But what do you fancy? We'll make it happen. I mean, think about that lady, the one, the first person in history to have had the lethal injection twice in the same session and survived it. It gives me a good idea of a new way to torture people. So let's say someone's on death row.

27:09Let's just inject them with saline and keep doing it and go, goodbye, Chris. But they're on death row. Yeah, yeah. But you're not supposed to torture them. No, no, no, but it's only saline, Chris. Right. We're just going to make a psychological trauma to make them feel that they're about to die. They'll be like, ah, I got you. We'll do it again tomorrow. And then they rush and roulette. This sounds like guantanamo this is like john kiriakow stuff you can't be doing that i'm friends with john kiriakow he's gonna shout at you other advice other bits of advice if she can't decide where she wants to eat tell her you've decided but it's a surprise give her one chance to guess where you're going whatever she says say yes and go with it 99 of the time it's where she really wants to go

27:42it's so manipulative i can't work out if this is horribly misogynistic or like actually a beautiful way to just cut through a lot of the mess of a relationship here's the final one um just order fries she's not hungry sure but she'll eat the extra fries have you seen those videos where this is so, this is ruthless. You can't do this. Guys will ask their chick whether or not she wants a snack. So do you want to go out? We should go for a drive-thru. We could get ourselves a little treat. Why don't we go for a drive-thru? And then when they pull up, say, you can order. What is it that you want? She orders. And then when the person asks him, he's like, I'm all right, I'm not eating. It drives people. But the same thing is true.

28:26In a relationship, you are allowed to gain weight, but only relative to your partner. Like you and your partner's level of fatness or fitness is supposed to oscillate together. When you start to... It's a massive point of friction. Coaching people over the years, I used to call it the relationship saboteur, where if one party wants to lose weight and the other doesn't, they will not succeed. I think that's now called a fitness gap relationship. Look at that. I'm trying to teach him stuff. I'm learning back. When you were ahead, I'm just giving it nomenclature. I come up with a cool name for it. You came up with a concept. I don't know what that means. But yeah, in essence, they'll just find ways to sabotage.

29:00Oh, I just got us a curry. Oh, but you know I'm dieting. Yeah, but this one, you know, it's Friday night. Like Friday night juice. Yeah, you've got to be on the same page together you have to from a health and fitness perspective you have to be on the same page when do you reckon this is one for you like i you know the russians used to have those like umbrella tips with poisoning they should give you poke you in the back of the leg yeah didn't some guy that happened in the uk right they did yes so i was thinking we get those but we but we put Retta True Tide in it. Just unsolicited jab people with Retta. They would be fat family members. So this is an intervention from within the family? Yeah, fat unk.

29:37Okay. So fat uncle Trevor, he's just a walking bloody NHS heart attack. You get the little umbrella. 160 over 110. Yeah, absolutely. Fucking get up to him, give him a little, oh, what was that? Oh, sorry, Hunk. There you go, didn't see you there. Do that once a week, 2.5 milligrams, start off, whatever. But then I'm thinking, we're moving to oral, I think they've got oral, a Zen pick. Oh, you're looking for the Bill Gates solution. So I'm wondering, imagine in the future, I'm just saying, I'm not saying, imagine you're a wife, you've started training, you you're in your fitness your husband's dragging a little bit behind and he's not losing the weight imagine soon there could be just a little je ne sais quoi

30:13going into seasoning yeah you put it in a grinder yeah and then he's dropping weight and be like yeah do you know what you know trevor's looking amazing is that gonna happen what did you think of that guy so we just managed to finesse our way into exeter university gym university of exeter gym which for a high class sporting university was actually a bit of a shitty gym bit mid it was yeah not enough machines i can't get pump on everyone in there probably very fit probably great the sports that they do not massive right but also 19 so we brought the average age up by- The average free testosterone level. Yeah, you did. The average free testosterone doubled just by you walking in. But as we were walking back,

30:51this is a question that's been asked a bunch at the live shows and we got to do it in person today with one of the guys who came up and said, I'm a first year. I've been at uni for a month. He's only been at uni for a month. It's the fucking middle of October. He hasn't been at university. He's been at university for- month. He's only been at uni for a month. It's the fucking middle of October. He hasn't been at university. He's been at university for six weeks. Been at uni for six weeks. And I feel like I'm not making any progress and I want freedom. So should I just sack it all off? Study in business. And he's like, I suppose the dilemma here is you're like, well, if I'm studying business,

31:21am I going to learn as much as I would run in a business or being in a business? You're 18. You can't go and run a business. Anyway, when people ask you that question, because they've asked me it a lot, because I do the Q&A, what's your perspective? Because you tried uni. What was your perspective on this? I told you a little bit about on that reel the other day that I got kicked out of school. So I got kicked out of out of school technically i didn't get enough grades to go to sixth form so i went in spoke to the teachers and they they didn't want to have me on into the college because i only had four gcse's supposed to have five yeah eventually they go right we'll do it but you've got to be on your best behavior you've not been a great student two weeks in and get kicked out

32:02what do you do uh so actually this is gonna be crazy uh when i was younger i wanted to be in the military so i was in the army cadets um applied to uh wellbeck college my dad said i could only join the army if i went as an officer so you have to go into like officer training and uh in essence usually have to be well qualified which i wasn't my school grades weren't good you can go straight to sandhurst with a degree or you can do OTC. Yeah, so Officer Training Corps. Wabak College was where I was going to try and go. That's pretty much my only way through. And on my interview for that, I had a little police report coming up where I got in trouble when I was younger for shooting someone with an air rifle.

