#779 - Hamza Ahmed - The Harsh Truths Young Men Need To Hear
01:56:09 Share

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Hamza. He's a YouTuber, personal development coach, and a community leader. What does it mean to be a man today is a question many young guys try to answer, with varied success. Hamza has a huge community of young guys looking for advice, so I figured it would be useful to find out what they are struggling with and try to offer some solutions. Explain.

Expect to learn how monk mode can go terribly wrong, the dangers of audience capture, why young men are struggling to find direction in life, the role of vulnerability and authenticity in relationships, my advice to Hamza on how to actually improve himself, how to integrate your emotions, what Hamza learned from his breakup, and much more.

This turned into a kind of impromptu therapy slash coaching session for a bit. Bit of a departure from, I guess, what is typical. But I think Hamza has...

the opportunity to be a really great role model for young guys, but I do think that he's a little bit lost. And I do care about him. I want him to be happy and I want him to move forward in the right way. So I kind of stepped in and tried to pattern interrupt a bunch of things I've seen him doing over the last couple of years. And maybe this is informative for you and your direction or the guys in your life or even the girls in your life as well. I think a lot of the

compulsions and incentives that are driving Hamza and his uncertainty and his fear about the world are very common. I know that they certainly were for me when I was younger. And I do think that there's a lot to take away from this one. So hold on tight.

This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. The best gym wear on the planet is from Gymshark. So no matter what you are looking for, if you are spending more time in the gym, you will feel better if you've got cool new clothing. And Gymshark make the best men's shorts ever.

on the planet. Their studio shorts in dusty maroon, willow green, onyx grey and navy were what I wore throughout all of my trip to LA, which you may have seen on YouTube recently. Their crest hoodie is what I am flying in whenever I'm on a flight and their geo seamless t-shirt is also what I train in every single day.

All of their kit is unbelievably lightweight, sweat-wicking, it's easy to wash and dry. I'm in love, and the fit and quality of their fabrics are phenomenal. Plus, there is a 30-day free returns internationally, and you can get 10% off everything site-wide and worldwide if you go to gymshark.com and use the code MW10 at checkout. That's gymshark.com and MW10 at checkout.

This episode is brought to you by Element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning. Your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is, and salt acts on your adrenal system. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no junk, no sugar, no coloring, artificial ingredients, gluten fillers, or any other BS. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue whilst optimizing brain health,

regulating appetite and curbing cravings. It's how I've started my morning every single day for over three years now and I absolutely love it. That orange flavor in a cold glass of water first thing in the morning is fantastic. It is the best way to start the day.

Also, they have a no BS, no questions asked refund policy. So if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you love it. Head to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom.

Look, we sleep for one third of our lives and life is too damn short to spend 33% of it sleeping in anything but amazingly comfortable sheets. It's time to upgrade your bedding with Cozy Earth, a premium bedding and loungewear company that's been chosen for Oprah's favorite things five years in a row. They've got thousands of five-star reviews and they offer a 10-year warranty on all of their products. So if you run into any issues at all, you are co-subscribed.

covered. You probably care about the quality of your sleep. You've probably got a nice mattress. You've probably worked out what sort of pillow you want. But the thing that goes in between you and all of that are the sheets.

And the quality of your sheets make a huge difference to the quality of your sleep. So if you want to upgrade your sleep environment today, you can go to cosyearth.com slash modernwisdom for an exclusive 35% discount off sitewide. That's c-o-z-y-earth.com slash modernwisdom or modernwisdom35 at checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Hamza. ♪

Talk to me about the dangers of monk mode that you've discovered. So monk mode is an intensive period of self-improvement that loads of young guys have been on recently. It's where basically you'll cut off everyone, even you will start spending less time with your family, your friends, and you'll go hard on self-improvement, go into the gym, meditate and eat and clean, journaling. And you'll go into the gym, meditate and eat and clean, journaling.

You can grow a lot during that time, but the danger is that then self-improvement becomes detached from social skills. And then you become what I call a self-improvement autist, which is these guys who are doing the Huberman morning sunlight routine and they're meditating 15 minutes a day and they're doing the zone two cardio, but they're just fucking weird. They don't know how to interact with other people. They can't hold eye contact. They can't shake a hand. They've got weird body language when they stood next to people. And

I realized how many guys I had actually led to that point because I had been doing those intensive monk mode periods myself. But the caveat was that I had already been like a party boy and I had those years of social experiences first, whereas many young men have never actually had an intensive social experience like university, college before.

So these days I don't actually recommend monk mode to most young guys because I think that being able to navigate your relationships with other people, family, friends, being able to be in the middle of like a social event, party, date, whatever, and actually navigate that in a way where you're present and charming is so important. So I recommend something which I created instead, which is what I call the Adonis protocol, which is kind of like monk mode, but we add in at least one social event per week. And if you want to as well, one date with a woman as well. Yeah, I think...

Monk mode is a very good excuse for people that are introverted to feel noble in their introversion. And it turns something which is like an aversion to going out into the world and aversion to making friends or putting yourself in uncomfortable social situations. It turns that from something which is a flaw to something which is a virtue.

and you begin to get prestige for actually not doing that thing. And so many people, there's this idea called the inner citadel by Isaiah Berlin. And it basically says that if you can't get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. So you injure your leg in battle. And if you try and fix it, but it doesn't work, you die.

Chop the leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued So so many people reverse engineer a life that puts them on a pedestal the same thing is how many people that are polyamorous here in Austin that have tried to make a

monogamous relationship work a couple of times, got their hearts broken and then gone, oh, well, this is because we're not designed to be that way. So people retreat into their inner citadels all the time. And I think monk mode in many ways is that. And you're right. The goal of monk mode is to be better as a human. So the retreat from distraction, from social life, and I've done, I did a thousand days sober, 500 days without caffeine, 1500 sessions of meditation. Like I did the things, right? Very, very intensively.

But that was with the goal of then reintegrating. And the strange thing is that self-improvement can become this sort of recursive cycle where you never actually bother to reintegrate. And you go, oh, I've just created myself a new prison now that I just feel a bit more comfortable in.

people do that with all kinds of things like with money when i was broke i was like oh yeah money's not going to change your life you know money doesn't make you happier there's a study that said that at 70k a year it's like no but you just don't have it this is what so many guys in the internet space will be saying about beautiful women like oh yeah all the other beautiful women they're all brain dead they're all shallow they're all no no no bro you don't get laid that's why you're saying this when when you start to achieve the thing that you hated on you realize oh it's actually pretty cool like making money is really fun it's actually super valuable it

It's helpful for your family. But when you didn't have it, it's so easy to criticize it because you don't have it. And it's more of an insecurity. It's like the guy who doesn't currently go to the gym says to the bodybuilders, like, oh yeah, you guys are just gay. It's like, well, bro, you wish you looked like me. Let's be honest. Yeah, I had a friend who was training for a bodybuilding competition that I lived with. And he was like a bit of an introverted guy. And he, through his prep, went hardcore monk mode, but obviously all dedicated toward the bodybuilding competition.

And then it finished, but the habits didn't finish. He stayed in the same sort of very retreated, very insular kind of life. And I thought, oh, that's sad. That's someone who has found a way to make something that

is a weakness become a noble virtue and now he's like attached his sense of self-worth to it and he's probably very nervous to then go back out into the world and be like oh I'm how do I even do the social thing I kind of haven't done it for a while and everything feels a little bit awkward and you just get into habits as well it's not even that conscious and that front brain it's like well I just go to bed at nine o'clock like nine o'clock's my bedtime or whatever it's so easy for the

Sleep deprivation is really bad and I have the bedtime and I stick to it every night. There's a party. I'm not gonna go guys and everyone will be like, oh yeah, legend or Sigma male and people will validate him for that. But they don't realize that if that kid goes to the party, he would have learned more in that five hour space than him reading 10 books on social skills.

for the guy who's saying oh yeah women aren't worth the distraction bro he'll have more personal development from going on a date with a girl and be even if it doesn't go well let's see even if he gets rejected then if he just stays at home and then does another gym session which you know he's already in the comfort zone for so people don't want to be pushed out of their comfort zone and

And it's really easy to criticize the thing rather than to just admit, oh yeah, I'm a little bit scared of it going wrong. When you're doing personal development and it's either guided by yourself or it's in a very controlled environment, which is basically what monk mode or any kind of social retreat is, you make probably quite consistent progress, but it's very linear. You never have any huge black swan events. But doing things with other people...

like if you go on a night out and you get drunk in Manchester and lose your keys and have a fight with your friend, that's a big black swan event. You find out a lot about yourself and about how you deal with pressure and you, maybe you get into a fight or maybe somebody tries to, to like rob you or you get into a relationship with somebody and then you have to go through a breakup or you get jealous or you have to learn about how to integrate emotions. All of these things are huge, huge step changes in terms of your learning experience. And you're right. Like it's,

People who think that all of life's goals can be achieved from the comfort of your desk seat. And it's not. That's the training ground. The actual competition floor is out there in the world. I've read a lot of books on social skills, relationships,

None of that will compare to the one night out in Manchester where I ended up stumbling across my old best friend who I used to live with and I had backstabbed this guy like I fully fucking ruined his life me and him fell out we had arguments I hated his girlfriend it was like this we had we were close to fighting each other.

And I remember before I left the apartment we lived in, I sent an email to his mother basically like writing on him that he had already dropped out of university, that he was being a criminal. He was starting fights. He was this, he was this, like I was just being, you know, I was like a dickhead basically, 21 years old. And I stumbled across him one night and, and it's awkward at first, but we're in the smoking area and he comes up to speak to me.

And this is like this, this cool black guy. I always looked up to him. He's charming as fuck. He's so much cooler than me. And he burst into tears and he's loud. Like even in front of girls, like I was, you know, holding the composure thinking, wait, that's not cool. You're not supposed to do that. Right. And he let it all out. And he said, like, I saw you as my brother. You were like a brother to me. I can't believe you did that. That was completely off limits. You shouldn't have done this. He didn't hurt me, but he grabbed it, like grab my shirt like this. He expressed anger and it was,

It was so interesting because in my mind I was thinking like, wait, you're not supposed to act like that. You know, like, you know, like alpha males don't do this. Five minutes later, I could see that he had actually moved on from the situation. He expressed everything he needed to express and he moved on. Yeah. I kept it in my mind for another. You're still talking about it. Yeah. I'm still talking about it right now. Yeah. Talk to me about, this is one of my big arcs at the moment. Talk to me about what you think the role of emotions and integrating them and using them are for young guys. Hmm.

Yeah, there's a really good debate about this actually. I feel like in the modern times, men are being pushed to be far more liberal and feminine and expressive of their emotions in ways that isn't actually beneficial for them. Like for example, they say like, open up about your emotions to your woman. And that's problematic because if you have a man who then becomes emotional, that's deeply unattractive and it's not valuable to society to have a man who basically can't control his aggression, his sadness, his anger, his disgust.

