The Weird Mental Frameworks Of The Super Rich - Codie Sanchez

Codie Sanchez is an investor, venture capitalist and a CEO. Being a contrarian is an alluring idea. Having a unique insight into the world, a different viewpoint that helps you grow and make money and become successful. But how do you actually come up with original ideas and avoid always following the crowd? Expect to learn Codie’s framework for non-conformity, how anger can be a useful tool, what we can learn from Warren Buffet about not optimising too much, why pushing through boredom is a superpower, how speaking the truth even when it hurts can be critically important, Codie's best advice from the billionaires she’s met and much more... Sponsors: Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: 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 #mindset #business #success - 00:00 Is Our Society Too Contrarian? 08:35 How Successful People Remain Intentional 14:26 Choose Your Controversy Wisely 17:21 Consider Reading as a Diet 23:05 Have Ideas Strongly Stated & Loosely Held 38:34 Our Over-Focus on Perfection 44:04 Why Boredom is a Superpower 49:47 How Much Truth Can You Tolerate? 1:01:44 Being a Spouse of a Navy SEAL 1:13:43 What is the Solution for Modern Day Women? 1:23:04 How to Get a High-Value Woman 1:38:43 What Codie Has Learned from Being Around Billionaires 1:47:06 Do You Need to Sleep on Your Couch to be Successful? 2:03:12 Logan Paul Vs Dillon Danis 2:10:55 Where to Find Codie - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - 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.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What's a contrarian to you?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  I think I want to steal a quote for this one, which is Christopher Hitchens. And his quote was, "A contrarian is not one who always disagrees, but one who questions everything." And so my idea is in the world that we have right now, it's probably pretty smart to question assumptions continuously. And the humans who do that are the ones that win over time. I don't think the goal is to just be ornery or to counterculture, but to actually use your brain to come up with a formulation of thoughts that is unique to you.

• 0:33Chris Williamson?

  Is that not antithetical to moving quickly? If you've got to question everything, super effortful, that means you can't make decisions quite as fast.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  It's interesting you say that. We were talking about a mutual friend of ours, Bill Perkins. And Bill told me, uh, he has two superpowers that have led to every single dollar he's made. And he goes, uh, it is that I'm willing to take with risk and I move faster than everybody else. So by the time they've even pondered an idea, I've already done it, made five mistakes and learned five lessons. And every time I meet with Bill, I realize that's exactly right. And that's why he's one of the most successful people that I've ever met. And yet, I think if you don't question things and you don't have a brilliant mind like he seems to, you're just going to be on the wrong road path. And if you don't actually know the goal that you want to hit, if you don't actually know where you're going, most people move forward towards things that they actually don't want in life.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  And I've done it many, many times. And so in my mind, if you don't question upfront, then you might not actually like the answer you get to when you find it.

• 1:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, yeah, the intentionality point, I think is so important. And it comes up in dating, it comes up in business, it comes up in where are you going to live? What sort of lifestyle are you going to have? How much success do you want? Ooh, that's a fucking big one. So this really cool quote that I saw from Nassim Taleb, "The world is split between those who don't know how to start making money and those who don't know when to stop."

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that hits home, huh?

• 1:57Chris Williamson?

  How are you feeling that one?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I'm feeling that one. That's kind of deep.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think he's, he's right, but thank God there are some humans that don't stop. Like, sometimes I think about, you couldn't pay me enough money to switch places with Elon Musk. There's not enough money out there. I am so glad that he exists as a human in the world because we get to benefit from the creations that he makes, but I don't think he looks very happy. And sometimes the person that I actually, you know, lust after from an exchange of life perspective is the person who owns a couple of cash flowing businesses, happily married, couple of kids, in good shape, has tons of free time and is really close to their community. And it's not the person who has built multiple billions of dollars. Because at the end of the day, what are you going to do with it? And so unfortunately, I'm wired as one of those freakish humans that loves the game,

• 2:45Speaker 01

  does not know when to stop and finds everything else pales by nature. But I do think he's, he's right, don't you?

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the idea of when is enough enough is such an interesting question. And you've heard the parable of the Mexican fisherman.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, such a good one.

• 3:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so for the people that don't know, this sort of very interesting parable that shows there is a quicker shortcut to the life that you want by reducing down complexity, not overcooking how much you achieve, and then just going for simplicity in the first place, right? Rather than having to build an elaborate life to then eventually be able to afford a simple one. Like, the elaborate life is kind of unnecessary, especially once you cross a certain threshold of, of income and wealth. Another cool quote about contrarianism, "A contrarian isn't one who always objects. That's a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform."

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Hitchens, right?

• 3:39Chris Williamson?

  Naval.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Oh, that was Naval. Good one.

• 3:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's Naval. I love the fact that when we're thinking about Pushing back against conformity, like the average American is obese, divorced with less than one K in the bank, right?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:57Chris Williamson?

  Taking the normal route might feel safe in the moment, but it's actually a really undesirable thing to do because you can see the outcomes that you're going to get.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  You're exactly right.

• 4:06Chris Williamson?

  That they're in front of you.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was reading statistics the other week about the, if there's one out of 10 Americans that get to age 65, by that point, only one of them will be independently wealthy. And by the time they die, only one of them will be independently wealthy. We will have, I think it's two people will have actually died by the time they go to retire, so they won't even have made it there. The other two will actually be on government welfare or someone else's dime, making their family, et cetera. And so what we have done systematically is not working if only 10% of the population actually dies with excess cash. Because funerals are expensive. And so I think, you know, it was interesting, what I really respected about Naval in many

• 4:52Speaker 01

  different ways, but I remember when he was first building Angel List, I interacted with him a few times on Twitter, we're by no means friends, but we interacted a few times after it had done, you know, been valued at a few billion dollars. And I was bothering him and his team. I'm like, I buy businesses all day long, there's nothing like Angel List for people who actually buy companies and want to own total majority shares as opposed to just small segments of companies like VC. You guys have all the capability, just build it. And I remember I was kind of getting through to his, I don't know if it was his CEO or COO at the time, and then Naval just came in and was like, it is not what we do. We do, and we are the best in the world at serving venture capital style businesses

• 5:36Speaker 01

  and small minority shares. And he's like, if we wanted to be everything to everybody, we would have never hit our first billion. And I was like, all right, sir, you know, and I totally, I get his point. Um, but to stand up when you have that much capacity and capital and see so many shiny objects everywhere and continue to say no to the ones that don't serve you is a real superpower, too.

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, don't forget that that is another type of nonconformity.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:00Chris Williamson?

  Right. That is another type of contrarianism to not say yes to everything. And it's, I've been thinking about this so much. The tools that you need when you begin a pursuit or when you begin a journey are sometimes even the opposite ones that you need as you begin to develop. So let's say that it's growing a business. In the beginning, you need to be very detail oriented. You need to be across everything. You need to be completely obsessive about all of the stuff that's going on. And then after a while, you actually need to be able to learn to delegate and the skill which made you effective in the beginning and you have proof is good and you get dopamine from doing and you're habituated to continuing to do it is exactly the one that's going to hold you back if you can't let go later on. If we were to talk about, um, status and the things that come to you.

• 6:43Chris Williamson?

  Explore in the beginning, try lots of different things, make as many connections as you can. Finally build up some sort of a reputation. And then as the reputation rises and rises and rises, you actually need to no longer say yes to everything. You need to say no to almost everything. Right? So again, the skill that you develop in the beginning is often not the thing that is useful at the end. And you've, you're so inculcated into this rhythm of doing it. And you're like, I'm trying to cast off this habit of me doing that thing. It's very difficult.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, especially if you think about, uh, dollar amounts. So when you first make your first hundred thousand dollars, there's a skill set that I think is quite normalized if you want to make a hundred thousand dollars, which is you need to learn as much as possible in order to increase your earnings, predominantly working for somebody else is the fastest way to get to your first hundred K. And that same skill set to get from a hundred K to a million is relatively similar. So you can get to a million dollars pretty much using that same skill set. But in order for you to become an employee that has a high level of learning and a high level of earning that is worth $10 million, actually quite hard. The difference between a million and 10 million is difficult. And to go from 10 to 100 million is categorically different. And to go from 100 million to a billion, if you just look at the math between the two,

• 7:57Speaker 01

  there is no possible way for you to do it as an employee. Like, it hasn't been done. There is not a billionaire that was an employee of somebody else's company. And so the math just doesn't lie. And so because of that, I think it's really interesting to determine what is, what is it that you actually want? Who has achieved it before? What are the characteristics that are similar in those subset of humans that have done it? And then can you actually find a roadmap or ripple or rhyme between all of those humans to get to the next level? And it's a, it's a superpower to be able to see through the matrix like that to figure out the difference between one and 10 and 100 and a billion.

• 8:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's your, uh, how do you ensure that you're remaining intentional? Like, what's your framework for non-conformity?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Couple of different things. The first thing that, this is a friend of mine, Alex and I, um, he's, I sit on the board of his hedge fund. He's one of the smartest men I know, and he runs a multi-billion dollar hedge fund portfolio. And I remember, you know, we focus a lot on this idea of how do we think differently than other people? Because if you invest just like everybody else as an investor, on average, you lose money over time to inflation. That is just the truth. Most humans, without a financial advisor in the market, actually lose money over time in the stock market. And what people say instead is, no, the stock market returns 10% a year on average. Yes, the stock market as an entity that is not you individually, you individually lose money over time in the stock market, which is wild.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  And so when I started thinking about it as a numbers game with him, I realized the funnel to non-conformity is essentially this. It is, you have to continue to question the thoughts that you have inherently. You have to, uh, be off from everybody else slightly, and you have to figure out how to be right. Those two things are really, really hard to be consistently have a different perspective and be right on those perspectives. And that's the only way you can actually make money long-term in the stock market. Or really in just about anything where you want to be worth over $100 million. You can definitely be in consensus and make a million, 2 million, 10 million, maybe even 25 or 50.

• 10:04Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to think about the, the fact that you can't signal off what everybody else is doing if you want to get outsized results, right? Ultimately, if you do end up signaling off everyone else, you're going to end up with the results that are at least comparable with what they're doing. And I suppose that this kind of, at least in part, relates to you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. I actually think that there's a better rule, which is you are the average of the five podcasts you listen to the most.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Can't imagine why.

• 10:34Chris Williamson?

  My ego knows no bounds. Yeah, but the outsized influence of the people that you're around, ultimately, you're still going to inhabit, encounter the same problem unless you and everybody else that you're friends with is on this insane growth trajectory. So, all right, so what's going to happen? You somehow, when you are at this stage of your personal growth, family growth, wealth growth journey, going to find four other people, all of whom are going to have the exact same trajectory that you do. And I think this is why, there's definitely a degree of loneliness that I have seen to a lot of people who achieve rapid success, because it's very hard to find some people to come

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  with you on that journey, because your growth is so rapidly accelerating. Like, who, what's the chance that you find somebody else that's able to come along with you? Or maybe the person that you're with is moving quicker than you are. So I think what seems to happen is people kind of move through bubbles of friends. So as they're going on their journey, okay, I'm in this new bracket, and then that kind of falls behind, and then I'm in a new bracket, and then that kind of falls behind. At least I see that through Alex as a good example.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I mean, the sad thing is, and you, I and Alex have talked about this before, I think, and he might have even been the one that said it, which was, other people want you to be just slightly less successful than they are on average. And, and I think that is a gross generalization in that not everybody's like that, but a preponderance of humans, because we're scarcity mindset, it's how we were wired, you know, from learning how to survive on the plains, we know that if there's a bunch of other people around us. Historically, there weren't enough resources to go around. You know, we had to actually be protective of the things that we made. Now, in today's world, in which innovation continues to allow us to achieve more and more. And there's actually, it doesn't have to be a zero sum game.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  I don't think we have caught up here with what we know out here in the innovation sphere.

• 12:34Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So if you say, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. But what it's also doing, that sort of a rule is protecting you from being the person that's going to receive the ire and the jealousy and the backbiting from the other people. So endeavoring to be the poorest person in the room, or the most stupid person in the room, or the least accomplished person in the room ensures that you're going to receive less and less and less envy or.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  That's actually really true. I mean, we were thinking about it the other day, and I was trying to imagine a person who is really, really successful monetarily, if we want to say, who actively trolls people and is negative to others. And I can think of a few, right? You could think of like Elon Musk does some trolling on the internet, the Paul brothers do. But why do they do that? They do that because it's actually a direct revenue line to a thing that they care about, right?

• 13:28Chris Williamson?

  Attention, yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. We are, we want to have this attention arbitrage trade. So because of that, we are willing to troll. But for the average successful person, I have never met a successful human that doesn't have a monetary incentive to troll the trolls. They just don't exist. Like, if you want to figure out if somebody is going to be successful or not, I think you should go and look in their Twitter replies and comments. And if they have a bunch of negative ones, you go not hiring them and also not investing in them. Because that type of human, all they can do is they can take rocks and they can throw them because they don't realize they should build with them. And so it's, it's one of the biggest signals in our companies, actually, we have a social media screen. So for every single hire that we have across our companies, we see, do you have a negative perspective on reality? And do you play the victim frequently?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  And if you are either of those two things, you're just not part of our ecosystem. We do not believe that humans like you will be successful with an attitude like that.

• 14:21Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Okay, you've got a lesson, the controversy and conformity conundrum. There is a spectrum where controversies and conformity sit on two ends of the line. More conformity equals less controversial. And yet, most of the wins in life land on the edge of controversy. Choose your controversy wisely, but choose it.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think you can play this out most easily on social media, right? It's just very easy to tell. Once you have an eye towards frameworks, is this tweet going to do well? Is this tweet not going to do well? Depending on, is it something that is slightly off from the norm? And Maya Angelou said, you know, people aren't going to remember what you said, but they will remember the way you made them feel. And that was this touchy feely thing that she said that I never really associated with until I saw Twitter. And I said, that is exactly right. The second that you can make somebody feel something on one way or the other, they are going to react to it. And often we humans react really aggressively without thinking about it at all. In fact, I've found myself doing it. Now I sort of have to train myself not.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  But when I see something on the internet, you know, there's like that famous Tom Hardy little meme where he's like, that's clickbait. Have you ever seen that?

