How To Survive University

Jonny & Yusef join me again as we relive our best & worst moments at university. Discover how you can complete a degree without going bankrupt, getting a police record or having a mental breakdown. If you've never been to university, then you might enjoy hearing that it's not quite the doss around of Netflix and chronic masturbation that you hear in the news. And if you HAVE been to university, then reminisce fondly or cringe your way through your memories. Expect to learn why you should go to Hadrian's Wall and wear a condom while you're there, what you can do to avoid becoming a basic bitch and how Evernote will safe your life. Further Reading: Evernote: https://www.evernote.com/referral/Registration.action?sig=a51c13796a1906976e4d676cbcc756e7836bf4767d9d76e822ed017352c3df86&uid=62953055 (with referral) Anton Kreil on School Teachers: https://youtu.be/hzFl0uDwAQY - Video editing & production by Dean Hindmarch https://www.deanhindmarch.com/ https://www.instagram.com/deanhindmarch - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  Welcome back. Jonny and Youssef from Pro Pen Fitness are here again. Today, we are going to discuss how to survive university. How many degrees have we got between us? One and a... You're a chartered accountant.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  An ECA.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  One and a... You're now a Bachelor of Medicine.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, true. Well, I'm a... Is it a health science diploma that you get after halfway through and then... So 1.5?

• 0:31Jonny?

  You're the only one that knows.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 0:34Chris Williamson?

  You've got, you've got kind of two. I've got two. So there's five degrees between us and like cumulative amount of like what?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  How have you got two? When did you sneak a second one in?

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I see. I'm lying, okay.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Masters.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  Masters. So we've been at uni for like, what, 12 years between us? Something like that? Yeah. Bare time, bro.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Made every possible mistake that you can make at university. Been waistman, been super productive and everything in between.

• 0:58Jonny?

  I resat a year at uni.

• 1:01Chris Williamson?

  Did you?

• 1:01Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:02Chris Williamson?

  What for? I would have never guessed that.

• 1:04Jonny?

  So, well, it's part of what I want to talk about.

• 1:07Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 1:07Jonny?

  Went just basically, came out of first year hard with momentum, went into second year with same momentum.

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  Stiffy.

• 1:16Jonny?

  And then about a third of the way through, you thought, "Fuck", and then failed to make it.

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  Shit. Well, so we've got a lot to get through today. For those of you who don't know what I do, I'm a club promoter. And for the last 12 years or so, in one form or another, I have had to look after freshers. They are usually the moneymakers for us in terms of guest listers. So what that means is that every year I get one year older, but the age of the people who work for me and the situations that they encounter pretty much stay the same. It's just faces and names that change.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  That diverges.

• 1:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Does that make you feel more old?

• 1:54Jonny?

  Those people also do get older. It's what Chris is saying, is that he's working with different people.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're not frozen in time.

• 2:00Jonny?

  The perception that they are getting older. Chris is okay.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  I'm aware of that. What I'm saying is that although they are not frozen in time, I see a snapshot of them while I continue to age.

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  And then there's, there's a picture of them all that's in the attic of a dusty house. And if they look at the picture of themselves, then they catch up all of the years that have gone by.

• 2:19Jonny?

  And then, yeah.

• 2:20Chris Williamson?

  And that's it. So, yeah, I thought one of the things that we all know pretty well is how to fuck up at university and what common.

• 2:28Jonny?

  And to prosper.

• 2:29Chris Williamson?

  And well, the thing is, while I was at university, I really did, I prospered outside of uni.

• 2:33Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  But I was categorically shite at university. The fact that I got a two one and then a merit in a masters is really, it's a, it's a miracle.

• 2:43Jonny?

  So I think that means actually that you've mastered university, honestly.

• 2:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Because it was kind of seamless.

• 2:49Jonny?

  Well, like, you're there for experience and your degree is part of that experience. But if you just get a degree, what a waste of time.

• 2:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Jonny?

  An expensive waste of time.

• 2:58Chris Williamson?

  Good point. So what do we want to start with? Surviving freshers week is probably a pretty good place to start. Can you remember your first freshers week?

• 3:06Jonny?

  Uh, yeah.

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  What happened? Did you do anything funny?

• 3:08Jonny?

  Just, I just remember total, total overwhelm.

• 3:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Jonny?

  Had a great experience.

• 3:13Chris Williamson?

  Overwhelm. Find overwhelm. Where's the overwhelm? I cannot see it.

• 3:18Jonny?

  Uh, so I think, don't, don't, uh, literally just, hands behind your back, kamikaze, headband on and just go.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Then don't do that.

• 3:27Jonny?

  No.

• 3:28Chris Williamson?

  That is what to do. Yeah, you need to go.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  With the alcohol.

• 3:30Jonny?

  Just with everything.

• 3:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 3:32Jonny?

  I think there are, there are lots of things to consume, consume all of them in as much as you possibly can.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Just a week, isn't it? So.

• 3:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Jonny?

  Just.

• 3:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Dive right in.

• 3:40Chris Williamson?

  How were, how were your freshers week? Cause when you did your first freshers week, you would have still been Muslimic.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that, that's an interesting point, actually. So I, for anyone who doesn't know, I've done two degrees. One in maths and business, two thousand eight to two thousand twelve. Another one in, um, two thousand thirteen, fourteen, up until now. During which time I had a, a crisis of faith. Um, and I mean, I've, I've never.

• 4:07Jonny?

  He ate a sausage, basically.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  He ate a sausage and it just.

• 4:10Chris Williamson?

  Selfing that or another.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  It's a very slippery sausage and went down the uh.

• 4:14Chris Williamson?

  The wrong tube.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  The slope of carefors. So um first freshers week, pretty sensible. Second freshers week, you're five, six years older and you're like, oh man, I'm too old for this. Like even though twenty three, twenty four is not really like super old, but you realise the differential between having to do that with a bunch of eighteen year olds and you can you can smell the like pulsating insecurity and um this it's a surge of seeking approval because you've taken someone who is in that stage of their life along with a lot of alcohol, new people, new environment, and it just creates this cocktail of um desperation.

• 4:58Chris Williamson?

  It's a very, uh there's an awful, like a Velcro level grasping for some sense of

• 5:08Chris Williamson?

  assurance and and centring.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  So this is why people like hook on to like the people in their corridor or like the first person they meet, they just become instant best mates with. And if you just only hang around with the people in your corridor or or whatever, then you get this misplaced sense of loyalty because you.

• 5:25Chris Williamson?

  Well tribal, right. So I said this on the social social chain podcast. If you don't play a sport and don't have a really tight hobby that is going to immediately give you some sense of first identity and then second community with people at uni. What are you bonding with other people over? The people in your course, apart from the fact that they've also chosen to do your course, have in no way been discriminated to your interests or your mindset. This is. So here's my first tip for surviving university. Surprise, surprise. Work for an events company.

• 5:57Chris Williamson?

  Because.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Oh, here it is.

• 5:59Chris Williamson?

  This entire thing was a huge fucking affiliate scheme. No. Here's the reason, here's my justification for why I think you should work for an events company. First off, it gives you support structure of people that are older than you, that understand the city, they can tell you where's good to go for food, where you should go on a night out. You'll get to know a bunch of people. If you're into partying and if you like to go out and drink. You're immediately going to get a family of two hundred to four hundred other people, all of whom have got similar interests, they're at the same university, you've got a manager who'll look after you the whole time. You get free entry to nightclubs, you get discounted drinks, you get the family that you need at university and it's a fantastic support structure.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  That is quite a good point, because otherwise, like, the the alternative is, like, if you don't expose yourself to a wide range of people straight away, is that you end up like narrowing your slice of people that you experience and withdrawing into just, you know, this this happens every single time, because I've seen so many freshers come through as well, where it's just like, they only hang around with the first four people that they meet, and then that's it. And the first four people may not be, may not be

• 7:05Chris Williamson?

  Good for them.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Anything that overlaps with them, apart from the only thing they have in common is that they both were equally desperate to hang on to someone.

• 7:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  And then they end up living with them for the following five years and.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Um, so.

• 7:16Chris Williamson?

  Widening the net of the people that you can reach is a good idea. So, things that I think going into freshers, well, let's go through it year by year. So going into freshers, I think it it's such a cliche and everybody says it, but like, your grades do not matter. If you get forty percent, that is all that matters. And I even like, everyone is like, oh, well, you know, I know that you only need forty percent, but like, I should. No, for me, at university, there is a quite a long period of time, probably six months to twelve months, where you just need to completely let loose. It's the first time you've been away from home from your parents, you've got absolute liberation

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 7:59Chris Williamson?

  from all of the previous confines that you used to have. And I think if you don't take advantage of it in your first year, the fear is that that then surfaces in second or third year when it does matter. So bin yourself. I would advise as much damage as possible to yourself in the first year.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  I can, I can. You're saying, throw yourself in to the first year.

• 8:18Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Be- because you said that you you went, you you kind of spread out the decades.

• 8:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no, no, I just didn't stop.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  I see.

• 8:27Chris Williamson?

  Very different problem. So I I can really clearly remember, um.

• 8:32Jonny?

  So one of the first times I met Dan, the broadcast Gibson, he just happened to be, we went to the same school, but weren't that friendly at school. He happened to be in the the flat next to me. We're on the same course. And I remember both of us at one point having this conversation that we were like, we'd missed the library tutorial. Because we were, there was something happening alcohol related, we just didn't go to anything. I didn't go to anything for like the first six months at all.

• 8:58Chris Williamson?

  Cause this would have been before like smart card check ins and stuff now.

• 9:02Jonny?

  Yeah, so like there was a whole, the the library was actually quite complicated. And so I didn't get a book out at uni until third year, year third year.

• 9:09Chris Williamson?

  Didn't know how to.

• 9:10Jonny?

  Because I didn't know how to. But I remember being really stressed about it at the time, thinking like, I'm fucking uni.

• 9:14Chris Williamson?

  That's impressive.

• 9:15Jonny?

  I can't believe I'm already fucking uni. Like it's ten days in, but like, nothing happened.

• 9:21Chris Williamson?

  You didn't get the book out until the final year exams.

• 9:24Jonny?

  No.

• 9:24Chris Williamson?

  I didn't get a book out ever.

• 9:25Jonny?

  It was all on the, it was all on the portal.

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  Not even in my masters, never got a book out once.

• 9:29Jonny?

  The only time I did get a book out, I had to intimidate a Chinese lady. He was standing at the photocopy booth. And and then I took the book, went home, went back to Newcastle and stomached a ten pound a day fine. Because I was so worried I was gonna fail the exam.

• 9:43Chris Williamson?

  Ten pounds a day.

• 9:44Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, I think.

• 9:46Jonny?

  So, yeah, don't worry about all that. Like, don't worry about intro lectures and library tutorials and.

• 9:51Chris Williamson?

  There's, there's.

• 9:51Jonny?

  Maybe a bit.

• 9:52Chris Williamson?

  How many days did you have it for?

• 9:54Jonny?

  Uh.

• 9:55Chris Williamson?

  Would it have been cheaper to buy the book?

• 9:57Jonny?

  So you couldn't buy the book?

• 9:58Chris Williamson?

  Uh, that's fine. So I think, go dick and balls, full length and testicles on first year.

• 10:08Jonny?

  Because I think actually the worst thing that can happen after uni is that you regret how you spent your time there. And I don't think you're ever gonna look back, as long as it doesn't impinge on your degree.

• 10:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Jonny?

  You're never gonna look back and think, God, I partied far too much in first year.

• 10:22Chris Williamson?

  For a lot of people, obviously we're coming at this from the side of a group that are either still at university or have relative amounts of freedom to do what they want because we work for ourselves. A lot of people are going to go into a much more bureaucratic organisation and their final bastion of freedom is their time at uni.

• 10:40Jonny?

  Yep.

• 10:41Chris Williamson?

  And I can imagine that if I feel like this. For someone who doesn't have that same level of freedom, once they get into a proper working routine, it must be, it must be even worse. Well, I experienced that. But people living for the weekend, once they get to. Well, that's just what happens. It's a hangover. Yeah. It's oddly a hangover of not drinking enough and partying enough that you need. So first tip is go dick and balls during your first year. Remember that the forty percent grade that you need, that's it. Once you've hit forty one percent, it doesn't matter after that. Yeah. Now, I think. So most, that's probably not the same with you though, is it?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  It's, it's not, but um, I've, I've heard people, well, I've seen people mess up by saying like, oh, I only need to pass forty percent, so I'm just gonna learn forty percent of the course. I'm like, no, then you need to learn a hundred percent of the forty percent.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So that's actually a terrible idea.

