Can Men & Women Be Friends Again? - James Smith

James Smith is an author, podcaster, online trainer and not a life coach. Many men and women no longer see each other as on the same team with a common goal, and instead view them as adversaries who don't play well together. But given that humanity has continued successfully for hundreds of thousands of years, this can't be how it's always been, so why is it now? Expect to learn why James got in trouble for saying "she's a 10 but...", how convenient activities often get mistaken for enjoyable activities, whether Elon Musk not buying Twitter is a huge win for him, whether TikTok is a dangerous influence, what you can learn about yourself from the tasks you're avoiding, why people fearing ignorance is making them stupid and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out James' Academy - https://www.jamessmithacademy.com/ Follow James on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jamessmithpt Order Not A Life Coach - https://amzn.to/30VkVdb Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #relationships #dating #gym - 00:00 Intro 04:27 Is it Acceptable for Guys to Look at Girls at the Gym? 10:44 Are Men & Women on Different Teams? 20:33 The Lack of Love & Passion in Society 29:18 Feminism’s Internal Conflict 44:08 Holding Out for Sex Robots 48:49 How Political Narratives Halt our Learning 56:59 James’s New Book 1:06:49 Importance of Finding Work You Enjoy 1:13:50 Where to Find James - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00James Smith?

  Girls, you have been expressing your icks about guys for clout on social media for about a year now. So if I'm not allowed to make up a hypothetical situation with a hypothetical 10 out of 10, you are not allowed to rile together your female community to talk about icks.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  James Smith, welcome to the show.

• 0:20James Smith?

  Hey, it's good to be back. It's been a bit of a long stint since I've been on. It feels like I was on a couple of months ago, but it's been nearly a year.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

  It's been a long time, yeah.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  What's going on?

• 0:30James Smith?

  I'm a different man.

• 0:31Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 0:32James Smith?

  I'm completely different. Look at this setup for a start. We were just talking about this offline. Last time, I'm embarrassed of the version of myself a year ago.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  Technologically?

• 0:46James Smith?

  In many ways, professionally, technologically, personally. Like, last time we did this talk, I was wearing a broadcaster headset, which at the time, I thought was innovative.

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  Pinnacle.

• 0:58James Smith?

  Podcasting. I was like, I've got a mic, got headphones connected. Now, a Shure SM7B, the pinnacle of podcasting microphones. I've got three of them in it, right? A DSLR, which, you know, I never fully appreciated the power of podcast clips an hour ago. The game has changed.

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Well, you, how long have you had TikTok now?

• 1:23James Smith?

  I've had it for two years, but I've only started respecting it as a platform probably six months.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  And you've got how many followers?

• 1:29James Smith?

  1.5 million.

• 1:31Chris Williamson?

  Out of nowhere.

• 1:31James Smith?

  Mate, I did 580,000 in a week.

• 1:36Chris Williamson?

  What was that due to? What did you talk about?

• 1:38James Smith?

  There was one video that really booted off, which is a subject that I've actually spoken about for years. So when I did the video on it, it kind of reeled off the tongue, which is the swimmer's body illusion, where I don't ever say this to shit on fitness people, but. I'd say to people in the video, look, imagine there's a person who wants to get in shape and they look at different physiques, they wanna, you know, idealize and they go, oh, I would be a runner, but then I'd probably be a bit skinny and look a bit miserable. Or I could be a bodybuilder, but then I might be a little bit too big and look a bit thick. So then they go, oh, swimmers, I love a swimmer's physique, so I'm gonna start swimming. Then three, four months pass and they like, realize it's an illusion. Swimmers don't always look the way they look because they swim, they swim because of

• 2:23James Smith?

  the way they look. Similarly to me, the people always go, oh, it's right for you, you're big and broad and that's why you, you know, that's because you play rugby. And I was like, no, I'm, I'm big and broad, so I play rugby. When 50 lads in a year play rugby, the big, broad, dense, heavy guys stay on and enjoy it and the people that don't, don't. And in the gym, people that lift weights to six months and don't build muscle, don't continue the endeavor and they start picking other sports. And there's always that adage that you don't pick your sport, your sport picks you. And so many people in the fitness industry, there, there are people genetically who have a much easier time getting in good shape and maintaining good shape. And when they say their tops off on holiday, rather than people going, oh, you're empathetic, intelligent, you care about people, you should

• 3:07James Smith?

  be a coach. They go, wow, you're in great shape, you should become a PT. And that's unfortunately, the state of affairs of the fitness industry largely is people on, you know, people don't look the way of what, because of what they preach, they preach what they preach because of the way they look.

• 3:23Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah. So it's a selection effect. And the people that come out the other side are the ones that were predisposed to be good at it in any case. I mean, that's, one of my friends says that he always wanted to learn to bench in powerlifting from the guy that had long arms. So I don't want to learn to bench from the guy with short arms because it's easy for him. I want to learn to bench from the guy that had an absolute nightmare in doing it. I want to learn to deadlift and squat from the tallest powerlifter in the gym. Reason being, well, there's, there's another argument here that if you see two candidates that are of equivalent merit, equivalent qualifications, equivalent experience and all the rest of it, but one of them is really ugly and the other one's really good looking, you should hire the really ugly one because that person has had to do all of the things the good looking person's done and they've had to overcome the fact that they're ugly as well.

• 4:07James Smith?

  There's also people, your guilty, non guilty verdict isn't affected, but the amount of time you get sentenced is affected by how good looking you are. So people that are good looking serve shorter jail sentences. So you've just got to make sure whoever you hire, if you do pick the ugly one, that he's not getting locked up because you won't see him again for a long time.

• 4:26Chris Williamson?

  He's going to be away for a long time. So you have a lot of female followers and you've spent many thousands of hours on the gym floor. Do you think that it's acceptable for guys to look at girls while they're training?

• 4:40James Smith?

  Well, I suppose if you're all going to share a room together to train, yes, but there's, I suppose you've got the nuance of how long the gaze is because I'm not sure of this. You've had much smarter people than me on the podcast, but there's probably an objective measure of when an inquisitive gaze becomes a gaze with intent. And, you know, for me, I'm someone that when I'm in a room, I like to read the room in gym training. You know, I'm like, okay, cool. Lifting shoes, don't need them. Cool. Yeah. You know, someone using wrist straps when they're doing decline bench. I'm like, I'm trying to figure it out in my head. I'm doing the maths. I'm like, grip assists for a decline bench. But then sometimes, you know, I'm someone that talks to someone in the gym. So if I ever

• 5:24James Smith?

  see a woman doing like a hip thrust of significant weight, or I see someone doing mobility work, because I've been in those environments, I'll often just go up and be like, hey, I'm really impressed with what you're doing here. I don't even tell them I'm a personal trainer. I'm just like, that's a really impressive amount of weight.

• 5:38Chris Williamson?

  So you do that, you do that as just another gym schmo walking up to other people in the gym despite the fact you're not at work?

• 5:46James Smith?

  Yeah. And I, you know, for me, if I've ever had to go into a shopping centre and you know, now you have like a men's floor and a women's floor, I feel very uncomfortable in what is the women's area. So if I'm ever shopping with my girlfriend and she's like, I actually need to get some stuff from here. I'm kind of on edge. And if someone would just speak to me or someone go, hey, you're right here, by the way? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good. Thanks. You know, something like that can really put your nerves at ease. And for me, I suppose it's a bit easier because I'm a PC. I can say, look, if I was caught staring, this was a professional, you know?

• 6:15Chris Williamson?

  It was a professional stare.

• 6:17James Smith?

  This, this, I'm just making sure your technique was good. But I think that, you know, it's because the gym is perceived in a hostile environment that things like a gaze can be taken the wrong way. I suppose context is everything, but being a, being a man, you have to be very.

• 6:33James Smith?

  You know, aware that if you're in a gym environment or a training environment, you don't want to make people feel uncomfortable, especially if there's a chance they already feel uncomfortable.

• 6:43Chris Williamson?

  I agree. There was a video that went viral on TikTok, which you might have seen about a month and a half ago of a girl wearing booty shorts and taking a top off and filming it. Then she turned around and called one of the coaches a pervert. Did you see that?

• 6:55James Smith?

  Yeah, it's annoying with stuff like this because I appreciate what people are doing. And this is, have you ever noticed that life at the moment, you're never sure if someone's filming it? Like something can happen now because content is king and people are spending more time than ever on their phones. Like, say someone has like a seizure in a busy shopping centre, there's a part of me that's like, is this a TikTok? And that's a scary realisation to be like, and you've got this bystander effect already as it is, like people not really wanting to get involved. And it's hard to know if things are now set up. So you see a girl do that in the gym where you might go over and be like, excuse me, you know, what's going on here? It's just someone trying to get some virality on TikTok or social media.

• 7:40James Smith?

