Evolution, Meaning & Managing The NYSE's Social Media | Matthew Kobach | Modern Wisdom Podcast 216

Matthew Kobach is a content strategist. Matthew transformed the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) into a social media behemoth. Plus he's a very interesting guy with a fantastic moustache. We get into everything today including evolutionary signalling, psychology, ancient philosophy, social media strategy and much more... Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Follow Matthew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/mkobach Follow Matthew on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/mkobach Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #socialmedia #psychology #NYSE - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you're someone who's chasing that social status, that to feel good about yourself, think about how social media then plays into our evolutionary predilections. So I'm chasing this high of like approval from other people and I'm chasing like, yeah, I'm working out, I'm getting fit and I'm doing all this. And then I'm able to post a shirtless picture of me on Instagram, but then it gets a thousand likes and you can see how it's like, this is all just a big reward, seeking social status, seeking pride. Like, that's why social media has totally, I don't mean this in a, in like a bad way, but you can see that social media has hijacked that or like used it to their advantage.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Matthew Kobach. Matthew, welcome to the show.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Thank you. Super excited to be here.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  Pleasure to have you on, man. That facial hair is absolutely crushing. It's making me wistful for my old mustache, which is now gone.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  If people are listening to this, I do have a mustache. It's been four months since I've had to see anybody. So I decided in that four months to grow a mustache, cause really to see if I could. It's a challenge to myself and it turns out I can.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Every guy that I know who's had latent mustache desire for the last few years of their life has been like, yes, this is the opportunity I've been looking for, a global pandemic when I don't have to see anyone. Let's grow some ridiculous facial hair.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  The pandemic has been bad for a lot of people, but great for mustaches.

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  I think the stock price of mustaches, anyone that was long mustaches in February time.

• 1:31Chris Williamson?

  What a return.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  They've seen hacker returns, that's for sure.

• 1:36Chris Williamson?

  For sure, man. So talk us through, give us a bit of background to you. What do you do? What have you, what do you, what do you do?

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. So if anyone happens to know who I am, it's solely because of Twitter. So over the past maybe 14, 15, 16 months, I've built up a bit of a persona on Twitter just by regularly tweeting, just by putting out stuff, really every day. I make it a goal myself to do it once a day. Social media rewards consistency. So literally however long ago it was, I made a pact with myself that I was going to take everything I knew about social media and apply it to my own personal profile and just see what happens. And it just, it caught fire, to be honest, you know? It's a little bit of luck, a little bit of knowing what I'm doing. And over the past 16 months, it's gone from like a thousand to, you know, 65,000, whatever it might be.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  And it was because I work professionally in social media. So I've been doing this for over 10 years and I know what kind of works, at least know what works for brands. And I kind of decided, why don't I take that same concept, apply it to my own personal profile and not do it in a way that's deceiving or that I'm not being true to what I think or who I am, but just like, let's write tweets in a way that I know works. Let's talk about things that I know people are interested in. And it took off. You know, here we are. Now I'm on your podcast.

• 2:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. So I find it really interesting. I've got a number of buddies that work in the social media world and there does seem to be two very distinct types, especially as you get higher up. There's one type that Steve Bartlett from a company, Social Chain in the UK, which my buddy works at, who exactly, as you said, takes the principles, applies them to his own. Then there's his business partner, Don McGregor, also a good buddy of mine, past Modern Wisdom guest twice, who doesn't give a fuck about social media. He's like, that's work. This is home. I'm going to draw a line in the sand. So it's interesting to see what happens. So what were the principles? You said that

• 3:39Chris Williamson?

  you were consistent, targeted messages. What else did you do?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  So one key thing that I think a lot of people leave out is that they're not focused enough on social media. So, you know, like, we're all complicated, interesting people that have, you know, I might like to go kayaking and then I might like to think about philosophy and then I might like to pet my dog and you want to share all those things in your social media. The problem is when you're on social media, you're more like a TV channel, you know, you're more like ESPN where you've got to kind of stick to one programming if you want people to follow you. So you really have to narrow in what it is that you talk about. So even using you for an example, you've already, you've got, it's the same idea with your podcast. If all of a sudden you started, had a guest on tomorrow that wanted to talk about cricket, people are going to be like, why is this episode on

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Modern Wisdom? So really you just use that same concept and apply it to social media and you apply it to your personal brand. And that's how you start getting a following and getting people interested in what you have to say and building a community. I mean, you absolutely have a community around your podcast and social media works the same way.

• 4:45Chris Williamson?

  What were you talking about then? What have you been tweeting about for the last 18 months?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  So a lot of it was about social media, just kind of about content in general, about the stuff that works and the stuff that doesn't work. Social media was interesting because it came up, you know, what, 2004, I guess, is when Facebook started. And when it first kind of got big, when it was clear that brands were going to be using it, there was like a land grab by, by people that were just kind of throwing out like, "Do this to grow your following and do this to get engagement." And that kind of worked in social media 1.0. But now we're to a point where that stuff doesn't work anymore. Either the algorithms have changed or they have, you know, there's new platforms that you just can't game the system that way. And so I just started tweeting matter-of-factly, which again works, so you'd be direct, be concise,

• 5:32Speaker 00

  about stuff that works and stuff that doesn't work. And I think people found it somewhat refreshing. You know, it wasn't, if you follow social media stuff on, on social media, you get a lot of like, "Just be authentic," or, you know, "Social media is meant to be social." It's been repeated so many times, it just doesn't mean anything. Like, that's not helpful to someone who's trying to get better at it. So I would literally do things like, if you're on Instagram, you're going to post a photo that's this size. If you're on Twitter, you've got to, you know, tweet every day, or you've got to be consistent, or you've got to narrow in your focus. And it was the stuff that these people kind of, that work in the industry, knew to be true. You know, it's like they felt it, and that's what's key to getting retweets. It's this thing that like, you kind of feel in yourself that, that you just haven't articulated yourself. And then when you see someone else articulate it,

• 6:17Speaker 00

  they've now spoken for you, and they're likely to retweet it. And so that's, as simple as it was, if you can tap in to what someone else is thinking and do their, you know, put it on paper, like, that's how you, you get people that are like, "I like the way this person thinks because they think like I think." And, and that's really what I did. And, and then on top of it, I just happened to be interested. This is actually how I found your podcast. I happened to be interested in philosophy and happiness and, you know, making my life as enjoyable as possible. And I feel like you probably, there'll be some overlap with, with your interests as well. You look for like this really, really old advice that has stood the test of time. Like, I don't want someone's advice from five years ago.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  I want someone's advice from 2,000 years ago that's still relevant today. And so I just started taking that. I mean, like stoicism kind of stuff, like you can apply it to social media. And so that's all I would do. I would take this like philosophical lens, just took it and look at content. And so many of my tweets, I swear to God, if you take out the word social media in the tweet and replace it with life, I've just plagiarized it from someone who wrote it 2000 years ago. But it just resonates. People understa-- it's these beautiful concepts that people get. And you could literally do it with anything. You could take out social media, put it in motorcycle repair, put it in canoeing, put it in friendship. It's like the, like, a lot of the big problems we've had in life, people have been thinking about for a lot, lot of years. So use their wisdom

• 7:43Speaker 00

  and apply it to, to the problems we're facing today.

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if Seneca knew 2000 years ago that he would be providing you with content. In a couple of millennia, there's some guy is going to remove some of the words from this, put social media in and get 1000 retweets.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  I would love to thank him if I had the chance. There's no way he ever could conceive of that. But like, if you really think about Twitter, too, it's no different than that kind of philosophy. Like, that's why I love Twitter so much, is there are these ways to spout out wisdom, to be pithy, to kind of say these things that like, the reason I like pithy sayings and the reason I like Twitter is because there's a way that you can say certain things, and it just hits you, you know? And it's different than a long form conversation like this, which is equally as valuable, not saying it isn't. But there's ways that you can say certain things that it just hits someone right in the soul or right in the heart. And, you know, if only for a second, you can kind of change their thinking, or it kind of shakes them out of their day to day stuff. And I

• 8:44Speaker 00

  think that's what a lot of ancient wisdom does. And so I'm just kind of taking it. Sometimes I don't even get rid of the word life, I just keep it in. And other times I apply it to social media.

• 8:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're very, very correct about what you say, that small aphorisms can really make a big impact, because a large concept ends up being distilled down to probably one sentence description. And perfect example of that, I know that we're both fans of The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, and I was reading it this morning. And there was a sentence that stuck out to me, right in the middle of the book. It's like 60% of the way through. And it's the sentence which, to me, describes what most of the book is about. And it says, "Our genes did not design us to be happy, they designed us to be effective."

• 9:32Chris Williamson?

  And I'm like, that's just some throwaway line in the middle of this huge, like, multi-hundred-page book.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:41Chris Williamson?

  I remember the sentence, and the sentence is a distillation of the concept of the book.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's honestly how I go about tweeting, is I read books like that. I read stuff just because that happens to be my hobby, it works out. And you get beautiful lines like that, you get, or you're just able to think about it and summarize it yourself. And that's what kind of goes through. Like, you see the, you read lines like that, and it hits you so hard that like, and I could go off on that for a while. Like, I love evolutionary psychology. I'm a full, you know, if you want to call it a cult, I'm in the evolutionary psychology cult. I've been, I've been, I did a dissertation, started writing it, and that was my theoretical framework was evolutionary psychology. And I've sidetracked myself now because we were talking about.

• 10:28Chris Williamson?

  Let's go down it, let's go down, let's tumble down that.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 10:31Chris Williamson?

  Let's do it, man. Oh, I tell you what, before we go into that, who do you think is the best aphorist on the planet?

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Oh, man, probably Naval.

• 10:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, man, I know, I know, I don't, I don't.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  It's too classic and.

• 10:45Chris Williamson?

  I don't want to give the obvious answer, but he's.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  All right, how about this? How about, there is, I'll give, I'll give one that maybe some people don't know. There is someone called Orange Book on Twitter.

• 10:54Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  So it's orangebook, I think, underscore. So one word, orangebook underscore. Brilliant. Lot, lot of that same stuff, a lot about just how to live a better life, how to be happier. And just writes it in a way, like, what I think a lot of people miss about Twitter, or don't understand about Twitter, is you can have these ideas, but you also then have to get them on paper. You have to write them in a way that's easy to read. And this person, he's anonymous, or pseudonymous. And so I don't know who he is or she is, but the way that they write, the way that they think is just super clear, super concise. And it's, it's one of those people that adds so much value to your timeline if you're a regular Twitter user.

• 11:30Chris Williamson?

  I know. That's why Naval, as a guy who doesn't follow anyone and just tweets, like, single words sometimes, or like, couple of word sentences, has like nearly amassed like nearly a million followers now. And you're right, as much as I don't want it to be the obvious answer, it is for a reason. You know that there's a reason that Floyd Mayweather was the best boxer on the planet for a while. You don't want to say that he is the best defensive boxer of all time. But he was. And Naval.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:56Chris Williamson?

