How Do You Develop Real Confidence? - James Smith

James Smith is an author, podcaster, online trainer and not a life coach. Many people say that their number one personal development goal is to be more confident. But what if you don't have anything to be confident about? Is competence a required prerequisite to becoming confident or can you fake it until you make it? Expect to learn why most entrepreneurs are miserable, how leaving unasked questions can eat up your mental energy, the relationship between anxiety and confidence, how to deal with fear and failures, the heritability of confidence, whether women are actually more confident than men, the simplest way to build genuine confidence and much more... Sponsors: Get £150 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy How To Be Confident - https://amzn.to/3C0gBfe Check out James' Academy - https://www.jamessmithacademy.com/ Follow James on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jamessmithpt Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #confidence #failure #motivation - 00:00 Intro 03:17 Are Healthy Foods a Form of Oppression? 11:17 New Things Learned about Confidence 17:12 The Power of Rejection Therapy 23:20 Does Fake It ‘Til You Make It Work? 34:40 The Matthew Principle 44:20 Relationship Between Confidence & Anxiety 55:10 Celebrating Wins Vs Maintaining Focus 1:03:50 Preparing for Fatherhood & Family 1:08:15 James’s Relationship with Alcohol 1:18:07 Imbalances in Self-Judgment 1:26:45 Bullying Chris into Writing a Book 1:37:00 Where to Find James - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00James Smith?

  If you go through life, always taking the path of inaction, always opening these loops, wondering whether or not the girl on the tube was single, whether or not your boss would have given you a pay rise, whether or not you could have got more responsibility at work, whether or not you could have told your partner how you really felt, is it all a guise? Is not being confident a guise to excuse yourself for constantly picking the source of inaction?

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  I'm very, very happy for the last couple of months for you, some big wins, another Sunday Times bestseller, congrats man.

• 0:27James Smith?

  Mate, thank you very much. And the same goes for your camp. I mean, watching your trajectory over the last few months, it's been really good. Probably saw it before, like probably six months ago, when you went to Austin, I was like, this guy's, this guy's serious. This guy is going to start moving in some big circles. And then some of the guests you've had on, I think have just bolstered your credibility, like to that next level. Like, uh, yeah, you could see it from your first few years of effort, where you were going. And, uh, mate, it's been a pleasure to watch you go as well.

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  It's awesome to have a little community of people that are crushing it from the UK now. Really, really cool. And people that are all supporting each other, whether it's the trigonometry boys or yourself, Darren's starting to step things up, you know, people are moving away to different countries, places that they know they can get more growth in. And it's really positive some. Every time that you win, it makes me feel good, which is not necessarily something that I can say is a common culture in the UK. So I think setting that example is probably pretty good as well.

• 1:24James Smith?

  Yeah, I am, I hired like my first proper employee to help me with my socials, like, uh, pretty much like a social digital manager. And when it was things like YouTube, I was like, Chris Williamson, we need to be more like him. Your end cards, your content, the way things all connect together. An interesting paradox that I kind of created the other day, I call it the hater inspiration paradox. And in essence, most of the people that probably hate on you or hate on me, if I use myself as an example, often personal trainers or black belts in jiu jitsu. And the reason for that is they came to a fork in the roads where they could have been inspired by what I did or hate me for what I've done. And it's quite ironic that the majority of people that will criticize you could have

• 2:06James Smith?

  all too easily taken the same path as you to get to success. It's very weird. They're not, the people that hate you the most aren't strangers. They're very similar to these kind of like two little forks. And I'm sure that a lot of people back in the day would have seen what you'd done and could have had negative, negative things to say. But for me, I was like, what he's doing, success leaves clues. I was like, I need to step my game up, even if I could just, you know, follow the spearhead, even if I could just get in your, your path of least resistance behind you like a bird flying in formation. And yeah, it's good when we, we kind of put up strengths, weaknesses of, you know, real basic, who in the industry is killing it in these different social industries and your YouTube stuff is top level.

• 2:49Chris Williamson?

  We've worked out of it and you know, that's something that's good that it comes across and the same thing for you, you know, you specialize. I wonder how much of the swimmer body illusion thing comes through here with regards to socials as well, though, how many people are moving toward a platform which suits them. Me being short and pithy, the way that you do your stuff on Instagram wouldn't really work for me very well, but the longer form, more waffly verbose stuff seems to align. So yeah, there's, there's a lot to learn there. Before we get into talking about your new book, which is on confidence, there is a food standards video that the LA school district has just been slammed for. LA school district is slammed for posting woke video that's that calls junk food bad is wrong and promotes new concept of food neutrality that claims diet culture is based

• 3:34Chris Williamson?

  on oppression. The LAUSD posted the video on Instagram condemning negative attitudes towards junk food and claiming diet culture is based on oppression. In the video, nutritionist Kira Niembe Diop, who works with one of the world's largest snack companies urges people to eat food without guilt. She also asks the audience to avoid thinking of foods as good or bad and instead promotes a concept of food neutrality. Many took to social media to call out the lessons in the video and the fact that it was shared by one of the school's district's departments. What do you think about this?

• 4:05James Smith?

  Well, some of the things they said, I've said before, but because I'm a straight white male, you know, people probably disregarded that. Oh, it's okay for him, privileged, you know, all of these things. So to see it wokefied and then to have the finger pointed, you know, I've heard that dieting is racist, it's oppressive, you know, it's capitalistic. And people are getting very sidetracked with all of this, but watching the kind of woke version of it was a bit, yeah, a bit unsettling, to say the very least.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  It feel like your content from 2018 was being repurposed by the progressives.

• 4:39James Smith?

  Yeah, and I don't understand why they couldn't have just said, hey, guys, there's no such thing as a bad food, just a bad diet. There's no such thing as a good food, just a good diet, which I've got old videos from 2017 saying that. And to make it all about, you know, oppression and is, it's quite annoying to see something as simple as basic diet advice being put into a political pathway, where ultimately, you know, if we are going to solve childhood obesity and improve things in school, that needs to be a collective effort. And even if you're, you're extreme left or extreme right, surely everyone, or at least the majority of people, want their family, household of young children to be brought up into the best world, eating the best food and being the best composition for sport, health, social

• 5:22James Smith?

  activities, whatever. I don't understand why it'd be a political thing.

• 5:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a, a couple of sentences in here that people might not have seen if they haven't watched the video. You're judging my food choices based on a false standard of health again, aren't you? Diet culture, fatphobia and systems of oppression have created false hierarchies of food and it shows up everywhere. Nutritionist, who is then joined by Maya Finno, a black feminist and advocate against fat shaming, who suggests that junk food is not bad for you. We are all incorrectly taught from a young age that our size and therefore the food we eat are markers of our self-worth. No, I don't think that anyone says it is. It's marker of your health and your health's worth, though, perhaps. The only foods that are bad for you are foods that contain allergens, poisons and contaminants or foods that are spoiled or otherwise inedible. I think that this seems to me to be a way

• 6:10Chris Williamson?

  of using anything that you can get your hands on as a political football. What can you align a particular group with? How can you rally someone behind your cause? And saying this is oppressing, insert marginalized group one and insert marginalized group two. Like, you know, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if somehow they'd managed to inject sexuality into this as well. But my point being that Anybody that thinks that there are not better ways to eat over the long term and worse ways to eat over the long term, what job does she have being a nutritionist? Also, she might have a little bit of a, how would you say perverse incentive, given that she works for one of the world's biggest confectionery manufacturers?

• 6:55Chris Williamson?

  Like, could it be that she perhaps wants people to continue paying her wage? Maybe.

• 7:01James Smith?

  There's one of the most powerful lessons I've learnt from you, and there's quite a few that I'll explain in this podcast, but the inner citadel is rife within this kind of, you know, there's fat phobia, which again is used as a political tool, there's body positivity, some of the objective things she's saying, you know, like some people go to war with E numbers and, you know, they say, oh, if you can't pronounce the makeup of that ingredient, then you shouldn't eat it, but they've never looked at the makeup of a banana or a strawberry broken down to that level. And, you know, the whole, there are, I do agree with some of the elements of health at every size. If someone is obese, there are more than one ways we can make that person healthier. We don't have to just look at fat loss as a single metric for improving that person's health.

• 7:45James Smith?

  We can improve their cardio, you know, cardio ability, we could get them into a team sport, we could look at their sleep, we could look at all these things, but we can't just say to people, being overweight is fine. That's definitely an overcompensation. And I mean, again, there's lots of examples of overcompensation here. We can even look at it, there's almost a duality here with the feminism kind of side of things. The original cause for feminism is a fantastic cause, but there is an overcompensation that goes into the realm of man-hating. And, you know, is it missandry or misandry?

• 8:18Chris Williamson?

  Misandry.

• 8:18James Smith?

  Yeah, missandry. So they move into those realms of overcompensation. And it is kind of sad to see because that inner citadel effect is, it hasn't worked for me, and I'm not surprised with the current state of diet advice and, you know, some of the other things that are promoted in America. But you shouldn't go on to then a war against people trying to give health seeking advice and calling them fatphobic in the meantime.

• 8:41Chris Williamson?

  I was in Rome this week with my mum, and one of the things that I noticed while I was there was the difference in portion sizes. Frankly, I was still hungry after I finished some meals, but I was satisfied. Now, that's because I'm used to my satiated level is starter, main, side and big dessert. And I was getting an all right sized main, but it wasn't that big. And then maybe some gelato on the way past and I was still hungry. But I was thinking to myself, as I looked around the centre of Rome, which is a cosmopolitan city with people of all backgrounds and ethnicities and probably a big chunk of people in different classes as well. The difference in BMI between that city and a lot of the ones in America is pretty stark.

• 9:25Chris Williamson?

  And that I think can probably almost exclusively be laid at the feet of portion sizes.

• 9:31James Smith?

  Yeah, Joe, I was in Italy a few months ago and it's so funny, the Italian culture, I got on like a, an easy jet flight, the 7am easy jet flights when you're travelling around Europe seems so appealing until you do the maths off, you paid for it. Okay, I need to be at the airport for five. Shit, that means I've got to get up at four with a four in it. Anytime waking up with a four, so I was pretty grumpy on my way there. And the way that Italians don't queue, or they have a very different way of queuing to us. So I'm tired, I'm at the airport and people are just walking into the front and I'm like messaging my manager Luke, I'm like, man, Italians rude. He's like, that's what they're like. And I was like, oh God, I've got to get used to this. And the food is incredible in Italy, like it's incredible, but it is crazy. You go to like the Mediterranean or somewhere like that.

• 10:16James Smith?

  And like you say, people are slimmer, they're in better shape, they seem to be drinking all the time as well. I'm there like, how do you guys do this? Like, there's a new system I want to sell. Is it having a cigarette with a bit of coffee at breakfast? Then is it having wine with every meal? Maybe we're missing out on something that they, we need to take over to America and sell.

• 10:33Chris Williamson?

  I think it's just make the portion sizes smaller, man. Honestly, make the portion sizes smaller seems to be the biggest difference I could find. But yeah, to run that off, I think that any opportunity for people to use intersectionality and or oppression as the vehicle with which to, it latches itself onto something that is a common talking point, like diet, fat phobia, body image, body shaming. Yeah, it's, it's pretty dangerous because you're talking about things that impact people's health, genuinely impact people's health. This isn't just a fashion choice. This isn't about whether guys should be allowed to paint their nails or something like this is one of the fundamental elements that's going to contribute to your health long term.