  But I think men have an obligation to be polite, you know, chivalry is something that you can barely have a discussion with anymore. Where, you know, people, oh, right. Okay. So because I'm a woman, men are just going to objectify me by looking at me. That's not really the discussion to be had. And if I was to catch a dude staring in the gym, I probably be like, hey, mate, come on, she's trying to train. Relax.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  I get that, man. I think both sides are pretty hypersensitive. There's definitely an argument to be made as far as I can see that

• 8:11Chris Williamson?

  guys need to understand that girls might feel objectified, girls might feel very sensitive about guys looking for too long. But that video in particular, so there's this girl in booty shorts and she's taking a long sleeve top off and there's a sports bra. She's already in like booty shorts, takes it off and there's a sports bra underneath and two guys 30 yards away in the back of the gym, turn and look as she's taking her, literally as she's decl clothing. And she turns around and says, can I help you or what do you want or something like that? She's zero to a thousand in no time at all. And in the same way that guys need to understand that girls don't want to be objectified, girls need to understand that guys are biologically hardwired to look if something like that is happening. I mean, if a guy took his top off in the middle of the gym, some people would turn around and look.

• 8:57James Smith?

  I was just about to say, have you ever heard of a pump cover?

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  No, what's that?

• 9:02James Smith?

  So like bodybuilders, I've done this for a long time, steroids for it's quite almost embarrassing. So let's say you're in the middle of a steroid cycle, you're pretty swell, right? You get like a stringy vest on underneath and say you're eight, 10 weeks into a cycle, you're pretty juicy. So what you do is you put a massive oversized hoodie on and track pants. You go into the gym, you do your first four or five sets on a bench, like to the point where you're literally getting so hot and you're just maxing out the reps and underneath, you know, you're a little bit sweaty, you've got a savage pump, you feel like your chest and arms are about to explode. And then you wait until everyone's in the gym, people are away from like the water fountains and you uncover your top because everyone just thought you were just some big dude in a

• 9:44James Smith?

  baggy jumper. Then they see the swell enormous Lord Swaldamore there and then you do it. So you get the stairs. Sebum, a Canadian bodybuilder, he's famous for this is that when he takes his pump cover off and everyone's like, oh my God, it's like a gorilla coming in to, you know, create alpha status. But the thing is the male bodybuilding community, they like to sneak in under the radar. They don't want the red carpet to be where they walk into the gym. They want it for when they take their pump cover off. And there are quite a lot of people in that setting who kind of cherish the attention. And again, like, you know, I wish there was a bit more dialogue in the gym where if those two guys are staring, she could be like, can I help you? And I'm sure

• 10:27James Smith?

  the majority of times guys will, oh, sorry, you know, I'm bad. I don't think people are so ill intended or have such poor intentions as people assume. And yeah, I'm sure a bit of communication and not going from not to 100 probably be the smartest option there.

• 10:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I think one of the problems we've got at the moment is that men and women see each other as adversaries. And this is one of the most like interesting insights, I guess, around gender dynamics at the moment, that men and women have somehow been convinced that they're playing on different teams. I don't think that men and women have been on different teams pretty much ever, right? Yeah, maybe women didn't have particular access up until recently. But a lot of the oppression when women talk about it comes from women, like most slut shaming comes from women, most pro-life rhetoric, so anti-abortion, like anti-pro-choice rhetoric also comes from women. A lot of the restrictions that are placed on women come from kind of within their own house, as opposed to it being men that are doing that.

• 11:25Chris Williamson?

  Like, men and women have had to exist together in order to be able to get families to work, in order to have anything close to a functioning society for almost forever. But now that we want to try and find tribal groups that we can jump into whenever we feel is appropriate, this is just another one. Gender just happens to be another one that people are going to tumble into as well.

• 11:45James Smith?

  I love that you've brought this topic up because it is such a topic contention. I mean, if you were to look at the US political system, the left and the right, who heavily oppose each other, it's almost like they've lost sight that the fact that they're a political party to run the United States of America, to lead a democracy and a happy nation into the American dream, they've lost all sight of that. Instead of the left and the right being an upward trajectory to support the political state of the nation, they've become internalized, to be polarized against each other. And they're obviously losing sight of how to run a country, they're just trying to beat their opposition. So to that merit as well with men and women at the moment, like you say, with guys, guys do things to impress other guys. If I shaved my chest and increased the volume of my chest, it's because I want to impress other guys, right?

• 12:30James Smith?

  I don't want to do it to impress women. They don't appreciate the amount of effort it goes into to have a chest as a man. So things like hairline as well, guys are the first ones to comment on your hairline on TikTok or whatever, like, just shave it, bro. And you're like, you're allowed to have a receded hairline. I was in Croatia a couple of weeks ago, I was looking around at Europeans. And I was like seventy five percent of every man I can see here is experiencing some form of hair loss. Rather than seeing that as a bad thing, I was like, this is more normal than than we kind of realize. And I like watching older films where Nicolas Cage for decades was a lead actor, was Hollywood sex icon with his hairline starting like Homer Simpson with three hairs being

• 13:13James Smith?

  swept across. Bruce Willis, when he was doing Die Hard, right, and he'd gone seventy five percent bald and he just had the bits around the side. No one cared then. So a lot of these standards and beauty standards, like you say, are being upheld by men and the same with women. Absolutely. Like, you know, women are less aggressive than men, or especially less physically aggressive. So they are more inclined to use verbal communication as a way of being combative with people. So yeah, you have that kind of side of things where gossiping, like you say, slut shaming. But the thing is as well that sometimes there's a lot of double standards. So this week, my friends on the sofa, my housemates have made up a game where they go, okay, she's a ten, but she shouts your

• 13:57James Smith?

  dad's name when she orgasms. And like, it was funny, like, so we'll just be sat there watching TV. And then one of the housemates go, she's a ten, but and you're like, okay, here we go. And I put it in a YouTube video to break up what was an informative video. And people are like, that's disgusting. They're like, I was really enjoying that YouTube video until I saw that. And the reason they comment that as well is because they're trying to change you. If they were truly offended by something, they'd just leave. All right, they'd just be like, oh, this guy's not for me. But they're proactively trying to change you. They were calling me a misogynist on all of these things. And I go, hold on, girls, you have been expressing your icks about guys for clout on social media for about a year now. So if I'm not allowed to make up a hypothetical

• 14:42James Smith?

  situation with a hypothetical ten out of ten, you are not allowed to rile together your female community to talk about icks. There was one that went viral on TikTok where she was like, I never knew this was my ick, but when he gets in the shower and he kicks the water to test the temperature, that's my ick. If he does that, you know, when this shower's warming up and you give it like those little toe kicks to check what temperature is. And then I was like, girls, how can you have this double standard where you openly express things that you find explicitly unattractive in men, but the second we make up a hypothetical situation and we're oppressive, we're misogynistic, all of these things. And I'm like, come on, like, if we're going to set the standards as that, being a conflict between genders, then fucking hell.

• 15:27Chris Williamson?

  I got featured in a mega viral ick thread about a year and a half ago. So my, one of my many past lives of being a commercial male model, I'd done some stuff for a nightwear company, like loungewear, nighttime stuff. And one of the icks was a man that wears matching top and bottom pajamas. So you can imagine like a plaid sort of cross stripe scenario, like a, what you'd imagine someone in the 1800s would wear without the cap, without that sort of long, like weird fez type thing. And it was me, it was me, the photo was me and the ick was myself. And I was like, ah, yeah, at least I don't wear it, not properly. But, uh, yeah, you are right. I think one of the reasons that that

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  seems a little bit more acceptable is that girls presume that they can say those things about guys and it's not going to hurt, right? That girls are much more, uh, how would you say, sensitive about their looks than guys are. Therefore, the ick threads aren't real, like the she's a 10, but the he's a 10, but I've seen that put over the top of golden retriever videos, like he's a 10, but he dances like this when he's waiting for his food and this golden retriever is doing a silly dance. Like, I don't think that it's serious, but you are right that when the double standards and hypocrisy are what people love to point out at the moment in the world. And the reason is that it allows you to have a sense of righteousness, moral righteousness, whilst having done nothing moral to earn it. Like you get to point at the failings of somebody else and say, this is something

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  that shouldn't happen. Your, your morality stands on the shoulders of other people. Now one thing that I'm not sure that I would agree with is that people who comment online aren't truly offended. I think that for a lot of people, that is. By mimesis, by seeing what other people do when they're offended and they say that they're offended, they presume that that is the way for them to go about offence, that maybe they're going to leave, maybe they're going to unsubscribe or unfollow you, but first they're going to let you know why. I mean, how many comments do you get that says absolutely outrageous, unfollowed, or absolutely outrageous, unsubscribed? Like, that happens a lot.

• 17:28James Smith?