But what I've learned from the spiritual teachers that I've studied and from like spiritual friends is that we still need to honor the emotion that we currently feel. So we need to be able to say and be aware that I am feeling angry, but then find the discipline to not need to express that in violent ways. So we can feel anger. Like I remember a breathwork teacher actually said this to me. He said, when you feel anger,

let let yourself like breathe the the energy and let yourself honor it and actually think to yourself like oh i'm angry i'm pissed i'm this i'm this and when he said that to me i actually remembered my my friend i was just talking about that you're able to say it and even convey it but not be violent with it because the men who are violent are the ones who either have expressed it immediately in a violent way because they had no control of themselves basically they were emotional or the men who

Bottled it up for a long rage and then it exploded as well So it's like you can go either way you can just be the the cute guy who wears the skirt and who's just you know Expressing every emotion and you're listening to the modern-day advice that they're telling men Which then is isn't gonna get you to where you want in a happy polarized relationship Or you can be way more of the the traditional man which then also has the risk of you exploding and so I think somewhere in

in the middle where you can honor the emotion, you can be aware of it and think to yourself, yeah, I am angry right now. And then unleash that into something that you know with a logical mind is safe to do so. So you take that anger into the MMA gym and you go into the heavy bag and you unleash it there for a few rounds. And it's like, you're too tired to even care about the situation afterwards. Yeah, it's interesting. I had a last person that was sat in that seat with me was Matthew Hussey. It's probably the number one dating coach on the planet. And he's on a huge arc at the moment, basically,

big change from where he was 10 years ago, even from when I first met him. And he's huge into being as open as possible with your partner. But his openness comes from a place of extreme power, to be honest, because what he will say is exactly what you mentioned. It's like, hey, that thing that happened earlier on, this is how it made me feel. But he's not

trapped and owned by the emotion, but he's helping his partner to regulate along with him. And I'm not sure whether an emotional man is an unattractive man. I think a needy man is an unattractive man. I don't think that emotions, obviously the, should you open up about your vulnerabilities to your partner thing has been done to death on the internet, but

To me, it doesn't seem any more powerful or masculine to feel things and then pretend that you don't feel them. Like that to me isn't control. Control is integrating them. Control is going... Because what else is going to happen? Let's say that your chick does something that maybe is a little bit petty that you shouldn't find uncomfortable. Or you feel there's some shame and some guilt, which is also an emotion. There's some shame and some guilt about the fact that...

She stays late on an evening time and you know that her boss fancies her. And you go, hey, look, I just, I feel like every evening when you stay with your boss, I always feel a little bit uncomfortable. I wish I didn't, and I don't really know how to say this, but I'm sort of working through this and I don't want to get ratty with you. I don't want to say something to you that's going to piss you off. But I just wanted to put that out there. I felt like it was important for me to, like that level of truthfulness is,

absolutely can turn some girls off. You do not want to be in a relationship with those girls. Like it is on them. They are the problem. If they can't accept you being open, honest,

truthful, direct, like that to me, for a guy to overcome the shame and the guilt and the fear and the concern of saying that, that says a lot more about a man's bravery to face emotions and then to put them out into the world, remembering what we were saying before, not just the monk mode equivalent of emotions, which is the heavy bag, but the integrated version of emotions, which is doing them in unison with somebody else. Because the alternative is that you're just going to continue to like eat this shit and

this scenario, this situation that keeps on going. It's like, hey,

I would really love it if when I came through the door, you gave me a kiss on the cheek and asked how my day was. It makes me feel like a king and it's amazing. They want you to be happy. If you're in a relationship with someone that's antagonistic, and I think this is one of the problems with so much relationship advice, both people are trying to play this transactional game where neither of them wants to get hurt, so neither of them wants to invest. So neither of them actually cares about making the other person better. And neither of them wants to make the other person feel happy. It's like, well, okay, that's...

what maybe many relationships are, but that's not what I want. And that's not what anyone that I know that's an integrated man wants. What they actually want is someone who says, I want to do everything that I can to make you feel better. And I want you to do everything that you can to make me feel better because that's what a partnership is like. That's how a team works. What did Mark Manson say in Models that vulnerability is one of the most important traits and it's being able to convey what you actually feel like authenticity. Yeah.

You know, I can say the most intensive development period I've had in a relationship is when I started to convey that with my anxieties of like, oh, I'm anxious that you're doing this. I'm anxious that you might be cheating. Have you ever cheated? Because previously when I had tried

tried to convey that or I had those thoughts and I kept it inside, it was toxic for the relationship. And like you said, you don't want to be bottling that up till in some point it either comes out in a bad way or even in just the monk mode way where it's just on the heavy bag. You're actually so right there because when I've conveyed it to the other person,

I actually had the biggest moments of transformation with like anxieties that I had from childhood. I don't know. I was like loved inconsistently or something. And that's, it was triggering that. And I was able to really find a lot about myself. And the most important thing is it actually is a great assessment to see if whether you and your woman are actually compatible, because if you're able to tell, okay, this is how I feel about this situation.

If she's got the ick from that, then you're clearly not compatible. Well, you're not a match. Yeah, because you're going to continue to feel anxious about these things. And there's two choices. Lie to her or break up. Right? So, yeah, I think a lot of...

incompatible relationships would be saved much more quickly if people were more open and honest about how they felt. Like, yes, do you need to titrate the dose? Like, you don't need to tell them about your chronic flatulence and athlete's foot on the first date. But, you know, just as things come up, when the time is right, and I get it, you know, there's these videos of like, I asked him to be open and emotional and honest, and then he did it, and then immediately I dumped him because I don't fancy... It's like, hey, darling, you suck.

Like you suck as a partner and no one wants you. So feel free to advertise this to the world. And that guy is now liberated to go and find someone who is emotionally mature, who is going to be able to support him in the right way. Or maybe they're just not the right match. Maybe she wants to be with the old school, like boomer parent guy, like, you know, just drinks his problems away or hits them, you know, punches a couple of holes in walls. And maybe she feels like that's love, but

I think for a lot of the people that will be listening to this, both guys and girls, they'll want something that's more emotionally integrated, something that's more truthful. And giving yourself the opportunity to grow from that relationship and in the relationship is like, wow. As opposed to just being two people doing personal development that get to cuddle and have sex every so often.

know it depends what you're optimizing for i think like with the red pill space it's all about optimizing just for the just for sex basically and if you're just going for that and you want the highest probability to find a damaged girl who wants to have casual sex with you then you don't show her any emotion go with full alpha male stoic mode you're most likely gonna get laid at that point but if you're trying to actually optimize for a long-term relationship where you get to co-regulate with each other and you've got this cute like long-term compatible relationship of someone you actually want to be next to

You're going to have to admit like these vulnerabilities. You're going to have to look to her and say like, I feel good when you do this. I feel bad. Cause it's like, why, why the fuck wouldn't you? Like when she, why wouldn't you say it's like, that feels nice. Cause your love language is touch. Tell her bro. Otherwise she won't do it. She's not going to keep doing it. Yeah. Train them, train them, treat them.

Both men and women, treat your partner like they're a particularly slow golden retriever. You know what I mean? Like, that's the way to train them. Bring on Eminem. Speaking of the red pill arc, though, Dan Bilzerian, now monogamous, I messaged him the other week. Yep, massively monogamous, had this big...

big video that went viral. I messaged him about it and he was like, yeah, man, like, you know, it's weird, but I'm kind of really enjoying it. It's sort of sex is better and I feel happier. And Tate said, like, is it not that fucking all of these women is gay? Like, do you not think it's gay, dude? Like just, you know, fucking all of these different women. So I can't tell from Tate's perspective, I can't tell whether that's like kind of the new trend

kind of optics thing. Cause I do think like a lot of what's going on is kind of optics as opposed to like genuine, this is where I'm at with my life and this is how I'm moving. I don't know how optics. So the way that he's positioning himself, I don't know how much of what he says is like, this is actually a personal transformation that I'm going through. And this is something that sounds cool on the internet. Right. It's such, it's the WWE character thing. Like I'm, I'm

I feel pretty confident that Dan Bilzerian actually thinks the things that he thinks, even if they're wrong. And even if he's maybe he might be like doing denialism or he's, you know, self deceptive or whatever. I think he believes what he's saying. I'm not sure that the same is true. But my point being, there are lots of former red pill ish people that are now talking about the virtues of marriage and, or of long-term relationships. And,

And then there's still a good few that aren't. Yeah. Who's, I mean, this is from the start of the red pill. I'm trying to think back of the original guys who were like Roosh. He was like one of the first major pickup artists. Then he disappeared. And married Neil Strauss living here in Austin. Rolo Tomasi's married.

Tucker Max. Yeah. Tucker Max, the guy that created the fratire genre. I hope this will serve beer in hell. He wrote like three New York Times bestselling books about having sex with girls and throwing up on the floor in nightclubs. Now five kids and a ranch out in Bastrop, Texas, a million rounds of ammunition. And he's just gone like full sort of doomer optimism prepper mode. Yeah. Did five years of daily psychotherapy, five years of daily psychotherapy, how many people

content creators on the internet would call that gay. Hang on a sec, I'm pretty sure Tucker Max has been through more chicks than you do. So like pick, and this is one of the things, it's so funny, I had this conversation with Hormozy, I know you just got back from Vegas. Congratulations winning the school games. Thank you. I had this conversation with him. When you get into kind of a weird, unnecessary...

a competitive streak with somebody, maybe it's on the internet, maybe it's someone that's one of your friends or whatever. There is a masculine urge to want to try and beat them at a game that they care about, even if you don't care about it, but you know that you can beat them at it. And, you know, it's like the whole, well, I'm stronger than you. I'm richer than you because you know that that's a thing that they care about. Or I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to get really big because he cares about being big. And if I can get bigger than him, then that will make him feel less. So

Obviously, you've immediately lost before you've even started because they made you change the game that you were playing. But I do often think with the TukaMax thing, how many people...

think that that's like a suboptimal existence. Meanwhile, he knocks fence posts in, retired off the back of a huge company and just gets to chill out and homeschool his kids. Like who's managed to reach success more? The person that's still playing the game, that's still comparing themselves on the internet or the dude that doesn't even know that it's happening?

It's interesting that I see this bridge between the red pill guys where they start off and they're basically always the little nerd, loser, virgin, childhood trauma, learn the skills to pick up girls, red pill, go out, nighttime, day game, basically your head's on a swivel finding the closest girl you can go cold approach to and you know the highest probability lines and the peacocking colors and everything. Yeah.

and then it's like you enjoy that you indulge and you get to the point where you start becoming sick of it and that that's when the fantasies of like monogamy that's when the fantasies of a good girl comes in because um myron said this he said now that he understands girls he can't respect them and i think there's truth in that but i think it's just slightly misguided it's that it feels like many of us men have been sold the lie of what women are and i really do think that when you do go through the red pill arc you you

you understand they're not the princesses that they were made out to be. You see like the dark feminine energy. You see how quickly certain girls will get into bed with you. You'll see how certain girls will speak about their boyfriend and husbands. And I think some men need to go through that. Or like, you know, men who are born into...

amazing households with no trauma. They get a girlfriend when they're 16 years old, get married. Okay, sweet, awesome. But there's guys who, like, there's guys who were born fucked up, right? There's guys who had the dad in and out of the house, alcoholic, cheating, mother's cheating, this, this, this, this.

And it feels like, I don't know, you have an incessant need for the intimacy of more than, of what more than one woman could ever give you because of the inconsistent love that you receive from your mother. I agree. That to me is, there's two fixes, right? You can either continue to satiate an insatiable hunger or you can stop being so hungry. And stopping being so hungry is self-work, therapy, if you need it, dieting.

the meditation, the breath work, the spending time actually unpicking and unpacking those patterns. Why is it that I don't seem to ever feel validated by the world, no matter how much I achieve? Why is it that I never feel comfortable or safe and secure with one partner, so I need to go and see five or ten? I need to be dating as many as possible at once. What is it about me

that needs that void filling inside of me. And there's two ways you can do it. You can continue to feed the beast, or you can stop the beast from being so hungry. Were you red-pilled at one point? I don't even know what that means. I have never identified with that group. I've never been a part of the Manosphere. I know Eve Syke. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person from the Manosphere that's actually spoken at a symposium for human behavior and evolution, which I did last year.

I understand the dynamics. I disagree with most of the methods, even if most of the diagnoses are correct. It's like, it's the classic thing of like the diagnosis is, is in many ways accurate. And the, uh, prescription is fucking atrocious. So,

it is what it is like it's it's horses for courses i think a lot of the time what people are doing is just confirming their biases you know if you're someone that's an avoidant person that needs an awful lot of validation you will find a life philosophy that allows you to feel noble in your same as the monk mode thing it's the guy it's the introvert that just wants to retreat into spending his time in the house oh but this is a virtue now i have prestige because of the

thing that I already was. It's just like an amped up version of that. It's like, hey, if you just need endless amounts of validation from the world while only chasing pussy and money and status, well, that's a really good way to make the thing that you already were the thing that everyone is supposed to want to be. Does that make sense? Mm.