  Naval's the Floyd Mayweather of aphorisms, man, with a little bit more humility.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  He is. And I would say a healthy more dose of humbleness if we're comparing him to Floyd Mayweather. But like, and even Naval aside, like you can see the reason someone like him is so popular. And you can, people can mimic this, and it's certainly just a style of writing. But it's the fact that there's this sense that so much wisdom is packed into just such a tight, concise package, that that's what makes it so interesting and makes it so relatable and so easily to understand. It's almost like, you know, like a picture is worth a thousand words. You can have tweets that are 10 words, but they feel like a thousand words. And that's how he tweets, and that's how some of these people that are so popular, like they tweet the same way. And it's that same idea of the, of the moral animal summarization you gave.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  In one sentence, you understand how we're designed. We're not designed to be happy. We're not even necessarily designed to reproduce. We're designed to reproduce specific genes. So you got a gene that doesn't care if it's like, if it's doing something good or bad. It's just like, will this gene multiply next time? Like, will it be around? And like, that's all it really boils down to. And I'll go down this rabbit hole just for a second. That's why I love thinking about evolutionary psychology is once you know how we're programmed, you can think, how do we, how do we communicate? How do we relate to people? How do, if I'm a brand, how do I sell stuff? How do I get people excited? How do I kind of make a cult following out of this brand that I'm representing? And whether, or it's yourself.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  There's just so many things to understand about human nature that you can then look at and apply it to any part of your life. And I just happen to be in marketing, happen to be in social media. But you could use it in sales, you could use it in presentations, you could use it in podcasts. Like, it's just, it applies to literally everything. That's why I think it's just such a beautiful theory to, to just have in the back of your head and have dancing around there at all times.

• 13:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, relationships, family life, friendships, everything.

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  I genuinely believe that evolutionary psychology is the ultimate red pill. It stops you from seeing matrix and starts you seeing code, but it does it in a way that means that I don't know whether you found this. When I started reading it, I started slowing down a lot. I became less effective in the real world because I was triple, quadruple checking everything that I'm like, oh, so why do you think that? What does it say about me that I'm asking myself, why did you say that? What does it say about me that I'm asking, what did you, what does it say about me? And you just end up this like constant regression all the way back. You know what I mean?

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. That's why one, one concept I've been kind of playing with and I'm real bad at it. And it's super, it's super like down the rabbit hole kind of thing, but it's a sense of like identity, like who are you? What do you think? And if you can lose your own sense of identity, if you can just say like, I'm just another person in this big blue planet, whatever. It's easier to understand your own thinking. So like you, like you going down like, why did I say that? Well, he responded to this and I said that, not that. And you realize like, that's kind of how you're hardwired. But we have such an ego, you want to defend everything you said, you want to defend everything you think. But as soon as you, if you can just take a step back and think, you know what? This, uh, this is just some person doing something. Let me try to disassociate with what that person

• 15:15Speaker 00

  did, even though it's yourself. And that's how you can better understand all the stuff and hopefully make better decisions. Now it's next to impossible. It's really hard and I'm not good at it by any means. I'm, you know, I've got an ego. I've got, I take things personally all the time. But the best thing you can do, like if you're ever in an argument and you can just like, take a step back and think like, these are just two people who are, aren't communicating properly. You can then all of a sudden be a lot more logical and see the other person's point of view so much quicker than if you go, that person hurt my feelings and they did something wrong. And now I'm mad and I'm upset about it. But again, we're, we're animals that are designed to have emotional reactions. So it takes a lot of practice to do that. It takes a lot of practice to see, uh, like how we're programmed. It takes a lot of practice to see that like, I'm reacting like

• 15:59Speaker 00

  this because at some point it benefited my ancestors to react like this. And I've got to be a smarter person. I, you know, like I've got, we've got the frontal lobe capacity to realize that just because we're programmed this way, doesn't mean we have to act this way. It means we're likely to act this way. It means that we want to act this way, but it doesn't mean that we have to act this way.

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  It's all well and good saying. This is my gene expressing itself through feelings. But when you get sadness, happiness, anger, any emotion, it feels, it's not as logical as that, right? It is a sensation. It is the expression of that gene giving you a sensation in yourself that causes you to act in a particular way. If you haven't been around people for a while and you start to get lonely, that yearning for people is to get yourself back to the tribe. But it just feels like loneliness. It feels like some curse bestowed from the gods, or on the positive side, some sort of blessing that's been handed to you. You know, that feeling after you complete a workout,

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  you don't think, oh, that was me expanding my domain of competence. You know, like, it's not, that's not what you think. But that is what's happening. And learning that slowly as Robert Wright continues to deep throat me with this evolutionary psychology red pill.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  That's a hell of a metaphor there. We don't have these in this state.

• 17:23Chris Williamson?

  Hey, look, you get a little bit of colorful language. It is our language. We'll anglicize what we want. We'll spell everything with an S. We'll add U's into like every word that we can. And we'll talk about Robert Wright deep throating a red pill.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  I just love this. One thing too, is it is so hard to be in the throes of it, to be feeling something emotional and to take that step back. And what really helps me is I'm very lucky. I have a fiance and we're really good at kind of holding each other accountable when something like that happens. And it literally happened today. I moved out of New York. I had to ship a bunch of packages and for no reason, the mail just returned them back to a place that we don't live anymore. And I got super frustrated, got a little stressed out, like, how are we going to get this? And, you know, like, that's your, you know, that's your body like in fight or flight. But there's literally nothing I can do about it right now. So, you know, she's like, relax, like, take a breath. Like, there's no, like, we can't solve this right now. We're going to have to figure out a solution.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Like, we'll get a friend to come over and do it. But like, literally stressing about it right now. Does you no good. It's just gonna make you more unhappy. And I was getting ready for this. She's like, like, she didn't say this, but this is what I internalized. It's like, do I really want to be stressed out for this podcast that I'm excited to go on for this person that I'm eager to talk to? And you can see so many issues in people's lives where they kind of let these little stressful things build up and then you come out and explode, or that you're not your best possible version of yourself and you're having a conversation like this and you're not expressing what you actually think and you're not having a rational train of thought or a rational mind. So it's so important to be able to do that and then to surround yourself with people who think the same way. And that's really what I'm trying to do going forward is who, who, who thinks

• 19:07Speaker 00

  the same way that I do, who can reel me in because I'm not perfect at it by any means. And then who are the people that don't do that, that don't control their emotions, that do go and stress about things and bring you down? You know, take a step away from those people and take a step closer to the people that, that understand this and want to get better at it.

• 19:25Chris Williamson?

  You, the external accountability is such, such an assistance, man. Like, it's such an unfair advantage. I've been thinking about this a lot. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. So this is very trite to say, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I'm aware that that's like off the back of a bumper sticker somewhere. But

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's the perfect tweet. It's a perfect tweet.

• 19:46Chris Williamson?

  Hey, look, thousand retweets. But I've been thinking about that an awful, awful lot about where the optimal line is for solitude versus relying on others. And as someone who's 32 and still single, it's interesting for me to see the pace at which my buddies are moving. And I think that there's been, I've had a disproportionate advantage up to now. But I'm now starting to see that situations that perhaps might be diffused by a partner or by like having a family, having dog, having kids, whatever it might be, that distraction is actually now the tables are

• 20:26Chris Williamson?

  starting to turn? Does that make sense? Like, the, literally, I'm watching that go fast in the beginning, like tortoise versus hare situation play out in front of my eyes.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  It's funny. I think this goes back to a concept. You've talked to, you've had Roy Sutherland on, right? And one of his things is like the opposite of a good idea is sometimes another good idea, you know, and it's that same kind of concept. It's like the opposite of going fast can also like the opposite of like having success by going fast and also be having success by going slow. And I think some of these, it's like, it depends on what stage you are in your life. It depends what you want to accomplish. And so I can certainly see a scenario where you're alone and you're able to spend time and you're able to like, kind of get your head right that you can't do with someone else.

• 21:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, you just mentioned before we got, you mentioned before we got started that the moustache is going because you've got to go to a wedding. Like there's 50%, 50% of the weddings that you need to go to are your partner's friends and 50% of them are your friends. So if I don't have to go to the wedding, I do 50% fewer weddings than everyone else. That's a competitive advantage. Like you cannot get out, even Naval Ravikant can't get out of going to his wife's friend's wedding. Like it ain't happening, you know? And so there's a perfect example.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Well, right. And it ends up being a trade off, obviously. And so you get to, and but a lot of it too is you end up, if you can in solitude, if you can, when you're single, when you're in your twenties and thirties, depending on when you get married and settle down, which by the way, I'm slightly older than you, but I was in the same thing at 32, I was single, um, like spending time with myself. Like I had a dog, like we would go to the dog park every day. I'd walk a trail for an hour and, um, you know, sometimes take a notebook and this is for you. Yeah. But no, but it's like, I was in the exact same shoes. And, and honestly, doing this, like you're obviously in a situation where you're setting yourself up to succeed, not only right now, but later, like talking to all these interesting people, not that I'm interesting, but all the other people that you've had on before,

• 22:26Speaker 00

  but talking to them and like getting all these different perspectives on lives, like you've got a lot of good stuff, like bouncing around in your head, even if you don't, uh, you know, like write it down or repeat or something, it's still in there. It's still processing. And so whenever it is that you, you know, settle down, sort of family, whatever it is, you've already got such a good foundation. That it's gonna end up being, it's it's kinda like you've put up all the all the bricks of the house and you're like, all right, there's literally no more bricks I could put up. Like, I guess I could add some more bricks, but it's not gonna make the house any better. It's time to add some drywall. It's time to add some paint and some furniture and stuff. And that's where you get to a point where someone else is able to help you add those things.

• 23:06Chris Williamson?

  That's a really nice analogy, man. I love it. I had, Andrew Scott was on the show the other day, longevity expert. He said, more women in 2019 had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. Yeah. I honestly, you have to kinda believe that, too, because I think there is a lot of people that are kinda doing what we're doing, where you wanna get yourself right first. You wanna make sure that like, you're the best possible version, or at least you're on the right track. And, uh, and obviously, if you have to have the means to do it and stuff, but I like, I'm in the same boat. I'm not rushing to have kids. I wanna be, I wanna have everything feel secure, feel right, and, and feel like I'm ready for this next step as opposed to just being thrown into the fire and like, hope for the best, kiddo.

• 23:55Chris Williamson?