  Yeah, and I say to people as well, I was like, I'll always out them a bit. I'll be like, fuck it all, mate. This isn't an airport. You don't have to announce your departure. But what's kind of interesting as well with this, like, kind of culture that we have now. So I've been devising a kind of a few systems in my mind of why I think this is. Now, passion is something that before, probably book two, I would have been like, go find your passion. But a lot of people came back to me and they're like, what if I haven't found it? And I was like, well, yeah, it's not something you're just going to find on the horizon. I realised I didn't really follow my passion when I started doing what I do for work. I followed my values and I didn't even know I was following my values. A lot of the successful decisions I made were almost by accident, almost by accident.

• 18:12James Smith?

  So I became a PT because I just wanted to be happy. I thought going to work in shorts and helping people would make me happy and it did. And I was like, not having to have a boss would make me happy and it did. So I followed my values. It was only four years into being a PT that I loved my life, that I found passion. So, so many people are disconnected from their values, so many people that they never ever experienced passion. And a lot of people mistake being good at their job for passion, which is another tragic state of affairs, where they go, yeah, I like my job, you know, I hit bonuses, I hit quota, I get money. And then when you're infused with enough money, you can use that as a guise to cover up passion. So there are a lot of people out there so disconnected from their values

• 18:56James Smith?

  that they never experienced passion on the way into a job or during a job. It's now been 10 years of a passionless existence that they may be covering with money or they may not be. So when they do put on their righteous, politically correct hat, or they come in from a moral high ground and they express their emotions in such a way, they feel something in their belly and not many people are combative. Not many people fight, not many people have a martial art or something they can lean on. So they get this fire in the belly of self-righteousness and for once they feel passion. And I think a lot of people. Are inspired to be politically correct and to almost in some respects be a Karen.

• 19:39James Smith?

  And no disrespect to anyone called Karen, because it's the only time in the last few years, they've genuinely felt passion. And for a lot of them, I think it's the only time they've truly felt alive for a very long time. And they get hooked on that. And when you see these, like, do you see, there was a woman who got kicked off a United, a USA flight for screaming that the guy next to her wouldn't disclose whether or not he was vaccinated or not. And in the end, it was, it was transatlantic flight. And she's screaming. And in the end, the pilots like, get off the plane. And I was like, your bags in the hold, you're flying to the UK, you've got, you've done everything. And this is where you decide you're going to scream and make a big fuss. I reckon she was really

• 20:20James Smith?

  enjoying it. And it's a sad state of affairs that that could be the only time that person's felt fire in the belly for months.

• 20:27Chris Williamson?

  That's the place that somebody gives themselves a sense of purpose and righteousness is when they're actually able. Yeah, well, that, that would seem to make sense to me. I think that it's rare that people love anything very much. It's quite uncool, especially with a UK background. US people might not get this quite so much, because out here is a more of a collegial, uplifting, optimistic, blue sky vision type world. Whereas the UK is very much a tall poppy syndrome. If you deviate from the norm, people very quickly will point that out and say, why are you doing that? That's fucking shit. That's lame. That's not going to work. Especially typically, I think, if you to take an average. And there was this interesting bit at the start of Eliad Zukowski's book, which is about rationality.

• 21:10Chris Williamson?

  And he said, people take the piss out of rationalists that love rationality, not because rationality is a weird thing to love, but because so few people love anything in the modern world. So few people have a genuine passion about anything in particular. So when you see someone that does, they're an outlier. They're such an outlier, because most people are just like, what, what is it that you love? What do you love in life beyond family and friends? Oh, well, you know, I'm a fan of true crime. What, you love true crime? Like, true crime documentaries? That's, that's the highest point of fucking existence that you've got. True crime or football team, maybe, or, you know, some sort of sport that they support. Those are the sort of places that people go to. And

• 21:52Chris Williamson?

  with that vacuum of meaning and purpose, I think that people do try to fill it with.

• 22:00Chris Williamson?

  A stance that gives them the simulacrum of a sense of meaning whilst not actually being something that aligns with how they feel. Like it's very performative. You know, that lady that's doing that vaccine thing, that's super performative.

• 22:15James Smith?

  You're completely right. And I agree, even people like, like you say with sports teams. And what I try and warn a lot of people of is, it's completely fine to love Formula One or love a football team. And even to some people to love your partner that much, but you can't take every part of currency of happiness and values and passion you have and put it in one thing that isn't a stable investment. Look at crypto, right?

• 22:38Chris Williamson?

  Do you have any money in crypto?

• 22:41James Smith?

  Nothing, right? I'm not. But then again, we've had this discussion before. I'm not an investor at all. Like it doesn't excite me, but some people would have put everything into that and it can bottom out. And some of my friends, their, their, their universe circles around a black hole, which is their relationship, right? And their relationship gobbles up everything. And I say, look, if that relationship doesn't work out, you're left with nothing because you've put your whole life into that. Same with football teams. And some people probably get depressed when their team gets relegated. But this is why, again, I love martial arts and there was a black belt. I saw a speech that he made when he got his black belt and he said, you know, I'll lose friends, I'll lose family, my job, my money, all of these things can be taken away from me, but jiu jitsu can

• 23:26James Smith?

  never be taken away from me. Like the camaraderie, the brotherhood, the accomplishments. He's like, he held his black belt. He was like, wherever I go in the world, whatever happens to me, I still have this. And I was like, that's, that's really compelling. It was pretty emotional to hear it as well.

• 23:42Chris Williamson?

  What do you think that, what do you think that that symbolizes? What does him holding up a black belt symbolize?

• 23:48James Smith?

  I quite like the fact that it's a, you're.

• 23:53James Smith?

  You're almost stuck in a tenure of never-ending development within a specific field, but not just a field of philosophy that you can do on your own, or something where you can read books and become Ryan Holiday and become the expert of the Stoics. With jiu-jitsu, it's something you can't do on your own. You could have the best gym, the best black belt, but if he's in a room on his own, he can't do the sport. There's camaraderie, there's brotherhood, there's teaching people, there's educating people, there's being a mentor to people, there's being an inspiring figure to people. There's this massive hierarchy. If you look at the military, you've had generals and captains and all of this, lieutenants and sergeants. I

• 24:34James Smith?

  believe men crave this hierarchy between them, where tribes for hundreds of thousands of years, you've earned your stripes. And now you can have that in a martial arts setting where people are safe, they don't have to go to war, they don't have to leave their families for periods of time. It's nice to go in and know who's above you, know who's below you, know who you can give advice to and who you can go to for advice. And it's a very powerful feeling to know that. And it's a bizarre experience almost where I'll take my martial arts gear with me somewhere across the world. And when I put on my belt, I have respect from someone without ever even talking to them. And it's something, whenever you interview anyone that does jiu-jitsu, they always have that little spark, that little, this person is going to fight me, but he's also going to care about me.

• 25:16James Smith?

  He's also got respect for the work I've put in, I've got the respect for him. And I think there are a lot of little parts of the human psyche that jiu-jitsu caters for, which modern day society doesn't.

• 25:29Chris Williamson?

  Well, is one of the problems that in jiu-jitsu, your status that you achieve is directly proportional to the amount of work that you put in. I know you can go to shitty gyms where maybe you'll be given a purple belt before you perhaps should be, and then that's a less respected gym or whatever, when you go and train globally. And there's certainly harder gyms as well, right? Or ones that are seen with more prestige. But generally, your work put in is Directly related to the belt that you carry around your waist. So what you're showing with the belt isn't the belt. What you're showing with the belt is all of the years that you've spent doing it. One of the problems that you have at the moment with regards to fame is that fame has become decoupled from things that used to be worthy of making people famous. So our mutual friend Adam Collard's just gone on Love Island for the second time and Love

• 26:14Chris Williamson?

  Island is basically the Hunger Games for fame. You get picked out of obscurity, you get thrown at the top of a pile, you come out with a million dollar, million pound, pretty little thing contract and like several million Instagram followers and there you are. That's the next five years of your life. Well, you're the same person that you were six weeks ago. Whitney, 21 year old hairdresser from fucking Bristol or whatever you are, like nothing has changed. So what people have done now is they've seen the fact that obligation free status is available. You can just hope to be plucked out of obscurity. Remember that guy on TikTok who was skateboarding down the street drinking, was it cranberry juice? And listening to a particular song and the song went to number one and now he's got this very different sort of life because he was skateboarding down the street drinking

• 26:57Chris Williamson?

  cranberry juice. When someone's ability or when society begins to reward with fame, actions that don't deserve it, people are going to immediately think that the way to get fame is no longer to do the hard things consistently over a long period of time at a very high quality. What they're going to see is I need to be in the right place at the right time and hope that I get plucked out of obscurity and thrown at the top of the tree.

• 27:20James Smith?

