#1178 Chris Williamson On 10 Principles To Handle The Chaos Of Life

Chris Williamson is the host of the Modern Wisdom Podcast. This conversation was held at Lyceum Miami. Chris talks through 10 principles to help you survive and thrive in the chaos of life. A few principles include choosing our regrets, confidence starts with action, a rich vocabulary results in a rich life, and more. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey guys, what's up? The following conversation is with Chris Williamson, the host of the Modern Wisdom Podcast. Chris has had conversations with a ton of awesome people, everyone from David Goggins and Jaco Willink, to Jordan Peterson and many others. In this conversation, we talked about the 10 principles to survive and thrive in a chaotic world. This conversation was recorded during Lyceum Miami, a conference that I hosted this year. I always learn a ton every single time I talk to Chris, and I hope that you guys enjoy this conversation. Here is my conversation with Chris Williamson.

• 0:35Speaker 01

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• 1:04Speaker 02

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• 1:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain your process for Modern Wisdom, and how you pick guests. And I look at the guest selection as really the way you're programming your learning. You're learning from these individuals in conversation. Give people that context before we get into these principles. Like, how do you pick the guests? And how do you go into a conversation trying to understand what you're trying to learn from them?

• 1:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I got toward the end of my twenties as a guy that maybe outwardly had a lot of success, the renown, and I was running this big events business in the UK, and everything was going great. But I didn't really understand myself or the world around me. And this was a time when people like Jordan Peterson and Alain de Botton from the School of Life and Sam Harris and Joe Rogan were coming along. And they spoke to me and they gave me insights that helped me to understand myself. And I figured, well, if I start a podcast, I can basically do this as much as I need to. I can do this as much as I want and I can pick my own syllabus. So very much the guiding rule is, who do I like? Who am I interested by? Who sparks my curiosity? And if they meet that criteria, that's good enough for me.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  And Douglas Murray once said to me that my instincts may lead me wrong, but they're the only thing that's ever led me right.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  That's pretty good.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you presume that people have enjoyed the things that you've done before because you were interested in them, just keep following that. And that is the best heuristic that I've found.

• 3:01Speaker 04

  The first principle that we're going to talk about today is, in life, we must choose our regrets.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is Douglas again. So this is almost exactly a year ago. And I'm sat in Manhattan, drinking a Manhattan, probably my third Manhattan of the evening, I think, about two in the morning in Douglas's apartment, midtown. And he was talking to me about Christopher Hitchens, the famous British philosopher. And he was lamenting to Hitch about the fact that he had a bunch of different options that he needed to choose. And because you have to deal with, by choosing one thing, you can't do another. He was suffering with this because both of the things seemed great and he was going to have this sort of avoidance concern he had. And I really wondered, it was the first time I'd ever heard, "In life, we must choose our regrets." So he's talking to Hitch about this.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  You can imagine he's smoking, probably in some British pub somewhere, Chesterfield sofa, and he's got a bottle of Scotch or something. And he says, "Douglas, in life, we must choose our regrets."

• 4:04Speaker 03

  I thought that's really interesting. What does he mean choose our regrets? I'd never considered it in that way because I'd always gone through life under the assumption that any regret was due to a suboptimal decision. That had I have made the right decision, I could have avoided the regret. But because you inevitably don't do one thing by choosing another. If I want to go to the gym or go to the theme park, by going to the gym, I don't go to the theme park. Even if the gym was the right choice, I'll always wonder what it was like to go to the theme park. So I didn't realize that regrets are baked into the fabric of life, right? They're not a bug, they're a feature of having limited optionality. So I was like, right, okay, that's interesting.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  But what does it mean that we have to choose our regrets? Okay, well, maybe it's that when you come to make a decision, given the fact that you're going to have some sense of, I wonder what that other thing could have been. Instead of wondering about what decision you want to make, it's which regret could you live with? Because the regret that you can live with or that you can't live with is evidently the decision that you should make. Like which one? You're going to live with this decision for the rest of your life, right? You're going to live with the open loop of woulda, shoulda, coulda, what would have happened? And if one of these is a regret that you can live with with more ease than the other one, that to me seemed to make a good bit of sense. And I really liked the insight in life.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  It's interesting when you view it as I'm making a decision, not what am I running to, but kind of what am I running away from to some degree? Because it then begs the question, would you change some of the decisions you've made in your life from a regret minimization versus what do you want to do in the moment, right?