Well, okay, you're saying that the prescription of the red pill is bad. What would your prescription be for a 16 year old right now? He kind of wants to date, but he's heard that women aren't worth the distraction and that there's degeneracy everywhere. But then he wants to have sex and he doesn't want to watch porn. And he also would like to find a good girl, but he doesn't want to be distracted. What would you say to him?

I would say to do what feels right. I don't think that at the age of 16, you need to be overthinking the way that you're going with your life plan. And it comes back to what you said at the beginning, which is you will learn so much more by just experimenting with things.

Anytime that I get, my audience is older than yours, but anytime that I get a message from someone in their teens, you know, like 13 year olds, 14 year olds that send questions in for the Q and A's that we do, like, bro, just exist. Like you're already evidently very self-reflective. You're introspective. You're doing the rumination thing. You're going to assess your behavior. You're going to reflect on the things that you did. So for me, I just accumulate as many experiences as possible and

I wouldn't do it forever. So I'd be like, okay, well, I'm going to try dating. I'm going to see what this is like. And maybe I'm going to try monk mode. I'm going to play around with that. I'm going to be super social for a while. Maybe I'm going to get into the gym. Like, what do I like? You don't know what you like. I'm still fine. I'm 36 and I'm still finding out things about myself that I like about how I like to regulate about what I want to spend my time doing about what the perfect day looks like for me. And I've been playing with this for a decade. So just

live life and find through experimentation. I think trying to have too much, certainly other things that are better for you to do than others. Yes. Should you have a physical practice? Yes. Should you be trying to eat clean? Yes. Should you avoid getting drunk five nights a week? Yes. But does that mean that you shouldn't ever drink? Does that mean that you shouldn't ever miss a training session? One of the things that you do

which I do as well, is you care a lot about your routine and about getting dialed. You wouldn't come and do a podcast with me in London because it would drop your HRV too low. But there is a peril of over-optimization because you then become a prisoner of all of that stuff. And if you get yourself to the stage where the things that are supposed to serve you now own you, what life are you living? Like who's in charge here? You or your whoop strap? Like is your whoop strap there to tell you how life is going on or to tell you how to live life?

I think you need to get it the right way around. There's a quote I've been saying to my students recently, all of the greatest men were sleep deprived.

So here we are. Okay, Huberman said, I've got to get sunlight in the morning and don't get blue light. I'm wearing the orange glasses and stuff like a nerd. The whoop strap is red, so I'll take the day off training and stuff. There is no great man in history who had perfect sleep all the time. Not even like great sleep all the time. Most of them, I am sure, would have been deeply sleep deprived. They had sleepless nights. They were awoken at 2 a.m. because that's just the things that you need to do to sometimes get to the top level in a chaotic world. And we love these routines. And this isn't like,

people have taken this the wrong way and said like, oh, but Hamza said sleep's like bad for you or something. No, no, no. Sleep's amazing for you. Of course it is. But obsessing over it is not what the greatest people do. They have a great routine, which allows them to usually get pretty good sleep most days of the week. But if they miss a day, they don't view it as like this, oh, this horrible thing that's happened. Rather, they're actually, I can imagine they actually

enjoyed it like there's times where i'll wake up at 1am and i'll randomly be full of energy and instead of being upset thinking oh but my aura stat's gonna be all fucked up now i'll just get up and work for like an hour i end up like having this weirdly peaceful time where you know everyone's asleep it's strange when you try and work at one in the morning yeah it's so nice and you do that for like an hour or so it's just me shouting in my house with a

Let's get another video out. Dude, I think that you're really right. I think that looking at how you become a prisoner of what you want to optimize is so dangerous. And it speaks to me of like massive fragility. It's like, oh, you think that your constitution balances on such a knife edge that one bad night of sleep that you can't even survive that. Oh,

You think that going out and drinking once is going to be the beginning of the downfall of your thing. This is coming from the guy that did a thousand days sober, but I periodized it. And then after that I reintegrated and I did other, like it, it is all about chunking things I think into manageable blocks and,

How many guys have you got that are part of your community thing now? This morning we have 1,865. 1,865. What are the young guys in your community struggling with a lot at the moment? Because we hear stories of what is it that Gen Z and Gen A, what are the problems that they're finding? But a lot of this is coming from self-reports in

uh, survey data and the kind of surveys that are going to be asked are going to be things to do with, um, the beliefs around the LGBT movement or whether they support abortion or whether that's skewing to the left or to the right or whether they're dating or whether they're not and why they're not. But you have like ethnographic qualitative data. It's the conversations that you see between people when they've kind of got their gloves off a little bit,

What are you seeing? What are young guys worried about? What are the problems they're encountering? What are they fearful of at the moment? It's very difficult for them to find anyone else like them. Only with the newest content creators and communities are they finding like-minded people. And it still isn't really scratching the itch. So for example, in Vegas, I just did a little meet up with some of my community members.

And 15 guys randomly turn up. I didn't even give much notice, but they turn up and the youngest guy there was 13 years old. He came with his father. They drove her 30 hours to get there. They came from like Ohio. And I only gave the notice about 30 hours before we met as well. So they literally saw the post, got in the car and drove to come see me.

and he was he was a young killer 13 years old only eats red meat we were all racing each other he was faster than all of us as well which was like fucking absurd we literally I raced him as well and I wasn't gonna go easy on him twice his age I had like triple his body weight which is a bit unfair yeah

And he, um, he said as well, it's like, I think he's getting homeschooled now, but he mentioned when he was in school, he's not going to fit in with anyone. He tried to get a few friends on self-improvement and he said like, you know, they, they kinda got it and watched a few of my videos, but they didn't take it seriously and they were never going to meditate. It's just a

At least with my community, the problem is they don't find other people who are on self-improvement, who aren't being degenerate, who are going to the gym, meditating, journaling, eating clean, not touching plastics and stuff. It's quite like a rare group of people that I've brought together who normally we wouldn't have ever been able to find each other. So at least with my community, the biggest thing is finding like-minded people. But then in just in general, let's say the average guy who maybe doesn't watch my videos, but who

maybe has just discovered them recently. Then it's the stereotypical problems that you already know. It's like they're watching porn, they're in video games, they feel like horrible, they're not getting girls. I looked at, I think you posted a poll a couple of days ago on YouTube community. It seemed like being awkward and cringe, worrying what people think about me, insecurities and the way that I look. Those are the things I took away from that. Yeah. Lux maxing is very popular these days. What is lux maxing?

it's kind of like you get onto a protocol to look like cuter as a guy and so I have a free Community we have like a hundred thousand people in there I had to make a post and literally saying like guys I'm not gonna lie

this is kind of gay these kids are joining and literally we had about 100 posts a day of guys posting selfies and literally asking like do i look cute how could i make my hair look cuter and i was thinking like do you guys watch my videos i'm there in an angry bathroom like busker head i'm like shouting about yeah like you know we've got to be strong guys you know testosterone and all these guys are coming in like how should i make my eyebrows like this or like this should i do my hair like this they really care right now because they're

Like young men are realizing just how important the physical appearance is in the modern dating scene where it's all judged on Tinder and Instagram. And so there's a huge level of, I don't know, need or pain right now for the young guys who basically aren't fitting in with the TikTok boy stereotype that seems to be like the meta of attraction. You said cute. Why do you say cute, not better looking? So what I found is the youngest guys are optimizing for like,

teenage girl gaze which is the tiktok boy meta once you get to like 21 22 years old like you can be a man yeah you'll agree with this it's like women aren't attracted to the cute looking tiktok boy with the fluffy hair and stuff any woman who's above like 22 23 years old isn't looking for a guy like that but when most of these kids who follow me uh 13 14 15 years old they're on the

Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok and they see the girls in their classroom who are posting about those TikTok boys. So it seems to be less like the- Timothee Chalamet. I wouldn't know, but- Timothee's the guy from Dune, like the lead actor from Dune. He's quite a feminine guy, like a skinnier sort of dude. With that hair. Yeah, big floppy hair, curly stuff. All right, so young guy comes to you, says, I want a Lux Maxx.

What do you tell him? If we want him to get as much attraction from girls as possible, and he's a teenager, which is important to mention, then there's five steps. Number one, most importantly, is muscle mass. If you can build up the first noob gains in the gym, the 10 pounds, it's the easiest time you'll ever build muscle is the first year. So rinse that out. There's no excuse why any man should not have...

his new gains in the gym but along with that is then his body fat percentage especially the younger you are especially for the guys who are teenagers being closer to like 10 body fat having the the jawline like you've got very good like jawline cheekbones and stuff but what seems to be the meta for these young guys is that tiktok boy look and all of them you're not going to see a tiktok boy who's got like a like skinny skinny fat indian

It's all going to be like, you know, like lean skater boy kind of jawline, cheekbone. So low body fat percentage, 10% ideally. The hair, if you're a teenager, you go with the TikTok boy hair. It's like the fluffy, like, I don't know what they call it, like the broccoli style looking hair that like very attractive to like 14, 15, 16 year old girls. And then the style, the kind of clothing you wear. Again, it's like copy the TikTok boys. They're always wearing like,

boot cup pants, which are up to the belly button. It's like a white vest and like, you know, the hair and then the little jacket or something. It's like the cute fashionable style. And then also the huge one, which makes it very easy to attract girls these days is followers, social media presence, pre-selection. This is for like, let's say guys who are teenagers, first of all. Then if we, it's similar to

But once you get to about 21 years old, the game changes. If you're not trying to date like underage girls and you're trying to date like women,

they're not attracted to some of these things. Women who are 22, 23 years old are not attracted to TikTok boy hair. They're attracted to more just of the masculine style, especially basically how polarity works is the more masculine you are, the more feminine of the women you will attract. So if you want to date a feminine woman who, for example, is more nurturing and you'll have this sexual polarity with where you feel like more of a strong, traditional masculine man next to, she's going to be attracted to more of the dimorphic,

traditionally masculine traits of shorter hair, which

shows off like your skull shape for example a thicker neck you still want good things like for example muscle mass but you can actually have way more muscle mass now when you're younger you want like you know a little bit of a lean physique whatever now you're talking 200 pounds and they'll like the more feminine women might still want you to be a little bit bigger but for dating women you don't need to be anywhere near as lean and in fact it's kind of nicer if your body fat percentage is a

The size of you is bigger. What I'd say is, in general, if you want to be attractive to older, not older, but like women, women, 21, 22, 25 years old, think about just being more of a primal caveman, especially if you want to go for more of the feminine girl. So, for example, if you wanted some of the most feminine girls ever, you would want to look like a caveman, Dagestanian, cauliflower ear type of guy, because that's probably as masculine as you can look in the modern day.

You still want the followers, the intellectual Chad archetype that you've got is probably what I would say is the meta where it's like, you're a very attractive, handsome guy, but you're not like the stereotypical dumb Chad who's just attractive, but he's brain dead. So it's like when you can show off your intellect in a podcast, you basically got, if I had to rate right now, you have...

the 10 out of 10 funnel of attracting women right now. I wonder what your DMs are like. I'm sure that there's a lot of women who cope. It's fucking chaos. And they're like, there's women, I can imagine, right? They'll say like, oh yeah, you know, your podcast is like this. I know it's supposed to be for guys and stuff, but I'm a girl and I like it too. Yeah. When I first started the podcast six years ago, my friends used to call it groundwork at scale.

So, yeah, it's one of the weirdest things in the world, like in terms of an arc. You know, as a guy who early 20s didn't really feel very confident, didn't really know his position, there wasn't the kind of advice and content online that we have access to now. So there wasn't the same kind of guidance.

And I remember thinking like a decade ago or whatever, it would be so amazing to be a Gymshark athlete. Like, could you imagine if I was a gym? Cause then that would be good. That's validation. That means that everything's cool. And that would be good. I would be so great to get a blue tick. It would be so great to like have the, this thing to have the, that thing.

