Cancel Culture, Sobriety & Identity Change | Modern Wisdom Podcast 313

... the smartest minds on the planet have had most of their time taken up arguing about whether men are men and women are women over the last few years. Like, **** me, if that's not the way to send our civilization back a couple of generations in terms of the development of where it could be... You know I said about like, imagine the person that you could be if you went sober for six months? Like, imagine the civilization we could have if we stopped debating stupid **** for a decade.

Cool. So look, before we begin, this is going to be an absolute roller coaster because I like to pride myself, uh, with having a bit of a narrative when it comes to the guests I speak to. We kind of start in the early days, move through to what they're currently doing. It almost feels like there's a nice story there. But I've listened to 250, if not more, of your podcasts, so I feel like I know far too much to have a narrative here. So before we begin, just prior warning, this is going to jump from one topic to another really quite quickly. But where I want to begin is actually how I discovered you, because I discovered you entirely by accident in a place that I never thought I would discover the content that you produce, which is on a video about Love Island. There I was in our office back in Cardiff, typed into YouTube "behind the scenes Love Island" and there was this video that had just recently been published of you and two guys sat on a sofa talking about Love Island. And I clicked on it and truthfully I thought I'd stayed for about four minutes. I thought, "For fuck's sake, one of these- another one of these guys just trying to milk his attention." Um, but actually what I found was the complete opposite. So I clicked onto your channel, I think I watched a video of Don McGregor and a couple of others, and I realized that you were actually the exact opposite to every stereotype I had created about you in my mind, right? You are the ex Love Island club promoter with a six-pack and a blue tick. And I thought, "Fuck's sake." But actually, you're this incredibly, uh, curious person who uses your platform not to try and sell booty, but actually just to have conversations, right? And so in the midst of living in all of those stereotypes that I just described, when was it you realized that you weren't that guy?

That's a good question. I didn't quite have an existential crisis on Love Island, but it certainly catapulted me toward one. Um, I spent a lot of time with people who genuinely are the person I thought I was, these guys with endless charisma that are built to be party boys, and that's the role that I thought I was playing, but it didn't necessarily turn out that way, and when I was given this fatal dose of contrast, I had to live with them, right, for three weeks. And I just realized, right, that's not me. It was a fortunate time. Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro, everybody was coalescing. It was about a year before Bill C-16, Jordan Peterson's thing, it's two years before Evergreen State College for Bret Weinstein, and there's just this whole slew of mindful content coming out. So I jumped into that and thankfully managed to pull my head back above the parapet, didn't drown, uh, in introspection and self-reflection, and then, yeah, here we are.