• 5:50Speaker 03

  Regret minimization is a good way to look at it. But yeah, it really liberated me to think, look. You're gonna regret some things, that's fine. But choose your regrets and choose them carefully.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  The second principle is you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. Which, when I saw you said that you wanted to talk about this, I was like, oh man, we're gonna get real deep.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, to a lot of the people that are in the crowd, they are probably type A, go-getters, self-improvers. You know, by being here, you're already in the top percentile of all people doing personal development and self-learning, right? The top, the rarified strata flying around the earth next to the ISS. And one of the problems of that is that you will want to be good at everything that you try and do. You'll start doing pickleball and you'll become obsessed with it. That's a personal vice of mine. You start something new and you don't want to suck, right? And there's a quote from Essentialism by Greg McKeown. And he says, "You have to focus on progress toward a specific thing

• 6:57Speaker 03

  in the medium term, or sacrifice meaningful progress toward everything in the long term." And that is the insight, right? You look at world-class athletes, they periodize their training. For the next cycle, it's going to be strength. Then it's going to be speed, then it's going to be agility, then it's going to be skill work, then it's going to be conditioning. And in life, one of the problems is, as soon as you start to focus on one thing, "I wanna get really good at growing my podcast," let's say. Maybe some fledgling podcasters in the audience. "I wanna get really good at growing my podcast, but I don't really wanna let my body's condition drop. I wanna stay in good shape. And it would be nice if I didn't, you know, if I stayed on top of work. And maybe I should get a girlfriend. And maybe I should do..." And you go, okay, look, you can't do all of those things. And if you do, you're going to be beaten by somebody

• 7:41Speaker 03

  that focuses on one of those things for a short period of time. This isn't forever. You can periodize it, but you have to focus on progress toward a specific thing in the medium term, or sacrifice progress, meaningful progress toward everything in the long term.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  Is there an example in your life when you've done this and it's really worked?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so for me, during the pandemic, that was when I turned pro with my podcast. And I just conceded the fact that training was not going to be a priority for me. It was good because the gyms were closed. So I'd taken the local environment and I was like, right, this is going to actually aid me. Gyms are shut, it would kinda suck to train at home in any case. I wasn't fired up to go and do more glute bridges in the living room. But that made it easier for me. And...

• 8:26Speaker 03

  The time that I would have spent in the gym opened up time that I could spend on the podcast.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  The third principle you have is a richer vocabulary means a richer life.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is Ludwig Wittgenstein, and there's a quote from him that says, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." What he means by this is that when you have an idea in your head, it's like a smell. It's a notion, right? It's just this sort of ephemeral, wishy-washy, like, what actually is it? Until you put it into words, either by speaking it or writing it down, it doesn't actually form anything concrete. You can't see it, you can't play with it, you can't work out where it's got holes. It's just a notion, right? It's an idea of an idea.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  What that means is that the tools with which you draw your ideas is your access to vocabulary. It is your access to language. If you have to squeeze notions from your brain into words that are either written or spoken, the breadth of the words that you have allows you to portray those ideas more precisely. That's it. Like, it's just expose yourself to new language as much as possible. And this has been something that's been very fortunate for me. First off, being British, which is, you know, a genetic advantage. But secondly, also being able to get exposed to great speakers. Jordan Peterson's of the world, the Rogans of the world, you know? Even David Goggins, incredibly precise speaker. And that's what I use.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  For the people that want to become better speakers, precision is the word. It's not more, it's not less. It's the word that you meant to describe the thing that you're trying to describe. That's it.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  When Americans hear anyone from Britain talking, they immediately are like, oh, they sound smart. Chris, we will determine at the end whether that is true or not.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  That's fine, that's okay.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  The genetic comment dings you immediately.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Look, I had to, I had to spend 4th of July in Austin last year. It was very difficult.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Had to.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  It was a very, it was a very difficult time for me. It was very painful.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  What that specific insight reminds me of is, I think it's Eminem. The rapper said that he used to read the dictionary. Because obviously, when you're rapping, you want to have this very robust vocabulary and be able to understand what the words mean. And there's not just the rhyming of the words, but also there's kind of the induendos and all of that. But what you're really talking about is not just specifically language, you're also saying the exposure to ideas, right? The exposure to different types of content. What is your content intake? Like, do you just listen to podcasts all day and you're like, "I have a podcast, so I'm gonna listen to other podcasts"? Or are there other things that you consume that you find really valuable that other people could use in their day-to-day life?

