Why Is Everyone So Emotionally Fragile? - Whitney Cummings

Whitney Cummings is a comedian, actress, writer, and a podcaster. Emotional maturity is a difficult thing to truly come by. Making your needs known, setting boundaries, being able to disappoint people without being afraid. If it's such an important skill, why is it so hard to discover how to develop it? Expect to learn how Whitney has been changed since becoming a mother, why Whitney has been thinking about circumcision so much, what codependence is and how to overcome it, why your niceness might be narcissism in disguise, why the news and memes are moving at such an insane velocity right now and much more... - 00:00 What Has Changed Since Becoming a Mother? 10:41 The Benefit of Not Thinking About Yourself 14:02 How Having a Son Changes Your View on Men 23:06 Do Women Gossip About Sex More Than Men? 35:22 The Danger of Co-dependence 41:56 Balancing Empathy & Selfishness 50:01 How Co-dependency Shows Up in Life 1:01:27 Future Challenges of Young Men & Women 1:11:49 How to Stop Sugarcoating 1:16:55 Can You Take Too Much Responsibility? 1:21:26 Balancing Discomfort & Tolerance for Discomfort 1:25:22 Recognising Addiction to Work 1:37:12 Why It’s Hard to Build Self-Esteem 1:47:36 The Extreme Pace of Current News 2:02:29 Our Culture’s Lack of Authenticity 2:13:10 Knowing What Criticism to Accept 2:23:07 Where to Find Whitney - Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What has changed since becoming a mother?

• 0:03Whitney Cummings?

  I stopped getting Botox.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Is that?

• 0:06Whitney Cummings?

  The main headline.

• 0:07Chris Williamson?

  That's the big thing?

• 0:08Whitney Cummings?

  Stop smoking weed, stop getting Botox.

• 0:10Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 0:10Whitney Cummings?

  You know, a lot of things. Um, I start with the sort of, you know, more facetious ones, but I'm obviously off birth control, you know, after having a kid, I went off and I can't believe how much clearer I am, less emotional I am, less judgmental I am, uh, less attracted to gay men I am. Uh, and then I was like, okay, what else am I putting in my body? You know, cause as soon as you have a baby in utero, you care about your own health, you know, and then I'm like, I'm not going to drink tap water anymore. Instead of spending money on stupid shoes that are going to give me blisters, why don't I spend it on glass bottle water, whatever, you know? And in trying to care for my son and protect him from microplastics and chemicals and stuff, I accidentally took care of myself and cannot believe how much better I felt. And I spend so much time now thinking of like, when I

• 0:54Whitney Cummings?

  see my girlfriends acting crazy or women acting crazy, I'm like, maybe Amber Heard just wore too much deodorant.

• 1:01Whitney Cummings?

  Maybe we need to get, we need to get Rose McGowan off tap water, you know, like what are all the chemicals? And I know this is very in the zeitgeist right now. You talk about it, Huberman talks about it. There's people that actually know what they're talking about, but in my own, you know, research on myself, I'm like, I cannot believe how many chemicals I was putting in my body before and how much better I feel now that I'm not. The Botox thing was more of, you know, you can't get Botox when you're pregnant. And once I was pregnant, I couldn't believe how much better I was all of a sudden communicating. And I was like, oh, this must just be because I'm compassionate now and it's hormonal and like I'm, I'm connecting with people more. But we're designed to read micro expressions. And I look at all my past toxic relationships where we had like trouble communicating or,

• 1:45Whitney Cummings?

  you know, I expected the person to read my mind or just like know what I meant on my face or something and they.

• 1:50Chris Williamson?

  Meanwhile, you've got a stone face.

• 1:51Whitney Cummings?

  I know. I'm just like, like, no, what do you mean? Everything's fine. Like I just, and now like women are, and men I think are having a harder time communicating than ever. And we're just adding more and more things to make it more and more difficult.

• 2:02Chris Williamson?

  Like Botox that literally stops you from having facial expressions?

• 2:05Whitney Cummings?

  Correct. Correct. And so I was like, let me just stop because also, look, I've lasered my entire body in my twenties. I have no pubes. I have no nothing. Like. If I don't have any wrinkles either, I'm just gonna be attracting pedophiles. So why don't I, like, also, what kind of person wants to be with a woman with no pubes and no wrinkles? Like, that's, I think Epstein Island's closed, but like, you know, I don't know. The more I think about this, the more I'm like, I'm just deciding to become the most authentic person, even if it's someone that I'm not 100% proud of all the time, so that I don't attract the wrong person. I think this is something that, you know, I realized, is that we put on this thing to try to attract as many people as we can, but we might attract the wrong person, you know?

• 2:48Whitney Cummings?

  Like, the guy that wants a woman with, like, no wrinkles, like, do I even want to be with that guy? You know? I stopped, I mean, I'm on your show, so I had to wear a little makeup. I don't want the comment section to be too brutal, but I stopped wearing so much makeup, you know, which I always thought, like, oh my God, this is gonna make a man attracted to me, but it's gonna maybe make the wrong man attracted to me? So, a lot of that. I also have this weird obsession with how into me men were when I was pregnant. It made me, like, love men in this weird way. I just saw a different side of men when I was pregnant. And I think this thing of, you know, men don't want, you know, don't have, like, caretaking

• 3:32Whitney Cummings?

  and whatever it is, like, whatever bullshit I got from my mom programming me, because I came from a lot of bad divorce and I was, you know, fed this narrative that my dad was this monster and this, like, you know, they were both, you know, had a lot of work to do, but I just, and I had a son, you know? And once you see a little baby boy and you, like, they start out so innocent, you're like, how do we get from this, you know, to such a toxic place? And I'm fascinated.

• 3:57Chris Williamson?

  It feels like, even when we were speaking last time, you were kind of in the middle of softening up a lot. And maybe this is part of a big arc. You said last time, you know, you'd spent two decades really grinding, I needed to kind of prove to myself, and then realized that all of the proof that I gave to myself was for everybody else, and I actually hadn't changed anything internally, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 4:15Whitney Cummings?

  Blah, blah, blah. I mean, do we, I mean, blah, blah, blah. It is a pretty good impression of me, actually.

• 4:19Chris Williamson?

  It's literally the sound of your fucking thing, isn't it?

• 4:23Whitney Cummings?

  Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah.

• 4:26Chris Williamson?

  That's the British equivalent.

• 4:28Whitney Cummings?

  Am I just like the teacher from Charlie Brown?

• 4:31Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Correct. That's correct. Um, so it seems like a big softening for you.

• 4:39Whitney Cummings?

  But I think that, you know, we're, and we were kind of texting about this a little bit like, you know, as soon as I was, you know, conscious, I remember being like, I'm at war. I come from, you know, alcoholic home. I saw fighting. I saw men and women fighting from the jump. And then I was, you know, I come from the generation where you walk home from school when you're seven, you know, and I was taught, don't talk to strangers, you know, you're, we're at war, you know, and then I played sports and it was like, I'm beating, you know, I'm at war. Great. A healthy type of way to channel that instinct. And then I go to school in Philadelphia and it's like, you're walking home from school, you're at war. Self-defense. You're just taught, like, it's, you know, dangerous to go to your car. It's dangerous to do anything. You have to fight with men. You know, I had a situation, assault situation with, you know, a man and I

• 5:25Whitney Cummings?

  shouldn't have been in the situation. That's on me. I didn't know how to get out of relationships. No one tells you how to get out of relationships. All we learn about is how to get in them. And I didn't know how to get out. And this was before I had done any recovery work around codependence and I still erroneously thought, I don't want to hurt this person. So I'm not going to leave them. That's like almost sadistic. I don't want to hurt them. So I'm going to waste their time? I don't want to hurt them. So I'm just going to pretend I still like them. I mean, I just, I didn't know how to dismount. I was too afraid that I was going to break his heart. He'll be fine. He'll find someone else. The narcissism of thinking that if you leave someone, you're going to decimate them is beyond. Or these days, I see a lot of men that are like, I'm afraid to break up with this person because I'm worried she's going to tweet about me. You know, I,

• 6:10Whitney Cummings?

  that's a different fear. We'll get to that later if you want. But I was just terrified because I was, you know, taught that breakups should be long and nasty and hard and just unnecessarily, you know, sadistic and masochistic, whatever.

• 6:26Whitney Cummings?

  And then I come into this business and it's, I'm told like you're a woman in a male dominated field. You have to fight tooth and nail. Everyone's your enemy. And I was like, all right, I'm at war with everyone. That was just kind of my default state. I was taught men was my, men were my enemy. And I think I was my own worst enemy, you know? So it took me a second to kind of just go like, I don't think anyone's trying to hurt me. I think I'm looking for that because that's familiar and comfortable.

• 6:51Chris Williamson?

  I think there's almost also an element there too, that the way that women compete is not in the same way that men do. So there's some really interesting studies around the amount of physical affection that women on the same basketball team give to each other versus men on opposite basketball teams. Women on the same basketball team are less physically affectionate than men on opposite basketball teams.

• 7:10Whitney Cummings?

  Fascinating.

• 7:11Chris Williamson?

  So when you look at lots of the arenas in which men learn how to kind of form alliances, have conflict, have competition, and then kind of do it within the bounds of a game of some kind not that it's less serious, but that there is this ability to kind of turn it on and turn it off. I wonder whether when you enter a mostly male dominated space, like doing stand up and comedy and Hollywood and shit like that, whether this, you just don't have the same kind of learning that you would have done had you have been a guy that had had that genetic predisposition and then grown up playing a ton of sports. You know, it's coalitional warfare practiced within, but you're just kicking a spherical object around or whatever.

• 7:53Whitney Cummings?

  Totally. Oh, that's very interesting. I mean, I, I was just talking to someone about this this morning, is the thing that, that matters the most to me is, uh, class and grace and sportsmanship is one of those things. I played basketball where if you didn't look the person that just beat you in a championship in the eye and shake their hand and mean it, you were doing 50 suicides, you know? So I, I come from that. Like I come from, you know, maybe almost to a fault, you know, that I'm like, because I don't want anything I don't deserve. I mean, that's just my kink personally. We see a lot of people that just want what they want. They want to, you know, skip the line. They want something fast. I want, um, I don't want anything I don't deserve.

• 8:32Chris Williamson?

  You can make a, you can create a bit of a chip on your shoulder with that as well though, right? Because once you've done it and you've come up through the ranks, you then want to kind of prove to everybody, well, I earned this the hard way. I did this and look at all of these male comics. They fucking didn't want me here and I did it and blah, blah, blah. And that also doesn't come off as particularly classy either. So there's all of these little.

• 8:52Whitney Cummings?

  I don't.

• 8:53Chris Williamson?

  Snakes that you can slip down.

• 8:54Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah, I think the older I get, after having a kid, this is kind of crystallized is, you know, to me, the between, you know, whatever time anyone goes to bed, nine and 10 at night, where I'm laying there on my pillow, can I live with myself? And am I corny? And am I someone that I would make fun of or roll my eyes at? And am I cringe, you know, and I'm in this, you know, 12 step program, Al-Anon, ACA, Codependence Anonymous, and you sit there and you do something called a 10 step every night, and you go through your behavior and you kind of look at yourself as if you were yourself, watching yourself, giving yourself a little judgment of like, oh, do I owe an apology there? Oh, should I have said that? Was that necessary? Did I say what I mean, mean what I say and say it mean? Ah, that was a little catty. Did I need attention in that moment?

• 9:38Whitney Cummings?

  And yeah, I definitely shy away from any of that. I did it the hard way because everyone's already made up their mind about us. That's also like a wild realization to have. And when you're trying to convince someone to see you a certain way, you just come off desperate and needy. And you have to know when you're cemented too. You have to know when you can like chill a little bit and go away. And that's something that having a kid really helped me with as well.

• 10:05Chris Williamson?

  There's an idea called tilting at windmills. An online stranger doesn't know you. All they have are a few vague impressions of you, too meager to form anything but a phantasm. So when they attack you, they're really just attacking their own imagination. So there is no need to take it personally.

• 10:20Whitney Cummings?

  We're kind of these like projection machines, you know? It's like who I am to you is an intersection of sort of what you saw today and your entire past and your experience. I'm so fascinated by the fact that I'm someone different to pretty much everybody, you know?

• 10:34Chris Williamson?

  It's like a, how do you say, like a personality raw shock test? Like this person sees you as that, that person sees you as the other.

• 10:40Whitney Cummings?

  A hundred percent.

• 10:41Chris Williamson?

  So going back to kind of what changed from a role perspective, this sort of softening thing, obviously you made lifestyle changes, but was there this, you know, existential personality, my position in the world has changed. I was learning about, what's that idea, like the obsession of self or something that you talked about?

• 11:03Whitney Cummings?

  Well, yeah, the narcissism, you know, of what I do. I just wanted to be a stand up comedian for a living. I want to make people laugh. And then, you know, the, you know, business evolves and all of a sudden we're like, hey, guys, hey, guys. And we're, it's just me, me, me all the time. And I realized, like, I was like, am I, how is my self-esteem getting lower? I'm getting everything I want. I'm paying my bills. I've achieved my goals. Like, how is myself worth falling? Is this from the comment section? Is it, I'm, turns out I'm just thinking about myself way too much. I actually like myself when I only think about myself like an hour a day. But when I think about myself 24 hours a day, that's when my self-esteem plummets. So now, having a kid, it's such a joy to not have to think about myself so much.

• 11:45Whitney Cummings?

  I also, this is gonna get me in trouble, fine, that's my brand. I do believe it's okay to say, women are caretakers by nature. We're good at it. And I think that when we don't care take children, I'm not saying every woman needs to have a child. I know plenty of women that I hope never have children. You guys pushing this narrative, women need to have kids, you've seen them, right?

• 12:09Chris Williamson?

  Some, some.

• 12:10Whitney Cummings?

  Do you want all of them having kids?

• 12:12Chris Williamson?

  Some.

• 12:12Whitney Cummings?

  You and Alon and all these guys saying like, have more children. I mean, I know a lot of women that I'm like, can someone tie their tubes, please? I'm begging.

• 12:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, people sort of point to Kamala Harris and say, look at the sort of like childless cat lady thing.

• 12:25Whitney Cummings?

  Right.

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  I mean, do you want that screech as a fucking child growing up?

• 12:30Whitney Cummings?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:30Chris Williamson?

  In the home?

• 12:31Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah. Do you want a kid being told they're a different ethnicity every day? That would be very confusing. Okay? I grew up in an alcoholic home. I don't wish that on anyone.

• 12:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 12:39Whitney Cummings?

  I'm not saying she's an alcoholic. I don't know, but those speeches are wild. Um, and, uh, for me, I found myself mothering adults, groups of people, even concepts. You know, I'm not attacking, attacking the left or right. It's more, I see women that are, identify as liberal, progressive, and they don't have kids. And I wonder if that, we need to save this minority group, we need to save Ukraine, we need to save Gaza.