32:36But we'll glaze over that. Check James's Instagram for the full story. Yeah, so I go to sixth form. I had pretty bad behavioural problems. Imagine this. I had a really cool lock knife that I go to sixth form. I had pretty bad behavioral problems. Imagine this. I had a really cool lock knife that I used to use because we used to go off into like where you flick a knife out and then it doesn't come back. Why? Because we used to go camping. As cadets, you like go out, face paints. You get like an assault rifle. The barrel's concreted. But you'll have live rounds on you. If you shoot a live round on someone's face, half their face is coming off. So like it it was super cool by the way i don't think

33:08people would do i went cub scouts cadets then i wanted to go into the army so i could strip how were you such a tearaway you had all of the guardrails to be highly disciplined and well behaved and you shot someone at 13 and had a police report well this thing i was excited to join the army i just wanted to go shoot people. So excited that you shot someone. Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out there's a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us, become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Timeline. They've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria so your cells can actually renew themselves.

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34:18additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. So the British Army rifle is called an SA-80. The ones that we use in cadets, it's called an L-89 AI GP cadet rifle. And basically it has an iron sight instead. I could still strip one blindfolded and put it back together. I still remember, yeah, let's clean the barrel. I still remember you would do drills where even as you're checking the barrels empty on the weapon you do a sweep with your hand underneath the magazine cover to make sure there's no magazine in it like we even as a cadet as a 15 year old you do these drills become very

34:56proficient I've been to Arborfield, Purbright I've shot on some of the like the best ranges in the country I've even used one of the like digital ranges. This was like 20 years ago. So I was like obsessed. I loved it. But one day I was just like, oh, I'm just going to take the knife to school and show my mates. Got caught. And me as. Sixth form. No, this is 13, 14. It was just after I'd been arrested. So you shot someone. Yeah. Got out of it. Yeah. So it was. Then took a knife to school. It's criminal damage. It doesn't, the optics. It would have been actual bodily harm. Do not. The guy's. Look, great. Seven stitches in the face. And have I told you about the ballistics report? Can you just give, tell the story from start to finish?

35:34Because I wanted to take the piss out of you on Instagram for this story, and I couldn't do it. So we would, we had break barrel air rifles. We'd have the pellets. We'd have the shot pellets. Me and my neighbor. And we would shoot different different things and then we wanted to kind of raise the stakes and at 13 you know a freeway going past with cars driving moving target in our heads would like oh that'd be cool it didn't really occur to us in our brains that we were committing damage on cars like imagine you're driving and someone shoots a pellet your car that is would it leave a dent yeah go through wouldn't go through go through significant damage right but we were just pissing around and then

36:11one day where we pitched up outside the house outside of your own house outside of our own house right cool because my brain hadn't developed the same time in my life i took a knife in school show my friends the teachers were like james you don't understand that you can't bring a knife in school and i was like why they're like in case you stab someone i'm not gonna stab someone they were like but james it's school you can't bring that here so um shooting cars and thought nothing of it one day i play an age of empires 2 my mom walks in and she throw great game throws like a yellow pages she's crying she's like what have you done the yellow pages like a phone book why she was obviously trying to call someone when the police came so call who i don't

36:48know but she's come to the she was obviously in the middle of doing something police at the front door said to my mom and the closest projectile that she had to exact her outrage on you was the yellow pages she held so okay so your all i remember is turning around and come and she was like what have you done not you get to save your game? I couldn't tell you. The adrenals, boom. So I go out, and there's just two police officers sat in the front room with notepads. And I had to talk to my parents about this afterwards. I was like, what did they say? They said, we're looking for some kids, maybe they've got air rifles. My mom was like, they'll be my son. She wasn't like, oh, I don't know what you're on about.

37:21She was like, they'll be my son. Come in. So I come out. She's a good citizen. What have you been doing and uh we've been pissed around like we didn't we didn't mean to shoot well kind of anyway you go my mom's in hysterics my dad's come home from work he's like don't say don't say anything until you've seen a lawyer good man i've already done everything at this point um and the police officers knew we weren't trying to hurt someone so they were like oh so you were shooting items you're shooting objects you obviously missed i'm like correct they they actually were helping because they knew we weren't bad kids they knew the neighborhood whatever we didn't go out that day to try and hurt someone so they go yeah unfortunately uh

37:58someone has been shot um currently at heatherwood they're having stitches now uh so headwood heatherwood hospital so uh they were like my mom and dad obviously in the states they go let's let's do this tomorrow uh come to the police station and we'll do everything there so i was like oh god mom and dad were not happy next day go there and as you get into the police station i was like i'm about to get telling off and i remember the police officer going you ready i said yeah he's like okay you have the right to remain silent anything you do say 13 maybe used against you in a court of law i'm there with my mom what does that mean when they say that you're under arrest i'm under arrest now so i'm going in there's a 13 year old

38:35fingerprints dna mugshot the lot so you can't commit a murder in the uk now interrogation room interrogation my friends at school didn't believe i'd been arrested because they were like oh you're just lying so one of my friends who'd been arrested had an ankle tag he was like he's like tell me about the interrogation up in a really nice area that's that's how it begins mate he was from uh ashford my school was in surrey so anyway i said take deck two tapes two red buttons he was like oh you did get arrested so uh yeah i came back and basically the police officer was like look you're gonna meet the guy you've shot and you're gonna apologize and he's not gonna convict you he's not gonna press charges who was it that you shot how did the how did you hit someone so before we met him

39:13they took us through a ballistics report so he went to headwood hospital he said i've been shot the the doctors don't have to call the police there's been a shooting yeah if the sentence is proclaimed i've been shot armed all hell breaks loose armed response so the guys that came to the door didn't have guns but they were armed response and ask for this so that would have been worse my mom dad seen them full ballistics report he was passenger so this is in england his wife's driving back window was open on the right side. Missed his son. Hit him in the face and the passenger's home. So the police are like, you could have shot the wife, blinded the wife, killed the wife. Who was driving. Crashed the car.

