Why Most Jacked Guys Are Still Insecure - David Laid

David Laid is a fitness model, influencer, Creative Director at GymShark and a YouTuber. Being young, jacked and famous is a desire almost every 17-year-old guy can probably confess to wanting at one point. But what if the glamour isn’t all it’s made out to be? What happens when injuries threaten to take away the foundation of your self-worth? And what do you do when you need to grow up? Expect to learn how David uncovered self-worth beyond aesthetics, the setbacks that led to his lowest point in life, how to mentally deal with injuries, the biggest influences on his mindset, David's perspective on modern dating, how to harness adversity, what gymbros should envision beyond fitness and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all GymShark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get $100 off plus an extra 15% discount on Qualia Mind at https://neurohacker.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow David on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@UCMqa1mNaKmSSe48FzwohAEA Follow David on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/davidlaid Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #fitness #bodybuilding #mindset - 00:00 Intro 00:27 David’s Young Entry into Viral Content 06:12 Going Through a Period of Introspection 13:48 Role Models for the Modern Male 22:56 How to Overcome Ego with Self Awareness 30:28 The Extremes of Self Development 34:42 David’s Humbling Back Injury 43:51 Challenges in Modern Dating 52:16 How to Become Great in a Fragile World 1:02:36 What David Values the Most 1:08:26 Where to Find David - 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/ - 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?

  Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is David Laid. He's a fitness model, influencer, creative director at Gymshark and a YouTuber. Being young, jacked and famous is a desire that almost every 17-year-old guy can probably confess to wanting at one point in their life. But what if the glamour isn't all that it's made out to be? What happens when injuries threaten to take away the very foundation of your self-worth? And what do you do when you finally need to grow up? Expect to learn how David uncovered self-worth beyond aesthetics, the setbacks that led to his lowest point in life, how to mentally deal with injuries, the biggest influences on his mindset, David's perspective on modern dating, how to harness adversity, what gym

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  bros should envision beyond fitness and much more.

• 0:50Chris Williamson?

  I very much like hearing from people who have had early, rapid success and exposure and notoriety and status and prestige and stuff because it helps to see the other side of the curtain, something that an awful lot of people want or think that they want. And finding out just how rosy or not the reality is, I think, is an incredibly important lesson. I really hope that you enjoy this one.

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• 2:41Chris Williamson?

  But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David Laid.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  We are both fans of Charlie Hoopat and he says that when somebody asks you, what do you do? You have the opportunity to hook lots of different things in. So if someone was to ask you, why do you do what you do? What's the single thread that ties together all of the things that you do?

• 3:23Chris Williamson?

  What would you say then?

• 3:26Speaker 04

  That's interesting. I feel like there's been like an evolution like throughout that because

• 3:33Speaker 04

  just what I do, I guess it's like changed like over time. Because like now, like broadly speaking, like on the surface, like I make like YouTube, like fitness oriented videos. But I think that started when I was like 13 or 14 years old, like I got into like weightlifting. And then I took a lot of pictures of my progress, made a transformation video, then ended up going viral. And then I just like started making a YouTube channel, just with like my friends in the gym, just making random videos of working out. And then I guess I started being more interested in making cinematic-ish like content and just making it more like, I don't know, sophisticated, like higher quality, like etcetera, like more artistic. And yeah, I guess.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  I just enjoy making videos that I just enjoy making.

• 4:22Chris Williamson?

  Do you wish sometimes that your entrance into the world of virality, social media, YouTube, hadn't been so tightly defined based on the way that you look, the gym? Or do you like integrate that as part of your history perfectly fine?

• 4:44Speaker 04

  I'd say so. I mean, I'd say at an earlier point, maybe like years and years and years ago, it was to the point where there was like a, like, I guess, a slight like toxicity component to it. Because the whole reason that I got into working out was because of like very like generic stereotypical insecurities as being like extremely skinny, feeling all that. And then as I started getting more and more progress in the gym, and then that obviously gave me like a self-esteem boost. I felt a lot better about myself. And then I would like take pictures. And then obviously, when people take pictures, oftentimes they just want to like maximize it to get it, you know, best lighting angles, etc. And then I got to a point where maybe like a few years into working out where I had just a decent bit enough of muscle to get pictures that look like semi decent, right?

• 5:28Speaker 04

  But not in those pictures like in real life, like without like a pump or whatever. I remember just like feeling like still like very like just like skinny and insecure. And then it was like a problem because even say like my senior year in high school, I remember I would just wear hoodies just all the time. Because if you're wearing like a big baggy hoodie, you can't like exactly tell like, like the size of an individual.

• 5:48Chris Williamson?

  Even though at this stage, you're probably one of the biggest guys in.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I wasn't like gargantuan or anything. So but I definitely, I, I, I look like a normal, reasonable human being with like an acceptable amount of like muscle tone, right? But still in my head, there was like this crazy just distortion, body dysmorphia. And then eventually the way that transferred over to social media is it was like that thing just amplified even more in terms of just needing to look as good as I possibly could, like in.

• 6:12Chris Williamson?

  People are now scrutinizing you for it.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. So if like I take a picture with someone and then my physique didn't look like as good as. Like I thought it would like in my own pictures that I would take or just by myself in like particular curated environments that would definitely wreak havoc on my wellbeing and that was definitely suboptimal. But as more and more time went by, I feel like that general complex just naturally like dissolved. There's been a bit more peace.

• 6:37Chris Williamson?

  Where are you at now with, you know, cause you're still, what are you 24?

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Uh, just turned 25.

• 6:42Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. So you've been on the internet for longer than I have, despite being 10 years younger than me, right? Given the fact that you have had this long career from basically, when was, when did that first video go viral? 17, 18?

• 6:57Speaker 04

  What, the age that I was at? I was about 17.

• 6:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So, you know, a good chunk of time that you've spent with an awful lot of eyes on you on the internet. All of this has been based around the way that you look. You know, this is coming out the back end of the like aesthetic bro, like gyms is era type thing.

• 7:13Chris Williamson?

  How have you managed to dispense with, or how much have you managed to get rid of that body dysmorphia, that sense of your sense of self-worth being attached to the way that you look, your leanness, your size?

• 7:26Speaker 04

  I think the way that that dissolution happened to whatever degree it has happened was through just so many years on end or such a prolonged period of time of just feeling such internal like discomfort and dissonance and just in, yeah, just an overall sense of like discomfort in my actual day-to-day life, having to just like micromanage just my own like self-image of how I think I look, yada, yada, this is that. And then it just got to the point where that was just so unsatisfying to operate in that way that the more and more I would distance myself from that, like organically as a byproduct of like achieving a certain like understanding of how that makes me feel, then I would just notice it

• 8:08Speaker 04

  would just not feel that way anymore. But even like throughout the years, like at times, I would have. Situations where I could just see my brain re-entering previous thought patterns that I did when I was like fully ensconced in that mindset, but back when I was fully ensconced in that mindset, that was literally my like reality as I was like having those thoughts and feelings, but now that previous thought pattern still exists, but it it exists within a broader understanding so that when it arises, I could just recognize its arrival and then it'll just go away and then um just like, I don't know, at peace or I like feel fine, like there's like no like issues really. So I don't know, I didn't like necessarily implement like just like a strategic like plan or like take any like steps or like create, I don't know, like a mental

• 8:52Speaker 04

  hygienic discipline to do that. It's just, it just sort of just organically just happened after just like contemplation and stuff.

• 8:59Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the introspection and the self-work that you've done over the last few years.

• 9:06Chris Williamson?

  Just to interject there, man, like you're a you're a young guy, right? You're 25. I was like an adult infant at 25 and the way that you're talking about letting go, releasing difficult challenges that come up is very mature, especially for somebody that's had broadly the internet world at their feet for quite a long time. And I'm fascinated to work out how you go from that aesthetic growth thing to now at still a relatively young age, taking value in different stuff. What have been the practices, the thought patterns, the influences that have got you?

