Raccoon Wars, Lindsay Clancy, NFL Scammers & Past Crimes - Matt McCusker

People of the UK and Ireland, if you've listened to Modern Wisdom for a while but haven't seen me live, it isn't just a podcast on stage where you can finally see my legs. It's a show I've spent over a year building specifically for a live audience, with stories I've never told before, ideas I've deliberately saved for the stage, audience confessions, and a Q&A where I try to solve your biggest problems. Dublin has already sold out and the other cities aren't far behind, so head to chriswilliamson.com if you want tickets.

I'm in a battle with raccoons at the moment.

Where?

My backyard. It's just me versus raccoons right now.

They go on your roof. I've got this nice comfy couch thing outside that you can lie on, and they've just wrecked it — every single night they come in and wreck it. They also decided to tear up one of my Crocs. I'd left a pair outside, which, honestly, might have done me a fashion favor.

I almost fought the urge to wear Crocs here today.

You're a Crocs guy? I love Crocs. But anyway, I'm actually at war with these raccoons. It feels very demoralizing, losing a war of wits with an animal that survives exclusively on garbage — that's what's defeated me. I haven't been able to get rid of them.

You've got to trap them. Get a professional — they'll trap them and just release them somewhere else. You don't have to drown them or anything.

I can't do that. I kind of love raccoons, but they destroyed my watermelons. I was growing them over the summer, had one big watermelon forming, and I woke up one morning and the raccoon had just torn it to shreds.

That was like my Croc, except I hadn't gotten to grow it yet. I was pissed, but I do still kind of love raccoons.

I can't believe Austin allows you to grow watermelon. I don't know where I thought watermelons grew, but I assumed the climate had to be way more exotic.

No, you can grow watermelon here. It's a short season — you have to start early, otherwise they get burned out in the sun.

Otherwise the raccoons come and get it.

Yeah, I've got to put it behind the fence this time.

I keep imagining what it would be like to be in a fight with those raccoons. They've got claws, so I'd look like a lunatic — one Croc on, because they took the other one, wielding a broomstick for self-defense. Like one of those guys in World War I sent over the top with a bugle and a sandwich.

My neighbor used to have raccoons for pets — two raccoons in a cage. Remember Urkel cereal? From Family Matters, the show with Carl Winslow — Urkel, the nerd character. He had his own line of cereal for a while. My neighbor who lived behind me would feed the raccoons Urkel cereal. They ate it in the cage for a while, and apparently it's illegal to keep them as pets.

The American desire to turn anything into a legitimate commercial opportunity.

What year was this?

Back in 1991, Steve Urkel got his own cereal. Urkel-Os were basically strawberry and banana flavored Froot Loops. I just remember seeing Urkel cereal next to a raccoon cage and thinking, "Damn, my neighbor's raccoons eat Urkel cereal." I was a real little boy, and I just stored that fact away in my head. I break it out anytime raccoons come up: "Oh, they actually love Urkel cereal."

My go-to raccoon fact is Urkel cereal.

Imagine you're already entrapped, your life is in a cage, and the next thing that happens is you have to eat cereal for the rest of your life. Banana-flavored cereal sounds horrible — fake banana is awful, the worst thing.

Fake banana is polarizing. I love banana Runts.

We're doing this America-versus-British thing — Runts are just a hard candy shaped like real fruit.

When I was growing up, everyone would say, "Dude, get those away from me." I actually liked the banana Runts, so I would trade up all the time and just end up with a ton of them, because you get them in a variety pack. Every little fruit comes in there, and everyone would go, "Oh, it's the banana ones," and I'd be like, "Bro, let's go — hit me." I'd take the watermelon, take the strawberry, take the cherry.

I have a story for everything, dude. You want to talk about banana flavoring? We can talk banana flavoring.

I want to teach you about some British stuff. Do you know who Francis Bourgeois is? He's a new guy who came up after The Grand Tour — that thing Jeremy Clarkson did on Amazon about cars — became a train guy, a trainspotter. Just watch this video.

In the clip, he says he's about to see the largest steam locomotive in the world: "I've waited my whole life to see 4014 Big Boy in action. So today is a very important day." With crowds lining the tracks, there's an unexpected arrival before the main event — another locomotive, 21. He snorts at it on every video. Then his phone dies at the crucial moment and he has to grab Amy's phone, which fortunately has a camera. "A dream come true."

This was in Pennsylvania, I think. It was really hot that day, and a lot of the guys working there passed out. My friends were telling me about it — people standing in the field passed out while waiting for Big Boy to come.

Meanwhile, Francis Bourgeois managed to live the dream. I told my friend, if I was there with my kid and they passed out waiting for a train, I would just step over them and walk away — "I'm out of here, man, I'm not doing this."

Trainspotting is odd, but it's a very particular archetype. There's a type of white person that only exists in America, and there's also a type that only exists in England — a category I don't think you get in America in the same way.

Oh, we have trainspotters here too. But they present differently. Our American trainspotters are probably a little more quiet — they kind of stand there and just watch. That guy was pretty talkative.

I have no fear that Francis Bourgeois is going to become a future school shooter. But if I made his American equivalent — "Frank Bougie" — I'd say watch him. You'd want to keep an eye on the internet history for sure.

I can't believe people passed out. When I heard it, I laughed for like ten straight minutes — a field full of children just fell out waiting for a train. It was the kids, yeah — it was young ones, it just got hot. Not all of them, but enough went down that it was a bit of a problem. Some of them missed Big Boy.

If your kid passes out, it's kind of easy, because you know they're not going to move. They're just going to stay in that location. You put a little cool pack on them, go see Big Boy, and come back. That's what happened — they went down, Big Boy went right by, and they came back like, "What? What happened?" They just teleported beyond Big Boy. You just have to be like, "Yeah, you saw it, man. He's great, I promise." Like the child's memory was working.

There are basically two categories of stereotypical British person. One is Francis Bourgeois. The other one — you may not have seen British people going Bosh on the internet. This is a guy called Big John, and he does takeaway reviews. In the clip he orders: "Can I have two pie, one mash, twice, please?" So he's kind of a food reviewer, I guess.

Pies. And Matt, don't say that. Don't do that. There's two colors on that plate.

No. No eels today. The eels can save.

He's being asked if he wants eels, and he declines. Someone identifies the dish as pie and mash — "the food of my people" — and they sort out who's taking which plate.

Then the seasoning ritual: turn your pies over, add chili vinegar — there are chilies in it — all over the pies, all over the liquor, all over the mash, plus a dash of salt. With that done, he's ready to dig in.

One person notes they love the idea of eating with just a spoon and fork, since the knife is totally irrelevant here.

That leads into a conversation about English food. One speaker has an English friend who sends pictures of the classic British breakfast, and his reaction is "ew." Asked what he doesn't like about it, he says: the sausage, tomatoes, and beans. For him it should just be bacon, potatoes, and eggs — no beans, no tomatoes. He'll "stand on business" about the beans: seeing them first thing in the morning isn't appetizing.

Another counters that beans first thing in the morning mean you're farting all day — which someone calls a power move. The rebuttal: you've loaded the magazine for the remainder of the day, you're ready all day, and by the time you go to bed they're out, so you're not farting in bed. That's not bad.

The first speaker says he's more of a raccoon when it comes to farting — nocturnal, all night. He admits it's terrible and actually concerning: usually it's one day a week, but he's been on a four-day stretch and realizes he needs to change something now.