• 11:36Chris Williamson?

  And even then, it still might not work.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, very, very risky.

• 11:40Chris Williamson?

  If anyone's taken, what I mean is get a forty percent grade, has learned forty percent of the course, they deserve to fail.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Fine, so your, your first tip comes from a place of get it out of your system. Don't have any lingering sense of like, oh, I didn't quite squeeze the lemon there. And I'm just gonna spend the rest of my life trying to catch up in the weekends for partying.

• 11:59Chris Williamson?

  I think it's not just, not even just that, it's just that, especially when you first arrive at university, for me, what you should be trying to do is get as much of a broad cross section of experiences and exposure to people as you can. Remembering, I know that you go to university at eighteen and you think that you understand how the world works. But I'm telling you, as someone who's thirty years old, you don't even have the first clue. Like, I look at the boys that work for us now, the managers who I'm closest with, and then the girls as well, who are the guest listers and stuff below them, and some of our hostesses, et cetera, et cetera. And they're so much further ahead than I was at their age, like so much more mature. I think that exposure to the internet means that people are able to grow up and be exposed to different people more quickly.

• 12:41Chris Williamson?

  And yet they're still like broadly like children, like they're children who can legally drink, drive and vote.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Exactly what David said, as I was leaving the house, I was like, David, what are you, what's your survival tip for university? And he was like, you're gonna be shit the whole time, but you're gonna think that you're awesome.

• 12:58Chris Williamson?

  There you go. He's right though, he's definitely right. So I think be, be aware of the fact that it's a learning process in all areas of your life. And don't try and take, I think, don't try and take anything too seriously. I certainly thought that.

• 13:13Chris Williamson?

  I wasn't prepared to mess up because I was like, oh, my university, there's all this pressure on me. I'm supposed to be this adult who's living on his own, who's supposed to have his life sorted out. Like, twelve years later, still not got my life sorted out, still mess up all the time. So don't think that that's something that you need to do.

• 13:30Jonny?

  There was a, there was a really clear moment for me about three months in. Really sharing my darkest moments here. So I'm sat in the corner of my room because there was nowhere else to sit because there was just mess all over the floor. And I was eating a cold pot noodle, sat perched in the corner, eating this cold pot noodle. And I just looked at my room and I thought, I've got to do something about this.

• 13:55Jonny?

  And I don't think, like, I sort of slowly did. But I just, I really felt like I, apart from the gym, I just let go of everything else. I was just like, right, I'm just gonna absolutely, I just felt like I was in a playground.

• 14:12Chris Williamson?

  And just go.

• 14:12Jonny?

  And maybe that's not the right way to go about it, but I definitely don't look back at that and think that was stupid.

• 14:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think a good, a good thing to do is potentially try and join a sports team or a society. I wish that I had doubled down more on the opportunity to play sports. Reason for that is, like, when you get to twenty five or thirty, like, going, I'm gonna start rowing. Like, no, you're not. No, you're not going to start. You're not going to start rowing. But at uni, this is a time to try new things. So go like, I remember thinking ultimate frisbee was like weird. And now I think, if you give me the opportunity to try ultimate frisbee for a day.

• 14:46Jonny?

  You're like, absolutely.

• 14:47Chris Williamson?

  Fucking right, so I go and do ultimate frisbee. So I think try as many different societies, sports and societies as you can. I'd like to segue on to you, Yusuf, about trying to get some low hanging fruit for studying tactics. So I think the one thing that I had, like, you can't completely write off your entire first year as it being a waste. But one of the things that you should do is begin to grease the groove of at least understanding how to study effectively.

• 15:19Jonny?

  So, yeah, I've got it. So I've split my notes up into this different section. So before we move on to study, just the final thing on freshers week and this desperation for approval and people latching on to each other is an example that I saw of a guy.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Second time round with my freshest week, second degree. Who was, he was eighteen, he was called, um, I'm not gonna say his name actually.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  But.

• 15:44Jonny?

  He was last insurance number.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  But he was a Muslim guy and he was drinking and I was chatting to him about his Muslim family. I was like, do your family know that you drink? Oh, no, no, it's, that's actually the first time. Like, oh, how come you're drinking? It was like, oh, just, you know, it was fresh as we can. I have to because there's the pressure. I'm like, do you even like it? It was like, no, like, well, don't just like completely compromise on who you are for the sake of approval. Don't just like, do this because you think that's what you're supposed to do. And I was like, look, I, I, I took it out of his hand and I was like, just be you. Don't, don't try and, because this is the slippery slope. This is the time when if you make that one compromise now, that's it, like.

• 16:21Jonny?

  There's numerous ones that are gonna go.

• 16:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a good point. And people are doing that, Muslim or not, in, in, in loads of ways in.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  I was like, if you like it, go ahead.

• 16:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Like, but the fact that you're saying you don't even like doing this, but.

• 16:37Chris Williamson?

  Well, I did loads of stuff. I did loads of stuff that I thought that I, I thought I liked at the time. Like, I was going out all the time and I very quickly realised that for me, I was much more interested in developing my business. Like, I wanna spend time developing my business, but because all of my flatmates weren't like that, I'm like.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  You feel like a weirdo.

• 16:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Jonny?

  I ate loads of Pizza Hut. Didn't realise. I like Domino's better.

• 16:57Chris Williamson?

  There you go. That's it.

• 16:58Jonny?

  Like, I remember eating loads of Pizza Hut, thinking, this is, this is the obviously.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  You're sat in the corner of the room, loads of Pizza Hut boxes.

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  Studying.

• 17:04Jonny?

  I don't even like Pizza Hut.

• 17:06Chris Williamson?

  Studying.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Studying, so.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  With studying, the, the best way to go about this is not to think, oh, I don't need to go to lectures. No one's checking up on me here. This is great. I can, hey, I can just like do, start working a week before the exam. Just if you really want a good degree, like if you're there to get a degree and to get a good grade, treat it like a day job. You're the one that's the master of your own time then, and I guarantee if you treat it like that, there is no way you'll get anything less than a first. If you just treat it as like a nine to five during the day, same way as when you, with you, when you were doing A levels. You didn't, you couldn't go home during the day. You just turned up, did the work, came home, maybe did a bit of homework.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  But you don't even need to do that. Set yourself a really hard rule of no Xbox during the day, no nonsense before.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Four P M. Doesn't even have to be a full nine till five. And once you've done that, your evenings are fully free. There's no guilt. You're the fun stuff tends to happen in the evenings anyway. And then you're a free agent.

• 18:11Chris Williamson?

  Is this in fresh, is this in first year?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  First year, like, it depends how scared you are of failing. Like, I think, as, as you said, Chris, like, people are often. You get two types of people, the neurotic ones that are too afraid of failing. And ironically, they're the ones that need to pull back a bit. And then the ones who think, oh, I'll be fine. They're the ones that fail. So you, you almost have to look at your own track record and say. Have a bit of self-awareness to say, am I someone who is legitimately at risk of failing? Or?

• 18:38Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. It's very difficult at a young age to work out that sort of a thing, though, isn't it?

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Because Cambridge suicides are the high, like, the people who commit suicide at Cambridge are the highest performers. Because they're the ones that have the most neurotic fear that they're going to fail or that they're not living up to that.

• 18:52Chris Williamson?

  That's a, that's a terrifying statistic. I think, I think what, what I would say is. I had a very well-established revision ritual, which was I'd identically learn. Everything on a page. So I'd write out my notes for the exam. I would summarize the entire module. Write out notes for the exam and then just learn it verbatim. So I could then, I wouldn't, I could even remember when looking on the page, oh, there's that top left-hand. Okay, so I'm learning about something to do with accounting. Okay, what are the four principles of accounting?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a summary page and then you've just.

• 19:24Chris Williamson?

  I would have a summary eight pages and I would learn them verbatim, like allow myself to read until a bit, read a new bit. Close the page, try and remember it. If I could remember it, go back, learn another bit and just compound it on top.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  That's what the guy in your learning podcast said, isn't it?

• 19:39Chris Williamson?

  But he, he does, but he talks about, he doesn't talk about doing it as verbatim because what the problem I came across from doing that. Was that I had a glass ceiling and box and sides on everything I knew. Cause if it was.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  It wasn't on your notes, no, it's not.

• 19:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm fucked because interpretively I had nothing. But for courses like business, accounting. Like, there's no creativity required. You don't need to be creative with your answers.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  So I think that strategy works extremely well when there is a finite curriculum and it's like, if you learn that stuff. In these summary notes, you've got.

• 20:11Chris Williamson?

  If you're doing philosophy or classics.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Then you then you need to read like and those those degrees are that's why they say like, what are you reading? You know, it's like at university, it's like the you do have, there's no way around that. But you end up with a lot more depth of knowledge as a result and you can interpret. And so, yeah, the the guy, the the main thing that jumped out at me from your podcast about learning was the guy saying, learning and memorization is repeated recall, not repeated exposure to the material. And loads of people, they just like reread their notes loads of times and highlight. And it's like, then you just create the familiarity fallacy, familiarity paradox. Where you're looking, oh, yeah, yeah, I know that. That's fine. That's fine.

• 20:52Chris Williamson?

  Close the box, see if you can tell me it.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're like, oh, no.

• 20:56Chris Williamson?

  So that's good. That's good for studying. Um, I think relationships.

• 20:59Jonny?

  I've I've wanted for studying.

• 21:01Chris Williamson?

  Hit me.

• 21:01Jonny?

  So something that I wish I'd done. So I feel like uni is the biggest example of Parkinson's law for most people. So it depends on the type of degree you do, but.

• 21:09Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain Parkinson's law, please?

• 21:11Jonny?

  So you take as long to complete something as you allocate to that task. As you say, I've got.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  It's the epitome of uni, isn't it?

• 21:19Jonny?

  It is. So like, you come out of school where you're given day structures, lessons, homework. You're basically a a map between starting point and endpoint is is built for you.

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  With the little.

• 21:30Jonny?

  The little checkpoints. You dropped into uni and someone says, right, here you are for three or four years. You have to get a degree at the end of it.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  You don't even need to turn up.

• 21:37Jonny?

  You don't even need to turn up. Like, if you don't turn up, we'll send you the we'll send you the odd, like, stiff, submitted email, but that that's it. So mo- what I did certainly in certainly first and second year was you'd wait until I I went to like three weeks before the exams and think like, oh, my God, there's all these lectures to go through. If I had done thirty minutes of work a day, the entire time I was there and kept on top of like lecture today. Like, what were the key points? Can I understand and can I explain them? Forget about it. Live the rest of my life.

• 22:08Chris Williamson?

  How many people that have been to university that are listening now or at university now? Or even that have done A levels or GCSEs, left their revision until the night before. That's me all over. Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time given for it. And that's the reason why people do it beforehand. I think it's very telling of people's personality types. My business partner, Darren. Very, very procedural, likes to schedule things in. He would have finished it. I don't think I ever saw him finish an assignment. And he did the same course as me later than like the Thursday before the Monday it was in.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 22:38Chris Williamson?

  And it would be me who would be leaving one of our events at three o'clock on a Sunday morning for a nine A M. Hand in on a Monday morning. Going back, someone would have a party in my flat downstairs and I'd be upstairs like going downstairs to have cans of Red Bull. So my master's dissertation, I'd done four thousand of twelve thousand words. Thirty six hours before it was due to be handed in.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Horrifying.

• 22:59Chris Williamson?

  And I stayed up, I stayed up for a day and a half, full case of Red Bull and just wrote the whole thing. And I was so wired and wrecked by the end of it that I didn't trust myself to drive to town to bind it. So I walked to town from Jesmond to get my dissertation bound. Because I wouldn't trust myself to drive. So I trusted myself to complete a nine thousand pound master's dissertation I'd been working on for a year. But didn't trust myself to drive to hand it in.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  I'm not sure if that's an advert for doing that or.

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  I don't think so. It was just, it was just, and the fact that I got through it as well, to me. My kind of synopsis of uni overall was that it was just get it done by any means. But now, looking back, I think that that should have been an identify to me that I didn't care about the course. So I did business management, then I did international marketing. And had I have done philosophy or psychology, I would have been sufficiently stimulated by the material that I did to actually want to learn.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 23:54Chris Williamson?

  Whereas very quickly, it was a transactional relationship between me and the university.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Oh, that that needs to get handed in right. I'll just bash it down now.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  Minimum, minimum effective.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Did you have an ongoing stress before, like say, three months before it was in?

• 24:06Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Or, okay, fine. So at least you weren't, you weren't bearing the, the load on your head of like, oh, that thing's in for three months' time. Like it's always weighing on you. And so two things that came out for both of you. The thing about handing in your dissertation like hours before the, before the deadline.

