Q&A: Becoming A Dad, Health Update & Favourite Peptides - #1134

Hello friends, welcome back. I’m doing another Q and A, so send me your stories, problems, life hacks, business nightmares, terrible dates, all of it. I can put some to guests and make this more fun than me shouting into the void. The show should help you understand yourself and the world, but it should also be something you can relax into—not homework that makes you feel guilty for skipping flashcards.

There’s self-improvement fatigue in the air. Maybe it’s AI, geopolitics, uncertainty, or years of grind-slop telling you to ignore your feelings and work harder, but people are tired of making life an endless to-do list. I’m trying to keep the useful ideas while making episodes a great hang: like a brilliant retelling of the Odyssey that leaves you fuller, without obliging you to rebuild your life.

If you’re lonely almost all the time in a relationship, don’t use a spreadsheet of your partner’s virtues to argue your body out of what it knows. Ambition and chasing dreams are brilliant, but if their dreams make your daily life miserable, you’re in love with a future version of them. Sit them down: this isn’t working for me. I deserve a relationship where I don’t feel abandoned.

I ruptured my Achilles playing cricket in 2020, which is about as British and stupid as it gets. A pandemic was weirdly the least bad time for year-long rehab. The first months cannot be rushed, and waiting for surgery was horrible; in under two weeks, one leg visibly shrank because it did absolutely nothing. But the boring productivity bros get one on the board: diligent morning rehab got my strength and mobility back.

More debates are coming, starting with AI: enthusiasts, cautious people, and proper skeptics, without baby’s-first-AI-chat or an incomprehensible technical lecture. I’m desperate for a big geopolitics one too. And Red Rising still absolutely rules; Dungeon Crawler Carl is wildly different and equally addictive. Pierce Brown, Matt Dinniman, Brandon Sanderson, maybe Patrick Rothfuss around one table? Sexy little thought.

A belief that protected me but now confines me is erring too hard toward caution. I inspected every decision, avoided mistakes, and moved slowly enough to feel safe. But planning can be anxiety in a sensible little suit. Having every duck in a row can become a way to avoid risk forever, so I’m trying to use more gut, even if I make mistakes I’d previously have avoided.

I’m still dealing with the aftermath of Lyme and mold stuff, and it’s a bastard. Chronic problems usually aren’t fixed by one dramatic intervention; it’s sleep, walks, saunas, binders, treatment, recovery—pennies in the jar again and again. I’ve kept it quieter because I don’t want to become tired, sad, forgetful bloke with another health complaint. But if you’re in the tinnitus, POTS, autoimmune, mold, Lyme, whatever-the-fuck club, I’m still there with you.

If you always ask people before deciding, you probably don’t fully trust your judgment yet. That isn’t shameful; we weren’t designed to make every meaningful choice alone. Trusted people give you a second angle, but build the muscle with small decisions where you ask nobody. You’re not becoming a solo saxophone player in another valley—you’re learning that your view counts too.

The dating bar is lower in real life and infinitely more deranged online. Most people aren’t screening you against an Instagram fantasy checklist. If you’re thoughtful, employed, trying to tell the truth, working on yourself, and can meet people in the actual world, you’re already in a rarefied group. If someone makes you feel fundamentally inadequate despite that, their outrageous standards don’t automatically make them a catch. Sometimes they’re selling a shit sandwich at McLaren prices.

Opening yourself emotionally means you get properly connected to your life. Success feels real instead of temporary relief that disaster didn’t happen. The cost is failure hurts more. You can’t pick only the good feelings; if you want life in three dimensions, painful bits come along too. I’d rather feel alive, even when it’s agonising, than drift through life like a ghost.

If you’ve done loads of inner work but the outside hasn’t changed, that chapter is painful because you want reality to confirm you’re not wasting your time. Change makes you temporarily incongruent: no longer who you were, not yet able to see who you’re becoming. Celebrate external milestones—sobriety, the post, the song—but a lot requires faith. Uncertainty is part of the entry fee, not proof you chose wrong.

Don’t confuse talking about the thing with doing it. Planning, fantasising about praise, tweeting grand intentions: all offer watered-down reward while protecting you from failure. Start comically small and add social pressure—a training partner, co-working mate, habit group, or tiny daily consequence. Thirty push-ups can feel pathetic, but it’s thirty more than zero, and zero is currently winning.

Health problems when you’ve tried to do everything right feel like a cosmic nut-kick meant for someone else. I can make myself insane explaining why it’s unfair, but that story reduces agency. The useful belief is there’s something I can do, even when progress is slow. Invisible suffering is real; people can look fine while their internal world falls apart. It fucking sucks, but I hope I’ll be proud I stayed in the trenches.

As the podcast grows, I’ll happily delegate logistics, but I can’t outsource taste. Choosing guests, finding questions, reading, noticing ideas that matter—that is the show. I spent years organising hundreds of guests myself, and I’m delighted people can help now, but I don’t want someone else’s hand up my arse puppeteering my curiosity. Four pages of something great can still give you three ideas for the day.

For young lads desperate to become men: don’t speedrun it. Eighteen to twenty-four is a sick period of life, and wanting to be elsewhere makes you miss it. A good man knows where he’s headed, enjoys the journey, and feels comfortable in his skin—then has enough wisdom not to exploit everyone around him. If you’re leaving loneliness behind, celebrate it. Be patient with rusty social skills and enjoy this pause point.

Meditation taught me a softer way to deal with myself. Instead of shoving away a distracted thought, invite the worrying part in: ah, there’s the hard-working bit, the bit with high standards; come sit down. Goals can become contracts to criticise yourself until you succeed, and forgiveness means giving up the fantasy of changing the past. Suppression isn’t strength, and age alone doesn’t heal wounds you’ve never worked on.

Modern stress still counts. Our nervous systems are built for survival, but now they’re tuned to rejection, isolation, group chats, unanswered texts, and boundaries with people we love. You get no points for shaming yourself because a Viking raid sounds worse. You’re allowed to feel anxious; judging yourself for it reliably makes it worse. I love you all. Keep sending your stories, and I’ll see some of you on tour.