• 13:08Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, get a child.

• 13:09Whitney Cummings?

  Kind of.

• 13:10Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 13:11Whitney Cummings?

  You know?

• 13:11Chris Williamson?

  That's really interesting.

• 13:12Whitney Cummings?

  Cause now that I have a son, I go, you know what? I can just make this the best man I can. You know what I mean? This I can control. I'm not going to be able to clean up Gaza, Israel. I'm not going to fix Hamas with a tweet or a march or whatever, but I can control this. And this might make a difference, actually.

• 13:28Chris Williamson?

  I'd love to see the constitution of the people tweeting about stuff, supporting things, going out in protest. I would love to see how many of them have got kids.

• 13:37Whitney Cummings?

  And it's mother, right? I need to mother this group. I need to care. I need to protect this group. You know, I mean, that's like, you know, I think that whenever someone's protesting or whenever someone's like coming out, you know, a lot of times it looks like virtue signaling, self-righteous indignation. Fine, but I'm like, is the root of this? You want to mother something and take care of something? And it's like, you know, this group, you know, needs help and needs support. I need to be an ally. It's like, I think I kind of just needed to be a mom.

• 14:02Chris Williamson?

  Has it changed your relationship to men, your understanding of males generally now that you've kind of got one on your side?

• 14:09Whitney Cummings?

  Yes, of course. You know, um, look, the, I won't even, the word feminism has gotten, is so ridiculous at this point, but I am working on a bit about how it's impossible to be a feminist and a boy mom. Because it's like, I believe that women, you know, do have horrible things happen to them, but also they lie. Uh, and, but that's also about equality. It's like, you can't say, I'm a feminist. Men and women should be equal. And it's like, okay, by that, women are just as destructive, just as conniving, just as, you know, uh, brutal, just, you know? So I think for me, I do spend a lot of time going like, this will be interesting. Am I going to have to teach my son about consent? Like, what is this going to look like? And I, I very much less so see things about men versus women now, and it's just more good versus evil.

• 14:55Whitney Cummings?

  And I don't think it's men versus women anymore. I think it's good men and good women versus bad men and bad women. If that makes any sense, you know, but also just seeing, sorry, I'm just coming in hot with this. I think that the wildest part was deciding whether or not to circumcise my son. That's, you know, and I did defer to his dad on it, um, because I just, that felt like the right thing to do.

• 15:19Chris Williamson?

  As an English person, this is not something that we really have to deal with. So I think. I mean, I could probably pull up the stats. I would guess somewhere in the region of single-digit percent, guys that aren't Jewish in the UK would be circumcised. And I'm going to guess that it's maybe not far off the inverse.

• 15:38Whitney Cummings?

  In the United States, it's automatic at the hospital. Like, you have to actively say I don't.

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  Cut the umbilical cord, lose the fucking.

• 15:45Whitney Cummings?

  Truly, that's it. I mean, it's just.

• 15:46Chris Williamson?

  You can double it up with just one extra lung paresis.

• 15:49Whitney Cummings?

  Well, I did have to have that, too. I was kind of circumcised during birth. That's a different conversation for another day. But I, I mean, if that was reversed, how insane would that be? You know, and, you know, Rogan talks about it a lot. And, you know, he, I won't plagiarize him here, but I mean, he really does think of it as mutilation. And I looked at all these like studies, which again, look, whoever puts their circumcised baby in a study, I already have questions about this study. It's like, it's like these studies, you know, I do this every text, too. But it's like, you know, when they're like, you know, women mature faster than men. I'm like, who needed to do this study? Who was like, you guys, let's do a study about how young girls are more mature. Like, did Epstein fund this study?

• 16:30Whitney Cummings?

  Let's be honest, you know, like, there's, what's the new thing of how babies taints are shrinking because of microplastics?

• 16:36Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. I thought that.

• 16:38Whitney Cummings?

  Who did this study? Who was measuring taints?

• 16:40Chris Williamson?

  I looked at.

• 16:41Whitney Cummings?

  What are we doing?

• 16:41Chris Williamson?

  I looked at one. So, yeah, the, you call it taint?

• 16:45Whitney Cummings?

  The between your.

• 16:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the.

• 16:47Whitney Cummings?

  It's a taint.

• 16:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think it's anal genital gap is technically what it's referred to as, or the gooch in the UK. Much better word than the taint.

• 16:56Whitney Cummings?

  Hate it. Gooch is gross.

• 16:58Chris Williamson?

  Fucking brilliant.

• 16:59Whitney Cummings?

  Because it feels wet.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, it is because it's better, it's better describing the area that we're talking about. But, yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's not good. But penises are getting bigger a little bit.

• 17:09Whitney Cummings?

  Are they? How do, is that from microplastics?

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  Uh, they're not sure. They're not sure. So sperm count going down, testosterone going down, anal genital distance decreasing.

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  Penises, little bit bigger.

• 17:22Whitney Cummings?

  How do we know who, who's doing the study?

• 17:25Chris Williamson?

  Oh, here we go again.

• 17:26Whitney Cummings?

  But am I wrong?

• 17:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, fucking.

• 17:29Whitney Cummings?

  Who's measuring penises? Did anyone ask you to be in the study?

• 17:31Chris Williamson?

  Who's doing the study? You are like the conspiracy bro of every psychology study that's ever been done.

• 17:37Whitney Cummings?

  But think about study. I know, look, I respect studies and all, but I used to do studies. When I was broke, I used to sign up for studies. I had no money. You get $50. They'd be like, are you depressed? Come do the study. I was like, I wasn't depressed, but now that I have to go do a study for cash, I guess I qualify.

• 17:50Chris Williamson?

  Do whatever you want.

• 17:51Whitney Cummings?

  Totally, but it is always going to be college kids. It's gonna, you know, I just like to know who, you know, because a lot of medications, you know, Ambien, I think it was, didn't test on women. So the dosage was off, like there's certain.

• 18:02Chris Williamson?

  And that's what happened to Roseanne Barr.

• 18:04Whitney Cummings?

  That's one of the things. Yeah.

• 18:06Chris Williamson?

  There was a few things.

• 18:07Whitney Cummings?

  There was a few things.

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  Circumcision, so you chose to, you decided to go for it?

• 18:11Whitney Cummings?

  I chose to do it.

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 18:12Whitney Cummings?

  Because, you know, there's an argument to say that the son should look like their dad, you know?

• 18:17Chris Williamson?

  What is that argument?

• 18:18Whitney Cummings?

  When they like change or take a shower, that kind of thing. That's an argument. That wasn't the argument here. You know, I also was there and it was anesthetized and I had a very specific surgeon do it. So there was really no pain. Cause that's the other thing is like the trauma of the pain, associating that with the mom. I was like, I don't want my kid to, you know, be a serial killer. Cause as a mom of a son, every serial killer's behavior is blamed on the mom. It's like the mom didn't let him wear the pantyhose, you know, or wear her shoes. So he went and killed a bunch of women. I'm just like, I just did not turn my son into a serial killer. He sees his dad all the time. They have a great relationship. Like, I just need to figure out if I don't circumcise him and then he gets made fun of in the locker room and then go kill, kills a girl. Like, I need to just do the right thing.

• 19:02Whitney Cummings?

  And so, yeah, so I decided to do it, but I was very micromanaging about it to make sure. You know, because to me, the circumcision, I mean, you know, look, and when you talk about something like this, all of a sudden it's like, is she anti-Semitic, whatever? It's not about that. But when you do like a ceremony four days later, it's like, it's going to hurt a little bit more. And then the baby sees all these people just clapping as they're, they feel this horrible pain. I mean, it has to leave a mark in some capacity. But I am also going through the process of it. The way that they put a baby down and strap them down and wait, like, I was like, no, no, we, I, managing the entire process to make sure it wasn't like super stressful.

• 19:37Chris Williamson?

  Well, it was like me doing one of my podcasts. Guys, can we just pan in a little bit more on that, please? I think we're actually a little bit off on the tilt. Can we just move that a little bit?

• 19:46Whitney Cummings?

  I love watching you before a podcast do your thing because it is the way you do anything is the way you do everything, probably. And you, this is why you're so successful.

• 19:54Chris Williamson?

  Circumcise your son.

• 19:55Whitney Cummings?

  It's so.

• 19:56Chris Williamson?

  Fucking, you should have brought me in. Why did you, why didn't you bring me in? I could have got it done in no time.

• 20:00Whitney Cummings?

  You and your Crocs? I mean, you do dress like a ER doctor.

• 20:03Chris Williamson?

  That's true. That is very true. I like it.

• 20:06Whitney Cummings?

  Um, what would you do if you had a son? Do you know?

• 20:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I think, uh.

• 20:10Whitney Cummings?

  You wouldn't?

• 20:10Chris Williamson?

  No, I don't think so. Um, look, I haven't done the research on this, but it seems like the genitals don't have that many moving parts going on.

• 20:21Whitney Cummings?

  Right.

• 20:21Chris Williamson?

  That nature probably designed most of them to be essential.

• 20:25Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 20:26Chris Williamson?

  So there's a few other things that are interesting. I've got, I'm very close with a friend who was circumcised Muslim and he wishes that he wasn't. And, uh, you know, he talks to me about, um, like, lack of sensitivity and.

• 20:41Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

  Stuff like that as he's grown up. And again, you know, it's your fucking choice. And it's not like this is such an outlier problem. There's got to be a hundred million men.

• 20:51Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 20:51Chris Williamson?

  In the United States that are circumcised.

• 20:53Whitney Cummings?

  It's the default. I mean, we'd be the cycle breakers, you know? If I had another one, I don't know what I would do, you know? I was like a game time to sit.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  Now that fucking, that's how you throw a real spanner in the work. Dad circumcised, elder brother circumcised, younger brother.

• 21:08Chris Williamson?

  Keep a hold of it.

• 21:09Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, that's research. That's good research because it's the same family.

• 21:14Chris Williamson?

  That's dangerous. Being, being fucking, uh, British with a foreskin in America is now like, how many women have never seen an uncircumcised?

• 21:21Whitney Cummings?

  It's so much easier to give hand jobs, though.

• 21:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, you'd have to tell me more about that, but.

• 21:26Whitney Cummings?

  Well, it's easier be, when it's circumcised. I mean, sorry, uncircumcised. It's easier because you have something to like, hold on to.

• 21:32Chris Williamson?

  You're the expert.

• 21:33Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Whitney Cummings?

  I hate your guts.

• 21:36Chris Williamson?

  You're the expert.

• 21:38Whitney Cummings?

  But I was with a man that was uncircumcised and he had a lot of shame about it in America. Like, again, a lot of women are like, what is that? What's happening? I mean, it is.

• 21:46Chris Williamson?

  Penis.

• 21:46Whitney Cummings?

  Uh huh.

• 21:47Chris Williamson?

  It's a penis. It's the way that it's supposed to look.

• 21:49Whitney Cummings?

  But we don't really see that. It's the same way. It's like when, you know, boys that are 18 now probably see a girl for the first time with pubes and they're like, what's all that?

• 21:57Chris Williamson?

  That didn't exist on Pornhub.

• 21:58Whitney Cummings?

  No, you know, I mean, you'd have to look for it, but I mean, it's, I think if you saw a regular woman's body and you only looked at porn, I'm sure that's kind of traumatic.

• 22:05Chris Williamson?

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• 22:49Chris Williamson?

  Plus, you can get $350 off your Pod4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com/modernd wisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's e-i-g-h-t sleep.com/modernd wisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Tell you what I've been thinking about a bit recently, how much more women gossip about sex and intimate sort of sex stuff with their friends than guys do? I think that women presume that guys are super open about, you know, and then I turned her over and I did this and she was like, ah!

• 23:24Whitney Cummings?

  That's gay. That's gay.

• 23:25Chris Williamson?

  And. There is, I have never had, I mean, maybe, maybe when you first start having sex.

• 23:31Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 23:31Chris Williamson?

  And you're like, like nineteen or some shit and like, everybody in your friend group is kind of just exposed. Is this normal to do that thing? And oh, yeah, yeah, I do that too. But you get to twenty two or whatever as a guy and no one is talking about that. No one's asking their friend over a beer, what him and his girlfriend or one night stand get up to in the bedroom. It is, it makes me, it makes my fucking toes curl to think about that.

• 24:00Whitney Cummings?

  Cause then you're just imagining your friend having sex.

• 24:02Chris Williamson?

  Kind of, it seems, it seems it's sort of like a bit of an invasion of privacy. You're basically asking to kind of imagine your mate's girlfriend doing that. It's a little bit crossing the boundary with him too. Like, what is it? You asking this because you want to imagine me and what I'm doing? And then I know there's just something a bit sort of fucking no, like that's your area.

• 24:22Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 24:22Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that's the same with girls.

• 24:25Whitney Cummings?

  I'm maybe an anomaly because a couple of things. For me, my biggest turn on in a relationship is respecting the person. And if I'm.

• 24:34Chris Williamson?

  Fucking gay turn on.

• 24:38Chris Williamson?

  Such a shit turn on.

• 24:40Whitney Cummings?

  Why?

• 24:40Chris Williamson?

  Who wants to be respected?

• 24:41Whitney Cummings?

  Okay, so if I say money.

• 24:42Chris Williamson?

  Choke me while you respect me.

• 24:43Whitney Cummings?

  If I say money, I'm disgusting. If I say a car, I'm disgusting. If I say a good job, I'm disgusting. But if I say I respect him, I'm an idiot.

• 24:51Chris Williamson?

  Hand or a good set of shoulders? I don't know.

• 24:54Whitney Cummings?

  Well, I respect that if you put time and energy into respecting yourself kind of thing. But, but I always think that whenever I talk to my guy friends and girlfriends, if you're gossiping about your person with other people, you might not respect that person. I found that in the past, if I'm like, yeah, is this normal in the bedroom? Or he did this in the bedroom? I'm like, oh, I don't respect him enough because I'm willing to share this, you know?

• 25:14Chris Williamson?

  All right, it's an invasion of privacy that you're opening up because you don't actually care.

• 25:19Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah, or it's like, I don't respect this person. Now I'm going to let everybody else have this thing in their head that that he's a goofball or whatever, you know? So I stop, if I found myself doing that, I would just end the relationship because I'm like, oh, that's a first indication. I mean, I'm gossiping about my person. I really think that no matter, I mean, I always tell my girlfriends, I don't want to hear about your guy's porn addiction. I don't want to hear that he was texting with another girl because you're gonna break up if you're already telling me that.

• 25:41Chris Williamson?

  Well, how many, just thinking about sort of the actual public front showing of this, how many podcasts owned by Spotify or bought by Spotify are girl talk, it's girl talk with fucking Cindy and Lindsay. And all they do is talk about their one night stands and what happened, blah, blah. And this is the position that I like. And if you tried it to do this way, I, I know of no, even the most Dgen autistic red pill manosphere podcast, do not get to that. There was a brief period where,

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  there was like this odd campaign where going down on girls is gay. Was like, was a sort of movement that was being pushed by, but

• 26:21Whitney Cummings?

