900k Q&A - Unreleased Andrew Tate Episode, Toxic Comments & Steroids

I hit 900k Subscribers on YouTube!! To celebrate, I asked for questions from YouTube, Twitter, Locals and Instagram, so here's another 90 minutes of me trying to answer as many as possible. As always there's some great questions in here about why I didn't release a 2 hour Andrew Tate episode, why certain commenters have been getting banned on YouTube and whether I'm on steroids. Expect to learn whether IQ or boobs are more important in a mate, whether I'm going to do a meet & greet at my live shows, what the darkest elements of the manosphere are, whether I think we can beat population collapse, my advice to a 13 year old entrepreneur, what the intro song on audio is and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at http://mudwtr.com/mw (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Zachary and Miguel from AISHIP. CO created the ChrisBot for me. They can develop all kinds of AI solutions, check them out here - https://aiship.co/ Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #andrewtate #positivity #steroids - 00:00 Intro 00:40 New Project with James Smith 01:33 Current Role Model 02:35 New Sleep Token Album 03:28 ‘The’ Moustache 03:54 Does Hard Work Always Equal Success? 08:00 Coming to Montreal? 08:30 Advice on Changing Career 09:26 Banned from Comments 11:31 Discord Server? 12:21 Becoming Less Self-Conscious 14:17 IQ Vs Boobs 16:07 Podcast with Andrew Tate 18:22 Challenges in Monetising the Podcast 20:55 Meet & Greets on the Live Tour 21:50 Darkest Elements of the Manosphere 25:14 Guest Cancellations 26:03 Software for Remote Podcasts 26:44 Russell Brand 27:35 Guest Suggestions 28:06 Indian Food 28:16 What It’s Like to be Chris 29:31 Population Collapse 31:45 How to Become Articulate 32:44 Chris’s Hairstyle 33:11 What Chris Would Like to Discuss 34:27 Structure of Live Events 36:11 Biggest Sacrifice to Make MW 37:33 Processing So Much Learning 39:14 Advice to a 20-Year-Old 41:02 Time Management 42:58 Why Chris is Interested in Men’s Dating Struggles 46:35 Advice to a 13-Year-Old 49:12 Advice for Starting a Podcast 50:10 Advice to More Traditional Women 53:09 Did Chris Think the Podcast Would Become This Big? 54:33 Hardest Period of Chris’s Life 56:22 Modern Wisdom Hoodies 57:02 Cutting Out Alcohol 59:30 Behind The Scenes of MW 1:01:00 Chris’s Next 10 Years 1:03:07 Is Chris Taking Steroids? 1:03:17 Modern Wisdom Intro Song 1:04:39 How to Get a Girlfriend 1:07:12 Dream Q&A Question 1:08:18 Applying Knowledge into Daily Life 1:11:00 Course on Improving Communication 1:14:16 Overcoming Limiting Beliefs 1:17:44 Being an Outlier 1:19:32 Hamza & Iman Ghadzi 1:20:03 How to De-Sedate Men 1:23:34 Andy Frisella 1:24:47 Worse Dates than Chris’s Love Island Date? 1:26:21 Making Friends at University 1:28:49 Becoming Comfortable on Camera 1:31:42 How to Learn Lots & Stay Curious 1:33:39 How to Stop Overthinking & Start Doing 1:34:59 How to Build Confidence with a Disability 1:35:59 Preparation for Each Episode 1:38:18 Video on Spotify 1:39:35 Conclusion - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Bonjour friends, welcome back to the show. It is a 900,000 subscriber Q and A episode. This one came along quite quickly and as usual, I asked for questions on Instagram, Twitter, Locals and YouTube community. And there were literally thousands. So I've tried to condense down lots of ones that were all similar and I'm going to get through as many as I can today. As always, thank you so much for all of the support. I really do appreciate it. This year has just been insane. The growth, the guests, the quality of the conversations, everything's amazing. So thank you very much for being a part of it. Let us get into it. Dwinga22, what is this product that you're releasing with James Smith?

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so I flew back to the UK for 44 hours a couple of weeks ago to finish off the final versions of something that I've been working on in secret with James for six months now. We're going to be able to announce it probably within six weeks or so. Early July, I think we'll be able to announce it. And it is so good. We've been working so hard on this. We've tested 150 different variations and I'm so happy. I can't wait to release this. It's also the first product that I'm ever going to have released and the first product that James has ever done, the first thing that we've ever properly put our names behind. And we're, we're joining forces like, like what, who did, who did the fusion dance in Dragon Ball Z?

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  Whoever that was, that's like us. Andres Coy1, who is your current role model? I think I'm quite fortunate that at the moment, a lot of the people who I used to idolize are now friends, partly due to living in a place that's just full of absolute beasts. And also because I do something that I'm also a fan of. I'm a fan of the podcasting independent thinker space and I also exist in it as well.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  Definitely thinking more and more about how to be a positive person. So guys like Naval, who have a very rosy outlook on life, who you try and see the good in what's happening is something that I'm trying to take more of. But honestly, turning idols into rivals and then rivals into friends is one of the biggest life hacks ever. It's phenomenal to have somebody that you both respect and admire that is now a fan of even your work and you get to look up to them. It's really cool. Max Podzigan, Sleep Token album, thoughts? Also, your favorite albums of all time. Thanks for amazing pod. Thank you.

• 2:43Chris Williamson?

  This new Sleep Token album, Take Me Back to Eden, is out of this world. It's probably one of the best albums I've heard in the last five years. So if you haven't checked it out, you need to go and listen to it. It's amazing, man. I mean, they've managed to blend metal with like hip hop, rap, with funk, with this weird jazz offset shit. It's outstanding. I'm very, very impressed. Other favorite albums, Semper Fi by Bring Me is outrageous. I also listened to Dead Mouse's album from 2007, the one that had more ghosts and stuff on it. Those would be two that come to mind.

• 3:26Chris Williamson?

  Clan C, that moustache. Yes, yes, I know. I don't know, I was gonna grow my hair and I literally only got it cut today. I was gonna grow my hair out because I was getting a bit bored, but it's so hot in Austin that I can't bear it. And the moustache, I had one of these during lockdown and I just thought, why not channel my inner 70s cop slash porn star? So this is what we're playing with for the time being.

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  Smelly Cat, congrats, sir. Well deserved. Thank you. I feel like you do these 100K Q and As every month now. Yep, I do. That 1 million episode is coming soon. My question, love the Dr. K episode. You guys got to talking about Sigma Grindset and survivorship bias. And he mentioned that there are some people that work their ass off and still fail, maybe for the lack of proper strategy. As someone who put in the work and has built multiple successful businesses, is it hard for you to concede to the idea that hard work doesn't always equal success? Do you think that there are people who do the work, have the right strategies even, but still, for whatever reason, fail? Or do you think there's always an observable, addressable reason someone is unable to get to where they set out to go, even in regards to the low probability of success, things like living off creative

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  endeavors, as you do? That is a really smart question. I have to say as well, all of the questions from today are so phenomenal. Do you want to know why this doesn't feel like the tenor in the comments more? Like, they're so reasonable and balanced and smart, super, super smart. And then sometimes some of these episodes go hyper viral and it, I don't know, it just reaches out into the real versions of YouTube, like the cesspool YouTube. And sometimes the comment sections are just so boring, filled with like, I don't know, just negativity. Anyway, the people that ask questions, you should comment more on YouTube,

• 5:13Chris Williamson?

  is my point. Is it the case that people can work very hard and still come out on the other side not succeeding? Yeah, obviously. You know, you are rolling the dice every single time that you try and have an interaction, that you try and set out to achieve some sort of a goal, you might not do it. And that is a risk that you take. It is a difficult circle to square, because every single person that I know.

• 5:43Chris Williamson?

  Bar none, who has continued to work hard and is talented and consistent, has achieved success. There's no one that I don't know. So here's a good story. Christoph, the DJ, CJ from Newcastle, I was with him last weekend, he was playing in Austin. I remember, we used to go back to after-parties at this guy's house when we were early twenties or something, and he would play people songs that he'd produced. And he was in love with Eric Priz, and the Priz was his idol and stuff. And he would bring these tracks in and play them, and some of the guys would be a little bit mocking like, "Oh, you and your mate Eric, have you been speaking much?" Obviously, Eric Priz didn't know who the fuck this guy was. And he would leave after-parties that were in his own living room to go into the spare

• 6:27Chris Williamson?

  bedroom of his house, which was his studio, and make tracks for a couple of hours, and then come back in. So he would abandon a party he was hosting to go play, work on his stuff, and then come back in. And the guy just didn't stop. I remember thinking at the time, this dude is so talented and hardworking, it's simply a matter of time before something hits. And sure enough, all of the people that had sort of given him a bit of digs about, "Oh, you and your mate Eric," I think three or four years ago, he warmed up for Eric Priz at Madison Square Garden on New Year's Eve, and he's on Pride, he's on his label, he's playing every Monday at High Ibiza this summer with Eric and Adam Beyer. So if you're in Ibiza

• 7:09Chris Williamson?

  this summer, you should go and see Cosi play. My point being that sometimes, things are not going to work out, even if you have put all of the hard work in. But the more that you are intentional, the more that you work hard, the more that you are consistent, the more that you try and apply reason and talent to whatever it is that you're doing, that likelihood gets infinitesimally smaller and smaller and smaller. And then, over time, you can basically erode it away to zero. I know a lot of people, I know a lot of people who are successful, all of them are people who have had failures, who have continued to iterate, and then on the other side of that have been, have managed to achieve what it is that they wanted. It is a little probability, but if you keep going, you either stop, or

• 7:54Chris Williamson?

  you win. Those are the two solutions.

• 8:03Chris Williamson?

  When are you coming to Montreal? Maybe next year. The live tour thing that we're doing in November, hopefully will do really, really well. Obviously, it's all sold out and stuff, which was great. If that goes well and I enjoy it and it's fun, we will do a full global tour next year. Australia, there are so many Aussies, all of America, Canada, UK again, and then maybe some places in Europe. So maybe next year. Just Joel Williams. Hi, Chris. I want a changing career, but everyone around me is telling me not to. Any advice? Don't listen to them. You don't need to listen to somebody telling you what you shouldn't do if you want to do it. I want a changing career, but everyone around me is telling me not to.

• 8:49Chris Williamson?

  Just do if you've done the assessment and because you listen to the show, you probably have worked out what you want to want. If the changing career is something not to being a drug dealer, it's presumably to something which is more aligned, more virtuous, more ascended, more awakened in line with what it is that you want to do in life. Just go and do it like you're already succeeding presumably at a job that you hate. Can you imagine how amazing you would be at a job that you actually enjoyed? So yeah, most people's advice isn't worth listening to. You can aggregate it, but I don't know. Most people are midwits. User nine, two, two, two, eight, one. Why did you ban me from commenting?

