Proof That The Lonely Chapter Works - Jett Franzen

00:00:00I'm sorry it's taken so long, but merch is nearly here this Friday, the 31st of July, at 12 midday central time or 6pm UK time. The brand new modern wisdom merch goes live. Head to nwmerch.com now to sign up, you'll get first access and once this is sold out, it's gone. Never to be printed again. You've only got six days to be able to buy. So head to mwmerch.com now. I just did a seven-day silent meditation retreat. And one of the pitfalls that people tumble into when you're doing that much meditation, like multiple, multiple, like big sits per day for seven days without talking is when difficult emotions come up, they use the releasing technique inside of meditation to not engage with the emotion as opposed to

00:00:43embodying what they call conductivity. Conductivity is allowing the emotion to move through you. And if it makes you want to laugh, if it makes you want to cry, if it makes you feel great, if it makes you feel horrible, like if it arises and then you sort of release it from you by kind of, it's a kind of pushing away. It's a sort of prophylactic. I'm sitting. I'm working on my mind. This is me being with my thoughts. I'm not being distracted. It's like, yeah, but there's still little pernicious ways that you can use even the most positive habit as a coping mechanism to get away from something. 100%. Yeah. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Carl Jung. And I just think every person needs to read some of his work at some point in their life, but specifically about like sort of confronting

00:01:30yourself and, you know, your own shadow. And I think that's kind of related to what you're saying because Carl Jung was, was believed that for a lot of people, the real danger in humans was not the evil that they're capable of, but the evil that they're denying in themselves. And evil is kind of, there's kind of like an ambiguous meaning there in the sense that evil could just be a bad habit. But if I go to the, gym that is allowing me to steer myself away from that bad habit or it's or it's becoming a mask and it's this is all happening subconsciously so it's very hard to diagnose it but i think one of the most important things that people need to go through in their life is constantly confront themselves like

00:02:12i very very recently and trying to start this and it's almost like psychological suicide in a way that's why it's so scary and dangerous is because you're basically trying to expose yourself to yourself, which potentially is harder than exposing yourself to other people. And you're like, hey, if X, Y, and Z issue, now how am I trying to avoid addressing these issues? And it's like if you can't confront that shadow and then embrace that shadow, then it's going to control your life subconsciously. You won't even realize it. Think about how uncomfortable it is to have done something that you have praised yourself for that was hard to do to then have to face the realization that that was maybe a

00:02:52a very sophisticated coping strategy. Yes. Like, it's not a surprise that people don't really, really want to face it. I had this conversation last night. You know, you ask people, what's your why? Why do you do, why do you work so hard? Why do you build this business? Why did you start to do content?

00:03:06Why, why, why, why? And there's always a kind of PR answer. There's like a publicly acceptable one. It's usually quite positive sum. It's, even if it's negatively origined, it's got a positive. outcome. It's like the underdog story. Yeah. But for a lot of people, it's like, I didn't feel love as a kid unless I performed. And I now fear that people are going to abandon me if I'm not working as hard as I can all the time. Yeah. Or I was terrifying, terrified in my loneliness and I realized that if I'm

00:03:46useful, that's kind of the same as being loved because people want me. They don't need me. they want me and that's a good good enough proxy so even in your wise you can kind of get to a level of awareness which is like I like to do this thing and I felt this way in school and now this is what I'm doing with my life you go okay what if we take it just a level or too deeper than that the same thing about going to the gym why do you go to the gym but almost everybody I think that when you look at someone who is an extreme in anything an extreme in terms of wealth an extreme in terms of beauty an extreme in terms of competence and extreme in terms of smart and intellect I would guess that almost in every situation, the reason that those people have developed that is because they feel the opposite.

00:04:30The person who's made themselves very beautiful feels ugly on the inside. The person that has made themselves very wealthy always feels like they're not enough. The person who's made themselves very competent often feels like they're powerless. The person who's created all of this skill and these connections often feels like they're alone. Yeah. Like you are that shadow and it just some people turn it into something beautiful. alchemize it. And obviously they get praised by everybody externally and they can kind of kid themselves. And also, as you said, it's psychological suicide. Like who wants to? It's like, dude, I'm living in

00:05:01fucking bliss. You're telling me I already overcame this thing that fucking sucked and now I've turned into something that's great. You're asking me to like go deeper, reveal this fucking veil from myself to now make this thing that is undeniably and objectively good. My physique, my money, my intellect, my beauty and the way that I bring my skills to the world. And you're asking me to go deeper and kind of completely remove that comforting, like, disbelief. Yeah, I mean, it's a story as old as time with you projecting the opposite of what you are in the sense that, oh, if I lack this thing, I must let everyone know that I have that thing. And it's interesting because I don't even, I don't know if it was on your podcast, but Naval Ravicon was talking about you should live life like a lion. You know, lions, when they're hunting, they are 110% effort really viciously going after it.

00:05:55And then when they're not, they're resting. They're not really doing it. They're kind of lazy, for lack of better terms. And the interesting thing about that is, I think that's what a lot of viciously ambitious entrepreneurs or whatever endeavor you have in life, that's what a lot of people are doing. It's like you have the one side that is the, it's like yin and yang, balance of the world. Like we different cultures over time have sort of established this sort of reality of the world that we live in where, you know, it's stark contrast. So there's certainly a psychological aspect of that. And it's just so the problem is with everyone is it's so hard to to go deep into your subconscious and like really grasp what you believe.

00:06:39A thing that I talk a lot about on my YouTube channel is the concept of self-belief. I think self-belief is perhaps the most important thing, especially for a young person. person when they're trying to pursue whatever goal they have in life, whatever career, even in finding romantic partners, in friendships, whatever it is, you have to believe in yourself because if you don't believe in yourself, no one else is going to believe in you. And the problem is you're trying to convince yourself when you're the one that is the most critical of yourself. So you are the most aware of all your flaws. And all of a sudden, it's like now I need to almost brainwash myself into I'm capable of doing X, Y, Z. I really

00:07:17like Alex or Mosy's advice on that where it's like self-belief is not going to just spawn out of nowhere, right? You have to do something which creates evidence, which then not tricks your brain, but convinces your brain that you're the type of person that's capable of doing that. Once you establish the identity, once you actually have the identity, that's all the momentum that you need. Like with me with social media, it's really straightforward. You start it, you suck at it. I posted 1,162 videos before I got 1,000 followers. I sucked the month after I got a thousand followers. I got 100,000 followers. So it was just this huge, like I was really a student of the game. Like I was genuinely trying.

00:07:57And the problem was it was like, didn't have that identity, didn't have that identity. I'm like, I just got to keep throwing stuff at the wall. That's my only, that's the only thing I could think of at the time. So I keep throwing stuff at the wall. All of a sudden, you know, it's law of averages, chance. Something's going to hit. Okay, that hits. Okay, maybe it's somewhat possible.

00:08:13Then slowly but surely things start to hit. They hit at a higher percentage. All of a sudden, I'm like, wait. I'm the type of guy that could go and record a video in my parents' basement, and it gets hundreds of thousands, millions of views, and that just changed my identity. And now I'm like, oh, that's, I can totally do this now. The interesting thing is people want to speed run the first thousand videos that get no plays.

00:08:33Same thing on the show. It took 400 episodes and three and a bit years for us to hit 100,000 subs. Wow. And then in the next 400 episodes, we did like three million subs. Yeah, exponential growth. Yeah. And everybody wants to just get to the point where the growth is already exponential.

00:08:56Something I've kind of come to realize is the opportunity, you don't want the opportunity before you're ready for it, and you're ready for it far later than you think you are. I got to go on Rogan's show the first time the back end of 2022, and I think I'd done about 600 episodes at that point, and we were maybe at a million and a half subs, something like that. And I was saying for a long time to myself, like, you deserve to be in the room with the big boys. I think that this show adds something to the world that's really beautiful.

00:09:27I think that you're having conversations that aren't being done elsewhere. You should be in that room, but I shouldn't have been. And if I'd been given the opportunity, before I was given the opportunity, I wouldn't have been ready for it. And the desire for people to want to speed run it and to not have what Jack Butcher calls latent leverage, like you've just accumulated, accumulated, accumulated. and that skill that you do, like, staying ready, meaning that you don't need to get ready, that is what unlocked it when something finally hits. Because if it hit 30 videos in,

00:09:58and your next video was at the quality of someone that had done 31 videos, you're like, that was your chance. Yeah, blew it. Because you weren't ready. So speed running that. Interesting point on the, I guess, like, fake it until you make it-ish approach.

00:10:15I had this idea for a while that I'm kind of the poster boy for imposter syndrome and there is a fake it until you make it thing but there is an alternative which is make it until you believe it and that is just developing the stack of proof so high that no matter how much

00:10:36you don't believe in yourself it just crushed under the weight of evidence does that make sense? Yeah, 100%. Well, I think those things go hand in hand I don't think it's one or the other I think you do. You're faking it until you make it. You're just trying to get up so many shots to then create the evidence. The whole goal is to transition nothing to something. And you're like, can I do this? I don't know if I can do this. And you just show up every single day. Something has to hit. Eventually, it has to hit. You know, I was helping some people try. I was trying to encourage my friends and people that I met online that were smaller creators. Like, I'm not any giant creator by any means. But I was like, well, this is what I learned. It's that you're not going to know what you're doing. I still don't know

00:11:18what I'm doing. But you start to pick up the pieces. It's kind of like Socrates's philosophy. I know that I know nothing. You have to accept that there's so much that you don't know. But then you also need to accept that there's so much that you'll never know. That's just the human condition. So I'm going to try the best that I can anyways and see what happens. And then all of a sudden, the winds start to pile up and all the sudden, like you said, you're just crushed by the weight of it. So in a way, you are faking it until you make it. And in a way you are, making it until you believe it. Yes.

00:11:47It's kind of like both in one. You're right. I think the reason that I wanted to say it, I said it the day that I did the biggest live show I've ever done, which was the event in Apollo in London. That was three and a half thousand people and I was shitting myself. And before I went on, this guy at the meet and greet that we do beforehand for VVIP ticket people said, do you ever think that you would be here? like no like I'm just the poster child for imposter syndrome but the reason I wanted to

00:12:21that felt quite exposing to me as I was about to like supposedly go out on stage the guy that's got it all together and the show went amazing and standing oh and all the rest of it like it was brilliant but I feel like for some people believing that you need to have self-belief stops you from actually just doing the thing and it would be even easier for you to go, I can just show up with no self-belief. Yeah. I can do it when I'm tired, when I don't know what I'm doing, when I'm sure that it's going to go wrong, when no one around me believes in me, when everybody's mocking me for trying it. Like, I can just show up and do it anyway. And eventually the wins come. Yeah, I think at some point, the self-belief,

00:13:11when people are like, you need self-belief, I think it's true, but it's not, doesn't have to be at the beginning. It's a journey. It's the character arc. Every TV show, movie that you watched, every book you've ever read always starts with the main character in somehow, some way, being a little bit shaky with their confidence, not knowing what's going on. And then over time, they just develop into that. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on destiny and fate? Like, do you think that you have sort of a path that you're meant to follow and that you're going to get there? I'm always interested to hear people's opinions on it because I I've heard people that are religious, people that are not religious, people that have grown up in different cultures.

00:13:50And it's, I can't really find a trend or like a pattern there where, oh, I'm religious so I don't believe in fate. Or I'm not religious. I do believe in fate. I'm always curious. So what do you think about that? Fate's an interesting one because the personality trait that I care about most is agency and sovereignty over my own experience. the ability to choose. Yeah. I happen to life. Life doesn't happen to me. But then there's times when you're happening to life,

00:14:22but it feels like you're kind of dancing to the wrong tune a little bit. You branched off into some other universe that wasn't quite right and things aren't flowing as easily. And your gut and your heart and your head don't feel as aligned in the same way. And there's three areas, I think, that don't remove agency but are interesting to think about. So victim mentality, life happens to me. agency mentality, I happen to life. And resonance mentality, life happens through me. And that, like being able to open yourself up to what happens. It comes with a degree of releasing as well.