Someone mentions there are machine-like apps for sleep.

The conversation turns to sleep-tracking apps that record noises or movement. One host says he'd love to see the other's recordings, since they'd be full of snoring, rustling, or "just straight ripping." The apps work by staying silent during ambient noise and only turning on the recorder to work out whether you're snoring or talking in your sleep. "I might have to get that," comes the response, along with the idea of making a compilation of all your favorite farts — the nighttime ones would be awesome.

Missing your own fart while you're asleep, one of them explains, is like being a child who passes out while watching a movie: "I missed it." That, he says, was the entire reason for eating beans at night — all to waste, since he wasn't even there for it. "My mom got to see it or whatever. The wife got to see it. She was a part of it."

Waking a Partner by Smell

Asked whether he has ever woken a woman out of sleep by farting in bed, both admit they have. "It's not a good feeling. There is a level of shame and pride. It's equal parts shame and pride." But you also think, "That's a horrible way to wake up," and apologize.

One host draws a distinction: not waking by audio, but wake by smell — which he calls pretty devastating. His partner was in such a deep sleep that she forgot the whole incident, and he got off scot-free for about four days. Eventually he brought it up himself: she said, "Holy [__], I forgot about that," then, "Ew, I do remember that. That was gross." He admitted to the crime because it was bothering him — "I wanted my penance. I can't get away with that. I wanted to atone, but I needed her to remember."

The other host reads a motive into the confession: wanting her to recognize the power, in case he needs to hold it over her in future. The confessor compares himself to a man who kills someone and can't live with it: "I got away with it, and I was like, I got to go to the authorities. I got to turn myself in." For two days he told everyone he knew about it before finally telling her.

Groaning Into Consciousness

Asked what it looks like when someone is woken by a noxious smell, he describes it: eyes still closed, a groan — "groaning into consciousness" — then going back under. "It's like coming into hell, and then you just go back under." He recalls thinking, "That was the craziest thing I've ever seen... I'm in so much trouble when I wake."

He clarifies it was hopefully a one-off. The other host thought he meant waking by sound — you can rip one loud enough — but the slow smell version raises the question of how many breaths it takes: the first one hits, and you hope that when it's exhaled it doesn't get hit again. He estimates it's probably a two-breath alarm.

One host offers a theory, admitting he could be wrong: the amygdala is really close to where smells are processed, so they're linked with threat — which is why she was terrified immediately. "Swear to God."

I went to the PBR and saw Shane at the bull riding event, which is strange because it's about as American as you can get.

But it's an arena full of people hoping somebody gets injured by an animal that weighs a few thousand pounds. It's a very strange sport to watch, and there's not a massive amount of racial diversity in the audience. Then Nelly played, so he kind of offset it toward the end. PBR was crazy — a very interesting experience.

I'd only ever watched it on TV, but I like bull riding compared to bull fighting. Bull fighting seems like one of the meanest sports. I just learned they pre-stab the bulls before you even fight them — like that scene in Gladiator where they shiv the fighter before he goes out. They just poke him a couple of times so he's weaker.

I also found out the reason the capes — the red rag to a bull thing — are red isn't that bulls see red and get angry. It's to hide the blood as the bulls run past, because a white sheet would just be marked with loads of bull blood and look horrible. That makes sense given they've been pre-stabbed.

My whole life I thought the opposite. I've been around bulls a couple of times and I'd always scan and think, "Bro, I hope I'm not wearing any red — they're going to charge me."

The Bull Behind the House

I actually had a bull that lived behind me. My dad and his brother bought a piece of property out in what became the suburbs of Philadelphia, but when we moved out there it was really rural — no sidewalks, nobody around. They each had a house on the plot, so I lived right next door to my cousins. Behind us was another house that they rented out to a guy who kept animals — he was the one with the raccoons in cages. He had a barn with horses, and for a while he had a bull.

We had an old apple orchard where the trees had dried up and only made crab apples. Me and my cousins would sit up in the trees and shoot this bull with a little slingshot all the time. It got so aggressive and nuts that they had to get rid of it. I was about nine years old, sitting up there tormenting it — it would just shake. They said, "We've got to get rid of that thing — PTSD from being hit by little crab apples all day long." Could you imagine being a bull that doesn't understand physics and gravity, thinking that tree is throwing apples at you, that the tree is your mortal enemy pinging you with crab apples all day?

And these were the really nice slingshots with almost a wrist brace, so you could really rip those things back — high-velocity crab apples, very hard, exploding on impact. The bull's back would be covered in welts like when you shoot someone in paintball. That thing started getting nasty and too cantankerous, so we had to get rid of it. So now I'm like, maybe they just got rid of it, but I'm pretty sure we fired that thing up, because we would just taunt it and mess with it all day.

It was really nice-natured until the CEO of the PBR showed up in the area we were in. I had no idea what was going on — I didn't know how the scoring system worked, nothing. And this guy absolutely loves bull riding, and he wrote the rules. So I was just relentlessly harassing him with questions: how does this happen, how do they train the bulls, stuff like that.

What I didn't realize is that the people who own the bulls take enormous pride in the fact that no one has ever ridden them. There's a bull called Ridin' Salty — you can apparently name them whatever you want, which is awesome — and no one's ever ridden it. It's framed as "the best rider in the world versus the hardest bull in the world," and there are these match-offs. They pair riders and bulls up, and the rider teams have coaches who know which way a bull turns, so they'll put a really good guy in the clockwise position or whatever. It's like matching fighters against other fighters, or knowing that the guy on the left wing is a bit slow when he cuts in, so you put a right-footed player on him. There are squads, training, and tactics — and I had just seen a guy holding on to a bull.

That's what I thought too. I didn't know they have teams as well.

Yeah, each city has a different team, and the city you're in gets to host the final. There's walkout music, and each guy comes out to different music. It was sick.

It sounds awesome.

It was really good.

I haven't done much classic Texas stuff, but I did take two-step dance lessons. Have you seen that before?

I've seen it.

There's this place called the Broken Wheel where you can take two-step lessons, run by an old lady. It takes a lot to astonish me, but she would apparently just grab and smack women's backsides — she'd call someone out to dance and say things like "God, your ass is flatter than cardboard." It was insane. And she'd throw in racist remarks too, just to flavor it up. I was sitting there thinking, bro, this is insane, and everyone else was like, "Ah, this is cute, I guess."

There's a level of bigotry where, once people get beyond a certain age, they just get a pass for all of it.

Yeah, you have to let this lady cook. A lot of Asian tourists came, and she was having a field day with them — "There's nothing there for me to grab. You have no ass on you. Look at where you're from, Vietnam. Get out of the way."

She thinks the war's still going.

It was wild, but it was fun to see, and it kind of brings everyone down to earth — you just let her do her thing.

That's what being British is like, actually — that level of insulting everyone. Were you any good? Is it hard?

I was all right. It's pretty easy, honestly — easy to do, that is. But once you have thirty people on the dance floor, you don't know which way anyone's going. And there are people who are actually really, really good at it, whipping partners around and throwing them, and you realize you're just in their way.

It's also very important that you lead your partner. I'm horrible at dancing, so I'm stepping on her feet the whole time while insisting, "Actually, I'm in charge. Be quiet. Don't move."

So the lady grabbing asses also said "I'm in charge."

It was fun, though. I'd definitely go back — it's a fun night, especially if you go stag, because the ratio is in your favor. A lot of women go, but usually as a girls' group thing, and you need a male partner.