All of those things are apparently available if you just have sufficiently weird conversations on the internet. Like the easiest route to becoming a Gymshark athlete is to not actually care about the way you look and to just have interesting conversations. The easiest route to getting the blue tick thing, all of that. But I think fundamentally what that is, is

What is your competitive advantage because of your predisposition, the thing that you like to do and the capacity that you have? And you just lean into that because I'm not going to beat Sebum at like being jacked. I actually probably can't beat him at the emotional thing either because he's like pretty, he's pretty good at that. But I can hold a pretty good conversation with him. All right, well, that's my thing. So I'll just lean into my thing and

It's weird how stuff ends up coming full circle. All of the dreams and goals and things that you wanted so long ago, even if they feel kind of like petty or juvenile now, there is usually a...

a much quicker way to get the things that you want with far less resistance by swimming downstream rather than upstream you know what i mean if i wanted to set up like a wife funnel like a protocol to attracting wives i'd basically do the exact same thing that you're doing i first would have started with like chad archetype i go to the gym i'm on love island whatever i party and stuff but then i want to stop that rehabilitate yeah like oh yeah i'm a chorn out guy it's like but

But you know that I slay. This is all one big con. It's a massive psyop. Literally. And the 10 out of 10 topics I'd be choosing is like, oh yeah, you know, the sexual revolution's kind of crazy, guys. And you shouldn't be taking the pill. Message me when you're on your... Hormonal birth control. Honestly, dude, you are right. You've actually called out my meta there, which is fucking terrifying. It's really strange. I think the whole world of, like, especially for young guys at the moment,

Is it young girls that have got it worse? Is it young guys that have got it worse? I don't think it really matters. I think that everyone is kind of lost. And this obsession with luxe is so interesting to me because we definitely had it, you know, I'm 36 now. So I guess from your audience, it's like two decades. Sounds like a long time and really was interesting.

we weren't as obsessed with the way that we looked. And for girls, there's at least a bit of like nobility in vanity for them. Like, you know, women that are in their 50s get cosmetic surgery, in their 60s get cosmetic surgery. They use makeup, they wear heels, they accentuate their body shape by wearing certain dresses. Like it's in kind of in the lines. It's part of the lineage of your sex. The same isn't quite true for men, you know? So...

There's an interesting stat that says male body dysmorphia is on track to overtake female body dysmorphia within the next two decades. That doesn't surprise me at all. With men becoming more and more feminine, lower testosterone, societal pressures to not be as masculine, I'm not surprised that so many guys are getting into like, am I looking cute or not? Because quite frankly, bro, when I was in high school, and I'm sure it would have been even more so for your generation,

It was gay. Like we, we saw Justin Bieber. And the first thing that any of us said was he was gay because he had this kind of hair. And it wasn't even us trying to be like homophobic and trying to make like a, some kind of actual point. It was just like, guys don't do that. But these days, the younger generation are, and I think it's because they're taking on a lot of like feminine traits. Like, like I, I,

Every now and then I'll scroll on Instagram or something, right? The algorithm gets me too. And there'll be like videos I'll see of guys who it should be a girl who's made it. He's like looking into the camera and he's putting on like cream or some shit. Then he's doing his eyebrows. He's doing his beard and looking cute. Then he puts on hair product and he's like doing this. And it's like, he'll have loads of likes, validation, girls who are attracted to him, guys who are looking up to him. But it's very interesting that that's like, that's how a girl would be posting on Instagram right now. I guess that,

A lot of the stuff that guys typically do when they're young doesn't probably come across that well on TikTok.

Like it's just you and your boys playing Xbox in your pants, your pajamas, like in your bedroom, in your parents' house. Like, why is that? That's not very exciting. I wonder whether this is downstream, at least in part from Me Too and women being more concerned about aggressive, dominant men, especially when they're young and vulnerable. Maybe they haven't had sex or maybe they're starting to become sexually active. And they're thinking, actually, if I'm with someone that seems like,

like halfway like a best friend that's almost like an anime character cuddle toy equivalent of a boyfriend. I wonder whether they feel more like sexually safe and secure. That would be something that I could absolutely see. And then with them, so many people taking birth control, they're more likely to be attracted to more of the feminine features. More feminized men, correct. Which is that we had a kid in Adonis School actually who said,

his girlfriend went off birth control. And it's exactly what you had spoke about with Louise Perry, that his, their sex life went to shit and she, they watched your podcast. I sent them the link and they said that that's basically what's happening right now. - Yeah, I had a friend who, a girl friend who swings both ways, mostly lesbian, but bisexual. - Wasn't her?

She'd eat you alive. You don't want to step into that war game. And for one week out of every month, she says that she's straight again.

Like she's not on hormonal birth control, but for the week that she's ovulating. Yeah. So that, that change in that change in hormones. And this is one thing that I don't think guys really understand just how aggressively women get ragged around by that internal, uh, manipulation. Like guys are very hormonal in short bursts and it's not reliable. Like you can't track it based on the moon's position. Uh,

But we are not in the same way that women are. And women, I think for the most part, are a lot more controlled by emotions. They tend to feel emotions more deeply, both as a predisposition and then socially it's more acceptable. So they don't tamp them down as much.

like, it would be like, if we could swap places, I would hate that. Like, I've just got, you know, I'm looking on my calendar and I'm like, oh yes, I've got the podcast with Hamza on Tuesday. And then I've got the podcast with Owen McManus on Wednesday. And I'm like, fuck, like I start my period on Thursday and it's going to kill it. Like, I don't want that. I wouldn't want that. But yeah, it's, it'll be interesting to see what the next few years have in store. I wonder whether, well, actually that's a question. If, if it's such a case that,

young guys are optimizing for this super pretty boy TikTok look. Why did Andrew Tate resonate so much with that same age group? Because it's the guys who aren't optimizing for that. So it's like, let's say... The counterculture. Yeah, whatever percentage it is of the guys who are going for the sort of femboy look and they...

you know, being proper cute, wearing the dress and saying, yeah, this is positive masculinity, whatever. There's an equal or even greater number of guys who have just been silenced and, you know, living the quiet lives of desperation where they feel like that's odd, but they've not been able to speak up about it because they know that that's hate speech. And so when you see Tate go viral, he said basically the things that most men have wanted to say, but haven't had the courage to do so. So he's just attracted a different audience compared to the

likely fen boys out there. Yeah, for every cultural movement, in fact, I can teach you to predict the future. For every cultural movement that occurs, if there hasn't yet been a countercultural movement, that's what comes next. So 2020, you have COVID, everyone gets shut down, no one can go outside. 2021, Megan Thee Stallion releases Hot Girl Summer.

You didn't get to party last year. So glam up, make the most of yourself, go out with your girls, have casual sex, have a fun time. 2022, you have feral girls summer. Don't shave, don't wash. No one cares about what you think. Every single time for every like,

simp there's a sigma for every alpha there's a vegan carnivores every movement has to have it's like a thermodynamic law of culture that every movement that has to be a counter movement for every left that has to be a right and yeah it's uh i think you could quite easily predict it if and i didn't know that that sort of underground more femboy trend amongst teenagers was happening but if that's

part of the fashion, it absolutely makes sense that Tate comes in and presumably he doesn't know about it either, but he just managed to like strike at the right time. One of the other things you've been talking about a lot recently is the life cycle of a creator, the perils of audience capture, stuff like that. What have you reflected on that?

Being a content creator who goes viral, especially when you're young, it's kind of like being the hot guy in the gym. So you'll recognize this. Okay, look, you're the hot guy in the gym. Let's say you're secretly taking steroids as well.

You go in there and you say hello to the first gym girl, then the PT, then the other guy, the old guy, you fist bump everyone. You know, you're feeling nice and relaxing. This is your environment. You're the king of this location. You go over, there's other guys there who are copying you. There's girls who are looking at you. There's guys who are asking if they can join your workout. You're hot shit and you know it and it feels awesome. That's like when you're popping off on the algorithm, that's what it feels like. Everyone wants a piece of you. Your DMs are being flooded. It's so cool.

That guy realizes that steroids are actually not that healthy for him. And so he makes the hard decision to take a step back from that. And he walks in, he's still got residual attention and the same people are still into him, but it's kind of starts going down and down and down. That girl's not really into him anymore. That guy's not paying attention to him anymore. Those people are copying someone else now. The new Jim Chad walks in, the one who's still taking gear. And that's when it really disrupts you, your mental health shit. This is someone else popping on the YouTube algorithm in your space that you were like the king of.

So there's like, you know, other creators who are popping off in self-improvement or masculinity. And this is when you get really fickle and emotional. Okay, maybe I should do like that. Maybe I should start taking gear again. And you do it for like two weeks and you're like back to doing that thing again. But then you stop it again because you realize it's unhealthy. And it's like your brain's all fucked up thinking, wait, how do I get these people to like me? I don't actually care about them liking me. But like, what?

it'd be nice if they didn't like me again like you know when was the last time i posted a video and it said one out of ten on the youtube algorithm so it's like crack i need it again there's you've still got like your the ogs who are still watching and you know that's nice but it's not enough

You're still the guy who, for example, you come in and there's five people watching you in the gym. You're still the guy who posts and there's 100,000 people who are watching you, which is more than basically every stadium out there. But it's not enough because you used to be hot shit. You used to be the guy who gets 500K, 1 million. You used to be the guy who had a lot more subscribers. And so it's...

It can drive a person insane getting the peaks and troughs of the content game. And I'm in the trough. From last year, I basically took a massive step back from YouTube. I posted every single day without fail for...

Maybe about a year and a half, which barely any other creators have ever done that daily upload streak that I did. And my videos had animation, like custom animation. People don't realize that it was costing about a thousand dollars per day to put one of those videos out there. And my business was suffering. I was literally losing money every month making these videos, but I thought it was like a very purposeful thing to send out this message to the young guys of self-improvement.

And in the end of 2022, I decided that I just wanted to stop the entire thing. I let go of my team. I stopped posting to YouTube. I started posting like maybe once every few weeks or once a month or so. And I put all of my focus into Adonis School, which is like my online community. That's like

kind of like where I bring guys in and we help them with teachers and support and they get advice from me every single day. And I put so much effort into that, that I just didn't really have the bandwidth to also grow YouTube at the same time, even though I wanted to. So I became that fickle entrepreneur, the fickle YouTuber who like, I'd start posting again daily for a few weeks, but then I'd lose the bandwidth because my priority is that, you know, the guys who are paying the money. So I'd go and stop it again. Then it's like, you know, I look like I'm, I'm

like, I don't know, fickle, emotional. I'm on and off. I'm bipolar as fuck. ADHD where I'll go hard on YouTube again for a little while. Then I'll drop off again. Then I'll go hard again. Then I'll drop off again. And I don't really have the regrets because I've been able to build like a wonderful product. I just won a massive competition. I met Alex Hamosi some ovens, but it's, it does fuck with your head when you're not at the top of your space anymore. I think definitely one thing to take away from that is the,

The most popular job that young kids want, they're in school, primary school kids, is they want to be YouTuber, a content creator, influencer of some kind. It's like, well, that right there is what... That's if it goes right. That's what your future has in store. That's the best that you have to hope for. Unless you absolutely thread the needle and then hit the top and then just keep going. So yeah, I think...

Everybody has this in microcosm. It doesn't matter whether you're a content creator or someone that works a normal job. You...

get a degree of self-worth from the content that you put out on the internet even if it's just your photos your family photos from the weekend or whatever like you you outsource your sense of self-worth to the crowd everyone knows kind of what you've gone through everyone's had one post or one video that's that's kind of popped off on instagram or tiktok or whatever they're like oh yeah that was nice maybe maybe content creation is my thing i am kind of funny and you realize

You realize how quickly audience capture comes in. And, you know, if you're going to rise with other people's inflations, you're going to fall when you're on the other side of it too. You kind of use this analogy about taking steroids and then stopping because you realize that they're not good for you.

It seems to me like you were trying to draw some sort of analogy that you like transcended some more toxic type of content that you were producing previously. What was that? What was the message that you disagree with your previous version of yourself about? The videos that got me viral were one, heavily edited and so like high dopamine videos.

which when I look at it, like, you know, I'm supposed to be helping these guys live a better life. And I was making the kind of videos that are like sapping their dopamine by, I had like hit markers and shit come up. I had, you know, explosions, green screen. I had all these like extra animations, effects, everything. And so I felt like I was almost making the situation with like people's poor attention spans even worse.