• 11:18Chris Williamson?

  Moving on to confidence, what do you think, given all of the research that you did for your book, what do you think that most people misbelieve about confidence?

• 11:29James Smith?

  It's interesting that there are several kinds of lines of thought. And I'll say that half of what I wrote in the book I knew before, half I didn't. And, you know, John, I'm still not solid. The whole book doesn't say this is exactly what it is. I go through many theories where I see confidence on loads of spectrums, you know, confidence and anxiety, confidence predicting the outcome of success, anxiety predicting the outcome of failure. Then we could look at confidence alongside failure. Is confidence being okay with failure? Or is confidence something tied to winning? One of my favorite elements that I'll credit you for is when we were in Austin together, sinking a few beers, you told me about the Zeigarnik effect. And you started telling me about how you can open and close loops

• 12:12James Smith?

  in your lives. And if you don't do anything, it's going to take a mental drain on you. And something that now, that's something that you can leave with someone they can never forget. So I say to people, is confidence bullshit in some respects, that the majority of people use it as a reason to pick a path of inaction. So you hit a fork in the road, you can either take action or take inaction. If you go through life, always taking the path of inaction, always opening these loops, wondering whether or not the girl on the tube was single, whether or not your boss would have given you a pay rise, whether or not you could have got more responsibility at work, whether or not you could have told your partner how you really felt. Is it all a guise? Is not being confident a guise to excuse yourself for constantly picking the source of inaction? And if we can call bullshit

• 12:54James Smith?

  on this concept of low confidence, can we start looking things more pragmatically as an ability to close loops? And not even for confidence, let's put that to the side, for anxiety, mental drain, insomnia. You know, everyone's had it, probably where you've had a big night out. It's the easiest way to explain it. And you wake up and straight away, you think you've lost your mind. And you know you haven't lost your phone. You know you were texting or firing flares when you got in. You up babe? Or whatever it was, but you have to close the loop by getting up and holding the phone and going, it's here. And so one of the first things that I kind of learned, and I speak about in the book and the talk is, are we using low confidence as an excuse to

• 13:35James Smith?

  get away with not picking a path of action continually in life? And that really is a really hard point for people to think about because once you planted that seed in my mind, it couldn't go away. And that was kind of liberating. And then I was quite excited to plant that seed into everyone else's mind afterwards.

• 13:50Chris Williamson?

  It's a dangerous thing to know, to think about the fact that maybe I use I'm not very confident as an excuse to not put myself into situations where I can potentially face failure. Because by inoculating myself from making action in the real world, I ensure that failure never comes up against me by never actually stepping onto the arena floor. And I think that that's a, that's a concern for a lot of people, man. It, the open loops thing, I'd never thought about applying it to confidence and to the, the fact that people causing action to occur in their life. And you're right, the number of times that you think, I wonder what if, how many what ifs are you going to have? What if I'd spoken to the girl on the metro? What if I decided to ask my,

• 14:32Chris Williamson?

  my boss for a pay rise? What if I decided to move to another country? What if I'd left that toxic relationship I didn't want to? What if I stepped in and told my dad or my mum that their health habits were terrible and they shouldn't listen to that LA school district lady? All of these different things are continuing to open something in the back of your mind. And even if you're not consciously keeping track of them, I do believe that the subconscious is. I do believe that every time that you decide to lean out as opposed to lean in, you are making yourself into the sort of person who is going to continue to lean out in future when difficulty arises, when you are faced with an opportunity or a challenge that you need to try and overcome. Okay, every single decision that you make now is going to engender a type of person that will

• 15:14Chris Williamson?

  make that same kind of decision in future. So it's not just about what are you doing now? How much do you want to speak to that girl? It's do you want to be the sort of person in five years' time that would speak to the girl or not?

• 15:29James Smith?

  It's objectively known as well in psychology that when you question people on their deathbed, especially old people, and you ask them about their life, people regret the things they didn't do, not the things they did do that didn't work out. And we need to instill and kind of haunt people a little bit to fully appreciate that. When you are 50 years older than you are now, if you're lucky, you are going to regret all of these open loops, these what ifs, you're going to regret them, and they're all going to cause a lot of mental carnage in your mind. And there's something so beautiful about getting closure on something and realising it wasn't that bad. And another thing, I'm sure you've read quite a bit of Tim Ferriss's work as well, and one of his most famous tasks was about asking for a 10% discount on a coffee. And I

• 16:14James Smith?

  just wanted to insert that in the book. I just wanted to take that beautiful idea of asking for 10% and put it in. But what I realised is by putting it in the book, I opened my own loop. And then I had to go do the task that I never wanted to do. I just wanted to put it in there. And I thought, no one will know. And I thought, oh, no, this is going to haunt me. I'm not even going to be able to release the book. And I remind people that asking for 10% off a coffee isn't to get the 10% off, it's to look like a complete imbecile, a buffoon, it's to embarrass yourself, it's to completely disintegrate any comfort that you have. But it's only past that point you can appreciate how valuable it was putting yourself out there and how it wasn't that scary. And when you can accrue enough of these little victories, whether it's the

• 16:57James Smith?

  number, asking someone a single, even if that girl says, no, thanks, I've got a boyfriend, even if she's lying, there is a euphoria after, not because of the outcome, because of the action that you perceived so scarily big that you do it, and you realise it wasn't that bad at all.

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  Did you come across, when you were looking at the Ask for 10% off a coffee, did you come across rejection therapy and their 100 Days of Rejection Programme?

• 17:20James Smith?

  No, tell me more.

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so rejectiontherapy.com and there is 100 days of rejection principle here. And you're supposed to do this one per day for 100 days. And it's basically the same as what you're talking about, right? It's exposure therapy for people that don't like to do awkward things. Borrow $100 from a stranger, request a burger refill, ask for an Olympic symbol donut, deliver pizza for Domino's, have a tour in a grocery store warehouse, play soccer in someone else's backyard, speak over Costco's intercom, get number one spot in Best Buy's Thanksgiving line, send stuff to Santa Claus through FedEx, listen to a happy birthday song when it's not your birthday, learn sales from the number two car salesman in the country. Like, these are all different things that you can do.

• 18:05Chris Williamson?

  There's a TEDx talk of the same name that people can go and have a look at. But lots of people have done it, and I think it is, it's just exposure therapy about learning how unscary and undestructive receiving a no is. A lot of people, I think, have this tantamount to complete annihilation fear, that if they go up to someone and they don't get the response that they're expecting, that, I don't know. Just on the other side of that is obliteration.

• 18:37James Smith?

  They think it's Pyrrhic, which is another thing I think you might mention. Pyrrhic victories is from your email that you sent out before. Is this victory tantamount to defeat? In many cases, no. And do you know what? I've kind of tripped up into this through being poor. So when I was a student, I had no money. I would, you know, retake anything for work. I worked in a pub on a, like, pretty much like a caravan site when I was 16. When it was my 18th birthday, the guy who hired me was like, how old are you? I was like 18. He's like, you kidding me? You've been working in this pub for two years. He's like, I thought you were 18 before. So I used to work up there. We used to have, like, you know, builders in all the time. Whatever it was. And then I got offered a job working in shopping centres, stopping people to

• 19:19James Smith?

  to sell to them. So this is ten, fifteen years ago. Do you remember when Blockbuster started facing its demise, Love Film came out, where you get posted your DVDs? So I worked as a contractor for Love Film. And for every person I stopped and signed up to a membership, I got seven pounds, which you get your two coffees from Costa nowadays. So I used to do that in shopping centres. So the majority of things I experienced were nose. Then I got a job in door to door sales, working for N Power in Gloucester, knocking on doors, trying to convert people from the big giant British gas over to N Power. In some cases, I could save people four pounds a month. And then I had to be like, hey, look, forty, fifty pounds a year. That's a good saving. So I got rejected so much that I didn't realise how brilliant that was for me, you know, having

• 20:04James Smith?

  things, doors shut in your face, people telling you to fuck off, people getting angry that you're there trying to save them money or whatever. And I kind of went through that rejection therapy as part of work. And it's weird, because at the time I was like, I didn't enjoy it. But looking back now, it's one of the things I'm most grateful for.

• 20:21Chris Williamson?

  How much did that cross over into other areas of rejection fear and confidence, though? Because I know that you've spoken about how you drink or drank a lot before going on first dates because of anxiety about going up and speaking to a girl for the first time, even one that you've organised to go on a date with, or if you were given the choice between going and giving a presentation in front of a thousand people unprepared, or asking for a girl's number in a bar, you would happily go and give the presentation. So it does seem like there's different buckets or domains that confidence doesn't necessarily always cross over into.

• 20:51James Smith?

  A hundred percent. And again, the public speaking thing, for some reason, it relaxes me. Do you know what's really weird? And this is going to sound like such a narcissistic thing. The bigger the crowd, the more I can relax, because the less I can actually appreciate how many people are in the room. So if there's twenty, I don't know, twenty five, thirty people, I can actually lock eyes and, you know. Actually appreciate that there. When you get past a thousand people, it's beautiful because you can't lock into anyone that's there. But I think the rejection thing, you're completely right. And I speak about this in the talk, saying that, in essence, I'm an insecurity machine. Because I became a P T through working on my insecurities. I wanted to be less insecure and feel less inferior to other men. So then I did that. And then when I became a P T,

• 21:36James Smith?

  it was inadequacies and inferiorities that didn't really make prospecting a good thing. Because someone might not be able to afford P T. They might not want P T. They might be doing another plan. But it's very difficult to not take that personally, especially when you do appreciate. I never really appreciated Love Film. I never really appreciated N Power. But I appreciated myself as a trainer. I was like, I work hard, I'm good, I'm worth the money. So when I got rejected there, I was like, oh, that kind of hurts. So then, through being insecure there, that's what led me down the path of making social media content. So I made content so people would organically come to me. They were a warm lead. It would make the whole idea of prospecting or conversion a lot easier. But then I became insecure about my content being right. So now, out of fear of judgment and fear of, you know, all of

• 22:19James Smith?

  this, then I started going out and searching and educating myself on evidence-based courses. In essence, a lot of the success I've had in my life has come through working on my insecurities, which then only really clocks that this is one of the main lessons of Jordan Peterson, where if you're in an existential crisis, you're not sure what to do with your life, take stock of your insecurities and work on them. And I was like, I look back and I'm like, wow, I didn't even know that I was doing it.

• 22:45Chris Williamson?

  There are a lot of places that people can look. I mean, Peterson said this on the second episode that I did with him earlier this year. If you don't think that you have anything that you need to work on in your life, look inward. You know, you're not telling the truth sufficiently, you are not living up to your highest ideals, you're making promises to yourself and other people that you're not keeping, just this endless list of inadequacies, that small things, you know, the tiny little things. I promised that I would wash up tonight to myself. I promised that I would wash the dish and the glass that I had dinner in, and I didn't do it. Well, that's a thing. That's a thing that you can work on. A lot of people will have probably thought when it comes to confidence, especially looking at you, what's the chicken and egg scenario here? Does confidence come first or does competence

• 23:28Chris Williamson?

  come first? Can you fake it until you make it? What's your thoughts on that?

• 23:32James Smith?

