How do we find our purpose? How can we clarify our desires? What is the right way to balance our cognition with our intuition? These questions, along with many others are answered in this incredible conversation with Chris Williamson. As the host of Modern Wisdom, Chris has such a breadth of knowledge our conversations are always wide ranging and wildly interesting, whether it’s at a dinner party or on a podcast. This show is loaded with mind expanding takeaways to help you lead the legendary life you are desiring.   Check out the Modern Wisdom podcast | https://apple.co/3HX5bLQ  

AUBREY: What's up, brother? 

CHRIS: I'm good, man. How are you?

AUBREY: I'm doing really good, doing really good. So one of the beautiful things that I think about a conversation with you is that it can go so many different directions. But I really like where you tend to try and take your podcast, Modern Wisdom, and really exploring concrete, pragmatic advice for people as they're just trying to figure their shit out, as we all are. And you're really diving into very practical ways of thinking about things. Very much I know that you're close with Jordan Peterson. He does that really well, too, which is very clear thinking, and very clear steps and advice. So, we'll start to get into some of these topics that are kind of fresh on your mind.

CHRIS: Yeah, man. I'm from England, right? And a lot of England is very spit and sawdust, still got a very working class mentality. And it's sort of salt of the earth people trying to make things work. So I like the abstractions. It's fun thinking about ideas and concepts and stuff. But there's a way that you could look at something, does it grow corn? It's like, this is lovely, all of these ideas are great, but does it grow fucking corn? What can I do with this? I think that's one of the reasons that Andrew Huberman's been so popular, that he's really sort of concretized and made applicable, a ton of sort of fluffy stuff, right? And he's made things come down to earth. So for instance--

AUBREY: Yeah, telling you how to breathe, which way you can expand your eyes, gaze to change your cognition, very practical things 

CHRIS: Not just how it makes you feel. Actually, I want to make this happen in my life right now. What does that mean for me? And maybe over time, it'll become a little bit more abstract or whatever. But I guess on anyone's growth journey, when they feel like they've got tons of unanswered questions themselves, they're trying to find stuff to apply. So, that's, I guess, still, where I come from. So, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is this tension between cognition and intuition, between thinking and feeling. So you can imagine a journey of anybody that's trying to develop a skill. And a lot of people, I think, will have found that they can become very successful very quickly, by applying tons and tons of cerebral horsepower, right? That they just think themselves out of whatever the situation or the challenge is that they come up against. Now, that's great. And a lot of us have found a lot of success doing that. But I don't think that that allows you to reach anything close to mastery. I think it allows you to get from maybe nought to 50 or nought to 60. I think you're going to start to bounce off the limiter. So Iain McGilchrist wrote, "The Master And His Emissary" and "The Matter With Things", neuroscientist but also a philosopher. So he looks at how the brain works. And he studied Isle of Man time trial races, you know the motorbike race that goes around the Isle of Man? So this is a small island in the British Isles. And it's roads. This isn't a racetrack, this is potholes and dry stone walls and right hand bends and stuff like that. This isn't built for what they're doing. And he looked at the speed that these motorcycle races were going around it. And he realized that the pace at which they're taking the corners and changing and making adjustments is quicker than conscious thought can work. So the lesson there is that you can learn things step by step in a very deliberate, very logical, very rational, very cognitive, very cerebral way. But if you want to make it to the next stage, you need to allow intuition to take over because it aggregates all of the things that you know and can verbalize and can think. And then it adds in all of the experience and all of the things that you don't know. And there's this gorgeous quote from Confucius, which I must say about twice a week, which is hilarious. So, Confucius, ancient Chinese philosopher like 3,000 years ago. He says, “in the early stages of training, an aspiring Confucian gentleman needs to memorize entire shelves of archaic texts, learn the precise angle at which to bow and learn the length of the steps with which he has to enter a room, his sitting mat must always be perfectly straight. All of this rigor and restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated, but nonetheless genuine form of spontaneity. Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete, until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought, or effort.” And this is precisely the point at which I'm talking about here. Do you feel like you have reached a stage where you can't continue to think yourself to the next level of the, whatever it is, you're trying to be an online content creator, or a poet or a coach, or a lead or whatever. Maybe more thought isn't the answer, maybe actually getting out of your own way, and allowing that spontaneity cultivated, but genuine to come through.

AUBREY: I think there's two areas that are interesting here. One is, in trying to figure out what to do. And one is the mastery of a skill. Both are different places because you can think your way into what you want to do, and how you would like to strategize your game board and figure out what you should develop and all of these things where you can feel it. And then there's the skill aspect of things which the example that comes to me the most is, I did an apprenticeship to learn how to offer bodywork, and it's a very specific lineage and a very specific type. And it's highly intuitive by its nature, but the structure of the way that you move around the body, the techniques that you use, I had to train those very dogmatically. And then now, even though I'm far from being a master on that path, the most interesting discoveries come from pure listening and pure intuition. But of course, I had to learn the shaking techniques, I had to learn the different fascial holds. And I had to learn all of this stuff first, that actually informed my intuition over time, and then allowed me to riff. Or it's like salsa dancing, like you got to get the basic steps, and then--

CHRIS: You good at salsa free?

AUBREY: Not good enough. Not good enough to be free. I'm still in the part where I'm doing the, I'm still the first Confucius where I'm still, and every once in a while, I just get a little glimmer of a moment of freedom, where I did something that I didn't expect myself to do. And so, I would need to put in the hours to get better. So I think both of those tracks are interesting. I think, potentially more interesting, because one is kind of anthro-ontologically easy to understand, like oh yeah, I got it, intuition takes over at a certain point. But trying to use your intuition to figure out what to do, that to me is very interesting, because what to do is a very complex question in my mind. 

CHRIS: It's the question that most people in the world right now have a problem with, I think. A lot of people do. Because previously, you would have been set on a relatively linear path, right? You don't have a job for life now. Who has a job for 50 years now? No one. I would love to see some statistics around how long on average people stay in a career. And that's within the space of two generations, has gone from my dad, my dad was out of school at 16 years old, no O level, no qualifications. Worked at the same company for the next 20 years. No way would that happen now. People move around. And the problem is, you've heard of the paradox of choice, right? By Barry Schwartz. The fact that the more options you have, if you look at this purely rationally from a utilitarian perspective, more options means that you can precisely work out exactly what you want. But it also gives you this huge sense of pressure and stress. Because he uses this great example of jeans in the sort of 1960s or something. You went into the store and there was one type of jeans, one color, one cut, it's like what's waist size are you? Probably small, medium and large, and extra-large. There you go. There's your jeans. Whereas now you go in and it's, do you want a bootcut? Do you want skinny, do you want ripped, do you want faded? Do you want black, gray, blue? 

AUBREY: All in seven brands. 

CHRIS: Yeah, millions and millions of different. So previously, the decision may have been suboptimal overall, but the decision making process was a lot less stressful. And the issue arises, the jean problem issue arises now with what we want to do with our life. I'm facing this question now. So I just this weekend got my O1 visa for America. So, I can come and go as I please. But it's a bit hot in Austin, so maybe I want to go to Amsterdam. But maybe I should stay here. Well, maybe I should go to Mexico because I can go to Mexico. Well, maybe I should go back to the UK for summer. If you have lots of options, it's beautiful and great, and oh, what a first world problem to have. But it's still difficult to work out what to do. And we often let our intuition, I mean, how many times do people say, when you're trying to work out whether to get into a relationship with someone, you should write down on one side all the good things about them, and on the other side, all the bad things about them. With a job, should you go to Amsterdam? What are the good things about Amsterdam? What are the bad things about Austin? And stuff like that and you go, well, that's taking me away from that intuition thing. But over time, I think that you can get yourself to a stage where you've used and I've certainly done this, use your brain so much that there is no room left for intuition to actually be heard. That the cognitive processes are speaking so loudly, that it just drowns out whatever your intuition is. 

AUBREY: Yeah, the intuition is always a whisper. And so I've been studying the Kabbalist lineage, and they call the whisper, the Lehesha, and the Lehesha is like the whisper of your subconscious, it's your intuition. And you have to get really quiet to hear a whisper. And as you said, your brain can be noisy as hell. And so, it's cool to see that these ideas, like I would have thought the idea of, oh, intuition speaks to you in a whisper. That's kind of a new idea. No, 4000 years old, deep in the old Torah, hidden. And people understood this, these basic human processes, people understood. Their advice to answer this question was to go through a process of what they called Berur which is the clarification of desire, understanding what it is that you actually really want, and who is the you that's wanting what you think you want. And the idea is that you merge yourself and you participate in the name of the Divine. So the you that's actually wanting is antically identical with the Divine, participating in the name of the Divine. And so that way, you're acting Ritson Hashem in the Divine Will, right? Like this is their goal is to clarify your desires, understand where they're all coming from, allow for whatever wants to happen. But if you want to make the best choice, then you as yourself participating in the name of God as you, effacing yourself into the divine, decide what you want to do. And so, this has been something that I've been meditating on as well is like, uh-huh, so that being said, what the fuck do I want to do? 

CHRIS: Well, dude, I mean, this was a question I asked you when you came on Modern Wisdom. People should go and listen to that podcast, one of my favorite episodes that we've done, so good. It'll be linked in the show notes below. I'm sure that people can go listen, or whatever. That was just after you got married, just after the Onnit sale went through and I asked you this question. I was like, "Man, you've been chasing the feminine and success, business success for all of this time. Are you concerned now that the thing which previously drove you is, there's this huge void, two huge voids that are ready to sort of be filled by potentially nothing?" And it doesn't surprise me that you've been looking at ways to really recenter that direction.

AUBREY: Right. And there's many things that I love. I love many things. I love doing, I love Fit For Service, I love writing, I love poetry, I'm actually really interested in fiction now which is particularly interesting. I mean, I love podcasting. I love so much of my... Actually just living my life and not doing anything.

CHRIS: Not being a workaholic, 18 hours a day. 

AUBREY: So, it feels like I'm in the time between stories right now. And that's something that Michael Meade who was recently on the podcast was talking about is, the time in between stories. Of course, our world feels like collectively we're in a time in between stories but me personally--

CHRIS: Is it scary to you?

AUBREY: The world?

CHRIS: No, the time in between stories.

AUBREY: It can be confusing. I wouldn't say scary. It can be confusing, it can be stressful, it can be anxiety producing, it can be exciting, it can be liberating, it can be ecstatic. It's a lot of different things. But I wouldn't say scary.

CHRIS: One of the strange things is that the only time you ever feel the speed of something is when it accelerates or decelerates. You can be going 1000 miles an hour, but if you've been going that way, it just feels inside whatever the vehicle is, it's just easy, right? It's just inertia. And I often feel that that it's only during the change, during the switch from non-married to married life, during the switch from full on business to fuck, I've sold it, what do I do now? That's when you go, oh my god, at the top of a roller coaster when everything feels weightless, and you're like, I don't know what I'm doing anymore and something's really changing. I think maybe some of your psychedelic work has perhaps prepared you for being more comfortable with the unknown maybe.

AUBREY: Of course. Yeah, I mean, that's a gigantic swan dive into the void, repeatedly done for 22 years like wee, here we go. So that certainly helps. But I think for people, let's take it out of our context, because it's unique. And we've found a lot of ways that we can actually thrive. So it's a luxury of choice that we have here. But for those people now who are in a situation where they're not really happy because the world is transitioning as well, and a lot of jobs that don't have meaning are becoming insufferable. It used to be I think, collectively in the zeitgeist oh, yeah, you just work and it sucks. And that's normal. And then you have a pint after you're done. And fucking, this is life, what are you complaining about?

CHRIS: I mean the book, "Bullshit Jobs" smashed it over the last few years. Why? Well, because it resonates.

AUBREY: Right. Right, and people are getting sick of it. And I think that's good, because bullshit jobs are going to be usurped by animation and automation.

CHRIS: Robotic jobs. 

AUBREY: Right. So it's actually appropriate, but nonetheless, people are trying to figure out, alright, what do I want to do? And then what I do see is people rushing into online coaching, at a fucking massive, massive rate, but I'm how many people are there to be coached random--

CHRIS: Well, then you can become a coach that coaches coaches, don't forget about that. You can scale yourself up, man. Dangerous. 

AUBREY: Yeah, it's the top of the heap. 

CHRIS: Yeah, exactly. Well, this is a perennial question. Really, really interesting. I found this out a couple of weeks ago on my show, the ancient Greek word for work, meant not at leisure. Not at leisure. The set point is leisure, the aberration is work. How do we see the world now? Completely the other way around, right? The hustle--

AUBREY: Good little industrialists. 

CHRIS: Yep, the grind set mentality. I mean, here's an interesting way actually, to make decisions. And this could apply to directions in life and stuff like that. So, Douglas Murray, a very good friend of mine. I went out to spend some time with him in New York. And he lives in a Manhattan cocktail. So it's two in the morning, and we're in his beautiful Midtown Manhattan flat. He's telling me these stories about Christopher Hitchens and like back in the day. Amazing, gorgeous stories. He said he sat down with Hitch one day and he was talking about the problem that he has when he needs to make a decision and there's tradeoffs with that decision. Apparently, you could imagine Hitch is probably smoking. Got a corduroy...

AUBREY: And probably three to one drinks to--

CHRIS: Yeah, that's correct.

AUBREY: For sure. 

CHRIS: He's got a corduroy shirt rolled up, like an oversized brown corduroy shirt and the sleeves are rolled up. And he said, "Douglas, in life, we must choose our regrets." And he said that to me, even now the hairs on my arm stand up. And he said it to me. And I was like there's something in that. Why is there something in that? He went to the bathroom and you don't want it, when you're having a conversation with a mate, you don't want to be noting things down. Like it's a podcast, he went to the bathroom, I'm frantically writing stuff down. So I'm like four Manhattans deep, and I'm thinking, I'm not going to remember this tomorrow. So what I learned about that, in life we must choose our regrets. I'd always thought that having regrets in life was a byproduct of a suboptimal decision that I'd made. If only I could have gone back and read on that decision, I could have gotten rid, I could have avoided the regret. But opportunity cost is baked into life. By us being here doing this podcast, we are not outside in the sun. The cost of doing the podcast is not being outside in the sun, and every other thing that we could be doing right now. So, even if the decision that you make is the absolute optimal perfect decision that you could make, you're still going to fear the fact that you didn't make the other one because you just never know. We're not rational beings. We can't see what the other option could have been. And even if this one's better, we still have a bit of FOMO about the thing that we didn't do. Okay, that's kind of interesting. Regrets aren't a bug, they’re a feature of life, they're baked into the fabric of existence when we have opportunity cost. Okay, well, what does he mean you need to choose your regrets? Okay, so maybe the best way to look at a decision is not what do I want to do? But which regret could I not live with? Which of these regrets couldn't I bear living with?

AUBREY: Could I bear living with?