• 9:32Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so I mentioned earlier on about the real internet that you kind of push out into. If anything achieves a bit of virality, you go from outside of the core audience that are the subscribers and the people who align with what you're doing. And you get out into just like the rest of the internet, right? Like the general public of the internet.

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  And I just found that some of the comment sections were getting boring and negative and cynical. And this toxic positivity thing that I'm on a flex of at the moment, I'm just bored of it. Like I'm bored of all of you, every single person that comments with something that's knee jerky, unthoughtful, not mediated through any sense of thinking about what's going on. There's no context and all that you want to do is just, I had some guy before I came on, commented on a real, on a slide that I put up. I wasted two minutes of my life on another white boy that goes to the gym. I'm like, okay, you don't get to play in the playpen. Like it's my house. You have to behave if you want to come in here. This doesn't mean that everyone has to be a sycophant. I'm fine with criticism.

• 10:37Chris Williamson?

  I'm just not fine with retards. That was retarded. So it's a one and done ban policy now on the YouTube. It used to be that if someone had commented a number of times, because we can see on the backend, if you click on a user, you can see everything that they've ever commented on your channel. And there was tons and tons of people. It was always the same offenders commenting just stupid stuff. And after a while, I'd said to the guys that are looking at the channel on the backend, like, look, get rid of people if they're being consistently just negative and boring and not adding anything to the conversation. And now it's one and done. And over time, the comment section will be sanitized. So just behave. This doesn't mean that you need to agree with me. It means that you need to not be an idiot. So, yeah. And also, like I say, everyone that's contributing here,

• 11:22Chris Williamson?

  contribute in the comments more because your guys' input is way more interesting than what most of the other comments are. Juan Mashilling, have you thought of building a community in Discord or something? So I've actually been speaking to a guy who, his entire company builds Discord servers around communities and there's all layers and admins and it gamifies stuff. So, yeah, I have. If people would like that, if they want more of a community side of things, that's something that I'd consider doing.

• 11:57Chris Williamson?

  It's not something I'd thought of before, either a Slack or a Discord.

• 12:02Chris Williamson?

  Mostly because I don't use Discord myself, or I haven't until very recently, when I started doing Mid Journey and Slack as well. I hadn't used until we started adding some more people into the team. So I would. And if people are interested in that, then, I don't know, comment or something. And if there's enough people, we'd consider doing it.

• 12:21Chris Williamson?

  Guegos underscore pan, how to actually realize that people don't notice us, especially our appearance as much as we think? Yeah, this is, um, it's obvious philosophically, but kind of hard to deploy in reality, I think. You know, our biology is... Created to make us feel concerned about the judgment of others. This makes sense ancestrally. If you knew 50 people in your portion of the tribe, you needed to be very, very careful that you didn't do something that would make you fall down the rung of status because status was so closely associated with your mortality and with your quality of life and so on.

• 13:03Chris Williamson?

  So we are, your entire body and physiology and mind is designed to make you unsatisfied. And remembering that makes life make an awful lot more sense. However, you do know that you don't care all that much about anybody else. So why would you think that anybody else cares that much about you? You're just some random person walking down the street with tomato sauce on your top. No one remembers, no one cares.

• 13:33Chris Williamson?

  For me, as somebody that was super self-conscious throughout fucking forever, it was just time and attention, I think. That was a big part of it, realizing that so much of the stuff that I did was unnecessarily shaped by the opinions of people who didn't have an opinion on me. And I, I really, really think that if you realized how little people care about your appearance, that you know, you, some of your favorite friends, you're friends with people not because of the way that they look, but because of the things that they say, whether or not they're good people, whether or not they're interesting, whether or not they're kind, whether or not they're reliable. Your appearance doesn't make that much of a difference, I promise.

• 14:16Chris Williamson?

  Escaping mediocrity, IQ or boobs in a mate? How far would you give up aesthetics for a smart girl? This is an interesting one because, you know, men don't value intelligence as much in a partner. This isn't to say that they don't at all. And obviously, intelligence is highly associated with being interesting and kind and all of the things I just said we care about in the people that we want around us. But it's not as important. And a lot of guys would happily take like an 80 IQ girl who had the perfect body and not convinced that the reverse would be true.

• 14:57Chris Williamson?

  One of the problems you have is that smart people in general can be more disagreeable. And disagreeability is not all that enjoyable when it comes to a relationship. So it's not just like you get either IQ or boobs. You don't even just get boobs, right? It's like, okay, has the boobs come with back problems down the line? Does the boobs come with an increased risk of something else? There is like a polygenic score of everything. I think that it's a balance, like fence sitting, it's a balance. But you can't work out whether or not you should date somebody who is a 10 out of 10, but dead as a doornail, or someone who's super, super smart, but you can't bear to see them naked. Like evidently, both of those are bad ideas.

• 15:40Chris Williamson?

  So personal preference, I suppose. That being said, I did once hear someone who made a perfect example of everybody is a boobs guy until they have sex, after which they're a bum guy. Basically, his argument was that the utility of a bum is greater up until it's greater to use, but boobs are better to look at. I don't know, but interesting. Nevvy69, what about the podcast with Andrew Tate? Underhouse arrest at the moment, and I saw what happened to that Vice guy who tried to get in. I never said this, never mentioned this on the podcast before. I recorded a podcast with Andrew Tate three years ago, I think. Two or three years ago, it was in the height of COVID.

• 16:25Chris Williamson?

  Andrew Tate, welcome to the show.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Hello, good to see you.

• 16:29Chris Williamson?

  Good to see you as well, man. And we spoke about lockdowns, concern about governmental overreach. He was sort of waging war against people that were getting vaccinated at the time and complying with government demands. And I had to turn a pushback. It was like well-natured, but I just didn't put it out because it would have got the channel absolutely nuked for talk of vaccine misinformation. It was when everything was super hot on YouTube. So I texted him afterwards and I was like, look, mate, I can't, I can't put this out because it's just gonna, it's gonna destroy the channel. And he understood and said, let's run it back and we can do a different conversation. We can talk about other stuff. But yeah, that's just sat on a hard drive somewhere, unreleased Tate content. This is another thing, man, like.

• 17:13Chris Williamson?

  I understand that everybody, all of us on YouTube sell our soul to one degree or another, but there are people out there like that as an example, I could have released that at the height of Tate's fame as some unseen, unreleased, two-hour Andrew Tate video. It would have been clipped up to hell. It would have got millions of plays. But I know it just didn't, it felt like the time had passed for having that conversation. It probably wouldn't have been a super smart thing to do, or a super fair thing to do about Andrew because his views would have changed. There are people on YouTube that behave like normal human beings. Like, that's a normal thing to do. It's just fair and

• 17:56Chris Williamson?

  not screwing over somebody. I know that a lot of content creators can seem like they're just ready to take a bag or to compromise whatever value and virtue that they have. And that's tempting all of the time, every single day. That's tempting. But I do work pretty hard myself and a lot of my friends do too, to like, try and find that balance. So have a bit of faith in your content, creative favorites when you can. Timo Schönen, what has been the greatest challenge for you in monetizing the podcast? Very appropriate question. I mean, largely I haven't monetized the podcast. There are people who have followings 10% of what I do in terms of monthly reach, in terms of

• 18:38Chris Williamson?

  subscribers, in terms of impact, who make 10 times, 100 times more money, I mean 100, but a lot more money than I do. And they've got courses and educational products and they've productized, commercialized stuff. I think one of the biggest challenges has been remaining aligned with what I want to do. I've said no to so many guests to come on this podcast that I don't think add any value to the conversation, or I don't think that they're good actors, or I don't think that they are virtuous people, or I'm just not interested in them. And even though they would have caused tons and tons of plays, and I'm trying to hold that same level of value and...

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  Integrity as best I can with monetizing as well. And that means I'm leaving an awful lot of money on the table. Like I'm leaving tons and tons and tons of cash on the table. I'm not monetizing as effectively as I could be or should be. So that's been one of them, balancing like integrity with commercialization.

• 19:47Chris Williamson?

  Another one would be that it's a very heavy lift. You know, for all that the

• 19:53Chris Williamson?

  channel is massive and channels of this size usually have a huge team around them. It's not, we've got a new guy who has been with us for about two months now. Chase, who is my YouTube wizard, my little YouTube dwarf mage guy, like little spellbinder YouTube person who's bigger than me. And he's great, but it's still a very small team, which means that anything that we want to bring to market is very effortful. So I'm always the bottleneck for this stuff. But I would love to release some educational products over the next couple of years. Like I'd love to do a morning routine course, a communications course, maybe something to do with networking, maybe a podcast mastery thing. I'd love to get those out because I think that they're genuinely aligned with me. I don't feel like I'm selling out.

• 20:35Chris Williamson?

  It's not a grift or a shill to teach people the things that you guys ask every single Q and A. But it is a heavy lift. And I also kind of don't actually know if you want that, what it is that you want. Do you want the Discord community? Do you want courses or whatever? So I know comment or find some way to tell somebody to tell me to do something. Maybe we'll do it. Murphy's Law. Are you going to do a meet and greet or after party event following your live shows? Yes, didn't put this on the advert, but yeah, we're going to find a venue for after Dublin, Manchester and both of the London shows. And everybody's going to be invited and I'm going to be there. And some of the like big and name guests that are just going to come and sit in the crowd will probably be there too.

• 21:16Chris Williamson?

  So we'll be able to catch up and, and every, I can meet everybody and I can do photos and things. When it's shows of this size, most people, some people would do VIP tickets with meet and greet and the photos and all the rest of this stuff. But I'd rather just meet everyone. You know, if we're doing next year, shows that are 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 cap plus, you can't do that. But for now, with the shows at the caps that they are, it's realistic that I can get through everyone. So yes, is the answer. Heluficlovanas, what do you think are the darkest elements that came out of the manosphere? That is a good question.

• 21:58Chris Williamson?

  What do I think are the darkest elements that came out of the manosphere? I mean, some of the fundamental assumptions around that philosophy, I think, are quite damaging. I think that treating women as the enemy as a resource to be extracted from, or as an enemy to be used and discarded or avoided at all costs, isn't a particularly successful approach for a guy that wants to feel like he is integrated holistically into the world around him. Like, you're seeing 50% of every, every single street that you walk down, half of the people that are walking on that street are either an enemy or a resource to be extracted from.

