Chris Williamson examines teen mental health declines linked to screen time and sleep loss, then analyzes the rising "bro-ligarchy" of male influencers like Elon Musk and Donald Trump who reject performative empathy. He critiques the left's focus on trivial optics over critical issues like cost of living, connects this shift to global fertility crises in nations such as South Korea, and argues that anti-natalist ideologies worsen population decline without viable solutions. Ultimately, Williamson suggests balancing achievement with emotional well-being through traditional social connections rather than relying solely on AI or extreme political posturing. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Social Media's Impact on Youth00:03:34
I am very concerned like you are about what social media does to young minds.
You cannot deny the fact that teen mental health appears to be plummeting.
What do you think of the bro-ligarchy?
It's primarily about doing things that men typically have been good at, which is just getting shit done.
Is Donald Trump a good role model for men?
We've gone full circle from Andrew Tate to Trump doing the YMCA.
Women are struggling to find eligible partners because they're outperforming men.
We want robust, strong, competent men as partners, and we want the same from women too.
Oh, well, you want to put women back into the kitchen.
You want to take them out of the workplace.
You want this to be the handmaid's tale.
I don't want that at all.
But I don't want this species to fall off a cliff.
President Trump won decisively with a broad and diverse coalition of voters, catching many apparent experts off guard.
But one of his more predictable victories came in the resounding support from men, a feat attributed in part to his podcast blitz and a careful cultivation of a so-called manosphere or the oligarchy.
Depending on who you ask, the manosphere is either a thriving digital network of male interviewers and influencers who celebrate masculinity, authenticity and discipline, or according to a recent op-ed of the New York Times, a dangerous movement of misogynists, which promotes resentment and outdated gender stereotypes.
No matter which label you slap on it, there's no doubt it's now a pro-Trump movement.
So are young men really becoming more conservative or have they simply been alienated by a radical and sneering form of liberalism?
Returning to uncensored, this time in person, is the host of the hip podcast Modern Wisdom, Chris Williamson.
Chris, great to see you.
Great to see you too.
I've literally just come off doing your podcast an hour ago, which was fascinating.
It's a great world, this, isn't it?
I mean, I was saying to you just in a break there, that when I worked in tabloid newspapers, we wanted to kill each other, right?
All the rival papers.
In the YouTube world, it's the opposite.
There's a lot of collaboration, helping each other, being on each other's shows and things.
Why is that?
I think it's not a zero-sum environment anymore.
Somebody watching your show doesn't take away from mine.
Yeah.
And that's not necessary.
So I don't know how many people bought two papers.
You know, if one paper had the scoop, that means that the other paper isn't getting it.
So I like the, I'm all for the collaboration.
It's a big departure from how your life started.
You've become incredibly popular.
You've got over 3 million subscribers to your channel.
Why?
Why are people gravitating to you?
I think I try to provide a place where questions that you've always had about yourself or about the world get answered.
Understanding human nature.
Unfortunately, humans don't come with an operating manual.
We kind of have to work it out ourselves.
And the world that our parents found themselves in and the one that we're in are different again.
So even the accumulated wisdom of our earlier generations don't necessarily work.
And I think that providing people with a little bit of a roadmap and a place as well to remind them that if they've got these questions, if they're uncertain about the direction that they're going in life, if they're asking themselves, why am I so bothered about the opinions of others?
And why do I feel this particular way when such a thing happens?
And how should I deal with the breakup?
And how should I deal with grief?
I think that those are important conversations.
And I like having them.
It was something that I needed toward the end of my 20s.
You said I had a different life.
I was a club promoter for a long time.
And I appreciated it when I was on the come up and I'm trying to pay it forward.
Australia's just banned under 16s from all social media.
What do you think of that?
I think it's a good idea.
I am very concerned, like you are, about what social media does to young minds.
The research from Jonathan Haidt, I have seen replication crisis come in.
Navigating Modern Masculinity Crisis00:07:11
There's a lot of skepticism and criticism around that.
But you can't deny, no matter what the mechanism is, you cannot deny the fact that teen mental health appears to be plummeting.
