#827 - Whitney Cummings - Why Is Everyone So Emotionally Fragile?
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Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Whitney Cummings. She's a comedian, actress, writer, and a podcaster. Emotional maturity is a difficult thing to truly come by. Making your needs known, setting boundaries, being able to disappoint people without being afraid. But if it's such an important skill, why is it so hard to discover how to develop it?

Expect to learn how Whitney has been changed since becoming a mother, why Whitney has been thinking about circumcision so much, what codependence is and how to overcome it, why your niceness might be narcissism in disguise, why the news and memes are moving at such an insane velocity right now, and much more.

Don't forget, people of Australia, my live show is coming to you this November and tickets are selling very quickly for Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. You can get yours right now by going to chriswilliamson.live.com. And you can do the same if you live in London or anywhere in the UK or anywhere in the globe, anywhere on the planet. You can come to London on the 28th of November and see me at the event in Apollo with 3,599 other people by going to chriswilliamson.live.com.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Whitney Cummings. What has changed since becoming a mother? I stopped getting Botox.

Okay. Is that the main headline? That's the big thing? Stop smoking weed, stop getting Botox. Okay. You know, a lot of things. I start with the sort of, you know, more facetious ones, but I'm obviously off birth control. You know, after having a kid, I went off and I can't believe how much

clearer I am, less emotional I am, less judgmental I am, less attracted to gay men I am. And then I was like, okay, what else am I putting in my body? You know, because as soon as you have a baby in utero, you care about your own health, you know? And then I'm like, I'm not going to drink tap water anymore. Instead of spending money on stupid shoes that are going to give me blisters, why don't I spend it on glass bottle water? Whatever, you know? And in trying to care for my son and protect him from microplastics and chemicals and stuff, I accidentally...

took care of myself and cannot believe how much better I felt and

I spend so much time now thinking of like when I see my girlfriends acting crazy or women acting crazy, I'm like, maybe Amber Heard just wore too much deodorant. Maybe we need to get Rose McGowan off tap water. You know, like what are all the chemicals? And I know this is very in the zeitgeist right now. You talk about it. Huberman talks about it. There's people that actually know what they're talking about. But in my own, you know, research on myself, I'm like, I cannot believe how many chemicals I was putting in my body before and how much better I feel now that I'm not.

The Botox thing was more of, you know, you can't get Botox when you're pregnant. And...

Once I was pregnant, I couldn't believe how much better I was all of a sudden at communicating. And I was like, oh, this must just be because I'm compassionate now and it's hormonal and I'm connecting with people more. But we're designed to read microexpressions. And I look at all my past toxic relationships where we had trouble communicating or I expected the person to read my mind or just know what I meant on my face or something. Meanwhile, you've got a stone face. I know. I'm just like, no, what do you mean? Everything's fine. I just...

And now like women are and men, I think, are having a harder time communicating than ever. And we're just adding more and more things to make it more and more difficult. Like Botox that literally stops you from having facial expression. Correct. Correct. And so I was like, let me just stop. Because also, look, I've lasered my entire body in my 20s. I have no pubes. I have no nothing like that.

If I don't have any wrinkles either, I'm just going to be attracting pedophiles. So why don't I... Also, what kind of person wants to be with a woman with no pubes and no wrinkles? I think Epstein Island's closed, but I don't know. The more I think about this, the more I'm like, I'm just deciding to become the most authentic person, even if it's someone that I'm not 100% proud of all the time, so that I don't attract the wrong person. I think this is something that...

you know, I realized is that we put on this thing to try to attract as many people as we can, but we might attract the wrong person, you know, like the guy that wants a woman with like no wrinkles. Like, do I even want to be with that guy? You know, um, I stopped, I mean, I'm on your show, so I had to wear a little makeup. I don't want the comment section to be too brutal. Um, but I stopped wearing so much makeup, you know, which I always thought like, oh my God, this is going to make a man attracted to me, but it's going to maybe make the wrong man attracted to me. Um, so, um,

A lot of that. I also have this weird obsession with how into me men were when I was pregnant. It made me like love men in this weird way. I just saw a different side of men when I was pregnant.

And I think this thing of, you know, men don't want, you know, don't have like caretaking and whatever it is, like whatever bullshit I got from my mom programming me because I came from a lot of bad divorce. And I was, you know, fed this narrative that my dad was this monster and this like, you know, they were both, you know, had a lot of work to do. But I just and I had a son, you know, and once you see a little baby boy and you like they start out so innocent, you're like, how do we get from this?

you know, to such a toxic place. And I'm fascinated. It feels like even when we were speaking last time, you were kind of in the middle of softening up a lot.

And maybe this is part of a big arc. You said last time, you know, you'd spent two decades really grinding. I needed to kind of prove to myself and then realize that all of the proof that I gave to myself was for everybody else and that I actually hadn't changed anything internally and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. I mean, do we, I mean, blah, blah, blah. It is a pretty good impression of me, actually. It's literally the sound of your fucking thing, isn't it? Bah, bah, bah, bah.

Blah, blah, blah. That's the British equivalent. Am I just like the teacher from Charlie Brown? Yes. Correct. That's correct. So...

It seems like a big softening for you. But I think that, you know, we're and we were kind of texting about this a little bit. Like, you know, as soon as I was, you know, conscious, I remember being like, I'm at war. I come from, you know, Al-Khalaqom. I saw fighting. I saw men and women fighting from the jump.

And then I was, you know, I come from the generation where you walk home from school when you're seven, you know, and I was taught, don't talk to strangers. You know, you're, we're at war, you know? And then I played sports and it was like, I'm beating, you know, I'm at war. Great. A healthy type of way to channel that instinct. And then I go to school in Philadelphia and it's like, you're walking home from school, you're at war. Self-defense. You're just taught, like, it's, you know, dangerous to go to your car. It's dangerous to do anything. You have to fight with men. You know, I had a

a situation assault situation with you know a man and I shouldn't have been in the situation that's on me I didn't know how to get out of relationships no one tells you how to get out of relationships all we learn about is how to get in them and I didn't know how to get out and this was before I had done any recovery work around codependence and I still erroneously thought I don't want to hurt this person so I'm not going to leave them that's like almost sadistic

I don't want to hurt them, so I'm going to waste their time. I don't want to hurt them, so I'm just going to pretend I still like them. I mean, I just I didn't know how to dismount. I was too afraid that I was going to break his heart. He'll be fine. He'll find someone else. The narcissism of thinking that if you leave someone, you're going to decimate them is beyond. Or these days, I see a lot of men that are like, I'm afraid to break up with this person because I'm worried she's going to tweet about me. You know, that's a different fear. We'll get to that later if you want. Yeah.

Um, but I was just terrified because I was, you know, taught that breakups should be long and nasty and hard and just unnecessarily, you know, sadistic and masochistic, whatever. Um, and then I come into this business and it's, I'm told like, you're a woman in a male dominated field. You have to fight tooth and nail. Everyone's your enemy. And I was like, all right, I'm at war with everyone. That was just kind of my default state. I was taught men was my, men were my enemy. Um,

And I think I was my own worst enemy, you know? So it took me a second to kind of just go like, I don't think anyone's trying to hurt me. I think I'm looking for that because that's familiar and comfortable. I think there's almost also an element there too, that the way that women compete is,

is not in the same way that men do. So there's some really interesting studies around the amount of physical affection that women on the same basketball team give to each other versus men on opposite basketball teams. Women on the same basketball team are less physically affectionate than men on opposite basketball teams. Fascinating. So when you look at, um,

lots of the arenas in which men learn how to form alliances, have conflict, have competition, and then do it within the bounds of a game of some kind. Not that it's less serious, but that there is this ability to turn it on and turn it off. I wonder whether when you enter a mostly male-dominated space, like doing stand-up and comedy and Hollywood and shit like that, whether

You just don't have the same kind of learning that you would have done had you been a guy that had that genetic predisposition and then grown up playing a ton of sports. It's coalitional warfare practiced within, but you're just kicking a spherical object around or whatever. Totally. Oh, that's very interesting. I mean, I was just talking to someone about this this morning, is the thing that matters the most to me is class.

and grace and sportsmanship is one of those things. I played basketball where if you didn't look the person that just beat you in a championship in the eye and shake their hand and mean it, you were doing 50 suicides, you know? So I, I come from that. Like I come from, you know, maybe almost to a fault, you know, that I'm like, cause I don't want anything I don't deserve. I mean, that's just my kink. Personally. We see a lot of people that just want what they want. They want to, you know, skip the line. They want something fast. I want, um,

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

I don't... Snakes that you can slip down. Yeah. I think the older I get after having a kid, this is kind of crystallized, is, you know, to me, the between, you know, whatever time anyone goes to bed, nine and ten at night where I'm laying there on my pillow...

Can I live with myself? And am I corny? And am I someone that I would make fun of or roll my eyes at? And am I cringe? You know, and I'm in this, you know, 12-step program, Al-Anon, ACA, Codependence Anonymous, and you sit there and you do something called a 10-step every night and you go through your behavior and you kind of look at yourself as if you were yourself watching yourself grow.

giving yourself a little judgment of like, oh, do I owe an apology there? Oh, should I have said that? Was that necessary? Did I say what I mean, mean what I say and say it mean? Ah, that was a little catty. Did I need attention in that moment? And yeah, I definitely shy away from any of that. I did it the hard way because everyone's already made up their mind about us. That's also like a wild realization to have. And when you're trying to convince someone to see you a certain way, you just come off desperate and needy. And yeah,

You have to know when you're cemented, too. You have to know when you can, like, chill a little bit and go away. And that's something that having a kid really helped me with as well. There's an idea called tilting at windmills. An online stranger doesn't know you. All they have are a few vague impressions of you, too meager to form anything but a phantasm. So when they attack you, they're really just attacking their own imagination. So there is no need to take it personally.

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

how do you say, like a personality raw shock test? Like this person sees you as that, that person sees you as the other. 100%. So going back to kind of what changed from a role perspective, this sort of softening thing, obviously you made lifestyle changes, but was there this, you know,

existential personality, my position in the world has changed. I was learning about what's that idea, like the obsession of self or something that you talked about? Well, yeah, the narcissism, you know, of what I do. I just wanted to be a stand up comedian for a living. I want to make people laugh. And then, you know, the business evolves and all of a sudden we're like, hey, guys, hey, guys. And it's just me, me, me all the time.

And I realized, like, I was like, am I, how is my self-esteem getting lower? I'm getting everything I want. I'm paying my bills. I've achieved my goals. Like, how is myself worth falling? Is this from the comment section? Is it? I'm,

Turns out I'm just thinking about myself way too much. I actually like myself when I only think about myself like an hour a day. But when I think about myself 24 hours a day, that's when myself is in plummets. So now having a kid, it's such a joy to not have to think about myself so much. I also this is going to get me in trouble. Fine. That's my brand. I do believe it's OK to say women are beautiful.

by nature. We're good at it. And I think that when we don't caretake children, I'm not saying every woman needs to have a child. I know plenty of women that I hope never have children. You guys pushing this narrative, women need to have kids. You've seen them, right? Some. Some. Do you want all of them having kids? Some need. You and Alon and all these guys saying like, have more children. I mean, I know a lot of women that I'm like, can someone tie their tubes? Please, I'm begging you. Well, I mean, people sort of point to...

Kamala Harris and say, look at the sort of like childless cat lady thing. Right. I mean, do you want that screech as a fucking child growing up in the home? Yeah. Do you want a kid being told they're a different ethnicity every day? That would be very confusing. Okay. I grew up in an alcoholic home. I don't wish that on anyone. I'm not saying she's an alcoholic. I don't know. But those speeches are wild. And for me, I found myself mothering adults

groups of people, even concepts. You know, I'm not attacking the left or right. It's more, I see women that identify as liberal, progressive, and they don't have kids. And I wonder if that, we need to save this minority group. We need to save Ukraine. We need to save Gaza. Sorry, get child. Kind of. That's really interesting. Because now that I have a son, I go, you know what? I can just make this the best man I can.

You know what I mean? This I can control. I'm not going to be able to clean up Gaza, Israel. I'm not going to fix Hamas with a tweet or a march. But I can control this. And this might make a difference, actually. I'd love to see the constitution of the people tweeting about stuff, supporting things, going out in protest. I would love to see how many of them have got

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

I think I kind of just needed to be a mom. Has it changed your relationship to men, your understanding of males generally now that you've kind of got one on your side? Yes, of course. You know, look, the word feminism is so ridiculous at this point, but I am working on a bit about how it's impossible to be a feminist and a boy mom. Because it's like, I believe that women, you know, do have horrible things happen to them, but also they lie.

And but that's also about equality. It's like you can't say I'm a feminist. Men and women should be equal. And it's like, OK, by that women are just as destructive, just as conniving, just as, you know, brutal, just, you know. So I think for me, I do spend a lot of time going like this will be interesting. Am I going to have to teach my son about consent? Like, what is this going to look like? And I very much less so see things about men versus women now. And it's just more good versus evil. Yeah.

And I don't think it's men versus women anymore. I think it's good men and good women versus bad men and bad women, if that makes any sense. But also just seeing... Sorry, I'm just coming in hot with this. I think that the wildest part was deciding whether or not to circumcise my son. And I did defer to his dad on it because that felt like the right thing to do. As an English person, this is not something that we really have to deal with. So I think...

I mean, I could probably pull up the stats. I would guess somewhere in the region of...

single digit percent guys that aren't Jewish in the UK would be circumcised and I'm going to guess that it's maybe not far off the inverse here in the United States it's automatic at the hospital like you have to actively say I don't cut the umbilical cord lose the fucking truly that's it I mean it's just imagine double it up with just one extra long pair of scissors well I did have to have that too I was kind of circumcised during birth that's a different conversation for another day but I uh I mean if that was reversed how insane would that be

And Rogan talks about it a lot. And I won't plagiarize him here, but I mean, he really does think of it as mutilation. And I looked at all these studies, which again, look, whoever puts their circumcised baby in a study, I already have questions about this study. It's like these studies, you know, we do this over text too, but it's like, you know, when they're like, you know, women mature faster than men. I'm like, who?

needed to do this study. Who was like, you guys, let's do a study about how young girls are more mature. Like did Epstein fund this study? Let's be honest. You know, like there's, what's the new thing of how, um, baby's taints are shrinking because of microplastics. Right. Okay. I thought that. Who did this study? Who was measuring taints? I looked at, I looked at one. So yeah, the, uh, you call it taint.

Between your... Yeah, the... It's a taint. Yeah, I think it's anogenital gap is technically what it's referred to as. Or the gooch in the UK. Much better word than the taint. Gooch? Hate it, hate it, hate it. Gooch is gross. Fucking brilliant. No, because it feels wet. Yeah, well, it is. It's better describing the area that we're talking about. But yeah, I mean, that's not good. But penises are getting bigger a little bit.

