James Smith - How To Be Confident: Learning A Skill Everyone Can Obtain

Full transcript: James Smith on London Real

2:24 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is James Smith, the personal trainer, best-selling author, and one of the biggest names in the fitness industry, with over 1 million followers on Instagram. You become one of the most recognizable faces in fitness. Thanks to your no-nonsense approach to helping people achieve their goals, your career began after you grew tired of the corporate grind and decided instead to pursue a life that made you happy and fulfilled.

2:58 You’re passionate about exposing the toxic myths within diet culture and committed to helping people reach their goals and make a positive and lasting change. Your two previous books, “Not a Diet Book” and “Not a Life Coach” both reach the number one spot on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and your latest book in the series, “How to Be Confident”, explores how we can all master our true ambitions and realize our strengths in a world that is all too often filled with negativity. James, welcome to London Real.

3:23 Very surreal, but very happy to be here. It’s great to have you here. We’ve got a lot of things in common, which I’m sure we’ll talk about on the show. A book about confidence. Let’s jump right in and talk about it, because in researching this book, you must have to really think hard about what is confidence?

3:41 Do you have confidence? Who has confidence? And there’s like tons of nuances in this book that I’d love to dive into, but like, on the surface, what is confidence? And when we see someone with confidence, like Conor McGregor, is that real confidence? Is that something anyone can attain?

3:57 Now, what did you discover when you were writing this book? So I think confidence sits on many different spectrums, and one of which that I like is: I put confidence on one side and anxiety on the other, and I say that anxiety is predicting an outcome of it going wrong, and confidence is predicting an outcome of it going right. And how you predict something is going to go is tied to expectations. So when we’re looking at people, they’re not different to us.

4:25 They haven’t got different DNA or anything like that. They’ve got a different lens in which they see the world, a different set of perceptions and values, and those things we control. Many of them are beliefs, and beliefs can be changed. So a lot of people are programmed, whether it’s an evolutionary thing or a societal thing, to predict a bad outcome. I think that that probably saved many humans over thousands of years, but in everyday life that tendency to lean towards a pessimistic outcome, I think, is hindering people’s ambitions and potential.

5:01 But society doesn’t really care if you’re not confident, and businesses don’t care. The taxpayer doesn’t care. All of these things, like, no one’s going to come and make you more confident. And it’s a very nuanced, strange topic, and people have said to me only in the last few years, “You’ve got a lot of confidence.” So I was like, “Probably not.”

5:25 I probably have a good relationship with failing, and I probably have a good relationship with predicting a good outcome, because I’m happy to be wrong if it doesn’t work out. Yeah, that’s something I think you can learn: being comfortable taking risk and being comfortable with failure. And that makes you take more risks and actually have more wins and successes. And then people see you and say, “Look how confident you are.” When in fact, maybe you’ve just mastered the art of risk taking.

5:54 And yourself, sat here, very natural, calm, composed. Someone goes, “He’s just a confident guy.” No, he’s done a thousand podcasts. He’s mastered the repetition. Same with martial artists.

6:06 Conor McGregor, José Aldo, about four, five years ago, he won that match in a matter of seconds, and people were very quick to divide the amount of money he made by the seconds. I’m like, “I got paid two million dollars a second.” You’re like, “No, there was years before that. There was countless hours, months. There were training sessions that went well, that didn’t go well, and all of these things accumulated over time.

6:33 But what got that performance? He wasn’t you know, just confident. He was ready. And I think those are two very different things. The key point that when I was asked to write a book on confidence, I sat and I thought about it, and I went, so many people are using a lack of confidence as a guise to hide behind, to exist with making decisions that point to an action.

6:58 If people aren’t doing something proactively, it’s very easy to just say you’re not confident enough to do it. There are so many deltas, or forks in the road, that we get to where we can either make a choice or we don’t. And when people continually don’t make choices, they need a label to give themselves as to why they didn’t make a choice when others did. And they use confidence as a reason to not do anything. Is that a standard narrative you hear people, or, you know, people say to themselves, “I’m not confident.

7:26 I’m just not confident.” I like the confidence, and then that just becomes procrastination, stalemate, and then nothing happens. 100 and one of the things I used in the book was the Zeigarnik effect, where waiters that work in restaurants, when they close the bill, they forget what people have ordered. So they only really remember the bills that are still open. And the reason for that is, once the bill’s been paid, they don’t need to remember anymore.

7:53 And I talk about this as being open and closed loops. So the waiters have an open loop. They need to have mental computing to remember that, in case the machine makes a mistake. But when they’ve closed the loop, they get closure and they can put it to bed. They don’t need the computing anymore.

8:09 So I hypothesize in the book that maybe many people are creating a lot of open loops. You see someone on the tube and you go, “Wow, I’d love to talk to that person. Maybe I could give her my number. Or you’re in a meeting and you want to say something and express something that you disagree with. It might be your boss.

8:26 You had a one-on-one with him, and you wanted to express that you feel undervalued. In essence, we are opening these loops, like the Zeigarnik effect, and I want to get people in a position where they get the opportunity to close it, because when you close it, you can eradicate that computing power in your mind. And anyone that’s got married, again, I hypothesize, I’m not married, there’s always kind of mental machinery working for people that are single: who am I going to end up with, who am I going to marry, when am I going to meet this person?

8:53 And when men get married, and I’m sure women as well, they close the loop of that worry and decision-making about who they’re going to be with, and they can relax more, as I hope. So when you’re married, you have this whole part of your brain that you can continue to use. So when people, I need to motivate people somehow to make more decisions that point towards action, I see it as closing loops. So you have a thought in your mind, put it to bed. You want to ask something, put it to bed.

9:19 And if the outcome’s bad, that’s completely fine, because bad outcomes or failures or things not going to plan do two things. They point the finger in the direction of how you can improve on that, and they also add to a level of competency. So many of the lessons I’ve learned in life, I learnt by accident. And before being in the corporate world, I ended up in door-to-door sales for Npower in Gloucester in winter. Oh yeah, I used it.

9:45 It wasn’t during inflation times, that would have been even harder. So yeah, I would not have been allowed into so many houses. But I had a conversation, and my Mom and Dad worked really long and hard to provide a great life for me. And when I finished university, I kind of messaged my dad and I was like, “Oh, times are tough out here. You know, I’ve just finished university.

10:02 I haven’t got a job.” And he was like, “I’ll go to the job centre.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I was like, “Oh, but Dad, you know, what if I don’t find a job?” He was like, “Oh, we can sign on.”

10:12 I was like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “You can sign on the dole.” He goes, I paid tax the last 50 years. It’s for people like you. And I was like, “Oh.”

10:20 So I went to the job centre. These little touch screens in Gloucester city centre, where is it, uni? First job that came up was working for Npower door-to-door, and I was thinking to myself, “What would I rather do, this or sign on?” And I was like, “This.” So I even went to interview for the job we spoke before about.

10:37 I was thinking about wearing a suit the day of my interview. I didn’t have any dark socks. I only had white socks, tennis socks, with a suit on. My first interview that I’ve ever had as an adult. I’m wearing tennis socks with a grey suit.

10:51 I managed to, like, pull my trousers down the whole time. I couldn’t cross my legs. I get the job, and I have to go out and pretty much convert people from their existing supplier to Npower. Luckily British Gas just put their prices up. So I knock on people’s doors, and some people would think I’m there to read the meter.

11:08 They go, “Come in.” They go, “I’m not with Npower.” I go, “Exactly.” They’re like, “Get the f*** out, you know, don’t come in.” But with this, I remember having a bit of a meltdown, maybe two, three months in, and my boss said to me, he goes, “For every 100 doors you knock on, you make a sale.

11:23 You need three more sales for today. Go knock on 300 more doors.” I thought about that, and I thought every time I get rejected, it’s not a bad thing. It’s not a self-worth thing. It’s me putting myself that little bit closer to that sale, and knowing that it’s hundreds of doors away makes it a little bit easier.

11:39 But also, I thought, as I go through my career of doing this, that hundred dollars is going to become 90, because I’m going to become more competent. Then it becomes 80. And then where we see these guys who are like smooth talkers going in, gas, electric, signing people up. There’s a level of competency that increases with failing, and if people could only see failing as a pathway to getting better, suddenly getting rejected by the girl or asking your boss for a pay rise and them saying they don’t have the budget, all of these things, they pay into developing your skills of communication, rejection, failure, and that bulletproof nature that you can grow over time, is what will mean in a few years’ time people will look at you and go, “It’s all right for him, his confidence, right?”

12:22 Okay. So people should get out there and close all those open loops that are coming up in their brains right now, because that’ll give your brain more bandwidth then, and it’ll also mean you’re going to learn something from those things, and like you said, either be confronted with something you’re not doing good enough, or get some competence. So I switched, and I’ve had a lot of authors in that chair and a lot of them say, “The reason I wrote the book is so I could now focus on new things,” because all the ideas they couldn’t get them out of their head until they put them down in a form that they knew were safe, basically, and now they could open their head to work on new, new ideas.

12:57 So I always thought that was interesting, as far as kind of closing that loop out to then move on to something else. But tell me about fear, because like you said, back in the savannah we were scared of everything, and that meant that the bump in the night, all these things. It kept us maybe on our toes from the saber-toothed tiger, or making sure, you know, that our kids were fed. And it was functional. In this day and age, especially with all of our phones beeping and popping and all these things, most of our fear receptors or fear indicators, there aren’t life and death situations, but we take them as life and death situations and add that within social media, and we’ll talk about that, that maybe slowly grinds down people’s confidence and their ability to take risks.

13:36 And so then you get a bunch of people that are stuck, maybe stuck, not making decisions, stuck in procrastination. Is that kind of what we see? And do you think it’s important for people now to re-engineer risk into their lives based on understanding the world that way? Yeah, and I mean, the pessimism bias is something that I find fascinating. I joke around when I do the live talks.

13:57 I try and bring, like, an element of, like, stand-up into it, and I joke and I say, “Whenever I get a little pain in my side, I think, this is it, I’m gonna die.” Or, you know, we all get that little sharp pain. We’re like, “What is this? Is this something serious? Oh my god, yeah, this is how it ends.”

14:10 And then like two days later, you’re like, “Oh, that pain never came back.” Or you get a phone call at 10 p.m. and you’re like, “Who died?” You know, we always have this. No one’s ever thinking, “Oh, this is going to be the best news in my life.” We always have this tendency to favor a pessimistic outcome.

14:24 And you know, I experienced this when I was in my single days, dating. The second before you’re about to go on a date, you’re like, “This is going to be the worst day ever.” And you do have to kind of reverse engineer that and go, “What if this is the best date that I ever go on?” And we’re very, very bad at doing that. Like you say, from an evolutionary perspective.

14:43 Being overconfident probably wouldn’t have been the best, especially with, you know, heuristics. How far away is that island, could I swim to it? Yeah, you know, next thing you’re caught in a rip and that’s the end of your, your DNA. So I think that a lot of the time that tendency to be pessimistic is a safety net, but we need to reverse engineer it, like you say. There’s a chapter I talk about, kind of Pyrrhic victories, where the victory is tantamount to defeat, where a picture that I saw once was a dog jumping off a cliff to bite a bird.

15:15 And yeah, he gets the bird, but yeah, he also dies in the process. We don’t really have any Pyrrhic issues that we face on a day-to-day basis. The outcome is never going to be truly that severe. And, you know, even let’s say yourself, you want a guest for the show. You’re on their Instagram, suddenly you arrive at your destination, you might go, “Do you know what?

15:33 Right now, I’m a messenger person,” and ask them to come on. I’ma close that loop. Even if you do have a pessimistic outcome and go, “They’re not going to say yes.” You can start putting all these kind of different biases together, and I think that another one that kind of works together is pessimism bias and loss aversion, where we feel the psychological losses feel psychologically twice as west as the alternative, gaining it. You know, losing 10 pounds, walking through East London, is that tenner.

16:00 It was worse than finding 20 pounds on the floor. There’s a study that was done on two groups of people: half were given a mug and half were given a chocolate bar, and although they were equated to be the similar value, if you offered them to swap, they wouldn’t. And I joke, going, the person with the mug would go, “Well, I’m not gonna have a cup of tea and a chocolate bar, am I?” You’re like, “All right then.” You go to the other side and you talk to the chocolate bar people.

16:24 They go, “I can’t eat f***ing mug.” So once you have hold of something, it’s a lot harder to give it up. And we then, that plays in with sunk cost fallacy. But with the loss aversion thing, say you’re in a job that you don’t find rewarding, you’ve now got pessimism bias. “I’m going to leave and hate the job more.”

16:43 Or you feel the psychological pain of losing your existing salary and safety now or comfort. You worry about losing that more than you can, the idea of gaining something better, like a better work-life balance or whatever it is. So with the writing of the books, really what I’m doing is finding flaws in the way we think about things and bringing to people’s attention how they come together, like the loss aversion, psychological pain of losing things we know objectively is something that we need to worry about.