And it's happened pretty precipitously and it seems to be correlated with what's going on in society.
And anxiety in particular.
Why is that?
Why is this young generation of people, you know, say 12 to 24, why are they so anxious?
I think there's a lot of reasons for this.
Certainly one would be less time outside, less exercise, worse physical health.
We had a discussion last time about mental health or physical health.
And the two work sympatically.
They never do.
Right.
That if you have poor physical health because you're spending more time on screens because there's more to do inside, you're going to spend less time out and moving.
I sleep worse.
And I wonder how much of it is sleep related.
Like if I've not been doing much physical exercise, like I was in New York for the election, it was constant work, reading all the time.
not really exercising, not even getting into the park.
And I found that my sleep was affected more than it normally would be.
There's some evidence to suggest that people spend around about twice as long on screens as they do asleep per day.
And the number one form of malnutrition now is not starvation, but obesity worldwide.
There's twice as many people that are obese than starving.
Now, I'm not saying that we need to make more people starve in order to rebalance this, but this just shows we've gone from a world of scarcity to one of abundance.
And the problems are very different.
You now need to be discerning as opposed to scouring.
Young men have had a rough old decade, really.
You can chart it to sort of when the Me Too Times Up campaign hit, a crisis of perhaps confidence about what it means to be a man.
How should you behave?
Some of it was obvious, some of it not so obvious.
A lot of blurred lines, sort of moving pendulums and so on.
Really interestingly, in the American election we've just had, a lot of young men, white, black, Latino, Latinos in particular, gravitated to Donald Trump, who'd surrounded himself with what they're calling the broligarchy.
So you've got Trump, and they're all like alpha male guys.
And then you've got the Jordan Petersons and Joe Rogans out there in the YouTube world who are also supporting this.
What do you think of the bro-ligarchy?
Is it a long overdue, like, I don't know, what would you call it?
A support group that's come for young men who just don't know quite what it means to be a man?
Interestingly, I don't think that the broligarchy or bro-politics, as it's been coined, I don't think it's actually primarily about men.
And I think that's what's really interesting.
It's primarily about doing things that men typically have been good at, which is just getting shit done.
They get things done.
And it's an optimization now on effectiveness and efficiency over optics, right?
It's on getting something created, regardless of how you appear.
Elon had this really interesting discussion a while ago where he said, I care more about doing good than the appearance of looking good.
And I think that that world of the performative empathy, toxic compassion, victimhood mindset, I think that...
Virtue signaling.
Yes.
I think that that was, it was like a gold bar that was beaten down into a leaf so thin that if you poked it, a hole immediately went through it.
It looked glitzy from the outside.
It looked like it was legitimate.
But really, when you poked it a little bit, we've seen this time and time again, whether it's individual authors or organizations or charities or movements or whatever, they're not as virtuous as they seem from the outside.
And now you have people who have easily stressable.
Does your rocket go to space and come back or does it explode?
Does the Pentagon's budget get cut or does it not?
Do we get better efficiency inside of government or do we not?
And this world of optimizing for facts and outcomes as opposed to optics, I think is one that's long overdue.
And the masculinity thing, you know, if that ends up bringing along for the ride a role model that says this is what a man can be being able to achieve these things, there's no reason that it can't be.
Tulsi Gabbard is right in the mix along with all of these people.
She seems to embody as many masculine virtues as...
Well, Trump actually has a lot of women in his nominated cabinet, a lot of women.
I mean, it's one of the most diverse cabinets, actually, in terms of gender and race there's ever been.
Yeah, you know, it's fascinating.
And I think that creating a positive role model for men to look up to, for anybody to look up to that just wants some mastery and some upward aiming, meritocracy, you've said has been under attack for a long time.
I get the sense that you're right.
And yeah, applauding, like making achievement great again is not a bad.
No, I completely agree.
It's reality.
But this also plays into what Elon calls the woke mind virus.
A lot of what he's talking about is not based on reality.
It's based on a weird kind of...