  I know. I know. Yeah, just jumping at the deep end. Tell me about the stock exchange. Tell, tell the people that don't know what you did for the last, last few years, what, what you did.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  So I was the head of social media and digital media for the New York Stock Exchange. Recently left that job, um, uh, just a few weeks ago. And what I did was, they didn't have a social media, uh, presence really before I came. This is 2014. And so I had to create it. I had to, uh, figure out what we're gonna do, figure out what platforms we're gonna be on. And it was so much fun. I was very lucky to, uh, be in a company to have a boss that just was kinda like, all right, if you think it's a good idea, do it, which is unbelievably empowering for any job. Like, this is outside of social media. If you have a boss that trusts you, but especially in social media where it's so public facing, you know, like, I mess up, CNBC reports on it. Like, it's.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Like, that's a lot of stress, especially the first time. And I know every person who's ever done social media for a brand, it's kind of like that first tweet, that first post, it's like being on top of a cliff. And like, you're looking over, yeah, oh, for sure. And you're like, looking over the edge, and you're like, alright, I gotta jump, I gotta jump. And you're, and you just kind of gotta psych yourself up to do it. Obviously, you do it a thousand times, it become, you know, second nature. But to know that, like, if you mess up, you're gonna trend for the wrong reasons, and there's gonna be reporters calling, especially for an institution like the New York Stock Exchange. Like, you can imagine one wrong tweet, and, you know, like, you could arguably move the markets with a wrong tweet, or with, you know, someone had ill intentions.

• 25:32Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my god.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  They've taken away all the past from me now that I'm gone.

• 25:37Chris Williamson?

  Thank god for that, yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Not me. But so anyway, so I did that, and what happened was, the, no one really expected the New York Stock Exchange to be any good at social media. So, which is good news for me, because that means the bar was set incredibly low. And that's the secret to life, to have expectations super low, and then make it so you can't help but to exceed them. It's funny, I was actually thinking about this, and again, I'm gonna go off on a tangent, because that's apparently just what I do. But, think about, like, so much of your life is comparison. So, it's kind of like, if you live in this really nice subdivision, and it's, everyone's got all these beautiful houses, and you got the crappiest house in that subdivision, you're gonna kind of feel like you don't really have that good of a life. But if you live in a less nice subdivision,

• 26:22Speaker 00

  you have the same exact house, and it just happens to be the nicest house in that subdivision, you're gonna feel like you're a king. And it's because you're comparing yourself to, you know, what's around you. And that was the same idea for the New York Stock Exchange. You're kind of comparing ourselves to other financial institutions, which were unbelievably boring, unbelievably dry, unbelievably uninteresting. And so, all it was, was like, what if we just kind of talk like we're a person? What if we put me on camera interviewing CEOs, and real quick stuff, like, you know, 60 seconds, where we're able to demystify CEOs a little bit? Because, you know, with the Elon Musks, and the Bezos, and the Zuckerbergs, like, they become mythical creatures, almost, you know? And so, we wanted to do a little bit like, CEOs are just regular

• 27:06Speaker 00

  people. And it was, and we did it super lo-fi, I've got my phone right here, it was literally like, me grabbing a CEO, doing this, and just, and just talking to him.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Completely disarm the CEO. It felt super real. It didn't, you know, like whatever you're watching a CEO talk. They're hitting their talking points. They're talking to investors. They're, you know, they're super polished. But this completely disarmed them. And we could have fun, little stupid, you know, questions that weren't about the stock price. It weren't about, you know, the next quarter. So it was this really unique way to, to talk about financial markets, to talk about businesses and to talk to CEOs. And, uh, and we were just making it up as we went along. You know, like Snapchat was invented or like gained popularity while I was there. And it was like, what are we going to do on Snapchat? We should be on it. And that's when it turned into, all right, I'll interview CEOs.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Like let's, and again, that's where it goes back to having a, a team that empowers you. I, I literally said, I'm like, are you all right if I'm on camera as the face of the New York Stock Exchange on social interviewing CEOs? And they were like, no, love it. Great. Do it like we trust you. And so, and, and that's why again, bar was set low. Had a team that really empowered me. And then we got noticed by like media outlets and, and stuff. So people wanted to write stories. People wanted to say, you know, like, wow, we didn't expect the New York Stock Exchange Pinterest page to be this good. Why, why is it this good? It's like, I mean, yeah, I appreciate it. It's good, but it's because you expected nothing. So as long as I had, and like the, like, again, the, the bar was one. I gave you a three out of 10, but you know, three times expectations.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Uh, so that, that's what I did for, for, or for five years, six years, whatever it was. Um, and then, and then moved on and had a cool new opportunity. And so I jumped into that.

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  You must've had some awesome experiences during that time.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure. If you go, I wish I, I wish I would have taken more pictures. Like that's my biggest regret. If you go to my Instagram, which is the same as my Twitter, uh, you can see so many pictures of like so many cool celebrities and athletes and CEOs and stuff. Um, it was, it was like a pinch yourself moment every day. Um, and I, I don't mean to say this, I mean to see that, say this part because like I literally still can't believe it and still can't quite comprehend it. I remember I was interviewing Shaquille O'Neal for the second time. And I just remember thinking like nowhere in my life plan was the sentence ever gonna be, I'm about to go interview Shaq again. And it was just so wild and so crazy. So like that, that's why like I'll have so many fond memories of that place.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  Like the amount of cool people I got to meet, like it was just through the roof. And again, that fact that I was able to use social media. You have someone super famous like Shaq come, he gets hounded. Everyone wants to talk with him. Everyone wants his picture. Everyone wants his autograph. But I legitimately had a business reason. So I can go up to their PR person and I go, hey, I know Shaq's here. And he's talking about how he just joined the board of Papa John's. Um, I do social media for the New York Stock Exchange. I'd love to get 90 seconds with him so that he can promote the Papa John's thing. And they go, yeah, sure. Great. So they push everyone away. I get to go in. I've got like a whole crowd around me, like talk about like getting real good by doing something in public. You've got like this whole floor of traders and all these people watching. But again, it's just me, him and a camera doing a quick little interview for 90 seconds.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Because you know, he's there to do press and I'm, you know, social media is kind of press. It's at least publicity. And was able to do stuff like that on a regular basis. It was, it was just, you know, it's still surreal to be honest.

• 30:35Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that must be so cool. Like having memories like that from a job is worth an awful, awful lot. There's some things that if you're fortunate, you can look back on in your career and be really, really thankful that they happened. And it's worth an awful lot more than the paycheck when it's like that. What's the atmosphere like in the New York Stock Exchange? Obviously we see these kind of quite cliched images of the guys with the, the pieces of paper shouting in the air like.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  It is.

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  Is the kind of alpha male, a gram of caffeine per day atmosphere kind of, does it permeate through to the social media floor?

• 31:10Speaker 00

  I'm happy. I'm happy you said caffeine. Caffeine, yeah, I knew. So, so a lot of it is done electronically now. So what you almost have, so you don't really have that, you know, like you see it in the movies, you see it on TV, it's not quite like that anymore. You still have people there, but what they're doing is facilitating these trades electronically. So they're just really overseeing stuff. They'll get on the phone for large trades, they'll make sure, like, they have a, um, a phone where they can talk to the CFO of certain companies, vice versa, the CFO can talk to them if they don't like something that's going on with the stock, or they have a question. But yeah, it's, it ends up being a lot more quiet, it's a lot more like beeping and buzzing from the computers than people expect. The, uh, the one exception, or the, I shouldn't say the one exception, but the biggest exception is during the IPO time.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  And that's when, an IPO is when a company goes from private to public. Uh, so you've got someone like Airbnb who's private right now, at some point they're gonna go public, and when they do, they have to pick an exchange to go public on. And what that means when they go public is someone like me and you can buy shares. Like, me and you can't buy shares in Airbnb now, but when they're public, that's when you can just, you know, open your Robinhood account, whatever it might be, buy Airbnb. Uh, but what they've gotta do is you've got this private market that has a bunch of shares, and you have the public market that wants to buy shares. So they're pricing, they're trying to figure out the right price to open the stock at, at what price, like, what does the public want this stock at? And that's where you have traders who, like, in real time are yelling at each other, wanting to know what, like, the current, like, people, what, what are people offering, what are people offering to sell it at, what are people offering to buy that?

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Uh, so that's super exciting and that stuff. Like, and I, again, I got to be in, like, the middle of that. Like, that's wild to me. And, and I got, I had plenty of traders, I'm sure if there's any trader listening to this, they're thinking, "Ah, that SOB, Matt Kobach, he got in my way so many times." Because he had to get a picture, a video. Because you're, you're a little bit like a photographer. If you've ever had, like, a photographer at a sporting event, you have to get up close, you have to be unapologetic about getting in someone's way and getting the shot. And it's the same way with social media. Uh, you know, like, they didn't want, you know, our audience didn't want the shot where, like, I'm shooting this way and it's 20 feet away of a trader. They wanted the phone right in their face so I could see someone yelling and doing that. And, like, again, that's what sells our floor, that's what sells our product too, so it was justifiable that I was that close.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  But then they also have a job, so, you know, you kinda have these competing things, and you get to a good rhythm of, they know who I am, I know who they are, we try to stay out of each other's way. Uh, but, super exciting, just being in the middle of that. Like, like, there's so many IPO pictures, you have all these major companies that have IPO'd for the past five years. And you've got like Getty and, and, uh, you know, the stock photos of it. And I'm sitting there like I'm just next to the CEO, just hanging out. Sadly, very embarrassingly, if you're on the podcast, you can't see this, but I'm gonna like, I'm just sitting there looking at my phone like this, like I, like I don't care.

• 33:54Chris Williamson?

  Doing work. Yeah, exactly.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  I swear I'm working, but it looks like I'm just scrolling Instagram or something.

• 34:00Chris Williamson?

  I just sat there texting. So what are you having for dinner, honey? Uh, really, I really don't want Italian again. The last time that we got that snap, you and Bezos.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  And then you've got like traders in the background like, uh, speaking of, we had Snapco public there, which is awesome. You have Evan Spiegel and then his, uh, I forget if it was wife or girlfriend at the time, but Miranda Kerr, they're there taking like Snapchat selfies with like the dog filter on their face. It's like, it's just super, again, surreal moment that you're like, this is the dude did Snapchat with his wife, putting on the dog filter with the tongue on the floor of the stock exchange. Like it's just, you know.

• 34:36Chris Williamson?

  Where I work.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm just at work. Why did I quit? What am I doing?

• 34:39Chris Williamson?

  I know, man. Um, have you checked out the r slash Wall Street Bets Reddit sub thread?

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Oh, uh-uh. Do I need to?

• 34:49Chris Williamson?

  Dude.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  I don't spend nearly enough time at it.

• 34:52Chris Williamson?

  Man, this is, so these guys are the most outlandish traders on the internet. They made it to the front page of some huge financial magazine at the beginning of this year. Um, there's been all sorts of ongoing crazy litigation to do that. It's like a million plus people now, but basically it's, it's people that are beyond reckless on Robinhood, like insane calls and puts and within, with ridiculous timeframes, like by the end of tomorrow. And there's people leveraging their entire net worth and more for internet points from people that they're never going to meet.

• 35:35Chris Williamson?

  And they get immortalized on this, like, within this sub community. And there's some people that have made.

• 35:46Chris Williamson?

  Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in a couple of days and then blown the entire amount and now like 300 grand in debt and it's just the most there's a the dankest trades of Wall Street Bets is a YouTube series which like summarizes each quarter's trades and goes back through it. Man, it is, it's intense. You will, you will be on glove it.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  I, I'm stressed out now. I don't know. I can't, I'm worried that these people don't know what the F they're doing. Like, I know it's the point. Oh, it's so, oh, it's like, oh my God, I'll, I'll try. I'll, it can only look for so long. Yeah. Like I feel that it, I think it brings, I just, it's, it's.

• 36:31Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen those, you've seen those videos of the guys that do, they'll climb up a crane tower that's sort of 500 feet in the air. That's precisely the same feeling that you have when you watch Wall Street Bets on Reddit.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Oh my God. Oh, I just hope these, I hope they're not kids, but they are kids and I hope they're responsible. I know. I need, I need someone to be like, Matt, you need to, you need to stop thinking about this. You're stressing yourself out.

• 36:54Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. We were talking about being mindful and reverting to the present earlier on.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  It's what's funny too is working at the stock exchange. So many people ask me like, give me stock tips, give me advice. And my advice is so unbelievably boring. It's like find a nice diversified ETF. Just put your money in it every month and don't touch it for 10 years. Like that's what you do. And, uh, but everyone wants to, you know.

• 37:18Chris Williamson?

  What's the stock pick of this year? Yeah, exactly. No, dude, you're the guy that's been stood on the, the ground floor at the New York Stock Exchange for the last six years and Morgan Housel is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the best sort of financial writers on the internet. And both of you have said the same thing. Just find something aggregated that's not going to tank and don't touch your money and hold on. And when it goes low, hold on harder and then keep holding on. And then maybe in a generation or two's time, you'll have some money. That's it. And it's so boring. It's so boring. Someone that what they want you to say is that at the beginning of February, you should have decided to go long on Tesla because now it's at 4X.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  And like, who would, no one in their right mind would even said that. You know, like, that's the problem too, is like, you want to do, um, you know, someone wants like a stock tip, like what you do, and it's like, you're literally asking someone to predict the future and to predict emotion. Like, the, you can't, it's really hard to argue some stocks, I won't name any by name, but they don't necessarily trade on fundamentals, they don't trade on stuff that anyone could see. They trade because people love the brand or love the company, just love the idea. And I don't know how to gauge that, I don't know how to predict that. I don't know how to say, people love this stock and they're going to keep buying it. Like, maybe, maybe not, I really don't know. But, you know, it's not like, oh, I know this new chip manufacturer just, uh, cut their, you know,

• 38:49Speaker 00

  they got a new, they got a new plant in whatever country and it's going to cut their prices by half. Like, that's the only reasonable type of information that you could use, that would then be like, alright, and I don't think it's been priced into the stock price, so that's a good buy, in my opinion. But like, the past four months, it's just been like mostly emotion, it seems like, at least the big names. So like, I, I don't know.

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  What was handling the social media like during the last four months?

• 39:17Speaker 00

  So it became, um, so one, we don't actually talk about specific stocks that much. We don't talk about, uh, stock prices. The, the reason being is that like, so legally, our restrictions were, you cannot talk about like what a stock's going to do or what you think it's going to do. We can't like give financial advice, we got to stay away from that stuff. So it was very black and white about what we could and couldn't do. You could talk about what a stock is currently, like what it has done, like, so it closed today at $70. That was fine, you can't say anything forward looking, that was a big no-no. But what happened was, we were a little, uh, like, we had some fun. You know, like, if there was a cool trend on social media that made sense for us, we would join it.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Um, you know, again, it was me on camera, like paneling around with CEOs, like, it was showing them in a different light. All of a sudden, in, what was it, February, everything just starts tanking. So you're having like, thousand point drops in the Dow. And, and the way the stock exchange is set up, if it drops quickly enough or by a certain percentage in a day, it literally freezes. So like, you literally, no one can trade for 15 minutes. It's like, alright guys, circuit breaker went on.

• 40:25Chris Williamson?

  What happens when that happens? Is there like a big red alarm bell that goes somewhere?

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just, it's like all of a sudden, nothing happens, but all of a sudden it goes, and it had, I don't know that it had happened, I'm gonna, someone feel free to reply and tell me the actual answer, but it'd been like a decade or two, I think, since it had happened last. But all of a sudden, everything on the floor just like pauses, so it's, it's, and it's a different color, you got red and green, and I forget what it was, maybe it was like yellow or something, and it was like, just like X's. And so, none of the screens, you could like trade, and, and it's an automatic thing, it's, it's a, it's a computer program, so once the, yeah, once it hits, I think it was 7%, once it hits that, it's literally, no one can do anything, and you just hang out for 15 minutes, and it's real surreal, you've got everyone on the floor, just kinda waiting for 15 minutes.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  But for us, what we wanted to do is, we knew it was gonna happen, like you can kinda, before a stock, before the market opens, you can see what the futures are trading at, and you can see that like, the Dow's gonna open up or down, whatever percent. And so, if you see that it's gonna open down 6%, you know, like, oh, there's a chance that this could go further. So, sitting there waiting, and for us, what we wanted to do is, when this started happening, one, we wanted to be very real time, we wanted people to get their information from us. So, if the, if the stocks were paused trading, I was literally sitting there, I had the tweet ready, cause I knew it was gonna happen, as soon as it did, I hit go. And the reason is, we then became like the trusted source for that information, when people were doing stories about it, they saw our name, and

• 41:56Speaker 00

  so we got to get our brand out there significantly more than if we waited even a minute later. The other thing we did, is now, I mean, people are losing money, you know, like, this is people's 401Ks, these are people's investments that, maybe they're living off of, or at the very least now panicked that, you know, you bought something and now it's down 20%. So, we just, we got rid of all, you know, kinda cute stuff, we got rid of all fun stuff, and it just became very matter of fact. Here's where the market just opened at, here's where the market just closed at, and let's talk to this person about what this means for, you know, their stock. So, we really changed our tone, overnight, almost. And so, we, you know, like, we're talking about people's money, and if money, if money's doing well, you can have some fun, you can be a little silly, but when people are losing

• 42:40Speaker 00

  money, you, you know, that's when you kinda tighten the tie, and you look a little more professional, and, and you don't have as much fun.

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  Anyone that's ever been on a very long diet knows exactly the same feeling as when you've got money worries. It's like everything is, everything sucks. Everything that happens in your life is like, this thing happened, but I'm hungry. And it's the same as that. It's like, this thing happened. My, my daughter just won at her football. That's great. But the stock market's just crashed. This thing happened, but the stock market's just crashed. So you're right. Like, don't, anyone out there that is listening, that is getting social media advice, if you're the guy from the CDC who looks after their social media, or the, the lady who looks after British Rail Network or something like that, if everything goes down, don't, don't do the TikTok dancing videos of everyone in the office. Let's save that for another day.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's also a good lesson, too. It's why we don't schedule anything. So a lot of social media managers will schedule stuff in advance. They got a calendar. It's, you know, timeless. It's evergreen kind of stuff. Like, it works on a Tuesday as well as it works on a Saturday night. But especially on Twitter, you don't know what's gonna happen. So you don't wanna, like, I remember when Kobe Bryant died. All of a sudden, like, all the TV stations are breaking to it. It's news. We're still figuring out, like, no one really knows the information who died. And then if you're a brand and you're tweeting, like, LOL, ice cream Saturday, like, you look completely tone deaf. You look like you're not paying attention. And, you know, you maybe just had something scheduled on a Saturday, but it's, I will never schedule stuff for that reason, especially on Twitter, because you just risk looking tone deaf. And you could, with all the Black Lives Matter stuff.

• 44:15Chris Williamson?

  Blackout Tuesday, precisely, yeah. Here's our new, new sale, like, imagine if someone had done, like, a Black Fridays come this June or something like that. And it actually happened on that, on that Tuesday. That could have been a very, very unfortunate situation.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. So it's just not, it's just not worth the risk. I know the person who heads up comms and social media for John Deere, the tractor company. And every morning, they literally take the temperature of what's going on in the world. Now, like, all right, what's going on? And they're a global company, so they're looking at different countries, they're looking at different cultures. And they're like, all right, our job is to make sure that we're not saying anything that could now be insensitive, that could now be misconstrued. I mean, you've even got it with, with COVID. Let's say you had this like ad campaign with a bunch of people hugging. You've got to scrap that. You can't have campaigns with people shaking hands or high fiving. Like, all this stuff changes so quickly that you've got to be really, really nimble to make sure that you're not, you know, coming off insensitive.

• 45:21Chris Williamson?

  Did you ever take your interest in evolutionary psychology and use it when watching the traders and the atmosphere and the personalities of the people that you saw on the New York Stock Exchange?

• 45:33Speaker 00

  I can't, so I certainly applied it to the content we did. So like, I've always, so the, I'll rewind a little bit. I didn't actually explain what I did a PhD in, which by the way, I dropped out. I did not finish the PhD. A lot of people think I have the PhD because I say I pursued it, just to be 100% certain. I do not have it. I'm a dropout and I'm a very proud PhD dropout. I like to say I was smart enough to be a PhD dropout.

• 45:57Chris Williamson?

  Nice.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  What I did was, this is in 2008, 9, 10, and so social media was like just kind of getting started. And I wanted to predict how people use social media. So that's why evolutionary psychology was such a robust theoretical framework to base predictions on how people would use social media. So that's when it became clear of like how to communicate on social media, how to do it if you're a brand, like what are the kinds of stuff that people want to do? Like, they want to build communities, like we're tribal species. And so you want to like take into account like those things, like we're a species that needs to communicate clearly, to understand each other. And so I was really invested in there. And so that's what I used evolutionary psychology from.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  If I was a trader myself and I was doing that, I probably would try to think about it differently. But it was like my world never necessitated, you know, interacting with them in that fashion. It was my job was to like show emotion, because I understand that emotion sells the New York Stock Exchange better than explaining what our market model was. And so that means, so for me, the evolutionary psychology aspect was let me get in this trader's face while he's shouting, and I'm going to record a video. And that's what's going to resonate with our audience as opposed to like me talking, having like an interview with someone where they're kind of explaining what they do. I'm sure there's a whole litany of things. Like if I, you know, wanted to think about evolutionary

• 47:24Speaker 00

  psychology and why people are nuts about trading certain stocks and other stocks, like I'm sure there's a totally ripe for exploration, but I've never, I haven't spent much time thinking about it.

• 47:35Chris Williamson?

  How many of your predictions about social media came true?