00:14:57And I know you talk about having fun with the process, not being, not gripping things too tightly. Because I happen to life causes you to take things very, very seriously. And that's great. And especially in the beginning. You need to do a thousand videos. You need to study all of the other creators and I'd be obsessive. But after a while, you actually, because of the accumulation of all of your experience, the tool that got you here isn't the one that gets you your blue belt or your purple belt isn't the one that gets you to black belt. And after a while, you actually need to learn to let go. I'm sure you've seen the videos of Harland walking around the pitch. Like a lion. Lazy. Like straight up lazy. Like distracted,

00:15:35fucking riding rodeos and stuff before he goes on. But when he needs to turn it on, he turns it on. and I don't think you can turn it on that much if you're gripping too tightly. Yes. So when it comes to fate, there's certainly times where stuff happens in life and like there is no way that I actually made this happen. Like the convergence of the confluence of all of this stuff

00:16:00is way too serendipitous. Yeah. And then there's other times where you go, I need to swim into the stream here. Like I'm brushing up against the grain of life and it requires me to like steal myself and the ability to move between those two to kind of like dance when you need to

00:16:16and like I'm feeling my rhythm here a little bit here and things are sort of moving nicely and I can release a little bit more and it's like I need to batten down the hatches and going full fucking demon mode and that balance between the two I think is is it's a skill and all of this sounds incredibly fluffy and kind of unobjective

00:16:33and yet almost everybody has a sense of what it feels like to be in flow with life to be in resonance with life So call it what you want. I'm aware that on the internet, it's not as rational and as provable and as derivative from metrics as you would like it to be. Yeah. And yet everybody's felt experience knows that this thing can be true. Yeah.

00:16:54I mean, metaphysics are fascinating. But I really like what you were talking about agency. I really like what you said about Erlene Holland because I literally just made a video about him. Do you know the Olympic skater, Alyssa Lou? No. She's got like the different colored hair, like the past. She went insanely viral over the Olympics. But her whole thing, why everyone was so drawn to her and attracted to her, was she's just

00:17:18fun maxing, as they would say. Like, she literally... Oh, I remember. She wasn't she the lady? Somebody asked her, did she win before? And did somebody ask her, like, how is it going to feel like, do you feel a pressure to win again? And she was like, I'm...

00:17:31I'm just lucky to be here. She was like, I'm lucky to be here. I'm detached from the outcome, but attached to myself or so. I think I'm, I'm paraphrasing that. But she did figure, I think, she did figure skating for many years,

00:17:45was obviously really high performer. And then she quit. And I think the, the narrative online is that she didn't like it anymore. And then she came back to it. And then like within a year or two, goes to the Olympics, wins gold.

00:17:59And in all of the videos, she's just really soak it. Like, I don't think you can fake her joy. Like, she's just enjoying it so much. So I, I just made a video that I'm going to post

00:18:08where Erling Holland is very similar to Alyssa Luhn. Like he's having fun. He had an interview and they were like, oh, what like some question about France. And he was like, well, to be honest, I think France will win the whole thing. And then he's like, I'm just happy to be here or whatever. That's not really what you'll hear from a competitor. Normally competitors are supposed to be like, I believe in myself and I'm going all the way. But he's just authentic and he's just like having fun.

00:18:30It's interesting. You talk about, yeah, gripping. I call it suffocating the experience to death. So when you want something so badly to happen, it's simply not going to happen because what you're doing is, and once again, this is getting into that metaphysical. There's not really an objective. It's hard to prove it. But the best way I can describe it is that you're operating from a frequency of abundance. You are not forcing anything to come to you. It's flowing. That's why people talk about the flow state. It's like your brain's on autopilot. You're not really like, it's not that you're not intentional. You're just not like, hyper focused on one specific thing all the time. Because as you said, you can't be 100% all the time because you have a finite amount of resources, right? So time, energy, effort, mental capacity, whatever you want to call it. It's interesting because I used to be, when I started out, I was recording 12 to 14 videos a day and I would get up. I would do my schoolwork. I would go to gym.

00:19:31And the rest of the day, my goal is, okay, research, read books, figure out what videos I want to make. I would make videos until 4 a.m. And I did this every single. I was so dedicated to it. But the thing that sucked was the more time that would pass, the more I felt like, okay, now I'm growing a little bit, there's more stakes. Now I got to somehow perform better. All of a sudden, there's pressure involved. All of a sudden I really need to make this work right now.

00:19:56And my videos started to suck a little bit more. And I was like, wow, this sucks. And then one day it's 3 a.m. It's the middle of winter. And I hadn't recorded a single video. I was doom scrolling and I would kind of use the excuse. Oh, I'm just trying to find inspiration and research. Yeah.

00:20:12And I was like, you know what? I'm going to go outside because it's freezing and the snow is falling. And I'm just going to record videos because I know I can't stay out there forever because I'm going to have to go with my bare hand. I record eight videos and I'm like, you know, I'm just going to do these in one of two takes tops. Every single one of those videos got hundreds of thousands. Most of them got millions of views. And I put almost no effort into it.

00:20:33And I was just seeing there like, wow, like this is just sort of uneniable. Like I was like, I just need to hit that quote of getting my 12 videos for the day. Mm-hmm. And then it just happened. You do understand, though, that people who see that and think, wow, all I need to do is just speak stream of consciousness. That doesn't work unless you've got the reps beforehand. Yeah. The only way that you can...

00:20:50That's the danger. You can only break the rules of the game once you've learned them. Right? You can't leapfrog the I need to learn. Do you know what Wu Wei is? You come across this? So it's a Confucian idea of trying not to try. effortless action. Right? Yeah.

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00:22:15That's join.com.com slash modern wisdom. There's this line that was in a book that I found about it. In the early stages of training, an aspiring Confucian gentleman needs to memorize entire shelves of archaic texts, learn the precise angle at which to bow, and learn the lengths of the steps with which he is to enter a room. He is sitting mat must always be perfectly straight. All of this rigor and restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated but nonetheless genuine form of spontaneity. Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort. And the kind of summary of this is the next stage of your development might not be more effort but more ease. It might not

00:23:00need more grind, but more grace. And it sounds great to hear that, dude, you can just like stream of consciousness, fucking Michael Smoke, wellness your way to just get like, like, like, yapp max, this stuff. It's like, if you haven't spent a long time removing your filler words and understanding what sort of ideas work well and understanding a good speaking cadence and realizing the sort of flow that you need to have, you're not breaking the rules of the game to level up mastery. You're just not playing the game at all. Yeah. And there's an interesting analogy with the ice skate lady that you talked about.

00:23:36Novak Djokovic nearly quit this. He did quit the sport. And same thing. Too much pressure. Didn't enjoy it. And then when asked how he got his passion back, just said, I like hitting the ball. I just like hitting the ball. And that I just like hitting the ball thing only works when you've learned how to hit the fucking ball.

00:23:57Yeah. Well, that's why I like to hit the fucking ball. say putting your brain on autopilot, right? Because we'll continue the sports metaphor, right? Literally what happens when if you ever played sports when you're younger and you've gotten really nervous, I played baseball, I would go to the plate and I would just be really tense. And what happens is there's a lot of blood flow to your brain and then it doesn't function as it would if you were just chilling on your couch or something. And then you sort of now have to be consciously aware of what you're doing. But the problem is all your training and everything

00:24:35like that, it was developing skills for your brain to run on autopilot. So that's why people mess up or the choke. That's like the art of the choke. The yips. Yeah. And you're absolutely right. It's like you need to first develop that skill for it to almost become second nature to your brain to allow it to happen. And it is a very dangerous talking point when you tell people, especially win really successful people, like entrepreneurs that make a bunch of money or athletes that have spent literally blood-swein tears for 20-plus years of their life dedicated to something when they're like, oh, I'm just, Shea, he has this one, the MVP of the NBA, Shea Gilchus Alexander. He's got this one, like, it's kind of corny because I think he was just trying to be nonchal,

00:25:20but he's like, I feel like the game's just coming to me. I'm flowing. It's just all natural. But it's like, like you're saying, if you're a kid, that's not just going to happen for you. You have to develop the skills. And most people, they don't have that agency to then go and do that thing. A lot of people have asked me, what do you think is the one thing that has differentiated you when you started doing social media? And the truth is, I always told people it was agency. But specifically because a year ago from today, I was literally sleeping on the couch of some guy's apartment in Iowa. like I was doing and I would get and I would get up every day and I was doing streaming. I started

00:25:58clipping. I started doing these random things and it's like all of a sudden I start to build myself up and I started to realize okay, I really want this. Like I really like this is not, I feel like when people say they want something, 95, maybe even more percentage of the time, it's a bluff. Like sure, I want the hottest girl in the world. I want to be a millionaire. there, but wanting something is being willing to pay the price that it requires to get it. And I realized that I was willing to pay the price. And so that was, it was go mode. Like I was constantly going. I was doing it so much that my parents were literally begging me not to work. They're like, Jet, what are you doing just sitting in this basement? I got no

00:26:38sunlight like ever. I was just so dedicated to what I was doing. And then people will see me now. And I see hate videos about me every day where it's like, why is this guy, Jet? Why did he find a way to like hit the algorithm to do this like he's doing the same thing as everyone else. I was like you literally never saw. You're not acknowledging the 1,162 videos it took me before I got 1,000 followers. You're not acknowledging the sheer amount of times where I posted something and I was wrong or I got embarrassed or what like all that stuff and then got up the next day and said, I don't I don't give a shit. I'm just going to keep doing it again. And what I'm realizing now, especially I just graduated college, I'm realizing that.

00:27:20it's talk or action. It's you do or you don't. You know what I mean? There's there's no like, oh, I'm thinking about doing this because I had, I don't know who said this, but the most dangerous people are ambitious, lazy people, people that will lead you to believe that, oh, I'm down to go and start this business idea with you and I'm going to go knock doors to get leads or do whatever it is. I had an old friend of mine who was just like that. He was constantly, oh, I'm down to do this and that with you, Jet. And I'm always like, I'm going to do it. And I'm like, all right, come to my house. Let's set up the plan. He would come to our house. He would set the plan. And then slowly but surely, the conversation goes towards girls, random stuff that is not. And I sort of fell into

00:28:00that trap because you act like the people that you're around. And then I realized, wow, like the difference between the people that make it and the people that don't are, you dedicated yourself for a ridiculous amount of time. And I'm not even including myself in that category. You know, like I have way bigger aspirations. I'm nowhere near where I want to be. But I really saw after I put in the work, I was like, okay, it takes this much to get to that point. And I'm only, you know, a centimeter down my path of where I want to be. And so then I look at someone like Alex Ramosi, like a Naval Robcon. I'm like, oh, yeah, these guys, they put in their due time for so many years, probably got

00:28:37clowned on. Probably everyone that was in their previous life was looking at them, like, what is this guy doing? You know, maybe he's like 25 years old and he doesn't have any job or he doesn't have anything going for him, but really behind the scenes, he's relentlessly trying on this entrepreneurial endeavor. He's starting a business. No one really respects you. And so you have to be like, okay, do I have the agency to say, screw their opinion? I'm going to do this and give it a shot or do not? And honestly, that percentage is like, it's probably more than 95% of people are on the,

00:29:11they think they want it, but they don't really want it. And then, you know, two to three percent, five percent are like, I'm actually wanting to do it. And that's what I realized, When I started the whole social media thing, I was like, okay, this is going to have to be a daily thing that I want to do, right? Before you win, everyone will ask you why you're working so hard. And once you win, everyone will tell you how lucky you are. Yeah. It's so fucking true, dude. And talking about the thing and doing the thing, vie for the same resources.

00:29:38So you need to allocate yours appropriately. Like literally, if you talk about the thing, I'm sure you've come across this in neuroscience. If you talk about the thing, it gives you pings of reward in the same way as if you've done it. and yeah so few people are operators. This is what I learned in nightlife, like club promo. So few people can actually do what you need to do in order to become successful. And that's not some unbelievable level of talent. It's just actually doing the fucking work on a consistent basis.