I mean, I would say it comes down actually to, you know, my truth.
As soon as I heard that phrase, I was like, what do you mean, my truth?
And we heard it from Meghan Markle and then all sorts of people started saying it.
There is no such thing as my truth, is there?
I mean, there's the truth, which is a fact-based thing.
And then there's everything else.
But you can't have your own version of truth, can you?
There's certainly a place for...
Do you ever use that phrase?
No.
I've never used that, I don't think.
But there is a place to do a devil's advocate thing.
There are certain types of individual or personal experience that are very difficult to put in objective data, right?
There are certain things that you've been through, ineffable parts of your personality, emotions, experiences, stories, and stuff that you've pieced together.
Where if you say, well, show me where that appears on a balance sheet, you go, that's kind of hard to do.
So there is a sense that we need to flesh out the way that people see the world in more than just what can be accounted for.
But I think both of us would say the pendulum has swung far too far in one direction, which is that we're looking for taking everybody at their word as opposed to, what does this actually mean?
Well, I remember also going back to the Me Too campaign, there was a weird thing to start with where all women must be believed.
Believe all women.
And I found that immediately as a journalist, I just found that very incongruous.
I was like, well, hang on.
I've covered many, many court cases over the years where people have turned out to be lying, male and female, right?
Why should you automatically believe people?
Automatically listen to them, take what they say seriously if they're making allegations, which is serious.
You don't automatically believe anybody, not in my world.
You listen.
I mean, you can tell me stuff now.
I'm not going to automatically believe you.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I think what the world is trying to do, whether it's with the climate change debate, really overblowing the level of intensity that the rhetoric needs to be have around you, gluing yourself to the floor or you're throwing soup over a painting, or whether it's with me to believe all women, kill all men, you know, these sorts of campaigns.
What they're trying to do is overshoot the target so much to actually come into land where they want.
But that doesn't garner people to care more.
What it does is it makes them feel like you're overblowing the entire conversation and it gets them to switch off.
I think, you know, Me Too probably was a reckoning that was needed to call powerful men to account for what they were doing.
Stop Automatically Believing Anyone00:09:20
I agree.
The problem was it sought to sanitize the toxic elements of male behavior and instead it ended up sterilizing all of them.
It made men terrified of women and it made women incredibly nervous at being approached by men.
So these gym videos, some girls doing horrible hip thrusts in a gym and some guy glances over three times in 90 seconds, she tries to put it on the internet to flame him as, you know, this is a creep in the gym.
So two things happen with that.
First off, it makes men very nervous about approaching women in the gym.
But the second thing is it gives other women a barometer for what is and isn't acceptable behavior by men.
Now, thankfully, really interesting reversal of what could have happened.
I think most people push back against those videos and said, I don't think that that person's misbehaved.
I think that you're being too sensitive.
And that's actually not something you should pull them up on.
But had it have gone in the other direction, you now have a generation of girls, millions and millions of girls who have seen that video who think if a man looks at me more than three times in 90 seconds when I'm in the gym, I should feel uncomfortable.
This is creating the very fragility that we don't want in women.
We want robust, strong, competent men as partners, and we want the same from women too.
But the more that you hypersensitize everybody to this situation, I don't think it's a good environment.
Is Donald Trump a good role model for men?
That's an interesting question.
Given how many have gravitated to him?
Yeah, well, I mean, he's kind of part of a past gone era in a way.
He's like, he's very old school.
And yet here he is at this election campaign.
Every week at the rally, dancing to a gay anthem.
YMCA by Bullish People.
The supposed biggest bigot in America, literally choosing...
Maybe one of the gayest songs of all time.
The gayest song of all time.
And now all of America is mimicking his dad dance to YMCA.
Yeah.
Well, look, if that's what peak masculinity has gotten to, we've gone full circle from Andrew Tate to Trump doing the YMCA.
Yeah, that's full metrosexual.
I mean, I think Trump, you know, I could construct a negative characterization of him, but also having known him 20 years, I can also construct a positive one.
He has a remarkable resilience about him.
He has incredible mental strength.
