100k Q&A - Sam Harris, Brian Rose & Podcast Tips | Modern Wisdom Podcast 289

We hit 100k Subscribers on YouTube!! To celebrate I asked for questions on Instagram and Twitter. I was going to just make a short YouTube-only video but the questions were so good, I couldn't cut enough out, so here I am, answering your questions for an hour. Expect to learn whether I think Brian Rose is a sham, whether Sam Harris will ever get rid of his Trump Derangement Syndrome, my biggest tip for starting a successful podcast, whether I get annoyed by people calling me Chris Wills and much more... Sponsors: Get 19% discount, 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #samharris #brianrose #podcasttips - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  I'm filming this on my birthday. All these questions are so good. I wasn't sure about whether or not I was going to do this as just a short video for 20 minutes or a full podcast episode, but I was going through the questions and they were all mint. I'm like, right, I'm gonna have to do them all. Shit suit with the wide pinstripes from like the early 90s, breakdancing in a stairwell, sleeveless t-shirt, bullshit. Like, if you wanted to create a human that looked like what people think politicians look like, it would be Brian Rose. If there's like, anything, anything at all that I hope the people that listen to this show take away, it's that embracing your weirdness will improve your entire life.

• 0:38Chris Williamson?

  What's happening, beautiful people? Welcome back. It is a 100,000 subscriber Q and A special with yours truly and no guest. This will be my first full solo podcast episode, so I hope that you enjoy it. Thank you to everyone who's tuned in over the last three years and supported us and shared the episodes. I really do appreciate it. I asked on my Twitter and my Instagram for some questions, so that's what we're gonna go through today. Let's get into it. Does it annoy you that people think your name is Chris Wills? Yes, it does. It is very hard to get a hold of Chris Williamson on any handle on social media. And there's one guy, like some designer somewhere, that bought every URL in existence with every different

• 1:21Chris Williamson?

  permit, chriswilliamson.io, chriswilliamson.au. Yeah, so I would like to be able to find a better handle if possible, but not a thing. What was the biggest mistake you made on your YouTube journey? That's an interesting one. It's different coming at YouTube from a podcaster's perspective, because I'm only bothered about having good conversations. I've never really learned about gaming the algorithm or creating content that's YouTube friendly. So I suppose that I should have learned earlier how YouTube works, what makes a thumbnail clickable and a title enticing. I wasn't really too sure. Yeah, I think learning the basics of YouTube to maximize

• 2:06Chris Williamson?

  the impact you can get from a podcast. What do you think is the biggest misconception about you and your channel? Conversely, what one thing do you wish people knew about you and your channel? Yeah, that is a really good question. I think- There's two broad groups of people that arrive at the channel. One of them are people that have seen me talk with the big name guests that tend to bang on YouTube. You're Douglas Murray's Andrew Doyle's Sargon of Akkad, Michael Malice, et cetera. And then the other side of that are people who perhaps know me from what I did in my past life as a sort of club promoter and reality TV guy. I think the biggest misconception is probably that I'm really interested in politics and I love woke bashing.

• 2:52Chris Williamson?

  To be honest, I'm far more interested in individuals than I am in collective groups. I don't have a massive interest in politics. I don't really care about how different groups get on and group disparities and stuff like that. But YouTube really, really rewards those sorts of episodes. So they get a disproportionate amount of attention because they feed the algorithm. So it looks like I'm constantly talking about politics. But if you actually take a broad view of the 300 episodes I've done, it's like less than 10% of them are even related to politics. It just happens to be those ones that get the most views. What one thing do you wish people knew about me and my channel? It's that as I move forward, I really, really want to help people

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  get from where I was about five years ago, which is someone who didn't really understand himself, was not really living a true sort of alignment of the type of person he wanted to be. And get them to where I am now, which is feeling a lot more happy in myself. I find joy in the things that I do. I have a project that I love and I care about. I'm a much better friend. I'm a much better son. I'm just all around have improved myself in ways that I thought you couldn't. I've deconstructed source code in me that I didn't think that you were able to rewrite.

• 4:16Chris Williamson?

  And I really, really want over the next few months and years with this channel to increasingly focus on that. I want to make down the pipe monologue YouTube videos like this that are helping people do that. That's, yeah. And even thinking about that, even thinking in that sort of a selfless way is something that I wouldn't have considered five years ago. So even that itself counts for quite a lot of the progress that I've made. Where do people recognise you from the most, hosting the podcast or being on Love Island? I suppose it depends on who it is.

• 4:53Chris Williamson?

  I haven't been out of the house an awful lot over the last year, same as everyone, we've been locked down. I imagine that it's going to be more from the podcast when we get re-released into the real world. There was a period where I was barred from the front door of my own event by my business partner because of the Love Island thing, because everyone wanted to ask about like, what did you think about that girl there? And did this really happen? But no, that's no longer holding as much water. I think, man, like people's fame from Love Island is so fleeting anyway. And also, I would much sooner, a hundred times more prefer someone to come up to me and say, man, I love the show. I really enjoy that. As opposed to what? I was watching ITV2 at the time when you came on and did that thing in those shorts, like,

• 5:39Chris Williamson?

  I don't need to go into that. Which story from a guest do you think about the most and how often? That is an awesome question.

• 5:49Chris Williamson?

  I think Aubrey Marcus really opened up on an episode I did with him, which is nearly two years ago now. And he used this analogy around, you do not serve other people from your cup. You serve them from the source which overflows around your cup. It's the same episode where he said, the persona is incapable of receiving love. It can only receive praise. And this really resonated with me. This was sort of still, as we all are, right? We're still trying to grow. But yeah, this was a period where I was like really, really keen of just trying my hardest to understand myself and why I didn't feel fulfilled and how I could feel more fulfilled and find more meaning. And yeah, that, that was awesome from him.

• 6:33Chris Williamson?