  It's one of the last remaining true meritocracies. Well, I think I've got that word right. Have I? Yeah, thank God for that. And it's great that nothing's going to influence that. And I really enjoy the fact that I started jiu jitsu before I had a blue tick, before I had a book deal, before I had fucking anything notable and nothing's changed. And I love that it doesn't matter who I am. I still line up in belt order. We still wipe the mats together. You know, the only time that I ever try and assert status is when it's time to clean the mats. And I'm there, I'm like, listen, mate, I don't know your name, but that's not how you wipe the mats. I've had ringworm twice this year and you don't know what it's like having a girlfriend and ringworm where you can't touch them. You're laying in bed and you get a bit of skin, skin. I'm like, get off me. I've got ringworm.

• 28:05James Smith?

  So it's, it's one of those times where it's really truly an amazing thing to go in and. Another thing as well is that you can access some of the best athletes in the world. So when I came to Austin last time I saw you, I'm still recovering from that hangover. I was training literally with the David Beckhams, the Cristiano Ronaldo's of the world. And I went into the gym, I had to do like a little form and our mutual friend Zach, Zach Tellander. I went to his gym and he's like, bro, come correct, man, you gotta come to my gym. I was like, yeah, sweet. So I'd already trained in the morning, I'd go there for lunch and it was war. And some of the guys in there, I was like, oh my God, it's the Tackett brothers, they're sick. And I'm like, oh my God, there's that Cody Steele, I was like, he's sick. And even their culture was very different to where I'd been before, but they were super welcoming.

• 28:49James Smith?

  None of them knew what I did for work, no one really gave a shit. They were very respectful when we rolled, they actually, all of them lowered their level to me so we could have fun rolls. They could have smashed me, they could have wiped the floor with me, but instead, smile on the face. Most of them didn't even have their gum shields in and it was such a like a great opportunity to train with some of the best. I'm intimidated, right? I can talk in front of thousands of people, that's fine. Doing a TED talk, no sweat patches, training with these guys, I was like, oh my God. You know, and I think that's one of the things as well that I love about the sport.

• 29:18Chris Williamson?

  I put a clip up a couple of weeks ago about a feminist called Louise Perry explaining that while some girls think that choking is a passionate sign of love, others are misinterpreting it. And it's not actually that and that girls should stop showing their bruises on TikTok as a badge of honour. What were your thoughts there?

• 29:37James Smith?

  Yeah, I commented on this. I don't think one woman can objectively hold an opinion for all women. Same way that, you know, that that's not allowed irrespective of genders. No one can say this is my opinion on something, therefore it's all of your opinions. And I didn't like the objective manner in which you said that. I do think that, you know, any bruises on the neck between genders is probably a telltale sign that you're being a bit too rough. You know, it's probably what a bruise is. I don't ever advocate any striking or violence between people. But I think that she'd probably be better off doing a Survey Monkey and asking women of the world, a good large population, why it is they may like choking. And I mean, it's not women that just like choking. I think if you look at asphyxiation deaths, there's a lot of men in there as well.

• 30:21James Smith?

  And yeah, do you know what? It's crazy that straight away, when you use the word feminist, it puts everyone on edge, including women. Because what was a true passion and passionate stance, and I'm sure feminists over across history have done some really stellar things for women. But there's now this kind of extremist group of people that are trying to, they're almost like liberals in a sense. They want to rewrite everything. They want everything to change. And straight away, as soon as you said, I had a feminist on the podcast, people, oh, God, here we go. What's coming next? And it's annoying, like, and this isn't just in this context, for someone labels me misogynist, which they probably have already, veganism, 10, 15 years ago, I'm like, fair play. Do you know what? Fair play. I

• 31:06James Smith?

  love animals too. But the fact that you don't eat them, I love that. Then the extremists come along. Someone goes, oh, I had a vegan on the podcast. Oh, fuck, no, there we go. You know what I mean? So it's one of those things where I also appreciate that your podcast is really doing well. And for some guests, that could just be their moment in the limelight. They knew that was going to be a clip. They knew there would be some controversy. And they could then link arms with other extremist feminists. But although I think people should 100% remain safe, everything should have consent, everything, each person to their own. I mean, you can't sit here and go strangling is really bad. Hold on, David, a wine bottle up his ass. What about that? You know, like, so it is one of those things. I think they should ask women. There was a lot of women in your comments as well.

• 31:49James Smith?

  They were like, no, that's exactly not why.

• 31:52Chris Williamson?

  With Louise, her stance in particular is an interesting one, because she considers herself a feminist. But on the other side of that, she's not a sex positive feminist. So she doesn't think that sex work is the same as normal work. She doesn't think that OnlyFans should be normalized. She doesn't think that the highest calling that women should go for always is their careers. And to call yourself a feminist in most young people's circles at the moment, would be someone that would be for all of those things. Whereas Louise, I think, would be more of a trad feminist. Like, she'd be accused of being like a trad wife, or something, even though she writes for The Spectator, which is like, does she write for The Spectator? No, she doesn't. She writes for The New Statesman, which is very much on the left. And she also has a

• 32:33Chris Williamson?

  Organisation which helps to prosecute women who have been killed when men use the excuse of rough sex as a defence.

• 32:47Chris Williamson?

  So, I mean, one thing to note about this is that if people decide to comment on a particular clip that's taken from an episode and I say, did you watch the full episode? Because evidently this is a clip which is taken from it. No, I don't need to. And it's like, okay, well, I mean, you're not, you're not taking this particularly seriously. So why, why should I? I think that one of the points that she makes is quite interesting though, which is that girls on TikTok are showing off bruises as a badge of honour, that they're saying, look, this is how passionate my love is. This is how important he finds my attractiveness. That is a very impressionable group of young girls that are being told that this is something that they should strive for. And one of the concerns is that almost any guy will do what almost any girl tells him

• 33:30Chris Williamson?

  to do to her, because guys are terrified about their performance and just want to do it right. Whatever it is, they just want to do it right. Whereas the reverse isn't necessarily true. I mean, I would be interested to know how many girls would say yes to choking their male partner if their male partner said, I'm absolutely certain it would be fewer, and it may be quite a few fewer. I just think that it is an important time, especially with TikTok and how messed up and how much social anxiety there is and how much vulnerability there is amongst Gen Z kids. I mean, there's girls that show off self-harm marks on there. There's girls that give tips about anorexia and stuff on there. Like, it seems to me like, fair play for doing successfully on the platform, but for

• 34:15Chris Williamson?

  a very young group, it seems pretty dangerous. I don't think from the outside looking in, it looks like a particularly positive environment to be in if you were a 14-year-old guy or girl.

• 34:26James Smith?

  It's interesting. I'll start on the the OnlyFans thing is something that I've been thinking about for quite a while. And again, I

• 34:32Chris Williamson?

  Starting one up?

• 34:34James Smith?

  No, no, no. Maybe.

• 34:35Chris Williamson?

  Send this stuff out the window. Fuck it.

• 34:37James Smith?

  Let's see how book three sales go. But I actually, I can understand both sides of the argument where she's saying like, look, don't sell naked pictures of yourself on the internet, especially to a platform, I think. And I'm pretty sure if people buy it, they then own the image or there's something crazy like that. I could be wrong. However, I actually quite like the idea of women being able to perform these paid services without having to be in the room with another man or being in a strip club with drunk men and or being in a position where they're unsafe. They could do it remotely from a room with a camera. So I actually quite like the division between the woman and the man. I think that's a lot safer. And I think that, you know, if you were to say to a woman, you can make $300 a night in a strip club, but you've got to, you

• 35:19James Smith?

  know, dance on drunk men or whatever, or you can make 150 a day and you could just take pictures in your underwear and do, you know, whatever for for guys. I quite like that safety barrier between them. Because I, I, you know, you people criticize sex work, although I'm not an advocate of it personally, it's one of the oldest professions I think that's ever existed. Then

• 35:41Chris Williamson?

  But I mean, just to interject there, would you say that that's empowering women? Like, it seems odd to me that female empowerment has gone from wanting women and men to be treated as equals to encouraging women to get naked for the price of a cheeseburger. Like, that to me doesn't seem like the peak of female empowerment. And neither does telling women that the most important thing that they'll ever do in their lives is their career. And I think that the trickle down effect of that is that one of the easiest ways or one of the potentially easiest ways to either supplement your income or increase your income is to do something like this on the side. As you say, it's one of the oldest industries in existence. It's probably what the first transactions were made for, either sex or food, you know, like survival and reproduction. It was

• 36:26Chris Williamson?

  a spear, it was a piece of grain, or it was a girl. And I'm not convinced that that is a progressive idea. That's not for me to say that girls that were Potentially go and do sex work elsewhere in strip clubs. Is it safer? Yeah, absolutely. Would I prefer a girl to be working on cams instead of walking the streets? Yeah, absolutely. My concern is that the frictionlessness and the fact that it's seen as a no externality, no negative externality option for a lot of women to do is that it's lowered the ick floor for a lot of girls to get into an industry where they're not going to make that much money. They are potentially going to lock themselves into being a type of girl. Maybe photos get leaked. Maybe a future employer or boyfriend sees them. Like, here's a question. Would you be happy getting

• 37:08Chris Williamson?

  into a very long-term relationship with a girl who recently quit OnlyFans or currently still had one?