Are they? Is that from microplastics? They're not sure. They're not sure. So sperm count going down, testosterone going down, anogenital distance decreasing, penises a little bit bigger. How do we know? Who's doing the study? How do we know? Oh, here we go again. Am I wrong? Yeah. Who's measuring penises? Did anyone ask you to be in the study? Who's doing the study? You are like the conspiracy bro of every psychology study.

that's ever been done. But think about study. I know, look, I respect studies and all, but I used to do studies when I was broke. I used to sign up for studies. I had no money. You get $50. They'd be like, are you depressed? Come do this study. I was like, I wasn't depressed, but now that I have to go do a study for cash, I guess I qualify. Do whatever you want. Totally. But it is always going to be college kids. It's going to, you know, I just like to know who, you know, because a lot of medications, you know, Ambien, I think it was, didn't test on women. So the dosage was off. Like there's certain... And that's what happened to Rosanne Barr.

That's one of the things. Yeah. There was a few things. There was a few things. Circumcision. So you chose to, you decided to go for it. I chose to do it because, you know, there's an argument to say that the son should look like their dad, you know? What is that argument? When they like change or take a shower or that kind of thing. That's an argument. That wasn't the argument here.

Um, you know, I also was there and it was anesthetized and I had a very specific surgeon do it. So there was really no pain because that's the other thing is like the trauma of the pain associating that with them. I was like, I don't want my kid to, you know, be a serial killer because as a mom of a son, every serial killer's behavior is blamed on the mom.

It's like the mom didn't let him wear the pantyhose, you know, or wear her shoes so he wouldn't kill a bunch of women. I'm just like, I just need to not turn my son into a serial killer. He sees his dad all the time. They have a great relationship. Like, I just need to figure out if I don't circumcise him and then he gets made fun of in the locker room and then kills a girl. Like, I need to just do the right thing. And so, yeah, so I decided to do it, but I was very micromanaging about it to make sure, you know, because to me, the circumcision, I mean, you know, look, and

when you talk about something like this, all of a sudden it's like, is she anti-Semitic? Whatever. It's not about that. But when you do like a ceremony four days later, it's like, it's going to hurt a little bit more. And then the baby sees all these people just clapping. They feel this horrible pain. I mean, it has to leave a mark in some capacity. But I also, going through the process of it, the way that they put a baby down and strap them down and wait, like,

And I was like, no, no, no, we, I managed the entire process to make sure it wasn't like super stressful. It was like me doing one of my podcasts. Guys, can we just pan in a little bit more on that, please? I think we're actually a little bit off on the tilt. Can we just move that a little bit? I love watching you before a podcast do your thing because it is so...

The way you do anything is the way you do everything, probably. And this is why you're so successful. Circumcise your son. You should have brought me in. Why didn't you bring me in? I could have got it done in no time. You and your Crocs. I mean, you do dress like an ER doctor. That's true. That is very true. I like it. What would you do if you had a son? Do you know? Yeah, I think... You wouldn't? No, I don't think so. Look, I haven't done the research on this, but it seems like...

the genitals don't have that many moving parts going on, that nature probably designed most of them to be essential. Yeah, I agree. So...

There's a few other things that are interesting. I'm very close with a friend who was circumcised Muslim and he wishes that he wasn't. He talks to me about lack of sensitivity and stuff like that as he's grown up. Again, it's your fucking choice. It's not like this is such an outlier problem. There's got to be

100 million men in the United States that are circumcised. It's the default. I mean, we'd be the cycle breakers, you know, if I had another one, I don't know what I would do. You know, I was like a game time to sit. Now that fucking, that's how you throw a real spanner in the work. Dad's circumcised, elder brother's circumcised, younger brother, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Keep a hold of it. Yeah, that's I mean, that's research. That's good research because it's the same family. That's dangerous. Being being fucking British with a foreskin in America is now like how many women have never seen an uncircumcised? It's so much easier to give handjobs, though. Well, I mean, you'd have to tell me more about that. But well, it's easier when it's circumcised. I mean, sorry, uncircumcised. It's easier because you have something to like hold on to. You're the expert. Yeah. Yeah.

I hate your gut. You're the expert. But I was with a man that was uncircumcised and he had a lot of shame about it in America. Like, again, a lot of women are like, what is that? What's happening? I mean, it is. It's a penis. It's a penis. It's the way that it's supposed to look. But we don't really see that. It's the same way. It's like when, you know, boys that are 18 now probably see a girl for the first time with pubes and they're like, what's all that? Yeah.

That didn't exist on Pornhub. No, you know, I mean, you'd have to look for it. But I mean, it's I think if you saw a regular woman's body and you looked at porn, I'm sure that's kind of traumatic. I have been using my eight sleep mattress for nearly three years now, and I can't imagine life without it. If you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night due to your temperature, this is the game changer.

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a checkout. Tell you what I've been thinking about a bit recently. How much more women gossip about sex and intimate sort of sex stuff with their friends than guys do. I think that women presume that guys are

super open about, you know, and then I turned her over and I did this and she was like, ah, and I was like, yeah. That's gay. And there is, I have never had, I mean, maybe, maybe when you first start having sex and you're like, like 19 or some shit and like everybody in your friend group is kind of just like, is this normal to do that thing? And oh yeah, I do that too. But you get to 22 or whatever as a guy and no one is talking about that. No one's asking you

their friend over a beer what him and his girlfriend or one night stand get up to in the bedroom it is it makes me it makes my fucking toes curl to think about that because then you're just imagining your friend having sex kind of it seems it seems it's sort of uh like

a bit of an invasion of privacy. You're basically asking to kind of imagine your mate's girlfriend doing that. It's a little bit crossing the boundary with him too. Like, what is it? Are you asking this because you want to imagine me and what I'm doing? And then I know there's just something a bit sort of fucking no, like that's your area. Yeah. I don't think that's the same with girls. I'm maybe an anomaly because a couple things. For me, my biggest turn on in a relationship is respecting the person.

And if I'm... Fucking gay turn on. Such a shit turn on. Who wants to be respected? Okay, so if I say money... Choke me while you respect me. If I say money, I'm disgusting. If I say a car, I'm disgusting. If I say a good job, I'm disgusting. But if I say I respect him, I'm an idiot. And or a good set of shoulders? I don't know. Well, I respect that if you put time and energy into respecting yourself kind of thing. Okay.

But I always think that whenever I talk to my guy friends and girlfriends, if you're gossiping about your person with other people, you might not respect that person. I found that in the past, if I'm like, yeah, is this normal in the bedroom or he did this in the bedroom? I'm like, oh, I don't respect him enough because I'm willing to share this, you know? All right. It's an invasion of privacy that you're opening up because you don't actually care. Yeah. Or it's like, I don't respect this person. Now I'm going to let everybody else have this thing in their head that he's a goofball or whatever, you know? So I see...

stop if I found myself doing that I would just end the relationship because I'm like oh that's a first indication I mean I'm gossiping about my person I really think that no matter what I mean I always tell my girlfriends I don't want to hear about your guys porn addiction I don't want to hear that it was texting with another girl because you're gonna break up if you're already telling me that well how many just thinking about sort of the actual public front showing of this how many podcasts owned by Spotify are bought by Spotify are

girl talk it's girl talk with fucking cindy and lindsey and all they do is talk about their one night stands and what happened blah blah and this is the position that i like and if you tried it to do this way i i know of no man even the most dgen autist red pill manosphere podcast do not get to that there was a brief period where um

there was like this odd campaign where going down on girls is gay uh was like a was a sort of movement that was being pushed by but why because it's like sub or something yeah kind of being the woman yeah exactly um

Beyond that... It's like sucking her dick or something? Yeah, kind of. I honestly think that was it. Going down on trans girl, maybe, for sure. But beyond that, literally, that was the closest I've ever heard the sort of most unencumbered, total explicit, open-door policy guy podcast get to one that... There's a whole fucking...

sub-genre of them for checks. So it's just, it's real interesting, you know? And it's also like, you know, I always try to go, how has this existed? Just look different, you know? Like the way that I stopped checking my email every 10 minutes is I just visualized, imagine if 30 years ago you watched someone walk to their mailbox, check if there was anything and then walk back in the house. And then 10 minutes later, check. Like it's this, we're doing the same thing, right? Like, how is it different? Like, I'm like, this is a crazy person being like, do I have any mail? Do I have any mail? Like it's like, okay.

You know, I think that like, you know, is it equivalent to, you know, guys in their garage have a poster of a hot girl? You know, that kind of thing. I think men are more visual and women are more verbal. So guys have Sports Illustrated, Swimsuit Edition. And that's kind of how you, you know, share in gossiping about girls. But it's like just looking at hot girls or something, whereas we don't have that really. It's sort of more like this guy called me and then he didn't text me back. I'm like, you know.

And my bigger, you know, I think it's fine. It's we're in America, free speech, whatever. I think the bigger thing is when it's motivated by revenge or motivated by wanting to be a victim in some way or something.

You know, that I don't think embarrassing men or trying to humiliate men is a solution to any of their problems. And it to me just seems very self-destructive, you know, because what kind of your whole thing is like men are trash, but no great man is going to ever want to be with you if this is what you do. You're not going to attract a king if you're acting like that.

Mm-hmm.

I think there is value in sharing intel of like, a guy did this. Is that weird? Is that normal? I think that's when people really share. It's like guys going, my girl keeps asking me to hit her. I don't want to do that. I don't want to hit her. That's different though. What I'm talking about is the sort of this weird...

open door policy about he does this and I like it and he tries that and we're trying to do this thing. I don't know. Maybe it's just that all guys are still sort of sexually unenlightened and they're not prepared to speak to their friends about it or maybe they think that it's something it's like, I don't know. There's just an ick. There's an ick about that kind of open door policy and I think

most girls think that most guys talk like that around their friends. I just wanted to set the record straight. You know that, I wonder if he's talking about how we have sex. You can imagine one of those memes and it's turned over. And it's fucking Warhammer 40k or, you know, he's like planning his fucking end of year accounts or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not guys talking about sex. I felt like that needed to be. I think that's, yeah,

No, I really appreciate you saying that. All my friends are male comedians, so this is probably not where I can weigh in the most. I've heard things like light bulb pussy, battery pussy. What's light bulb pussy? It's when a girl's vagina is tight and then it's not as tight inside. Oh.

Oh, it's like that way. It's going that way. Well, yeah, you know, like a light bulb. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in that way. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. I thought you would. It looks like one on the outside. Oh, yeah. Sorry. No. Fuck this.

like things like that i've like heard this from just guys talking if it was the other way if it was a light bulb that was upright it would be like one of those things that you you know when you need to hook a painting onto a yeah yeah yeah a screw and you're like well dude if it's too big at the top you can just move it down to the bottom but that i know yeah like spacious roomy inside one of those good new york apartments where you think there's no way it's going to be able to fit and you're like oh yeah kind of

Yeah, it's not bad. Vietnamese family could live in here. I just think sex is so, it's just so like, I don't know, porn or whatever. It's just so everywhere. I mean, I'm more interested in talking about when you're in a relationship, like, does your guy wash his jeans? Mine? Are we? Things like that. Are you washing your jeans, Chris? No. No. Never? The maid does that. Oh, no, no.

But that's not what I mean. There's some jeans that aren't supposed to be washed. You're supposed to put them in the freezer. What? Washing your jeans. Who puts jeans in the freezer? What does that do? Okay, there's certain raw denim that you're not... You've spent too much time around Bobby Lee. So true. You've spent way too much time around Asians that spend a grand on a pair of fucking jeans. Very true. I can tell. You're exactly right. I can tell. These hipster fucking...

Overpaid Hollywood. You know what? You're actually very right. If everybody came through to Austin, Texas and wore square-toed boots and a fucking cowboy hat. I know this is going to get me in a lot of trouble. Bring it. But I'm very fascinated now. And I, you know, I don't think it's just having a kid. I think it's I've had a lot of relationships and they haven't worked. And I'm working on this bit about how, like, when you, you know, you're like,

And you're like, I don't need a man. I'm an independent woman. Men are trash. And you get older and you're like, maybe it's me. Like, what are the odds? You know, if at the very least I make bad choices, at the very least I stayed for two years in that thing that I'm like, he's an idiot. It's like I stayed. Yeah.

I think there's something really powerful about having an epiphany that you're kind of toxic. Well, you're the common denominator between all of your relationships. That's it. And just going, you know what? Let me just clean up my side of the street and let me just see what happens. You know what I mean? Let me just take responsibility for my part and sort of see what happens. And I've always been kind of trained to believe don't be a gold digger. Do not need advice.

money from a man, do not need anything from them. And also don't let them take care of you because like that's not their job or, you know, you're going to be needy. You're going to be a succubus. You're going to be a parasite. Like because I grew up, I'm just going to say it. My mom was, you know, worked very hard, but she also had to date men for money. That's what I watched. And I watched her being trapped in relationships that she didn't want to be in that were weird with like creeps that were creepy with me and all this kind of stuff. And I was just sort of like, I never want to be that. I definitely overcorrected.

And I'm seeing a lot of these overcorrections. And now maybe I'm overcorrecting again, but I at least want to kind of try. I love the idea of, look, I'm not going full trad wife. Don't everybody panic. I still dress like a bull dyke. Don't worry. But I love I want to be able to take care of a man like I want to be able to take care of it when I see these women. They're like, I don't cook. I don't clean. I'm like, what do you do?

You dirty, hungry bitch. What do you do? Are you proud of that? Are you proud that you don't cook? How do you feed yourself? Is that cool? Like, why isn't cooking cool? It's like you're using fire and knives. Why can't this be? Why does it have to be?

Why is this lame? Like, I'm just I'm genuinely shocked as someone that, you know, didn't do that for a long time because I was just literally too busy, you know, and it worked, you know, whatever my high functioning autism. I was like, you're going to do that. I'm going to do this. I'm going to just eat a go-grit in the car because I'm, you know.

Of how ambitious I was. But now I'm just sort of like, don't you what why what's the pride around all of this? I'm useless is like, what is why is that something to be proud of? Like for me, I just I also enjoy it. You know, I think.

Everyone's sort of a, I'm not doing anything for him until you meet the person that you actually just want to do it for. That's why people have got such a problem with anyone that has a sort of big stake in the ground. This is me. I'm not going to have kids. I'm not going to get married. I'm not going to do the whatever. And then someone...

pivots and then they don't ever retro point at the thing you're I was wrong guys I apologize about that or whatever or what everybody should do as far as I can tell like I'm chronically uncertain about everything right I don't know every smart person I think is okay well yeah maybe and

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

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

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

But my story for this- Don't call it whores meditation. Whores meditation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't say it in an English accent. That's why she was crumped. So it happens with Erewhon, everyone outside of Erewhon doing whores meditation. And yeah, that was really interesting because reflecting on what it is that you want from an animal, what it is that you need from somebody else. And I started going down a codependency learning rabbit hole after we spoke last time. I think you suggested a couple of books to me, which I'm still partway through.