  So I don't like the fake it till you make it thing. I think it's kind of a bit of a checkout of the conversation. That's a chicken and egg thing itself, but you're completely right. What I don't like, and I'll bring this into a context that you'll be familiar with, is when people see success straight away, they like to connect their own dots. It's like a heuristic where suddenly they're like, boom, boom. Okay, cool. And some of the ways that I don't like they do is they go, oh, you know, Chris Williamson, he's a confident guy. He's got a podcast. And you're like, okay, was he confident that he started a podcast? Or did he start a podcast that built his confidence? You know, the fact that you can jump into a podcast for three hours without show notes, is that competence or confidence? Exactly like you said. Then they'll sprinkle that with some

• 24:15James Smith?

  ideology that's rife at the moment. They'll go, ah, he's a straight white male as well. You know, he got everything he wanted in school. We got picked for sports teams, all of these things, which makes it a lot more of a complex debate. But with me, I think that it's only in retrospect that people now go, ah, he's confident. I'm like, part of me wants to say, fuck you. I was frightened at the beginning. I was petrified. I was, you know, scared, alone. I was, you know, as a PT on my own, even though it doesn't seem like a scary kind of job, it was. I left the corporate world. I moved back in my parents. I could have all too easily ended up skin broken, going back to door to door sales. So, you know, even that industry is quite siloed off because although you have banter with other PTs, you're competitors, you're not colleagues, you're in there fighting

• 24:58James Smith?

  for the same thing. And then it's just through consistent being okay with failing, turning up, and, you know, I'm coming up to 10 years now. If you've got anyone to do anything for 10 years that appear fucking confident, you know, not some, my mate Cam is a carpenter. I watch him do stuff. I'm like, mate, you're a wizard. And he's like, mate, I've been doing this since I was 15. And I'm like, okay, that makes sense. So it does kind of annoy me that people look at 10 years hard work and they can almost use this elixir of confidence as a reason to not fully appreciate what you've done. I mean, what episode of podcasts will this be? What number?

• 25:34Chris Williamson?

  530, 540.

• 25:37James Smith?

  So when you look at that times the hours, sometimes I'm not saying fuck you to the people, I'm saying fuck you to their heuristics, their mental.

• 25:47James Smith?

  Tendency to just take the reality and squish it and pull it apart to make it seem like it's trivial. Because that completely undermines the cheat code to success. What people need to be doing is to stop that that tendency to just make a snapshot decision of how it happened and look into it. Someone's go fucking hell, five hundred podcasts. How many hours is that? Oh, two hours a fucking podcast, a thousand hours. This guy's, you know, on his way to mastery, not to mention everything else you've done outside of it. So, yeah, the competency thing is is big and one of my favorite kind of lessons is about saying to people, stop avoiding failure because there is a massive utility to failing. Failing is brilliant because it brings you closer to competency.

• 26:32James Smith?

  It also shows you the path to not do things. So even if we go back to my door to door sales, if I was too cheeky, too crass, too provocative, too facetious, too, you know, nonchalant, it didn't work. So, and again, my YouTube strategy at the moment is to put out a hundred videos and take stock of what works and what doesn't. Ultimately, the algorithm wants people to watch my videos. If a video doesn't do well, it's on me. Double down on what does work. If I didn't, or I was so fearful of putting out a video that underperformed, I didn't put it out, I wouldn't be able to take that utility of it not performing. So, you know, if people don't look at failure that way, you know, having a girl just go, oh, no, gross, that was a horrible chat up. Although that is devastating to your ego and your confidence and your morale,

• 27:14James Smith?

  that could be a lesson in which you can take upon yourself to then improve. And if people don't look at failure as having this incredible utility, they're going to really struggle to ever develop their competence. And I say to people, if you become competent at something, two years' time, someone's going to say to you, you're confident. It's not, it's almost like a byproduct of seeking competency that we get this magical superpower of being confident.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  It seems like your expectations around what you can do and the challenges that the world is going to put up against you are one of the fundamental elements that this is. The first time that you do a live or a podcast or write a sub stack or pitch to someone on the front door of their house on a cold December evening or something, you don't know what your capacities are and you don't know the challenges that you're up against. And then even after you do know what your capacities are, sometimes the challenge can be so much further beyond anything that you've done before that you think, oh, God, like this is really, really scary to me. But. If you can get yourself into the mindset that on the edge of your zone of development

• 28:19Chris Williamson?

  is exactly where you're going to find out just how good you are. And if you're not that good, then fantastic, because it's going to give you feedback. I think I've heard you say that winning can cause you to become weak. Too much winning can cause weakness. And I mean, anyone that's been through a difficult breakup, like not one of the ones that completely destroyed your life, but one where you felt a little bit bitter and resentful afterward. Your gym discipline, your diet discipline, your personal development, at least for me and a lot of my friends, for the next three to six months was unbelievable. Turbo powered by that. Well, why? You've just come out the back of a failure. You've come out the back of something that shouldn't have happened, or you get scorned, or someone takes the piss

• 29:01Chris Williamson?

  out of you, or a person that you respected rebuffs your efforts, or something like that. That is motivation for a lot of people as well. And there definitely is a case of comfortable complacency that comes along with too many wins, or at least too many wins that are within a domain that you were never going to be challenged. If you keep on winning and you're always beating new records and always pushing yourself, I'm not sure that that would cause you to lose the edge. But certainly, the opportunity to use failure as fuel is a pretty big blessing for people.

• 29:38James Smith?

  I think this is why I love jiu-jitsu so much, because I had a period, 2020, it came out the pandemic, I trained a bit during the pandemic, you know, did some sneaky privates with the local black belts. And I went to compete and I was like, this is my opportunity to shine. And I even, this is the only time I've truly been overconfident with jiu-jitsu. This is exactly the humbling I needed. And I said to my housemates, I'll be pretty annoyed if I don't get gold. And I lost all my matches, like embarrassingly so. My first match, I tried too hard and I gassed out. And the most horrible feeling was knowing I'd lost. I'm tying my belt three minutes into the match. And I was like, I'm done. And the only time I'd competed and said, I don't want to be here. And he kind of finished me. And my whole team were there in the corner. And I couldn't look at them. They're like, well done. I'm

• 30:22James Smith?

  like, don't say well done to me. I didn't deserve it. Then the next match. My mates were like, relax, relax, you'll be fine. This guy just took my back and choked me out and they were like, he didn't even try. They weren't even, they weren't even trying coaching me. They were like, why didn't you just try it? I was like, my head had gone. And the next day was probably the only day that I felt like depressed about something in years. It had nothing to do with business, work, whatever. And then there was a little switch in my mind where I just started taking things so much more seriously. I started in privates with people. I started studying. I started looking into positions a bit more. And like, the next six months, I was a monster at training. I was like, I didn't matter who you were. I was like, I need to start scalping the higher belts, whatever it was. And then when I get through a period of being really comfortable in my training, I'll sit there and I go, fuck. I'm gonna have to compete again.

• 31:06James Smith?

  And when I compete, I can't, I hate losing, but I welcome it. If I lose, I'm gonna get that kind of beast trainee person back. Who eats more vegetables, hits their protein, goes to sleep early, says no to the beers. And the last time I competed, it was a really weird emotion. I wanted to win with everything I had, but I kind of wanted to get beaten as well. And I won all my matches. It's the hardest I've ever worked in com. And at the end of it, I couldn't believe how hard I'd worked for someone who kind of wanted to get beaten. And it was beautiful. It was euphoric. It was amazing. And then I came to the conclusion, I've got to compete at a bigger tournament now. And obviously jiu jitsu isn't my life. I don't get paid to do jiu jitsu. I teach a class for free on a Friday, like whatever it is.

• 31:51James Smith?

  That, to instill the values and the, the lessons I needed to take into everything else. Is, is such a beautiful thing. And I think that's why so many people love jiu jitsu because even Rogan, Lex Friedman, Jocko Willink, all these people. If they ever feel like they're winning too much in their life, they can put themselves in a room where they get humbled. And they realize they're not that great. And yeah, your podcast might be doing well. Yeah, you might have made a hundred million last year. Yeah, you might have got this big deal. But come to this room and get, get truly scorned, get beaten, get scalped, get humiliated in some respects. And it's such a beautiful feeling because if you remain in this echo chambered room of winning and you're the best or the greatest, which is all too easy with success.

• 32:34James Smith?

  You have too many yes men and I think they can really diminish your full potential. It's always good once in a while to just put yourself in that room and be terrified. When I trained in Austin. I, I relished the fact I was probably, if you put everyone in competency order, I was in the bottom three. And there were two guys that were in that bottom three with me. I was like, we're in it. We're in this together, guys.

• 32:55Chris Williamson?

  How heritable is confidence? Did you look at that?

• 32:59James Smith?

  Yeah, so heritability and confidence is an interesting one. I actually found an interesting study about adopted children. And so me, myself being adopted, I was like, is there, are my, are some of my personality traits, you know, in my genes? And it was saying that adoptive kids resemble the traits of their parents up until their young teenage years, and then they start moving into more of their genetic sequence and code. Then I started getting into this debate of gender and confidence. But I stayed clear of some of the debates because I was like, are men genuinely more competent? Or are they more disillusioned? Are they more, you know, programmed through evolution to be more competitive things? And I was like, you know what, I probably don't know enough about gender to delve into this. But what I

• 33:42James Smith?

  kind of came to the conclusion was, if you want to be a woman that's taller than a man, you've got it up against you. If you want to be a woman who's stronger than a man, okay, things are more in your control. You could be, you know, start working towards the higher echelon. That's something that you could really work towards. But I was like, if you want to be more confident than the majority of people, that's something you can actually do. And I could point at anyone, no matter what disadvantages they had from a genetic standpoint, upbringing standpoint, a trauma standpoint, give me that person for a year and get them to do enough practice, you can make someone incredibly confident. Whereas you can't make people taller, you can't make them, you know, more symmetrical in the face, you can't give them whatever it is that people say you like when you're

• 34:23James Smith?

  looking at social content. And I think there's a beauty to, even if you've got it against you from a hereditary standpoint or genetic standpoint, you can do the fucking work and get over it. If you want to play in the NBA and you're five foot two, you know, that's something where I'm like, oh, maybe, maybe you need a better goal.

• 34:40Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to think how low the bar is set for most people. This is one of the things that I think the black pill insult sort of discussion really gets wrong when it comes to men that aren't in the top 20% of men aren't being looked at by almost any women and blah, blah, blah. Do you realise how little almost every guy works on himself? Almost when you step outside of the world of internet personalities and look at the normal humans on the street, almost no one is doing pretty much anything to develop themselves and make themselves better. The people that are listening to this podcast simply by being interested in longer form conversations about personal development are in the top probably

• 35:24Chris Williamson?

  percentile, if not maybe 5% globally, right? All of the grandmothers that don't know that podcasts exist, all of the, okay, and then we'll reduce it down to men only, and all of the grandfathers that don't know that it exists, and all of the people that are too young, and all of the people that are too busy working, and all of the people that don't have an interest or an intellectual pursuit, all of that, all the way down, then to the point when all of the people that can't be bothered, that don't have the motivation to do it, that don't feel like it's going to be worth their time, that are too busy thinking about other things, that haven't got the inclination to do it. The bar is set so low because the selection effect is unbelievably low as well. And I think that if more people understood that the competition is minute, and all of the challenges that

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  people come up against, the boredom, the repetition, the loss of faith, the fear of rejection, everybody else faces that as well. So you have to presume that if you're facing it and you just get an inch past it, you have selected yourself out from what everybody feels into what only a tiny, tiny sliver of what is already a tiny subsection of everybody feels. To become an extraordinary individual to me doesn't seem like a particularly difficult pursuit. It just requires a little bit of movement. And this is something that going through your book, I kind of realised, which is the Matthew principle. Are you familiar with this? Okay.