• 24:22Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  My flatmate did that and ended up, because it was universal time for dissertation handed in at twelve o'clock on a certain day, all the printers and all the libraries were jamming and massive backups and out of paper. And he was losing the plot, absolutely losing his mind. And it made me think, like, you've had a year to know about this.

• 24:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  There's nothing about that deadline that is particularly magical.

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  Special, yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  You know, you could have very easily had all this stress and stuff in week one or week fifty two, but and so the Parkinson's Law thing applies so much.

• 24:56Chris Williamson?

  So as a rule of, as a rule of thumb, would you say that it might be an idea for everyone to just remove two days from the deadline?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  At least, like.

• 25:04Chris Williamson?

  Remove two or three days from the deadline. So I mean, you know, avoid printer problems, you're going to avoid file losses. Ooh, we should do.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:12Chris Williamson?

  How do you, how do you work in a manner that means that your files never get lost?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  So the, I mean, I've had an assignment that I've kind of really internalized that lesson. I had an assignment that I had to hand in. It's due for mid-October. I handed it in two weeks ago.

• 25:27Chris Williamson?

  So that's mid-September.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  So that's a month, a month early, because I was like, I just don't want it on my head. The deadline is irrelevant, like, it has to be done by that point. Okay, I'm not going to fit my life around the deadline, I'm just going to do it when I have capacity and get it done. But we seem to think that the deadline becomes like the, the point of focus and then our life has to then mould around it, which is a terrible way to work. The, the Parkinson's Law thing as well about doing thirty minutes a day for any degree is so valuable, but there are certain degrees that the stack of work is not possible to backload.

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  If you're doing medicine.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  So medicine is one of them, and I've, I've experienced two degrees. I did maths and business, which I know is not like a hardcore degree, but the, the first term of the first year of medicine was harder than the entire four years of my maths and business degree in terms of like total workload, total cognitive load, everything like that.

• 26:22Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  And so that what they say about studying medicine is like eating ten pancakes a day. Like, it's fine to eat ten pancakes a day, but if you miss a day, you've got twenty pancakes to eat that day. And if you miss that day, then you've got thirty. It very quickly becomes.

• 26:38Chris Williamson?

  An insurmountable amount of pancakes.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  You should give them to him.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  What's the?

• 26:43Jonny?

  The most, I reckon the pancakes, the little buttermilk.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  No, no, like.

• 26:46Chris Williamson?

  Oh, shit. You should give them to him. Two hundred and five kilos.

• 26:49Jonny?

  If you ever got to eat pancakes.

• 26:51Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  How.

• 26:53Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so how um how are students going to avoid their work being lost? If it was me. Working in past me, it would be Google Drive, but now.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Saved everything on my computer and it was all fine, but like. I had three backups, my dissertation, like physical, cloud and um.

• 27:12Chris Williamson?

  So I would you would you advise anyone doing a bachelor's or a a higher to use Evernote?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yes, so.

• 27:21Chris Williamson?

  How would you use it briefly?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  So you can use Evernote or handwritten notes, it doesn't matter. And I and I know you probably like. Cause I'm Mister Paperless, but um.

• 27:31Chris Williamson?

  Sergeant Paperless.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Sergeant Paperless, but.

• 27:33Chris Williamson?

  Lieutenant.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Like, I I'm very anti-paper, but I recognize that some people like paper and it does help you in the data. To learn better. So handwriting stuff does improve recall. So if you can do that, fine, but you have to be systematic from the start and you can't let any single thing get away from you.

• 27:52Chris Williamson?

  So what's this, what's the system?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  So whether you have um separate files for separate modules that are chronologically ordered or whatever it is. But anytime you have any scrap bit of paper, any lecture slides, whatever it is. Don't just think, I'll print it off later or I'll sort it later. Like, put it into the filing system straight away, because if if you don't. You will end up with sub piles and it would be like a bug in a system that just compounds.

• 28:15Chris Williamson?

  So you would aim for, I'm gonna guess, anyone who doesn't understand how to use Evernote, you have notebooks and then within those notebooks you have notes.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  So notebooks, yeah.

• 28:22Chris Williamson?

  Physical filing system, but digitized.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  It is, yeah.

• 28:24Chris Williamson?

  And it's all held.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Three layers.

• 28:26Chris Williamson?

  It's all held in the cloud.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  So it's cloud and local, which is good. It is three. So you have notebook stacks, which is like groups of notebooks. So like a box with all your files in.

• 28:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  The notebooks then have sub notes in, which are each one is a little plastic folder. And then the notes, you can search by title or you can tag. And so then you can have two ways of categorizing the same thing. So you could have. Um, year one, module one notebook under the year one stack. But also you could tag the certain notes within there as cardiology.

• 28:57Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  And then anytime other things wi- within the branch of cardiology come up in.

• 29:01Chris Williamson?

  So if you're in third year and you need to look at something about cardiology, it'll pull up everything across all the years. So I think for me, the the main reason that I like that, that I like the idea of using Evernote is. How many times have you seen someone post? Like, I see it all the time because I've got a lot of students on my Facebook. X number of thousand words through my piece of work. Computer crashed and didn't save X, Y, Z. And you go, I mean, the, yeah, it's it's it's vomit inducing.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:26Chris Williamson?

  And I've never had that. I don't think I ever had it happen seriously, maybe like five hundred words as a as a gap. But the fact that I was doing it on this weird incremental discreet sections of saving of work on Microsoft Word. Feels fucking prehistoric now, like just use. Google Docs with um Google Drive is free. And Evernote, if you upgrade for what, like five pounds a month?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  It's incredible. I've not seen anyone that like whenever I recommended it, they're like, oh, my God, like, how did I not know about this before? And when now, yeah, whenever I've seen you on sat in a lecture with a Microsoft Word document, I'm like, you're so basic, like, just, oh.

• 30:07Chris Williamson?

  Get Evernote out and start, start using it now. And if this is the thing about greasing the groove, right? If you start using Evernote in your first year. Then you're in the rhythm of it when it really matters, when second year kicks in and third year kicks.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  This is the thing about the ten pancakes or the bug in the system that very, very soon, it'll be a year later and you'll have, you'll be like, oh, God, I've got to collect all my notes. And if they're just indexed, because you don't want to be spending, you've got a month to revise. You don't want to be spending half of that time just collecting your notes and trying to pull them off things and find where they are and download them from the portal and.

• 30:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  You know, that is.

• 30:40Chris Williamson?

  It only becomes insurmountable if you don't just manage it in a way that is like, just establish a process, establish a. Like, how much work am I willing to do per day? What's my minimum effective dose to keep on top of this? So it doesn't become a house fire that I can't get out of.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  And do it. People do just fitness as well.

• 30:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, that's all the topic, isn't it? So, moving on.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Couple more tips on academic before we.

• 31:05Chris Williamson?

  What I, what I keep laughing at incidentally is just how, I don't think.

• 31:12Jonny?

  The, the, the, where your advice is coming from is such a, like you've, you did a Russian memory course.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, the Russian, Russian memorization course.

• 31:22Jonny?

  Eight tomes or something of.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  But also, it was a lot, yeah, it was forty, forty two modules and it was like.

• 31:28Jonny?

  You, you are running a business while doing a medical degree and managing both of them.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  So, so interestingly, that was something where like, you know, when people say like, you only realize how strong you, you are, or your, your capacity, when it's fully challenged and you have to

• 31:44Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  work to that.

• 31:45Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And I'm realizing how much of a serial wasteman I was in my first degree.

• 31:49Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  The amount of time that I wasted.

• 31:51Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Whereas now, like, knowing all of the stuff that we're discussing in this podcast, if I'd went to do my first degree, that again, it would have been an absolute

• 32:00Jonny?

  Just, yeah, could have had you cock out, swinging around.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  The thing is, could have had a full time job, could have done whatever, and it would have been stress free.

• 32:06Jonny?

  You're just such a different person.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:08Jonny?

  Looking back, like, I, the prospect of even being more organized just didn't, trust me.

• 32:13Chris Williamson?

  It didn't even, it didn't even factor into your landscape.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it wasn't because you think, oh, well, that's an overwhelming force. I don't need that sledgehammer approach just to, just to pass my

• 32:21Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  degree. And it's like, well, yeah, that's, that's true, but you are absolutely capable. If you're listening to this podcast, you're smart enough and you're capable enough to put all of these systems in place from the beginning and get away with an hour of work a day or two hours of work a day and smash it.

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  This, this may sound like if you're in second or third year, that it's a lost cause. All that we're saying is that greasing the groove early is good. But greasing the groove and having a system at all is infinitely better than having none. So if you're listening to this and you're starting your third year, or maybe you've come back and decided to listen to this and it's the beginning of January or something like that, like, or you're doing an MBA, whatever it is. Look at the sort of system that we're talking about, which would be Evernote. Get yourself a routine during the day. Have a wake up time that you get up to most days. If you're, if you're hungover, okay, do the same thing again, but have a routine for when you're hungover.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  Don't allow yourself to sleep in after midday if you're hungover.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  So you have a contingency plan even for a hangover.

• 33:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. You've got numbers of routines rather than one single routine. Ryan Holiday recently did a very good Evernote post about it. Where he says, you don't need to be militant about your routine. You just need to be militant about your routines.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 33:30Chris Williamson?

  You have a finite number of of consistent situations that you that you come up against. All you need to do is when it happens once, if it's new, model it, it'll never happen again and you're not used to it. Yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  That's a good shot. So on that note, never, that any circumstances, work with people. Don't go to the library with mates and do this kind of.

• 33:53Chris Williamson?

  Bullshit.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are people. They spend, they'd be spending sixteen hours in the library and they'd work at fifteen percent capacity. And you're like, well, you may as well have done one hour. They're just not valuing their time properly.

• 34:04Chris Williamson?

  Brian, Brian from optimized.me does this lovely thing, which is work done equals time, times intensity.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:11Chris Williamson?

  And you're like, right, okay, so I can do ten hours at thirty percent, or I can do three hours at a hundred percent.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 34:16Chris Williamson?

  Which you want to do. And the three hours at a hundred percent are going to bury themselves in your mind more deeply as well. And you're gonna have a greater sense of satisfaction at the end of the day, once you've completed.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Then you can relax and you don't, you haven't got this constantly elevated sense of stress. Cause doing.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  My whole first degree was that. It was sit, I did a lot more work than I needed to. And it was a lot, well, a lot more time working than I needed to.

• 34:37Chris Williamson?

  So there we go. Actually, on that, on that point, I think, um, try and create your room at university, whether it's in halls or in a a house or private residences or whatever, once you've completed it. Have your room at university with a desk and an area, which is conducive for you to do work. Buy, spend a little bit of money, avoid a couple of nights out and spend a little bit of money on a nice seat. Or get your mum and dad to buy you a nice office seat. And then you're like, right, okay. I now have no excuse for not doing my work and I can do it in silence, in my room, or I can listen to music, but if it's music, it's my music.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and if you don't trust yourself to do that, even even if you were to say like, I've got my desk, wifi, I'm gonna unplug the router. I'm literally just gonna like, but if you can't trust yourself to do that, then only work in the library and never work.

• 35:21Chris Williamson?

  Uh what work in a kiosk in a library, so you're on your own and like zeroed in.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, somewhere that's like the antisocial. We used to have a place called the bunker, which was like.

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  No phone signal underground or something.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like, it was literally underground. Like, I think it used to, maybe it used to be a bunker and like hardly anyone was there. It was twenty four hours a day. There were showers and it was just this wasteland of a, of a computer room.

• 35:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  And it was just dead silent. It was lovely.

• 35:44Jonny?

  That's where you went all the time.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:46Chris Williamson?

  That's where I live.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Cause also, if you go somewhere that is really unpleasant to be, then you're like, right, I've got this set of tasks to do. I'm gonna go to that place and because it's unpleasant, I'm gonna have an inherent incentive to spend the minimum time there. So I'm just gonna spend.

• 36:02Chris Williamson?

  That's why I like the idea of having, even now, like I've only recently given myself, got back to having a home office in my room. And I love it.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 36:10Chris Williamson?

  Like, it's just somewhere else where I can do work and it's, it's just a nice, it's a change of scenery, it's silent.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  That's because now you're self motivated to do, I suppose you said the error you made was you were doing a degree that didn't feel aligned with what you were. So I guess motivating yourself to do it at home, you'd be like, oh man, this is a.

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

  So, moving on, uh, relationships, I think would be quite a good one.

• 36:32Jonny?

  I just have one more, just final thought.

• 36:33Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 36:34Jonny?

  Just, I'm just imagining what eighteen year old me would think.