  And I must think about it. I mean, it's the basis of one of the sections of my TED Talk. So it tells you all you need to know about how often it comes up in my mind. Who are the dream guests you have yet to interview? This sort of constantly changes based on the tide of whatever my topical interests are at the moment. A couple of years ago, I'd have said, you know, it would have been Jordan Peterson and then Seth Godden. I've had Seth on the show, it would have been Aubrey Marcus, Aubrey's been on the show. I think Jordan would still be really good.

• 7:03Chris Williamson?

  I would enjoy to get Thomas Sowell on. I'm only just starting to get exposed to some of his work, but he seems like an absolute boss and he's 90 and still sharp as hell. Nick Bostrom from the Future of Humanities Institute in Oxford. I mean, like his assistants assistants email, like desperately slowly climbing my way up the ladder, trying to get my way toward Nick. He would just be awesome, talking about existential risk and stuff like that. Toby Ord as well, talking about X risk. And then some top level athletes like Matt Fraser would be pretty fun. I'd quite like to get Tia Claire Toomey on as well. I think she's, she's interesting. Goggins would be awesome. I really do like his mindset. Jocko as well. But these people aren't,

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  I don't think they're out of reach. Like if the show continues to do what it does, there's no reason that they shouldn't be coming to me when they've got a new book out. So hopefully that'll be the case. What's your biggest lesson from hitting 100K?

• 8:01Chris Williamson?

  The biggest impact on your growth online is consistency. I like to think that the show gives the audience a really good sort of broad spectrum of guests. There's a big gap in the YouTube market now with Rogan only being on Spotify for people that want to listen to stuff about philosophy or psychology and then like about sex robots and whatever else, you know, that real broad pick and mix of topics. And I think that being consistent and often knocking out episodes, week after week after week is so rare. I think it's like some ridiculous percentage,

• 8:43Chris Williamson?

  90% of podcasts don't make it past episode five. And then of the remaining of that people that do survive, another 90% don't make it past episode 20 or something like that. So just consistency, like that is the way that you get better at anything. And now whatever, like a thousand hours deep of talking into cameras and microphones and

• 9:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it rewards it. You get better at the things that you do. So yeah, just do it consistently. How many followers were you on after three, six and 12 months? It was like none. I don't think for the first three months of the channel had actually posted anything. And then we did a what it was really like to live on Love Island episode and that kind of at least brought the channel up to a bit of notoriety. It got us over a thousand subs within one video, which was quite good. But man, we did, we were under 5,000 subs by the time I spoke to Dr. David Sinclair and the podcast had been going over a year. So not a lot. The growth is very, very slow and the curve return is super exponential. So again, like it's that Jack Butcher graph, right?

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  Where it's this is stupid, just as you're doing something and continuing to do it and you're just about at that point of all of the latent leverage kicking in. So yeah, again, same as the biggest lesson, like just keep going. Thoughts on Brian Rose running for mayor and thoughts on him in general? Snake merchant or nah? Right. Okay. Anyone that knows me knows that I've had strong opinions on Brian Rose since long before the Freedom Fund or the Brian for Mayor thing, whatever his new trend of the week is. I've had my concerns around Brian. I actually know some of the guys who are affiliated with working for him.

• 10:32Chris Williamson?

  I won't go any deeper than that. And his internal staff think things about him critically that he's a closet psychopath, that he's got BD cod eyes. They think those things as well. And it makes me so uncomfortable because there are certain things he's done. He's got this video out there, which is like my relationship with alcohol. And I watched it and it's just him monologuing down the video, talking about how he drank every day for 20 years. And now he's turned himself around. And I'm like, man, not only would I not dislike you if this was what all of your content was like, I would be an active fan, but he just tumbles into that like Dan

• 11:15Chris Williamson?

  Peña shite suit with the wide pinstripes from like the early 90s, breakdancing in a stairwell, sleeveless t-shirt bullshit. Like it, it's just so off putting. It smacks massively of someone that's a charlatan. Like if you wanted to create a human that looked like what people think politicians look like, it would be Brian Rose. I really, really hope that something occurs where he sees what he could do with a platform of his size and some of the conversations and guests that he has access to. I really, really hope that he just gets back to doing his thing because the UK, even though he's adopted, the UK needs more good podcasters and it's a shame that his huge channel is

• 11:58Chris Williamson?

  being wasted on him walking up and down outside of his office, talking about how the mayor of London's like an idiot. I'm bored by that stuff now. How did you manage to get so many excellent guests on such a relatively small channel? This is a question I get quite consistently. Obviously, a lot of people want to start podcasts and guest quality is an indicator of the show's level of respectability. Really, I got lucky because a friend Lucy from Reebok got me Dave Castro and Dan Bailey as like the first two guests after a mate for me. So episode two and episode three, the director of the CrossFit Games

• 12:38Chris Williamson?

  and then CrossFit Games OG. After that, I just reached out to people. I just sent them a very short email that respected their time, saying what I wanted to do, what I wanted to talk to them about and why I thought they should do it. You'd be very surprised at how responsive people are. When you get to your top, top, top level, like S tier podcast guests, your Seth Godens, your Jordan Petersons, your Goggins. Sam Harris and such, they're going to be really, really hard, but even them, like if you have sufficient reach, you're going to be able to get them and then cascading all the way down, you can do the same with guests that are below that. So yeah, just reach

• 13:18Chris Williamson?

  out consistently. Don't be scared to DM people. Like I just fire out DMs. If I see someone that's interesting, I'll just DM them and ask what their email address for podcast invites is. And a lot of the time they'll just say, oh, well, it's me, I deal with it. What do you want to talk about? So people are responsive. What do you think, Chris, five years from now would advise you? This is such George Mack question. Fuck's sake, man. Probably focus on essentialism still. I think I get distracted a lot by shiny objects and taking that essentialism red pill has been a big improvement for me. But there's still

• 14:02Chris Williamson?

  so much trivial many projects and thoughts that appear that I don't need to concern myself with. Probably assess your assumptions as well. A lot of the time, the biggest benefits and the biggest changes that I make to myself are when I try and take a first principles approach on why do I think this thing? Do I still need to be doing this thing? Is there an easier way for me to achieve this thing? He would almost certainly say delegate more, presuming that this show and platform continues to grow. I will hate the fact that right now I don't have anyone who assists me with my emails or my podcast bookings or my scheduling