• 37:15James Smith?

  Oh my God, that's such a misogynistic question. No, I'm joking. Like, it's interesting because if I was to, this is the defence I like to say a lot. I really wouldn't want my future daughter to do it. Right? That's, that's fine. That, that can give me a stance, can't it? As a potential soon, I could be a father in two years or whatever. There's another, there's another point to that. You say about the empowerment. I have no idea because, you know, the empowerment side of things, I have no idea what that's like. But there is kind of one other avenue for kind of thinking on this. There's a lot of potentially low status men that we talk about. Maybe utility of deprivation is one of my favourite Jordan Peterson topics where he talks about,

• 37:56James Smith?

  you know, masturbating, giving yourself access to so many women can negate your actions are imperative to improve the quality of your life. If you're wanking every day to porn or to OnlyFans, you're hardly going to feel gee'd up to ask the girl in the coffee shop if she wants to go for a date. But I can only imagine how many sick and twisted fucking men out there are sperving on women's Instagram. And oh, she's so fit. Oh, she's so fit, whatever. I quite like the idea sometimes that some of these absolute sickos can actually then access naked pictures of that person and fulfill their fantasies online a long way away.

• 38:36James Smith?

  opposed to potential other things that they might do stalking that person, becoming fanatically obsessed with this person or whatever those things are. So in my recent thinking recently, I was like, I hope, I don't know, I hope that this market is catering to some sick men.

• 38:53Chris Williamson?

  One of the problems, one of the problems you have is there's been a bunch of OnlyFans models that have been killed by fans that they've had. So I would say that the degree of separation that you have on Instagram, which is evidently not for you, you feel absolutely no obligation or sense of ownership or sense of contribution or intimacy with that person.

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  Anybody that's got 10 bucks can become one of like have the virtual boyfriend service or whatever. That's not the same with a follow. Nobody expects that with a follow on Instagram. I think that you're actually, from a psychological perspective for men, I think that you're leaning them further into a dangerous arena as opposed to taking them away from it.

• 39:30James Smith?

  That's actually a very valid point, which I hadn't thought about. These are all just thinkings in my mind. Sometimes I'll be like, I'll be walking somewhere and my mind will just drift off and I'll try and break down things like this. That's another valid point because those kind of interactions are usually exclusively only to people in relationships. And when you're financially incentivized and sometimes financially propped up by the income that you get from this group of men, you can become subservient to them. And then if you discontinue that subservient nature, it could be met with animosity.

• 40:02Chris Williamson?

  A lot of revenge, yeah.

• 40:04James Smith?

  I think that it's a really delicate one because the psychology of, of, you know, men like that Jordan Peterson clip where he goes, "A man can expose himself to more naked women in an hour than previously a man would ever have seen in an entire lifetime." And the psychological implications of that are profound and probably not fully, you know, appreciated or studied or understood.

• 40:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, there was an interesting point in a podcast I did with Andrew Huberman recently where he said that men specifically who train themselves to get aroused by watching other people have sex may not have the arousal response carry over when it comes to being in reality with a normal person. So you could neurologically train yourself to become a voyeur in a way. If that's what you get used to, if you condition yourself to become aroused by watching other people and you then get one on one. That might not work. It may not work in the way that you're supposed to. So you have increases in erectile dysfunction amongst men, a lot of the time because they've desensitized themselves. They've downregulated their arousal response so much by watching ever increasingly extreme

• 41:11Chris Williamson?

  or exciting porn, and then reality just can't compete.

• 41:15James Smith?

  You know, that's actually such an interesting topic. I know we're talking about so much porn now. What's it called when men like to watch someone else sleep with their wife?

• 41:26Chris Williamson?

  So it would be cuckold porn, I think technically.

• 41:28James Smith?

  Cuckold, cuckold. So I've always wondered how someone ends up in that position. And you might have just opened a can of worms there where, like you say, if you're a third party watching other people have sex and you are in love with your wife and you want the best thing for her, then the cuckold experience may come from that. And again, there's that genre of porn, the POV point of view, to maybe try and negate that. But one thing that I'm genuinely concerned about, all right, and this is the metaverse, right? I never gave it like real much thought, but I digest things over and over. And we both have a mutual friend, Luke. He went to a Red Bull experience where they go to six festivals in half an hour

• 42:08James Smith?

  wearing an Oculus and they're sat down. But in the metaverse, they get handed a drink, which is actually made in front of them. But as they drink the drink, the Oculus notes that they look up and when they look down, there are another festival. And I was like, wow, that's, that's pretty fucking amazing. And then I saw a story about a guy who watches movies in the metaverse, because you can watch a movie on an Oculus, but he actually watches it from a penthouse apartment in bed in Las Vegas, where that's not where he lives, but in his Oculus he is. So he's like, why would I not wear this? I'm in a shitty fucking one bed in the middle of America, when I can put this on and be in a penthouse in Vegas? And then I was thinking about, let's say we get Neuralink, right? In the next few years,

• 42:49James Smith?

  we could tap into, you know, telling our body something. Why would you risk STDs, pregnancy, all of these things, when you could have a virtual experience of having sex? And people are going to be very quick to scoff at that. But I was thinking to myself the other day, okay, let's say in three years' time, I can put on an Oculus and see my favorite DJ play at Glastonbury. And instead of paying the money, driving to Glastonbury, parking, camping, queuing for toilets, being stuck in massive crowds, idea of getting trampled on, losing phone reception, like festivals, you give up a lot to have a good time. Imagine if me and three of my friends can sit on the sofa. Watch Bicep play, put an Oculus on, it feels like we're in the crowd. But whenever we want to go for a toilet, we can just take the Oculus off, go use our toilet.

• 43:34James Smith?

  We don't even have to leave the house. You know, if we wanted to take some MDMA, we can do it. Imagine as you turn the Oculus, I can see my friend, I can even virtually high five him. I was just joking about that, but as I was saying it, I was like, that sounds pretty fucking appealing. Going to the pub with your mates, why would we pay for for real beer when we can buy a pack and have it at home? And we can have a virtual, you know, banter, like pointing at your mates and, you know, we're soon very slippery on the slopes of, everyone goes, yeah, but I love leaving the house. But would you if there was a better alternative without having to?

• 44:07Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever seen the Bruce Willis film Surrogates?

• 44:14Chris Williamson?

  You remember that one?

• 44:16James Smith?

  Yes, um, uh, I've, I've seen it. I'm trying to think, I keep getting it mixed up with the jumper one.

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  No, not that. So it's, it's basically what you're talking about. So in the future, people have surrogates, they're these sort of avatar, perfect versions of them. And you buy upgrades for your surrogate and it walks around in the real world and you just sit in your apartment in a leather chair. Basically locked in and controlling it in one way or another. Uh, and then Bruce decides he wants to do something different. Dude, I, I really am pretty concerned, I think about that. I mean, I get comments sometimes on the more blackpilly conversations that have come up on this channel from guys who have evidently lost hope that the future is going to be better for them in terms of dating. And they're saying, uh, don't worry, boys, just hold on, the sex robots are coming. That's not ironic. They're not saying that in an ironic way.

• 45:04Chris Williamson?

  They're saying, right now, I feel like I'm so invisible to the other sex that all I'm, the only piece of hope that I have is technology coming in and saving me from the current world. Like, that's a terrifying situation to think that we've managed to get a super affluent, super comfortable society to, that that's the pinnacle that most guys or many guys, should I say, not most at all, but a significant minority of guys think is their outlet.

• 45:33James Smith?

  Yeah, I've spoken about this quite a lot in my most recent book, which I've got to credit you for. I'll talk about in a second, some of the parts of the book that are quite literally from our conversations. But there's two kind of things here. One, the pandemic really fucking slingshotted people into the online dating world because they physically would break the law to go on a physical date. The organic meets, you know, meeting someone in a coffee shop, someone at your local gym, whatever it is, all those were taken away. So people went online pretty aggressively and it's fear of rejection. You know, now you don't have to get rejected. You know, before you'd have to interview for 10 jobs. Now your CV gets rejected on LinkedIn before you even get there. But the world is becoming more and more comfortable where you don't have to have awkward conversations anymore.

• 46:16James Smith?