• 36:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 36:36Jonny?

  If I was listening to this.

• 36:37Chris Williamson?

  What do you think?

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Shut the fuck up.

• 36:39Jonny?

  Well, exactly, because you wanna have a good time, but I think trying to look at it as you're buying a very expensive, either if it's vocational qualification that requires you to go and be a doctor or architect or whatever, or a very expensive signal to employers, which is like, I'm semi organised. It's extremely expensive, so you need to get that outcome. So how do you have the best time while creating that outcome? And having that discipline actually creates the best experience.

• 37:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Jonny?

  So it's the discipline equals freedom idea, that without, and people think, oh, I'll just, I'll loll around, like, do what I did, basically, I'll loll around and then create these stressful chunks of my uni life. Actually, just chip away at it. You'll have the best time overall and get a good degree.

• 37:19Chris Williamson?

  A really good point, the, the fact that doing a little bit of work and consistently will allow you to have more spare time. Conversely, it sounds like, oh, well, you're asking me to be constantly working. No, I'm not. I'm asking you to split your work up into manageable jobs.

• 37:34Jonny?

  Work anyway. And if you're not going to do the work, then you need to leave university. So you're going to do that volume of work. So just do it in a manageable way. And you'll be that guy that was like, how's he getting, well, like you said, how's he getting those results while, you know, he's doing, doing all these other things and he's still getting these results. It's because of the process in the system.

• 37:51Chris Williamson?

  Cool. So relationships, Johnny, you said that you had some comments on relationships at university.

• 37:56Jonny?

  So I, um, I broke up with my girlfriend just before I went to university.

• 38:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay, because you were going to university.

• 38:06Jonny?

  Yeah, because I had, I remember, I remember thinking like, I can't possibly go to university with a girlfriend. Which is.

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 38:15Jonny?

  I don't know. But so when I got to uni, like a few people I was living with had a relationship, they were still in. I remember thinking like, what are you doing? It's like someone arrives like having not enrolled on their course.

• 38:25Chris Williamson?

  What the fuck are you doing?

• 38:26Jonny?

  Yeah, exactly. Um, but best decision I ever made, I think.

• 38:31Chris Williamson?

  How long did the relationships of the people who you lived with last?

• 38:34Jonny?

  Not long at all. It was like the Battle of the Somme. Honestly, it was just, I remember.

• 38:38Chris Williamson?

  People getting shot down left, right and centre.

• 38:40Jonny?

  Things like you just watch people cheat on each other and it was just.

• 38:44Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, there was a lot, and especially the people who were in the long distance relationships that were like, no, no, we're really, we're, we're for the long term, man, like.

• 38:52Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 38:53Chris Williamson?

  A week later, you see them just in an orgy with.

• 38:56Jonny?

  I think.

• 38:57Chris Williamson?

  Did you?

• 38:57Jonny?

  Everyone's got a dick in their mouth.

• 39:01Jonny?

  So it's, it's what you were saying, Chris, about like, you go to uni thinking, I'm eighteen, man, like, I know what's going on. I know what I want. I know what my values are. You haven't got a clue. So like, hampering that first year of your life at university. When you're going to meet probably the most concentration of new people, have all these like weird, intense experiences of people, even like. Mate, that's my pan. Like, what are you doing with my pan? Like, you know, weird experiences like that.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  I know exactly. That was such a common experience.

• 39:29Jonny?

  But exactly, like what, like who's eating my bacon? What sort of stuff? Like, you just need time to figure it out and you don't need to have.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  It's crippling, isn't it?

• 39:37Jonny?

  Something else to manage at the same time.

• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  I think that that's a really nice way to come at it because it can quite easily lead to us sounding like we're saying you should just spray it around as much as possible during your time at university, which isn't necessarily right. I think what we're saying is that you should expose yourself to as many learning experiences as you can. And a relationship is nothing short of a mitigating factor in that. Now, a lot of short relationships at university, I actually think is quite good to good learning experience, but if you're going to look at anything, you would take some statistics and you would then model what you're going to do off the back of the statistics. I would love there to be a representative sample of how many people arrive at university with their girlfriend or boyfriend that they had in college and what the drop off rate is, because mine lasted until.

• 40:23Jonny?

  So did you arrive at uni with a girlfriend?

• 40:25Chris Williamson?

  With a girlfriend and that was like my first main girlfriend as well.

• 40:28Jonny?

  Right.

• 40:28Chris Williamson?

  So I was like, oh God, like, you know, you've got this sense of belonging. You've got this kind of, I've never had a girlfriend before. I don't really know how to do it. And I'm naturally oddly sentimental in any case. So that kind of all was a perfect storm of me just not letting go. And it was just, I ended up sacrificing so many experiences at uni and that's not turning down girls to sleep with, although obviously that was part of it. It was just stuff like that that person is at a different stage of their life than you are, even if they're at a different university, it's a different stage of their life because it's a different place. And you end up, am I going to go to this cricket social? No, I'm not my girlfriends up.

• 41:08Chris Williamson?

  It's my, it's like, so my 21st birthday, for instance, was another girlfriend was spent with my then girlfriend crying to me on the phone. Because I decided to go out with my mates instead of going to see her on my 21st birthday. So I didn't have a good 21st birthday at all. Regardless of whether I was with her or still at university. And I'm just.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  She managed to remotely mess it up. Just throw a really long.

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, a really long grenade. And I think, yeah, like just. I think you need to be, and this this shouldn't be, this shouldn't classes like if you are in a relationship, you should get rid of it. I think the the best model for this is if you're in a relationship, when you go to university and you're confident that you want to stay in it, then do so. But the second that you think that it that you are unhappy in the relationship, then call it quits there and then because not only are you wasting your own life, but you're wasting the other person's life because they can be happy with someone else. As opposed to being happy with someone who's unhappy with them.

• 42:04Jonny?

  Even just the the headspace that, so I I remember like you go to sort of a uh you there's loads of stuff that goes on in freshers week parties and meeting new people and all sort of stuff. People with boyfriends and girlfriends were definitely in a like a less open frame of mind. Going to those.

• 42:21Chris Williamson?

  There's been new experiences.

• 42:22Jonny?

  Because you're like, oh, like what if someone makes a move, like I can't do anything, I'm gonna have to have that awkward conversation.

• 42:27Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna have to say, oh, where were you last night? Oh, I went to this after party.

• 42:31Jonny?

  Exactly.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  Like, well, no, you should go to the after party because you've never been to one before.

• 42:34Jonny?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  So, yeah, the the predominant theme I saw with those with people who are in a relationship was fear, anxiety, trepidation, just like they're just desperately hanging on to what they know is safe from their home relationship. And so they're just like they're just not, there's like, yeah, it's dipping your toe into the whole experience and being like, oh, it's okay because I've I've got a girlfriend. It was almost like a a a excuse or a shield that was being used.

• 42:58Chris Williamson?

  Very much so. I think people use, to a degree, I've seen some people use sports as that as well. So that they'll choose to not do something social that takes them out of their comfort.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Oh, mate, no, I've got rugby, sorry.

• 43:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because I've got this. And it's like, well, no, hang on, you could do both.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Mate, I'm on the C team, like.

• 43:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Mate, no one even knows your name. Like, it's fine. And I think as well, falling into a relationship during freshers week or the first few weeks of the year, like.

• 43:24Jonny?

  Also, I'm just saying.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  It's the same same as like the, you know, the first people you meet, you just.

• 43:29Chris Williamson?

  Latch on to. Yeah, exactly. Like, I there is going to be no time in your life that you're going to meet such a wide range of people. Like, just accept the the sheer odds that are in front of you, that the likelihood of you meeting. The person you should be in a relationship with, being within the first couple of days and also living on your floor in your halls.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Infinitesimal, isn't it?

• 43:51Chris Williamson?

  It's probably pretty low.

• 43:52Jonny?

  Yeah, or you're extremely fortunate.

• 43:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, but that's what that's in the back of everyone's minds, right? Oh, no, no, this is this is why it's right. It's right because we're so close. And you're like, no, it's not. It's a fucking nightmare because you're so close. I see it all the time, right? Like, these guys and girls come to university and they just tumble straight into a relationship. Because it gives them a sense of comfort. It gives them this sense of belonging. Someone's got their back. And it just turns toxic so very, very fast. Again, what I want to try and get across is getting into relationships at university isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is clinging on to them once they're already gone. Like, you know, you know that it's gone and treat it. If it was easy come.

• 44:40Chris Williamson?

  Treat it as easy go. And that's one of my primary problems at uni was letting go of things like that. Like, it was very, very difficult for me, so I didn't want to.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  It's a sort of grabby fear to just like quickly just pin something down.

• 44:55Jonny?

  It's familiar, isn't it? It's you're searching for familiarity in a part time of your life where everything's new and nothing stays the same.

• 45:02Chris Williamson?

  That's a lovely way to put it. I think as well, another another thing is that your sample size, so at eighteen years old, your sample size of life experience. Is so low, like you've really at eighteen only been close to the person that you are right now. For probably about two years, because two years ago you were a completely different person.

• 45:21Jonny?

  Were you doing your GCSEs?

• 45:23Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what I mean? So if you if you've been with.

• 45:26Jonny?

  Mental.

• 45:27Chris Williamson?

  Fucking crazy. So think about the fact that if you're in a relationship for six months at the age of eighteen.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  It's a large fraction of your life.

• 45:34Chris Williamson?

  It's a very, it's a significant proportion of the time you've been alive.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:40Chris Williamson?

  And you go, right, okay, so I I need to try and look upon this. And that's the problem with this perspective. I think a lot of what we're trying to get across here is the fact that you need perspective.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  It's horrible because I had such a a lack of self-awareness, combined with a lack of experience. And um this sort of, I I mean, I'm so I'm so lucky that um my girlfriend broke up with me before I went to uni. Because I and I was upset at the time, forgot about it within a week because of starting the, you know, uni. And then I was like, actually, that unconsciously poorly articulated feeling of what you've described, both of you of like the seeing people in a relationship and just seeing something a bit um held back about them and and a bit like unwilling to to dive in. And the people who were in a relationship, yeah, they've fallen at the first hurdle because they're they've like they're in cling mode already.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  But then the people that fall at the second hurdle are the ones that then jump into a relationship with the first person that they that they think they're the ones they need.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  And you you've had the worst of of all scenarios because you've had you've missed out on months of experience. You've had to navigate a failed relationship remotely while at uni, potentially some.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  It's traumatic, man.

• 46:51Chris Williamson?

  Awful conversations.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Ruined your twenty first birthday.

• 46:53Chris Williamson?

  Ruined, yeah, ruined my twenty first birthday. I remember getting into another argument. I was in another argument as I was trying to write like the first set of exam, the first set of assignments for my masters.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  I'm just looking. Masters.

• 47:05Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Should I say masters?

• 47:07Speaker 01

  I I don't know.

• 47:08Chris Williamson?

  Say whatever you want, Chris.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  It it sounds off compared to the rest of your accent, but.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what I say. It's always one of those words. It's like it's like plaster or plaster. You know, I say, you're right, I say app for everything else, but masters, I always, I don't know why.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  So like, what what's the name of this app?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Without thinking about it.

• 47:28Chris Williamson?

  Garage band. Not garage band.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Garage band.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  We've never been, that's American, yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Abdomen.

• 47:35Chris Williamson?

  Abdomen. What would you say? Would you say masters? I bet you would.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Masters.

• 47:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you would.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  I'm hybrid, I think.

• 47:40Chris Williamson?

  Oh, God. Anyway. What about plasterboard? Plasterboard. Plasterboard, bath. Plasterboard, I know.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Plasters, masters.

• 47:48Chris Williamson?

  So I would say plaster.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Plaster.

• 47:50Chris Williamson?

  But plaster. Plasterboard. Yeah, I'd say that as well.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Verb and noun. I'm just gonna go plaster the wall.

• 47:57Chris Williamson?

  Would you like it? Would you like a plaster?

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Do you like a plaster?

• 48:00Chris Williamson?

  Do you plaster your finger?

• 48:02Jonny?

  Do you? I don't know.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  I mean, you can do if you're just like.

• 48:04Chris Williamson?

  Gentlemen, we've gone off topic again. So on the topic of, on the topic of being single at university.

• 48:13Jonny?

  Unvested.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Wear a condom for heaven's sake.

• 48:15Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that's, that's my point. My point is, for the love of God, wear a prophylactic. Because the easiest way to do it is buy them at the start of the year. Buy a big box, like a thirty box of Durex.

• 48:31Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Chris Williamson?

  Stick with the brands. Keep one in your wallet at all. Keep it. So have a buffer level of them and keep one in your wallet at all times.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Get them for free.