17:10 So then we look at sunk cost fallacy, where, hey guys, just to let you know, you’re gonna struggle to walk away from things that you’ve put time, effort and energy into, and you’re going to make bad decisions based off not the fact it’s a good idea, but you’re making a decision based on your previous investment. So we’ve all had friends in toxic relationships, and we say to them, “Why are you still with this guy?” “Nah, we’ve been together four years.” They’re using their previous investment as a reason to remain invested, not whether or not that’s a serving relationship.

17:41 So then we’ve got sunk cost fallacy. We’ve now got loss aversion. Fear of losing the toxic partner is causing more psychological distress than the idea of gaining someone else. And it’s all of these things together, combined with societal things and everything else, that gives people this illusion that they don’t have confidence. And even just bringing into people’s attention these fallacies, we can start to break down and give them the understanding of why they feel this way.

18:06 Because even though we’re more connected digitally than ever, I don’t feel like we share enough genuine emotions. And the fact that so many of us can seem fearless or confident because of the way we portray ourselves may make people feel they’re very unique and having fears, in worrying about negative outcomes and worrying about losing things, when the truth is, if we can let people know that we all feel the same, we can all work together to dismantle these beliefs to make decisions easier to make. Yeah, I think definitely social media seems to show us all of these people in our life, now hundreds of thousands, that have skyrocketed confidence.

18:45 Whereas back in my day, when I was on my block in San Diego in the 80s, like, I didn’t meet that many people that had confidence. Maybe I’d see a Rocky movie or a magazine cover, but I didn’t have these interactions like on social, where now I can see someone that can pretty much do anything in the world, and now they’re on my show. So I got, like, the Dan Bilzerians and the best boxers in the world, the best writers in the world, and they do make you feel like you’re lacking sometimes, when in fact they’re just normal people as well.

19:11 You just happen to see that one thing they do really well, and they’re probably very insecure about a lot of that stuff too. So that’s a real issue. I want to just get back to this thought of engineering risk, because it’s something I struggled with for a long time. I went to school as an engineer. As an engineer, I got a mechanical engineering degree at MIT, and they basically teach you to make sure that the plane doesn’t fall out of the sky, the bridge doesn’t break, and so you take this, you know, bias towards failure and you magnify it, because as an engineer your job is literally to make sure these things don’t happen.

19:41 But I found myself, when I started this show, I was in a real risk-averse situation, and it was until I met one of my mentors, Dan Peña, the trillion dollar man, who I both love and hate equally where he basically said, “You need to be taking more risk in your life, and you need to engineer risk back into your life, because what you’ll find out is most of the fears are unfounded, and the wins will just out magnify all of it. Most people will forget about your losses and just remember your wins.” And that’s allowed me to do things that I never would have imagined doing, like running for mayor in 2020, like things that I would have never imagined.

20:18 I signed myself up for a boxing match earlier this year at the O2 Arena when Martin Ford asked me to go on his card. I was 51 years old. I’m telling you, James, when I was 41 and in better shape physically, I would have been mentally unprepared to do that. But once I understood, stood my mind, I thought, “Wait a second, okay. It’s three rounds.

20:38 Okay, I get KO’d on television and it’s on YouTube forever, but like, what’s the worst that can happen?” But the 41-year-old Brian, he couldn’t handle that. I would have been terrified to do that, but now I can look at it in my brain and say, “Okay, you’ve got about how many more years you’ve got left? 30 years left.” You want to make this an incredible life.

20:56 Well, then you’re going to have to engineer that risk into your life, and maybe from the outside that looks like confidence or arrogance. I’m not sure, but for me it’s the only way I can enjoy my life now, is to put myself way out of my comfort zone and to kind of see what happens. Our enemies are always greater in our imagination than they’ll ever be in real life. And Ryan Holiday, in his recent book Courageous Calling, talks about some men that are in, like, I think they’re in the desert or they’re in Africa.

21:24 They’re somewhere and they’re surrounded by grass, tall grass, and they can hear wolves, and they’re thinking, “We’re all going to get eaten. The horses are going to get eaten. Do we turn around? Do we move?” That’s howling all night, and when they move forward, there was only two of them making all the noise, but in their minds there were enough to devour the whole load of them.

21:42 So he said, “There are always more wolves until they’re counted.” And that really resonated with me, and I was thinking about it, and even we spoke offline about Brazilian jiu jitsu. My opponent in my mind is always stronger, scarier, he trains harder, he gets up earlier, he’s a savage, you know, all of these things. And then you compete against them, they’re the nicest people, they’re no different to you. You think, oh, in competition someone might try and hurt me.

22:07 They never really do. And I say to people, when it comes to competing in jiu jitsu, it terrifies me. It honestly does. “Have you done it yet?” “Yeah, yeah.”

22:18 And whenever I get comfortable, similar to what you were saying, I might need to do a comp. I can’t be comfortable, and it ruins my weekends. I stress about it. I can’t even be present with people the day before, or the morning of, or even when I see my teammates. They’re like, “Hey, what time are you on?”

22:34 And I’m like, “I don’t even enjoy this interaction.” But whether I win or lose, it’s a net benefit. Like you say, I’m exposing myself to more risk. I’m now training with someone who doesn’t have the motivation to keep me injury-free or to not do anything stupid. Like, we can’t jump guard in training because we’re all in the same academy, we want to keep people safe.

22:53 But in competition that’s permitted, or someone can break my leg, and it’s completely fine with no whatever. So when I compete, at the end of it, it wasn’t that bad, but I exposed myself to the risk, the danger, the fear, the insecurities. But at the same time, the fear is normal. And again, we’re at this kind of delta where we can move in two ways. We can either see victory or loss.

23:15 But strangely enough, sometimes I go and I kind of hope I lose, and this is a weird thing to say, because the times I’ve lost, I’m a different person the day after, because I wake up. I know I’m not as good as I thought. I’m not training as hard as I thought. I’m not as fit as I should be, and I can take those personal emotions and I can make them into a better person. Winning makes you weak.

23:39 Conor McGregor, again, I think he’s won too much. Credit to him for it. The fact that he hasn’t won in a long time, all of these things are all credited to his success in some respects. He got too good. So when we are faced with this fear in yourself, with the boxing, I’m sure that if you did get knocked out, where most people would think, oh, he’ll be embarrassed, all of this.

24:00 You might wake up the next day as someone that goes, “I’m gonna do that better. I’m going to hire a boxing coach. I’m going to learn to keep my gloves up. I’m going to be faster. I’m going to improve my footwork.”

24:09 And people without the same values would go, “Why is he doing that?” Again, when really you’ve just created this new, hungrier version of yourself. And I think that exposing yourself to these failures is really just such a great way to bridge the connection to a version of yourself you might need to be to get to the person you want to become. Yeah, very much so. You know, I was, I was training for this fight, and I got the privilege of training with David Haye and his boxing gym south of the river, Haymaker, and Dave’s been kind of a friend for many, many years, and he got me down there, and I only had about six weeks to train.

24:40 And so the philosophy was I wouldn’t do any sparring because of injury. And David watched me after, like, three sessions, and he’s like, “You’ve got to do some sparring, Brian, with someone you’ve never met before. You have to do it mentally. He’s like, otherwise all this is nonsense. You’re going to hit pads.

24:54 Who gives you s***?” And so he said, “I’m going to set you up with a sparring partner, and you’re not going to meet him. You’re not gonna know anything about him. We’re gonna do this just like a fight on Sunday. You’re gonna show up at six o’clock.

25:03 I’m gonna bring him in the ring with the call signs, and you guys are gonna go at it.” And we did that, and he’s like, “Brian, it’s gonna be the longest day of your life.” And I was out there like, “It was the hardest thing.” I was thinking about it all day. I couldn’t even be with my kids outside the gym.

25:18 I was like, cold sweats going through my mind. “What’s going to happen? My jaw’s going to break?” Like all these crazy situations, right? I get in there, it’s this kid, half my age, Filipino kid, taller than me.

25:26 I’m just like, “Are you kidding me?” And it was a tense and difficult three rounds, but afterwards it was just massively eye-opening. Like, none of the bad stuff happened. I learned on the back of it. The next set was even better, and it was just like, “Okay, we progressed.

25:42 We progressed. We progress.” But it was probably the scariest thing I’ve done in years, just putting myself in a situation that now, in retrospect, wasn’t scary. And then I looked at that and I’m like, “How many of these things am I putting in the rest of my life, building them up to be these scary things when they’re just not?” Uh, I think we don’t share this enough.

26:00 And, George St Pierre speaks about this. He says that he was frightened to the point he couldn’t sleep before every match, and the only one match that he wasn’t so fearful that he could actually have a good night’s sleep, he lost. That’s there. Yeah, and everyone was expecting it was a massive upset, but I think that we need to remind ourselves that the people we hold in the highest regard are scared too, and that that’s completely fine, and we do need to repackage our thoughts.

26:24 We do need to see things for a different lens, and like some of the white belts that I train, I take a class on a Friday and I speak to them, and they go, “Shall I compete?” I go, “Whichever way it goes, it’s going to be the best thing you do, because you’re going to come in as a different person.” I think that fear isn’t a bad thing. Fear is a tool we should use. And a good friend of mine says the lessons we need are in the tasks we’re avoiding, and whenever I’m I kind of question, “Somethings are okay?

26:49 Shall I do this?” She’ll just say that, and I’ll go, “Wow, that’s completely right.” And if we don’t have those levels of discomfort, we can’t. We live in almost like an echo chamber, where for instance, some celebrities that do jiu-jitsu only do privates with people that they pay, similar to yourself. You went in the ring with someone who is going to hit you in the face if you put your gloves down, whereas the person you pay probably isn’t in the coaching side of things.

27:13 That’s what David said. Yeah, and then you’re training, you’re paying him, you can he’d tell you he’s going to give you a hard session, but he’s not really. And, Tom Hardy, I think, last weekend competed in a real competition in jiu jitsu. He won both of his brackets, and I was like, That shows to me he would have had the same thing, where people get excited when they roll with you. Like, I’m sure purple belt, people also see you there.

27:37 Guys, that guy, I’m gonna f*** him up, you know, whatever. The fears that you start building up, when really those people finish, they shake your hand. I love your podcast, you would have seen them in your head as someone who potentially wanted to hurt you. Will show you up, like you say. those fears in our mind, we always multiply them.

27:52 We always magnify them. And I’m sure for hundreds of thousands of years that was a net benefit, but right now it’s just gonna crush and limit and hinder the ambitions of millions of people. Let’s finish up with Conor McGregor, because he seems to have this massive amount of confidence, which I can’t tell if it’s real or if it’s not real, but he clearly believes it, because when he doesn’t win or he breaks his leg, like he’s still out there talking smack and calling people out, and he believes he can win, and I’m just wondering for most people, can you fake it until you make it with confidence?

28:26 Or does part of you, who’s watching every action of you every day, that can see when you’re cutting corners, when you’re not honoring your word to yourself, when you’re not putting in the work you know you need to do, can you really be confident over time if you’re not if you’re not that person? You know, I think about this a lot. Like the ten thousand dollar question, right? And I think that if you, if you set making it as this and you have to fake it to get there, then that shouldn’t be making it.

28:53 And again, with Conor, like, I admire him so much as an athlete. I think that he’s probably overstepped the lines with some of the things he’s done. But then again, I have this time, right, where you actually have to think about your flaws as a contributing part of your success. So sometimes I’ll get too drunk on a night out and I’ll wake up the next day with sore head, nothing [expletive] is this congruent to a successful life or getting the most. I’ve written a book about, you know, make the most reach a potential, and I think to myself, am I reaching my potential, getting drunk, and then I think, this is a contributing part of my success, and I must embrace it.

29:25 I think for him, even though he has these flaws and we could point out these inadequacies, they are part of his identity that make him so good. But one thing that I think he might have underestimated is how hungry he made other people, because I talk about inspiration being a part of confidence and I think it was Nelson Mandela that said no one believes it’s possible until it’s done. And I think that for so many of us, we, one should eradicate and battle our insecurities and try and make the greatest we can out of our lives, not just for ourselves but for other people watching.

29:58 And inevitably, people watching your podcast or Joe Rogan’s, when people can spearhead to these incredible heights of achievement, they pull through, people that now know it’s possible, and they will work tirelessly because if you don’t think something can be done, it’s going to really hinder your ability to do it. And this is why Elon Musk, to me, is an incredible, incredible human, because he doesn’t need someone in front of him to follow in the slipstream. He creates them for other people.

30:25 So for Conor, as far as being a great fighter, he has spearheaded a whole new world for other fighters, like Dustin Poirier, people like that. And now that they know what they can get with hard work, I think it’s going to be near enough impossible for him to get above them. I think, again, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, the wolf climbing the hill was hungrier than the wolf at the top. I would love to see him come back. I’d love to see him win again.

30:51 My hypothesis is maybe he needs less people around him that say yes, and again, I don’t know him. I don’t know his inner circles. I don’t know anything about him. That’s just my observation from someone that’s only seen snippets of him, but I feel everyone, you know, should have someone around them that can slap him into shape and say, “That wasn’t good enough. You need to do this.

31:11 You need to stop being like that.” Yeah, also once you beat someone and show that they’re beatable, everybody looking at the top of that hill, they look at you different. We saw it with Ronda Rousey. We saw it with so many champs where everyone’s like, “Oh wow, they’re, they’re, they’re beatable,” and even though you would think fighters know that everyone’s a human, and they all have a carotid artery that can be squeezed and then go unconscious, but until they see it, and once we saw Nate Diaz take out Conor, I feel like everybody, they stopped giving him too much respect.