  So you have that. And there's also a phenomenon which I write about called declinism, where people have a tendency to think things are getting worse, you know. And again, Jordan Peterson was in a debate a good few years ago where someone was talking about climate change, this, this, what's your thing on this? And he goes, do you think you have an easier life than your grandparents? And the woman wouldn't answer it. You know, everyone's so caught up about how bad things are that he was like, do you reckon you have a, you know, better life? Yeah, you know.

• 46:43Chris Williamson?

  Let me just give you something there, man. So there's a concept called the Tocqueville paradox. So as the living standards in the society rise, people's expectations rise along with them. But obviously, your expectations are able to move much more quickly than reality can. So after a while, most of the low hanging fruit that reality can deliver to you in terms of convenience and comfort and such like that, they start to level off. However, your expectations continue to go up. So what you end up with is a delta between where you see life being and what you thought life was supposed to be. That's the Tocqueville paradox. The fact that as living standards rise, so do expectations, and then expectations overtake the reality, and that causes people to be dissatisfied. I think that's very close

• 47:25Chris Williamson?

  Concept of talking about that.

• 47:27James Smith?

  And people seem to think, you know, I think that a lot of people even thinking about having children, you know, we've got a population crisis nearing around the corner. You had a fantastic interview with Jordan Peterson about that. Fifty years in the United States it's been since people have been producing enough kids to have younger generations. So not only are we going into that, I think there is a bit of in the subconscious people going, why would I want to bring a child into this world? But there's a book called Factfulness. Forgive me for, thank fuck for that. And that was pre pandemic that I read that, but still so much of that rings true. There's one part in the book where he's like, four million babies will die before their first birthday. And you're like, oh, it's terrible. Down from 12 million five years ago. And you're like,

• 48:12James Smith?

  the way the media like portray everything, you do feel like the world's getting worse, but the world is getting better. And I do like to remind people of that. And it is tragic that declinism is having such a profound impact on people's thinking where they they do suddenly like pessimism bias, loss aversion. We're all genetically programmed to negative outcomes. And we have that with the future as well, which is, which is tragic. I whenever I get like a deep conversation about this, my friends, I'm like, guys, Elon will save us. Elon will save us.

• 48:41Chris Williamson?

  He's not fucking buying Twitter anymore. He's about to be sued by Twitter. Do you see that? That he's just been, the lawsuit's just been unveiled about him?

• 48:48James Smith?

  What else can they do? Because in essence, he's lifted the skirt on some bullshit that's been going on with Twitter. He's aired the laundry for the world to see. And I think it's fucking brilliant. And, you know, there's so much skullduggery that's been going on in the social media space. And there's so much of even Twitter's code that definitely got reversed during that process. When like Joe Rogan and all these people got hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of followers overnight, where they've obviously been shadow banning people, the political leaning stuff, you know, and it's very hard to ignore the fact that many of these social media platforms are switchboards to political leanings and narratives. And mate, you know, when I went home to spend some time with my parents recently, I realized that my parents spent a lot of the

• 49:32James Smith?

  time in the pandemic locked in lockdown, and it has changed them. And all they had was each other, the news. The newspaper and I've now realised that my parents cannot have a debate or a discussion anymore because they are so set, it's almost like the fabric of your stance sets in stone after about two years. So my mum and dad really don't like Elon Musk and I was like, I was trying to figure out why. And my dad was like, oh, you know, it doesn't pay enough tax or any of these things. And then I was like, right, let's see if I can have like a genuine discussion. I was like, the atrocities going on in in Ukraine, terrible. I go, I

• 50:13James Smith?

  said to my dad, because for thirty years, I've gone to my dad for, dad, what's communism? Dad, why is this happening? Dad, what what does socialist states mean? And I said, Dad, why is Putin invading Ukraine? And he's like, because he's evil. And I was like, I think there's, there's some bigger reasons to that. And I was like, what about NATO? NATO been praying? My dad's like, no, he's just evil. And I was like, I think that's a narrative that's been painted online. And I couldn't get anything else out of him. I had another discussion recently where there was a, someone on Lex Freedman's podcast who was talking about how the Nazis were the first to stop pregnant women from having x-rays. And the Nazis were some of the first people to stop their nation smoking. Thirty years after

• 50:57James Smith?

  the Nazis stopped their nation smoking, America publicly said, this is probably what the sixties, I think, or seventies, if we found out that smoking hindered people's health, we'd make it illegal. And when I said that once, I said, oh, did you know the Nazis were actually at the forefront of of health of their own people? People go, how the fuck can you can you sit there and say that? I'm not I'm not supporting anything they've done. And suddenly I was getting abused from someone for bringing up the fact that the Nazis were a little bit further ahead in that medical field. And I was like, wow, I actually think in recent years, we've moved away from the ability to even have discussions on so many topics anymore. And especially with things like Twitter and all

• 51:39James Smith?

  of these things. Have you found that it would short form, especially people that maybe you and I right now podcasting, it's a channel that's not governed by media, by the big media, or there is a source of media. I feel like these are some of the only genuine conversations that can be had. I feel like podcasts are now the back channels where you can actually say and talk about things.

• 51:59Chris Williamson?

  I would agree. I think one of the main.

• 52:06Chris Williamson?

  Common denominator between all of the situations you've spoken about there is that people have attached their sense of self-worth and/or identity to a position that they hold, that if they were to let go of their position, it would be the same as destruction. So Eckhart Tolle talks about this, the fact that when you're having a discussion with people, a lot of the time, the reason that they don't want to admit that they're wrong is it's tantamount to ego destruction, right? That this would feel like the complete removal of everything that I am, because if I'm wrong about that, what else might I be wrong about? And there are certain people out there that are more curious than others, and they will be the ones that will be able to continue to update their software and their programming as new information comes in. Personally, for me,

• 52:48Chris Williamson?

  I spend almost all of my time, especially now I'm in Austin, because it's a very open, philosophically open city, I spend almost all of my time having conversations that I don't know the answer to, and asking other smart people if they've got an answer to it. So for me, I haven't really noticed that, but certainly online, comments are reactionary, they're short, they take the worst possible implication of what someone's words could mean. And I don't know, that just doesn't seem like, for the people that decide to do it very quickly, they're going to realise that it's not an effective way to exist. Now, that's going to mean that they're miserable, they're going to be, their negativity bias is going to be even worse. So yeah, I mean, I choose to not ever associate myself with

• 53:32Chris Williamson?

  those people. I want to have conversations about stuff as freely as I can. Now, one of the things that I have started to realise is that there's a limit to what I can even talk about on podcasts. There are conversations that I sometimes refrain from having, or at least I have to force myself to have with friends, because most of the conversations that I have are on podcasts. And that means that when I want to really push the boundaries of something that's different or interesting, or like, can we talk about whatever topic that would be completely unacceptable, even on something like YouTube, that's something that I've conditioned myself into. So when you think about, if most of your conversations were you and the media, I'm aware it's like a one-way conversation, but if most of your conversations were between you and The Guardian, or the BBC, or CNN, or Fox News, or whatever,

• 54:16Chris Williamson?

  that is going to become your sense of identity. I've internalised one as well, it's just that my internalisation is like guardrails on what I can speak about. Somebody else's are the guardrails that have been set on them by a media organisation.

• 54:29James Smith?

  Yes, interesting. I think that one of the most worrisome things that I see is the disintegration of ignorance, where ignorance is now painted in such a bad light, where even when we spoke about the OnlyFans thing before, I expressed my point of view and you're like, well, actually, this is what's happening. And then I'm like, oh, I'm actually wrong on that point, which is fantastic, because I appreciate that. And the same thing with like, you know, trying to have a discussion with my dad, why is Putin doing that? And I think that it's annoying that someone could go, well, actually, this, this, this, this happened, you shouldn't even be questioned. I have ignorance about the whole situation there. But the thing is, you can't really easily find out what's going on. You know, if I, if you were to ask the majority of the people in the UK, why is this

• 55:13James Smith?

  happening? They'd struggle to give you an answer on it. And I feel that, do you know what? This is crazy, right? I've, I've become more concerned with history as I'm getting older. And people used to tell me history was such an amazing subject. It was like, medicine through time, get out of here. But now I'm getting a little bit older, mate. I spend a lot of time on YouTube. I went down a North Korea rabbit hole the other day. I reckon I watched about five hours of documentaries about North Korea.

• 55:39Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 55:41James Smith?

  Fascination. We don't like, we just get told like, oh, they're evil, which I agree with. But I didn't really understand what was going on there. You know, we, Joe Rogan had Park in, I don't want to get a name, Yonme Park. And I was listening to that, I was mortified. I was like, the whole world needs to know about this. We should have been taught this in secondary school. Why was I learning about medicine through time? And, you know, like, in America, I really like, became fascinated about all these things. And it, as time goes on, it's one of those things, you get, you get concerned about, why are we learning the things we're learning? Why aren't we learning about what's happening? And so much of history does repeat itself. And I think it's absolutely bonkers that we don't have like, better narratives on that at the moment.