• 15:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  I know what that is, that's bait, right?

• 15:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  And now we can tell why. Because if it's slightly off from the norm, it is going to attract our attention because just like if there was Where's Waldo in red and white stripes in a sea of people in green, you're going to note this thing that looks slightly differently. And I was talking to a room yesterday of a bunch of builders and some of our companies. And they were asking me, how do you, how do you build a personal brand? And how do you tweet and know what's going to work one way or the other? And I don't know if I ever told this story, but I feel like your audience might appreciate it or think this is terrible. But they, I remember I, we have a newsletter, right? So in that newsletter, I felt like our subject lines were getting really stale. I didn't like them. So I told the team, I bet you a thousand dollars, no matter what you come up with on this newsletter, I'm going to beat your subject line.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  And my team was like, yeah, sure. There's like three of us and you're not really that involved in this. So let's go, like, great. So it's about landscaping or tree trimming or something. It's about tree trimming.

• 16:27Chris Williamson?

  Thrilling.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, just so sexy, right? And so it's, it's about making money with tree trimming. And their titles were like, this guy made X doing Y. This guy trimmed trees and had X, Y, Z. And there were a couple of them that were slightly more clever. And I was like, now we're going to A, B test them. And I go, mine is, I love guys with wood, dot, dot, dot. Which do you think bet did better? Of course, this one slightly off spectrum, it's still true. So it's not complete clickbait, but it makes you feel something when you see it is going to do better. And so that's just marketing and sales 101. And that's also attention 101. Like if you have a Tinder profile, you're probably better off having something slightly controversial. So I bet women would engage with that.

• 17:09Chris Williamson?

  Like a KKK hood?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Probably not that far.

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  All right, okay.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  That's not, I don't know if the Brits really know what was happening there, but.

• 17:15Chris Williamson?

  Fair enough. Uh, reading as a diet, be careful what you read. It becomes the way you think. Words are heard, then internalized, then repeated, and then habituated. Curate what you let into your brain as you do with your body. This got me onto an idea I had a while ago about the content diet. So most people, especially now, especially in Austin, Jesus, are super, super concerned. There's seed oils in this. What's the amount of glucose? Tell me if this has been responsibly sourced? And like, it better be from an organic farm. Are there any pesticides? Did somebody that had the vaccine live within 10 miles of where this cow was like, you know, getting milk drawn from it? Um, and yet, when you look at the YouTube suggested feed,

• 17:56Chris Williamson?

  it's just limbic, race to the bottom of the brain stem. Ben Shapiro destroys like panel of leftist. You know, it's, it's the stuff that the guilty pleasures that many people like to watch. And yeah, it got me thinking about if the cells in your body are made up from the food that you put in your mouth, your brain is made up of the things that you watch and listen and read. And given that, your content diet should be spirulina for the soul rather than fast food for your amygdala.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  It's a great line, by the way. Spirulina for the soul. Bookmark trademark. Yeah, I love that. What I've found about reading is I can immediately see the contagion of greatness when I read it, and then I take action. So if you go and you read Charles Bukowski's best pieces, and then you go to write, your writing will be uplifted by this contagious effect of greatness rubbing off. I don't know what it is. I don't know if there is a framework or philosophy as to why, but I've found the same thing with looking at deals. Often, when I go to invest in a company, I look beforehand at what did Warren Buffett say in his last memo about how he analyzed a company?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  And you can actually, I think, steal from the minds of others by figuring out what you allow into your brain and then applying that immediately to what you do. So it's not just in the ether all the time, what are you listening to? But right before you go take an action, if you're going to go into the gym, you know, usually maybe you're taking some sort of pre-workout, right? And then when you're in the gym, you're putting in some hardcore rap or whatever you listen to when you work out, you buff dudes. And then when you're done with the gym, you might go sauna or whatever. But the influence that you have right prior, if you have a giant donut or steak immediately prior and you listen to Lana Del Rey is going to be a different experience than if you do the former. Why would we think it would be any different with any other aspect of our

• 19:51Speaker 01

  life? And so I have now applied that pretty aggressively to the very few things that I know drive most of my success, which is before I'm writing, before I'm investing, before I'm hiring, who can I steal from to get some of their intelligence?

• 20:05Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's like an intellectual aphrodisiac.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's right. I still like spirulina for the soul better, but I thought that was good, too.

• 20:13Chris Williamson?

  We can keep that, we can keep that rolling. Yeah, I am, the content thing, the priming yourself, who do you want to be around? I love, you know, I know that he's like an unspeakable guy because you promoted the fucking lockdowns or whatever. When I read Ryan Holiday, and I kind of get this, it's much more pedestrian pace to kind of what's going on. And I imagine, as every man does, that I'm in the Roman Empire, I imagine that I'm walking through, you know, the Roman Forum or the stoa poikle below the Parthenon in Athens. And you just get this much slower sort of pace of life and pace. I'm sure if I looked at my HIV and my resting heart rate, it would come down.

• 20:56Chris Williamson?

  You know, I'm just thinking about ideas and I'm, it's couched in this much slower. Slower sort of existence. And I really, really enjoy that. And you know, if I was to then go in and try and have a difficult conversation, I think I'd feel more resilient. If the alternative is watching a whatever podcast, like we kick these only fans thoughts out, like, can you believe what Candace Owens said to this, like such and such a person? It's like, well, guess like what dreams I'm having tonight. Like, I want dreams. Here's a good metric. Me and George Mack have been talking about the difference between hidden and observable metrics. And we're trying to come up with some of the greatest hidden metrics that tell you whether

• 21:38Chris Williamson?

  your life is going well or not. One of his that was pretty contrarian was the number of hours per year that you spend in a hammock is like a really fucking great hidden metric of how well your life's going. That like, if you spend a good few hours in a hammock per year, it's like, it's probably pretty good. I would say the number of hours that you have having dreams about the Roman Empire would probably be a strong, a strong, but yeah, hidden and observable metrics, fucking obsessed with this idea at the moment.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  I like it. Well, we even on our fridge, Chris and I have, Chris is my husband, not you, Chris, other Chris. And he, one of his favorite quotes is from Marcus Aurelius that is the something along the lines of throughout your day, assume that the people that you meet will be miserable, wicked, selfish, et cetera, and do right anyway, something to that regard. And I always chuckle with it because, you know, my husband is so, he's a very intense dude, and he has incredibly high expectations, former military Navy SEAL, and expects humans to be honorable, and to do the right thing, and to be thoughtful. And turns out, most humans are not like that. And so I bought it for him as a reminder, coming back into the civilian world, that unfortunately, this warrior culture that he

• 22:52Speaker 01

  has been in is not normalized. And thus, if you can start your day, every day with really low expectations, it turns out that often the days surprise you. And so that has been helpful for us, too.

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  Ideas strongly stated and loosely held. Having a strong opinion is the mark of intellect, but having the ability to change it is the mark of true intelligence. Only politicians hold one stance forever for fear of flip flopping. We mortals do better to constantly experiment.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am. I've recently spent some time with Vivek Ramaswamy, the presidential candidate, and also spent a lot of time with other political candidates who are high up, named or won't name. And what I've been impressed by with, let's say, two of the candidates, one on each side of the aisle, has been that they played in the realm of business where numbers mattered and outcomes were obvious. And so you either win or lose in business. There is a scorecard every single day and every single year, and you only stay in business if you continue to win in the scorecard. And what I like about Vivek's perspective,

• 24:00Speaker 01

  I don't agree with him on everything, but he has changed his mind on many things. And what sort of business leader or human would you be if you couldn't change your mind once you had increased inputs? That would be absolutely wild. You find out X and you say, nope, already made up my mind on this. And yet, that is what we expect of our politicians often and our leaders. Like, well, this guy changed his mind. Thank fucking God. Thank God there is a human out here who continues to think not just in soundbites, but in full nuance.

• 24:27Chris Williamson?

  So I've got this idea about the unreliable ally. And basically, somebody who's a mono thinker that is, sticks rigorously to the party line, that's ideologically pure, they are very predictable for the future, which means that they make a really great ally. Because you know that no matter how much new information comes to them, they're not changing their mind. So yeah, I can totally see why that would be a good signal that you want in a friend, but a totally terrible one that you want in a political ally, right? Because you don't know, what if, what if things change a lot over the next couple of years and they switch parties? Oh, my God, you know?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, we, we kind of talk about choosing sides. I do think it's really important to have humans who will choose difficult sides, but not have strong opinions once they learn new information. And so my husband and I always talk about the fact that you can really, I think what you, what people want, but they don't know how to look for it, is most humans, what you want is somebody who will stand by you even when the mob. Won't. When things are irrational, somebody will stand by you because they know who you are as a human being. That is what we want in our lovers. That is what we want in our friends and in our colleagues. And instead of looking for somebody who has over time taken courageous

• 25:46Speaker 01

  stances, you look for somebody who has continued to follow set norms in order to put them in a box. And I think that's the mismatch. If instead, we looked for people who know they took a really difficult stance on this, even though that was detrimental, actually, to their well being, I would rather side with that person than, well, this person has done the party line continuously. And so I could assume the outcome here.

• 26:11Chris Williamson?

  Two really good models for this. When was the last time, in fact, more, when was the last time that you heard this person change their mind? Like, can you recall when they said, I was wrong about X? And especially if they're front and center about it. Secondly, how often do their opinions surprise you? Right? I think about so many of the creators online that are big. And I know, tell me something's gonna happen. Russell Brand's been accused with a me too thing. There you go. I know every single person in this lineup's opinion, right? I can predict it with 100% accuracy. The most, as far as I can tell, good faith, genuinely intellectually virtuous people are the ones who every so often are

• 26:56Chris Williamson?

  going to do something and you go, really? You think that? Hmm. I don't agree, or that might be wrong, or whatever. Say what you want about Sam Harris. I know he's like the least cool guy on the internet at the moment, and everyone wants to keep dunking on him, despite the fact he's not on Twitter. He continually trends on Twitter. But I have good faith that he believes what he says. That counts for a lot, but the problem is unreliable, really unreliable ally, right? Third thing, final thing, is how many different problems does this person explain with the same solution? So if all of the issues of the world, if all of the problems are because of climate change, or all of the problems

• 27:39Chris Williamson?

  are because of racism, or all of the problems are because of capitalism, it's like, oh, Your demand for answers outstrips your supply. And because you only have this much worldview and perspective, you just retrofit the one answer you have to all of the problems that are in front of you.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the things that I found most interesting is when we're analyzing companies, the best companies and their founders, they do this one thing. They say, here's the action I want to take and here's our company. I'd love you to poke holes in it and tell me the things you think I'm missing. And they are actively looking for disagreement because they don't want to be right. They want to win. And most people who want to win, all we care about is we want to information gather. We want to always be connecting dots and we can only connect dots if we see more of them. And so the winners are usually the ones that will ask you, tell me what I'm doing wrong. Tell me what I'm missing here. I think this, but I am open to persuasion one way or the other. And it was funny because we actually did a little mini podcast the other day and I was so irritated

• 28:40Speaker 01

  because I had this person on because they had an incredible tweet that I was like, ooh, spiky point of view. I want to talk about that. And then they came on and they just softened it and they waffled it and they didn't at all stick by what they had said. And, and I was, I was poking, I'm like, did you change your mind on this? Like, do you think something differently? And they're like, no, well, what I meant to say was, like, no, what you meant to say is that you got kind of called out for this and your strengths and beliefs were overcome by other people's opinions and likes. And those type of people, once that happens to me once with somebody, I realize, hey, those can be an acquaintance, but they'll never be in the inner circle.

• 29:19Chris Williamson?

  I had an interesting lesson that I learned, which relates to something that you had here, the gift of dissent. Sycophants, yes men, will kill you faster than dissent. Surround yourself with unruly individuals who make you stand your ground or berate you for not. That's exactly the same as what you were just talking about.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we. You know, one of our job, one of my favorite job descriptions of all time is the Shackelford job description, which is Shackelford went to the, went to Antarctica, right? And wrote this little tiny job description that now has been used all over the internet about, you know, high likelihood to die, looking for adventurous souls, you know, who, who want the ability to fail greatly, basically. And one of the things I talk about with our team and the people that we hire continuously is you want to look for the people who get off on the hard. Like you want to look for the people who, when there's a potential to fail and when something is difficult is when they get interested. And if it's not that interesting, they're probably not going to, to participate.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  And those humans are relatively rare because in today's world, we want to succeed so badly. And it seems like we have repercussions that if we do fail, there's something wrong with us. And yet, most of the most successful people I know have just failed prolifically, continuously, and yet iterated and learned on it. And so, you know, on our team, one of the other things that, that we do, and you know, Tanner's here, so he could tell you if I'm lying or not. But, uh, like, I find that if you are a manager of humans, if you are a leader of humans and your humans don't disagree with you often, then you probably are not a leader of humans. You're a director. You're somebody who they work for because they have to, but you haven't actually inspired

• 31:05Speaker 01

  somebody enough to tell you their true thoughts, one way or the other. And that's usually what kills companies faster than anything, is a series of yes men surrounding somebody who should have been told no.

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  The problem as well is if you don't have people who will tell you what reality is showing you, your own obfuscation and biases and blindness will never get corrected. And presuming that you start to continue to make progress over time, the impact of your decisions continues to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And that means that At the time when your impact and the magnitude of what you choose to do is at its greatest, your ability to see what reality's feedback to you is, is at its lowest. And you've had this emperor has like emperor's new clothes fucking scenario, right?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:54Chris Williamson?

  For god knows how long. And it means that you you're completely out of touch.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true. Well, I even joke with my husband that you should tell me when I look fat. Please do, because I don't want to hear that from somebody else, first of all. Second of all, it's not healthy for me to be that way. So in fact, I would want nothing more than the humans that are closest to me to tell me the hard thing first before I go out and people tell me I have no clothes or I look awful in this.