• 36:45James Smith?

  It'll be in my next book.

• 36:47Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure it will. In the Bible, they talk about, it's in, it's in Matthew, which is why it's called the Matthew principle. And they say, from those who have everything more will be given, from those who have nothing more will be taken. And it describes, we call it what you want, the Pareto principle or power laws, right? These are ways that people who are winning accrue more wins and wins accrue to the people that already have them. People that are losing accrue more losses and losses continue to push down. And it seems to me that confidence works like this as well, that People who have even a tiny amount, they've decided to take that first step, that inertia that they've got past, and then they get a little bit of positive feedback from the world. So they have a bit of self-belief and then they decide to go a little bit further

• 37:30Chris Williamson?

  and get a bit more self-belief. That is how you look at a Rogan or a Dave Chappelle or Adele Beckham Jr. Or whoever you hold in high esteem as somebody that's incredibly confident. They have drilled this Matthew principle where confidence breeds competence breeds confidence breeds competence. And after a while, they look superhuman. I can't believe the capability that this person has. And then especially perhaps Rogan might be a good example for this, where you have someone that has crossed that confidence into multiple domains. So it's somebody that's not just prepared to do the podcasting, but then the live shows, but then

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  the jujitsu, but then the commentary, but then all that stuff, right? Douglas Murray is not only a speaker, but he's a writer, but he does the journalism thing, like someone that has gone through all of these. You think that person is so unbelievably willing to do things to the point where I can't recognize them as someone that is from the same species as me. And then you look at the people at the bottom and it's brutal because if you don't have the confidence to develop competence, you are going to reinforce that same cycle. And I think that this Matthew principle, from those who have everything more will be given, from those who have nothing more will be taken, just continues to diverge people. And this isn't some cis heteronormative patriarchal superstructure, right? This is simply the reinforcement mechanism. Peterson spoke about

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  this on the podcast. He said, almost all of the rivers, almost all of the water in rivers are held by only the biggest ones. Almost all of the mass that's held by star are only held in the biggest ones. Like, this is the way that things work in the world. This isn't due to some cultural artifact. This is simply due to the fact that people who do things and objects that have capability continue to do it more and more and more.

• 39:21James Smith?

  Someone said to me, oh, it's impressive you wrote a book. And I said, no. And I went in and I said, I said, fuck you. I was like, no. I was like, you've annoyed me with the way you've thought about this. And I said to them, I sit you down on a Monday. I give you a laptop. I give you unlimited coffee. I give you the internet and I put a pistol to the back of your head. And I say, here's your topic. I want you to research for 15 minutes and write for 15 minutes. We're going to meet at the same time every day. We're going to do this for 30 minutes every day. There's going to be a gun in the back of your head every day. If you don't do it, I'll shoot you. And in a year's time, we're going to assimilate all your work. And we're going to look to see whether or not you've put something together worth 10 pounds. Cool. Suddenly you realise it's not impressive to write a book.

• 40:05James Smith?

  It's not impressive to write a good book. All it takes is work and consistency. The hardest barrier to writing a good book is the belief that you can do it. The belief that you can turn up every day and put this together. Then the belief that you're willing to do the work and preparation required to sell it, promote it, go to the book signings, whatever it is. It's not an impressive feat to write a book. It's an impressive feat to believe you can do all of it together. And it's interesting what you say about, Joe, I've really been thinking about this whole status and men thing. And it is a really, really interesting thing. And there are some things that men can't do. And again, something, I'm not sure if I'm appalled, disgusted, offended, or what about it by the six sixes. You heard of this? In men.

• 40:49James Smith?

  So women over the years have, whether or not it's made up by women or this was made up by men, I'm not sure. But it says, women want the six sixes. Over six foot, over six figure salary, over 600 brake horsepower car, six months since next girlfriend, six pack and six inches below the waist. Now, the majority of women.

• 41:12James Smith?

  Not probably publicly on camera are looking for that. And the statistics on dating apps, eighty percent of women want a woman over, a man over six foot, which is fifteen percent of the population. So there are unrealistic expectations from women, especially when it comes to dating. I didn't even know on Hinge you can actually take off the height requirement. So they even get blind swiped. A friend of mine, I won't name him, he had to change his ethnicity because he was getting no swipes. So to the point that, you know, I was saying to him, mate, your, your account is broken or you've been shadow banned or whatever it was. And he had to lie about his ethnicity to white just to get matches.

• 41:51Chris Williamson?

  What was his original?

• 41:54James Smith?

  Well, he's from Morocco, right? So I'm not sure what, what he put in.

• 41:58Chris Williamson?

  Is that Arab? I feel like it might be.

• 42:01James Smith?

  Maybe, maybe something like that. But for him to lie about his ethnicity, and he definitely lied about his height. I was like, five left, he's short, mate. And I was like, wow, we're trying to jump through all of these hoops. But if we were to look at this statistic of how many men are actually within the six sixes, you're talking a fraction of a percentage. And if the majority of women are after that, not only is that fucked, but I've often thought about how could I help men with the things that are obtainable? And I would love to put together a program where you can mix a good mindset, an entrepreneurial brain and a martial art. And, you know, the competency, confidence thing. Once you have mastered or got your blue belt in, you know, martial arts, or you've got to the gym and you've sorted yourself out.

• 42:46James Smith?

  Once you can get someone to deadlift their body weight, do a chin up, strangle out someone at the same belt level, you know, run a five K without having a heart attack, have an online business where they put their laptop out for a few hours at night and they can create money or whatever. Suddenly, not only do you create a lifestyle that's congruent to happiness in a lot of people, not only do you improve their self-worth, their competency in the gym, whatever it is, you start to build their status from the inside up. And there are so many tools, like you say, that are just uncomfortable for people. People that want to sell a product, I'm going to put themselves out there. People that want to, you know, lift in the gym, don't want to be embarrassed or to get in front of someone else. People that go to martial arts are worried about sucking for the first two years, although that is the only way you can get better.

• 43:28James Smith?

  And I do often think that, you know, if a man out there wanted the six sixes, he's looking at the wrong things. Because I don't even think that the, those six elements are. Backed up by literature, the height thing especially, I believe you said it was, it's not a predictor in a success in a relationship.

• 43:44Chris Williamson?

  No, so there's an issue that we have here that the desired preferences from both men and women on the front end are not the things that predict relationship happiness long term. But there is an argument to be made that those are the things that get you past the front door. However, if you get past the front door regularly and the relationships aren't effective, you go, well, what's the point of of doing this in the first place? This is just like transactional sex. I'm just masturbating with someone else's body here. So.

• 44:15James Smith?

  Heard that.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  All right. So talk to me about, it seems like anxiety and this sort of fear of failure is one of the key elements of confidence or a lack of it. What did you discover as the relationship between confidence and anxiety?

• 44:32James Smith?

  So we need to have, it ties into expectations as well, similar to what you said, because if we see anxieties predicting an outcome of failure, that is also governed by a lot of mental biases we have. We have loss aversion, negativity bias. We've got all of these kinds of things pretty much. You know, like when you go to, I've just thought of this as an analogy again, and you roll the ball and it always is tilted to one way. So usually curves in the direction of the weighted ball. If you had pessimism on the left and optimism on the right, the way the human brain works is if you roll it down the middle, it's going to curve off towards the pessimism side. So we have that. So this tendency to predict things as a negative outcome is going to happen. So how is it that we predict an outcome of success? How is it we can bolster our expectations?

• 45:15James Smith?

  It's not a simple exercise, but we do need to go into things, you know, being more optimistic about it. And if, if we're really crippled by this fear of anxiety or whatever, can we redefine the metrics for success? So let's say you are a single man, you feel like you're a low status, you feel like you're petrified. Can you just say hello to someone? Can you compliment them on what they're wearing? Can you ask them what they do? Not invasive, not creepy, be shiverous, hold a door open to someone, hey. You know, my name is James. I haven't seen you around here before. Do you study here? Are you, you know, is this your local coffee shop? You know, I usually say hello to whatever. There's something within people's capability that they have the confidence to do, whether it's prospecting or talking to someone for their business. If you set the bars too far, it's always going to be very daunting.

• 45:59James Smith?

  And again, we can always relate this back to fitness. You never as a trainer would get someone into the gym and get them to do something they can't do. That's going to diminish their confidence, their ego, their self-esteem, whatever. It's all about finding what they can do and working with them to decide what's the next logical step. And that's why we have little 2.5 kilogram discs, you know? That's why we have these things. So if people can just snap out this mentality of being pessimistic, expecting things to go badly. If I get someone to squat 50 kilograms, I'm now instilled into them that they're strong enough to do it. You can then work along with them and say, look, I think 55 is within your reach. If you can do 50 for five, you can do 52.5 fucking three, whatever it is. And we need to install progressive overload into people. We would never chuck 40 kilograms onto someone's back squat and expect them to do it.

• 46:44James Smith?

  So when people do take stock of this appreciation that they're going to predict a negative outcome. Okay, why is that? We set in the metrics for success too high. Can we break this down to, okay, jiu-jitsu scares the fuck out of you. Could you go to your local gym and say hello? Could you watch 10 minutes of a class? Okay, dating scares the shit out of you. Could you talk to a stranger? You know, okay, business scares the shit out of you. Okay, could you cold call one person a day to pitch for business? Whatever it is. And yet, in essence, the anxiety is sometimes caused by having a lack of evidence that you're good at it. But you can't accrue evidence without action. So it has to be almost action first. Create evidence that you're competent, diminish anxiety over time.

• 47:28James Smith?

  But it is such a complex nuanced debate that's case specific. In essence, we kind of just need to get people and rattle them up and say, you need to take action. You're not going to know anything about yourself, your capabilities, until you start doing it. And it's so much about getting moving and correcting the course on the way. Have you ever noticed that like, you write brilliant email marketing emails? Sometimes you've just got to start writing and then you can always delete the first third. And then you have a beautiful, brilliant email. The worst thing is being sat there with nothing on your screen, being crippled by this notion that you don't know what you're going to do. A lot of the time I'll just start typing, get in a flow, get realised that this isn't even the topic I want to write about, go back, delete the first part and I'm suddenly there.

• 48:10James Smith?

  Action precedes motivation, action precedes competence, action precedes, you know, confidence, all of these things. And it's about taking the step first and correcting it on the way.

• 48:20Chris Williamson?

  I think that's right. I think that people being stuck in inaction, spinning their wheels, with the anxiety cost or the open loops from the Zeigarnik effect just playing rampant in their mind. Another thing to consider as well is that failure under conditions of optimism is very different to failure under conditions of pessimism. Because failure under pessimism confirms your fears, failure under optimism feels like an aberration. And this is something that I I've been thinking about a little bit, that having a single vehicle for developing your confidence seems like a good idea. Now, we mentioned earlier on that confidence in one area doesn't necessarily always cross over. Just because you're great at rugby doesn't mean that you're going to be able to speak to girls in a bar.

• 49:01Chris Williamson?

  But I do think that having a primary vehicle, that you build that confidence competence feedback loop is a really good idea. And the reason for it is you become ever more attuned to how your performance within that particular domain is going. And I think that maybe for you it's Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and and writing perhaps, or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and social media or something like that. Certainly for me, looking, and I reflected a lot reading the book on sort of my journey from pretty unconfident person to now, at least within certain domains, feeling fine to go on Rogan or to speak to Jordan.