31:39 You know, the, the, he was an illusion before. You know, it was like the, the Conor would come and then he would beat you before the bell rang. But now they just saw that there was a flaw and he was beatable, which I think makes it. I was there. I was reading in research in this book, the expectation effect, which is a book about the power of expectations, and even when you look into the realm of like placebos and people taking, you know, say they take a painkiller, if the pill was bigger, people reported it to be even more effective, even if it was a placebo, because the expectation of it.

32:11 And I played rugby for 15 years and I remember playing in New Zealand there were a lot of Islanders who were very religious, and I always thought to myself, I wonder how much better they perform thinking they have got on site. I was like, if there’s a 50-50 collision and they feel that their God is with them, I thought, it’s hard to compete with that, because similar to Conor McGregor and, you know, there’s, there was that magical thing about can this guy be defeated, and if you’re going into the ring, even as a professional athlete, you’re asking yourself the same question. I think, I can’t remember where it’s from, they talk about if God can bleed, then suddenly, like you say, people know it can be possible, and people fall off that cliff, and the people fighting them aren’t necessarily becoming better athletes.

32:54 They’re just getting better belief in the outcome. Again, that confidence and anxiety spectrum. Seeing someone lose moves them more away from predicting the outcome of failure and more so closer to predicting the outcome of success. And confidence is massively rewarded in sport, and it’s such an incredible topic. It’s a winner-take-all.

33:12 I mean, look at Charles Oliveira, Charles de Bruns. I’m a huge fan of his, but you know, he had a mediocre UFC career for eight years. I mean, I always loved watching him. He had great jiu jitsu, but he was not winning until the last three years, where he’s been on an absolute tear, and he believes he is, he was, he, he believes he is almost chosen for this role, and he goes in there and puts it all on the line, and you just kind of know he’s going to win, and he believes that God is on the side.

33:39 He says, “I am the enlightened one.” And it’s something switched in his mindset. There’s a great example of confidence or channeling the quantum field, or a bunch of things you talk about in here, but it’s really obvious in sport, especially in combat sport, because does he have better skills than the Oliveira from four years ago? Not necessarily, but now he has decided he will win, and he does win, and it’s, it’s fascinating to watch. He’s incredible, and I mean, looking at some of his fights where he almost looked like he didn’t want it, and you’re like, how is this the same person?

34:12 And one of the chapters I went back to, gcsep, where we learned about natch and naf need to achieve personalities and need to avoid failure personalities, and even just goal kickers in rugby that kick at the posts when they’re presented with the choice. If we’re going to take the kick, the captain will, you look at your fly-off. You go, “We’re going to get this.” And you can tell someone that’s not afraid to lose. Again, this like predicting the outcome of success.

34:37 They’re going to take it. They need to achieve. They’re not focused. If it misses, they just need to get the next one. But some people are crippled by needing to avoid failure, and that is a really tough thing.

34:46 They look at the posts and go, “I can’t, afraid to miss.” But this varies across all sports. I then think about tennis: your first serve would be need to achieve, I need to ace this, but your second serve, I need to avoid failure or I give up points. So this mindset can be swapped. It can be changed, and it can be something that we brewed into people, and you feel that even with Oliver’s amazing performances, he’s still been dropped a few times for exposing his jaw, but that’s because he’s more concerned about the punch he’s throwing than he is the one that’s coming towards him.

35:15 And it, it is inspiring to see that. And I do, although I’m not a religious person myself, I’ve become fascinated with people that manage to utilize belief to improve their performance. And even Jordan Peterson talks at lengths about God, and I look at him as someone who’s hugely intellectual, very smart, and I’m like, is he talking about an actual God or a set of principles? And I’m still not sure myself, but if he can utilize that and create a form, a means, or a way of bettering someone’s performance, their likely livelihood, everything, then it’s something that needs to be respected.

35:51 Yeah, definitely. If someone believes they are influenced or protected by the divine. If you can channel that energy, it’s, it’s a different level. And, Jordan was here in that chair talking a lot about God. This is like three to four years ago, and like many of us were sometimes brought up with a bit of an aversion, sometimes, to people being overly religious, but when you listen to Jordan talk more, he’s talking about stories in the Bible, and you’re like, why is this guy talking about the Bible?

36:14 And he said, you know, the Bible, it’s just, it’s, it’s, the stories in the Bible are in our DNA. They’re basically just lessons for life. And so sometimes he talks about God, but he’s really talking about channeling higher levels of energy, which is what all humans want to do, can do, aspired to do. And if you look at it that way, it’s an incredible tool that you can tap into, and something I’ve played with over the years and been playing with a lot lately, and it’s powerful.

36:40 Do you know, I went to a religious school. They were like, okay, RE, religious education, you got to go in, and I remember I was very disruptive at school. I was very poorly behaved, and I’d be reading stuff and I’d be like leaning back on my chair, and I’ll say to people, I was like, “This is bollocks, you know, he’s walking on water. What are you talking about? I’ve just done physics, lads, and this don’t add up, you know.”

37:01 So I’d have fun with it. So then I found myself moving towards, like, atheism. Then I found myself, like, moving towards, like, trying to convince people that it, I don’t know why I was doing this when I was younger, but like, let’s say I was sat with a Christian. If I mate someone who was going to church on a Sunday, I would say things that, kind of looking back now, with disrespectful. I go, “Let’s pick five religions, you know, we’ve got all five of them here.

37:24 If one of them’s right, 80, you’re wrong. It’s not good odds, you know.” And but now I’m looking back to it after doing psychedelics. Although I had many discoveries and epiphanies, or whatever, I was left with, there’s something, and that was enough to push me more towards maybe an agnostic. And that was a big eye-opener for me, and I was like, “I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something,” and now, even as a science-based person, when I look at the universe, the big bang, creation of life, all of these things, I actually went through a phase of knowing a little bit, probably like a Dunning-Kruger effect, then I realized that there can’t be anything there.

38:03 But now I’m at the other end of it, with years to reflect on it. It is very incredible to think there’s something. Wait till you get even older, there’ll be something. And I look, I think your religious experiences for a lot of people in this world, especially grew up in, like, our time, where maybe it was forced down your throat, you rejected it at first, it didn’t make sense, you push back on it, but then the older you get, you’re like, “Wait a second, maybe there’s something there, maybe there’s a reason.”

38:27 I think religion is just technology for humans. Maybe there’s a reason that they talk about these stories in these lessons. Maybe it makes us a better society. Maybe there are some things we can’t observe with our five senses. You know, maybe there are some other powers and things, so it gets you to open your mind up a little bit, and then yeah, psychedelic experience can change that, or sometimes a meditative experience can also change that.

38:50 Yeah, I’m still still trying to figure out what’s going on out there, but there’s something more happening than just what they teach you in physics class. I’ve got Richard Dawkins here tomorrow, and this is a guy that wrote The God Delusion, and he would reject everything that we’re talking about right now. Everything is down to the science. There’s no higher power. So it’s always interesting to hear people like that.

39:10 People have said to Richard, smoke some DMT and you’ll disagree, but I don’t think he’s taking anybody up on that challenge. I could be wrong, but isn’t he at the forefront of talking about how soon even the matter that hold our thoughts together will be expanded to the point that thoughts won’t exist, light won’t exist, the photons will be pulled apart. So he’s kind of a bit of a pessimist with the outcome of the universe. He’s like, we won’t be alive then, but soon everything we know as matter will be torn apart and sucked into black holes.

39:37 And you know, atheism is quite pessimistic, but I think that even, like, exactly like you say, you’d be like, okay cool, I fully respect your decision. We’re going to get your DMT in a vape. You’re going to have four puffs, and then let’s just see if there’s a change in mind. But then again, I’m trying to convert someone to what I see my reality of the universe being like. But yeah, it’s interesting.

39:57 Is it, I think that I would love it. It’s obviously a ludicrous idea that everyone should have some type of psychedelic experience. Obviously I don’t think everyone benefits from it, but when I look at the world and the way it is, and I see, like, violence and malice and all of these things, I think if I was to look back at some of the, someone said to me a couple of days ago, they’re like, you’re a different person three years ago. You really matured, and when I was looking at, like, the key steps of maturation, seeing the world differently, I even decided I want to have kids on a mushroom trip, and I was like, people will hear this and go, “What James is talking about is an illegal substance.

40:34 It’s controlled.” This is, you know, not good. I’ve had people always, I’ve always been open. I think honesty is a very important thing with this thing. Well, I was like, these net decisions have made me a better person.

40:44 I started drinking this after one trip, so I did want to have kids after another. I decided that I’d really introspective conversation with some friends and I started thinking to myself, it’s very important that I do well in life. You know, I look at my social media following that’s growing, I look at my businesses, I look at financial freedom, to, I’m very privileged that I earn more than I spend, and I joke with my friends, I’m like, that makes us wealthy.

41:09 It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a million in the bank or whatever, but one part of me on a psychedelic trip said, what’s going to impress your parents more, bringing home a Ferrari or a family? And the voice in my head said to me, don’t get to the end of your life and don’t win the wrong races. And I was like, wow, I was like, Jesus, there are races here that you know are tied to being a good parent or, you know, being a good partner, or all of these things.

41:37 And I was like, at the end of the day, having the most money and the most followers isn’t going to be the race that really is going to be rewarding. And I was like, I was like, wow, and I went away from that and I thought about my work-life balance and everything, and it’s crazy that I’m grateful to a substance that’s controlled and frowned upon, using whereas I actually have a relationship with alcohol where I’m like, I know this is destructive, I know this isn’t good for me, I know this doesn’t make me feel good, and it’s just crazy that the narratives that exist around these things, even bringing people closer to a god is illegal, but then again, this is, I’m a personal trainer who’s had mushrooms a few times. I’m not a Richard Dawkins or anyone like this.

42:16 Yeah, we should talk about psychedelics. I mean, we’ve been having these conversations for pretty much since the start of this show. It’s always come up. I probably talked to 30 of the top people when it comes to psychedelics, from professors at Imperial College, like Professor David Nutt, Robin Carhart-Harris, that are literally doing studies with fMRIs when they inject people with psilocybin to see what it does, and they found people stop smoking, stop drinking, issues with anorexia, anxiety, all go away with, sometimes, a one dose.

42:47 People like Rick Doblin at MAPS, they’re using MDMA therapy to help soldiers get over their PTSD. I’ve had experiences with ayahuasca, with DMT, with psilocybin mushrooms, that have completely changed my life. So let’s talk about this. Why is the psychedelic experience make major changes in your life? Why do you think that is, and how does that differ from a drug?

43:09 Because alcohol is a drug. It’s just something that’s legal, that seems to create a lot of A&E occurrences, seems to have just a different experience, toxify the human body, lead to more deaths, etc., and again, this is almost a narrative that doesn’t want to be spoken about, where with alcohol, you know, if we were to have, like, a lab setting here, and we were like, okay guys, we’re going to remove all the labels, double blinds, placebo controlled study, memory loss, aggression, getting behind a wheel, you know, all of these kind of poor logic decisions, and rationality goes out the window. We’re moving further from our reality with alcohol, whereas with psychedelic experiences, you’re going closer to your reality.

43:52 You’re diving in into your thoughts, and we talk about stripping the ego. And I think this is a really important one, because when you do take psychedelics, you start tearing down the things that you say to yourself on a daily basis, because the narrative of our life is what we tell ourselves. We go through life with this little inner monologue about what we can do, what we can’t do, and for me that was just completely stripped, and and people, therapy, things like that.

44:17 We take advice from other people, and I think that’s amazing. I think it’s something that’s helping a lot of people around the world. I think accessibility to it should be you know, only ever improved, but people fail to realize how well you listen to advice when it comes from yourself, and that’s something to me as someone who’s probably got quite a thick skin to external validation, criticism, whatever, when I tell myself these things, I listen, and that’s powerful, and beyond what money could buy to me, and I think that I’ll always sit in the pro camps of these things, even if it faces rebuttal, because ultimately I want what’s helped me to help other people.

44:58 Yeah, they’re, they’re an incredible, incredible piece of technology. Psychedelics. I remember I was in Costa Rica about to go into my first ayahuasca experience about four years ago, and I had Dennis McKenna, who’s like an OG psychonaut, and I said, Dennis, what should I expect from this ceremony? And he said, He said, “Well, Brian, I’m not going to tell you what to expect,” he said, because whatever happens happens between you and the medicine. That’s the beautiful thing about it.

45:20 There’s no one telling you what’s going to happen. There’s no one selling you what’s going to happen. There’s no one with an agenda. It’s between you and the medicine, and it’s going to tell you something that you need to know, and that’s something that you’re going to go on, and that’s your adventure, and it’s probably not going to involve words, even, or even a conscious lesson. Sometimes it’s very subconscious, and that’s one of the beautiful things about the medicine.