• 32:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  And where is it okay in society where we say, oh, it's just a little white lie? Yeah, they didn't look great, but I lied to them. Why would you want to be lied to by somebody that you know loves you? You certainly won't get lied to by people who don't. And so let's front, you know, let's front run the pain so that we could have some short term pain, maybe even in private, instead of of suffering over the long term. Well, actually, we were talking about our mutual friend Hermosy before, and I'm a I'm like many people, a super people pleaser, like actually.

• 32:48Chris Williamson?

  I'm really bad.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  At my core, which is probably why we're semi good at media. We can have empathy and understanding, which leads to association. And and so I'm really bad at that, which means that sometimes I'm too agreeable. And later I'll be like, ah, I didn't agree with that. Why did I? Why did I say that thing? And why did I say yes to this when I shouldn't have been saying yes to this? And so, you know, he jokingly has become my captain no. And I'll just say, I don't feel like saying no to this. I'm going to screenshot to you anytime I don't. And you just tell me no, because I already know I should say no. And then I'm going to start screenshotting you when I actually do. And so we trade back and forth nos, because the more successful you get, the more questions and requests you're going to have. And if you don't learn to say no, you won't be successful. There's

• 33:29Speaker 01

  like a kind of cringey video of Elon Musk's first wife. Did you see that? Where she she basically says, it's just cringey in that in how it's displayed, but the message is incredible. And the message she basically says is, I had a very successful husband. I watched him for a long period of time. The number one reason he was the most successful is he had an amazing amount of requests paced upon him. And he learned to say no better, faster, and more frequently than anybody else. And I was like, if Elon Musk says no a lot, that probably means there's something good happening there.

• 34:01Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. How have you overcome your?

• 34:06Chris Williamson?

  Felt sense to want to be a people pleaser?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Um, practice, practice saying no as often as possible, uh, with kindness every single time and brevity every single time. So somebody asked me the other day, um, they wanted to, to, to style me or something. Can I, you know, pick out your clothes? And, uh, and normally I would say, oh, you know, I'm okay right now, but thank you so much. You know, I'm, I actually don't need that. Or I just bought new clothes or I'd have some excuse. And now it is no, thank you. I hope you're well. No, period. End of story. The second that you allow one other sentence behind the word, you have allowed an opt in. So if instead I say, no, I don't really need it right now. What's the opt in? Well, what about later?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  You know, if I say, no, I'm, I already bought some clothes. It's like, well, what about, uh, I give you some clothes? And so what I found is we allow our concern for hurting other people's feelings to open a door. It just means we sound like more of a dick later because

• 35:08Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  We could have said no fast upfront, but we should have said it later.

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  The, the other truth is you will, people will be pissed at you about this. People will be upset. I'm sure it happens to you all the time. I'm almost thankful I don't have a podcast because I could only imagine the amount of times interesting people that you really like, ask to be on this podcast and you have to say, no, thank you. And no matter how you do it, and no matter how you phrase it, that is always going to feel a certain way to a person.

• 35:37Chris Williamson?

  One of the problems that you encounter, if you don't end up learning to be able to say no fully, is that you have a kind of like a wave swell underneath the surface of these. First you kick a can down the road and then you kick a couple more cans down the road. And then before you know it, you have this overlapping number of cans that's turned into a fucking tornado. And you're, all you spend your time doing is kicking cans. Uh, and that is born out of a fear of disappointing people. Uh, I Sat next to a mutual friend of ours and he referred me to a therapist that worked with him. And I was like, I've tried therapy before a couple of times and like mixed, mixed

• 36:20Chris Williamson?

  results out the other side of it. But if she can deal with this guy's bullshit, she can definitely deal with mine because he's a dickhead. So I, I've started, I've started going back into therapy and spending some time with her, which is really, really fascinating to be on the receiving end of questions for once, as opposed to be the person giving them. And the people pleasing thing is just such a huge, huge block for me. It's such a difficult thing for me to get past. And I've started to see it in a lot of other people because a lot of the time you see people's politeness or the way that they move through the world as an accurate portrayal of their volition or their intention. It's what they actually meant to do. And you go,

• 37:02Chris Williamson?

  no, it's not. Think about all of the things, all of the ways that their desire has been perturbed, right? I thought this was what you actually meant to do, but what you meant to do was the opposite, but you were so shy or tired or nervous or hungover, or you didn't want to upset this person, or you'd had an argument with your boyfriend that morning, or whatever it was. So the other thing happened. From the outside, what you see is, oh, that's what they meant to happen. From the inside, it's this, you know, game of tennis and ping pong between two choices, 10,000 times in a minute. And then they go, oh yeah, we'll do that thing. You go, wow. So yeah, that's kind of opened my eyes to the world of people. I was like a secret member of the people pleaser club and I never knew.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Well, I bet people on the internet would be surprised that you would say you were a people pleaser and that I would say I was a people pleaser because we have some rough edges on the internet. We'll take some difficult stances. But I've almost found that people who take difficult stances have learned to do it because we too often didn't.

• 37:56Chris Williamson?

  In spite.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so it's, you're scared and you don't want to take the difficult stance, but you do it anyway. I think there's very few humans, you know, maybe Donald Trump has learned to like, you know, the pain of.

• 38:09Chris Williamson?

  To be the heel.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Right. But I, I've never met a person even who was quite abrasive. Who said that they didn't have some discomfort with controversy pushing back? Have you ever met one?

• 38:19Chris Williamson?

  Michael Malice.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Okay, I don't know who that is.

• 38:21Chris Williamson?

  Uh, he is a cultural commentator, professional troll on the internet. He's like the low key of politics.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  And he likes it.

• 38:27Chris Williamson?

  Oh, he fucking lives for it.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he absolutely lives for it. Uh, another interesting one, Warren Buffett doesn't optimize. Wake up at five AM, meditate, work out, drink seventy two ounces of chloride water and stand upside down. Okay. Or do none of those things and instead focus on thinking clearly, intently and strategically before you pull any triggers. This relates to an absolute monster from Alex, which was, uh, your fears about perfection will kill you more quickly than your imperfections.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, this was an OG one of mine. Often, I think if you want success, you should look at those who have had the thing that you already want. And so I was getting caught up in this series of noise surrounding all the shoulds that are in my life, that are actually not needs. And, um, and so I went to one of the people that I admire the most, which is at least from a business perspective, Warren Buffett. And I looked at what his day was and, you know, the motherfucker drinks Coke every day. Uh, you know, he's eating McDonald's cheeseburgers. He's, uh, not working out and hasn't for a while. And he largely sits and thinks and reads a newspaper every single day. And when I looked at that, I thought, well, he has basically realized that there's a ten to twenty percent that drives the eighty percent.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  And so now I'm in a thing right now where I'm trying to be healthier and work out more and try to get a six pack and whatever the cool kids do. And, uh, and I have this trainer right now that I really like, but he has me, you know, tracking my steps every day, tracking my macros, uh, inputting a workout where I like check the box and how much am I lifting? And what I finally said to him is, what are the two things we could do? Where if we did those two things, everything else gets easier and my team gets tired of hearing me say this, but I'm like, You have a list 400 lines long of to do list items, just like everybody else does. And yet you spend your time ticking them off as opposed to thinking, is there one snowball in which if I pushed it, everything else became easy?

• 40:24Speaker 01

  And you know, for, for working out, for instance, there's one snowball, which is if I just preorder a set number of meals each week from the same provider, I don't have to track my macros because I've had the guy track it already and I know what it is. And you could do that even if you just ordered Chipotle every single day. And so there's no monetary reason why you wouldn't have to do it. And this tracking in the app every single day ridiculously doesn't have to happen. And it's the same thing for a workout. Well, what if I just do the same workout every single day or three rotations of it for one month and then I rotated again for, you know, to have diversity in my training? And instead of that, we layer all this complexity, which makes absolutely no sense to me. And so I like cold plunging.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  I like, you know, some lemon in my water, but I think we'll be fine if we skip it every now and then.

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And the concern about the over optimization often gets in the way so much and makes you fret. I'm worried, what if I, what if I don't show up sufficiently effectively? I had a Rian Doris on the show. Do you know him from Flow Research Collective? Neuroscientist, researcher in Flow. And he's brilliant. He taught me that if you're bothered about flow, the best thing that you can do as a morning routine is work within 90 seconds of waking.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Oh, that makes me feel better about what I actually do.

• 41:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. It depends. I don't think that what he meant by work was frantically answer emails with lots of capital letters.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  I don't actually do my own emails, so I'm better at that now.

• 41:50Chris Williamson?

  That's good. But my point being, his thing is get up within 90 seconds of waking, right? Not of getting out of bed, of waking, be at your desk.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 42:02Chris Williamson?

  Working, especially if you need to do deep work, writing, creative stuff. And I've done this on weekends with my newsletter, which I do on a Monday, I release on a Monday. So I'll be writing away and it seems to work pretty quickly. The reason, the argument is that delta and theta, sleep and flow, brainwave states are right next to each other. So it's actually easier to slip from sleep into flow than it is typically from daily, I've just walked the dog and got caught in traffic into flow. Even though you might think, God, I'm only just awake. This is stupid. It seems to be the case, at least the neuroscience backs it up.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a great book that I can't remember the name that talks about all the varied habits of the greats and their morning and evening routines.

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  5am Club, Robin Sharma.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Right. And then there was a New York author as well that tried all of them. And then also did a YouTube series on them, which was hysterical. You know, because it was like some of the great writers, you know, basically like got up at 3am, snorted a little bit of cocaine, started writing until they got so hungry they needed a drink. And then they kept writing. I mean, ridiculous, right? But what I've realized is, is, you know, I think the muse loves habits. Whatever those habits are for you, the muse really likes when you continue to show up in the same way day after day. And whatever that way is, you can decide by and large. But the common thread I've seen for successful people is they have a process. They have a flow. And to try to project that on another person is like to try to say that you should eat this

• 43:33Speaker 01

  when I know nothing about your genome and how you work. And so for me, I get up early. I do a cold plunge because I like am groggy in the morning. I do it for like way less than I probably should or any scientific benefit. I grab a coffee and I get to work. And that works for me right now. But see in a year, the only thing that I know will be consistently true is I will have a process I follow every single morning because I do not believe that you wait for the muse for whatever you do. I think you go and you grab it and you tell them to show up at 8am, just like you will.

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  Very Steven Pressfield-y. Boredom is a superpower. The best ideas need breathing room. There are flowers stretching for the sun. Clutter them with meetings and watch them die. Instead, he clears his schedule every morning with no calls prior to 10am. I do the same, paired with two no-call days a week.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm pretty religious about this. My team knows that I only take calls or meetings on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I will substitute something like a podcast for a Tuesday, Thursday, or a speech, but nothing continuous. Because what I've realized is, you know, as you get more successful, you really have one job. And that is to find that 10 to 20% that drives the 80%. And it takes digging. It's needle in the haystack work. It's not stacking up haystacks. And what most people do all day is they stack haystacks. They do the same thing continuously every single day. But what do we know about normal? Normal equals results we don't actually want. And so. I find that if I do not allow my ideas room to breathe, I'm anxious, frustrated,

• 45:03Speaker 01

  kind of uncreative, and probably come up with more problems than solutions.

• 45:08Chris Williamson?

  Hidden metric, how many hours per year are you spending being bored? I bet that that would be correlated with the quality of your life and your flourishing as well. More time being bored would be good.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  I think they say that that is true. I wonder, though, it depends what type of boredom.

• 45:21Chris Williamson?

  Of course, by the definition of what we're talking about.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Country club, yeah.

• 45:25Chris Williamson?

  No, yeah, not, yeah, not bored with someone giving you a rubbish speech, a presentation at work, but like, walking through nature, allowing your mind to flow as it wishes.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:36Chris Williamson?

  Pretty good hidden metric.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Very much so. And so what would we call that instead? It's not really boredom, it's like.

• 45:42Chris Williamson?

  It's not quite rumination, I guess imagination time.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's basically, when are you, when are you in a non-action-taking state? How often can you be in something where you're not entertaining and you're not taking action?

• 45:54Chris Williamson?

  I had this conversation with John Lovell from the Warrior Poets Society. Big, like, military guy, pro patriot guy, also big Christian guy, and he was episode 666. And I got a shit ton of kickback in the comments because people are like, I can't believe that you put like John on episode 666. We needed a man like John to battle the devil's number. And I was like, I did, it was just a Saturday, right? To me, it was just a Saturday. I didn't think, but anyway, cool. And he taught me this term, which I fucking love. I think you'll enjoy as well. It's called the tyranny of the urgent.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 46:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so good. The tyranny of the urgent.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  And there's this, like, a quote or something that either he has or somebody else has about that.

• 46:36Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. It's not his. I didn't know it was an urgent.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Well, I'll have to find it. You are the, you have the memory for quotes, but something to the degree of, if you let the tyranny of the urgent overwhelm the important, you'll never achieve. Something like that. We can have the internet tell me I'm wrong and say the right words. But I think that's, that's very, very true. I also find the most, like, if you're particularly frazzled, it's probably because you are focused on urgent and not important. And those who focus on important, not urgent, kind of coast their way through life. I mean, to go back to Bill Perkins, because I adore the guy. I remember when I showed up at his house the first time, I was late, so I was frazzled. I'm Latina, I'm basically always late and I'm an overs scheduler, so I was doing way too many things.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  And as I got there, he was, he was so calm while making more money than I do and having more businesses than I do. And I was, you know, I was kind of like, Bill, what do you got going on today? He's like, this is the day. I'm like, what's, what's this? He's like, you, this conversation with you is the day. It's the most important thing that I have to do today. And I just thought, that's fascinating. And even when I talked to his wife, she's like, yes, he's quiet. He will move very quickly between activities. He'll get out of bed, he will immediately get on a phone call. But the things that are important, he will allow a ton of space on either side.