• 11:04Speaker 03

  One of the things that's been really great for me has actually been Substack and the advent of articles. So there is an extension on Google Chrome called "Send to Kindle". It's made by Amazon. If you have a Kindle, you press this button in the top corner of Google Chrome, whatever the webpage is, blog post, doesn't matter how long it is, it could be 20,000 words, it will send it straight to your Kindle device, optimized, you can highlight it, you can go through it. And that, for me, has been phenomenal because it's turned my Kindle into a "read later" app type thing that I'm not distracted from. And it also has exposed me to a bunch of other differing ideas that I wouldn't do usually. There's another thing called "The Browser", I think it's actually thebrowser.com. They send you five articles every day.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Sometimes it's about how the city of Jericho fell, and the next one's about knitting and the advent of knitting in the 1600s or something. And it's just, that's really great. And other than that, it's crushing volumes of YouTube and podcasts.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  Yes. Are you 1X, 1.5, or 2X speed on YouTube?

• 12:03Speaker 03

  2X is the speed I've worked myself up to. But I remember, you know, you do need to match up, how much can I comprehend and retain with how quick is this going? But if you do want to speed up the listen, the pace that you listen to things at, just do little increments, especially on Spotify. You can do it in .1 increments. Just creep it up over time, and you'll get there.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  The next insight is, just because something is difficult to obtain does not mean it's valuable.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this was, I very fortunately got to do Rogan's show in August of last year, and he dropped this bomb in the middle of the episode that I'd never heard anybody speak about before, and it's plain and obvious in retrospect. So he says, "This is what I've termed Rogan's Value-Diff difficulty Conflation."

• 12:51Speaker 03

  What can I say, I like to mean things. Look at the car he's driving, look at the watch he's wearing, look at the girl he's with. That's unattainable to many people, so it seems like it's valuable, but then you attained it, and then you realized, oh, this isn't valuable, this is just difficult to get. And there's a difference, there's a big difference. What's valuable is something that fulfills you intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, lovingly. And most smart people, I think, realize that there is value in stepping outside of your comfort, right? On the other side of discomfort is something valuable. And we're told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain, because if they weren't difficult to attain, they wouldn't be worthwhile.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  This is how non-valuable, but difficult things get slipped into our desires without us noticing.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  And it's people who are actually using difficulty as the measurement for value, rather than what the actual true value is.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  100%. Difficulty is the proxy.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  How do you avoid that? Are there...

• 13:48Speaker 03

  With difficulty.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  Measurements?

• 13:52Speaker 04

  The guy should be a comedian.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  It's very hard, because we're memetic beings, right? We see what other people want, and we want to want what they want.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  The memetic desire.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Correct. Precisely, yeah. We see, that's a successful person, why don't I do what he does? Why don't I try and...

• 14:08Speaker 04

  That guy has a great British accent, I want one.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  You really should try and take this on for a day, it would be great for you.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's incredibly hard, but certainly, spending a good bit of time working on your values, what is it that you like, what is it that you genuinely want to want in life, what is it that you take pleasure in for yourself, what are you prideful about, in a good way? Those are the things. Once you've got those down, you can just run everything through this heuristic. It's a business-y sort of talk. Really interesting lesson that I learned about both Bezos and Musk. So, both of them had single, unidirectional, ordinating principles for both of their operations. So, every single question that Bezos was asked in the business went through, does this make the customer experience better? One ordinating principle.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Unbelievably simple for you to work out whether or not you should say yes or no to something if you only have one criteria it's moving through. For Musk, it was, does this get us closer to Mars? Everything gets fed through that. Now, I'm not saying that you should have a single question that your entire life is built around. You probably have multiple conflicting, sometimes even idiosyncrasies and bits and pieces you want to do. However, if you can reduce them down, and if you can maybe even write them down, or if you can have an idea of them in your head, it's gonna make it easy.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  The next one is, "It's not coordination, it's cowardice."