CHRIS: Couldn't I bear living with. Which of these regrets could I not bear living with because that's the one where you think, I have to do this, I simply have to do this. And inversion is such a powerful tool with this, right? Because it's very difficult to work out what makes someone happy. But what makes someone miserable is actually a little bit easier. And when it comes to making a decision as well, okay, do I want Amsterdam or Austin? Oh, for me, a good example of this was two years ago, I knew that I was getting a little bit of itchy feet in the UK. But it would have meant leaving my business behind of 13 years that had given me all of the status and the money and the resources and the accolades, and the sense of belonging and need and all that stuff. Well, I have this desire to go traveling, to go to America to see if I can make a go of it with the podcast, and stuff like that. But I didn't know. And I realized looking back the regret that I couldn't have lived with, would have been not coming here. And it makes decisions a lot easier. The problem that you have when you try and give a one-size-fits-all answer is that they don't scale very well. You say, well, you put down the to-do list or whatever, it's like okay, well, what if it's not like that? And I think that in life, we must choose our regrets. Regrets are unavoidable. Which regret can you not live with bearing?

AUBREY: And then fast forwarding to, I think I studied a bit of Bronnie Ware's questionnaire, she worked in palliative care, at the end of life, and she listed the top deathbed regrets. Number one, I wish I would have let myself be happier. That was the one thing that people, that was the top regret, right? I wish I would have let myself be happier. So that perspective is always stuck in my mind a little bit as well. I think it's a great question. And it's a really clarifying question. And I like the inversion of which could you not live with rather than which could you live with. Because you can live with a lot, but which could you not live with? And in some ways, I guess I've been doing that a little bit, because, so I'll give an example. Vylana and I are probably going to have kids, we're going to start trying in about 15 months.

CHRIS: That's very specific. 

AUBREY: Okay, so I'll tell you why. So we met at Burning Man in 2016. We've never been to Burning Man together as a couple, we've been three times with different partners, and we weren't together. And then we're going to go this year, we're going to have a blast, I'm pretty confident. And then I want to do one more with her before we have kids. Once you have kids, it's a different story. It's more complicated, not that it's impossible. People bring kids there, we can get a huge family, grandmom, and the whole situation, it's all good. But nonetheless, things fundamentally change. And the relationship changes from a dyad to a family. And I've seen in every friend no matter what strategy or style they have, shit changes significantly. And I'm thinking about this next 14 months. And part of me is driven to, I could write two books in these 14 months, but then I think about when I was writing a book, and how many times I watched my former partner, Whitney, just out having a blast. And there was one time I was actually looking over, out the window at this pool party that was happening, and I was in the editing process. I couldn't leave, I was there all day. And just every once in a while looking out and writing. And that was the right choice then. The right choice was to write the book then. But now in this 14-month window, really what I've been arriving at is the regret that I couldn't live with, is not enjoying this. Of course, there's the beauty and the joy of having a family and raising kids. All that's great. But at the end of all that, if I said, oh yeah, for that 14 months that we had, just as us, as lovers on this extended honeymoon after I sold my company and all this, I worked my ass off instead of just really enjoying it, I don't think I can live with that. And so I think that's really, as I'm talking through this with you, it's just reifying that decision that was still kind of flimsy, because I'm still conflicted. Fuck, I want to do stuff, I love doing stuff. In some ways, I'm a bit addicted to doing stuff. And so offering my gifts and having the impact of that kind of reciprocity loop of giving and receiving which is immediate. And I can do that but I think I can't live with not just fucking loving every moment of this little stretch that I have.

CHRIS: I think it makes a lot more sense to me that there would be a problem with you trying to write a book, which let's be honest, can wait. It can wait, but this can't. I have a friend, George Mac and he's got this great idea. I really struggled with looking at things over like duration perspective. I really tend to see things that whatever it is now is going to be forever and that's just a little, it's like availability bias I guess, or scope neglect basically as far as biases go. But he's like look, which of these decisions that you're looking at are reversible? And which of these are postponable? If you can postpone something and/or reverse it, dude, it doesn't matter. You can just do that whenever you want. If it's reversible, you can do it now and you can turn it back around. And if it's, I want to go to Amsterdam for the summer, that's fine. I can go for a week and I hate it, and I come back, why am I even worried? Right? Postoponable, the book. Doesn't need to be written now. Maybe there's pressure from a publisher or whatever, but they're going to listen.

AUBREY: That doesn't matter. The pressure that I feel is actually, so this is the thing that actually makes it conflicting. What's conflicting is the world is very tumultuous, in a transition right now. And I also can play out a scenario where I can't live with the regret that in this crucial period, in this crucial time, I didn't deliver the very best of what I had to deliver, so that it could actually affect change in this period. So this is the dilemma that's difficult. My own personal life, enjoyment, satisfaction, happiness is a clear choice, but then my desire to be of service at the time when the world feels like it needs the most service is like that's the tricky part. Because you have to kind of predict, is everything going to be alright? Are we going to be okay?

CHRIS: How selfish is this? How much am I doing this for me versus other people? Well, I already serve other people, so maybe I don't need to serve them anymore. Well, maybe you need to serve them a little, this is a bit of a crisis, and this is the “dah dah dah”. That's a neurosis. 

AUBREY: Yeah, it does. And it keeps me somewhat under a constant level of stress, because I haven't chosen a path. And there's an old wisdom from Carlos Castaneda that he was a crazy person, but had a lot of wisdom. And it was, pick a path, any path with heart and just follow that path. I think one of the challenges is, we're on a path. And at least for me, I'm continually second guessing, is this the right path? Should I be doing this? Or should I be doing this? And I think it's important in this period, that I fucking pick a path, because riding, straddling both of these surfboards as they get wider, I'm going to pull a groin.

CHRIS: It's exhausting, man. I mean, you probably would be familiar with the Zeigarnik effect. So this famous psychologist was studying waiters and waitresses in a restaurant, and everyone would have been to a restaurant before. And the waiter comes up, and he's got his hands behind his back. And he says, "What would everybody like?" And you're homeboy's not got a notepad. And then everybody starts reading it off, and he's able to go, I always find that particularly impressive. I always think that's pretty cool. 

AUBREY: It gives me a lot of anxiety. 

CHRIS: Because he's going to get it wrong? He's going to come back with a medium well, instead of--

AUBREY: I ask them to pull out and write it down. I don't trust you. Don't tell me to trust you. I've had plenty of evidence of many times where I've ordered a bunch of shit and not gotten it because you were so cocky about your fucking memory skills. No time to show off, just pull it out for my sake. And I do it very nicely. I'm like, listen, just for me, just for my own comfort, if you wouldn't mind, I would like for you to write this down.

CHRIS: Imagine if he got his notepad out, and he's just writing down, knob.

AUBREY: Yeah, this fucking guy. 

CHRIS: That's a dick.

AUBREY: Spit in his food, which I will tell you later, because I don't need to write it down now. 

CHRIS: So, he was looking at these waiters and waitresses that worked in restaurants. And he found that while the checks were still open, while the food hadn't been delivered to the table, they were very, very good at recall, because they had an open loop. But as soon as the food had been checked off, and they delivered it, they had basically no recollection of what each table was. And this has been called the Zeigarnik effect. This is used in Netflix shows. So the way that they get you to stay on after the next episode is an open loop. Oh, it's a cliffhanger, what's Tommy Shelby going to do next with this guy that he's going to shoot in the head or whatever? That's how they keep you hooked. So, the brain abhors open loops, really, really dislikes them. And what you have and what anybody else who likes to question not only how to do the path, but the path itself, you're just living with open loops. And that's what gives you that ambient anxiety. It's just this pervasive sense of, should I be doing this? Should I be doing this? And it's an exhausting question to ask. It doesn't allow you to focus on the thing that you're doing. You're constantly stress testing. Don't think about the red elephant. Like the very thing that you're trying not to do gets tested up against what you're doing. So you're always just bouncing off this question. And it distracts you, and it makes you feel stressed, and it makes you feel anxious. All that.

AUBREY: Yeah, that needs to be, that I would like to resolve. I would like to resolve that. And I think it's just going to come with, going back to this, all right, I'm going to have regrets. I will never avoid regrets. And so I'm going to make a choice and I'm going to live with this regret. And for me, one or the other, there's a potential for great regrets. One is a guaranteed regret however. The guaranteed regret is if I work my ass off over these 14 months, and the world just kind of figures it out. And then I'll be like, damn, I really could have postponed this, and I could have fucking enjoyed this time of my life.

CHRIS: Depends on whether or not it's a bigger regret to wake up in 14 months in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Your kids are born into some Mad Max nightmare.

AUBREY: But then also there's the question of, well, how much would I really have been able to... Exactly. Could I have made a substantive difference in that?

CHRIS: This comes back to that question we had at the start about, like a mission for life or a purpose for life and stuff. And the paradox of choice is a real thing, man. For people to say, oh, what an awful decision that you've got to make, do I want to write the book? Or do I want to go and spend 14 months with my brand new wife before we make a family and stuff like that? Yeah, there are people out there, I've just come back from Guatemala, there's people that don't have shoes there. There are people there who objectively have more difficult lives to lead. But an existential crisis is an oddly luxurious position to be in, because you need the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to be filled before you can actually start to. The guys in World War One weren't concerned about whether they were fulfilling their logos or not, they just didn't want to get shot the next day. That doesn't mean that the pain, the sort of existential pressure that you feel doesn't hurt. It's still a very difficult decision to make. Should I stay in this relationship or should I leave? Should I stay in this job or should I not? Should I move? Should I decide to try and change a different path? Should I let go of the friends that I've been with for a long time? These aren't life and death decisions. They still hurt, still very difficult, and can still cause a lot of pain. 

AUBREY: Yeah, I think in the World War One example, of course, in that famous story of over Christmas, where they called a ceasefire, and they started collecting bodies in no man's land. And then they ultimately ended up having some conversations with whatever languages they can share.

CHRIS: They got a football.

AUBREY: And then they ended up playing a game of football. And so everybody hears the story. But after that, the deep pain that was felt by the soldiers is probably a story that hasn't been emphasized. Because if you follow the story through, there's reports of the officers, they didn't want to go fight each other anymore after that. December 27 comes around, it's like, okay, back to the mustard gas and fucking shooting them, and they're like, I just played football with these guys, they're kids, like--

CHRIS: "What, you mean, Klaus, the guy with a killer right foot? You want me to shoot him?" 

AUBREY: He can bend it. 

CHRIS: He sweeps it in from the right like no one's business. 

AUBREY: And at that point, the officers literally had to threaten to shoot their own men to get them to actually fight again. So in World War Two, for example, I think there was never that moment because it was whoa, this is clearly evil. This is ostensibly evil. So in that case, that war was such a clear path. So it was horror upon horrors. War is always horror. But nonetheless, they weren't troubled by that fundamental choice. And so, it can even go in war unless something's really clear, unless it's oh, I've got no choice. And there's this kind of beauty in this, and a mission that's so clear, that you have no other fucking choice. And in there, there's this complete surrender of all other ideas. And it's just one single thing that you're focusing on.

CHRIS: That's liberation. I remember when I was 16, man, I used to do kung fu. And we would go away every summer to a kung fu camp. I would be one of the youngest guys that was there. And I remember, we sat around a campfire. And one of the guys asked, what weird thing would you like to do when you grow up, but you know that you're probably not going to do it? One of the things I said was, I'd really love to join the army, because I would really love to have my decision making taken out of my hands for a significant period of time. And for someone to just tell me what I need to do. I think I've always liked the idea of committing myself to one thing, without questioning whether or not this is the thing that I should be committing myself to. And that was when I was 16, man. I'm 34, 18 years I've been playing with this question, this direction around what am I doing? How should I be doing it? Have I got the motivation to continue doing it? And then you just rinse and repeat. The blog post actually that I took that Confucius quote from is called, What Do You Want to Want? It's by Kyle Eschenroeder, it's available online. It's one of the best blog posts I've ever read. The question, what do you want to want, is what you were touching on earlier on, the Jewish thing from 4000 years ago. It's a really interesting question. Not what do you want? Because what you want is influenced by your past traumas and the path of least resistance and social norms and mimetic influence of your friends and all that shit. What do you want to want? Genuinely, think about what do you want to want in your life? And it's such an unbelievable question. I think it's Aristotle that says, to the man who doesn't have a destination, no wind is favorable. If you don't know where you're going, or where you want to go, you could literally end up at the end of your life in a place not only that you don't want to be but that you didn't even mean to get to. And this is why for all of the pain and all of the discomfort of questioning, what am I doing with my life? Is this the right thing to do? Stress testing the heading that you're on, the direction that you're on is important, because it ensures that you don't end up spending an entire life climbing up a ladder that's against the wrong wall.

AUBREY: Yeah, these are the fundamental questions. And I think we may be talking, people might say, oh, these are questions just for you guys. They're not. And if you can't see the application to your own life, you're not looking carefully enough, because these decisions are made in small micro choices all the time in every little moment of, should I go out drinking tonight? Or should I go read this book? Should I do this or this? 

CHRIS: Do I tip the waiter or not? Do I drive or walk?

AUBREY: Right. These constant choices. And so, you want to get to a period, a place of choiceless choice, where you make a choice, but it feels like this is the clear and decisive choice. And sometimes you just have to fucking choose, like that Castaneda thing, like just pick a path. Pick a path, stick with it. And then of course, you can change at a certain point. We all will. Reversible, as you're saying. And I think it's a very important lesson. It was a lesson that came up for me when I was in my darkness retreat. In the darkness retreat, I had the choice to leave the darkness. And it was brutal. It was hard. 

CHRIS: Were you tempted to leave? 

AUBREY: Fucking every day. 

CHRIS: Why? 

AUBREY: Well, it was bringing up a lot of intensely difficult things from my own consciousness. And it's a very difficult situation. No light, no sound, no people. I'm just in a completely black room by myself. So there were so many other reasons that I was saying, ah, I could just meditate out in the forest. It's a beautiful forest out here. Why don't I just, all of these different voices, but I'm super grateful that I just stuck with a choice. And I tend to double back on my choices more often than I would like. I'll have a clear direction, and then I'll be like, I'm not sure about that. But the times that I've really stuck with it, because I've made a commitment. It's like backing your commitment. There's something very important about that. And there's something about trusting yourself, when you actually make a commitment that you will do it. So even from a meta perspective, trusting that you can trust your commitments, is also very important. So that could be a time limit that I set, just thinking personally. So I'm not just giving advice randomly, I'm talking to myself, obviously. Just set a time commitment, like this, potentially this 14 months. Like okay, listen, I'm not going to save the world in the next 14 months. Sure, potentially, my work could contribute to the betterment if I doubled down on that. But for the rest of my life, I will never be able to regain these 14 months. So I'm going to live with the regret that could arise if Apocalypse happens. I could have had some clever book or something that could have helped. I mean, I have to be able to live with that, and look that straight in the eye, allow it to wash over me, feel all what that might feel like and say, "Okay, I'm okay with that." And I commit to this. And I'm going to do it.