39:55Could have crashed into another car. Could have hit the son. And they were like, if you hit the son. How old was the son? Six or seven. They're like, if you hit the son, he's convicting you. He had seven stitches across his face just under his lip that you needed from the shot and who shot it you or your mate we don't know right obviously it must have been him it must have been him i'll give you everything um but you can imagine the world crushing down you for what seemed like just being idiots just shooting out a moving object so go through the ballistics report, have to meet the guy, like obviously not so apologetic, but there's nothing you can do at this point. Afterwards, we don't get the conviction.

40:33I have a police reprimand until I'm 18. So in essence, if I get in any more trouble, I'm fucked. Like bringing knives to school. Yeah. So then we haven't even got to my uni bit yet. So we had that, but then it meant that when i was out drinking being like a yob when i was like 14 15 16 you know when the police pull over and you've got alcohol on you and they're like you lads got booze yep what have you got wkd four fosters what did you do i put it down the drain right now i just didn't want to get in trouble again yeah where my mates would be like oh fuck off mate i was like yes sir no sir goody two shoes yeah and um so that was a bit rough then got my 4G sissies then I couldn't even get into sixth form

41:09so then we're pissing around one day in sixth form we're bunking I'm already like two weeks in and Solution School in Chertsey there's a school hall and there's a drama department all the props are behind the stage and we thought that'd be a good place to bunk we wanted to smoke cigarettes we're smoking there it was less likely to get caught in the drama hall than you would be outside anyway we're dressed up in the props we're fucking around and i shove my mate he's on a sofa that's got wheels on it i shove him off the stage but he's holding on to the curtain and the curtain's going don't don't don't don't don't tipping off it's like a tom and jerry cartoon i'm pissing myself i turn around at the back of the hall cross-armed to my head of year he's just been watching us and smoking and pushing someone off

41:48a stage on a wheelie sofa i think at this point i'm what 16 just turned 16 so go to my head of year and they make you sit outside so i'm sat outside of my god then my mom comes in another yellow pages sit in there this is like what two years after i've been arrested three years after i've been arrested and also i didn't get the grades my mom's like you need to go get a job sixth form was my way to not get a job so my head of year was like we can expel james formally we have the grounds for it or you can take him out today like you remove him from school today we don't expel it like that that was pretty much the ultimatum it's either leave or we fire you yeah so uh get in the car drive on the way home uh my mum takes like a slightly different

42:31route we're not going home she takes me to bracknell job center she pulls up and as we're walking across the job center i'm walking behind her like my nokia and i'm texting my mates like i've just been expelled she gets my phone just smashes in the road just smashes in the road I've never seen like my parents likes before going to the job center she turns to me don't come home without a job that was it don't go home without a job oh my god so I went there and I sat down and one of the questions was do you want to like keep going in education I was like what are my options there was an agricultural college doing a b-tech in sport i was like the most canonical like can i qualify for that they said yeah so i came home and i had

43:11to try and barter to my mom that i wanted to remain in college so then what was good there was all my subjects were pe because of sports coaching so that went pretty well but then i got a b-tech and actually i just got on really well with my lecturers, played rugby for the college, did a lot of sport, used to give rugby kit that I got from playing for county to my lecturers. And they gave me extensions on my work. So it was cool. I was like, oh, mate, I'm going to Tenerife. I can't do the coursework. Because you need to play sevens or what? I was like, that waterproof looks quite nice. I thought I'd get you one. You were bribing your teachers with good merch. It's the same as us now. It's like a gay one. You were bribing your teachers with good merch. It's the same as us now.

43:46It's the same with Nutanix. Mate, and the college I was at, it's called Berkshire College of Agriculture. They had like a grave digging course on site. So they were teaching people how to dig graves. Then we had the sports part. Then it was equestrian. But then at the end of that, you can top up and do something called a foundation degree. So you can turn your BTEC into a first year of uni foundation degree. FDSC it goes down as. And so I applied for that. But my mum and dad originally were like, we're not letting you go to uni because we know you'll fuck it up. We know you'll get in debt. So I actually stayed. They literally didn't trust you to go to university. Yeah. I was like, I want to go to Bournemouth.

44:22They're like, no. I was like, what do you mean no? I'm 18. They're like, no. So I continued at my college. No, dad, i haven't been arrested for like three years now so i did two more uh years technically university technically buxom uni in buckinghamshire but the campus for it was my existing college so i did four years at college loved it it was great lived at home then for my third top-up year to go from a foundation degree to a full degree you have to do a top-up and that's why i chose hartford college now hartford college is a rugby college i thought i was pretty good at rugby until i went there so i was like barks under 20s captain playing like adults rugby was good when i get there they're like oh you can try out for the third team i was like one of the hardest

44:59games of my life we had like england under 20 boys in the second team and uh when i got there freshers load of us got mumps you've had mumps i got mumps on one side in my first year of uni yeah do you want to explain what mumps is uh i first of all woke up thinking i've been in a fight because i don't remember the night out my jaw was killing me yeah so i'm asking my mates like did we get a scrap last night and then i went to go see the nurse on site, and she was like, you've either got glandular fever or I reckon you've got mumps. Now, I had it in both sides, and you look like a hamster. Is it your lymph glands? Whatever there's under here, I'm sure people in the comments will tell us, but yeah.