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is great. So this is from Andrew Schultz. And he may not, for the people that know him, he's a great comedian out of New York, but you may not think of him as like a font of philosophical wisdom, but this genuinely is. So this is from an episode that I did with him. "A lot of the time, we believe that there is a grand plan at work to try and push a narrative or hurt people from a particular group. From the outside, it looks a lot like a coordinated assault, collusion orchestrated by some malign, overlord conspiracy. But on the ground, it doesn't look anything like that. It's just individuals trying to save their own skin and not get fired. They've got an expensive house they can barely pay, and the mortgage, and a wife who wants a new car and a private school for the kids. It's much easier for them to adhere to whatever ideology will keep them in their job, rather than go against it.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Sure, it might mean that they push an unhinged story about whatever ideology people don't like, but this doesn't mean that they've been indoctrinated into some grand plan. Like, the incentives encourage execs and influential actors and the people in power to behave in particular and aligned ways, but the coordination is not consciously conducted, it's just a path of least resistance for each person." So what that shows is that the people who you are concerned are trying to take over from an ideological perspective,

• 16:46Speaker 03

  aren't coordinated, they're just cowardly. And that actually makes any concern you have about the direction that the world is going in a little bit easier. So another thing that he said was, "So much content and ideology is curated by a pool getting installed in an executive's yard." So there's two more great ideas here that relate to this, that I love. One's called Bonhoeffer's Theory of Stupidity. "Evil can be guarded against, stupidity cannot. And the world's few evil people have little power without the help of the world's many stupid people. As a result, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil." And obviously as well, one other thing that you know is, Hanlon's razor, never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  So it's fascinating, because I think that there's a lot of people over the last three years that if I polled the audience, whether it is public health-related, whether it's economic and federal-related, or even things in their local communities, they would be like, "This is literally insane." And really... It's one thing for the people who are making the decisions. It's not coordination, it's cowardice.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  What about the people who are either subjected to it or who are participating in it although they are not making the decision? Are they simply just trying not to step out of line? And it's kind of like this like group think and kind of social cohesion? Or is there something else going on there?

• 18:10Speaker 03

  I think it's just very difficult. Like, how are you going to be this one person trying to hold back a flood of the entire organization behind you? Yeah, you've got the memetic desire. You don't want to be the one that stands out. You don't want to be the person that's pointed at as being the transphobe or the racist or the whatever that it is in your office. But it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, for all that I can say it's not coordination, it's cowardice. It doesn't make the impact of these sorts of policies any easier on the people that they impact. You know, if you're somebody who's lost a job due to saying some unspeakable thing, me going, "Oh, well, at least it wasn't a coordinated conspiracy, mate." Like, that doesn't, that's not going to help you feel any better about, about the fact that you're now unemployed. So it's very difficult.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  But I think understanding that makes the foe, if you want to call it that, less impressive, less grand. And you realize that if people are acting in this memetic way, all that you need to do is change the ideology du jour at the moment into something which they also want to replicate, which you may see as being better for the world.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  Speaking of Schultz, I told him this. There was a point where people went after Joe Rogan. And there was like a pendulum swinging. And it was very much like, are they going to try to cancel the largest podcast in the world, right? And Andrew was one of the first people to stand up and be like, "Dude, I know this guy. This guy's done incredible things for my career. He has been an incredible friend behind the scenes." You know, all, kind of went out and put his reputation on the line and put a flag in the ground and was like, "I know this guy. He is not a racist."