• 9:41Speaker 04

  I'd say one of the main reasons that happened is just my natural disposition of being extremely introverted. So for me, I spent a lot of time by myself. That's my recharge period, yada, yada. Like, we all know like how like introversion works, like basically. So for me, just just long periods of time, just by myself, just thinking about shit.

• 10:01Chris Williamson?

  Are you an only child?

• 10:03Speaker 04

  No, I have three brothers.

• 10:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. Just thinking, just obviously listening to just lots of podcasts, like lots of great thinkers, just borrowing like thought patterns from other people and just building this larger like conception like in my head and then contrasting that with my own insights and things that I've just experienced and yeah, just, just lots of, just, just lots of like thinking, because I feel like that's how most things are like typically like resolved. Like there's an idea that I forget, like there's lots of people that talk about, so I'm sure you've heard people talk about this too, but if you

• 10:36Speaker 04

  If you wanna, like, for example, like, you're familiar with like Naval Ravikant, like him talking about like prescriptions or like if he's spoken to an individual like, like Capital Group, I don't know if like seen that podcast.

• 10:46Chris Williamson?

  He's been on my show.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  Oh, he has?

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  Very long time ago.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Who?

• 10:48Chris Williamson?

  Kapil Gupta.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  No way.

• 10:49Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  Has he actually?

• 10:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the no prescriptions prescriptions guy.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  Was it an audio only podcast?

• 10:54Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean, you get that whole idea, like, it basically, I feel like, so if an individual is like struggling with like any source of like body dysmorphia, image issues, like etcetera, one line of thought is like, okay, like, I have an issue, like, I have a problem, I have like anxiety, I have distress, I have all these like things going on. So one school of thought is like, okay, let me, okay, I have issues, right? I need to fix issues, so let me like implement like certain like things in regimes to like combat these problems, which is like useful in moderation to a degree, but I feel like for just a really, really deep, internal, authentic transformation, you can't do that by following just certain like, oh, let me just write down like in my gratitude journal, like 15 minutes a day, like every single day, like, let me just like have this like mantra, like meditation kind of pattern.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Maybe that works to some people to some degree, but in a certain kind of way, there's a type of like insincerity that goes with that because you become obsessed with doing the, doing the the surface level generic action to get out of your state of distress as opposed to just sitting and being in the distress without any agenda and just, just being there and in that state, just naturally you somehow

• 12:08Speaker 04

  just wiggle out of it or dissolve or just transcend like the issue per se, or you don't even transcend it, you could just understand it on a deeper level. And it's that deeper understanding that gives like health, I suppose, if that makes any sense.

• 12:22Chris Williamson?

  It does. Well, I think that an interesting question might be, how many of the strategies that you use to deal with the things that you don't like about yourself or about your life are not helping you to deal with them, but are helping you to escape from them?

• 12:37Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so I just remember, so I remember.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  So when I was like young, when I was like thirteen, fourteen ish, like twelve or whatever, I was like very insecure. I was like skinny, whatever, right? So like I saw like, you know, muscular people that I look up to. I was like, oh, like I want that, right? So then I followed a bunch of people. I gained like a lot of inspiration. Then I did like what I needed to do to like build my physique. And then I think I was around the age of like eighteen, nineteen, twenty, like sometime around that time. And then I think that's when Jordan Peterson like first started popping off. And um, I was like listening to a lot of his content and I was like, whoa, there's something about this like resonates so much. I remember like feeling just that I would just like have like certain just interesting ideas or like things going on in my brain, but they couldn't like come out just right. And then when I would listen to someone like Jordan Peterson speak, I had a very specific admiration for the

• 13:23Speaker 04

  his ability to so precisely with perfect congruence of what's happening internally and what he's saying externally to be at a one to one ratio with just like music, the orchestral grade precision with like his like delivery, just almost like irregardless of what he was like saying. It's like the structure, not the content of a speech that I just had like an admiration for in addition to the things that are obviously said as well. So then that I feel like launched my brain into wanting to just like develop in those like general regions, like categories and stuff. So I would just listen to like so many other people, you know, the Sam Harris's, um, Alan Watts, et cetera, like all these like different people. So then I remember like reaching a point of like, I was like twenty, twenty one ish. And then I had a

• 14:04Speaker 04

  general feeling of just like the whole body dysmorphia, yada, yada, all this like stuff was just like catching up to me, all these like generic, whatever, like all these are problems that me and like so many people deal with. And then I went down like the prescription path, right? And the prescription path would have been like, oh, like I started going into yoga all the time. And then I had this like huge ego complex, like showing up on time, like doing all like my poses, like extremely, extremely well, because I'm like, if I'm like doing this, right? And then I also like, I'll like sit down, like I'll meditate in the morning for like thirty minutes, whatever. I was like so obsessed and excited to do that. Because obviously, you know, the thought pattern is doing these things will like alleviate me and like get me out of like my problems or whatever. So then I feel like it's like a very common thing for like so many people to do. And then they become obsessed with doing that. I became obsessed with doing that.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  And then I felt like huge bursts of dopamine throughout that, right? Because I'm like, oh, checkbox, like yoga session finished, like this thing finished, like this, like food like eaten, right? And I would just feel like so excited, but it was almost like a short term, just.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  Pleasure seeking fixation on like doing that and that it actually didn't like really like solve anything.

• 15:02Chris Williamson?

  Underneath, you've still got the the existing problem. Okay, so you've got in the first instance, an issue with body dysmorphia or dissatisfaction with the way that you look. You fix that by finding people that you like the way that they look and modeling what they do. Then you find people that you admire the way that they think and you compare the way that you think to the way that they think. You then start to model off of the way that they think. What are the similarities between or what is it that you were looking for, do you think, in both camps of people? Like, what is it that Ziz and Jordan Peterson have got in common that seduced you?

• 15:38Speaker 04

  Great line. What are the things that Ziz and Jordan Peterson have in common? I say that it's

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  To you.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  To me. An attainment of something that I, for whatever reason, deemed to me deemed to be admirable and non-negotiable necessary for me to have. And in Ziz's obvious case, it's, you know, muscles, Jordan Peterson brain, etc. But so it's just their accomplishment of something.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I feel like you could almost tie that into, I don't know if you could tie that into the general concept of like masculinity, but

• 16:18Speaker 04

  I'd say to me, it's just something that they like achieved that I, for whatever reason, just wanted to have.

• 16:26Chris Williamson?

  Well, it sounds to me like if you want to roll masculinity into this, you're trying from first principles to come up with like, what is a modern Renaissance man? You know, how do we have the body, the brains, the humility, the benevolence, the altruism, the insight, the self-awareness, you know, the the power, but not the tyranny, the money, but not the greed, you know, how do we hold all of these things together?

• 16:53Chris Williamson?

  One of the challenges that I've been talking about a lot on the show at the moment is finding a firm place for men to stand in the modern world. And this isn't just good for men, right? Because if you have good, benevolent, strong men, they make pretty good partners usually on average, like they're good for the women as well, and they're good for the community, and they're good for the society, and they're good for the civilization, and the GDP, and the economics, and all the rest of the stuff.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  Given the fact that you have spent a lot of time chronically online for the last 10 years, what's your conception of male role models at the moment, the challenge of masculinity? Why do you think it is that a lot of young men are feeling lost and requiring more and more of these role models?

• 17:37Speaker 04

  I think there's many different interpretations. Like one school of thought or camp is like, oh, there's been a disruption of the nuclear family unit and there's like some conspiratorial reasons for that, some non-conspiratorial reasons, because you can go under the hypothesis that to, you know, have a more or less successful upbringing, you want the standard nuclear family unit, mom and dad, and then with that being like fragmented, fractured, then that creates all sorts of problems. So if that is the case, then the quote unquote child, boy, like in this instance, isn't getting a certain type of, isn't getting like a healthy, proper dose of masculine energy like within like the household, under the assumption that the household is fragmented for whatever reasons, then that need still needs to be satiated.