  Why? Cause it's like sub or something, serving the woman?

• 26:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:26Chris Williamson?

  Beyond that.

• 26:28Whitney Cummings?

  It's like sucking her dick or something?

• 26:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, kind of. I think, I honestly think that was it.

• 26:31Whitney Cummings?

  Or not a trans girl, maybe for sure.

• 26:33Chris Williamson?

  But beyond that, like literally, that was the closest I've ever heard the sort of, you know, most unencumbered, total explicit, open door policy guy podcast, get to one that there's a whole fucking subgenre of them for chicks. So it just, it's real interesting, you know?

• 26:50Whitney Cummings?

  And it's also like, you know, I always try to go, how has this existed? Just look different, you know? Like the way that I stopped checking my email every 10 minutes is I just visualized, imagine if 30 years ago, you watched someone walk to their mailbox, check if there was anything and then walk back in the house. And then 10 minutes later, check, like it's this, we're doing the same thing. Right? Like, how is it different? Like, I'm like, this is a crazy person being like, do I have any mail? Do I have any mail? Like, it's like, you know, I think that like, you know, is it equivalent to, you know, guys in their garage have a poster of a hot girl? You know, that kind of thing. I think men are more visual and women are more verbal. So guys have Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and that's kind of how you, you know, share in gossiping about girls, but it's like just looking at hot girls or something.

• 27:35Whitney Cummings?

  Whereas we don't have that really. It's sort of more like this guy called me and then he didn't text me back. I'm like, fuck him, you know? And my bigger, you know, I think it's fine. It's where in America, free speech, whatever. I think the bigger thing is when it's motivated by revenge or motivated by wanting to be a victim in some way or You know, that, that, I don't think embarrassing men or trying to humiliate men is a solution to any of their problems. And it, to me, just seems very self-destructive. You know, because what kind of, your whole thing is like, men are trash, but no great man is gonna ever want to be with you if this is what you do. You're not gonna attract a king if you're acting like this. You know, so it is what it is. I think that I try to just go, you know what? The world needs contrast, and you wouldn't be you if they weren't them.

• 28:21Whitney Cummings?

  But I think the more interesting thing with talking about what goes on in the bedroom, I think there is value in sharing intel of like, a guy did this. Is that weird? Is that normal? I think that's when people really share. It's like, guys going, my girl keeps asking me to hit her. I don't want to do that. I don't want to hit her.

• 28:38Chris Williamson?

  That's different, though. What I'm talking about is the sort of, this weird open door policy about, he does this, and I like it, and he tries that, and we're trying to do this thing. I don't know, maybe it's just that, yeah, maybe it's just that all guys are still sort of sexually unenlightened, and they're not prepared to speak to their friends about it, or maybe they think that it's something, it's like, I don't know. I don't know. There's just an ick. There's an ick about that kind of open door policy. And I think most girls think that most guys talk like that around their friends. I just wanted to set the record straight. You know that, I wonder if he's talking about how we have sex? You could imagine one of those memes, and it's turned over. And it's fucking Warhammer 40k, or, you know, he's like, planning his fucking end of your accounts or something like that.

• 29:22Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:22Chris Williamson?

  It's not guys talking about sex. I just felt like that needed to be.

• 29:26Whitney Cummings?

  I think that's, yeah, no, I really appreciate you saying that. All my friends are male comedians, so this is probably not where I can weigh in the most. I've heard things like lightbulb pussy, battery pussy, I've.

• 29:37Chris Williamson?

  What's lightbulb pussy?

• 29:40Whitney Cummings?

  It's, uh, it's when a girl's vagina, like, is tight, and then it's like, not as tight.

• 29:49Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 29:50Whitney Cummings?

  Inside.

• 29:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow, it's like that way. It's going that way.

• 29:54Whitney Cummings?

  Well, yeah, you know, like a lightbulb.

• 29:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but in, that way.

• 29:57Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, so.

• 29:58Chris Williamson?

  I thought you would, it looks like one on the outside.

• 30:00Whitney Cummings?

  Oh, yeah, sorry.

• 30:03Whitney Cummings?

  Like, things like that. I've like, heard this from just guys talking.

• 30:06Chris Williamson?

  If it was the other way, if it was a light bulb that was upright, it would be like one of those things that you, you know, when you need to hook a painting onto a

• 30:14Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:15Chris Williamson?

  A screw. And you're like, well, dude, if it's too big at the top, you can just move it down to the bottom. But that, no, yeah, like spacious, roomy inside. One of those good New York apartments where you think there's no way it's gonna be able to fit. And you're like, oh.

• 30:26Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's not bad. Vietnamese family could live in here.

• 30:30Whitney Cummings?

  I just think sex is so, ah, it's just so like, I don't know, porn or whatever, it's just so everywhere. I mean, I'm more interested in talking about when you're in a relationship, like, does your guy wash his jeans? Mine, are we, things like that. Are you washing your jeans, Chris?

• 30:46Chris Williamson?

  No, I'm no.

• 30:49Whitney Cummings?

  Never.

• 30:50Chris Williamson?

  Ah, the maid does that.

• 30:52Whitney Cummings?

  Oh, no. But that's not what I mean. There's some jeans that aren't supposed to be washed. You're supposed to put them in the freezer.

• 30:59Chris Williamson?

  What?

• 30:59Whitney Cummings?

  Washing your jeans.

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  Who puts jeans in the freezer? What does that do?

• 31:03Whitney Cummings?

  Okay, there's certain raw denim that you're not.

• 31:06Chris Williamson?

  You've spent too much time around Bobby Lee.

• 31:08Whitney Cummings?

  So true.

• 31:09Chris Williamson?

  Way too much time around Asians that spend a grand on a pair of fucking jeans.

• 31:13Whitney Cummings?

  Very true.

• 31:14Chris Williamson?

  I can tell. I can tell. These hipster fucking overpaid Hollywood.

• 31:21Whitney Cummings?

  You know what? You're actually very right.

• 31:23Chris Williamson?

  If everybody came through to Austin, Texas and wore square-toed boots and a fucking cowboy hat.

• 31:28Whitney Cummings?

  I know this is gonna get me in a lot of trouble. Bring it. But I'm very fascinated now. And I, you know, I don't think it's just having a kid. I think it's, I've had a lot of relationships and they haven't worked. And I'm working on this bit about how, like, when you, you know, you're like, younger and you're like, I don't need a man. I'm an independent woman. Men are trash, da, da, da, da. And you get older and you're like, maybe it's me.

• 31:52Whitney Cummings?

  Like, what are the odds, you know? If, at the very least, I make bad choices.

• 31:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Whitney Cummings?

  At the very least, I stayed for two years in that thing that I'm like, he's an idiot. It's like, I stayed.

• 32:05Whitney Cummings?

  I I think there's something really powerful about having an epiphany that you're kind of toxic.

• 32:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, you're the common denominator between all of your relationships.

• 32:14Whitney Cummings?

  And just going, you know what? Let me just clean up my side of the street and let me just see what happens. You know what I mean? Let me just take responsibility for my part and sort of see what happens. And I've always been kind of trained to believe, don't be a gold digger. Do not need money from a man, do not need anything from them. And also, don't let them take care of you because like, that's not their job. Or, you know, you're going to be needy, you're going to be a succubus, you're going to be a parasite. Like, because I grew up, I'm just going to say it, my mom was, you know, worked very hard, but she also had to date men for money. That's what I watched. And I watched her being trapped in relationships that she didn't want to be in, that were weird with like creeps that were creepy with me and all this kind of stuff. And I was just sort of like, I never want to be that. I definitely overcorrected. And I'm seeing a lot of these overcorrections.

• 32:56Whitney Cummings?

  And now, maybe I'm overcorrecting again, but I at least want to kind of try. I love the idea of, look, I'm not going full trad wife. Don't everybody panic. I still dress like a bull dyke. Don't worry. But I love, I want to be able to take care of a man. Like, I want to be able to take care of my, when I see these women, they're like, I don't cook, I don't clean. I'm like, what do you do? You dirty, hungry bitch. What do you do? Well, are you proud of that? Are you proud that you don't cook? How do you feed yourself? Is that cool? Like, why isn't cooking cool? It's like, you're using fire and knives. Why can't this be, why does it have to be, why is this lame? Like, I'm just, I'm genuinely shocked. As someone that, you know, didn't do that for a long time because I was just literally too busy, you know, and it worked, you know? Whatever my

• 33:41Whitney Cummings?

  high functioning autism, I was like, you're going to do that, I'm going to do this, I'm going to just eat a go-grit in the car because I'm, you know, of of how ambitious I was. But now I'm just sort of like, don't you, what, why, what's the pride around all of this? I'm useless. Is like, what is, why is that something to be proud of? Like, for me, I just, I also enjoy it. You know, I think everyone's sort of a, I'm not doing anything for him until you meet the person that you actually just want to do it for.

• 34:08Chris Williamson?

  That's why people have got such a problem with anyone that has a sort of big stake in the ground. This is me. I'm not going to have kids. I'm not going to get married. I'm not going to do the whatever. And then someone pivots, and then they don't ever retro point at the thing. You're, I was wrong, guys. I apologize about that, or whatever. Or, what everybody should do, as far as I can tell, like, I'm chronically uncertain about everything, right? I don't know.

• 34:29Whitney Cummings?

  Every smart person, I think, is.

• 34:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Well, yeah, maybe. And.

• 34:34Chris Williamson?

  I think, I have no idea if this is the right answer to this thing. This is something I'm trying at the moment. I think this, to me, this seems to be the right way to go about stuff right now. And this is where people get a problem with, it's one of the reasons that there is a contingent of the internet that's got a problem with Huberman's stuff. Because they say, protocols, and he's saying that it's the way to be done. I'm pretty sure that he's saying, this seems to be what the evidence suggests might work.

• 34:57Whitney Cummings?

  Take what you like and leave the rest. You know, take what works for you, you know? But I think like, you know, I love what you're saying because I think to me, it's like, you didn't know you were, I'm doing nightclubs, I'm doing this. And then you found the podcast and then everything clicked into place. This is it. I think it's probably the same with a person. I think it's the same with a job. I think you like, really know who you are until you find the thing. You're like, oh, it's this, it was here the whole time, you know?

• 35:22Chris Williamson?

  Last time that we were together, you told me to do equine therapy. And then I went and did it. And I called it, what do I call it? Horse meditation. And the lady didn't like, the woman that was taking it was, she had mixed opinions on that. But my story for the-

• 35:36Whitney Cummings?

  Don't call it whores meditation.

• 35:38Chris Williamson?

  Whores meditation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:40Whitney Cummings?

  Don't say it in an English accent. That's why she was crumpled.

• 35:42Chris Williamson?

  So what happens with Arowan, everyone outside of Arowan doing whores meditation. And, uh, yeah, I, that was really interesting because reflecting on what it is that you want from an animal, what it is that you need from somebody else. And I started going down a codependency learning rabbit hole after we spoke last time. I think you suggested a couple of books to me, which I'm still partway through. But can you explain, codependency seems to be this thing that kind of lurks below the surface for most people. Maybe everybody's got some degree of it. And then some people, it's the driving force that's in their life. And the first time that I'd ever heard of it was when I spoke to you. And it seems kind of important.

• 36:19Whitney Cummings?

  Can you please just promise me that you'll stop me if I'm rambling or if I'm not being clear?

• 36:24Chris Williamson?

  All the time.

• 36:24Whitney Cummings?

  Okay. So codependence, I like a good definition. I live for a good platitude aphorism. Codependence, the definition that I like to work with is the inability to tolerate the discomfort of others, or the perceived discomfort, right? Because we might just be projecting. My specific codependence came from at an early age, feeling like I need to take care of the feelings of the adults. I need to behave a certain way to get someone to act like this. Ultimately, it is the same way an alcoholic, you know, is alcohol makes their life unmanageable, right? An addiction is, you know, continuing to do something despite your life becoming unmanageable. Porn making your life unmanageable, you might be a sex addict. Alcohol making your

• 37:07Whitney Cummings?

  life unmanageable, you can still drink alcohol, but if you can make it to work the next day, not unmanageable. If you can't make it to work the next day, unmanageable, right? Addiction, continuing to do the same behavior despite negative consequences, right? So in, you know, AA, you're addicted to alcohol. In NA, you're addicted to narcotics. In Al-Anon ACA, you're addicted to perfectionism, people pleasing, shape shifting to try to control other people's behavior. You know, self deprivation is another part of codependence. So codependent, we hear a lot, like, sometimes it just sounds like you spend a lot of time with a person. That's not necessarily codependent. There's codependent and interdependent, right? And codependent is you're getting your emotional needs met through another person, whereas

• 37:49Whitney Cummings?

  interdependent means you're getting your own emotional needs met internally. So addiction being, I'm getting my internal needs met with external things, drugs, sex, and with us, it's other people. It's almost like being addicted to a person. Love addiction is a very close concentric circle, but that's kind of another thing. So if you and I are dating, and we're codependent, or you and I are just friends and we're codependent, it is like, you send me a text, I have to, I just have to respond right away. There's a fear that my behavior is going to make you uncomfortable, or that my behavior is going to make you leave me, abandon me, judge me, right? So ultimately, it becomes an addiction to control, trying to control someone else's perceptions, behaviors, addictions, choices, right?

• 38:30Chris Williamson?

  What's the usual root cause? Or what are the most common root causes?

• 38:35Whitney Cummings?

  A lot of things. Um, uh, in my experience, you know, growing up in a home where the adults didn't get their emotional needs met internally. So, you know, they, they were checking out, they were drinking, they were using, they were fighting something else. And then the child as a result goes, I need to try to fix this. We're parentified children. We tend to be. So we had to be adults too young, right? So instead of just being kids, we had to be like, mom and dad are fighting. What if I get good grades? What if I just do great in basketball? What if I just clean this thing? Or for me, there was also a lot of neglect and there was a lot of I'm on my own, right? No one's going to take care of me. I can't trust anybody. I just need to, you know, and this belief that your behavior can control someone else's behavior.

• 39:15Whitney Cummings?