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  Almost like Domino's. Another comedian, another comedian, another comedian, right? And they all came. And so what it begs the question of is you always have to have the first, right? The person who's willing to kind of put the flag on the ground first. And then it is fascinating to watch. People go from following the crowd out of fear or wanting to fit in to, oh, it's okay to say this other thing. Oh, let me go follow and I want to be in that group.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  It needs to be the right person that says it first as well. You know, if it was some unknown, upcoming, well-respected, but relatively small comedian, it wouldn't have worked. But because it shoots, you know, massive time, very big reach. Here's the other thing, right? Here's the reason that Rogan didn't get cancelled last year, in my opinion. It's that most of the news stories that try and find the smoking gun that suggests the racist bigot, whoever it is, is that they're trying to accuse it of. What they're saying is this is the tip of the iceberg and you know nothing about what lurks below the surface, but we do and we always have. The reason that it didn't work for Rogan is that you have even a casual fan of him

• 20:57Speaker 03

  having listened to 200 hours of this man, 1,000 hours, 5,000 hours of this man. They go, you're telling me this is the tip of the iceberg? It's like, I've seen the whole iceberg. I know that there's nothing lurking down there. And this is one of the great protectionist strategies that you have if you do have direct connection with your audience and if you produce regularly and frequently. Because you expand the degrees of freedom within which you could mess up, so to speak, because your audience is still going to have faith that you are.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  And they think of you as a human.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  Precisely, it humanizes you, yes.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  The next one is absurd ideological beliefs are shows of feality.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  Yes, so this is, it falls straight on from what we've just spoken about. This is from Gwyneth Boghul, one of my favorite Substacks. An absurd ideological belief is actually a form of tribal signaling. It signals to one's ideology is more important to them than reason itself, than truth, sanity. To one's allies, this is an oath of unwavering loyalty. To one's enemies, this is a threat display. It's not always about what's true. It's often about how does. This make me look to my tribal compatriots and to my enemies. And this again helps people to understand how could this person hold this ridiculous belief? We all know that this isn't true. This flies in the face of reality. You go, well, what if the belief isn't about what you're believing?

• 22:17Speaker 03

  What if the belief is about trying to hold a flag in the air that says, I am this kind of a person? And the more ridiculous the belief, the stronger your show of fealty is to the organization or the group that you're a part of. Because if you have to put aside an awful lot of reality in order to be able to believe this thing, they go, wow, like, Pom's a reliable ally. You know, he just disregarded the laws of thermodynamics in place of, in place of like, us and this. So that was just a very nice succinct way. It's not coordination, it's cowardice and ideological beliefs are like shows of fealty and threat displays. That really, to me, helped to turn down the volume of the culture war back and forth.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  And everybody gets caught up in it. You know, no matter how much you try to avoid this stuff, you'll see something, some ridiculous video from whichever side you do or don't like. And both of those things really helped to kind of just turn the volume down a bit.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, those are great. The key to confidence starts with action.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Okay, so this is probably the best thing that I learned last year. And it's from Alex Homose. He says, "You don't become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are. Outwork your self doubt." That to me is like such a mic drop. That's money. That's what I do my podcast for, to hear people say things like that. And I was chronically unconfident for a long time in my twenties as somebody that was standing in the front door of a nightclub, that was a male model, that did two reality TV shows. But I was very performative with the way that I was doing this stuff because inside I still didn't have that genuine rock hard sense of, of something to be confident about.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  And I always wondered about why other people had confidence and I presumed that it was a mindset thing. And what I have come to believe is that it's because I hadn't created a stack of work. That I genuinely felt existentially connected to and was proud of. I loved the work that I did with my nightclub business, but there was always so many degrees of freedom between the success of the business and me and my inputs. Oh, it's because of market conditions. Oh, it's because of how effective all of the managers are. Oh, it's because all of our competitors went away. And this is one of the beautiful things about any individual pursuit, especially where you've got immediate feedback. It's why sports stars and athletes, although it's in some ways a very difficult existence,