45:35So from freshers, I got sent home, but, like, all the rugby team got down. Because it's super contractible, right? We said it was from sharing water bottles, but we were just all snogging birds on freshers. You know, it's like, and this is before camera phones. So boys can neck like 10 birds and two blokes in a night. And that's, that's a heterosexual male. One time, me and another one. Sometimes you just miss the target, I suppose. I remember one time me and another bloke snogged each other to prove to the girls we were going to kiss him. And in rugby, that was like, that's just normal like just imagine giving someone so many shout i'm really good at kissing prove it dave come here um not my not my

46:17proudest semi uh but anyway so i got mumps had to go home and uh i was home for like three weeks i lost a lot of weight i lost maybe like eight or nine kilograms i remember i was in the trenches the fevers are terrible then just as i got good and it passed it went to my nuts and my nuts i've heard about this massive so i go to heatherwood hospital again same place at the moment when they got shot and um they were like yeah you just gotta like hold them so i was worried i was maybe gonna be infertile from it because it's really bad for your fertility so i go back to uni this This is a long story, by the way. And I'm looking at like my cohort, my, uh, my year, whatever. And I go to my first lecture, but I've been off campus for three weeks.

46:53So I expected when I first walked into that lecture, someone could James welcome. Where have you been? I walk in and everyone just stares as if i've walked into the wrong room when i know fully well this is my lecture theater yeah and they're like can we help and i paused for two seconds and just turned around and left because i i was really embarrassed but it was it wasn't what i was expecting so it wasn't as welcoming as yeah i was like we'll deal with this another day and then i never went to a lecture again so a quick quick aside, you probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with Element in it.

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48:08sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom that's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom when did you leave well this is the thing at uni i was told may not be true, if you don't hand in your coursework, they kick you off campus. I was living on campus, but someone said, if you hand in a blank cover letter with every bit of coursework, they can't. So I did that. How'd that work out? Well, I didn't get kicked off campus. So remember I told you earlier that my name was Jimbo? So Lucy Lord, who you met last night knowed me knows me as jimbo uh so everyone at uni knew me as jimbo no one knew me as james smith

48:49my last week of playing rugby for hartbury one of the coaches went are you james smith i went yeah he goes mate i'm your dissertation supervisor he's like none of us know who you are i only know you as jimbo from playing rugby you jason bond yourself dissertation supervisor he's like none of us know who you are i only know you as jimbo from playing rugby you jason bond yourself yeah and he was like university he was like mate where have you been i was like oh mate yeah i went to my first lecture and like no one ever let me in he's like we've been emailing you i go yeah i never got my logins i never even got into my student uni account to log into it and uh yeah that was my one year at uni and the issue was

49:23though did you have to do stats and research yeah stats and research was 7 a.m on a thursday the social was on a wednesday night so it was never going to work i was never going to pull an all-nighter in liquid gloucester have my one pound cheeseburgers on the way home and get up at 7 a.m for stats and research i didn't even do my foundation degree properly i swapped rugby stash with people i knew at college to get the first part of the degree so then that was it and then i had one year sending it at uni and best year of my life and didn't get the degree so that guy backed full circle half an hour we pretty much said to him like you're away from home you're building independence you're learning how to feed yourself and wash your own clothes.

50:05That year away from uni, for me, like, accelerated my, well, it didn't do that well, accelerated my maturity. I say maturity, and I've got to backtrack on that. So, you ever played Centurion? Yeah. You're going to have to explain for the Americans. I got banned from the prom. So, we had a game, we were bored one day at uni. We're like, right, every minute, on the minute, you've got to do a shot. So, we do a shot of beer, so we had a game we were bored one day at uni we're like right every minute on the minute you gotta do a shot so we do a shot of beer so we had like proper decent pint glasses and we've been drinking a bit before and all i remember is kind of blacking out again and at hartford college you've got these different campuses and the one

50:38we were in was the one they show people around and so i get woken up like our head of year at uni knocking on our door where I was took us to the block we'd been drinking in. I'd been using cans of deodorant to graffiti windows but I'd been drawing cocks. That's how everyone knew it was me. You know Superbad when they draw cocks and everything. That was me at uni. But I don't even know how I did this. I somehow put a knife in a fridge door. Everyone was like... Stuck it through it. What is it about you and weapons? I don't know. how I did this. I somehow put a knife in a fridge door. Everyone was like... Stuck it through it. What is it about you and weapons? I don't know, mate. It seems like a consistent...

51:09I mean, you know, we've run Newtonic for four years now and I haven't seen you with a weapon once. I'm worried that you're going to turn up one day with an improvised explosive device. But the good thing is, I got this all out the way. So, like, up until 23, 24, I was a fucking liability. It's the only word. Nothing was impressive i've ever done like even on rugby tours puking on the back of a bus necking a bottle of wine being a degenerate like really the university for me was in the skills of drinking it's a really interesting archetype because everyone that's gone to school college college, sixth form, and university in the UK knows that kind of archetype of person. I certainly do. And I was facilitating it for much of my time in nightlife.

51:53I don't know what the equivalent is in America. I imagine that there will still be that maybe Greek life. They take their sport so seriously. If you're talking college, university, you're a pro athlete. You're bigger than some pro athletes, right? The following that you have, they've now unlocked all of the sponsorship stuff. So Nike and Gatorade and Nutanix can come in and sponsor college athletes. If you're a college athlete that fucking rules, we want to hear from you. That archetype of person that you just think this person should not be allowed near anything requires responsibility can you imagine these people i went to uni with now they're like he's that guy he's got what yeah that guy 100

52:37million dollar drinks business i think this is one of the things that's been interesting for me to reflect on. When you're young, you have no perspective over whether or not you're going to amount to something in future. And I think that we're able to make predictions based on how people perform in school. Because that's really the only merit that you have, even in sport. You knew that kid at 15 that played for England under 17s. I did in cricket, right, which was my sport. Or there was because cricket's not a physical sport in the same way that rugby might be or even football. It means that you can speed run the adult game as well. So you can have some superstar, Scotty Borthwick, who plays for played and I think still plays for Durham County Cricket Club.