CHRIS: Oliver Berkman in 4,000 weeks talks about choosing in advance what you want to suck at, is a good way to inform your life direction, and it's so good. So okay, what do I want? Here's the thing that I think I might want to do, what would be the sacrifices that I would need to make in order to do that? This year I want to gain 10 pounds of lean muscle mass. I think that it's really going to benefit my confidence. And I've always wanted to look stronger, and blah blah blah, and maybe I'm getting older, and I want to do it now before I'm in my 50s. And I know it's going to be really, really difficult, something like that. I mean, what would be the things, what do I need to suck at? Well, I'm probably not going to be as social because I'm not going to be able to go out on late nights drinking as much, because I'm going to have this started. Maybe I'm going to have to deal with injuries a little bit more. I'm going to have to deal with the pain of perhaps suffering with injuries. Maybe there's going to be a cost involved with food and supplements and bodywork and blah, blah, blah. Okay, those are the things that I need to suck at. My finances might take a hit, my social stuff, I really want to find a partner this year. Okay, well, that means you're going to be going out a bit more, probably not going to be great for your gym routine. Might not be great for your work or your career, your finances, but that's the thing. Okay, so again, what are you prepared to suck at? What regrets are you prepared to live with? Could be another way to put that and which ones aren't you? Those are good ways to clarify the direction that people are going in, I think.

AUBREY: When it comes to the anxiousness and the anxiety, I've been meditating on that a bit. And what I've realized that I do, and I think most people do is we look at all of these potential timelines of all of the realities that could manifest in the future. And we project a version of ourselves out to those potential future timelines, like scouts, like sending the scouts ahead of the army to see what this path holds, right? And I send scouts out to all of these disparate paths. And in most of the paths that I'm sending them out, the scouts suffer. And that's what I'm doing on purpose. I'm sending a part of myself out to suffer in this potential timeline if things go this certain way, and get the feedback. Like oh, yeah, in this timeline, this is how I could suffer. So I'm constantly pushing out little versions, little avatars of myself to suffer and all of the potential consequences of all of these different paths, and then getting feedback. I'm like, how's it going out there? And they're like, it sucks. I'm like, great, good feedback. Keep it up. Stay with it. Keep telling me, send the reports. And it's like, it sucks bad.

CHRIS: The problem that you have there is that you live a protracted version of that suffering yourself. Yeah, it's not quite the same thing, but actually dealing with it just a little bit. So let's talk about what the issue is if you decide not to do this, right? If you decide not to follow your instincts. We started off talking about intuition and cognition here. And you can think yourself into and out of a lot of difficult problems. So, I asked a friend about how it is that you deal with following your instinct? How do you have the bravery to follow your instinct? A lot of the people that are listening are going to be cerebrally minded, right? They're going to really, really enjoy using their brains to figure stuff out because they're inquisitive and curious and stuff. Tell me the story about a guy who was the editor of a newspaper, a very successful editor of a newspaper in England, and he decided that he was going to release a play about Prince Charles on the West End in London. And the entire thing was going to be done in rhyming couplets. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn't very successful. I don't think it even finished the first night, there was no one left in the audience. And half of the cast had gone home, apparently, by halfway through. And he'd gone and asked this guy about, look, this is a bit of a, and he was dejected, right? He made this big song and dance about it, and he had been promoting it and stuff. And it was a huge failure. We asked him, how is it that you're dealing with this problem? And he said, "Well, I followed my instincts." Said well, yeah, but I mean, we can see where your instincts have got you here. Said yeah, your instincts may lead you wrong, but they're the only thing that's ever led you right. And I thought, you motherfucker, that's really, really good. So, maybe there's a price to pay for allowing your instinct to come through. Maybe you're going to put a bunch of trades on, and some of them are going to end up in a loss. But some of them are going to end up in a really, really big gain. Those are the ones that you need to be focusing on. And maybe, Nassim Taleb talks about this a lot. This was the whole point of his Black Swan events. He was prepared to be made to look stupid consistently in small amounts, because he knew that he was going to win absolutely huge. Now, it's not quite to do with instinct. But it is the same sort of concept. If you're not careful, you'll dampen down the ability to hear that intuition, that aggregated subconscious speaking through, right?  And by following that, you're going to end up with egg on your face, with a play about Prince Charles and rhyming couplets and nobody in the audience and half of the cast gone home. However, if you accept the fact that that may be a cost that you need to pay, in order to be able to follow your instinct, in order to be able to cultivate that and have faith in the fact that over the long run, if you aggregate it out over 10 or 20 years of trading in life, that you're going to end up in a significantly better place than you would have been. So maybe that's the price that you need to pay, the price you need to pay for following your instinct is looking like an idiot sometimes, but winning big other times.

AUBREY: The place that instinct arises from, this is an interesting question as well. And I've thought about this in terms of Savant syndrome, which for many people, we saw the movie "Rain Man", did you ever see the movie "Rain Man" with Dustin Hoffman? 

CHRIS: No. 

AUBREY: It's an example, a Hollywood example of Savant syndrome, where basically, you could drop a series of toothpicks, and the Savant could actually calculate how many toothpicks were dropped. Now, this is not something that the conscious mind could do. Similar to the motorbike races on the Isle of Man, like you couldn't actually consciously decide what to do. But there's something in you that's calculating at a far greater level than your cognitive mind can calculate. And this is something that I think gives some substance to what instinct might be, is just basically, it's the micro calculations that are happening through the entirety of your being. Whether that's your consciousness, which is not localized to your brain, or whether it's the intelligence of your body, the whole neuronal network that your body is feeling in this kind of sense, or the inner connection to the field, that can actually feel the energy of the field as we always can. But again, it's subtle. But I'd like to think of instinct is not some magical force, but it's just the latent ability for us to make calculations at a far greater rate and a far higher efficiency than our cognitive mind can make. And that actually helps me trust my instincts, because I like to understand, well, why am I trusting my instincts anyways? When I break it down to alright, there's just micro calculations that are happening, as evidenced by real cases of Savant syndrome, where people are doing astonishing things without actually thinking about it, because they're tapped into that latent subconscious process, because part of their conscious mind is actually shut off. And it gives them this ability. And then I'm like “alright, so just trust, trust that I'm calculating this far better than my mind is calculating it.”

CHRIS: Here's the thing with that, you have to go through the first stages of confusion training before you can do that. Because it's very easy to look at, I'm just going to follow my instinct as, if I'd done this 15 years ago, as a 19-year-old kid, hang on, hang on, what instinct am I optimizing on here? I haven't aggregated enough experience to actually be able to have this. So, I really do think, and this is the point I was making in the very beginning around the tension between cognition and intuition. You need to be very deliberate in the beginning, you have to. You have to understand where the steering wheel is, and how to change gear and how to use the clutch or not if you're in America, but you have to understand those things. Only after learning those very deliberately, can you then do that on a racetrack whilst optimized--

AUBREY: Because you're still training the calculator. The calculator is your subconscious mind. It is your inherent faculties, which still needs to be trained by the rigor of the discipline of going through the process of training. And then once it's trained, then it's calculating at a far higher level, it's the same with any sport.

CHRIS: Here's a good example. So I got back to my Airbnb after being in Guatemala for a couple of days, like nearly two weeks. And the first time that I stayed in the same place. Airbnb has absolutely had my pants down this year. The first time I stayed in this place, my phone charger was in one location, but it was too close to my desk, and I was using my phone while I was at my desk. So when I came back in the beginning of March, I put it in a different location. Last night, when I got back in, I'd put it in location number one. However, on the very, very evening, as I was about to go to bed, I found myself walking to location number two. That was the one that was most recent, that was the one that I spent the most time in. And it made me think, hang on a second, my charger should be over here, this is the place that I optimized it for. I'd consciously plugged it into the wrong place, location number one, less optimal. And where did my body take me? It took me to the place that it knew it was correct. I also have a friend who told me this story. So, he was out somewhere over in Asia. And he was always saying he's very, very attuned to his intuition, unbelievably so, and he's a quantitative trader. So he's like the most rational trader that you can. It's all algorithms, it's technology. And it was in this bar, and they were sat. You can imagine those sort of sunken booths that you have in Asian bars where it's the floor, and then the floor falls away into a circle, and you sit with your legs into the floor of the circle. The floor is padded, and you sit around a circular table in the middle of it, right? So the floor is completely flat, table's flat, and then people sort of sit and their legs dangle over the sides. And he was there with a couple and his wife, and apparently his wife is familiar with him to have a sense of something. And she sort of knows when it's bullshit and when it's not. And he got this really, really, really bad sense as he sat down with his friends, and it's a sort of a long, busy bar. He got this really, really bad sense, and he looks at his wife and he's like, "Honey, we need to get under the table." She's like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "I'm telling you." And then immediately she went from what do you mean, to okay, deadpan. He tells the other two people, he says, when I tell you to get down, we need to get underneath the table. "What?" Imagine one of your friends said that, and they're not bought into his ability to tell these stories and he's like, look, look at us, I'm not fucking about when I tell you need to go under the table. As he's saying that, someone picks up a bottle of vodka and cracks the waiter across the head with it. He says, "Get under now." Sure enough, the guy that he was with, that cracked him across the head with it, pulls an Uzi out of the inside of his coat and sprays the entire bar. These guys are underneath the floor, underneath this table. Nobody was killed, one person was injured. And it turned out to be some gangland Yakuza territory type stuff that occurred. And 20 seconds before it happened, he was like, something's going on here. And he's got 10 stories that showing that. Okay, what is it?

AUBREY: Well, to me that makes sense, he's again, talking about the connection to the field, right? I strongly believe that. I tried to write a book called "Mastery of Mind'. And what ended up breaking that book got me to 60,000 words, and I had to scrap it twice, is that I could not adequately separate and contain the mind, from the field or from the body. Like you just can't. You can draw an imaginary line but it's not real. The mind and the body, of course, are so interwoven and inextricably woven together. Well, where does one start, and where's one end? And then the field, which is the, it's the energetics of what's actually happening from heart resonance to different things, even mirror neurons, even different ideas that exist, and all of these things that are happening in the field. And also, potentially the cues that are happening from those people around. Like that latent sense of violence that was imminent in space, right? And we just don't have the right language and science and whatever to calculate that. But my stepfather was a SWAT team officer, and has similar stories. Stories about, he was supposed to go down this alley, and he gets this intuition that he just can't go down this alley, someone was laying an ambush with a shotgun. Like how? It's either completely magical, or that you just trust the field. You trust that you're tapped into the field. And when there's something amiss in the field, you can feel it. Some part of you in your soul or in your spiritual sense can actually, which is connected to the field to connect itself can feel what that is. So that's absolutely a part of our intuition. And potentially, what the training that we need to take for that is to just train ourselves to listen, because so many times even like small things, even small things, I'll have weird feelings. Like we have two cats, and I'll be like, I should probably move that bottle off the counter. And then I'll be like, fuck it. I'll go off and do my thing, and then skippity pat pat pat, crash! And I'm like, I fucking knew I should have move that thing. But I almost always know. Recently, I was... Stupid thing. Obviously nothing with Uzis or shotguns, I'm not living that kind of life, thankfully. But like I was borrowing my wife's phone. And I was simultaneously moving a rock. I had no pockets. Heavy rock, right? And I was like, "You should put the phone down." And I was like nah, I got this. I can carry the phone and the rock, like don't worry about it. It was a strong message, put the phone down. Well, of course, what ended up happening is I did succeed in carrying both the rock and the phone, except now her phone screen has a giant scratch on it from where the phone scratched up against the rock. And I think to myself, bro, you got a clear message that just put the fucking phone. Of course, it ultimately doesn't matter. She'll get a new screen. No big deal, but it's annoying. And these things happen. Of course, there's the big dramatic stories, like you said, but these things happen, where we just have a sense of calculation of things that could either be from the field of what's going to happen. Maybe it's the cats that I'm feeling in the field, or maybe it's, I don't fucking know, but it's worth trusting. That's the thing that I do know.

CHRIS: One of the things I worked on for a long time, when I was younger, in my 20s, I'd spent a long time building up a persona. And it's actually a lesson I learned from you on our first ever podcast. You said the persona is incapable of receiving love, it can only receive praise. And I did a TEDx talk that used that as one of the main hooks in the middle of it. And I wondered what does it mean that the persona can't receive love, it can only receive praise? If you've spent so long cultivating a mask, cultivating a persona that you're playing to everybody, you begin to distance yourself from feeling like you're in touch with any of the things that you do. So we don't love Russell Crowe, we love Gladiator. We don't love Chris Hemsworth, we love Thor, right? And this is how you can feel alone in a crowd, a hollowing victory because people aren't applauding you. They're applauding the role that you play. They're applauding the mask.

AUBREY: Yeah, you literally say I loved you in, and they're like--

CHRIS: Well, love me now.

AUBREY: "Oh, I loved you in Gladiator."

CHRIS: But when I came out of Gladiator, am I Prick or something now? What's going on? Okay, that's interesting. And what I realized was that throughout my 20s, because I was so desperate to be wanted and needed by people. I was very unpopular in school. And I'd found success running club nights, and that meant people needed me. I was like, wow, if I can continue to lean into this, people will need me more. And I've never been needed before. So I started to be the person that was needed by people. I wasn't me, because I was adamant that the Christopher that I was, would be rejected or not needed or not wanted, or whatever, by people. So I would play the role that they wanted me to play, and continue to split test different options of. Someone would ask me a question about my opinion about something, and I would think, what did they want to hear?

AUBREY: It's classic seduction, actually.

CHRIS: Except this was scaled across my entire life. Everybody--

AUBREY: Which is still, I mean, people try to reduce seduction to the sexual, it's not. Seduction is something that we play out in every aspect of our life. We're seducing somebody into a response that we want, and we want from them. We're seducing a relationship.