• 24:45Speaker 03

  it's a great existence as well because they can see the fruits of their labor immediately. You spend an amazing off-season building up your strength. You crush it next year. So for me, Rogan calls it building a mountain with layers of paint. Right, one layer of paint at a time. And you go, what's a layer of paint? Nothing, absolutely nothing. But after thousands of iterations of this, you end up with a really big-sized mountain. And that, you don't become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are. Outwork yourself doubt just encapsulates that perfectly. And the key to confidence starts with action for me

• 25:26Speaker 03

  is rejigging your mental state to be like, right, tomorrow I'm going to wake up and I'm going to be positive. Cool, like that's not a bad thing. More power to you. But reality is going to come and smash you in the face. What you're going to be, if you want confidence without competence, you want delusion. And if you want competence without confidence, you want fantasy. So it's like, look, those things need to grow together. In my opinion, it is much easier to do a thing, start doing it, do it well, and then go, okay. After a while, your old imposter syndrome has no choice but to be eroded by this mountain of evidence that you've got.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  And that, for me, was the easiest way that I built up my confidence.

• 26:12Speaker 04

  I enjoy always talking to you because a lot of these ideas start to intertwine. And I read a lot of books. And there's things that I will read in one book that I'll see in another and then in another and another. And they usually come from different walks of life. It's very similar with the podcast. We talk to a lot of different people. You start to see these commonalities. And this idea of the key to confidence starts with action. Is almost perfectly overlaid with almost every book you read from someone who's successful at something, there is a theme of practice, whether they knew they were practicing or not. And so confidence comes from the ability to know, I've done this before, right? And I can keep doing it. And like, maybe you start out and you're like, I suck at this. And that's kind of the first couple of layers of paint. And then eventually it's like, okay, well, I'm better than I was, but I still suck.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  And eventually you're like, hey, I'm not half bad. And then like, maybe you get to the point where you're like, okay, I'll like, show somebody else what I can do. And then you build that confidence, which really came again from that action.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  There's a quote from Seth Godin that he said on my show, and he said, a lot of the time you need support, but only the first time around. And his point there was that when you're starting out with something, you haven't done it before. How do you expect to be confident at something you've literally never done before? You have no evidence. And this is where the lone wolf, super Chad, alpha guy going and Lone Ranger in it on his own, doesn't really work too well if you're starting out. It's all well and good if you've gained mastery in some domain and have a huge audience and loads of people like you and stuff. And then you say, right, I'm going to stick my middle finger up all of these people. I'm going my own way. You can't do that when you're starting out, because you need the support of people around

• 27:50Speaker 03

  you just to get over the hump of how hard becoming good at anything is. So yeah, you need support the first time around, lean more heavily on your social circles. And then as you become better and better, you can actually refine it a bit more.

• 28:02Speaker 04

  The next one is how to deal with the pain of feeling things so very deeply.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is from Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright. Robert Wright, an evolutionary psychologist who then turned to meditation later in his career. Evolutionary psychology and meditation might not be two things that you immediately bring together. So he tried to battle with this sort of polarity in a book, Why Buddhism is True. And the quote from Jungi Menge Rinpoche is, ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions, or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. Become aware of them, or become ruled by them. And this pain of feeling things deeply, which many people in the audience, given that you're