• 18:19Speaker 04

  And because it's not being satiated at home due to the easy access of the internet, then that role models will be found like online.

• 18:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  So like inbuilt, intrinsic, like in the human condition is like that, like need for that like kind of energy. And if it's not being like given at home, it's going to be, needs to be supplemented elsewhere. And all this case online. And depending on the maybe maturity level of the individual or just how the individual is wired, like certain people gravitate towards these types of online figures, other will like rotate in this, I mean, not rotate, resonate or connect with other people that they find on the internet. And I think that the reason that people like Z's and like Jordan Peterson and all like that are influential and have like resonances because they're arguably supplementing that need that a lot of people aren't getting in the stereotypically standard, classic

• 19:11Speaker 04

  home nuclear family-esque kind of way.

• 19:14Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, I think yes. I also think that even if you do have a nuclear family, the rules and procedures that the generation before ours had, you know, if your dad grew up and never had the internet until you were born, how is he going to be able to fold in, understanding the way that social media works, understanding the way that online dating works, the crazy, crazy changes that we've seen with regards to men's roles, the Me Too movement, all of this stuff. I think that even the best meaning father in the world from the previous generation might struggle to have the language to be able to communicate with a kid that is growing up.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, for sure. Times are changing so fast, things are changing so quickly that, you know, the previous like rule set or whatever, although it may have like certain fundamental pillars or parameters that'll be universally applicable for any timeline whatsoever. When things change, as they inevitably do, like things approaches needs to be just like micromanaged and nuance like tweaked and then no one knows like exactly to what degree that needs to be done. Like it's so easy to overshoot or undershoot. And because the rules like haven't been made yet, we're essentially figuring out like on the fly, like what's like happening.

• 20:27Chris Williamson?

  Correct. I also think that it's more than perhaps just a micro tweak. I think that the last 30 to 40 years has been a bit of a left turn. As soon as you introduced the internet. One interesting thing that I was considering on the plane ride over here. For the guys that didn't come up, uh, living on Ziz and that aesthetics bro era, a lot of that was about pulling girls at festivals. It was sort of quite chauvinistic. It was harmless and funny and self-deprecating. But there was still a lot of that like sort of gym flirtation energy in there. How do you think in 2023, given the politics that we have at the moment,

• 21:09Chris Williamson?

  given the hypersensitivity around approaching girls in the gym, given the advent of Me Too, how do you think if you deposited Ziz in 2023, that kind of content would be received now? Do you think that he would survive without cancellation?

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Someone like Ziz?

• 21:27Speaker 04

  I think that he would survive without cancellation, probably because I think like extremist people like that, that I mean, they garner like a certain like audience, like the more niche or extreme you could be like you'll cultivate an audience and obviously like a lot of people also dislike you as well. And that'll like add to your benefit in terms of like social media, like expansion. So I mean, there's like plenty of people that many people deem to be detestable, but they're still extremely prevalent on the internet. So no, I mean, I think all things considered, I don't think this would be like canceled per se today because I mean, there's so many other people that are like taking on like this esque manly energy and just like passing, you know, taking the torch that he, you know, passed on that are still living in those general like kinds of ways. So I think that I think he would probably flourish just fine, objectively speaking.

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  Talking about this, I'm fascinated about this trajectory, right? That that you've gone on specifically.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  What changes if you were able to create what you think the world of men that are around about your age need right now in terms of influences and influences? What do you wish that you could see more of in terms of the sort of content that's out there in terms of the kind of messaging, the kind of values, the sorts of things that men should be aspiring toward and the things that they should stop aspiring toward as well? What would you try and prescribe?

• 22:45Speaker 04

  I think generally speaking, like a reduction in materialism would probably be a good thing. And I think the additional emphasis on

• 22:56Speaker 04

  just developing like a competence, like any domain whatsoever, whether it's like pottery, you know, exercising, working out, like whatever it is. So it would be, I think it'd be better to shine more of a light on people's genuine like ability and attainments and skill level in whatever their idiosyncratic or generic just pursuit and endeavor is and just have appreciation for that in and of itself without any, with a significantly less emphasis on the periphery of the tangible material assets of that, that that type of success could like yield.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  So

• 23:34Chris Williamson?

  Homose on an episode that I did with him a couple of weeks ago said, far more people are kept poor and stupid by their ego than get rich off it. And, you know, he made this great point that if you are somebody that considers yourself to be a high performer that is pushing and always trying to grow and you're able to retain your ego, it's because you're in the wrong room. And his point was, even though he's now worth a hundred mil, he's got this acquisition.com, he's doing these massive deals. He is permanently in rooms where he is both the stupidest and poorest person in the room. How can you allow an ego to proliferate and grow when you're permanently the lowest rung of the ladder?

• 24:13Chris Williamson?

  And his argument was basically that ego comes from people artificially walling off the size of the pond that they get into to allow themselves to always be the biggest fish.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  But also I feel like it comes down to their deepest, most fundamental motivation. Cause for example, you could take someone like Alex. He desperately is wired to do something and wants to do something, just like work, build his empire business, whatever. That's like his sort of thing. So he just, he simply needs to do that to be satiated, happy and like satisfied. Right? So that's just what he's on. And in order to be able to do that as effectively as he possibly can manage that would necessitate and require a very high level of like self-awareness. And obviously self-awareness is the antithesis to ego. So that's just simply what he, what he wants to do. And then you could take someone else that is like the small pond, like ego situation. Their primary, most fundamental desire isn't doing something for its own sake or any, you know, deeper reason like that.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  It's simply towards the, the growth and maintenance of the ego. Right? And that's just simple, that's just what their motivation is. Like they're simply, they're more interested in like having a certain self-image of themselves and doing everything to convince other people of that image and convince themselves of that image. Cause to them that's more important than other things. So it's just like a, a, a different hierarchy of like priorities. Right? So like, yeah, the lower level development is like, is going to want to favor just egotistical-ish types of things.

• 25:37Chris Williamson?

  How do you square this circle with the person that's listening to this and going, hang on, you're David fucking Layde, like you're Mr. Instagram ziz era? Like, how have you made that change? How have you made that transition from being somebody who outwardly it seemed like it was? And you mentioned yourself, it was to satiate your feelings of insufficiency to now get to a place where, I mean, how many videos have you posted on YouTube in the last year? Probably less than 12? How many Instagram posts have you done in the last year, less than 20?

• 26:08Speaker 04

  It's been at a decline.

• 26:11Chris Williamson?

  But my point being that from where I can see, and I didn't get to hear you on podcasts before, I think that your trajectory in terms of how you're sounding to me, in terms of the things that you're thinking about, is fucking phenomenal. I would have happily taken the sabbatical from social media if what it's resulted in is you being like this. But how do you get to that point? There are guys on the internet that are watching the ego lifter, the materialist Ferrari driver, the Richard Mill red Le Boutons bottom table at Club Live in Miami. What is it that can drag those people out of that? Or what would you say to those like young guys if you could?

• 26:53Chris Williamson?

  Why should they be bothered about this thing which seems hard and difficult and nuanced and no one gives a fuck about, except for their own sense of existential self-worth?