• 14:46Chris Williamson?

  or the advertisers and the sponsors that we deal with on the show. Like it's me and video guy Dean and late nights. That's all that there is. So I think he would say focus on what's essential and get a fucking assistant. Thoughts on Sam Harris and his Trump derangement syndrome. Okay. So I did, I did a video about this and that was actually what crossed us over from like the late 90s through 100K was that Sam Harris video. Like I've just finished listening to Sam talking to some awesome physicists about the nature of time and, and the reality of whether or not we're in a simulation and stuff like that is where

• 15:28Chris Williamson?

  for me, Sam is at his best. I appreciate that Trump was such a trigger. That he took people that we think, the best of us think, that the best of us are sane, and had completely flipped them on their head. I think about Ryan Holiday writing that blog post about his dad, like wishing that his dad wouldn't vote for Trump. And then like some of the stuff that Sam said, just seems so detached from that balanced, calm persona that both him and Ryan give off. So I totally get that Trump can trigger some people. Being honest, I don't care that much about politics. I said earlier on, like, I'm not that bothered about politics.

• 16:08Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate that some people become so patriotic to their side, that once someone has done a thing that they disagree with, politics is so fundamental to their being that they no longer want to enjoy anything else that person has to do. I take my personas, the people that I watch and listen to, I take them far more piecemeal than that. Like, I don't agree with Jordan Peterson's views on religion, wholeheartedly, but I'll definitely listen to him when it comes to life advice and the philosophy of taking responsibility and stuff like that. I don't need to take everything together. Like, I don't know whether I'm going to switch from determinism to compatibilism in terms of free will, but just because I disagree with Sam Harris on free will

• 16:51Chris Williamson?

  wouldn't mean that I can't listen to him when he talks about space or meditation. Yeah, I hope that this is the end of the TDS for Sam, though. It definitely did sort of bore slash tarnish the stuff he was putting out. Do you think that gyms will recover to pre-pandemic levels?

• 17:10Chris Williamson?

  The UK, I was really surprised when gyms reopened the first time after summer. And I went in on the first day that it was open, and it was, we've got a very popular gym, 800 plus members, huge, massive place at Reebok CrossFit Tyneside. And I thought it was going to be swamped. And I really think that there is a undercurrent of people that are quite uncomfortable about just being out and around. I wonder if that'll change now the vaccine's out, but I don't think that gyms are going to get back to pre-pandemic levels for a while yet. PTs would be okay, but owning a facility, I sort of really hope that all the gym owners out there have got their finances in

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  order. And good luck to all of you, because it's going to be, I think it's still going to be a little bit of time before we get back to that. What topic slash subject do you want to learn more about in 2021? All these questions are so good. I wasn't sure about whether or not I was going to do this as just a short video for 20 minutes or a full podcast episode, but I was going through the questions and they were all mint. I'm like, right, I'm gonna have to do them all. What topic or subject do you want to learn about in 2021? I'm really, really enjoying the evolutionary psychology stuff. I'm currently reading The Ape Who Understood Himself, The Ape Who Understood the Universe by Steve Stuart Williams.

• 18:34Chris Williamson?

  Mint, so good. Existential risk just has this real pull on me. Those two, I think, even though I spent a lot of 2020 learning about that, if ever there was a year to learn about existential risk, it was going to be the year of the pandemic, right? But yeah, those two. What's your favorite uncomfortable truth that you've discovered recently? This is someone who knows me and what I talk about. Fuck, that's such a good question.

• 19:01Chris Williamson?

  So I learned, I learned about the worst age to lose a child at in The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, that we might think that to lose an infant would be very heartbreaking because they had so much life left, or we might think that losing an 18-year-old just as they're about to go out into the world and do things might be the worst. But evolutionary psychology suggests that the psychologically worst time for a parent to lose a child is around about sort of 11, 12 years old for a girl, 12, 13 years old for a boy, because it's just as they're about to become fertile. So the whole compulsion of your genes is

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

  to be a grandparent optimizer. It's not necessarily just about having kids, it's about making sure that your kids have kids. And therefore, it means that the worst time, as proposed by evolutionary biology, to lose a child would be just before they're about to become fertile, because you've done all the hard stuff. You've got them through the ridiculously difficult period of infant mortality, which, you know, would have killed some ridiculous majority of children in our evolutionary past. You've got them to the age where they're just about to make it work. And then they're gone. And I think this is actually exemplified in Darwin's own life. He had some insane number of children, like 10 children. I think maybe seven of them

• 20:27Chris Williamson?

  survived until adulthood. And the one which was most painful was the one that died, I think, 10, a girl who died at 10 years old. So yeah, I mean, the uncomfortable truth thing is just seeing the motivations of our source code, right? Like, that's what we're looking at when we observe this full on, when we look at the sort of nuts and bolts of how we're put together. The uncomfortable truths are seeing what we are, rather than sort of what we presume ourselves to be. So yeah, I really enjoy doing those. I just enjoy putting them out as well. I know it triggers people, like, people get uncomfortable about talking about the ethics

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  of sex robots, or whether women being told that they need to choose between a career and having a family is actually good or bad for them. But these are interesting questions. I don't have a massive agenda, other than, fuck, that's a really, really interesting question. I wonder what's on the other side of it. You've described yourself as enigmatic because, have I? That doesn't smack very well, does it? You've described yourself as enigmatic because the contrast between what you used to do and what you do now. With that in mind, have you ever felt a pull to be more legible to other people? Do you ever feel misunderstood?

• 21:45Chris Williamson?