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't exactly make me think that they're going to be a good person. And it's not like these people arrived at this conclusion on their own. The thought leaders are giving these pieces of advice out there. So that would be one of them, that you've basically demonized 50% of the entire globe. I'm not convinced that teaching men their primary goal is to become as high value as possible, to lean into discipline and, and do all of the hard things, and you've got to be on your grind, and you've got to make money, and you've got to be in shape, and all of the rest of it. But that discipline ends at the boundary around your penis. You can be disciplined in everything in life, but when it comes to women, like, just, it's

• 23:25Chris Williamson?

  a free-for-all, bro, because Genghis Khan or something also doesn't strike me as a particularly smart idea. Like, it's just rank hypocrisy, isn't it? Like, if you believe that discipline and integrity and virtue and doing the right thing are a smart way to go, but you want to carve out this little niche because you can't control where your penis goes, and that's not me saying that this is, like, something that any guy can do, but if you're going to proselytize about all of this stuff, you need to have a philosophy that is contiguous with that, right? It needs to run.

• 24:03Chris Williamson?

  At least you need to scale it to your penis from your bank account to your pants. And I don't know, I think those would be two of them. But I mean, I'm writing this book with David at the moment. For people that don't know, I'm writing a book with David Buss, the grandfather of evolutionary psychology. And it's going to come out soon. No, it's not. It's going to come out next year. It's going to be finished within the next six months. But I'm balls deep in all of this research at the moment, trying to work out what's going on with modern mating. Deeper than I go on the show, which is pretty deep already. And it's fascinating, but it's dangerous. Like, people aren't being fed particularly good advice by mainstream media. And the stuff that's on the internet has like glimmers of gold in piles of shit. So really trying to dig into that is proving difficult.

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  I would say those two things, adversarial nature between men and women, seeing them as an enemy to be avoided or as an adversary to be used and discarded. And this lack of

• 25:04Chris Williamson?

  discipline across all areas of your life, I think, two not particularly positive concepts.

• 25:12Chris Williamson?

  Wizard wow. Have you had guests cancel last minute and suspected or knew that it was due to them? Maybe learning about problematic guests you had on the show before. Never, I would say either never. Well, I guess, how would I know? I've not suspected it ever happening and certainly not recently. I don't think I've had that many problematic people on the show. Like, you know, the most problematic guests are people like Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad. He's up there. I guess Jordan Peterson, if you don't like him. David Pakman would be problematic for a lot of people from the right.

• 25:49Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. I think that most people seem to be quite reasonable around people that you've had on, especially if you seem to be acting in good faith. So far, I appear to be doing it. Nick O'Neill, what software do you use to record the podcast remotely? Do you have any recommendations on how to optimize audio quality when recording remote interviews through Zoom or Microsoft Teams? Critical drinker sorted me out with this. I was having a bit of a nightmare recording remotely and he got me onto StreamYard. You need to get StreamYard, whatever the big dick, biggest, biggest, biggest dick platform is before you go to like Teams and Enterprise and all that. It's like Pro or Platinum or something. And you can do local both ends recording, audio and video, separate tracks, 1080p, locally recorded and uploaded.

• 26:34Chris Williamson?

  And it's all hosted in a backend that everybody can access. You can delegate user profiles and it's brilliant. So StreamYard. Sam C, have you ever considered going on Russell Brand's podcast or having him on the show? He's just put a video out on Population Collapse and I can imagine you having a really interesting conversation with him. I would love to speak to Russell Brand about Population Collapse. He has gone, especially during COVID, it was a bit like, you don't know that they're coming for you. You won't believe that what they said about your children's vaccine state, like it was all kind of a bit, ah, like if the sun made a YouTube channel. But he seems to have dialed it back, which is good. And the Population Collapse video that he did was with my friend Stephen Shaw, the guy that I broke on this podcast a couple of months ago.

• 27:17Chris Williamson?

  So for as long as he's supporting Stephen, fucking brilliant. Population Collapse, fascinating topic. Russell Brand, genuinely, genuinely interesting fella. Little bit tough to get a hold of, so I need an intro to him. If you know the Russell Brand, loop me in, that'd be great. Holly Robinson, I think I'm too late to ask a question for the pod. No, you're not, but two guest suggestions. Brett Contreras, aka The Glute God, not familiar with him, but he sounds interesting. Palmer Lucky, I did a, I did a podcast at Palmer Lucky's house, actually. So I've met him. Palmer Lucky's interesting dude. He's got like this military wing thing that he does. And he was the guy that founded Oculus and sold it to Facebook.

• 28:00Chris Williamson?

  He's pretty cool. M Sidharth 9080, what do you think about Indian foods? Phenomenal, but hard to find good quality Indian food in Austin.

• 28:14Chris Williamson?

  Authentic vibe have, how is it like being you? I think you mean, what is it like being you? Um, it's pretty fun at the moment. I think my life, if people got to see what my day to day life looks like, they would probably be quite surprised. It's very regimented, very normal, like kind of boring for the most part. There's, it's interspersed with cool stuff, right? Like last night I got to go to the comedy mothership and went in and got to see Mark Norman and chilled out and caught up with him because he'd been on the show on Wednesday. Or, you know, today, Bill Perkins, the guy that wrote Die With Zero, I get to go out in his boat.

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

  But for the last full week, basically all that I've done is go from here where I've recorded a podcast to the place I sit and work in my house, looking over my garden, answering emails, doing calls, organising stuff, trying to integrate this like growth for the team so that I don't need to do this all the time. So it's, it's fun, but kind of repetitive. And I'm, I'm looking forward to having, like having more fun in my life because it's been, I've grinded a lot since I got to Austin. So I think it's time for me to maybe let go of some of that, he says, as he begins to embark on writing a book. Cade Derbyshire, do you think we'll react too slowly to population collapse? That's a good question.

• 29:39Chris Williamson?

  Reacting too slowly to stop it? Yes, I think that we're already rolling down the hill and I think that we're probably going to get at least below five billion, maybe below like four.

• 29:58Chris Williamson?

  What you are going to see though, is a rapid diminishing of particular groups of people, particular sort of demographic groups. So, uh, white liberals, for instance, are kind of going to be eradicated by population collapse. Because they're not having children. So who do you think are going to be the white liberals in future? I don't say that it's supposed to be the case that we're supposed to have a society filled with a lot of white liberals. But if you care about. Liberal values and that's something that you want to propagate into the future and you're not having kids, you are ending not only your own genetic line, but also your

• 30:39Chris Williamson?

  own cultural line and your own political line. So what you're going to end up with are a rapid proliferation of groups like orthodox religious, fundamental religious groups. So Mormons, Jews, Orthodox Jews, especially like Roman Catholics, Christians, certain Christian sects and stuff like that. So those are going to be the ones that are going to grow, which is interesting. It's like, will you react too slowly to population collapse? Over time, I think that a true, true existential risk, I don't think population collapse is, but it's going to be shitty on the way down. It's going to be shitty while we're there and it's going to lose, not like biodiversity, but like human diversity actually is going to

• 31:21Chris Williamson?

  decline an awful lot because the sort of groups that don't reproduce are going to be the sort of groups that don't reproduce, which means that downstream from that, there are fewer of them to make fewer of them to make fewer of them. Meanwhile, other groups are going to make more of them to make more of them. So if you care about having a diverse population, which everybody who doesn't care about population collapse says that they are, you need to have kids. Lynny.e What is the best way to become an articulate and eloquent person? I get asked this question a lot and just intentionality, I think, is the most important thing. Think about what you're going to say. Be precise with your speech. Practice it. If you can, record it, listen back to yourself and work out what the twerks and tweaks and

• 32:05Chris Williamson?

  tics that you have are that you don't like. Get rid of them. Go again. Working with a speech coach that I have done and I still do and I will be doing in the build up to my performance at the end of the year for the live tour. It's honestly like, what brand of protein powder do you use in order to get big as opposed to, did you go to the gym five times? Are you eating your macros? Are you getting enough protein into your diet? Are you having your protein shake? Like the brand of protein shake? It's the top 5%. That was the leverage. Almost all of it was just reps, spending time and attention. That's the way to go. Russ Broch, just buzzed my hair similar to yours. Good work. Do you like it for confidence reasons?

• 32:50Chris Williamson?

  It's convenience reasons, to be honest. Not having to do your hair is a life hack. It's hot here in Austin. It's the reason I just got it cut from that long down to however short it is now. And I had a massive Afro for almost 10 years. So I've served my time with long hair. Good Art Soup, what is the field that you're interested in, but haven't covered yet in the podcast? So I think that the existential risk of AI is something that I'd love to revisit, given that we've got this language learning model, ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-5 thing coming down the pike. I think now is the time to really sink back into that. I was obsessed by it for a while when I first read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.

• 33:35Chris Williamson?

  And now I've got all of the market in the world to talk about this with. And yeah, I'm going to have Tristan Harris. I texted him a couple of days ago, the guy that did The Social Dilemma on Netflix, texted him, he's keen to come on at some point. Jeffrey Miller is going to come on and do a primer so that all of you guys can understand the entire landscape of what we're talking about, how AI could be an X risk. And then I've got Catcher Grace, maybe, who's an AI researcher that William McCaskill introduced me to. So I've got a ton of different people that I'm going to kind of try and fold together and really just work out, okay, how big of a problem is this? What are the ways it could go wrong? What are the ways it could go right? What do we need to do to protect ourselves?

• 34:18Chris Williamson?

  What can we do ourselves to influence the way that this field moves forward? So that, probably AI. Kiran Karmi-Coch, very excited to come to your Manny event later this year. How will it be structured? So I think it's going to be similar to the 14 Lessons from 2022 style episode. So you know, segments of me telling stories, insights from those stories. Hopefully there'll be some production that we can tie into that to make it feel a little bit more immersive, maybe some music. I might be speaking to Mark from After School or someone similar to get some visuals that can kind of accompany what we're doing. I did this, you might not have seen, but I narrated a story for After School, which was really cool.

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  It's called The Slow Drip of Endless Fantasy, I think.

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  I really enjoyed it and I thought that it drove the point home in a way that me just telling you a thing can't. So I'm going to try and have some of the Philosophy Bros stuff, a little bit of jokes and personal stories, some really tactical takeaways, you know, how to apply this, and then some super inspirational points that will tie in with some performance, arty, musicy stuff too. Should be really fun. I'm just going to kind of test the water and see what works, what resonates. And then from there, you know, come 2024, if we do a really big tour, I'll have got a good bit of like, right, wow, all of that stuff worked, or this is really great, and this we can switch, or whatever else. It's gonna be cool. I'm really excited.

• 35:57Chris Williamson?