• 56:26Chris Williamson?

  So there's a concept called firehosing, which I learned from a friend, Gwyneth Boghul. He said, with so many competing narratives in the digital age, disinformation agents can't convince you of any single narrative. So instead, they overwhelm you with many contradictory narratives. And still you start to doubt everything and become confused, demoralized and passive. So the point there is that it is significantly easier to confuse and demoralize people than it is to convince them of anything. And firehosing involves throwing all of the information at you until you can't work out what's true anymore. I think that's what you're seeing.

• 56:59James Smith?

  Sounds almost like he's zygotic.

• 57:03Chris Williamson?

  Do you want to talk about, do you want to talk about the cool stuff you've put in your new book?

• 57:07James Smith?

  Yeah. So when we were sat in Austin sinking some beers, you know, I never let good advice fall on deaf ears. I put that in both my books so far. So the zygotic effect, which you told me about, about waiters remembering open bills and forgetting about them when they're closed. You started then telling me about the implications that could have to our, to our psyche and writing about it really expanded that. Well, I've actually experienced this firsthand, like when you see someone or someone very attractive and everything in you goes, oh my God, I find this person really attractive. I'd love to ask for their number. You're on the tube or it might be someone, you know, I remember doing a qualification once and it was a five day course. And the first day I really found this girl attractive. It was the last 10 minutes on the last day. I was like 19 that I asked her, oh, can I have your number?

• 57:50James Smith?

  She goes, I thought you'd never ask. And we ended up going on some like amazing dates. It was like incredible. I, I think about it to this day, if I hadn't have asked, how long would I have thought about that? What are the mental implications of not doing things? You know, that job that you saw on LinkedIn that you didn't apply for. And now you're following the guy that's in the role and he's loving his life, just got a big bonus. Like all of these things take up mental taxes and I keep thinking about loops, TV adverts. Oh, after the break, we've got seven ways to kill zombies in an apocalypse. You're like, oh my God, the, the loop's been opened, shut in loops. And I've, I've really coined that into like a bit of a motivator in how to be confident. But like there was that, the Pyrrhic victories as well, which you spoke about, like a dog leaping off a cliff to bite a bird for dinner.

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:35James Smith?

  Tense amount to defeat.

• 58:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:37James Smith?

  How many, how many things are truly Pyrrhic in daily life that scare us?

• 58:44Chris Williamson?

  Very few, I think. Like most of the time what people are doing is they're slowly chewing away, they're eating away at their own sense of sovereignty with stuff like that. I think I spoke to you about the anxiety cost as well, right? Like the amount of mental effort that it takes to consider something that you could get rid of by simply doing the thing. All of the stuff that you leave undone, all of the loops, all of the uncompleted tasks, all of pretty much everything that you decide isn't yet finished, that you could have just done right now, if you were to have just done it right now, that would have been sorted.

• 59:17James Smith?

  Yes, it's one of those things where, yeah, I read those out. I'm recording the audiobook at the moment. So I'm back in the studio in about an hour and a half.

• 59:24Chris Williamson?

  You finished it. Bloody hell, Luke would be happy.

• 59:26James Smith?

  Printed on Friday during the audiobook. It takes, I read for about three hours a day for five days. And it is pretty heavy, but then it's your book. So some chapters I wrote more recently than others, but sometimes you don't realize how long the sentence is. So you have to go through, then you have sense, then you have words that you've potentially misinterpreted, then breathing is difficult as well, because you've got to learn how to breathe properly and when to breathe. And some sentences, you might have to do 15 words before a comma. So you have to take mini breaths in between. It's a bit of an art form, recording an audiobook.

• 1:00:01Chris Williamson?

  I would agree.

• 1:00:02James Smith?

  But they're a credit to Douglas Murray. His book, War in the West, is about 11, 12 hours. Incredible. How, and I, I, I might be doing a podcast with Doug's Murray in the next few months. His voice, I love it, right?

• 1:00:18Chris Williamson?

  Spectacular.

• 1:00:19James Smith?

  The way he's got this, this posh, yeah, authoritative voice that, and he's like, "Well, that's very interesting." And I'm like.

• 1:00:32Chris Williamson?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:00:34James Smith?

  I think, but when I saw that 12 hours, it was like, my book's probably going to be six, seven hours. I was like, wow, that is some stint of recording an audiobook.

• 1:00:41Chris Williamson?

  It took him an entire week as well, but I think he does it in, he does it in morning and afternoon stint. It was happening, he was recording it as I was in New York with him. So I left and that first day after I left, he was going, something that I saw on an episode of Seth Stephens Davidowitz, who is a data scientist, and it links to what you were talking about earlier on about comfort. He says, "We sometimes mistake a comfortable activity for an enjoyable activity." And this rounds up something I've been thinking about for probably about three years, which is that a lot of the time, when you consider how future you would have wanted you to spend your time right now, it involves doing something enjoyable, but current you wants you to do something which is comfortable. So it would be the difference between going out to a salsa class for the first time ever,

• 1:01:25Chris Williamson?

  which might be shit, but might be absolutely brilliant. And even if it is shit, you're going to remember it a lot more than you are yet another night watching The Terminal List on Amazon Prime or whatever. But because we optimize for comfort in the moment, and we presume that comfort in the moment will be enjoyment in the long term, you often end up. Selecting for comfort and ease and convenience. And over a long period of time, that ends up with just a pretty dissatisfactory life. And that's kind of the same as what you're talking about in terms of you need to have something which will motivate yourself. Like, what is the little thing that you rely on that when you think about it? Look, I probably just need to go and do this thing because it's going to be quicker for me to work out whether or not I should have done it by doing it than it is for me to just think about it all the time and obsess.

• 1:02:10James Smith?

  Yeah, I think that you can measure your growth by measuring your discomfort. So right now, and I put this in the book as well. How, how many things this week truly make you uncomfortable? How many things this week truly make you a bit nervous and put you on edge? If there's a considerable amount, you're probably in a growth phase. And if there's nothing, you're probably in a stagnation phase. And I'm quick to spot these. The last few weeks, I was like, oh, it's good to be back in Australia. Life's good. So I was like, fuck, I'm going to compete in jiu jitsu this weekend on Sunday. So on Sunday, I'm going to drive an hour and a half away to fight other men in my division at my weight level. Why? Because quite frankly, it scares the shit out of me. Training is comfortable and it's not even the fight that I'm scared of.

• 1:02:55James Smith?

  It's the expectations in which I attach to it. And that, that leading up to doing unenjoyable, finishing, whether I win or lose, in hindsight, it's amazing. Like, winning is great, but losing, I love to remind myself how amazing it is to lose because there's no better reality check or dose of inspiration that you can get than having your ego realigned to reality. And I think that's such a rewarding thing. And like, let's even say this, say you reach out for a podcast guest who you think is probably a few echelons above where you're currently at and they reject you. That's one of the best things that can happen because if you've made it this far, that's

• 1:03:39James Smith?

  just going to put fire in your belly and you're going to go, okay, I'm going to grow this motherfucker until the point you're knocking on my door to come and do this. And I think people have also, not only do they avoid uncomfortable situations, they can't quite see the potential upside of putting themselves in it. And even better yet, they're so fearful of losing when that could be the key thing. Lucy Lord, my friend, she says, the lessons you need are in the tasks you're avoiding.

• 1:04:07Chris Williamson?

  That's very nice.

• 1:04:10James Smith?

  She might have got it from someone else, but that's all right.

• 1:04:12Chris Williamson?

  Fair play. Give it to Lucy. It's okay. Yeah, that's lovely, man. I don't disagree. I think that most people understand the places that they're hiding away from themselves. And you're quite right. It's the things that you don't want to look at are the things that you don't want to do. And those are the identifiers.

• 1:04:31Chris Williamson?

  What else? What else about the new book you excited for? We'll probably, we'll have another conversation, I'm sure, once it's out. But is there anything else that you're super excited about it?

• 1:04:39James Smith?

  Like, people think it's a book about confidence. Like, I'm like, hey, my name's James Smith. I'm so confident. Let me teach you how I've done it. And weirdly, my life is something that I look back on. I'm quite proud of a younger version of me because he wasn't as intelligent. He just happened to make the right decisions. I look back now and I'm thinking, fucking hell, you did all right there, mate. You did all right there. But I've come to realize that confidence isn't so much about success, it's about failure. And it's about how you deal and how you, how you react to failure. And I think that people, they see the spectrum from the wrong end. They see it the success end. Oh, you're confident because you're successful. I'm like, well, I'm actually confident because losing doesn't faze me. Things going wrong doesn't faze me.

• 1:05:23Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:05:25James Smith?