  And it's magical thinking and it comes from, uh, I not having like consistency, not having, um, people that were fair around you. Um, you know, cause alcoholism, we say, like, if you grow up in alcoholic home, many times you end up being a codependent, but alcoholism is defined, you know, look, in order for alcoholism to be present, alcohol doesn't have to be present. So when you go through and do an inventory in this particular program, which if you're codependent, you don't necessarily have to do this whole program. It is just kind of like a school for your brain. It's just like a way to reparent yourself and have mature adult, uh, expectations of people and yourself. So, you know, all of the defense mechanisms that you developed as a child to survive your family system. And by survive, it doesn't mean it was life or death. You know, it might just been on Christmas, your mom puts a ton

• 39:59Whitney Cummings?

  of pressure on everybody and everything has to be perfect and every, the table is set perfectly. That's a form of like alcoholism, this workaholism, you know, obsession with perfectionism. If you grew up around that, it's a way to sort of reparent yourself so that you are not acting from the point of view of your inner child, uh, who is trying to solve everybody else's problems, manage everybody else, care, take other people, you know, get your self-esteem from, uh, your productivity, right? And your usefulness to others. That's a big one, you know, it's like, I need to rescue everyone. I need to save everyone. We've all been in those relationships where you like, need to save them. You need to rescue them and then you resent them so much, you know? So codependence also has this sort of like, you know, You think you're just really nice. You think you're just like, you know, being a great

• 40:41Whitney Cummings?

  person. You think you're just like this angel that's rescuing people. But what you're really doing when you're going to rescue a girl, say, you know, this girl, she doesn't have her bills paid. She's in a bad relationship. She's got bad credit. You're, I mean, essentially what you're saying is like, you wouldn't be able to survive without me. You couldn't do this without me. So ultimately, a lot of times, our help is coming from a place of arrogance and playing god and trying to change people, trying to fix people.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  Desperation, too, I'm gonna guess, too.

• 41:09Whitney Cummings?

  And the three Ms, mothering, micromarting, I'm sorry, mothering, micromanaging, and martyring. You know, those three things. Do you get your self-esteem from being useful to other people, from rescuing other people? Where are you in terms of your ability to like yourself without other people's approval? Does your mood, is it dictated by other people's perception of you, your achievements? You know, it's, it's a tricky one, because it's something that it's the only, quote, addiction that you get rewarded for. You know, it's if you're a drunk and you act shitty at a bar, they kick you out. If you're codependent, you're like, no, I'm gonna drive him home. I got him. I'm gonna take him home. And then I'm gonna take him to rehab. And then I'm gonna get him sober. And then I'm gonna, you know. And it's like, well, you're this hero.

• 41:54Chris Williamson?

  But it's got the elements of being charitable, being caring, being sensitive.

• 42:00Whitney Cummings?

  But that's also selfish sometimes.

• 42:01Chris Williamson?

  Well, I guess it depends on where the compulsion's coming from. It's so fascinating, because all of these things, the dose kind of is the poison here. The, like, doing something nice for somebody else, caring about somebody else, having empathy. Are we really supposed to expect that where we would be able to detach our unself-esteem from the opinions of other people? We're a social species, that, you know, you should care about your opinion of you more than you care about other people's opinions of you. But assuming that you're ever going to not be able to care about other people's opinions of you, I think, is, it's not gonna happen. Maybe there's some, you know, one in a thousand Michael Malice anarchist, you know, middle finger type people that can go and do that. But I think they're outliers. The problem being, where is this coming from? And it seems to

• 42:44Chris Williamson?

  me, it's the drive, it's this need, if I do this, then I will be wanted, needed, accepted, validated by the world, not abandoned.

• 42:54Whitney Cummings?

  And this is why it's so tricky, because the difference between kindness and codependence is the motive. So if I drive you to the airport, because I'm like, well, I want Chris to like me because I want him to put me on his stories. And I want him to tell other people that I'm cool and I'm trying to control, trying to make myself feel safe and I'm using you. Right? I'm that's dehumanizing you. But if I drive you to the airport because we're friends and I want to talk to you and I want to hang out with you. And you owe me nothing in return and I'm not keeping score. That's just friendship and that's just service and that's kindness. But it's one of those things where it's like, other people can see if you're addicted to drugs, other people. But in codependence, you have to fucking do it yourself. You have to hold yourself accountable, you know? Because ostensibly, I might look like the nicest person in the world, but a lot of times if I'm over gifting. Like I brought you a gift and I don't know if I'm going to give it to you.

• 43:39Whitney Cummings?

  Like I'm trying to decide if I should give it to you. This is a real thing. This is where codependent. Because I don't want you, I don't want to make our relationship transactional all of a sudden. Do you know what I mean? And I don't want you to be like, well, now I have to give her something. It depends, you know, am I going to keep score? When someone's over gifting, am I doing it to make you owe me? Am I, are we entering in some kind of toxic contract where I've given you this thing and you know, it's, it's really interesting in the past.

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

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• 44:42Chris Williamson?

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• 44:58Chris Williamson?

  Slash modern wisdom. Does this mean that a lot of the time, if you're unwinding your codependence, that you're actually going to become a worse person in terms of your actions before you become a better person again?

• 45:09Whitney Cummings?

  I think you'll become a worse person to people that want to use you. And you will become a better person to healthy, balanced people. So when you get healthy, the sick get angry. So when you start, you know, taking care of yourself, when you start putting yourself first, when you start giving 50% in a relationship instead of 90/10. And then it'll feel to, I don't, I'm not a doctor. I'm not going to, you know, diagnose people, but borderline narcissists, you know, selfish, insecure people are going to go like, oh, so you're just ignoring me now? Hey stranger, where have you been? Like, you know, so once you stop a lot of your codependent behaviors, there will be a little bit of a backlash. But then you realize, oh yeah, these relationships were codependent. We were using each other or I was using them. Or, you know, once I went to recovery for codependence, I realized that like most of my friends, I didn't even like them that much. I just like, didn't know how to say no.

• 45:54Whitney Cummings?

  And I did a lot of things out of obligation, you know? And I think it's probably better. And part of the reason I'm getting tripped up is like, sometimes it's better to just use specific examples that are helpful. So, you know, before I went into recovery for codependence, I would get an invite to a birthday and it was like, oh, I gotta go to this. I gotta go to this birthday party. I gotta go, we gotta swing by. And then another friend, ah, friend, another friend's having a party. So I gotta stop at this one, I gotta stop at this one. And the implication there is like, if I don't go, what are they going to cancel the party? Like they're going to be like, where's Whitney? Like the, it's the, I'm a piece of shit in the center of the universe thing. And because when you keep score as a codependent, you assume everybody else does.

• 46:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 46:30Whitney Cummings?

  You know what I mean? So if you're the person that's like, oh, well, Kristen showed up to my party. Okay, noted. I'm assuming that other people behave like that too. Chances are they would not even notice that I didn't show up. And I'm the person showing up at the party going, hey, I'm here. Okay. Well, I gotta go to another party now. And everyone's like, cool.

• 46:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:44Whitney Cummings?

  Sick philosophy on life, just dragging yourself from party to party and making it about you. Like, well, I have to go to another thing now. And I was like, awesome. So no real friends, just a bunch of acquaintances that I felt obligated to, you know, run around and please when I wasn't even pleasing. But I'm the person at the party who's like, can I help you clean up? Can I do this? Like, I didn't know how to just be enough and be in a conversation with someone. And, uh, you know, here, uh, here are some of the like, you know, slogans that I love because it's a simple program for complicated brains, right? We have complicated brains. Before you try to solve a problem, first make sure it's your problem. That like blew my mind when I first came in. It was like, oh, a friend of mine is going through a breakup. I need to go over there and I need to start helping her pack her stuff. So she, it's like, why am I solving someone else's problems?

• 47:28Whitney Cummings?

  What am I, my addiction was to get out of myself instead of checking out with drugs or alcohol. I was like, I'm going to check out with, I'm going to use someone else's problems to disassociate and to get some self-esteem. That's how low my self-esteem is, that I need to go rescue someone to feel good about myself. You know? And it's again, a really tricky thing because if a friend of mine said, you know, I'm in a really bad situation, someone just hit me, I'd be like, I'm on my way over, you know? But I wasn't doing it for that reason.

• 47:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Which is why the motive thing comes in.

• 47:56Whitney Cummings?

  It's kind of of a subconscious addiction to drama, uh, which is ultimately adrenaline. And we forget about the internal drug cabinet. So where the external drug cabinet, you know, all those are, we can also get high internally. And I remember watching the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial and I was glued to it. I couldn't get enough because I was like, everyone needs to watch this because this is the apotheosis of internal drug cabinet. This is adrenaline addiction. We don't talk about this because no one sells adrenaline, right? When you subconsciously put yourself in situations, we're going to get a ton of adrenaline because adrenaline turns into dopamine. It's addictive. That's why toxic relationships are addictive, you know? It's like, this feels bad, but it also I can't stop. And that was a big thing for me in codependence.

• 48:39Whitney Cummings?

  I was like, why am I, you know, anyone who's like, I hate drama, that is a red flag. Get away from that person because you know, you find yourself just subconsciously attracting, you know, to situations where there's going to be adrenaline. You know, look, there's also more about like ancestral roles and birth order, which I know you know a lot about and stuff too. I do believe like my epigenetic imprinting, you know, the neurochemicals that are emitted in utero, I think maybe we've even talked about this. You're born addicted to the same way if your mom does crack, you're born addicted to. So when I had my, was pregnant with my son, I was, if someone cut me off of traffic, I'd be like, good luck. I hope you have a great, like, I would not allow any adrenaline because I know that I was conceived during like a very acrimonious divorce, very dramatic shit.

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  So like a crack baby, you're an adrenaline baby.

• 49:23Whitney Cummings?

  Literally. So I basically did detox from adrenaline. I mean, I did 30 days no adrenaline.

• 49:29Chris Williamson?

  How do you do 30 days no adrenaline?

• 49:31Whitney Cummings?

  You basically just like block everyone.

• 49:35Chris Williamson?

  Fucking nightmare.

• 49:36Whitney Cummings?

  You know, but you really look at yourself and just going the common denominator and all these toxic relationship. It's really, do your relationships and the choices you make, do they feel like an obligation? Do you feel guilt or shame when you say no to people? Do you take care of yourself for real? Do you floss? Are you feeding yourself well? I mean, little things like that, where it's, are you putting other people's needs before yours in a way that's not cute?

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the ways that this can manifest in people's lives that they might not realize?

• 50:06Whitney Cummings?

  When you become a boss and you can't not be friends with your employees, or I see a lot of like HR issues and a lot of toxic work environments, I'm like, that's codependence. First of all, Johnny Depp Amber Heard, I was like, that's all codependent shit, you know? Little things like you hire someone because you're doing them a favor. You do a favor for someone. When does that go well? You do a favor for them, you give them a job, okay, I'll mentor you. And then all of a sudden, you're like, okay, you're not right for this, right? And now I'm going to help you. And now we're hang out and we're friends. Now you want more because I, now you're entitled, like I enabled this situation, you know?

• 50:49Whitney Cummings?

  I think hiring, it gets very tricky. Self deprivation, I mean, codependence tend to be the people that don't go to doctors. Forget we live in America and it's a fortune to go to a doctor, but like not taking care of yourself. You know, before I came into program, like I wasn't consistently flossing, I wasn't getting my vision checked, like I wasn't, I had chronic migraines. It can really like manifest in your health as well, you know? I wasn't, uh, uh, sitting down, reading, I wasn't stretching, like I would work out because I'm-

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  Just not much self care.

• 51:19Whitney Cummings?

  I mean, if any, it's like a, it's, it's sort of, yeah, self harm in a way. If you're the person where before people come over, you're like, I have to clean up and I have to, everything has to be perfect. It's like, so are you friends with people that if all the dishes weren't clean, they'd be like, never mind. You know what I mean? And what you're doing is you're implying that everyone is shallow. As you maybe, like, would you judge someone for that? Ultimately, you do, it is a very judgmental kind of thing because you're assuming everybody else wouldn't accept you if you weren't perfect.

• 51:49Chris Williamson?

  And that they care enough.

• 51:51Whitney Cummings?

  And the arrogance, yes. And the arrogance of thinking there is such a thing as perfection. My thing was perfection. You just have to be perfect at all times. And then it'd be like, would hurt even more when someone didn't want me or rejected me. Because it's like, well, I'm perfect. I can't get any, you know, but that's not how things work, right? And I think that, um, hold on, I'm trying, I'm so overwhelmed because this is such a big topic and the pressure to talk about it and get it all in without being boring.

• 52:18Chris Williamson?

  I think you're doing a great job.

• 52:19Whitney Cummings?

  My brain just goes like, don't be boring, don't be boring.

• 52:21Chris Williamson?

  You're doing a great job.

• 52:22Whitney Cummings?

  But ultimately, a big part of what it is, is making sure you stay a victim. Okay, so I'm gonna be so nice to you and give you so many presents and do so many amazing martyry things for you that you can never requite them. And Chris doesn't appreciate me. I love, it's the people that get out of relationships and go, my problem was I just love too much. Stop doing it for them then, you know? You're doing 90% instead of 50%. So relationships should be 50/50. So I'm gonna do, that's the trick about the trad wife thing and, you know, is if I'm, it doesn't count if I make you dinner and clean your shoes and do your laundry and da da da. Well, how come you, oh, and you're gonna say this?

• 53:07Whitney Cummings?

  And you're gonna do, oh, you're gonna text that person at, you know, 10pm and I made dinner? That's codependence, right? Because I'm being so nice that the score is always off.

• 53:15Chris Williamson?

  It's a bargaining chip, you're keeping tally.

• 53:18Whitney Cummings?

  And I always feel unappreciated and I get to recreate the childhood circumstances or whatever familiar vibe of being a victim. And I see this glamorization of victims these days and not true victims, but people that think like, if I'm a victim, I'm interesting or I need to be a victim because that's, I don't know, I don't, my nightmare is to be pitied. You know, I think before I really valued being. A martyr. I thought it meant you were strong. I thought it meant you were selfless. You know, I thought that was like life's purpose. And then I realized like, I'm not going to save anyone or rescue anyone or be any value to anyone if I'm sick all the time and doing it out of obligation. I wouldn't. And it took, you know, going into recovery to go like, I would

• 54:02Whitney Cummings?

  never want someone to hang out with me or come to my birthday or drive me to whatever because they thought they had to. Like, how embarrassing. I would never want someone to stay with me and be like, I know this isn't going to work out, but I don't want to break her heart and stay with me. How embarrassing, you know? So it's kind of a selfishness that because you don't want to feel bad or for the other person to think you're a bad person. And I think a big part of success these days is like, you know, the linear relationship with the ability to have uncomfortable conversations and to be able to say no. And if people don't like you, not seeing it as they don't like me, seeing it as like, I've been rerouted to a different group of people that can handle directness. These people are just too sensitive to be in my life because I grew up around very

• 54:44Whitney Cummings?

  sensitive people. A mom that cried, you know, like stuff like that. When you see that, you're like, the last thing I want to do is make someone cry or make someone upset.

• 54:51Chris Williamson?

  Make my needs known, make a demand of somebody.

• 54:54Whitney Cummings?

  I'm needless, wantless. The idea of like, people to apologize all the time. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. People that can't be direct. You know, when someone gets off the phone with me, it drives me nuts because it's so codependent. When someone's like, all right, well, I guess I'll let you get back to that. I'm like, can you just say you have to go? I'll be fine. You're implying that I can't handle someone getting off the phone, you know? But this kind of, we live in this thing now where everyone's just like so afraid to hurt someone else's feelings.