It's hard to peel a woman off from a group of her friends, though.

In a formalized dance setting, it's as easy as it gets, because she has legitimacy to leave her friends, at least for a bit. There's also that inner feminine rivalry: whoever you ask to dance, it's "oh cool — not them," because of the ratio. It throws everything into an upside-down world where you're now the commodity — you get to say "my lady."

I was watching all this with my wife, thinking, this is great. It is going to be hard, though, if you're not good at dancing: you need to lead, navigate the traffic of the rest of the room, lay down some game at the same time, and then get your phone out — "Can you do the thing, the nudgy thing, take your number?" — before spinning her around.

Yeah, you have to go a couple of times. There are a lot of old men who go there who are just experts at it — they twirl young women around for two hours at a time. And the instructor kind of feeds them over: "If you see Dale, he'll spin you around. Don't be shy." She kind of hands them over to him. It's pretty wild.

It sounds like it's going to be a Netflix documentary in a few years. It's like one of those ashrams where some yogi develops a new type of yoga and all his disciples are the ones feeding in the new followers. Like the Nexium cult — the guy was branding women. It was a cult here in America; I don't even really know what he did, he just had this cult. But the thing he did that was genius — obviously he's a cult leader sleeping with all the women in the cult, and there were married couples — was that he instituted a rule where everybody has to kiss on the lips when they greet each other. That way he could kiss every girl on the lips and no one would realize he was sleeping with all of them. It was an ingenious move.

What's interesting is that he decided to brand the women in the cult as opposed to just using crab apples in a slingshot — he could have gotten them from way further away. If he got really good, he could have written something on the side of the apple.

He got in trouble for sex trafficking. Whenever you move a woman across state lines to have sex with her, that's when it becomes a federal issue — under false pretenses, that's the key term. Wasn't there a big recent case about trafficking women across state lines? Epstein or Diddy?

It was Diddy. I don't know if he actually got charged with sex trafficking, but that was the charge they were trying to run — crossing state lines under false pretenses.

But what's the issue with the state lines thing? So under false pretenses within the state is fine? If you're in Texas, you can trick Texas women, but if you trick a woman into crossing into Oklahoma, you're going to jail. It's a very vague thing. It's what people get in trouble for: if you lure someone here saying "I have a job for you," they travel, and then you brand them and keep them as a slave in your basement, you get in super big trouble — double trouble for making them cross state lines. And worst of all, he made them go to Oklahoma.

It's a very weird rule. It's like trying to work out why sex trafficking is so bad dot dot dot across state lines. Within state lines it's not great either. It's just one of those extra charges, an enhancement they toss on you — like an upgrade: do you want to super-size the happy meal? But it's one of those things that's very important in these cases: if they can get you on that, that's how they get you.

One explanation from chat: crossing state lines isn't inherently considered more evil than committing sex trafficking within one state. The reason it's treated more seriously in US law is largely about jurisdiction and federal authority, not greater moral blame.

We do get higher penalties—that's what they're saying. Someone can be prosecuted for sex trafficking even if every act occurred within a single state, as long as the conduct has the required connection to interstate commerce. That's what brings the FBI in.

So if you manage to find a locally owned motel, don't use a payment processor that routes it through Delaware or something, and pay in cash, sex trafficking is just free. That seems like a loophole that needs to be closed.

Yeah, they get you for tax evasion then—where did that cash come from?

"Have you seen this DeJohn Love thing? This case that's everywhere."

"Who was that?"

"The fake football player from the 49ers."

The speaker explains he first heard about it mid-podcast: while checking his phone in the bathroom, he saw an influencer he follows post something like "thank God I didn't pay this guy—I didn't even know he wasn't a player." He wondered why the influencer had been asked for $200,000, then came back and realized it was this guy.

He was targeting men and women, especially women—he was really going for the women's money. One influencer the speaker knows, a health guy, was approached too: "Give me 200k and I'll promote your electrolytes or whatever." Apparently the scammer didn't have that many followers himself.

The case

For those who don't know: this guy pretended to be a 49ers player—a starting wide receiver. Thirty-five-year-old DeJohn Love, who federal authorities say faked an entire NFL career as a 49ers wide receiver to scam others, has been arrested and charged with defrauding over 26 women out of more than $1.3 million. Love allegedly met women through dating apps, convinced many they were in legitimate romantic relationships with him, and portrayed himself as either a wealthy NFL player or a successful real estate investor.

Fake 49ers presence, fake Instagram, fake banks and investors. He apparently had an 18-year-old friend he'd put on FaceTime as his "investment adviser."

One woman lost around $87,000 and helped him get a McLaren—qualifying for it, he made her a fake pay stub saying she earned about $50k a month. Another woman gave him $7,000 for an apartment he never got for her. Another gave him around $30,000 for a Mercedes.

"After a while, you just think like these people kind of deserve it."

"Yeah, the romance scams are really, really messed up."

The beach photos

The photos of him working out on the beach are hilarious—just a football helmet on the beach. That's the kind of thing that would give it away: "Hold on a second. I don't see..." It's presumably a memorabilia helmet. And there's another photo of him with the helmet in the passenger seat of his car: "Why is it not in your bag?"

One speaker jokes that this is karma from the bad men of the world for the Lindsey Clancy case—some dude comically thinking, "Women are getting complained about at the moment, so I'll give men something they can..."

I'm sure Clancy is the woman everyone's trying to get out of jail right now — the protesters, the "it's a mistrial" crowd. It is a mistrial. Supposedly one male juror held out for six days. It was 11–1, and that one juror said no, not murder, so it's a mistrial. She's free at the moment. Or is she on bail? Either way, with a mistrial they have to run the whole thing back — do it all again, or maybe take it up to a bigger court.

I was actually reading about this last night. I didn't realize it happened three or four years ago, and the husband has already remarried. Three years is quite a long time — not long to get over something traumatic, but I'd never even heard Lindsay Clancy's name until three weeks ago. Think about where you were three and a half years ago; that was a while back. I could be wrong, but I think he just works an office job. That would be insane.

I had a psychiatrist on earlier this week who worked in the ward she was discharged from. He knows the doctors who prescribed her all the medications and the people who managed her care. A lot of guys defaulted to "she killed her kids," but he spent an hour explaining the deep neuroscience of what happened — the pharmacology, the psychosis, how all-encompassing and totally compelling it is, how your agency is essentially taken away from you. He used the example of going to the bathroom and thinking one wipe wasn't enough — you don't even think about it, you just do it. That's what psychosis is like: you get compelled. As he was explaining it, part of me was thinking, I thought I had my position, and now you've pulled the pin on this grenade. Now I'm all conflicted again, with everyone else: how do we deal with this as a society?

Here's the thing — the whole situation sucks. I really felt bad for the dad reading about him last night; the guy just started his life over, and that sounds sad. And then there's the woman who strangled her children to death — maybe she was in psychosis. But if she had been a meth addict who got high and killed her kids, everyone would say throw the book at her. Since she's trying to get help, it's slightly different. My only problem is with people — even neuroscience types — who say free will is an illusion, that it's all genetics. If that's the case and someone does this, if they're just a lump of meat, why not just discard them? I don't think that's really her case, because it was the medication and psychosis, but still.

I think you just have to park those people forever. This isn't fair, it sucks. The thing is, she is going to be parked forever either way — the question is whether she's parked with culpability or with an excuse or reason. If it's psychosis, I think it's mandatory psychiatric commitment, reviewed every year. So there's a world where she gets out.