00:30:07It is so rare. And that's why people tend to be serial successes and people tend to be serial failures because the transferable skill of here is a thing that needs to be done, here are the ways to do it, and I show up and do those things. Like, when I think back to the start of Modern Wisdom, there was days in 2018 where we did zero plays. Like we'd done multiple weeks of episodes, and we had zero, like a full day with no plays.

00:30:33And then I ruptured my Achilles at the back end of 2020 and constructed a special recording setup where I could have my foot still elevated above my heart so that I could still, and then a mic that came in like this so that I could still record podcast episodes with my foot like behind the guest. It's like blowjob camp, like straight from my crotch. And that was the level of,

00:30:59that was the level of dedication that I had to this. I remember I spoke to this girl at a breathwork class back end of last year, and she hadn't seen me since I first moved to Austin, like four years ago. And she said, it's so great to see you. Are you still doing those ads? what do you mean he says well we were talking a few years ago and I remember we used to invite

00:31:20you on nights out to to like come and meet new people in in this city and country that you'd just moved to and you'd send me these like photos of some audio software and you were saying and it was like 11 o'clock at night and you were saying something about ads and I was like oh fuck I forgot that I recorded a fresh ad read on audio three times per episode for every episode for every episode for 600 episodes. Before we had dynamic insertion where you can pre-record it and then slot it in.

00:31:51I did like 2,000 ad reads. That was the finished ad read. Think about how many times I failed. Like 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, including a multivitamin, multi-mineral, pre-un probiotic, plus all the green superphab.

00:32:06It's like fucking seared into my brain. And that's because at 12 o'clock at night, even though I was getting invited to go out, I was like, if I want to afford to live in this country that I've said is my dream, I need to do the ads and the ads aren't that expensive, which means that I need to do three of them and I need to make sure they perform well. So I'm going to re-record them each time. So I keep the sponsors happy. So I have a great relationship with the sponsors. And I'm going to do it at 12 o'clock at night because I don't have anyone else to do it. It's me, my editor and a Mormon assistant in a Facebook Messenger group chat. And that is like 600 episodes and fucking two million subs. I'm like, okay, that's. just what it needs, that's what needs to happen in order to get there. The one thing that I wish that I'd done, and I know that Alex feels the same, like I can give a nod to this like member of royalty over the far side. Oh, yeah.

00:32:56I know that Alex feels the same is I wish that I'd captured more content in the beginning. I wish that I'd captured more stuff in the first one year, two years. And it's, I guess in some ways it's kind of cool because everything that you make is put out online. Yeah. That's not the same. Like if you're an artist, like you should have your first pieces of art. shit. But more of the behind the scenes of what it was like, of what the shitty rigs recording

00:33:20set up and the sleeping on the couch. Because I, you know, Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones, I heard this interview with her. And I think she was Arias Stark at like 10 years old or something in season one of Game of Thrones, super young. So it was her, basically all of her childhood is her being in this incredibly complicated production. Yeah. And somebody asked her, what do you wish that you'd done? She said, why started journaling? in season four, but I can't remember what it was like in season one, two, and three. And I really wish that I had. I really wish that I had that for myself. I wish I had those memories. And I also wish that I was able to sort of show other people what it was like in the beginning.

00:33:56That's interesting, because with me, I do have the documentation. I at least I have the documentation of what I posted. I didn't document when I would say the same thing a hundred times before I would be cool enough to post it. But yeah, specifically on my, on my YouTube, I have, I have, videos that it's funny while I was making it I would tell myself I was like 10 years down the line this is what I'm going to look back and I'm going to be showing people on like a yacht or something like guys this is where I started from you know because like my YouTube videos they're they're so like it's so like okay this guy's on the bottom right now just literally trying to work his way up being consistent every single day but yeah it's interesting the cope that people have specifically as it relates

00:34:39to success or, you know, sort of leveling up in life, doesn't matter what you're pursuing. But I've been, I think that's the one of the top things I've been getting flack for online is I truly believe, if you live in America, it does not matter how far on the bottom you are. I believe that anyone is capable of clinging their way up the ladder. I'm not saying you're going to go all the way to the top, but you can go from the absolute bottom to at least bare minimum middle. if you really have the agency to do it. There's a, there's like an old, I don't know if it's like a news interview with Morgan Freeman, and he, do you know what I'm talking about?

00:35:18And he was like, the interviewer was, I think it was like a white person telling him something about black people can't. How oppressed they are. Like how oppressed they are, like how they can't get to his position. And he literally goes,

00:35:31bullshit. And they're like, what do you mean? He's like, he's like bullshit. Look at me. Like look at, look at Denzel. Look at Obama.

00:35:38Look at all these people. And I started to realize I was like, you really have to just be viciously consistent. And it's going to take a very long period of time. And granted, I was fortunate growing up. I grew up in a working class family. You know, I never had to worry about paying the bills. So I 100% recognized the privilege that I've had. But then I was out on my own sleeping on a carpet, literally not even a couch, a carpet

00:36:05it a year ago today and now I'm on this podcast. Did that happen out of thin air? Like, I'm a little bit confused there. But I do have sympathy for these people, but I think this is a very, it's a pain point that people don't like to be called out on if you in any way sort of, and for me, it's not even necessarily criticism so much as I believe in them. I wish they would believe in them as much as I believe in them. You know, people are like, I'm not capable of doing this. There's an old study that was done where they took a bunch of women and they said, hey, we want to, we want to test or figure out whether or not that people with facial disfigurements get any type of oppression. Are you familiar with this study?

00:36:47Yeah, the Dottmuth Scar experiment. Exactly. Yeah. So they basically put makeup on them and they said, yeah, let us know if you fell in any way discriminated against in this interview you're going into. And they had like high-end makeup. They put it on their face. And these girls saw in the mirror. they're like, oh, yeah, I have it.

00:37:03And then right before they go in, they're like, hey, we just need to touch it up a little bit. They take it off. They don't know that. They go in. And, you know, at the end, they reported that they felt like they were discriminated against. And more than that, they could, you know, point out a specific thing that the interviewer said that they thought was referencing, you know, the scar on their face. And it really shows you the power of belief. Like, I'm not saying oppression doesn't exist.

00:37:24But what I am saying is a lot of it can be self-inflicted for sure. Like, people genuinely are told by the media. And this is what's so dangerous. It's so dangerous. If everyone in the media is telling you that, oh, because you aren't an EPO baby that you can't make it, you're going to believe that. You're going to internalize that. And subconsciously, that's going to dictate the way that you move about the world. And that's such a dangerous talking point. And I understand why it exists because they're trying to be sympathetic. And I get that. But once again, you got to have the agency. You've got to have the discipline to be like, fuck that. I'm going to bet on myself.

00:37:58And I think that I can do it. And I wish these people, would have a similar view about that. Granted, not all of them. I mean, how many examples are there of people that have gone from nothing to something? There's simply too many, at least in America, that you could sit here and say, it's literally impossible.

00:38:15I'm not, it's very difficult. I'm not denying that, but you can't say it's impossible. This episode is brought to you by Jim Shark. If you're going to spend an hour in the gym, you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it. Jim Shark makes the best men's and women's training gear on the planet.

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00:39:05sitewide. Right now, you can get 10% off everything by going to the link in the description below. I heading to jim.sh slash modern wisdom slash modern wisdom 10 a checkout. That's jim.sh slash modern wisdom 10 at checkout. If you had disadvantages, I agree with you. You are right. It's harder to be successful if X happened to you. Replace X with gender, race, birth, deformity, different language, different country, abuse, etc. The main point of the longer conversation is that despite the disadvantage, you only have one choice. What are you going to do about it? Number one, take action anyway and become proof to other people like you, your people, also born into or abused into this tragedy that you were, that they too can overcome it. Number two, blame and complain.

00:39:52And to be clear, you can do whatever you want. I support your choice, but only one of those decisions will make you better, and I wish I could say this without getting attacked. But you know who wins by you not being successful? Whoever or whatever you blame. And fuck them or fuck that. You can lead a rebellion of one and blame the one thing that you can control, which is you. In your mind, redefine the word blame as give power to. And when you do that, there's only one person you're going to want to give more power to.

00:40:22And that's you. For everyone who's had shitty circumstances, I'm on your side. your long-term side, the side that wants you to win. So do it anyways, with all the disadvantages, and still tell them to shove it and win. I want to be clear again, if you had tough shit happened to you, it sucks and it's not your fault. But now what? Why do we go? My two cents, win anyway, and prove that you can win even when the chips are stacked against you or your dealt a lousy hand. Because we can't get dealt a new hand, we've got to play the cards that we've got rather than hoping the dealer rules in our favor.

00:40:56So again, what are you going to do with your shit hand? The only thing possible, you play it the best you can. Ho-Mosey. Fucking slammer, dude. That's almost like a modern-day Marcus Aurelius quote. That sounds like. It's a little bit, it's updated for 2026. But, I mean, that's, I understand that there is this line that needs to be walked,

00:41:17which is if somebody's been through a lot of shit, not recognizing that feels callous. and uncaring and unempathetic. And yet, if you look at what the real world impact of that is, do those people really want to be coddled if they want to get out of this thing? Probably not. And when you realize that there is a self-fulfilling prophecy

00:41:38in telling people that because of your ex-disadvantage, you're not going to be able to do this thing, what is meant as empathy ends up being restriction. and I don't know I again like you not salubrious but perfectly fine upbringing but no

00:42:04given no objective advantages the fact that there are people who have had it worse doesn't negate the fact that most people most people exist in the middle of the bell curve yeah like they didn't grow up with extreme abuse in extreme poverty with the birth disfigure Like most people, and this is what becomes really pernicious, you can use, look at these people at the bottom end of the tail, you're not sufficiently recognizing their level of disadvantage. And that gets like concept creeped out to include earlier parts of the tail as well.

00:42:42And then actually bits of the bell curve in the middle. Does that make sense? Well, like people who haven't had those disadvantages pattern match themselves with the people who have. And they take on board that sympathy as a self-fulfilling prophecy of restriction. You're like, oh, that's me. And this is one of the reasons that for a long time, everyone's been real worried about pedestalizing victimhood because it turns the value system upside down. It says that being the most oppressed is actually the position that you want to try and be in

00:43:14because success is something that is only achieved through oppression. and victimhood is more noble in some ways. Yeah. Which is, it's incentivizing people in this very pernicious, like, presenting as pro-social, but functioning as like a speed governor on a car. Yep. If you're a parent and you have a kid and your kid does something that isn't good, do you say, oh, that's okay, like you'll get it next time, or it's okay, like you're a kid,

00:43:53or do you tell your kid, hey, that's not how a good human operates, and we need to do better than that? And do you give them constructive criticism? Well, if you're a good parent, you give them constructive criticism. Now, at that time, is the kid going to like it when you tell them they can't do it? Absolutely not. But why do parents do it? Because they love their kids, and they're going to do the thing that's going to make them uncomfortable and maybe they're out in public and their kids going to throw a fit.

00:44:19But they have to do it because they love their kids. And the only way that you can help someone grow is by unfortunately pointing out a lot of their faults. It's not the only way, but it's essential. And so I look at, it's like I call it, and this isn't my original phrase, suicidal empathy, where people are like, oh, I'm going to empathize with this person who has self-destructive habits. And I'm going to say that it's okay. Why? Because that's the culture.

00:44:45That's the narrative. we live in. Everything everyone does is okay. There's nothing that is not allowed, except for you telling me that there's something not allowed. And then all of a sudden, you know, 10, 20 years goes down the line. This person doesn't have the life that they want. They still have these self-destructive habits that are causing, to some extent, their inability to succeed. And then they're like, oh, it's the system. It's let me, let me place the blame on everyone else. Again, if you were a parent, you loved your kid, would you not criticize them out of a place of love? I think that you would. I think that you would. And you have to do that as a friend. You have to do that as a peer.