• 47:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's not swamped by the urgent. Yeah, he seems to have a lot of, uh, an awful lot of time. Here's another hidden metric. I'm just throwing this out, out at you. Uh, the average speed that you walk at. I bet that if it's, I bet if it's reduced down, the average speed you walk at per year is like a really lovely metric of, I'm just fucking, I got time, man.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Except if you're at the airport, can we, you know, if you're at the airport.

• 48:15Chris Williamson?

  Because you should always spend as little time as possible at the airport.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you should just get out of people's way. It's like number, actually, you know what? There's two things, I think. I agree with you on when necessary, walking with conviction, but uh, not franticness is an interesting one. I think the counter opposite is, show me how long it takes you to order at a counter and I will show you your bank account. I think the longer people take in, I had this happen to me the other day and I about lost my mind. But I was at a counter, like one does, a coffee shop or something. And there was, there's always a lady in front of you, right? And the lady in front of you takes four centuries to order a coffee and a muffin. And what I realized very quickly is, you know, if you want to get something

• 49:01Speaker 01

  done, you give it to a busy person is the saying. And I think often, that's why they say you should take somebody to dinner before you hire them or take them out to lunch. See how they treat the staff, but I also think see how quickly they make decisions because people. Who take forever to order when they stand in line, one, are really comfortable inconveniencing somebody else around them, which means they have limited self-awareness, maybe borderline narcissism. And then simultaneously, they're not very efficient at the things that don't really matter. That coffee order does not really matter. And so if we know we are here for a finite amount of time, why spend so much time on that as opposed to a walk, a sunset, et cetera?

• 49:38Chris Williamson?

  Low tolerance for uncertainty as well.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 49:41Chris Williamson?

  You really didn't like this lady, did you? Speaking of that, the toleration challenge, what if your intellect is measured by how much truth you can tolerate? Can you be told you're wrong and that dress makes you look fat and you're getting older and he's smarter than you and take them all in stride?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And my husband and I basically have a thing where, something annoyed me yesterday, actually. And instead of typically, what do we want from our partners? When something annoys us, we typically want the other person to just go, yeah, fuck that guy. Yep, agree, you were right, he was wrong. And instead, we make it sort of a purpose of saying, all right, what are we going to learn from this? And so he gave me some feedback that I didn't really like. I was like, whose side are you on? And yet that practice helps us because if we don't associate with, you know, to get woo-woo because we're located here in Austin, we know that, you know, we're not our body because we can have thoughts that change as our body changes. You know, we know we're not our job because our jobs can change.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  We know we're not the way that we look because if something terrible happens to us, we're still there. So if we know we're not all of these things, why would you let it control so much of your brain for you to be seen one way or the other about them? And it's something I think about a lot because we're on the internet, which means our reflection is thrown in our face constantly. And often, other people's reflection of themselves is thrown in our face constantly. And because of that, I don't think you can have thin skin and be on the internet. That's actually kind of a beautiful thing because you learn, none of it really matters. We will all die eventually and every one of us will be forgotten. And there's such liberty there.

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  The way that that gets perverted is people go from, it doesn't matter, I can have unbounded dreams to, it doesn't matter, nothing that I do makes any difference. Right? It's the nihilism or cynicism versus optimism, helicopter thinking, seesaw. And it seems to be a bit of a knife edge between the two. But I also agree that if you have a If you have a partner or a friend or somebody who regularly will compromise what's true in order to tell you what's convenient or comfortable, that are actually like really rubbish, why bother asking them anything? Because every single question that they hear

• 52:00Chris Williamson?

  is not what is the truth about this thing, it's what do you think I want to hear from you? That's every single question is the same question. What do you think that I want to hear from you? And then you say that. And again, that's the people pleaser thing. What else have you learned from Bill Perkins? He was instrumental in bringing you down to earth in a pretty big way, I think.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, he was funny. I think our first interaction, I consider myself relatively successful. And so when I went to meet with him and I told him about some of the things we were working on, he had this line that stuck with me that I wish I could just like put on a bumper sticker somewhere, which was, I was explaining all these things we're working on, we're buying these companies here and here, we're growing. And he kind of looked at me and paused like he does. And he's like, Cody, do you think that you have been investing in small businesses for so long, small has infected your thinking? I was like, and an immediate reaction could have been like, who are you? Fuck you. I don't know. And instead, I took a pause and I was like, God, there's so much freedom

• 53:07Speaker 01

  in that line. What if I am thinking too small and somebody else who has had a past history of positive performance says that, then what might I be capable of? And so I almost wish all of us a friend that pushes us harder as opposed to is the shoulder to cry on and says like, you know what I'd like you to do next time is something else. In fact, we have another mutual friend that I was talking to that did something really big and really successful. And and they came to me because they're a high performer and they were like, what, what should I have done different? What should we have done different? And I was like, I think, one, and I want you to hear this, everything you did was incredible. I'm so impressed by you and and I think you should keep going.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  And then I said, secondly, there's this one thing that you did that was a mimic of somebody else. And what if that would have been a totally unique style to you? And that's what I want to see from you next time. I think you are capable of coming up with your own style that is totally copyable. And she was like, God, thanks, because what everybody else said was positives, positives, positives.

• 54:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  And very few people will tell you, yeah, but what if you could do this one thing? Not that you're shitty, but like, what if you could do this one thing better? Wouldn't that be cool?

• 54:14Chris Williamson?

  Two stories that come to mind. First one, Lex Friedman was at some party neurodivergent degenerates at Michael Malice's house. And I was talking to him about, I think he was, I think he was saying that he had a lot of work on at the moment. And he was doing his robotics stuff and he's doing the podcast and maybe the Ukraine conflict was was going on too. And he was just feeling it, feeling all of this stuff's going on, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh, interesting. And then he took a pause.

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  And he said, I wish that my friends would stop comforting me when I say that I work hard.

• 54:52Chris Williamson?

  Because some of his friends say, you already work so hard, Lex. You know, you should go easier on yourself like this is you're doing a lot as it is. He said that he really, really values the friends that say, yeah, this is tough, but you're tougher.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. You know, even my mother, she had an incredible line to me. She basically said, and it's so simple, but we don't hear it enough. You just continue every single day to do the best that you can. And only you know what the word best is defined as. And most people put some subjective best, hard, good, bad on you. As opposed to saying, I believe in you so much that you know what you are capable of. And only you can answer if you are actually living up to that on a daily basis. And I love that because I actually think most humans are very capable. Should they apply themselves continuously and work past a point that is comfortable or even rational? And if you can do that, you can achieve very many things.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Pending, you don't want to be a basketball player and you're, you know, five one. Like pending those things you can achieve much. And that's part of the reason I'm so prevalent on the internet now. Is, you know, I made a lot of my money already in finance and doing the things that I did previously. And then I realized, eh, I want to make more money because it's fun. I really like every dollar I make. But I think it's more interesting if I could figure out, could I help other people actually achieve the same thing? And not because I'm nice, I'm really not that nice, but just to see like, is that possible? Because that seems like a more interesting and bigger legacy, actually, than just can I apply this one thing continuously?

• 56:32Speaker 01

  And so lots of people who are on the internet, I think people say one thing or the other about humans like us that talk about things publicly. And yet, thank God that there are humans like you who talk about things like neurodivergent being normal. Because I thought that just used to mean, well, you know, I have a little bit of ADHD, which means I'm defunct in some way. And so, yeah, I think most humans can work harder and they just don't want to hear that.

• 57:00Chris Williamson?

  You're getting perilously close to Chamath's man in the arena tweet, which is going to get you destroyed on the internet.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  And I actually have actually used that before. I do think, you know what? Fuck that. I think if you own a small business and you are a business owner, now maybe not Chamath in the sweaters and jets at this point. Maybe you have a lot of buffer there, but I actually don't know his life, so I don't know. But I think if you are a small business owner and you are working really hard out there, you're in the arena.

• 57:24Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  And, and I think my husband, who went to war multiple times, would say the same thing.

• 57:29Chris Williamson?

  Counts as, it definitely counts as an arena. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  It's some sort of difficult and we should, we should actually praise people for that a little bit more.

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  You remember when Elon took over Twitter and he said, he gets rid of 95% of the coding team,

• 57:46Speaker 01

  That was wild.

• 57:47Chris Williamson?

  dev team, whatever. And I think he puts out a job application webpage and says something like, if you want to work harder than you've ever worked in your entire life, come to Twitter. And people criticized him on the internet and said, this is a return to, you know, early 1900 sweatshop labor. What is this? Are we going to be going down chimney sweeping? And I understand that in a world where we can have much more luxurious working conditions and everybody can have their mindful Mondays and they can have their latte Wednesdays and stuff like that. And that's not just to mock it. Like, I do think it's a, in some regards, a much more balanced holistic

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  culture. But what it fails to understand is that there is a cohort of people out there who just want to put their nose on the grindstone and see how fast they can make it spin. Like, all they want to do is work. They love and are fired up and take so much more pleasure from the idea of achieving something completely unreal with their time. And it is a failure of theory of mind for you, person on the internet, to look at that job post from Elon. Maybe it is exploitative. Maybe it's fortunately, like, a coincidence that he can both

• 59:09Chris Williamson?

  use the people's drive to be able to achieve whatever they want and also like get them basically a cut down price to work 24 hours a day, perhaps. But it is a failure of theory of mind to understand that there are people out there who just want to do that. And it would fire them up way more to be told, here's an obscenely unrealistic goal in a ridiculously short time span, and I want you to do it. Here's as much Adderall as you need and a comfortable standing desk. Let's see what you can manifest. Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was, so my husband was a Navy SEAL and I was at the, it's like the 40th year anniversary of his team, SEAL Team Three. And I thought it was fascinating on a couple of different fronts. One, you looked around the group of 600 people all gathered and you could immediately pick out all of the SEALs, right, out of uniform, because it's become so rare to be fit and healthy and have, you know, 200 people who are like that all in one space, 200 warriors was really rare. Thought that was interesting. What I also thought was interesting is I spoke to them about it and I spoke to those who had come out and those who are still in, is those who had come out and said, do you know what we miss more than anything? And I'm like, the adrenaline,

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  you know, the operations, kicking down doors.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  It was doing extremely difficult things with other people who want to do extremely difficult things well. And that level of of human who wants to excel is just rare. And so when you're around them, you feel it, you know, you feel a difference between you have an energy that is positively accelerated when you're around another doer. They just, they don't drain from you because they're too busy doing and pushing out. And with with the SEAL teams, I was never in them. I can't speak to any of it myself. But what I've seen is that these guys miss that more than anything else when they get out. It's not just like camaraderie. It's we were excellent at what we did, and we held each other to an incredibly high

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  standard, and we had a joint purpose. And I mean, there was a study done during the Blitz, right, during during the World War that everybody talks about with humans were conceivably happier as defined by lower suicide rates during the Blitz than afterwards, because there was this shared purpose and meaning. And so I think if you compare your shared purpose and meaning with a group of excellent humans, let go of all of those who do not want to be excellent because cancer spreads, then you can create somewhere where people want to spend 24 hours working, because society at large looks nothing like that. And you can feel the difference.

• 1:01:53Chris Williamson?

  What did you learn looking around a room of 200 SEALs, 300 SEALs? What did you learn from looking at their spouses?

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Well, that's interesting. Well, the spouses probably fit in a lot of ways two categories. One category would be more traditional looking, sundresses, you know, cute kids running around, happy looking American family. And the other were just as jacked as their, you know, just as as like, strong and tattooed as their men. And so I actually thought that was an interesting dichotomy. And you see that, like Gabrielle Lyons, a friend of mine, and she's a badass doctor, and also just like one of the strongest, fittest women I've ever met in my life.

• 1:02:37Chris Williamson?

  Is her husband a SEAL?

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Her husband's a SEAL.

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  And a surgeon. And and then Emily Frisella, Andy Frisella's wife, also just jacked in great shape. Um, her husband isn't a SEAL, but like, I do think that it seems like really strong driven men that are team guys either want sort of the traditional spouse, um, you know, sundress, etc., or like a very strong, similar person to them. And when I've gotten to know a lot of these guys, and I have a lot of respect for them and their spouses, there's two types of strengths there. I mean, the the physically strong thing is really important, but you will not last. I mean, the divorce rate among team guys and special operators in general is incredibly high.

• 1:03:19Chris Williamson?

  Is it really?

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's the highest of any military. Um, one, because they're gone all the time, both training and deployment. Um, and two, because I've been, you know, through deployment with my husband, and it's emotionally taxing in a way that we are not habitualized to. And so, um, you have to be strong enough to do that. I I think I would have struggled to do it with kids. Like, I have nothing but respect for the women who have kids with men who go into line of duty every day where they could potentially die. That's incredibly difficult to live through.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  What's the reality of being married as a power couple?

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Hmm. Um, you know what's so funny is everybody says it's really hard. And Chris and I kind of look at each other every day. And we're like, best part of my day, right now. Like, we wake up in the morning. Do you know what I actually do in the morning? I don't get in the cold plunge first. Chris and I snuggle like little nerds for like five or 20 minutes. We're just like snuggling, talking to each other. The dog gets into the bed. The dog's a little tiny thing, not even a cool looking team guy dog. And, uh, and he's, you know, my person, who's somebody that I can just trust and rely on. And I think I'm that for him, too. We loved the quote, I remember in the beginning when we were first dating, didn't age well, because I think it was Jeff Bezos who said, uh, I married my wife because I wanted somebody who could get me out of a third world prison

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  at any point. Uh, but, uh, we always kind of associated with that, you know? Our thing is it's us against the world. And so, um, I think that's the one truth of being a power couple. I, I don't know any different, because I've always worked. So I've never been, and my, my, you know, husband, he's always worked, and most of my significant others were powerful and successful in a traditional sense. Um, but one of the most incredible things, I think, when you find another human who is striving for something. Is you really can track on what's going on in your lives and there's a lot you can share. Whereas at least from my perspective, if I was with a man who wasn't working very

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  hard in a job in some way, shape or form, it's harder for us to be on the same page. And I end up having to talk with a lot of other people about the thing I'm obsessing on all day long. And I never really understood how people could be with like the trophy wife thing never really made sense to me. A trophy girlfriend makes a lot of sense. Trophy boyfriend makes a lot of sense. A wife or husband doesn't to me because what would you talk about? Do you guys just look at each other all day? Like what's happening there? And so I actually think that's really shallow and we should all strive to be the best versions of ourselves. Not to mention, do you remember that, um, there was a blog post a million years ago,

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  where the guy was like really brutally said, why would I ever have a trophy wife or a trophy husband? He was talking about a trophy wife. Um, and he's like, and, and marry that person for just their looks when your looks are definitely going to depreciate over time and my assets will appreciate over time. And at the time, I remember being like, yeah, fuck that guy. And then I was like, well, also kind of true. Makes a lot of sense if all we're talking about is the way you look. That's pretty shallow. And so I don't have a lot of complaints and I think I wouldn't last very long with somebody who wasn't striving right alongside me.