  All of these are so good. Yeah, okay, so multi-layered might have been easier for me to say. Enigma is, it makes me sound like I think I'm some sort of rock star. Yeah, there is a little bit of a juxtaposition, I suppose, right? That you have this person who comes through club promo and in a very transactional sort of showy industry and is now trying to delve into the sense of what does meaning mean and what is truth and how should we live a flourishing, actualized life? I do understand that that necessarily doesn't align for most people. It doesn't make sense. Have you ever felt a pull to be more legible

• 22:25Chris Williamson?

  to others? Yeah, for a long time, I compromised all of this side that you guys see on the show in order to be successful in an industry where people...

• 22:37Chris Williamson?

  They're bothered about your follower count, but not the quality of the content. They're bothered about who can party the hardest, who knows the most people, who's known by the most people. So I compromise for a very, very long time. Do you ever feel misunderstood? Almost every day. And I don't think that's ever really going to change, but I don't think that's a bad thing. Like to feel fully, fully understood is to be predictable by others around you. And I don't actively go out of my way to be unpredictable, but I think that a level of misunderstanding, a level of being misunderstood is an inevitable part of being a complex human. And that's actually something to be proud of.

• 23:18Chris Williamson?

  You know, the fact that people can't predict necessarily what your interests are or what your background is or what you're going to do next.

• 23:26Chris Williamson?

  That's one of the reasons that we're attracted to people, right? Like, we like people who have layers, who aren't just immediately, we see them, we spend a couple of days with them, we know everything that there is to know about them. You want to be in a relationship with someone who 50 years later, you're still discovering interesting things and insights that they have around themselves. So yeah, I mean, it's not a like dating optimization strategy, but yeah, I am. I think people should be proud. People should be proud of their illegibility to others sometimes. What one thing had the biggest impact on reaching 100K? It was using clips, to be honest. I know that some people sort of get a little bit annoyed that

• 24:08Chris Williamson?

  the channel uploads clips from episodes that they may have already seen. But the fact of the matter is there's far fewer people that are on YouTube than have watched the episodes. And a lot of the time, it's hard to get people to commit. And if I've got an hour and 20 minute conversation with Michael Malice, it's very tough to get people to, just because they like Michael, watch, or maybe they don't even know who he is, well, dedicate 100 minutes of their time to

• 24:36Chris Williamson?

  80 minutes of their time to the show. So by giving them a little bite sized feeder of, you know, a seven minute clip or a 10 minute clip, a lot of the time that actually drags people in and it really, really works well on the YouTube algorithm. So anyone that's a burgeoning podcast that's listening, just use clips from your channel. Take the best bits of the episodes with good name guests and get them out there. And that made a huge impact. Were you surprised?

• 25:01Chris Williamson?

  By what YouTube said your listeners listen to.

• 25:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so this is a new feature in YouTube Studio that shows other channels that people that listen to your channel watch. And mine was, I'm sure Dean will be able to make it appear here somewhere around here. And yeah, mine was to do with everything that you would expect, literally every single person that you would expect. Tim Cast, IRL, Tim Cast, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Ruben Report, Crowder, Sargon, Carl's new podcast channel, The Hill and the Quartering, I don't know what that is, Lex Friedman, Jimmy Dore, Brett Weinstein and Brett Weinstein's Clips channel, and then Trigonometry. So like, not really, it doesn't surprise me. There is a part of me that wishes channels

• 25:51Chris Williamson?

  that I watch more were on there. So stuff like The School of Life, and like Sam Harris' stuff, and Charisma on Command, things that are more about the individuals. But those channels are huge. All those ones that I've just listed there are over 200k or a mil. So obviously, there's going to be, they're going to chew up an awful lot of the people that watch this show. And I suppose that because of the episodes that have banged so far, they do tend to be about politics. Yeah, that was fairly inevitable. But I think that's going to change over the next year or so. I'd be very interested to come back and see

• 26:32Chris Williamson?

  what that's like in a year's time. What type of investments do you have? So right now, I've got nothing in the market, which I know might be a little bit dumb. But I've also got nothing in crypto. I have four houses, I have mine, and then I have three other buy-to-lets. And they're done on an interest-only mortgage, about 25% LTV or 75% loan-to-value.

• 26:56Chris Williamson?

  And they just tick over. That's, I know that some people think that property isn't the way to go. But for me, it's been fantastic. I enjoy the process of sourcing them and purchasing them. And they generate money in a way that I don't think many other investments can. Your capital gain is going to continue to increase, presuming that we don't have some catastrophe to do with the housing market. And it also generates money on a monthly basis. So to me, there's still like, great money to be made in houses. How to critique your own podcasting skills and learn to ask better questions.

• 27:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, um, leading with curiosity is a big part of this. So just actually thinking, what do I want to know? What's that person just said? And what do I want to know? This is just a general skill for conversations in life. And I have to say, doing this show has meant my conversational skills have gone so improved so much more than they ever have done. Then almost in like 28 years of life up to beginning the podcast versus the last three years of doing the podcast. I've got better at conversations in the last three than all 28 before. Um, yeah, just thinking like, what do I want to know from this person? They've just said a thing about this. Is there something that needs clarifying?

• 28:12Chris Williamson?

  Is there something that I want to dig deeper into? Am I kind of done with this topic? And should I move on? The way that I think about um, structuring the podcast, actually, a lot of people ask about whether or not I script questions and stuff. I tend to write out like a rough idea of what might be interesting to talk about with the guest. But being honest, you have no idea what their mindset's going to be like, whether they come in and they want to talk about what you want to talk about or something different. I never send the questions to the guest because I like their responses and the reactions to be natural. But yeah, you just having that, having that framework of like, here's some things in case you get stuck, or in case you're not sure, or in case you want to have a next step to move them on to.

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

  That's like the tactic perhaps that you would give a team to go out onto the field of play with. But the actual game plan of what you do when you're on the field is always changing. And the game, the tactic that you've taken in could be thrown out the window after two minutes. So yeah, that's very much the way to do it. Follow, lead with your own curiosity, allow the guest to kind of speak. And also, don't be, don't be worried about sitting with silence. That was something, a huge problem I had when I began. I presumed that.

• 29:25Chris Williamson?