• 48:39Jonny?

  So I've heard keeping it in your wallet can cause.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Abrasion.

• 48:42Jonny?

  Yeah. If you set it in your wallet, because I put my wallet in my backpack.

• 48:44Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay, but I would rather have, I would rather have an abrazed condom than no condom at all.

• 48:50Jonny?

  There's an argument to say birth rates are dropping in the UK. We should be giving the, pick, put a tiny little pinprick in the edge.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Stakes was to your notes and then, yeah. The other way.

• 49:01Chris Williamson?

  To your notes. The receipt, receipt, receipt, receipt. Oh, condom.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  That big girl in the maths class that you can just be like, oh.

• 49:08Jonny?

  Oh, put that off.

• 49:10Chris Williamson?

  So put them in the bedside table next to your bed because it's the same, it's the same as defrosting the chicken the night before. If you don't defrost the chicken the night before, you can't food prep in the morning. If the condom isn't near the bed.

• 49:21Jonny?

  It's an erection killer, isn't it?

• 49:22Chris Williamson?

  The likelihood, it is, it is an erection.

• 49:24Jonny?

  Silent killer.

• 49:25Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what it is? I'm going to touch, I'm going to touch on something that I've wanted to talk about for ages and I'm going to, probably going to bring it up on another one.

• 49:30Jonny?

  You can talk about erectile dysfunction.

• 49:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:32Jonny?

  Wow.

• 49:33Chris Williamson?

  So guys at university, it is normal, it is absolutely normal for you to not be able to get it up when you're pissed. It's absolutely normal for you to not be able to get it up when it's in your head that you can't get it up as well. But for me at uni, I think it was maybe my third year and I was absolutely blind drunk, out of my mind drunk. Couldn't get it up when I went back with the girl. And then that started to become a self referential echo chamber. That was like, okay, now I've only had a couple of drinks. Oh, God, that problem might happen again. Then it does. And then it gets to the stage where you're like, oh shit. Maybe this is gonna start happening when I'm sober. And sure enough, it actually does.

• 50:09Jonny?

  Wow.

• 50:10Chris Williamson?

  And you're like, right, okay, I need to break the spell of this somehow. And it's really, really difficult. And I've got, I've got a number of friends who have, this has been a cascade into a really, really horrible situation. And all that it needed was someone to say this, which is, it is perfectly normal to not be able to get it up when you're pissed. And if you laugh it off, she'll laugh it off as well. And if you're a girl, it doesn't matter if it's never happened to you before. It's not about you, it's about the amount of alcohol that he's had to drink. And if it happens, be gracious about it and just say, don't worry, you're not the first, like, cause that is just gonna make him go.

• 50:50Jonny?

  Oh, thank God for that. Yeah.

• 50:52Chris Williamson?

  That makes me feel so much better, cause at nineteen, twenty years old, thinking I've got erectile dysfunction.

• 50:56Jonny?

  Crushing.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  Is fucking terrifying. Did it happen to you?

• 50:59Jonny?

  It's, it's happened to me a couple of times, yeah.

• 51:00Chris Williamson?

  And you go through a little cycle.

• 51:01Jonny?

  It's the, it's the thought, it's the split second of, God, imagine what would.

• 51:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no.

• 51:07Jonny?

  Oh, it's happened.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  That's a good tip then, cause you've given people the safety catch to, um, to, to stop the safety valve, to stop that happening. And if it happens in the moment, you've given both men and women a way to.

• 51:19Chris Williamson?

  There you go, just laugh it off.

• 51:20Jonny?

  The only reason that it happens is it's the, it's the antagonistic reaction to being relaxed. So like, you, it requires relaxation, you are creating anxiety and stress.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  So interesting mnemonic where used for that is um, point and shoot. So, uh, parasympathetic nervous system regulates erection. And sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight, flight, regulates ejaculation. And so P, point, S, shoot.

• 51:45Chris Williamson?

  Nice.

• 51:46Jonny?

  There we are.

• 51:47Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, I think, you know.

• 51:48Jonny?

  So deep, deep breaths.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Deep breaths, yeah.

• 51:50Chris Williamson?

  And just concede the fact that like, if you've, if you've put ten pints and a bunch of shots into yourself, and you've been day drinking on a bank holiday Sunday or something.

• 52:00Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 52:00Chris Williamson?

  Like.

• 52:02Chris Williamson?

  There are men across the world that this happens to.

• 52:05Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 52:05Chris Williamson?

  And the problem that you have is that you don't know that it's that common.

• 52:08Jonny?

  Yeah, especially when you're that age, I think.

• 52:10Chris Williamson?

  And you're terrified of seeing it.

• 52:11Jonny?

  So my, my experience happened a few times at uni and I remember thinking like, wow, like I really hope that never happens again. But it just takes a few conversations with people as you get to your twenties and everyone's like, and you're like, oh, actually, this is really common.

• 52:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:23Jonny?

  But you, no one, when you're eighteen, nineteen.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  No one wants to be the first person to say.

• 52:27Jonny?

  To raise it, yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Oh, guys, does anyone else, um. Struggling to get erection. Uh, just me then. Does anyone remain flaccid when they're inside of a one? I'm struggling to maintain my turgidity during coitus. So the good tip on the condoms, so I, I, I saw a patient who.

• 52:43Jonny?

  The stapling.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  That, not the stap, don't, don't staple, that was a joke, do not staple your condoms. Um, saw a patient who, fresh as week, was a virgin, had sex with one woman, didn't use a condom, got HIV.

• 52:55Jonny?

  Oh, my god.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  It's so, yeah, so like, that's extremely unlucky, but, but like.

• 53:02Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, the, the chances of it's.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  It is brutal, isn't it?

• 53:05Jonny?

  God.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  So you just, you don't know who.

• 53:10Jonny?

  Was it a guy?

• 53:11Speaker 01

  It was a man, yeah, he had sex with a woman, it was like a.

• 53:13Chris Williamson?

  And the thing is as well, transmission rates, female to male are lower than male to female. This is something else, girls.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  It's like just ultimate unlucky, wasn't it?

• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  Girls, if you are, if you are listening, your chance.

• 53:22Jonny?

  Caught a snitch, didn't he? Caught a girl a snitch.

• 53:25Chris Williamson?

  Your, your chance of catching HIV, uh, catching HIV, catching an STI as a girl because of the shape of your sexual organs.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Well, just think what happens, like, you, you have a receptacle in your pelvis, where, and people are shooting things into it, like possibly infected things. Like you're going to.

• 53:46Jonny?

  That's out of losing erection, just play that back. Play that small segment back to yourself.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  It's gonna be the, that's gonna be the preview.

• 53:55Chris Williamson?

  You have a, you have a receptacle inside. Fucking hell. So, yeah, I think. As much, and then, once you're in a relationship with someone, easiest way to do it, if you want to be hyper, hyper safe, both go and get checked, because both of you should do it in any case. And then, once you are, go to fucking town.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:13Chris Williamson?

  Like, make sure that she's on whatever form of birth control that is appropriate for her.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  I'm glad you said that.

• 54:20Chris Williamson?

  What, as opposed to just like, start making uni babies?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Resty, I free, just go to town.

• 54:27Chris Williamson?

  Can't get pregnant in the ear.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  Um, so, relationships, relationships on that one there. What about, um, what about making friends and stuff like that? So I've suggested, my, my main one is joining events company. If you're, if you like to go out and you like to party and stuff like that, I think it's a fantastic way. Sports teams.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  I've got no tips on this. I haven't got any friends, so I don't.

• 54:51Chris Williamson?

  You've got us to, but we.

• 54:52Jonny?

  Yeah, I'm your friend.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  But I pay you to, to.

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was a donation.

• 54:55Jonny?

  You don't have to mention that. You didn't have to say it. We'll cut that out.

• 55:00Chris Williamson?

  Johnny, you did like rowing and stuff, right?

• 55:02Jonny?

  I did. Interestingly, so the, there were two types of people that I encountered at uni. People who were obsessed about being on like the rugby or the rowing socials and all that sort of stuff. And people who very much just kind of like kept themselves, themselves. I was really good friends with some of the people, funny enough, in my flat, where I was like in, where I was a fresher, and they were the people who I ended up being really frien- really friendly with. And I'm still in touch with all of them now, ten years later.

• 55:33Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 55:34Jonny?

  Um, one of them has just, another wedding, just got engaged, asked me to be his best man.

• 55:40Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 55:41Jonny?

  Yeah, so.

• 55:42Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy, so.

• 55:43Jonny?

  So, so the, the point with that is, again, like, as I just gave you everything in my life, like, what, what are we trying to get out of this? Like, what's the, what's the goal here? Like.

• 55:52Chris Williamson?

  Be a best man.

• 55:53Jonny?

  Do you want, well, yeah, I mean, bingo, done it, completed it. Do you want to leave uni with loads of like, low level acquaintances that you never speak to after graduation? Or would it be nice to have like, a couple of friends that you, that you speak to for the rest of your life? And so I think there were a lot of people who paid a lot of very diffuse attention to a large group of people, because they felt like that gave them popularity and status.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  That's, that's a good point. So I guess it depends on the timeline as well. Like, it's like, if you see your university degree three years as a funnel, you don't have to, um, narrow down in year one. You can spread your net wide. Feel out loads of different types of people.

• 56:31Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Not literally, but um yeah, do not touch them, but just fe- fe- feel them all out and then be like, actually, this group who I thought I was mates with was just because of the primacy effect.

• 56:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  And then.

• 56:42Chris Williamson?

  You want to split test, don't you?

• 56:43Speaker 01

  But yeah, and you know, there's no problem with split testing your social life because ultimately it's it's a reciprocal relationship.

• 56:50Chris Williamson?

  As long as you understand that it won't be a true split test.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:53Chris Williamson?

  So people, people are so tribal, man, like they.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  The fear I had was that because of that, because people was a tribal, I thought like, oh, if I um if I don't like knuckle down now with that group, then I'm gonna lose them.

• 57:03Chris Williamson?

  But I remember being, I remember being at uni and some of my friends um being like, also like, who are you going out with tonight? And then take a piss. Oh, you're going out with like the promo lads, are you?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 57:13Chris Williamson?

  And it's like, okay, there we go. That's like, that's the tribal nature. And the problem is, if you are, if you are in a group of people who don't have a sufficiently high level of emotional intelligence to understand that this is a good idea and that they should be doing it too.

• 57:28Chris Williamson?

  You become.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Their fear talking.

• 57:30Chris Williamson?

  You you become a a a victim of their own insecurities.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:35Chris Williamson?

  Which is really fucking dangerous.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  Because if you sequester to what they think you should do, you you it's a very, very fucking slippery slope.

• 57:45Jonny?

  It's it is projection, isn't it? They project like this is what I think I should be doing. I think you should be doing the same thing. If you're not, I'm gonna criticize and try.

• 57:51Chris Williamson?

  You're you're going out with a different group of people.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  They see you as.

• 57:54Chris Williamson?

  I wish I should, I wish I was able to go out with a different group of people. You're not going out with us, therefore you're out of our little social circles.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. If that's the case, then screw them.

• 58:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, just use it as a, you you can use it as a big fucking red flag about like this person.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:08Chris Williamson?

  Not bad. Yeah.

• 58:09Jonny?

  And and position. Stop loss.

• 58:10Chris Williamson?

  Stop loss.

• 58:11Jonny?

  Move the, move the, that into another, another.

• 58:13Chris Williamson?

  Portfolio. Um I think another good point is, do not choose the flatmates you're going to live with in second year or third year. In October.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 58:24Chris Williamson?

  And I see this happen all the time. Like, the number of people, and this is.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Second year flat is always the rockiest, doesn't it?

• 58:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, yeah, you've just made this a rash decision early on. And one of the problems is that because good student accommodation, good private student accommodation is becoming more and more uh competitive now, that it's common for a lot of the good flats, well-priced flats, to go by November, December time, and you're like, okay, like, there definitely is a spectrum between wanting to go early enough to still have a good choice of houses, but late enough to be able to make a good choice of flatmates. But I can tell you a fine fact, you would much sooner live in a shit house with good housemates than a good house with assholes.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 59:10Chris Williamson?

  So I would tend towards the latter.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 59:14Chris Williamson?

  Like, you don't need to make the decision before Christmas. Like, if you have, unless you're absolutely certain and you get on like a house on fire with these people and you know all of them. Another one as well.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  There's very few towns that finding a flat is so competitive that you have to do it before.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, you'd be surprised, man, Newcastle, Newcastle is, Newcastle is one of those, but for the really nice ones and then you're talking value as well.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Right, but I I'd imagine like, you you're not, you're not totally, like, you you will find somewhere to live that is acceptable if you start searching in March or whatever, you know, it's not like you.