• 1:06:31Chris Williamson?

  What, there's a lot of talk and narrative on the internet about the sort of alpha polarity, the, you know, super masculine guy with the very feminine woman. There must be a leader, there must be a follower. What is the dynamic like, given that you are two leaders?

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, I sort of have this theory and we'll see if it plays out. You had the girl boss, me too movement, right? Women, power, fuck guys, we don't need you. Then you had the alpha man movement, you know, get behind me. I'm the protector. I'm in charge. You know, women stay home in your gardens. And I think in the future, what we're going to come back to, which is what we do every time we have massive pendulars, pendulum swings is like, uh, yeah, why don't we both kind of chill out in the middle? Like, that seems like typically where we go. And I think there will be not an alpha power couple, but a what if we both just realized that we're nuanced humans and we look for somebody who could actually support us continuously. A bunch of the guys that have that alpha woman.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Movement saying got divorced, like one of the main guys who was like, you must protect your family, you know, do whatever and had a woman that was sort of this other thing gets a divorce. The other guy who's a big proponent of it, like Andrew Tate, not fucking married. So like the people who are talking about this alpha man movement, let's scoreboard it. Let's see over time, does this work out for you? And I'm a big proponent of you should do whatever you want. But I think I'm good friends with the Hormozis because I watch them have each other's back through time. And that seems to be more sustainable than the other way around. What do you think?

• 1:08:08Chris Williamson?

  So I think that there is a significant cohort of women who are like you attracted to guys who have excellence, but don't have that same drive themselves. I don't think that the reverse is quite as true for men. I don't think you're going to find a normal dude who chugs away at a perfectly acceptable job, but is like, I really get turned on by like boss bitch women that are like, you know, like high powered lawyers and stuff. Because the socioeconomic status of a woman doesn't matter as much to a man on average

• 1:08:47Chris Williamson?

  as it does in reverse. So I think that ultimately being competent as a man, and this is to cut through three and a half years of learning evolutionary psychology, whether it be status, whether it be resources, whether it be looks, whether it be height, whether it be being funny, whether it be being charming or whatever, like just portraying competence, right? But competence comes on both sides of the equation. And the polarity can be changed with quite nicely because, you know, if you see as a husband, if you see your wife, just like a fucking wizard with the kids, you know, and the all three of them are ready for school five minutes early and the breakfast's done and there's a kiss on the cheek and she's

• 1:09:29Chris Williamson?

  out the door, you're like, you're a fucking boss. Like, sure, you're not going off to the office or whatever, but you've got this shit on lock. That's attractive. A grade players look for A grade players, right?

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Regardless of sector.

• 1:09:43Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Regardless of what the subgenre of.

• 1:09:47Chris Williamson?

  Game is that they're playing.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:09:49Chris Williamson?

  And this is why, you know, very rarely do you see, I've been watching that quarterback on Netflix. It's about three different NFL quarterbacks and Patrick Mahomes is one of them. And you look at all three of the wives of these guys, all three of them, pretty well spoken. They're not, you know, super pretty, like, I think at least maybe two of them have been together since before they were even in college. Right? So it's not like they picked up some like hot totty girl and like moved her into the house or whatever. Longstanding relationships, but they all, all of the girls are like competent with what they do.

• 1:10:30Chris Williamson?

  Like they, they're able to talk and they're able to explain and they have insight about themselves and they have insight about their partner. You're like, hmm, yeah, that's like, that's hot. That's cool. Right? Like it's attractive. Competence is attractive and incompetence is almost always going to be unattractive.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  That's absolutely true. Yeah. I mean, I do think one, one thing I've found for women that I think women really need to watch out for. And I've noticed this just among my friends because I'm, I'm a little bit older now. And so I have a lot of my friends who have had kids and been married for a period of time. And a lot of them are highly competent. Like you said, we're incredible mothers, are incredible mothers. Have gone through childbirth multiple times, which still intimidates me and I find incredibly impressive.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  And then I found there's this, there's this low period after your kids don't need you as much anymore. And, you know, your husband has continued to progress in this linear career progression. And you poured yourself with competence into your, your, your kids. And I think we will see in the future, a rising usage of prescription pills, sleeping aids, Adderall. To this subset of women because they start to realize, ah, where do I go now? And society doesn't really have this fit for me any longer.

• 1:11:43Chris Williamson?

  Well, what that typically or traditionally would have been if we roll back. Over 200 years, we would have been in pan-generational houses.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Chris Williamson?

  Right? So it would have been assisting with my sister's daughters, assisting with my daughter's daughters, assisting with my niece, assisting with my whatever, right? You know, there would be so much to do. It's called allo parenting. Not many animals do it, but humans do, where multiple related and unrelated women share the child-rearing burden together, right? Because rearing a human child is an effortful.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  Sounds much better.

• 1:12:16Chris Williamson?

  Effortful task. So you share it between your friends and your family. And there's an idea, do you know why the evolutionary psychology explanation for why menopause exists?

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:12:27Chris Williamson?

  This is cool. So it's called the grandmother hypothesis. Grandmother hypothesis says that why would you have an animal, female animal, that exists beyond their reproductive window?

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:41Chris Williamson?

  If our goal is to survive and reproduce, as soon as you stop reproducing, surely kicking the bucket makes a ton of sense because get out of the way, let the calories go to the ones that are going to be able to survive if you can no longer make kids. But that doesn't account for the fact that the very effortful rearing that's required for human children. So if you imagine that you have a particular fertility window, after that point, you as grandmother can no longer produce children that sap calories, but can contribute to the rearing of children, not only yours, but your daughters and your sisters and so on and so forth. So this is the grandmother hypothesis.

• 1:13:23Chris Williamson?

  You age out of your reproductive role and move into a new kind of role. So you are still a net positive from a caloric perspective to the whole tribe. I thought that was really interesting.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  That's fascinating. It actually makes a lot of sense. But I don't know what the solution is for the modern day. Modern day woman.

• 1:13:42Chris Williamson?

  Rough. You know, you've got, Adam Lane Smith tweeted this thing where he said, uh, don't forget that moving out of home at 18 is a psy op by the real estate industry. Like, and he's, in, in some regards, it's true, right? We would have always lived in big pan generational houses, farms, community type things. Um, I, I think that you're right. I think that as financial independence becomes more available to women, its lack will be more tightly felt. Right? If you have sacrificed a career that you were already on or never got into a career, uh, to be able to raise the kids because you wanted to be the greatest mother that you could, when that role is now gone, it's like being an NBA star. You're 37 years old.

• 1:14:26Chris Williamson?

  Right? Jonathan, come in, sit down. There's your retirement check. You've done really great. Okay. All I've known my entire life, or all that I can remember that I've known for the last 15 years has been ball or children. What, where do you take your sense of meaning from? Uh, and you know, you see this, I think, uh, the Peterson talks about the greatest sacrifice that a mother can make is to allow their child to go out into the world, knowing that they're fragile. And he says, uh,

• 1:15:01Chris Williamson?

  if you go out there, you might lose yourself, but if you stay with me, you'll lose your soul. And it's this, uh, Michelangelo's Pietà, it's this, uh, beautiful, um, marble sculpture that's in the Vatican.

• 1:15:17Chris Williamson?

  It's the mother with Christ sort of draped across her arms like this. And he says that, you know, it's, it's the female crucifixion. It's not about you. It's about your child. And, uh, it's rough. I, I think that you're right. I think that we will see some, some challenges there. That being said. Women have got really, really great performance in the workplace at the moment. And I don't think that a 52 year old, uh, mother of two, who is still conscientious as hell and, and super competent, is going to struggle to reintegrate back into a, a, an office working environment, especially if you've got all of the emotional intelligence and all of the people's skills

• 1:15:59Chris Williamson?

  that have been developed over the last two decades of raising a bunch of tiny screaming kids. Like, that's a skill set. I certainly know within my operation that having like a mothering role, someone to just lubricate the wheels socially. I think that would be a really cool, like a, like literally like a surrogate mother. Cause there's a lot of like lads, I guess, that work for me, you know, 25 to 35 dudes. And like just someone to come in and be like, boys, can we stop doing X, Y, and Z? Or someone's forgot that this thing, professional mother, I think would be corporate mother.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we've got a new coin there. Um, yeah, well, there's a couple of things. One is, uh, I've never really understood ageism in the workplace because if you actually employ older people of both sexes, um, both people, you know, let's say 50, 60 and above. The immediate reaction is usually that they have a deficit with technology, which is true, as we will when we get to that age. But the flip side of that is actually that their experience, their lived experience is so strong that when you hire somebody like this, they just have more rep, they have more reps on this planet. And so I saw it the other day, we were in a team meeting and I have this one, uh, person on my team, shout out Kimberly, and she's great. She's a mother of three. And, uh, and you know, I saw one of our, our individuals in the team getting a little flustered, a gent.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  And I was pretty aggressive and direct, which not usually the best way to be when somebody is that way. And she, as she probably does with her three kids, was amazing. She was like really calm. She was like, you know, how are you feeling about that? Like, what do you think? And I would never ask a question like, how are you feeling about that? I need to work on my EQ. And she did. And I do find that, that aspect, I hope to bring back more. Goldman actually had a great program, which was bringing women re-entering back into the, the workforce. I'm not sure, re-entering back into Goldman, sounds great after I had been a mom for a while. But I'm curious to see what happens for that generation of women. And I think it'll be, it'll be really, really cool. And I also think. My husband and I work together in a lot of capacities and he still has his, he, he does

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  work for the Department of Defense. Um, but that's another thing that people say you should never do. And I find extreme joy in it. Um, and I'd be curious what would happen for more individuals if partners allowed their significant other more into their sphere. Doesn't mean you have to overlap entirely. We have very different pursuits. But when you can watch your significant other excel in something that you really understand day to day, I don't think there's anything sexier on both sides of the equation.

• 1:18:30Chris Williamson?

  It's competence plus understanding, right? You're able to interpret. You, you watched someone be really good at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or pickleball or drawing or something. And you're like, honey, you did great, right? You, I'm so proud of that thing you just did, which I don't largely understand. And actually, if you were to look at some of the most sought after pursuits for guys, because again, the increase in status that you get by being competent at something seems to be beneficial to men a little bit more, what they're actually looking at doing, I wonder if this is right. What men are looking at doing is trying to find

• 1:19:11Chris Williamson?

  pursuits that are the most easy to interpret by the widest number of women.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:19:17Chris Williamson?

  Music. Everybody can tell, is that good music or bad music? But you know, how many people are like, I'm going to make, uh, like cyberpunk drum and bass. I'm going to be the best cyberpunk. It's like, yeah, sure, but it's not going to be as broad. Uh, comedy, right? Movies. Everybody watches movies. Everybody watches comedy. Everybody watches, listens to music.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Six packs.

• 1:19:39Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Yeah, exactly. Like, I'm going to be in shape. I can see that. I don't kind of understand what's going on, but like, I, I know that's good, or at least other people think that that's good. Um, and that's another one, signaling, right? So you've got, not only is it obviously competent, but do other people hold that competence in high esteem? Again, cyberpunk drum and bass, who, who, who even knows if that exists? But

• 1:20:04Chris Williamson?

  If you're in a cohort of people who very much value this thing, you know, I remember when we were doing club promo, so many times, some of the boys would use the term like she's Instagram hot. Right. Which is like, so she's, she looks fit on Instagram, but in real life isn't quite as hot. But part of the hotness of the girl on Instagram was impacting how highly they regarded them in real life.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:20:30Chris Williamson?

  Because you've got kind of pre-selection, right? If this girl's got more followers than everybody else and everyone else is like, looking at what she's doing and everyone thinks that she's really, really fit online, even if she kind of isn't that in the real world. It's almost like a degree of competence, right? Beautification, the ability to beautify yourself and having a, a style, a visual appeal. Even if that doesn't translate very much at all to the real world, it's still a, a thing, right?

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's true, you know, I was talking to the, to a couple of entrepreneurs the other day about, um, they delivered something and I, the end product was okay, but the way that they delivered it was poor. And so I call this the Tiffany's box theory. And basically, you know, if you look at two diamond rings that look identical to them, but one is from Zales and one is from Tiffany's. This one from Tiffany's will have a price tag of 50,000 and this one will have a price tag of five. It is the same exact product. There's literally no difference, except the name on one versus the other. And what is the real difference between the two? Well, if I was to give you either one of those rings and I like stuck in a paper bag and I crumpled it up and I threw the paper bag at you.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  And then you got that ring, you're already pre-selected, you already have a bias to say, what is this? This is like a fake ring. This is whatever. It wouldn't actually matter that this was the Tiffany's ring, but if I gave you the $5,000 ring and I put it in the Tiffany's box and I tied it up and I presented it to you in this way. You would now value that ring at a $50,000 amount, even though the difference between a paper bag, 25 cents and the Tiffany's box, I don't know, a dollar 50. Doesn't actually equate at all to the value that's changed between the two. But if we wrap something properly, we will consider it to be more valuable. And that is like rule number one in success, business, probably sex, love, the way you present.

• 1:22:19Chris Williamson?