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Well, so what I ended up doing is I was, at the time, I was looking at interpersonal communication. And so it could end, to be honest, it's been so long, I don't even remember what I ended up predicting. Because what ended up happening was, I would, and for anyone who's never done a dissertation, this is how it works, at least for mine, is you do a bunch of coursework, then you have to have a, like a study that you set up. You make some predictions, make some hypotheses, and then you've got to test them. So I would write them based on where social media was at the current time. And then it was moving so fast, Facebook would make an update, and they'd make my predictions moot, because I, you know, I had to work in the, like, they changed their algorithm, and now like what I wanted to do was like, well, that's not part of what their platform

• 48:23Speaker 00

  is anymore. And so I got really frustrated with that, which is why I left. It was like, a year of like writing and rewriting and rewriting. I'm like, this is, I can't do this anymore. But a lot of the predictions I made was about, were about attraction, and about like, how to engage with other people. And so, and again, I forget exactly what I said, but it was very clear that like, online dating was going to take off. It was very clear of what to, how to position your profile to be more attractive as opposed to less attractive. The difference is, what you do in a profile, if you're a male attracting a female, and if you're a female attracting a male. And so you, and you kind of see all this stuff now, and all the online dating, you know, all the tenders and bumbles and stuff of the world. So that was kind of where I was at. And then it was like, how do we then

• 49:07Speaker 00

  communicate with each other, once we've decided, you know, this is the person that I want to talk to? So it really, the closest thing I can say to a prediction that came true, was really that we're going to use social media in the same exact way that we You know, communicate offline. And the reason Tinder was so effective or so popular, the reason it totally zoomed off is one, they gamified it a little bit. They made it fun, interesting. But more importantly, it wasn't like a dating site. You know what you don't do if you're single and you go to a bar? You do not get to see what everyone's interests are. It's not like they're hovering over their head like, I like canoeing and I like going outdoors and I'm this old or whatever. You go to a bar and you go, that person, I am kind of attracted to that person.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  And you go over and you strike up a conversation and either it works or it doesn't work. And that's what Tinder was. The difference was instead of saying like, I'm attracted to that person, I'm going to go walk up to them, you just swiped right. And then it would, it mimicked what we do offline. And that's all social media does is like, if people complicate it, don't understand how we work without social media and then just, or without technology, period. And then layer on technology and you'll know how we act. Like, it's really that simple. Uh, there's, it's like, the most attractive people in real life are going to get the most, most dates, the most attractive people on Tinder are going to get the most dates. Like, it's not, it's not some complicated formula here. Uh, and then if you're a guy, there's going to be certain things that you're going to

• 50:32Speaker 00

  have to add to your profile to be more attractive, uh, than, than if you're a woman. So, uh, it's super interesting to me. I think in another life, I would have been like an online dating consultant or coach or something.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I could have seen you doing that.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  You, you see so many, uh, men especially, you see so many men that it's like, this is your profile? No wonder you haven't met anyone. Like, why, why do you have that picture in there?

• 50:56Chris Williamson?

  What are the biggest errors? What are the biggest mistakes that you think guys and girls make when setting up their profiles online?

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, uh, what, the biggest mistake, one is set yourself up, well, first off, figure out what you're looking for. So if you want to look for a long-term relationship, uh, and I'll just do it for, for guys, I don't want to speak for women. But what you're going to want to do is make yourself look like a long-term attractive mate. And to be a long-term attractive mate, there's several different factors, like, uh, and not everyone's high in everyone. You can't be good-looking and you can't be kind and you can't be funny and you can't be, I have a lot of resources. Yeah, you you need a little bit of all of them. So what you've got to do is figure out which one of these traits that you have are most desirable and highlight those traits. So again, this goes back to the evolutionary psychology thing.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  We're attracted to one, people that are good looking. People always say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's not really. There there's some cultural differences. But every culture likes good skin, good teeth, good hair. Uh, so there's certain things. So that's why you have like these Photoshop apps that are so popular is because from an evolutionary standpoint, they make us more look more attractive because they make us look more healthy. Because if you look more healthy, you're gonna have a higher chance of reproducing with that person who's healthy. And so you're gonna wanna make your uh highlight your attractiveness as much as possible. And again, it's why it's why if you're a guy, you really like the best thing you can do to be attractive is to lift weights. Like just get fit. Like that that is more than half of being attractive as a guy. And again, it goes back to fitness.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  It goes back to evolutionary psychology. So one, so do that. So if you haven't lifted weights, lift weights. Uh, you know, get a picture where your teeth and hair and and uh and skin look good. But then also, but that like that, that's not uh, it's not just that. So you can't just be good looking if you want to be a long term mate. You've also got to uh really suggest that you're gonna be invested in the long term, in the long run. And you've also got to show that you're gonna be able to uh access resources, get resources, provide resources. So showing things like you're kind, showing things that maybe you have like a a bond with your family. Uh, you know, that you're that you love your mother kind of stuff, you know, and that you would raise a kid who also loves their mother.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Um, and again, I'm not saying to be deceiving about this stuff. I'm saying it's marketing. Highlight your best possible qualities. And you want to be trustworthy and uh and you want and being things like funny and intelligent are important because those are ways to get resources. You know, people who are clever, who work hard, who have ambition, who are smart, tend to have more resources. So again, if you can crack a joke right away, you can say something clever, funny, or that it's the same reason why you would put Harvard on your Tinder profile. You know, it suggests that you're someone of means that's gonna have more means. So you really want to do everything to highlight your attractiveness, highlight your commitment to being a long-term partner and your ability to gather resources.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  And this isn't to say that women need resources or need someone to do it. But again, I think we're all kind of programmed. We've all got this in our DNA that we're still attracted to that, those kinds of people, even if we don't need it.

• 54:10Chris Williamson?

  It's very difficult, I think, for the vast majority of women to deprogram the attraction to a man who has the ability to gather resources. Like it is, there are ladies out there who are the breadwinners in the family. That's awesome. But the likelihood is if you are richer or better educated than the man that you are married to, the man is richer or more educated than you are and/or has some other social notoriety, incredibly talented, very muscular, very good looking, whatever it is. Because that's, that's the way that life has worked. You are battling against some deep, deep, deep-seated genetics.

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  If you are able to work around that. I had Rob Henderson on the show a couple of months ago and he was a beast. Anyone that's interested in this sort of evolution and dating and how it rolls forward should go back and check that episode out. But he taught me about the sexy son hypothesis. Do you know about this?

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Oh, it is. Yes, it's that. Well, let's see how much I get right. I'm going to butcher it.

• 55:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  But it's essentially that women are attracted to men who they think would give them good-looking sons because then they would be more likely to reproduce as well.

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, precisely, man. You know it.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Uh huh. The, it's just, what's so funny is that's why I love evolutionary psychology so much. It's like someone says it, it's just, it just, it clicks. It seems so logical. And you know, someone comes up with a better theory, believe me, I'll be the first to, to get rid of it. But like, it's just, everything just kind of stacks up so perfectly.

• 55:49Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the things that, I'll give you one of mine and then we'll see if you can, if you can give me some of yours, some of the kind of like jaw drop moments when you read evolutionary psychology. One of mine recently has been learning about the purpose of pride.

• 56:06Chris Williamson?

  That it's a positive feedback mechanism for doing something which is challenging and worthwhile. And that the sensation of pride is something that we intrinsically seek for ourselves. As someone who, anyone who is an entrepreneur, who goes and decides to train or do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable. You kind of seek the endorphin hit after doing something. But it's all, it was all abstract. You've kind of thought about it before and you know how it fits into the bigger picture of you in your life. And you can kind of get lost in the weeds away from the fact that it's like, nah, evolution's there for absolutely everything that you do.

• 56:45Chris Williamson?

  And this is no different. The sensation of pride to me, because it's something, continuing to motivate yourself. Most of the motivation comes from chasing that sense of pride that comes afterward. And you think like, well, I'm not doing this for the hedonic treadmill. I've done my explore. I've ensured that I've got rid of the trivial few and focused on the trivial many and focused on the vital few. And I'm expressing my logos. You know, you've taken the top 1% of everyone's work. That's looked at this over the last few years and you think that you understand why you're doing something. Then evolution just comes in with a big sledgehammer and smashes you in the face and goes, yeah, mate, but it's still just evolution. The thing about pride was a real sort of jaw drop moment for me.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, and also too, and I'll answer your question, but pride with social media, it's so, it's so clear. So it's like, if you're someone who's chasing that social status, that to feel good about yourself. Think about how social media then plays into our evolutionary predilections. So that word predilections, whatever, the way that we're already designed. So I'm chasing this high of like approval from other people and I'm chasing like, yeah, I'm working out, I'm getting fit and I'm doing all this. And then I'm able to post a shirtless picture of me on Instagram that then gets a thousand likes. And you can see how it's like, this is all just a big reward of us doing this thing, seeking social status, seeking pride.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  And like, that's why social media has totally, and I don't mean this in a, in a, in like a bad way. But you can see that social media has like hijacked that or like used it to their advantage. Like we, and I do it too. Like, you want to argue on status seeking? Yeah, I, there is absolutely a part of me that likes having, you know, however many followers on Twitter. There's a part that likes me getting a thousand retweets. I can say until the cows come home, I do it for myself. I do it to keep myself honest. I do it to, to make sure that I'm increasing my habits, which sure, that's true. And I could probably, probably pass a lie detector. But again, it's that identity thing and I've got to get out of my own head and get out who I am.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  And it's like, you also like the fact that you've got higher status now because you do it than if you didn't do it.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  To answer your question though, to answer your question, the one, and we talked about it already. It's, it's this gene thing. It's that we're not even in control of the ship. We're not the skipper. We're, we are cargo. Like this, what your, your brain, all of it. You, if you've got a gene that wants to get passed on, it is going to do whatever it takes to get passed on. Cause we think, oh, evolution, I get it. Like, so I want to reproduce. I want to make another version of me. And you're like, no, no, no, it's even, it's deeper than that. It's like, you've got this one little weird gene that wants to make another version of itself. And depending on how strong that gene is compared to another gene, like that, that's the stuff that's really wild to wrap your head around. And, and that's what makes you feel like, I'm not in control here.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  I'm not, I'm, you know, and like, I'd like, it's like, uh, it's like you go on a ship and there's like a little, like a steering wheel for the kids to do. Like, that's what life feels like. It's like, oh, I'm totally, yeah. I'm like, or when I was a kid, I have a little sister and she wanted to play video games with me and I didn't want her to play. So I'd give her a controller and tell her she was playing. Like that's, that's what we are.

• 1:00:05Chris Williamson?

  There's no batteries in that controller. There's just batteries in the one that I've got.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  And you, and you think you're controlling it and you're just as happy knowing it, but you're not controlling anything.

• 1:00:16Chris Williamson?

  Have you read Buddhism is True by Robert Wright? Uh, why Buddhism is true? Dude, you would adore it. So imagine, imagine the moral animal and then adapt the evolutionary psychology to why meditation works and why Eastern philosophy has some truths to it. Um, highly recommended to anyone who's listening, if you, if you fancy getting into this. Uh, the audible version also is really, is quite easy listening. I probably wouldn't have wanted to audible the moral animal. I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much. I liked rereading those mic drop moments, but

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  Uh, for why Buddhism is true, that's good. Have you had a look at much to do with self deception?