00:45:19You have to do that as a member of society. But the problem is, it's a story as old as time. Everyone's going to hate you. Everyone's going to hate you. Everyone wants to live in their own little world that, you know, everybody else is against them. And are you familiar with Nietzsche's idea of resenting man, the slave and master morality? No, tell me. So Nietzsche basically believed, and I agree with them that people, like, we'll apply to modern day context. Poor and middle class, people, not all of them, but some of them, they seem to be obsessed with the concept of morality and virtue. And it's not that morality or virtue or bad, but they weren't able to get external success. They weren't able to get money. They weren't able to get the good wife, whatever, the nice

00:46:03house. So they don't really have the life that they want. And so what they do is they move the goalposts from external success to internal virtue, which they conveniently get to define. So now I don't have to win in life. Instead, what I can do is I can just say, oh, but I'm a good person. Who defines what a good person is? You, because it's subjective to you. So it's almost like a free cop-out. Now, I'm not saying by any means that you shouldn't want to be a good person or that virtue and character aren't, I feel like my dad's going to listen to this and he's going to be like, oh my gosh, yeah, what are you saying? Like, shout out, shout out Jet's dad. Yeah, shout out my dad. But you have to understand that like people are constantly coping. It's subconscious. It's,

00:46:46They're not even aware of it. And then for me, I just can't stand these people because they're so obsessed with morality and virtue. And they're like, oh, I hate all these people when it's like, I don't think you're aware that what you're doing is just cope because you couldn't get the external success. I'm not saying external success is everything in life, right? There's nuance to this, of course. But Nietzsche recognized this. He realized that it's like, hey, these people, they're kind of just making up some bullshit to make themselves feel better. And that's what happens.

00:47:13And I mean, I'm a Christian myself, but a lot of Christians, do this, where they're like, oh, you know, people online say that Jesus is the personification of slave morality, you know, the person, they have resentment built up against the people that are successful. Then they switch, they, they get to choose what's actually right. But the thing is, is that Jesus is not slave morality at all, because slave morality comes from a place of resentment, and Jesus didn't have resentment. So I really hate that narrative online. But it's like, you'll, you'll, I will admit that you see this a lot in Christian communities or whatever, where they're kind of be like, ah, like, you know, it's, it's harder for, surely I tell you that it's

00:47:52harder to get in the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to walk through a needle, whatever that Bible verses. And they're like, you shouldn't get money. Like, that's anti-Christian. And it's like, well, you could do amazing things with money. You can help people with money. It's not in herely, yeah, it's cope. It's cope. So the problem is you go online, you say that. You are, it's funny because I've posted a few videos on this over the over my time on social media and every time I get stitched a hundred times. Everyone's like, you know, fuck this guy, Jeff. Out of touch. Yeah. And it's funny because it'll be like, you know, you'll get a comment. He actually thought we were going to agree with him. No, I didn't think you were going to agree

00:48:27with me. I was just willing to say what needed to be said. But these people are, it's just everywhere you go. You see cope, cope, cope. I used to be that guy. That's how I know. Right. And I'm not saying everyone does this. I'm not saying everyone that is concerned about being a good person is doing it out of resentment for people that have external success. Not saying that at all, but a very large percentage of them surely are. It's such a cheap shot as well. It's so predictable. Before you look at the comment section, you can already see, like, this is out of touch. He doesn't understand. He thinks that the only thing that matters is materialism. And yeah, there's this idea from Isaiah Berlin called the Inner Citadel. Familiar with that, very similar to what you're talking

00:49:05about. So he says when the path to human fulfillment is blocked, we retreat into ourselves. into a kind of inner citadel where we're walled off against all of the fearful ills of the world and we make our own laws. So an example of this would be your leg gets injured in a battle and you have the choice to either try and rehabilitate the leg. But if you can't rehabilitate the leg, then you cut your leg off and denounce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. Yeah. Yeah. Like this, we see it everywhere. People that say weight has no bearing on health because they've struggled to lose weight.

00:49:39people who say that jobs are for suckers because they've struggled to hold one down and they turn to a life of crime. People who have been cheated on and found it difficult to get a relationship to work so they turn to polyamory or they become in cells. Like at each of these different, I guess it would be vol cells. At each of these different junctures, what somebody is doing is saying, the world's denied me that which I want. I'm going to rewrite the rules, retreat into myself so that I no longer need. need to face the reality that I could get it if I did something different. And again, like, this is, there's two very, very unpopular things to talk about online. There's many, but like two that are kind of reliable philosophically. One of them is that. And the other is the arrival fallacy.

00:50:23If you say the view from the top of the mountain that you're climbing up is not going to be as satisfying as you think it is, you sound like a fat guy at a buffet telling someone who's starving that food doesn't taste that good. Yeah. Like you suck the engine out of them and the oxygen gets pulled out of the room. It's seen as, like, bourgeois, it's seen as judgmental, as opulent, and rightly so, you, a person who has the thing that I want, are telling me a person who doesn't have that thing and wants it, that the thing I want won't satisfy me. But how many people that have got a problem with their self-worth or a scarcity mindset reach some level of success, or fame or monetary notoriety, and then go,

00:51:13all my inner problems were solved. It was so great. So one of two things is happening with that, which is the first one, it is true that when you achieve something that you try to fill an internal void with an external success, it's not going to reliably work. The other one is that everybody that reaches a level of success is part of some weird cult cabal

00:51:36that's all cartelling to convince, other people to like pull the ladder up after them so that they it's like no one else can win exactly exactly it's like oh it's not that good i'm fucking idiots yeah like no that's obviously not the case it's obviously the case that people can't fill internal voids with external accolades yeah and this is like you're saying it's any time that you'll see an interview with a really successful person this seems to be a common trend will those say you know the favorite days in my life were when i was going through the struggle when I was, you know, building every single day, was unsure whether or not I was going to make it because that made me who I am. Or, you know, they'll say like, wow, like, it really was

00:52:14the journey the whole time. I've said this before. I think winning a championship as a professional athlete has to be literally one of the most underwhelming feelings ever because you just worked, however whatever percentage of your life, this was your main goal or so at least they say. And all the sudden you have it, but now you have this thing and it's, okay, my life is the same. It's like, are you familiar with Lacan's theory of desire? So in order to desire something, the object of obsession must be perpetually absent. You can't have that thing because the moment you have it, you can no longer want it. This is, this can apply to anything in life. Relationships is the biggest one. This is why it's, people are always talking about, why is it that like,

00:52:57right when I express to this girl that I'm interested or tell this guy that I like him, it seems like they pull away. Well, because now they know they have you and it's not really, they know that fantasy in their head. Well, the same concept sort of applies when you have this big goal and you want it and you're convincing yourself like, that's going to be the thing. And it never is. And this is, I've never really seen an interview where I felt like the successful person was being genuine where they didn't in some way, shape, or form acknowledge that if they were asked. But it all goes back down to Albert Camus has this quote. It's the end of the myth of Sisyphus. I'm paraphrasing here. But he says,

00:53:32the struggle towards heights is enough to fill any man's heart. And he's basically, like, it's literally the journey. It is Sisyphus relentlessly pushing that boulder up. He knows he's never going to get it to the top. But it's the process of pushing that boulder up. That's everything. When you think about life, if your life is a timeline, right? Well, let's say you start going towards your goals when you're 18 years old or maybe

00:53:5722 when you graduate college. So you have like 22. if you're lucky you live till 75, 80, but probably you're going to tap out at like 60. So 99.9% of like actual time, the metric of time is going to be chasing the thing. And then you're going to get it. So why in the world would it make sense to just be like, oh, I can only enjoy myself once I'm there? Because you won the cosmic lottery to be alive, right? It's like one in 43 trillion or something.

00:54:25Like you're winning the lottery multiple times to just be alive. And so why would you then be like, oh, I'm only going to do what I have to do to enjoy a 0.000,000,0001% of my life to be like, ah, I did it. And then probably after that, you might be underwhelmed or depressed or something like that. I think you need to enjoy that 99.9%. And that is enough to fill a man's heart. From the meditation retreat, one of the biggest takeaways I had was, for many of us, goals are contracts to self-criticize until we succeed. Like running away from a monster that never gets tired. this contract makes permanent success necessary to avoid being swallowed by misery.

00:55:02Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. And yeah, you're right. Almost all of your time is going to be in the pursuit. And what that means is you are going to be underwhelmed. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue.

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00:56:04the cellular machinery underneath your training. If you care about staying strong into your 30s, 40s and 50s and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, plus free shipping in the US, and they ship internationally. And right now, you can get up to 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Have you ever seen Scotty Sheffler,

00:56:34the golfer, talk about what happens when he won the championship? That's one of the few pattern breaks in somebody winning. I know exactly what you're talking. I made a video on it. I know exactly what you're talking about. Fucking awesome. So, yeah, I mean, he wins the Masters or a Grand Slam, perhaps some huge, illustrious.

00:56:53title and he gets to do the press juncture at the end and he's sitting down and everyone's going like how's this going to be like how does this feel and yeah he he has a slightly surprising response the end of the day it's like i'm not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers i don't i'm not here to inspire somebody else to be the best player in the world because what's the point you know this is not a fulfilling life it's it's fulfilling from the sense of a accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of like the deepest, you know, places of your heart. You know, there's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life. And then you get there and all of a sudden you get to number one in the world and then they're like,

00:57:36what's the point? And, you know, I really do believe that because, you know, what is the point? Perhaps if you could be satisfied simply by hitting the goal, you would kill yourself. That's the most jet franzin response to that video that I could have. But you, you're, but, you're not far off, right? Like the reason that the arrival fallacy exists and the reason that we have hedonic adaptation is that if the first time you had sex, you were done with sex for the rest of your life or the first time that you killed a deer, you would be satisfied with that. You wouldn't be chasing the next piece of progress. Like, there's this, uh, duke, D-U-K-K-H-A, it's this line from the butter and a lot of people hear life is unhappiness like is one of the

00:58:28translations of this but duca can actually be translated as unsatisfactoriness so it's not sorry life is suffering like life is suffering is a line from the buddha but it can also doca could also be translated as life is unsatisfactoriness like yeah Morgan has this story about when him family went away on holiday and he'd been planning this trip for ages and it was the first one that him and his wife had got to do with the kids and they knew exactly where they were going to sit at this resort they looked at the menu in advance they knew what drinks they wanted to get they'd done everything and they arrived and they sat down the first night and he thought about what the experience was like and he's like well the drink was nice but there was like a little bit

00:59:13too much ice and I probably should have got it blended as opposed to as opposed to on the rocks and like it was really beautiful. The table that we chose was great, but like there was some sand between my feet and that sort of was irritating a bit. And I, look, the veal was lovely, but the salmon also could have been a little bit better. And then he walks out onto the balcony and he has this thought like, as they've arrived, the first day that they're there, and he's like, this is so great. We should come back here next year. Like immediately in the process of enjoying the thing, he's already moving the goalpost to the next thing. The experience is unsatisfactory and the enjoyment of the thing is primarily based around recreating the anticipation

00:59:52of it again during the experience of it. It's kind of deranged. You know, I was, I, a couple months ago, I went out to eat dinner and I ordered a steak and they gave me a chicken and I was happy that they gave me the chicken because I was like, wow, I was like expecting the steak and I just got a chicken, which is like a curveball. And, and I was, like, a curveball. And, and I was, I was happy. And, And I started to realize that this is like your, the ability my, my, my, my sophomore year AP US history teacher always had this quote, roll with the punches. You've probably heard that before. Roll with the punches, guys, roll with the punches. But truly, that's one of the best skills to develop or personality traits. I don't know if it's, you know, genetic, but your ability to just go with the flow is makes things so much better. My family, I come from a very anxious family. My family's very anxious. They like to plan. everything in advance and love them to death. But like sometimes it's like, wow, like we're, I feel like we're suffocating the experience. And it's one of those things where it's like, if you just kind of let it happen, then you're going to like it more. My brother is not a very

01:01:00anxious person. And I always find that like being just in the presence of my brother when you're like going and doing things, relaxes you and it's just like better. It's like if I could have anybody on a road trip with me, it'd be my brother because you just, let me just go with the flow. it's not too serious. He just, he's very practical about the way that he approaches things. And yeah, I think life, you just, I don't know, the expectations and wanting something to be a certain way, it kills it. And suffering lives. So you have the expectation of how the world should be, which is personal to you. And the reality of the world, the delta between those two points, that's where suffering lives. Because you're like, well, it was supposed to be like this. And it wasn't like that.