53:23I remember he was 14 playing seconds, county seconds, right? This is something that men do full time and he was still in secondary school. So you look at these very precocious young guys and girls and you're like, wow, they've speed ran success. They're so much closer to this. And I think that it can create a sense of helplessness and young people, they go, well, look, this is the time when my future is being predicted by my present. What's happening right now is going to be indicative of where I'm going to end up. And when puberty comes online, one of the things that you do is you start looking around and comparing yourself to everyone that's nearby, because you're getting ready to become an adult in the world and this is one of the reasons that trends seem to uh be particularly permeable like they seep through

54:11groups of especially girls but also guys in puberty through college through university and you can think fuck like i'm not going to amount to anything like how can i amount to anything that guy was what 18 18 yeah he's been at uni for six weeks i said to him i was like mate like not to say that i'm going to be your role model but 18 i i was still not allowed to go to uni at your age i was housebound i was on house arrest by my parents then at 20 i went to do freshers then by 21 i was failing my third year at uni having the biggest booziest year of my life i was like then 22 23 still lived in gloucester did door knocking it was 22 when I did the door knocking 23 during corporate then empire yeah there was a door knocking for empower so I was like mate if in

54:55three years you're not door knocking in gl1 something gas you're ahead yeah yeah you're ahead then 24 I didn't become a pt because I wanted to run my own business I did it because I just hated everything I'd done before it was a move of desperation i was like oh if i can charge three people 30 pounds and make 90 pounds a day i could live off that and i could get that done between nine and one and then cool i'll go and play call of duty the everyone seems to think retrospectively like oh it was a strategic move i was like no i fell into it by accident through hating my job and here's another thing in corporate no one really does anything so for instance in a sales job a lot of input not a lot of outcome i won't

55:30name the company rsa security um part of emc there i was in the inside sales department and my job was marketing would bring in the leads i would qualify the leads on the phone find out the size passed it to a distributor or reseller so similar to our model you although we do sell direct you don't buy a Mars bar from Mars you get it from Costco or you get it from your local corner shop and I had a set commission amount and I had to make a certain amount of phone calls every day and I said to my boss oh I've hit target it's April is there any way we can expand my commission she goes no I'm sorry I was like well what am I supposed to do for the rest of the year she She was like, look, as your manager,

56:07I just need you to take your phone calls. I was like, and I'm not going to get anything else. So I would call up Cornwall County Council every morning at the same time. And basically it would have press one, press two, press three, press four. And if nothing happened, it would go back to press one, press two, press three. So I'd leave it off the hook for like 50 minutes. Then at the end of the day, I would just keep putting the phone down and bashing it. So then the statistics... Total number of calls, total time on call. So I did something similar when I worked at the AA. So I was doing outbound warm telesales, upgrading people to get vehicle cover. So if you got something broke that wasn't the engine and wasn't the timing belt, the AA would be prepared to cover it. But it was really specific. It was very hard to actually end up getting it covered. So I realized that when the other person put the phone do, but they don't look at how much time they weren't able to log that the other person was off the call.

57:08So they would see that my ratio, and then someone cottoned on to what I was doing. I worked at the AA for like nine months during my placement year. And someone cottoned on to that. All of this together is to say, I don't know whether outcomes in early life, I don't know whether outcomes even in like middle early life, in your 20s, are that predictive. Like Greg Lavecchia, for the people that don't know him, he's the CEO of Bloom. He's only 22. Look at the, he's aged a bit. The 2,000 nanograms per deciliter of testosterone will do that to you. But the interesting thing here is, so with that office job, not only was I like gaming the system, from April to December, I did nothing. So I would just sit at my desk. I had to do 40 hours a week, sat at a desk doing nothing. And

57:50it was the worst torture. If you gave me the opportunity of going back there, that was worse than my busiest of times now. And I remember we were next to a building that was empty. I was there for a year. And if someone came through maintenance with a ladder, I was like, oh, I've made my share. I'm like, this is interesting. After experiencing- You just needed novelty so desperately. That pure boredom actually set me up. And you know, I was like, oh, I've made my share. I'm like, this is interesting. You just needed novelty so desperately. That pure boredom actually set me up. And you know, I was saying to you that, you know, I hit target in a job that I hated. If I have this mindset to a job that I love,

58:14I can do incredibly well. It's one of my favorite lessons from you. So like, uh, If you're achieving in a life that you hate, imagine how good you'd be at one that you enjoy. So almost that 18 year old, he doesn't get to just skip to the successful part because he needs the job that sucks. He needs to be bought. He needs to have the manager. Why do you think it is this sort of speed running, trying to skip past it mentality? Is that a social media comparison thing? Being able to see people of your age or even people that are outside because your exposure, I don't know, but maybe because you come from an area that was much more affluent than mine, I was never exposed to anybody that had sort of entrepreneurial gumption. I never felt like I was comparing myself to my peers,

58:51that they were better than me at cricket, they were getting more time, they were batting up the order in firsts, or when I went to university, you can compare your grades with other people, et cetera, et cetera. But it didn't feel like the same fervor. Do you know what I mean? Like this rushy, desperate need to speed run childhood and early adulthood into maturity. I think it's status signals have changed. So for instance, like I said to you before, came home with a gold Rolex and my dad was like, that's nice. Come home first class, my dad goes, that's nice. Come home with a son, my mom and dad, like, my dad cried when i told him that uh tay was pregnant so like the status signals of their generation the child was the biggest

59:30accomplishment like they would rather have one child than three number one best-selling books i assure you rather than a thousand so now i do think the young people and again i play into this a bit but young people at 18 shouldn't know what a lamborg Aventador SVJ is. And they shouldn't. You knew what a Nissan GTR Skyline was like, right? When you were growing up as a 14-year-old. I don't think I knew how much it would cost and how much money I needed to earn to then have the revenue to do it. I didn't have Chachi Baty to talk to and say, how can I afford this car? It feels a little bit more like the dream. It's almost like being a fan of like harry potter or a sports team like having messy as a poster on your bedroom wall and thinking i love messy not i'm going to be messy and the