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  Uh, not, not really. Where, where are you going? Got something on your mind?

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man, that mustache. Um, no, I, I've just been blown away with how convincing liars we are even to ourselves.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:10Chris Williamson?

  Like, I, I mean this in the most pernicious, like, source code level of a way. And this is one, this is one that really, really shocked me. Um, so couples that have been together for a significant period of time, living together, let's say maybe sort of six, seven, eight years, who still haven't had kids, will tend to break up. And there's some moderately robust stats that show this. That's presuming that they want to have kids. Now, when you think, why does this happen? You know, everyone that's listening will have

• 1:01:54Chris Williamson?

  had some friends, perhaps you were one of them, um, that was in a relationship for a real long time, you know, got together at university, now we're sort of 29 and we've just grown apart. I don't really feel the same about them anymore. Our interests don't really align and this, that and the other. And you think, not only is that perhaps what you told the other person, but it's genuinely what you felt, or you, maybe you felt some version, some analog of that. So you were convinced, you yourself were convinced.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  You could pass a lie detector.

• 1:02:23Chris Williamson?

  That was the reason that you did it. That's what you told them. That's what you told you. That's what your brain told you. However, there is some pretty good evidence which shows that if you've been together for a very, very long time, let's look back to our ancestral environment, if you and another person have been together for quite a while and there's still not been any kids, there's something wrong with one of you. That means it's beneficial for both of you to go and be with someone else. That problem might be you, but that problem might be them. And by leaving and going to see if the other person also has this problem, or perhaps if you've taken it along with them. This is again presuming that most people were trying to have children. The difference now is that people elect not to have children.

• 1:03:07Chris Williamson?

  But the genes don't know and don't care about that. The genes don't care about the fact that you're on the pill and have been, and you just want to wait until you're 31 and then you're going to have, you're going to start to become a baby-making mum. Like that's, they don't care about that. So it would make sense for your genes to say,

• 1:03:28Chris Williamson?

  something's up here. That person and you aren't a compatible match because as of yet, there's been no children. But it wouldn't say to you that that's not the best, most effective way. What would happen is that you would become more easily irritated about the things that they did. The fact that they chew with their mouth open perhaps isn't cute like they used to anymore. The fact that they make little snoring noises in the night isn't as endearing. Maybe they're just not as attracted anymore. All of these different sort of the parameters and the dials and the knobs that your genes can twist to change things. And then it tells you, oh, well, you know, we're just kind of growing apart and we're doing this, that and the other. And then that's how it deploys.

• 1:04:11Chris Williamson?

  So not only are you convinced of that, but your genes have lied, made you lie to yourself about what's going on. And like upon reading that and then

• 1:04:20Chris Williamson?

  100 other examples of how you don't really know your own motivations at its deepest, deepest level. You realise cargo in the ship is exactly that. The child that's just got the toy wheel and thinks that they know what's going on. And you can go layers and layers and layers deep, right? There's a, there's a level of layers that you could go back to consciously, which you need to strip away. You discussed about stripping away ego and becoming fully aware of why you feel the way that you do and controlling that. But then there's like another glass ceiling to kind of try and get through. And up there, that's where the real, that's where the real fat controller is. And he's up there with your genetics, twisting the knobs and moving the dials. Blows my mind, man.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And it's why you, it's so easy to see someone else's motives. And then they tell you their motives and it's completely different than what you observed as an outsider, but you know for a fact that they could pass a lie detector. It's like, I know you believe this lie because it's beneficial for you to believe this lie. And it's, and to you, it's not a lie, it's the truth. It goes back to this idea too, that like, we're all, that we're all just, again, cargo. But imagine being cargo, that then, when we arrive at our destination, we have to justify how we got there, why we got there. So, so you get there and you're like, so you ended up in, you know, in Brazil. And you're like, yeah, that's where I wanted to go the entire time. I was always going to Brazil. I love Brazil.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  Rio is beautiful this time of year and I love beaches. And you're like, and, but, and, and again, it's, it's, you have to believe it. Uh, so yeah, it's, and again, it goes back to that genes thing. We got our genes doing things that we are then have to explain away.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Again, it's why it goes back to this ego thing and it's so unbelievably hard. It's like, I barely understand it, that like, it's a thing, let alone can like, do anything about it. But, uh, you know, and, and it's so hard to see in yourself. It's next to impossible. Uh, but it, it's just, like, again, we're evolutionarily designed to, to deceive ourselves. You know, it's a, I forget, it's a saying, something like this, like, the, uh, the way to tell a lie is to believe it. And so, and if you know it's a lie, you're not going to believe it. But if you honestly don't know it's a lie, then you're going to be just fine saying that, no, we grew apart. That's why we got divorced.

• 1:06:42Chris Williamson?

  That's what's going on. Well, I mean, one of the things that came up, I think it's Moral Animal or Why Buddhism is True. Uh, this just sounds like a Robert Wright somewhere. He's going to be sat at home with his fucking ears burning, because me and you were just like mouthing off about him for this entire podcast. Um, yeah. Uh, it was in one of those where he spoke about the fact that our ability to detect the lies as humans is really, and deceit, deception is super high, super, super high, because the risk previously.

• 1:07:12Chris Williamson?

  Would always have been pretty vast. It's one of the reasons why we're the only primates who have white around the outside of our eyes so that we can see where each other's looking. If you had dark eyes, it would be more difficult to see where you're looking, but you've got white around the eyes, which means you can see eye contact tends to be an indicator of truthfulness. And he was saying in that, that everybody else's ability to pick up on our deception means that we need to become incredibly good liars. And as he said, the best way to tell a convincing lie is to believe it yourself and to not even know that it's a lie.

• 1:07:50Chris Williamson?

  Like the fact that that is the, as far as one of the theories in why Buddhism is true is concerned, is the reason that we have consciousness. So the reason that we have consciousness and central governor, the ability to have that like executive function is to be the narrative that plays the interim between what our genes want and what our actions are. Like, holy fuck, man. Like, that's the sort of thing that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Like, the fact that I'm able to step into my own programming, or that I think that I can step into my own programming, is the kid at the wheel again.

• 1:08:31Chris Williamson?

  Maybe the kid at the wheel analogy is that that daughter can move the ship by like 3% in either direction. She has a minor amount of control, or maybe, no, less than that. She can change the temperature of the climate control and the station that the radio's on. She can make some superficial changes which do manifest and make her feel like she's in control. But yet, the, the big shit that's going on, that's, that's daddy. Daddy's, daddy's, daddy's sat up top and mum's got the map out. Like, that's what's happening. And then the daughter's downstairs and she's, she's put the air conditioning on and the radio's too loud.

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  She gets to pick whatever station she wants to listen to. That's, that's, that's what we are. We're, we're on a road trip and we have no say in how fast we go, where we go, when we get there. But we can listen to 90s grunge if we want to. That's what we get.

• 1:09:26Chris Williamson?

  Especially as well as you're on this kind of wisdom seeking journey, which I have to say, I really love, like the last sort of five years, this pivot, say what you want about him, but people like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Brett Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, the fact that you have smart minds teaching you how to step into your own programming, or at least alerting you to the fact that it's possible to do that, is something that I don't think we've had, at least not en masse, ever before. You know, you can read Seneca or Marcus Aurelius's meditations, but you need, you basically need to read those with a companion book, which is the person that tells you how it

• 1:10:08Chris Williamson?

  works, right? And that's what some of the best content creators and podcasters and video and writers from the last few years have done. They've synthesized stuff that's quite abstract, quite difficult to work out what's going on, and giving it to people. And this kind of wisdom sphere, whatever you want to call it, I love. I think it's amazing. People like Naval, who are obviously like the synthesis, like they're the pharmaceutical weapons grade plutonium version of like this wisdom sphere. The fact that you have that at your fingertips is amazing. And what is scary to realize is that that's kind of pushing the limit of trying to break social norms as best you can, to be in design of

• 1:10:52Chris Williamson?

  your own life, to be in control of the direction that you take. And yet, with all of this liberation, all of this information, the best minds on the planet giving you some of the best advice they can, sometimes distilled down into a 360 character tweet, like you're still just cargo in the ship or the door downstairs, put the air conditioning, fuck's sake.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  At least the best part about it is like being able to see it, you know, when like, when you turn on the media and you see what they're doing to you and you pay attention to a political debate, and you see how they're just going after emotional responses and like, at least you can kind of choose not to participate in some of the things that are unhealthy for you. Again, you're, you know, maybe it's like you get a little, maybe you start with controlling the the volume and then they give you the air conditioner and then you can roll down the window. You know, it's like the more you do, you get at least a little more safe. And that's why I think knowing these things is so important. It's like it just, even if it's 1% better, it just has such a huge impact over the course of your life.

• 1:11:55Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the lessons that you wish that you'd known sort of five, 10, 15 years ago? Anything that comes to mind like that?

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  I wish I would have gone a lot deeper on this topic in general a long time ago. So I started probably when I was in college to like be interested in this and I've always kinda, and it started with I had an amazing professor opened my eyes. It was a behavioral consumer, I think, consumer behavior class or something like that. But he didn't teach any, he didn't teach anything about marketing. It was literally about like, here's how we're programmed, here's how we're hardwired. And you have to be able to sell yourself before you can even sell a product. So learn how we operate. And so ever since then, it was, it's been bouncing around in my head. And actually, I still have, I might even have the textbook right here. I just moved and I kept it out. But it's something I like, I'd kind of revisit every few years.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  But I wasn't nearly as diligent about it and I didn't really go as deep as I could have. So I wish I would have gone real deep into that and I wish I would have found like-minded people early on to kind of have those conversations to, to sit and, you know, think about that stuff as opposed to, you know, whatever. Like you end up being friends with the people you're around. And I've, I've actually got a friend in my house right now who might be listening and I don't mean you, friend. Like, we're good. But, you know, like you're, you're a product of your circumstances. Like, think about some of your best friends often are the people that were in the same hallway, the same floor of you as your dorm when you went to college. Like, so much of your life is by chance. I, I met my significant other on Tinder.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  And had I not swiped right and she not swiped right, it would have been complete, you know, which by the way is just chance, like, and obviously we were able to filter through and realize that we both liked what we brought to the table and it all worked out. But to not leave some of that stuff up by chance, you know, to, to search out like-minded people and to search out people who want to have these conversations and to think about these things. I would, I would have pursued that a lot earlier and a lot more. And especially in a college atmosphere, like ideally, there's a lot of those people. I, I think it might be less and less true now. I might be.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  You know, a little nostalgic for a time that that no longer exists.

• 1:14:09Chris Williamson?