  Raluka Fenachui, Fenachiu, no question, I just love you. Thank you. I love you too. Keep the fire burning. We are doing good to the world. Trying. Cole Campbell, what is the biggest sacrifice you make behind the scenes to make Modern Wisdom what it is? I think it's what I said earlier on, that life takes a big hit. Like, you know, I'm not a lumber worker, right, with a 90 out of 1,000 chance of mortality per year or something like, I don't, I don't lose 10% of my friends to work accidents

• 36:36Chris Williamson?

  every single 365 days. But it is consistent, it is hard work, it is grind, like, there's a lot that I put in and it does, like, it is sapping sometimes, and it's all me, right? There's no boss, there's no one to step in and to make this work become harder, become easier, sorry, there's no one else that's going to come in and help and do it. If I don't do it, it's not going to get done. If I don't find the guests, if I don't schedule them, if I don't research them, it's not going to happen, which is fine. That's the price that I chose to pay. And I love the, like, show itself.

• 37:12Chris Williamson?

  But there's an awful lot that goes on to like just buttress it and keep it going. And it's getting more, there's more and more and more stuff that needs to be done all of the time to keep this show going. So I'm looking forward to growing the operation to the point where I can kind of just get back to only doing the stuff that I'm really, really good at, which is conversations, researching. That's it. Capy, do you ever feel like your head is going to explode with all this information you take in all the time? And if so, how do you process all of this and make sure important lessons aren't forgotten? Okay, so Chris Bot came back. I spoke to the team that made it and actually made an upgraded version 2.0 that is less Switzerland-y, sit on the friends, is it Belgium or Switzerland?

• 37:53Chris Williamson?

  Whoever it is. Anyway, it's like more me supposedly. So let's see. Do you feel like your head is going to explode with all this information you take in all the time? And if so, how do you process all of this and make sure important lessons aren't forgotten? Chris Bot, don't be a cuck. Ha, I'm not sure if my head is going to explode, but I do feel like I'm constantly learning and growing. I'm always looking for new ways to process and store information. And I'm constantly challenging myself to think out the box. I'm also a big believer in taking notes and writing things down so I can refer to them later. This way I can ensure that I'm not forgetting anything important. That's not far off. That's not far off at all. I do take a lot of notes.

• 38:30Chris Williamson?

  And you'll hear me in episodes sometimes refer to them. I'll bring up some quote that I'm trying to find and I'll just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap away. And then it comes up. Processing it and making sure that the lessons aren't forgotten. I've said this before. It's, I have to teach it. I have to recall it to people on an episode with a guest or in the newsletter or on a tweet, or when somebody asks me just day to day during conversations, I'm always recalling information. You have to remember that learning and memorization does not come from repeated exposure. It comes from repeated recall. You have to recall this stuff. If you're not recalling it, you're not going to learn it. Like repeated exposure means nothing. Repeated recall is what matters.

• 39:11Chris Williamson?

  Akande Daniel, recently started watching your podcast. You're a huge inspiration to me. Thank you. Any advice for a 20 year old who doesn't know what the fuck to do with his life? Chris Bot, let's see if you've got anything to say for this gentleman who doesn't know what the fuck to do with his life. Come on now, Chris Bot. You cook. My advice would be to take some time to explore and find out what you're passionate about. Don't be afraid to take risks and try new things. You have plenty of time to figure out what you want to do. So don't be afraid to take a few details along the way. Life is all about learning and growing. So don't be afraid to make mistakes and learn from them. Also, not bad from Chris Bot there. I would say explore before you exploit. So you can go and travel to a new country, try

• 39:56Chris Williamson?

  something different, go and work abroad for a year. Don't be scared about taking risks. You've got basically nothing to lose because you haven't accumulated anything yet. There is going to be a point in your life in 10 or 20 or 30 years' time where you have tons of responsibility and restrictions and you can't go and do this anymore. So allow yourself to do the things now that you are only going to be able to do now. And that includes, when I was 22, I went and did the season in Ibiza and it was maybe two months or something there. And I came back and I'd lost like 12 IQ points and had just partied for the entire time. But it was fun. And I'm not going to do that now. I'm not going to go and do the season in Ibiza now. So there are certain things that you can only do, that you can only experience, adventures that you can have, learnings that you

• 40:37Chris Williamson?

  can gain at certain periods of your life. So what are those now? How can you go and explore, expose yourself to different things, different people, different cultures, different languages, different adventures? And you will discover, especially if you're a reflective person, which it sounds like you are, you're going to discover so much about yourself during that process. Just keep on exploring and eventually you'll find the thing that you're looking for. The Benass Podcast, proud to say I've been around since day one, almost. Dear God, thank you. I apologize. The progression has been absolutely ridiculous in the most positive sense. Doing three a week like clockwork deserves all the praise possible. Thank you. I'm wondering how you learned to allocate your time to everything and how rigorous you are with your schedule.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  There has to be a ton of hard days in between. It has to be a ton of hard days in between. Keep rocking. Well, thank you. I'm not that, I'm not that like rigorous with the schedule in that there's no calendar, but I do just try and do the same things each day of each week. So Mondays, we sit down, we go through clips, we make sure that the full weekly YouTube schedule has been lined up. I'll do prep for all of the guests and I'll try and check in on emails. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, I'll try to record. Wednesday is publish day, so that's full day, uh, running through titles, intros, thumbnails, descriptions, everything for the coming up week, then record intros, record ad reads, uh, deal with advertisers, make sure that everything's sorted there.

• 42:05Chris Williamson?

  And then weekends, do the newsletter, try and have some time to myself, uh, and then run it back from Monday. So I've kind of outsourced a lot of what I do to just routine, but it's not like it's a rigorous schedule. I don't have some, you know, very carefully put together calendar that's keeping me accountable because as a disciplinarian, I'm kind of shit, but as a habit follower, I'm actually really good. And I think that this is, you know, the other side of talking about discipline, that discipline can be made much more easy if you turn things into habits. But because having to rely on anything that isn't discipline, like, you know, discipline eats motivation for breakfast, which I don't disagree with, having to rely on anything that isn't discipline makes it sound like you're undisciplined, but you might as well just use less discipline if you can.

• 42:50Chris Williamson?

  And relying on routine is one of those strategies that I think that you can use. Alex Davidson, why are you so interested in the facts surrounding how a majority of men struggle to attract women when you yourself are well outside of that demographic? I imagine that for men that are in that demographic, listening to you talk about their plight is a bit like a billionaire explaining how much poverty sucks to a homeless person. You're good looking and successful, so why are you fascinated the average guy's dating struggles? I'm looking forward to your million mark, man. I think your show is underrated. Keep up the good work. That's a very good question. Tough bit of pushback, but also a shit sandwich to make me feel nice at the end. That's the sort of comment that is critical, but acceptable on the podcast channel.

• 43:35Chris Williamson?

  The analogy between me being like a billionaire explaining how much poverty sucks to a homeless person, if I wasn't successful and I wasn't good looking and I was talking about the plight of men, people would accuse me of just being bitter.

• 43:49Chris Williamson?

  Even though I'm not those things and I talk about them, I'm accused of being out of touch. So it's a very difficult, like it's unfalsifiable really for me to talk about. I can either be in that cohort and be accused of being a misogynistic incel soy boy, or I can be outside of it and I can be accused of being like a bourgeois opulent lapa. So I think the reason that I do it, the reason that I'm interested in it is because any topic that is not being discussed by the mainstream media, but needs to be discussed because it's affecting people's lives. What am I doing with an independent platform if things that interest me and that I care about and that are underrepresented, that I don't

• 44:29Chris Williamson?

  bother talking about them? Um, I do think that there is value in hearing from people who are on the ground experiencing this sort of stuff. But I don't know, like, do you, why do people follow guys that are in shape when they're learning how to get in shape? Is that not like saying, well, this guy's genetically gifted, or he's on steroids, or he has been training for longer than me. So what's the point in learning from them? I'm not too sure. Uh, the guys that are in that demographic that want to hear from anybody talk about the plight of of men, they can go to any channel that they want.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  You know, there's Wheat Waffles, that's like a black pill content creator who is still on the come up and doesn't consider himself to be that good looking. So they can go and listen to him if they want. But I don't know, like, the billionaire explaining poverty to a homeless person, I would like to think it's a little bit more like the billionaire saying to the world, we should care about homelessness and dedicating a good bit of his time to trying to raise people out of it. And also to give awareness to the world that poverty is something that we should care about. I'd like to think that that's the the approach that I'm doing. If it does appear like I'm just some like bourgeois lapa laughing from his high horses, he doesn't deal with any of the problems that the normal world has to deal with. I'm not convinced that that's true. And also, I hope that it's not the case because I genuinely do care. I do care about both men and women, anybody

• 45:54Chris Williamson?

  that's suffering, man, like for all that. The Fiat 500 drivers of the internet don't think that this is the case. I am a really, really empathetic person, like massively to a fault, to the point where it makes me make decisions incredibly slowly. I massively regret things that I say to people, even small. There's comments I've made over the last year that I can't stop thinking about because I'm terrified that it makes me into a piece of shit, even though it's just some passing joke that I made or a bit of banter that the other person's never going to remember. I care about anybody that's suffering and especially people that are suffering that are being ignored by the mainstream. I think that it's a good investment in my time. But I appreciate the question. It's a really good question.

• 46:33Chris Williamson?

  Johnson Uher, I'm 13 years old.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  Interested in business and I go to the gym. What do you recommend I do to acquire more knowledge and invest in my future?

• 46:48Chris Williamson?

  Dear God, man, this is the second time in a row now that a child who watches this podcast has come on and asked questions around business and personal development and stuff. First off, massive, massive props to you being someone who is

• 47:07Chris Williamson?

  just under a third of my age and is asking yourself questions that most people my age haven't got around to asking themselves yet. Congratulations. Secondly, I don't mean to be patronizing, but experiencing life and just allowing yourself to indulge in social situations, exposing yourself to as many different experiences as possible, will be the highest leverage thing that you can do with regards to your learning. Like, there is so much unrealized wisdom and insight that you can tap into by just experiencing the day-to-day like vicissitudes of being a human, because you haven't had a massive amount of it yet,

• 47:49Chris Williamson?

  that you're going to capture a lot of that. So I would be very cautious around going monk mode at age 13, focusing on reading all of the books you can and spending your time in the gym with your headphones in, listening to Sleep Token's new album. I would spend time probably around people that are older than you. If you can get in with good, well-meaning 15, 16, 17-year-olds that'll take you under their wing, you've got to be careful that they're not going to, you know, take you down a dark path, but.

• 48:20Chris Williamson?

  You're basically like 13 years ahead of your 13 year old self. So finding people that are a bit older would be a big help. If you are serious about trying to maximize the time that you spend in terms of understanding knowledge and investing your future in.

• 48:38Chris Williamson?

  Find the content creators that resonate with you the most. Listen to them, consume their stuff, read however you feel is appropriate. And then apply that to life, like, don't, don't be too concerned about starting a business at age 13, unless there is some niche that you know that you can nail and you have a competitive advantage. Living life, exposing yourself to your content and then going and applying that day to day would be great. But dude, you're going to be a beast, you're going to be a monster, like you're going to be phenomenal as long as you don't knock yourself off. So keep going.