But can you explain, codependency seems to be this thing that kind of lurks below the surface for most people. Maybe everybody's got some degree of it and then some people it's the driving force that's in their life. And the first time that I'd ever heard of it was when I spoke to you and it seems kind of important. Can you please just promise me that you'll stop me if I'm rambling or if I'm not being clear? All the time. Okay.

So codependence, I like a good definition. I live for a good platitude aphorism. Codependence, the definition that I like to work with is the inability to tolerate the discomfort of others or the perceived discomfort, right? Because we might just be projecting.

My specific codependence came from an early age feeling like I need to take care of the feelings of the adults. I need to behave a certain way to get someone to act like this. Ultimately, it is the same way an alcoholic, you know, is alcohol makes their life unmanageable, right? An addiction is, you know,

continuing to do something despite your life becoming unmanageable. Porn making your life unmanageable, you might be a sex addict. Alcohol making your life unmanageable, you can still drink alcohol, but if you can make it to work the next day,

Not unmanageable. If you can't make it to work the next day, unmanageable, right? Addiction. Continuing to do the same behavior despite negative consequences, right? So in, you know, AA, you're addicted to alcohol. In NA, you're addicted to narcotics. In Al-Anon ACA, you're addicted to perfectionism, people-pleasing, shape-shifting to try to control other people's behavior. You know, self-deprivation is another part of codependence.

So codependent, we hear a lot like sometimes it just sounds like you spend a lot of time with a person. That's not necessarily codependent. There's codependent and interdependent. Right. And codependent is you're getting your emotional needs met through another person, whereas interdependent means you're getting your own emotional needs met internally. So addiction being I'm getting my internal needs met.

with external things, drugs, sex. And with us, it's other people. It's almost like being addicted to a person. Love addiction is a very close concentric circle, but that's kind of another thing. So if you and I are dating and we're codependent or you and I are just friends and we're codependent, it is like you send me a text. I have to I just have to respond right away. There's a fear that my behavior is going to make you uncomfortable or that my behavior is going to make you leave me, abandon me, judge me. Right. So ultimately, it becomes an addiction to control.

trying to control someone else's perceptions, behaviors, addictions, choices, right? What's the usual root cause? Or what are the most common root causes? A lot of things. In my experience, you know, growing up in a home where the adults didn't get their emotional needs met internally. So, you know, they were checking out, they were drinking, they were using, they were fighting something else. And then the child as a result goes, I need to try to fix this. We're parentified children, we tend to be.

So we had to be adults too young, right? So instead of just being kids, we had to be like, mom and dad are fighting. What if I get good grades? What if I just do great in basketball? What if I just clean this thing? Or for me, there was also a lot of neglect and there was a lot of I'm on my own, right? No one's going to take care of me. I can't trust anybody. I just need, you know, and this belief that your behavior can control someone else's behavior. And it's magical thinking. And it comes from, uh,

not having like consistency, not having people that were fair around you. You know, because alcoholism, we say like if you grow up in an alcoholic home, many times you end up being a codependent. But alcoholism is defined, you know, look, in order for alcoholism to be present, alcohol doesn't have to be present. So when you go through and do an inventory in this particular program, which if you're codependent, you don't necessarily have to do this whole program. It is just kind of like a

school for your brain. It's just like a way to reparent yourself and have mature adult expectations of people and yourself. So, you know, all of the defense mechanisms that you developed as a child to survive your family system, and by survive, it doesn't mean it was life or death. You know, it might just been on Christmas, your mom puts a ton of pressure on everybody and everything has to be perfect and the table is set perfectly. That's a form of like alcoholism, this workaholism, you know, obsession with perfectionism. If you grew up around that, it's a way to

sort of reparent yourself so that you are not acting from the point of view of your inner child, who is trying to solve everybody else's problems, manage everybody else, caretake other people, you know, get your self-esteem from your productivity, right? And your usefulness to others. That's a big one, you know, is like, I need to rescue everyone. I need to save everyone. We've all been in those relationships where you like need to save them, you need to rescue them, and then you resent them so much, you know? So codependence also has this sort of like, you know, it's

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

help is coming from a place of arrogance and playing God and trying to change people, trying to fix people. Desperation, too, I'm going to guess, too. And the three M's, mothering, micromanaging, and martyring. You know, those three things. Do you get your self-esteem from being useful to other people, from rescuing other people? And

Where are you in terms of your ability to like yourself without other people's approval? Does your mood, is it dictated by other people's perception of you, your achievements? You know, it's a tricky one because it's something that it's the only, quote, addiction that

that you get rewarded for you know it's if you're a drunk and you act shitty at a bar they kick you out if you're codependent you're like no i'm gonna drive him home i got him i'm gonna take him home and then i'm gonna take him to rehab and then i'm gonna get him sober and then i'm gonna you know and it's like well you're this hero but i might have got the elements of being charitable being caring being sensitive but that's also selfish sometimes well i guess it depends on where the compulsion is coming from like it's so fascinating because all of these things uh

the dose kind of is the poison here the like doing something nice for somebody else caring about somebody else having empathy are we really supposed to expect that where we

we would be able to detach our own self-esteem from the opinions of other people. We're a social species. You should care about your opinion of you more than you care about other people's opinions of you. But assuming that you're ever going to not be able to care about other people's opinions of you, I think it's not going to happen. Maybe there's some one-in-a-thousand Michael Malice anarchist middle-finger type people that can go and do that, but I think they're outliers. The problem being, where is this coming from? And it seems to me it's the drive. It's this...

need, if I do this, then I will be wanted, needed, accepted, validated by the world, not abandoned. And this is why it's so tricky because the difference between kindness and codependence is the motive. So if I drive you to the airport because I'm like, well, I want Chris to like me because I want him to put me on his stories and I want him to tell other people that I'm cool and I'm trying to control, trying to make myself feel safe and I'm using you.

Right. That's dehumanizing you. But if I drive to the airport because we're friends and I want to talk to you and I want to hang out with you and you owe me nothing in return and I'm not keeping score, that's just friendship and that's just service and that's kindness. But it's one of those things where it's like other people can see if you're addicted to drugs. But in codependence, you have to fucking do it yourself. You have to hold yourself accountable. Yeah.

You know, because ostensibly I might look like the nicest person in the world. But a lot of times if I'm over gifting, like I brought you a gift and I don't know if I'm going to give it to you. Like I'm trying to decide if I should give it to you. This is a real thing. This is where codependent because I don't want you. I don't want to make our relationship transactional all of a sudden. Do you know what I mean? And I don't want you to be like, well, now I have to give her something. It depends. You know, am I going to keep score when someone's over gifting? Am I doing it to make you owe me?

Are we entering in some kind of toxic contract where I've given you this thing? And, you know, it's really interesting. Over the span of about a year, I tried pretty much every green string that I could find trying to work out which one was best. And I came across AG1 and I've stuck with it for over 30 years.

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

people that want to use you and you will become a better person to healthy balance people. So when you get healthy, the sick get angry. So when you start, you know, taking care of yourself, when you start putting yourself first, when you start giving 50% in a relationship instead of 90, 10, and then it'll feel to, I don't, I'm not a doctor. I'm not going to, you know, diagnose people, but borderlines narcissists, you know, selfish, insecure people are going to go like, oh, so you're just ignoring me now. Hey stranger, where have you been?

Like, you know, so once you stop a lot of your codependent behaviors, there will be a little bit of a backlash. But then you realize, oh, yeah, these relationships were codependent. We were using each other. I was using them. Or, you know, once I went into recovery for codependence, I realized like most of my friends, I didn't even like them that much.

I just like didn't know how to say no. And I did a lot of things out of obligation, you know, and I think it's probably better. And part of the reason I'm getting tripped up is like sometimes it's better just use specific examples that are helpful. So, you know, before I went into recovery for codependence, I would get an invite to a birthday and I was like, I got to go to this. I got to go to this birthday party. I got to go. We got to swing by. And then another friend, another friend's having a party. So I got to stop at this one. I got to stop at this one. And the implication there is like, if I don't go, what are they going to cancel the party? Yeah.

Like they're going to be like, where's Whitney? Like the it's the I'm a piece of shit in the center of the universe thing. And because when you keep score as a codependent, you assume everybody else does. Oh, that's interesting. You know what I mean? So if you're the person's like, oh, well, Kristen show up to my party. OK, noted. I'm assuming that other people behave like that, too. Chances are they would not even notice that I didn't show up. And I'm the person showing up at the party. Hey, I'm here. OK, well, I got to go to another party now. And I was like, cool. Yeah. Sick, fun.

philosophy on life, just dragging yourself from party to party and making it about you. Like, well, I have to go to another thing now. And I was like, awesome. So no real friends, just a bunch of acquaintances that I felt obligated to, you know, run around and please when I wasn't even pleasing. But I'm the person at the party who's like, can I help you clean up? Can I do this? Like, I didn't know how to just be enough and be in a conversation with someone. And, you know, here are some of the

like, you know, slogans that I love because it's a simple program for complicated brains, right? We have complicated brains. Before you try to solve a problem, first make sure it's your problem.

That like blew my mind when I first came in. It was like, oh, a friend of mine is going through a breakup. I need to go over there and I need to start helping her pack her stuff. So she it's like, why am I solving someone else's problems? What am I? My addiction was to get out of myself instead of checking out with drugs or alcohol. I was like, I'm going to check out with I'm going to use someone else's problems to disassociate and to get some self-esteem. That's how low my self-esteem is that I need to go rescue someone.

to feel good about myself, you know? And it's, again, a really tricky thing because if a friend of mine said, you know, I'm in a really bad situation, someone just hit me, I'd be like, I'm on my way over, you know, but I wasn't doing it for that reason. Yeah, which is why the motive thing comes in. It's kind of a subconscious addiction to drama, which is ultimately adrenaline. And we forget about the internal drug cabinet. So where the external drug cabinet, you know, all those are, we can also get high internally.

And I remember watching the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial and I was glued to it. I couldn't get enough because I was like, everyone needs to watch this because this is the apotheosis of internal drug cabinet. This is adrenaline addiction. We don't talk about this because no one sells adrenaline, right? When you subconsciously put yourself in situations where you're going to get a ton of adrenaline because adrenaline turns into dopamine, it's addictive. That's why toxic relationships are addictive. You know, it's like this feels bad, but it also I can't stop.

And that was a big thing for me in codependence. I was like, why am I, you know, anyone who's like, I hate drama, that is a red flag. Get away from that person because, you know, you find yourself just subconsciously attracting, you know, to situations where there's going to be adrenaline. Right.

You know, look, there's also more about like ancestral roles and birth order, which I know you know a lot about and stuff, too. I do believe like my epigenetic imprinting, you know, the neurochemicals that are emitted in utero. I think we've even talked about this. You're born addicted to the same way if your mom does crack, you're born addicted to. So when I had my was pregnant with my son, I was.

If someone cut me off in traffic, I'd be like, good luck. I hope you have a great, like, I would not allow any adrenaline because I know that I was conceived during like a very acrimonious divorce, very dramatic shit. So like a crack baby, you're an adrenaline baby. Literally. So I basically did detox from adrenaline. I mean, I did 30 days, no adrenaline. How do you do 30 days, no adrenaline? You basically just like block everyone. Yeah.

Fucking nightmare.

What are some of the ways that this can manifest in people's lives that they might not realize? When you become a boss and you can't not be friends with your employees, or I see a lot of like HR issues and a lot of toxic work environments. I'm like, that's codependence. First of all, Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, I was like, that's all codependent shit. You know, little things like you hire someone because you're doing them a favor.

You do a favor for someone. When does that go well? You do a favor for them. You give them a job. Okay, I'll mentor you. And then all of a sudden you're like, okay, you're not right for this, right? And now I'm going to help you. And now we're hanging out. Now we're friends. Now you want more because now you're entitled. Like I enabled this situation. You know, I think hiring it gets very tricky. Yeah.

Self deprivation. I mean, codependents tend to be the people that don't go to doctors forget we live in America and it's a fortune to go to a doctor but like not taking care of yourself, you know, before I came to program like I wasn't consistently flossing I wasn't getting my vision checked like I wasn't I had chronic migraines. It can really like manifest in your health as well, you know, um,

I wasn't sitting down reading. I wasn't stretching. Like I would work out because I'm not much self-care. I mean, if any, it's like a it's it's sort of, yeah, self-harm in a way. If you're the person where before people come over, you're like, I have to clean up and I have to everything has to be perfect. It's like, so are you friends with people that if all the dishes weren't clean, they'd be like, never mind. You know what I mean? And what you're doing is you're implying that everyone is shallow.

as you maybe like would you judge someone for that ultimately you do it is a very judgmental kind of thing because you're assuming everybody else wouldn't accept you if you weren't perfect and that they care enough and the arrogance yes and the arrogance of thinking there is such a thing as perfection my thing was perfection you just have to be perfect at all times and then it'd be like

Would hurt even more when someone didn't want me or rejected me because it's like well, I'm perfect I can't get any, you know, but that's not how things work. Right and I think that Hold on I'm trying I'm so overwhelmed because this is such a big topic and the pressure to talk about it and get it all in Without being boring. You're doing a great job. My brain just goes like don't be boring. Don't be boring You're doing a great job, but ultimately a big part of what it is is making sure you stay a victim and

OK, so I'm going to be so nice to you and give you so many presents and do so many amazing, martyry things for you that you can never requite them. And Chris doesn't appreciate me. I love it's the people that get out of relationships and go, my problem is I just love too much. Stop doing it for them that, you know, you're doing 90 percent.

Instead of 50%. So relationships should be 50-50. So I'm going to do, that's the trick about the trad wife thing. And, you know, is if I'm, it doesn't count if I make you dinner and clean your shoes and do your laundry and do that. Well, how can you, oh, and you're going to say this and you're going to do, oh, you're going to text that person at, you know, 10 p.m. and I made dinner. That's codependence, right? Because I'm being so nice.

that the score is always off. It's a bargaining chip. You're keeping tally. And I always feel unappreciated and I get to recreate the childhood circumstances or whatever familiar vibe of being a victim. And I see this glamorization of victims these days and not true victims, but people that think like, if I'm a victim, I'm interesting or I need to be a victim because that's

I don't know. My nightmare is to be pitied. I think before, I really valued being...

a martyr. I thought it meant you were strong. I thought it meant you were selfless. You know, I thought that was like life's purpose. And then I realized like, I'm not going to save anyone or rescue anyone or be any value to anyone if I'm sick all the time and doing it out of obligation. I wouldn't. And it took, you know, going into recovery to go like, I would never want someone to hang out with me or come to my birthday or drive me to whatever because they thought they had to. Like, how embarrassing. I would never want someone to stay with me

And be like, I know this isn't going to work out, but I don't want to break her heart and stay with me.