  Quiet, silent moments meant that it was boring or I had nothing to say or maybe the guest didn't like me or maybe the audience thought that there was nothing going on and they'd get bored. But a lot of the time, you actually need silence to allow the topic to sit because it's not just a bulleted list of you communicating indexed information to the audience. It's a experience that they're going through. They need time to think about what it is that the guest or you have just said previously. And also that in it for the tone and the tenor and the cadence of this, the conversation. So Daniel Schmachtenberger

• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  paused for 30 seconds to answer a question, but I didn't cut that out. I just left that in because it's like, okay, well, if he thinks it's worth a 30 second pause, then you can come along for the ride. And if that's not your bag, then there are much more highly edited podcasts out there. They're not the ones that I listen to, but you can go and listen to the ones that are super cut into basically just a list of bullet points. Horses for courses. What's next? What's next?

• 30:35Chris Williamson?

  Why did you start the podcast? I wanted to have more conversations. I went on the propane fitness podcast and really enjoyed it. And I wanted to do more of them. And I guess that the easiest way to do more of them was for me to start my own and then I could do it as much as I wanted. And here we are. Why are so many young adults obsessed with social justice?

• 30:57Chris Williamson?

  So I'm, I employ about 500 young adults, right? Between the age of 18 and 21 that work for my events company. And very few of them are obsessed with social justice. And I've said this before, I think it's, I wonder if it's a quirk of being in the northeast of the UK, but. I don't see this world of gender neutral bathrooms and patriarchy oppression and stuff like that. I don't know if it's limited in the UK, if it's limited where I am, if it's purely an American thing. I don't know. The reason that I think that they're obsessed with it is because there are far fewer of the traditional routes to success and finding

• 31:41Chris Williamson?

  meaning in life available now than there would have been in our parents' generation. We have an abundance of luxury and in that time, we find our own wars to fight. Like, in the time of a real crisis, we refocus our priorities. In the absence of a real crisis, we create our own. So that is one thesis that might explain a very terrible effect that's going on at the moment. Did you ever consider joining the military? Yes, I did. Actually, I remember I thought it would be really cool to join the military because I've always wondered what it would be like to kind of cast off all of the, all

• 32:25Chris Williamson?

  of the considerations that you do on a daily basis. I find making decisions, choosing just what to do with things. This was like when I was at uni. I still remember thinking like, if I went to, if I went in the military, I wouldn't have to, I wouldn't have to think about whether I was supposed to do something or not. I'd just get told to do it. Wouldn't it be interesting to see what my potential would be like if I got out of my own way just because I outsourced the decision making to some higher power? And that was a brief, but I was thinking sort of semi-seriously about it. My mum wouldn't have been too happy. She didn't want me to go in the military. But yeah, that would have been something that I would have been really interested to do. I don't know how I feel about conscription.

• 33:09Chris Williamson?

  I really do think that a unifying experience for all young men, maybe women as well. I don't know whether women were conscripted. I definitely think that it would be interesting to have that shared bond, you know, even maybe just six months, something like that. I think it could probably do a lot of good. What lessons have you learned rehabbing from injury that you've applied to other areas of your life?

• 33:37Chris Williamson?

  So I'm, I've been plagued with injuries for the last couple of years, which is why I'm getting like smaller, fatter and more unfit at the same time. But yeah, rupturing in Achilles taught me that you're far stronger than you realise. So you don't often know that you've got this power inside of you that allows you to deal with things that are going to be much, much worse than you've ever dealt with before. Rehab my back taught me the power of perseverance, that you need to just do things over and over again. And that embracing the grind is an important part of the important part of making progress, that it's, it's just going

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  to be suck, day after day, for a very, very long time. And it's helped me to manage my motivation. It's certainly made me a lot more resilient at things like when stuff gets tough with the podcast, or workloads with other things, the TED Talk, like trying to learn an 18 minute talk, rote is, it's just the same sentences, the same words, the same inflections over and over and over again. And that was, that's difficult, but I know that perseverance is important. I know that you need to just embrace the work and go and do it. I know

• 34:58Chris Williamson?

  that you're going to be able to deal with whatever the challenges are that end up coming up. And also learning in some form or another to enjoy the process, like to make things that you have to do a little bit easier. Like, I can't get around the fact that I need to do Stu McGill's Big Three and a ton of Achilles rehab every morning. So I choose to listen to a podcast while I'm doing it. And it makes that process easier. The same way as when it's edit day for the podcast and I need to put three episodes up in one day and write the show notes and do the intros and edit it and send the edits for the video to Dean and then make sure that the thumbnails are all written out for the design so that Dean gets those right as well. Like, I just do that, but I intersperse it with listening to music that I enjoy, or I just do other stuff that makes me feel good throughout the day. So yeah, you can turn suck into enjoyment pretty easily. You just need to

• 35:43Chris Williamson?

  make some tweaks. Best advice for a burgeoning content creator? Ah, just keep going. Like, just keep on going. In the beginning, quantity is far more important than quality, because the quality will come off the back of the quantity that you produce. It takes so long to get good at doing anything. And

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  Demotivation arrives really quickly, which means that if you continue to keep going, if you can get through that demotivation, you are selecting for a very, very small sliver of other people that are trying to do that thing, because most of them got demotivated and stopped. So if you get demotivated and keep going, you will start to get reinforced. So there's been periods with the show, like, we made, we must have made like, less than a tenner in our first year on YouTube, I think, with like, all of the AdSense money, like, 10 quid. But I wasn't doing it for that. And then over time, when we ran out of energy again, I would lean on Dean and he'd give me support. And then I'd like,

• 36:49Chris Williamson?

  get a cool message off a person that listens to the show and say that it really, really helped them or improved their life. I'm like, right, that's amazing. Continue to sort of just tick over, tick over with that, the periods of demotivation, know that they're going to come, keep consistent, stay on the cadence. And then now, it doesn't feel like a job. I don't get demotivated with the show anymore, because I've sunk into a routine and a rhythm of work, that if I wasn't to have three or four episodes a week that I need to record, it would feel like there was something missing from life. So yeah, just keep going. What's your go to tactic when feeling unmotivated? The similar sort of question, I guess.