I think she'll only be held for a year before she gets reviewed—I could be wrong, but that's my understanding. They reassess her every year, and they could keep her forever, or she could get out. So even if it's pure psychosis, if someone can fall into that level of psychosis and it's on record, you kind of have to be careful about releasing her.

She's a distinctive looking lady as well. It's going to be very hard for her to come out even in five years time and not be recognized. Well, she's paralyzed too, right? That as well.

Honestly, this case is about as sad as it gets. Dead kids, a suicide attempt, paralysis, postpartum depression, public scrutiny, loads of women wearing pink in support—it's OJ Simpson for white women. That's what it is. It really is.

I'd love to ask the protesting ladies: what do you want to see happen here? Do you want her to live with you? Are you going to take care of this lady? Because the argument is that the state failed her, and now she's being put back into the hands of state mental care. If the state failed so badly, maybe that's not the answer—since that's where she's going back to. You've got to park her somewhere and give her the treatment. It's sad.

It's so messed up, and I had the same reaction. When I first heard about it, I thought, "Screw that lady." Then you read about it and realize, "God, that's so sad." But at the same time, once you strangle your children in the basement, all bets are off in my book. It's sad, it's messed up, there's complexity to it—but still.

The gender split in public support

What's interesting is the gender split of support for and against her. Support comes almost exclusively from women, but opposition isn't necessarily only men, because mothers split into two groups. Some mothers, especially those who've been through postpartum depression, think, "Wow, that was rough, that was really hard." Dr. K gave me the stats: about three in 10,000 women get postpartum psychosis, and of the psychosis sufferers, 5% experience homicidal ideation. That's a chunk of a chunk of a chunk—but with 60,000 births a day in the US, the law of large numbers means roughly one woman every day may have these homicidal thoughts alongside the psychosis. That means there are some women who look at the beauty and delicate nature of their children and get the total tiger-mother, mother-bear aggression of "I can't believe this would happen." Then there's another group of women who think, "I was close to feeling down and bad, I wasn't myself"—so even that group splits into two.

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It's messed up, but what I really think is that women especially are not supposed to be by themselves after they have babies. That's how people live now, but it's not what you're supposed to do. As soon as you have a kid, you should be with other moms and have a lot of people around you at all times. It's a relatively new thing for a woman to just have a kid and sit in a house alone for a year, and it's really messed up.

I asked an expert who wrote a book called Dad Brain. There's "mum brain," where you lose about 3% of your gray matter — executive function stuff, like forgetting where the keys are. But the interesting part is you actually get better at knowing things related to the kid; you're just really bad at other things, like managing your calendar or doing finances. Dads have a similar experience. She thinks the outcome is almost exclusively mediated by one question: is there support? Do you feel contained and held by your local community?

Luis Perry taught me about a practice called "laying in." It was a month-long period in the Middle Ages where a woman who had just given birth did nothing but lie in the living room, and everybody had to do things for her — be nice to her, bring her food, help her go to the bathroom, help her get washed, offer shoulder rubs, look after the baby. Everyone was kind. It was probably an infuriating amount of attention — if you were a bit of an introvert, you'd be thinking, "Okay, this has been nice, but I'd like you to leave."

Now there's no mandatory maternity leave, and people are back in a solo cubicle office before they've even physically recovered. And at work you're thinking: I have to make more than daycare costs — if I don't make as much as daycare, I might as well be at home. You're running on a treadmill: it's you versus daycare, and if you don't run fast enough, you get kicked off the back of it.

It's brutal, especially in the first two weeks. Everyone stops by at first, and then that's over and it's just you, sitting there nursing constantly. Feeding releases hormones, and you don't produce enough milk. It's kind of a nightmare, and how people go about this should really be revisited, because it's not good at all.

I think we got the 90-day maternity leave from a therapist — I think an English guy, Winnicott — who said you have to give these people at least a couple of months. He determined 90 days was the bare minimum.

Nine months mandatory.

Really? I don't think we do that here.

Nine months, and you can pick when. You could take a month before the birth and eight months after. My business partner's wife tried to take it right up to the limit — she went to a Spice Girls concert the day she was due, and gave birth the day after. They said, "Look, if we give birth while Geri Halliwell's on stage doing 'Wannabe,' that's fine." They had floor tickets, right in the middle of the stadium. That's kind of a cool story.

Like, on a Swiss ball this morning, Spice Girls tonight. Imagine being at the concert and some lady's water breaks next to you — that would be wild.

When you're with a woman who goes through the whole process of being pregnant and giving birth, it really does flip a switch in your head where you're like, "Wow, you guys can do cool stuff." Not in a bad way—I know that sounds patronizing, but it really does give you a deeper appreciation. They're champs; childbirth is terrifying.

And you watch them go through it and you're like, where was this stoicism? I've known you for three years—I've seen belly aches take you out. Now you're just like, "If I pass out, grab me." It's terrifying, unbelievable. But yeah, that completes the whole picture. You're like, "Okay, now I can see the full spectrum here."

The lady-to-Navy SEAL transition is crazy. I wonder what changes—

Asked how having kids changed him, the speaker says the main change is painfully obvious: you don't realize how self-absorbed you are, how your thoughts just bounce around about yourself all day long. It's natural, and everyone does it. Then you have a kid, and it's like another self gets planted in your brain — you're always thinking about this person while still thinking about yourself. You notice it when you're about to do something and then remember you have to do something with your kid, so you say you'll get to it later — and over time you realize you'll never get to it. You go through an inner transformation, letting certain things die off, and it feels good.

His interlocutor agrees that no one really enjoys an insane level of selfishness, and mentions a tweet: "You're not autistic. You're just spending too much time in the house on your own and it's making you weird." He adds that he doesn't think your brain is designed to think about yourself for more than thirty-something years. He had a kid in his 30s and remembers feeling he'd already played all the hits — circling the same tracks, getting kind of old — and when the kid arrived: "All right, thank God. I can just think about you now."

He brings up Jimmy Carr's line that having a child is like a surgical procedure where your own heart now lives outside your body — suddenly that's the most important thing. He believes a lot of the malaise, weird habits, and obsessions men have are just surrogate families they haven't got around to yet, and that much of it would be fixed by having a baby to look after — it would clean the barnacles off the bottom of the ship. Or maybe it would just torpedo your life because you can't afford it; he doesn't know.

The other speaker adds that he's tried a lot of things, telling himself he'd commit to this or that, and it always felt only kind of cool. With a kid, it clicks into an obvious groove: "Yes, this makes sense why I'm doing this now." It's a baked-in purpose.

Examined purely as a list of advantages and disadvantages, it's mostly disadvantages: he gets hit in the nuts constantly and gets woken up early. Kids are nut height — they don't have any concept of nuts, so they just jump, about to land on their dad, boom, right in the nuts. Your nuts are getting obliterated endlessly, you never sleep, every day you're making meals and doing stuff — and you're happy to do it, which is weird. When you lay out the deal and ask what you're getting out of it, you get repaid in small moments: last night, heading to bed, he saw that his kids had dressed the inflatable alien they won from Chuck E. Cheese in a Princess Peach dress. He looked at this alien in a princess dress and laughed for five minutes. You get little rewards from complete nonsense.

One thought experiment: given how much time I've spent in America, where TV personalities get commercialized into cereal brands — and given that dads get hit in the nuts a lot — maybe you could market a special cup designed just for dads.