How embarrassing, you know, so it's kind of a selfishness that because you don't want to feel bad or for the other person to think you're a bad person. And I think a big part of success these days is like, you know, the linear relationship with the ability to have uncomfortable conversations and to be able to say no. And if people don't like you not seeing it as they don't like me seeing it as like I've been rerouted to a different group of people that can handle directness.

These people are just too sensitive to be in my life because I grew up around very sensitive people. A mom that cried, you know, like stuff like that. When you see that, you're like, the last thing I want to do is make someone cry or make someone upset. Make my needs known.

Make a demand of somebody. I'm needless, wantless. The idea of like people to apologize all the time. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. People that can't be direct. You know, when someone gets off the phone with me, it drives me nuts because it's so codependent when someone's like, all right, well, I guess I'll let you get back to that. I'm like, can you just say you have to go? I'll be fine. You're implying that I can't handle someone getting off the phone, you know, but this kind of we live in this thing now where everyone's just like so afraid to hurt someone else's feeling. Somebody else's emotional state is my responsibility. A hundred years ago, we were fighting each other in fields. Like, how do we

get to this yeah i the funniest uh petri dish for this to happen in for me uh was ubers so i'd get into the back of an uber and if i was on the phone i'd like make this like groveling apology to the uber driver who i i evidently thought needed me to entertain him for the entirety of this journey sorry i'm i'm i'm on the phone i'm on the phone at the moment sorry yeah i'm very good thank you like what the and what is that what is that saying what is your judgment of him

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

100 episodes. I got it. I'll listen to you. If I want you to entertain me, I can do that at any time on Spotify, you know. And yeah, it's that. And so it's taken me a long time to realize a lot of times my groveling, you know, being obsequious to people is actually insulting to them. And that's and then I use that like, oh, why don't I be codependent in that way? Like, I don't want to insult this person.

Right. So I'm going to be direct. I'm going to be clear. I'm not going to grovel over people and infantilize them because when you infantilize someone, they all of a sudden started regressing emotionally. And then you're in that jam, you know? So it's like, if you're in, you know, if someone is like,

It enters into the contract. It's kind of called like human magnet syndrome. We're kind of like a certain type of person is going to be attracted to someone who's, you know, caretakey and people-pleasing. I'm not going to say narcissist because that word is so... What is this thing now where if a guy breaks up with you, they're a narcissist, they're a love bomber, they...

are gaslighting you. Well, there's pretty much no normal relationship behavior that hasn't been turned by TikTok into some pathology. If you break up with someone, you're an abuser. Yeah. No. I mean, getting your heart broken sucks. It used to be you just sort of like show up where you think they're going to be, you know, or whatever like that. You don't have to go online and say that they're a toxic, narcissistic gaslighter. And even if they are,

If you're saying someone gaslit me for two years, you're just admitting that you fell for it. You're just like, I'm dumb. Like, is that either way? This isn't going to go well for anyone. Like, why do this? You know, I look back and I'm like, if I was 22 and dating now, would I do that?

What do you think? Do you think he would? It's interesting. I think that because now I think people go like notoriety, like if I can't get fame, I'll settle for notoriety. Whereas a big thing in codependence is if I can't get love, I'll settle for being used. So I'm always like, what would I be willing to settle for? Because I'm always fascinated by that. And I think I might do stand up and talk about, I might be doing what you were just talking about.

there's a chance that I could be on a podcast saying, and this guy, this guy, this guy. But my codependence is I don't want to embarrass people. And I don't want anyone to be mad at me. So I would never name names. I would never do that. Fucking immovable object in an unstoppable force clashing up against each other. But you know what? I wouldn't because I think for me, whenever someone broke up with me, I like agree. I was like, you're right. I am worthless. Like I had such low self-esteem. I don't think low self-esteem is our problem anymore. That was my generation's problem. We had Kate Moss was our beauty queen.

influencer, someone who was literally anorexic. And I had very low self-esteem. Now I feel like we're gone the other way. It's like Lizzo is like, look however you want and like you're better than everyone and no one deserves you.

And if someone leaves you, it means they're a narcissist. How did you, or what do you suggest to people who think, uh, last 15 minutes that when you just spoke about, that sounds an awful lot like me or a pattern that I have in my mind, where do people go to begin to unwind these behaviors? Cause really quick, sorry, there has been a little bit, I'm seeing it shift from when I started going to, you know, ACA Al-Anon meetings, it was, it was a lot of women, some men, a lot of women. It's

It's more and more men and more and more men, because I think that what was supposed to be this movement that was women are equal, women are strong. There has been such a overcorrection or people have decided to, you know, use this wave to victimize themselves or just attack men casually about things that aren't even crimes.

Now men are going like, well, I can't break up with a woman or she'll sue me. Like, and now I'm seeing men go into codependence. So they're kind of cultivating codependence. Kind of. It's sort of like there's this thing now, not that women are so strong and equal, it's that they're so fragile and made of fiberglass. Yeah.

that if you break up with them, we'll fall apart. But we're equal. Like, which is it? We kind of have to pick one at some point, you know? It is currently hotter than a bonfire in hell's backyard, but the Texas heat is no match because all I have to do is throw Element into a glass of water and I'm good to go. You've heard me harping on about Element for forever because I use it every single day, first thing in the morning. It makes me feel fantastic. It tastes phenomenal. It's got natural sweeteners for those of you that care about it. And there is no sugar or artificial junk. It is fantastic.

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Problem that I think you're going to see with the next generation this current generation of girls growing up to become women is going to be fragility and narcissism because all of the subtext in all popular media is the only Challenge that you ever need to face is men around you not believing in you sufficiently. You're perfect as you are you are Immutable and the world is mutable. It will change to fit your preferences to fit your needs and the subtext it

I know it's hard. It is definitely hard for guys. I talk about this an awful lot that you've got to pick yourself up by your bootstraps and carry a heavy weight and burden and so on and so forth. But at least that worldview, although it's difficult and filled with responsibility, it's complimentary in as much as it suggests to you that you can handle it, that you can bear it. And I think that that's a

That's something that you should be flattered by as a guy, and it's a hopeful message. It's way more hopeful than if you ever encounter a challenge in the world, it's because of a problem with the world, not something that you need to overcome yourself. The world should fold around you. And isn't this kind of Darwinism, though, too? You know, it's like the people that expect that are not going to make it, and the people that don't, don't. Like, I mean, I learned in early age, like, and this is the thing that I learned in program, is like, the world owes you nothing. That, like, blew my mind.

That blew my mind. Why? That I don't know whether it was movies that instilled this in my brain. I don't know where or maybe it was just, you know, the magical thinking that, you know, because growing up in Al-Khalaq home, a lot of times fantasy becomes your primary addiction first. So that's another thing. You know, there's manifesting, there's fantasizing. You know, at a very young age, I was checking out in fantasy. And then I found myself in relationships, you know, fantasizing about the relationship and

Instead of basing my feelings about it on what was actually happening. And I think I see more and more people having these like kind of text relationships that aren't based on actually connecting with the person. And the relationship is kind of like a confluence of a little bit of in-person time, texting, and then their imagination. And then all of a sudden it's like, you know, the person's not behaving the way that they

they're picturing. And I found myself doing that a lot is a way to not have to be in something. So that's a like more into the love addiction thing and the fantasizing thing, because I see a lot of situations now with men and women where things go South, but it was kind of a lot of the relationship was fantasy. Uh,

And not based on actual things that were happening. And I definitely did that as a way to check out. And then as an adult, you know, my early 20s was I an adult, but to not have to be in something real. So I'm not going to get rejected. I don't have to do the rejecting. I'll just be in this fantasy world.

Oh, yeah, it's a protection. I mean, again, we spoke about this last time, this sort of Overton window of emotions that most people exist within where nothing's ever that joyful and nothing's ever that sad. I'm kind of like the thermostat. You know, I exist between 65 and 72 degrees. And any time that I cross outside of that, there's something really, really wrong and that's not safe. So I'll cope by scrolling on my phone or by going out and distracting myself with TV or with junk food or with porn or

with video games or with social media or whatever. And yeah, it results in us becoming ever

ever more sensitized to ever less strong emotions. And then something happens that pulls us out of it and somebody has a panic attack. Totally. Totally. I mean, you know, I think this is also like the ice bath thing. I have no idea. You guys in your ice baths. I think that it's a good thing regardless to just go out of your way to make yourself uncomfortable. It's such a trope. And I keep having this conversation with a ton of my friends that have kind of been in this world for a while saying,

I genuinely believe that almost all of the important insights from a personal development standpoint, I already know now after eight years or whatever of being kind of in the trenches of learning this stuff. And I'm sure that there's way more that I don't know that I still need to know. The point is, there's only a small number of really important sort of foundational elements to becoming a better person, as far as I can see. And most of them you accumulated

at the very beginning of your journey through personal development, because they're the low hanging fruit, because they're the ones that are most robust, they're the most highly scalable, they're the ones that are repeated the most because they're the most effective. So, so many of the time I encounter a fucking problem and realize that I wrote or said or interviewed the guy that had the solution to this four years ago. I'm like, why have I, I'm assuming that this new piece of info, it's not a, I,

discount the stuff from four years ago it's the new shit this is the new shit this is the stuff that's interesting no dude like you already found those and I know that it's a trope to talk about do hard things you know get comfortable being uncomfortable so that you can be comfortable when you're uncomfortable a tropey yes but every single time that I do a cardio workout I fucking hate cardio I'm not built for cardio every time that I do a cardio workout I

It puts me into a place. It's so humbling because I suck at it and because it's hard and because there's nowhere to hide. Even in a bodybuilding gym bro workout, you can kind of hide away in some ways, even if you go to failure. Yeah. But prolonged cardio discomfort, there's nowhere to hide. And you're like, right, okay, I'm doing this thing. And

And while I do it, all of these sort of inner voices about you're not good enough, you're going to suck, you're not working hard enough, this should be easier, this is because you fucking ate that cookie three days ago, this is because you blah, blah, blah, this is just like Mr. Patterson in fucking physical education always said blah, blah. All of that stuff starts to come up and you're forced to grapple with it. And that's interesting. I go, okay, well, for me, it doesn't happen in the sauna, it doesn't happen in the ice bath.

bath all that much, but it happens during cardio. And I think finding a thing which can be a little safe, but controlled period of discomfort for you to exist within and go, okay, I'm going to use that meditatively to kind of just move through the things and the assumptions and the voices that come up inside of me. And yeah, I remember when I was doing CrossFit, I was maybe 20,

seven, 28, and hadn't done as much self-work as I have now, any time that my heart rate got above probably 160, 165, so zone four, not even top end zone five stuff, any time that my heart rate got above that, all of these weird voices would appear, all of these sort of negative, sort of

very zero-sum mentality, threatening, frustrated, bitter, resentful, angry. All of these voices would start coming up inside of me. I was like, why the fuck is that coming from? I was like, oh, you're threatened. You're threatened by something at the moment. You're in discomfort and you're

go-to default is to derogate yourself. It's to feel like somebody's mad at you, to feel like you've done something wrong, to have this sense of sort of foreboding, this ambient sense of anxiety and threat and discomfort, and you need to control it and getting yourself too far outside of that. And you can pick whatever it is. For some people, it can be staring at a wall. For some people, it can be meditation. For some people, it can be learning a hard piano. Whatever it is, the

period like modality of discomfort I think can be anything but certainly for me that's like it just opens up so many of those interesting insights and that's why I understand why it's fucking like oh yeah man get comfortable being uncomfortable I'm like the lessons are there to learn and but also like as a recovering codependent like

our comfort zone is, you know, martyring ourselves and we're very masochistic. So a lot of my recovery is being like, no, you don't have to hurt yourself. No, you can sleep eight hours and not feel like, you know, guilty like a piece of garbage. And you're like a big thing with me is you're falling behind. If I take a nap, it's like you're falling behind, you know, and which might be true, but fine. And, um,

You know, I think that it's what this program does or any kind of recovery around codependence. At least you're able to sift through your inner monologue and figure out what is helpful and what's not. Right. So instead of saying this isn't healthy, this is healthy, that's pathologizing, you go, this isn't helpful.

This is helpful because I think a critical inner monologue can be really helpful. I'm the same with negative YouTube comments. This is not an invitation. Don't embarrass me in front of Chris, please. But sometimes like when people are like they're mean to me in the comments, I'm like, does it only hurt because it's like a little true? Yeah.

So that's when it, you know, so for me, it's like I get feedback for a living. The audience decides what I say ultimately. And then I'm like, I don't want feedback. It's like, well, the audience decides everything else. Like, you know, and so I look at comments and I'm like, you know, that's actually true. I need to be able to take that. So it's like if you can't take criticism, that to me is the ultimate...

because we are in a, I know someone wrote the book, Crisis of Comfort, whatever it is, we get our, Amazon delivers things to us. We get Postmates. We, I mean, like, you know, I think we're kind of designed to be at, you know, hypervigilant at war at all times. And now we're in a place where we're getting all of our needs met and we got to start these little wars everywhere, whether it's with your ex, whether it's, you know, online, whether you're the person writing Yelp reviews about some family-owned restaurant that the food wasn't, leave them alone. You know, we have to sort of, you know, sort of do this, whether it's an adrenaline addiction or whether it's

that human nature thing, you know, but I think that, um, you know, the new discomfort is being okay with hurting someone's feelings because everyone is, has become more sensitive, you know, and just stating your needs plainly without bringing it into land. I see men walking on eggshells around women in a way that I'm like, do you think I'm going to sue you? Like what's happening, you know? And, um,

I do it with women, too, where I'm scared that, you know, and it's taken me all this time in recovery of codependence after having a very histrionic mom and being scared of women for so long. I go into a program and I'm like, no, you can be direct with women. They can handle it. You're insulting them. And then all of a sudden now I'm like if I'm like, you know what, I'm you're going to need to come into work in person today. You can't work from home.

And then it's like, this is a toxic work environment. It's like when working from home for two months, you have a doctor's appointment every day. Your acting class starts at two. I need in the office once a year and I'm toxic. So I think that a lot of times it's being able to have and not worry about what we call the afterburn. Like I'm going to say no period at the end of the sentence. No email should be longer than two sentences because after two sentences, you're either apologizing or trying to manipulate. We've lost the art of just succinct, clear terminology.

direct, you know, because we have to go like, and here's why I need you to come to the office because in this and that it's like, I don't owe you this explanation. What's your advice to someone who is the perennial sugar coater? How can people become better at more direct communication or what worked for you?