• 37:32Chris Williamson?

  Um, I do get periods of demotivation, like, that are different to being outside of work, the more existential, I suppose. Just doing the things, I have a list of things that I know that are good for me and that make me feel good. So go outside, have a big glass of water, have a walk, have a cold shower, have a good night's sleep. Like, if you do those things.

• 37:58Chris Williamson?

  More often than not, you'll fix the demotivation. I think the demotivation often comes just from some sort of physical challenge, perhaps that you've, that's dusty as fuck. Top of my, top of my mic thing's dusty as hell. Yeah, the, the demotivation occurs, it's a trigger because of something that often happens physically, but then it manifests mentally and then you start to ruminate about it. And then you think, oh, this is because I'm X, Y and Z, when it could just be you're underslept, or you haven't been outside for a couple of days, or you're dehydrated. Like just focus on the basics. Make sure that you eat, sleep, move and drink right. And most of the other stuff ends up being all right.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  What's a belief that you hold, which many people disagree? What's a belief that you hold with which many people disagree? So this is Peter Thiel's interview question.

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  So the main one, the one that I always give when people ask this question is that we need to have a new perspective on the way that society views paedophilia. And I have to say that very, very carefully because people are too quick to jump to conclusions about it. I think that we need to help people and treat them from a place of empathy who are suffering with an awful affliction to their sexuality. They're completely ostracized by society. They're hated by pretty much everyone. And the difference between paedophilia and child molestation is everything. Paedophilia is some poor person who has been like basically cursed with this awful immoral

• 39:41Chris Williamson?

  type of sexual attraction. Child molesters are people that act on it. And I just think that, yeah, the vast majority of discourse around this is so unsubtle and so unnuanced. And like, to an extent rightly so, because it is really terrible. You know, children who have been abused, they grow up with all manner of PTSD and it's Awful like, you know, it makes everybody feel very, very uncomfortable. But I think that we need to treat people who are trying to recover, who are trying to do their best to control something that they know is malignant. We need to treat them with compassion. So yeah, there we go. More people annoyed.

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

  How have the conversations you've had on the podcast changed you? Like it's been one of the biggest transformative experiences that I've been through ever.

• 40:40Chris Williamson?

  I suppose that kind of speaks to the fact that if you do anything enough, it will become a part of you. James Clear talks about this in Atomic Habits where he says, if you kick a football once, are you a footballer? Well, probably not. If you do 100 keepy-uppies, are you a footballer? Well, probably not. Well, if you play football every Sunday for a team, are you a footballer? And you go, well, yeah, you probably are. So at what point do you become the thing? And it's when it becomes a part of your identity. And yeah, very much. Very much I see my role now, like I see the person that I am as someone who's different, fundamentally different to the person who I was when I began the show.

• 41:23Chris Williamson?

  I've had the fortune of speaking to all of these like wonderful, interesting people like Ryan Holiday and Seth Godin and James Clear and Chelsea Ferguson.

• 41:33Chris Williamson?

  And that is a very privileged position to be in. Which means that I almost being able to repackage that and help other people with those bits of advice. It's like really, it's just, it's awesome. Like you can't buy the insights that I've got from the show. There is no course on the planet that you could purchase. There is no coaching platform on earth that would permit you the amount of exposure that you can get by doing something like a podcast. And yeah, it's, it's made me more mindful. It's made me more aware of my own flaws, but it's also helped me to get past them. It's made me accept the person that I am and also embrace it. It's helped me find a voice as well.

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  Like I didn't really know. Who I was massively, because you're not forced to articulate who you are much. A lot of the time when you're having a conversation, it's kind of fleeting. Now, even the longest conversations that you tend to have with mates are like, what? 20 minutes, half an hour long? Some of the ones that we've done on the show have been over two hours. Constantly assessing your own motivations. Why do I think that thing? What is it? What is my belief around this? And because it's so cross-genre, because it's across everything from, you know, sport and fitness to philosophy, to meditation, to meaning, to sex work, to whatever, relationships.

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  There's nowhere to hide. There's nowhere for your assumptions to hide within that. So yeah, I think that everybody that's listening should try, if they can, to have a deep conversation with a friend once per week for at least an hour where they don't use their phones during it. And it will feel like you've done a mental floss. It feels like, it feels like rigorous therapy for everything that's a part of your life. And the more that you do it, the better you'll get, the more rigorous you'll be with your speech, the more precise you'll be with the way that you articulate things. That's such a hack and everyone can do it. You know, ring your mum, ring a friend. I know that you probably can't see them at the moment because we're all locked the fuck down in our houses.

• 43:45Chris Williamson?

  What's the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to you? I mean, that's a deep question. I came off a bike, I came off a moped in Bali and it was paying 50 pence a day for a bike in Bali, which is obviously my fault. Pulled the brakes, brakes didn't work, came off the bike, hit the road, lost most of the skin on the left-hand side of my body, like just coarse Balinese tarmac. And I've just grated half of my body off onto the floor. And I was riding with these two Australian dudes that were staying in my hotel, who I'd only really recently just met. And they always did this, they were always in Australia and then. Nipping over to Bali, so they were really sort of agile on their bikes.

• 44:27Chris Williamson?

  And I remember thinking ahead of, I've just lost half the skin off one side of my body. I'm still in the middle of a road. So there's traffic coming in both directions and the bike's on the floor and I'm like in this tiny pair of swim shorts and a vest. The first thing that I felt was fuck, like what a dickhead. It's so embarrassing. And the guys came over and asked, oh, mate, mate, you all right? And I was like, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm fine. So I was more concerned about looking like a twat than I was caring for my own personal safety. So that was, that was fairly embarrassing, I suppose. I tend to, I tend to be sort of fairly all right with avoiding embarrassing situations mostly. Do you feel a sense of purpose and service in what you do?