And so that was one. Just to interject there, I don't think that you necessarily were. There's an idea in internet marketing that you'll be aware of, which is sell people what they want, teach them what they need. And like you can come for whatever you think you're going to get. Like, because you are the, at the end of the day, you are competing with,

the best on the planet at Limbic Hijack, right? Because if they don't watch you, they are watching Mr. Beast. And Mr. Beast is going to continue to play that Limbic Hijack game. He's going to have the escalating, ever-increasing set of stakes, and there's going to be tensions, there's going to be explosions, and his are actually real. And I think...

I would spend some time fact-checking just how true that was for yourself. It's a good story, and I don't disagree that fully pushing the dopamine button isn't a fantastic idea, but if that's seven minutes or ten minutes that someone spent learning about themselves or about meditation, or that's the thin end of the wedge that then gets them into some more meaningful stuff, I don't think that that's a disservice. We do it very differently, but

We often use inflammatory titles or thumbnails. We very rarely do both, but it's like, come for the clickbait, stay for the insights. Like, why are 7 million American men unemployed? These men are not working. It's a really in-depth conversation with the demographer that breaks down exactly why you have this massive unseen group of guys that are unemployed, not looking for work and not in education, employment or training than NEETs.

phenomenal conversation, but like, why are 7 million American men not like unemployed? It's a kind of a spy. It's because of the, why should we contribute to a world that doesn't care about it? And I'm like, I am, I will push that button all fucking day long because people are going to come and they're actually going to be like, wow, I walked away from this having a great understanding about this topic. So just to interject that I wouldn't do the previous version of you so harshly with that. And the same thing goes for everyone else as well. Like

This is an insight from Sam. Given that you've just seen him, I can teach you this one. Sam Ovens was...

kind of like one of the original personal development wealth influencers. He had this penthouse apartment with a motorcycle in it. I have no idea how he got it up there. All he drank was LaCroix and Quest bars. And he's like an OG of internet marketing. He's now on school.com, which you have a platform on and Homo's he just invested in. And I went to a retreat with him in August last year. And I was asking him why he stopped uploading content. And he said,

Because I felt like I had to live up to in private the things that I was saying in public. And that made the fucking hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I felt like I had to live up to in private the things that I was saying in public. Wow. I really think that you need to be careful about the stories that you tell yourself about things. You know, you say a lot of stuff with conviction, which I appreciate, but you need to...

fact check your own certainty as much as possible because if you're smart you can make yourself believe things right it's one of the problems of being clever one of the issues of being clever is that you can convince yourself of stuff that isn't true right that's really fucking vicious so with looking back and going oh yeah the you know playing the dopamine game maybe that was like it was like cheap or it was tacky or it was whatever it's like all right that that's a nice story

Is it true? Like, is that actually what was happening? Or is there a different angle that I can look at this from? And I think that's worthwhile reflection. Yeah, what you've just said about Sam has, I don't know, it's made me have like an insight. I feel like I don't really even know who I am. Like, I remember speaking to you once, probably around two years ago, where you mentioned it casually that

I had gotten a great deal of fame and attention when I was still fairly young. You know, I was 22 when I started YouTube. I was 23 or 24 when it popped off and it was on a global level. And I even caught myself a few days ago wondering like,

what do I want and what are my morals and values compared to what I know will get me views on YouTube and it's very hard to distinguish between the two because it's also my business it's also my financial livelihood and my family's and so it's it's a very difficult game to play when

you've got the judgment of thousands of people. And you know, a lot of people think that the hardest part of being a content creator is the hate. I always thought that that was the problem I'd have to deal with. The hate is like,

it's fine just close your eyes just stop reading the comments it's fine honestly but it's actually the positive comments that that will steal your soul from you because you're getting the positive reinforcement for a certain kind of behavior from potentially thousands or even tens of thousands of people and suddenly you start acting like that type of person again and again and again when that might not have actually been your real value to in private the things that you say in

You're looking around and everyone's patting you on the back. It's like, well, I'm going to keep doing that thing, right? It's like every pat is like a dose of crack for me. Of course, I'm going to keep doing the thing. And it gets years later and you realize, wait, like I'm not even an asshole. I don't know why I'm speaking like this on camera. I'm actually a nice guy. Yeah, dude. Well, let's unpack this a little bit. It's something that I want you to go through with you. Obviously, you've been through this sort of recent relationship breakup and there's definitely been a lot of pivots, like hard pivots that I've watched you make over the last couple of years since we've known each other. You've

sort of went to Dubai for a little while, dropped that. I was going to go and be a fighter in Thailand. Then you came back. Then I'm in my dad era. I remember seeing a video from you that's like, I'm in my dad era in up in the Scottish Highlands, basically completely isolated you and this chick. And then that doesn't work. And now I'm in this next era, like I'm in the money-making era. And it seems to me like that's kind of the thing that's,

captured you a lot at the moment, like money is the god. Basically, more money is always going to make you better. I've heard you say that desire is good because it creates dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction is good because it creates success, but it only creates a very narrow band of success. It creates success exclusively in terms of chasing resources. It doesn't give you peace or fulfillment or solitude that you actually care about. So one of the things that from a guy that's about 10 years older than you, I'd just...

tread carefully with your convictions. Like I know that what your audience comes to you

And we are often attracted to people that sound like they have certainty. There's a guy called Peter Zion, who's a global geopolitics expert. That guy has the most fucking conviction of anyone I've ever heard. And people pray to him like he's a god because he just says things like, this is what's going to happen with oil over the next five years. This is where China is heading and what will occur by 2050. This is the state of the WEF right now. And this is where we can see that they're going, like, there's no, it seems like it's caveat. It's like, this is what's going to happen. And,

people will be seduced by your amount of certainty. It's like, this is what you need to do. These are the steps that you have to take. This is the way that it has to be. But I think the problem you have there is as soon as you posit an ideal, you can then compare yourself to that ideal. And if this ends up being wrong, like if...

actually the thing that you need to do is become a fighter because fighting men have always been warriors and then three weeks later you're like i don't know fighting's not for me and then it's like i'm in my dad era like i can't wait to start for a relationship's gone like the more hard the stake is that you hit into the ground the more difficult it's going to be to pull back out so if i was to give you advice i think that like treading more carefully and being open and honest about hey look

This is what I think feels best at the moment. And this is what I'm experimenting with and treating things like a game and treating things like an experiment or a hypothesis to be tested as opposed to like a commandment to be proved, um, I think would make life a lot easier for you. Um, and you know, like, I want to see you do well. Uh, I do, but I,

I also can see how you rile other people up. I can see why there are comments on the internet that's like, fucking why would you take relationship advice from Hamza? Because it was so certain. Like if you'd gone in and you'd said, dude, everything feels really great with the missus at the moment. And I think that this is what's right. But there's also this that's in the back of my mind. I'm thinking about this and all the rest of it. I feel like you're bringing people along for the journey

But no one likes anything more than tearing down someone that was certain that got it wrong. Right. You know, it's the smart ass in school. It's the guy that has every single answer. And then he puts his hand up, says the wrong thing. And you're like, yeah, all right, mate. Like, so yeah, I think, I think treading carefully would, would do an awful lot to just dampen that blow. And it would also allow you to be more open and honest about things because you're, you're

living up to in private what you say in public would begin to converge more because you will have uncertainties. You will be chronically uncertain all the time. What is it I need to do? Like, how should I look to move forward? So there's some insights. I fear that if I don't speak with that certainty, that my advice won't be taken as seriously.

That may be true. That may be true. You're not going to be a Messiah who comes in and says, well, this water might become wine and we might turn this fucking like one fish into 5,000, but you know, it might only be five. I don't disagree, but like, what are you here to do? Are you here to make money?

popular lies? Are you here to tell people on the internet to track the journey that you're going on? Like, you've already got more money than you ever thought that you were going to earn. You're already more popular than you ever thought you were going to be. So why not have the next period of the arc be, "Okay, I'm just going to tell the truth." And especially if, as it seems, you know, this is one of the perils of young fame, if you haven't worked out who you are before you have incentives from people on the internet encouraging you to be somebody else,

you're never going to work out who you are for as long as you're owned by the people on the internet. So ultimately, what are you looking to, like, you're looking to bring this into land at some point. I know that you want to have a family. I know that you want to get into, you know, like a committed long-term relationship. Like, do you want to continue to play this game where you're like, I'm 36, you become 36 and you're like, I still don't really know who I am. Like, do you really want to do that? Because I don't see what, unless you begin to

be prepared to be more open and honest online, I don't see the moment at which you're able to separate yourself from the content. It's so immersive. You're spending all of your time in the forums. And again, like for the people that are listening, this is you every single time that you compromise the things that you do or the things that you say in order to appease the people that are around you. And the reason that I can talk about this is because this is what I did for like 15 years, right?

When somebody asked me a question, I would not think, what do I think? I would think, what does Hamza want to hear me say so that I will become as high status and popular and well-liked in his opinion? And I'd gotten to the top of the top of the professional party boy industry, the Love Island thing, all the rest of it. But

You're never going to connect with the things that you do or the successes that you have in your life because they're not real. They're not you. You didn't do those things. The persona that you made did those things. The persona doesn't receive love. It receives praise. You're always existing one person.

one layer away you're one degree separated from your accomplishments and the work that you do and even if someone says dude i fucking love i love when they did the thing you know in the back of your mind yeah but that's not really me you don't see me you see the role you see the fucking mystique you know like you do not need to see the real me you do not need to see the real me like that's what you're doing so it's like fucking well played russell crowe

as Gladiator, well played Chris Hemsworth, as Thor. No one's applauding them, they're applauding the actor, right? They're applauding the actual character that they play. And that's why people feel hollow in victory or alone in a crowd, because no one sees them. They don't see what they're doing. The most common compliments I've ever gotten is, you've changed my life. And it's from guys who tell me deep stories. They were suicidal, they were depressed, they were anxious, whatever.

And when I get that compliment, it does nothing to me. And I've always wondered why, like, I don't give a fuck when someone says this to me, it does zero things to me. Even any compliment I get with my work, it often does not. It only does something because I use it as a way to get status and recognition from other people. You know, it's a screenshot worthy of other people. And I've always wondered why that is. And I think you're, you're so right. Because what they're really saying is like your persona helped me, like cult leader Hamza helped me. Right.

If that's not you, yeah. And it's, you know, I think for the guys that are a bit older, at least from what I can see, the message is great, the positioning is great, the optics are great, all of that stuff's great. But you wouldn't be working this hard at trying to do personal development if you weren't like tearing yourself up inside trying to find out who you are. So if that's the case, like, what are we doing here pretending that this is a fucking messiah? Like, you don't have the answers.

And that's fine. Yes, people will come to you and you're going to grow the platform from that. But I think you have an opportunity over the next few years to really make a hard pivot into, I can be uncertain about things. I can be fearful. I can be vulnerable. I can be open. I can be scared. I can be ashamed. I can be guilty. I can be all of those things. And I can still be proud of myself and I can still be successful.

And I think that you'll really connect with what it is that you do. And this is, again, I'm saying this to you and you might as well be a mirror of what I'm saying to myself. This great quote from Neil Gaiman that says, the moment that you feel that just possibly you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that's the moment you may be starting to get it right. And I think he's true. I think that's the way it works. Wow.

Well, thank you for saying that. It's my pleasure. I wanted to get this across to you today because I think that you have the opportunity to be a really good influence on the guys, but crucifying yourself on like the cross of your own platform. I don't know. I think, I don't think that's noble, like to do that, to play some like massively, not that you have been, but like some slightly deceitful game for like a fucking decade and then come out the other side of it and be like, ah,

I don't care about it. Like, I didn't feel like it was me. I didn't do that thing. And again, this is every single person who at the water cooler when asked a question of like, hey, how's, like, give me your opinion on this thing. Give me your opinion on the new Dune movie. And you're like, do you know what it is? I actually really didn't like it. Like sci-fi kind of, it's just not my thing. If, Dune's popular at the moment, right? And most people probably want to hear you say, oh, it's so amazing. Oh, wasn't it amazing? Did you watch it in IMAX? Oh, I watched it in IMAX. Did you get Sour Patch Kids?