• 55:17Chris Williamson?

  Somebody else's emotional state is my responsibility.

• 55:19Whitney Cummings?

  A hundred years ago, we were fighting each other in fields. Like, how did we get to this?

• 55:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, the funniest Petri dish for this to happen in for me was Ubers. So I'd get into the back of an Uber and if I was on the phone, I'd like make this like grovelling apology to the Uber driver who I evidently thought needed me to entertain him for the entirety of this journey. Sorry, I'm on the phone, I'm on the phone at the moment. Sorry. Yeah, I'm very good. Thank you. I'm like, what the?

• 55:47Whitney Cummings?

  And what is that, what is that saying? What is your judgment of him?

• 55:50Chris Williamson?

  That he needs me, look, look at what a blessing I am to his life. Also, if I don't, he's incapable of looking after himself as he is, I need to step in and make sure that he's okay and I'm on the phone and that's kind of rude. And I mean, you know, he may, he has to be entertained by me for the entire, because it's not like he literally does this as a job every single day.

• 56:12Whitney Cummings?

  And he's like, if I want to listen to you talk to it, there's 100 episodes. I got it. I'll listen to you. If I want you to entertain me, I can do that at any time on Spotify. You know, and yeah, it's that. And so it's taken me a long time to realize a lot of times my grovelling, you know, being obsequious to people is actually insulting to them. And that's, and then I use that like, oh, why don't I be codependent in that way of like, I don't want to insult this person. Right? So I'm going to be direct. I'm going to be clear. I'm not going to grovel over people and infantilize them. Because when you infantilize someone, they all of a sudden start regressing emotionally and then you're in that jam. You know? So it's like if you're in, you know, if someone is like, enters into the

• 56:57Whitney Cummings?

  contract, it's kind of called like human magnet syndrome. We're kind of like, a certain type of person is going to be attracted to someone who's, you know, caretaky and people pleasey. I'm not going to say narcissist because that word is so, what is this thing now where if a guy breaks up with you, they're a narcissist, they're a love bomber, they are gaslighting you?

• 57:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's pretty much no normal relationship behavior that hasn't been turned by TikTok into some pathology.

• 57:25Whitney Cummings?

  If you break up with someone, you're an abuser.

• 57:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 57:28Whitney Cummings?

  Now, I mean, getting your heartbroken sucks. It used to be you just sort of like, show up where you think they're going to be, you know, kind of may, or whatever, like that. You don't have to go online and say that they're a toxic narcissistic gaslighter. And even if they are, if you're saying someone gaslit me for two years, you're just admitting that you fell for it. You're just like, I'm dumb. Like, is that, either way, this isn't going to go well for anyone. Like, why do this? You know? I look back and I'm like, if I was 22 and dating now, would I do that? You know?

• 58:04Chris Williamson?

  What do you think? Do you think you would?

• 58:05Whitney Cummings?

  Would I? It's interesting. I think that because now I think people go like notoriety, like if I can't get fame, I'll settle for notoriety. Whereas a big thing in codependence is if I can't get love, I'll settle for being used. So I'm always like, what would I be willing to settle for? Because I'm always fascinated by that. And I think I might do stand up and talk about, I might be doing what you were just talking about. There's a chance that I could be on a podcast saying, and this guy, this guy, this guy. But my codependence is I don't want to embarrass people. And I don't want anyone to be mad at me. So I would, I would never name names. I would never do that.

• 58:42Chris Williamson?

  Fucking immovable object and an unstoppable force clashing up against each other.

• 58:46Whitney Cummings?

  But you know what? I wouldn't because I think for me, whenever someone broke up with me, I like agree. I was like, you're right. I am worthless. Like I had such low self-esteem. We, I don't think low self-esteem is our problem anymore. That was my generation's problem. We had Kate Moss was our beauty influencer, someone who was literally anorexic. And I had very low self-esteem. Now I feel like we're gone the other way. It's like Lizzo is like, look however you want. And like, you're better than everyone. And no one deserves you. And if someone leaves you, it means they're a narcissist.

• 59:15Chris Williamson?

  How did you, or what do you suggest to people who think, ah, last 15 minutes that when you just spoke about that sounds an awful lot like me, or a pattern that I have in my mind? Where do people go to begin to unwind these behaviors?

• 59:30Whitney Cummings?

  Because really quick, sorry, there has been a little bit, I'm seeing it shift from when I started going to, you know, ACA ALAN meetings, it was, it was a lot of women. Some men, a lot of women. It's more and more men, and more and more men. Because I think that what was supposed to be this movement that was, women are equal, women are strong. There has been such a overcorrection, or people have decided to, you know, use this wave to victimize themselves, or just attack men casually about things that aren't even crimes. Now, men are going like, well, I can't break up with a woman or she'll sue me. Like, and now I'm seeing men go into codependent.

• 1:00:09Chris Williamson?

  So they're kind of cultivating codependent.

• 1:00:10Whitney Cummings?

  Kind of. It's sort of like, there's this thing now, not that women are so strong and equal, it's that they're so fragile and made of fiberglass.

• 1:00:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Whitney Cummings?

  That if you break up with them, we'll fall apart. But we're equal, like, which is it? We kind of have to pick one at some point, you know?

• 1:00:23Chris Williamson?

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• 1:01:05Chris Williamson?

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• 1:01:47Chris Williamson?

  You're perfect as you are, you are immutable and the world is mutable, it will change to fit your preferences, to fit your needs, and the subtext, I know it's hard, it is definitely hard for guys, I talk about this an awful lot, that you've got to pick yourself up by your bootstraps and carry a heavy weight and burden and so on and so forth, but at least that worldview, although it's difficult and filled with responsibility, it's complimentary in as much as it suggests to you that you can handle it.

• 1:02:18Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Chris Williamson?

  That you can bear it, and I think that that's a- That's something that you should be flattered by as a guy, and it's a hopeful message. It's way more hopeful than if you ever encounter a challenge in the world. It's because of a problem with the world, not something that you need to overcome yourself. The world should fold around you.

• 1:02:34Whitney Cummings?

  And isn't this kind of Darwinism though, too? You know, it's like the people that expect that are not going to make it and the people that don't, don't. Like, I mean, I learned in early age, like, and this is a thing that I learned in program is like, the world owes you nothing. That like blew my mind. That blew my mind.

• 1:02:51Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:02:52Whitney Cummings?

  That I don't know whether it was movies that instilled this in my brain. I don't know where, or maybe it was just, you know, the magical thinking that, you know, because growing up in an alcoholic home, a lot of times fantasy becomes your primary addiction first. So that's another thing, you know? There's manifesting, there's fantasizing, you know? At a very young age, I was checking out in fantasy. And then I found myself in relationships, you know, fantasizing about the relationship instead of basing my feelings about it on what was actually happening. And I think I see more and more people having these like kind of text relationships that aren't based on actually connecting with the person. And the relationship is kind of like a confluence of a little bit of in-person time, texting, and then their imagination. And then all of a sudden, it's like, you know, the person's not behaving the way that they're picturing.

• 1:03:37Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 1:03:38Whitney Cummings?

  And I found myself doing that a lot is a way to not have to be in something. So that's a like more into the love addiction thing and the fantasizing thing, because I see a lot of situations now with men and women where things go south. But it was kind of, a lot of the relationship was fantasy and not based on actual things that were happening. And I definitely did that as a way to check out. And then as an adult, you know, in my early twenties was I an adult? But to not have to be in something real, so I'm not going to get rejected. I don't have to do the rejecting. I'll just be in this fantasy world, which now.

• 1:04:10Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, it's a protection. I mean, again, we spoke about this last time, this sort of overton window of emotions that most people exist within where nothing's ever that joyful and nothing's ever that sad. I'm kind of like the thermostat, you know, I exist between 65 and 72 degrees. And anytime that I cross outside of that, there's something really, really wrong and that's not safe. So I'll cope by scrolling on my phone or by going out and distracting myself with TV or with junk food or with porn or with video games or with social media or whatever. And, uh, yeah, it results in us becoming ever more sensitized to ever less strong emotions.

• 1:04:47Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Chris Williamson?

  And then something happens that pulls us out of it and. Somebody has panic attack.

• 1:04:52Whitney Cummings?

  Totally, totally. I mean, you know, I think this is also like the ice bath thing. I have no idea. You guys in your ice baths. I think that it's a good thing regardless to just go out of your way to make yourself uncomfortable.

• 1:05:04Chris Williamson?

  Like it's such a trope and I keep, I, I, I keep having this conversation with a ton of my friends that have kind of been in this world for a while.

• 1:05:12Chris Williamson?

  I genuinely believe that almost all of the important insights from a personal development standpoint, I already know now. After eight years or whatever of being kind of in the trenches of learning this stuff. And I'm sure that there's way more that I don't know that I still need to know. The point is, there's only a small number of really important sort of foundational elements to becoming a better person as far as I can see. And most of them you accumulated at the very beginning of your journey through personal development because they're the low hanging fruit. Because they're the ones that are most robust, that are the most highly scalable, that are the ones that are repeated the most because they're the most effective.

• 1:05:50Whitney Cummings?

  Right.

• 1:05:50Chris Williamson?

  So, so many of the time I encounter a fucking problem and realize that I wrote or said or interviewed the guy that had the solution to this four years ago. I'm like, why have I, I'm assuming that this new piece of info, it's not, I, I, I discount the stuff from four years ago. It's the new shit. This is the new shit. This is the stuff that's interesting. No dude, like you already found those. And I know that it's a trope to talk about do hard things, you know, get comfortable being uncomfortable so that you can be comfortable when you're uncomfortable. A tropey, yes, but every single time that I do a cardio workout, I fucking hate cardio. I'm not built for cardio. Every time that I do a cardio workout, it puts me into a place, it's so humbling because I suck at it and because it's hard and because there's nowhere to hide.

• 1:06:34Chris Williamson?

  Even in a bodybuilding gym bro workout, you can kind of hide away in some ways, even if you go to failure.

• 1:06:39Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Chris Williamson?

  But prolonged cardio discomfort, there's nowhere to hide. And you're like, right, okay, I'm doing this thing and. While I do it, all of these sort of inner voices about you're not good enough, you're gonna suck, you're not working hard enough, this should be easier, this is because you fucking ate that cookie three days ago, this is because of you, blah, blah, blah, this is just like Mr. Patterson in fucking physical education always said, blah, blah. All of that stuff starts to come up and you're forced to grapple with it.

• 1:07:04Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Chris Williamson?

  And that's interesting. I go, okay, well, for me, it doesn't happen in the sauna, it doesn't happen in the ice bath all that much, but it happens during cardio. And I think finding a thing which can be a little safe, but controlled period of discomfort for you to exist within and go, okay, I'm going to use that meditatively to kind of just move through the things and the assumptions and the voices that come up inside of me. And yeah, I remember when I was doing CrossFit, I was maybe 27, 28 and hadn't done as much self-work as I have now. Anytime that my heart rate got above probably 160, 165, so you know, zone four, not even, you know, top end zone five stuff, anytime that my

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  heart rate got above that, all of these weird voices would appear, all of these sort of negative, sort of very zero sum mentality, threatening, frustrated, bitter, resentful, angry, all of these voices would start coming up inside of me. I was like, why the fuck is that coming from? I was like, oh, you're threatened, you're threatened by something at the moment, you're in discomfort and your go-to default is to derogate yourself. It's to feel like somebody's mad at you, to feel like you've done something wrong, to have this sense of sort of foreboding, this ambient sense of anxiety and threat and discomfort and you need to control it and getting yourself too far outside of that. And you can pick whatever it is, you know, for some people, it can be staring

• 1:08:31Chris Williamson?

  at a wall, for some people, it can be meditation, for some people, it can be, you know, learning a hard piano, whatever it is, the period, like modality of discomfort, I think can be anything. But certainly for me, that's like, it just opens up so many of those interesting insights. And that's why I understand why it's fucking like, oh yeah, man, get comfortable being uncomfortable. I'm like, the lessons of that to learn.

• 1:08:50Whitney Cummings?

  And but also like as a recovering codependent, like our, our comfort zone is, is, you know, martyring ourselves and we're very masochistic. So a lot of my recovery is being like, no, you don't have to hurt yourself. No, you can sleep eight hours and not feel like, you know, guilty, like you're using garbage and you're like, a big thing with me is you're falling behind. Like if I take a nap, it's like you're falling behind, you know, and which might be true, but fine. And, um, you know, I think that it's what this program does or any kind of recovery around codependence, at least you're able to sift through your inner monologue and figure out what is helpful and what's not. Right? So instead of saying this isn't healthy, this is healthy, that's pathologizing, you go, this isn't helpful. This is helpful because I think a critical inner monologue is can be really helpful. I'm the same with negative

• 1:09:35Whitney Cummings?

  YouTube comments. This is not an invitation. Don't embarrass me in front of Chris, please. But sometimes like when people are like, they're mean to me in the comments. I'm like, does it only hurt because it's like a little true?

• 1:09:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:46Whitney Cummings?

  That's what that's when it, you know, so for me, it's like, I get feedback for a living. The audience decides what I say ultimately. And then I'm like, I don't want feedback. It's like, well, the audience decides everything else. Like, you know? And so I look at comments and I'm like, you know, that's actually true. I need to be able to take that. So it's like, if you can't take criticism, that to me is the ultimate. Because we are in a, I know someone wrote the book, Crisis of Comfort, whatever it is, we get our, Amazon delivers things to us. We get Postmates. We, I mean, like, you know, I think we're kind of designed to be at, you know, hyper vigilant at war at all times. And now we're in a place where we're getting all of our needs met. And we got to start these little wars everywhere, whether it's with your ex, whether it's, you know, online, whether you're the person writing Yelp reviews about some family owned restaurant that the food wasn't, leave them alone. You know, we have to sort of, you know, sort

• 1:10:27Whitney Cummings?

  of do this, whether it's an adrenaline addiction, or whether it's that human nature thing, you know? But I think that, um, you know, the new discomfort is being okay with hurting someone's feelings because everyone is, has become more sensitive, you know?

• 1:10:41Chris Williamson?

  Or just stating your needs plainly.

• 1:10:44Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Chris Williamson?

  Without bringing it into land or wrapping it in sugar.

• 1:10:47Whitney Cummings?

  I see men walking on eggshells around women in a way that I'm like, do you think I'm gonna sue you? Like, what's happening? You know? And I do it with women too, where I'm scared that, you know, and it's taken me all this time in recovery of codependence, after having a very histrionic mom and being scared of women for so long, I go into a program and I'm like, no, you can be direct with women. They can handle it. You're insulting them. And then all of a sudden, now I'm like, if I'm like, you know what, I'm, you're gonna need to come into work in person today. You can't work from home. And then it's like, this is a toxic work environment. It's like, you've been working from home for two months. You have a doctor's appointment every day. Your acting class starts at two. I need in the office once a year. And I'm toxic? You know, so I think that a lot of times it's being able to have and not worry about what we call the afterburn. Like, I'm gonna say no.