• 49:11Chris Williamson?

  Chung Lu, do you have advice for someone who wants to start a podcast but don't feel qualified? None of us were qualified. Nobody started a podcast and was qualified. There is no podcasting qualification. When I started doing this, the first ever episode was me in my old studio with a single blue yeti attached to the middle of the desk that made tons of noise. And I kept saying, mm hmm, every three seconds. And it was filmed on an iPhone and the guy's girlfriend was in the corner of the room. And that's it. And now we reach like hundreds of millions of people every single year. So you don't need to worry about the qualification and no one's watching you when you start doing something. People that have a fear that when they start doing something, they're going to suck and the people that are watching them are going to laugh at them.

• 49:56Chris Williamson?

  The beautiful thing is no one's watching. So few people know that you're doing the thing that no one is there to watch how much you suck at doing the thing. There is no pressure. You can just start.

• 50:07Chris Williamson?

  How can a more traditional woman who wants to be pursued be more proactive in her love life? That is a cool question. Chris Bot, come on. Red pilled Chris Bot, this is the newly ascended hardcore four chan Chris Bot. How can a more traditional woman who wants to be pursued be more proactive in her love life?

• 50:33Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, that's a tough one. Good start. I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer that question. I mean, I'm a guy, so I'm not sure I'm the best person to give advice on how to be pursued.

• 50:45Chris Williamson?

  He's saying that I'm not pursued. But if I had to guess, I'd say the best way for a traditional woman to be more proactive in her love life, to make sure she's putting herself out there. Go to events, join clubs, and make sure you're meeting new people. That way, you can increase your chances of meeting someone who is interested in pursuing you. That's not bad. This is kind of, this is a lot more like me now, I think. One other thing that you could do, and we're writing about this in the book at the moment, is cultivating, as a woman, cultivating openness and friendliness. So in a post Me Too world, 86% of women say that they want a man to make the first move, but around about 50% of men say that they are terrified of making the first move for being seen as creepy.

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  Around about 20% of American millennials and Gen Z'ers say that a man asking a girl out on a date, asking a girl out for a drink in person always or usually constitutes, not abuse, but like, is overbearing and shouldn't be done. So you have a world in which guys are seeing anything that resembles a no as a hell no, but girls who still want to be approached. So guys are scared of approaching. Girls want to be approached, but are terrified of being physically abused by some like random man on the street. And like, that just causes neither of them to ever open up.

• 52:07Chris Williamson?

  So the goal for guys is to cultivate a sense of overcoming approach anxiety while still being safe and respectful to women. And on the woman's side, it's important for them, like this is a takes two to tango scenario. The woman needs to be open and friendly. They need to be receptive to the guys that they want to hear from. You know, if you give off a why men love bitches vibe, or like a treat him like you don't like him thing, he's not going to come over. So that would be a good way, you know, a more traditional woman who wants to be pursued and be more proactive. You don't necessarily want to be

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

  doing the short skirt and Tinder thing, but you also still need to up your chances.

• 52:53Chris Williamson?

  Chris Bot got it right, you know, attend places and go to events and join clubs where you will be around the sort of man that you want to date. And while you are there, cultivate receptiveness, openness, friendliness. I think that'll work.

• 53:08Chris Williamson?

  Rin, resin, null, live in. Did you think that you were going to get this big? That's a good question. Um, me and Dean always said, you know, even when we, I remember we were episode like 40 or something, and I remember saying, fuck dude, I can't believe that more people aren't watching and more people aren't listening. So I think this stuff's really interesting. And he said, yeah, me too. It's really, really cool and strange, isn't it? It just hasn't sort of kicked in yet. We've been saying and doing the same thing for five years now. Like some of the stuff that I put out on Instagram that went, that goes super, super viral is shit that I've been saying for half a decade. And it's just now that there's enough people to listen or because of, I guess, like,

• 53:52Chris Williamson?

  the skewed perception of status, changing how people perceive the thing that you say, like that me five years ago didn't have the same authority as me now, therefore basically the words that I say, even if they're the same, are essentially different.

• 54:08Chris Williamson?

  Not much has changed. It's just been the same conversations, the same curiosity. And I don't know, I'm very, very happy at how the growth is going. I want to change the day to day experience that I have of it because it's such a heavy lift, but it's a price that I'm willing to pay and it's not going to be like that forever. And for as long as we keep accumulating awesome people that ask questions like this, I'm happy. Matt Lake, what was the hardest period slash worst phase of your life that you have managed to overcome?

• 54:40Chris Williamson?

  Um, I don't think there's been a particular individual period of time, but there was a chunk. A number of chunks during my twenties where I was very regularly depressed, down, spending days in bed. I'd struggle to get out of bed. I'd make excuses about not attending meetings and it would make me feel very ashamed of myself. And that was borne out heavily of a poor sleep pattern. And I wasn't eating amazingly, but it was mostly sleep, I think, and not connecting and not being true to the people that were around

• 55:21Chris Williamson?

  me. And that took a long time, man. Like every end of September, for probably five years, I basically had a breakdown, a miniature breakdown, because I'd worked so hard, I'd invested all of this emotional energy into running the events. And then at the end of freshers week, at the end of the second freshers week, it was two, it ran for two weeks, sometimes for three weeks, I'd just break down and I'd spend a few days in bed, feel like an absolute waste man, and then drag myself back and restart the engine and then go again. And it was, that was just this cycle that I'd go through. So probably that. And, you know, COVID wasn't great for a lot of things. And I don't like the fact that

• 56:05Chris Williamson?

  it destroyed, destroyed, it paused the business that I'd spent a decade building, more than a decade. But it was good to teach me what a stable sleep and wake pattern feels like, and to also give me insight into a different kind of life outside of that. Paul Nadiris, need a blue modern wisdom hoodie in my wardrobe. When are they out, sir? I've wanted to do merch for ages. I've had a ton of conversations with merch companies, but I'm not going to put out anything that isn't awesome, because first off, I've waited for ages. And secondly, if it's not nice, you're not going to wear it. And thirdly, I want to wear it. So it needs to be good. We are sampling a million different versions of t-shirts and hoodies and everything. And it'll be out 100% before the live tour,

• 56:50Chris Williamson?

  because we need merch for the live tour. But Soon, hopefully. Will it be blue? I don't know if it'll be blue. Maybe navy. Blue makes it sound too blue, but navy for sure. Luke Blight, thoughts on cutting out alcohol and the implications it has on socializing. So I'm a massive proponent of going elective sobriety. I've done lots and lots of periods of it. The implications it has on socializing,

• 57:23Chris Williamson?

  the gains that you'll accrue by spending time around people that you genuinely are interested in and you don't need to sedate yourself out of the experience of being around is priceless. For me now, half a decade, more than half a decade, like six or seven years into playing with sobriety and using it as a tool, I do think that right now, for where I'm at, socializing is more important than being sober, but you don't need to drink to socialize. Does it make you less confident? Yeah, a little bit. Does it mean that you're going to want to go home at one in the morning as opposed to at three in the morning? Yeah, but that's a good thing. Nothing fun has ever happened on a night out after one in the morning, right? I know, I'm the night out guy, right? I have a sample size of a

• 58:06Chris Williamson?

  thousand club nights. Nothing good happens after one in the morning. So there is almost no reason that if you've never gone sober and you live the sort of life that most people do, the kind of drinking patterns that most young people do in the West, there is no reason not to go sober. I can't think of a good reason if you've never done it before. What does Chris Bott say about this? I've been sober for a thousand days now and it's been a wild ride. Was sober for a thousand days. Was a vanilla ride. I've noticed that I'm more productive, I make fewer bad decisions and have more money in my pocket. Correct? I also make, I'm also more selective with the people I hang around with because I don't

• 58:47Chris Williamson?

  have alcohol to bond over. That said, I'm still finding ways to fun, have fun and socialize without alcohol. It's all about finding the right people and activities that don't involve drinking. All of this is correct. Socializing doesn't just mean going on a night out. Thanks, Chris Bot. Doesn't just mean going on a night out. You can do stuff during the day. Go and see some live music. Go and see a comedy show. Go and do sport, any, there's a million things that don't involve that. But it's a marker of how ingrained and embedded alcohol is into our culture. That people immediately, as soon as you say socializing, oh, it's in a bar. Oh, alcohol is involved. So finding a group of people who don't need to drink to have fun and that you don't need to drink to be around, that's a life hack. Gary F.

• 59:30Chris Williamson?

  I'd love to see a behind the scenes of how you make your shows. You must have a big team working for you. There's not much to see, man. This is, it's kind of come up a few times today. I haven't really spoken about it before, but

• 59:44Chris Williamson?

  the process of making Modern Wisdom is, for the most part, very unspectacular. It's me with notes and, and documents and books and videos, just frantically reading them all and listening to them all and trying to work out what I want to talk about. And then a couple of other people doing things. Ben, Dean and Chase. Chase Wizard, YouTube Wizard is helping to take a lot of work off my hands. Dean's always done the stuff that he's done. And then Ben picks up all of the rest of the bits.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  It's not very spectacular. That may change and hopefully will do. But yeah, it's the behind the scenes would be like the, the least, what you expect and what you would be delivered would be so disappointing. I don't think that it's going to be worthwhile. It would be cool to do one of the big episodes that we have, you know, like another Goggins or whatever, when we, we've got a few of those coming up soon. That's fun, but for the most part, I walk from that house to this house. I come and stand in here and make sure that I have a drink. And then I start talking and then I go back in there and I upload everything and then an episode appears. It's, it's not very exciting. Bailey Maggi. What is your next, what is your end goal?

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  What's the next 10 years of Chris Williamson look like? See if Chris Bot comes up with something, but I'm going to answer it.

• 1:01:11Chris Williamson?