• 49:37James Smith?

  You were very, very fucking composed on that. I messaged you, I was like, how's he doing this? How's he doing this? Because any person that's got any digital persona or presence always imagines what it'd be like to get a message from Rogan. And you got it, you went on and it was like, it was your third episode. It was like you were one of his mates. An hour in, I messaged you, I was like, fucking hell, how are you doing this? I want to know, how many ice baths have you been on?

• 49:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe that contributed. Well, it's interesting with that, like.

• 50:04Chris Williamson?

  People brought that up about, you know, the Rogan thing. It's a big deal, but it would have been a bigger deal for me to go through this entire journey of making 500 podcasts and speaking to all of these people and then to get a message and feel like it was a shock. It's like, no, this is what you were working towards. This is what you meant to happen. Like, yeah, maybe you've jumped ahead a few moves that you were pleasantly surprised by, but this is literally the goal of what you didn't mean for this to not happen. Therefore, congratulations. But yeah, the journey and having a single pursuit that you can focus on, look, this is my vehicle for me developing my confidence. And I think that it's so interesting reflecting on the person that I was maybe four or five years ago, especially starting

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  the show or the way that I would have framed things because it was very, very anxious centric. It was very much loss aversion. I would be playing not to lose rather than to win. That would have been my approach. I would have always been trying to take a very easy, no failure potential route. That would have been how I would have gone about stuff. And now, if I have a bad episode on the show, one that I consider to be bad when my performance isn't quite right, rather than saying this is some moral judgment on my worth as a person, this is because I am useless, bad, inconsistent, undisciplined, whatever, whatever, I can just look at it as what it is. I'm a lot more detached from my performance and my self-worth because

• 51:31Chris Williamson?

  I can say, well, look, what's the reason for why you performed the way you performed? Maybe you were underslept. Maybe you hadn't hydrated enough. Maybe you were too hungry. Maybe you hadn't prepared enough for the guest. Perhaps the guest was having a bad day. Maybe it's not your fault. Maybe it's them that, what else can you do? And that's what I mean when failure under conditions of pessimism versus failure under conditions of optimism are very, very different experiences. It's that John Kavanaugh thing, you win or you learn. And whereas in reverse, it's either, I don't know, you fail and your preconceived ideas about what you were going to do are confirmed, or you're surprised. Like, that's the alternative, right? That's pessimism versus optimism.

• 52:11James Smith?

  Yeah, and it's interesting. I joked there about ice baths. I'm not, I'm not a fan of ice baths. It doesn't mean I don't rate what they do for people. I just don't like cold water. And I think there is, with confidence as well, if you can do things that really disturb you, like not, not from trauma, but like, competing for me, I hate it because I put so much pressure on myself to, to win. And I also just put so much pressure on myself. I'm like, this is my identity. This is what I love. This is what I want to do. That it's frightening. It's terrifying. And especially when you can get injured. So in training, people won't try and injure you. In competition, it's about making your opponent submit. If a leg breaks, if a knee pops, anything, it's kind of fair game. You put yourself in the competition bracket.

• 52:56James Smith?

  You don't know anything about your opponent. You don't know what they're like. I joke and I go, maybe he's been to jail. Maybe, you know, whatever it is. So everything's on the line. My meniscus, my ACLs, my rotator cuff. I saw like a spiral fracture in someone's humorous from someone not tapping. So shit can get pretty gnarly. But by putting myself in there, and when I'm competing, I say to people, I hate competing. I hate it. When I'm stood there on the mat, my feet are sliding around in sweat inside my flip flops. I'm stood there and for the moment before I step on, I go, why am I here? Why have I ruined my weekend by doing this? But the second it's all over, suddenly everything else isn't so bad. Suddenly the podcast, the FaceTime, the talking on stage, whatever. And I think that's why a lot of people get, you know, such benefit of ice baths, because when they're sat there,

• 53:41James Smith?

  their mind's saying stay, their body's saying, what are you doing? We're gonna die. And if you can, if you can harness the monster of that discomfort, suddenly get out an ice bath and go, oh, I'm single, I'm lonely. That's a pain point. I'd like to address it. There's a loop here I could close. I'm gonna take my headphones out. Hey, look, never seen you in the Starbucks before. Uh, you know, I think you're really pretty. Uh, if you haven't got a boyfriend, here's my number. Uh, if you do have a boyfriend or you wanna lie to me, that's completely fine. Great day. You know what I mean? Suddenly, if someone was to go, ice bath for five minutes, or ask to go, oh, ask ten birds out, you know, ask ten of them. So.

• 54:15Chris Williamson?

  That's why you need to do it, man, I think. And this is something I realised living with Zach, because we've got an ice bath now out the back of the house. Which you will be forced into when you come back to Austin. And for me, I find it, it's difficult, but it's not that hard. Forty degree water for three, five minutes, we've worked ourselves up to now. And it's just not that hard for me. So although it's, I can almost kid myself into convincing me that I've done something hard because for Zach, it is Zach was getting in and out, talking to himself, he'd be in for 20 seconds, he'd get out, call himself a bitch, get back in, get back out for 10 seconds, get back in, and he'd be shouting at himself. I've seen, I've watched that boy get in and out of cold

• 54:52Chris Williamson?

  tubs, like in reps, he's done reps of cold tubs, not sets. And it's easy to kid yourself that the thing that you're doing is difficult. A lot of the time, I think that's people playing within their own inner citadel, perhaps, or just like their zone of competence. And another thing that I was considering as well is how rarely driven people celebrate their wins. You're very, very quickly looking past whatever it is that you've just done, peering over its shoulder, even as it's only just finished, to then think about what's next. And this is a real delicate balance, I think, that people need to be able to be

• 55:35Chris Williamson?

  grateful, thankful, and celebrity of their own victories whilst not letting themselves lose that edge. It's a very, very hard balance to strike.

• 55:47James Smith?

  This is something I'm struggling with. If you were to say, what's your biggest mental downfall at the moment, it would be the ability to celebrate victories. And I'm the one that says, you know, we need to be set in the metrics. And I think that anyone that's in my position is very easy to be a hypocrite. It's very easy. Some of the advice I give, I can't take myself. And one of it is about celebrating small wins. And I've been good at it before, but I've also been terrible. This weekend, Ventum Apollo, we've got three and a half thousand people, sold out event. And in my mind, like, people are like, you must be buzzing. I'm like, I don't think I am. Because to me, one, I want to make sure it goes well. I can't be happy until it's gone well. And even if it goes well, and afterwards, people come up to me and go, that's the best you've ever

• 56:28James Smith?

  spoken. In my head, I'm like, well, what next? And I'm really, I did it with a million followers on Insta. You know, had a beer, then the million on TikTok. These are things I looked forward to for years. Then um third time bestseller. My publisher at Harper Collins, he goes, you and Luke have just done the exact same thing. He goes, what? He goes, you should have celebrated, but instead you were relieved. Because the idea of failing to you was such a big thing you wanted to avoid. That you shouldn't feel a sense of relief when you conquer things that you wanted to conquer. He's like, you should be happy. And I think about this quite a lot. Because I don't take stock of any achievements or accomplishments and where is,

• 57:13James Smith?

  what you always want to do is have someone slightly above you, similar to the humility thing in Jiu Jitsu. They're always high abouts. Even when you're a black belt, there's someone who's higher than you as a black belt. And the gradings of black belt go on time. So if someone's a black belt now, I can never overtake him. So that's impossible. But like, I did a really cool show, did Manchester Apollo. And then I was like, oh, Peterson sold it out two nights in a row. And then I did the event in Apollo and then they're like, oh, Peterson did that and he added Wembley. And I'm like, fuck, I'm not, I'm not doing Wembley. And you know, if I could only go back to twenty eighteen, James and knock him on the fucking face and be like, hey, mate, you're doing fifty people at a venue now. You're going to be doing three and a half thousand soon. Twenty eighteen, James, but fuck, oh, you're gonna have a million followers. Shut the fuck up.

• 57:55James Smith?

  You have three bestselling books. Fuck, oh my God, I can't wait to be thirty three. But now at thirty three, I'm kind of like, oh, you know, and it is a difficult thing where. Did this happen for you after Rogan?

• 58:09Chris Williamson?

  A little, but not much, a little but not much. Um, mostly because it was, it's like a step change, I think, in how you're perceived or whatever within the industry, that you've got the stamp of approval of the guy that's currently the leader. But I learned about a term called championship ring or it's got a gold medal syndrome. Uh, which is.

• 58:32James Smith?

  Depressioning gold medal athletes?

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:35James Smith?

  Yeah.

• 58:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, what do you do after you've done one? But I did mention one, one of the guys from Trigonometry, I took them out the week before I went on and they were going on Rogan the next day and we did the ice path in Cold Turb and went for barbecue at Terry Black's and they were going through, vacillating through the same emotions that I was about to the next week. So it's kind of funny to see them six days ahead of me doing the thing that I was about to go and do. And one of the guys mentioned, I'm concerned about this sort of gold medal depression thing. And I was like, well, yeah, but there's a reason that you've got 10 fingers and a championship ring only fits on one. So the goal of going on and doing it is to go and do it again.

• 59:17Chris Williamson?

  Like, you know, if you're Gordon Ryan, right? And he's got a couple more challenges for this year, maybe two more challenges, I think. And then if he does those, there is no way that anybody could say he's not the greatest grappler that's ever lived. Okay. Well, if you've won this title for the first time of greatest grappler, how long can you hold on to it? Can you do it for two years? Can you do it for three years? Can you sustain it without any injuries? Can you do it flawlessly? Can you beat everybody in under a minute? There is always a next level, I think, to get yourself to. But it's interesting. I think it's important for people to hear the challenges that you would have, that they will face as well. You know, the guy that's sold all of the tickets at the live shows and does the thing for some

• 59:59Chris Williamson?

  reason, despite the fact that he literally wrote a book on trying to be as grateful as possible and celebrating small victories. And he's got this big academy of people and he's saying, you lost, you lost a pound this week. You've lost 10 pounds so far this year. Congratulations. This is something that you should, is struggling to imbibe his own advice. And this is why the insights that people that are genuinely writing content and creating stuff from the heart, that's why they're valuable. This is the big difference, I think, between somebody like yourself and somebody like Brian Rose, let's say, who I think is completely creating content exclusively to try and get an effect. I don't think that he's personally invested.

• 1:00:42Chris Williamson?

  And I watched one video from him a few years ago, and I've been very public of my distaste for Brian online. And I know that you've been on his podcast, so you don't, you don't need to comment, but. I saw a video from him talking about his alcohol addiction and he'd faced the camera and he's walking around near Bethnal Green or something like that. And he is genuinely opening up about the fact that he struggled with alcohol daily for decades, maybe, maybe multiple decades. And I was like, if this was what this guy's content was like all the time, not only would I not be a hater, I would be a genuine fan. This feels like him opening up. This is evidently something which not only is valuable, but is something that is super, super personal to him. This is, this is a different version of this man.

• 1:01:26Chris Williamson?

  So my point being, when people do things, I think it's very important for those that have got positions of success on the come up to continue to remind people that the challenges that everybody else is facing are still the ones that the people that are leading the space are as well.

• 1:01:42James Smith?