• 27:01Speaker 04

  I think, I think a lot of those people that like operate like that, like they have like a vague understanding that like maybe the way in which they're operating from a lot of other people's points of view is like seen as like negative, egotistical, immature, like etc. So they have like that, like general like awareness and they may be aware that they just satisfy, you know, society at a whole, you know, expectations of them, they would maybe like cease or halt or like slow down on some of that behavior or like, you know, Alk Road or etc. But they're like aware of that, but they just, they just, they just don't want to do it. Because going back to what I was saying before, that's just simply like, they're just more interested in doing that. That's like where the current level of like their development is. So.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  In the same way, like to me, the only, the way that I outgrew whatever, like I grew like whatever time, like it came from just like, just organic, like introspection. So going back to kind of what I was like saying in the beginning, like you just simply, you need to just examine, you need, you just need to just like, like look at what you're doing. It's like, look at how you're living and look at how you're operating and just like, like dissect it as much as you can and be as, like be honest with yourself, obviously, and like, look at it. And I feel like if you're genuinely and sincerely doing that, right? You're more than likely to realize how that pattern, that style of like, living is just disadvantageous for your absolute best interest. And through coming to that realization, you just organically stop doing that. You don't have to do different things. Yeah, you don't have to discipline yourself to stop doing like, oh, I really want to do it,

• 28:23Speaker 04

  but I want to go to this, but I can't like, no, you, you just won't have that desire. And that's the best place to be at. Cause why do you want it? Like, it's just where you got to arrive, you know?

• 28:32Chris Williamson?

  So there's my favorite ever blog post of all time is by a guy called Kyle Eschenroda, and it's called, what do you want to want? And he talks about the difference between wants and what we want to want. So wants are societal programming, they're paths of least resistance, they're the way that you've dealt with past trauma. They are all of those things. What you want to want involves you going in and reprogramming your desires. You want to end up at a place where what you want is what you want to want. And he uses this example of the fact that if you don't go in and program your desires, the best thing that you can hope for is to be a rich, successful or famous slave, a slave to the impulses of your body, the confused biochemical signals that you get, the desires of the people around you. And when I read that, and this is, you know, five

• 29:16Chris Williamson?

  years ago now, I thought, what do I want to want in life? Genuinely, what do I want to want? Like, I have the opportunity, laws of thermodynamics and like, a little bit of economics restricting, I can want anything. This is what we're talking about here. We're talking about digging away at all of the layers of ego and predisposition and expectation that you've built up and getting yourself to something that's firmer, getting yourself to something which is what you want to want.

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of validity in that because basically like what you're saying is like you, a person wants certain things and then maybe he realizes to some degree like these just kind of this maybe maybe isn't my best interest like silly like little hypothesis lurking in the back of the mind. Okay, so if I'm an autonomous being, I could, I could more or less curate or decide what I want to want. So if that's a possibility, let's just look broadly speaking, what are some of the things that would maybe be in more of a best interest for me to want? And then you decide those things and you fixate in that pattern. I mean, fixate in that direction. And even if you, you could argue that that's still prescription-esque to some degree, but then you could also say that doing that is better than just continuing wanting those like suboptimal things. So

• 30:38Speaker 04

  if that, if that's what gets you moving in that direction, then it's

• 30:41Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. Yeah. And direction is more important than speed, right? Like you can be going as fast as possible in the wrong direction and it actually takes you further away from the destination. This is something that a lot of people, I call it the manopaws, which is mid twenties toward late twenties, a lot of guys, it seems like you had yours earlier, realize that a lot of the values that they hold, a lot of the things that previously they took a sense of self-worth from, that the world told them that they should value, they don't make them feel fulfilled anymore. And they go, oh, fuck, like, I, I got toward the top of this mountain and I realized that it was the wrong mountain that I climbed. And actually, I was supposed to be on that one over there. And it's difficult because in order to get to that one, you need to go back down this one that you've

• 31:25Chris Williamson?

  already climbed. You need to dispense with the stuff that you've, that you've got rid of.

• 31:28Speaker 04

  This is why I think introversion is such a cheat code because like, I feel like

• 31:32Chris Williamson?

  You're less at the mercy of other people's desires.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Because even like for me, I noticed that if I'm, the more frequently and the more for a sustained period of time, I'm involved in certain just patterns of behavior, oftentimes socially or just, just what I do in general, you just become locked in those patterns and it becomes more difficult. You have more of like a narrow perspective. So, you know, the brain's malleable, it just gets programmed in that way and you're just kind of operating that way. So for me, a lot of like the best insights that I've gotten are like times when I like completely just like fully detached and just entered this weird like meditative, just like flow state of just being just so just alone. And then, yeah, so it's just I feel like, yeah, I mean, almost a prescriptive thing that you could say is to just stop. I mean, that's what they say psychedelics do. I think I heard someone on Joe Rogan talk about.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  He had like a nice analogy. It's like the brain is like, like a hill covered in snow. And then when the skis go down the snow, that's a thought behavior pattern, et cetera. And the more you have it, the more deeper that groove gets. And then psychedelics, they just like wipe the snow.

• 32:30Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  So detaching from society, detaching and, you know, reclusing yourself for a period of time. It's like a micro form of like a psychedelic, snow flattening kind of thing.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Because you're removing the external inputs as best you can.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Removing the inputs, stopping the behavior patterns, just allowing yourself to see things differently and have different patterns.

• 32:47Chris Williamson?

  For the people who are thinking about monk mode, um, there's a really great blog post by ilimitable man. If you just search ilimitable man monk mode, it's 13 years old now, I think. Uh, but it's really, really great. There's the three I's isolation, introspection. Some other shit. There's a third one. Anyway, that I really, really enjoyed that blog post and that was good to me. One thing that I do find, and this is me almost directly like telling it to Hamza, my friend. Monk mode can be taken to an extreme and you can do.

• 33:23Chris Williamson?

  You can obsess over isolated self-development too much.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. The way that I, the way that I would look at that is like monk mode could become a detrimental extreme. When monk monk mode becomes hyper prescriptionized, because the, I feel like the way it becomes an extreme is like, okay, okay. I want to self-improve myself, just monk mode, right? So then you've become obsessed with RPE 10, just maxing out like monk mode. So there, the true fundamental motivation isn't understanding things. The true fundamental motivation is to feel good about yourself for maxing out monk mode for the egotistical grab. Cause yeah, I mean, like just how we talked about how you say young individuals, like materialistic, programmed by society, like wrong values and stuff. The reason that they're doing that is because that satisfies their ego that's been programmed and programmed into them, right? Someone going all out monk mode, right?

• 34:11Speaker 04

  Abominably abstaining from all of that, right? They're, they're.

• 34:15Chris Williamson?

  Same energy.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  No, they have the, they have the exact same ego, but the subtle difference is that they could feel a sense of just like moral superiority.

• 34:22Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  Because like, I'm better than you because of all of that. But in reality, they have the same ego. It's just transmuted into something else.

• 34:27Chris Williamson?

  This is a very important point that I want everybody to take home, which is.

• 34:34Chris Williamson?

  You can justify any kind of activity as being the thing that is going to give you a sense of dopaminergic, I achieved the next thing. Just because you have switched one type of obsession for another type of obsession does not necessarily mean that that obsession is more holistic. You could argue, given the choice between being obsessed with the gym and being obsessed with taking heroin, that the gym is objectively a better obsession to have. But if you're going to get really down to zero, what we're talking about is how can we sit with the discomfort of not being enough? How can we sit with the discomfort of not having an obsession at all? What does that feel like? And this

• 35:16Chris Williamson?

  is like almost a psychedelic point, right? To get rid of, to get rid of the desire to need those things overall.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  You know, I feel like that, that's a very good point, the idea that like, yeah, like doing heroin or whatever, or like versus like working out in the gym, like it's a similar kind of egotistical pursuit, but due to like, I mean, obviously the working out's like the healthier thing.

• 35:40Chris Williamson?

  But the externality of one is very different to another.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Exactly. So that's what I'm getting at. The externality could be like drastically different. For example, like you could be addicted to heroin, or you could be addicted to just like rampant entrepreneurial, just financial, just hedonism, splurge. And that, and that again, due to how society is, it's celebrated, yada, yada, blah, blah. But like you said, it is the most important thing is realizing that fundamentally, you're a slave to an egotistical construction with either one. And the goal is to transcend that, even though your egotistical construction that you're feeding is societally rewarded, right? So that's a trap that you could really, really fall into. So the key is you need to go a little lower than that.

• 36:19Chris Williamson?