  Never really existed perhaps as well, yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. We might be looking back at the sixties and we're like, yeah, there were revolutions. And yeah, maybe they were smoking a bunch of pot, but they were having these philosophical conversations. And maybe when we go back there, it's really just, nah, they were just partying the whole time and dancing the music. And it's, and it's no different. Um, so I wish I would have, and I, you know, I feel a bit like I'm making up for lost time. It's, I've been able to, I mean, honestly, doing this podcast is an extension of that. Uh, reaching out to people on Twitter is, has been such a godsend. So if anyone wants to do this, anyone's listening to this going, God, I feel like I'm behind. That's why I love Twitter so much. There's so many people talking about this. There's so many people thinking about it. And that you can connect to any of them at any time is just so powerful.

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  So I, I'm such a fan of Twitter for that reason. And, and, uh, and it facilitates, like, I see the value in longer conversations. Like this, like we could never do this via Twitter, even if we're in the DMs, it just doesn't happen. But Twitter facilitates, Twitter can be the gateway to stuff like this. And so I just think it's so powerful.

• 1:15:12Chris Williamson?

  You're right, man. As well, it's a good point to bring up there to say that if you're not, if you haven't decided to delve deep into reading evolutionary psychology, or the basis for human emotion, or you haven't started meditating, like it really, it doesn't matter. Like I, I was, I'm pretty much certain that under the age of 25, none of this stuff would be able to have much of an impact in any case, because the context in which you are consuming it is so chaotic and changeable. Like there's still, the vast majority of shit that you do is new. You know, you go out, you have a conversation with someone. It's the first time you've ever had that conversation before.

• 1:15:53Chris Williamson?

  I think the ability to look at stuff with finer grain is when the ship is so big that it starts to steady itself on the waves a little bit. It's like if you're constantly flipping from one, from starboard to port all the time, every single, oh my God, now I've got a girlfriend. I've never had a girlfriend before. I don't really know what to do. Oh my God, now we've split up. I don't really know. Oh, I'm on holiday. I'm here. I'm on a plane. I'm doing this. It's like, dude, just live, live in that moment. And this was a realization that I came across. From a Luke Coombs song while I was in America last year doing a road trip. And it's the first line of this song and he says, at seventeen, you don't think that much about life. You just live it. And I was like, holy fucking shit.

• 1:16:36Chris Williamson?

  That's it, man. Like that, that is the reason that time seemed to expand and dilate when you are younger and seems to get quicker when you are older. Like 24 hours today is the same amount of time as you had 24 hours 10 years ago and 20 years ago and the day that you were born. But the lack of a learner's mind, the lack of new and novel experiences, the lack of a presence is what's causing time to speed up. What people say when they say, I need more time or time's going so quickly is I need more memories. Because memories are like individual slots. They're like little cuts in the cake that identify how many pieces you've gone through in that time.

• 1:17:16Chris Williamson?

  And if you're spending every day doing the nine to five, driving to work, the same route to work, the same conversation, the same Netflix and Doritos on an evening time. Like, why would your brain make memories from that? Like, if you want, if you want to make memories, make something be worthwhile of being memorable. And um, it's again, it's that the sort of beauty of getting older is that you can increase the resolution of how you look at things to make stuff new.

• 1:17:51Chris Williamson?

  You have this wider context, you have all of these different examples, and then you can start to look at stuff with a little bit more dexterity, right? A little bit finer grain. And you go, fuck. Like, that's cool. I didn't think, I didn't think that that would have been cool before. And you can compare it to you 10 years ago and go, 10 years ago, me would have been embarrassed about this, but me now thinks this is awesome.

• 1:18:12Speaker 00

  To your point too, about making memories and stuff, fully and like totally, you get stuck in a routine and you just realize like, did I just waste a year after work? And, you know, woke up, drove, went to work, came back home, turned on Netflix, had dinner, went to bed. So what we're doing is, I'm in a place in Atlanta right now. We've rented it out. We're just going to drive across the country for five, six months and just stay in different cities. Few weeks at a time where you're so taken out of your routine that you can't help but make memories, you can't help but build memories, to do a lot of stuff, to do as much stuff possible as outdoors, to experience like just all these new things. And again, like

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  this is kind of a blessing of the current situation, is to take something that is a negative and to figure out like, how can I, I shouldn't even say it, well, it's definitely a negative, but take a, take a new kind of scenario that you're in, and you kind of think, how do I turn this to my advantage? And so the fact that we don't have to be in an office, the fact that we don't have to be in any particular city, we're using that to our advantage to go explore cities and to go explore nature. Like, we're gonna drive up through Yellowstone, we're gonna drive up through like some of the most beautiful parts of the United States and park there and work for a month or whatever it might be. And that's something like, I'm gonna remember that. I'm very confident I will remember that. So, so yeah, totally on board. And it is, it's, it was hard that we got

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  to unprogram our monkey brains of like being able to even enjoy it. And it's so easy to get back on like these comfortable habits. And one thing that you were talking about, and I thought of when you were talking about kind of this Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, part of me feels like the reason that some of this stuff matters and exists and even resonates now, it's almost like we're, we're trying to find solutions to the fact that we live in a world now that we're no longer designed for. So obviously, like, we're not designed to live in society. We're not like all this, we're not designed for agriculture. We're not designed to live in houses like this. We were designed to kind of be in small groups and to travel. And honestly, we're not designed to work eight hours a day, 10 hours a day, whatever it is. We were designed to work like, eh, two or three, hunt something,

• 1:20:20Speaker 00

  gather something, maybe make a fire, maybe make some shelter, and then relax for most of the day. Like, that's when we're most productive. But then all of a sudden, we invented agriculture, you gotta tend to the crops all day, and then there's industry. And so now we're stuck. And there's no way evolution can keep up with that. So we've hacked our own brains. I think that to me is honestly what, what these ways of living are, is how do we take the society that we made, that is not ideal for our, for our systems, and make it so that we're able to live in this environment, that there's no way we're designed for this?

• 1:20:54Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting you brought that up. Shane Parrish, Farnham Street, has a quote where he says, "Tradition is a set of problems, a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems."

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:07Chris Williamson?

  It's like these questions that have been asked. I had Alex O'Connor, Cosmic Skeptic, on the other day, talking and teaching us about ethics, what ethics is. And he was giving us some of the classical ethical thought experiments that you can do. Like, would you push a fat man onto the bridge to stop the train from hitting five people? What if it was three people? What if it was one person, but it was a baby and blah, blah, blah. And he was saying, so much of this stuff is just brought from classic texts and then repurposed. These are the fundamental questions that people have been asking since the beginning of time, since the beginning of working out what morality is, what ethics are, how to lead a good life, what it means to be a good person and to live well. That hasn't changed.

• 1:21:52Speaker 00

  Do you think those questions, it hasn't, do you think those questions started? So let's say, just to make things easy, let's say that we've been who we are, you know, DNA wise for 100,000 years. Okay. And let's say that society has existed for 10,000 years. Okay, like agriculture roughly starts around then. Have we had those questions for 10,000 years or 100,000 years?

• 1:22:15Chris Williamson?

  That's a really good question.

• 1:22:20Chris Williamson?

  There's an interesting thing to do with the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And I think that one of the challenges we have, the existential crisis that people sometimes come up against, and the melancholy, and the feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness, and the increase in suicide that we see in the modern world. I think a big part of that may be due to the fact that the bottom levels of that pyramid are very well looked after. That if all that you want from life is to not freeze to death and to find some berries today, it's very easy to get a positive feedback mechanism from that. So if it's

• 1:23:03Chris Williamson?

  100,000 years ago, and you're living somewhere that's real cold in the winter, surviving winter is like actualizing. That is you. You've reached the peak of what you wanted to do. Whereas now, when you can Uber Michelin star food from around the corner to your house while you watch Netflix on your Amazon, all of your clothes that you need and you do whatever else, like Airbnb yourself a holiday, like the convenience is so high, those answers, those questions have been answered, which means that the things further up, which are more existential, more melancholy, more abstract, they require high levels of complexity and sophistication to even think about what's happening. You have to do self-development

• 1:23:46Chris Williamson?

  work to get to the top of that pyramid for the most part, unless you end up having to be lining up with a life which is perfectly aligned with your values, which tends to be quite rare, it seems. You're going to have these challenges, like you're going to come up against stuff that makes you think like, why am I here? What am I doing with my life? But if avoiding a saber-toothed tiger, or like I managed to make a new spear today, like if that's actualization for you, then it's a little bit, it's bizarrely almost easier to feel, to reach the top of it. So I think that some of the more existential questions that we've come up against about what it means to lead a good life, I think that they're

• 1:24:28Chris Williamson?

  luxury questions. They're questions that can only be asked in a time of abundance rather than scarcity. And I'm aware that there's still been serious times of scarcity throughout the last 10,000 years, but significantly less as soon as you've got agriculture and you can trade and you've got security and you're living in bigger groups. Those questions come to the forefront because previously they would have never had to have been asked.

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  Right. And maybe this is all just a manifestation of neurosis because we live in societies anyways. You know, it's like, we've got, you know, when you put everyone in a city, you've got new problems, you've got more conflict, you've got strangers that you don't recognize. And so we've got all these modern anxieties or whatever it might be, that are a product of this, like.

• 1:25:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's more complicated, but maybe maybe it should be simpler. Like why we're inventing, we're inventing problems that don't have to necessarily exist. Like, why wouldn't I love to make a spear and nap for most of the day under, under sun, under a tree? Uh, and you're obviously you are still finding mates, you are still finding love, like love is a hundred year, a hundred thousand years old. Uh, or at least the sensation of it. And, uh, like, uh, sounds pretty good. Uh, the problem is you need the, you need everyone to, to jump into.

• 1:25:46Chris Williamson?

  Everybody get on board, right?

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, everyone, literally everyone has to be on board. We're too, we're, we're way past it that we can't go back to it. So that's why you got to figure out like the self-actualization techniques to, to make do with the society that we're in, you know, the hand that you're dealt.

• 1:26:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about Diogenes, right? One of the first cynics, he was living in a pot, which he was like literally living in the thing that people used to urinate in. And yet he was, this is two and a half thousand years ago. And he was talking about casting off possessions that living simply is the key to a happy life. There's this story where Alexander the Great, uh, went to go meet him and said, um, uh, Diogenes, if I should not be Alexander, I would wish to be you. And he basically replied and said, yes, I'm not surprised. Uh, he said, is there anything I, I command half of the world? Is there anything that you would want? And he replied and said, yes, for you to get out of my son.

• 1:26:43Chris Williamson?

  And you, you think like, when you have someone back then, there's the level of abundance present in ancient Athens was nowhere near as much as we have now. And yet you still have philosophers and people who are talking about casting off possessions, casting off desires, stripping themselves back the ascetic lifestyle. And look at what we're seeing now in the modern era, the minimalist movement. We're seeing people who are living, living lives with 40 possessions and, uh, in apartments that are a couple of hundred square feet. And, you know, the, this van life thing, this van life craze, which is like, I guess, you're like the glamping version of van life at the moment where you've got.