45:42 It does take your ego out, and allows the ego, which controls our perception of everything, because it tries to keep us alive on the savannahs, take it away for a little while, not when the tigers are around, then you can really learn some things about yourself that you can’t normally learn. And again, with even tying this back to confidence, values are a big structure of, you know, so many things we want to get out of life, and our everyday mind, with our ego layered on top thickly, can cover up things. So for instance, there are a lot of pain points, so I always get people to look back at their pain points as a PT.

46:16 People would say to me that oh, I want to get fit, I want to feel better. I’m like, you don’t tell me really what’s behind that, and they were like, okay, I want my husband to not turn the light off when he f***s me. I’m like, with that, you know, I don’t want to pull my top down incessantly when I stand up at work, because it makes me feel like I’m a piece of s*** cool with there. When it comes to values and really thinking about what we want from life, which is what psychedelics often make us do, you can get to a point where you go, “I’m lonely,” and you wouldn’t say that on a daily basis to yourself.

46:44 You might do, and if you do, that’s, that’s great in some respects, because it shows you your pathway inadequacies. It does a great thing of showing us the way we want to go, but sometimes psychedelics show you the gaping holes in your life, but they don’t let you cover it with money, alcohol or drugs, which is what a lot of people do. If people are lonely, they’re like, “Oh, go out and get pissed. I’ll go out with my friends. I’ll buy myself something to feel better for it.

47:06 I’ll go shopping.” Yeah, shopping, sex, anything that comes up, and they use that as just a way to cover it. But when people have psychedelic experiences, they sit and digest that, that gaping hole of loneliness, and when they come out the other side, they go, “I need to do actions that are congruent with success, with those values, because no one does the psychedelic trip and goes, ‘I need to go Vegas.’ It’s always the opposite. They never go, ‘Oh, I need to get f***ing smashed tonight.’

47:31 It’s always the opposite. So I think when people are looking for confidence in something, really they’re looking for something to get them to point in the direction of taking actions. And I think psychedelics, a lot of the time, point people in the direction of doing actions, drinking less, smoking less, going out less, and doing things that are more positive to the outcome that they need for values. Because I always like to distinguish pleasure and happiness as two different things, and often people, everyone has access to happiness.

47:59 You spend any time in Asia, you see people that have nothing pleasurable. They have, you know, family, friends, community, food, shelter. Everyone has access to that, and the majority of people do. Pleasure would be holidays, drugs, partying, all of these things. When people try filling their happiness quota with pleasure, they go down dark holes, similar to black holes in the universe.

48:20 You can never fill the quota that pleasure has, and suddenly they get absorbed by that, and then they try getting more and more pleasure to fill their quarter of happiness. But really, people, if they don’t understand what makes them happy, they will distinguish the two as the same, and that’s why people with loads of money can still have issues feeling happy. They’re filling their pleasure quotas, and they get very efficient at filling their pleasure quotas, whereas I think psychedelics give people a really good understanding of what makes them happy.

48:44 And people go, “That guy did a mushroom trip. He drinks, he doesn’t go out and party anymore,” yeah, because he now realizes when he’s getting a good deal or not. And I go through stages of not drinking, because I can recognize when something’s hindering my happiness, and if I need to give up a little bit of what gives me pleasure to give me a little bit more happiness, that’s a good deal, and that’s what the decision-making process in my head got me to understand.

49:07 Not to mention that people also rely on alcohol as a precursor to false confidence as well, with the easy accessibility of filling that void, because to become more confident you need to do self-development, and people don’t like the idea of doing self-development. If they did, they’d read more books. I say to people all the time, I’m like, someone just put everything they learned in their life in 300 pages. Do you know how f***ing succinct that is? How much does it cost?

49:34 The same as three coffees from Starbucks, and people still don’t do it. They still, you know, would rather listen to the radio of people chat and s*** than they would an audiobook. So people aren’t as obsessed with self-development as they like to say, and when there’s that void in their life, they often will use alcohol as a reason to just avoid the self-development part. You want to start going on sober dates. It’s going to be awkward, but at least you’re not going to let alcohol do your decision making for you.

49:58 So there are a lot of lessons to be learned with all of these things, and everyone’s just trying to avoid this point of action, because they’re terrified of failure. And the crazy thing about being terrified of failure is you don’t then get a dial on where you’re at or where you should be going. And you know, I would say that I’m still learning about confidence all the time, because it is such a vast topic, and half of what’s in that book, I actually probably didn’t know writing it.

50:23 So I do feel a little bit like a fraud, where a lot of people that probably would have sat here would have gone, you know, I’ve been a professor for 10 years and I know this inside out. For me, I was like, it was a year-long journey of discovery, and I was like, this is the greatest hits of everything that I’ve learned, and yeah, it’s a crazy topic. It’s good, that’s the way it should be. You know, anybody ever tells me they’re a master in confidence and always will be, I just wouldn’t believe them.

50:48 It’s funny how you say pleasure is not happiness, because I just had Dan Bilzerian back on again, and when I first had him on, I called the episode “Pleasure’s Not Happiness,” and I actually called him out in the very beginning, and I said, you know, I see a lot of times doing mushrooms, it’s psychedelics, and I also see you’re looking for something, and you know, it’s more than pleasure seeking, and he’s the first one to say, he’s like, “Yeah, Brian, like, pleasure doesn’t get me where I want it.” He’s like, sometimes I do too much of it, and sometimes I stop for a while. He stopped smoking weed.

51:16 He had only one girlfriend when he was writing his book. He cut it all out, then he went back to, you know, all the girls and all the drugs and all that stuff, but even he knows that one is different than the other, and and yet the hard thing to do, like you said, is to try to confront the things that are going to make you happy that aren’t pleasurable, and one of those could be something like alcohol consumption, and I just want to kind of tie this right out, possible, not because I struggled with alcohol for a long time in my life, since I was like 18 into my 40s. I was drinking every day, and it was one of the things that I couldn’t figure out.

51:51 I couldn’t figure out how to stop doing it, and I was functional, whatever the hell that means, and you know, it wasn’t until about five years ago where I actually stopped drinking, but it was something, and I want to get your thoughts on this, James, because I think subconsciously it made me less confident, because I had to live with the guy who couldn’t stop doing this destructive thing to himself, and I’d have to go to some liquor store in Shoreditch and get a bottle of vodka, and I’d look at the guy, and he’d be looking at me, and he’d be like, “You f***ing loser, you’re back again today. I want you to get another bottle. Aren’t you, you just f***ing, you’re just a loser.”

52:25 And I think even though I was doing a lot of things, and I could be confident, and I could train jiu jitsu, and I could work in the city, I think part of me didn’t respect me, because I couldn’t figure this thing out or stop this thing that was clearly destructive to me, and I’m a logical person, and I’m curious how you think that ties into people’s confidence. Is when their daily habits or practices aren’t congruent with who they want to be, do they ultimately have to change that to make a step function up in their confidence and actually act as if, or can you just, Conor McGregor, tell yourself you’re the greatest in the world every single day, Muhammad Ali and just do it? I’m curious for your thoughts on that.

53:04 I think that a very easy way for people to see it is to imagine confidence being like fitness. You’ve got to turn up. You’ve got to keep going, and if you take a long period of time out from training those things, it will fade away. But we can’t buy fitness in a bottle. We can’t buy fitness in a way.

53:20 And what’s challenging is it’s so accessible everywhere, mainly right now. If we wanted to be drunk in 20 minutes, we could do it. We’re in the City of London. You know, it’s accessible everywhere, but I think people don’t need to go almost cold turkey on things, but maybe if I was to say to someone, if you’re lonely, which is your pain point, you feel like you lack confidence in the ability to go out dating, do you think that doing these things sober could benefit your ability to meet someone meaningful and compatible, to fill the void of your pain point of loneliness?

53:50 I think almost everyone that would read that question would go, yes, not drinking would help me make better judgments on people, be myself more, and make better decisions, so therefore I should probably take that way of action of doing it. And again, I always question people like this: will it be easy? No. Will it be fun? Not at times.

54:10 Would it be challenging? Yes. And ultimately, will it be worth it? And the answer to that is always going to be yes. Anything that is a shortcut to self-development must be eradicated.

54:20 Then when you meet that person and you’re in a loving relationship and you want to have some wine with dinner, then you’re cool, but something like that, like drinking a lot, trying to find someone to feel a pain point, I just don’t think is going to be a net positive in the equation. I think the people need to be the best versions of themselves in the time they have in front of us, because human existence is a blink of an eye of rocks flying around the universe, and I think it’d be a shame for people to lean on something like that to make decisions in life. I love how this just turned into an alcohol-bashing session between you and me.

54:55 You know, it’s funny because you talked about that lab scenario earlier. I’ve had guests in here before from Imperial College that said, “Brian, if you were to create a brand new drug today called alcohol that had this effect, this effect, of this effect, it would be banned by all the countries around the world as you know a dangerous, dangerous new drug. The fact that it’s just been grandfathered into our existence, and it’s just part of our culture, especially British culture.

55:18 It’s something that we just don’t think about, and it becomes part of our life, but it’s definitely something worth questioning. And to finish that up, like, I’ve got a bit of a course voice from an event at the weekend from drinking, but I did a podcast with someone here, had a sparkling water, and I said, you’re a bigger man than me, because although I’ve written this book on confidence and brought so many fallacies together, I’m still not yet in a position to get rid of it completely, which is why I like people to always know that I don’t write books from a point of perfection. I wrote a diet book and I’m not in the best shape.

55:50 I wrote a life design book. I still haven’t got the best life balance, and I wrote a confidence book, and there’s still things I’m working on myself. That’s good, man. We’re all work in progress. That’s the damn truth, you know, and that’s why it always will be.

56:00 So I appreciate you being honest, talking about visualization, because it’s one of your chapters in here, and I’m curious what you think as far as visualization and confidence. When I went up to the castle to see Peña, he got me onto affirmations, and again I always thought affirmations were something I would learn in California, where I’m from, where you say, oh yeah, I’m gonna affirm my million-dollar house, and I’m gonna affirm my supermodel girlfriend, and I’m gonna wake up every day, and it’s like the movie The Secret, and here was this old man that wore a three-piece suit saying that he did affirmations every morning, every night, for every one of his goals. He had an affirmation, so I’m comfortable and excited to be public speaking all the time, when he, maybe they were terrified, or I’m excited running a billion dollar business, even though you’re not.

56:40 So these are these affirmations I incorporated in my routine for a long time, and they definitely helped you know, they definitely got me in the mindset of the person I wanted to be, and by stating them out loud every morning, which I still do, it got me to kind of act as if I was that person and make those decisions. But I recently came back from a workshop with Dr Joe Dispenza out at the Excel Center, and he has a different way of doing it. He actually gets you to connect with your future self, feel it as if it’s now, and actually become it now.

57:09 So you don’t aspire to something in the future. It, you, you actually connect to that future you, and you kind of bring it to the present, and you celebrate it right now. And you know, tapping into the quantum field and all the stuff that I’m getting to know, and I’ve known Joe for a long time, but I’ve never actually done it, and I’m finding it even more powerful, and I’ve been doing these walking meditations every morning for like an hour, and I’m kind of like tapping into this future version of me, and I’m feeling as if it’s me and trying to to really make it become me now.

57:39 And so I guess what I’m asking you is, how do these tools, how do you suggest we use these tools for confidence? So I completely agree with you on this, and I’ve done a talk before where I say confidence isn’t so much, you know, me being a different person to you. It’s me having a good idea of who I need to be in this very moment. Even right now, I am projecting to you the person who I need to turn up today to be on a real podcast. He is better spoken.

58:07 He is more calm. The actual version of myself that’s existing behind it, and I have such a good idea of who I need to be, because I’ve kind of made my persona who I really could have done with 10 years ago, and that’s really who I am. I would have loved someone to have slapped me into shape a little bit and told me, you know, about these fitness things about these life design things before I went through it, but I’m grateful looking back that I managed to go through the the s*** jobs and the struggles of being overweight, and the person that you know had to become a version of himself to be successful so I could help other people.

58:40 So I completely agree with that, with visualization. I used to do this when I was playing rugby. I’d imagine the kickoffs on the bus. I’ll be like, okay, it’s going to come here, I’m going to catch it. I think about it with tackles before I go into talks.

58:52 I listen to the backing music that’s going to come on before I have a talk, and I think about how I’m going to say it, what I’m going to do in my hands, where I’m going to look in the crowd, because I can get reps in before I do it. But one thing that I’ve started doing, and none of us can be right with it, we can be right for ourselves with the methods we use. I’ve started leaning on interrogative self-talk, where I actually ask myself instead of telling myself.

59:14 So for instance, today, instead of saying, you’re going to go on London Real and you can have a great episode and everyone’s going to give you good feedback, I go, can you go on London Real and have a good episode? And I go, well yeah, because you’ve been on lots of podcasts, you’ve articulated yourself well, I hope. And then I go, can I get across points in my book succinctly? Because I have doubts coming on here. I’m like, what if I’ve forgotten the chapters that we talk about?

59:38 You know, I wrote it, sure, but that doesn’t mean I don’t forget things. So then I go, can you remember the things? You go, yeah, you wrote the book. Can I do this? Can I do that?