  Yep, I agree. It's a very difficult thing to do to let go of something which is not destructive, reinforced, praised, gives you accolades, and really importantly, like you said, gives you the moral high ground. It's like, look at me, look at how awakened I am. This is, there's a term that you might, I might not be familiar with called spiritual bypass. So have you heard of this before? Yeah. So people that go to

• 36:50Chris Williamson?

  South America, take a ton of ayahuasca, come back and proselytize, extol the virtues of this amazing peak experience that they've had. Don't do any of the integration, don't do any of the self-work, go back to being the same, maybe not even a piece of shit, but just go back to being the same person that they were before, and then go and do it again, right? That's spiritual bypass, or better, I prefer spiritual tourism, that you can go and like, visit it like a holiday home, and come back and forget about all of the things that you learned. The goal is to integrate each of these different points here. So one thing that was very formative for me, and I'm interested to find out about your experience as well, I had a pretty serious back injury about four years ago. Got into

• 37:30Chris Williamson?

  CrossFit, was way stronger than my body could deal with, and managed to slip two desks. I found Stu McGill, number one back pain specialist on the planet. I know that you have worked with him too.

• 37:45Chris Williamson?

  How difficult was it for you, as somebody who had a lot of his self-worth wrapped up in the way that he looked, to have that taken away from you by, first off, a back injury, and secondly, by what I'm guessing, if you followed what Stu told you to do, was an unbelievably slow, painful, very humbling process of slow rehabilitation?

• 38:05Speaker 04

  So yeah, this could tie in real nicely. So, so with me, due to having all the body dysmorphia insecurity, just like needing to work out to feel like the validation, self-love, self-worth, etc., right, that other extremes that that pushed me into is just like how intense like I would exercise, right? I would, you know, horrible form, lift as much as I could, just pain tolerance, like push through all of that, right?

• 38:26Chris Williamson?

  Deadlift sumo as well, which is cheating.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  So here's the thing. So from one point of view, it's like, wow, that's so admirable. You just work so hard, you're so disciplined, you're so dedicated, that's just so amazing, good for you. But if you, you know, look behind the curtain a little bit, that's not this, that's not that altruistic and pure of like an energy source, right? It's a toxic energy source, and that toxic energy source is an insecurity, and then basically, that led me to just severe injuries of my spine, because horrible form, lifting heavyweight, blah, blah, blah. So with that, right, it's almost like my back injury is a personification of...

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Being fueled by

• 39:10Speaker 04

  a toxic fuel source, right? And then the thing is, like, someone could have told me back in the days, oh, like, you know, you shouldn't be like lifting this heavy, you shouldn't be doing this, you should have been more careful, right? And that's me being like aware that maybe I shouldn't be doing that in the same way as someone that's like living a very hedonistic, young, immature, egotistical lifestyle. I was also vaguely aware that I maybe shouldn't be doing that. I had that same awareness too, but even though I knew that it just didn't matter because my, my goal was like so egotistical at the end of the day, which is why the back situation like needed to happen to me like there was simply

• 39:40Chris Williamson?

  Are you thankful that it happened?

• 39:42Speaker 04

  I mean, and, and well, yes, in a certain kind of way, but I feel like it was inevitable to happen because I mean, one school of thought is like for people to make like a proper drastic change, like they need to hit like a form of like rock bottom, right? It's, I had this having this thought the other day, I maybe have like heard it somewhere, I don't remember, but it's like

• 40:01Speaker 04

  something along the lines of like wisdom is often, if not exclusively attained after like, like a rock bottom ish type of situation, but then

• 40:10Speaker 04

  ideally you'd want that wisdom like beforehand, but paradoxically it can only be gained after like a rock bottom like kind of thing. So it's like this weird tango inverted loop thing. But yes, I mean, like for me, that kind of definitely aided in a lot of the um just introspection, like growth or whatever, just like having like that back situation happen because it forced me to just like slow down. Like I, like I was in such debilitating pain that like, not only could I not deadlift or squat like the way that I wanted to, I couldn't deadlift, squat or all, I couldn't work out sometimes how I wanted to, I'd just be laying in bed with just chronic debilitating pain. And to get out of that really wasn't that difficult at all. I mean, it was, but when I say not that difficult at all, I mean, it's just like stop doing stupid things that hurt you and like rest. But how my brain was wired at the time, that's not an option.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Like I just need to go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. So it hit a point where

• 41:00Speaker 04

  So you could almost argue that it wasn't this just altruistic transformation. It literally hit a point where the back pain was so debilitating that I would rather kill my previous ego and start from scratch than I would maintain that ego and tolerate the back pain. Cause before it was back pain was here, ego was here still more with it. But when, when those scales like tipped just the right amount, it was an organic shift. Cause I literally just had no other choice. So I literally-

• 41:24Chris Williamson?

  You were constrained by your body.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. So like I had to start from ground zero. And I mean, that's changed, like not being so extremist all out in the gym, like being very like patient, disciplined, careful with like how it go about something as simple as like training where in the past like, oh, I feel good today, max, just all the time. And so I feel like that new mindset now that I got from dealing with my back injuries has definitely permeated out like into other areas. But I think it arguably needed to happen to checkmate me into a form of like introspection. So-

• 41:59Chris Williamson?

  Me too. Me too, man. Uh, it came at the right time. I had spent all of my twenties being a commercial male model, uh, walking around with my night, with my top off in nightclubs, uh, getting photographed by Dean. And, um, a lot of my self-worth was wrapped up in that, you know, even though I wasn't doing the online thing to the degree that you were, I still was like the guy that was in shape. I was always the, like one of the biggest, one of the leanest amongst my friends. And that gets taken away from you and you think, oh, fuck, who am I now? Who am I, who am I now when all of the thing, all of the places that I took my self-worth from are gone?

• 42:44Chris Williamson?

  Well, fuck, like what, what's left? Because this isn't going to be here forever. I had, uh, thought of a quote the other day, which was, um, your looks are a depreciating asset, your mind is an appreciating asset. Invest your self-worth appropriately.

• 43:00Chris Williamson?

  Like everybody, no matter whether you think that your sexual market value as a guy is going to peak at 45, like there is going to come a time where you get over the top of that hill and it's going to start descending. Like even fucking David Gandhi, right, is going to start descending at some point. You have the opportunity to invest in something which is evergreen, which is going to compound, which is going to benefit the rest of the world. And that's not to say that people that are in shape can't benefit the rest of the world. It's good to be motivational, so on and so forth. But especially for women, I think, there was this story about Polina Porikova, who was a supermodel back in the 90s, 80s and 90s. And she's now 56 and her husband had died. And there was a famous story that came out about her about a year and a half ago. And she was lamenting the fact that as a 56 year old,

• 43:45Chris Williamson?

  she walks into parties and none of the guys look at her anymore because they're all distracted by the 23 year olds that are in the room. And she was saying, you know, a lot of my self-worth, I feel really terrible and so on and so forth. And it made me sad. It made me sad because I was looking at somebody who was still taking their fundamental sense of self-worth from the way that they looked with, I think, two or three kids. And it just, it doesn't feel graceful. Do you know what I mean? Like, it doesn't feel like somebody has allowed themselves to get harmony and grace and transcend and include the things that they had before. And also, there's obviously a massive amount of like hubris and hypocrisy here because when you were 22, you didn't care about the 56 year old that was in the room that all of the guys

• 44:29Chris Williamson?

  looking at you were ignoring to look at. It's like, look, this is the arc of life. Everybody knows that it's coming. Everybody knows that your looks are going to fade, that you're going to become sick or ill or destitute, that you're going to run out of money, that the people around you are going to die. And all that you're going to be left with is the power of your thoughts, right? How much resilience do you have that you can rely on?

• 44:59Chris Williamson?

  So that when the hard thing happens, you have somewhere firm to stand. And if the firmest place that you have to stand is, I am single digit body fat, you're in for a hard fucking time.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, any, you know, external metric or just anything that you like latch on to, you know, whether it be your body fat percentage or your youthful looks that diminish with age that you just get upset.