01:01:40And so in other words, if you can just eliminate the expectations, which in all fairness, you probably can eliminate expectations, but you can at least lower your expectations, you'll be pleasantly surprised a lot of the time. It's only suffering for as long as reality under delivers on your expectations. Exactly. If reality over delivers on your expectations, that's pleasure. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, low expectations are kind of the key to a good life, but also it's a revolutionary thing to say in the modern

01:02:10world, I'm good with that or I'm satisfied. That's good enough for me. Like satisfaction is kind of seen as surrender. And that's, again, creating this like inverted motivation. It's not biological to us. I'll tell you that much. Are you familiar with the hedonic treadmill? Yeah. So it's like, I was always, when I found out about the hedonic treadmill, I like so much of life just made sense to me right there because I was like the moment, like, everything has to regress to the mean. It has to. So think about our ancestors, right? A lot of our ancestors lived in tribes and they would hunt for game to get the food that they would need to survive. Let's say you fought a bear. You and some of the other men of the village went out, fought a bear. That's a huge achievement. That's like awesome.

01:02:58You probably you probably have your high on life at that point, right? You just killed a bear and now your village has meat or whatever. And you're feeling really good. It's like, so what, you're just going to put your guard down now? Like you're just, that's it. And so then you would not care. And then all the sudden, you know, there's infinite amount of predators out in the world and then they would just come along and fucks you up. Exactly. And so you literally have to regress back to the meat. Like, so many people, I'm sure people ask you this. It's like, oh, what's it like having so many followers? And it's like, dude, I don't know why, but when I had less than a thousand followers and I gained two, three followers in a day, that almost felt better than right now where I'm, you know,

01:03:35getting thousands of followers a day. And it's like, that's just how it goes. It has to rest of the It's, you know, the easiest metaphor, whatever you want to call it is like developing tolerance for drugs. Like eventually you're just, it's not going to be enough. You just need to keep pushing it more and more. Well, the ruthless thing I think about people that are competent and that drive themselves is that every new level of success becomes the minimum level of acceptable performance moving forward. So this is the curse of competence. Yeah. Right. If you're good at things and you regularly do well, then success doesn't become a cause for celebration. It's simply the minimum baseline entry that you're allowed.

01:04:10to pursue. Like anything less than success would be failure and success itself becomes nothing more than acceptable. Like that, there's a line from a John Bellion and Luke Combs song, which is if the higher I climb, it's the further I fall, then why I love anything at all? And he's talking about falling in love with somebody and opening himself up. But I think the same thing's true for a lot of people in pursuits. And it sounds very morbid. Like I'm aware that this sounds morbid, but it's good because you do existentialism and I'm British. So, It's kind of the same thing. But a lot of the time, I realize this last year.

01:04:48This podcast is the eighth biggest podcast in the world. Eighth biggest in the world. Spotify chart last year. Fucking unbelievable, right? Spotify wrapped. I wake up one day. We found out one day before. And I'm like, holy fuck.

01:05:00That is insane. Just so fucking insane to be this guy who's not been a part of a network, who's never taken money from outside investment, who's started it in his bedroom and still does it with the same editor he had eight years ago, to get to that point is so fucking phenomenal. And that lasted for about half an hour. And then this thought crept in, which was,

01:05:20dude, if I'm not in the top 10 next year, I might as well kill myself. Yeah. Like, eighth would be just about okay. Seventh would be good, but presumably only for about half an hour before I realized that was the new baseline. And if I'm not in the top 10, then it's a failure.

01:05:34Yeah. And that's the same way other people will perceive you as well. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jimmy Carr's got this fucking wonderful line where he says, trajectory is more important than position. So if you are number 300th in the world, but last year you were number 600th, people are like, wow, dude, you're on there. Things are moving right. But if you're third in the world, last year being first, that is almost toxic. And I think a big part of it is that

01:05:58we have such recency bias. We can only really remember what's going on. We also want to be, someone that's moving in the right direction has to be popular in the moment. And there's always this sense, there's a kind of nepotism, I suppose, or like inheriting daddy's money, there's this sense that if it hasn't happened recently, maybe the underlying signals that are supposed to be the reliable indicator that you're good at doing the thing, maybe they've fallen away. I've been fascinated, obviously, because of this number eight in the world thing last year, and that creates a new kind of pressure, a different kind of pressure, but I've been fascinated about the difference between having never made it and how.

01:06:39having fallen off the perception of those two things. And the gold medalist syndrome is exactly that. Gold medalist syndrome is having fallen off. And I think I'm sure you've seen the studies that say bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists. Yeah. Yeah. Which is just fucking hilarious. Like just about nearly being there and not getting it. Yeah. Is worse than being a few a few steps away. Exactly. Yeah. Well, first off, congrats on number A in the world. like ridiculously impressive, especially, like you were saying, you started it on your own. You didn't take money from outside investors, which is huge. Are you familiar with our author, Schopenhauer's The Will to Live, the Will of Life? So the Will is basically, it's almost like

01:07:25this metaphysical part inside of you that it creates your desires. He argued that you're not the one that creates your desires. It's just created by the will. And then you sort of recognize those desires are you realize that they exist and then this sort of subtly dictates the decisions that you make in your life. And the will is not concerned about you being happy at all. As a matter of fact, he almost argues, he does argue that happiness is a temporary state. You cannot always be happy. And happiness, even when you do get it, it's very short, short-lived happiness. And it's really because the will just wants more and more and more. And the desire of the will, it just wants to replicate itself. So that's like drawing you to have sex and reproduce. And basically the will is

01:08:14just telling you, oh, you got to do all these things and you just relentlessly pushes the goalposts more and more. And that's why author Shopin Hour is widely regarded as, you know, a pessimist. People say, if you're going to get into philosophy, don't start by reading him. That's a very interesting talking point to me. It seems like the internet hates pessimism, which I understand why. You don't want to be around negativity. It's a bono killer. Yeah. But they, you know, you. You know, You got to acknowledge that to some extent. There's a lot of truth behind some of the talking points in relation to pessimism. And that's what I tried to, I tackle that idea on my YouTube channel.

01:08:49But yeah, even people will be like, oh, Jeff Franz and he's a dumer. He hates all this stuff, even though at the end of my videos, I'll try to, you know, be like, okay, but. Have an uplifting uncle? Exactly. Exactly. Have you looked at instrumental goods versus ultimate goods? Maybe. That stinks of a video that you should do.

01:09:06I'm putting a request into the DJ for you to do a... So instrumental goods doing something for something. Yes. Ultimate goods doing something for itself. Yeah. And if you ask the why do you do that thing for any pursuit, eventually you get to an ultimate good, right? And typically it's something like to feel peaceful,

01:09:25to feel happy, to be loved, to be enough, to be able to rest. But instrumental goods are, why do you get up and go to the gym? Well, to have a good body. why do you want a good body? It makes me feel fit. Well, why do you want to feel fit? And you just keep on going down, down, down, down, down to something close to an ultimate good. And my concern for a lot of people, including myself, is that we live instrumental lives. Our entire lives are instrumental. Yep. We are doing the thing to do the thing, to get the thing, to do the thing, to get, as opposed to

01:09:57a radically revolutionary belief, which is maybe I can just sidestep all of this and go straight to the ultimate. Like what is the what is the feeling that I'm trying to get? Typically it's a feeling and this is another idea that I've been so fucking obsessed with and it came out of the it came out of the meditation retreat last week that if as a guy you pray at the altar of fuck your feelings just work harder how can you be surprised when you achieve but you don't feel? Yeah like the root that has gotten you there, the fuel that has arrived you at the destination, has robbed you of the satisfaction of being there. Yeah.

01:10:39And that to me is just, it's this game. It's this game that's always going to be played. And what we've done, I'm going to sound incredibly left wing here, in modern society with the meritocracy and capitalism, is we've encoded, we have, like, canonized and created an architecture of pushing the hedonic adaptation button as much. as possible. It's an instrumental life. It is an instrumental life. Why do you want the next rung on the job ladder? Why is it that you want that? Or a bigger paycheck and I'm going to get more respect than people. It's like, but what are you sacrificing? Oh, I'm going to be homeless with my

01:11:18kids and my relationship might suffer and all the sleep worse and my health might degrade. But like, you know, the thing. Like, what about the thing? And yeah, it is radically revolutionary to just go, fuck it. Like, I'm good. I'm good. I like, I like this. I like. I like. I like this. I like. where I'm at. The scariest place to be, and this is what, this is my biggest fear. I'm absolutely horrified of it, is waiting all day for 5 p.m. all week for Friday. You wait each summer for the winter and so on and so forth. It's like you've probably heard those people say, oh, you know, once I graduate high school, then I'll be away from my parents, then I can do what I want. Oh, well, now I'm in I just got to finish college. I finished college up and then you know what? I'm going to go travel

01:12:02the world. But you know what? Then they graduate college. I got to work on my career right now. I just, and it's, there's always something. There's always something. And then you never live your life. And there is a talking point online where people will say happiness is just

01:12:18not wanting any moment to be anything other than what it is. I want things to be different. Yeah, you're not stuck in the past. You're not anxious about the future. You're fully accepting the moment. If you go outside and there's construction and it's really loud, this goes back to what we were talking about before. It's like you had the expectation that there was a world that

01:12:37existed that there wouldn't be construction. And the fact that there is construction, the delta between those two points, that's where you're suffering and you're getting pissed off. You know what's an interesting indicator, early indicator of this? How much somebody complains? Somebody who complains a lot is basically admitting that they have a poor model of reality. Yes. Why is there all of this traffic? Because reality has traffic. Yeah. And your model of the world was a reality that didn't have traffic. your model of the world is wrong. Reality is undefeated. Yes.

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01:13:58are heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash Modern wisdom. There's this little essay that I want to read to you. Don't wait. Life is happening right now. I become obsessed with the belief that life's duties will one day be out of the way and then you can finally start doing the thing you want to and living your life. It's a myth. It's a lie. Marie-Louise von Franz talks about the provisional life. She says, there is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being one is doing this or that, there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future, the real thing will come about. Similar to another idea called deferred happiness syndrome,

01:14:39the common feeling that your life has not begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that will fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death. It's strange, I regularly have this sense of foreboding and guilt about time slipping away, that I'm not making enough of my days, especially when I look back on a week and I know that I've done things and dedicated myself to pursuits

01:15:02and working hard, but I can't fully recall how I spent my time. So I worry that this is just a one-week microcosm of how I look back in my entire life. There's time having passed but me not really noticing it, of existence occurring but living,

01:15:17not actually having got going. Wow. You know, I, when I was in later years of high school, I was trying to save up money for college. So I picked up all these jobs. One of the jobs I picked up was, you know, that stereotypical factory job. And I was in Chicago. It's middle of winter, freezing.

01:15:40I'm working the graveyard shift. So middle of the night. And I worked this job. And I remember I would sit there and I'd be like pissed off because all my peers, all the people that I knew, none of them were working a fraction as hard as me. And I knew their parents were going to pay. for their college or whatever it is. They were living life up.

01:15:59That's the temptation of the victim mindset. Yeah, exactly. And so, well, I was the victim mindset because I would be, it would be 1 a.m. and I'm in this trailer lifting heavy boxes. It's like 30 degrees in this trick because they literally don't have heaters. And I'm like, life just sucks, man. Like, I'm just like sitting there. I'm like, why does this got to happen?