That wouldn't be bad. Sports cups can be a little rigid, but even just a bit of padding would dampen the impact. Because you react in the moment as if some random guy came up and punched you in the dick — you're like, "FUCK!" and then you have to say, "Sorry guys, I'm fine." You've got to try and explain it in child language: "Does it hurt now?" "No, it's going to hurt. Hold on, give me 10 seconds." "Yeah, here it comes."

But it really did put things into perspective for me: I love my kids a lot, and every other human being is somebody's kid, so I should try to be as nice as I can to them if I can help it. Now you have something people can attack. If someone says "I hate you," I don't care. But if someone says "I hate your kids," it's "fuck you, dude." So if someone were that mean to my children — it's like do unto others as you'd have done to yourself, except your kids are like ten times that.

That goes back to your question about at what age we say a person is culpable — responsible for what they do. Sam Harris has a great thought experiment about this. Uday Hussein was Saddam Hussein's son, and he actually makes his father look like a lovely man. He was crazy ruthless: he would turn up at weddings, kill everybody except the husband, assault the wife in front of the husband, then kill the husband, then kill the wife — just because he could. I once had a guy on the podcast who had to look after him on a flight to Vegas, get him cocaine and all this stuff, while he was going around Vegas trying to act like this Middle East warlord.

Harris's example goes something like this: take maybe one of the most evil guys who's ever lived, and ask, at what point does Uday Hussein become culpable for his actions? At two years old, he's got the genetics of a warlord father. At three, he's pushing the other kids in nursery — well, he's three, so kind of not really. Roll the clock forward: he's six and pulling the wings off flies, grown up in this honor culture with the genetics and the reinforcement of a dad who lets him do whatever he wants. Okay, but he's six... and you just keep rolling the clock forward. At what point?

It's really difficult. I'm not saying adults aren't responsible or that kids aren't responsible for what they do, but the question messes you up, because you go, "I don't know." You look at a kid and think, well, no. We even have that reflected in the legal system with juvenile detention, or the young offenders system where that Johnny Chang guy went. At what point do you point the finger at this horrible guy — maybe one of the worst people who's ever lived — and say, "You're now responsible for what you did"? And the same thing applies: he was someone's son at some point. But some people are shit, and you're allowed to say you hate them.

Well, he was Saddam Hussein's son, so most people are like, "fuck both of those guys." But it does color your thinking — where you're more forgiving of strangers who do stuff.

Usually when you're driving around and some guy offends you, you just want to go nuts — but then you start thinking, "Hmm, maybe that guy's having a..." Small stuff like that. But once somebody does irreparable harm to another person, you're able to say: it's sad that they're someone's child, but there are 8 billion of us here — we've got enough. You lost your chance. It comes to a point where it's not ideal, but you're like, "Bro, get out of here." It'd be nice to say, "Let's just put you away in one of those Norwegian jails where you get to learn drums or whatever," but some people just have to be tossed away.

Norwegian jails and British halls of residence

The jail in Norway is kind of sick. I'm pretty sure there's a quiz on the internet: is it a Norwegian jail or a British university halls of residence? It's essentially impossible to tell which is which. A lot of the halls of residence were old jails just near a university that got cleared out — that was the case in Newcastle, where I went. One of the halls used to be a correctional facility. The thinking was: that's a big building, we can probably put students in there — just paint it, put some paintings up, change the color, get rid of the bars, and we'll be fine.

I used to have an apartment in an old insane asylum — I used it as an office. To get in, there was a kind of labyrinth underneath to reach the basement level, and it looked terrifying. Was I worried about ghosts? I didn't sleep there. If I had slept there, I'd have been terrified. It was my office apartment, so I'd go there and work during the day, but I never slept there — I'd have been so scared of crazy ghosts.

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The conversation turned to Tolstoy's diary entries, which the host called some of the best ever written. He read a few aloud: September 19th, 1858 — "Decided that one must love and work, and that's it." September 20th — "Tired, didn't work, and didn't love." March 31st, 1852 — "Woke up at 6:00, woke everyone up. I did not get up and slept until 9." January 25th, 1851 — "I've fallen in love, or imagine that I have. Went to a party and lost my head. Bought a horse, which I don't need at all."

The guest agreed that Tolstoy fits the mold of the great Russian writers, joking that if they were alive today they'd be living in an insane asylum — and loving it. He mentioned he's currently reading a Dostoevsky book and marvels at that era of 1890s Russia: with no phones, you were just stuck in a town full of people. If someone didn't want to see you, you had to show up at their house and be told to go away, face to face.

The host asked whether this was unique to Russia, and the guest thought it was more that time period in general — everything unfolded in person, before phone calls existed. There was also that old-fashioned vocal register: "Your presence offends me. Get out." Matches worked like a cell phone, the host explained — at night you had to light matches and candles, so people would just barge into your house in the dark, fumbling for matches, only to light one and discover it was some other guy. The exchanges were pure theater: "Be gone, fool." "Where are my matches?" Then you'd just go to bed thinking, "Fuck that guy." The guest found it wild that your entire existence relied on whether you could find your matches, while your beefs played out in person.

The guest recalled a story, possibly Tolstoy's or an old folktale he wrote down, about a farmer who kept wanting a bigger and bigger farm. He eventually found some indigenous people who offered him all the land he could walk around from sunup to sundown in one day — just trace the perimeter and it was his. He walked so far trying to claim it that he died, and they buried him. "The most Russian story," the host said.

The guest also mentioned reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a collection of nine Russian short stories where the author explains how to read each one. The host couldn't quite place the author's name but noted the book is fairly famous.

Russian literature is often so stark that reading it just leaves you thinking life is miserable. It is comparable to getting an NAD IV drip: the process feels terrible the entire time, but once it finishes, you feel relieved simply because the unpleasantness stopped. You wonder whether the literature actually taught you something about life or if you just feel better by contrast— because in those stories, everyone is mean, everything is bleak, food is scarce, and endless tragedies happen back-to-back. Yet that relief only lasts briefly before everyday trivial complaints return, like being bored or getting a coffee that is slightly too hot.

Because it is so easy to slip into a negative, whining mindset, actively resisting that impulse should be the primary focus of the day. The daily challenge is to defeat that internal complaining voice entirely.

Frequent complaining often reflects a distorted view of reality. Complaining usually stems from reality failing to meet personal expectations, which is ultimately the fault of the expectation rather than reality itself. While genuinely unfair events occur, complaining about mundane frustrations—like being stuck in traffic—ignores the fact that you failed to anticipate it and that you are part of the traffic yourself.

Reality remains undefeated. When someone constantly complains, it shows a disconnect from how the world actually works; aligning expectations more closely with reality naturally eliminates the urge to complain.

The Fixed Demand for Problems

It's 100% true. For me, it's like when things are good, I'll find trivial annoyances and blow them up to a ten, like "this is garbage," and focus on that for four hours. It's not even a real problem compared to problems you've had before—you could just ignore it.

It's strange, because when you've got loads of big problems, you think, "Oh my god, all of these problems are big." Sometimes you actually have ones where you go, "This is a justifiable issue I need to deal with in life." But other times, when there are no problems, it's like the demand for problems is fixed and the supply needs to be brought up to meet it. I have a waterline of problems I need to have in my life, and I'll lower the threshold for what constitutes a problem until I'm able to make things qualify—like, "I should have got it blended. I got it on the rocks and I should have got it blended."