That when I was, I had many employees, like hundreds. What was this for? I had two sitcoms at the same time, two television shows simultaneously. Were you with the exec? I was the creator. Okay. And running one of them and co-created another one. And then the Roseanne shows, you know, having a lot of employees. And when you ask for things and you don't get them,

And you're like, this person can't be that bad at their job. I must not be being clear. I love a please tell me if I'm not being clear. I may repeat back to me what I asked person. So I don't know if you've ever done a MAGO therapy with a relationship where before we can even move on, you have to repeat what you heard.

So, Chris, last night we were at this party and I feel like I really wanted to leave, but you kept talking to your ex-girlfriend. And you have to say what I'm hearing is to make sure we even hurt each other. Because sometimes the way I'm saying something is what I'm actually saying is going to get lost and you're going to hear what I'm hearing is you're jealous.

That's not what I said. Let me keep saying it until it lands. You know? Amago therapy? Amago. Because then you're going to go, well, you're jealous. That's not what I said. Don't hold your hand up at me. And then we're gone. We're gone. We're gone. And now we're just fighting about fighting. You always do this. What? And then we're like, what are we even fighting about? I don't even remember at this point. Right? And we're just like, we're in our trauma responses and we're both just four, five-year-olds throwing shit at each other. Right? And so...

You know, to me, it's I love I stole this from Rick Glassman, comedian. I spoke to him for the first time the other day. Yeah. I did DM with him. He seems great. He's great. He's just he's he's I think admits to being high functioning Asperger's. You know, I was diagnosed with autism when I was a kid and I beat it. I think we can all agree. And, you know, one time I said something to him and he went, can you say that again in a different way?

And I was like, I'm stealing that because a lot of times people will say something to me and I don't really know what they said, but I don't want to admit because I'd be come off dumb or something or I just wasn't paying attention or, you know, whatever it was. And so for me, I

I realized that I'll go, okay, so if you could just go down there, I'd really appreciate it if you would just like Xerox this. And then if you could take it over to Lindsay's office, like, sorry, it's so far away, but if you could just go do that maybe and then grab yourself some lunch. And then the person walks away and is like, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. I have no clue because she just tried so hard.

badly to make me like her or not be mad at her. Or like I felt guilty asking someone who gets paid to go make the Xerox to go make the Xerox. I don't like it's just bullshit nonsense communication. And this is why horses are so valuable prey animals in this space. All roads lead back to Iquanthar. I'm telling you, because horses interpret the fear and they don't have codependence. They don't have people wanting to like them and anxiety about other people's opinions. So everything to them boils down to fear.

fear that you're not going to like me, fear that you're going to go away, fear that you're going to reject me. So any of that with horses, they just, if you're alone with them in arena, they'll just move away from you because your energy's a mess. And I don't think we take responsibility for our own energy anymore. I'm obsessed with radical self-accountability. Truly, just exercise, just everything's my fault. Let's just play in this for a second. What if everything is my fault? Like, what would that look like?

And then what can I change that I can control on my side of the street? Because we're also like another way to know if there's codependence in your life or addiction in your life is like, how much are you blaming other people for things going on in your life? You know, forget that you're in a financial situation where you have to blame the government. That's real. You know, people can't buy houses anymore. You can't get healthier. That's fair. You know, that's a fair thing to blame. But.

to just go like, well, the relationship didn't work out because he did this and he did this. Like, so you had no, nothing to do with, like nothing. Innocent in every single situation. I didn't get this job because my boss was not okay. Like everyone's boss is an asshole. Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing. And I've been using Nomadic's Backpack

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Is there a reversal of that where people take too much responsibility for everything? They make themselves the martyr. They make themselves like it's because of me. It's always because of me. It's because I'm insufficient. It's because I did this and I did this. I'd love to meet that person. Are they single? Well, that's my pattern. I'm kidding. That's my, that's my pattern. So, you know, uh,

But you, because I think high performer brain is like, I actually have control of my circumstances. And I'm being extreme, just going, let's look at this. Mm-hmm. Because when you walk into an arena with a horse or you're doing equine therapy, and I know this sounds so elitist to be like, so when you're working with your horse, but it's just helpful because it's such a mirror to your own energy. Like, I didn't even realize that I was bringing energy into rooms that was like needy energy. Mm-hmm.

You know what I mean? And then I'm like, why is everybody so nervous? Why is everyone... And it's just like being able to take responsibility for your energy and your motives because horses can kind of read your mind, essentially. And it's a great way to have someone or an entity show you your own energy because...

If I show up and I've got this energy and you've got that energy, I can't even think about what I'm- A little energy mirror. Yeah, because, well, I'm too, like we said before, we're like an intersection of each other's shit. But horses, when they move away from you, that means you're no longer providing them with serenity and peace. That's all they value is serenity.

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

sort of stood there looking. Well, that's another thing, but I won't, you're going to think I'm an extreme, but most horses that are broken, they're shut down. Like what I do with my horse, the horses I work with are not like that because we give them pride and dignity and they're not just like, you know. Well, maybe they would shut, but it doesn't matter. I'm waving this, you know, walking over with this thing and she says, you put

put your hand on its shoulder and then you kind of slide it down and you just give it a little pinch and you lift the foot up. And if the horse wants to lift the foot up, if it feels comfortable, then yes. And you're supposed to sort of visualize lifting the foot up beforehand because that's going to make the horse feel sort of comfortable with you. And, you know, you can't be too stressed. You go, I remember thinking as I went over, I really want this horse to like me. And if it doesn't lift its foot up, that's some...

sort of comment on me as a person. And, you know, if it doesn't lift its foot, it's like, oh, this is fucking typical, isn't it? You know, obviously because I'm unable to do the thing and I can't, it's just insufficiently chill. And I knew that this was going to be the case. If it does, I've got this sort of glow of dopamine. If it was a person, if it was a person rejecting you, you'd be like, oh yeah, but she's in this tube top and she's who cares?

You know, with a horse, you can't get out of it by judging or blaming the person. So you just have to look at your own motives. So fascinating because horses and I think that even if you're never near a horse, great. This still is helpful. Horses want you to be regal. They want your outsides to match your insides. They don't want you to pretend. They don't want you to be fake. They don't want you to worry that you're not going to like them because all that translates to them is worry. And to them, worry means where's the mountain lion?

You're worried? We're prey animals. Energy conservationists aren't going to waste worry if there's not something to worry about. And then it's like, oh, you're worried that I'm going to like you? They think you're like sick.

They're like, this is a sick animal. I need to get away from it because it's it's scared for no reason. And they move away from you and they're kind of right in a way, you know. And I think that, you know, you know, for me, I was moving through life with if I'm just make myself small just so other people shine. And if I don't outshine other people and if I just like make sure like I'm people pleasing and shape shifting to be whatever other people need me to

be, I'm going to be okay. And they're going to feel okay. And everything's going to be copacetic. And then you do that with horses and they're like, get away from, you can't be in this herd. Like you're a danger to the herd. You're self-obsessed. You feel fear when there's no danger. So for you have to felt feeling fear when you're just picking up a horse's foot safely is weird. It's weird, isn't it? You know, it's weird to be like, I need to break up with this person and I'm scared. Are they going to hit you?

We, you know, feeling fear under those circumstances is very bizarre and maladaptive, you know? So horses train my brain to go like, you know what? I can't be results-oriented here, you know? And we go through life being still results-oriented based on what we think is going to either make us happy or what should happen. We go on a date being like, this should be the love of my life or, you know? It really helped me going on dates being like, it's all just practice. If something great comes, great. But we have all these sort of

results that we need attached to it that then make us feel like failures, you know? It seems to me there's sort of two things going on. I haven't fully thought this out, but it seems to be the same pattern in a lot of stuff that I'm learning about at the moment, that there's two things happening. There's one, which is your capacity to deal with the thing.

And there is another, which is the environment that you are working within. And you can kind of play about with both. So on one side, you would say, I am going to...

Be more brave. I'm going to be more courageous in my communication. But what you're doing there is overcoming an amount of discomfort. There is also, I shouldn't feel this amount of discomfort. Where is the discomfort coming from? And there will be times when you need to use the bravery, but there will also be times where you go, okay, when I'm in wartime, when it's a really big deal, when I've tried to be screwed over by a business partner or this person at work accused me of a thing that I haven't done or whatever, I need to fight for my corner. That's the time to use bravery and courage. But what you want to do is basically bring down

the level of stimulus that you're feeling ambiently to the point where you don't actually need to call on bravery and courage all that much because I just feel comfortable being direct and being open so it seems to me that there's sort of two elements going on here one which is like wartime fuel and one which is like peacetime policy I love that and I think for me I think this is a

A response that's helpful. But for me, and a tool that people don't talk about a lot because we're all about how to go, go, go, how to high perform, how to like is it's an aphorism I know, but like, don't just don't do something. Sit there. Don't just do something. Sit there. And they say every year that you're in a 12 step program, you get a moment of pause.

Right. So for me, if you just go like, Whitney, what the fuck was that? I'm like, what do you mean what the fuck was that? I can now go, I have 10 seconds to just be with myself and have choices because, you know, how can I respond, not react? You know, because the reacting is my fear driven reaction.

I'm trying to fix it, trying to change it, not being an acceptance of the moment, not living life on life's terms, trying to control your perception, trying to change something I can't change, which is what you just said, which is the most arrogant thing you can do is be like, I'm going to get a time machine and erase it, whatever. I'm going to try to make you like me by what? Being like, what? Like, that doesn't make anyone like anyone. It's delusional, but I'm allowed to take pause and have grace. And I'm allowed to say, I need a second.

to think about this. I need to remove myself from the situation because I feel as dorky as it sounds, my inner child, you know, should be the name of every abortion clinic, but we're in Texas. My inner child, I'm having an inner child reaction. It helps me to just have that language and those tools to just be like, I'm having an inner child reaction. I need to remove myself from the situation. Nothing personal. Can I just get 10 seconds? And then you go, these tools like HALT. Are you hungry, angry, lonely, or tired? If I'm hungry, I need to go eat. If

If I'm lonely, I need to go make a call. If I'm thirsty, I need to go drink. If I'm tired, I need to take a nap before I even address the situation. And it's weird to say like,

Like when all these high performer podcasts and you're you it's like what about slowing down, you know And why does this situation matter to me so much? Why is this such a deal? Like why is this gonna shatter me if it doesn't go well is because my life is not full so another big part of codependent recovery is like do I have hobbies that are not work related or Self-improvement related. It's a tough one for me. Do you uh

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

pride tim ferris the father let's go dude yes tim call me my uterus is empty yeah it's currently vacant but who knows for how long taking application uh so there's this uh quote from matthew hussey who was sat there not long ago and it's from his new book love life it's so good it's a really good self-development book masquerading as a relationship book he says

I struggle to believe I'm worthy of moments of joy and peace without first putting myself through a brutal schedule, monitoring my productivity levels down to the minute. Perhaps some people apply this earn your cookie mindset in ways that lead to healthy achievements. Not me. Mine is a mutation whereby joy and self-compassion are regularly outlawed by an internal tyrant who

who decides when I've been flogged enough for one day. Just when I'm about to collapse, a voice inside says, okay, give him half an hour of peace before bed, but make sure he knows we'll start again bright and early in the morning. And- Is it English? Yeah. Oliver Berkman, also English, calls it productivity debt, that basically he has to justify his existence every single day in order to stave off some ill-defined catastrophe that otherwise might come crashing down on his head.

Few things are more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I'm falling behind and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. Falling behind what? I think the key is to have really specific definitions because I think the vagueness, you know, vagueness is always the enemy of clarity, always the enemy of happiness. I think vagueness because once I'm not falling behind, I'm falling behind what?

Because a lot of people look at me and they are jealous of me. So Julia Roberts, like who am I even comparing myself to? I think you also have to get real clear on what your goals are so you can even measure if you truly are. You might be. But I think that sometimes we self-sabotage by having this vague idea of what we want to accomplish. Just like what world domination? Like what do you want? You know, how much money do you want? Like because for me, I'm like if I keep succeeding and succeeding, it's going to be a lot of money.

But my mentality of I'm falling behind, I don't have enough, I'm not good enough doesn't change. That's on me.

Like I'm I'm yielding. And then this is just an addiction. It's one too many, a million, not enough. When will it be enough? You know, and I think that it's taken me a long time to realize, like, my goals have been so vague on purpose so that I can continue to self-flagellate and to justify being able to be like, see, you can be doing more. You can be getting more. You can have three TV shows like and it's like, well, I didn't set goal lists specific enough to even know if I'm coming in over with extra credit or if I am failing. I couldn't even tell you if I'm failing.

I'm just making sure I always feel like I am to justify this behavior towards myself, which is the same way you justify drinking or self-harming or whatever it is. It's kind of mental self-harm, right? One of my friends gave me a quote the other day. General ambition gives you anxiety. Specific ambition gives you direction. How did you just pull that up? Like, what is this? It's just... That's the perfect quote. It's just Apple Notes, but I just have a lot of smart friends. So yeah, I just, you know, that kind of addiction to work and to this

this need to always be being productive and sort of contributing and stuff. And I think I've got human coming on the show very shortly. I'm with him this week. And, um,

We spoke about this last time. I spoke to Andy Galpin, his colleague, I guess, about this too, the perils of over-optimization. And I do think that we're seeing a swing already back away from that. And we're seeing even people like Andrew or, you know, even the most, actually the only guy that doesn't have this, I was with Brian Johnson on Sunday, you know, the like swap blood with his son, live until he's 150 guys. Yes, yes. So did this breakfast with him. He's the only person who is absolutely sort of

How do you say? Unyielding. There was an episode you did on, I believe on here, and I don't know who it was with, talking about like, what is the point of living forever if this is how you live? Correct. Kind of thing? Yeah. And Huberman, look, I said, dear, dear friend, and I love him and I'm allowed to joke about him. If like, are you fathering the world?

the same way I was trying to mother the world. You know? It's like... Not that it's... I mean, life is working out great and he's happy, but he truly is driven by, like, I want to give free healthcare to... Like...

That's wild. You know, that's a wild motivation. And, you know, look, it's like there's a lot of people in podcasting that are having such a big impact. I can't imagine how hard it would be to walk away from the drug of actually helping people. You know, I've dated a ER doctor before and he would I'd be buck naked on the bed. He'd be like, I got to go back into work. I'm like, that is knowing you can go save a life. I can't even imagine.