• 45:11Chris Williamson?

  You fucking should and thank you. Well, thank you.

• 45:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, this is interesting, I suppose. This is another Aubrey Marcus thing. He says, in order to serve, you have to be fit for service. And until you feel that you're fit for service, you kind of just see it as a very one way street, right? You're having this conversation or you're creating content. You don't really ever think about the impact that it has on people. You know, there are far, far bigger channels and people doing much greater work than the size and the scope of what is happening on Modern Wisdom. But I do think that it's

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  a voice and a rhetoric that really, really needs to be heard. Like obviously, or else I wouldn't be doing it.

• 45:55Chris Williamson?

  Like being radically sensible, genuinely caring about the integrity of the words that you say, speaking with virtue, being mindful, being open to new ideas. Like these things make for a good life. They help us to avoid the trappings of.

• 46:17Chris Williamson?

  Being dogmatic about any ideology about our assumptions, they allow us to be happier because they they let us cast off the things that we used to think and it permits us to see the world the way that it actually is. So I suppose now that in terms of service, I I hope so. I hope that it impacts people positively. It certainly does me. In terms of sense of purpose, yeah, absolutely. I have done for the last year or so very strongly since I decided to turn pro, as Stephen Pressfield calls it. Like, I want to be the best podcast in Europe. I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be the case. I know that there isn't an objective metric of that. I'm not bothered about being the most played.

• 47:02Chris Williamson?

  I'm bothered about being the best, which means the most interesting conversations, the most insightful conversations, the best realizations, like who is the the guests that no one else has even thought to get, the conversations and the places that no other podcaster even thinks about going, or if they do think about going to it, that it's delivered in a more precise way, in a more rigorous way, in a more insightful way. But those are the things that I want to do. And I the skill set that we've built up between myself and Dean over the last few years, I really feel like now that the platform 100K, obviously, now that we've got to that stage and we have this big platform, it feels like, right, finally, I've got all this ammunition in the magazine and I've finally got some targets to shoot at. So I really hope that I really hope that that

• 47:47Chris Williamson?

  does does continue to to make me feel the way that it does. It's very, very fulfilling. How old are you? I am 33 years old today. I'm filming this on my birthday. Is that cool? Well, I'm doing it. I'm filming this on my birthday. I I thought I might as well do something that I would enjoy. So answering these questions has been it. I'm 33 years old today. Does Chris watch Geordie Shore? I don't even know if that's still going.

• 48:14Chris Williamson?

  It can't be. It can't be going during the pandemic, is it? I I did not watch Geordie Shore. I was actually on the first episode. I was on a bunch of different episodes at the house parties and stuff, but the first ever episode of Geordie Shore ends up at our event at Voodoo at Riverside, which we ran for forever years through Voodoo Events, our events company. I've maybe seen that half, no, I've maybe seen that two episodes, full episodes ever. Most awkward interview.

• 48:46Chris Williamson?

  So out of 400 ish episodes, no, sorry, 300 ish episodes that we've done.

• 48:56Chris Williamson?

  I think I haven't published maybe four. So like a 1% rate of failure. I don't think that's too bad. I do one failure out of 100 episodes.

• 49:12Chris Williamson?

  Don't tend to be awkward. It's just, you feel bad for the guests because if they're talking themselves in circles, it's just a bit like, this is really not going to look good for you. I haven't, thankfully, I haven't had many awkward ones. I've just had ones that I didn't think really showed the guests in a very good light.

• 49:32Chris Williamson?

  The most awkward interview that I've ever seen is the real Wolf of Wall Street and Grant Cardone. That was just compelling watching, but it was like a slow motion car crash. If you haven't seen it, go and watch it once this video is done. It's like Grant Cardone trying to be really quite alpha. And then Jordan Belfort being like very accommodating as the host, obviously trying to get this conversation out. And I think Grant Cardone just sees it as a big, a big dick measuring competition. It's so, that's so bad. Is seeing yourself as weird or having weirdness a lack of self-love and acceptance?

• 50:15Chris Williamson?

  I don't really know what that means.

• 50:21Chris Williamson?

  I suppose if what you mean by this is,

• 50:27Chris Williamson?

  I think that the assumption here is that using the term weird or having weirdness means that you don't see yourself as worthy of love and acceptance. For me, the term weird or weirdness is just a.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  Different iteration of unique or one of a kind. That's all it is. Like, people want to be unique and spectacular and astounding in life. But for some reason, because of the quirk of weird or weirdness, it's associated because of playground mentality with being a loner or not being popular or not being successful. But no, I don't think that you can find people who get non-typical results without them having weirdness inside of them. And if there's like, anything, anything at all that I hope the people that listen to this show take away, it's that embracing your weirdness will improve your entire life.

• 51:24Chris Williamson?

  What do you have planned for the relaunch of your events business? Ah, that is an interesting one. So Bojo came out this week and said that this roadmap to recovery, which the 21st of June, I think, is the day that is being predicted for nightclubs to come back. But the only way that works is if there's not a single speed bump along the way, which I just can't see happening. Like, it would be awesome if it did, but I just can't see it happening. So we will go back to probably our lockdown lineup of events, which would be Monday, Tuesday at Wonderbar, and then Thursday, Friday at

• 52:08Chris Williamson?

  the Points. But what we want to really get back to is the proper lineup that we have, where it would be Monday, quids in at Digital, Tuesday, Prism has been sold, so we can't do that anymore. But then Thursday at the Points and Friday at Top. So that is really where we want to be. But I don't know, I think talking about events and nightclubs still, when the R rate and the level of infections and the deaths and stuff are where they're at, like, we can't really even plan for anything. It's gonna be very, very difficult. But I'm looking forward to getting stuck back in. I very much missed being on the front door of nightclubs. What's the best advice you ever got or gave? God.

• 52:56Chris Williamson?