  While he talks, um, end goal, I don't have one. I just want to keep on having interesting conversations. It's been the way that it's always been. Find people I'm interested in, talk to them about the stuff that I'm interested in. That's it. The next 10 years of Chris Williamson, if I don't do something catastrophic and put my foot in my mouth, or get cancelled, or say something stupid that I don't mean, it really does feel like the world's at my feet. And it's, I said it at my birthday, Michael Malice very kindly ran a birthday party for me a few months ago. And I said, you know, it literally feels like I can do anything and it's beautiful. And I've never felt this way before that I have every door open to me, every opportunity is coming my way. And I get to pick and choose what it is that I want to do. And I get to

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  hopefully like make the world a better place along with it. I am not kidding myself. I'm not going to be remembered in a hundred years' time. But I can nudge the civilization that I'm a part of, even a tiny, tiny, tiny degree, I can give it a little nudge. And the people that are here at the same time as me, hopefully I can make their existence and their time on this planet, make a little bit more sense and be a bit more enjoyable while they're here. Fuck, like, that's pretty cool. Like, it's pretty cool as a day to day. Chris Bot, what'd you say? My end goal is to maximize my freedom to do the things I want all the time. That's pretty hedonistic. I want to be able to wake up in the morning and decide what I want to do with my day. And if there are things I don't necessarily want to do, that's not strictly untrue. Want to be able

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  to get them done quickly so they don't take up too much of my time. I also want to make sure that I don't fall into the trap of productivity dysmorphia, where I can't see the fruits of my labors on a daily basis. This Chris Bot is like, this is overconfident Chris Bot. So we've gone from cooked Chris Bot, cooked Bot, to confident Bot now. Um, cool. I mean, it's, he's not far off, but some of that stuff, I don't think that's what productivity dysmorphia means. And I made it up. Omar Sareltelli, are you taking steroids? No, I am not. And I would be in significantly better condition if I was. Tommy Conde, you get asked every Q and A, intro song, please. Right,

• 1:03:21Chris Williamson?

  I did it. I actually saw this come up and I went and I found it. It's called Chris Talk, Fly Away, the J P B remix. And Chris is K R Y S Talk, Fly Away, the J P B remix. I listened to this earlier on today before I came and recorded.

• 1:03:40Chris Williamson?

  Listening to that song will make your head fall off because you, if you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, have heard it tons of times. It's been played millions, tens of millions of times, that song as an intro, an edit that I got my friend to make, a DJ friend to make, five and a half years ago.

• 1:04:01Chris Williamson?

  And then you hear the full version of the song and all of this extra shit appears and you go, no, no, no, he's supposed to say like such and such, welcome to the show. Hang on, no, this isn't, this isn't where it's supposed to stop. There's all of this extra stuff. It's like the uncanny valley, but for listening. So yeah, Chris Talk Flyaway, the JPB remix is available on YouTube. It's Creative Commons licensed free, which is why we used it. And then I got someone to edit it and it's the both intro and outro, the actual outro to the song with that, the episode of that big long swell is the breakdown from the episode that you should be able to hear, actually. But yeah, that's, that's it. Go, go and enjoy and break your brain. Soul biscuits. If I want to get fit, I go to the gym consistently. If I want a girlfriend, what do I do? What's my gym?

• 1:04:46Chris Williamson?

  Fucking good question. That's a smart, nice question. I like that. You are smart people. If I want a girlfriend, what do I do? What's my gym? Well, the gym can be your gym for this. And you know, this is common wisdom from me. Go to the place where the kind of people that you want to date, hang out. Are you into girls that train? You need to be in a gym. A gym that's social would be a great idea. So something like a CrossFit or a boot camp or any kind of team sport like, fuck me, the fields near where I live, they do kickball, which looks like the lamest sport I've ever seen in my entire life. And yet, while the guys and the girls stood waiting to kick the ball, the dudes are chatting

• 1:05:31Chris Williamson?

  up the girls. So I'm thinking, well, it's a coed sport. It's not actually that dumb of a way to meet girls, apart from the fact that every girl that goes there knows that you're the sort of guy that plays kickball. So, you know, other things, if you're into acting or improv or art or whatever it is, there are social groups that exist in the real world where other people into the things that you're into, go to.

• 1:05:57Chris Williamson?

  If you're talking about how do I progress? How do I improve the constituent parts of my personal development in the same way as going to the gym makes you fitter? What is the progression place that you do if you want to get a girlfriend? It's just reps, right? It's just interacting with girls. Destiny has got this great piece of advice where he says, you just need to have lots of girlfriends that you spend time around. And that's a really underrated piece of advice because

• 1:06:25Chris Williamson?

  good example, only child, never was friends with a girl that I didn't want to bang ever. Never was because I didn't have a sister, like I guess apart from my mum. I didn't have a sister. I didn't have any girlfriends in my life. So for me, from as soon as I was 14, 15, 16, all of the girls I was hanging around with, I would just girls that I was attracted to.

• 1:06:47Chris Williamson?

  But you lose out on a lot of the understandings that you gain from just how to interact with girls, which is different to how you interact with guys. So yeah, I think hanging around in a place that's got goals that you don't need to be trying to get with and just being okay with that and knowing that they'll be okay with that and knowing that you don't come across creepy and just learning how to communicate. That's the lion's share of what you're talking about, I think. Spooner Shaun, what's one question that hasn't been asked in the Q and A that you wish somebody would have asked? Is there a topic that's bubbling up in your mind right now, but you haven't got the chance to deep dive on publicly because the right question or guest hasn't landed recently? This is like the solution to super intelligence from Nick Bostrom. It's called machine extrapolated volition.

• 1:07:31Chris Williamson?

  So basically, if you can't get, if you can't work out what it is that you want a machine to do, you ask the machine what it should want to do if it was to detect all of your preferences. Chris Bot, I'm asking him this. Hmm, that's a tough one. You're correct. No shit. I'm always thinking about new topics and ideas, but I'm not sure. I have a specific question I'm waiting to be asked. I guess I'm just waiting for the right opportunity to come on. Cook Bot and confidence bot merging together here.

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  Not really, man. Like, I talk for so many hours every single day. There isn't anything. There isn't something that I haven't been asked and you don't know what you don't know. Right. So I will wait and Sean and a bunch of the other people from the locals regularly ask phenomenal questions. So relying on them to come up with one. Zohybe Sidi, do you have any advice for someone who is trying to find good ways of taking knowledge they have collected over time and incorporating it into their daily life? Thanks and I love your podcast. Keep up the great work, Chris. So this mental masturbation concern thing is something that I feel in myself as well. And I know that a lot of people that listen to podcasts and consume lots of content do because you are exposed to way more content than you have time to implement it.

• 1:08:44Chris Williamson?

  And you get the illusion of progress by exposing yourself to more stuff and more stuff and more stuff. And then you look at your life and you realise I haven't changed anything. But got exposed to all of this new information and what have I done differently in my life? Oh, I haven't changed anything. So avoiding mental masturbation and the illusion of progress is very important. Doing it requires narrowing down all of the different areas that you're trying to change in because you can't change everything at once. And if you try to, you're going to get nowhere, right? You have to sacrifice meaning, you have to sacrifice progress toward everything in the short term to make meaningful progress toward any one thing. So forget worrying about all of the other stuff.

• 1:09:27Chris Williamson?

  Focus on, I'm just going to work on dialing in diet and training for the next month. And I'm going to learn as much as I can and I'm going to try and apply it and be as applicable as I can. And once I've built up a little bit of momentum with those, then maybe I'll switch to some productivity stuff. And then maybe I'll switch to something else as well. When I look back, I realise that a lot of the times I stopped making progress or when I took my eye off the ball of something that was an obvious goal and then tried to pivot. So there's a period where I was obsessed with productivity, the start of this podcast, so obsessed with productivity for ages and ages. And I'd capped out, I'd already completed, I'd accumulated all of the information that I needed. And I presumed that more productivity was just.

• 1:10:06Chris Williamson?

  The next YouTube video or the next productivity hack away. And it wasn't, I'd already done that. So it's like, okay, I've done this thing. I've completed it. Let's move on to the next one. I can come back to it in future. So I would narrow down the sort of things that you're doing. I would try and be as applicable as possible. And I would ask myself, when I'm reading or watching or consuming anything, how am I supposed to apply this to my life? What's the way to get tactical with all of this stuff? You listen to an entire podcast that I have with some guy. Take one thing away from it. One, how can I apply this to my life? What should I do? Try and habitize it, try and make it into a routine. That should make a good bit of of impact. But it's it's a it's a disciplining of not doing more.

• 1:10:50Chris Williamson?

  Or it's a disciplining of restriction as opposed to a disciplining of abundance. So that would be, it's a different kind of challenge, but it is important. Jake, but firstly, congratulations and well deserved and still severely underrated. Thank you. Agreed. Would you ever consider providing any standalone information on how you've developed your conversational fluidity and brilliant questioning skills? Either via a course, video series, book, et cetera. I think that the world would benefit from people having more conversations like you have on your podcast, but not everyone necessarily has the verbal skills to facilitate them. So yeah, communication mastery is something that I've thought about releasing as a course. I would maybe even bring in some guest lecturers, guys like my speech and diction coach, comedy coaches that I've worked with and other good communicators to maybe talk about

• 1:11:35Chris Williamson?

  their skills and then try and create a syllabus. But I'm also concerned about getting out over my skis. You know, like I I'm a good communicator. I've spent an awful lot of time developing real world skills from the ground floor on how to have a conversation, but I'm not trained. So who the fuck am I to release a course on it? And this is another reason, this cynicism thing that I'm railing against at the moment. I want modern wisdom and I want the people who consume my content to be as positive as possible because I feel in myself the lack of confidence and the uncertainty and the skepticism that I have around things that I can do because I can hear what the worst elements of the internet will say if I try and do them. So if I try and release

• 1:12:20Chris Williamson?

  a course of communication mastery, even if people care about it and even if it adds value and even if it would be good, the fact that I'm not formally trained in it and the fact that I am going to be like trying to reverse engineer something which I just stumbled upon myself is going to cause people on the internet to have a vector of attack for me, which is going to mean that they can say, "You shouldn't be fucking doing this thing." So maybe I don't do it. It makes me reticent about going to do it, which is why being positive, encouraging people to go and try and do something and see how it gets on. And fucking hell, man, like, good effort. You tried to release that thing and it maybe it was really, really great and it adds sense of value. You know, it was, it was all right and it wasn't so good or whatever, but like you had a crack. I

• 1:13:00Chris Williamson?

  know, like presuming the best of people seems like a really cool strategy and that's what I want. I want more presumptions of positivity, the positivity presumption paradox. But yeah, I would consider doing that. I would love to release it. Again, need help, course management, building it, all the rest of it, which I just can't do on my own because I have too much stuff to do. But I would love to release it. I just need to find someone that can bring it to life and overcome the skepticism. And this is me. One of the first questions is like, oh, you me advising some guy, just, you know, adventure and explore

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  and don't be worried about failing. And here is me speaking my fear of failure out into the world. The guy that's about to hit a million subscribers on YouTube and reaches like 25 million people a month. That fear of failure continues to track with you. It doesn't within domains that you've already conquered, but in domains that you're new in or you're moving into, it's going to be there. So it's natural. Like even the people that you think that have got all of their shit sorted, still feel this stuff that should make you feel more comfortable about not having your shit together as well.

• 1:14:15Chris Williamson?

  George Daniel, when you were younger, did you have any, when you were younger, did you have any limiting beliefs? And if you did, did you get over them? How did you get over them? You are an inspiration. Thank you, George Daniel.

• 1:14:29Chris Williamson?