So you guys are in a situation where you're kind of this big brother, uncle, father to all these men that I think are very lost, younger boys that are very lost, and women too. Women love your podcast. And how do you stop? Or take a break. We're just seeing this. The pendulum is swinging back, I think, in a way that was probably needed from over-optimization. And sometimes the kind of early warning alarm is actually that

you realize that it's totally unrealistic for anybody to have the perfectly optimized day and all the rest of it. And the more that we're not

leaning into the only way to do it is this this is the absolute this is the only existence that that you can go for i think that that makes life a lot easier so i think also with a world that's very out of control i see a lot of people needing some kind of control i also think that the less we are into religion the more we have to create a new religion and i think optimization is like kind of looks like a new religion in a lot of ways right it's like you every morning you have

your routine and you say whatever it is, your meditation, you sleep eight hours, you have your rituals, you go into your ice bath, you go into your sauna. I mean, I don't always think it's a bad thing. You know, I think sometimes we're addicted to over pathologizing ourselves, too. It's like if it keeps you sane, if you're not hurting anybody and like you're taking care of yourself and setting good examples and not committing any crimes, like

What does it hurt? It's interesting that you say it's a sort of addiction to control because there's definitely a kind of fragility that comes along with people who can only perform if they've done this weird rain dance before they actually go forth and do the thing. I can't just get up and start working. I can't just get up and raise my kids. I need to do my affirmations and I haven't done my five minute breath work and I haven't done my 10 minute meditation and I haven't done my so on and so forth. You think, well,

In an attempt to become more resilient, you've actually made yourself way more fragile. Interesting.

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

Have you heard of monk mode? Do you know what that is? No. Okay, so... Hey, Shetty. No. It's kind of like...

imagine no fat but for your entire life no fat no fap fap no fap so like not wanking but it's for everything jerking off yeah it's got nothing to do with that i it doesn't work if you don't know the thing i'm referencing the original reference doesn't work if the second anyway it's uh focused on the three eyes introversion isolation and introspection so you go away and you

relinquish all social obligations for a while, you basically focus on improvement for a good chunk of time, you know, six to 12 months as a guy. And the point is to try and go away, not have the distractions and the motivations that often come along with being in social groups and having to adhere to social obligations. And then you re-enter the world now having done all of this work. One of the problems is, and I saw this in myself, I saw this in

almost all of my friends that have had really successful monk mode periods is that the isolation becomes addicting and it is a way to help you feel noble in your retreat from the world. It's not that being in social groups makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable or that you're scared about rejection or that you find it hard to make friends. It's I'm doing monk mode, bro. You know, you're sort of got this very regal up on my high horse, better than you version and monk mode

unfortunately can be very addicting and there's a real problem that guys have of reintegrating after they've done it so there's three eyes but there's actually a fourth which should be integration or reintegration and um you know there's every time that i speak about this

loads of people say i did the monk mode thing i'm probably a little bit introverted and i know exactly what you mean i really struggled to just get myself back out into the world after i'd focused on working on me and that's kind of the same as the addiction to being in the cabin in the woods or whatever you go it's you doing the thing which from the outside looks like discomfort

but from the inside is actually home base. And then when you try and rip yourself back out, what would really be uncomfortable would be you going out and saying hello to three new people at a party. That would be real discomfort for you. And now you're able to feel noble in this sort of isolation, which was, let's be honest, your home base all along. Right, right. That's fascinating. I love this. Like, you know, it's, I think that my fascination has always been how our brain has not had an opportunity to evolve neurochemically to,

you know, catch up with how quickly technology has changed things, you know, like where does, you know, we used to need to fight. We used to need to, you know, I come from Appalachia. I don't know. What's the Appalachia equivalent in England? Um, I'm not really too sure what Appalachia is. Appalachian America, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, uh,

And how would you describe it? Well, I guess the way I would describe it here is very low income. Okay. So, I mean, any of the Northern working class towns. So where I came from, Teesside, Middlesbrough, which is, it was famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. And then it lost that. So it didn't even have that anymore, which is a fucking L, big L. I need to get back over there. Get some teens pregnant. Yeah, I know. Um,

Yeah. And can I just ask one question? Also knowing what's it all for? Is my kink just bettering myself for me because I think I'm such a piece of shit and I want to have a better inner monologue? Is it because I derive dopamine from pride in my behavior? Am I trying to prove someone wrong? You know, I did realize like sometimes unhealthy motivations can provide really positive results, right? So

When people talk about... A friend of mine texted me the other day about jealousy, and I was like, dude, I... It bothers... Like, I'm like, give me someone to be jealous of. Like, that is my... Gets me going so hard. We can call it healthy competition. Jealousy is, right? Envy and jealousy are a little more toxic. But I'm like, healthy competition is something that really drives me, and I really appreciate it, you know, when it comes along. When...

And someone like that David Goggins thing, like, I mean, when people talk about negative comments, I'm like, thank you guys. It kind of drives me, you know, because I'm like, I got to get that person that hates me. I got to get that person. Like, I got to prove him wrong. You know, I'm kind of into that, you know, and I think we're getting to a point where we're trying to solve every problem. To me, I'm like, well, there's certain I don't want to solve because I do use that for fuel and I do kind of need that for this. And

If I solve all my problems that I'm just going to make new ones, right? That's what I feel like I'm seeing. I see like, especially when people who come after comedians, they're like, that's not funny. And that joke's punching down. I'm like,

It must be nice to have such an amazing life that you don't even need comic relief. Because comedy is for people whose lives suck and who need an escape from their own brain. They need comic relief. They need the laughter that's the best medicine. You don't need any of that. That's so sick for you. I would never want to be in that situation, right? Because I would rather have real problems than the fake ones that I see people with no problems making up just to create chaos. There's certainly an element of...

One of the patterns that I realized I was encountering when doing a lot of personal development was it allows you to not face low self-esteem in the moment because you know that you're always improving. You think, hey, I don't need to love myself today because tomorrow I know that I'm going to be a little bit better because of all of the stuff that I did today. And the day after that, I know. So you're permanently kind of manana manana anesthetizing yourself from having to ever really realize

face your own low self-esteem. You don't because I'm moving forward. You know, I don't, I guess some people could use this in a good way, which is I don't like my body now, but I know that I've been to the gym and I've stuck to my diet for the last two months and that's going to be great. And I know that in future I'm going to love my body. But I think that when it comes to things like self-esteem, it's

much more chronic that you're trying to fix an internal problem by a series of external accomplishments yeah and you know how many rich or successful or famous people that fucking hate themselves do we need to see to so look it's evidently not going to be fixed by this thing on the outside and it's one of the most unfortunate lessons i think because it's one that for a couple of reasons

Firstly, no one's going to give you any sympathy for dealing with it. It's a sort of champagne problem, right? It's like...

being killed on the Titanic while everyone tells you how fortunate you are to be on the greatest steamship in history. Another problem, I suppose, is that the world rewards you for continuing to improve and continuing to do these things. And you're always able to just push and hide things further, further, further down. I'm not ready yet, but it doesn't matter. I'm not ready yet, but it doesn't matter. Yeah.

Something that I don't hear a lot, and I haven't heard every episode of every high-performance podcast, obviously, but something I don't hear a lot is about service. So the thing that clicked for me was in order to build self-esteem, you have to engage in esteemable actions. And if I'm spending all day just trying to make myself better by reading these books and get more money and get better friends and get a better relationship, it's really just narcissism. You know what I mean? I'm just trying to make myself the best person I can possibly be and the prettiest and the fittest and the whatever. And

Like, I started just, I had a neighbor, I would go for this run and, you know, we say in program, like, being of service to other people is, you know, what's going to keep you sober, emotionally sober, literally sober, whatever. Just doing simple things for other people, expecting absolutely nothing in return. It is so simple, it is free, and it is such a game changer. And the guy down the street, he had this long driveway and he would pull, he was very old, and he would pull this trash can all the way. And then I started every morning, on Thursday mornings, going and just pulling his trash can down for him. And

I couldn't believe how much I liked myself. I couldn't believe how simple it was, how simple it was. During the pandemic, I was like asking people if I could get them groceries. If they say no, fine. You know, little things like that. And, you know, the other day I was on 6th Street and there was a very beautiful, hot mess of a girl just sobbing in the middle of the street, something you see a lot on 6th Street. She was just crying on her phone. And I just to just go up and be like, are you OK? And she's like, I'm fine.

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

positive way and you can do it in a sort of malignant way as well. You can do it in a way that is to manipulate or to seem like a good person or to guess. This is what's so fascinating about that codependence thing, which is it really all is about the motivation or the motive on the inside, which is difficult because you think, well, I'm doing a good thing. If I'm doing a good thing, if this is me doing something nice for somebody else. Are you doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because sometimes you do the wrong thing for the right reasons. You know, if you need to fire someone, if you need to break up with someone, whatever it is, you know, but you have to be your own, you know, judge, jury and executioner and be like,

I'm not doing this for the right reasons. You know, when I brought your present today, I'm like, why am I bringing this? What am I doing? I really wanted to give you this thing. And I, you know, I just really have to watch that. And that's a little game I have to play with myself because sometimes I'll go into autopilot. You know, a really good friend, Christina Pazinski, is going through a health thing. And I've been on this website to send her flowers every day. And I'm like, nope, not sending her $500 flowers. I'm going to call her.

What am I doing with these flowers? What, she need flowers? She wants flowers, she'll have flowers in her house. It's little, you have to check yourself, you know? And that's something that I think we spend so much time thinking about ourselves, but not in a objectively like,

I don't want to say critical, but like holding ourselves accountable type of way. Am I going to send her flowers so that if she doesn't immediately send me a picture and say thank you, I'm going to be like, okay. Am I victimized? Am I trying to create a situation where I feel like I'm unappreciated and victimized? Am I just trying to ruin our friendship? Or injecting yourself into the suffering of somebody else to show just how important and charitable you are. That's it. I can also go, hey.

let me know if you need someone to watch your kids for a couple hours. I can be of service. Do you know what I mean? Let me just drop something off at her house. I'm just making, am I making it about me? Am I giving her a chore so that I seem like a good person? I know this sounds like I'm overthinking it, but these little tiny things are like the death by a thousand cuts. Also, this is kind of the system two thinking that then allows you to pull it across into system one, right? That when, okay, I have this pattern and it's probably pretty malignant and I'm

I need to spend a very focused period of time, maybe decades, working on doing it very consciously until hopefully there's a part of me that starts to bring this across into my nature. So yeah, doing it deliberately. I understand exactly what you mean. I had to redefine the word nice and kind. I didn't know what those words meant. I'm just trying to be nice.

Well, you don't say I'm being nice. Like, is that nice? Was that nice? Well, no, I got you this thing. Oh, OK. Thanks so much. You know, I took I think that we've grown up.

I'm not coming for English people. I've dated an English man. There is such I felt that so much this like guilt and shame that's just imprinted. I don't know if you can't shine too bright or you have to just self flagellate. I'm not sure if that's regional or what. This person was taught from Tottenham or like Tottenham. Yeah.

Was that a thing? Fucking American person tries to understand England. Yeah, it's a thing. He rooted for Tottenham. Does that mean he must hate himself? Well, I mean, he just... It's a football club. He could be from anywhere in the country. Go on. But I think that there's a difference between, you know, being self-flagellating, self-deprecating and humble. And I think that this whole self-deprecating thing, I remember one time...

is a huge red flag. Insecure people are dangerous. That blew my mind because we're kind of trained to feel sympathy for insecure people, but you got to stay away from those people. If you're dating a girl or a guy who's like, you know, guys like my calves aren't big enough. I need to go to the gym. That's a dangerous person. Get out of there. If that person's not happy with themselves, they're not going to be happy with you. Right. If they can't get their own internal needs met internally, you've got to get out of that situation. If a girl is insecure and being like, I don't know if I'm going to get this shot, get out of there.

Don't be like, I'm going to save the day and make you feel secure. Just get out of there because like you're going to be on the chopping block next and you're going to be the whatever. So I used to, you know, I think a big thing in codependence is you conflate love and pity.

That's a big one. Like if you're just like, how do you know if you're codependent? Like, do you feel guilt when you're saying no to people? Do you feel shame? You know, do you, um, uh, whatever I just said, do you remember guilt, shame, but there's one before that pity, pity. Do you feel pity for somebody, you know, instead of loving them, you shouldn't feel pity for somebody and be in a relationship with them. That's like a, like a fucked up soul contract thing. Do you feel hooked by people? Do you do things out of obligation? You know, stuff like that. And I think that, you know, do you worry that a horse isn't going to like you? I mean, that's interesting. Do you do that with humans though? Yeah.

I think so. Yeah, in some ways. So that's certainly, you know, going back to time through school, very much being on the outside, very much being sort of bullied and always being, always watching things occur, watching everybody else be in friends, watching everybody else play at lunchtime, watching everybody else have, you know, support groups or whatever it might be. And then not being that always led me to try and reorientate

reverse engineer. Okay, so what is it that I need to do in order to be accepted by the group? And I think that that's just such a subtext which I carry forward into normal life. Sure. Which is... And as I hear that, I'm just going, lucky, lucky you, lucky you. I mean, I'm big on, and I know this is fine, I'm big on like trauma privilege.

You know, of like, you know, in comedy, we're always like, if you were a girl that was molested, it's like doping in sports. You know, it's kind of like, it's like, no, you don't compete in the same league if you're molested. It's like cheating. You know, it's like you have more adversity. You know, it's like, I do think there's a point where we have to all stop being like, but no one liked me in high school. It's like, well, you're saying it on an interview on Oprah. It obviously worked pretty well. Yeah.

You know, there's a point where we have to take some of the wins. You know, it's like, I was neglected as a child and, you know, my parents were drunk. Okay, well, now I'm really comfortable entertaining drunk strangers. Thanks, guys. You know, there's a point where we have to kind of just go like,

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

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

And I think that that's true. Same with science, right? But science happens and then it takes a year to be vetted. And I'm like, is this still true? Conceptual inertia. Yeah. It takes time for people to play catch up. You mentioned before about this sort of mismatch technologically and psychologically between us.

This is my first election year in the U.S. Is this pace of vibe and meme shift normal? The pace that news is moving at the moment seems absolutely absurd. Is this normal or is this an outlier? Interesting. I think, you know, it's very unoriginal to talk about our, like, short attention spans. I think the desensitization, I mean, is interesting, but...

We're no longer talking about Trump getting shot in the ear, but we kind of still talk about January 6th. You know what I mean? There are some things that linger and some things that are super ephemeral. And I don't know why. I don't have an answer. Well, we went Hawk to a girl. Biden's senile. Trump gets shot in the ear. Kamala is brat summer.