• 59:42Chris Williamson?

  Another thing to consider, I would refrain from living in a house with any more than max five people, ideally four.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 59:51Chris Williamson?

  Because.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  I was in the seven in my second year and and we chose it early on and it it it worked out just about okay, but I could I could see it having gone very bad quite easily.

• 1:00:01Chris Williamson?

  Did you split in third year into two houses?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  There was also a guy who we knew who did a similar thing. This group of people, like, one of the guys on their corridor, they want to, they like, didn't wanna leave him out, so they went, they lived with him. And he ended up uh being a sex offender. He ended up putting one of these like fake USB sticks in the bathroom and filming the girls showering. And um like was saving the videos on his computer. Police raided the house, he threw his laptop in like a bin on the street. Um and ended up as like, so so basically.

• 1:00:36Chris Williamson?

  Jesus fucking.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Chris Williamson?

  That is a hot, hot story right there. And I think as well, another another good point to remember when you get into your second and third year house is. I would genuinely, genuinely advise. At the halfway point and then at the end point, just pay for a professional clean. Like, I didn't get.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  So the five bed, five person house, it's like three quid each or something, isn't it? So.

• 1:01:04Chris Williamson?

  So just do it, do a halfway point. So do it just after Christmas before you come back to uni. Pay for a professional clean on a five bed house. It'll be maybe three hundred, four hundred quid, a absolute tops. And that's if you've. Essentially like infested the place. Um, and then do another one at the end because it is not worth your time. You do not have the expertise, the inclination, the time. Or the um, tools to be able to clean your second year house to the standard that it was when you moved.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  You're losing the buzzer anyway.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  So you may as well.

• 1:01:33Chris Williamson?

  There was a five, five of us in a, a house in Jesmond. Five hundred pounds each in the DPS and we didn't get a single penny of it back. Two and a half grand it cost to get our house back to working order. There was.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Well, according to the agent.

• 1:01:48Chris Williamson?

  It was, I honestly think we got a deal. I genuinely think we got a deal.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:01:51Chris Williamson?

  Like, there was.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  You got two and a half grand of damage and you think it was.

• 1:01:55Chris Williamson?

  They had to refloor the entire kitchen because there were these maggots that were. Powered by protein powder because all of us, a mixture of protein powder and creatine. So they're all grown to humongous sizes. Yeah, exactly. They were all in there benching pizza crusts. And then we had two hundred and ten bottles of uh Tesco value vodka. That were just like strewn around. We'd spelled out, do you remember when nuts was a big, was a big thing? So we had, we spelled nuts out with the bottles on a street.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Was this over one year?

• 1:02:26Chris Williamson?

  One year.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  And how many people in the flock?

• 1:02:28Chris Williamson?

  Five.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  So two hundred and ten divided by five, forty two. So that's one per week per person.

• 1:02:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  There's a very like consistent rate.

• 1:02:39Jonny?

  Well, they did the took the advice that we gave of establish a routine.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  True, ten pancakes a day, just.

• 1:02:45Chris Williamson?

  I mean, there was there was once.

• 1:02:46Jonny?

  Don't miss a week.

• 1:02:47Chris Williamson?

  There was once upon a time when Morrisons were doing three litres of Morinov vodka for twelve pounds. This is before minimum unit pricing came in.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  And I imagine you would have drank other things. You wouldn't have just lived on vodka.

• 1:02:58Chris Williamson?

  It was majoritively vodka. It was mostly vodka.

• 1:03:02Jonny?

  Calories, isn't it?

• 1:03:02Chris Williamson?

  There was a time, there was a time where we were so poor that all of us were drinking water, dilutey juice, like dilutey orange and vodka.

• 1:03:12Jonny?

  Oh my god.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Well, that's that's a cocktail, because that's three ingredients, isn't it? So.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  That's my idea of a cocktail.

• 1:03:23Jonny?

  I really like dilutey juice.

• 1:03:25Chris Williamson?

  Dilutey juice. What have we missed off your list?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  So, um.

• 1:03:28Jonny?

  I have a cleaning story.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:30Jonny?

  So I I tried to clean my flat myself with my.

• 1:03:34Chris Williamson?

  On your own?

• 1:03:35Jonny?

  No, no. So like, we looked at the price of a cleaner, like. Went to, we're like, it's all right, we'll hire, like, we'll just hire the stuff we need. And I can s- I just really clearly remember the way this woman said this. So went into B and Q, went up to the lady in B and Q, very little, very aggressive Scottish lady, looked at you. So if there's a group of people, whoever she was speaking to, she like looked straight in the eye, like that. And we went, do you have any cleaning equipment? She was like, no. You don't have any cleaning equipment? She's like, well,

• 1:04:06Jonny?

  we've got the rug doctor. The rug doctor. Aye, the rug doctor. We'll take the rug doctor, which is this like.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Happy to hear where this has come from.

• 1:04:15Chris Williamson?

  Me too, yeah.

• 1:04:16Jonny?

  This is, it's a tower with that basically shoots out water out the front of it, runs some brushes over it and then that's like a dry brush at the back. It's shite, basically.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Aye, we've got the doctor.

• 1:04:28Jonny?

  The doctor. The doctor will sort you out. The doctor's here to see you.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Three different passages on the elbow.

• 1:04:37Chris Williamson?

  Pour this like purple stuff into this thing, push it over the carpet, did one row. We're like, right, that's, that's dyed the carpet of a different colour in one specific street. Just, I don't know why, it must have just something to do with the carpet. So then had to do the whole house. In this, in this new thing. And then they tried to take the deposit off us because somebody left a closed condom wrapper under the bed.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  We had uh used condoms under our bed when I moved in.

• 1:05:09Chris Williamson?

  Didn't go, oh really?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, the agent were just like, oh, sorry mate. And it used condoms and loads of Maltesers just on the floor.

• 1:05:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, as a

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Someone had a good time, didn't they?

• 1:05:17Chris Williamson?

  So here's the way, here's a little hack for you. The way that um as I'm slowly moving into landlord life, beginning to understand this, the way that the DPS, the deposit protection scheme works is to do with the tenants returning the property in the condition that it was moved into it. So what you actually really want is for the condition of the property that you move into to be as dirty as is possible whilst still acceptable.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  Then complain to the landlord or the letting agent. They'll come round, they'll clean it, but your inventory will be done at the uh condition that it was when you moved in. So if you do move in, take photos, have a little bit of a look. If there's any marks, stuff like that, just grab a couple of snaps, evernote them.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:06:04Chris Williamson?

  And then, and then in

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  And you can set a date on the evernote.

• 1:06:07Chris Williamson?

  To remind you, yeah, here it is. And then, yeah, there you go. You, basically you want it to be as low as possible.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:06:13Chris Williamson?

  So that when you end up moving out, you're like, well.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  That's cool. So No, no, rug doctor. Only other thing on my social list was just visit your family occasionally, like, don't just completely sack them off. But also, I mean, it's it's difficult giving advice like this because some people are proper homebodies and they'll, they'll go home every week. And have their mum come and do their laundry, like, which I've, I've seen. So, but as in like to come up to like across the country to come and do their laundry and then, so that's, it's difficult, but basically see, see your family at a cadence of once a month.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Probably the safe.

• 1:06:46Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:46Chris Williamson?

  I think another, I think another thing to consider as well, which I never ever did at uni was that you've left your mum and dad and and family back home and the dogs and stuff like that. And although you're having this fantastic time, your parents probably miss you.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Life just went on for them as normal, so.

• 1:07:06Chris Williamson?

  They're they're now in the house and there's no more, no more use of mess anymore. There's no more like him coming in from college and talking to you about how his day's been. Like, think about if you were them, like if you were a parent, you'd want to feel like you were a part of your child's life as they'd moved away to uni. So invite them up, let, show them your university room, like if you've got a sports game that you're playing at, or if you're doing a play, or if you've got a presentation for uni, or if you've got whatever, like invite them up to it because.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  That's a very good point.

• 1:07:34Chris Williamson?

  That'd be a very meaningful experience for your parents. Like, there's so many um relationships, mature relationships that go to seed. And people's parents split up during the first couple of years of university because the final thing which bonded these two adults together was the rearing of this child. And I'm not saying that you inviting your parents up once every six weeks is going to save their marriage. But it's definitely at least going to make them feel a little bit better.

• 1:08:00Jonny?

  I I saw that happen. I saw someone witness the breakup of their parents in like the first.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 1:08:08Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, it's mad, man, like.

• 1:08:09Jonny?

  Yeah, it's like tech, text them as well.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, just, just like.

• 1:08:14Chris Williamson?

  You just keep, you're spending, you're spending eight hours a day on your phone, like you can, you can afford to text.

• 1:08:20Jonny?

  Like, they have played a massive part in getting you to that point.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Just because you're nailing birds with condoms and and like doing all the fun stuff, like it still doesn't mean that you can.

• 1:08:29Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Make time to text you.

• 1:08:31Jonny?

  Parents.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Just not while you're nailing a bird with a condom.

• 1:08:34Jonny?

  Hmm, I just, I can't imagine, sorry.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:08:37Jonny?

  Oh, man.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  You can lay on.

• 1:08:38Jonny?

  Or T man, or man and woman.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, just don't use other people's olive oil as lube when you're having an orgy, especially when they've just bought it for three part seventy five.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  I can tell you weren't the person in the orgy.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  I woke up the next day, where's all my olive oil? I went, oh, sorry mate, we had an orgy last night. Ah, like.

• 1:09:02Chris Williamson?

  What, with olive oil? Well, I mean, why are you there?

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  They showed me photos as well. I was like, guys, like, I've just bought, it wasn't even opened. They like clicked it open.

• 1:09:09Chris Williamson?

  But I mean, I'd be sad about the use of the olive oil, but I wouldn't feel disgusted because it would be almost impossible to put it back in.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  That's true. It was one of those like dispenser bottles as well. So, yeah.

• 1:09:19Chris Williamson?

  But even then, what are they gonna do? Scrape it up and down their skin? You know what you should do to protect yourself from that? One of those like one cal sprays?

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Chris Williamson?

  Not going back in there.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  No one's gonna be using them.

• 1:09:28Chris Williamson?

  Probably sell them orgy with it. She's pushing my turn.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Slow things down, but yeah, it's true.

• 1:09:32Chris Williamson?

  Significantly, yes. This is only one calorie. It's like a one stroke spray, isn't it? It would be like a pull out and a squirt and then a pull out and a.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  They'd be using.

• 1:09:41Chris Williamson?

  Keep reapplying.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'd be using Gary's butter instead. So, the other categories I've got, so we've been through academic, we've been through social and relationships.

• 1:09:52Chris Williamson?

  And fatness.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Fatness. Yeah, so I've got physical and financial left.

• 1:09:58Chris Williamson?

  Let's go financial. At Dean.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Okay, so the, the point that Johnny made earlier, which is very, very well put of a degree is an investment. And so when people be like, when people are like, when people be like,

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  setting up a business is a bidness.

• 1:10:16Chris Williamson?

  A bidness.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Is too risky. It's like you're putting yourself in sixty grand of debt to go and do something that is.

• 1:10:27Chris Williamson?

  Is that how much university is now?

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Well, for nine, for me, nine grand a year times six years plus living costs. So, yeah, pretty, but.

• 1:10:36Chris Williamson?

  Remembering our first, the tuition fees for all of our first degrees.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  At nine percent as well. Nine point one percent is the new, so it's six point one up until twenty four thousand, but anything above that is nine point one.

• 1:10:47Chris Williamson?

  Mortgage levels of debt, isn't it?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  I think just sack off your student debt, pay minimum or, or go to, go to Paraguay or Cayman Islands and just, anyway. So, yeah, it was somewhat, it was. Nate Schmidt that said you are taking on like a huge amount of debt to go and work a job that guarantees like thirty grand a year for life, maybe with a slight incremental growth. That's much more risky than starting a business, for example. So do start a business, do like, you know, it doesn't mean there's not mutually exclusive.

• 1:11:19Chris Williamson?

  This is finances outside of uni or while you're at uni.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  Both. So so remember that like uni itself is a is an investment and so make sure you pass it. Cause otherwise you've got the worst of both worlds. You're just committed to the debt plus the uh.

• 1:11:32Chris Williamson?

  So that doesn't go away just because you failed.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:36Chris Williamson?

  It's just tinged.

• 1:11:38Jonny?

  You never earn above, like, what is it, fifteen K? Like, just cruise below the radar.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. Cruise below the radar, but the the point is you are there to maximize your return on that investment.