• 45:26Chris Williamson?

  Even bank account, man.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, your bank account, like forms of status, like etc. Just, yeah, if you become, I mean, it's like a Buddha saying, like, you just become like attached to stuff. It's just a problem. It's just not good, but there is an enjoyment in, you know, having like, like a huge bank account or enjoying your looks to a very, very high degree.

• 45:44Chris Williamson?

  Don't, don't, don't get me wrong. Like, you need external accolades, right? Like, I'm not, I'm not saying that we can, like, dispense with status.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's the primal hierarchy or whatever. That's legit thing too. Yeah. Yeah, but it just, I guess, I guess, we'll put it like, yeah, like, that stuff is necessary, useful to like certain, like, healthy degrees, but obviously.

• 46:02Chris Williamson?

  Not sufficient. Necessary, but not sufficient.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, necess- necessary, but not sufficient. And it's just, yeah, I mean, it's, it's like a spectrum of like, the more you like rely on those kind of things for like the, like wellbeing and like happiness, it's just, you just, you just run into problems. And it just, and like, like you were saying, like, you wanna be in a state where, when all is like said and done, and it's just you, that you have like something like firmer to stand on. So.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:33Chris Williamson?

  What are your thoughts about the modern world of dating, especially for young guys? Do you think about this much? There's a lot of advice out there for young dudes with regards to dating, especially to do with gym videos, approaching girls in the gym, and the lack thereof, and the challenges of guys approaching, and so on and so forth. What's your conception on this?

• 46:55Speaker 04

  I mean, I guess, modern dating, like, the internet has obviously played like a massive role, like, the whole dating apps, that being a situation, um.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  I mean, I think obviously speaking things like the internet have like drastically reduced like genuine like human like discourse where like in the past a lot more conversations were like in person that were like real because like when like people are saying that communicating over text is such a narrow dialogue when you're like with someone in person, there's like all these just energetic components, intangible, micro facial expressions, like all of that. And that's preferable slash arguably needed to have like a maximally rich and satisfying and satiating like human experience overall with people like in any relationship, friendship, S kind of context. So I think just like the simple idea of that that being reduced due to the introduction of the internet, although the internet obviously has a lot of benefits, you can meet people around the world, different areas, etc. There is like that like obvious downside and

• 47:53Speaker 04

  with that being said,

• 47:56Speaker 04

  there would be like an isolation component as well to, you know, socializing with real people less and then living in your own head and then communicating in just meeting and talking to people on like dating apps and stuff it and then you could just start downloading and integrating certain just like toxic ideologies on male, female, intersexual dynamics that could have some tidbits of truth, but without contrasting it and integrating it with your own like real experience because you have none because you're just isolated and extracting ideologies online that that could be just a massive detriment to your dating life.

• 48:33Chris Williamson?

  Bang, bang, bang. Dude, I've been harping on about this for so long. I did an interview for new, the redone Substack of what used to be Ideas Sleep Furiously, and they've changed the name and I can't remember what it is. And they did, we did a little interview and they talked about, um, why is it that men seem to be struggling with the advice that they get online? And remember, for the girls that are listening, you need the advice that men get online to be good because you are the one that's gonna have to put up with these fucking men. Right? So my point was, if you're chronically online and most of your experiences around male to female interactions have been mediated through the internet, what are the kinds of stories that are the ones that go the most viral online?

• 49:15Chris Williamson?

  They're the most egregious, they're the one where some terrible catastrophe happens and the guy comes home and loses his house and his left foot and she, she takes his like all of his hairline in the divorce and that's the story that's going to go viral.

• 49:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you can almost parallel this with prescriptions because if you Don't have real, you know, sufficient amount, whatever that means of a real experience with the real people and you're just, you know, getting ideologies online and just hearing worst case catastrophic scenarios, et cetera. A lot of like theoretical frameworks that could be laid forward could in isolation in the abstract makes so much sense and the math could like run out and like it works out, especially when extreme scenarios like added upon that. And then when it comes like dating advice, just like, like what you should say to approach and this is that like the more prescriptions like you add on, it just becomes just like such a disaster. And but then people think, oh, but how do I do this whole thing if I don't have any like prescriptions or like

• 50:12Speaker 04

  know what to say or how to go about it, right? But the thing is paradoxically so, if you like lay that like to the wayside, right? And then you're like around like people like speaking to people, girls, et cetera, whatever it may be. A certain organic chemistry arises if you would like let it arise. But the more weird prescriptions and layers like you add on top of that, you're just like fucking the whole thing up and it just becomes off. So paradoxically, leaving that to the wayside, your body and your instincts will take over and they'll just like know what to do, right? But so that's almost another way of putting it. The advent and introduction of the internet dating apps, et cetera, has suppressed the natural organic instinct in favor of just weird, toxic, arguably toxic like programming with, you know, how to go about things. And that

• 50:56Speaker 04

  just creates just in a GMO inorganic disaster.

• 50:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So this prescriptions thing, I think we just need to drill this home for the people that maybe aren't familiar with Capil's work. The point is, if you don't have any real world experience, the only place that you're going to get any tactics from are things that have been told to you that you've never actually come up with in the real world. But if you were to spend, let's say that you could live for eternity and have an unlimited number of interactions, if what the prescriptions are accurate, you would inevitably arrive at them in any case. If I gave you a million years to work out and you didn't know it, the most effective way to get a bar from the floor overhead in one single movement, you would eventually arise at something close to a snatch, because it is simply reality and theory coming up together. Konstantin Kissin,

• 51:44Chris Williamson?

  quoted this unbelievable line the other day that said, in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're different.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  Hmm. Just a thought that I was having as we're saying that is so you could like parallel this whole prescription idea like from the dating back to like, like working out for instance, like you have someone that's never worked out before, right? But they'll sit and they'll learn like all like the theory and the this is that etc. And like what their personal ideal regiment would be. And then come up with that. And then if they try to execute it, if they even bother to do so, like sometimes it will like fall through because just their bodies are different, like how their lifestyles are set up. So yeah, even prescriptions could be like detrimental in something even as simple in the realm of fitness, because if you just like start like doing it, right?

• 52:28Speaker 04

  If you want to go all out and be like the best of all time, then obviously you're going to need to follow like certain things, but.

• 52:36Chris Williamson?

  The problem I have with the, the problem I have generally with Capil's, and I, I had this problem when I spoke to Capil on the show. The issue I have with Capil's no prescriptions point is that unlimited degrees of freedom allow people to find things through experience. However, you need guidelines and guardrails. Why are we talking about this crisis of masculinity where guys are lost and alone? It's because everything has been, been blown open. If everything is masculinity, then nothing is masculinity. Right? And you go, okay, from first principles, please work out how you are supposed to show up in the world. And you go, dude, that's really, really hard. And you, what, you want me to do that for diet and my role in society and the way that I should make money and the way I should interact with my friends and the way that I should get a

• 53:18Chris Williamson?

  girlfriend and the way that I should become a father, da, da, da, da. Like it's fucking exhausting. The best way that I found for this, and this is where I diverge from Capil's work. The best way that I've found from this is that in the beginning of anything, you need instruction because you have no experience to rely on. You don't want to become dogmatic about the instruction, but you do need to take it. So you explore at the start and then you exploit over time. Do lots of different things, find out what works for you. And then over time, once you have learned the rules, you can break the rules. But breaking the rules before you learn the rules is just not playing the game.

• 53:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, I agree with that. I did such a poor job of expressing what I wanted to with that, um, parallel with prescriptions with the working out. But yeah, I mean, obviously if you're getting like into fitness, like you, you're going to follow like some like vague program in general. I think the idea that I was like trying to get at is you're better off like. Taking a random workout program, whatever it may be, just going out, doing it, seeing how you respond to it, just seeing how much you like working out in general. Maybe you don't want to be a heavyweight bodybuilder. Maybe you just want to work out a few times and we can get in shape and that'll like satisfy you, but you won't know that unless you actually try. So that's all fine. But what I was getting at is not doing anything, just having like all like the theory, like what works out. And then it just not being like a practical like execution in your actual life. It was more something like that. But I agree with the nuance. Like obviously, like you can't derive absolutely everything and just know how to just be like a fool.