59:46 And asking myself the questions or the points and answering them myself gives me a better leg up than telling myself, manifesting it myself, or doing any of the practice that way. I think that’s something that people need to do, but they need to appreciate that the voice inside your head that helps you from psychedelics is also the voice inside your head that doubts you when you’re doing everyday life, and it’s controlling that voice and putting it as a force for good, that is really going to help people with their potential. Do you have a daily practice when it comes to this, with affirmations, or do you always have that mental rehearsal where you kind of ask yourself who you want to be, or can you show up?

1:00:25 It’s not as organized. I’m quite a chaotic person. I would like to. I’d like to get tested for something like ADHD, and I’d like to make it a podcast, actually, not really be open about it, but I embrace the chaos, but that’s because I know when I need a little timeout. I know when I need a little three minutes from my thoughts, and similar to the expectation effect, although I’m not a massive meditator, I know that if I close my eyes for three minutes, listening to a Hans Zimmer song and think about my day and think about things that are stressing me out, I don’t only believe it works.

1:00:56 I expect to work, and it does work. So I’m what I would say pretty good at knowing when I need to have a little check-in myself when I need to just remove myself from people and go through things in my mind people that are probably more successful than me in other ways are the ones that wake up. They do their ascension. They do their meditation. They go through it, but then again, I’m 33 now.

1:01:18 Maybe we’ll sit down in a couple years’ time and I’ll be like, I do every day at six. Yeah, maybe who knows. What’s the confidence diet? Because this is an interesting point you make in your book, and it reminds me of Tim Ferriss, who had something in The Four Hour Work Week, and when he was on here he talked about the information diet, which was a really novel concept back in the day. When I read this, like, 20 years ago, where he said restrict the amount of information you consume, and remember you used to say check your email once a day and be careful what you consume.

1:01:45 Now this is almost like pre-YouTube, where you couldn’t pre-Netflix, where you couldn’t be consuming 24-7, but he was always like, be careful about what you consume, even though it’s free, and it was a new concept. But what do you mean by the confidence diet? You have to be careful what you’re consuming and how it affects your confidence. 100 and I’ve definitely taken inspiration from other people that have this, where they go, your diet isn’t just what you put in your mouth.

1:02:08 It’s what you expose yourself to. And then another bias that’s in the book is the availability bias, where we make decisions based on information available to us, more so than the reality of the situation. Driving somewhere is more dangerous than flying somewhere, yet no one gets petrified in the back of a Uber by putting the seatbelt on. They get scared getting in the plane as it takes off, because they’ve been exposed to films that go down, crash, everything.

1:02:29 We don’t get exposed to car crashes. People come to Bondi Beach in Australia, they’re like, “Oh my god, how’d you deal with the sharks?” I’m like, “You’re more likely to drown today than you are to get bitten by a shark.” However, the drownings that occur on Bondi Beach aren’t quite the ones that make it to movies. So the information available to us, even, if we were to sit here and go, we should build more nuclear power plants, people are, you crazy?

1:02:51 Chernobyl. We need to be doing solar panels. And then I could go, hey, more people die from falling off installing solar panels than they do from nuclear energy generators. So we build this reality based on the information that feeds us to it. And it’s important that the people we surround ourselves with, we need to appreciate that, almost like ointments that we put on our skin, are transdermally absorbed.

1:03:12 We need to appreciate that everyone around us, their opinions, their visions on the world, their levels of confidence, that is going to seep in, and it is going to affect our reality on the situation. Even during the pandemic we saw people in hysteria through the information they’re absorbing. No other thing in history, we had a daily death count. It was insane. People’s skewed reality was almost, and now the annoying thing is we’re a couple years past it.

1:03:39 It’s just been blown over. We were absolutely freaking out, and I’m not saying I’m not a COVID denier or anything like that, but the information available to us is a very important part of how we see the world, and we need to appreciate that there is a diet that goes beyond what we stick in our mouths and swallow. It’s what we listen to, what we hear, what we see, and if you’re, and the hard thing here is, a lot of people that love you most will be the first to squish your dreams and ambitions, because they want to see you safe.

1:04:08 And if I’d leant on my family for support with my ambitions early on, I would no doubt have my ambitions squished down. So people need to take stock of the information they’re getting from people, because if your partner, loved one, family member, colleague, business partner, they’re either a wind in your sails or they’re a headwind, and you need to appreciate which direction that’s going to go. And I always say, about, like, picking your passengers, if we mean you have to drive up to Manchester right now, who you have in that car is of utmost importance, because if someone is going to steal your energy or your ambitions or your confidence or your drive, you’d be better off paying to put them in another car.

1:04:50 Now the real truth is you need to get rid of most of your friends and family if you want to do something important in this life. Right? It is it, and it can be like that. Yes, and it’s harsh, but then you’ve got to think about the bigger picture as well. Should you leave their kind of visions behind, show them it’s possible, don’t ask them if it’s possible.

1:05:09 Yeah, it’s funny, I, in my, I did a TED talk in 2015, and I talked about when I started the show London Real, and it was like a year into it, and if you remember, back in the day there wasn’t like a Facebook page for like a corporate. It was just a personal page, and I remember one day I looked at it and I could tell how many of my friends and family had liked, like, my London Real thing, and it was like none of them, and I was like, wait a second, these people know I quit my job in the city. I’m doing this 24/7.

1:05:36 Like, this is everything to me, and I would ask my friends, if you watch my show? No, I’m too busy. Like, you’re too busy. Like, click on it. You lie to me at least.

1:05:43 But none of my friends and family supported me. They all thought I was crazy, and at first I got upset with that, and then when I started, finding the London Realers, people that were on my vibe or frequency or something like that, then I started finding people that really liked what we were doing and were interested in psychedelics. Then I was like, okay, this is the way it’s supposed to be, because your friends and family, they’re there, not necessarily to support you.

1:06:07 To see how bad you want it, to see if you really believe in this thing, and you ultimately need to find your tribe of people out there that really are on your frequency, and if you can get through that hard part, you’ll find all these people that are like, they want to support you, they want to encourage you, and then when that happens, your friends and family will say, I always knew you were going to do it, James. It’s interesting because there, there is a power if you can appreciate that that person isn’t going to be a wind in your sails. There is a utility to it, and for instance, I’ve got friends, and was saying before, that I need to take YouTube more seriously, and someone, I think to myself, what’s the level of contact I want to make, the content I want to make?

1:06:44 And I go, I want to make videos so good that my friends watch it. They’re the hardest people to convert. My friends on YouTube, who wants to catch up? My day, that’s the level I’m at. But also, it is quite good to have some people around that just don’t give a s*** about your ambitions, because your blood, I’ve got some work, and they’ll be like, shut up, come on, we’re going for food, and you’ll be like, okay, and it’s quite nice in some respects.

1:07:06 So have them not care about your world, but then you pick up the tab for dinner, and they give you the little, yeah, you’re doing well. Yeah, I guess it’s good to have a mix there as well. But yeah, I mean, the truth is you’re gonna have to cut out a lot of that if you want to go somewhere, or just not let it in your diet. Just not let it, yeah, go into your mind, not let it be absorbed, and just to wear that kind of thick skin with it, because the weight of one negative comment will outweigh a thousand, and I’ve tried so many things from a mental standpoint to try and even the scales with this, but it’s tough, that small dig, that small criticism from that one person whose opinion doesn’t really matter that much.

1:07:42 Again, those people that don’t watch our stuff, they’re not contributing to your subscriber count or your views or your YouTube revenue or your paid products. All those things, yet you let that small thing they’ve said carry the weight of 100 people that buy into you, and it’s a very difficult thing to let go of. Well, yeah, let’s talk about this now, because now your immediate circle, friends and family, gets exposed to your million friends and family on Instagram, and you got to deal with all this stuff, right?

1:08:07 Some of them aren’t even following you. Like you said, mostly haters probably aren’t. So how do you, James, deal with this? How have you evolved to deal with this, and how will you evolve to deal with this? So I had some people even recently, I was fascinated by some of the moves that, like, Andrew Tate was making, a very controversial figure, fascinating to watch, and not, not even, you know, I wouldn’t even call myself a supporter.

1:08:32 I see a digital marketer, which is what he is, create this massive shitstorm, and I’m like, I’m gonna watch this, considering the people that drop hate on my posts also follow me. A follow is not a sign of commitment to the cause of support, or whatever. I’m getting people messaging me, like, with hatred, being like, I used to respect you, but since you followed that piece of s***, you know, I’m, I’ve, and it was almost like an ad hominem attack, and I was like, okay, and then afterwards I would sit there, and that would be, that, like, a little assault on me with a message, and I’d go, I very much doubt this person was going to be at my book signing tonight, or they were on the edge of a seat to book a ticket at Sydney Opera House later this year, and I go this person is probably dealing with something else that they’re venting to me right now.

1:09:18 If they’re not a contributor to my lifestyle, I shouldn’t take what they’re saying to heart, because this is the difference between criticism and feedback. Criticism is something that’s said to you from someone who’s never going to benefit your life, and feedback to me is something that someone said from someone who is. And if someone started a message and goes, “I’m a paying member of your online academy. I’ve seen what you’re following this person. It doesn’t sit with me.”

1:09:44 Well, at that point, which actually did happen, I then decided to unfollow him, because the criticism wasn’t accurate. But then when it was feedback, I was like, this needs to be listened to. This is someone that’s paying me, contributing to my life, and the reason that I can stretch my legs out on a plane is because of people like this. So this is what I need to do. It doesn’t mean they can control your editorial decisions completely, correct.

1:10:05 But then it was at that point that I was like, okay, I never want to hinder or have malice towards people that help me be who I am now. They don’t control me, but that’s an important thing for me. If someone out there is just saying, you know, a comment on YouTube, who would listen to this, you’re like, I need to ignore this. But it’s very rare that actually the criticism coming from people that do benefit your life, and this again, I’ve written in the book, whenever you feel this, just ask yourself if this person is benefiting you, and if they are someone that is going to actually sit within those two categories, and then make a decision based off that.

1:10:43 Yeah, it’s a fine line. I’m sure part of you wanted to keep following him as well. More like a more like a freak show, like what’s going on, what’s going on here? I think it’s fascinating. We can learn a lot from him, and you know, it’s, you know, in some ways you’re like him by being controversial online, maybe not as controversial, and we’ll talk about your style for sure.

1:11:01 But you know, I had Grant Cardone in here, and he said, it’s something I repeat to myself every day, especially when I was running for mayor and when I was broadcasting during COVID. Which is this: if people, though, if people don’t hate you, people don’t know you. That’s what Grant Cardone says, and which basically means that if you want to do important things where people are going to know you and follow you and buy your books and come to your, you know, incredible events, then by definition you’re going to have haters as well, because you’re saying something that’s worthwhile.

1:11:28 For some great art divides, and you’re going to have haters. So with Grant, he’s like, I want to get more haters. Now, you know, Tate might have said I want to get more haters, but he also became the most famous person in the world, as he self-describes, which according to Google he was for a while. So, you know, the other thing that Grant told me is he said hate and love are actually the same thing. They just got kind of perturbed on the way that it was coming to you.

1:11:53 So the person that hates you, some way loves you. Maybe they respect you, because they’re going out of their way to give you this, to give you this feedback. They’re not indifferent to you, and maybe they don’t know how to show it to you. Maybe they’re going through some difficult times, but there’s an emotional connection with you that just gets kind of perturbed in the transmission. Maybe they love you so much that they don’t want you to let them down, and maybe that’s why they’re hating on you, and it’s just something I try to think about sometimes, and I think he’s got a point there.

1:12:19 It is emotion. They’re very, very similar, and so I’d say to everybody processing this, and I’ve had lots of students in my academy that I encourage to put videos online, and they always ask me questions about this. What do you do with the feedback? You know, is it 10 comments of the same, and then maybe they have a point? Is it someone you trust and respect?

1:12:36 Is it one of your paid subscribers? And then you listen. I try not to ever listen, but, you know, sometimes you will get the feedback. Is it your friends and family? They tell you that, but there’s a point, like you said, where it becomes feedback, and then sometimes where it’s just hate, and it’s trying to discern the two.

1:12:51 I think it was Seneca who says to avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. And I completely agree with that point, and also certain levels of success rub people the wrong way. Like you say, there is actually, I agree with him in this, there is this fine line, and sometimes as you experience success, some people lose the ability to be happy for you, and I do believe that is their way of dealing with something that’s going on in their lives. And I joke around with some negative YouTube comments, and if someone says something, I go, just because you’re unhappy, don’t try and drag me down.

1:13:24 And it’s an interesting one, but people need to see success and be happy with success, because if I look at success with the right lens, that should motivate me. And I think that this should be something that all people look at, if someone that is feeling hatred towards someone doing something, is there any way you could look at that, motivate yourself to do better? Anyone, anyone in the world. But it is one of those things where it was fascinating, and any digital marketer in any field should not have supported him and gone, oh, this man, what he’s saying is amazing.

1:13:59 But at least gone, he’s doing something here that’s not been done before, and it doesn’t even have to be admiration. It can just be fascination, but and what was the Andrew Tate phenomenon? What do you think happened there? Why did he get so big so fast? I think he managed to polarize people on so many levels, and he, I think, utilized the left to build his profile the most, which was very interesting.