Morgan Housel has this awesome story about exactly this. He planned for a long time to go away on holiday with his wife—they'd done all the research, and it was the first trip, I think, where they were taking both of their kids. It was going to be a big deal: the first time the kids went abroad, they'd saved up the money, and they even looked at the restaurant at the big resort in Mexico or wherever. They knew the menu in advance and the table they wanted, because apparently, according to the reviews, it had the best view of the sunset. "This is the cocktail I'm going to get, and I'm going to get it blended."

Then they finally get there with the kids, and it's a nightmare. They arrive, dump all their stuff, and on the first night the kids are at the nursery for a bit—so it's their first time sitting down away from the kids in another country since they had them. And the first thing he thought was: well, it is nice, but there's some sand between my toes, and the sand is distracting me, and I should have got it blended rather than on the rocks. And the sunset—look, the sunset is nice, but I don't think the reviews are quite right; that table over there would have been better for the view. And I didn't bring my glasses, and now the sun's so low it's hitting me in the face, and that's uncomfortable. He's like, what am I doing? I've dreamed about this thing, and the experience is so close—

But the human curse is for everything to be not quite as nice as you thought it was going to be, and then for you to focus on all the ways in which it's not as nice.

Getting Used to a New Set of Problems

I think about it a lot. I can clearly remember when I was living and dying by whether I had a job—I hated that job, and I was like, one day it'll come together and I'll make a living doing a thing I like. Then I remember when that started to become a reality, and it was really unsettling. I had all these problems I could rely on—my boss is awful, I hate this, I don't have money—and then that stuff started to go away and I felt weird. It didn't feel good to not have all that stuff. It was comfortable in a way, because at least I was familiar with it. Then you get out of it and you're like, yeah, I kind of did it—and then you're just flooded with different problems, because you get so used to what life becomes. I remember thinking, "I would never fall into that kind of stuff," and then it happens and you're doing exactly what you said you wouldn't.

For me, it really comes down to learning how to slow myself down and not be so frantic every day. If, god forbid, I don't get something done one day, it's about learning to chill and really hash out my priorities, rather than just doing the things you think you're supposed to do—like you have to perfectly dominate the day, and if you don't, you go to bed a loser.

Yeah. Or just feel that it's not fair, because again, your ability to dream up a world will always outstrip reality's ability to deliver it to you. You're literally fantasizing about what that cocktail could have tasted like, or how the sunset was, or the lack of sand between your toes. If you set this almost impossibly perfect standard for every single day, you're kind of guaranteeing yourself to be miserable.

It's interesting how you get escape velocity, freedom from this thing, when all of the problems—your boss is a dick and you don't like it—and you get out of that, and then you almost have to grieve this weird life that you lost. Connor, one of my friends who was on the show this week, talks about how when his wife was pregnant with his first kid, he'd lived in his car and rode a motorcycle with spikes glued onto the helmet—all the red flags in your future son-in-law, all the stuff you don't want somebody to do.

His life could have gone in such a horrible direction: smoking weed and selling weed and drinking booze and getting in fights, not being a good, productive member of society. And then, when he was married with a house and a pregnant wife, he had this moment of: I made it out. I've finally gotten free of what could have happened in my past life, and now I'm blown away by where I am. He said he didn't even know what the emotion was—it was very confusing. That could have gone so wrong, and now I'm in this new place, and I don't think I have to worry about those problems anymore. Those things that were my driving force, my motivation, my ambition—all of that was driven by "I just don't want to be that guy that I was when I lived in my car in a Walmart parking lot."

That's the funny thing, because I was possessed to escape the 9-to-5 job. When I was younger, I would have done anything to just get out—I can't do this, being in an office. I'd do it for like three weeks and quit. I still think about it every now and again: it terrified me to such a level where I was taking insane risks just to get out of that. And who knows, I could always go back at any time, but I remember I...

I was thinking about that while driving recently. My whole 20s were just insane — I could have died a couple of times, and it wouldn't even have been that crazy.

The closest calls? I've had guns pulled on me twice. I used to sell weed, so it was like any other day — the guy could have just decided to shoot me instead of not doing it. Looking back, I think, "Holy shit, that was crazy."

Was it over debts? No, it was robbery. I wasn't the robber — I was the robbed. I got robbed constantly, and I'd just be like, whatever, fuck it.

You sound like the worst drug dealer ever.

Well, hold on — those other guys were the worst drug dealers. I was doing my job: I was on time, punctual, very quality-control focused, and I never tried to rip people off. For me, money was always about buying freedom. I didn't care about nice stuff, so I'd just save everything and think, "Yes, I don't have to work for six months. This is awesome." Then I'd get robbed and go, "All right, I'll make it again. Come on, guys, let's go."

Getting out of it and taking risks — I think that's all good stuff. But then it's like, dude, I could have just chilled out internally too. I didn't have to go that crazy. I could have slowly figured things out.

It is a relief, though — never having to worry about that. I got pulled over by cops recently and just said, "Hey, what's up, guys?" Before, I would have thought, "My life's over. I'm dead. I'm going to jail." Now it's just, "What's up, guys? How you doing, brother?" It's so nice.

You sound like a very stand-up drug dealer.

There's one compliment I always get: "Dude, you're actually on time." I was very good — I never ripped people off or anything like that.

A shame there aren't Trustpilot reviews for drug dealers, isn't it? You'd have had a great rating.

I think that's what the dark web is now. A lot of dealers just operate there, so you can forego all the drama and crazy stuff.

The thing is, if you're a supplier on the dark web, the game is completely different, because it's not about who you know. You're essentially running a Shopify store — it comes down to how good you are at product photos and writing headlines.

The New Face of Drug Dealing: From Street Corners to Online Marketing

There are just guys in one-bedroom apartments now quietly raking in millions of dollars a year. Really quiet, unassuming life. You do it for a couple of years, get out, and you're like, "All right, peace," with a bunch of Bitcoin. I watched this Netflix documentary once about a guy who ran a service similar to the Silk Road from his bedroom. He was young, and as part of the documentary they recreated the bedroom perfectly — the old computer he had, the exact desk, the full-on dimensions — put it into a sound stage, and after he got out of jail, sort of put him back into it. They seamlessly cut from archive footage of what was going on to a reenactment by the guy in the same size, same shape, same color, same lighting, same computer bedroom. It was so immersive. It was really cool.

The fact that being a drug dealer now means you can basically just be an online marketer — it's like, how good are your Facebook ads, dude? It's a very different world to the one you lived in.

Yeah, it is. I remember hearing about the dark web when I was younger, and I knew guys who used to do that stuff, but I was like, I'm terrible with computers. I'm going to click yes and get arrested. So let me just do what I know and drive around here in my beat-up car.

I think about it now because it was such a weird thing — it was like a decade. I did it for a long time, long enough that I think I fried my nervous system. My family does kind of go gray early, but I went hyper-gray really fast, because you're adrenalized every single day. If you're in an office, you're bored, and that's a problem. So I escaped that and was just constantly flooded with adrenaline for like 12 years.

What He Was Afraid Of

What were you worried about — being caught?

Being arrested, pretty much. It's mostly being arrested. Any other problem? Interestingly, not being killed. I was like, they're not going to kill me. There was one guy who pulled a gun on me, and then I went back to him later because I was like, "You have to front me stuff from now on." I figured that if I didn't have any leverage on me, there'd be no reason to try to rob me.