• 54:35Chris Williamson?

  First principle.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  Workout from first principles. Obviously, like when you're a kid, like you need to be taught language, you need to be able to talk your shoes. Those are prescriptions from a certain point of view. So, yeah.

• 54:44Chris Williamson?

  That was where I got caught. That was where I got caught with Kapil's stuff. So I did a newsletter that I wanted to read to you from the other week. And I think that this is, this is very, very interesting. It's something I've been thinking about a lot. This is from David Goggins. "It's so easy to be great because most of the world is weak. If you are even remotely a savage, you will run these people over. It's all out there for the taking right now." That's Dana White. "Everyone rails against the victim mentality that seems to be sweeping certain areas of the world. I get it, you don't want your town or country or species to go to hell because everyone has forgotten how to take some discomfort or deal with challenges in life. But on another hand, this rampant fragility is your competitive advantage. The bar has never been set lower. A bit of consistency, a bit of intentionality, a bit of resilience and a gram of talent will make you into an

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  absolute killer. I also understand that you probably want to raise other people that belong with you. Having your greatness stand on the shoulders of the world's fragility may seem exploitative. And I love the idea of not just improving yourself, but changing those around you for the better. But there's a limit. Your efforts are multiplied by 10 times when building with the right people and by 0.01 times when building with the wrong people. If someone refuses to alter their habits or update their worldview or improve their life despite being given all of the tools and encouragement they need by you, then they can stay where they are. It is not your job to drown yourself by trying to keep others afloat who don't want to change. Humans don't mind hardship. In fact, they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the

• 56:10Chris Williamson?

  art of making people not feel necessary." That's Sebastian Junger. "It's easy to be a savage when everyone else is a pussy, but sometimes it's hard to find a sidekick." What do you think about that?

• 56:22Speaker 04

  What does that mean, that last word, sometimes with the sidekick?

• 56:26Chris Williamson?

  That if you're with the right people, your efforts are multiplied by 10 times. And if they're with the wrong people, then they're restricted, basically.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I can go back to like the simple saying of like, you're like the average of like the five people that you surround yourself with and you gain exponential momentum in the direction that you're going with. So if you're with a suboptimal set of people with values that aren't in your best interest, you're going to be accelerated in an accelerated fashion, going in the wrong direction.

• 56:52Chris Williamson?

  What about this balance between fragility of the modern world being a competitive advantage?

• 56:57Speaker 04

  Well, I think with a lot of those people like the Goggins and the few that you said like that, it's a very like stereotypically uber masculine kind of like mindset, which is like fine, right? But I feel like sometimes that can be taken to an absolute like ridiculous like extreme, but the right amount of that is like, like, like a good thing, like.

• 57:17Chris Williamson?

  What are you aiming for? What's an integrated version of that to you?

• 57:25Speaker 04

  I like the idea of

• 57:29Speaker 04

  having an indestructible mindset, being able to overcome like obstacles and adversities and having that like

• 57:38Speaker 04

  just like that, just focus intensity. But I think that

• 57:45Speaker 04

  sometimes you can get

• 57:48Speaker 04

  just exclusively like fixated on that. Like, for example, with David Goggins, he went through just like extremely like traumatic stuff. Like, I've like heard him on so many podcasts and like I've like, like, like audiobook with a good amount of like his books. So I know like the backstory, the dad, etc. is really just like horrible stuff. And for him, just all the experience and everything that he's gone through, just in order for him to be able to like thrive and come out of that, he needed to adopt a certain kind of just like, just indestructible, godlike mindset, which he did achieve.

• 58:22Chris Williamson?

  A coping mechanism.

• 58:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. It's exactly it. It's like a coping mechanism. In the same way that you could look at um, me working hard on the gym when I was younger. So, oh, that's like so admirable. But in reality, the fuel wasn't like the most like positive thing.

• 58:33Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 58:34Speaker 04

  So you could make a semi-ish kind of like parallel to the David Goggins situation. So because of what he went through, he simply, he needed to adapt that way. It was a necessary coping mechanism. And

• 58:45Speaker 04

  His situation was so extreme and he talked about it just so poetically, which is so much like passion and intensity that a lot of people, when they read that, they resonate with it like tremendously, especially if they're like lacking that, if they're lacking just like the discipline and that kind of stuff. Hearing someone like David Goggins give you the theoretical framework of being able to overcome stuff, combined with his own painfully visceral experience of it, it'll just give you goosebumps hearing it. And if you have a depletion or lack of that in like your own character, you're going to naturally gravitate to like someone like him. It's gonna fulfill you. Yeah, exactly. You're gonna get the benefit in the same way that people would be inspired by me working out when I was younger and that would benefit them, even though the fuel source pushing

• 59:25Speaker 04

  me wasn't like the most cleanest form of gasoline. So although mindsets like that are extremely, extremely useful and powerful in like certain circumstances, but I feel like, because I mean, I feel like for like a David Goggins situation, like,

• 59:44Speaker 04

  like at a certain point, like he might even go like deeper when it comes to just his, just like character arc, just like his like development as like a human being. I just had the parallel, for example, with someone like Mike Tyson, like when he was like super young, just like indestructible, like supervillain, like and as he's like gotten older, like a lot of his like temperament has just like simply transformed. Like he was so aggressive and just intense, like when he was like younger, because I don't know his full situation, but maybe it's a form of coping mechanism, maybe which is in his DNA to be like that, but he would just like that. Then over time, he just mellowed out in a certain kind of way. And that's not better or worse of mellowing out, that's just like the arc that he's going through. But then you could say like if David Goggins,

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  I'm not David, if Mike Tyson was that exact same way that he was when he was younger into his old age where he is right now, you'd almost look at that and be like, there's like,

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  Like there's still like fixation in a previous behavioral pattern that's no longer

• 1:00:39Chris Williamson?

  transcended and included. Well, I think the point here is that kind of

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  almost like a resentment that very visceral, powerful

• 1:00:55Chris Williamson?

  scarcity mindset is an unbelievably potent fuel. But it's really fucking toxic.

• 1:01:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't, it can be toxic in certain instances. I don't say, I don't, I don't think it's like purely like toxic, like in

• 1:01:08Chris Williamson?

  It's toxic to you. It's toxic to the inside. Like, yes, it's very, very good. Like being driven by a sense of insufficiency can cause people to do unbelievable things. Right. It, almost all of the high performers that I know are not driven by what it looks like from the outside and what it should be proselytized. It's this beautiful balance of, you know, fulfilling the, the logo, speaking forward and manifesting your essence. It's not the running away from something which makes them feel insufficient. There is a voice inside the head that is a disparaging parent. It's a bully at school. It's a teacher that didn't believe in them. It's an abandoned sibling. Something inside of them is saying, you are not enough.

• 1:01:51Chris Williamson?

  The only way that you can make yourself enough is to perform out there in the world. And if you perform well enough, maybe finally the world will accept you and you will be worthy of love. That is an energy that fucking every single high performer on the planet, except for like three people can resonate with. Because running away from something that you fear is an unbelievably potent fuel and running towards something that you want comparatively is less so. But if you use the fuel that pushes you away from something that you fear for too long, you will end up having malignant coping strategies. And it will burn everything that's inside of you as well. Fucking powerful, but it's going to make that engine run at a very high rate.

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  It's powerful and you'll need to use that fuel for a certain period of time when it's needed. But then it's important or ideal for your best interest to want to just like transcend and like go forward.