1:14:25 He, in a bid, almost tried to get cancelled on the way up, and I said to people, I actually made a video about this, where I said, if you really want him to go away, stop talking about him. They couldn’t. They couldn’t stop. But I actually said before, recently, there was a, I, I believe there’s potentially an intelligent person back there, state chess champion when he was younger, pretty sure he’s from like a military family. If it was a persona, I think he should have just broke from it at some point and not kept it going.

1:14:59 And I think that in my earlier years I was more rude, more obtuse, more facetious, and more risk-taking, but then as you kind of get to a point that you get your head above the water and you can breathe, it’s at that point that I need to actually start being myself more and not try and come on here as LAD Bible James and be like, oh, you’re f***ing with it. There has to be a point where you actually get there and people can see that for the real you. And I’m sure that we’ve all had to imitate someone that isn’t us, and I still am guilty to it now on social media, but there has to come a point where you just have to be real.

1:15:32 And I think that maybe that was missed. I think to anyone out there, I think that you’re always better off. It can be very, very exhausting pretending to be someone else, even if it does make you successful. Yeah, I don’t know if he was pretending to be someone else, or if someone created something else by taking small pieces of him, which happens with any media personality. Sam Harris recently got it, where someone took a small snippet of one of his podcasts to the point that when people do that, you would usually ignore it, but he had to come out and be like, “Hey guys, by the way, this take from a long format discussion, and it completely misconstrued it,” but by the time you put that on social media, now the way the algorithms work of serving you on something you’re interested in, not on someone you follow, and the ability to take these snippets and put them out there, it’s pretty scary.

1:16:20 Yeah, well, Joe Rogan went through that whole piece as well, with that, you know, a little amalgamation of him with his quote-unquote racist comments. But look, I mean, what happens with everybody is we get media bias. I mean, I’ve had guests that are about to sit in the chair before, where I’ll read about them and learn about them, and I think, okay, this is just some two-dimensional rock star or some person that, you know, had it easy, and then once I spent two hours in the chair, I’m like, well, this is a fascinating human that had to go through a lot of struggle to be the person they’re gonna be.

1:16:46 I’m always surprised. And I think with Tate, people took a lot of things out of context and created videos. He allowed that to happen or encouraged that to happen and became this thing. You know, yeah, he probably engineered that. It was probably brilliant.

1:17:01 I think there actually is a real guy behind all that, who’s quite nuanced and fascinating and quite congruent with everything he’s saying. One thing I think it showed us is that there’s a real, real need and desire for men hearing quote unquote maybe a truth that they haven’t heard from a long time, maybe because of the canceled culture and everyone worried about all the things that we put on social media and what you can and can’t say, and there was someone a bit like Dan Peña. I don’t know if you’re that guy too, that maybe gives it to you straight in a world where everyone else is worried about being canceled or judged or whatever, and the truth, as fascinating as it is, has become a commodity as rare as, you know, Bitcoin these days.

1:17:45 It’s something that it’s so hard to find when you can find someone that will give it to you, that’s not worried about the ramifications. I don’t know. I think a lot of young men said, “Wow, there’s something here that I don’t hear anywhere else, and I want to learn more about this.” And that’s what I think also happened, and that’s why Peña does so well, because Peña you know, when he dies they don’t make him like him anymore. He’s an old school guy from an old school place who doesn’t care if you buy his f***ing book.

1:18:10 He doesn’t give a f***, he doesn’t care if you cancel him. He went to a university here recently, and all the kids, like, protested him and stood on the desk, and the girls took their clothes off, and like he doesn’t care. He just goes to the next, and goes to the next, but he also will give you something straight. Now, can he be a little crass sometimes? Can he, you know, maybe say the wrong thing?

1:18:29 Okay, but also he gives it to you straight, and I think people crave that in a world of today where everything is manufactured and set to be super pretty, and I think that’s one of the reasons that it was so viral. I had a rugby coach, 10 years ago who dropped me for an important match. So I go up to him and I say, “Hey, why have I been dropped?” And he said, “You played like s*** at the weekend.” He goes, “I can’t believe you missed so many tackles with your parents watching,” and that hurt.

1:18:59 I mean, I was, oh, and people think that’s a really bad thing that he did, but because of that, I turned up to training on Tuesday early. I wasn’t f***ing around with the other lads in the gym. I went out, I trained, didn’t miss tackles. I hit my rucks. I listened to the coaches.

1:19:15 I wasn’t disruptive, and I realized that the feedback he gave me, although it hurt, I could use that pain to get something more out of myself. And I think, back, the biggest danger that could have happened on this Tuesday night in Berkshire when I was growing up is for him to lie to me to protect my feelings. If he said, “Ah, Smithy, mate, it’s just, you know, play a rotation, don’t worry about it,” I would not have turned up the person I needed to be.

1:19:41 Now, not everyone likes criticism in that form, but for me that’s the best way I want to hear it. So when I do put my stuff out and content out in a way that is like that, I’m not talking to the people that need to be sugar coated. I’m talking to the people like myself, and if that’s one percent of the population, I have millions of people that I can help with that message. And what I don’t like is that people see me doing that, and they misconstrue me as being rude or arrogant, or that I’m, you know, that I lack empathy or sensitivity, when really I’m just talking to people who are like me.

1:20:14 And that’s quite an interesting one, where we almost live in an echo chamber now, but they’re like, “You can’t swear to people. You can’t use that. Did he just use the word fat?” And it makes the social media landscape a difficult place to navigate. Yeah, well, let’s talk about your style, because first of all, you’re on platforms like Instagram that are, you know, in Twitter I guess, that are controlled by companies in Silicon Valley that have their own set of values that they project to the world, that probably say you can maybe you can’t say the word fat these days.

1:20:40 I don’t know what the latest rules are. You sure as hell aren’t supposed to say the word f*** especially not in America, or s*** all these other things, and you don’t mind saying all those things. So where did your style come from? Did you embrace it right away, and what, what, how has it been good and bad for you? Obviously you’re here.

1:20:58 That’s pretty good. You must be doing something right. I spend, you cut through in a world of fitness experts that maybe look like you have the sports history of you, but you have cut through. So you’re doing something right. I remember, so I coached people for years on the gym floor in a small trading estate in Bracknell, which the gym membership was under 20 pounds.

1:21:21 It’s 19.99 a month, so I was in a budget gym in a technology park, and I remember some of the people that sat down with me, and I used to write blogs, and I’d swear in my blogs because I would type how I talk. And I remember this one lady who sat in front of me, and she was like, “Oh, James, I’m a fat f***, and you swear a lot. You’re perfect for me. How much is it? I’m ready to go.”

1:21:41 And I was like, this is the easiest consultation I’ve ever had, because I was myself, not someone else. And then in the early days, I didn’t have a camera. I didn’t know how to edit. I didn’t know any of these things. All I had was the live feature on Facebook, so I’d get my phone out, go live, and I’d get a whiteboard and draw some macronutrients and be like, “Hey guys, this is how it all works.”

1:22:03 But then something would piss me off in the news, and I come in, I go, “This f***ing brick is doing this, this is s***, let me tell you why.” And I’ll be drawing it, and I’ll be like, you know, I’m, I’m acting to a crowd that’s watching me live and then I’d look, and afterwards the engagement on the live video would go up, and I was thinking, there’s something here. People are enjoying seeing real emotion, and this is why, apart from doing GMB, Piers Morgan, nothing on TV really bangs or slaps that much on social media, because people are like, “Hey guys, today we have,” and people know that’s not real.

1:22:34 And I think that when people see a polished post of someone going, “Hey guys, you’re excited to work out this morning. We’re going to be doing a hit workout in the back.” No one’s exercising. What are you talking about? Just anyone, anyone on social media.

1:22:46 But then they, you know, and it’s fake straight from the beginning. I’m not that excited about having a barbecue, and I love barbecues. You know, so when someone’s getting that excited about a workout, I’m like, this is fake. This is someone trying to appease the audience for whatever reason they have, and for me it was just the fact that I could be authentic. It wasn’t exhausting being myself, and that I knew some people on some level would relate to that.

1:23:09 And running a face-to-face business, I only ever wanted 10 clients. I would get them to pay me for three hours a week. I would service those 10 clients, or do 30 hours. That was it. Then when I went online I was like, okay, I could take a few more.

1:23:22 I only need 40 people to like me. So then when my following got up to 10,000, which I thought at the time I’d made it, I was like, I went for a beer. I was like, guys, I can swipe up on Instagram now. I’m a f***ing big deal. It was crazy, but when I got to that point I was like, I don’t need that many people to like me to run a very profitable business.

1:23:40 So I’ve never needed that many people to truly like me. I just need a small amount of people that go, “For once there’s someone here who’s not going to f*** me or be overly excited about exercising, because exercising isn’t the enjoyable part. It’s doing the training, progressing towards a greater goal, inching small progressions at a time and being satisfied that moment you go to bed that you did what was right for the day. The actual training part sucks.

1:24:08 It’s painful, it’s sweaty. You don’t even get the feel-good feeling to you on the way out of it. So I don’t buy the fact that we should be getting, “Hey guys, yes, we’re gonna be here today.” Okay, and I hated seeing that on social media. All right, so you’re being yourself, giving it to them straight, and then you attract people that want you, and like you said, you don’t need everyone to like you.

1:24:26 You just were looking for a client base, and in some way that probably made you more famous, because people can sense real in this digital world today, right? Social. It’s, you know, it’s funny. I can do a vlog on the street with cabbies honking their horns behind, or I can do a beautifully produced video with the thing, and the vlog will always do five to ten x the views. Like people crave something real in this world, and you give them that, and you’re one of the few fitness people that do it without the smile.

1:24:56 Right? You’re not talking about Joe Wicks, and that you’re the opposite of Joe Wicks in this country. Yeah, the, you had the hero, you needed a villain. Right? So I was the villain, so he’s the, this model looking pretty faced, let’s smile about our hit workout, and you’re the guy that’s saying bad words and saying, look, this is not rocket science, guys, just eat less than you do.

1:25:15 Yeah, and you know what, there is an element of admiration for him as well, which I don’t share because it wouldn’t be, you know, very good for the hero and villain thing. But you know, like two rappers, they have beef because it builds both their profiles. I messaged Joe in private about five years ago, and I said, you know, I had two thousand followers at the time, by the feeling he would see some of the posts, and I said to him, you never get put down by people above you.

1:25:40 That was it. That’s what the email said, and what people fail to realize is we have different methods doing similar things. There are some holes in his method, but the f*** there’s methods in the holes in mind, and I was thinking people that are on his side are going to remain on his side. People on my side are going to remain on my side, but we need some kind of like dialogue and something going on here, because I do disagree with some of his things, but his approach is perfect for people that love his approach.

1:26:04 My approach is perfect for people that love my approach. There are no real, you know, bad outcomes here. You know, no one’s gonna go egg him, because I’ve said that no one enjoys a hit workout. No one’s gonna watch this video and go, f***, oh, he’s got a point. Let’s go egg Joe, wakes his house.

1:26:19 That’s not gonna happen, so I’m not taking money out of his pocket or trying to defame him for what he’s doing. The same way the politicians have discourse between them, whether it’s about budgeting, spending, whatever. The House of Commons is a pretty rowdy place, or, you know, so this is a normal thing that should happen between people, and I think that it engages people. You look at a school playground, everyone runs towards the fight. They want to see it.

1:26:43 We can’t imagine we’re not a peaceful species. I mean, and you know, some people actually jump in. They go, “Oh my god, this is the most privileged argument that’s ever happened, you disagreeing over the way you see the fitness industry,” but it’s never genuinely malice. We have the same publishers. If I see him at the publisher party, I’ll probably go over and say, “Hey mate, you know,” shake his hand.

1:27:05 It’s not personal. It is business at the end of the day, and, you know, it is one of those things where people would say, “Oh, he hates him.” I don’t hate him. I disagree with them, and there’s probably loads of things we do agree on, but it would be honest to say that I find it fun, and I think the people that watch it do, and that’s what I think makes it a good social strategy, but as I have experienced more success, I felt the incessant need to do it a lot less, and now some people do it to me, and I see, I see myself a few years ago, and that’s why it doesn’t bother me too much.

1:27:42 I go, do you know what? If I was where you were, I’d probably be ripping the piss out of me too. Right, so people always hate up, is what you’re saying? So that was your message to him, saying you know, that was a compliment to him. Look, I’m smaller than you, that’s why I’m, I can’t remember the amount of tweets it was, but he sent thousands of tweets before ever making money daily, and his Twitter was one of his first platforms to blow up, and people never saw that, and that’s why, you know, he made a lot of money very early on.

1:28:07 And I think that’s why he got quite a bit of hatred from people, because they saw success instead of being inspired. I think that there was a lack of people understanding his story, and if they had seen someone who had done the tweets for so long before ever making money, or make their life easier. Yeah, and success leaves clues at the end of the day. I’m not a big believer in luck, so I think that yeah, that was probably it, but it’s fun to look back on now, and just kind of, you know, I look at the 2018 version of James and I go, off, he’s got a point, but that was a bit much, a little edge to him.