01:16:19Whatever. And there was every once, most of the time you'd be alone, but every once in a while, you'd work with another person in this. I became friends with this other guy. And me and him, it was like the double the victim mindset. But he was kind of playful with it, which I liked. He was like, you know, life is so fucked. And then we'd joke about how fucked it was or whatever.

01:16:36And, you know, I remember like sitting there and I built up resentment because I was like, man, these other people, they're not working as hard as me. I'm just trying so much more than them. And yeah, and that went on for years. And that wasn't the only job I had. I was working three jobs over the summer. I was just constantly doing stuff. and then we get to college and these people,

01:16:56I had better grades of them and they would go to a nicer school because they could afford it. And I'm like, man, man, I really keep drawn the short end of the stick. Joe Rogan, he has this one clip.

01:17:05I don't think it's like Viro or anything, but he's like, he's like, those people that always say, I can't catch a break. He's like, you need to get away from those people. I can tell you as someone who used to be that person,

01:17:13you need to get away from those people because like you're saying, if you complain that this is, all the sudden, you're just making your life worse. And then I eventually, I ended up, it was super cliche, but ended up reading meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and I was like, wow, like, this is, this is incredible. The ancient clean your room by Jordan Peterson. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, okay. And then event, like, you know, and I sort of was that way for a while. I mean, it was years. It wasn't like I just flipped a switch and boom, now I'm not victim mindset anymore. It was, well, let me take a hard look on my life. I have no friends. I have nothing going for me. I'm just going to school, minding my business. And that's it. Okay, we need to make. some sort of change. And to amplify this, what makes everything so much worse is that for millennia,

01:17:59the only people you compared yourself to were the other people in your tribe, right? You couldn't, you couldn't know what was going on with Kelsey when she was studying. Like, you didn't know. You didn't, we didn't have anything. No, what was going on in the fucking valley over. Exactly. It's a 30-person pod in 150-person Dunbar group. That's it. Exactly. And so what's happened is social media just rapidly hit us. Our brains have not psychologically adapted to under, to comprehend this. So a guy like you, you get millions, potentially billions of views every month. It's like all of a sudden, all these people have opinions on you. But more than that, what do you do? You doomscroll. Everyone doom scrolls to some extent or you're going online. And what does online feed you?

01:18:39The top 1% of everyone. You're seeing the most attractive people, the funniest people, the richest people, the most well-spoken, articulate people, and on and on. And then you're like, wow, my life sucks. Like, I was sitting down there and it would be like, Andrew Tate starts getting popular. Like I see the Nelk boys. Like everyone just seems to be living this amazing life. And it would really piss me off because you see these degenerates and I was, why do they get that? That's not fair.

01:19:05Like they're not doing anything that's worthy of, you know, making all this money or having all this attention and being in the public eye. And I wanted that and I wanted it bad. And it literally wasn't until I actually let all that go that I was like, you know what? I don't have resentment. I can accept that I am who I am. all the sudden, all those things started to fall into my lap.

01:19:25And it's like, that's really how it works. I feel like you have to let go, kind of like what we were saying before, because otherwise, in a way, you're paralyzing yourself. You're not going to take action. You're just going to feel bad about yourself and have pity. And that's, if you carry that on through your 20s, through your 30s, all of a sudden, you're going to be 35 years old and look back and be like, wow, I wish I would have had the ability to just accept who I am.

01:19:50But you can't really blame. I mean, we're the first. generation that's had this. Can I give you a bit of advice for what I think is going to come next for you? Please. So you've got yourself to this stage now where the wheels will start to spin on their own and there will be a lot of opportunities that will come your way, different things. Maybe I'm going to start a business.

01:20:10You've already got an app. Well, I need to run the app. That's important. I need to have a dev team. Like, well, we need to do marketing. Like, maybe we need to take some outside investment and you'll start to take investor calls and you'll maybe look at acquisition and you'll start to pay a little. bit of more attention to, well, there's a competing app that's just started. And, well,

01:20:26I need to make a little bit more money because my lifestyle should inflate because I'm growing up. And like, I worked at this. Like, I worked hard. You not remember when I was doing the thousand videos and nobody watched? Like, I should start to do some sponsors. You'd take sponsor calls. Those will begin to rack up a little bit more, but they'll be worth money. And you'll do the just connect with me dinners and you'll start to make more impressive friends. And one of the things that you need to be incredibly cautious of is not doing the things. And you're not doing the that got you here. Now you shouldn't hold on to the working modes that don't serve the principal output. So that's you don't need to play the game the way that you used to. But there are a few

01:21:07key areas of contribution that if you let those slide, all of the competitive advantage goes. And that for you is likely going to be reading. It's like if you don't protect your reading time, If you're not constantly feeding yourself with new ideas, you're going to become stale and you're not going to have new stuff to talk about. And what it's going to feel like is growth. It's going to feel like growth because all of the objective metrics are going to continue to expand and continue to get better. But what made you differentiated was this very particular kind of obsession with learning interesting ideas, scrutinizing them, and then communicating them. Right? That's kind of it.

01:21:46That's the engine. That's the engine that both me and you have used. Yeah. And maybe you'll get some staff. You need to manage the staff. Like, that's kind of being, well, you've got an editor. Ah, fuck, the edit wasn't quite right on that thing, so I need to negotiate with him. And he needs his motivation, jing up.

01:22:02So I'll take him out for dinner. And while the editor needs an assistant, so, like, I might as well get him. And before you know it, you've built this very unwieldy spaghetti monster. And that's fine, as long as you protect what the main thing was. And the reason that I say it is I've noticed as I've sort of swung to and fro on the show when I've protected the first couple of hours of the day, which is typically when I'll sit and when I'll read, when I'll think about stuff and I might do a little bit of writing, if I just get a few hours, maybe even just one hour of that, like I'm nourished for the day,

01:22:34I'm continuing to have new ideas, I'm continuing to come up with stuff. Everything feels fresh on the pod and I go, oh, that's got fucking Sheffler video. Like, isn't that good? That's something to pull out. Yeah. That will be a temptation of growth. It's a strange kind of paradox that the more leverage you have, the more distractions you have. And that sounds great because it allows you to not need to focus on things, but it can tempt you to not focus on the main thing. And the only thing that matters is keeping that little flame, that sort of kernel that was the beginning of the

01:23:05inspiration. Like, that's what's important. And if you do that, dude, you're going to continue to fucking rip. But that's the thing that you need to protect. You have to have to have to protect. your reading time. You have to protect your new idea time. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think that makes a lot of like you're just saying that. I'm like, yeah, I think you're right. And the reading and in the researching was, that was what I think has allowed me from the get-co. I mean, I was reading, researching well before I started making videos. And even when I started making videos, I was making more feel-good comedy videos. I wasn't doing philosophy or societal commentary or talking about the implications that X, Y, or Z event has on your life. I was just genuinely a kid that was interested

01:23:48in these things, more so classic books, not even necessarily philosophy. And all of a sudden, it's like, okay, I'm going to talk about this. Let's see if people like it and then it happened. And so, yeah, that's definitely my roots. So I think you're right. I definitely do need to save time. And it's hard because I've been, you know, started to make a little higher value friends, started to do a little bit of traveling. Not a lot, but I'm like, hey, it's easy for me to no longer read or I'm tired on the flight. So I'm going to put my head down when that's like a prime opportunity

01:24:20where I can't really do anything else. And that's what you would have done in the past as well. Yeah, exactly. And the limited amount of motivation that you have, which everybody does have, that becomes degraded by having to do things that aren't the main thing. Yeah. Last year I did 100,000 miles. So it's like three times around the world.

01:24:38this year so far we're not even we're just about halfway through the year and I've done like 70,000 miles on flights and like that was not what I was doing when I first started the show. Yeah. Which means that I need to be even more aggressive at protecting some areas of my time at a time when there's more compelling seductions that are going to pull you away. So Alex talks about, you know, the scene in The Matrix where Neo is first brought into it and he's walking down the street and there's a woman in the red dress. Yeah. And Morpheus says, Neal, were you paying it? attention to me or were you paying attention to the woman in the red dress and he says luck again he turns around it's agent smith with a gun yeah says okay being able to say no your capacity to say no is not looking

01:25:21at the woman in the red dress but now imagine as you get more successful that it's not a hypothetical 10 it's a thousand hypothetical one thousand's yeah your capacity to say no needs to scale more quickly than your ability to be successful and if you don't get out ahead of it you're going to be seduced by all of these new poles on your time. That's fine and that's cool, right? And it affords you the opportunity to go to the Super Bowl and hang in this special box because someone loves your videos or whatever it is. But if you do that too much, you will lose the thing that kept you sharp. And I think that that's why a kind of monastic lifestyle that you see a lot of sports stars have. Like even Harlan, for all of his fun, when it comes to preseason training,

01:26:08I bet that guy's a fucking monk. Yeah. Like there will not be a stone that's not turned over and looked underneath. And if he was having all of this fun, but not looking after his sleep, not looking after his diet, he's loose when he's able to be loose, but he's not distracted. There's a difference between those two things. Yeah. And yeah, it's another curse of competence.

01:26:29As you get more effective and there are more opportunities in front of you, you need to learn to be able to say no to something that you will. would have begged to have had the opportunity to say yes to only two years ago. It's crazy. Yeah. It's a trip. And I've seen, I've gotten a little bit of a taste of it already, you know, it's like everybody wants to, I don't know, like Leach is not the right word. Because a lot of these people that I've become friends with are much bigger, much more successful than me. Associate. But yeah, it's like they, the moment that people see that you have some sort of momentum, that's a very attractive trait. You know, everyone, everyone wants to be

01:27:09your friend now. You know, I was very much, I wasn't even wanting to say antisocial because I try to be social, but I never necessarily fit in in my, like my later years of high school through college. And that has been my biggest advantage ever. I would not be sitting here right now if I did not spend all that time alone, just really trying to confront myself, trying to be honest with myself and figuring out what I wanted to do and then having the balls to go and start doing it. And that's been my biggest advantage. But now all of a sudden, this guy that I looked up to when I was a kid slid into my DMs and he's like, yo, let's go hang out. Let's go do this trip. Yeah, heroes become rivals and then he rivals become friends. Exactly. And so it's like,

01:27:51wow, okay. But yeah, for me, like I said, I've just, I've gotten so used to being alone that I'm very comfortable with it. But yeah, you're right. It's going to be tempting. If someone's like, Jet, do you want to go to the Super Bowl? Yeah, I want to go to the Super Bowl. And that happens to a state at a frequency that can end up sapping a lot of what it was that you used to do. But yeah, it's one of the reasons for solace that anybody that's alone should rely on, which is you have an opportunity now to focus on developing yourself in a way that you can't, if too many people want you. One of the weird things, talking as a horrendously unpopular kid and an only child and someone

01:28:36that basically started to learn how to become a human at 18 when I moved to university, I wonder whether it's giving you the realization it did for me, which is kind of the fickleness of sociality. Yeah. That, well, I'm the same person. Yep. As I was before, the differences, the trappings and the trimmings that are on the outside. And sure, I'm sure you've developed yourself into a more.

01:28:59socially fluid person. You've got interesting things to say and you've become more self-conscious and self-aware. That brings a kind of authentic sincerity and earnestness to a conversation. And that's kind of compelling, right? Like that's beguiling. Like, ooh, like there's something going on here. That's cool. Which you wouldn't have had before if you were posturing and you were having to play a role and people kind of have a bit of a version. So some of it will be the development. Some of it will be the understanding and the information. But a good bit of it is, Jets fucking, like he's ripping it the most. Should we invite? He should come to the thing with and you go, well, you didn't fucking want me before. Yeah. You didn't want me before. Yeah.