CHRIS: So, I've done this for a long time throughout most of my 20s, stood on the front door of a nightclub. I've stood in the door of a million, seen a million people going into about a thousand club nights that I've run. Being on the door a lot. What I'd done is I'd drilled this version of me where I didn't even know what my own truth was. I didn't know what I thought, I didn't know what I believed. So my intuition has been quieten down so much, because I'm playing third, fourth, fifth degree of separation away from who I am. I've layered personas upon personas to work out what I need to be. And I realized that what that meant was that I couldn't really work out what my own truth is. I couldn't work out what it was that I truly believed. I couldn't work out where it was that I actually belonged in something. And the problem that you have is that you can't trust yourself, the same way as if you had a friend who kept on saying that they would meet you out for dinner at six o'clock. And consistently, they wouldn't show up until 7:30, or maybe not show up at all. After a little while, you just stop trusting that that friend can deliver on anything. And in the same way, I kept on breaking promises to myself about being truthful or being honest, or being virtuous or having integrity or doing things in the way that I wanted to do. So I needed to make a really, really big change then. And I wonder whether there is an equivalent with intuition as well. Whether there's an equivalent, by saying, I need to accept the fact that following my intuition is going to have some costs. And I'm going to end up with egg on my face in the West End of London sometimes. But overall, it's going to be victorious. Overall, it's going to net out to a better end. And that the more that I can put my faith in my intuition, the stronger it's going to get, the more that I'm going to be able to believe that this is something which is not only profitable, but an enjoyable strategy for me to follow in my life. And the same way that you can build up trust in yourself by making small promises and fulfilling them. I will go to the gym tomorrow, and then you go to the gym and you're like, "Holy fuck, I did it." I'm here, I didn't think I was going to do it and I did. So you can start small. Like when people say, I don't like the person that I am, it's mostly because they're not keeping promises to themselves. I say, look, start very, very small, commit to doing very, very little things, but build it up over time. And before you know it, you're going to be with an amazing morning routine and meditating and training and your partner is going to believe everything that you say, because you're going to be telling them the truth, and you're going to be open and vulnerable and caring and blah, blah. Okay, well, what about the same with intuition? How can we allow ourselves to give that room to swell and space to grow?

AUBREY: Yeah, intuition is a skill. Intuition is a skill. And I think it's important also to disambiguate intuition from impulse, right? Because those things get conflated and dangerously so. Like you'll receive, let's say, somebody says something that gets you flustered on social media. Your impulse is to clap right back, right? And that's an impulse. It's not your intuition. Your intuition isn't to call that guy a fucking troll, or whatever you want to call him, or however you want to do it. It's an impulse. It's an impulse based on an emotional response. So, being mindful that impulses happen in the height in the fire of an emotion often, or in the deep longing and craving for something, or the fear of something. That's where impulses are. Intuition typically happens in the quiet. And if you're going to actually tap into your intuition, you've got to get still. Even if you're in some heightened sense of like a hall at war, it's always like, if you kind of can go there yourself, you'll see there's a moment of quiet. It's like, let's get quiet for a second, let's let the fear go, let's let the anger. Let's tap into the intuition which comes as the whisper, the whisper that's coming through and you have to get still. And the impulse is going to be hot and fiery and loud. And just making sure you go, "Okay, I know the difference between these two."

CHRIS: Well, we're both friends with Cory Allen, right? And he calls that the mindfulness gap. And that's the best description, the best justification for people that are, meditation is not for me, I've tried it, I just don't really see the, I'm okay. I don't need to sit underneath the tree and think about my thoughts. The ability to have just a small breakwater between stimulus and response is a fucking superpower. The fact that something can happen, and in between that thing happening and you're responding to it, you get just a beat, where you can go, "Huh, interesting." And then whatever happened, however you choose to respond, that is a superpower. And that's one of the biggest differences, I think over five years of consistent meditation for me, has been my ability to just have a tiny, tiny, little bit, but that is the moment that allows intuition to come through, I think. And that is also the one that negates the impulsivity a little bit.

AUBREY: That's it. So, I had a recent musing that I think would be fun to explore with you. Haven't made a social media post about it. But I was exploring the idea of shame. And we understand that protracted carrying of shame is one of the most detrimental things to your physical, mental, emotional, spiritual health, right? Shame and guilt. These are these anti-life energies, they're the lowest vibrational energies that you can really feel. And many people who try to chart such things, but you can just feel it, like shame is. And so, we can obviously put that aside and be well, let's banish all shame. And in some ways, that makes sense. But I started to see the virtue in it. Because ultimately, shame is creating a situation where you have the opportunity to learn, you have the opportunity to learn from a choice that you made. It's a natural response. And I feel like Jordan Peterson might have talked about this at some point, but maybe it's just kind of in the vein of the things that he would talk about. So I want to give him potential credit. If you ceded this idea, and I can't exactly--

CHRIS: That's when you know you've made it, by the way. Sorry, I need to tell you this. There's something called Churchillian drift. Have you heard of this? 

AUBREY: Uh-uh.

CHRIS: Okay. So many, many, many quotes from people that just say, "Churchill once said," and what you realize is that tons of the quotes that are attributed to Churchill weren't said by him at all. And there's a term for it, it's Churchillian drift. And it's like you just need somebody to say that this quote came from, and most people just go, "It must have been Churchill." And that's when you know you've made it. That when people are attributing to you ideas that you didn't even have, that's Peterson. You're like fucking, I'm shilling your ideas that you didn't even have. That's when you've made it. 

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. So whether he did or did not, and whether I'm shilling him or not, ultimately, this idea was that this shame exists. And it's an incredibly painful thing. And one of the problems is what creates what you call the shadow is those things typically, shame casts a huge shadow. Because we're afraid to face our shame, so we pretend that that thing didn't happen. We don't even remember that we did it. We're not acknowledging that that's something that we're doing. It's blind to us. The shadow is a place that's ultimately it's blind to. But what you can do is, if you have courage to face your shame, courage then becomes the alchemical mercury that transforms shame into integrity, right? Like if you actually face it, and be like wow, I'm fucking ashamed of that. And you face it head on and then layer in, practice your forgiveness, forgive yourself, because we're all flawed, we all fuck up, we've all done little shitty uncharacteristic things. All of us have. Little moments of dishonesty, little lapses in integrity, little places where you could have showed up like a hero and you showed up like a coward. All of us have had those things. If we have a strong judge, then we're going to have even more shame because we're going to punish ourselves more relentlessly. But if you just have the courage to just face your shame, then that's actually what builds integrity. And it really gave me this whole, kind of turned this idea of shame on its head to almost go, like looking for those things. Like alright, what am I ashamed of? And just stare at it long enough and let it really wash over you. Don't turn away, don't put it back in the shadow, or justify it. Just look at it, look at it until it does its work. And then when it does its work. That's where you get to start to build your integrity.

CHRIS: Well, it suggests something that you care about. This is what Daniel Pink's new book, "The Power of Regret" is about. He says that people would love to get rid of regret. One of the most common regrets that people have actually is that they bullied somebody in school. Interesting regret to have. I'm not sure if it's thankfully or not, but I would have been on the receiving end of the bullying. So at least, I had to suffer with the bullying, but at least don't have to regret being the bully. It points you towards something that you care about very much, which is good. It's the same as anxiety. Anxiety only exists of the things that you care about. And maybe you wish that you didn't care about them. But it's very good at focusing your attention towards something that you're concerned with. Shame is a very, very interesting one. I feel like for me, definitely, I said this to my therapist and coach, Vinny Shoreman the other day. I mentioned that I wish I had more courage and more bravery to do the things that I want to do in life, to commit myself to the decisions perhaps, to commit myself to my intuition, you could even say. And I don't know where, I don't know how you build that up. That's something that for me, I'm really, really working at to try and no longer be someone that is able to convince themselves that not committing to something that every fiber of your being is screaming to do. That's a very, very difficult thing to do. And the shame around not committing to that. I think, especially as a man, you're supposed to be courageous and brave. You're supposed to protect, preside, provide, right? These are the things that you're supposed to do. It's difficult, it's very, very difficult to do that, especially when you have no reason, no legitimate reason not to. It's like simply the inertia of my own fear is what's stopping me from doing things that I know that I should do, committing to decisions that I know that I should do. But it is a teacher, man. It directs you toward things. The problem is, I think, getting stuck in a place that I've got stuck in a lot, which is having all of the shame and not learning from it particularly, or not having the bravery or the courage or the commitment or whatever it might be to actually be able to get yourself past that. Peak patterns.

AUBREY: Yeah, I think the idea that I'm just playing with now is that in the sitting, just the sitting in shame, that starts to create a level of suffering, that then compels you to do it differently. Because if you shun it, and if you dodge it and slip it and duck it and wall yourself from the shame, then it's not going to apply this significant enough pressure to cause you to actually make the change. So, it's almost like this is a way. And of course you can get overblown, we can still be ashamed about something that we've already learned. Now once you've learned it, and when you've changed the behavior, and it's already become integrity, that's when you gotta let it go. 

CHRIS: Yes. 

AUBREY: You fucking got to let it go. And also, we kind of overblow it a little bit too, because we're ashamed of things that we should not be ashamed of. Because universally, we all have the same things. Universally, everybody's been in the same position as you. Universally, we've all been questioned by our partner, and come up with a slightly slippery answer, or a slightly slippery justification. We just patently forgot to think about them. "Oh, did you grab me some silverware?" I'll be like, "No, I thought you grabbed it." No, actually, I just didn't think about you at that moment. You know what I mean? But that's like--

CHRIS: Can't say that. 

AUBREY: That's shameful. But ultimately, if we realized that we all do it, and then we sit in that, and then we acknowledge that and say, hey, actually, I didn't and I wasn't thinking about you then. I was just thinking about me eating my food and not you eating your food, and sorry. 

CHRIS: I'll go do it. 

AUBREY: Yeah, and then that moment comes and they feel like, wow, that was rude but very honest. That moment actually has the power to teach, that becomes like a didactic moment of okay, and I think this is like the beautiful part about sharing these things that we're ashamed about is, it allows us to face it, we have to face, also, the criticism of the crowd. We can't do this thing in isolation, all the criticisms, and look at it. And also we're going to likely receive some gratitude because everybody's carrying all of this shame thinking that they're the only ones that's ever been an asshole. And everybody else is perfect and courageous and doesn't have fear and goes out towards their runs like David Goggins every day, and wakes up like Jocko every day at 4:00 am. No, we all have this stuff, but it seems very important to me to just acknowledge it, feel it, feel the shame, and then let it go and learn.

CHRIS: One of the problems that you have is that some people, perhaps myself included, are very, very good at self-flagellation, when it comes to just being able to sit with the shame and allow that to sometimes become recursive. Shame about shame is very, very difficult to deal with, right? Like I feel ashamed of myself, and oh my God, how shameful.

AUBREY: In the same logic, if you allow yourself to sit with the shame of being shameful, then that can actually teach you not to be shameful.

CHRIS: It can, unless your ability to deal with self-created suffering, is greater than your ability to or your desire to try and move past it. Because that is like this liminal space in between the two, right? That is the hallway between the two of them, where you get to just sit with all of the stuff that you've carried in with you, and you don't make any of the progress past it. Again, this isn't to say that I'm a coward with everything, but my point is that there are things that I know that I should have done in my past. Like, the move to America, man, it took me so long. Every fiber of my being was screaming to come out here, every single fiber. And it took me like years and years and years to actually convince myself. And maybe that's just part of being human. Maybe that's just one of the things that you have to deal with. But this is something else that I really love to talk about. This is why jealousy is such a pointless emotion. Because you look at somebody that ostensibly has it all sorted out. Elon Musk is an example, a Tiger Woods or something, right? You look at these guys, and you think, I'd love Elon Musk's work ethic or his IQ or whatever. Or I'd love Tiger Woods' golfing ability.  You go, hang on a second. You don't get to pick little items of that person's wardrobe and put them on like you're in a fucking store. It's a onesie, right? This isn't pick and choose, this is a wholesale sale. You have to take Elon Musk's body image, and his relationship with his father, and the way that his brain feels when he falls asleep in the pillow at night. And you don't know fuck all about what the actual inner landscape of that man's existence is like. Tiger Woods is a perfect example. People would love to be Tiger Woods for his golf ability. But he was racially abused by his dad on the golf course throughout his entire childhood, they even had a safe word like you do during rough sex. It was the E word and his dad would be abusing him on the golf course saying, these white people are never going to let someone like you play here. And he'd say if you ever need to make it stop, you can just tell me. Say the word and I'll make it stop. It was the E word. And he never once said it throughout his childhood, it was enough. Never once said it. You go okay, so part of the price of being Tiger Woods is to be abused by your own father, to consider winning as the only thing that is worthy, to the point where your sense of self-worth is so low that you can't hold a marriage together. You have the most public marriage failure in history. You spend more than a half a decade out of the sport with injuries because of how hard you push yourself with training. You crash your car and break both of your legs within the last 18 months, pulled over by the side of the road on antipsychotics, all of these things. That's the price that you need to pay to be Tiger Woods. That's the price that you have to pay if you want to be the best in the world. Do you want to pay that price? Most people wouldn't pay that price. And this is why jealousy is such a pointless emotion. All of these people that you're jealous of that you think have amazing lives, you don't get to pick little bits of the things that they do. And sometimes the sacrifices they need to make on route to the thing that you see is a bill that if you had to, if you looked at it at the end of the night, you'd be like, no fucking way.

AUBREY: Elon on Joe Rogan's podcast said, you wouldn't want to be me. And there was this very quiet, sincere, deep moment where you said something and I'm paraphrasing, I don't know if that's exactly what he said. But it was basically that, you wouldn't want to be me. And it was this admission of all right, there's a lot of amazing things and I know he probably has a lot of days and experiences that are unlike anything we can ever imagine. But also the quiet challenges that are carried within as he said. And I think it's a really good analogy to say it's not a piece of clothing, it's a onesie. And to just understand that, it can actually diminish these feelings of jealousy. But really, I want to also try and draw a distinction between envy and jealousy. Because to me, those are slightly different things, right? Jealousy is like the active, in some ways it has this active principle to it. You can be jealous, and of course, in a relationship, you can get jealous and you get fueled with a kind of anger. And sometimes actually, you can turn that, because I always say I was polyamorous for a while. So I dealt with jealousy a lot. And jealousy was, you're able to turn that into anger, which is not healthy, not good, but it was transmutable. It was kind of, it had a lot of energy to it. And you could also sometimes turn it into turn-on too. There's a whole field of people who get turned on by things that make them jealous. You can scroll any kind of porn search cue list, and you'll see jealousy inducing things that cause people to get turned on. It's kind of like the active principle and often is specific. Envy is cold. And I think it was Shinzen Young, the Buddhist teacher who said, envy is the hardest emotion to transmute in the Buddhist teachings. That's the one that actually you can't transmute that into something else, you actually have to go this kind of leapfrog approach, turning envy into jealousy, which is this more, almost aggressive, more passionate form of envy. But envy is just this cold, lonely, kind of dark place where you're just wishing that you were somebody else. 

CHRIS: Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good.

AUBREY: That's another fucking great way to say it.

CHRIS: Wroth, gluttony, sloth, all that stuff. They feel good in the moment, might feel shit about yourself when you reflect on it, but envy is shit now and even worse tomorrow, right? It's not a good place to be. Speaking of Shinzen Young, you see he's just released a new app? 

AUBREY: Really? 

CHRIS: Yeah, so here's five ways to know yourself, which is the best, it's what I've followed for my meditation for four years now. He's released an app that's just come out that is fantastic. It's coming on the show soon. So if you want, we should try and get him out to, we should fly him out and get him to do a--

AUBREY: Definitely. 

CHRIS: That would be great. 

AUBREY: I'd love to talk to him.