1:28:37 Huh? And so since we’re talking about diet and fitness, like in a nutshell, what are your tenants? What are your beliefs in this space? So I’m known as the calorie deficit guy, where in essence that’s the only bit of advice that I couldn’t find in the first 10 years of trying to lose fat, so being overweight at school, going up to the dinner ladies and be like, which one of these is fattening? And them not being able to give me an answer.

1:28:58 My parents couldn’t give me an answer, and then in my early 20s I tried playing rugby at a high level, didn’t really understand fitness nutrition. The first time I moderated calories, I was like, oh my god, this is easier than I thought. Then I hit a protein target, and the protein target that seemed arbitrary then suddenly meant that my meal planning and structure improved drastically, and if someone said to me, eat more protein, or if someone had just said, oh, eat clean, these things never worked.

1:29:25 But when I had a structure that I could follow, calories and protein, and then working things, it was like the Matrix. I could finally see the binary code. Then I realized that that first segment of managing calories is like a joke about having a leak in the bathroom. If you have a leak in your bathroom, first thing you should do is stop the leak. Then however you want to clean it up is up to you, but so many people arrive at dieting just wiping the floor without plugging the leak.

1:29:49 No calorie control. So that was the first kind of like tenant for success, and a lot of people had that same moment that I had in my early 20s, and then with training, you know, just doing something that you enjoy. I don’t care if you just walk every day doing something you enjoy, because people create a hierarchy for exercise, preferentiation or efficacy, when really I go, look, whatever tool you’re using to clean up the leak in the bathroom is irrelevant once the leak’s been plugged.

1:30:15 Someone wants to use this, or there, someone might have a better mop than someone else. Cool, but people should have the prerogative to do it at their own pace. So then the training side of things, with that, then with the physique side of things, I don’t have a rock hard six pack, but I could do two hours of sparring and jiu jitsu. I compete at purple belt. I could run five or ten K, and I can dead lift twice my body weight.

1:30:37 I can swing an axe if I need to, and I still wake up with a boner, so I’m happy with those things, and I say to guys, like, let’s maybe get you in a pair of budgie smugglers on your next holiday in a few months’ time. Let’s put on a pair of speedos. I might not be able to see any of the, you know, the markers of your six-pack, but if you’re happy, you’re healthy, you’re training hard, and you’re enjoying those things, then this is my idea of how you should look, and I do the same with women as well.

1:31:03 Where I go, you know, you’re probably not going to be on the front cover of Women’s Health, and what I really want to instill in them is those things spoke about before: seeking progression, challenging yourself, enjoying your training, and moderating calories when you need to, not calorie counting until the end of days. But similar to finances, we go through these peaks and troughs, so we get paid, we feel like we’re rich, we start running out of money, start eating sandwiches a couple days before payday, then boom, it happens again. And those cyclical bouts will probably occur through people’s lives, where they go on holiday, put a bit of weight, they have a birthday, but on a bit of weight, whatever it is.

1:31:36 The problem the world has isn’t just obesity in itself. It’s just people’s inability to know objectively how to lose it, because once I empower someone how to lose it, they don’t have such the mental stress of gaining it in the first place, so they’re kind of like the tenants. I keep it simple. If you’re, I don’t train professional athletes. I show normal people, because I am a normal person.

1:31:58 I train normal people in the gym for years, and when I see people getting really excited about doing burpees in their front room, I’m like, this is insanity. Maybe one percent of people in fitness, like, doing this. Let’s not paint a narrative that this is the best thing ever. This is easily marketable. I say jumping around in front room, everyone’s got a front room.

1:32:17 The second I say let’s go do a back squat, suddenly we alienate 90 of the country that have never done a back squat. So it’s hard, it takes time, it means I have to educate people, which is difficult. It means that I can’t sell everyone the same PDF, which is profitable. It means that everything is harder, but I find it more rewarding. And you petitioned Men’s Health magazine to put some more realistic bodies on their covers, besides the ones we always see there, which are these probably etched-out eight packs and low body fat things.

1:32:48 Why did you do that? Because I don’t see that as a metric for success that everyone can accomplish. I don’t even like the word dad bod. People go, “Oh, dad bod.” I’m like, “What?

1:32:59 So you think that’s how a dad should look, because he’s now trying to look after children, and there’s other people in his life more important than him, and you’re going to use that as a derogatory term?” And this is where the double standards come in a bit. Girls like, “Oh, he’s got a dad bod.” Well, there’s a lot to unpack there, and it’s not, you know, a great way to explain things, but I think that so many people will look at that and see how unrealistic it is, that they might not even try.

1:33:24 Similarly, to if we all held in high regard being a billionaire, you know, you’d have someone that makes quarter of a million pounds a year going, oh, I’m never going to get there. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. So I think that we should set the metrics for success, because so many men and women that I’ve worked with, when I’ve taken that barrier from Men’s Health cover and gone, “That’s a 10 out of 10,” why do we aim to get at a six? Trust me on this, when you get to the six, you’ll be a lot happier.

1:33:47 You feel a lot better. You feel everything in your life will improve. They go, actually I could do that, and sometimes I’m very open with the fact that I partnered with UKG. I was in Europe a couple months ago. I was like, guys, I put on eight kilograms.

1:33:58 I’m a PT. I feel like a f***ing fat fraud, but I’m still gonna wear speedos when I go swimming in the ocean, and people are like you know what, this is the guy that could potentially help me. Whereas, you know, I’m not gonna have 15 cups of coffee and pretend I’m excited for jumping around my front room. Yeah, no, I get that. So those bodies are unrealistic, so people don’t try, but they can still enjoy their body workout, get all these gains, and get close to that.

1:34:21 And then if they get close to that and they really want to go for that, they can. And then you teach them the calorie deficit, which is the only thing they need to know. And similarly to if you sat in front of me and said, “I need to lose 10 kilograms,” I’d say, let’s lose one. Let’s just lose one, and then once you’ve done that we’ll look for another. The barriers people put up, they, people go, “I want to be, I want to get a six-pack for holiday,” I’m like, f***, oh, that’s like saying you want your business to be listed on the, you know, stock exchange or something.

1:34:48 I’m like, let’s do the basics, one step at a time. Let’s lose that one kilogram, call then that person is so driven with the success and the validation of getting these small wins that before they even look up from the blinkered mentality that they had, they’re there. Similarly, with me, me and my manager, who’s outside for years, every time I grew by a thousand followers, we’d message each other first to be like, we just f***ing grew by a thousand followers, and we’ve done this for years, to the point I’d wake up and he would have done it in the middle of the night, and I’d be like, you f***ing broke, beat me to it.

1:35:18 And then before we knew it, we were a million followers, and we kind of look at each other like, whoa, we never aimed for this. We actually just aimed for the next echelon to get to, which was a thousand followers. Like I said, at 10,000 I thought I’d made it. So just little wins, no wins, calorie counting or not counting, calorie deficit. Do you find that sometimes your clients struggle with being honest about the calories?

1:35:42 Like they’re like, “Oh, James, I did. I only ate the piece of chicken and then this.” When you look at him and you’re like, you clearly didn’t. Is it hard for sometimes people to be honest with themselves about what they’re actually eating? The toughest thing is the misinformation that they’re exposed to, where people go, “Oh, calories don’t count,” or people go, “Oh, you might be under eating, that’s why you’re gaining weight,” and they know yeah, maybe I am under eating.

1:36:03 But then this is where I have to take that rugby coach mentality and go, if you’re in a calorie deficit and you’re not losing weight, you’re probably not in a calorie deficit. Then people, you know, they some of them react badly to that, but no one has to join my program or use my coaching, but some people do need that. But again, I just say to them, I have a calculator online. I go, hey, use that. You can use it for free.

1:36:23 Never pay me. They go, “What if it doesn’t work? I’ve used your calculations and three weeks, nothing’s happened.” I’m like, “Okay, take off 10,” and they’re like, “Why?” But it’s not working with what you’re doing.

1:36:35 You’re not losing weight. You’re not in that deficit. Try reducing by ten percent.” I’ll buy my friends say 1600 is too low. “I’m not your f***ing friends.

1:36:43 You’ve said that the amount you’re on isn’t working. I’m saying reduce by 10 percent. I don’t think you’re going to keel over or you’re going to pass out, because you just told me that 10 above that amount did not accrue weight loss.” Yeah, so, like, even, like, little things like that, they realize the onus isn’t on me. I can just say straight back to them, “Reduce by 10 until it works,” and then suddenly they’ve, they can’t use any more excuses.

1:37:06 Yeah, it’s so simple. There’s nowhere to go except eat less. There’s no, like, is it the right keto oil? Was it the right protein? Was it the right intermittent fast?

1:37:16 You’re just like, drop it by 10. And then once that conversation happens, there are other things like, okay, let’s look at your step count, because studies have shown over the years that when we diet, people, their non-exercise activity thermogenesis, big words, reduces. So when you diet, people, especially females, they move a lot less, they’re more inclined to take the elevator, and I’m like, Sharon, you’ve been in deficit three days, you stopped taking the stairs?

1:37:39 Oh, but I’m on a diet. No, I need you to keep doing those things to offset it, so we can keep your activity high. Then they’re learning, and these are things they’re going to take away with them, where they stop using my program a year later, why is my weight loss stopped? Oh, because I’m down to 3,000 steps a day. So it’s giving people the information to understand these things that really benefits them in the long term.

1:37:59 Okay, you’re selling out Sydney Opera House, Hammersmith Apollo. Here I mean, there are thousands of thousands of people coming to see you. I can’t believe you’re that funny. When people go to see you, like, what do you make of this phenomenon? Are there people like you that are doing this well?

1:38:14 I realized at some point that I was never going to be in the best shape. I was never going to be the most experienced. I was never going to be the most muscular, but I found an ability to take I’d listen to a podcast on caffeine for an hour, bored out my mind, but I’ll be excited because I can use that knowledge in maybe a year’s time, and do it in an educative way, where people need to be educated on social media. So I even went down, I learned a lot about the female menstrual cycle to help women, but when I presented the talk, I spoke to the guys in the crowd.

1:38:46 So I was like, hey guys, this is the part of the mental cycle you think is bad. It’s actually quite good, and then I’d say, like, you know, this is ovulation. This is where the most fertile, and you know, they lift their best weights, but you know, and I was almost like crude, but the women are laughing, so they’re like, oh my god, that’s my cycle, but the guys never really understood, and I’d be like, you know, this is when they’re going to be cranky. So if you’ve got a lads trip, be careful, so I was not misogynistic with it, but I could take it out of context and actually have some laughs with it, where I’m educating the guys on a menstrual cycle while the girlfriends are laughing, because they go, oh my god, that’s so true, but it’s almost my way.

1:39:18 The only thing I don’t want to do is bore someone, okay, or I’ll try and take a very salient point from the book, then use a personal anecdote, and in my last talk I used my dad as an example of something, how the values between us and our parents can be the same, but the world is a completely different place. And in that I joke about how, someone asked me, I get asked a lot, what my death row meal would be, and I go, don’t let me choose, because my dad has been married to my mum for 50 years, and I go to the crowd, and I go, to make this clear, my dad could have murdered someone, got caught, gone to jail, came out, murdered someone again, gone to jail, got caught, came out. That’s how long he’s been with my mum, and he doesn’t get to pick us for dinner, so there’s no way we should be letting inmates pick their last meal.

1:40:04 And that’s, like, you know, I’m just taking, making fun of that, and then I’m like, okay, into a values bit, so I like to almost, like, jab cross with something that’s informative, then bring it out of context and say something funny, which I suppose in some respects is quite unique, but it’s good because I like to think people don’t expect me to be funny. Okay, whereas if I go out as a comedian, then you know that joke kind of sucked, and if a joke bombs, I’m like, quick, get an informative slide out, but they’re clearly showing up to see you, so they find your information important to them, and you, they find you entertaining, and I would like to imagine that as a PT if I put knowledge in someone’s mind, I could see them in a year and they would physically change.

1:40:50 Then with the second, workers joking as about “Not a Life Coach,” they could come back in a year’s time to me. To the naked eye they could look the same. They might not have dropped fat, gained muscle, whatever, but they could be a completely different person that now does a job they enjoy, or whatever. With the third book, I get excited by the fact that I see that person a year from now, and they go, “I’ve got the confidence, leaving my partner. I had the confidence to start a business.

1:41:12 I had the confidence to chat the girl in HR that I found really attractive when I’m married, or whatever it is.” So it always excites me that I can plant information in someone’s mind, see them a year later and have changed the course of their life. So I think that it wasn’t like I just popped up a show and I was like, right, we’re selling out this. We did a tour in 2018 where I’d go to Maidstone, they’d be like, 55 people in a theater, and three would leave when I first said the word f***, and you know, so we did that, we lost money on tours, and what we’ve always kind of thought is, if I can get one person to come to an event next year, they’ll come back with two people.

1:41:51 Right, right, yeah. People always forget that there’s, when you see a comedian in front of 10,000 people, they were the same one that did the show in front of three people, and one was on their phone and one left. It’s like you know, I’ve had shows like that where I go, and it’s like, all right, guess what? You gotta suck it up and make sure it’s the greatest show that those two people have ever seen. Right, exactly.