  I think that, and it sounds really privileged to say this, there becomes a numbing effect the higher echelons you go to because you become conditioned to it. Like I even, I flew first class about a month ago and when I sat there, I wasn't buzzing like I used to. And I was like, James, you fucking piece of shit. Like you were fucking emotional the first time that you sat in business class. You had a glass of wine, you sat there, you're like, oh my God, this is amazing. I don't even drink on them anymore. I'm like, oh no, I don't want to be tired when I get to the other end. I'm like, this is the fucking pinnacle of most business people's lives. So I kind of do have to remind myself, but weirdly this numbness to success is making me broody, right? To have kids.

• 1:02:24James Smith?

  Because part of me is like, you get, you get kind of above the parapet in a certain sense and my life's great or whatever. And I kind of think like in the next three to five years, what would be great would be the inclusion of kids as a project, as something to then, not to be constantly dissatisfied with the, the wins, but to have something completely, and I could be wrong by all means, I could be on a podcast in a few years going, mate, don't have kids. But part of me is like, I want to take things away from venues, revenue, all this thing, and have like a little project that can sit by the side of it. So I have my humility in jujitsu, my ultimate project being my kids. And then I have business as just like one leg of everything so that you can kind of like diversify your attention to different things.

• 1:03:09James Smith?

  But yeah, I think that, I don't know whether or not it's. Actually in there, but the last couple of years, I was like, oh, I'm kind of getting a bit broody for that because you kind of complete these, these fields in, you know, certain areas with podcasting, whatever it is, but it's almost not real. You know what I mean? It's not real. The money comes, you spend it, it's gone, boom. The podcasts, they come, people listen, they go into like a, a library. And then sometimes you just want to make sure that you're winning the right races because ultimately what you don't want is to have this mega podcast, mega loads of money, but not have a family and the little stuff.

• 1:03:42Chris Williamson?

  No one to share it with.

• 1:03:44James Smith?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I think we're both in a similar situation here. I've been saying, people have been asking, do you want to have kids? And it's only been the last two years, probably that I've genuinely been able to say that I can't wait to become a dad. Genuinely cannot wait to become a dad because all of this time that you've spent working on yourself and building yourself up and helping other people to upskill their world. And it's fantastic and fulfilling, but it's, it doesn't feel as altruistic as funneling all of that toward some tiny little human that is your genetic heritage. And one of my friends, David Perel, was talking to me and he was, he's someone that's very, very successful. He does Right of Passage, which is this cohort based online course and it's, it,

• 1:04:29Chris Williamson?

  it makes a terrifying amount of money and is very, very successful and helps people to enact their dream of becoming writers online. So it's fulfilling and all the rest of it. And we were out for dinner and he said something along the lines of, I think I spent most of my twenties preparing myself to become the father that I want to be. And that is a beautiful way to look at it, even though you weren't doing it at the time, even though that was, it was your inefficiencies and fears of self-worth and your desire to chase tail and get drunk and do whatever. All of those experiences created a person downstream from that, that is going to be the sort of father that you want to be. And I think it's one of the justifications, you know, for all of the more

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  50.1% of women at the age of 30 and blah, blah, blah, and all of this sort of stuff, there is a non-small cohort of people for whom the kinds of parents they will be in their 30s are.

• 1:05:26Chris Williamson?

  Orders of magnitude greater than what they would have been in their twenties. And I think that me and you probably fall into that camp.

• 1:05:33James Smith?

  Yeah, I think it's kind of sad when I listen. You know, sometimes when I listen to entrepreneurs talk, sometimes I feel sorry for them. It's really weird thing. Like, people that are so caught up with money, I think you're never going to love anything as much as you love making money. And money, although it opens up experiences, whatever, I was like, I really, I look at them and I go, I really hope I never have that relationship with money. Because you'll probably like that more than your kids or whatever. But also, when people say like, oh, how do I even know I like my kids? You know, I think it was Alex Hormozzi, that guy, him and Derek, More Place More Dates, talking about, oh, why would you have kids? It would ruin your productivity. Why would you have kids that would do all this? And part of me, like, I said this to quite a wealthy person the other day, and I don't think he liked it. I said, I'm

• 1:06:17James Smith?

  wealthier than you, you've just got more money. And I really didn't sit well with him. And I was like, I kind of feel sorry for people that are like that, because ultimately, it's like the ultimate sacrifice. You know, back in the day, you could like-

• 1:06:30Chris Williamson?

  Is that your, is that your dog? Can you go and strangle it?

• 1:06:33James Smith?

  Mate, I'll take a free kick into its arse. It's the most happiest, you could tell it's a Jack Russell, right? It's got, bad dog's got anxiety. You know, like, back in the day, you could be like a Spartan warrior, and you'd be like, the best thing we could do is die in battle. But now you can't even do that, probably, because, you know, you would just be sent off to some little conflicts, that's a political thing, and you die, and it would just be a waste. Now, I feel like the best way to fall on your sword is to be like a proper good parent.

• 1:06:57Chris Williamson?

  I think that's not far off. Hormozzi and Leila, when they came on Modern Wisdom, they spoke with a little bit more nuance about the position. And they said that a lot of what people are trying to do with kids, there's, Alex had read something about it, and it was in a nice framework, six areas, service, legacy, improvement, something else, something else, something else. And he said, we feel like we already get that from the particular construct that we have to our life now. And that seems like a more balanced version than it's going to damage my productivity. But one of those may be the real one, and the other one may be the public facing version. I don't know which one's which. But yeah, I think, um- For me and you, from where we are now, which if you told me this, I guess if you told either

• 1:07:41Chris Williamson?

  of this, what, five years ago, yeah, man, you're going to feel paternal broodiness. You're going to not actively hate kids, or they're annoying, or they're the thing that stops your business partner from being able to go out on the lash with you, or whatever that they were, but you're actively going to, when you see one on holiday, you go like, oh, pretty cool, isn't he? He's cool. You spend longer than you should grinning at them. And then the parents see you and you're like, oh, because the nonce radar is like, no, he's like, he's cute, he's cute. I'm not attracted to him. But yeah, another thing that you mentioned earlier on was alcohol, and I brought it up to do with Brian as well. Alcohol is bottle confidence is something that I've heard a lot of people talk about. But I also know

• 1:08:25Chris Williamson?

  that your relationship with alcohol has changed a good bit recently. Talk me through that.

• 1:08:29James Smith?

  Yeah, you know what, like, it just makes me feel like shit more than ever. And I'm not sure if that's physiological or psychological. And it's quite interesting because now, if I go back through my rugby pictures, I've got a beer in my hand all the time. And I used to drink heavily every weekend. Part of me looks back now, I kind of cringe looking at my younger self going, cool, James, you were, if I could just snap into your life and go, mate, why are you getting blackout drunk every, one in every seven days? I still drink now, but for the right occasion. Like, we finished the event the other day. Oh, do you want a beer? I'm like, no, I'm cool. But then we had Phil Graham host us in Belfast with that big feed. And I was like, yeah, I'll have some of mine here. But then the dating, taking alcohol out of the equation was another utility of deprivation. So I

• 1:09:13James Smith?

  ask people with dating apps, I'm not going to say I'm better than you because I didn't use one, could removing dating apps make you a more confident person? If the answer's yes, you should consider to do it. Cool. Now you're going on dates. Could removing alcohol from that situation make you more confident on dates? It's kind of a double edged sword, this one, because in essence, it will make you have to do the practice you need, rather than alcohol, just masking it, covering it up. Cool. Also, I have a big bit about this in my live show where I talk about the effects of drinking on dates. Where you meet someone and you're like, nah, that's not me. One drink, you're like, hey, I'm being sociable. I'm out, I'm enjoying myself. Then you have two drinks and you're like, I really should stop judging a book by its front cover. And then by six drinks, you're like, wow, this is gonna work.

• 1:09:58James Smith?

  Yeah. And then the next day, you're like, fuck, I shouldn't have done that. So like alcohol, I think there's a, there's definitely a utility of depriving it. Then JP's utility of deprivation with porn. So porn stops you from going on dates because if you have a wank, there's no way you're dating anyone for the next six hours. I've probably pulled out more dates than I have women. And then when I go on dates, I've got a utility of deprivation of drinking. Okay, I don't drink, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, there's definitely, alcohol should be used kind of sparingly. I know you've done stints as well of sobriety, but I think that I'm in a happy relationship now and that's a massive kind of benefit to not wanting to drink. So I'm kind of like, what's the point? Yep. And I know that Andrew Tate jokes, I remember just before he got cancelled, he was like, clubs are for people to fuck.

• 1:10:44James Smith?

  He's like, you go there, you get drunk, the dynamic is that men buy the drinks for the women, women flock to the guys, cool. Men get pussy, girls get dick, whatever. That's his like, his way of, his angle in it. Then I was like, fuck, he's got a fair point. I was like, now that I have a missus, I wouldn't dream of going to a club. I'd be like, what's the point? They're like, oh, but you can get drunk and dance. I'm like, yeah, but what's the point? Yes. You know, I have other things that make me happy. So, uh, yeah, alcohol, I think is sometimes nice, relaxing, but it's also self-destructive. I think people do need to appreciate that. And if you've got goals and ambitions in your life that you want to accomplish, if wanking, dating apps and booze are getting in the way of that, you need to eradicate them. And you can always

• 1:11:25James Smith?

  reintroduce booze when you're in a happy relationship or a marriage. You can always reintroduce porn, even when you're in that relationship. You can always, you know, reintroduce dating apps if you've got nothing in your, your pipeline, but people do need to look into alcohols. A crux that almost bypasses. Confidence is a lot like fitness. You do need to keep working and paying into it. Otherwise it will go away and it will diminish. You lose anything. Skills are perishable. John Dana has said that. Gordon Myers' coach. And you never really think about the things that, you know, define the skills, even whether it's playing darts or bowling or whatever, they perish over time. They will diminish over time. So I think that you don't want to become too reliant on alcohol, otherwise everything will seem more daunting sober.

• 1:12:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, alcohol is a butler's that a lot of people rely on because they're scared of being social sober. And a lot of the time is, I mean, I've spoken about this forever, right? This has been my thing for a very long time, the sobriety stint. It was one of the biggest, most important changes that I'd made in my life, not because I had a problem with drinking, but because I needed more time and money and consistency and energy to spend on things that I truly cared about. There's this quote from Homose, actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a prediction about one of the things that I think you may end up dialing back in future as well. I think that you'll end up being red pilled about caffeine too. I think that you'll end up dialing that back as well. And this from Homose is after I'd done 500

• 1:12:47Chris Williamson?

  days without caffeine, this absolutely nailed why I did it. Cycle stimulants, don't let them use you. If you can't function without them, they've stopped conferring a benefit. Be able to stop and only use them when you really know you can crush. Off on, off on is typically good enough for most.

• 1:13:08James Smith?

  I do love caffeine. I think it's probably as well because, um, do you know what? It sounds crazy to say this. I recreationally use drugs all my life. I went through a phase when I came off alcohol in my early twenties, took MD. When I took MD, I was like, wow, why have I drunk my whole life? I went through all these kind of cycles. And then, you know, that early phase of coming into money and you're like, oh, you know, we'll get a bag in, go somewhere nice, whatever it is. But genuinely, when that caffeine hits me in the morning, it's like my favorite drug. Like, because my values are so leaning on productivity and work and servicing, like a good video, a good concept, a good live video, even going in the Facebook comments on like my group or whatever. So I'm getting a high from a

• 1:13:50James Smith?

  drug and I'm being productive. I've got these two realms of like happiness and dopamine coming in through it. I'm like going out and racking lines and partying. I'm like, no, no, no, caffeine and productivity, let's go. Um, so yeah, I do appreciate that there's definitely a dependence on it, but I like the dependence. I don't want, I don't want that natural because it's

• 1:14:12Chris Williamson?