Um, people don't always want to hear what they want to hear. So as a perfect example, uh, I had a text conversation with like someone that previously I would have not dared ever dared say anything that I thought might've upset them. And they asked me about someone that had been on the show. And I was like, do you know what it is? I actually really like him. Like, I think that his takes are great and this is good and that's good. And he was like, I think he's a fucking dick. And I'm like, all right, well, like I, I quite like this thing he did and that thing he did. And I was like,

There is no world in history where that actually lowers this other person's perception of me. That's just my opinion. People don't always want to hear what they want to hear. They don't just want you to agree. They just want to know what you think. They want to know, hey, when they say, "What did you think of the Dune movie?"

Idiots may want to just hear the thing that they can agree to, but anyone that's even remotely insightful wants to go, "What did you actually fucking think about that movie? What do you actually think about that creator? What's your opinion actually on relationships?" Not, "What do you think is an acceptable thing that will make you popular so that I can..." You know, like just playing that game. That's not what they want to hear. What they want to hear is what you actually fucking think about something. And that's actually unique. Like that's genuinely unique because it can't be copied.

but people can copy anything if it's just a formula it's like no well he's not following his instincts we can just reverse engineer this algorithm well it's very much like what we were saying with dating women and being vulnerable showing your authentic side it's like

Maybe I'm still trying to learn the skill of showing that to the world, really. It's very hard. And God fucking hell, man, there's a young guy who's still... I mean, you're so much further ahead than I was. And everybody in my audience is. All of the people that are in my audience are like... There's always those jokes about me at 14, this generation at 14, and me at 14 was head to toe in...

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pajamas playing RuneScape or something. And this generation's partying in a Hummer or something like that. But it is kind of the same with personal development too. Oh my God, these teenage kids that listen to this show or any show on the internet, you're asking yourself questions that it took me to like 28 to even know existed. Not to answer,

Like, to even know that that was a question that you could ask, to even think that truth is something that's important, to even realize that vulnerability and emotions is something that you should integrate, not be fearful of, or not hide away, like all of this shit. You're like, wow, that's fucking cool. For my own personal benefit, what are some questions you think I should ask myself? If money and status were no object, what would I do? If I was less afraid of other people's opinions, what would I say? What actually makes me happy? Does success make me happy?

What is my definition of success? What is my definition of success if money was taken out of the equation? What is my definition of success if money and followers were taken out of the equation? Because that's what you're optimizing for. What are the things that I'm hiding from myself? What are the emotions that I'm unprepared to feel? What are the things that I feel the most shame and guilt around?

And again, this is, I could be drawing from my own fucking journal here, but I'll send you some stuff that I've written that I think would be useful for you. But those are some, and most of them are you trying to unpack assumptions about yourself. It's like, hey, I think I think this thing, but I really don't know if I do. And I really want to work out if that's right.

I think I think this thing. Let's stress test it a little bit. You are so right. I feel like there's...

there's a transformation i'm going through which is to really find myself like these have been some very formative years like you know i finished university i graduated i got into entrepreneurship but i've done it psychology but i've been through this this these last few years with so much change but whilst it's felt like a lot of people have been watching my every step so it's like even the way i i sit or i walk has

has been crafted. Yeah. It's been crafted for the image.

And it's like, do I actually want to walk like with the alpha male body language? Do I actually want to be manspreaded right now? Or is it just because I'll get like, you know, there'll be a comment of someone saying that my legs is too close together. Honestly. Well, I mean, dude, I'm wearing, I'm wearing fucking Crocs and shorts, and I'm sure that there will be a number of people that have got a problem with it, but Hey, guess what? That's what I was wearing earlier on. Like, that's what I wear on the house. And I'm not, I absolutely not totally bereft of, of being at the mercy of other people's opinions, but yeah,

One guy that you should maybe even do an interview with for Adonis School, Dr. Robert Glover, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Beyond outstanding. Phenomenal. He has the three constituent parts of an attractive man. And he says a man who has a mission, knows where he's going, and is having fun while he's going there. It's like, hey, that's fucking easy to do. Like having fun while he is doing a thing.

Like, okay, so he's fully embodying what it is that he's spending his time doing. Like he's actually integrating that into himself. Hmm.

I'm getting so many insights. I wasn't expecting this to be like a coaching session. Well, again, maybe it'll be interesting. We haven't done many episodes where I've opened up, but then I also don't speak to that many people that I'm as close to as you, and also not people that I'm invested in. I genuinely do want you to become better. But one of the other challenges, I think, of young guys is what does authenticity mean? I've heard these things about what women want. Mm.

Or the world. And for women as well, I'm sure. Maybe it's kind of uncool for young women to become mothers or whatever at the moment. It's like, I really just want a family. And I'm terrified if I say that, that people are going to think that I've been conned by the patriarchy. Or I really want a career. And I'm terrified that the right is going to call me some wannabe boss bitch chick. So people compromise the things that they want to do all the time.

And yeah, working out what you actually want, like, what are you? And I think that this is the most legit criticism that I saw like post your breakup was that talking about trying to keep like an alpha masculine relationship

facade, like the James Bond style of talking going, it just doesn't work. It's one of those beautiful things that may work in theory, but just can't work in practice because no one can keep up a facade for the rest of their life. So the best thing that you can do is just

be as authentic as possible with the person that you meet. And if that involves you opening up about your weird love of manga, or like the fact that you just every Sunday morning, I fucking love watching the rugby or like, I've got this weird, I really love

going bird watching, whatever the thing is that's your thing, like that is your competitive advantage because there is a chick out there who would fall in love with someone. They're like, do you know what it is? I don't care about birds at all. But the fact that you're an ornithologist, that you have something, that you know where you're going and that you're having fun while you're doing it, there is nothing that's more attractive to me than that. And Hormozy says this about Layla, who's like, I'm sure that if she had the choice, I wouldn't wear a vest and shorts to dinner every night.

but she is way more attracted to the fact that I do what I want to do and she can trust that that's what I want to do than me compromising and doing the thing that she thinks that she wants. It's again, like she doesn't want you to wear what she wants you to wear. She wants you to wear what you want to wear. You know what I mean?

see with the james bond thing i i've seen the criticism as well maybe i i probably didn't word the message as well as i should have it's not that you should be keeping up a facade with your woman but rather i think that your time with your woman and with people should you should present your best self to them i think too often in relationships people get very complacent they stop putting in effort for each other so what i what i meant was not to be faking some character some persona but rather like

Like my mistake was for example when I met my woman I'd take her out on dates We'd we'd see each other in this like polarized sexy time and you know I was putting in a lot of effort to be a gentleman six months later It's like we were spending loads of time together. I'm lying there. I've got like stains over my top I'm not even speaking to her in the romantic way that I used to I'm not opening the okay Let's go back to the beginning there. How authentic was what you were doing in the beginning?

I think it is, yeah. How authentic was that to you? So why did you zero in on something that wasn't that later on? If it was authentic, why did it change? It depends what you mean by authentic. Because, look...

is it inauthentic for me to be wearing this jumper instead of like the bathrobe i was just i mean yeah like kind of you know i wasn't born in the jumper but if i came here in the bathrobe you would have thought i was one of the crackheads on the street right so it's like what's the definition of of authenticity you know it's like i burp i fart and stuff am i really it's like is it inauthentic if i don't do that in the podcast like in some ways yeah if i'm holding it yeah in some ways but it's like

you know, there's standards. It's a degree of decorum. That's it. And so it's like with your woman, I think it's worth putting in the extra effort to keep up that extra, like that level of, of effort and presentation because it's what they're attracted to. And also it's like, why wouldn't you use that as an opportunity for you to present your best self to the world? Okay. So let's just run this to the extreme. You're a guy or a girl that gets into a relationship and you just

If you're a chick, every single night when he comes home, your makeup's perfect, the hair's done, you've got the boudoir five-piece underwear on underneath, and you've cooked him dinner and you rub his shoulders. That's making an effort, but it's also setting an unrealistic standard that you are going to have to live up to later in the relationship. The same thing goes for the guy. The door is held open, and every single night there's a different...

playlist that I've curated that day based on my emotions that I feel. And you can pick this however you want. You can do the perfect cocktail of psychedelic drugs because you're like a new agey couple, or it's the rough sex because you're like a very sexually active couple, or it's the gym training session. Pick the pathway that you have. I think that the thing you need to do is just try and be what

Try and start a relationship as you mean to continue it. That doesn't mean that you can't put your best foot forward, but people will always feel a change in like an acceleration or a deceleration. And if you've set like she's, she thinks that she's dating like this guy, like,

But when it actually comes to it, I really quite like reading for like half an hour and I need my space, but I've just obsessed her with physical affection for the last six weeks, the first six weeks of our relationship. And then when I actually want to do the thing that I want to do, which is like, Hey, I, uh, I feel like I'm going to go in the other room and I just want to read. I just like, I sometimes need a bit of space to myself. Like that's cool. If that's part of you,

If that is, well, he wasn't doing that before. That is a big fire alarm. I'm really worried that you don't like me because I think you didn't use to do this before. And now I'm really worried. And then you have to say, well, actually that is me. That, that guy is me. And what I did for the first six weeks is kind of some, like I sort of shaved that bit of me off. So I understand what you mean. It's a delicate balance between putting your best foot forward and wanting to, you know, like,

Again, you don't need to talk about your athlete's foot and your flatulence on the first date. But also to be like, hey, look, this is me. Fucking Crocs and bad hair or whatever and all. And weird bird obsession and book reading and stuff. And sometimes I needed a little bit of space. But like, that's the person you want. The person that loves that is the person you want to get into a relationship with because it's got the greatest chance of longevity. Yeah.

Because you don't ever need to be anyone else. You just need to be yourself. And I think that that is what people are trying to optimize for. They're trying to optimize for that like hyper authentic approach. I think you just need both. I think it's like what percentage? I remember I actually journaled about this. I said that

The problem it felt like in my relationship was that I went to like 98, 99, 100% of the sort of relaxed, this is me. Yeah, I leave shit stains in the toilet. It's like, yeah, sure. And a lot of authenticity, especially in a long-term relationship. Not in the toilet. Authenticity stops at the bowl of the toilet. But it's...

You need the right percentage. I skewed too far to the side. This is why I'm kind of revolting against the message you're giving right now. Because I went fully into the sort of natural, this is just who I am. You've got PTSD from being a lazy guy. Yeah, that's it. And I've experienced what it's like showing that side to your woman, but also just to yourself. And I don't like that side of myself. I like...

having your woman as an opportunity for you to dress up nice and put it, you know, like just put on your best foot. So why not turn on like the charming part of you more? And you shouldn't 100%. I'm not saying to fake it. Like I like being authentic and I'm not saying that you need to do that 24 seven, but maybe the balance is somewhere like 70, 30, 50, 50.

When it starts getting 100% or 95 on each side, let's say you're almost faking the charming side of you. Yeah, that's a problem. Or let's say if you're just being like too relaxed and the only thing you do now with your girl is like you tell her to bring some KFC and come over to your place and that's all she sees you as. And your hair's getting all scrappy. You've not been like trimming your beard because you've already got her, right? You may as well start bulking again. Like that's, then that's a problem as well because there's another guy who's putting in the effort who will walk past with like a fresh fade with a confidence and nice clothes and he'll speak to your girl in like a sexy voice.