  I mean, so many, man, my, my sense of self as a young,

• 1:14:36Chris Williamson?

  like a teenage boy was microscopically thin. And I didn't realise it at the time, but I was chronically unconfident. Here's a story. So I remember that I played cricket. That was my pursuit of choice as a kid. And there would be times where because of the type of player that I was, I bowled something called leg spin, which is probably the most complex style of bowling in the sport of cricket. And that means that it's very dependent on the conditions. If the weather's not right, if the pitch isn't right, if the game isn't at the right stage, it's very often that you would not be brought on to bowl because it's safer to bring

• 1:15:18Chris Williamson?

  on a different style of bowler, which is going to be more robust for the particular features of the game that you're playing. And that would mean that a lot of the time I would go and play a game, and then I wouldn't bowl. And I would sometimes not bat because I'd be batting a little bit further down the order. So it's a TFC, a thanks for coming, when you don't bat and you don't bowl, you basically don't do anything in the game apart from field. And I would speak to the coaches from the local county team that I was a part of, that was the one that was trying to get me to move towards playing minor counties, playing major counties, going into an academy. I was on England's books, getting trained by their like wrist spin academy, going down to Loughborough University and stuff. And he would ring me on a Monday and say, how did you get on over the

• 1:16:03Chris Williamson?

  weekend? And I'd say, oh, man, you know, like, everything was, it was, I didn't bowl, I didn't bat, you know, like, these things didn't happen. And he'd get frustrated because I hadn't accumulated any experience. But I would feel relief. I would feel relief because I hadn't had to face the potential of failure. I was so unconfident in my own abilities that I would rather not have to face potential failure.

• 1:16:33Chris Williamson?

  And inoculate myself from that by just not being not entering into the arena of play. So yes, I had an awful lot of limiting beliefs and that rolled forward into young adulthood. It rolled forward into relationships, it rolled forward into business, it rolled forward into my sense of self. It was, I don't know, like, I have had an awful lot of challenges with regards to self perception. And it's the whole mosey thing, man, like, I wish I could come up with a different quote that we didn't make go viral a ton of times, but you need an undeniable stack of proof that you are who you say you are. Like, if you want to be confident, give yourself some evidence, outwork the self doubt that you've got, outwork the imposter syndrome that you've got.

• 1:17:18Chris Williamson?

  You don't, if you're asking for confidence without competence and evidence, you're asking for delusion. You need to have something that proves to you that you are the person that you say you are.

• 1:17:32Chris Williamson?

  Iterating over time, just doing things, trying new things, going out there, putting yourself out there on the arena floor, seemed to work for me. Will Palmer, how do you deal with being the outlier when chasing that dream job while everyone else you know of going to a nine to five, in other words, dealing with the loneliness that will occur in the pursuit of a life that you want? My situation, I resonate, man, I feel for you. This is the price that you pay, right? Loneliness is a taxi you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind or a complexity of life. If you want to have a life that's different to everybody else, you have to do things that nobody else is doing. And if you do what everyone else does, then you're going to get what everyone else has got.

• 1:18:13Chris Williamson?

  And separating yourself out from the pack, this is why most people find things difficult and this is where they stop and this is why they don't win. This is the point, it's the difficulty that everybody else has to come over, among a ton of other difficulties. They have to be able to see it, they have to have the intention, they have to have the discipline to go after it, they have to have all of the different things in place. And then when it starts happening and they realise, it'd be easier, I'd have more of a social circle if I just stuck about with my friends. That's also going to be one of the hurdles that people have to overcome. Accept and understand.

• 1:18:49Chris Williamson?

  You didn't expect it to be easy. This is what hard feels like. On the other side of this is something that you want. Did you expect it to be easy? No, this is part of the hardness. Lean into it, lean into it. The sign that you are beginning to become more of an outlier is a signal that you're going along the right path. Presuming that you're not an outlier because you're addicted to drugs or like beating up grannies on the street. You're an outlier because you're working harder. You're an outlier because you're taking a non-typical life path towards something that you care about. That is a good thing. It is not something that you should see as a negative. Hamza El Azawi.

• 1:19:32Chris Williamson?

  When will you have Iman Gadz or Hamza Ahmed on the podcast? Chris would love to see you speak to these men. Already had Hamza on the podcast. Search Hamza Chris Williamson and it'll come up. I'm also going to some creator retreat with Hamza in, I don't know where it is, in a couple of weeks' time. So we'll be together then. Don't know whether we're recording. I don't think we are. We're just chilling out. Iman, I voice noted back and forth with him a couple of weeks ago. And that's going to happen, I think, in November. I'm in Dubai in November. So I'm going to have him on then. Taran Ram. How do you go about de-sedating men while not making them excessively dangerous, like burning down houses? Personally, I think it starts from education. We need to be encouraging boys to build businesses, participate in activities and more extracurriculars.

• 1:20:17Chris Williamson?

  Every time I go to a high school or college, it's literally girl up, girl business, girl that. What would be a good starting solution? Very cool question. These are smart questions. Please comment more on the YouTube. How do you go about de-sedating men while not making them excessively dangerous? It's tough. It's tough because the fuel, the motivation that men have to go and do these things can very easily just be nudged toward antisocial behaviour, right? Like, remember yobbos? Remember like antisocial, like asbos? There's this thing called an antisocial behaviour order that we had in the UK. And it was all these sort of.

• 1:20:57Chris Williamson?

  Young, working class and underclass guys in their teens who would wear Nike Air Max 90s and stand on the corner of streets and just cause bother. And they were given these antisocial behaviour orders as a disincentive. It was a way to stop this from happening. I would love to see the stats around that because I think that it'll have gone through the floor. It's really tough. I wouldn't disagree that encouraging boys and men to get involved in progressing and pursuing things that are genuinely going to make them feel fulfilled is a very cool place to start. I would also love to see culture re-pedestalise men's achievement.

• 1:21:43Chris Williamson?

  You know, not every man that achieves something is doing it from a place of toxic, tyrannical, patriarchal advantage. Some guys just worked hard at a thing. And if you disincentivise men from going after hard things and contributing and achieving, what do you think are the sort of men that you're going to get? They're going to be listless, apathetic, they're not going to be interested in trying to achieve anything. And then you're going to say, well, where are all of the good men at? Why are these men not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps? Why are they leaving education and employment at rates that we've never seen? 1% per month, 0.1% per month is the retreat of men from the US labour force since 1950.

• 1:22:25Chris Williamson?

  Every single month since 1950, 0.1% of men have retreated from the US labour force. Well, if you make the culture completely unaligned and unforgiving to men who do want to achieve things, who do want to acquire wealth or have ambition, if you say that that's part of some awful misogynistic fucking vestige that's been passed down from previous generations, you're disincentivising it. So what do you want? Do you want them to be listless and apathetic and spending whatever it is, thousands of hours per year playing video games while smoking weed like Nicholas Eversstat taught us? I don't want that. But on the flip side, you are going to have some guys that are going to go and do mean

• 1:23:07Chris Williamson?

  things if they're spirited and full of energy and vigour, they're going to go and do other things. So balancing those two is tough, but I would say that we are way, way too far into the world of sedation than we are into the world of animation. Jordan Heward, congratulations. Are there any plans on getting Andy Frisella on the show? Andy Frisella is the guy who founded First Form and also created 75 Hard for the people that are familiar with those things. We've spoken a good bit. He listens to the show. He's very complimentary on Instagram and has sent me some really nice messages. I think we've talked about getting him on when he comes through Austin. So at some point, yep. Have you considered bringing on the channel a scientist expert that you

• 1:23:50Chris Williamson?

  don't necessarily feel completely aligned with in terms of views, just to listen to a different perspective? I do. I try to bring on as many of these people as possible. Richard Betts from the IPCC, he is a lead author on a ton of the intergovernmental panels on climate change papers. He came on not a million years ago. He was really interesting. David Pakman, he came on, he got flamed in the comments. He didn't really have a particularly good episode, but he is somebody that a lot of the audience disagrees with and would disagree with. I try my hardest to bring on people. I mean, I've had a couple recently of academics that are very left leaning, but they have such a unique spin

• 1:24:33Chris Williamson?

  that is apolitical on whatever their academic area is, that we don't actually get into maybe some of the more squirrely worldviews that we would diverge on. So yeah, I do try. Functivity Colton, have you ever been on a date worse than the massage date with Zoe? If so, what happened? I just watched your season of Love Island to get some context about some of the things you talk about. Okay, yeah, so, um, no, probably not. But then I also haven't been on many dates on TV. Actually, no, fuck that. I have. The other, the other TV show that I did, Take Me Out, I think that one might have been more awkward. The first TV show that I did, I jumped off a boat in the middle of the

• 1:25:18Chris Williamson?

  ocean when they didn't have insurance for me to jump off the boat, because the date that I was on was that boring. And then the girl that I was on that date with sold a story about me when I went on Love Island. The police were called on my date with Chris. Bitch, you weren't even there. I'd left. I'd gone to an after party. I was with some cool people. And then she sold a story about me that I told her. The only reason that she knew about the police coming was because I told her. And the only reason that the police came was because I woke up on the central reservation of Tenerife's largest motorway, having lost my phone and my wallet. It wasn't because I'd caused some havoc somewhere. I'd fallen asleep on a central reservation of a motorway. Anyway, yeah, that was worse. That one was worse. I can't remember the girl's

• 1:26:03Chris Williamson?

  name. Can't remember her name. And she kind of looked a bit like Zoe. Weird. Some, what is it? Physiognomy or whatever it's called, where like the way that somebody looks determines their personality. I think that's the way it works. Anyway, yeah, it was awkward. Jensen McKay. Hey, man. First of all, congrats on 900,000 subs. Been watching you since your podcast with Kristoff. Wow, that's old. My question is, as a 19 year old, you've been watching me since you were 15. Cool. As a 19 year old heading to university in September, what is the best way of finding people as like-minded as me within the first week of freshers? Struggled a bit during schools. I used to live in a rural area. P S. What was your freshers week like? How did you survive it? Many thanks. Okay, so my freshers week was ruthless. It was 2006. It was Larry, British,

• 1:26:48Chris Williamson?

  lout, drink, culture. I had found a group of housemates. I lived in a flat with a bunch of degenerates that were fantastic, really, really great to go to uni with. But uni was second, third, fourth on the list of what everybody was there to do. Finding people that are like you during freshers, I would say, and this is something that I wish that I'd done more of, attend more of the groups and societies and classes, just join all of them. Like, I remember when I went to uni and I thought, ultimate frisbee sounds super lame. I don't want to go and do ultimate frisbee. I'm just going to go to the gym and get big with the boys. And I, again, it was a safety net for me because it meant that it was routineized and it was something

• 1:27:31Chris Williamson?