  That is what addicts say.

• 1:14:14James Smith?

  Yeah. But you know what? Who was it who said, find what you love and let it kill you slowly?

• 1:14:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:19James Smith?

  Yeah. That's another one. Cause that coffee in the morning, I love it. That and an almond croissant, little dip in the sea.

• 1:14:25Chris Williamson?

  Click through.

• 1:14:26James Smith?

  You know, I'm, I'm in a better position than I was before. How long did it take you to feel the benefits?

• 1:14:32Chris Williamson?

  I would say about a month, probably, which is quite a long time to put up with not having caffeine. But I realized, I'm gonna do a video on it soon, I realized that I didn't have varying degrees of tiredness. I just had varying levels of caffeine concentration in my blood. If I was tired, I would have more caffeine. I wouldn't look at the underlying question of why are you tired? And you spoke about this before, right? That alcohol is masking, it's filling in all of the holes that you're not developing within yourself. Okay, well, caffeine is filling in all of the holes that your sleep and your rest and your parasympathetic work isn't getting to. You're not restoring yourself. Like, you

• 1:15:13Chris Williamson?

  shouldn't be tired at 3pm. You shouldn't be tired at 11am. There is something, it shouldn't be the case. We managed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years with this makeup not being injected with caffeine in the middle of the day. Oh, maybe we had biphasic sleep and we had a nap or something. Fuck off. My point being, you shouldn't need to rely on it. And if you need it to perform, then it's stopped conferring a benefit. I realized that I didn't have any understanding about what was good for me in terms of my energy balance. And that may be different for you, because I think that you have a genuine love for the impact of caffeine and it's part of your daily writing ritual. But when I took it out and then reintroduced it after 500 days, if I do, around about

• 1:15:55Chris Williamson?

  three days a week now is sort of my limit. So that's kind of easy for me to do. But dude, if I have a training session with caffeine now, it is, I'm gonna blow the doors off. It's so good. It's unbelievably good. And it was never like that before. It was just, it was just a training session.

• 1:16:10James Smith?

  You know, in America and somewhere in some places in the UK, they've got this can of any drink called Rain.

• 1:16:15Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:16:15James Smith?

  200mg.

• 1:16:17Chris Williamson?

  350 in America.

• 1:16:18James Smith?

  Oh, yeah. Like, that's, that's already good. So like the idea of having two, three hundred milligrams of caffeine and especially like a sparring session, I love it because that much caffeine I start sweating quick. I become slippy and like I like the aggression. I'll catch like a knee in the temple and be like, do it again.

• 1:16:37James Smith?

  I love that energy I get from it. Sometimes I do like the crashes because the crashes I get on caffeine are the only times I can fully relax or justify it. But this is just the, this is just the addiction talking. And the worst thing is when you get a modicum of intelligence, you can justify the addiction better. So yeah, the caffeine one is, it's going to be a difficult one for me to think about. But you're right, it is completely masking the shortcomings in energy, which is ultimately one of the most valuable commodities. And for me to have that as one of my like wake up principles, I just love it. Like, have you spent much time in Australia?

• 1:17:15Chris Williamson?

  Never been.

• 1:17:16James Smith?

  The coffee there, I can't explain it to you. I was never a coffee snob. I was happy with my little pint of latte from Costa. When I went to Australia, I was like, my whole life was a light. It's like the first time I'd done M D and realised that drinking wasn't as much fun at a festival. When you do Australian coffee, the bowel movements, the come up, the density, the taste, even the care and attention they put into it. I'm definitely a dealer. Like I sound like someone proclaiming how good their dealer is, mate, honestly, this stuff.

• 1:17:43Chris Williamson?

  He's got the, he's got the rocket this week.

• 1:17:45James Smith?

  Yeah, he's got, he's got the absolute fire. So yeah, it's like Australian coffee culture will, will have this, even if you have a decaf, probably enough to get your guts going. Rather than with some proper, proper, we need to get, we need to get you to Australia. Cause you were in Dubai for a bit and I joked saying Dubai is great for people that have never been to Australia.

• 1:18:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very nice. I am, one of the things that I've kept on thinking about throughout thinking about confidence and reflecting on your book is the asymmetry of what we see in ourselves and what we see of others and that being a cause for self judgment. So it's one of the reasons that I think people who have achieved external success, it's important for them to open up about what their internal challenges are because we see our own failures from a front row seat on a daily basis, right? The tiny, tiny little nuances of all of the indecision and the,

• 1:18:41Chris Williamson?

  Complete failure that you have to get up on time, but you hit snooze this morning. No one, nobody is going to know about that, but you'll know, okay, let's add one to the lost column. And then you quickly checked your phone to see if somebody had texted you. Oh, well, I said, I wasn't going to check my phone before nine AM, but I know that I looked, but I didn't properly look. And then you tried to excuse it. And you know, all of the things like just endless numbers of failures that you view from a front row seat. And yet, all that you see of everybody else, even the people that you're the closest to, the manifestation of their actions, you don't get to see the vacillation that's going on inside of their brain, all of the flip flopping backward and forward between what I could have, would have, should have done. And then take that one step further removed to the people that you see online, that is, most of the people that you see, you don't

• 1:19:25Chris Williamson?

  see that many people day to day. Okay, well, they're giving you the highlight reel of only the stuff that they ended up doing, which is not all of the things that they thought about. And I think that just realizing, and it comes back to that, the bar is set unbelievably low, because everybody feels the same discomfort that you do whenever they're faced with the same things. When it's warm and comfortable on a Thursday evening and you're laid on the couch, watching Netflix, and you know that you're supposed to go to training in an hour's time, everybody has the same lack of desire to go there. Everybody does. And it is, the bar is so low for you to be in the cohort of people that does the thing as opposed to not doing the thing.

• 1:20:05James Smith?

  I think the like best way to kind of like the saying that we have more in common than we do differences. The vast majority of everything humans have is in common. It's not differences. And it's kind of annoying that even when we point the finger at race, gender, you know, all of the things that are hot topics in the woke community, we have so much in common. Like you say, we all want to lay in bed. We all want to scroll and get dopamine hits on TikTok before we go to sleep. We all get horny. We all, even in loving relationships, can be sexually attracted to other people. We all then have that internal conversation of being like, you know, no, I shouldn't act on this. I need to be more long sighted. We're all self destructive when we drink alcohol. We, you know, like that we have so much in common. And yeah, like you say, sharing these emotions and these

• 1:20:49James Smith?

  ways that we think is such a big step in it. Because absolutely, yesterday I was quite openly. I was tired, I was grumpy and with everything being shot for the Queen's funeral, it just kind of fucked my mood. I didn't have a reason to get out of bed. You know, depressed people don't get out of bed. I didn't have a reason to get out of bed. So it made me feel depressed. So then I was like, I was kind of like annoyed and people are, oh, do you hate the Queen? I'm like, that's not what I said. I've had my options taken away from me and it's made me feel like shit. So I was like, I'm just gonna be open about it. Someone was like, oh, why aren't you sad on my story questions? I was like, she lived to ninety six. I'm not gonna be sad about it. So I kind of ranted a bit and just let out this grumpy inside part of me and someone messaged me going, I like that you yourself on socials.

• 1:21:31James Smith?

  I just bought your book. And I was like, it was kind of liberating because I think that it is very easy for people to hide behind this guise of, hey, here's all the productive shit I did today. And do you know what? One of the, strangely, I don't usually respect everything he says so much, but Gary Vee did a video where he was saying, some days I don't get out of bed. And I was like, oh, wow. The guy who I assume in my mind never stops saying that he has days where he doesn't do anything. I was like, it's pretty nice to hear that. And I thought to myself, I need to be more sharing about that. Say, hey, guys, it's four P M. I just woke up. Or whatever it is. So you can kind of show people that you're normal as well.

• 1:22:05Chris Williamson?

  That's the same as the Brian Rose video, I think. It's someone dropping the veil that seems to be playing a character a lot of the time. And one of the problems that you have is if you play that character too much, then any, people talk about this. I mean, there's video compilations of Andrew Tate online saying, four times that Andrew Tate broke character, Colby Covington's got the same thing. That these people are such personas that people can't believe that they're people inside of it. There is no person hiding under the persona. There is only the persona now. But then there's the opportunity, because it's so unbelievable, they're trying to look for, oh, well, this is what he's actually like when he's at home with the dog or whatever. And, yeah, I, I think that it's important. I think it's important for people to see that

• 1:22:48Chris Williamson?

  the others that they look up to or whatever have got flaws, or even just people that they respect have got inadequacies, that they've got those same fears. Ali Abdaal gave this really great example on one of his courses. He does this part-time YouTuber Academy thing and he said, Important to teach people that are three steps behind where you are. Because when you're 10 steps ahead, you're not going to be able to remember the challenges of the people that are 10 steps behind you. And this is one of the important principles, I think, of continually, I mean, you've done it with the books, like. You spent time learning about fitness and you do a book on fitness and you needed to work out values and you did a book on values and you needed to work out how to execute and you do a book on executing.

• 1:23:26Chris Williamson?

  Those are the challenges that you're learning about and the audience presumably comes along for the ride and maybe in 10 years' time, there's a book on parenting or something like that. Because that, you know, these are the challenges, but if in 20 years' time, you were to try and write a book about the principles of. Losing weight and muscle gain and fat loss, they, that's gone, that's gone, you've ascended to bigger and better things. So, and other people have the opportunity to do this as well. This is why it's so important, I think, to have some sort of, not apprentice, but the opportunity to teach. People that are around you, whether it's at work or family members or friends or whatever. If they're developing something, learn from them and whatever you're developing as well, do the same because it gives you a purpose for the reason that you're actually pushing forward.

• 1:24:08James Smith?

  Yeah, I was saying, I do think about that and it's interesting that. I was, I joked, well, didn't joke, I was just hypothesizing what the next book would be about. I don't think it'd be parenting for quite some years, but. There's a, and that doctor who was on Rogan this week, have you started listening to this one?

• 1:24:24Chris Williamson?

  Gabor Maté.

• 1:24:26James Smith?

  Is that the guy that you referenced just before? Yes, it is. He's incredibly smart and very interesting and I love some of his stuff because. Brett Weinstein actually had a similar view sight. He had a book that came out. In maybe October last year. And he said a similar thing about babies crying and keeping them close and not letting them touch the ground. But I would love to do a project for men because my following has really changed in the last year. I've gone from majority female to majority men. But majority of young men, and it's not because I'm a sexist or a misogynist or the patriarchal arc or tyranny. It's that I've seen a lot of young guys in the gym, book signings and this, and when I'm with them. I can sense within a snapshot of me to me that they want my opinion on something.

• 1:25:11James Smith?

  And it's often about travelling, it's often about leaving a job they don't like. And it's often, I'll be training gym, young lad, twenty one, will come over. And I see a version of my younger self in them. And I can't do that with women because I don't know the struggles quite so well. And I'm like, what did you do? Oh, yeah, I work in insurance. I'm like, do you like it? And they're like, well, no one's asked them if they like their job for a while. And they're like, oh, yeah, it's okay. I'm like, what do you want to do? They're like, I kind of want to do this. I'm like, oh, why aren't you doing it? And then I'm like, you got a missus? And then they're like, yeah. And I'm like, you happy in your relationship? And they're like, oh, they feel quite challenged. And then I don't tell them what to do, but I kind of answer their questions. I was like, it sounds like you've only been with her because you went to college together. It sounds like you don't want to do the job you want to do. And you've spoken about Australia twice since we started talking. So maybe you should go back before you're too old.