  The medium is the message.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 1:22:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, think about, I learned this from Stephen Bartlett a couple of weeks ago. Really good example. Think about how much space every Apple store loses in terms of real estate by not packing more technology onto each table. Right? Going to in the UK, I don't know them over here, Target, maybe I guess, but like PC World or Currys in the UK, like big electronics stores. Go into there and it's just a fucking chaos of cables everywhere and screens are touching each other. Because the most amount of products that we can put out means that customers are able to find exactly what they want. And you go into an Apple store and it's just barren wasteland in between each product. All right, so a couple of, a couple of, a couple of interesting questions.

• 1:23:04Chris Williamson?

  For the guys who like the idea of having a highly competent, driven, smart girl. What?

• 1:23:18Chris Williamson?

  What are the do's and don'ts? What should those guys think about? What are they getting right and getting wrong in your and your friends' experience?

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  That's such an interesting question. Well, a couple of different things. The easiest, the easiest way, I think, to attract a, we need to, we should come up with a term for this. Is there a term for like?

• 1:23:38Chris Williamson?

  A high value woman?

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I don't want to use that because I know the origination. Also, could you imagine if I called myself a high value woman? Or somebody calls themselves a high value man, I immediately, there's rule number one, don't fucking call yourself that.

• 1:23:49Chris Williamson?

  Good.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Rule number two is, um.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  I think a couple of things people underestimate. We're talking about the wrapping. The wrapping does not have to be six pack and hot to get a high value woman. It really needs to be confidence. I always joked with my husband. He's like, he jokes because he's shorter. So he's like, you know, nobody's looking at this. And if you met him, which have you met? Yeah, you didn't meet him. He just takes up a room. Just the way that he is, his presence, he's really not afraid. He's rather direct. He looks you in the eye. He walks up to you specifically, like he's supposed to be there and so are you. And he's actually quite calculated on the method in which he would communicate with you. And so because of that, he could be not the

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  six foot five, you know, guy who's going to naturally have an unfair advantage in finding a partner. But he would have this like on this satellite around him that you just this magnet that you get drawn drawn towards. And I found that with a lot of the women I know who are, let's say traditionally, good looking, successful, competent in some way, shape or form. Often their partners are people who have an it factor in some way. And the cool thing about an it factor is you can create it. You could actually learn to be the type of person who just shakes hands with a little bit of strength and looks somebody in the eye. And you could actually learn to be the type of person that listens and repeats back the thing that the person just said to them.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  And it's a little bit curious and that chooses not just to be nice, but to be kind. The other thing that I think people who are competent on either side of it is they want, they want you to be courageous in one shape, way, shape or form. And it doesn't have to be because you're a man, but they don't really care if you're the, you know, nice. Oh, yes, of course. Thank you. You know, we don't really want that overly nice thing. What we actually do want is that you notice the guy on the side of the road who's having a flat tire and needs a little bit of help. And you decide to pull over and see what you can do to help the guy. You don't even have to know how to fix it. Just call up and make something happen. And so I think this world of like humans who make things happen.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  End up running into more humans who make things happen because we're just busy doing the doing. And so the cool thing I think about if you want to find a woman who is a strong, you know, partner in many pursuits is they really just want a woman or a man who is also kind of strong in their own pursuits. And some of my best friends who have long-term marriages, you know, 10 years plus to men who even aren't as monetarily successful as them, and some of them are, is that actually the way that the man looks has very little to do with it, which I don't always find to be true on the other side of the equation. But they might have like some incredible personality trait. And I think that's just really attractive to women.

• 1:26:43Chris Williamson?

  What about the other side of the fence? What advice would you have for your female brethren who think, I like the idea of getting a competent partner? What are the ways, the pitfalls that you see those women fall into? Or what are the things that they should be prepared for? Or what are the ways that that can go awry if if they're looking for the the competent man?

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Have you ever proactively looked for a partner? Like been looking and thinking a lot about finding a partner?

• 1:27:18Chris Williamson?

  Uh, no, not particularly. No, it's always kind of just stumbled upon me.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a common trait I've found. Typically, I think people who are competent and looking for that same thing in a partner, they focus on bettering themselves before they focus on looking for another. I think the biggest red flag is typically a human who's like, I really just want to be with somebody. I want to be with somebody. I'm ready. How do I find my person? Get that energy out of your life as both a woman, which I can speak more to, and a man, and instead become somebody worth finding. And that's really hard to hear, I think, on either side of the coin. But when you start working out, which doesn't mean you have to be perfectly fit, but you have more energy, when you start pursuing something that you're uniquely interested in, when you have real pursuits that are

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  Obsessions for you in some way, shape or form, you're more interesting and thus you will attract more interesting people. And I think the biggest thing that we have done wrong is a disservice to society. And you might have told me about this, or we might have talked about this before, is assume that finding the right person is simply a game of swiping left, swiping right continuously. I think one of the worst things we've ever done is allow dating apps to enter into our dating equation, because we have thought that it is a numbers game of finding the right person as opposed to a daily activities game of becoming the right person. When you become the right person, you will attract people continuously, no matter what. And I've seen this from both myself and my friends who are varying levels of attractive, varying levels of rich, but working really hard on

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  a few things that make them very interesting to humans.

• 1:28:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think lots of people ask the question, where are all of the good partners at? Very few people ask the question, why am I not attracting the kind of partners that I want to be attracted to?

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  That's the question.

• 1:29:05Chris Williamson?

  And there's a line from Artificial Intelligence to Zombies, Rationality from A to Z by Elliot Z. Yukowski. And he writes this book about rationality, which cognitive biases and the ways that our thinking goes awry and stuff. And at the start of it, he says, people take the piss out of rationalists, not because being in love with rationality is strange, but because it's so rare to love anything in the modern world. And this dearth of passion that people have, like, if you ask someone, what do you really love doing? Like, tell me what gets you fired up. If you had an appointment at seven in the morning to do this thing, you would be out of bed at six because you couldn't wait to

• 1:29:47Chris Williamson?

  go and do it, right? And me and Zach, my housemate, we always use the same example, rallycross. So it's like the drivers in the four-wheel-drive cars and they're going through wooded things and everyone dies, everybody dies all the time. But there's these dudes that go in the fucking pissing rain to Perth, Scotland, right, in November, at 3:00 PM on a Wednesday afternoon with an anorak and an umbrella over the top of their head. Some of them have got cameras, some of them haven't. And they stand there to watch a rally car go like that. And then they turn and look at their boys and they're like, ah.

• 1:30:32Chris Williamson?

  And we love watching those videos because watching anybody else get fired up at something that they love fires you up, right? To see someone love anything is so rare. It's like an oasis, right? In a desert of bland indifference.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I remember I knew I was gonna get divorced when I'm divorced and remarried. I knew I was gonna get divorced when I remember him saying, there's nothing in the world that makes me happy anymore.

• 1:31:03Chris Williamson?

  And that's a damning indictment of life, isn't it?

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  It was. And I thought, that's not the world's problem. That's yours. And we can work on that. But if you are not willing to see that is not cool, to think nothing is cool, then you will never love anything again, including me. And thus, I cannot love you. And so I find that that spark of obsession, doesn't even have to be greatness, but obsession is so contagious that it's like a little bit of oxygen in a Vegas casino. It makes you want to stay up all night, you know?

• 1:31:35Chris Williamson?

  Anybody that loves anything is cool. The guys on the side of the road, watching Colin McCray go past at 120 miles an hour. It's a flash of this one person that they know about. Like, I went to, Cameron Haynes took me to the bow rack in Eugene, Oregon. And he tuned up this bow. I'd never shot a bow before, since I was like 13 on holiday, doing like some lame kids club thing. And I'm there with the dude that owns the shop, family-run shop, since they got decades and decades and decades. And, you know, you can tell that it's a well-worn-in shop, because there's loads of stuff that's only there because

• 1:32:16Chris Williamson?

  it's been accumulated there. Like, it's not precise, it's not neat, it's accumulated stuff. It's the opposite of an Apple store, right? There's like, someone brought that cap in. Seven years ago and you haven't moved it yet and it's just been on this windowsill for ages or whatever. It's that, that, but everywhere. And there's all of the bows and all of the arrows and all of the different types of arrowheads and, and all this stuff. Anyway, he's tuning me up on this bow, tuning me up on this bow, tuning me up, making sure that everything's right. Dials it in, he's like, oh, that's cool. And then I go over to the, like, kind of like a workman's desk, there's an entire workman's area. I don't know whether you've ever seen bows, bows getting tuned up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's like tuning in the site and he's making sure, and then he does this special thing with a lighter to just make sure that,

• 1:33:01Chris Williamson?

  I, I think if you heat the thread, it binds a little bit more tightly. And he's like, oh, this is a little trick that I learned with whatever, whatever, like not supposed to set shock horror bow one oh one. Don't set the string on fire, but like he found that if he did it a little bit, it like tightened and locked everything in or some other bits and pieces. I was enthralled because I was just around people that were fucking in love with what they did. They were fired up, they were passionate about their thing. I love as well, one other thing that I really, really love seeing is people that have, how would you say? Very innocuous mastery, right?

• 1:33:38Chris Williamson?

  So, uh, for instance, one of the things that I have, which no one will ever see when I sit down at my desk or stand at my desk to do the, uh, episode remotely. I can be thinking about the episode that I've got coming up whilst doing vocal warmups. But the way that all of the studio comes together of like mics in, everything's checked, master is on, uh, monitoring is coming through my ears. Every like just dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. And I've seen it with so many friends, a friend that was a doctor, uh, and went to university for basically a decade to do three degrees, worked at Blackrock, became a doctor, became a surgeon. And if he has a pen in his hand, he'll just sit there and he'll do the most insane pen tricks.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:19Chris Williamson?

  And he's not even thinking just because familiarity, right? Like if I saw you, uh, prepare, in fact, I did see you preparing for a talk or something like that. There'll just be something that people do. Oh, here's a perfect example. I saw a, I saw a guy um playing guitar on Sixth Street. And he's playing away, playing away, playing away. And this pick like bing, like just there, it's in the crowd or something like that. And without even thinking, he's just like still singing away, pick goes, and he doesn't even think about it. He just keeps on playing with one hand, reaches behind himself, unnecessarily twirls this pick from the top knuckle all the way down to the bottom

• 1:34:58Chris Williamson?

  to catch it off and keep going because he's just done it a million times. So like, uh, yeah, like very normal mastery of stuff. And that's kind of the same as take the person that you're going to date or employ to a restaurant to see how they treat the staff.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:14Chris Williamson?

  It's what do people do in the beats in between?

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:19Chris Williamson?

  Right? It's not the big performance because that's dialed. It's what's the way that they put their jacket on before they walk out of the dressing room?

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. What are the small wins that compound? Yeah, you know, I was thinking about it. I think the, the 2.0 level to being a person that finds another high value one is not just being the one in the stands watching with that wild enthusiasm, but finding the thing that you can actually play in the game as opposed to be a voyeur in. And so to your point, um, even if you're not the champion bow hunter that Cameron Haynes is, being that person who sells and tweaks and prepares the bow for the champion is incredible to watch. Now Cameron probably makes quite a bit more money and perhaps is more physically fit than this other guy. And yet both things are enthralling.

• 1:36:10Chris Williamson?

  The necessary, right?

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. You know, I watched my father for many years. He's a long time hunter. And he was the same. He'd get up every single weekend that he could at three in the morning, pack a bunch of stuff in order to drive three or four hours, hike a couple more hours to try to find an elk. And it was like a joke amongst my mom's friends, like, yeah, you're gonna go look for a, you know, another elk for day's on end and then eventually one day shoot one. And uh, and I remember when my father and I became like really close and I was a young girl with, with some cognition about it. We would go hunting together. And now my husband will say that I have quite good eyes. So if there's game around and we're hunting, I'm usually the one that can spot it first because I have these reps with my father of watching movement across a landscape.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  And in the way like an animal has a different shape that you'll never really find in nature because there's often smooth lines on animals and on nature, you find much more jagged as the norm. And so watching him for so many years, do a thing that made no money whatsoever, but him master it in a way where he could spot an elk that nobody else in the entire like group could spot, even when he was trying to show them and he would have to shoot it and down it before anybody else knew where it was, was so incredible to me from a young age and so joyful with no, there's nothing, like he doesn't post on Instagram. You wouldn't be able to find my father anywhere. He's not a showman. And yet he did this thing to the best that he possibly could every single time because he had that obsession

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  and love for it. And I think that's part of why, you know, him and my mother have been together for so many years. And I see the same thing with with my husband. You know, when you find a partner who has that wild obsession and pursuit, it is contagious. And you know, Chris is a purple belt and we'll get off a flight and you know, I'll go work because I'm obsessed with working. It's my favorite thing to do. And he will go get in the gym, immediately change his clothes and go off to jujitsu because he wants a pursuit of a black belt. And that is really, really cool to watch. And you know, a bunch of, we have a bunch of friends, we both know who are famous humans. They're not always attracted to like the other famous humans and their exact same crowd. You know, Joe Rogan is attracted to Cameron Haynes. Yes, because they both shoot, but also because

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  he's like, wow, this is a pursuit that's just so fascinating. And Joe's also interested in somebody like you, who's just obsessed with human psychology and frameworks. And so maybe the the goal to finding an incredible partner who's top tier in some way, shape or form, is just becoming top tier obsessed with something yourself. That might be enough.

• 1:38:42Chris Williamson?

  What was your insight about why you should get into rooms where your average Tuesday is your best day?

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, I think the easiest way to change behavior is to get around other people who already have the behavior you want normalized, right? And so I would always joke with my trainer, like, is your, is your six pack contagious? Like, can I just like, can it rub off on me? And I remember one day he was like, yes. I'm like, can we explain how that works? He's like, because if you hung out with me all the time, I don't drink, I'm up early, I work out every day, I work out really hard. If you saw my intensity level paired with the normal person's intensity level, AKA yours at the gym, you would probably up yours and it would just be natural. It's actually why I think group fitness is so important, especially for women who weren't, a lot of us, you know, I was an athlete in college.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, in high school, I didn't, I wasn't an athlete in college, but a lot of women, we didn't have that intensity ingrained in us. You didn't find women fighting and wrestling with kids until, you know, we, we won some sort of outcome that wasn't normalized. And so when it comes to really intense workout sports, I tend to think women are better off doing group classes because you see a bunch of other competitive people right next to you and you can up level. Whereas my husband and maybe you, you know, if he's in the gym, he's just an animal. He doesn't, nobody could be in there for weeks and he would act that way. And so that's why I believe get around other people who, what you want just is there to stay.