I mean, we saw that when he actually got physically shot and got back up in defiance and then got back on rally stages afterwards, which I don't think many people might have done.
He's got an incredibly thick skin, thin one, too.
It's an odd blender.
It's an odd blend.
It's almost unique in that he reacts to absolutely everything, but he can soak up everything.
So most public figures, if they had a tenth of what Trump's had to take on and endure, would have crumbled.
And they certainly wouldn't have come back from all the stuff that he's had.
But he has got extraordinary resilience.
I mean, and it's a really commendable trait, I think.
I mean, his comeback story is for the ages.
It's an interesting mix, though, isn't it, with him?
It's fascinating.
Yeah, the fact that you have somebody who, by all accounts, is quite sort of fragile in their reactivity, quite easy to trigger.
You know, you saw this even during his debate with Kamala, that she was able to just throw exactly.
And immediately, you know, the masculine urge to not be outdone at a rally surfaces.
But on the other side of that, you're right.
I mean, I said this on the show.
I got a bit of stick for it on Modern Wisdom.
But I said that when I saw Trump get up and do the fight, fight, fight thing, that was the, I think the first time where I saw him as an admirable person.
You know, I'd seen him as somebody that did things that were kind of impressive or whatever, but I'd not really just spent that much time assessing him as a human.
I thought, I don't know really anybody that could have would have done that.
And 78, 77, how old are old he is?
And yeah, that's, there is no amount of media training or contrived narcissistic pathology that can get you to be shot in the head and then within 15 seconds, stand up and think and do that.
Like that's, it's deeper than that.
And that was, I think that it's interesting you mentioned it on the show that we just did.
How much of a turning point was that?
Because we all made the same comment.
I think it was huge.
But we all made the same comment, which was how quickly the press moved on.
How quickly everybody forgot about that situation.
And then there's a second one, and then there's a hot swap, and then it's Brat Summer.
And then before you know it, you know, it's October.
But I wonder how much of that lingered in the back of people's minds.
I think a lot.
I think it showed American strength under fire.
And I think that people, particularly Americans, they come from a young country, very young country, certainly compared to here.
A country that's been full of gunfire.
I mean, literally from its, you know, from the War of Independence to the Civil War.
In his blood.
I just think it's in American blood is this sense of gunfire.
It's been pervasive in society there.
It is now, 400 million guns in circulation.
To see a guy who was recently president, is running again, actually take a bullet, as he put it to me, take a bullet for democracy, which is a great line, and actually true.
Someone tried to stop him being president by shooting him.
It was extraordinary, A, how he reacted, B, how people then responded.
And I agree with you.
I think a lot of people quietly went, okay, that's changed my view about it.
Talking about the rest of that administration.
Last time I was on, we spoke about a list of things that were toxic masculinity, wearing X-body spray, saying, hello, I'll have a nice day.
I'm not sure if you noticed that during the run-up to the election, Politico said that JD Vance's beard was toxic masculinity.
So yeah, his beard may be seen as some, especially by women, as aggressive and not conforming to feminist ideals.
I think it's that kind of thinking on the left, which has been their really big problem.
Yes, they failed to get a grip of cost of living and illegal immigration and those other issues.
But it is that kind of bullshit, which I think a lot of American, particularly younger men, black men, Latina men, white guys, and they've all just gone, this is just such bullshit.
What it shows is people who are not really concerned with real issues.
And what the subtext of that is, if you're bothered about the facial hair of a candidate, what it suggests is that you have so much time on your hands that you can consider this stuff and consider it important.
Meanwhile, the normal American voter is that guy or girl really thinking, look, I have so much luxurious time on my hands that I can work out the misogyny level of JD Vance's beard.
Speaking of that, I've never seen you really rock much facial heads.
So you think I have?
Is that a defense mechanism against misogyny?
I actually never shave on vacation.
And if I have a long one, it can be like three, four weeks.
I'm the full.
I want to see a selfie of that on your Instagram next week.
Well, it's actually my Instagram profile picture.
Is it really?