1:00:15same thing for whatever the fancy car is because we would have had like fast car magazine and stuff growing up pictures of birds from zoo it was a a great, Fast Car Magazine in the UK, I don't know whether, there must have been equivalents in the US, was a wonderful way to, for a teenager to buy soft core porn under the guise of being interested in cars. Yeah. That's what that entire industry was based on. But I think this is the crazy thing though, to those, I don't know, I can't speak on behalf of 18 year olds, but I think those metrics have changed so much that people go, okay, well, if I'm going to have that at this age like that person does because they're 24 year old millionaires that live in miami the matt armstrong's rebuilding that car

1:00:52from the alex fg the the he teaches people at f foreign exchange or whatever by fixing that car how old is he 23 24 right iman gadazi was super young when he did his thing. Ibn Ghazi's 24. Still. He's 24, 25. When I met him last year, he was 24. Fucking hell. He's young, bro. So you think they will set the benchmark as that and go, right, the only way I get access to these signals is not through employment. It must be through having my own business. Do you think my vaping adds to the ambiance? Yeah. It's like having a smoke machine in the background. It's cool, isn't it? Especially if I'm talking. They're like, wow, they've got the smoke on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the state of signals, I think, have changed.

1:01:26I think the people now reverse engineer that. It's only a tour thing. Jared, have you ever considered you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man. I kept chugging, waiting for the regret to creep in. Never happened. Didn't you end up going home with that chick with the lazy eye? That didn't seem lazy to me. See, most people, like Jared, don't actually want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They make the best NA brews on the planet, so you can still have something cold and

1:02:02tasty just without the usual trade-off you can find athletic brewing co's best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you or best option get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's athletic brewing.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Near beer terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company fit for all times. If you're, because I remember 100k a year was you made it. That's what I thought growing up. Fuck it. I didn't know anybody that earned 100k when I was growing up.

1:02:35So then I think and when I was growing up I was like, cool, if I can get there before I'm 35 or 40, sweet. And then that's it. I remember my goal was personal training was six hours a day, 60 pounds an hour. I remember when i saw you do your how to make money as a personal trainer what was it get in at six do two hours 15 minute break six 7 15 uh 8 30 9 30 then 10 45 11 45 and you're done by one down so you do two hours, two hours, two hours. What's the meta lesson to all this? Because it's fun and it's interesting stories, but what, at least for me, trying to, it might feel a bit like needless nostalgia, largely anglicized needless nostalgia as well for people the rest of the world that don't understand it,

1:03:21or at least can't, I directly relate to it. One of the things that at least comes up for me is a reminder of how unpressurized my childhood and even young business time felt. I didn't feel the pressure really sort of turn the taps on until probably about 10 years ago it was probably 2015 16 17 okay like this is this really feels like i am competing with the world and i didn't have a massive amount of ambition beforehand but i just i don't know i wish that i could gift that young kid that we saw today fucking young kid he's 18 i wish we could give like gift like all of the freshers that we've seen at these events that have come out to see us just the liberation of not feeling like it needs to be done right now i've got a concept i've been working on it i've been trying

1:04:13to explain it a little bit because you're writing a book at the moment yeah this actually uh i actually just said it to someone giving them advice and i was like oh someone record that and uh we're talking it was actually ed lawrence asked me the most important financial metric to aim for as a business owner and i call it head above water so you write down what's my rent what's my car finance what's my um holiday fund what is it what is that amount now what is that per month now as a business owner you work towards it and actually there's a rowing coach that i work with and him and his wife have a glass of champagne every month they hit the number they need to survive and sometimes they do it on the 20th day but sometimes they do it on the 7th day

1:04:49and if on the 7th day of the month they've hit enough money they're invincible for the rest of the month yeah no matter if they don't it's quite a short-term window to be thinking but every month they get sit down have a glass champagne and the harder they work the sooner they have it and it's like and then if you have it on the 29th day babe we still hit it and i thought that's amazing but the head above water thing, a lot of people think that potentially I don't give a fuck online. I do give a fuck. I give selective fucks. But actually, ever since I started my business in 2015, 2014, I've made enough money for my head above water and that's made me invincible. So when my first brand deal came to me

1:05:21and I told them to fuck off, it's because I had 1,300 pounds in my Monzo. I was like, you can't buy me. I've had 1,300 pounds in my Monzo. I was like, you can't buy me. I've got 1,300 pounds in my Monzo, mate. And if people only realize that your head above water level changes, obviously your needs, your wants, the house you're in, whatever. But once you hit that, you are really invincible from the world. And people don't look at that line in front of them. They don't look at that line in the sand and go, as long as I hit that, I'm fine. Their line is fucking miles ahead of them. I'm realistically far ahead. They fill that void with void with depression anxiety and reasons to be unhappy we even do

1:05:49that i don't know why i'm giving this advice i can't take it myself but really if they just looked at that number and said right as long as i hit that i'm fine that that's it and as a student this guy's number for his head above water is a tiny amount and i say bro the whole world of business and everything you've got ahead of you how much work or how much services or how many products you have to sell to that number it's not scary and big and as daunting as you like then if you supersede that number hey you can have more cool stuff wealth is just reality minus expectations right and by that definition a lot of billionaires are broke if you have to explain that to me again. Wealth is reality minus expectations.

1:06:27So if you are overachieving what you expect from life, you're wealthy. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you are underachieving what you expect from life or what you want from life, your desires minus what your reality is delivering to you, everybody always wants to grow. They always want things that are beyond where they're at at the moment. But there's a difference between expecting it from life and desiring it from life. And I think that if you are permanently reminding yourself of all of the things that this other person has got, that's your comparison group. The problem is that our comparison group has been spread out so much more. And it's interesting being around students today, we gave out unsolicited, gave out a ton of Nutanacans in the middle of the Exeter Student Union today.