• 1:40:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What other advice have you got from billionaires? You spent a good bit of time around wealthy people, what, you know, lots and lots of net worth combined in rooms that you've sat in front of, like, what are the biggest takeaways that you've had?

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, sort of a funny story. One of the guys that is a billionaire, but also spent some time with Warren Buffett, had a story about how he went to dinner with Warren. And I'm a little bit of a Warren junkie. That would be like the guy that if I got to meet, almost anybody else don't care but him.

• 1:40:38Chris Williamson?

  Fangirling hard.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe I could be his third wife because I.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Anyway, so he goes to dinner with Warren and he's like, I have 400 questions for Warren because I'm worth this and he's worth this and I'm all excited. And so I fly there and I go and sit down for dinner and he's like. I couldn't ask him a question because he just kept asking me questions. All he did the whole time was pick my brain on what I thought here, what I thought there. And he's like, I didn't even realize that until I left, that he had basically gotten all this information from me and I had gotten nothing from him. Yeah. And he's like, and so he's met a couple of other people that know him too. And he's like, the, the smartest, richest people I know, ask the most questions and try to prove their intelligence the least because they know that the ones who collect the most knowledge have the biggest unfair advantage.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  And so I found that almost across the board.

• 1:41:31Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 1:41:34Chris Williamson?

  What about the, there's a lot of talk about ethics or lack thereof in the billionaire class.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:42Chris Williamson?

  What's been your experience of that?

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Obviously, we have real knowledge that there are billionaires that have done horrible things and we've seen that in the news of late. I do imagine a bit like the science fiction movies where once you have a certain level of money, it all becomes a power game and you lose a sense of reality for what is actually good, bad, or otherwise, because you have an ability to actually control your entire environment and bend it to your will. And the more money you have, the more you can bend your environment to your will. It's just true.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  One thing's interesting, we have a friend of ours that runs a family office and was a chief of staff for two billionaires. And, and I remember last time we saw him, like, what's going on with you? What are we doing? We're explaining what we're building and, you know, what our goals were and kind of what our companies were worth. And he was like, I wish you not one dollar more than $299 million. And I was like, that is such a weird number.

• 1:42:39Chris Williamson?

  Arbitrary.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, why 299? And he's like, I've run a family office for multiple billionaires and I see right about that amount is when they start losing touch with reality. And when you lose touch with reality, you don't feel like you're a part of society. And when you don't feel like a part of society, you start to become unhappy and you start to have really negative decision making. And I thought that was really interesting. Now I'm willing to try to be worth over 299 million. We can see what it works like for me, but I thought that was really, really intriguing.

• 1:43:11Chris Williamson?

  Kevin Kelly's got this piece of advice. You must try as hard as you can under no circumstances to become a billionaire.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:18Chris Williamson?

  Like his, that's, that's his.

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  I like Kevin Kelly.

• 1:43:21Chris Williamson?

  Kevin, Kevin, I really, really enjoyed my conversation that I had with him.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  I love his thousand two friends. I think that's true. But one thing I would say to get back to ethics and morals of billionaires, just for one second. I have found that the more people have and have created, the nicer and more giving they are. It's actually those who haven't created a ton, who are still living in scarcity, that are gnarly humans. And so what I find interesting is maybe there's some level where that changes.

• 1:43:48Chris Williamson?

  There's a Goldilocks zone in the middle, perhaps, and then you can overshoot it. I mean, I told you today, the reason I've got this mark on my arm here is I had COVID last week and it buttfucked me. Uh, and I was whining to Rogan the other day about the fact that I did it. And then his nurse showed up at my house today with an IV bag filled with unpronounceable NAD, vitamin B, phosphate, or some other bullshit. Uh, and she sat there for two hours while this thing slowly went into my body. And I was like, oh yeah, I feel, I feel really good. And, uh, I think that was, you know, a very nice gesture from someone who didn't need to help.

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  That's not. And, and I find that's really, really normal. You know, I actually asked, uh, one of my, my friends who's more private as a billionaire about it. And, uh, and, you know, I think a lot of it is learned behavior, right? After a while, you realize that to give to people who are givers in return just multiplies back to you.

• 1:44:49Chris Williamson?

  And oddly, the most selfish thing that you can do somehow.

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  Somehow. And so, and then you learn that it benefits you and then you get ingrained into your, your action.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  Which I find to be the same thing. Like it brings me an obscene amount of joy to be able to help people. Except there's a little twinge if they don't appreciate it over the long term, or if I don't feel them giving or paying it forward. And so, um, You know, the other thing I guess with billionaires is they just think different. And everybody at varying levels of income, I mean, haven't you felt that like your first, when you first made your first 30K, you're like, I'm so rich, I'm not sure what I'm gonna buy. Then you make 100K, you're like, I feel pretty good, I'm like, doing pretty well. Then you make 250K, you're like, this is pretty good. I think around 500K is where the real happiness to increase past that tapers.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  And then about, you know, a million, 10 million, there's not that much difference between the two. And so as you get worth more and more, the only thing that really changes is that your worldview is so much bigger. And so instead of spending a bunch of time on a thousand dollar problems or a hundred thousand dollar problems, you just naturally gravitate to problems that will hit the level that you're at. And so it's a huge unlock to be around more people who have more. In fact, there was a great study, you would love this, I'll, I'll find it so I can send it to you afterwards. But basically showing that kids in a, excuse me if this is incorrect, Minneapolis neighborhood, let's say. So same socio demographics of both groupings of kids.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  But in one segment in a neighborhood where there were only people of that socio demographic. So lots of people that make below $60,000 a year. And then one segment where they had a lot of interaction between those with wealth and those without wealth. Now, the kids grew up in the same types of environments, their parents make the same amount of monies. But this group interacts with more rich people, this group interacts with less rich people. This group on average makes 33% more over their lifetime, which is astounding. All else being equal, if you are around people that make more money, you have the ability, I think, to see what options really are. And so I think getting in rooms with people with big dollar amounts is actually really, really important.

• 1:47:04Chris Williamson?

  You had a contrarian idea about whether or not you need to sleep on your couch in order to be successful. What was that?

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, Alex and I disagree on this one because he definitely did.

• 1:47:15Chris Williamson?

  I think technically the gym floor.

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:47:17Chris Williamson?

  For him. Yeah. Yeah. He dreamt of a couch.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And our other friend, Andy Frisella is the same. You know, he has the best culture that I've ever seen is Andy Frisella. He, his company First Form is, is incredible to me. But he has this huge flag in his warehouse and the flag was representative of the exact size of his very first store that they opened, that they almost lost and went bankrupt on. And the, in the corner is a representative of the place that he used to sleep on the floor, on this huge flag that's located in their warehouse. And so he also slept on the floor to become successful. And I commend the fuck out of people who have had those sleepless nights without mattresses. I think there are few humans that can actually persevere

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  through that. I think it breaks a lot of people. On the same vein, I think we don't have to have this hustle porn culture where we think that is what you have to be willing to do. And in fact, what if we gave people the allotment and the allowance that you could stay in your relatively comfortable nine to five and build up a business simultaneously, or because I'm biased, buy a business simultaneously and go from your relatively comfortable nine to five to a slightly harder but more lucrative X, Y, Z, whether it's a side hustle, a startup or a business. It's not going to be easy, but I do not think you have to sleep on floors to get success. And the reason I say that is because I worry about people taking a

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  massive amount of risk. You know, studies show if you're, if you're bankrupt once, it's incredibly hard for you to reach financial freedom again. You want to almost avoid bankruptcy at all costs. Most people never recover from it. And so if we know that to be true, do we play to the edges to the excellent humans like Andy and Alex and tell everybody to be like them? Look at the size of those fucking calves. Look at the size of Andy's guns. Most people are never going to be those two people. And so we should allow them the ability to have massive success without the massive risk. And that's sort of my nuanced point there.

• 1:49:17Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. You don't hear, it's kind of survivorship bias, right?

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 1:49:22Chris Williamson?

  You just don't hear about how many people slept on the gym floor and then ended up having to sleep outside on the floor, right? You know, how many people end up going bankrupt, end up going into insolvency or administration for their business? Yeah, I uh.

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  Did you ever have to sleep on a floor?

• 1:49:39Chris Williamson?

  No, I didn't have to do it. I mean, the worst that it ever got, I haven't told this story before. The worst that I ever got was my placement year from university and I was living in Scotland. So we ran a, we had a franchise when I was nineteen, I picked up my first franchise for a nightclub bar crawl called Carnage. And this was, you wore a T-shirt and on the T-shirt were the list of bars that you were going to go through and there were tasks on the back, like pulled a pig, down three drinks, did a blah. This is a different era when we could, you could do this sort of stuff. And we would, it was a license to print money. I mean, it's a license to print like very normal

• 1:50:23Chris Williamson?

  amounts of money, but it was, it was very reliable in terms of how it sold out. And the goal was to expand this into new cities. So we put it in Newcastle, me and my business partner, Dominate, and we were very, very good at this. Then I was from Middlesbrough town fifty miles away. I knew that that was a shithole. I thought that that would work well. Sure enough, it did. It's full of Larry degenerates that, that loved it and we had a great time. It was really fun. Our placement year was coming up from university from a business degree. And the owner of the franchise, big dog, it's like, look, why don't you come and work for me? You guys are already more fired up about work than you are about your business degrees. So why not just like go full time in the thing that you're almost full time in with this part

• 1:51:07Chris Williamson?

  time degree on the side and then go back to uni once you done? We're like, yeah, that, that works. So we move up to Edinburgh, we move into this apartment and we're in Edinburgh for all of the summer. I'm going to the University of Edinburgh gym, I'm walking down the. Royal Mile in Edinburgh every single day, getting annoyed by French children who are off to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. And we're driving around Scotland. We had Stirling, Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh as four cities, plus Newcastle and Middlesbrough. So it's like a pretty big net, you know, from Dundee down to Newcastle is probably 300, 350 miles, maybe it's a good distance. Anyway, so we're doing this little loop and we're going to different places and dropping off flyers and making sure that the guest list staff and

• 1:51:49Chris Williamson?

  the selling staff, all of these things are occurring. And the problem with events is that you want to get paid once they've happened. And we were building up to this big, big, big chunk of events, but we had no income coming in in the interim. And I needed to keep on getting our boss to send me money to be later deducted from our cut so that I could have petrol to drive to the places. And there was a period where it was like, okay, I, I actually don't have money to eat here. And I had a guy that came and stayed with me who was going to help. And he'd come from a little bit more of a, like nasty background than mine. He was like, dude, I'll just go and steal some food from the store. And I'm

• 1:52:28Chris Williamson?

  like, bro, if I descend to the point where I have to steal fucking food, like the guy that owns the company earns easily enough money, I can just get him to wire us some cash. But that was, that was a period. I remember I once went to go and see Underoath, like a metal band. I went to go and see them. I went from Edinburgh to Glasgow to go and see Underoath play. And it was, I knew that by doing that, I couldn't drive my car. Like it was the amount of fuel I had to get there and come back. And I was like, supposed to drive to work or whatever the next day. And I was like, eat shit. I'm going to go watch this band. So I drove there on my own, watched the band, drove back on my own, got home and I was like, okay, I've got like 15 miles of fuel in the tank. And that was it. But

• 1:53:10Chris Williamson?

  it wasn't destitute. That was a very short space of time. And largely, You know, I I straddled, you know, three or four different industries. Am I going to be a DJ? I'm going to go full time with commercial modeling. I'm going to go continue to build the nightlife business. Then the podcast comes along and it just permitted me to kind of weather the storm very nicely. And I realized I didn't want to do late night stuff. Being a DJ is is fun from the outside, but kind of painful from the inside. The modeling stuff was depreciating asset, as you'd said earlier on. And it's like, okay, podcast, there it is. But yeah, by tinkering around, it gave me the options.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  I remember when we first met, I didn't know your background or who you were. And so I was Googling you because I have two Brits on my team. You remember those two? And one of them's a crazy kid and they were so excited to meet you. And I was like, who is this guy? Like, what is, you know, Chris, what's his deal? And and so I was Googling you and like the first pictures come up and they're like, like you shirtless, you know, like this from your, which I didn't even know what Love Island was.

• 1:54:13Chris Williamson?

  Sheltered, sheltered life.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  Apparently, apparently. And I remember sort of laughing because I heard you speak. And I was like, well, it's not the same guy because we've got this really well spoken gent who has like abs all over the internet. What's going on here? And then and then like seeing your background, I think it's really interesting to see the cobbled together history that equates to something rather.

• 1:54:37Chris Williamson?

  Frankenstein's monster.

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's how most people, I mean, I was, I thought that you went to university and you knew what you wanted. And then you went to your first job and then you climbed the ladder and then you continued up the corporate sphere. And I'm probably one of the very few corporate people. I mean, I was corporate for 12 years at big financial institutions. And and finally had the balls, but didn't have it before to step out and do things on my own. That's really rare, actually, in entrepreneurship. And so I'm trying to speak to anybody in your audience who is in that corporate position that they really hate, that right now you're sitting there thinking, I am watching this clock tick from 452 to 459. And it feels like it's 12 years of my life and I'm actively sitting here thinking.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  I want to be closer to death, just so that I can get up from this job. And I want to reach that person and say, you don't have to have a wild origin story in order to be really successful. It's really wonderful if you have the David Goggins incredible background where you have overcome such strife to achieve success, but it is actually not necessary. And you can create just as much of a hero story for yourself, having come from monotony as you can having come from travesty. And most humans today aren't getting that story because we want to idealize, which is actually great for the big, big victims out there. If you've had huge difficulty, it's actually a superpower. You just don't realize it yet, but you don't need it.