• 28:51Speaker 03

  here, learning and trying to improve yourself and reflecting and doing the introspection, is something that you might resonate with. And it was certainly something that I resonated with and still do for a long time. It's like opening Pandora's box. Like, once you peer in and realize that you are not all that you could be, that there is something better that you could get out of yourself and out of life and how you could contribute to the world. As soon as you realize that, you can't close the lid on that box anymore. And you spend the remainder of your days trying to meet the ideal that you've set for yourself, right? And if true hell is when the person that you are meets the person that you could have been, this can be very painful. And you can think, you know, you look at a dog, and it's just wagging its tail and having a great time. You think, oh, it would be so amazing to just be that golden retriever.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  You know, I wouldn't have to go to work. I wouldn't have to worry about whether I'm enacting my logos. I wouldn't get involved in culture wars. I wouldn't have to reply to DMs and emails. And yeah, you know, like, being a golden retriever, probably pretty fun. But I do think that for the people who have peered inside of Pandora's box, who know that there is more that they could bring to the world, you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube. You can't regress back to some other version of you where you're not trying for mastery and self-fulfillment and improving the entire globe and leaving it a better place than when you came. You can't do that.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  So the choice is between learning more about these challenges, becoming as competent as possible, mastering whatever you can in order to be able to wrangle this. Peterson says, "You take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that allows you to girdle the world around you." And this is, the way out is through, right? It's not, oh, God, I'm interested in some things and I find the world difficult. Let's back away from it. It's like, okay, cool, game on. I'm ready for this. And ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. For me, I don't want to be ruled by them. I would much sooner deal with the discomfort of becoming aware of them.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  Last one I want to talk about is accept that all of your heroes are full of shit.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Very, very apt for both me and you to finish on this one, I think.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  When I saw this, I literally was like, man, that is spot on.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  Sorry, yes. So this is from Jason Pargan, and he says, "Your heroes aren't gods, they're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else." And this is the description of every single high performer that I've seen. "In order to be good at one thing, you have to sacrifice more than the other people that are only doing one thing and prepared to sacrifice." And the example that I use for this all the time is Eddie Hall. So Eddie Hall, British guy, World's Strongest Man 2018. And he retires with the World's Strongest Man trophy in the air, right? His grandma died a while ago, and he's holding it up. He's saying, "Nana, this is for you," and he's crying.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  He's this big 200-kilo guy. It's beautiful. But he also says in an interview shortly afterward that "Had he have not won the World's Strongest Man on that date, he would have been dead, divorced, and with no relationship to his kid, because how hard he was pushing his body, presumably the drugs that he was having to take as well." Six foot four, 440 pounds, training every day. He was training so hard that his relationship with his wife was breaking down. He spent no time with his kid because of how much he was traveling to compete. That is a man who has sacrificed everything in order to be good at one thing. Only in light of seeing the entirety of someone's experience that is a high performer and taking into account the price that they pay for brilliance and greatness,

• 32:42Speaker 03

  can you see truly whether you want that life? To look at Eddie Hall and say, "I want to be the World's Strongest Man. That sounds amazing. I hold it in the air and crying and nana. Brilliant." Okay, well, do you want to nearly die because of how high your blood pressure is? Do you want to have the relationship with your wife glance off the bottom of divorce because of how destroyed the relationships become? Do you want to lose every single moment that you've got with your daughter? Probably not. You wouldn't pay that price. That's not to say that people shouldn't chase excellence or high performance. What it is to say... Beware of the price that you need to pay in order to become great, and make sure that you're prepared to pay it before you go down that route.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Before I let you go, I want everyone to take out your phone and immediately go subscribe to the Modern Wisdom Podcast. But can you share maybe one specific episode that we can send people to that you think can help, whether it's critical thinking, independent thinking, or something that they'll get some value out of?

• 33:40Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yes. So David Goggins only did two podcast episodes for his most recent book. One of them is Rogan, one of them is mine. If you need some motivation, David Goggins is there. Spotify is the best place to go. There's a follow button in the middle of the page. Just press that for me. There's also a five-star thing and there's a website.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  You can ding him for the accent, but the follow is the important one.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  What can I say? David Goggins would be good. Another one that's very interesting from a completely different line of thinking would be Guinda Bogle, G-U-R-W-I-N-D-E. It's from the back end of last year. If you just search Modern Wisdom Goginda or Modern Wisdom Goggins, both of them will come up on whatever you listen on. And the reason that I love that guy is that the entire episode is like this. So I'll find some of his concepts and we'll spend five minutes just riffing on each of them. And I really love this quick sort of back and forth. We've got, here's a concept, we'll do it. You know, you guys, maybe only one or two of those things resonated with you, but you're like, holy fuck, that's cool. I'm going to go learn about that inaction thing, or I'm going to go learn about that coordination thing.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  I really appreciate it. I really appreciate everybody being so welcoming to me since I've been here. I appreciate you for having me here, man. This event's really, really cool. It's one of the first live shows that I've done, and I hope that everyone enjoyed it.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Chris Williamson, everyone.