In fact, it's me smoking a cigar with a Panama hat with a full facial hair.
Yeah.
It's a real like misogynistic at the same time.
It's a Pablo Escobar kind of vibe, which is ironic because tonight I'm actually winning an award for Cigar Smoker of the Year.
You're kidding me.
Oh, true.
What does that mean?
You've done the most?
You've got the best.
I actually only smoke about four or five a year, and I've never smoked cigarettes.
But when I smoke them, it obviously sends such a powerful, overwhelming thing to the cigar world.
You and Andrew Tate influencing the cigarette.
Actually, no.
It's actually Ray Winston is getting one.
And Kelsey Grammar.
Wow.
But yeah, look, going back to the Berligarke thing, I think it's cool.
I think, you know, Vivek.
Yeah, I do.
Even six months, nine months ago, when Vivek was maybe still in the running for stuff and he was doing topless videos of him smashing forehands on the tennis court captioned with debate.
And RFK was doing the same thing.
I saw RFK do 50 polyps on Aubrey Marcus's ranch in Austin, Texas about six ages.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Pretty cool.
Just falconry.
There's nothing more alpha than false.
Here's what I think, though.
I've interviewed most of those guys, right?
So I've interviewed Trump maybe 40 times.
I've interviewed, oh, I've not interviewed Elon, but I had some time on my own with him in Massamba for about an hour and a half.
It's fascinating.
I've interviewed RFK maybe four or five times, Vivek three or four times, Jordan Peterson many times, including quite recently, amazing interview.
And I really enjoy interviewing these people.
They're very smart.
They're very interesting.
They have different views about the way to tackle stuff to what I would call establishment figures in politics or media.
I can absolutely understand why Trump has gravitated to them.
And I don't think everything they're going to do is going to work, but it's going to be one hell of a ride watching people who don't think in a conformative way about how to tackle issues actually tackle.
What have we seen over the last couple of weeks?
Chenk Uger tweet Elon Musk saying I can help you cut the government spending in the Pentagon.
Bernie Sanders supporting it.
Bernie Sanders complimenting Elon Musk.
If you'd said, well, I mean, if you'd said Elon Musk would be aligned with Donald Trump 15 years ago, that would have probably been a massive surprise.
But then if you'd said he's going to go sort of all the way right, be the single biggest owner, organize the campaign, do this stuff on the ground in Pennsylvania, and then Bernie Sanders is going to come along and support him.
And Chenk Uyger's going to be like, what?
Political Shifts and Billion Dollar Goals00:07:02
Like Avengers Assemble?
What is this?
Are we trying to fight Thanos?
And I don't know.
It'll be very, we spoke about this before.
It'll be very interesting to see where the Democrats go from here.
I just do not, I don't see a hopeful vision on that side for...
You need to have a centrist candidate.
I mean, I was told that behind the scenes, Bill Clinton was trying to get them off a lot of the woke agenda stuff, the trans athletes and women's sport issue and so on.
He just said, this is just a complete vote loser, right?
Because most Americans do not agree with this.
The main thing as well, I think, it's not so much that guys are moving toward the right.
They're being pushed away from the left.
Correct.
The left largely has left them.
There is no evidence.
This is from Richard Reids.
There is no evidence that men are any less supporting of gender equality.
Zero evidence.
But all of the different policies, you know, the same number of men die per year from suicide as women do from breast cancer.
The same number of men.
There is not a single direct, focused men's health organization inside of the CDC.
None.
Despite the fact that men die so much sooner than women, men take their lives, but more likely to be addicted, more likely to be homeless, more likely to be on the streets.
All of the stats that we all already know.
The Harris campaign, when they were doing, they had that homepage, I'm sure that you covered it.
Every different group in the book, which was the one that was missing?
Yeah.
Men.
So it feels like kind of like righteous retribution in some way that the group that you demonized, the group that you ignored, the group that you didn't care about, ended up saying, okay, if you don't want me at your party, so be it.
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I completely agree.
Elon's other big thing is global fertility.
As a lot of people, if you had asked them, said, oh, well, there's too many people on planet Earth.