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  You can still be wildly successful and interesting by just applying it. But maybe the only thing I would ask your opinion on, you know, there's another guy that we know who has a podcast. And I remember he was asking me like, how to grow this? How do I grow this podcast? You know, how do I get it bigger? And, and my, I kind of thought about it for a second. I was like, there's a bunch of tactics I could tell you right now. But I think the most important tactic could be go and do something really interesting. Instead of just trying to go interview a bunch of people who are interesting and use their clout to grow your podcast, go do something wild. Go do something interesting in yourself, build something yourself, create some stories, and then enter the Chamath's arena. And I think a lot of people these days are missing that. And that's why there's pushback to gurus on social media.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  And that's why most podcasts only last seven episodes is because they think to do the thing, they just mimic the big interviewing of humans. But there's a reason why you get really interesting podcast guests. It's because you are uniquely interesting too. It's because you have crazy pictures of abs on the internet, you're on a reality TV show, you've been in the grind of building businesses. You also have this weird sort of modern day stoicism philosopher aspect. And all of that together is packaged a human that is unique, Chris Williamson. And so how can you allow yourself a little adventure that actually equals your success? But it doesn't have to be tragedy, I don't think.

• 1:57:24Chris Williamson?

  No, I don't think so either. You are right. Trying to growth hack being interesting.

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  Not not cool.

• 1:57:32Chris Williamson?

  Is rough. And you're right as well. I think it's the reason why there is skepticism around gurus on the internet. Because it it seems like the story is fragile. And if I hit it with a strong enough hammer, it'll shatter. And the hope is almost in some regards that I can shatter it, you know.

• 1:57:53Chris Williamson?

  This is why people I think are going after Logan Paul's relationship amongst a whole host of other reasons. One of them being that

• 1:58:03Chris Williamson?

  there's a skepticism around both his and his partner's fidelity. Logan Paul's kind of portrayed as the king of the bros and his missus has got a history as well. And all right, like, let's keep hitting this thing. I'm pretty sure that there's nothing there. Let's keep hitting it. I'm gonna keep hitting it. And then maybe you'll have working working the other side. There's podcasters who've got huge, huge platforms online, and there's as many haters as there are, like, and critics and skeptics and stuff. And all that they do is spend their time trying to find holes. And I think a big chunk of that is that they think, hmm. Maybe maybe there is something hollow inside of that. And if I keep whacking it enough, then it it won't work, it'll break.

• 1:58:44Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, I think we should be cautious of portraying like an infallible front.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:52Chris Williamson?

  One of the ways that you can kind of protect yourself quite nicely against that, just as a normal person, you know. Nobody likes someone who doesn't seem to have any vulnerabilities, doesn't seem to have any problems. Yeah, exactly. Like,

• 1:59:08Chris Williamson?

  we bond with people over their flaws as much as we bond bond with them over their successes. But the flaws humanize them. If you've got someone and you're like, this guy or girl doesn't seem to struggle with anything. So all right, what what am I gonna bond with you over? Like, what are you? Are you just a fucking, are you an equation? Who are you?

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:27Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and you can.

• 1:59:30Chris Williamson?

  By wearing your weaknesses on your sleeve, not running with a victim mentality and not exposing them unnecessarily. But you know, if someone asks today, this people pleaser thing is like a revelation I've learned within literally the last two weeks, right? So I'm like, all right, I guess I'm part of the people pleaser club. And this is kind of a new thing for me to realize and learn about myself. And now, I don't know, like, there's other people out there that are people pleasers and they think, fuck, like, that's, maybe that's me too. So yeah, giving that gift of like self insight, I think is useful.

• 2:00:05Speaker 01

  It's true. Well, I also, I think people really don't like seeing perfect people for whatever reason. I think that's a flaw. We should work on that. We should be thrilled if somebody seems to have all the things together. That to me, I'd rather err on the side of optimism, that somebody else could have those things. And that means maybe I could too, you know, maybe I don't have everything right now, but maybe I could if this other human does. But I think for instance, you know, there's a reason that characters are created when people have personas. And those characters are very thoughtfully, you know, made. I always like talking about or thinking about The Rock, because I think he seems like a good guy. And I also think he's much more crafted than people give him credit for.

• 2:00:49Chris Williamson?

  I would agree.

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  You know, the way he dresses, you know, so as to not look too intimidating and also sort of like the people's champ, which is what he calls himself, even the way he humanizes what he talks about, calling himself the people's champ, right? I think these, these characters are created because we realize that nobody likes a glass house. We want to see if we can break it. And for, for, I'm a little embarrassed because I couldn't stop watching the whole Dylan Dennis Logan Paul thing on Twitter. I mean, I was like, when some, my husband, because he's a jujitsu guy, you know, going to watch the fights or whatever. So when some of his like degenerate friends sent me sort of the stuff they were doing back and forth, you know, I fell in, I'm like, oh my God, did she really say that? What happened?

• 2:01:29Chris Williamson?

  Compelling.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  Oh, very great content, premium content. And yet, as I was watching it all, I'm like, at the end of this, I have a feeling they're both kind of losing.

• 2:01:38Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 2:01:39Speaker 01

  And I think they both, they took it like a little too far. They could have actually stopped at some point. And, and then it just gets gnarly. And at the core of it, I don't think humans are as bad as we make them out to be. I think we like a little drama. We want to tear people down slightly, but it gets too far and we go, ah, this is gross. I'm out of here by and large. And I think that's what happened with both of them, you know? And, um, and yet, like for me on both sides, I just find it so funny. Like who cares? Who cares what these two humans that none of us know are doing on the internet? And why do we get so fixated on somebody else's life and projecting what we think should be right on them?

• 2:02:17Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that you don't see, and you can't do it if you're about to punch somebody else in the face, because it makes you seem like a coward. It makes you seem like you have limits. And the whole game of this is I have no limits, right? That's fundamentally, I think, what's happening. I'm prepared to go further than you. I'm prepared to be more ruthless than you. This is this great story of Tyson Fury. And I think it was Vladimir Klitschko and him, this is way before they were going to fight, maybe even years before they were going to fight, and they were both in a sauna together. And Tyson Fury just silently made a promise to himself. He was like, I'm dying or he's leaving first. I'm going to die or he's going, and they're in there for like 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes,

• 2:02:59Chris Williamson?

  forever, however long it is. Klitschko gets up and goes, and he was like, I knew I'd beat him. I knew I'd beat him as soon as that had happened.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  And did he?

• 2:03:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:03:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  So who do you think wins the Logan Paul, Dylan Dennis? Really important question for this podcast.

• 2:03:15Chris Williamson?

  In terms of the actual fight.

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And does it matter anymore?

• 2:03:20Chris Williamson?

  Does it matter anymore? Well, I mean, they've both lost and we've all won so far.

• 2:03:27Chris Williamson?

  I really don't know. Dylan Dennis has been fighting for a long time. I've seen some footage of him hitting pads. It doesn't look good. Logan Paul looks great at the moment. Physical condition is fantastic. Uh, and he looks good hitting pads too, but he's also, I think, never won a fight? I don't think he's ever actually won. Uh, and Dylan definitely does seem quite calm. Let's say.

• 2:03:58Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Dylan by decision.

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:04:00Chris Williamson?

  Goes the, goes the distance, but, but it's a ugly fight. It's both very bumbling. Nobody looks particularly slick. I would say Logan by knockout and Dylan by decision. I don't think Dylan's going to knock Logan out because of the size difference. But one of the other things that you see, right? The, talking about who's going to go further and that story of Klitschko and Tyson Fury. There is a, an amount of how far you go. That actually becomes a counter signal after a while. And what it teaches the world is, oh, you, you kind of don't have any morals. There's nothing left. There's no sacred ground left. And this can be done from the receiver as well as the accuser. Right?

• 2:04:45Chris Williamson?

  And this is what I meant on Twitter. You never see anybody on Twitter. Which is crazy because of how many insults get thrown around on Twitter and DMs and sub tweets and all that bullshit. You never see anyone on Twitter say, reply and go, yo, that's out of order and you don't get to fucking say that. Don't talk to me like that. No one has ever replied with that on Twitter, but you do that in person. Someone like you and your partner and your partner actually decides to bring up that thing that they know hurts you and you, they promised that they wouldn't, or it's just beyond the payload. And you go, yo, you don't get to talk about that. Okay.

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:19Chris Williamson?

  Like, no one does that on Twitter. It's always a, a sadonic, satirical reworking of what they actually said, or it's a screenshot of what their wife did the other day, or what it's some fucking bullshit. Like, what would have been an interesting strategy? And again, it doesn't work quite so well because it's like, oh, you're bowing out. This is like, uh, complicity and cowardice and weakness or whatever. But what would have been an interesting strategy for Logan, at least to have done in this particular exchange, would have been to have gone. You're a piece of shit. You don't get to talk about someone's fiance that way. I'll see you at the fucking fight.

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:55Chris Williamson?

  Right? And you go, oh, that's fucking interesting. Right? And it makes you look like the bigger man. Problem being, all of these tweets are like, Logan is financially invested in, like, he's very, very incentivized in ticking this over. But yeah, had he have not had that on the other side, had there have just been some, you know, like meaningless beef with no face punching at the end of it? I would have been interested to see.

• 2:06:21Chris Williamson?

  If he could have played it in a more noble way.

• 2:06:25Speaker 01

  I agree. Yeah, I also thought about it from the woman's perspective of.

• 2:06:28Chris Williamson?

  Fucking rough is mostly what I think.

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  Rough. And also, what would you want your man to do if that was you in that situation? Very rough for them as a couple, I think, on either side. I cannot imagine. I actually asked my husband, I was like, what if that was me? He was like, oh, God, you know, just like a visceral reaction. And we're very close and been married for a long time. But that is like a primal instinct, I think, in men that we just have to be honest about. So that had to make for fun conversation between the two of them. I don't wish anything on that. And on the other side, you know, there's part of me that I think would have said, fuck the purse. Like, why, why are we continuing to engage with a person that's done this? And despite it making you a ton of money, you know, is it worth it?

• 2:07:12Speaker 01

  Because her reputation has been severely beaten up and she'll have to come up with something really creative to turn that around if she cares.

• 2:07:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the rebrand of Nina is going to be an interesting one. Ah, I don't know. I mean, we, we pray at the altar of

• 2:07:31Chris Williamson?

  status and prestige and money. And we will do an awful lot to kind of get there. And it's part of that brand as well. It's part of that, like turbo alpha male machismo. Nothing can fuck with me, dude. I'm untouchable. But again, you know, if, if I think he'd said something like, uh, like she doesn't care about you. This isn't going to be a big deal. Uh, she thinks that you're like scum and, and that you're despicable, but like she doesn't care about you. I'm like, again, I, maybe that's the case. Maybe the, the whole relationship is like that. But if you'd said like, she's really been fucking hurt by this, like you've really hurt her.

• 2:08:12Chris Williamson?

  Like, that's a, that's a headline. Like Dylan Dennis is emotionally abusive to a girl that he's never spoken to.

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  A hundred percent, especially some of the stuff, just pictures of her with men. I'm like, I mean.

• 2:08:25Chris Williamson?

  Fucking funny though.

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that is the problem. I was on all of my, my, you know, gents, friends, text messages and just.

• 2:08:33Chris Williamson?

  Don't pretend that you weren't following it yourself.

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I, I, I admitted it. I was, I was admittedly embarrassingly following it for a period, but then I had to turn it off because I got, I thought it would peter out.

• 2:08:43Chris Williamson?

  Well, remember what I said. Content diet, right? Amygdala, the fast food for the amygdala all over again. Like, what does it make you? Here's another good way, right? When you watch your current content feed or creator, not necessarily of choice, but like the algorithms creator of choice that it's feeding you. How do you feel? I call it post-content clarity. How do you feel?

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  Feel the opposite. It's like fog.

• 2:09:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, it's just like, are you, do you want to ring your mum and tell her that you miss her? Do you want to go outside and go for a nice walk and be calm and look at the sky? Or do you feel like the world's out to get you and everything's pointless? And it's zero-sum, dog-eat-dog scarcity world mentality? And when I think about some of the most popular channels and how they make me feel, they make me feel rubbish afterward. I don't, I don't like the person that I am. And I almost need to, like, acutely rehabilitate myself back into being the person I am after watching this content.

• 2:09:41Speaker 01

  Well, especially something like that. You know, I was, I was talking to one of my friends in a meeting. You know what I think about? I imagine it like if my attention span or if my attention and focus is an apartment. Let's say I consider a penthouse, like this space in here is actually quite nice and it's very expensive. And everything that I allow into that apartment is me Airbnb-ing it out. I'm renting my mind out to these people. And I have just given these two dudes, you know, this apartment for a week, free. You know, they've gotten this penthouse-level attention, which has some cost, and it's not been a net benefit to me. And so I've rented it out to them for nothing. And, uh, and every time I rephrase it that way, I'm like, oh yeah, I would, I wouldn't do that.

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  I wouldn't allow these type of people to steal my attention for a week if my attention was an actual house in which I lived. And by the way, my brain, your brain is much more valuable than some Airbnb penthouse you could have. And so, um, my mind always goes back to the numerical calculus of what is it costing you? So you can feel it in your energy. You can certainly feel it in, in your output, which I guess could be monetarily driven. But yeah, at the end of it, I was just thinking, God, these two idiots are living rent-free in my mind for much too long. It's totally my fault.

• 2:10:51Chris Williamson?

  Big hidden metric again. Uh, I love contrarian thinking. I love your newsletter. Where should people go if they want to sign up to that?

• 2:10:58Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's contrarianthinking.co.

• 2:11:01Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. And where else should they go if they want to

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  Codie Sanchez.

• 2:11:04Chris Williamson?

  Follow the things that you do.

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  On all the socials. We do a lot on YouTube. We do a lot on Instagram. And yeah, I hope they tell me if they end up buying a business, which is what we talk about the most.

• 2:11:14Chris Williamson?

  Hell, yeah. I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.