1:07:08What did I say to the guy when we left? I went up to him. I went, bro, you're six foot two and blonde. You've won the lottery, brother. I said, mate, you could have been born in any country in the world, statistically most likely to be born in Africa, followed by Asia. You're in Great Britain. I i was like by the sound of your voice your parents grew up in an affluent area you're six foot two there's what three percent of men taller than you plus if you get any taller than six foot two i reckon you start to see negative returns because then you're too tall then you've got bloody knees touching the seats on easyjet not that i'd know and i'm joking i was like bro you you you have so much already i was

1:07:43like you haven't even accomplished anything and you've already won the lottery i was like, bro, you have so much already. I was like, you haven't even accomplished anything and you've already won the lottery. I was like, so everything from here on in, it's kind of cool. And it sounded like he had a hot girlfriend. There's a line from Joe Hudson. Most people believe confidence comes from being really good at what they do or never messing up. But unshakable confidence comes from knowing your worth isn't tied to performance. And it feels a little bit like managing to detach those two things. That switch of worth being tied to performance, especially in the status realm, which is now being quantified on social media, in the financial realm, which you're now able to compare more

1:08:19easily because of transparency online, all of that being made more obvious and broadcast is what I think the switch that got flicked for me when I was in my twenties. It was like, ah, I now have a metric to compare myself to and I should be ahead. And we're doing it now. And the interesting lesson is if you can't unpick that, knowing that your worth isn't tied to interesting lesson is if you can't unpick that knowing that your worth isn't tied to your performance, if you can't unpick that, I think you'll always feel lacking because the game just gets bigger. We're going to announce this most recent valuation and raise and all the rest of the stuff that we've done for Newtonic. We're about to announce,

1:08:58we will by the time that this goes out, have announced Walmart, HEB, Morrison's Daily. Look at that. Isn't that cute? We got, for the people that are listening we're holding up um custom woven coasters that we were gifted but we've also got there's a bunch of uh easter eggs that we have managed to slot into this scene let's see who picks up on them the game just gets bigger and you keep on fighting with harder and harder uh opponents or or rivals or whatever it is it's like oh you thought that your nissan your uh renner megane r26 f1 was nice well i know a guy who's got what's greg's car what's that stupid thing that i was in uh ferrari what is it summit 28 is it no is this um it's absurd whatever it is it's silly and fast and

1:09:47to like 1.2 million dollars smart car it is a smart car but you know what's interesting i will say off the back of that as you're saying this there's a meme in my head where you got like black and white two portraits of two people one guy's got loads and loads of money and he's pointing no you got a person with a family and a wife pointing at a millionaire saying you're rich and the millionaire's there on his own pointing at the people with two and you're happy you're rich yeah like the the wealth subjective we always say it's like money money money when when i meet people sometimes they say people are aren't in the career they want they're not earning the money they want they're not driving the car they want but they still have

1:10:20so much and i think in a world now we're told, like, hey, you've got a wife that you guys still get on after being together for 10 years. Pretty fucking cool. And you've got two kids. And despite having the normal struggles that everyone else has and half-term being expensive or whatever, I wish we counted that more as success. Well, there's a rebellion at the moment. For all that this can sound like, like needless nostalgia or two guys trying to over intellectualize what just the challenge of being human and and trying to sort of weave through that the competing priorities that everybody has that definitely feels to me to be a rebellion that's coming at least in part at the moment which is as both men and women,

1:11:05men in the past, recent past, and women right now are able to socioeconomically get to where they want to. Maybe they don't have the spending power that they wished that they had, but they're able to like achieve a lot of things and I've got a new job position and so on and so forth. I think that a lot of the backbiting and the scrappiness and the sort of discomfort and the finger pointing that's happening is people completing things that they thought would make them happy only to realize that the problem that they thought they were going to solve is still there, despite the fact that the antidote to it has already been ingested. Like I have got to the place that I thought would be escape velocity from my issues.

1:11:44I've already achieved the goals that I said would make me happy. Fuck. Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I did something wrong. And one of the wonderful, and it's very hard to thread this needle. The original live show that I did, that I wrote to go to Australia with was all about the arrival fallacy. You call it, you have a similar thing end of history end of history illusion so arrival fallacy the view from the top of the mountain is not as good as you think it's going to be when you're on the climb up if you're at the top trying to tell people who are still climbing that the view isn't that good it sounds like a fat guy telling a starving man that food isn't very tasty that's what it sounds like it's it's a luxurious position to

1:12:22be in no one wants to hear it etc etc and it's a bit trite. And I saw Jake Humphrey talk about it and then it kind of killed the glamour of it because it doesn't sound contrarian anymore when it's kind of like, you know, really hitting the mainstream. But there is definitely a big group of people who are achieving success in the way that society told them that they should be satisfied and realizing that it's not scratched the itch that they hope for. And there's two choices. You're sort of, when you are faced with that thing, you are offered one of maybe like three routes. One of them is gold medalist syndrome, where you think, ah, it wasn't regional manager. It was national manager. It wasn't getting the bachelor's degree.