And she's not going to cheat or anything, but it's like, you'll probably feel like, oh damn, like I used to be that guy who used to put in so much effort. I used to be the guy who would flirt with her and I don't do that anymore. I just kind of assume I've got her now. That's a very interesting framing to not, and I think that that's much more accurate because like the classic red pill approach would be,

And she's going to leave because alpha fucks beat a box. And like, you know, this is the new guy and she's going to trade up and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, dude, have you ever actually been in a relationship with a chick for a long amount of time? Do you know the reality bending distortion field that is female attachment? Like it is vice grip fucking no more nails shit. And,

they will go to the ends of the earth there's women that stay in relationships with guys that beat them that cheat on them that do all sorts of horrific things like and you think that because you've got a bit podgy she's going to leave no but what's it going to tell you about yourself especially if you see that other guy and you go oh fuck well here's another thing actually that's interesting and it'll be cool to see your arc as you uh slowly plug toward death uh that

aging gracefully as a man is something that's really interesting. So I've only noticed my age like at all, probably since 34, I think. So up to 34, every single year, just everything got easier apart from like injuries and shit in the gym, which is just me being stupid. Everything just got easier, more competent, uh, energy levels, like attractiveness, all the rest of the bits and pieces. And obviously attractiveness is very subjective, but then 34,

34, 35. I was like, hey, I got like gray beard hairs here. Yeah.

And like, I actually, if I sit in the sun for ages and I frown, like it takes a little bit of time for the frown to go away. That's kind of strange. That didn't used to happen before. And it does take a little bit longer to recover from workouts. Like that is, and I do sometimes I like have to, if I've drank a bit more water than usual, but nowhere near as much as I used to, I got to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I'm like,

oh, that's what getting older is. Those things there, that's what aging is as a guy. And I don't think that we have a particularly healthy culture around teaching men how to age gracefully because for women, there's a lot of talk about that and it's ruthless because so much of their value is kept in their youth, which is proxy for their fertility. But for guys, it's like,

oh guess what you're never going to be as strong as you used to be you're never going to be as lean as you used to be you're never going to be as fast as you used to be and that's going to continue happening and you're like well i took so much of my self-worth from my strength and my leanness and my speed i took so much of my self-worth from the fact that i could outwork or out hustle or outgrind people it's like well i you're kind of fighting gravity here uh and that's something i've been thinking about recently it's pretty interesting does that not like terrify you

Not particularly. I think that there is a good argument to be made for every guy that takes a lot of value from his looks going through a really serious injury. Because as soon as it rips away your ability to take your self-confidence from your physical condition, you have to find it somewhere else. So for me, it was the perfect timing. Two disc herniations followed by an Achilles rupture, like one year, one year, one year. Sorry, one year, one year.

a year in between and then another year. Uh, and it meant that as the guy that had taken all of his self-worth from how big he was and being like the most jacked, most lean guy in most gyms, I was like, Oh fuck. Like I'm not, I'm not that guy anymore. So where am I going to take my self-worth from? And I think your looks are a depreciating asset. Your mind is an appreciating asset. Invest your self-worth wisely. Like what are you focusing on?

Are you really going, is this, this is it? The way that you look is going to be the thing that you derive the most of your self-worth from for the rest of time. Are you investing in the most highly volatile stocks and bonds? And oh, actually, I know that this one goes down. Like, guess what? This one isn't just volatile. I know it goes down. Like, that's not where you'd invest your self-worth. It wouldn't be where you'd invest your money. So it is, it is, but like,

it's happening like you're there will come a day when the first gray beard comes in first gray beard hair comes in you're gonna go all right well like chris warned me about this and i kind of guessed at some point it was gonna happen so i guess this is what like aging feels like am i gonna just am i gonna fight against this or am i gonna be like well just as well that i don't take all of my self-worth from the darkness of my beard i think about death all the time

you know, the memento mori, like stoic practice where you think about your death and it makes you more grateful for life. And honestly, I do that with a smile on my face. I do it with this like wholesome feeling where I feel grateful and I've had a good impact on people. What gets me the most is when I think about family and people that I love dying and I have to stay alive for it. Like if I think about my mother passing away, she's getting older now. She's like not old, but you know, 50 something.

that's what that's what scares me the most i see the the other trend it's like when you see your parents getting older and you're like oh damn like you know people get older like people's parents pass away and you i don't know why but like you saying all this just gave me the insight of why i've always found that so hard to think about why it's always broken my heart to think about it because there's so much left unsaid there's a there's like there's a

non-abusive non-traumatic relationship error that we've not had just yet we like coming from like my household and a lot of your brown followers will know this is like there's a lot of abuse trauma and neglect and hardship and expectations and we've kind of crossed that now it's like we've gotten to this point where there's actually quite a lot of respect in our household you know i've retired everyone my siblings work in my company now

But it's like, there's so much still left unsaid. And so it's when you visualize someone passing away before you can say what you needed to say to them before that they could say, and it's like, it's not going to come out because if it does, everything comes out. It's the bottled up emotions that I've had for 20 years. Why was I loved inconsistently? You should speak to Charlie Hooper about this. So Charlie took his entire family on an MDMA facilitated. Did you read, did you see? Yeah. I mean, speak to him, speak to him about it. He'd love to have a chat with you.

And yeah, I think he had a tense relationship with his dad. I may be getting this wrong, so...

I'm sorry if this is misquoting, I'm pretty sure that his intention was to like bring the family in and he's got a brother and maybe a sister and then mom and dad. And his goal was to like kind of try and repair his relationship with his dad a little bit and do this stuff. And he's done tons of psychedelics. He was like full on psychedelic warrior. So he thought this is going to be fine. Like I'll hold space even though I'm going to be under the

MDMA influence as well. I'll hold space and you know, it's going to be beautiful and dad's going to, you know, like open his heart and he's going to see all the rest of it. Five minutes in, Charlie's crying his eyes out. He was like, fuck! It's supposed to be the other way around. And yeah, I don't know, man. I mean, I can certainly tell you this, that as your parents get older, the incentive to tell them things that you know is going to hurt them gets less. Mm.

So there is no better time than basically right now. And every day after this is going to get worse because...

after you say a thing, after you have a difficult conversation, especially with a parent, especially with a parent, if they haven't done a ton of like introspection and self-work and they haven't maybe got the emotional tools to be able to, does this mean that I was a bad parent? Does this mean, oh my God, like, you know, I just thought I'd raise this son. And what does this even mean for my sense of identity? It could really hurt them. The goal is to help them understand you and help you understand yourself and all the rest of it. But it's going to take time to reintegrate that.

But the older that they get, the closer that they get to end of life, the more the voice in the back of your mind is like, what's the point? Like, why do I need to, why do I need to have this conversation? Am I really going to like, let this memory linger, like toward the twilight of their years? It's like that now is the time to do it. Once you've done a bit more therapy, then it's the time to do it.

I say to my boys that gratitude has been one of the most important habits that helped me with my family. A lot of young kids think like it's the money and you know, that's what will improve your family relationship in some ways. It might do if your parents are working like undesirable jobs, but the, the greatest thing that I've done to improve my relationship with my family was writing them gratitude letters, right?

where I took some time to write down what I was grateful for. And I remember the first time I actually thought of doing this, I was watching like some online course about mental health. And I was in this like resentful mood of like, no, but like, what do I have to be grateful for? You know, they did this, they did this, they did this. But I started to write anyway, like one thing after the other.

until it all came out and it was the first time i promise i sound like a dick but it was the first i was 21 22 years old that i actually thought like nice things about my parents that they had actually been terrific for me that they went through so so much they they brought me to the uk when i was three years old and i even just thought about logistically like how difficult that would have been back then before you know the internet was really a thing my dad used to like you know like lining up outside of a building but you didn't have google maps you didn't even know what time it opened

Like for us, like that's scary as fuck. It's like, how do you, how do you just go somewhere? Like I need to check the Google reviews first. But my dad used to tell me this, like I asked him at this point, actually I thanked him for it, sent him like a picture and I asked him like, it must've been so hard to bring us here. And he said he, his exact words was in Pakistan, I had 500 people who worked below me. Like he had status in his job and,

In the UK, I worked as a laborer, but no regrets. I did it for my family. And I asked him like, what even was the process back then to move us to the UK? It must've been so difficult. And he said he had to go to Islamabad, like a different city of Pakistan. And he said, you have to line up in the mountains and stuff for like three hours, four hours before the building opens. And it always used to piss him off because he'd be lined up next to the, basically the peasants.

and all these nice cars would pull up just before the doors would open and the owners would step out and replace themselves with their servants who'd been waiting for them you know they'd outsource their position in the line you'd come in and he didn't even know if you were going to get the visa that day or not you have to come a few times fill out the forms and stuff his visa got declined and yeah and you know it must have been such a process to bring us here we our application got denied then he had to do it again and it

We came to the UK and we suffered so much racism. He had a decline in his status for 20 years straight. He's worked as a laborer, as a guy, like a brown corner shop taxi driver, taking all the racial stereotypes, taking bottles and punches to the face from drunk people, picking them up at like

3 a.m. outside nightclubs, because you know that scene very well. Imagine a Pakistani taxi driver outside of nightclubs. That's what he did for years to put us all through the education system. My mom's always been like a housewife, so she never brought an income, which meant that he's worked like a mule for us. This was all going on, and I literally still...

struggle to write down what i was grateful for up until the the tap opened and i feel like so many young men when i speak to them and they say oh you know my parents don't support my dreams and they're doing this and they're like this and my dad's done this well let me fold something that's even more difficult then how guilty do you feel about your resentments towards your father knowing how much he sacrificed for you yeah quite guilty it's awful yeah it's awful it's one of the most difficult things that people can deal with to think there was so much that they did

that was perfect for me. And look at all of the things that my mom stopped working for 10 years. Dad, to raise me, dad managed to get an entire family through on like, you know, three quarters of a person's wage, state primary, state secondary, state sixth form, first person in my family to go to university, all that stuff.

But then to think, look at all of those sacrifices and yet look at the patterns that I wish that I hadn't developed from the things that occurred, from the externalities, from the unmet needs, even though they didn't know that they weren't unmet, from the emotional coping mechanisms that I ended up having to do, from the things that I kept from them because I was so ashamed of talking about them because I didn't feel safe enough to be able to express them. And then to go, oh,

How on earth can I have that as a problem when they did all of those things for me? Look at all of the sacrifices. How ungrateful, how shameful, how atrocious is it for me to say, oh, my emotions and my integration and what about my regulation and stuff like that? It's like, look at all the things I did. And it's like, yep, and yet.

That exists too. It's like the mark of someone that I think is emotionally mature is being able to hold contradicting emotions in your heart at the same time. Like, hey, guess what? Resentment's a thing. And like sometimes you, some days you're going to feel resentful and some days you're going to feel grateful. And I think that trying to marry those two is a rough one. You know, you saying that made me think about my own actions and the man that I'm becoming where I'm ruthlessly optimizing for business and

And it's, I'm optimizing for kind of the same pathway that my father did, right? It's just the finances. And if all the things are neglected, if I'm that ADHD father who's really loving with full conviction, yeah, I love you guys so much. And then I just fuck up and contradict myself. Imagine my children just seeing me in a bathrobe and show it up. Well, that's the question I asked you earlier on when I was saying like, uh,

Desire is good because it pushes you towards success, but like, what is the definition of success? Now for my dad and for your dad that didn't have the luxury that me or you have, their definition of success was put food on the table, don't get kicked out of the house, right? Like pay mortgage, make sure that lights are on, maybe have money for like Christmases and birthdays and stuff like that. Like that was their goal. If you have the luxury of choice, it's like, okay, well, what does success look like for you?