• 1:11:33Whitney Cummings?

  The period at the end of the sentence, no email should be longer than two sentences, because after two sentences, you're either apologizing or trying to manipulate. You know, we've lost the art of just succinct, clear, direct. You know, because we have to go like, and here's why I need you to come to the office. Because in this, and then it's like, I don't owe you this explanation.

• 1:11:48Chris Williamson?

  What's your advice to someone who is the perennial sugarcoater? How can people become better at more direct communication or what worked for you?

• 1:11:59Whitney Cummings?

  That when I was, I had many employees, like hundreds and

• 1:12:04Chris Williamson?

  What was this for?

• 1:12:04Whitney Cummings?

  I would, I had two sitcoms at the same time, two television shows simultaneously.

• 1:12:08Chris Williamson?

  And were you with the exec?

• 1:12:10Whitney Cummings?

  I was the creator.

• 1:12:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:12:12Whitney Cummings?

  And running one of them and co-created another one. And then the Roseanne shows, you know, having a lot of employees. And when you ask for things and you don't get them, and you're like, this person can't be that bad at their job. I must not be being clear. I love a, please tell me if I'm not being clear. I may repeat back to me what I asked person. So I don't know if you've ever done a Mago therapy with a, in a relationship where before we could even move on, you have to repeat what you heard. So Chris, last night we were at this party and I feel like I really wanted to leave, but you kept talking to your ex-girlfriend. And you have to say, what I'm hearing is to make sure we even heard each other.

• 1:12:56Whitney Cummings?

  Because sometimes the way I'm saying something is what I'm actually saying is going to get lost. And you're going to hear, what I'm hearing is you're jealous. That's not what I said. Let me keep saying it until it lands, you know?

• 1:13:08Chris Williamson?

  Is this a Mago therapy?

• 1:13:09Whitney Cummings?

  A Mago. It's we don't, because then we're going to, you're going to go, well, you're jealous. And I'm like, that's not what I said. Don't hold your hand up at me. And then we're gone. We're gone. We're gone. And now we're just fighting about fighting.

• 1:13:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:20Whitney Cummings?

  You always do this. What, where did, and then we're like, what are we even fighting about? I don't even remember at this point, right? And we're just like, we're in our trauma responses and we're both just four, five-year-olds throwing shit at each other. Right? And so, you know, to me, it's, I love, I stole this from Rick Glassman, comedian.

• 1:13:36Chris Williamson?

  I spoke to him for the first time the other day.

• 1:13:38Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Chris Williamson?

  I did DM with him. He seems great.

• 1:13:39Whitney Cummings?

  He's great. He's, he's, I think admits to being high functioning Asperger's. You know, I was diagnosed with autism when I was a kid and I beat it. I think we can all agree. And, you know, one time I said something to him and he went, can you say that again in a different way?

• 1:13:55Whitney Cummings?

  And I was like, I'm stealing that because a lot of times people will say something to me and I don't really know what they said, but I don't want to admit because I'd be come off dumb or something, or I just wasn't paying attention or you know, whatever it was. And so for me, I realized that I'll go, okay, so if you could just go down there, I'd really appreciate it if you would just like Xerox this. And then if you could take it over to Lindsay's office, like I'm sorry it's so far away, but if you could just go do that maybe and then grab yourself some lunch. And then the person walks away and is like, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. I have no clue because she just tried so badly to make me like her or not be mad at her. Or like I felt guilty asking someone who gets paid to go make the Xerox to go make the Xerox. I don't like, it's just bullshit nonsense communication. And this is why horses are so valuable, prey animals in this space.

• 1:14:37Chris Williamson?

  All roads lead back to equinther.

• 1:14:39Whitney Cummings?

  I'm telling you, because horses interpret they fear and they don't have codependence. They don't have people wanting to like them and anxiety about other people's opinions. So everything to them boils down to fear. Fear that you're not going to like me, fear that you're going to go away, fear that you're going to reject me. So any of that with horses, they just, if you're alone with them in arena, they'll just move away from you because your energy's a mess. And I don't think we take responsibility for our own energy anymore. I'm obsessed with radical self accountability, truly just eating exercise, just everything's my fault. Let's just play in this for a second. What if everything is my fault? Like, what would that look like? And then what can I change that I can control on my side of the street? Because we're also like, another way to know if there's codependence in your life

• 1:15:23Whitney Cummings?

  or addiction in your life is like, how much are you blaming other people for things going on in your life? You know, forget that you're in a financial situation where you have to blame the government. That's real, you know, people can't buy houses anymore. You can't get healthier, that's fair, you know, that's a fair thing to blame. But to just go like, well, the relationship didn't work out because he did this and he did this. Like, so you had no, nothing to do with, like, nothing. Innocent in every single situation. I didn't get this job because my boss was not okay. Like, everyone's boss is an asshole.

• 1:15:50Chris Williamson?

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• 1:16:35Chris Williamson?

  And they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 20% discount off everything site wide by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com slash modern wisdom and using the code MW20 at checkout. That's nomatic.com slash modern wisdom. And MW20 at checkout. Is there a reversal of that where people take too much responsibility for everything? They make themselves the martyr. They make themselves like it's because of me, it's always because of me, it's because I'm insufficient. It's because I did this and I did this.

• 1:17:05Whitney Cummings?

  I'd love to meet that person. Are they single?

• 1:17:08Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's my pattern.

• 1:17:09Whitney Cummings?

  I'm kidding.

• 1:17:09Chris Williamson?

  That's my, that's my pattern. So, you know.

• 1:17:11Whitney Cummings?

  Interesting. But you, because I think I high performer brain is like, I actually have control of my circumstances. And I'm being extreme, just going, let's look at this. Cause when you walk into an arena with a horse or you're doing equine therapy. And I know this sounds so elitist to be like, so when you're working with your horse. But it's just helpful because it's such a mirror to your own energy. Like I didn't even realize that I was bringing energy into rooms that was like needy energy. You know what I mean? And then I'm like, why is everybody so nervous? Why is everyone, and it's just like being able to take responsibility for your energy and your motives. Cause horses can kind of read your mind essentially. And it's a great way to have someone or an entity show you your own energy. Because if I show up and I've got this energy and you've got that energy, I'm, I can't even think about what I'm.

• 1:17:54Chris Williamson?

  Little energy mirror.

• 1:17:55Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah. Cause well, I'm too, I'm like we said before, we're like an intersection of each other's shit. But horses, when they move away from you, that means you're no longer providing them with serenity and peace. That's all they value is serenity.

• 1:18:07Chris Williamson?

  I texted you about when I did mine and you get the little pick thing that you can clean the hooves with. And the lady came over and we'd been chilling out with the horses for a little while. The lady came over and she said, so you need to take this sort of blue thing and you're going to kind of walk up to it. And the horses can see, even though they look like they're brain dead, they all look like animatronic brain dead. They're not moving. They're just sort of stood there looking.

• 1:18:29Whitney Cummings?

  Well, that's another thing, but I won't, you're going to think I'm an extreme, but most horses that are broken, they're shut down. Like what I do with my horse, the horses I work with are not like that because we give them pride and dignity and they're not just like, you know.

• 1:18:42Chris Williamson?

  Well, maybe they were.

• 1:18:43Whitney Cummings?

  But doesn't matter.

• 1:18:44Chris Williamson?

  I'm there. I'm waving this, you know, walking over with this thing. And she says, you put your hand on its shoulder and then you kind of slide it down and you just give it a little pinch and you lift the foot up. And if the horse wants to lift the foot up, if it feels comfortable, then yes, and you're supposed to sort of visualize lifting the foot up beforehand. Cause that's going to make the horse feel sort of comfortable with you and you know, you can't be too stressed. You go, and I remember thinking as I went over, I really want this horse to like me. And if it doesn't lift its foot up, that's some sort of comment on me as a person. And you know, if it doesn't lift its foot, it's like, oh, this is fucking typical, isn't it? You know, obviously because I'm unable to do the thing and I can't, it's just insufficiently chill. And I knew that this was going to be the case. If it does, I've got this sort of glow of dopamine.

• 1:19:23Whitney Cummings?

  If it was a person, if it was a person rejecting you, you'd be like, oh yeah, but she's in this tube top and she's who can, you know, with a horse, you can't get out of it by judging or blaming the person. So you just have to look at your own motives.

• 1:19:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34Whitney Cummings?

  So fascinating because horses, and I think that even if you're never near a horse, great, this still is helpful. Horses want you to be regal. They want your outsides to match your insides. They don't want you to pretend. They don't want you to be fake. They don't want you to worry that you're not going to like them because all that translates to them is worry. And to them, worry means where's the mountain lion? You're worried? We're prey animals. We energy conservationists aren't going to waste worry if there's not something to worry about. And then it's like, oh, you're worried that I'm gonna like you? They think you're like sick. They're like, this is a sick animal. I need to get away from it because it's scared for no reason. And they move away from you. And they're kind of right in a way, you know?

• 1:20:15Whitney Cummings?

  And I think that, you know, for me, I was moving through life with if I'm just make myself small, just so other people shine. And if I don't outshine other people and if I just like make sure like I'm people pleasing and shape shifting to be whatever other people need me to be, I'm going to be okay. And they're going to feel okay. And everything's going to be copacetic. And then you do that with horses and they're like, get away from you. You can't be in this herd. Like you're a danger to the herd. You're self obsessed. You feel fear when there's no danger. So for you have to feel feeling fear when you're just picking up a horse's foot safely is weird. It's weird, isn't it? You know, it's weird to be like, I need to break up with this person and I'm scared. Are they going to hit you? We, you know, feeling fear under those circumstances is very bizarre and maladaptive.

• 1:20:58Whitney Cummings?

  You know, so horses train my brain to go like, you know what? I can't be results oriented here, you know? And we go through life being so results oriented based on what we think is going to either make us happy or what should happen. We go on a date being like, this should be the love of my life or, you know? It really helped me going on dates being like, it's all just practice. If something great comes, great. But we have all these sort of results that we need attached to it that then make us feel like failures, you know?

• 1:21:24Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me there's sort of two things going on. I haven't fully thought this out, but it seems to be the same pattern in a lot of stuff that I'm learning about at the moment, that there's, there's two things happening. There's one, which is your capacity to deal with the thing. And there is another, which is the environment that you are working within. And you can kind of play about with both. So on one side, you would say, I'm going to.

• 1:21:50Chris Williamson?

  Be more brave. I'm going to be more courageous in my communication. But what you're doing there is overcoming an amount of discomfort. There is also, I shouldn't feel this amount of discomfort. Where is the discomfort coming from? And there will be times when you need to use the bravery. But there will also be times where you go, okay, when I'm in wartime, when it's a really big deal, when it's, I've tried to be screwed over by a business partner, or this person at work's accused me of a thing that I haven't done or whatever. You know, I need to fight for my corner. That's the time to use bravery and courage. But what you want to do is basically bring down the level of stimulus that you're feeling ambiently to the point where you don't actually need to call on bravery and courage all that much, because I just feel comfortable being direct and being open. So it seems to me that there's sort of two elements going on here.

• 1:22:32Chris Williamson?

  One, which is like wartime fuel and one which is like a peacetime policy.

• 1:22:36Whitney Cummings?

  I love that. And I think for me, I think this is a response that's helpful. But for me, and a tool that people don't talk about a lot, because we're all about how to go, go, go, how to high perform, how to like, is, and it's an aphorism, I know, but like, don't just, don't do something, sit there. Don't just do something, sit there. And they say every year that you're in a 12 step program, you get a moment of pause. Right? So for me, if you just go like, what do you mean, what the fuck was that? I'm like, what do you mean, what the fuck was that? I can now go, I have 10 seconds to just be with myself and have choices. Because, you know, how can I respond, not react? You know, because the reacting is my fear driven, trying to fix it, trying to change it, not being in acceptance of the moment, not living life on life's terms,

• 1:23:21Whitney Cummings?

  trying to control your perception, trying to change something I can't change, which is what you just said, which is the most arrogant thing you can do is be like, I'm gonna get a time machine and erase whatever. I'm gonna try to make you like me by what? Being like, what, like, that doesn't make anyone like anyone. It's delusional, but I'm allowed to take pause and have grace. And I'm allowed to say, I need a second to think about this. I need to remove myself from the situation because I feel, as dorky as it sounds, my inner child, you know, should be the name of every abortion clinic. But we're in Texas, my inner child, I'm having an inner child reaction. It helps me to just have that language and those tools to just be like, I'm having an inner child reaction. I need to remove myself from the situation. Nothing personal, can I just get 10 seconds? And then you go, these tools like halt. Are you hungry, angry, lonely or tired?

• 1:24:06Whitney Cummings?

  If I'm hungry, I need to go eat. If I'm lonely, I need to go make a call. If I'm thirsty, I need to go drink. If I'm tired, I need to take a nap before I even address the situation. And it's weird to say like, Like when all these high performer podcasts and you're you, it's like, what about slowing down, you know, and why does this situation matter to me so much? Why is this such a deal? Like, why is this going to shatter me if it doesn't go well? Is it because my life is not full? So another big part of codependent recovery is like, do I have hobbies that are not work related or self improvement related? It's a tough one for me. Do you? I feel like you do.

• 1:24:43Chris Williamson?

  I try. So pickleball was probably one of the best things, but the problem with that is you always want to become better. Tim Ferriss taught me an interesting story about this, which was decentralizing your sense of self. So that he's not just, he tries to not just be Tim Ferriss, the podcaster, Tim Ferriss, the author, Tim Ferriss, the business person, Tim Ferriss, the investor, Tim Ferriss, the whatever, tries to have a lot of different areas that he can take pride.

• 1:25:11Whitney Cummings?

  Tim Ferriss, the father, let's go, dude.

• 1:25:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes, Tim.

• 1:25:14Whitney Cummings?

  Call me. My uterus is empty.

• 1:25:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's currently vacant, but who knows for how long?

• 1:25:20Whitney Cummings?

  Taking application.

• 1:25:21Chris Williamson?

  So there's this quote from Matthew Hussey, who was sat there not long ago, and it's from his new book, Love Life, it's so good. It's a really good self-development book, masquerading as a relationship book. And he says, "I struggle to believe I'm worthy of moments of joy and peace without first putting myself through a brutal schedule, monitoring my productivity levels down to the minute. Perhaps some people apply this earn your cookie mindset in ways that lead to healthy achievements, not me. Mine is a mutation whereby joy and self compassion are regularly outlawed by an internal tyrant who decides when I've been flogged enough for one day. Just when I'm about to collapse, a voice inside says, okay, give him half an hour of peace before bed, but make sure he knows we'll start again bright and early in the morning."

• 1:26:06Whitney Cummings?