  that I knew I was going to get social validation from. I remember in my mid 20s, I looked back and thought, why the fuck didn't I go and do ultimate frisbee? That sounds awesome. Like, ultimate frisbee sounds really cool. So I would join as many different societies as you can, expose yourself to all of those different groups and just talk, talk to people and talk about what you're interested in. Don't talk about what you think they're interested in. Because if you talk about what somebody else, if you talk about what you think somebody else is interested in, you are going to get friends around you who aren't keen on you. They're keen on the role that you play. They don't like you. They're like the person that you think, they're like the person that they think that you are. That's not who you want to be. You're going to end up surrounded by a

• 1:28:16Chris Williamson?

  community of people who don't have your interests and who you have to play a larping caricature of yourself to just be around. Be yourself, do lots of different things, expose yourself to as many people as possible. During fresh is the best thing to ask someone is, hey, man, what's your name? What course are you doing? What halls are you in? You can open up for the first four weeks of term, you can say that to a thousand people. See the ones that are interesting, make friends. Good luck. Fabuleous. How long did it take you to become comfortable recording yourself in front of a camera? I tried this for the first time recently and had no clue how hard it was to explain a coherent thought

• 1:29:00Chris Williamson?

  without stumbling over your own words. Any tips on how to get better at self podcasting? I'm glad, I'm not glad that you were traumatized by it, but I am glad that you have felt the discomfort. And I remember the first few times that we started doing solo down the pipe monologgy things like this. It is that hole there, that black void with the lens in the middle of it that looks like an eye is a terrifying thing to look at. It is so unforgiving and dark and you just stare at it and it stares back and it just expects you to say things and there's no one there to give you positive feedback or tell you that you're

• 1:29:43Chris Williamson?

  doing it right or that you're doing it wrong or that you should say more or say less or it's time to shut up or it's really difficult. I haven't spent all that much time doing solo stuff. I've spent a lot of time talking to other people and I think that my brain struggles to distinguish between the conversations I've had where there's been a person there and now this thing, which is where there's no person there.

• 1:30:05Chris Williamson?

  The easiest ways, the best ways to get better at self podcasting, I think, are to do what I'm doing here, which is to have a conversation, a one-way conversation with prompts. Prompts can come from you. You could maybe even use chat GPT to say, "Give me 20 interesting but accessible and easy questions to answer whilst practicing doing a podcast on my own." And I bet it would create some awesome, awesome ideas for that. But it's tough and I would be tempted to try and do podcasting before you do monologues, because this is the final frontier. Like even when you're vlogging, right?

• 1:30:48Chris Williamson?

  You know, like the Mike Thurston style, "Here I am, I'm in Dubai in my Jaguar," or whatever the fuck it is that he drives now.

• 1:30:58Chris Williamson?

  That, there's prompts going on, "Oh, look at this, this is a cool cup of coffee and I'm here with my friends and I've got the whatever." This is the final boss, man. This, no distractions, silent room, you and a lens. It's super difficult and this skill is going to become more and more important. Friends that I've had have applied for jobs where they've had to submit video applications. And if you've never had to sit, "Bunk!", and just put your phone in front of you and say, "Hi guys, my name is Chris and I'm really excited for the job opportunity at IBM. Here are why you should recruit me and this is to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." If you don't have that in the tank, you're going to be behind. And if you do have it in the tank, you're going to find an advantage. And even if you don't need it, it's going to make you a better communicator. So I highly recommend learning it.

• 1:31:42Chris Williamson?

  Ahmed Zobar Surosh from Afghanistan, fuck yeah, let's go. "Loving your content, can't thank you enough, mate. Thank you very much, my number one Afghani fan." "Question, how to find balance between time spent on being the least educated person in the room and the most educated, both are necessary?" Good point and plays off the back of Alex Hormozi's comment around, "More people are kept poor by their egos, they can get rich off them." Basically, if you're able to maintain an ego, it's because you're in a room where you're always the richest or the smartest or the most accomplished, which means that you're in a room which is too small. Make your room bigger, make the people that you hang around with more successful,

• 1:32:25Chris Williamson?

  which will make your ego smaller, because comparatively with them, you're useless.

• 1:32:32Chris Williamson?

  Finding a balance, I, to be honest, I wouldn't agree that you need to be the most educated person in the room, ever, basically. I think that maintaining being a stupid person, the most stupid person in a room, is a good idea. I mean, I've managed to make a career out of being the dumbest person in a conversation 640 times, and it seems to have worked okay for me. It is good to educate other people about things that you're a specialist in, but just continue to find people who you admire, who you respect, who you think have got a growth mindset and are interested and genuinely curious, and just allow them to teach you about all of the cool shit that they know, and then

• 1:33:14Chris Williamson?

  in response, you can teach them about the good stuff that you know. There is no better way to learn than that, and that's why Austin at the moment is phenomenal, because there are so many people that are super, super smart in different domains. So you can be the guy that knows about evolutionary psychology, but they know about AI risk, or they know about meteorology, or they know about whatever. Say, "Ka, congrats to us all." My question is, how do you just do it? Like, how do you stop overthinking and take action? That is quite an interesting question for Chris Bot. My quest, my answer would be that you just need to commit to doing one thing. Narrow the domain, as I said earlier on, stop distracting

• 1:33:59Chris Williamson?

  yourself with lots of different things. What the fuck is he trying to respond to this? "Chris Bot, how do you just do it? Like, how do you stop overthinking and just take action?" "I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it involves a lot of swearing and a few shots of whiskey." I, Chris Bot, confident bot over there, just getting out over his skis, poor guy.

• 1:34:26Chris Williamson?

  Stop overthinking and just take action. Commit to one domain at a time. The reason that you're feeling overwhelmed is because you're trying to do too much at once. You're trying to optimize your sleep and your hydration and your training and your learning and your career and your relationships. One thing, one thing, focus on that. Get really good at doing that one thing and then move on to the next one. You have periods, you can periodize your life, right? One month to three months, each little block. Once you've completed it, then you move on to the next one. You can even plan it in advance. Check in every couple of weeks, see how you're getting on. There you go. I Frazzy, my question is, what advice would you give to someone with disabilities and deformities to boost their confidence and self-esteem? So I've basically gave up on life because of my anxiety and depression.

• 1:35:10Chris Williamson?

  Your videos have been a big help and I want to say thank you. Thank you very much for watching. Look, I need to be able to identify where I'm at the boundaries of my competence and I think that this is it. I

• 1:35:25Chris Williamson?

  wholeheartedly believe that there is a strategy and that there will be, but I'm going to be pulling something out of my ass if I try and give it to you. I respect massively the fact that you're listening to channels like this and presumably other guests and similar people that come on here and you're exposing yourself to the right kind of content. When it comes to getting really tactical with it, I would be bullshitting you if I said that I had a solution. However, I am confident that you have the right mindset to be able to find a solution and I wish you all the best. Duncan Disorderly, how many man-hours of preparation do you do for each guest? You seem to have a good set of knowledge and ask insightful questions. Just seems like a lot of work goes into each episode. So yeah, it is, there is a lot of work that goes into each episode.

• 1:36:11Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to ask Chris Bot, see if he knows how much work I do. He'll probably say that I do it in a line of cocaine in five minutes. Ha, I wish I could tell you how many man-hours I put into each episode, but the truth is, I don't really keep track. I just know that I'm always doing something to prepare for the next episode. Whether it's researching the guest, reading up on the topic, just thinking of interesting questions, I'm always doing something to make sure I'm ready for the next episode. That

• 1:36:37Chris Williamson?

  That's like halfway between confidence, confidence bot and cook bot. It's usually about a day.

• 1:36:45Chris Williamson?

  So on and off, listening to the guest, but it'll be spread out over a period of time. Right. Usually takes around about a day or so. Sometimes less, you know, especially if it's someone that I know that the topic inside out.

• 1:37:01Chris Williamson?

  It can be a lot less, but for the guys that are new and a lot of this stuff recently has been new, like learning about. Who've I had this week?

• 1:37:10Chris Williamson?

  Video games.

• 1:37:14Chris Williamson?

  Not bullying. God damn it. Body dysmorphia, men's muscle dysmorphia and something else as well.

• 1:37:22Chris Williamson?

  That takes a lot of work, so.

• 1:37:27Chris Williamson?

  I'm prepared because it's what works and. I'm following the strategy that I used to follow before I knew all of the things that I know. And now I still follow the same strategy, even though I know a lot more things, which means I'm usually really, really well prepared for each episode, but I hope that it comes across and I hope that it, it makes the listening experience good because I'm not. Fumbling around and struggling for talking points. I want to keep it, you know, if you guys are going to dedicate an hour and a half of your time to me three times a week. I want it to be high bang for your buck. I want it to you to come away and think, wow, that was. I'm really well structured and great and it was no lulls in there that didn't need to be in there. And yeah, I hope that it makes for a.

• 1:38:13Chris Williamson?

  High ROI podcast. Roger Page, thank you for all the wonderful educational content you have produced. Thank you. My question is, when will you be adding video content to Spotify? This is a question that we have got. A lot and I don't know, to be honest, it's a bit of an effort to make this transition for some structural reasons behind the scenes of. How you. Create the audio, you rip the audio from the video that would then distribute to places like Apple Podcasts and Stitcher and Google Podcasts and Amazon that wouldn't be using the video. So we'd need a video version for YouTube, a video version for Megaphone to upload to Spotify, and then a different audio version that would go across everything

• 1:38:56Chris Williamson?

  else. There'd be three different versions of each episode three times a week. And it's just a huge lift. If we change the way that we do ads, I really don't want to start doing mid-roll ads because I think it destroys the listening process, but maybe we're going to have to if we want to do video on Spotify. So it's just, it's a, it's a mess. It's, it's a little bit of a mess at the moment. We have just changed hosting from Libsyn to Spotify. I announced this on Twitter the other week and that's gone really well so far. But as of yet, not going to happen. Maybe at some point in future. Not sure yet. Right. That is an hour and 45. I appreciate all of you. One million next, which will be wild. I have

• 1:39:41Chris Williamson?

  some plans and I will see if I can pull them off. In the meantime, like I say, if you are the sort of person that asks these kinds of questions, if you enjoy this sort of discussion, which I know that you do, comment more on YouTube. I would appreciate it. The real world of the internet that this show is going to continue to push out into more. Those people need to understand what a well-balanced, thoughtful, interesting, meaningful conversation is. And it is you who can contribute to that and you set the tone, especially if we're going to talk about releasing a Discord server and community and all this sort of stuff. I need to feel confident that the people that are the most reasonable, that are all of the ones that submit thousands of questions on each of these Q and As are the ones that

• 1:40:24Chris Williamson?

  are going to pipe up. And if you do post something that's stupid, then you're going to get a ban. Anyway, I'll see you next time.