01:29:40Kanye West's got this thing. It's like there's a Metro booming edit, which I've never been able to refind again. But it's Kanye West talking about how people say that they loved the work that I did in the beginning. But they didn't love it back then though. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Like, every time, like, I'm cracking you a smile in 2023, but I'm giving you a frown for 2013. And it's just, you know, Yays vacillated somewhat over the last few years. But, yeah, I mean, growing up North Chicago, always been the biggest Kanye West fan, always. Like, that dude, his concept of self-belief, I would love. literally go to, I'm not, I'm not even making this up. It sounds cringy. I would go to sleep with a

01:30:34compilation of Kanye West, basically being a narcissist. I just, I just loved it. I just loved the way this guy would talk about himself. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that because everybody hates some narcissism, the way that I look at this is that I think everybody's a narcissist, but it's a spectrum. And there's a healthy side of it and there's an unhealthy side of it. And what society calls narcissism are that person's a narcissist. There's a, specifically referring to the more extreme end of that spectrum where it's dangerous where you negatively impact other people's lives. But innately, humans are selfish creatures. We always have our own best interest at hand, with the exception of maybe, you know, you're a parent, so you're

01:31:14looking out for your kids or a loved one. But I've made videos on this, very unpopular, as you could assume. And I just think if you lean into your narcissism in a healthy way, which sounds crazy, but that is the ultimate propeller to where you want to go. So imagine you're climbing a mountain and, you know, very metaphorically the mountain is where you want to go in life. You're wearing a backpack. You could either have an empty backpack, which is just having a neutral sense of self. You could have rocks that are put in the backpack, which is self-doubt or any way that you think that may be a little bit of imposter syndrome. I'm not that guy.

01:31:53Or you could have self-belief. You could lean into your narcissism in a healthy manner. And that backpack turns into a jet pack and then it propels you up that mountain. And so I've recognized that like growing up, people have always, always been like Jet. You got you're a little bit of a narcissist. Not that I would ever negatively impact other people, but it was more like you're very self-absorbed, very self-absorbed. And I said, well, I have to bet on myself.

01:32:18That's the only workable solution, I think. It's the only workable solution. You have to lean into every aspect of yourself, build up that belief system. not that you should walk around saying, wow, I'm more valuable of a human than that person. That's not what I'm talking about at all. But you need to just relentlessly try to increase your self-belief because everything regresses to the mean in life

01:32:42and the mean is your identity, right? And your self-belief creates that identity. And so I think that you have to figure out, okay, what is the healthy narcissism? And how do I accomplish that? because these people that try to be, it's kind of what we were saying before. The really humble ones, a lot of them are coping.

01:33:02A lot of them are coping for the fact that they didn't go where they wanted to be. This is a very unpopular opinion within my family. They don't like when I talk about this because I come from a humble family and I'm not really like them. But you have to bet on yourself. You have to think that you're capable of doing this. I told my best friend when I was going to do the social media thing, I said, I don't know what it is about this. I failed at all the other things that I've tried in my life,

01:33:25but there's something about this. I just, I believe I can do it. I just know if I don't quit, I can do it. It's funny, once I started gaining two to three followers a day, I was 100% certain that I was going to hit 100K because I told myself I literally would not quit until I hit 100K, and there's enough days that I'm going to live to hit that. Well, the interesting thing about survivorship bias is that

01:33:45survivorship bias assumes that you die before you win. Yeah. And if you just don't stop, eventually you've rolled the dice enough times to have something that hits. Yes. On the ego humility thing, it's interesting, ego's quite antisocial and humility is quite pro-social in a way, in the way that it's interpreted, that ego causes people around you a lot of the time to have their own shortcomings and self-criticism thrown into harsh contrast.

01:34:18it also is quite confronting because people think, wow, he's going to go do that thing. That leaves me behind. I don't want him to do that thing if I can claw him back or if I can behind his backs at a vent about fucking, who does Jet think he is? Yeah. Talking about himself like that too, that's not even going to work. Yeah. It's fucking lame or whatever in the hopes that that might just slow it down. Whereas humility, even performative humility, is seen as, oh, he's got his feet on the ground.

01:34:46It's nice that he's not got too big. for his boots. This is very much a British concern that someone who thinks too highly of themselves is really not liked. Like it's very, very rigid class structure in the UK. You know, it's this ossified country that's not been fucking invaded for a thousand years. Like, that's a long time for these power structures to start to drop in. But you can tell, I don't know whether the same thing is true in America. I don't think it is. I can tell just by hearing somebody speak what class they were from. Like, underclass, working class, middle class, upper class,

01:35:22and have a good indication of what sort of school they went to because it's had time to like segment out. It's like stratified like fucking sedimentary rock or something. And it's determined a lot of the time by the way that somebody speaks and the way that they dress and stuff like that. But yeah, humility is pro-social because it doesn't, it binds the group together by not making anybody be confronted by a differential in the power structure.

01:35:48and ego is confronting for the exact opposite reason. What's interesting is I do believe strongly in the idea that you need to be rootable for. You want to be a person that other people want to see when. A perfect example of this. Over the past year or so, Timothy Chalmay went from this guy that everyone was like, I love this dude and he's so, there's something about him. He's just got that swag.

01:36:17He's in the way that he walked. And then all of a sudden he goes on one of those award shows after he wins and he says, I'm really on the pursuit of greatness, which to me I loved. I was like, I like when when. Fuck, yeah, Timothy Sholomey. Yeah, it's like, it's like it's like it. You have a goal and clearly you're on the path to do it. So yeah, like go up there and say what you want to do.

01:36:36And I felt like he still did it in a humble way. But you'll find a lot of insecure people or non-confident people. They really don't like that. Even if it, like, they don't want to have the nuance. People believe what they want to believe. And so if they listen to that, they'd rather believe that Timothy Shalameh's a narcissist than someone that's betting on himself

01:36:54and is like really putting himself out there and trying. Have you looked at ascending in the in-cell community? Do you know what that word means? Ascending? Like just getting better in life? Getting laid typically or getting attention from women on the sort of lower end. So if you're inside of some of the in-cell communities,

01:37:13I think most of them, ascending would be getting attention from one, but maybe even as little as the barista in Starbucks, her eyes sort of lingered on me a little bit longer than I think, maybe she was flirting with me. And ascending is, you're seen as persona non grata if you do that inside of the insult community. And the reason that I think that's the case

01:37:34is that if somebody that I saw as my equal who was afflicted with the same issue that I believe that I have, is able to bring themselves out of this issue, that now makes it, the potential for hope for me becomes, it's brought into reality. And that means that now maybe the fact that I feel like I'm afflicted with this thing

01:38:03is not a life sentence, but it's actually inside of my control. And I have agency over this and the fact that I haven't gotten out of this problem. So they're seen, they're literally seen as fake cells. as somebody who ascends is say, well, you weren't truly an insult. You weren't like us. So there's an othering of somebody who doesn't comport with the same issue that everybody else has. It couldn't be that everybody has the potential to do this. It has to be that that person wasn't a part of our group in the first place. And yeah, I, when you think about the, how much people are held back

01:38:40by the fear of others judging them for having self-belief. I think that far more people fail due to a lack of support than a lack of competence. And if you just had a couple more people in your life that believed in you, you'd probably be able to get 10 times further. There's a line from George Mack, my housemate, that says there is a guy out there with half your talent and five times your self-belief making 10 times the money. Yep.

01:39:05And it's just, yeah. Well, I think, the way that I look at it in the support side of things is honestly fuck support like it'd be not it's nice to have it but I'm going to go to where I want to go regardless and all all those nights those consecutive nights where I would say up till 4 a.m. just grinding whether or not my friend who lives on you know my family moved out of my hometown and I don't live I haven't been to my hometown in years and I don't talk to those people that much anymore so if they support me, or not, I could give a fuck and then I have no friends where I moved. And so it's like, okay, I'm just going to do this on my own because like you were saying, like we were talking about before, it's like optimal game theory. Okay, you got dealt shit cards. I'm not saying I got dealt shit cards, but you're not in the optimal position now.

01:39:54So what are you going to fuss about it or do you going to like just do something? And it's interesting you talk about the idea that, oh, if you see someone else doing it, then it's like, oh, you know, I have agency. I can do it. People really don't want to support you if you do well because especially if they grew up near because you become a mirror to them, right? If I come from the same place as other people and then more or less got the same opportunities,

01:40:18we go to the same school. But now they go on Instagram, they see that Jet is getting some views, he's getting recognition, get put in the public eye, whatever. That's going to tell them, well, I'm really no different than Jed. We came from the same place.

01:40:32He's there. I'm not. So now they get, you know, pissed about it. And they're projecting and they're like, oh my gosh, I hate this. guy because you were talking about the in cells and I have I had a YouTube channel I started at the beginning of this year and it gained traction pretty fast I got like 200,000 subscribers in the first two and a half three months and I became very popular amongst that sort of underground people

01:40:59that felt like the system was against them community and a lot of that community is in cells and of course I never went on these on my YouTube videos and said oh I'm an insuff. sell. I never claimed that or anything like that. But what happened was long, and in my videos, I would talk about, I mean, yeah, like, naturally, if I have a lot of followers on Instagram, yeah, girls are going to slide into my DMs. I wasn't being cocky about it, but I, there's really no good way to address it because they'll be mad if you don't address it because then they're like, he's lying. Yeah. And if you do address it, then you're seen as cocky, so you got to, you know, if you addressed it and had said that there were no girls in your DMs, that would have been fine. Well, it would have been fake.

01:41:39It would have been a lie, but it would have been fine. That would have been like, oh, actually, yeah, okay, I'm not throwing in. Are you familiar with the term LARPing? Yeah. So everyone's like, oh, Jets is like the biggest LARP ever, because what ended up happening was, and I never, this is what I hate, I never lied about it. I was always truthful about my life. I become friends with this big influencer, very wealthy.

01:42:00I end up going to his birthday party. It's on the East Coast. I go there, and there were some girls there. I don't know if they were Instagram models or whatever. They wanted to take a picture of me. It was not that deep at all. It goes on social media. And then I posted a video where I was like, oh, it was kind of like a motivational

01:42:18video. If you work hard at a specific thing, you have to be smart about what you work hard on. Because if you work hard in corporate, yeah, maybe life is not, you're not going to be rich because you're selling your time for money. You can never get rich off doing that. You need, there needs to be the potential for, you know, an increase and an appreciation over time. But I went and I posted that video.

01:42:37and my entire community turned their back against me. They were throwing a shit show. They were mad about it. And they were like, oh, this jet guy is faking it. He's larping. He's too good looking to have been socially excluded growing up. It's like there's not a picture of like I'll give you my life savings right now. If you can find a picture of me going to any school dance prom, I didn't go to graduation.

01:43:00I didn't go to anything. I truly was isolated. But these people could not comprehend the fact that now that I started. started to level up in life. It's like you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. And they just came after me. And they were like, this guy, he's six five. Like I never even lied about my height online.

01:43:19I just, when you go online and just like, you're six five, that's like, oh, that's cocky or they would say online. So I was like, so I just like wouldn't mention it. I was on a very popular looks max your stream. And they were like asking me how tall I was. I was like, I'm six five. And everyone thought I was bullshit. Everyone in the internet was like, this dude's not six. And then a picture came out with me working out with some fitness influencers. And they're like,

01:43:41dude, this guy's six five. Like, there's no way that he has life hard. It's like, what do you like, so you can't win with these people. But anyways, they really were mad about me basically leveling up. And they're like, yeah, he always had friends. It's like, so this guy was an influencer. Why would you think that I would be friends of them before I ever started doing content or like, I don't know. But like you were saying about that whole like in cell community, it's kind of the same thing happened for me. But I've never been a part of the in cell community. I've always been a part of the, okay, like, male loneliness epidemic. That was more my target audience. Well, it's the narcissism of small differences, right? If you go to the same school as somebody else and you have ostensibly

01:44:18similar skills, the difference in your outcomes is on them. It's on their, like, imagine a split-test universe in which one of them, you end up being a real success and in another one, you end up being a real failure. The guy that was the failure would feel really bad because he had all of the raw materials to become the guy that was the success. Like true hell is when the person that you are meets the person that you could have been. And a lot of the time, people feel like, well, I grew up with that guy and he was no more special than I was. This is one of the things I think is kind of interesting about content creation generally

01:44:54and the fact that lots of people consume lots of podcasts, YouTube, Instagram. And the issue that you have there is the talent delta is not as obvious as doing something that is more refined, like playing a musical instrument or being great at basketball, most people, I mean, if you sat anybody down with two microphones, they have technically recorded a podcast, no matter how big of a car crash that could be. If you give somebody a saxophone, they cannot reliably make a note come out of it, especially if they're untrained. So because the expertise, skill, Delta, doesn't feel as inaccessible, the small differences, become even smaller.