  Is it English?

• 1:26:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Oliver Berkman, also English, calls it productivity debt, that basically he has to justify his existence every single day in order to stave off some ill-defined catastrophe that otherwise might come crashing down on his head. Few things are more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I'm falling behind and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output.

• 1:26:31Whitney Cummings?

  Falling behind what? I think, I think the key is to have really specific definitions because I think the vagueness. You know, vagueness is, you know, always the enemy of clarity, um, always the enemy of happiness. I think vagueness, cause once I, I'm like, I'm falling behind. I'm falling behind what? Cause a lot of people look at me and they're jealous of me. So who, Julia Roberts, like who am I even comparing myself to? I think you also have to get real clear on what your goals are. So you can even measure if you truly, you might be, but I think that sometimes we self sabotage by having this vague idea of what we want to accomplish. Just like what world domination, like what do you want? You know, how much money do you want? Like, cause for me, I'm like, if I keep succeeding and succeeding, but my mentality of I'm falling behind. I don't have enough. I'm not good enough, doesn't change.

• 1:27:16Whitney Cummings?

  That's on me. Like I'm, I'm yielding the, and then this is just an addiction. It's one too many, a million, not enough. When will it be enough? You know, and I think that it's taken me a long time to realize like my goals have been so vague on purpose so that I can continue to self flagellate. And to justify being able to be like, see, you can be doing more. You can be getting more. You can have three TV shows like, and it's like, well, I didn't set goal lists specific enough to even know if I'm coming in over with extra credit or if I am failing. I couldn't even tell you if I'm failing. I'm just making sure I always feel like I am to justify this behavior towards myself, which is the same way you justify drinking or self harming or whatever it is. It's kind of mental self harm, right?

• 1:27:53Chris Williamson?

  Uh, one of my friends gave me a quote the other day. General ambition gives you anxiety. Specific ambition gives you direction.

• 1:27:59Whitney Cummings?

  How did you just pull that up? Like, what is this?

• 1:28:02Chris Williamson?

  It's just.

• 1:28:02Whitney Cummings?

  That's the perfect quote.

• 1:28:03Chris Williamson?

  It's just Apple notes, but I just have a lot of, I have a lot of smart friends. So yeah, I just, you know, that kind of addiction to work and to this, this need to always be being productive and sort of contributing and stuff. And I think I've got Huberman coming on the show very shortly. I'm with him this week and we spoke about this last time I spoke to Andy Galpin, his colleague, I guess, uh, about this too. The perils of over optimization. And I do think that we're seeing a swing already back away from that. And we're seeing even people like Andrew or, you know, even the most, actually the only guy that doesn't have this, I was with Brian Johnson on Sunday. You know, the, uh, like swap blood with his son, live until he's a hundred and fifty guy.

• 1:28:44Whitney Cummings?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:28:44Chris Williamson?

  So, um, did this breakfast with him. He's the only person who is absolutely sort of, um, how do you say, unyielding.

• 1:28:50Whitney Cummings?

  There was an episode you did on, I believe on here, and I don't know who it was with, um, talking about like, what is the point of living forever? If this is how you live.

• 1:28:58Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:28:59Whitney Cummings?

  Kind of thing.

• 1:28:59Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:29:01Whitney Cummings?

  And Huberman, look, I said, dear, dear friend, and I love him and I'm allowed to joke about him. If like. Are you fathering the world the same way I was trying to mother the world? You know, it's like, not that it's, I mean, it's life is working out great and he's happy, but he truly is driven by like, I want to give free healthcare to, like, that's wild, you know, that's a wild motivation. And, you know, look, it's like, there's a lot of people in podcasting that are having such a big impact. I can't imagine how hard it would be to walk away from the drug of actually helping people, you know, I've dated a ER doctor before, and he would, I'd be buck naked on the bed, he'd be like, I gotta go back into work. I'm like, that is, knowing you can go save a life, I can't even imagine, you know, so you guys are in a

• 1:29:46Whitney Cummings?

  situation where you're kind of this big brother, uncle, father to all these men that I think are very lost, younger boys that are very lost, and women too, women love your podcast. And how do you stop?

• 1:29:58Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think, you know,

• 1:29:59Whitney Cummings?

  Or take a break.

• 1:30:00Chris Williamson?

  We're just seeing this, the pendulum is swinging back, I think, in a way that was probably needed from over-optimization. And sometimes the kind of early warning alarm is actually that you realize that it's, it's totally unrealistic for anybody to have the perfectly optimized day and all the rest of it. And the more that we're not leaning into the only way to do it is this, this is the absolute, this is the only existence that you can go for. I think that that makes life a lot easier. So.

• 1:30:34Whitney Cummings?

  I think also with a world that's very out of control, I see a lot of people needing some kind of control. I also think that the less we are into religion, the more we have to create a new religion. And I think optimization is like, kind of looks like a new religion in a lot of ways, right? It's like you, every morning, you have your routine and you say whatever it is, your meditation, you sleep eight hours, you have your rituals, you go in your ice bath, you go in your sauna. I mean, I don't always think it's a bad thing, you know, I think sometimes we're addicted to over pathologizing ourselves too. It's like, if it keeps you sane, if you're not hurting anybody, and like, you're taking care of yourself and setting good examples and not committing any crimes, like, what does it hurt?

• 1:31:07Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that you say that it's a sort of addiction to control, because there's definitely a kind of fragility that comes along with people who can only perform if they've done this weird rain dance before they actually go forth and do the thing. Say, I can't just get up and start working, I can't just get up and raise my kids, I need to do my affirmations, and I haven't done my, my five-minute breath work, and I haven't done my 10-minute meditation, and I haven't done my sauna and so forth. You think, ah. In an attempt to become more resilient, you've actually made yourself way more fragile.

• 1:31:35Whitney Cummings?

  Interesting. That is fascinating. And I think that, you know, I don't know. And then you're, how much of it is to isolate? I think that's also something that any kind of time a program is rooted in some kind of addiction recovery. It's like, or are you just trying to isolate? Because isolation is where addiction thrives, you know? So I go like, I'm this workaholic and I have to work, work, work. And I'm like, oh, God, I think I just got myself again. I found a way to justify isolating. I have to go away to a cabin and write for three weeks and not talk to anyone because I'm such an optimal-

• 1:32:03Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard of monk mode? Do you know what that is?

• 1:32:05Whitney Cummings?

  No.

• 1:32:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so-

• 1:32:08Whitney Cummings?

  Hey, Shetty.

• 1:32:09Chris Williamson?

  No. It's kind of like, imagine no fat, but for your entire life.

• 1:32:14Whitney Cummings?

  No fat.

• 1:32:15Chris Williamson?

  No fat.

• 1:32:16Whitney Cummings?

  Fat.

• 1:32:16Chris Williamson?

  No fat. So like, not wanking, but it's for everything.

• 1:32:19Whitney Cummings?

  No jerking off.

• 1:32:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's got nothing to do with that. It doesn't work if you don't know the thing I'm referencing. The original reference doesn't work if the second. Anyway, it's focused on the three I's: introversion, isolation, and introspection. So you go away and you relinquish all social obligations for a while. You basically focus on improvement for a good chunk of time, you know, six to 12 months as a guy. And the point is to try and go away, not have the distractions and the motivations that often come along with being in social groups and having to adhere to social, like, obligations. And then you re-enter the world now, having done all of this work.

• 1:33:03Chris Williamson?

  One of the problems is, and I saw this in myself, I saw this in almost all of my friends that have had really successful monk mode periods, is that the isolation becomes addicting, and it is a way to help you feel noble in your retreat from the world. It's not that being in social groups makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable, or that you're scared about rejection, or that you find it hard to make friends. It's, I'm doing monk mode, bro. You know, you're sort of got this very regal, up on my high horse, better than you version. And monk mode unfortunately can be very addicting. And there's a real problem that guys have of reintegrating after they've done it. So there's three I's, but there's actually a fourth, which should be integration or

• 1:33:45Chris Williamson?

  reintegration. And, you know, there's, every time that I speak about this-

• 1:33:51Chris Williamson?

  Loads of people say, I did the monk mode thing. I'm probably a little bit introverted and I know exactly what you mean. I really struggled to just get myself back out into the world after I'd focused on working on me. And that's kind of the same as the addiction to being in the cabin in the woods or whatever. You go, it's you doing the thing which from the outside looks like discomfort, but from the inside is actually home base. And then when you try and rip yourself back out, what would really be uncomfortable would be you going out and saying hello to three new people at a party. That would be real discomfort for you. And now you're able to feel noble in this sort of isolation, which was, let's be honest, your home base all along.

• 1:34:32Whitney Cummings?

  Right, right. That's fascinating. I love this, like, you know, it's, I think that my fascination has always been how our brain has not had an opportunity to evolve neurochemically to, you know, catch up with how quickly technology has changed things, you know? Like where does, you know, we used to need to fight, we used to need, you know, I come from Appalachia. I don't know, what's the Appalachia equivalent in England?

• 1:34:54Chris Williamson?

  I'm not really too sure what Appalachia is.

• 1:34:55Whitney Cummings?

  Appalachian America, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee.

• 1:35:00Chris Williamson?

  And how would you describe?

• 1:35:01Whitney Cummings?

  Well, I guess the way I would describe it here is very low income.

• 1:35:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so I mean, any of the northern working class towns.

• 1:35:08Whitney Cummings?

  Blue collar, yeah.

• 1:35:09Chris Williamson?

  Where I came from, Teeside, Middlesbrough, which is, it was famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. And then it lost that, so it didn't even have that anymore, which is a fucking L, big L. I need to get back over there.

• 1:35:24Whitney Cummings?

  Get some teens pregnant.

• 1:35:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:28Whitney Cummings?

  And can I just ask one question?

• 1:35:31Whitney Cummings?

  Also knowing, what's it all for? Is my kink just bettering myself for me? Cause I think I'm such a piece of shit and I want to have a better inner monologue. Is it because I derive dopamine from pride in my behavior? Am I trying to prove someone wrong? You know, I did realize like sometimes unhealthy motivations can provide really positive results, right? So. When people talk about, a friend of mine texted me the other day about jealousy. And I was like, dude, I, it bother, like, I'm like, give me someone to be jealous of. Like, that is my, gets me going so hard. We can call it healthy competition. Jealousy is, right? Envy and jealousy are a little more toxic. But I'm like, healthy competition is something that really drives me and I really appreciate it. You know, when it comes along.

• 1:36:15Whitney Cummings?

  When someone, like, that David Goggins thing, like, I mean, when people talk about negative comments, I'm like, thank you, guys. It kind of drives me, you know? Because I'm like, I gotta get that person that hates me. I gotta get that person. Like, I gotta prove them wrong, you know? I'm kind of into that, you know? And I think we're getting to a point where we're trying to solve every problem. To me, I'm like, well, there's certain I don't want to solve because I do use that for fuel. And I do kind of need that for this. And if I solve all my problems, then I'm just gonna make new ones, right? That's what I feel like I'm seeing. I see, like, especially when people who come after comedians, they're like, that's not funny. And that joke's punching down. I'm like, it must be nice to have such an amazing life that you don't even need comic relief. Because comedy is for people whose lives suck and who need an escape from their own brain. They need comic relief. They need the laughter that's the best medicine.

• 1:37:00Whitney Cummings?

  You don't need any of that. That's so sick for you. I would never want to be in that situation, right? Because I would rather have real problems than the fake ones that I see people with no problems making up just to create chaos.

• 1:37:11Chris Williamson?

  There's certainly an element of,

• 1:37:15Chris Williamson?

  one of the patterns that I realized I was encountering when doing a lot of personal development was, it allows you to not face

• 1:37:25Chris Williamson?

  low self-esteem in the moment because you know that you're always improving. And hey, I don't need to love myself today because tomorrow I know that I'm going to be a little bit better because of all of the stuff that I did today. And the day after that, I know, so you're permanently kind of mañana, mañana anesthetizing yourself from having to ever really face your own low self-esteem. You don't, because I'm moving forward. You know, I don't, I guess, some people could use this in a good way, which is, I don't like my body now, but I know that I've been to the gym and I've stuck to my diet for the last two months. And that's gonna be great. And I know that in future, I'm going to love my body. But I think that with, when it comes to things like self-esteem, it's much more chronic that you're trying to fix an internal problem

• 1:38:08Chris Williamson?

  by a series of external accomplishments.

• 1:38:11Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:12Chris Williamson?

  And, you know, how many rich or successful or famous people that fucking hate themselves do we need to see to? So it's evidently not going to be fixed by this thing on the outside. And it's one of the most unfortunate lessons, I think, because it's one that, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, no one's going to give you any sympathy for dealing with it. It's a sort of champagne problem, right? It's like being killed on the Titanic while everyone tells you how fortunate you are to be on the greatest steamship in history. Another, another like problem, I suppose, is that the world rewards you for continuing to improve and continuing to do these things. And you're always able to just push and hide things further, further, further down.

• 1:38:58Chris Williamson?

  I'm not ready yet, but it doesn't matter. I'm not ready yet, but it doesn't matter.

• 1:39:01Whitney Cummings?

  Something that I don't hear a lot, and I haven't heard every episode of every high performance podcast, obviously. But like something I don't hear a lot is about service. So the thing that clicked for me was in order to build self-esteem, you have to engage in esteemable actions. And if I'm spending all day just trying to make myself better by reading these books and get more money and get better friends and get a better relationship. It's really just narcissism. You know what I mean? I'm just trying to make myself the best person I could possibly be and the prettiest and the fittest and the whatever. And like I started just, I had a neighbor, I would go for this run and, you know, we say in program, like being of service to other people is, you know, what's going to keep you sober, emotionally sober, literally sober, whatever, just doing simple things for other people, expecting absolutely nothing in return. It is so simple.

• 1:39:45Whitney Cummings?

  It is free and it is such a game changer. And the guy down the street, he had this long driveway and he would pull, he was very old and he would pull this trash can all the way. And then I started every morning on Thursday mornings going and just pulling his trash can down for him. And I, I couldn't believe how much I liked myself. I couldn't believe how simple it was, how simple it was during the pandemic. I was like asking people if I could get them groceries, if they say no, fine. You know, little things like that. And, um, you know, the other day I was on Sixth Street and there was a very beautiful hot mess of a girl just sobbing in the middle of the street. Something you see a lot on Sixth Street and she was just crying on her phone. And I just, to just go up and be like, are you okay?

• 1:40:27Whitney Cummings?

  And of course, you're like, it's my birthday and I got kicked out of a whatever. But it just, I was like, that was so selfish to just go up to someone else and get a little hit of you're not a narcissistic piece of shit. And I think we don't talk enough about service. It's a small thing.

• 1:40:44Chris Williamson?

  You can do it in a positive way and you can do it in a sort of malignant way as well.

• 1:40:48Whitney Cummings?

  You can do it in a way that is to manipulate or to seem like a good person or to.