CHRIS: He's so good, man. I absolutely love that guy. But yeah, the whole envy thing is, it is interesting. It's strange to think about how much of this is pointing me toward a virtuous element of somebody that I should pick out. That's a really, really admirable trait. Tiger Woods, his work ethic. Can I have that? Can I try and take that and bring it into myself, whilst not taking in the wife running down the driveway with a golf club type thing? Like how can I pick this apart? And when it comes back to shame as well, you don't know the shame that people have to pay in order to do the stuff. So many people, as far as I can see, are driven by fears of insufficiency, rather than by desire to be better. So many of the people that I know that are unbelievably driven human beings are coming at it from a place of lack, that they are filling with accomplishments, rather than a place of abundance.

AUBREY: Yeah, desperation versus inspiration. Desperation is a much stronger driver than inspiration. And I think the skill is being able to use both, and putting yourself, and it's a dangerous territory, obviously, because you want to be mindful of what you have. But it's like exposure and response therapy, right? You're afraid of spiders. Okay, you want to get over your fear of spiders? Put a tarantula in a cage, or maybe start with a picture. Google image search. Look at spiders. Ooh, that's tough. Just do it as much as you can. You'll get used to it. All right, then get a tarantula in a cage. Well, it's not going to fuck you up. First of all, it's a tarantula. It won't bite. Second of all, it's in a cage. 

CHRIS: Do tarantulas not bite?

AUBREY: No, they don't.

CHRIS: Oh, interesting. 

AUBREY: Yeah. So, I actually did this with my ex-partner, Whitney, who is incredibly arachnophobic. And we were doing this kind of experiment, we got a tarantula in a cage. Didn't go so well. That was too much exposure. And her response was full meltdown and shrieking, crying. But ultimately, through time, and ayahuasca and a variety of things, she ended up having a whole vision with this friendly little tarantula and blah, she made it through. But it was the classic kind of exposure and response. And I think, by exposing yourself to these challenging situations then, and doing it with courage, that gives you the adaptation. But anytime you look away, look away from whatever that thing is, you're denying yourself the opportunity to adapt. It would be like if you're in the middle of a workout, and it gets hard and you stop. Well, you're not going to get the adaptation that's going to make you stronger at the end of the day. So with all of these things, it's this kind of go into the difficult stuff, go into the uncomfortable, go into this shit. Just let it wash over you, know that you're strong enough and be mindful, don't do something that's too intense. Don't go full "Fear Factor" if you're arachnophobic and have all the tarantulas crawling around you with an open mouth and having it crawl out of your mouth, like you can see on some YouTube videos. Too much. Relax. 

CHRIS: That's too much for everybody. It doesn't matter how comfortable you are with spiders.

AUBREY: For sure. 

CHRIS: There's this experiment that Jordan Peterson talks about where they put starving mice in a tube, and they wafted the smell of cheese in from the front. Rat's got a little spring attached to its tail, so it can work out the force that it pulls forward with and forces equated to desire, right? The harder it pulls, the more it wants it. You think these rats are starving, they smell the cheese from the front. There can't be anything more that they would want to do than stop themselves from starving. They do another iteration of the process. And this time they waft the smell of cheese in from the front, and the smell of a cat in from behind. And this time, the rats pull even harder. And you go, well, why would that happen given the fact that they're already starving? And his justification is that not only do you need to run towards something that you want, you need to run away from something that you fear. And I think that that's the, how can we have the virtuous conquering, forward-facing desire to make as much of ourselves and our life as we can? And how can we blend that with the fear of what happens if we don't? With a sense of duty perhaps, to use our brief time on this planet to make it as fantastic and beautiful as we can. Also consider the fact that not following your instinct, which we spoke about earlier, not following the thing that you feel like you're supposed to do, can take you to a place where you don't do the one thing that you can. So Salvador Dali is a good example of this. He's this Spanish painter, and artist from the 1900s. And he was like the most bizarre human that I've ever read about. Have you read much about Dali? 

AUBREY: A little bit. 

CHRIS: Yeah, so his parents had a child about 10 or 11 months before him called Salvador, right? And it died. And then the next child was born. And they were absolutely adamant that it was the reincarnation of their dead baby. So they called it Salvador. And by the age of 10, he's throwing himself downstairs because he's a masochist, he just loved the pain. So he'd just throw himself down the stairs. He once gave a lecture in a deep sea diving suit, and he had to be wrenched out of it, because he was suffocating on stage whilst trying to give a lecture. And then he found this woman who was in a relationship. They were both married. I think Salvador left his wife, this lady left her current partner. And he referred to her as his muse. He literally thought that she was angelic. As soon as they were married, he bought her a castle, and immediately began to treat her like royalty. This means he didn't live in the castle with her. And he had to send her a formal letter asking to be able to see her. And she would have to respond to him. He treated her like royalty. All of this together means Salvador Dali is a bizarre human. But as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn't do Dali. And DaVinci didn't do Dali. So, if Dali did anything short of being the full manifestation of him, the combination of genetics and childhood trauma and social norms and everything, if he gets rid of all of this stuff that isn't him, he knows what he wants to want, he allows that to come through. If he didn't do that, the world would have never got his work. This is the weirdness imperative, I think, that it is your duty while you're on this planet to do the thing that only you can do.

AUBREY: Yeah, celebrate your unique self. And this again goes back to the wisdom of Solomon lineage, it's this idea that you are a unique emanation of the Divine, for which without you living in your uniqueness, the Divine is incomplete. Like we are on the bleeding edge of the Divine learning about the Divine and experiencing all things. And of course, they're using a religious context of the Divine but it applies to just living your own best life as well. But it's this idea that we each are our unique self. And this unique self has to live uniquely, face its own unique challenges, offer its own unique gifts. Your unique challenge is called Hisaron, that unique thing that you need to transmute, and then become your unique emanation of who you really are, your irreducible essence. And that's the only thing that nobody can compete with you in. Nobody can compete with you in being you. That's it.

CHRIS: Yeah, no one can beat you at being you. It's also very difficult to compete with somebody that's having fun. If you're doing the thing that is your calling. But that's how I see, we do not need a civilization of 7.7 billion people all trying to be right in the middle of the distribution of average. I don't want everybody regressing to the mean, I want everybody moving out to the tails as much as possible. I want you to do the thing that only you can do. Because that is the way that you get the richest, most interesting, most engaging society that's possible. And, that is probably one of the biggest motivations that I think you can have for being brave, following your instinct, continuing to do something that you feel is right, even if it seems a little bit different, or weird or different, odd, whatever. By doing that, that is the best way for you to give whatever gift you have to the world, as far as I can see.

AUBREY: And I think sometimes people conflate what you're doing with your career, as opposed to how you are in your career. Like there's lots of barbers. Occasionally, there's a barber who like that is their fucking vocation, and they show up every day, engaged in the conversation, enjoying the craft of what they're doing. And doing that in a different way, where you go, "Fucking cutting hair again." Or I got to fucking clean this thing again. Like we have the choice, even within the constructs of what we do to earn our living, to show up in our uniqueness in that place, even in the most horrendous situations. Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", there was the person that changed his life and thus changed the world, started this whole concept of logotherapy. And this whole idea was this person who they were absolutely starving, most of them doomed to death. And he shared his little morsel of bread with somebody else. That was his way of living his unique compassion itself. And that was recorded in his spirit and in the collective. Yeah, they were all just imprisoned, but how you are in any situation, even in that situation, is you being your unique self. And so, sometimes you gotta stick with a shitty job. But if you can transmute that into you being awesome in your shitty job, then that counts, like that counts as well. Because we aren't all going to have a unique, unique profession. I mean, we're very blessed. We get to podcast and really show our uniqueness. But many people have to just check groceries and bag them and do that. But there's those people that you meet that when they're doing it, it's like, oh wow, like that was a fucking refreshing experience. And when you're in that feedback loop of, then you can still be living your own unique life while doing something that's mechanistic.

CHRIS: But that's how we're adding as much color as we can to existence as far as I can see. And it's the biggest motivation for following whatever compulsion toward instinct it is that you've got that I can think of. Like think about what happens if you don't do it. Think about what happens if you let fears, past traumas, social norms, guide what you want to want. Think about where you end up. You end up in a place not only that you don't want to be, or you didn't even mean to get to. The world is fundamentally less beautiful and less varied. And it's making less progress. And you're an influence to everybody else around you as well, and remembering that everybody's mimetic. So what they see is somebody doing the thing that everybody else is doing and continuing to get away with that. All of these are motivations, I think, for us to try and try and do what only we can do as much as possible. And I think that the closer that I get to that, the closer that I get to telling the truth, to being brave, to listening to intuition, after having got aggregated a little bit of experience purposefully. The closer I get to that, I think the better life seems to be and I would guess that that's the same for pretty much everybody else as well. 

AUBREY: I think an underrated quality of life is laughter. And actually think in the UK, you Brits actually got this pretty down. I have a lot of friends who are British. And as they kind of come into contact my spiritual path and different things like that. There's this kind of this deep appreciation for that yeah, they're mates back home, and they're all a little fucked up. But man, they're funny. They're fucking funny. They're like, they're fucking beauties. They're really funny. And I think humor is such a powerful tool that's kind of underrated. It allows us to hold paradox, it allows us to alchemize different situations to dispel fears, to create bonds, and it's also like one of the highest vibration, best feeling, things that we do. And one of the things that of course, I've been on the psychedelic medicine path for 22 years. And some of the best times in my life have been taking mushrooms. Not in the wild, cosmic ceremonial things, encountering the devil, discovering mystical astral beings. I've had all of that, those are great and I value those immensely. But the treasures, like if I'm going to collect the treasures from my past, it's like moments where I was just hysterically laughing with my buddies. Just laughing so hard--

CHRIS: It's taking one gram, and looking at a squirrel upside down on the side of a tree and going, "Are you fucking kidding me? That thing's upside down. What's he doing?

AUBREY: Yeah, and just having your buddies there and just going back and forth. I remember we finished a mushroom ceremony at my house in Sedona, and we're all still kind of in it. And one of my buddies was trying to butter this piece of toast. And he was just having a hell of a time. The butter was cold, the toast was lukewarm. It's getting all chunky, it's carving holes in it. And we're all just looking at him. And that moment where we realized, like this extreme struggle that he was having buttering his toast, I will never forget that moment. So many moments just kind of fall away into these kinds of beautiful but normal situations. But that bread buttering moment was like, ah, yes, that was the gem. 

CHRIS: That's the one. 

AUBREY: That's the gem of my spiritual medicine path. 

CHRIS: That's my peak experience, yeah, yeah.

AUBREY: It's one of them, and I think, so one of my intentions moving forward is to actually not have this be a side effect of some of the intentions or journeys, but go in with like alright, deliberate. Here's the point. We're going to fucking laugh, we're going to go out here, and we're going to laugh.

CHRIS: I think that's a really fucking good point, man. I really do. And again, people at the moment are struggling with happiness. And they're replacing happiness with meaning and meaning is fantastic. But it's kind of heavy. It is kind of heavy. And you said again, episode number one that you did with me, linked in the show notes below, was you mentioned one of the things that you need to do in life is do the things, take the drugs, not all the drugs, but some of the drugs. Live the life, have the sex, go on adventures, do the things. And that sort of lightness that you talked about, I think is really interesting, because you go well, people are replacing happiness with meaning because happiness is a little bit hard to come by, and also has been given a bit of a bad rap. Like the hedonic line on the beach drinking a cocktail, it doesn't fit well with the capitalistic sort of grind set machine that we all need to be a part of. So people are finding meaning is not the same as fucking happiness, right? Meaning is doing something hard, which in the future, you'll look back on and think about pleasantly. Happiness is pleasure now that sometimes in retrospect, you value and sometimes in retrospect, you're like it kind of didn't really mean much. People are replacing happiness with meaning. A lot of the people that will be listening to this podcast and my podcast, will be seeking meaning because they're curious people that take things seriously, right? They take life seriously, they believe that this is something which is worthwhile, that they should do the hard stuff, right? These, one of the rhetoric that gets put forward. You go, well, yeah, but then, sometimes, like toast's just really fucking hard to butter. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

CHRIS: It's really hard to butter, and it's really funny watching someone fail at it. It's really funny seeing a squirrel upside down on the side of a tree, really fucking funny. I think that that's a very, very good point, that trying to find humor. Have that friend in your friend group. I've got a bunch of them out here, Zach, specifically. It doesn't matter what happened in my day. I could have had the shittiest day, and then within two minutes of being with him, he's either done something stupid, or told me about some ridiculous story. And it does remind you, look, all of this stuff that you are treating with cosmic significance, probably doesn't really matter that much. In three generations, no one's going to remember your name in any case. Like what's your great, great granddad's name? I don't fucking know. And he lived an entire life, and had some kids and I am part of that lineage.

AUBREY: I don't even know my single great granddad's name. 

CHRIS: Yep. So, yes, there are certain things, relatively serious conversations about the significance of taking your intuition, chasing your logos and integrity and blah, blah. And all of that needs to be filtered through the fact that you're here for 80 years or something. And that when you're gone, in a couple of generations, no one's going to be able to remember it. So really, chasing legacy or overthinking things. And it comes back to what you said about palliative care. It's like, allow yourself to be happy. Allow yourself to have fun. Allow yourself to laugh at the squirrel of the toast.

AUBREY: Yeah, there's a practice again, and I'm obviously very deep in this Kabbalist lineage teachings now, and this is something that I've, great credit to Marc Gafni, for illuminating this in his book, "Radical Kabbalah" and different ways that he's helped illuminate this. But there's this idea of Simsum. which is also like collecting the moments of beauty from your life, and actually bringing them forward. And I think this is another secret to happiness is, and the way that it's talked about is, it's like finding the sparks of beauty even within the broken vessel. So you can think about everybody, just a shitty relationship you had. You can easily wash over that entire relationship as like that was shitty, it was toxic, it was blah, blah, blah. But within that relationship, there were moments of beauty, or you wouldn't have been there. And you don't need to diminish those and cast away those stones. You can actually go collect those, and then bring them back into your life now and say, let me take that. Let me take that one moment of ecstatic lovemaking. Let me take that one moment of ecstasy as we're eating this food, or this laughter that we had over this thing, or this time we just spontaneously started dancing. Let me just gather all of those little precious gems, and pack those in and realize, because that's really what I think we're going to do, if you fast forward to the end of your life. And look at that, Memento Mori, remember, you're going to die, go fast forward all the way to the end and look back, you're going to be doing that. You're going to be collecting all of those moments. And if you lived a rich life of those moments, of those bread-buttering hilarity moments, you're going to collect all those. And as you're going to pass the threshold, pass the veil, you'll look back, and you'll have a little smile, and you'll be like, yeah, fuck yeah.