• 1:02:43Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Another quote. So this will be, everyone will have seen this by now because the whole Mosey episode will be out, but it wasn't out before this. And what he was talking about, as you said, was some of the challenges and the setbacks that people have and how that could give them the justification for maybe not being where they could be. And he said this really great quote, which was, if you have suffered from sexism your entire life, if you have suffered from racism your entire life, you would be absolutely justified in not being at the place where somebody who didn't have those disadvantages is. However, the advantage that you do have is that unlike me or you or Hormozzi,

• 1:03:23Chris Williamson?

  you can be a role model to those people who did have those problems because I can guarantee you that there is someone who had it worse and did it better. And he said that and I was like, holy fuck, that is so good. Because for me, somebody that went through challenges as a kid, who had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about not being in,

• 1:03:48Chris Williamson?

  not feeling like I was supported and having to do a lot of this work myself. Like I had to fucking pick myself up by my bootstraps. First principles, okay, what do I want to value? How do I want to do this? Let's build a thing on my own twice. And getting rid of that, like getting rid of that chip that was on my shoulder without using it as the bitter, like I'm doing this to prove the fucking bullies wrong. I'm doing this to prove the people that didn't believe me wrong. I'm doing this to prove the place that I came from that didn't have the big enough vision to help me wrong.

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  The way that that became was made alchemized to feel more holistic was that I thought, okay, well, there's other people that are going to be feeling this too. There's other people that are going to go through these challenges. Not only can I beat the setbacks that I feel like I had, but I can also help other people from get past to get past them too. And I can be like, look, here's the pitfalls. Here's how you expedite success. Not only did this thing not get me, but it's not going to get you either. And that's the best way, I think, to transcend challenges and traumas that you've had in your past. Not only do you beat it, but you help everybody else to beat it as well.

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  You know, I completely agree. It's like the tipping scale of you could either have it lean in the toxic, resentful like direction, or you could optimize and leverage it in like a greater scale benevolent, positive like way. That's definitely the way to go.

• 1:05:17Chris Williamson?

  What do you want to, how do you want to serve the world now? Like you've got creative director at Jim Shark, whatever you are, your new job role, you have a massive amount of reach. You have, as far as I can tell, the raw materials to be able to go and do pretty much anything you want, along with a shit ton of time. How do you want to serve the world now?

• 1:05:47Speaker 04

  I'm not entice, entice, I'm not entirely precisely sure.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  Still working on that exact like agenda and like figuring out like the most optimal way to do that, but like the ideas came on my head is like, for example, when they talk about with like, when you're like raising like children, like when you're like a parent, like the kids like hear nothing that you say and like see everything that you do. So almost like the person like that you are is like what sub communicates at the highest level like to people. Basically, if you're, if you're a certain kind of, if you live or exist in the right kind of way, like whatever that means, like as like a parent to your kid, then the kid gets like, has like a healthy development as opposed to doing everything incorrectly, but saying like all the right things. So for me, even though I don't know like precisely what I'm going to do like in a

• 1:06:36Speaker 04

  tangible fashion to just like help society of the world at scale. As I'm figuring that out, like the thing that I'm putting emphasis and priority on is just like, like living in congruence or just.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  Feeling just like optimized and just like aligned with like with just how I am as a person and like how I operate on just like a daily basis, even like with the most like subtle subtle things.

• 1:07:00Chris Williamson?

  What's that highest sense of self? What what are the things that you value the most when you're operating at your highest level? What do you genuinely take pride in?

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  Um, well, like lately for a good amount of time now, it's just been.

• 1:07:23Speaker 04

  I guess forms of like artistic expression, like in a sense, whether it be like something as like simple as like making like a YouTube video that's like like cinematic or well made like in a certain area or just.

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  Coloring and like editing, just like videos, I don't know, just like, like just like simple things like that. I don't know. Like lately, I'm finding. A very high degree of just like intrinsic, my bad, intrinsic satiation with.

• 1:07:50Speaker 04

  Doing.

• 1:07:53Speaker 04

  I guess just artistic things in a way and like.

• 1:07:56Chris Williamson?

  What about personally? Like, what is it that you, when you show up for yourself? Like, what are you most proud of? So I'll give you some of mine. So it's when I tell the truth. Like when I tell the truth is the most important thing.

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, for me, like when you initially said that that was like one of the first things that came to mind, but.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  But yeah, no, I mean, that's like, like, that's like a huge one too. And like all like micro like little situations, because it's so easy to just like, like, kind of like.

• 1:08:21Chris Williamson?

  Tiny little lies.

• 1:08:22Speaker 04

  Like twists and turns and lies. Exactly. And you could like feel and like sense all of those. So, yeah.

• 1:08:27Chris Williamson?

  What else?

• 1:08:31Chris Williamson?

  You need to tell the truth. What else do you need to do? Come on, to be the person that you want to be. What else do you need to do?

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  I don't have a precise answer at the moment, but I feel like with the baseline of just like honesty and all like the micro and macro situations like that, like covers like a good amount of it and like spawns out into. Other things, but.

• 1:08:55Speaker 04

  I feel like it's a pretty all encompassing one.

• 1:08:56Chris Williamson?

  I think that's the foundation.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right. But you know, for me, for instance, like vulnerability, learning to be increasingly vulnerable, which again, everything is a form of truth, right? Me saying that I show up and be like compassionate to my friends. That's a form of truthfulness, right? It's like trying to be your best self going forward, being vulnerable. For me, leaning into difficult things, for instance, like one of the problems of having increasing

• 1:09:25Chris Williamson?

  an increasing number of resources and like material success or whatever, is that success can make you soft and it can make you lazy and it can make you rely on other people, which is something that I've managed to avoid. But I've managed to avoid it mostly through a combination of neuroticism and like obsession, not through the, you know, transcended, no prescription. I do not just, I simply don't want it. It's like being fixed by something which is also still a relatively toxic fuel.

• 1:09:57Chris Williamson?

  I'm impressed by you, man. I think that you're a very impressive individual. I think that the trajectory that you've been on from where you were to where you are is fantastic. I'm really, really glad that

• 1:10:08Chris Williamson?

  you've got the background that you have. And the reason that I've like tried to drill so much into the psychological side of what we've spoken about today is that from the outside, the many million followers on Instagram, the, you know, 50, 60 million play video of the body transformation. It gives people not only a preconception about the person that you are, but it makes them presume that you would be locked into a particular type of life path. The same way as I know like U2 releases a new album and all of their old fans hate it. They go, well, look, guess what? We like it. This is the direction that we're going in now, right? And this is the getting to the top of the mountain and looking across and going.

• 1:10:54Chris Williamson?

  I think I'm on the wrong fucking mountain. Shit. I have to go down. I need to transcend and include. I'm really, really glad that you're doing what you're doing. I'm really glad that you're on the trajectory that you're on.

• 1:11:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm excited to see where it goes. It's an adventure.

• 1:11:07Chris Williamson?

  Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do?

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  Just my YouTube channel mainly, just search David Laid and yeah, that's basically it. Like my Instagram, same thing, David Laid. And if you guys want to have like a very natural and healthy and optimized pre-workout, you could also buy my pre-workout at euphoria pre.com. And yeah, that's where you can find me.

• 1:11:30Chris Williamson?

  David, I appreciate you. Thank you for today.

• 1:11:32Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 1:11:39Chris Williamson?

  Thank you very much for tuning in. A parting thought that I noticed on the internet this week by Morgan Housel that relates to everything we spoke about today with easy success that comes at a young age. Nothing is more blinding than success caused by luck, because when you succeed without effort, it's easy to think, I must be naturally talented.

• 1:11:59Chris Williamson?

  I'll see you next time.

• 1:12:01Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by EA Sports FC27. Welcome to the world's game. FC27 is introducing The Grounds, where the streets meet the stadium. Connect with friends, go pro, and express yourself on or off the pitch. Play FC27 with the ultimate edition September 18th. Learn more at EA.com. Rated E for everyone. Includes in-game purchases, including random items. The Grounds is only available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2 versions.