  Because that's not the metric that you should be setting for success. Imagine this, and this is again, is something I've written in the book. Why does something going right have to be successful? Why can't you trying to do something be successful? You know, let's say that I love using the setting of dating where people are so worried to ask for someone's number and for it to go wrong. But if you were to break that down into like a three minute segment, the second you have put yourself into that position and asked before they even have the chance to compute and response, you could win. That's your win. And if people realize that even if just sending their CV to someone, a potential employer, that can be your win. It doesn't have to be getting the job.

• 1:06:08James Smith?

  And if you can set these, again, I've been doing this with people for weight loss for years. I wouldn't lose 10 pounds. I'm like, how about losing one pound and making that a win? And if people can get better at what their wins look like and where they're setting the objectives and how that failure, you're only going to ever add strings to your bow by failing. And I think that if people can get that in their head, it's more about a book about dealing with failure than it is a book about being confident. And if you were to think of the most confident person in your mind, the most confident person you've ever met. When something goes wrong, how much they take it to heart?

• 1:06:41Chris Williamson?

  Very little.

• 1:06:41James Smith?

  And it's kind of, and it's that kind of mindset I want people to get into. It's not easy, but it's certainly worth it if people persevere with it enough.

• 1:06:49Chris Williamson?

  One of my favorite bits from the live tour that I went to go and see you do, the most recent one in Newcastle, was how you were explaining to people, if they don't enjoy their job, that you're basically risking nothing to then move on to go and do something else. Can you just go through that?

• 1:07:05James Smith?

  So firstly, I like to remind people that so many of them are doing really well in a job they don't enjoy. And that's just a fact. Most people in recruitment, right? There are probably a very few amount of people in recruitment that actually enjoy it. I've done it myself, but they're good at it and they are, you know, I've, I've always wanted to have my own job, have my own business. But, you know, I just don't know, you know, I can't afford for things not to go right. I've got kids, you know, I've just got a mortgage on a house. And I'm like, cool. Okay. But here's something to consider. You're doing very well in a job you're not passionate about. So if you're selling people to jobs you're not interested in, do you have the capabilities to sell something you actually give a fuck about? Probably.

• 1:07:49James Smith?

  Now, what if that doesn't work out? You probably go back to a job in recruitment. You're exactly where you started. And I think that people, when they really understand if they're dominating something they don't like, the potential they have for dominating something they do like is massive. And again, I'm pretty sure it's a statistic where people say, when they ask people on their deathbed, the thing they regret the most is the things they didn't do, not the things that didn't work out. And I wish people could have more conversations with old people. The old people aren't like, oh, went for it. It was the worst decision ever. They always talk about things they didn't do. And I think that it's really important.

• 1:08:31James Smith?

  The people appreciate that your work life is such a big constituent of your overall life and it gives you purpose, it gives you meaning, it is a pillar of your mental health, it's so, so important. And it kind of kills me that people don't see the implications that has to the rest of their lives because if you don't enjoy your work life, that is going to affect your relationships, it's going to affect your training, it's going to affect your diet. Because we need to, you remember like in Sims, playing it back in the day, you got those little plus and minus interactions. You want to be getting pluses from work, pluses from your partner, and you don't want anything in life to be giving you those negative interactions because it will take its toll.

• 1:09:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man. I mean, where you live, what you do and who you do it with are the three most important choices, I think, that you can make. It's a very British phenomenon, I think. Most of the American people that I've spoken to, and again, this could be selection effect from being in Austin, which is full of cultural refugees from elsewhere. So they're already people that are predisposed to travel. But still, I would say that the UK seems to have a disproportionate number of people who are scared to take risks like that. I don't think that there is a healthy number of role models that go and move to Australia or start their own business or drop a job or change something in their life that they know isn't working.

• 1:09:44James Smith?

  In America, you've got the American dream, right? There's, there's nothing like that in the UK. The UK is just a blueprint and it's a blueprint to get by. I think that, you know, I'm, I'm not sure about enough of the history of the UK, but people for the large part have probably just been struggling to survive, to get by. There's not been a dream. If you're, if you go to the UK, it's like, okay, go to school, go to college, go to uni, get a job, hold it down, get a mortgage, have enough money to retire. And what, I could be completely wrong with this, I could be naive. I hate it when people talk about their 50s and 60s. Do this now, your 50s and 60s. I appreciate there's a lot of sentiment to that. But now is very important too. Your 20s to 30s are very important,

• 1:10:28James Smith?

  not for your 50s and 60s. They're important for now. Your thirties to forties are very important, not for your sixties and seventies, but for now. There's no point not making the most out of now for a bid to have it later. You know, there are so many people that eject on life because they were too long sighted with that. And I think that I wish that there could be a better culture in the UK to be like, hey, do what you want, as long as you can pay bills, you don't get in debt, as long as you don't, you know, cripple or lean on the fucking healthcare system, the financial system or bankrupt yourself, then do whatever the fuck you want. And ultimately, I think that people do need the rules to life to be rewritten where it's more about,

• 1:11:10James Smith?

  wake up, do shit you enjoy, come home, spend it with someone you enjoy, go to sleep, get eight, nine hours and do it again, rather than it being like this, it's kind of a rat race. And London feels almost poisonous to me a little bit. I don't really like the vibe of London and some of my friends think I'm absolutely crazy for saying that. People are like, why do you like Australia? I was like, I just, I just like it better. I, I feel more relaxed here, swimming the sea more, I really want to get a dog and just give it a good life here. In London, I see so many people just working so hard, but I don't see the happiness that should come with that.

• 1:11:44Chris Williamson?

  I think the UK is characterized by people who are desperate to not lose rather than desperate to win. No one cares about winning, all that they're bothered about is not losing. And that causes a very particular uncomfortable scarcity mindset that is very hard to get rid of.

• 1:12:07James Smith?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And I mean, if anyone, if anyone in the UK listens to this, they, they're all, it's all right for these two, you know, you fucked off abroad and you're doing, you're living your life. If you're happy and you're listening to this, then fucking you've, you've completed it. Well done. You've, you've, you know, you've scored the highest score. It's just there'll be some young people listening to this and they're like, oh, I don't know what to do. I just inherited some money or I've got a bit of savings, so I don't know what to do. Surely better to go around the world, experience different cultures because everyone in my family loves where they live, right? My sister lives about five minutes away from my parents. My parents live within the same 300 metres that they were born. They all went to the same primary schools. There was no reason ever for me to not want to live

• 1:12:52James Smith?

  there. And all it took was for me to just go on a bit of a whim. I just had this urge to go to Australia. I flew one way and I got here and I was prepared to be completely wrong. I still am now. And I just wish that if anybody from the UK is listening to this, just go try out somewhere different, even if it means, you know, working a job. I actually did a TV piece with an Irish lady and I think she was working for the BBC. And I was talking to her, she goes, I used to live in New York. And I go, what did you do? She goes, I just worked behind a bar, in an Irish bar in New York. And she's now working for the BBC and she's not really enjoying her job that much. She goes, it was the best time of my life working in the Irish bar. So why did you leave? She goes, my parents pressured me to come home and get a proper job. And I was like, oh, I kind of felt for her then. I

• 1:13:36James Smith?

  was like, you did something to impress someone else. You did what the status quo said you should have done. And because of it, in an interview that should have been about my first book, we're now talking about you not enjoying your life as much as you did before.

• 1:13:47Chris Williamson?

  James Smith, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with what you've got going on, where should they go?

• 1:13:52James Smith?

  TikTok. I'm joking.

• 1:13:55Chris Williamson?

  Bring your breezes.

• 1:13:57James Smith?

  Yeah, online James Smith PT. Anyway, they put it, I'm hoping for a rebrand in a few years where I can just get the, the name at James Smith. That'd be amazing.

• 1:14:06Chris Williamson?

  Who's got it at the moment?

• 1:14:07James Smith?

  A PT.

• 1:14:09Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding me?

• 1:14:10James Smith?

  No.

• 1:14:11Chris Williamson?

  Why do you swap him?

• 1:14:15James Smith?

  Mate, I would love to. There was one point where he tried opening a business called The Academy. And I sent him an email. I was like, bro, come on. I was like, this doesn't look good on you. But yeah, hopefully we could get one day. I am PT. That is the way I've come up. And if I do experience any more notable success in the future, I will always say that I'm a, I'm a PT. I've been told by many people to tell people that I'm an author. Because whenever I bump into anyone in business class, they go, what'd you do? I'm a personal trainer. They're like, All right. Probably think I'm some trust fund kid or something, but yeah, that would be good. Anywhere they type in the name, they should find me. They might find a vocal singer called James Smith as well. Just look for the more handsome one and you'll find me.

• 1:14:53Chris Williamson?

  Appreciate you, James. Cheers, mate.

• 1:14:54James Smith?

  Cheers, mate. Thanks.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stop, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.