CHRIS: As far as I can see, the purpose of life is to live a life that in retrospect, you're glad you lived, especially if you're someone that's introspective, right? This is the balance between happiness and meaning. People that think a lot, that are introspective, that reflect, I think you need to optimize for meaning. People that don't so much, you can afford to optimize for happiness, you can afford to optimize for in the moment pleasure more. Because you're not going to look back on that and regret the fact that you spent three days in a row on a Lila with a cocktail in a pool. Someone that's a bit more introspective is like that. But to get rid of the seriousness, it's like look, like there are going to be peak experiences that you're going to enjoy. How can you bring as many of those forward as possible? Did you watch the lunar eclipse last night?

AUBREY: I didn't, I missed it. 

CHRIS: Dude, it blew my mind. It is absolutely one of the wildest things I've ever seen. I've seen a solar eclipse a bunch of times. It's just not as spectacular. It's like a blood flower, super moon, lunar eclipse. So the one in May, which is the last one before all of the flowers come, It's the color red, it was a full moon, and it was a lunar eclipse. Bro, it was one of the most spectacular things I've ever seen. And you look at that, and you're like, yeah, maybe the amount of courage and bravery and following the instincts and blah, blah and you go, "Yeah, but lunar eclipse. It's pretty fucking cool." Or is something, or in dread together, both emotions that I think that can really remind us. My problems don't matter at all. Like the shadow of the Earth is in between the sun and the moon. And it's completely blotted out all of the light that's going to that thing which has been circling us for several million years, and will continue until the sun expands and boils it off. The fuck am I worried about? Come on.

AUBREY: Yeah, it's got to be, and that's the paradox that we have to hold with laughter. It all matters so much, and it doesn't matter. And how do you reconcile those two things? Well, you fucking laugh about it, and you play the game as if it matters full out, like you would a pickup basketball game. It fucking matters. Like I've almost gotten in several fistfights with this one buddy that I play basketball with. Has shitty, called fouls and whining about different things and calling out when it's not out, and like, we'll get into it. But at the end it's like that was fun. We played it for real, it was fun and then we'll be having sparkling water or going swimming or going cold plunge, and we'll be laughing about the fact that we almost fought each other. 

CHRIS: Fucking punched each other in the face despite being best friends. 

AUBREY: Like an hour ago. 

CHRIS: What the fuck is it about rich people and sparkling water?

AUBREY: Maybe they just have access to it. I think sparkling--

CHRIS: What is it about sparkling water? 

AUBREY: It's a universal attractant. 

CHRIS: Fucking rich people. There's a level of wealth that you get to where you're no longer prepared to have flat water with dinner.

AUBREY: I don't know man. I think it's universal. I think once you start on the sparkling water train, you just can't stop.

CHRIS: I always thought I wasn't a sparkling water person. And then I spent a couple of weeks with Michaela and Jordan in New York. And they drink Topo Chico, I think I told you about this before. Bro, that shit changed my world. I was like, "Oh no, I've become one of those." Or maybe that was just the day that my net worth crossed the threshold, maybe it was nothing to do with the fucking Topo Chico. Like yes, welcome to the middle class. There we go, bubbly water.

AUBREY: It's the champagne of water, bro. 

CHRIS: You think it is? 

AUBREY: This is champagne and water. 

CHRIS: Fucking hell. 

AUBREY: And then you get real picky about which sparkling water

CHRIS: I'm not prepared to have San Pellegrino to me now, no thank you. Get me a Topo Chico.

AUBREY:  You want the fucking hutzpah of those bubbles.

CHRIS: Exactly, I want to feel like I'm deepthroating this fucking sparkling water. I want to be punched in the nose.

AUBREY: Yeah, like the horseradish of sparkling water.

CHRIS: Yes. That's it. That's it. I want the mustard, hit me.

 AUBREY: Ah, well, what else, man? Are there any other topics on your heart or on your mind that we want to explore before we wrap this? Love the conversation up.

CHRIS: I've been thinking about this thing called the inner citadel, which is a really interesting concept from Isiah Berlin. So, when the world denies you something that you think that you really want, people often retreat into themselves, this form of spiritual retreat, where they wall off their own desires against all the fearful ills that the world has canceled away from them, right? This is what he refers to as the inner citadel. If you can't get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. And I asked you about this, although I didn't know about the concept in one episode that we did. Where I said, how many people do you think that follow asceticism are doing it because they genuinely want to live a simple life? And how many of them do you think don't want to ever try and play the game in case they lose? And I think that a big chunk of people, it's cope, right? Inner citadel is a fancy way for saying it to cope. Rob Henderson has a really good way of putting this. He says, if you injure your leg, you can try and treat it and fix it. And if you can't treat it or fix it, then you cut the leg off and the desire for legs must be subdued. And he's totally misguided, right? So, if you can't win the game, you create your own game. And this inner citadel, I think is one of the ways that we fool ourselves quite a lot. So, let's say that you really struggle at losing weight, you might say that weight has absolutely no bearing on health, and demand that the entire world see your particular body size and shape as something that shouldn't ever be considered as unhealthy, and say that airplane seats need to be made bigger, blah blah blah. Or you may struggle to hold down a job. So you turn to a life of crime, because you say that jobs are for suckers anyway. Or you decide to retreat to the hills, because you're going to live this monastic lifestyle in a cave and stuff like that. And the inner citadel is a very interesting place to be, because it's one of the ways that we can convince ourselves that we didn't want to anyway. And I find that one of the things that a lot of people do is, you see them staunchly making a claim about a particular thing that they're doing in their life, and you realize that it's just the citadel that they've retreated into. I'm sure that you know as well, and some of your friends have maybe tried polyamory in the past, is it that you think that polyamory is the optimal way to have a relationship? Or do you just really struggle with either commitment or stopping your desire for other people or doing whatever? Like that can be, anything can be for a lot of people. And one of the ways to get around that is to decide in advance what you want to suck at. Like I said earlier, if you do that, then you go when it does arise, I don't need this. I didn't need that. I knew that I was going to suck at this. I don't need to pretend I don't care about it. Like I suck at this thing, I suck at losing weight, holding down a job, being monogamous, whatever it might be. I don't need to claim that the way that I'm doing this is the optimal way if I don't think that it is. But yeah, that inner citadel thing, I see it pop up everywhere.

AUBREY: This is huge. I'm glad you brought this up. And I read your little three-minute Monday thing on it, and I found it really compelling. So, with the polyamory example, I'll use this as something. When you're making an active choice to change something, I think that's a healthy approach, actually, saying, fuck, monogamy is not working? Let me make an active choice to try polyamory, right? Yes, there may be an inner citadel where you say monogamy just doesn't work. And really, you want that and you're trying something else. But at least you're making an active choice to actually put yourself in the fire, in the game, in the field, suffer the consequence. You're doing a fucking thing. And actually following the active principle. Where I think it gets really insidious is when, it's the passive principle of this which is, what happens a lot with virtue and ethics, right? So, you have some way in which you feel like you're losing in the game of, in the game of life. You can't get this much money, you can't get this, you're not this good looking, you're not this. So you invert the value system to some narrow band of morality or some narrow band of virtue that you have. Well, it could be, I've been oppressed more than them. So they're all privileged, and I'm better than them because I've been oppressed, and they're privileged. And no matter what they do, I'm better because of this thing. So you see that. And I'm not saying that that's not real, that certain people have been oppressed and certain people have privilege. Of course, it's real. But the Citadel effect can be taking place in that moment, and I think we see that a lot. I think Nietzsche actually talked about this in the inversion of values that actually allowed Christianity to flourish. Ultimately, they were in a construct in which the wealthy elites of Rome were making their lives miserable, for the most of the lower class. They couldn't get that amount of power, the ceiling was clearly well defined and locked. Upward mobility was incredibly difficult. And so this religion comes along, it says, blessed are the meek. And of course, there's many beautiful things about Christianity, and I think it's reductionist to just talk about it this way. But I think Nietzsche makes a good point. Blessed are the meek, the wealthy person has the same chance of going to heaven as the camel through the eye of a needle, and they're like, uh-huh, you're all doomed to eternal hell. And we are the ones that are actually God's people and chosen. But they're not actually doing anything other than just changing the rules of the game so that they're better. But they're not actually changing any aspect of their own life, other than their own projection of their identity construct, so that they're on top of the new game.

CHRIS: Yes. Well, this is why everybody has an ick factor around people that are social justice warriors, right? Even the ones that are other social justice warriors that are a part of it. Nobody trusts somebody else in that group. Why? Well, it's because you've decided, for the most part, there are valid social justice movements. For the most part, you've decided to point the finger at another group, and your morality stands on their shoulders. So, one of the reasons that people love scandal, right? The reason that we love scandal is we get to feel the moral emotion of superiority, whilst having done nothing moral to earn it. Like you get to point to the person that fucked up and go, look at how bad that person is. What's the subtext of that? I would never do that. Hang on a second, no one's looking at you. If we decide to do an assessment of you, person on the internet, that's calling out this terrible thing, supposedly, that somebody else has done. What would we find? What skeletons exist in your closet? Probably some pretty fucking nasty ones. And I think that's one of the reasons why I never ever trust people that do call outs online. I'm like, what the fuck are you hiding here exactly? What is it that you're trying to put dirt on top of so that we look at that person over there? Your stuff's being hidden, you're pointing the finger at that person there. Like your morality stands on the shoulders of people that have fucked up publicly. And, yeah, I think that it is interesting to work out, which of these are people that virtuously believe what it is that they're doing? And which of these are people retreating to an inner citadel, and then from this lovely walled garden, deciding to point at the heretic or whoever it is that's outside. There's also a part of the meek inheriting the Earth. Well, you think, well, what glory is there in that? Come on, 80 years, you've gone on this planet, like is that it? Is the best way to do this to try and wall yourself off in a garden, and just hope that nothing interesting or terrible ever happens? I think I'd said, it's Naval that I talked about, it is far easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them. It's much easier to drive a banged up car if your last car was a Ferrari, because you've closed that loop. Zeigarnik effect, right? You've got rid of it. Okay, I know that it was dumb, stupid idea. But it's finished, I don't need to do that anymore. It's far easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them. And as far as I can see, a lot of people choose to not play that game because they're scared of losing. You can inoculate yourself from public failure by guaranteeing private failure. If you decide to never play the game, you're not going to lose, if you've never stepped onto the pitch.

AUBREY: Yep. And part of not playing the game is changing the game. So that you're playing a different game. And you see this where the bigger the person you can put underneath your feet in this game of being the virtuous one, the better. So, if someone like Joe Rogan comes under criticism, and surely, and he apologized for certain things that he's done, and then stood up for the things that he believed in. And of course, like I'm not getting into the specifics of this, but I could feel the desire of like, "I'm better than Joe Rogan." Excellent, so you're standing on top of not just a person, you're standing on top of a giant and you're better--

CHRIS: Same as Will Smith. 

AUBREY: You're better than a giant. And at that point that fuels this kind of pseudo identity game structure that you're playing. And it's very, very slippery. I saw that I was in Whole Foods yesterday. Mask mandates have been lifted, there's been a lot of studies that have pointed, pretty much, that masks are not nearly at the very least as effective as they were once purported, if potentially not effective at all. So, there's a lot of people still wearing masks. And so, I see that and I think, okay, some of them are probably afraid and really still believe masks work. And I know that some of them are probably just not willing to let go of the idea that they're a better person for wearing a mask than everybody else. So as they're fucking shopping for cucumbers, and whatever--

CHRIS: Look how virtuous I am. 

AUBREY: Yeah, they get to look at all of the other people like myself who are shopping without a mask, and go, yep, better than that guy. Better than that girl, better than him, better than him. And they don't have to do anything other than shop for cucumbers, and they get to be better than everybody else in that. And I think if we're not really careful in studying our own motivations and our own desires, we can fall victim to this in many cases. Conversely, if you're one of the people who are not wearing masks, you can do the same thing. Look at all these fucking sheep, look at all these people wearing masks, I'm better than all of them. And you could be not doing, not pursuing your own art, your career and somebody could go drive away in their Ferrari and go and live their fucking national 10 million books sold bestselling life, doing their art, but you're like, fucking wearing a mask.

CHRIS: It's the problem with looking at a narrow domain of anything, whether it be to do with time, or to do with, like the domain of competence. If you look at anything very, very narrowly, you're going to be able to find a way to put different people up on a pedestal. Like, maybe that person, their sock drawer is nicer than yours. Or maybe that person, whatever, like something totally arbitrary, right? Another quote that Naval tweeted out last week, he said, karma is just you repeating your habits and patterns over and over again, until the world gives you what you deserve. Like you don't need anything outside of just a replicable chance. You don't need any spiritual woo with that, right? It's just you doing the things over and over, and the world giving back to you consistently what it is that you deserve. The problem that we have is that when there's a single incident, like Will Smith slapping Chris Rock or something like that, it's like a fucking discourse Rorschach test. Everybody sees something different because everybody only sees that one thing, right? Hang on a fucking second. This guy's, how long has he been on, like 40 years, or some shit? He's been on TV now probably since "Fresh Prince" came out. Think about all of the stuff that he's done. Like Will Smith was a hero to a lot of people, he was like the rock of that sort of comedy acting thing. 

AUBREY: For sure.

CHRIS: And this one situation is the opportunity for people to stand on the shoulders of somebody and feel moral whilst having done nothing moral to earn it. And the problem with that, the problem that I see, especially with this sort of social justice left-leaning group at the moment is it's inherently fragile to have bonding of an in group exclusively on the mutual hatred of an out group. They're not held together by the fact that they all believe the same things or care about each other. It's that they get to point the finger at other people. And this is where you get what's called a purity spiral, right? Where you're constantly looking to shave off the outer layer of whoever isn't sufficiently pure to be a part of this. Because the only way that you continue to bond together is to continue to find more and more insane and concentrated ways to be pure. Look at this person, they didn't have the right, whatever it might be. Douglas Murray said to me the other day that because he's gay and right wing, he's basically straight now. He said, he's like an honorary straight, because he's not part of the LGBT community, because he doesn't have the same political beliefs. So, he's basically casted out of that. Okay, so he's been shaved off. Okay, who's next? Who's next? Who's next? Who's next? If you're white and gay, if you're like white and female, then that means like--

AUBREY: The center gets smaller and smaller because you need to continually shave. You must, to perpetuate this. Marc Gafni shared something that I thought was really interesting. He talks about Eros as the animating force of life, and there's many faces of Eros. And it's like the deep pleasure that you can get from existence. And so, one of these is, feeling connected in the interiority of an interaction, a connection. So like right now, you and I are in Eros together, right? Like we're deeply connecting in this podcast and we're friends, and we do this elsewhere as well but right here. And we're bonded from a lot of different reasons but you can create pseudo interiority, like a pseudo connection by simply putting someone else on the outside, which by, that puts you on the inside with somebody else. That's why people are so attracted to gossip. Because the moment you put somebody else outside, well, then you have a pseudo interiority, you have a pseudo inner circle, just by putting somebody else on the outside. So, there's three friends, two of you get together, you talk shit about the other person, all of a sudden, it feels like you're even closer to that person. But then you do that going around the circle, and all of a sudden, you're not close with anybody. Because you've shaved it. Yeah, you've shaved everybody. So it's just this pathway to a desolate loneliness ultimately.