• 1:11:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  So you've already committed to the debt, even if you don't feel the the cost of that because of student loans until later. So make the most of the opportunities. Like you are there in an academic hub where there are people around you that are complete sources of knowledge, like professors, the people around you, the libraries, other people, the course. So just soak it up. How many student discounts as well and just um take as much as you as much as you can that's designed to feed you during that time.

• 1:12:18Chris Williamson?

  I would be interested to hear your thoughts on whether or not you would advise people to take a year in industry.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Oh, I think Johnny probably has.

• 1:12:27Chris Williamson?

  Like between second and third year?

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:12:31Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  If you get paid and.

• 1:12:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, no, you take it as a property or an industry.

• 1:12:38Jonny?

  I mean, I I didn't do it.

• 1:12:39Chris Williamson?

  Pop that over there, because it sometimes buzzes the mic.

• 1:12:42Jonny?

  Okay.

• 1:12:45Jonny?

  Is that okay?

• 1:12:48Jonny?

  I think the year industry, what you're trying to get out of that is, do I want to go into that line of work? And I think you can do that in a lot less time than a year. Like, obviously, yes, if you get like a salary or prorate salary.

• 1:13:02Chris Williamson?

  I would I would only be talking about if you got a a like, I think a typical like internships, maybe like eighteen grand for the year, something like that.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  The two benefits are it potentially gets you a job following, assuming you like it, I suppose, but it gives you the information that you. Um, that you like it or don't, and it pays you, but it delays you as well.

• 1:13:21Chris Williamson?

  So the, so I did two internships over summer that were of that format, just shorter. One was five weeks, one was first time I met you, actually.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:29Chris Williamson?

  It was during one of them.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Chris Williamson?

  And the other one was eight weeks long, um, and got offered a job at the end of one of them. It was, it's still paid.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  So you can still get the job offer.

• 1:13:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's like a summer holiday, basically. You get a flavour of, um, and I remember thinking, I don't want to do either of these things, but.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  But I think it's a job offer in the bag.

• 1:13:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that's definitely, so my approach to how I would plan my university years now, if it was me, is I would do university year study, then I would do a summer abroad.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:14:03Chris Williamson?

  As probably a party rep or something similar.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Chris Williamson?

  Um, because the intensity of experience that you're going, that you end up having. I did in between, this is a terrible idea, in between my bachelors and my masters, I did a, you've laughed at masters again. Uh, I did a year in Ibiza. Now, one of the problems with doing a year in Ibiza was I came back and my mind was about seventy five percent of the speed before I'd gone out there. Um, so it took a little bit of time for me to get back up to operating.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  That, that's not a year in industry now, I suppose.

• 1:14:36Chris Williamson?

  No. My point, my point is that you get a, um, you get to experience a lot of partying over the summer.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:14:46Chris Williamson?

  I would also advise a year in industry, and my reason for that is that by the time that you're twenty one and you've finished, if you've never spent any consistent time working, now the internship, uh, summer internship kind of gets around this. But with my model of going away and working abroad in Magaluf or Mount Mayor or whatever, you can't do that.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:15:05Chris Williamson?

  If you've never been in a nine to five and felt what it feels like to sit in an office all the time, you are going to tumble out. So one of my flatmates, JT, he'll be listening. He went, did three years at uni, this is before placement years were really a thing, years in industry were really a thing. And he tumbled straight out of uni, twenty one years old, into the Aldi grad. Graduate scheme.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Oh, it's intense.

• 1:15:28Chris Williamson?

  Sixty plus hours a week.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Chris Williamson?

  Working in Middlesbrough. Living with us and he'd done his six weeks of being a checkout person and he was on forty grand. You're like, you're twenty years old on forty grand a year, Audi A four outside, like full for, and it sounds fantastic. But he never wanted to work in retail. He didn't want to do sixty hours a week of work. And this guy is now just left a job at Bloomberg to go work at Blackrock.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:58Chris Williamson?

  And you're like, okay, that's the level that you're operating on. And I think that delaying the delaying your entering into the working world, first off, if you do, you're in industry. Yeah, it's a year of work, but if you can get it in the city where you're at uni. You get to spend it with your other university flatmates that are still studying.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:20Chris Williamson?

  And you extend, you essentially extend your degree whilst not having to pay, whilst earning some really, really good money. You get to understand what the working world feels like. You have a bit of liberation and a bit of a break. Yeah, you're gonna have to get back into academia, which is maybe not gonna be so easy. Because you've un-greased that groove of learning a little bit. But I think it's a, I think it's a really good idea. And I would, from my side, I mean, me and Darren went to Carnage, went to run Scotland, um, Carnage for them. And BBC Radio Parliament featured us because they didn't like us at all. And we had to essentially flee the country.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:16:57Chris Williamson?

  But, uh.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  So I found, I found a couple of the quotes that I was looking for from this guy Nate Schmidt. So he's a bit of a outlier because he quit college. So he set up a dropshipping company, was in business school. As soon as he made his first thousand dollars. Dropshipping, he was like, actually, why am I in business school now? And just left. So he says, I have a passionate hatred for modern business school. I paid thousands to learn nothing, nothing of value. Then I spent my free learning, free time, learning copywriting online for free. And started making more money than my professors in less than a year. Um, terrible ROI. College, um, the purpose, the purpose isn't fun, but it is a lot of fun to be there at least. Um.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  And where is it? Yeah, friend of mine graduated with a business degree, fifty K in student loans, applied to forty jobs, entry level, didn't get a single one, moved back home, now taking real estate classes. Dude can't even get a forty K per year job with his degree, but yeah, definitely go to college. Um, take out thousands of student loans, learn how to follow rules, don't lead, get a job building someone else's empire. Mediocre pay, two weeks vacation, you'd be cool forty hours a week, miserable.

• 1:18:10Chris Williamson?

  Slow down, it's gone.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Tell them to go to col-, tell them college is the only way, repeat.

• 1:18:14Chris Williamson?

  Put the brakes, Yusuf.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Like, like, don't let this be you.

• 1:18:17Chris Williamson?

  Stop it, you cast are gonna be knocking down the door. So I think, yeah, totally, I do get that.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  We've got to see both perspectives of that, that's someone who.

• 1:18:25Chris Williamson?

  Is an outlier, but I think what, what you can definitely take from that and what I think is a good thing to take away is, don't be scared of changing your course. Like, you've only committed one year and yeah, it's one big year.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  I think you have to read this one out because I'm not allowed to, you know? It's such a good one.

• 1:18:43Chris Williamson?

  Imagine a product that doesn't allow refunds, doesn't guarantee results, has dramatically increased in price, has dramatically decreased in value, encourages taking a massive debt if you can afford it. Debt is legally inescapable. This is called college, wake up. Okay. Well, if you're at university, you're doomed. There you go.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Well, so all, all three of us.

• 1:19:06Chris Williamson?

  One hour and twenty minutes into the podcast.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  All, all three of us.

• 1:19:09Chris Williamson?

  Started.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:19:10Chris Williamson?

  The businesses that we have at university. So I'm, I'm the, I'm like number one of saying that university was for me a waste of time. The difference is I don't think it was a waste of money because it was three thousand pounds a year.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:19:24Chris Williamson?

  Like it's, it was.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  It's made you a, a different person. And I think like, e- even if it doesn't get you a job at Ernst and Young, like it's not about that necessarily, it's about who's, who has grown you into. And I think there's nobody saying that hedging your income and developing multiple sources of income is a bad thing, regardless of what you end up studying or doing.

• 1:19:44Chris Williamson?

  I think. Don't be, don't be scared of changing your course. If you get halfway through the year and you're like, right, I can't switch anymore. Right, okay, no, you can't. But you can bin that year. You've got your friends at uni. Switch to a course that you're going to like.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  But those universities will allow you to move internally without having to reapply as well. Like, once you're in, you can.

• 1:20:04Chris Williamson?

  I, I, I wish, I still to this day wish that I'd done philosophy or psychology instead. And I knew at the time that that's where my passion lay. But I was, um.

• 1:20:15Chris Williamson?

  I was very attached to the idea of a degree having a linear trajectory towards a profession. And my terrifying fear was if I do philosophy, what, what job does that bring me into? And whereas what I should have actually thought is what skills does it give me?

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:20:34Chris Williamson?

  And in terms of university, yeah.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  I didn't have anywhere near that level of foresight at eighteen. I was just like.

• 1:20:40Chris Williamson?

  No, me neither.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  I wanted to be a businessman. I'm gonna do business.

• 1:20:43Chris Williamson?

  That was me.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  It was like, ended up in a business.

• 1:20:46Chris Williamson?

  So what did, what did you all want to be when you started uni? Fuck knows. Probably a business owner, which is what I actually ended up being. But one of the problems was, I got to see very quickly, so I did business management at undergrad. Very quickly, I got to experience what running a real world business is like. And doing club promo, for all that it, the club promoters get accused of being glorified party boys. You get to see from the ground floor, you get a very, very good cross section of everything from finances, logistics, operations, marketing, advertising, H R. You do everything. And you're like, right, okay. So each of the modules that I had at university, I was going into a lecture and learning something, then coming out, looking at my phone and experiencing the real world.

• 1:21:29Chris Williamson?

  And I was like, what the fuck am I doing? Learning about Henry Ford's scientific model of management? When everything that I'm experiencing in the real business world, and I know it's the real business world, because we're making thousands of pounds a year doing this business, is showing me that it's useless.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  That, that was exactly my experience of a business degree. I did a module in entrepreneurship because I was like, you know what? Everything so far has been so dry and. Like operations research and linear programming and stuff that didn't have any.

• 1:22:00Chris Williamson?

  Kaizen.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like how Welsh's grape juice run their algorithms to allocate grades from different sources to make the flavour. And it was like, this is completely irrelevant. So I was like, okay, module in entrepreneurship. And it was, it turned out to be history of entrepreneurship in the nineteen thirties of America.

• 1:22:17Chris Williamson?

  God.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  And I was like, this has told us nothing about. So.

• 1:22:21Chris Williamson?

  I think, I think that anyone who's doing a business degree should be really, really cautious about it.

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  Well, I suppose actually like.

• 1:22:26Chris Williamson?

  Fucking popular.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Cause you're not gonna have successful businessmen teaching you. They're not gonna be lecturing you. It'll be academics that actually most likely don't have an ostensible business of their own by definition, because they're not in a job that.

• 1:22:39Jonny?

  Well, that's Anton.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:40Chris Williamson?

  That is Anton.

• 1:22:41Jonny?

  Most of these teachers are just fucking failures.

• 1:22:45Chris Williamson?

  We'll link, we'll link the video, um, maybe actually get rid of us and Anton will appear here.

• 1:22:54Speaker 03

  Back to school teachers. Obviously, the vast majority work in the public sector. But even if you've been to a private school, it's very, very unlikely that any of these people have had a modicum of success anywhere in their life. So in terms of financial education, they can't teach you anything.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  Now we're back. Three of us were sat in a room and Anton came in eating scrambled egg and toast.

• 1:23:26Chris Williamson?

  That was a dream.

• 1:23:27Jonny?

  In a bowl.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:28Jonny?

  But actually, that's a really, are we wrapping up soon?

• 1:23:32Chris Williamson?

  We'll get, we'll wrap ups.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  We should do physical, don't we?

• 1:23:34Jonny?

  Of course, I would, I wish so much. And I don't feel like it was available as much then. Maybe that's just because I didn't, I didn't see any of it, but getting some kind of concurrent alternative education while I was eating from podcasts, books, YouTube.

• 1:23:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, now people, people's capacity to be able to learn stuff.

• 1:23:53Jonny?

  Like, do, do a couple of, like, if you're doing thirty minutes of work a day, the minimum effective dose throughout your freshers.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  And do thirty minutes of reading.

• 1:24:00Jonny?

  Like, do, do, or enroll in like a Udemy course or like.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  Do not say that you have no time because. Most people read thousands of words a day, but it's from some news feed or like something completely asinine.

• 1:24:11Jonny?

  Learn to code, learn to trade, learn copywriting.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Those three skills are so profitable.

• 1:24:17Jonny?

  If you if you have those, they're far more valuable than your degree and you're learning something else, do it in your spare time.

• 1:24:23Chris Williamson?

  If if I was if I was back at uni, actually, the job that I would get if I didn't want to be a promoter, another job that I would do would be get funding to or use some of my student loan to get P T qualification, because I think that pretty much unqualified, I am aware that there is P T level three is a genuine qualification and P T is out there, I apologize.

• 1:24:44Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:44Chris Williamson?