So I went back and was just like, "All right, I'll hang out with you again, but don't do that." He had thought I had robbed him — that was his whole thing. I had given him money to go get something, he went and got it, came back, and said, "Hey, they took all your money." I'm like, "Why would I rob you to take my own money back?" He was like, "I don't know what's going on," cocked a gun, and was holding it at me. My roommate at the time came out, and the guy ran outside, and then he ran after him. I was just like, "Oh shit."

Hang on — your roommate was the one that got chased?

Poor roommate. No, I did. He just came out like, "Hey, what's up?"

But he was the one that got chased.

Well, he was just like, "Go get him," and I was frozen. Then he ran out kind of like, "I'm out of here too" — but he ran out right after him. And I was just like, "Fuck."

Was your roommate not involved in anything?

Not at all. He was mortified.

You are the worst roommate.

Horrible. I think I was the worst roommate. I was cool though — I would cover extra stuff. But at that time—

Because you're selling drugs.

Come on. It's the one thing you can provide: drugs and cash. That's literally it.

The "Ethical" Drug Dealer

It was funny too, because I did have a real serious conscience about it. Weed is like — you're really conscience-free. I wouldn't sell to high schoolers or anything like that.

I didn't feel bad.

An ethical drug dealer is crazy.

Dude, I remember I dabbled in trying to sell coke — which I've never done, by the way. I've never done coke. I tried selling it for a while, and I remember stopping people and being like, "Dude, you're doing this stuff too much. You have to chill." And they'd be like, "Shut the fuck up."

Actually, an ethical drug dealer is a horrible drug dealer. You're the worst.

That was bad.

I can't believe you had a decade-long career in something you're bad at.

Weed was my strong suit, though, because you're dealing with like-minded people for the most part, and it's pretty chill all things considered. But once you scale up into bigger money, that's when a real criminal element enters. I know someone who got shot in the face point blank. They tried to set up a 50 or 60 pound deal, and someone flew out cross country to meet them and shot them right in the head. It gets gnarly, but you start off just slinging to your boys and it's all very chill, and it slowly gets scarier and scarier.

As for walking up the stairs, my old roommate might have seen something crazy at the top, but it wouldn't have been an inflatable alien — it was Princess Peach. He just replaced one slightly intimidated, very worried roommate with two small, sort of insane kids who were kind of always on drugs. A child behaves essentially like a drunk adult in tiny form — you're like, "What are you doing? Headstands? Why?" And then one comes up and punches you in the stomach while wearing a dad cap.

My housemate's away in Montenegro at the moment, and there's something really despondent about coming home and nothing's moved. That cup is in the exact same place as when I left it this morning. I just want someone to come and mess my stuff up a bit — just vandalize it slightly, move the cup or something. I want new mess, different mess. Instead it's like, oh, it's the same as it was before.

That's how it is when I travel for standup — the hotel rooms. I walk into that silence, and people say it must be great, but I really dislike it.

The thing I learned the hard way in my early twenties is that school is geared toward achieving for yourself and yourself alone: get into the best school, make the most money. I remember being in college thinking, I don't really care about that, but I also want to do well and have a nice life — and it was this big conflict. If I talked to a 20-year-old now, I'd say: find something you like to do that maybe benefits other people, and that will actually give you enough meaning to endure the horrible time in your early career where you're eating shit and everything sucks.

I tried to jump ahead of that, and it was a disaster for like 15 years — one disaster after another. I was such an asshole about having a job, thinking I deserved more than this. I almost literally died because I couldn't drink coffee and sit in a cubicle, when I could have just found something else.

I'd see office guys hanging out at lunchtime, ten people at lunch, and I'd get envious of them. That actually looks nice — you're there with your friends, everyone's chilling, you don't take your work home, you're not worried about someone breaking your door down, your housemate doesn't hate you. I remember almost craving boredom at one point: I wish I was bored, that'd be awesome, not having to worry about 90 million different things.

People really shit-talk university, and then they do the same thing about having a 9-to-5. Being able to do your own thing, or build your thing, or work on someone's smaller thing with more ownership — all that's great, but it's not necessarily better. When you work for yourself, you don't take your work home, you get your weekends off, you don't have to make payroll for the people who work for you. A lot of people think working for themselves means choosing when they work, but what it results in is just working all the time. Do you want that? Is that kind of what your dream is?

You're right as well that you're going to have to endure a bunch of shit. It's like, what flavor of shit can you eat? Some people can eat the cubicle-coffee-lunch-break shit super easy; other people can eat the never-get-a-day-off shit super easy. It's which pain do you want in your life?

There's that line about doing what feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else. But that ignores the fact that even the most existentially aligned thing you do in your life is regularly going to feel like work, regularly going to feel like shit. So the question is what shit do you want — not what fun and play do you want. Even writing your books: you turn up, you've managed the perfect morning, you've seen the sunrise, the kids are off, you've trained, you've got the right amount of caffeination, you sit down and you go, "Fuck." Just a blinking cursor versus a blinking curse.

Or you're tweaking a sentence for the 30th time and you're like, "Dude, I feel like I'm going to pass out. I'm sitting in a chair, no blood going to my brain, and I'm like, is that a perfect claw?" And yeah, it's just anything — and I love writing, and even then you're like, "Fuck." But that's with anything. It's just figuring out why you're doing this outside of your own personal gain, because that'll fizzle out even if you get it.

It's like, is there a compelling reason to do a thing?

Is it for other people? Is it for creating something new of yourself? Whatever it is. But that was the one thing I completely missed, and I got older and was just kind of like, "There it is."

There should be a name for when you disregard clichés and then in the future realize that the cliché was right.

It's that thing that everybody says, but because everybody says it, it feels trite, which means that it can't be true, so I'm not going to do it. And then you realize, "Oh god, I already had it. I literally had it and I got rid of it. And it was something my mom said to me when I was 13."

I've been reading Chesterton — the other Englishman, G.K. Chesterton, that's his name. I love reading his essays, and he has this book I'm reading right now called Orthodoxy. He had done a book that criticized a lot of other philosophical systems of his time, and someone asked him, "What's your philosophical system?" He's like, "All right, get this," lays it out, and then goes, "Fuck, this is Christianity."

He starts his book with the story of a sailor who's off by one degree. He thinks he's going to South Africa and ends up just rediscovering England — he goes in a circle and lands back in England like, "I've discovered England, guys. Check it out." And everyone's like, "Yeah, dude. It's been here forever."

It's such a funny idea. He was a really witty, sharp guy, and he thought he was about to blow everyone's minds — he put it all together and realized, "God, this is Orthodox Christianity."

He said he felt like he was ten minutes ahead of the pulse of everything, and it turned out he was 1,800 years behind.

You get older and you're all sparks and fireworks — "Dude, I'm—" — and then you get old and you're just like, "Yeah, I'm just another old guy being like, hey, be careful before you make decisions, man. Try to think about others." And they're like, "Shut up, old man. I'm doing this my way, okay? Advice is lame." "Yeah, thanks, dickhead."

And then you find out it's true. The Alchemist by Paulo

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho was the first book I read in a long time. I'd gone years without reading because I was at university and hated academia, even though I was okay at it. Within three weeks of starting, I was disenchanted — like, why am I learning Henry Ford's principles of scientific management? I'm never going to need this. So I immediately started running parties instead, which felt great and actually taught me some business too. But I became flippant and dismissive of anything academic, even stuff that was probably useful, because I'd learned it from lecturers who had never run a business. That's the odd thing about typical business courses: everyone assumes they'll learn to run a business from people who don't run businesses.