CHRIS: We are not in us, but at least we're not at them. 

AUBREY: Right. Not the way, not the way. It's self-defeating.

CHRIS: It's fragile. It's inherently fragile. There was a study that was done that looked at the reason that Democrats and Republicans voted for each side. And in 2012, it actually crossed over. So up until 2012, people voted for their political party because of love of their own political party. After 2012, they voted because of hatred of the other party more than because of love of their party. So it's literally a protest vote. It's like I'm voting for this, because I'm not that. How has that held together in anything other than the most fragile sand castle foundation that you can think of? Because nobody actually agrees or believes or cares about anything that's going on internally. But they're able to point at some stuff that's outside.

AUBREY: And then what you get is a situation we're in now where then, so politics, of course, is very scheming, Machiavellian wise to all of these different metrics. They realized that people's hatred was actually stronger than people's love. They weaponized that. So what I think in certain cases, of course, there's many different ways to look at it. But you have this impetus to then put forward somebody who you feel like is the least hateable rather than the most inspiring. Someone goes, oh, this person is the least hateable. But they're incompetent, and they're not going to actually lead anywhere else. But it's just like all right, what's the least hateable version? And then we'll pour all of our effort into hating the other people. And as long as we can maintain some level of not entirely hateable, then we'll win.

CHRIS: Seth Stephens Davidowitz has got a new book out called "Don't Trust Your Gut". He's a data scientist, an absolutely amazing book. It's really, really good. And in it, he taught, I think this might have been in his first one actually, "Everybody Lies". They looked at what could predict whether or not people were going to vote for a political candidate or not. They got people to rate the politicianness of different candidates. Which one looked like a head of state the most. And just that, that's all that they knew, they didn't know anything else about them. That predicted with 80% accuracy who was going to get voted into office. It's like the halo effect, but for politicians, as opposed to being good looking. Although good looking would have probably been a part of it, been like competence and all other bits and pieces. Does this person look like a politician? They're going to get into the office. And it's kind of the same as what you're saying there. It's like, who can we find that simply appears like they have this sort of statesman like manner? Maybe we're seeing this with the increasing age of American presidents as well, perhaps, that there's something sort of patriarchal and grandfatherly and non-threatening about that. Maybe that's part of it too. I don't know.

AUBREY: Yeah. And then there's going to be a counter reaction too, everything goes in cycles. Because as this gets as absurd as it is now, where it's we went from one flavor of absurdity with Trump to a whole other flavor of absurdity with Biden, it's like, alright, we need another fucking move to be made. And that's a truly inspiring leader. Like we keep playing this race to the bottom game. We're not going to fucking get anywhere. And I think it creates this kind of fertile ground, where hopefully something else can emerge. And I don't know how long that'll take. But I have faith that at some point, that next JFK, or somebody will come through like, this is a person of integrity.

CHRIS: That degree of charisma I think, would be quite hard to battle against, to push back against. It's pretty difficult to ignore that. 

AUBREY: Right. 

CHRIS: You see, Bezos has been tweeting some sort of pretty based spicy stuff recently. Been ‘tweeting’ the @POTUS Twitter. He got mentioned in some report today, and then quote tweeted that as well, basically saying, you guys don't understand how inflation works. Inflation hurts people at the bottom rung of the ladder, not the top rung of the ladder the most. It's not us that are to blame for this. And I asked a bunch of friends, I think that Elon's increasing outspokenness is mimetically being pushed by other people that are at the top of the tree. Marc Andreessen that looks after a16z, as well Andreessen Horowitz, he has been doing the same thing. Like this guy, they just got some extra level of financial accreditation so that they can do bigger trades in more places or whatever. And he's still doing really, really sort of out there based tweeting. Musk's doing the same thing. So, I do think that you're starting to see a little bit of a counterculture subversive pushback against typically what you would have expected from somebody in a position of authority, in a position of power. The Bill Gates's of the world, you would have never thought about him tweeting a meme, unless it was done by someone on his social media team or something like that. Whereas you'll consistently see Musk replying and responding to stuff that he thinks is interesting and, and pushing narratives in that way. And it can't be that long before it gets across into politics as well. Because it's an effective way. People like Elon, most people think that he's doing some pretty cool stuff. You don't get the same reptilian overlords criticisms of Musk that you do of Gates or of--

AUBREY: It actually bums me out when I do hear that actually. Of course, all things are possible. But nonetheless, like some people are so attached to this idea, this conflation of wealth with reptilian overlord, fuckin one world, despotic conspiracy that they'll be like, they'll somehow take what I think is a very fucking badass gesture that Elon saying, I'm going to buy Twitter, I'm going to open source all of the algorithms so everybody can see what the fuck we're doing.

CHRIS: Fucking open. 

AUBREY: Exactly.

CHRIS: How does someone got a problem with this? 

AUBREY: Yeah, and so these moves. But then they'll find, they'll fit it into their own confirmation bias, their own framework. And it just bums me out when I'm y'all, you have to accept it. It's almost like they imagine that for the first time ever in history, all powerful and wealthy people are all in perfect cahoots. And that they are not competing with each other and they're all of the same mind. They've merged with some insectoid hive mind of wealth, and they're all fucking doing some strange--

CHRIS: Drinking San Pellegrino. 

AUBREY: The sacrament of the wealthy, fucking rounds of San Pellegrino.

CHRIS: Another! So yeah, the wild thing is that people can hold two very, very conflicting views in the mind at one time. They can say the government is completely incompetent and shouldn't ever be allowed to be in charge of anything. And yet there is a vast global conspiracy run by the exact same people that have coordinated to keep everything under wraps. But hang on, which one is it? Yeah, which one is it? Is it the unbelievable reptilian overlords? Or is it the incompetent, who needs to wear an adult diaper? Which one of these, Oh, he's not part of that, it's like the real guys that are pulling the strings behind the scenes and blah blah. All right, man, I don't see coordination. Coordination is a huge fucking problem, right, to get done. And the vast majority of problems, I think, come out of a lack of competence. Not malicious intent.

AUBREY: And coordination requires an immense level of cooperation. And to get people who are oftentimes driven by a virtually sociopathic ego. Many times, not always. Of course, not always. You don't want to make generalities, but to assume that everybody got to power from this fucking ruthless dog-eat-dog, compete with everybody, dominate all other people. And then they get to this one threshold and they're like, oh yeah, we're all going to just cooperate. We're all going to be good partners in this one. No fucking way. No fucking way. And I think that to me is just a simple understanding, that's never happened before, there's tenuous treaties and then people double crossing each other at the first fucking--

CHRIS: Soonest chance, yeah. 

AUBREY: The fastest chance they get. Oh, Russia is fighting France, alright, they're on a team. Oh, fuck no. Now they're not. Like it's the fucking world. Yeah, it's always been like that. And it's still like that. And so for people who are locked in this kind of idea that there's this impenetrable fucking Sith Lord thing going on, doubt it. Maybe there's some loose treaties going on in the WHO, and some loose games of mutual benefit that are being played, but you better believe that the moment that it comes time for somebody to fall, they're going to be all with knives at each other's throats.

CHRIS: But think about this sort of personality of someone that's able to make it to that place. They're going to be so ruthless, so unbelievably focused on what it is that they want, that they are going to be precisely prepared to throw somebody under the bus the second that it becomes a problem. I was in Guatemala getting this visa thing and one of the guys that I met there drove me around, and was sort of giving me the law of Guatemala. He was explaining the fact that most of the government there is super, super corrupt. So, they always try to raise money, each government comes into power, and they raise money for getting rid of crime, or helping the roads or the infrastructure or health care or whatever it is. And then the money shock, goes walkabout. No one knows where it's ended up. And it continues happening over and over. Now I remember, I had this sort of weird blend of pity and gratefulness a little bit. I was like, oh my God, how unfortunate for this developing country that has the most stable currency in all of Central America. And everybody is really industrious, and I really enjoyed it. But they're being held down by these corrupt officials. And how fortunate is that I live in the UK, a place where nobody would ever be. Hang on. Hang on a second. What makes me think that the compulsion, the human nature compulsion to rise to the top of politics in somewhere like Guatemala doesn't scale across into somewhere like the UK. Now, yeah, maybe we've got more bureaucracy, and maybe there's more red tape and oversight. But for each increase in red tape or oversight, there's an appropriate increase in sophistication of methods to be able to get around them. So just because it's not as flagrant or out in the open, doesn't mean that it isn't happening. It's just smarter. And yet, I still don't think that they can coordinate transatlantically to create whatever it is that's going on.

 AUBREY: Yeah, and doesn't mean that there isn't scary shit going on. And doesn't mean that we shouldn't pay attention and be mindful of all of these things. But this overexaggeration of the forces that are allied against us, I think is a trap that we can fall in because then it causes us, instead of working for a cause, it causes us to want to buy five years’ worth of beef jerky, and fucking isolate yourself in a bunker somewhere, instead of being hey, no, like we can fucking change this, this isn't end times.

CHRIS: Have you got property in New Zealand yet? Gun full?

AUBREY: Nope, I haven't quite gotten there. I do have a nice place in Lockhart. And I think of course, I'm not saying that, have a little extra water, have a little extra food. We had a fucking situation where we called it, I called it snowpocalypse here in Austin, where in February, just all of the ground was covered in snow, everybody's water pipes were busted. And it was fucking wild for like five days. So yeah, it's nice to be prepared for things like that, maybe something else could happen a little longer. I'm not saying a little bit of prudence is a problem. But if you exaggerate the forces that are allied against you, your choices, your choice matrix is going to be really skewed. And you're going to end up getting really solipsistic, where you're just worried about yourself. What we need now is not that. Let's fucking stand together and change this thing, because we can. This is the choice point where we can actually make a difference. And so I think it's important to bust these myths about this, whatever you want to call it, that's trying to rule the world, like super unlikely. It would be completely unprecedented if that was the case. So, let's just assume that it's a lot of people making short term decisions. Pharmaceutical companies wanting to ramp up profits in the short term, politicians wanting to get elected in the next two years, in the next four years. And everybody's loosely working together for their own selfish as fuck goals that are very short sighted. That's most likely what's happening across the board, is just consistent, short-sighted thinking.

CHRIS: I personally welcome our new Chinese overlords whenever they decide to come in. I very much look forward to it. I'm a massive fan of--

AUBREY: You've practiced your Mandarin?

CHRIS: I'm a massive fan of the cuisine.

AUBREY: General Tso's is legit. He's conquered more white people than anybody else. 

CHRIS: Fucking damn right. I looked at this blog post about population collapse the other day, and it is so terrifying, man. It is so scary. Peterson thinks that we're going to peak at about 9 billion. This article said about 10, 10 and a half at 2100. And then it's such a sharp drop off. So the way that they do it, they have if you can imagine a graph that's got a single bar up the middle and coming out of the sides, male and female, and it's ages. So it's 0, 1, 2, like all the way up, right? That's how old they are. And what you want is a population that looks like that. So you have more young people than you do old people, right? This is very, very bad. You have a small number of people that are still working, producing, buying things, supporting a large number of people who are particularly older. And then you sort of end up with some that are kind of like a fat pear, that's the ones that are soon going to be there. But you can predict where the ages are going to be in the future because more people can't be born last year. More people can only be born in the future. So as soon as someone's born and the year finishes, you can see where that's going to move to. And the USA is actually not too bad overall, but some of the places in Europe, China, Japan, absolutely fucked. Like China went from one-child policy to a two-child policy to a three-child policy now, in a desperate attempt to try and fix it. But that's one of the things. I've had a ton of people on about China recently. And it is for all that I can joke about it, it's because I'm terrified that by 2050, we're going to be under their rule. But I do think that one of the things that they fucked up with is, is not looking at the population. 

AUBREY: It's just hubris, all of this central planning. This is the thing like it always fucking fails. Like the infinite complexity of the situations, yes, definitely some coordination. And some planning is good. But the idea that a small group of super intelligent people are going to be able to decide all of the best solutions. I don't know, what is it, fucking five people or 10 people in China where it's like one-child policy. That's a good idea. All right, so let's apply that to--

CHRIS: Fucking law of unintended consequences.

AUBREY: Right. And it's hubris to think that any group is going to figure it out. And I think this is the fatal flaw of these organizations that are trying to determine things for us, like, we have to inform everybody and allow our own collective mind, capital M mind of the collective to sort out what really works here. How can we do this in the best way? And it's just this idea, I'm smarter than everybody else, and I can fucking figure this out. No, you can't. You never have.

CHRIS: This is the problem with trying to dictate or really, or bureaucratically do anything, right? So a perfect example of this is the progression we've seen with language around sort of social justice stuff over the last 10 years. So, politically correct was a thing that was ironically used for maybe about one to three years. And then comedians got a hold of it, and completely ruined that word. And then coming out of rap and hip hop, you had the word woke. And that then got appropriated, very, very quickly by people on the left to describe somebody that was kind of seeing the corrupt power structures for what they are. And within a nanosecond, that got picked up by comedians and satirized to the point where you can't use it non-ironically anymore. The point there is that you could have tried to mandate politically correct or woke into or out of the lexicon as much as you want. But if you get a group of comedians to satirize it into hell, so that it is so socially contagious to ever use that, that scales infinitely. If you make something so socially toxic to us, because that's what the culture has decided on, because it's emergent bottom up, not dictated top down, you can end up with this unbelievably beautifully scalable solution. And the problem that you have is when you try top down to dictate stuff. Dude, this fucking blew my mind. When the introduction of the contraceptive pill happened in the mid-1900s, single motherhood went up. How the fuck would that. Women were able to stop themselves from giving birth to children they don't want to give birth to. And quite rightly, no one would have seen this coming. But this is the law of unintended consequences, a couple of degrees deep. So when contraception basically wasn't an option for women, if a guy knocked up a girl, he felt a sense of obligation to stick about. So, there was an increase in shotgun weddings beforehand, decrease in shotgun weddings afterwards, that then felt like a woman's choice. Not like a man's obligation. Introduction of the pill, increase in single motherhood. Who the fuck saw that coming? Right? No one. So, when it comes to bureaucracy, trying to dictate how things should occur, putting your faith in the government in anything more than the smallest narrow band of what it is that they're supposed to do, I think is just erroneous, because we can't predict what's going to happen and neither can they. 