• 1:25:55James Smith?

  And then I'll nudge him and go, uh, best do it soon. Or before you know it, you'll have two kids and you'll be living around the corner with the missus you didn't want to be with. And they leave and I can kind of see they're shell shocked. And I'd love to do that as a project because, uh, like you say, there's, it's very difficult. I can't speak on behalf, on behalf of women as well when I talk to men. But it's quite difficult to navigate this world as a man at the moment. And I think that it is like a political landscape, even having that agenda or saying that narrative is, you know, people will assume bad things straight away. When I think the men, something I think that Jordan Peterson said again, if you create happy men, you're going to make women happy. Because every man has a woman around them, whether it's a mother, a partner, a sister, whatever it is.

• 1:26:39James Smith?

  And like, um, yeah, I think that would be something I'd love to voyage into. I don't even know how it'd look, if I'll be honest. When's your, when's your bloody book coming out?

• 1:26:47Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I was on the phone to Luke earlier on today and he was, he, uh, he's going to continue pushing me. Pro, I would, I would maybe start on it next year. Um, there's two options for it. There's one that's about the current mating crisis. And there's one that would be lessons that I've learned, like a Broe twelve rules for life type thing, but more, uh, I guess more me. And, uh,

• 1:27:06James Smith?

  Just before you get distracted on that, we got pissed in a diner in Austin and you gave me three principles that ended up being found in backbones of chapters in my new book. You got it in there, it's a belief thing and it's not like you haven't got the fucking time. You can do 10 minutes a day. I don't see why you'd wait till next year. And like the people that listen to your podcast, what I've come to realise is getting people to listen to long format content is fucking difficult, but they're doing it for you. And there are different mediums that people like to absorb content. I found myself, I used to listen to audiobooks. Now I'm in a position where I actually love getting a physical book and taking it away from distractions. So I bought three books. I've got Adam Grant, Think Again. You read that?

• 1:27:49Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:27:50James Smith?

  I think he might have recommended it to me. There's one about distractions, I can't remember what it's called. And I've actually been recommended a book by a feminist. So I can't remember her name either.

• 1:28:01Chris Williamson?

  Not the case against the sexual revolution, is it?

• 1:28:03James Smith?

  No.

• 1:28:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:28:05James Smith?

  But this is for me to very much get in bed with my opposing thoughts. So my editor at Harp Collins, she goes, you're not going to like this, but you should fucking read it. I was like, okay. But I bought them in physical form. I'm going to Dubai in about a month. I'm going to take these books away from my environment and just read them. And for people that watch your YouTube content or absorb your podcasts or whatever, you should give them the opportunity to take something physical away from this competitive online domain so that they can absorb these lessons and rules for life. Because I'm relatively well read, but even some of the conversations we had, me, you and Zach, changed the course of my life. So if you, it seems to me you could be pushing it off just to not have to deal with the emotions of, is this going to work? Is it going to be successful? Are

• 1:28:50James Smith?

  people going to buy it? You could just be, the way you challenged me with caffeine, I'm going to challenge you with a book.

• 1:28:57Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right, man. I mean, I, there's definitely a fear of who the fuck am I to write a book? And you and Luke have pushed back against that a hell of a lot. Yeah, I certainly seeing you write yours has been a good inspiration, I think, for me, you know, as someone that's equally unqualified to write books, I think, makes me feel more empowered to go and do it.

• 1:29:27James Smith?

  And the most critical thing here is that you don't need to embody a persona of anything, you just need to stand on the shoulders of giants. And no one wants any more than that. Even, you know, sometimes I feel guilty for using people's concepts for my own advantage, but I'm like, they didn't fucking make that up. They read that in a book that was older than them, or it was a, you know, something from a study or from whatever it is. And like, even Gordon Ryan, right? Look at him right now, best grappler in the world, hands down. He's beaten every doubt. I don't think he's lost a match in five years. He is only the best because he stood on the shoulders of John Donahue. John Donahue is one of the best coaches, stood on the shoulders of Enzo Gracie. So this is always going to go back. You've just got to decide whether or not you're going to stand on the shoulders of all the guests you've had in before, or whether or not, because it's very difficult to get people

• 1:30:12James Smith?

  to go back and listen to old episodes, because they don't want to hear you talking about the beginning of the pandemic and the beginning of the pandemic. So, you know, if you can take the best bits and bring them together, worst case scenario, it doesn't work out, you've learned something about your offering and your client base and the people that listen to your podcast, which, so there's a utility to this, even if it goes wrong.

• 1:30:30Chris Williamson?

  You are doing Luke's work for him, mate. So yeah, I think that you're right. And I also agree with your point about the men conversation. It's very difficult online at the moment, generally, for me, especially because of the gender dynamics and the evolutionary psychology stuff. And it's on the, it's on the edge of red pill, but it's also not quite, it doesn't quite align with the worldview that those people have. So it gets weaponized when it's useful. And then it gets, people complain about it when it doesn't agree with the worldview. I'm like, look, I'm not part of the fucking manosphere. I'm not part of this red pill thing.

• 1:31:03James Smith?

  Can you explain red pill, blue pill, black pill?

• 1:31:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, sure. So red pill is seen as seeing the world for what it truly is. It's taken from The Matrix. That would be understanding the evolutionary psychology precept of mating dynamics. It would be hypergamy from women that date up and across. It's women want status, resources, looks, money, that men functionally should be chasing after youth and fertility, that men are supposed to have multiple partners, that there is the mate value and women drop off at the wall at the age of 30 and all of this sort of stuff. Now, they took a bunch of stuff that I absolutely love in evolutionary psychology. My issue and concern with red pill is that it doesn't think about women and it doesn't think about what they actually want.

• 1:31:46Chris Williamson?

  It considers them to be completely mutable and men to be immutable. It's focused more on changing women's preferences than men's. The blue pill would be anybody that hasn't taken the red pill. So it's people who have a romantic view of relationships. They're going to see true love as something that is possible, that you can have a partner that's going to be with you forever, that women aren't going to be looked to trade you in if you lose status or lose money or do whatever. Black pill are a group of men who see the entire pursuit as pointless. It would be tangential to Migta, which is men going their own way. Dating is pointless. I am a genetic dead end, basically, and any effort on my part is going to be wasted.

• 1:32:27Chris Williamson?

  So those are, I guess, the, no one would identify, self identify as blue pill, but red pill and black pill are the two main areas, I suppose, of the manosphere. But I just, I don't think that either of them are particularly useful.

• 1:32:39James Smith?

  Yeah, it's interesting. You'd think, oh, you could probably have a red and blue together down the hatch. Find your perfect balance.

• 1:32:46Chris Williamson?

  I had a, so one of my friends, Coleman Hughes, who you may have seen, he was on Rogan. He's been on, I think he's been on Sam Harris as well. It's this like dude from New York, crazy smart, but also a rapper and a really, really good rapper as well. Also plays classic trumpet or some shit. It's just like super, he's way too clever and way too competent. And he did a recreation of the scene from The Matrix where Neo takes the red pill. But instead of it being Morpheus, it was Neil deGrasse Tyson. And Neil deGrasse Tyson offers him the red and the blue pill. And Coleman takes both of them and washes them down together. And then the music video starts. It's really funny.

• 1:33:25James Smith?

  That is a pretty good way of seeing it because I like to romanticise with the blue pill ideology whilst being mindful of the red pill ideology. I think that, you know, there are going to be trade offs. I think that the biggest overarching concept is that we can't appreciate it's going to be easy. Because blue pill is going to be magnetised by red pill. And a lot of people's red pill ideologies have been magnetised by blue pill. And I think that we would all love for it to be blue pill, but then you have got valid points on both sides. I think, actually, no, the blue pill is more of an ideology. And we can start to look to like, you know, even some Peterson's beliefs about how families should be structured, marriage, all of these things, because they are conducive and congruent to

• 1:34:09James Smith?

  offspring. I think red pill can sometimes negate the offspring in the judgement as well. And this, even though you could say family, marriage is socially constructed. People don't ask themselves a question enough for what? And you're constructing it not to, you know, create anarchy or chaos, you're doing it to provide a stable upbringing for kids. And I think that if some people want to be mindful of the kids they're going to have, you might just have the blue pill. And it doesn't say it's going to work forever, but

• 1:34:40Chris Williamson?

  I think I've got this thing that I'm working on. I might be live streaming. It may have happened by now. Have you heard of Sneako? Do you know who Sneako is?

• 1:34:47James Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so I might be live streaming with him at some point soon. And I want to put this idea across to him of third wave manosphere. So like you've got first wave feminism, second wave feminism. I think that we've seen the first and second wave of the manosphere come about. So first wave was pickup artistry in the 2000s. It was Neil Strauss, it was the game, it was mystery, it was pickup, it was neuro linguistic programming, it was negging, it was that was the world. And then Me Too came around, right? And that was just, it was not going to survive the Armageddon that Me Too washed it away with. And maybe it shouldn't have done in any case. Then the second version was a much more sterilised version of pickup. And it was started by some of the people that had maybe been in it. Some of the language was similar, but a lot of it was different.

• 1:35:33Chris Williamson?

  So instead of it being about pickup and game, it was red pill, blue pill, alpha, beta, it was evolutionary psychology. And that, very interestingly to me,

• 1:35:43Chris Williamson?

  Has moved on, it's less whatever pickup was, which was fucking crazy when you actually look back at some of the advice that was given in that, which is, I don't think particularly healthy. I still don't think that where we're at at the moment is very functional because it doesn't see men and women fundamentally as allies. It sees them as adversaries. It sees the relationship between men and women as being zero sum, that if a man beds a woman, it's literally her loss and his gain. Hang on a second. I thought that you were trying to fix the instability that sex positive feminism and all of these boss bitches leaning in and trying to go their own way. I thought that that was what you're trying to fix. This doesn't feel like you're trying to fix very much to me. This seems like you're viewing the opposite sex as an enemy. That doesn't seem like something that's very useful. So

• 1:36:28Chris Williamson?

  yeah, I'm pretty sure that there is a third wave manosphere to come about, which is more holistic, more well-rounded. It sees women as compatriots rather than as enemies. And the other thing to consider is there's way more intrasexual competition than intersexual competition, right? Competition is between people of their same gender, not across genders. But men and women don't compete all that much. They need each other to keep going, but they don't compete. They compete within their own gender. So yeah, there's a longer form discussion to be had and maybe it'll be with, maybe it'll be out before now. But um, look, man, let's bring this one home. I appreciate the fuck out of you. What have you got coming up that people can go and see? Are there any tickets for anything left?

• 1:37:07James Smith?

  Exeter in Dublin, and then we've got Sydney, Auckland, Christchurch and Dubai. So there's some stuff going on there. Just really keep an eye on socials. If you want to come along, if it sparked your interest, come along. But if not, if they follow me on socials, they'll be in the honey trap.

• 1:37:23Chris Williamson?

  I love it. James, I appreciate you. Thanks, man.

• 1:37:26James Smith?

  Cheers. Thanks for having me back.