1:13:04It was getting the M field. That was the thing that was missing. So you try and run it back. The It wasn't getting the bachelor's degree. It was getting the M field. That was the thing that was missing. So you try and run it back. The dose wasn't sufficient in order to complete that. The second route is to sort of rail against the system generally and say this whole thing is broken. That's when people get really spiky about it, I think. And the third one, which at least at the moment, my bro science brain is telling me is the one that is more accurate, is to be more reflective and say, maybe the whole game of this beyond what do I need to be able to survive and get myself to where I want to and satiate my desire for like status and respect from people because we're a social species, right? We need to be validated by the world through getting some accomplishments. I've closed those loops. I shouldn't run it back. I shouldn't say

1:13:49that someone somewhere is oppressing me and limiting my happiness. I need to actually turn it inward and look at what is the part of me that is always feeling dissatisfied, no matter what the dose is that I get that's in return of this. And speaking as two guys that are trying to build a billion dollar brand for whatever reason it is, you know what, actually on this, to give you your flowers, one of the best frames, and I was so jealous of this when I first heard you say it, it was a long time ago now, you used to talk about success on social media as a game. It's just game points. And today i like didn't play the game quite so well i lost some points and in other days i played the game a little bit better and um that

1:14:30frame of once you have got yourself to a level of comfort that is accessible for most people maybe it's not palatial maybe it's not you know even house ownership but it's like okay like we're moving and we're grooving here but the the skills here are actually very simple to break down so for first thing you need to consider leveling up your character is one of the best messes in a game so for instance uh gta you might get access to money which gives you access to weapons uh when you that'd be great for you when you use the cheats it's not as fun so if i could give you that was a funny joke i'm sorry if i could give you a million followers tomorrow it wouldn't be as fun because you would use the cheat codes right uh the second thing is

1:15:07just pure volume and repetition so if we're doing shotty snipes on valhalla halo 3 anyone know about that you ever play shotty snipes on valhalla all right call of duty um whatever it is if you want to get a headshot mastery nothing is going to be pure volume and everyone could say i'll get the new controller change your settings and yes you should push your sensitivity up but nothing beats pure volume so then you have that as well where no bit of advice you could give someone on starting a podcast would be doing 400 episodes yeah so you've got leveling up your character which might be getting a better microphone choosing a better camera researching before you do a pod working on hooks looking at

1:15:43what other competitors are doing. All of these things come from gaming. Then you've got cooperation in gaming. When you work together as a team to work towards the same objective, even though you're separate characters, that can then put you into a team player. And an organized team in a game of Call of Duty are going to win the Warzone better than four people playing on their own. Also tends to be much more enjoyable because you get to celebrate the wins together and you also get to mitigate the losses together. Exactly. And gaming and reality have so much, because also if you have a bad day gaming you don't let it ruin your day it was just a tough day if you die on a level you get another opportunity

1:16:11that is unshakable confidence comes from knowing that your worth isn't tied to your performance and what you're doing with the game analogy is unpicking performance and worth yeah right unless you're a pro esports player but again your worth is tied up in this thing i love this analogy when i started doing speech coaching a lot of people i think maybe even you did this uh maybe you didn't some of my friends said but what about your lovely natural speaking voice like you're not worried that it's going to sort of take that away from you and i thought it was really interesting i wasn't really too sure how to feel about it and then i realized that if you're a pianist and you go and take piano lessons with a teacher,

1:16:50you're an amateur pianist, no one goes, well, what about your lovely natural piano playing? You're not worried that the teacher is going to take that away from you. And what I learned is that there are certain things that we feel is very close to our sense of self. It's very sort of central to who we are as a person. And then there are other things that we see as like pursuits or augmentations or like presentations of how we put our true self across. Accent, way that you speak and communicate, very close to your sense of self. Way that you play piano, less so. I would challenge this, but only from a pure, giving another point of view to this. So there's an interesting thing there where, however,

1:17:27sometimes speaking too perfect could be a reason not to listen because you bridge it out too far. I agree, but that's just another game of mastery. Here's a concept that I've got. Another one that I was talking about where in Jiu-Jitsu, we've got our belts. Everyone seems to think it's best to learn from a black belt. And yes, I agree because they've got a plethora of experience and lived experiences, whatever. A plethora. Good word, thank you. However, sometimes I think as a blue belt, you're best to learn from a purple belt, because although they do not have the answers to everything, they're much closer to where you were than the black belt. The black belt hasn't been a blue belt for 10 years.

1:17:54This is model the rise, not the result. Like you don't want to be learning from the person and what they're doing now. You want to learn from the person who knows what they were doing when they were where you are. So to the pianist thing, if you have a grandmaster pianist yes they will know so much but actually someone that's maybe only two years ahead of you might have more familiarity and you're still learning right you're still making developments so with the voice thing i would just make sure that and i don't know whether you do this whether or not you might start putting in little idiosyncratic ways of speaking into the perfect text so for a long time episode if you go back and look at like 200 to 500 i got worse as a communicator because i was

1:18:34thinking so consciously about the way that i speak about tongue position when i was saying s and l because i've got a slight lisp so i need to work on that i wanted to work i wanted to get rid of that i wanted to get rid of filler words wherever i could i wanted to stop saying yeah who's that jefferson guy what's his name jefferson fisher that's it great wonderful communicator james sexton same thing but they've got idiosyncratic ways of speaking that are still precise they're not sterile i feel like he's a witch he is a little wizard because he's so good at speaking i'm like get off my screen because he's gonna do his nlp and get into my mitochondria and he's gonna he's gonna make me buy some yeah because when he's off off flight

1:19:10so when he's talking to me sometimes i'm like no all right we need to fuck off i can see all of the boys twitching because we need to go and sound check on stage uh this is the first and maybe final podcast that we're ever going to do in a tour bus if you don't drink new tonic every person doesn't drink new tonic your neighbor's cat will die save if you don't drink new tonic every person doesn't drink new tonic your neighbor's cat will die save your neighbor's cat drink new tonic available in the sainsbury's meal deal walmart heb heb gelsons vitamin shop gnc morrison's morrison's daily and morrison's uh fuel stations motor fuel group if it's a good petrol station it'll be in there if it's not

1:19:43buy fuel somewhere else bingo all right goodbye my beauties