  Greg McKeown, talking about essentialism, saying that to do less but better is one of the answers to a common malady of the 21st century, I think is is a pretty good one, especially for me with the type A sort of curious, distracted by shiny things personality that I have. I genuinely think that most problems can be fixed by people just saying no to more stuff. And that was certainly true for me. So yeah, I would say the core thesis of essentialism, to do less but better, to focus on the vital few and not the trivial many,

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  is probably the most impactful advice that I've had over the last year. What does your typical training week look like? So right now, given that I'm recovering from the Achilles rupture, I can't do any functional stuff. I can't do much functional stuff. I'm not running quite yet. So for me, it would be pull and push, back and chest. Then it would be a legs and shoulders day, and then it would be conditioning and arms. So it's like a classic bodybuilding split, but I guess it's just a yeah, push pull with legs and shoulders put together and then conditioning with the with the pumpy stuff.

• 54:20Chris Williamson?

  That to me actually ends up being a much easier way to put your programming together because you can train upper back and chests together. And I find that it actually sets my shoulders in a nicer place. Especially if I warm up for chest by doing some heavy rows first. It means that when I go to bench, my shoulders are locked in and down and it feels a lot better. Whereas if like me, you've been training chest for 75 years. It means that as soon as you start working up through those sets, if you're not doing anything to retract your scapular and bring you back into that nice open position for your shoulders, you wake up the next day and you're just wrecked. Like it really is quite uncomfortable because obviously posturally, all of those of us that just did chest Mondays

• 55:03Chris Williamson?

  seven days a week for a couple of years have ended up with some imbalances. It's really important that I open up with that. So chest and back, shoulders and legs, arms and conditioning together. And that'll be maybe five days a week. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. What's your outlook on life and humanity?

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  I suppose that focusing, as I said earlier on, focusing on things which truly, truly matter and are truly true

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  is going to be very, very important over the next few years. There is a one in six chance that we don't make it through the next century because of the existential risks that we're facing. And having the smartest people of our time obsessing over whether boys are boys and girls are girls doesn't seem like a very good way for humanity to move forward. So I hope that we get past this sort of dogmatic, collectivist mindset and we focus on what really matters because there's only one cradle of humanity at the moment and it's here. And if something goes wrong, there is no do-overs. Like if we face an existential risk, we're screwed.

• 56:27Chris Williamson?

  Elon's not on Mars yet, we're wrecked. In terms of an outlook on life, it's changed significantly over the last few years. And I think that

• 56:38Chris Williamson?

  trying to find joy today in whatever it is that you do is an important part of that. I'd always been very much a I'll be happy when type person. I'll be happy when I hit 100,000 subscribers. I'll be happy when I finally live in this house or buy this car or have this kind of life or whatever. But tomorrow, that tomorrow is never, ever, ever going to come. It is going to continue to roll away from you. And the only way that you can stop, the only way that you can win that game is by stopping playing. By saying, I'm just going to find joy in whatever it is that I do. And the easiest way to access that, as everyone knows, is to try and be present, to try and

• 57:22Chris Williamson?

  take some gratitude for whatever it is that you're doing, the food that you're eating, the chair that you're sitting on, you don't feel, here's a good example. So wherever you're sat or stood or driving right now, just feel the sensations that are coming through your body. So feel the chair underneath your bum or feel the floor underneath your feet. Feel the steering wheel underneath your hands or feel the earbuds in your ear. Like those sensations are at the forefront of your experience. And yet you never notice them, you never think about them unless something catastrophic happens and you stand on like a piece of Lego toy or an upturned plug.

• 57:57Chris Williamson?

  Those sorts of things show us that there is far more going on at a simplistic and basic level that we can take notice of, that reminds us whatever is true of life is happening right now. And over complicating things, presuming that some level of achievement or some level of material wealth or some amount of success in life is going to be the answer is just, it's a misnomer because that success is always going to continue to run away from you. Whereas those things, the way that you feel right now, the things that you can see, the taste of your food, like those things are real and they can provide an awful lot of joy. I'm aware that it sounds very minimalist, that coming from someone who's doing 100K

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  subscriber celebration video to talk about like just finding, you know, find, find meaning and peace in the, in the present moment. But it is true, like you can want the success, but not make it about the success. I think that's important. Actually, I finished with this example from Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly Media. He talks about money on a road trip and he says that money is like gasoline on a road trip. You need to make sure that you've got enough gas to get you through the trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations either. And I think that that really highlights where I'm at at the moment, which is, I've

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  not totally cast off all of the, the trappings and, and the desires for success and quantifiable objective metrics of, of achievement. Like this channel hitting 100K makes me very, very satisfied, but it makes me satisfied because not because of the number itself, but because it's a representation and a milestone of part of a bigger journey that I feel compelled to do and that I feel is meaningful to me.

• 59:54Chris Williamson?

  I don't think everyone can or necessarily should totally cast off their desires for material success. Having nice things is nice. Having success and achieving goals is also nice. Being famous and wealthy can also be enjoyable and fun. You can enjoy the success and use the success, but always remember that it isn't about the success. And I think that that's where I'm at. In my less gracious moments, I still, the same as everyone, get drawn into obsessing over the YouTube studio app and seeing how many plays we've done today. And oh God, it's gone down. Like should, maybe we should try and do this. Maybe it wasn't good enough. Maybe this, this, this. And then as soon as you breathe, you just

• 1:00:39Chris Williamson?

  realise like, it didn't matter. Like just continue to focus on the process of doing the things of whatever it is that you're compelled to do, whether it be making a podcast or a YouTube channel, or being the best mom or dad that you can, or being a good boss, being a good worker, being a good whatever. Like as long as all that you're doing is trying to do your best, trying to focus on being present in that moment, trying to provide the things that you can do in the highest quality way that you can, everything else ends up falling into place. Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed that. That is officially my first monologue episode and the 100k subscriber completed. Thank you very much to everyone for tuning in. I really, really, really enjoy this show and I hope that it

• 1:01:24Chris Williamson?

  continues. I hope that you have enjoyed being a part of it so far. Big love from me and Video Guide Dean. I will see you very, very soon indeed. Peace.