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

And look, this is not, you know, Mark Andreessen's probably the person to weigh in on this kind of thing. I was talking to Hugh Roman about this the other day, you know, of like, you know, anyone can kind of just say anything all the time. Like, is this on like social media companies to not expose us as this kind of stuff? I see four people get stabbed a day on Instagram and I don't even sign up for it.

You know, I'm now if I saw someone get stabbed in front of me, I'm worried I would like laugh at it at this point. You know, it's like I think our, you know, idea of what is real and fake is, you know, I think this is like a crisis that is unprecedented and there's no way to, you know, it's when Will Smith hit.

you know, Chris Rock in the face and everyone thought it was a joke. I mean, people thought it was a joke. I mean, it's just like we don't even have a gut reaction to things. You know, the people that, you know, you know, again, Lex Friedman should weigh on this, but robots can't tell the difference between a husky and a wolf because of our sort of

just ancestral wisdom. Like your gut just tells you before you even know, you know, which is another cool thing about being around horses is they feel fear. They feel earthquakes before. Like we have that body wisdom, but we're just so disconnected to it. We have sort of changed what it means to have a gut. Like if I say when I have a pit in my stomach, if I see you at a bar, I call that butterflies.

That's your body going like, not dude, get out of there. You should not have a pit in your stomach when you meet someone. We've decided that's love. Like we've turned things around so much, you know, like I just worry we're like our gut is gone. I wonder whether it's because everything just feels so unreal. You know, we are by design detached from, you know, you've seen that assassination attempt from Palladino.

100 angles and 20 different reconstructions from a company that does fucking 3D modeling, CGI shit. And

it still kind of doesn't feel real. And yeah, I think that that's something that we should be concerned about. I think it should be concerning that viscerally people aren't impacted by this stuff more. But I suppose, actually, I maybe answered my own question here, which is, if you were

emotionally or viscerally impacted by all of the things that are meaningful, you would just spend your entire day getting ripped around. It's trite and has been said a million times, the human mind is not meant to consume the entire world's news 24-7 on a daily basis. Yes, we're not built for this velocity and volume of information or the way that it's portrayed to us with its horrible language and the inflammatory rhetoric and all of that stuff. And that, I think, felt like a

It felt like an interesting thought experiment that I wasn't experiencing personally. And I wonder whether this is what that little theory coming into land actually feels like. And I think like, look, I mean, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, always worth reading in this space. I'd be so curious what he has to say about this now. And I think I always go, look, I'm a comedian. I'm not I don't do what you do. I'm not a scientist. I'm not a sociologist, whatever.

But I look at things from a contextual point of view, like, is this the new Darwinism? Like, again, the people that are the most desensitized, you know, are the least likely to survive. Like, you know, I try to limit my exposure so that I stay sensitized. I would like to stay...

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

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

I can't believe how quickly everything seems to be moving. It's absurd. Yeah. I mean, right. It was always happening. It was just never covered. Right. Is it, you know, I mean, it's, you know, four years ago, it didn't feel like it was this quick. And I wonder whether going back to the January 6th, the only interesting thing that I said around the Trump assassination was, will the media say that, which day will the media say was big a deal in American history, January 6th or July 13th. And, and,

It should be, I think, when the president was nearly assassinated. I think, you know, if you were to just say to a representative group of Americans, a president, you don't get to know which party from, was shot in the head but survived.

or a group of people stormed the Capitol building, which one do you think? And I would guess that you would actually lean toward the president's side of stuff because the implications of that occurring is actually graver.

And it's just, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it's to do with the media cycle. Maybe it's to do with the fact that it was Trump. But yeah, there's just, there's a fervor and a pace to everything at the moment, which is, it feels like, like fucking holding onto a roller coaster. Yeah. I mean, I think that I, you know, I think that there's also a, I did a, you know, how have things changed since I've been pregnant? Like,

I did a mass unfollowing, a mass muting because we are just like we have to protect ourselves now.

I mean, food wise than what I put in my brain. Imagine, you know, so I try to go like, what is the media diet we're doing today? 100%. I think. Have to. Your body is made up of all of the things that you put inside of your mouth and your mind is made up of all of the things that you put into your ears and your eyes. And your content diet should be

Spirulina for the soul, not fast food for your amygdala. Because this is how they win. I mean, it's they and I know that sounds the non-binary person that runs the world, the they. Yeah, I think it's important to just like play defense and then make sure you're like choosing the people you surround yourself with wisely. Like I think we're a lot of people are their social circles are changing because I'm like, I just if I hang out with someone, I don't want to hear about this.

you know, the, and I think, again, I see things through the lens of addiction also. So it's like, I think that politics is becoming more and more of an addiction. Social media rehabs are, you know, opening up for social media. And then when I'm in that, I'm like, oh shit, dude, I am addicted to this thing. It definitely feels like a soap opera. It's a real world. Pure adrenaline. It's a...

WWE meets the Kardashians storyline that's being played out with real world consequences. So there's actual stakes. You know, the problem, the reason that WWE works is that there's a title on the line and that you care about this fighter and that fighter. And I like him because of that. No, no, he did this thing. And, you know, the good guy and the bad guy in the swap and all the rest of it. But they're trying to artificially create a reason for you to care.

Interesting. You genuinely already care about this. But I wonder how much of... I had this idea about why people use such dehumanizing language about anybody when they get past a certain level of celebrity. Jordan Peterson's a good example of this. People say, regardless of what you think about Jordan, awful things about him going through drug detox and all the rest of this stuff. And

I think the reason is that... I love that he's sober and those are still the suits he wears. I'm like, so he picked out that suit when he was on meth, right? No, that's the sober suit. Sick. And people say these things because I don't think that they... They really don't connect the fact that there is a human that they're talking about. This is a...

He's an amalgamation, a conglomeration, representation of ideas or philosophies or archetypes or a movement or something. He's just this tip of the spear that is a whole host of story and whimsy and bullshit. But there's not a person there. And people, it is dehumanizing, but like in the purest form of the word. Are you on Wi-Fi? Yeah. There is a movie called An American Crime. I'm just going to mess up the details. And this is about...

Catherine Keener played the woman and it is about what happens in the herd mentality when one person starts to behave a certain way abusing someone how everybody joins in and it was in 1977 right is that when the trial was 2007 was the release date of this movie but it's about based on the true story of the

1965, 16-year-old Sylvia Likens and her disabled 15-year-old sister Jenny are left in care of at blah blah blah.

Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. I hope they don't start. But this is it. So this is a real story. Real story based on a true story about a woman that started abusing a young girl that she was just caring for in her basement. And all the kids in the neighborhood started coming by and physically abusing as well, cutting her, hitting her, punching her. And she eventually died. No one said anything to anyone.

And it's used in psych classes to talk about sort of the herd mentality of when people are glomming on to like a punching bag and participating in violence, like this Lord of the Flies mentality in our brain of when you sort of like, you know, what is that called? Mob mentality, you know? And I think that's kind of what happens. I think that's, you know, our primordial brain being like, if I participate in this, I'll be safe. Right.

Right? Yeah. Well, there's these riots going on in the UK at the moment. I sent you that thing that I wrote, which is kind of interesting. I don't know. There's the situation in France that happened recently. There was a ton of riots that were happening there. I mean, it really is impressive for America to be the least kinetic of the, and after they shot the fucking president in the head and you, we actually haven't seen, I was surprised by that, that there wasn't more, more,

genuine protests. There didn't seem to be that many demonstrations. In the States? Yeah. Well, everyone's on fentanyl. How are they going to protest? Everyone's stoned or on fentanyl. That's a good point. I wonder what would have happened, how different that would have been, whether we would have seen people go to the streets if Trump's head had been a little bit further to the right. But yeah, I don't know. If we watched Trump's head explode on television, I mean...

It's incomprehensible. I mean, it's very rare that I'm speechless, you know, but the fact that there were tweets, even if there was one of a person saying like, ah, darn it, they missed. Like, guys...

what's happening like where did our like did we ever have empathy was this always jk like or are we the same savages that you know 200 years ago we're stabbing each other with with swords it's not aided by the fact that trump kind of does have a larger than life personality he does have this sort of wwe he literally was in wwe for a while yeah uh so this is sort of unreal nature to everything that he does in any case he doesn't he doesn't seem like a

normal like he's not like anybody that anybody knows yeah uh but then when when you see uh fucking what's her face saying that um pelosi says joe biden is a mount rushmore kind of president and that we should add him into the monument you're not a real person either

And now this Joe Biden. So, yeah, I the whole thing is, I mean, look, and this is like, you know, goes back to like the introduction of television. Like now it's about charisma, like the running for president used to be about connections and money. You know, now it's, of course, about money, too. But it's like survival of the most charming, maybe because you have to go charm people to raise money and you have to be charming, you know. And I always find it interesting, like what people respond to on a human nature level.

And Trump does this brilliant thing where we ultimately are attracted to people who are fearless. I think at the end of the day, that's what we want. We're looking for daddy, daddy, alpha, alpha. Where is he? And Trump just goes, yeah, Rosie O'Donnell's fat. And even if it's rude or disreputable, who cares? We just go fearless. Hmm.

And then, you know, the, you know, Joe Biden or whoever Hillary is like, no, I think clean energy, we should have clean energy and we're getting rid of coal mining, which she thought was this like genius progressive thing to say, had no idea what she was saying. If you see the documentary Hillbilly, then, you know, instantly Trump just goes to West Virginia and says, like, we're never going to stop the coal. I mean, coal miners. Right. So I think that we're

We don't care who you are as long as you're authentic. And I think that's cool. I actually think that's kind of cool. And I think everything's going to have to change because it used to be like, how much can we trick people into voting for us? How much can we bullshit people into voting for us? And everyone's like, can we just get this...

person who runs the best Costco to be our president. We don't give a shit. You know, it's like Trump, how did this billionaire manage to make working class people like him? Because he just said we don't believe he's full of shit. Even if he is, he has a fearlessness and we're willing to follow. Fear is very unattractive right now, I think, to people.

You're seeing this arc happen with content as well. Mr. Beast going through it at the moment because of one of the people on his team. What? What? Can't wait. Chris Tyson, I think, or Ava Tyson. I can't remember how it works properly. I'm sure it'll get canceled either way. Yeah.

trans person on his team has been rumbled for sending dodgy messages to underage people in discords and using language. Does it seem, it doesn't seem at least from what I've looked at that there was anything that happened in person, probably nothing illegal, but some pretty unethical kind of... One of his employees. Yeah. One of the people that's in a lot of the videos. Uh, and, but the reason that I think Mr. Beast in particular is kind of a, a

very precarious moment with regards to that, is that people were already starting to push back against this very contrived, very curated, very sort of limbically hijacking type of content. And then you look at a lot of the stuff that people are actually enjoying spending time on, and it's people like Coffeezilla, who is this investigative reporter thing. He doesn't live far away. Really smart, right? Smart guy, smart guy.

And, you know, a lot of what he does, he seems to kind of be unencumbered with what he saw. He's got very high production value and he's got this sort of very cool virtual studio thing, but

He, you believe that what he's saying is what he believes. And Sam Sulik, who is this fitness influencer guy, doesn't have fancy thumbnails, no fancy editing, no nothing. It's just him and a camera. And he goes to the gym every day and records what he's doing in the gym and talks. And he's kind of a bit socially awkward, but very charming. And guys live for this guy because he's

Again, we believe that he believes the things that he's saying. We have faith. And in a world of, I think that this is basically kind of like a Instagram reflex that for all of the curation and airbrushing and filters for a very long time, what people are craving now is something that just feels authentic. And as we are spending less and less time around people in the real world who understand

who are authentic and can give us that sort of sense. You know, have you ever eaten a shit diet for a while and there's just this part of you that wants a carrot? I just fucking want a vegetable. I've never craved a vegetable in my life, but apparently now my body just knows better. And I kind of think it's the same. I think so much detachment and so much curation when it comes to what we watch

on the internet that we're trying to supplant the real world stuff with the online stuff. Because I also think it's important to remember that when we try to get something over on someone or when we try to meet what we're doing, when someone lies to you, they're basically just saying you're dumb. You know what I mean? You're just saying I'm dumb, you know? And I think that

You know, right now people are so savvy now. I mean, not with I saw Justin Timberlake's mugshot start to move the other day and I was like, holy shit, like I thought it was for sure. But I think that as things get more and more fake.

you know, the idea of someone just being like, yeah, I didn't really like the Barbie movie. You're just like, I don't even care what anyone thinks. I just am. I believe that what you're saying is your actual opinion. And you don't think I'm so dumb that I would buy it if you're like, no, no, I liked it. I mean, Greta Gerwig is this amazing feminist director. And I'm like,

You just think I'm an idiot, don't you? You know what I mean? It's like when someone's late, they're basically I'm I'm fascinated by what someone's actually saying by their behavior that they're not saying when someone's late. They're basically saying, like, my time's more valuable than yours. That's what they're saying with their behavior. Right. And when someone lies to you, you know, it's like Hillary doing all that stuff. She was just like, I think you're all dumb.

By posing with Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry, she's like, I think you guys are so shallow and stupid that you would vote for me because Katy Perry has cupcakes on her tits next to me at the DNC or whatever. You know what I mean? So I think that people go past what the people trying to get attention are actually saying and they can feel like what's actually being said. But it's like, you're dumb. You're dumb. Yeah. Which nobody likes to be patronized. And then I think something with Mr. Beast, I don't know if this is true, but I think

It's interesting to know when you see a million views or something, you know, you don't know what kind of views you're getting necessarily. You could be getting hate views. You could be getting, you know, there's a lot of things that get, you know, Mr. Beast could be getting people going like, oh, this is kind of weird. This is what Ellen's thing was too, where it was like Ellen was, you know, she was doing like pranks on people and, you know, people were being scared. And it was one of those things where you kind of, it's funny at the time, but after a while it starts to like,

wear on you and you kind of have a weird feeling about someone and you're not sure why. And then you're like, oh, yeah, I think that person's mean, you know, like,

Why are you jumping out of box, having people jump out of boxes and like scare celebrities that like dressed up to come here, you know, that are in high heels? Like, it's just kind of like, oh, yeah, that's kind of. And I think that a lot of these people that have been successful for a long time after what, like pranks and stuff, people like, I don't know, I've grown up a little bit and that doesn't like sit the same way. I'm obsessed with things that like people have a weird feeling about someone, but they couldn't even really articulate why. I'm fascinated by that kind of stuff. So there's this guy, Byron Allen, who you would love. He's brilliant business person.

Self-made billionaire, bought the Weather Channel in cash, was the youngest comedian to ever be on The Tonight Show. And he's just amazing. I consider him a mentor and friend. And he just always is able to analyze these things so perfectly. So Arsenio Hall, I don't know if you ever remember him from back in, I was very young when he had a TV show, Comedian, and he had this huge talk show.