Elon's been saying the complete opposite.
And now the numbers are accelerating exactly as he warned, with many countries looking like they're really having serious birth rate issues.
The one that we're in right now is one of them.
Right.
1.4 is the current birth rate in the UK.
That means that for every 100 British people today, there will be 35 great grandchildren.
So a 60%.
And how does that compare to, say, 50 years ago?
I think that we would be way over replacement.
I think that we would be at something like 2.4, maybe 2.6, maybe more.
Korea, South Korea is the worst in the world.
I think they're at 0.4 at the moment.
And why are they so bad?
It's an interesting question.
There's a 4Bs movement, which is kind of the sort of extremist feminist movement that was kind of captured and adopted, I guess, by America after Trump's victory recently.
There seems to be a whole different bunch of reasons for this.
Some of the most uncomfortable ones are that women are struggling to find eligible partners because they're outperforming men in education and employment.
A lot of policies have been put in place to help lift women up.
And then as men have started to fall, women blasted through and overtook men socioeconomically.
and as men started to fall behind, the world doesn't feel quite so prepared to give men that same leg up.
In short, if women have a problem, we say, what can we do to fix society?
But if men have a problem, we say, what are we doing where men can't fix themselves?
And, you know, in some ways, that's a hopeful vision for men being able to lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
But the other side of that is if any group, if any social group is struggling with achievement in the real world or support or mental health or actual health, physical health, we don't say man up and sort it out yourself.
We spend billions in taxpayer-funded money and organizations and charities and fundraisers to work out what the problem is and do that on their behalf and help.
It just doesn't seem to be as popular when it's men that are on the receiving end.
That doesn't seem to be what we want.
If this trend continues, what will be the consequence for the planet?
We are going to see a peak in global population at less than 10 billion.
It doesn't look like we're even going to touch 10 billion and it will drop off precipitously.
The interesting thing about population decline is that it is a existential risk that creeps up on us without you seeing it.
There's no smog in the sky.
There's no increasing temperature, water levels.
There's none of that stuff.
What you have is a still increasing population because the population is getting older, even as you have fewer and fewer children and then you have this huge drop-off.
You have ever fewer young people supporting ever more old people.
Economic growth shrinks precipitously unless, and this is the only way that we can really fix it, two ways, both through technology and artificial intelligence.
One being outsourcing a lot of the labor and a lot of the work that's done to improve efficiency by putting that over to robotics and AI.
And the other side being...
Which is bound to happen.
Yes, it will, but will it be able to offset?
And the other one being fertility treatments that can extend the number, the viability, and the window within which people can have kids.
But if you actually look at what people are saying, a lot of the time they're saying, I don't want to have kids.
It's not just that I'm trying to have kids and I can't.
This isn't all sperm count, testosterone, you know, estrogen.
No, it's lifestyle choice.
Correct.
The number one reason that people say that they don't want to have kids is just not ready yet.
But there's some really interesting data.
Stephen Jay Shaw wrote an awesome documentary called Birth Gap that's all about the population decline.
He said he did some research.
Four out of five, so 80% of women who do not have, they get to the end of their life without children, didn't intend to be childless.
And these women have counseling groups.
They grieve over families they never had.
You've got these undertakers in Germany who are dealing with end of life.
They've been in hospices.
They've been in nursing homes.
These people, and they have funerals and no one shows up.
And when they do the embalming, when they take their clothes off to get them ready for cremation or for burial or whatever, they're finding bruises on their wrists and on their shoulders where it looks like they've been mistreated.
So these people who've spent their entire lives contributing to a country and then at the end of that are mistreated to then not even have somebody show up.
I don't know.
It's really, really concerning.
And the only intervention that anybody thinks of immediately as soon as you bring this up is, oh, you want to put women back into the kitchen.
You want to take them out of the workplace.
You want this to be the handmaid's tale.
You go, no, I don't want that at all.
But I don't want this species to fall off a cliff.
And this is something that everybody can work out the implications of.