01:45:37Like very few people are looking at Steph Curry and going, fucking Steph Curry, dude. Like the only reason that he got that is because his dad was in the NBA. It's like, no, the dude's a generational talent who literally changed the points game of basketball, the way that that game's played. Regardless of whether his dad was great or not, which he was, but Steph went and did his own thing.

01:45:57No one's looking at that and saying the only reason that he's got that because no one can do what he does, the more that people think that they can do what you do, the less respect they have for you doing it. Does that make sense? 100%. Because I've seen so many videos. This one guy made a video and it got like 300,000 views and he said he was going to sexually assault me in a more graphic, using more graphic terms.

01:46:23Okay, cool. And he literally, like, video is a statistical outlier on his channel. You know, all of my haters are going to go watch that video. and then he makes another one, another statistical outlier. And he's not really making any points. He's just like, I hate this guy. And then eventually he makes a video and he goes, you know, the real reason why I hate this jet guy is because I make the same content as him.

01:46:46And he's like, I do the same. And it's like you go on it. This guy is completely delusional. It's object. Like he's recording on it. It's like an android from like 2010 or something. I'm like, first off, your camera quality sucks. But he's like, yeah, this guy, he, he's just as basic as everyone else.

01:47:02He just has a better face. So that's why everyone, and it's like, okay, first off, Holy Cope, but second off, it's like, if people assume that they can do what you're doing, but you're getting big off it, they're hitting you more. Like you said, do you know who the streamer Rikai is? Oh, is that the dude that did the Beast's thing and was kind of the villain? He was like the, he's like a bit of a villain dude. Mr. Beast? No, Rikai.

01:47:27He did a hundred streamers compete for cash. I swear, he's like kind of a bit of a nuisance. He is. Well, he, okay. I don't know if I'm not like super familiar with him, but he's very young, very young. I don't even think he's graduated high school yet. And he's just kind of hollow-headed, trying to find, like, he's not the sharpest tool in the shed. And, but he just, he acts crazy.

01:47:51He doesn't really speak English. So he, like, he speaks English. That's his language, but you can't understand him. And that's the joke about him online. But anyways, this kid is, he has a- It is the one that I meant. Streamer Rikai. participate in the highly publicized Mr. Beast,

01:48:05$1 million streamer challenge video, his intensely competitive, aggressive play style, and interaction to the career, he's made him one of the most talked about controversial figures in the event. Yes, I do know how you mean. Yeah, so this guy is one of the most hated people on the internet, and just the reason to sum it up,

01:48:21and people are, they don't understand, they don't understand this. They don't consciously know that this is why, but this guy doesn't even talk good English. He doesn't do anything necessarily exceptional, but so they look at that, and they're like, I could do that.

01:48:35I could do that, but not only that, I could do it better. I'm smarter than him. But, yeah, I feel no negative way towards that guy. I'm not trying to knock him in any way. But yeah, of course. So people are like, oh, I can easily be that type of guy. Like, with the streamer stuff, I have a friend of mine who is trying to make it as a streamer. And the thing about it is all these underground streamers, these people that are trying to come up, it's just copy paste, copy paste.

01:49:01And I was telling him, I was like, respectfully, how in the world are you ever going to make it? If you are the product and there's no product differentiation, how in the world are you going to make it? You know, he went to Streamer University. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but Kai Sinat, one of the biggest, not even just streamers, content creators in the world, does this thing once a year now where he invites out all these streamers to this like school for like a week or something. And it's like class.

01:49:27It's just an entertainment thing. It's nothing too serious. But people literally quit their jobs. they drive across the country to go to these auditions. But the thing is, Kaysenat only lets in already known people. And all these other people, it's like you watch the videos and the footage

01:49:45and the cops had to shut it down. It's just copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. These people have the same personalities. And I was telling my friend, I was like, I'm obviously going to support you. And I've always been like, hey, you need to keep doing this thing. But it's like if you're doing the same thing that everyone else is doing,

01:50:00how in the world do you think at some point there's going to be like a switch that's flipped because back in the day you could record, you could get three viral videos and all of a sudden you're a known person on Vine. Nowadays, you record 50 and you're still, and then you don't drop something for a week and you fell off. So like things have to, you just have to keep on relentlessly getting these viral clips, but what makes clips for the big people go viral is the fact that it's the big people in the clip, not that they're necessarily entertaining in and of itself. So you have to push your time in the game and yeah, people are just really mad because

01:50:31they're like, I don't understand why I can't be where I want to be. Well, you have to find a way to product differentiate. And, you know, maybe the reason that you're not succeeding as much as me or as much as someone else is simply because you're not that person. Like you didn't do, like you think you are, but you're not that person. And that's the biggest issue. Everyone is just projecting, oh, I deserve to be X, Y, and Z. When I was at the bottom, I would, when I had, you know, less than 10,000 followers, I would find other creators in a somewhat similar niches me that had around a little bit more followers than me. And I would literally look at their videos and be like, that is shit. I would be like, I am so much, like, I would convince them. I'm like,

01:51:11my videos are so much better. And slowly but surely, I start getting past them. And then I'm like, who's the next one? Who's the next one? And like we were talking about before, that goalpost never ends. There's always someone else. But I was like, I would get, I would get mad at it. And I thought I was better. But I didn't really do nothing about it. I did something about it. And that's sort of the difference. Well, the difference is between simulating what somebody else does and learning inspiration that can help you improve, right? The best that you can hope for if you're trying to be somebody else is to be the second best in the world. Yeah. Right, at being them. Yeah. And you are the zeroth in the world at being yourself. Naval Robicon, he said,

01:51:51you escape competition through authenticity. Yeah. And what's that? What's that? There's Peter Thiel has a quote where he's, what is it? I made a video about this. I'm trying to think about it. He said, competition is for losers. And so in other words, you're a loser if you're not being authentic. If you correlate that with what Naval Robicon said, because, you know, you're like, you beat competition by being authentic.

01:52:18So you beat being a loser by being authentic. And so I was like, wow, that's just, it's such a basic, simple thing, but people don't really internalize it. They don't understand it. Authenticity is an interesting one because what everybody likes the idea of is seeing a person who is just being themselves. There's no filter. They're not playing a game. They're not trying to perform. They're not trying to finesse me into believing that there's something that they're not, or pretend that they're not something that they are. But there's kind of a, it's like a window

01:52:51of tolerance that people are prepared to live inside of. And as soon as you get outside of it, what you realize is that the internet is desperate for authenticity, but it's allergic to sincerity. Yeah, that's interesting. Like if you are genuinely sincere, genuinely earnest about something, like you go through a hard time and you talk about it with some beautiful montage over the top, and it's sort of all fluffy and bubbly at the end.

01:53:18It's the Y's question, right? Like, how deep do you go with the Y? Whereas if you see a dude do an Instagram video and he breaks down crying in it, Oh no, that's too much sincerity. I didn't, I wasn't, I have an aversion to that. And this kind of just goes to show how limited the internet's preparedness for empathy is and also how narrow most people's tolerance for an emotional window is.

01:53:45It's like you're allergic to somebody genuinely showing their emotions, especially when they're out of control. If it doesn't seem like they are in control of the way that they're operating anymore, That seems like a lack of congruence, a lack of competence. Yeah, yeah, internet is desperate for authenticity and allergic to sincerity. You know, it's interesting. Robert Green says that authenticity is bullshit and it doesn't exist. And I was thinking about that.

01:54:12And I think when people say authenticity or that person is authentic, it's like, let's say there's a spectrum. And they're closer to their genuine self than the average person. and then you're like, oh, that person's authentic. But they're not truly, if you take it in the absolute sense of the word, they're not truly authentic because I think that would probably be social suicide, right? Like if you really just say what you believe, listen, when I was in high school, this was the whole thing, I wasn't very well liked when I was in high school. And kind of the reason was because I was part of it was I was resentful.

01:54:49I started reading a lot of books and I got smart. And it's like the Dunning Kruger effect. I thought I was a lot smarter than everyone else when in reality. I really didn't know much. But a big thing was I really thought that honesty was completely virtuous and just being as wrong and as honest with someone was like the best thing you could do, which now is just not true. Like now I know that to be not true.

01:55:13To give you an example, this is going to make me, this sounds crazy. And I do not like anyone that's listening to this, do not do this. But we were at one of those football games on a Friday night. and I went there and this girl probably, I think she was under the influence. And she was like, she just straight up asked me, do you think I'm pretty? And I'm like, here we go with this like fishing bullshit. Like I was like, I was like, no. But I didn't say it in a mean way.

01:55:38I was just like, no, in a very neutral way. And she's like, what do you mean? Do you think I'm ugly? And I was like, yes, which is insanely immature. But that was how I felt. And I thought that that was okay. And also, I wouldn't go out of my way to say that to someone ever, but she asked me. So I thought it was right away.

01:55:55That didn't go over well. So that didn't go over well. I got a bunch of pushback. And I remember, I would go home and I'd be like, oh, my God, these people. Yeah, pushback for whatever that means in high school. And, and, yeah, I mean, no wonder these people didn't like me. I think they were totally valid for not like me. But I would go home and I would be like, I was in the right there.

01:56:19I was in the right. But it's like, okay, what do you, like, this is such kindergarten, like, this is such psychologically infantile type of activity. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, look, have you ever read Sam Harris's essay lying to an hour-long book? He wrote it, he wrote it with his wife. It's fucking great. It's like a 60-page treatise on why you should know. Wait, is this the one where he says, if your wife is pregnant, and she asks you if she looks good? Oh, yes. I read that a long time ago. It's pretty good. People should, people should revisit it. I think you can get it for free online and there's an audible version too. It's like basically a long podcast. It's just an essay and he wrote

01:56:53it with his wife, interestingly enough. There is definitely a like philosophical underpinning where you can say any lie, including a white lie at any time is a bad idea. Like the Anne Frank in the attic thing, it's like, just go up and get her, no worries. But functionally, it can put you in situations like this, right? And I think that you can have a kind of decorum. You can be classy in the way that you sort of show up. You can see. You can see. say things that don't fully, it's like, look, there's a type of girl for everyone, and I'm sure that I'm not for you. But, you know, I don't think that we'd make a great couple.

01:57:29And you're like, ha ha, tea, whatever the fuck. And then you're like, okay, I managed to get out of that because you've got scot-free. But there is, like, if you take the, like, the autism pill and decide, like, I am going to completely fucking tell the truth at all times, you end up in situations like this, where a girl that's drunk on a Friday night at a football game just wants to hear from some boy that she's like cute or whatever.

01:57:54And what she gets is like a existential kick in the nuts. So dude, you're fucking awesome. I think everyone should go and subscribe to your channel. Where should people go to check out everything you've got going on? Jet Franzen with J-E-T-T-2-T's on social media with Instagram, TikTok, and then, yeah, if you just search up my name on YouTube. It should show up. I think it's got like some other bullshit in the name. But just

01:58:21search up Jeff Rans and you'll probably get 50 videos of people shitting on me. So that's all. Well, I searched you and it seems to be your content. And your stuff rules. I think you're great, man. And keep going to be, I'm going to be watching. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.

01:58:49I'm going to be supporting from the sideline. Shout out your dad as well. Yeah, shout out my dad. Thank you so much for having me, bro. This is an honor, seriously. He crushed it, man. He crushed it. All right.

01:58:58Goodbye, my beauties. See you next time. Bro, yes. Fucking yes, dude. Same. Well done. Dude, I enjoyed that. I could have gone for like...