Everyone loved him. And then out of nowhere, this was back in ratings, there was like the Nielsen system and they could like measure ratings on TV shows. Right. So out of nowhere, ratings got cut in half. And then six months later, out of nowhere, ratings got cut in half. And he went back to like study the shows to like see what happened. And one of them, he said in his opening monologue, Oprah was fat.

And then later he said Prince was a skank. Two sentences, just two sentences, right? Tiny little things. The people probably couldn't even not like say, oh, I stopped watching the show because of this or this. But it's this little thing like worm that gets in your brain and over time, you know, starts to matter. You know, when people just go like, I get a bad feeling about that guy. They can't tell you why I'm obsessed with stuff like that. You know, it's very interesting what you were talking earlier on about what type of person is your behavior attracting.

I think that's kind of the same when it comes to the things that you post online and you don't need to be a content creator for this because everybody is accumulating some form of audience, no matter what it is that they want to do. I always think about this. So, you know, we've done a couple of episodes recently that have moved very quickly. Did this one with Tim Kennedy, did a million plays in a day. Did another one with Mike Baker from the CIA, did a million plays in a day. Chelsea Gabbard's done a million plays in a day. And part of me is like, oh, that's really, really cool. And

When you realize that, oh, that's, you know, maybe 30,000 subscribers that have come in. Thankfully, those guys, I think, have got a very reasonable group of people that follow them. But you also realize I could have achieved this or maybe even more. And who would have been the plays and who are the downstream sort of who is the channel accumulating? Because there's no such thing as making somebody unsubscribe. Well, you can't do that on especially on YouTube. So you go, OK, if you start to build

build up an expectation from your audience that this is the sort of content, let's say that you go really hard on Israel or you go really hard on fucking China or whatever it is, some topic which is more controversial than why was the president shot? You actually think, well, what is the future version of my life that I'm creating by doing this thing now? So it's not just about chasing metrics. There's this cool idea called the McNamara fallacy. So

Robert McNamara in the Vietnam War statistician who believed that what couldn't be measured didn't matter. He charted progress in the Vietnam War by body count because it was simple to measure. It was his way of keeping score, but his focus on what could be easily measured led him to overlook what couldn't,

which was negative public opinion of the US Army, both at home and in Vietnam, which deflated US morale while boosting enemy conscription. In the end, the US was forced to withdraw from the war despite winning the Battle of Bodies because it had lost the Battle of Hearts and Minds. Thus, the McNamara fallacy, as it came to be known, refers to our tendency to focus on the most quantifiable measures, even if doing so leaves us from our actual goals. Put simply, we try to measure what we value, but end up valuing what we can measure.

Love it. So you might cut this out. Fine. People coming, you know, rumbling in the comments of Huberman protocols are too strict or Huberman or whatever the, you know, inevitable backlash that someone so popular. I think it was because he had Mark Zuckerberg on. I think as I think that that's just a little thing that gets in the back and you're like, oh, wait, he's in the elite. He's in the Illuminati.

Like, it's just kind of like, wait a second. That's interesting. I think it had nothing to do with that. Now, James Franco, I don't know his accusations. I don't know what's going on with his career or anything like that. But I know he had a couple...

Things happen. Rumblings, they went away. And then he won in a Golden Globe or something. And then all of a sudden, boom, accusations, people coming for him. And I remember watching and going, I know, I think I know why that happened. His brother was in the audience and his brother didn't want to come on stage. And he started pulling at his brother. You know what I mean? Being like, come on, come on. It was kind of like.

why are you forcing your brother to do something he doesn't want to do? It was just like this weird little thing. Do you remember when Taylor Swift was doing that weird sort of celebration that somebody won an award? I think that it's that kind of mask slip moment. It really is kind of- That's it. You nailed it. You nailed it. It's that kind of thing where I go like, I remember when Heerman was interviewing Zach and I was like, uh-oh, oh no. Because now you're going to come off like elitist people's association with that tech thing.

you know, nefarious, don't trust. I mean, Facebook is, I mean, arguably for a lot of people, it does help people. Yeah, the Zook rebrand though, that's been strong. You compare that to pretty much everything else. Now he's got a beard and he's wearing a cool long necklace. And he's just like at MMA fights. Like, where do I stand? What's happening? Yeah. Yeah.

Godspeed. But things like that, like I feel like little things make a big difference. I mean, I'm like, I don't know what happened after the Peter Attia with the Kevin Spacey photo, but I was like, ooh, if people start to go like, I don't know about this protocol. I'm like, it's not about that. It's the Spacey photo. Very interesting. Yeah. Well, we're just so untrusting and rightly so. And so very skeptical of lots of people.

But, you know, I think this is certainly a skill set that I need to get better at, which is, you mentioned before, if somebody maybe says some mean things about you or if somebody starts to move as competition or as rivalry or begin beef or whatever, you have this sort of fuck you, I'm going to come get you mentality. I have a much more, oh, I was in the wrong, their opinion's right, this is a problem with me, this is the way that it always is, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm much...

more likely to take somebody else's negative opinion of me and turn it into my opinion of me. So I think that... But do you consider the person giving the opinion? Never, but it's an opinion, right? And the other people are always right. And my opinion of me is always wrong. Always have this... Just the girl with nine face piercings at Starbucks, like her, like, that's the other thing is like, if you're going to take criticism from someone, first make sure it's someone whose life you want and whose judgment you respect. You know, that's the other thing. It's like, you know, someone online can say like, you're a whore or whatever. If the guy I'm with says it, I'm like...

I'm listening, whatever. But, you know, I think that that's the other thing. It's like I think that that all of this is about gray, you know, like in the in 12 step programs, it's all about being in the in between. And it's all about the truth is somewhere in the in between. You know, you have a criticism for me. I have like the truth is somewhere in between, you know, and I think to be able to I think intelligence and maturity and.

why your show is so amazing is like giving people the opportunity to go like, okay, there's a spectrum here. And let me just like figure out the truth because my inner monologue can't totally be trusted. This person's assessment can't totally be trusted. And let me just like, you know, these two things converge, gently figure out like what the, what the truth is here. Because if I'm choosing to believe this, then I'm choosing to hate myself. If I'm choosing to believe this person that I'm engaging in codependence. But there's also a reason that we like that degree of certainty, even if it's in somebody else, you know, a, a,

uh certain criticism may be better than an uncertain compliment in some ways because

At least there's an answer. At least I don't have to sit in this like unsure fucking superposition that hasn't been collapsed down to actually give me an answer. You know what I mean? Have you done mushrooms? Now? Just in general? Yeah. Okay. Because I'm like, because to me, the hardest part has been in the in-between for me and the uncertainty and being able to go, and this is why I'm on this thing of like, who did that study? I don't know. I'd like to hear more about who funded the study. When did they do this? It's like the food pyramid. That was like science funded by like,

General Mills or something, you know, like we've been hoodwinked by so many studies without knowing who, you know, made them stuff like that. I mean, we thought soy milk was healthy for like 20 years and now like none of my friends have tits and all my guy friends have tits. Like it's like a nightmare. And so I'm kind of in this place where I'm like able to go like there's just no way of knowing. There's really no way of knowing, you know, and being able to surrender to that is kind of this like really freeing thing, you know, because I feel like I get my emotional safety from this is the truth.

You know, and in what world would I have the truth? Like in what universe would I have the truth? You know, so I think to be able to sort of like liberate yourself from like needing to know the answer right now, you know, because it's like, hopefully I'm going to be a different person tomorrow. Hopefully I'm going to change my mind every day because that means I'm going to be smarter every day. I hope I'm not the same person in five years. When people are like, you've changed. I'm like, I would hope so. When people are like, you're getting older. I'm like, I hope that would be how it works.

And so I think that for me, it's like leaning into the things that I used to think were a failure on my part and going like, oh, my definition of intelligence was totally different. It used to be you know everything. And now it's like, I know absolutely nothing. I can tell you a bunch of stuff I've memorized. I can tell you a bunch of stuff that worked for me yesterday. I don't even know if it would work today.

Next time I come on your podcast, fingers crossed, I might be like, hey, everything I said before, totally wrong. Like, I would hope so. Yeah. You know? And I think that everybody finds different information at different times in their lives where it really works for them, you know? And so there's things that, like, blew my mind 10 years ago, changed my life, that now I'm like, well, that's not really true. But, like...

It was intelligence at the time, you know? So it's like this fluid thing of like, you know, we're talking about gender fluidity. Let's talk about like intelligence fluid. Like this is what it means to be intelligent today. Like, you know, I mean, Andrew Huberman would be like, yeah, I don't know.

Like, I trust that person. I trust the person that says, I don't know. I'm unclear. It's premature to know the answer to this, you know? And, like, I've thought about myself too much already today. I need to take a break. So we might not even know the answer today. The truth is somewhere in between. I think that that's, like, the healthiest place, but we're all trying to, like, find safety. Like, what's the truth? What's the truth? You know? Yeah.

But it's actually fascinating because it's like we don't even trust our own eyes anymore, you know, and we question everything about other people. As soon as Trump got shot, everyone was like it was an inside job. And you're just like, what about your inside job? Well, certainties are used as a proxy for expertise. You know, if somebody doesn't caveat, if they don't say I'm unsure, whatever, it's reassuring to us. But the problem being that very few things we actually do have certainty about.

this i think it were maybe you've even said this before this i think we're kind of accidentally stumbling on like modern wisdom of like the people you date the people you work with the people you surround yourself with if they don't say i don't know in the once every hour i'd get away from them do you know i mean when you go on a date with someone like well my ex was crazy and my other ex was crazy and my other ex was crazy what happened he cheated like there's no like i'm not really

I'm not really sure what happened. It may just, it just wasn't a match. No accountability. So you just know everything. Like it's, I think that that's something that's taken me a long time because I've always attracted to people that were really certain and really dominant and really alpha or whatever that means these days. And so I,

I think now it's something to me that is such a, I know this word is overused, like red flag, you know, because I, and people come to me for answers now. And I, when I was codependent, I was like, here's the answer. Go to this doctor, go to this therapist, do MDR, do this, do this, go to da, da, da, da, da. And I'm going to fix your life. And I'm like, I don't know, dude, maybe do nothing. Maybe you don't have to go to therapy. Maybe you're fine.

Maybe you're just like making a problems. I don't know. But I do think that like we a lot of us have to look at the amount of problems that we need in order to feel important or useful or feel like victims and just go like you guys, we might go to war in a couple months. Like, is there is there any joy in any of this? Like, I think that's the thing. I see my son and I see him, you know, like kind of read. I'm redoing my childhood a little bit with him. And I just see the humans inherent desire for play and

And I'm like, whoa, like remember that. Remember that. Cause that's where, aren't we doing all of this to create a situation where we could feel that joy? We're doing this to find the job and to get the money and to find the wife or that, or the husband or whatever. And then we're here. And if it doesn't work, like what are we practicing what we preach? You know what I mean? You know? And I joke with Tim Ferriss about it. I'm like, how's the four hour work week going? You enjoying those other,

20 hours a day that you're doing push-ups instead of like what like what are we doing it all for are we just masochists and we just want to like work work work or like because for me I had to really look at myself and I was like all I ever wanted was to be able to pay my bills doing stand-up I pay my bills doing stand-up and I'm in a depression oh that didn't work okay I'm gonna do this is that that didn't work either oh all the things that I wanted didn't work that I thought were gonna work all the like magic bullet fantasias didn't work that's on me you know if the thing you wanted didn't work that's on you um and so I

I think that's what's really helped me with the codependence thing. Have you what book did you read? Codependent No More? Yes. That's a good one. And I think that you talk about this a lot, like, you know, you know, sons that didn't have fathers around. I know that's a big thing because you become codependent with your mom's feelings or dads that were around that didn't approve of you. You're codependent trying to make your dad think you're perfect, whatever. You know, it's not just broken homes. It's not just alcoholic homes, you know.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be the best that you could be, but codependence is like the diminishing marginal returns of like you're so obsessed with being perfect that you're actually paralyzing yourself. You know, something I love that I always try to remember is like, you know, perfectionism leads to procrastination, which leads to paralysis. So if you're the person who's like, I can't start that podcast because I don't have the perfect art yet. Like I can't start that relationship because I don't have my finances perfectly in order yet. You know, whatever. That's when it actually starts to be debilitating. And I think it's like,

everything that we're talking about is like, what's the level? Know yourself. What's the level that's helpful? And when does that bell curve, when does it start becoming hurtful? You know? And I think that's all of this. I don't, this all or nothing thing of like, is not the way to do it. How much codependence helps? And then when does it start backfiring? Like all of the maladaptive behaviors, like, you know, that I learned as a kid, you know, we call them character defects, but I sometimes like to call them superpowers. Cause it's like, if you have alcoholics,

you know, that raise you, you're trying to figure out their moods and stuff. Sometimes that comes in really handy when you're in a business with a bunch of, you know,

crazy people. Like I know how to manage them, but then I can't go, oh, I'm going to marry this person because I know how to manage them. You know what I mean? So it's like, you have to know when to pull those weapons out, when to put them away. Self-criticism. When I'm on stage, I am an absolute savage bully to myself. You are a piece of shit. You fucking, you know, mess that joke up. You should have gotten applause right there. They're paying me money. I will be damned if I'm

You know what I mean? But as soon as I get off stage, I have to turn it off. You know, so I don't think it's about getting rid of your inner bully or getting rid of your perfection. I think it's just about knowing how to calibrate it and control it and knowing when to pull out your superpowers. I love it. Whitney Cummings, ladies and gentlemen. Oh my God. Yeah. You feeling it? I don't know. How do you feel? Great. I really appreciate it. I think the insights that I get from you are very, very good. Last one was so good. This one's fascinating. Really? I also like, you have such great conversations with women.

It's interesting. Only in my professional life. What have you got coming up next? What can people expect? Oh my God. I'm touring. I'm touring. I'm just doing standup at the moment. I'm going to be back in Austin on the 6th. You'll have to come. I'll be at Austin City Limits Live and you can come see me live. And I don't talk about politics in my show. So even if you don't think women are funny, it's a safe place to not hear about politics for two hours. Where should people go for tickets? Oh my gosh. WhitneyCummings.edu.

kidding calm i'm not selling out the freaking o2 arena in a day or we're in england like your show event him event him apollo insane yeah that's we sold out all of the downstairs in a day that was cool insane that was cool so we got one more to do that being said it's way harder to come and see me perform i just do one show and then pack everybody into a single i'm dying to come see your i haven't seen your show i mean i'm dead talk with fingering jokes you'd love it yeah that's good whitney i appreciate you

I love you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.