Working Class Mentality in Politics00:04:24
Your political ideology is genetically predisposed, not predetermined, but predisposed.
You tend to vote in line with your parents, not only because you grew up in their culture, but also because your politics have a personality predisposition to them.
And that's inherited genetically.
If you are the sort of political group, like the Democrats say, that puts a vasectomy clinic outside of one of your rallies, who do you think is going to be replicating?
If you care about your political ideology, also being anti-natalist is the most seppu-ku logic that you can think of because you're just kamikazing yourself into irrelevancy within the space of, you're going to be filled with like Ben Shapiro's progeny, Mormons, like whoever else is going to be, the only people that have got, it seems, that are really above replacement rate are people in religions.
So yeah, it's a conversation you're going to hear a lot more of over the next few years.
It's going to become one of the biggest talking points.
And Elon Musk, not for the first time, is spot on.
He's also trying to contribute himself to research.
The 12 kids.
Birth rate decline.
Yeah, exactly.
He's put his money where his mouth is.
You did this brilliant podcast, Modern Wisdom.
What are the top three things that people most ask you about?
So I just did this live tour.
I went around Australia and then I did a show at the Apollo this week in London.
One of them would be, how can I be grateful for the things that I've achieved whilst still pushing myself to work hard?
I think this balance between wanting to achieve a lot in life, but also realizing that I need to stop and smell the roses and take a little bit of a break from that.
And I like that.
I think that's an important redress to like hardcore hustle culture.
I think another one would be, I want to make changes in my life, but I feel guilty about leaving my friends behind.
This is very much a working class mentality, very much from the Australia and the UK side.
You know, the tall poppy syndrome we spoke about last time.
I know that you're a big fan of the piss-taking stuff.
But I think there is...
I'm also a big fan.
Like I go on an annual golf trip with my village boys and there were 20 of us this year and everyone puts in the same amount of money.
It doesn't matter what you do.
You can be earning a fortune, you can be earning not very much, it doesn't matter.
Complete egalitarian system.
I think that is good.
It's a good thing of keeping your roots, nurturing those roots.
No one's better than anybody else.
You know, people that don't have that kind of grounding or, you know, maybe if they do well for themselves, choose a different, more glamorous lifestyle because they think it's more meaningful.
I think that's...
I don't disagree.
I don't disagree.
And I imagine that as you continue to sort of rise up through levels of fame, it's very important to keep your feet on the ground.
I think the concern people have is when they have no support structure around them.
So there's no one that they can talk on that level with.
I've got these new challenges, but if I speak to my friends about it, like it's all well and good me having the piss taken out of me.
That works for so long.
I actually need to have a productive discussion about whatever the inside of it.
So the second question I was going to ask you is, we're heading to Christmas.
And if people were thinking about, okay, modern wisdom, I want to get a book or something for my, you know, whoever it is, my loved one, my son, my daughter, whoever it is.
Who are the three wise men out there?
Not you.
Who are the three wise men that you would say, you know what?
Go and read a bit of that guy or watch a bit of that guy.
Very good.
Okay.
So first one I'm going to say, Alain de Boton from the School of Life, fantastic British philosopher.
He's coming on Modern Wisdom this week.
And he's great.
He is great.
A therapeutic journey from him, an emotional education.
And he's a real great redress.
If you've got any sort of concerns about the toxic masculinity thing, I don't think anyone's going to accuse him of doing that.
Next up, I'd try the Almanac of Naval Ravikant.
It's a book by Eric Jorgensen.
Naval is a VC founder.
He's the guy that founded Angel List.
Phenomenal book.
Maybe one of the easiest to read but highest insight per word books on the planet.
And that's actually available for free online.
And then a third one that I think is a good redress is Essentialism by Greg McEwen.
So it's just a book about doing less but better, focusing on the vital few things, not the trivial many.
So Centralism by Greg, Almanac of Naval Ravikant by Eric, and Anything by Alan is one of the things.
new three wise men of modern wisdom and two more exactly uh chris great to see you again appreciate you man and great to have you to come in thank you very much Appreciate it.