• 1:27:28Speaker 00

  I am. We're, we're, we're staying in the Airbnbs. I'm getting a fresh shower. Um, I, I talk a big game, but I'm not living the van.

• 1:27:38Speaker 00

  I'm going to cuss him to certain things.

• 1:27:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man, like pooping in a toilet.

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  But, but, yeah, that's a, that's a big one for me. Maybe, maybe one of them will have a bidet and I'll get lucky.

• 1:27:49Chris Williamson?

  That would be really good. Um, but yeah, dude, I, I, I think.

• 1:27:54Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, man. It would be interesting if everyone was able to cast it off. And I, I think everyone asks themselves this question. A little bit, you know, you look at a dog, anyone who's ever spent a lot of time looking at a dog and getting pure joy from one. Will have looked at it and thought, fuck, it would be so easy to be that dog. Like to be my dog, I would not have to have a concern. I would be loved, I would be fed, I would be watered. The question of whether or not that's an option. I don't know. I genuinely don't, you would have to be incredibly ballsy to say, look, this is my commitment. I know the things that make me happy in life. But I definitely think that.

• 1:28:38Chris Williamson?

  If we look to the people that are older than us. As. Examples of an evolution of lifestyle and or ideas. That show where, where our projection, our, um, trajectory is likely to go. Most people end up leading. A simpler life as they get older than when they were younger.

• 1:29:03Chris Williamson?

  It's like you have a state of disorder going to order. Right? You have like this kind of bizarre entropy thing going on. But within people's lifestyle design, you know, you look at the, the Dan Bilzarians of this world or anyone that's 18. You're excited by everything. And rightly so. But look at your granddad that's. 70 years old, 75 years old. He's just happy. Going to watch the football on a Saturday afternoon, chilling out, reading his book, doing this, that and the other. Like, what does that tell us? That tells us probably that. Given all of the choices of things within the world, there are a few simple pleasures that people will tend toward.

• 1:29:46Chris Williamson?

  And I wonder, I wonder how much we can shortcut our own path to get there by using people that are older than us and have allowed this evolution, this A B split testing of lifestyles to say, well, maybe, maybe I tried that a little bit sooner. Maybe I'll try and get there a little bit earlier.

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  It's, it's probably easier said than done. It's almost, it reminds me of something, I think Jim, Jim Carrey has this quote, something along the lines of like, I wish everyone could be a millionaire because they would, so that they would realize it's not the answer to anything. And it con is the same thing. It's like, you don't think sitting on the porch and having a cup of coffee in the morning is going to be like the best there ever is. You're like, no, I've got to go travel and I've got to do this experience, that experience. I'm going to go to Vegas and do whatever. And then once you do it, it's like you have to have the, the comparison. You have to know that like, was it actually really that great? You know what's nice is just being peaceful here, just sitting and enjoying this moment with someone that I enjoy talking to, or even solitude in yourself. And so I

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  don't know that there is a shortcut to it. The 70 year old does it because the 70 year old did the other shit and was like, this is too much of a hassle. This isn't enjoyable. This is what I love. I, you know, I like this football team. I like watching it or I like drinking sweet tea on the porch at sunset. And you realize like, that's what happiness is about. And that's why you realize it's not about getting a bunch of stuff. Like at the end of the day, like anything behind me could disappear tomorrow. And if you're attached to that stuff, it's, it's bringing you the wrong kind of happiness. It's not happiness anyways.

• 1:31:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, look at what Elon Musk said on Joe Rogan. Joe was like, so Elon, why are you selling all of your possessions? And he says, because it's an attack vector. And he's right. An attachment to anything is a weakness because that thing can be taken away from you. Now there's certain things that you don't want to not be attached to, like your family and the people that you love and your friends and the passions that you have in life and the interests and so on and so forth. There is. Probably a million caveats that I'm going to get criticised about for that, like evolution of ideas, just do what old people do. Basically, let's all just be old age pensioners in mid twenties. Yeah. But one of them, one of them is a Naval quote. It is easier to fulfil your material desires than to renounce them. It's like significantly easier to go and buy a 10 year old beat up truck

• 1:32:04Chris Williamson?

  after your last car was a Ferrari than to go through life wondering what it's like to drive a Ferrari. And I, part of it is going to be a selection bias for the fact that those people might have completed a bunch of the stuff that they've done. So I had Aubrey Marcus on the show about a year ago and he said, I was like, so what is a good life to you? And he said, like to live, you know, to do the things, like to take the drugs, not all of the drugs, to have the experiences, to go to the places, to make love, to laugh, to see these things, to build the business, to fail at building the business, you know, like all of the different things, because that is what life is.

• 1:32:41Chris Williamson?

  I don't know how much of that you can shortcut. And I don't know how much of that you could just cast off and say, well, I don't choose to do this. You know, anyone that's ever worked on a project that they really don't like, you know, like, oh, there's just been a bit of a grind and you're there again. And you're like, why am I doing this to myself? Like, I could just go outside and just have a cup of sweet tea and look at the night sky and I'd be perfectly happy. Have I ratcheted up the level of complexity that my life is required to fulfil to a point which is so unbelievably chaotic that basically I've detached myself away from the vast majority of stuff that would have truly made me happy.

• 1:33:23Chris Williamson?

  And in a society of abundance like we've got now, hyper normal stimuli from our mobile devices and the artificial light that we've got, which is playing around with our circadian rhythm and diets that are misaligned to us and living for longer, like living for so much longer than we've ever lived before. Like.

• 1:33:44Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, man. I don't know.

• 1:33:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's for the most part. Well, this is what I love, too, is like so many of these problems that we have, there's old solutions to them. That's why, again, we'll just go back to evolutionary psychology, because apparently this is like a fanboy conversation of psych. But you look at like, you're not feeling well. You're feeling overweight. You're feeling lethargic. Like, look at your diet. What did people use to eat? Like, they, these are all modern ailments. Again, like, you're feeling sleepy. You're feeling like you don't have enough energy. What are you doing physically? Like, are you mimicking what they were doing? What are you doing for your sleep? Like, so many of these problems can be solved with this ancient wisdom, or this just really what comes natural to us. And we've got to, like, sometimes you've

• 1:34:28Speaker 00

  got to shake yourself out of it. And again, I'm just as guilty of it as the next person. There's plenty of times where I get lost on Twitter at, you know, 10:00 PM at night, trying to go to bed. I justify it because I say it's for my job, but, but still, it's, you know, there's all these, like, the secret to me, or like, if anyone asks, like, what's the secret to life? It's think back about, you know, 15,000 years ago, how people would have lived, and just try to mimic that as much as possible. And it's, again, it's easier said than done. And we live in a different society where you need money, you need resources, you need these things to survive and get by. But just kind of know where you're, like, what your end objective is into getting this stuff, you know? And maybe, and to your point

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  about the Ferrari, some people just need to get the Ferrari, just to know that, like, all right, I did it, and I'm, you know, like, I don't have that yearning anymore, and I scratched that itch, and I don't need another Ferrari, and, you know, it brought me a moment of happiness, or even a year of happiness. But after a while, it's just your car, you know? It's just, it's just something that sits in your garage.

• 1:35:35Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. I think that's a good point to end there. Dude, I really enjoyed this. So, people want to check out your stuff, where should they go?

• 1:35:42Speaker 00

  Super easy. Go on Instagram, go on Twitter, M K O B A C H. That's M Kobach. Yeah, follow along. I've got a new job that I'm super excited about.

• 1:35:54Chris Williamson?

  Can you say what it is yet?

• 1:35:55Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly. No, no, it's a, it's a tech startup. It's called Fast. And the reason I joined is one, I wanted to get into the startup life. It's kind of the same idea. It's like you wanna, you know, you wanna try new things. Like I have this itch. It's the same kind of Ferrari thing. Like I wanted to join a startup and help build something. And if it succeeds, I'm unbelievably happy. And if it fails, I still get to say, hey, I tried to do this new thing.

• 1:36:19Chris Williamson?

  What are they, what's Fast?

• 1:36:22Speaker 00

  So their goal is to make everything that you hate filling out on the internet, only one click. So anytime you want to buy something, you don't have to fill out your credit card, your email, your name, all that stuff. It already knows who you are. You just click buy it. Anytime that you need to identify, like the bigger picture is anytime you need to identify who you are on the internet, as long as that website has their API in it, you will be able to just click that one button, you're done. So you can think like, you know, I'm not going to give away any secrets or anything. But literally, anything you ever do online that you need to prove who you are, and I'm not talking social security number, but like literally ordering something online, you need to prove who you are, that they would then be the one stop shop for all that information.

• 1:37:06Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. It's like a passport, like a digital passport online, where it automatically just shows it and the website lets you through and does the thing. Fuck, man, I need Amazon, Amazon one click ordering.

• 1:37:20Speaker 00

  Think about how much time. Yeah. Think about how much time you waste filling out forms online. Think about how many times you would have bought something online and you're like, eh, I don't feel like filling this out. Never mind.

• 1:37:30Chris Williamson?

  I can't check out as a guest. I'm not doing that on that website because it's too much of an arse on for me to enter my emails and sign up to their newsletter.

• 1:37:37Speaker 00

  Yep. And imagine, and you can see like, yeah, you can imagine it for newsletters. You can imagine it literally. And it's not just payments, but it's anything you need to log into. You would, you would do so many different things if all you had to do was click and you're in.

• 1:37:49Chris Williamson?

  I like it, man. That's cool. And I'm gonna guess you'd be able to integrate that with password managers and all sorts of other stuff so that it would be like, that's the dream, man. A seamless world where I don't have to fill forms in. Fucking hell. Can you hurry up and get hurry up and get off holiday and get this startup moving, please, so that I don't have to fill forms in?

• 1:38:07Speaker 00

  Oh, don't. I've already started. We're doing it, man. It's the launch. But it's just the reason you join, too. It's such this pain point that everyone gets. And if you think about it, the internet's like buying stuff online is 30 years old. And it hasn't changed. It hasn't updated once. It is such a hassle of a process, and it should be so much better. And so we're hoping to make it better. So.

• 1:38:29Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man.

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  Fingers crossed.

• 1:38:31Chris Williamson?

  I love it.

• 1:38:32Speaker 00

  You ever see the button? You just you just gotta promise me you click it. If you ever see the button, it's just fast, it's black, you'll recognize it.

• 1:38:38Chris Williamson?

  You'll get my you'll get my click throughs, man.

• 1:38:40Speaker 00

  Never have to sign up again.

• 1:38:41Chris Williamson?

  Don't you worry, you will get my click throughs. Dude, thank you so much for your time, Matthew. Everyone that is listening, if you enjoyed this episode, go and give Matthew a follow online. Let me know what you thought as well. If any of the comments about Buddhism or your child driving the spaceship, if any of that stuff resonated, you know where to get me at Chris Will X, wherever you follow me, like, share and subscribe and all that good stuff. For now, Matthew, thanks, man.

• 1:39:03Speaker 00

  Thank you. Loved it, man. Had a great time.