• 1:40:53Chris Williamson?

  This is what's so fascinating about that codependence thing, which is it really all is about the motivation or the motive on the inside, which is difficult because you think, well, I'm doing a good thing. If I'm doing a good thing, if this is me doing something nice for somebody else.

• 1:41:07Whitney Cummings?

  Are you doing the right thing for the wrong reasons?

• 1:41:08Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:41:10Whitney Cummings?

  Because sometimes you do the wrong thing for the right reasons, you know, if you need to fire someone, if you need to break up with someone, whatever it is, you know, but you have to be your own, you know, judge, jury and executioner and be like, I'm not doing this for the right reasons. You know, when I brought your present today, I'm like, why am I bringing this? What am I doing? I really wanted to give you this thing and I, you know, I just really have to watch that. And that's a little game I have to play with myself because sometimes I'll go into autopilot, you know? Our really good friend, Christina Pazinski, is going through a health thing. And I've been on this website to send her flowers every day. And I'm like, nope, not sending her $500 flowers. I'm going to call her. What am I doing with these flowers? What? She need flowers? She wants flowers? She'll have flowers in her house. It's little, you have to check yourself, you know?

• 1:41:54Whitney Cummings?

  And that's something that I think we spend so much time thinking about ourselves, but not in a objectively like, I don't want to say critical, but like, holding ourselves accountable type of way. Am I going to send her flowers so that if she doesn't immediately send me a picture and say thank you? I'm going to be like, okay. Am I victimizing? Am I trying to create a situation where I feel like I'm unappreciated and victimizing? Am I just trying to ruin our friendship?

• 1:42:15Chris Williamson?

  Or injecting yourself into the suffering of somebody else to show just how important and charitable you are.

• 1:42:21Whitney Cummings?

  That's it. I can also go, hey, let me know if you need someone to watch your kids for a couple hours. I can be of service. Do you know what I mean? Let me just drop something off at her house. I'm just ma- am I making it about me? Am I giving her a chore so that I seem like a good person? I know this sounds like I'm overthinking it, but these little tiny things are like the death by a thousand cuts.

• 1:42:40Chris Williamson?

  Also, this is kind of the system two thinking that then allows you to pull it across into system one, right? That when, okay, I have this pattern and it's probably pretty malignant and I need to spend a very focused period of time, maybe a decade, working on doing it very consciously until hopefully there's a part of me that starts to bring this across into my nature. So yeah, doing it deliberately, I, I, I understand exactly what you mean.

• 1:43:03Whitney Cummings?

  I had to redefine the word nice and kind. I didn't know what those words meant. I'm just trying to be nice. Well, you don't say, I'm being nice. Like, is that nice? Was that nice? Well, no, I got you this thing. Okay. Thanks so much. You know, I, it took, I think that we've grown up. I'm not coming for English people. I've dated an Englishman. There is such, I felt that so much, this like guilt and shame that's just imprinted. I don't know if it's you can't shine too bright or you have to just self-flagellate. I'm not sure if that's regional or what. This person was taught from Tottenham or like Tottenham.

• 1:43:45Whitney Cummings?

  Was that a thing?

• 1:43:46Chris Williamson?

  Fucking American person tries to understand England. Yeah, it's, it's a thing.

• 1:43:49Whitney Cummings?

  He rooted for Tottenham. Does that mean any, he must hate himself?

• 1:43:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, he just, it's a football club. He could be from anywhere in the country. Go on.

• 1:43:57Whitney Cummings?

  But I think that there's a difference between, you know, being self-flagellating, self-deprecating and humble. And I think that this whole self-deprecating thing, I remember one time, is a huge red flag. Insecure people are dangerous. That blew my mind because we're kind of trained to feel sympathy for insecure people, but you gotta stay away from those people. If you're dating a girl or a guy who's like, you know, a guy is like, my calves aren't big enough. I need to go to the gym. That's a dangerous person. Get out of there. If that person's not happy with themselves, they're not going to be happy with you. Right? If they can't get their own internal needs met internally, you've got to get out of that situation. If a girl is insecure and being like, I don't know if I'm going to get this shot, get out of there. Don't be like, I'm going to save the day and make you feel secure. Just get out of there. Cause like, you're going to be on the chopping block next and you're going to be the, whatever.

• 1:44:38Whitney Cummings?

  So I used to, you know, I think a big thing in codependence is you conflate love and pity. That's a big one. Like if you're just like, how do you know if you're codependent? Like, do you feel guilt when you're saying no to people? Do you feel shame? You know, do you, um, uh, uh, whatever I just said? Do you remember?

• 1:44:53Chris Williamson?

  Guilt, shame.

• 1:44:54Whitney Cummings?

  Guilt, shame, but there's one before that.

• 1:44:55Chris Williamson?

  Pity.

• 1:44:56Whitney Cummings?

  Pity. Do you feel pity for somebody? You know, instead of loving them, you shouldn't feel pity for somebody and be in a relationship with them. That's like a, like a fucked up soul contract thing. Do you feel hooked by people? Do you do things out of obligation? You know, stuff like that. And I think that, you know, do you worry that a horse isn't gonna like you? I mean, that's interesting. Do you do that with humans, though?

• 1:45:13Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I think so, yeah, in some ways. So that's certainly, you know, going back to, uh, time through school, very much being on the outside, very much being sort of bullied and, and, and always being, uh, always watching things occur, watching everybody else, being friends, watching everybody else play at lunchtime, watching everybody else have, you know, support groups or whatever it might be. Uh, and then not being that always led me to try and reverse engineer, okay, so what is it that I need to do in order to be accepted by the group? And I think that that's just such, such a subtext, which I carry forward into normal life.

• 1:45:46Whitney Cummings?

  Sure.

• 1:45:46Chris Williamson?

  Which is...

• 1:45:48Whitney Cummings?

  I lo- and, and as I hear that, I'm just going, lucky, lucky you, lucky. I mean, I'm big on, and I know this is fine, I'm big on like trauma privilege, you know? Of like, you know, in comedy, we're always like, if you were a girl that was molested, it's like doping in sports, you know? It's, it's kinda like, it's like, no, you don't compete in the same league if you're mole- it's like cheating, you know? It's like you have more adversity, you know? It's like, I do think there's a point where we have to all stop being like, but no one liked me in high school. It's like, well, you're saying it on an interview on Oprah. It obviously works pretty well. You know, there's a point where we have to take some of the wins, you know? It's like, I was neglected as a child and, and, you know, my parents were drunk. Okay, well, now I'm really comfortable entertaining drunk strangers. Thanks, guys.

• 1:46:31Whitney Cummings?

  You know, there's a point where we have to kinda just go like, let's take the win on some of this adversity stuff. And, um, you know, and also the horse thing, it's interesting because I'm so curious about what your success has done, because horses don't know who you are. That's the other thing, is they don't know, and they know nothing about you. And I think there's a point where you go like, you know, in life where you're like, oh, I can kinda get away with more with this. Like, I'm trying to make myself, I can play this card, or I can sort of have this, um... Artificial self-esteem because people are responding.

• 1:47:03Chris Williamson?

  I know exactly, I know exactly what you mean. You get, you kind of get this multiplier bonus for walking into a room. You don't actually need to be that funny. You don't actually need to be that interesting. I have not been sufficiently, still am not sufficiently well-known for that to have been a thing for me to actually embed it. So Mark Manson says that identity lags reality by one to two years. And I think that that's true.

• 1:47:25Whitney Cummings?

  Same with science, right? But science happens and then it takes a year to be vetted. And I'm like, is this still true?

• 1:47:32Chris Williamson?

  Conceptual inertia.

• 1:47:33Whitney Cummings?

  I'm just saying.

• 1:47:34Chris Williamson?

  Takes time for people to play catch up. You mentioned before about this sort of mismatch technologically and psychologically between us. This is my first election year in the US. Is this pace of

• 1:47:48Whitney Cummings?

  Do a crossfit.

• 1:47:48Chris Williamson?

  Vibe and meme shift normal? The pace that news is moving at the moment seems absolutely absurd. Is this, is this normal? Or is this an outlier?

• 1:48:04Whitney Cummings?

  Interesting. I think, you know, it's very unoriginal to talk about our like short attention spans. I think the desensitization, I mean, is interesting, but we're no longer talking about Trump getting shot in the ear. But we kind of still talk about January 6th. You know what I mean? There are some things that linger and some things that are super ephemeral. And I don't know why.

• 1:48:32Whitney Cummings?

  I don't have an answer.

• 1:48:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, we went hawk to a goal. Biden's senile. Trump gets shot in the ear.

• 1:48:40Chris Williamson?

  Kamala is brat summer. To Nancy Pelosi says that Biden should be on Mount Rushmore in the space of four and a half weeks. And you're right, it just seems so quickly like as the, the Trump thing is the most mind blowing to me. I can't believe how quickly people have gotten over the fact that the president, presidential candidate, former president got shot in the head.

• 1:49:03Whitney Cummings?

  And look, this is not, you know, Mark Andreessen is probably the person to weigh in on this kind of thing. I was talking to Hugh Roman about this the other day, you know, of like, you know, anyone can kind of just say anything all the time. Like, is this on like, social media companies to not expose us to this kind of stuff? I see four people get stabbed a day on Instagram and I don't even sign up for it. You know, I'm now, if I saw someone get stabbed in front of me, I'm worried I would like laugh at it at this point. You know, it's like, I think our, you know, idea of what is real and fake is, is, you know, um, I think this is like a crisis that is unprecedented and there's no way to, you know, it's when Will Smith hit, you know, Chris Rock in the face and everyone thought it was a joke. I mean, people thought it was a joke. I mean, it's just like, we, we don't even have a gut reaction to things, you know?

• 1:49:45Whitney Cummings?

  The people that, you know, you know, again, Lex Friedman should weigh in on this, but robots can't tell the difference between a husky and a wolf because of our sort of just ancestral wisdom, like your gut just tells you before you even know. You know, which is another cool thing about being around horses is they feel fear, they feel earthquakes before. Like, we have that body wisdom, but we're just so disconnected to it. We have sort of changed what it means to have a gut. Like, if I say, when I have a pit in my stomach, if I see you at a bar, I call that butterflies. That's your body going like, nah dude, get out of there. You should not have a pit in your stomach. When you meet someone, we've decided that's love. Like, we've turned things around so much, you know? Like, I just worry we're like, our gut is gone.

• 1:50:29Chris Williamson?

  I wonder, I wonder whether it's because everything just feels so unreal. You know, we are by, by design detached from, you know, you've seen that assassination attempt from a hundred angles and 20 different reconstructions from a, a company that does fucking 3D modeling, A, CGI shit. And it's still, it still kind of doesn't feel real. And yeah, I don't, I think that that's something that we should be concerned about. I think it should be concerning that viscerally, uh, people aren't impacted by this stuff more. But I suppose, actually, I maybe answered my own question here, which is, If you were emotionally or viscerally impacted by all of the things that are

• 1:51:12Chris Williamson?

  meaningful, you would just spend your entire day getting ripped around. You know, it's trite and has been said a million times, the human mind is not meant to consume the entire world's news 24/7 on a daily basis. Yes, we're not built for this velocity and volume of information or the way that it's portrayed to us with its, you know, horrible language and the inflammatory rhetoric and all of that stuff. And that, I think, felt like a, it felt like an interesting thought experiment that I wasn't experiencing personally. And I wonder whether this is what that little theory coming into land actually feels like.

• 1:51:49Whitney Cummings?

  And I think like, look, I mean, Neil Postman's amusing ourselves to death, always worth reading in this, you know, space. I'd be so curious what he has to say about this now. And I think I always go, look, I'm a comedian, I'm not, I don't do what you do, I'm not a scientist, I'm not a sociologist, whatever. But I look at things from a, you know, contextual point of view, like, is this the new Darwinism? Like, again, the people that are the most desensitized, you know, are the least likely to survive. Like, you know, I try to limit my exposure so that I stay sensitized. I would like to stay in a place where if I see someone get shot in the head, I, I

• 1:52:20Chris Williamson?

  Connected to humanity in a way.

• 1:52:21Whitney Cummings?

  I think it's awful. Yeah, I would like to continue thinking that. I would like to keep myself sensitized. So I have to go out of my way to do that, you know? I have to go out of my way to, you know, play defense. But, you know, I think this was all kind of by design. I mean, that guy from Facebook came out and said, like, this is designed to make you addictive, you know, the more horrifying and the more comments and the more clicks, you know? And we're just kind of, you know, people like the robots are coming. I'm like, I think we're here.

• 1:52:42Chris Williamson?

  But this part of that, so the algorithmic stuff and the kind of stickiness of these platforms makes sense. It seems like even the incidents or events that there are to talk about are occurring at a more rapid rate. And maybe this is just because we're ramping up, ready for November 2024 election and all that stuff. But I just can't, I can't believe how quickly everything seems to be moving. It's absurd.

• 1:53:09Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah, I mean, right, it was always happening, it was just never covered, right? Is it, you know?

• 1:53:13Chris Williamson?

  But I mean, it's, you know, four years ago, it didn't feel like it was this quick. And I wonder whether, going back to the January 6th, the only interesting thing that I said around the Trump assassination was, will the media say that, which day will the media say was bigger deal in American history, January 6th or July 13th? And It should be, I think, when the president was nearly assassinated. I think, you know, if you were to just say to a representative group of Americans, a president, you don't get to know which party from, was shot in the head but survived, or a group of people stormed the Capitol building. Which one do you think? And I would guess that you would actually lean toward the president's side of stuff,

• 1:53:57Chris Williamson?

  because the implications of that occurring is actually graver.

• 1:54:03Chris Williamson?

  And it's just, I don't know, I don't know. Maybe it's to do with the media cycle, maybe it's to do with the fact that it was Trump. But yeah, there's just, there's a fervor and a pace to everything at the moment, which is, it feels like, like fucking holding on to a roller coaster.

• 1:54:18Whitney Cummings?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that I, you know, I think that there's also a, I did a, you know, how have things changed since I've been pregnant? Like, I did a mass unfollowing, a mass muting, because we are just like, we have to protect ourselves now. It used to be we have to like seek out news, now we have to actively protect ourselves from it, you know? I do like Schellenberger, I do like Jessica Kraut. Like, I'm very specific about, you know, the same way that, you know, people are specific about what they put in their bodies. Like, I try to be just as specific about what I put in my brain. I'm like, if I was half as careful about what I put in my body, I mean, food-wise, than what I put in my brain, imagine, you know? So I try to go like, what is the media diet we're doing today?

• 1:54:59Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent, I think.

• 1:55:00Whitney Cummings?

  Half to.

• 1:55:01Chris Williamson?

  Your body is made up of all of the things that you put inside of your mouth, and your mind is made up of all of the things that you put into your ears and your eyes. And your content diet should be. Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:55:12Speaker 02

  On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:55:25Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

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  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:55:32Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:55:34Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.