  But it's a fucking couple of weeks course.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think most P Ts would would agree that it is a terrible.

• 1:24:49Chris Williamson?

  My my point is.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  And anyone who relies on their P T level three as like the source of their.

• 1:24:53Chris Williamson?

  But my my point is from from starting point to qualified, the takeoff is rapid. Get yourself a job at the gym group and you're earning thirty five pounds an hour.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Chris Williamson?

  And you could be nineteen or twenty.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Flexible as well, so you could do it all.

• 1:25:07Chris Williamson?

  Thirty five pounds, even now it blows my mind that P Ts get paid that much. It's fantastic. It's an unbelievable route to get into and you go, right, okay, I need to do what? Let's say I do ten hours, twenty hours a week. Okay, that's between three hundred and fifty and seven hundred pounds a week. Which of your uni mates?

• 1:25:23Jonny?

  Any part time.

• 1:25:23Chris Williamson?

  Which of your uni mates? Just do, bin your weekends, bin your weekends for most of the time you're at uni, work during the day.

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  That is a good point, actually. I could have like, I think we could have done that quite easily.

• 1:25:32Jonny?

  Yeah, yeah, you just, well, I mean, the gym, the pure gym and all that stuff didn't exist, but yes.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:25:37Jonny?

  Yes, we could. I think, I mean, that's what a fantastic option for, yeah.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  So, speaking of gym.

• 1:25:43Jonny?

  Yes.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  Just thinking about this and.

• 1:25:44Jonny?

  Is Jim coming?

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  It, I think he's he's on his way, but.

• 1:25:48Jonny?

  Video guy Jim.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Video guy Jim. Um, so. Physical.

• 1:25:53Jonny?

  Yes.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  Covered academic, social, relationships, financial.

• 1:25:58Jonny?

  Yep.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Physical, you are between eighteen and twenty five. There is no excuse for you to not be in good shape at that age. You are a walking ball of steroids. So if you're if you're shapeless and skinny fat.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  And untrained and you have the full capacity to train and you you aren't, you're wasting a huge dimension of your life and of your body. And it only gets harder from then on in. And if you if you miss that window and you only start training when you're thirty, when you think you've got more time or when you're forty, you've missed on that window of potentially being able to build the base of a physique that you can carry for the rest of your life.

• 1:26:42Chris Williamson?

  That's a really good point. What's there's a um there's a specific window, I think it's between the age of like twelve and eighteen. Or is it twelve and fourteen or something, which is when people make particular physical adaptations, then they're more pronounced later in life. And I've got to presume that there's a tail off that will occur eighteen, twenty, twenty one, et cetera, et cetera. But you're totally right. Like the fact that the one of the only reasons I think that any of us are in good shape is the fact that we started training when we were eighteen years old. Like, I could never train again for the rest of my life, go back.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Younger, actually, for us, yeah.

• 1:27:11Chris Williamson?

  Go go go back in the gym at

• 1:27:15Chris Williamson?

  forty years old, forty five years old, spend six months in the gym.

• 1:27:19Chris Williamson?

  Back in good nick.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Like you you wouldn't even just the time alone, but also the the endocrine profile, the hormone profile that you had at the time was so conducive to muscle gain. And so the other mistake is like either not training at all or training, but constantly cutting, constantly trying to be shredded.

• 1:27:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so give me a very easy, I'm at university, I'm a girl or a guy. What's the split that I'm going to do? How am I going to train? So first off.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Goes for girls as well. Don't think just in terms of muscle mass and whatever. It's like, yeah.

• 1:27:50Chris Williamson?

  Um. So first off, I would say that a good opportunity to get around this, if you don't like the idea of training, if you're not into maybe training on your own. First off, get a training partner that may help. Alternative would be start doing a sport. Like if you're playing netball, you'll have netball training. If you're doing rowing, you're going to get absolutely caned with some good conditioning work. Rugby is going to have some good S and C coaches in there. You're going to have a community of other people around you. But if you're not doing a sport like that, remembering that every uni's got books, fucking table tennis, badminton, like ultimate frisbee, whatever it is, there's something for you. But if you don't want to do that and you're going to go on to a training split, what's the suggestion?

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  So get as lean as is reasonably practicable. So just like.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Below twelve percent body fat. So like either. Yeah, for ab. So for a guy or a girl, abs almost showing is lean enough. If you're leaner, then great. And then just spend as much time as possible gaining muscle. Don't go fulking, fat bulking. Don't get your membership at the KFC club. Just eat a slight surplus. You're gaining two to three hundred grams a month. For the whole of your degree. And if you really feel like you're spilling over with body fat, spend two or three weeks cutting. And get back on.

• 1:29:13Chris Williamson?

  Before you see them abroad. Um, what what are they doing in terms of training? Three days a week?

• 1:29:17Jonny?

  Can I just add on to that, an alternative? So if you do, if you're someone who's very visually focused. He isn't that bothered about, because ideally you're in a calorie surplus on maintenance the whole time. If you are gonna cut, I would cut in third term. I cut when exams are on. So don't let it get in the way of the rest of you. So like.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  That was something we both did right, I think, which was dieting when exams were going on.

• 1:29:41Jonny?

  More productive as well. You're gonna be at the library, you're distracted anyway. Term one, term two. So like, starting uni now. Just forget about body fat. Well, don't forget about it, but don't forget about cutting. Have two terms, like twenty weeks or longer. Of just built and muscle. And in the last term, if you wanna diet for some holiday, do it then. Um, that's the alternate. But ideally. You'll see, I just think it's hard. As an eighteen year old guy, you're extremely visually focused.

• 1:30:07Chris Williamson?

  I think I think that a lot of guys, or at least when I was at uni, a lot of guys were just concerned about being massive.

• 1:30:14Jonny?

  Right.

• 1:30:14Chris Williamson?

  The biggest guy was the best guy. So so again. Kind of this race to hyper masculinity, because no one's, no one is yet showing any. Outright signs of super masculinity, because you're all just basically big children.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  This this is the difficulty, isn't it? Because we're trying to give advice for the two sides. But yeah, for the people, because I know exactly the kind of person you mean, that just tries to get massive. And a lot of the time, they they overshoot and they just get fat and they end up just looking like.

• 1:30:39Chris Williamson?

  The girl, the girl that wants to remain, the girl that wants to try and get to a size four, like some unbelievably tiny size. So they're just constantly on the stepping machine. It's like, I'm telling you now that guys will find you more attractive. You will be more healthy. And you will enjoy the shape of your body more, and it will be more sustainable for longer, and your maintenance calories will be higher. If you've got a little bit of muscle mass and that does not mean that you actually look like you have muscle. It just means that you look like you have some shape to your body.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Chris Williamson?

  Um, my, yeah, again, I'm gonna fly the flag for it.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:31:12Chris Williamson?

  Join a CrossFit box, like.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:31:14Chris Williamson?

  I don't think as someone at university, you're, so the gym where I go, I think a normal membership seventy nine pounds. A CrossFit membership now is forty nine pounds. As a student, yes, forty nine pounds a month, that is expensive, but you essentially have a P T. Seven days a week doing a class, like if you're someone who's really into their athletics.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  It's a small price to pay, like I, I think never shy away from investing with yourself, especially like a gym membership. Forty nine pound a month, like you'd spend that in vodka easily, so.

• 1:31:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you spend that on two nights out.

• 1:31:45Jonny?

  Al- alternately, hire a coach. I, I've just finished working with someone who's just finished uni, so he's been at uni for four and a half years. And he, he's just finished working, he's off to work somewhere exotic, but his before and after, he is a completely different person.

• 1:32:00Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 1:32:00Jonny?

  Massively different person and he's, his, his pers- perspective on it is like, it completely reshaped my. Because you, you, we've all experienced it, you go from being like, not that big to being the person who is their big person.

• 1:32:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Jonny?

  And that impacts how you feel about yourself.

• 1:32:15Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:16Jonny?

  And when you're going through that phase of your life, having that as a, something to fall back on, like, I got this.

• 1:32:21Chris Williamson?

  I, so here's, here's something that I, that I always used to think while I was at uni. Was I would never ever miss a training session and the reason that I wouldn't ever miss a training session was because I knew that if everything else in my life. Had gone backwards that day because it's so turbulent, right?

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:32:34Chris Williamson?

  And we come back to the fact that you don't have a tremendously big sample of life to work with. Like almost every experience, especially when you've just moved away from home, everything's novel. You've never dealt with this before, so you have no idea of how to model what is going on.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:32:47Chris Williamson?

  Like now for me, it's very rare that I have a new experience. I'm like, I, everything is some version of something I've already dealt with, so I've got.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Which they think is why your life speeds up as you get older.

• 1:32:58Chris Williamson?

  Because it's all the same. Gretchen Rubin, uh, The Happiness Project, you should check that out if you want to learn out more. About how to extend your remembered self life through the use of novelty, um. But yeah, I remember that I always used to train. So I was like, if I fucked it today and everything's gone wrong and I had an argument with the girlfriend, the tobacco and this, that and the other. I know that I've got a good training session in and my body's progressed point naught one of a percent. Um, which is a nice way to do it. So any parting thoughts on how to survive university?

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  Final thing on physical is to get a slow cooker or a rice cooker or something. Um, because it just requires minimum um competence at baking food. You can just put a bunch of frozen stuff in or whatever and it makes something that is passable as a meal. And then you're not relying on like plain pasta or Domino's every day.

• 1:33:51Chris Williamson?

  Super cheap as well.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  Super, super cheap.

• 1:33:53Chris Williamson?

  Um, I actually got an email off someone asking if I was gonna make that slow cooker ever known to public. And I now have. So if you want the slow cooker recipes, which are idiot proof is in, I can make them and they're definitely uni student proof. Give me an email, the email address is in the show notes and I will send you the.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  So my rice cooker just broke of eight years, instantly bought another one, like didn't make, didn't have a second thought. And I tested the fuse first, just.

• 1:34:22Chris Williamson?

  So there was a second thought.

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  Well, I was like, oh, my rice cooker, I tried to perform CPR on it, didn't work, bought a new one.

• 1:34:28Chris Williamson?

  Um, parting thoughts on life at university?

• 1:34:34Chris Williamson?

  Try to not

• 1:34:38Chris Williamson?

  leave with a regret or try to minimize regrets.

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  How do you know what you're going to regret?

• 1:34:44Chris Williamson?

  So I think there it's a tough one, but I think saying saying yes to as many things as you can, like if there's something that's tempting and you find yourself saying no to something because like you're worried about, I need to do this assignment or I'm worried about my calories or whatever, like things that went through my head when I was at uni. Just have as many new experiences as you can, because it's like a period of of life where ultimately, I think probably all of us. I feel like I went in like eighteen year old kid and came out like I feel completely different now. So I think those experiences shape who you become. So.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Breadth of experience is important, I think.

• 1:35:22Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  Stop clinging on to what you think is safe. Or you will, all of those new experiences will completely pass you by. Um, it is possible to pass your degree and enjoy every new experience that you want to. You're fully capable of doing that. You're the one in charge of your time. And if you use the tips we've discussed, you'll be able to do all of that and have a really full day. Um, and a really rich life experience in those three years.

• 1:35:51Chris Williamson?

  I think, I think that's a really good way of putting it. The, if I'd known, attempted the stuff that we've gone through today of how to organise my life, or the fact that I shouldn't double down on any one set of experiences. So I became like big dick party boy, like that was my thing. And it meant that I missed out on a lot of experiences that would have occurred during the day. So I'd have thought, oh, well, I'm not going to go to the trip to Hadrian's Wall. Because like, that's rubbish. Like, no, I'm, I'll go out and get lashed with the lads. I'll, I'll day drink on Osborne Road from eleven AM when Spy Bar opens. Like, it's going to be just the same as when you day drank last week at eleven AM when Spy Bar.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  See, that, that's so insidious as well, because if that's what you spend your week doing and the next week, very soon it's the end of the year, you've missed out on that richness of life experience. And you have become a more boring, more basic person that is going to carry you for the rest of your life.

• 1:36:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  And so.

• 1:36:41Chris Williamson?

  It's a slippery slope.

• 1:36:43Jonny?

  So go to Hadrian's Wall.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  Go, just go to Hadrian's Wall.

• 1:36:45Chris Williamson?

  For bloody hell.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  And wear a condom while you're there.

• 1:36:51Jonny?

  That's it. That's what this episode should be called.

• 1:36:53Chris Williamson?

  Wear a condom while you're at Hadrian's.

• 1:36:54Jonny?

  Wear a condom while you're there.

• 1:36:56Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  Right. Okay, bye then. Thank you everyone. Bye.