AUBREY: Yeah. And this is what's happened with every communist regime. Right? They predict oh, we need this much bread this year. All right. fucking good luck. Good luck figuring that out. And then you get the famous bread lines, right? And you get all like, okay, no soap this year, we didn't plan it right. And I think this is obviously the fundamental free market, Adam Smith capitalism saying, let the market, but there does need to be some guardrails. And I think there is a limited scope of what that is. I just want to also mention one thing that I haven't fact checked recently because I heard it actually in university at University of Queensland. I was taking a course there and they were talking about this. Milton Friedman, from my recollection, again, and I haven't fact checked this, but there was a point in which they mandated seatbelt laws. And they mandated that you wear seatbelts and presumably seatbelts save lives, right? Seatbelts save lives. Well, it does actually, for the driver. If you're driving, and you have a seatbelt on, or if you don't, then you're more protected. However, people started driving faster because they felt safer. And there was a rapid increase in pedestrian deaths because they were driving faster, and more recklessly and the accidents were actually more violent. Because they felt safer. Unintended consequences. They actually didn't save lives. They save lives in this specific, but not in the general. And it seems like an unwillingness to actually look at, well, what's really happening? What happens when we prohibit marijuana use versus legalizing? Let's actually look. Let's just not have a presupposed idea about this. Let's actually look. What's going on in Portugal after they decriminalized psychedelics? Are they fucking going crazy? Is everybody jumping off bridges out there? No, they're fine. It's like we have all of these ideas coming from our planning as though we're going to do this. And then there's reality. And reality is far, far--

CHRIS: Slapped you in the face. 

AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. Far different.

CHRIS: You know that story about the cobra epidemic that they had in India, right? So they had a problem with cobras. So they decided that they were going to offer the locals a particular amount of money per cobra. So the locals started breeding cobras and then selling them to the government. Humans will find a way, man. They'll find a way. And yeah, I think--

AUBREY: They should have gone with the Mongoose route. That would have been the route.

CHRIS: Why? 

AUBREY: Mongooses eat cobras. 

CHRIS: Right, but then they're breeding mongooses.

AUBREY: Yeah, I know, that would have been good though. I love mongooses. It's a personal preference.

CHRIS: It does feel a little bit like, this is borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. Like, do you want the mongoose problem or do you want a cobra problem?

AUBREY: I want the mongoose problem.

CHRIS: Fair enough. That's fine.

AUBREY: who's ever been like, "Fuck! There's a mongoose in our place!" No, it's like, "Oh shit. There's a mongoose."

CHRIS: Aren't they pretty vicious? 

AUBREY: I don't think so to people. 

CHRIS: But you've got cats that would fuck them up to be fair.

AUBREY: That's right. I have an affinity towards mongoose. There was an old mongoose versus cobra cartoon called "Riki Tiki Tabby". Do you ever see that? 

CHRIS: No. 

AUBREY: Oh, yeah. It got me on team mongoose early in the day. 

CHRIS: Fuck it. 

AUBREY: Yeah, so if I was, see, that's the problem, though. But we've seen that all over the place where we'll make some environmental changes, that we'll think, this will make sense. I don't know the details of the situation. But I've heard that there's a cane toad situation in Australia where they were like cane toads are going to end up eating this insect that's on the sugar cane. It's going to save everything. So they started breeding cane toads and releasing them. Then now there's this massive cane toad infestation. The cane toads can't actually reach the insects up on the stalk of the sugarcane, so it doesn't fucking work. I saw this again, they're breeding these genetically modified mosquitoes. And like Bill Gates is like a part of this whole thing, which is kind of creepy, has this creepy fucking commercial. We can put this in the show notes as Bill Gates mosquito thing. And it's not just him. There's a lot of scientists trying to do this. But they're breeding GMO mosquitoes to try and outcompete the other mosquitoes thinking that the GMO mosquitoes are going to be resistant to transmitting disease, but then they're starting to find that the GMO mosquitoes are just making new and more interesting diseases. And it's like, stop! Fucking stop. This is not the way.

CHRIS: Ecology is so bizarre. I mean, you must be learning this with the farm. Okay, so how do we balance all of this shit here? How many of these things can we have for how many of these things and how much grass and how much plant and insect, and what if we get that and can we use this particular spray? Well, no, because that's going to fuck up this particular type of plant, and all that stuff. It's so delicately balanced.

AUBREY: And so is human ecology. And that's the thing, like when we try to fuck with nature, nature's far too infinitely complex and wise, and we're never going to get it right. We try to fuck with human ecology too much, far too complex. We're never going to get right. But we can put some guardrails, environmental guardrails, guardrails about the aggregation of power. And these anti-trust monopoly things which, of course, as Bret Weinstein was saying on the podcast we did, the biggest problem we're facing from a meta level is capture. I mean, all of these agencies are captured. So the regulatory bodies are getting funding, and the politicians are getting funding from the people who are in the monopoly. So, it's like how vigorous are they going to be in denying and actually regulating these different situations? It's a big fucking problem, because they're captured, they're bought in a certain way. And they have their own self-serving bias, which convinces them that they're not and that they're doing something good. They have all the reasons that they want. But, this is a big issue, that the government does have a place where the collective needs are stood for, but it has to be a government of integrity, that's beyond the realm of capture and corruption. In Guatemala, the corruption is honest. It comes in a fucking paper bag full of cash. Here, it's very not honest.

CHRIS: Yeah, it's in the Cayman Islands, hiding away. 

AUBREY: Yeah, and it's lobbyists and it's campaign contributions, and it has all of these euphemisms for bribes. I mean, and you watch all the news, pushing out and whatever you believe you can't deny that when a news agency has every different segment sponsored, brought to you by Pfizer, like what the fuck do you think?

CHRIS: Did you see that video where all of the news readers were saying the same thing? And it pans out and pans out and pans out and pans out. And it's just the same line. I mean, that's when you think, oh, okay, there's something serious going on here. I learned from Stuart Russell, who was the guy that literally wrote the textbook on artificial intelligence. It's been translated into pretty much every language on earth. He has this book called "Human Compatible" about the alignment problem to do with AI. And he said that there's two ways that social media reinforcement algorithms could work. They need to be able to work out what you're going to click on. That's what they're doing, right? They're trying to reinforce clicks. There's two ways that they can do it. They can either try and deliver you content that is more appropriate for you to be able to click on and learn your preferences over time. Second thing that they can do is repurpose your preferences to be more predictable. So what I learned about this, and I don't know whether this is like news to anybody or not, the way that social media algorithms are working at the moment is a two-way street. So not only are they learning our preferences, but they are impacting our preferences, so that we become more predictable. Because the only thing it was given to do is produce content that I'm going to click on. That's the law of unintended consequences. This is one of the things where with Twitter, opening up the algorithm is probably a relatively simple task. People are going to be able to go in and they're going to be able to go okay, what are the things that are being shadow banned and downvoted? What are the things that are being promoted? Stuff like that. And Stuart agreed. If you were to open up the black box of the YouTube algorithm, he was like, even the engineers don't know what that does. They don't know how it does what it does. YouTube, as far as I can see, is the best, it's got the best algorithm. I go on my YouTube feed, and there is always stuff that I can't wait to watch all the time.

AUBREY: And stuff that I didn't even know I wanted to watch, which is like, "Messi's Top 10 Goals." I'm not even a fucking soccer fan. 

CHRIS: Yes, yes, that's exactly what I want. 

AUBREY: I'm like, oh man, that was epic. 

CHRIS: Yeah, I'm eating a sandwich, I'm watching Messi smash it in from 35 yards up. To me, I just think sometimes, when we're talking about coordination, it's really easy to see that more transparency would be good. But we're getting to the stage now where systems are so complex, that transparency wouldn't even fix it. So the guys that work at YouTube, if you said why is it that your platform seems to be pushing the right wing social media agenda? Or some shit like that. "We don't know." Fucking black box. Yeah, watch time and clickthroughs, that's all that we got it to optimize for. And now before you know it, you've got fucking Alex Jones like, "They're turning the frogs gay." Like oh, okay, this is what happened. And then here's another thing. So I think you've got, the algorithm is learning preferences from users, users are then having their preferences manipulated by the algorithm. They reinforce certain pieces of content that rise up. Limbic hijack, or put red in your thumbnail or have a big face with wide eyes, whatever, whatever. Then one level up from that, another level of audience capture is that of the creators themselves, because all of the creators are creating content that they think that their audience wants to watch. So, okay, so not only now are the algorithms and the users, or the consumers in a sort of a bidirectional relationship, but then it's actually been pulled out into this big tree, where you have even the people that make the content, okay, so what should I make in order to get the algorithm with the preferences which had been influenced by the algorithm to move back up?

AUBREY: And then what is your tolerance for your own corruption? Really is what it is. 

CHRIS: How much are you prepared to play the game?

AUBREY: How much are you prepared to play the game? And just being transparent myself, how I'm willing to play the game is I'm willing to cleverly title my YouTube videos, and cleverly thumbnail them, but I won't change the content of my conversations, right? Like my conversations are sacred. But yeah, I'll fucking, I'll beta test different thumbnails. I'll have one where, this episode right now, if you're watching it on YouTube, you saw a thumbnail where both of us are going. And this will probably be it right now. I'm going to do the face. And we're going to put that up.

CHRIS: Christian's going to put that up. You're totally right. I mean, why is it that we don't just have black text on a white background for every thumbnail? Well, it's because that's not the way that the game is played. So this is a very interesting conversation. How far is game playing permissible, right? We all know that creator, who has started to feed red meat to the mob, and has continually just got further and further and further into a cul de sac that they can't back out of. Because when you begin, when you're in the middle, you can guarantee disagreement from both sides. When you're out on the extremes, you at least get agreement from one. You know that if you're pushing right now on the internet or parties online, you're at least going to get agreement from one side. Now you get hatred from the other. But in the middle, everybody's got a problem with you. This is why I think Sam Harris has been an interesting case study to watch over the last few years. Anti-Trump, but anti-woke. Anti BLM but Biden's incompetent. That is not a typical combination. Say what you want about him, but that's not a typical combination of views to hold. And because he does, I probably trust that he fully believes those opinions, the reason being that the price that he needs to pay to hold those opinions is so high, right? I would much sooner distrust him if he had, I know one of your views, and I can accurately predict all of the other ones. Well, that's the capture again, right? What about the nuance? What about the person that goes from archetypes to here's a dude singing a song from Atlantis several thousand years ago to whatever, right? You go, okay, well, probably got a good bit of faith that this guy's following his own sort of internal. And you're fallible, and you got your biases and whatever, whatever. But okay, this has sort of changed a little bit of what I thought. And then there is a price to be paid by the person that doesn't do the thing that's predictable. One of the most uncomfortable things that people can deal with is somebody that they thought they could predict the behavior of, that then diverts from what it was that they thought. Because why is it that when we watch a TV show, the nerd always wears glasses, and the villain wears black and the hero's muscles and has a big chest? Because we want to be able to put them into a box very quickly, we want to do low resolution thinking, shortcut. I know this person does the box, don't need to think about it.

AUBREY: And we don't even do that with just characters we don't know. The sad thing is we do that with characters we do know. I've come into this awareness field, particularly in deeper meditations or breath works or medicine journeys of seeing how you'll have an idea of somebody, like you've reduced the hyper object of a person, infinite complexity, infinite dynamism, right? And you reduce them to something that's a predictable algorithm. It's a persona that you think you understand. And then you're judging them based upon this thing. But if you just go a little deeper, you can get back into the novelty of wow.

CHRIS: But then you get upset when they don't adhere to your version of what they would have done.

AUBREY: Or delighted. I think that's why like your mates who are funny, what makes somebody funny is they say something that you didn't think of in your head. 

CHRIS: Yes. 

AUBREY: So, it's one or the other. You're either going to be repelled or delighted. But you have to be willing to take that unique risk to either repel somebody or delight them, but with your truth. And I think we actually crave that. I think it's one of the reasons that so many relationships fall apart is they lose the ability to see each other in radical novelty. So of course, one option is be polyamorous and then you can get novelty with new people all the time. And I did that and it works, highly effective. But what's also effective is finding novelty with the same person through different practices, tantric practices, medicine journeys, or whatever practice you have to see an even deeper depth. So you go whoa. Which is what happens when you take mushrooms and look at the same tree in your backyard you've looked at all the time. That's that fucking tree. And then you're like, "The tree is breathing. That tree is speaking to me, fucking A." And the squirrels they're upside down. It's amazing. 

CHRIS: Yes, they are. Motherfuckers. They are upside down.

AUBREY: And they have huge balls. The interesting thing about animals too, is I think all animals around this gradient of freewill, we have the most and still it's highly limited, but we have the most of it. But I think as you go through the mammalian kingdom, you get a little bit more. And I swear I was in Costa Rica. And there was a squirrel who I watched go all the way around the trees and he found a mango that was like right above my head, and he grabbed it. And then he goes right to the branch above my head and starts ripping pieces off and throwing them at me, and I go, "Good for you. Good for you." Like nice, you're fucking with me. I appreciate that. I appreciate that you were making a choice. He wasn't eating it. And then I moved and then he immediately dropped it where I was and I was like, ah, not today.

CHRIS: Not today, you motherfucker. Costa Rican squirrels coming after you. So you're talking about that? That is the enlightened squirrel. That's the one that's managed to find his way. 

AUBREY: He's just got a little bit of elbow room where some little bit he had a choice. He's like, fuck that guy. And I'm like, fucking yeah, I appreciate that. 

CHRIS: Well played. 

AUBREY: Well played, sir. Indeed. Man, it's so fun to talk to you. It's an experience that whether we're having a dinner party or a gathering or whatever, we always find our way into super interesting conversation. So I just applaud you for your interest and curiosity and your willingness to dive into all of these different topics and ideas. And I really like, this is the first time I got exposed to your three-minute Monday newsletter situation. It's really cool. 

CHRIS: Thank you. 

AUBREY: Good job. Fucking great,

CHRIS: I appreciate you. I very much appreciate how welcome you've made me feel here in Austin, for a British person away from home on his own, trying to recolonize your, his imperial powers coming back over here trying to fuck you up. But yeah, man, I very much appreciated the episodes that we've done. People can go and listen to those. There's also an episode from Jordan Peterson that they'll probably very much enjoy. We flew out to San Antonio and brought a full 6k production, put it all on YouTube and a huge team and stuff. So those will be linked in the show notes below. Chris Williamson on YouTube, Modern Wisdom on Apple podcasts. And if you want to sign up to the newsletter that Aubrey is on about, you'll get a free reading list of the 100 best books I've ever read. And it's Chriswillx.com/books.

AUBREY: How many books are not in the list?

CHRIS: Tons and tons and tons. But it was just, I always get asked, where should I start with personal development? So I've called it The Modern Wisdom Reading List of 100 Books to Read Before You Die. But really what it is, is, if you are looking for something that's just going to be a good introduction to personal development, or something that's a changeup to what you've already seen. So it's a combination of the ones that are the most important. And then one two people haven't heard about, and like that it was a good blend. Because I don't need to put 12 rules for life in there. Like everyone's heard about it and most people have already read it. So it was like my sort of blend of interesting things, at chriswillx.com/books.

AUBREY: Beautiful. Thank you everybody for tuning in. Much love. Peace.