Why are you playing by the same rules that your working class, underclass immigrant father did to just optimize for as much money as possible? Is there not maybe a different definition of success that you could use, which is...

a little bit more balanced. What if, you know, like, again, you've already said the father that kind of shows his love through his toil, but emotionally or in terms of like affection time, maybe isn't quite there, probably like quite a classic immigrant mentality, first generation thing. All right. Well, you have the opportunity to be the breakwater here. Like you don't need to pass down this weird ancestral trait, this odd like habit. It's like,

you get to choose and you've got the luxury of doing it because you don't, you don't have the, you don't have the necessity to keep the bread on the table for the family. You know? Is this a cope if I say that?

chasing after the business results and the money is kind of like the fun thing that you mentioned before. Ali Abdaal said this, he interviewed someone and he said, "Oh yeah, it's very convenient that all the rich people say that it's really fun for them, that making money is the thing that you find fun. It's very convenient." Am I so- Is that you're in a citadel? Yeah. Am I so deep in the conditioning that chasing after the money and the business success is the thing that I find fun?

or is it just genuinely enjoyable? Because business is a very, like, it's basically a game, and it's got trackable metrics and scores, which is very addictive. You have, like, a positive impact on the world if you're doing it in the right way. The money itself is very beneficial as well. But, like, for example, this season where I'm really into entrepreneurship, genuinely, I'm having a great time. Now, I could be coping, right? Maybe I go home and cry about it later. Like, oh, yeah, shit, like, I'm actually depressed. What am I doing? Yeah. I don't know. I certainly think that periodizing anything

is a good idea and i think that that's one of the reasons why just caveating your conviction a conviction especially given that yourself public facing and this is again the same for anyone that that

doesn't have a platform, but just start saying things around the water cooler or to their work friends or to their family or to their spouse. They're like, well, you said that thing and now you have to feel like you live up to it, right? What you say in public, you feel like you have to live up to in private. The advantage of periodizing anything, whether it's monk mode or even a relationship is like, okay, well, I'm just finding out. I'm just finding out if this is for me.

And if it's not, there's no value judgment on me or not. What I get to do is close this loop and like tick that off. So Naval says it's far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them. Basically, you can drive a shit car if your last car was a Ferrari because you know what a Ferrari feels like. And I think that the same thing is true here. It's like,

You don't know if you like or loathe entrepreneurship until you've gone both feet into it for a good amount of time. Then you come out the other side and you go, okay, well, is this still serving me or am I serving it? Is this a habit that's in control of me? Or is this the sort of thing that...

I maybe have outgrown or is something else I'm going to do. I had to do that with the way that I looked from the gym, from the nightlife thing, from standing on the front door. I had to, even during that career, I had to periodize things because I was the guy in the front door. And then after a while, it was like, are you really going to be the dude that all the 18 year old chicks come up to wanting VIP bands at 29? Like, is that really what you're going to do? Or are you going to pass this down and delegate to some of the boys? So I had to

take myself out of that. I'm like, okay, I'm not going to be the front-facing guy anymore. I'm going to be the exec. I'm going to be the dude that recruits the dudes that are going to be the new Chris. Okay, well, that's like a loss of identity. How do I go through that? So I don't know whether it's a cope or not. I certainly think that asking yourself questions like, if money was no object...

what would I do with my time? Like, when do I feel the most alive? Not dopamine, like connected, genuinely connected. One good frame that George Mack has is a dopamine George and serotonin George, and there's cortisol George as well. And he says-

The more time he spends in Serotonin George. Serotonin George is melodic deep house, walks in nature, conversations with friends, amazing quality coffee. It's pickleball, it's learning a new sport, it's going and watching live music. It's all those things, right? It's love, it's affection, it's connection, it's ringing your mum and telling you like something cool that happened in your day. It's that.

dopamine George is growth of the business and it's a great thread that Elon just retweeted on Twitter and it's more newsletter subscribers and it's money and it's bank accounts and it's travel and it's novelty and it's new and it's intense and it's rushy and it's compelling but he wants to be in serotonin George and then cortisol George is all of the executive function problems but cortisol George doesn't exist anymore

in any way related to serotonin, George. You're never getting cortisol from the serotonin shit you do. You only get it from the dopamine shit you do. So the bad and the half good are related together. And then the bit that's in the middle is the bit that you really like. And I think like optimizing for serotonin, Hamza, would probably be a pretty good idea. Like where do I, where can I get that?

Not the like, oh, this guy sent me a message that said that I really changed his world. And it's like, yeah, that should be serotonin Hamza, but it's fucking not. It's dopamine Hamza, right? Because it's another one on the dashboard of look at how many people's lives I've changed and all the rest of it. But you're not sitting in the emotion and being like, ah, that's something that was meaningful to me. That really, really worked. Okay, so our first...

First analysis, serotonin, Hamza, two things are coming up. It's one, a great workout. Like when you're hitting PR after PR, it's not even about the dopamine. It's just like, it feels awesome that you've worked hard and you're seeing the progress of your efforts, especially if it doesn't feel random. You know, those random moments when like, you haven't had good sleep, you had shit diet, you still hit a PR. It's like, what the fuck is this? Like, it's when you've actually really worked hard on it. You've been nailing the sleep, nailing the diet. Then you come in, you hit a PR, feels awesome. Especially when you're coupling that with friends, that leads to the second point, which is like,

not just the deep conversations, but I feel like for me, I really like the goofy ones. I like when I giggle, it's like, you know, I've got to do the alpha male thing, but like, I like giggling, bro. I like, like telling funny jokes and just laughing at my own jokes and everything. They're the two I can think of right now, which bring the, the realest part of me. Yeah. For me, it's, uh, going for dinner. Um,

with people that are coming through town, like showing them a really cool restaurant that they've not been to before. And then going for a walk afterward and you know, you're digesting your food and you may be playing with ideas. And this is interesting. The other one for me is pickleball. Like I just lose myself in this, basically in tennis, you know, in this sort of racquetball-y sport. I'm outdoors and I'm getting fresh air and there's competition, but it's, there's dopamine crisis fucking left on the edge of the court. Like I'm not doing it. Actually, this is a lie. I was playing with a girl a couple of weeks ago and she said, um,

two games to two best of five and we're walking back to the baseline before we're about to start the next game and I'm like just fully in the competitive like hyper masculine thing and I'm like right okay so that girl the chick on the other team like her backhand's really really poor so if we can look to push it across there and we need to like when we're driving we need to be up to the net a little bit quick because both of us are a little bit slow on that and I really like the thing she's like hey hey hey yeah and let's not forget to have fun and I was like

Yeah, yeah, that too. I'd just totally forgotten it. So we get captured, even in our most serotonin moments, we get captured by the dopamine side. Dude, I really appreciate you. I'm really glad that you came to see me. And I'm looking forward to seeing what happens over the next couple of months for you. What can people expect? What do you think is going to be the next... What's the remainder of 2024 going to install? Honestly, who knows? Every week is different. I might have children soon. I might not. I might turn to Islam. I might not. I might turn to Islam.

Before we finish, there's a quick question I had saved for you. Your ability to articulate your thoughts is amazing. Do you have any advice for someone trying to learn that skill? I worked very hard at it. So I purposefully practiced for a long time. I have done 760, 770 podcasts in six and a half years. So that's a lot of time and attention, right? Um,

I listened back to probably the first 50 or 100 episodes that we did and cringed at all of the weird verbal tics that I had and deprogrammed most of them consciously. There's this great story about Tiger Woods. So Tiger Woods gets towards the top of his game, one of the best in the world, but there's inefficiencies in his swing. You know, he started playing golf literally as soon as he could walk, probably even before. And he's just brought with him some...

old patterns that he needs to get rid of. But the problem is for him to reinvent his swing, he's one of the best golfers in the world, to reinvent your swing you're going to get way worse. You're basically starting from scratch. You're not even starting from scratch, you're starting from scratch with habits that are going to creep in, that are going to ruin the new thing that you're doing. It's even worse than kind of starting from scratch in some ways. But he did it and that allowed him to take himself from being one of the best in the world to being perhaps one of the greatest of all time. And

I thought about that when for probably about 18 months from maybe 29, started 2019 to the middle of 2020, actually probably more like 2020 to the middle of 2021, the show got worse because

because, or at least my communication skills got worse because I wasn't just saying what I felt, I was obsessing over the way that I said it. And you can't think about the thing that you're doing whilst being in the process of doing it. Like it takes you out of the, what you want is the flow, right? Well, we had to, there's an idea and it's kind of not right. And it's this thing and it's a blah, blah, blah, blah. That's what you want. But if you're thinking, okay, make sure that you pronounce your S's correctly and what's your tongue position and we mustn't say the word like, and don't say too much and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You can't do both of those things at once. So the show got worse. So the tips that I would give would be, you need to speak in a rigorous manner. And what I mean by rigorous is that you're actually trying to be as precise as possible. Precision is what people want with speech. And precision is using the right word. It's not the one that's too fancy. It's not the one that's too simple. It's not more. It's not less. It's precise. It's the number of words that you mean.

Reduce the friction from brain to mouth. Okay, so you want to be rigorous with your speech. What are some of the ways that you can do that?

have a 30-minute conversation with a friend once a week where you record a fake podcast. So phones are out of the room except for one that's in the middle of the table. Put the phone on the table in front of you and have a conversation. Have a conversation about something that one of you is interested in. Maybe even text each other earlier in the day and say, hey, we're going to talk about what's going to happen in the 2024 election or we're going to talk about who's going to win between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson or we're going to have a conversation. Whatever it is, pick whatever you're interested in.

And then listen back and listen back to all of the awful toe curling ticks and strange things that you say and that you do and realize that you, I found the first ever episode I did of this show. I kept saying, all the time, because I wanted the guest to know that I was listening, that I was paying attention. And I said, this is good. Go on. Hey, guess what? You can do that by just nodding. Like, you know, the invention already existed. You didn't need to do that. So yeah.

I was like, "Okay, well, I don't like the way that sounds when I listen back. How can I do something that achieves the same end without completely molesting the listening experience with me?" So, fake podcast once a week with a friend, 30 minutes, listen back to it. I would say listening to people that communicate in a manner that you like

and immersing yourself in that content. Some great communicators, Jordan Peterson still, especially old Jordan Peterson, like 2018, 2017, 2018, 2019, Peterson's phenomenal. Alain de Botton from the School of Life is maybe one of the most easy to get into because he's not got this unbelievably slick communication style, but he gets the words out in a beautiful manner. So especially for the Brits, he's British guy. And he's sort of a, I think,

I think a bit of a bumbling, kind of likable British man. And he sort of talks a little bit. Sometimes he gets a bit of it, but it still comes out very nicely. So you're like, oh, okay. So he can kind of add his charm and his personality. And Shapiro, obviously fantastic. Rogan, also really, really great. Sam Harris. So like, yeah, but pick your creator of choice. But find people that speak in a precise manner, immerse yourself in what they say, and listen carefully. And don't listen at two times speed. Hear the cadence. Mm.

Where are they leaving pauses? How are they using silence correctly? How are they actually sitting with the body of... Are they...

saying words that sometimes elongate. Are they over-articulating words in some ways to add a little bit more emphasis on it? And just after spending enough time doing this, you go, okay, well, it's just like being around a friend. You know, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You are the average of the five YouTube creators that you listen to the most. So those are some things. And then finally, if you do really, really want to turn it up, or if you just feel like this isn't enough of a hammer blow,

Going to an improv class will be phenomenal. I did that before my live tour that I did last year. I did two courses of improv.

If you think that you've got social anxiety or that your mind doesn't work quickly enough, go to improv and for a couple of weeks, everybody gets it wrong and everyone sucks. They celebrate failures and the way they celebrate failures is when you do something, when you mess up, like they're playing a game and you said bing instead of bang or whatever, you have to put both hands in the air and say, I failed and you bow and everyone claps.

and it's getting rid of the social anxiety. Okay, it doesn't really matter so much. It doesn't matter. I don't care about that. It's okay. It's all right to fail. It's safe. Safe for me to fail. Improv is great. Speech coaches are great. Miles at speakwell.co.uk is the guy that I use, still do use. Phenomenal. Toastmasters, I haven't done it, but I've heard that it's okay. But honestly, most of that stuff, and it's just time and attention. And then when you're speaking to people,

in a bar or whatever just think about okay precision say the thing that you mean to say dude have you seen that most recent whatever whatever and there you go it's like okay i'm that's a conversation i'm just saying this stuff and you once you get out of your own way it gets a lot easier well thank you for the conversation my friend my pleasure man where should people go they want to keep up to date with the stuff you do uh just search hamster on social media you'll find me the most well-known hamster on the internet dude i really appreciate you thank you for coming to see me

Yeah