I went to school for business too, and I remember thinking, so you're a doctor in business — why aren't you in business? It's like getting surgery from a research doctor. You're like, all right, this doesn't make sense.

Anyway, I went through university not really understanding what I was learning, and by the end I hadn't read a book since Harry Potter at around age 14. Then I went to do Love Island, the reality TV show. Before filming, there's a week of media lockdown: the production company needs to release the cast list to the press, but they don't want the contestants to know who else is going on the show. So they assign a chaperone who lives with and supervises you for the week while you do all your TV, radio and press interviews. He watches you at all times. We were based on the south coast of Marbella, in a small geographic area you were allowed to move in with your chaperone, who followed you 24 hours a day. Every other contestant had a different territory and went to different gyms at different times so there was no chance of overlapping. It was wild — like a military operation.

They take your phone away and you can't access the internet. You can't even go into a newsagent on your own, in case there's an English newspaper about to announce the new series and its cast.

So there I was with nothing to do — after a decade of doing nothing but messaging people on WhatsApp asking, "Hey mate, are you coming out tonight?" — and my mom had given me this book, saying I should read it while I was away. So I read it. Have you read The Alchemist?

I have. I read it a while ago.

It's a psychedelic trip to read. Anyway, the whole long detour of this story is to say the lesson from that book: going on a journey and ending up in the same place you started is not the same as having never left. I think that's a cool idea, because it can suck to realize, damn, I wasted a long time relearning something I already knew, or sailed the seas just to come back and go, "England again."

But it made me feel less like I'd wasted my time. You learned that a bunch of experiments you thought might be right were wrong. You're back where you started, but at least you've gotten rid of all the things you thought might be good for you that actually sucked.

There's also just no emphasis on people's interior whatsoever. It's all work, get a thing, get a job, do this, that. At least in American school, there's no class, nothing saying, hey, if you feel this way all the time, maybe think about this. In my day, I probably put 95% of my time into getting stuff done—usually it was 100%—and 0% into stopping. Not even meditating, but just going for a walk, chilling, calming myself, focusing on what's going on inside of myself.

I mean, it's not the most important thing—you can't just meditate your way through life, you need to do stuff. I'm not being one of those guys who says you don't have to do anything, but I really think you need about 10% of your day, even if it's just 10 minutes, of slowing down. Maybe write your thoughts out, do anything to figure out why you're doing what you're doing that day, what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, what the plan is.

And I've never done that. I don't know many other people who really do it either. They try to fix the problem by just throwing enough stuff at the wall and hoping some of it gets through.

It would have been so funny to have put Matt on the episodes with Joe, Dr. K, and Connor. We had three master coaches around this table—one was a monk in an ashram, another had gone to Tibet and done Ayurvedic medicine, and another had coached tens of thousands of guys using Jungian and psychoanalytical theory and shadow work. They basically all came to the same conclusion: you should spend some time being aware of why you're doing the things you're doing. If you're not, you're kind of just in the dark, groping around a bedroom, picking things up thinking, okay, this isn't it—you don't even know what you want or where you're going.

The reason I brought up the university thing is that people give so much grief for going to uni or having a nine-to-five. University ruled for me, even though I hated the actual course and didn't learn anything from the lecturers. And the times I've had nine-to-fives—I knew they weren't going to be forever, but they were also kind of nice. Being disparaging and saying you need to be a lone arranger making your own way in the world is kind of a curse.

Let me give you an example—this was so embarrassing. I went to Bali for a show at the end of the Australia tour at the start of this year and met up with a friend who used to work for me in nightlife. She was out there doing nutrition coaching—hormone optimization, how to work with your body. She'd done some courses online, used to work in finance in London, and she said, "I earn like five grand a month and I'm the happiest I've ever been," after having lived in London with all those things.

I said, okay, tell me how your business works. She said she coaches people one-on-one over WhatsApp. I asked how much she charged—however much she wanted. I said, "That's stupid. What you need is a big website, a funnel, and a low-level deal. The low-level deal is your squeeze page—$5 or $10 to get them in. You need a lead magnet to get their email addresses. Once you have the email, you upsell them to the small course, then the mid-level course, which you don't need to look after and where most people will end up. Then your one-on-one is an upsell at a grand or a couple of grand, which means a sales call, which means learning sales. If you scale up, you'll need people doing sales for you, paid ads, Facebook ads..."

I was watching myself going, what? I stopped and thought, what the hell are you doing? She just told you she's the happiest she's ever been, and you're trying to curse her with the same problem every person in history has said not to do. It was insane.

The urge to hand out unsolicited advice

I caught myself doing it, paused, and said, "Actually, just disregard everything I just said — you've already done it." And there I was again, saying, "That's stupid, this is what you need to do."

It's the same reflex of "you need to scale this into the biggest thing ever," even though she'd just said she's happy. Although I'll admit, if I have any level of expertise in anything, I'm all too eager to dump it on people.

I suffer from the same thing — I'll just completely unload advice on people.

"What's this private investigator thing? Was that part of your history?"

Matt explained that he was a PI very briefly — mostly working for insurance companies. When asked how someone becomes a licensed private investigator, he said it was actually kind of sweet: he knew somebody who just let him do it. They gave him a little card and told him, "If cops come up and bother you, just show them this thing."

"So nothing you're telling me, basically."

He clarified that you could get the real thing, but he never had an actual license — he was just doing PI grunt work. The card was something to flash at the cops, because people would call the police on you: "Why was this person sitting in my driveway?"

He thought it would be a lot more exciting than it was. It was very boring — he did it for two days and quit. He had to sit outside a warehouse with a grainy photo of a guy, waiting through a shift change to see if the man came out. But it was hard to even distinguish anyone: he had a grainy photo of a Black man, and then twelve Black men came out of the building. It was winter, everyone wearing hats and scarves, and he realized he'd need to get face to face to even have a shot. So he just sat there reading books for two days, then told his buddy he couldn't do it and to take the badge back. When he went in, the guy had been showing him spy watches, and he'd imagined recording conversations in a bar — instead he was in his car for twelve hours just reading. Then he realized they'd done a shift change without him noticing. "I was a terrible private eye."

It was one of his many jobs. Throughout his career, which was mainly selling weed, he went through booms and busts: during the busts he'd get a job, so he was constantly doing multiple things at once.

His co-host summarized the cycle: "Sell drugs, make money, get robbed, take a job."

Matt confirmed it: save money, buy drugs. If he couldn't get them fronted, he'd have to save up again and start over. Once he had enough money from weed, he'd start finding weed customers at his job — and then quit the job and leave.

His co-host joked that the Princess Peach alien gig sounded like heaven compared with that. Matt agreed it was the best. Having kids changed his whole attitude toward work: he'd had a strange anxiety and fixation over what his job was, but while in the hospital room, he watched a guy come in to change the paper towels and thought, "I could do that for all I give a damn." It all made sense to him: just get a job so you have money to do all the other important stuff, rather than being blinded by the idea that your job is your entire world.

His co-host added, "Or fighting raccoons and hoping you're going to scare them away. I just can't do it."

The host asked what Matt has coming up and where people should go. Matt said he has a bunch of shows coming up, with details at mattcusker.com. He mentioned one show in New York where he really needs to move some tickets, but either way, people can go to mattcusker.com for standup, the Matt and Shane podcast, and the whole shebang.

They thanked each other and signed off. The episode closed by congratulating listeners on making it to the end of a podcast episode without dying, and inviting them to watch another one.