1:42:10 That’s how you pay your dues. You know, you just brought us to maybe, like, this third part of your IP. We talked about confidence. We talked about diet and fitness and health, but this whole kind of life side of it is something you talk a lot about, even the decision you made to, you know, stop going down this corporate path to take this job as a PT, which all your mates are like, this is, isn’t going anywhere. Most people can’t ever make that change.

1:42:32 Everybody’s a PT. It’s not going to do anything. And also how you’ve noticed in a lot of your clients that their life choices are part of the reason they can’t stick to their diet choices, whether you said before it’s that relationship or that job or things in their life that are making them happy. So like, what are some of the things you like to remind people of as far as, like, career choices and then career changes, and even, like, relationships? We talked a little bit about the sunk cost fallacy with those things, but like, what are some of your thoughts there?

1:43:01 There are things you can share with people. So look at you and think, wow, I would love to make a change like that. So you could still be in recruiting right now. If we have, if we look at our life, we have where we work, who we’re in a relationship with, and then a bit of spare time there. And I feel that if people don’t get something rewarding or pleasurable from their work and their relationship, I’m not surprised they’re devouring three and a half thousand, four thousand calories a day.

1:43:29 Now restricting that and leaving in the relationship that doesn’t serve them, the job that doesn’t serve them, they’ve now just removed the only thing that was bringing them happiness on a daily basis. So the second book was like a precursor to that. And I was earning really good money in recruitment, but I hated it, and people even said to me when I started, they go, you’re earning good money but you hate it. And as a 21-year-old, I was like, whatever, and then I earned good money and I hated it, and when I decided to be a personal trainer, I just wanted a job I’d be happy with.

1:43:55 And when I was happy in my work life and I was less stressed, I wasn’t having to appease a boss. Suddenly the training, the eating well, everything else, reading a book was so much easier because I was happy with what I was doing. Also, I feel that people’s creativity is massively shunned in the early part of their career. No one wants you to be creative when you’re 21. I didn’t realize I’m actually quite a creative person.

1:44:19 I had no idea until I was maybe 25, 26, so I felt like a little bit trapped, a little bit suffocated that whole time, and I realized that when I started as a PT I was probably making 20-25,000 pounds a year, but I was happy, and I realized, oh my god, I’m wealthier than I was making 50,000 pounds a year in a suit going into meetings, pretending I cared about who they were hiring. All I cared about was my commission, and I realized that I was extrinsically rewarded in recruitment, because I was doing it to earn money, and I was earning money so I wouldn’t run out of money, whereas when I was a personal trainer, I was intrinsically rewarded, because I was enjoying it and I was enjoying seeing people do well with it. So people, I think, need to appreciate that, although the biases of pessimism buyers lost their version, all these things play into it.

1:45:05 If you could be happier earning slightly less money, that’s a good deal, but society wouldn’t ever get you to think of it like that. In your relationship, you’ve got to make sure that you’re not remaining invested just to not let previous time go to waste, because that is something that takes many relationships and marriages to the grave, and if people can appreciate when they’ve got these fallacies in their mind that are making these decisions, it won’t always be comfortable, but it’s important that you put your happiness first, because it’s a currency we don’t talk about enough. And it’s a currency that inflates, deflates.

1:45:36 You get interest on over time. All of these things, it’s a real currency that really exists, and people don’t give it enough importance in their lives, and whoever’s rich with the currency of happiness is gonna probably have a better time living, training, eating, than someone that has all the money in the world and the job tight or in the nice car that doesn’t have happiness. And I think, as me, as a trainer, I was personal training people to get them happier.

1:46:02 I was also giving them life advice to make them happier, and I like to think now that I’m giving them tools to make them more confident, so they can be happier, because I don’t think people actually want to be fit, or they want to be, you know, or need a life coach. I don’t actually think they want to be confident. I think ultimately they want to be happier with the choices they make, the lifestyle they live, and the, you know, paying into their health.

1:46:22 They do with fitness. Yeah, people just kind of want to be whole. You know, it’s interesting how you say clients would come and say, I want this, this, and this, and you’re like, no, but what do you really want? And I used to work in the city, and I would take out these traders to these, like, hot restaurants like Nobu, and all these places, and at the end of dinner I’d always say, why are you doing this? They’d be like, oh, for the money.

1:46:42 Okay, why are you doing it? I’m gonna buy a Lambo. Okay, why do you want to do that? And it would all come down to, I want to show my dad his son’s not a loser. I want to show those kids in school who teased me that I made it.

1:46:55 I wanna, it was always something deeper that people wanted, but they sometimes dress it up for other things. You know, I want the money, I want the car, I wanted this and that, but like, ultimately they were trying to find some happiness or some peace. And if you can deconstruct that and you can find out what you really want, because I used to have wealthy clients who couldn’t understand why I was so happy. They were like, you’re driving, you’re driving a shitty Polo.

1:47:19 I was, they were like, they were like, you’re a great PT. They were like, you earned more than most PTs in this gym. You shouldn’t have to put your key in the door to open it at 25 years old. They were like, you should have a nice car. And to me they were, they were confused.

1:47:33 They’re like, how can you be happy? And it was because I had enough. I had enough then. I had enough now. And I think that that’s like a really important currency that people need to think about when designing, because we are the designers of our life.

1:47:44 People also push that to the back, and they think other people or they let other people design it for them. I know, such an important point. I had some couple on my show that named the icons many years ago, and they were all about designing their life. Very few people designed their life. They usually just, their life just kind of happens, probably to the design of the society somehow, but they were like, no, this is what I want, and this is what I’m gonna do to where I can have this thing.

1:48:09 And I love how you say that you have enough. That’s a great place. It’s a great place to be creative from as well, which means you’re making decisions that make you happy, not make you get paid or make you get x, y, and zed. It makes you a better creator when you have enough. So, like, we get, we joke about this as well, because as I’ve been in that position for so long, no one can understand why I’ve never done a paid post.

1:48:33 And I was like, I just, I just don’t want to, and people are like, you’re crazy. It’s like good money to promote something. I was like, I don’t really want to, because you’re giving me cash to do something I don’t want to do, and I wouldn’t have accepted that when I was 25 on the gym floor if someone was an a**hole. I wouldn’t have taken their money to do the session, so I’m happy that I can keep those values going. So important.

1:48:53 Five years from now, 2027, what’s James doing? Hopefully a black belt. Okay, hopefully a family man. Okay, okay, hopefully a resident in Australia. Okay, they’re the three things.

1:49:06 How many more books I don’t know. How many more Instagram followers? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe one more book, one thousand more Instagram followers. Come on, no, I honestly don’t know.

1:49:18 It’s not really a metric that’s massively important to me, like, the one million was, but it was very hollow victory. It was a weird one, funny isn’t it? And like, yeah, I think that for me just if I can continue what I’m doing now, that’s great, and I mean, I want to wake up feeling how I’m waking up now, probably a bit more sleep deprived, if I’m a farming man. Okay, all right, fascinating. A couple more questions about you.

1:49:42 Best day of your life and worst day of your life Worst day of my life, which isn’t even a bad one, was where I was struggling to build a PC business in Sydney, and it was actually, actually the same day. It was the best day, because it was the day I decided I was going to put everything I had into going online. I bought a whiteboard, some felt tips, and a tripod, and that was a definitive moment in my life, but it was also the only time in my life I felt like the biggest failure.

1:50:09 So worst moment of my life, about 12 p.m. Best moments, probably about, what, midday. The best moment was probably three hours afterwards, when I did something about it. I marched home from the gym, put up this whiteboard again. My housemate was like, what have you done with this wall?

1:50:24 I put up a whiteboard on the wall, and I was like, I’m going to go live at 3 p.m., which was 6 a.m. UK time. I’m going to rant about something to build my business. And then boom, yeah, then boom, then it all opened up. Can you imagine if you didn’t do that?

1:50:39 It haunts me all the time, thinking about it. Where would you be? Still training? Yeah, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, but I probably have come back home a lot earlier. And this is, again, why I’m so obsessed about making people make these tiny decisions, because if that book just changes one person’s decision in one month’s time, but that decision was to put the whiteboard up and to go for it, then that would drastically change the trajectory of their life.

1:51:03 Right, okay, so you’re trying to make that one person make the one decision. It’s a great way to make content as well, just focus on that one person. A couple more questions. If you were to pick up the phone and ring up the 20-year-old James and give that young man some advice based on everything you know now, what would you tell them? Keep going.

1:51:22 Be it just keep going, like it’d be very short, very sweet, no regrets, nothing. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and I think that would motivate me as a 20-year-old as well. Okay, would you have not kept going then, or were you going to keep going anyways? Well, this is that whole, like, paradox of if you could go back in time, but were you the guy that was going to keep going, or were you still just not sure what the hell you were going to do? I was always hungry.

1:51:47 I was always hungry. I always very much appreciated the family life I was given, and it wasn’t, I always think that although I’m privileged with the family life I had, I don’t think privilege is luck. I think privilege is good long-term decisions made before me. So the reason that my dad was able to, you know, fill my car up with petrol when I was 17, that was because my dad was long-sighted with everything when he was younger, and he stayed in the same businesses and worked his way to the top.

1:52:13 It wasn’t like people were just, you know, assorted different houses and different money by the state, and he was lucky enough to get a good, good slot. So that was always in my mind, that’s why I went into corporate so early. That was because that’s what he did, but then I realized we were different people with similar values, so the drive was always there. That’s why I turned up and did laboring on building sites, knocked on doors for gas and electric, sold products in shopping centers a lot.

1:52:37 It’s fascinating when you go back through your grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather and grandmother, and think about what did they do to get you here? I’ve been thinking about that a lot these days, and man, they did some hard, hard things, you know, getting through some hard times just to get my ass here. Something I think about quite a bit, sometimes, and I always wonder if I’m ready to do those same hard things. You know, it’s definitely a motivator.

1:53:02 That’s why I think about it a lot as well. On that same note, best advice you ever received, could have come from your dad or another PT or a client or just somebody like, you know, Ryan Holiday or Seneca. This was the last chapter in my second book. Whenever I’ve asked my dad whether or not I should do something, he said, why not? You’re a long time dead.

1:53:21 He’s always reminding me I’m going to be dead for a long time, so that was probably the most definitive response I could ever get to a question, and it’s probably the same thing I’ll tell my kids in years to come. Yeah, take risk. That’s what you’re telling them. Take risks, because yeah, there’s a graveyard right here called Bun Hill graveyard, and I walk through it. I go to the gym going right after this, and I see all these dead people around, and I always ask myself, I said, what do they wish they had done?

1:53:49 You know, are they, are they thinking to themselves, I’m so glad I didn’t take that chance? You know, because then, blah, blah, blah, no, they’re dead, so they’re all thinking, man, I would have loved to have the chance to take that chance. And I’ve got a very strange fascination with graveyards also. What’s on the gravestone, like you said earlier? Is it your social media followers?

1:54:11 Is it your net worth? What’s on your obituary? Or is it your family and what you did for the community, and how you made the world a better place? Like, that’s how people remember you. I joked around with a friend and I said to him, if we ever find out we’re gonna die, or we’re gonna get really short notice, like you’ve got a month to live, we have to say the words out loud.

1:54:31 “Fair play, fair play,” that was it, and he goes, if you can’t say “fair play” out confidently with your family around your deathbed, or whatever, then you didn’t live life right. So I’d probably say on the grave, on the tombstone, “Fair play.” That’s good, and that also means you have to be doing the things you need to do now, because you could get that news a week from now. Exactly right, and that’s kind of the way you’ve led your life. It’s not like I’m going to do this job for 40 years so I can retire.

1:54:56 It’s like it could be up at any moment in time, and you have to be able to say fair play, because I, I did it. I did, I did it right, and you want to be able to say that at any time. Right, yeah. You know, you know, portal always said meditate on your death every day. I think he’s talking about things like that.

1:55:12 You know, I think it’s important. Yeah. Last part of that question to that 20-year-old, this listening, what’s the best advice you can give them? Whatever you need to do, do it every day. Five times a week versus every day, I think every day is better, three times a week versus every day.

1:55:30 Do it. You can never do these things too frequently. Successful habits, because it shouldn’t be a weekday thing. It should be an everyday thing. So that would be the best bit of advice.

1:55:41 If you’re not doing it every day, you’re not really doing it. It’s good advice, man. What about the weekend, when you’re supposed to get drunk and relax? What’s the weekend? Yeah, do you love it?

1:55:49 If you love your job, it doesn’t end on Friday. What’s a bank holiday, man? That’s what I want to know. They always surprised me. James, really enjoyed sitting down with you.

1:55:59 I can now see why you command these audiences, because you’re very real, and it shines through, and I think people crave it. A bit like Andrew Tate, they create the real, they crave the realness, you know, and I appreciate you bringing it and not bringing whatever the front room version of, and I think that the future is going to be surrounded by real people. You know, take Elon Musk or something. He just gives it to you straight, and I think people really crave that.

1:56:24 So I think you’re going to be super successful, and and I look forward to watching you do more stuff in the next few years. Thank you very much for having me. Dude, my pleasure, man. All right, all the best. Cheers.

1:56:37 Cool, man, thank you. We’re out. See you next time. Take care, you