Cancel Culture, Sobriety & Identity Change | Modern Wisdom Podcast 313

This episode was originally recorded on Sean Spooner's podcast Life and Lessons. I enjoyed this discussion so much, I figured I'd put it on Modern Wisdom too. Lots more talking by me on this one, which you'd better enjoy, or else. Expect to learn why identity change is so hard, what being club promoter without nightclubs for a year has been like, why going sober is still a red pill everyone needs to take, my thoughts on cancel culture, what chapters I would include in my book, why social justice warriors fundamentally hate themselves and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at https://www.activelifeprofessional.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Check out Sean's Podcast Life and Lessons - https://apple.co/32CkfKR Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #chriswilliamson #cancelculture #personaldevelopment - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  The smartest minds on the planet have had most of their time taken up arguing about whether men are men and women are women over the last few years. Like, me, if that's not the way to send our civilization back a couple of generations in terms of the development of where it could be. You know, I said about like, imagine the person that you could be if you went sober for six months. Like, imagine the civilization we could have if we stopped debating stupid shit for a decade.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Cool. So, look, before we begin, this is going to be an absolute roller coaster because I like to pride myself with having a bit of a narrative when it comes to the guests I speak to. We kind of start in the early days, move through to what they're currently doing. It almost feels like there's a nice story there. But I've listened to 250, if not more, of your podcasts. So I feel like I know far too much to have a narrative here. So before we begin, just prior warning, this is going to jump from one topic to another really quite quickly. But where I want to begin is actually how I discovered you, because I discovered you entirely by accident in a place that I never thought I would discover the content that you produce, which is on a video about Love

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Island. There I was in our office back in Cardiff, typed into YouTube, "Behind the Scenes Love Island", and there was this video that had just recently been published of you and two guys sat on a sofa talking about Love Island. And I clicked on it, and truthfully, I thought I'd stay for about four minutes. I thought, fuck's sake, one of these, another one of these guys just trying to milk his attention. But actually, what I found was the complete opposite. So I clicked on to your channel. I think I watched a video of Don McGregor and a couple of others. And I realized that you were actually the exact opposite to every stereotype I had created about you in my mind, right? You are the ex-Love Island club promoter with a six-pack and a blue tick. And I thought, fuck's sake. But actually, you're this incredibly curious person who uses your platform not to try

• 1:51Speaker 01

  and sell booty, but actually just to have conversations, right? And so, in the midst of living in all of those stereotypes that I just described, when was it you realized that you weren't that guy?

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

  That's a good question. I...

• 2:06Chris Williamson?

  Didn't quite have an existential crisis on Love Island, but it certainly catapulted me toward one. I spent a lot of time with people who genuinely are the person I thought I was. These guys with endless charisma that are built to be party boys. And that's the role that I thought I was playing. But it didn't necessarily turn out that way. And when I was given this fatal dose of contrast, I had to live with them, right? For three weeks. And I just realized, right, that's not me. It was a fortunate time. Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro, everybody was coalescing. It was about a year before Bill C16, Jordan Peterson's thing. It's two years before Evergreen State

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  College for Brett Weinstein. And there's just this whole slew of mindful content coming out. So I jumped into that and thankfully managed to pull my head back above the parapet, didn't drown in introspection and self-reflection. And then, yeah, here we are.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Take me on that journey, right? So you, I guess, I'm making a big assumption here, but I guess you lived within this kind of this collection of stereotypes through the modeling, the Instagram, the Love Island, all of these things. Was there ever a point where you thought, shit, I need to almost step away from at least my presumed identity to become the person that I actually am?

• 3:24Chris Williamson?

  Very much so. I've got a TEDx talk coming out this Sunday, actually. And this is the topic of the talk. You can bury yourself under so many personas that you genuinely don't know who you are anymore. And that's a real thing. Like, you can compromise your view so many times because you want to be liked by people, right? It was born out of a place of insecurity and a lack of confidence. I wanted to be liked by people so much that I said whatever I thought they wanted to hear from me. And I'd continue to do that over and over and over again, until eventually I didn't actually know what my opinion was anymore. I'd kind of habituated this second order, metacognizant way of answering a

• 4:08Chris Williamson?

  question, based on what I thought the response was.

• 4:13Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, it was difficult. Introspective work is like turning over dirty stones in your back garden. Like for every one that you turn over that's clean, 19 of them are filthy and have something terrifying hiding underneath. But it's worth it. Over time, it really is. And if I was Ali Abdaal, or if I was some other productivity guy, I would have had a much more curated, organized developmental strategy for how I could have done this. But I'm not organized in that way. So I just relied on crushing volumes of mindful introspective content. I had a lot of long drives to do. There might be people listening who have got huge commutes, or they, you know, 45 minutes to and from work every day. You will accumulate,

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  if you spend that time listening to the right stuff, you can accumulate a terrifying amount of content. At 1.5 times speed, you will get through ridiculous amounts of content. And that's what I did. I had big drives to do. I was driving for maybe, you know, five or six hours a week, every week, sometimes more. And um, yeah, it was, it was oddly, I look back on it quite fondly now. At the time, it just felt like I was drowning, losing the person that I was. I wasn't this club promoter anymore. I mean, I was, that was my job, but that wasn't my identity. That wasn't who I wanted to be. And I think there comes a time, especially with guys, girls, I've, I get the impression figure themselves out a little bit earlier. But with

• 5:39Chris Williamson?

  guys, they hit the menopause, as I've done it, or the fitness menopause for just the fitness side of things. And they reach their late twenties and they realize that the things which they used to spend their time doing, and the sort of values that used to consume them, really don't scale. They don't work anymore. Look, I'm 28 years old. I can't be excited about every single weekend, getting a bag in with the lads and going out on the lash. That's just not where I wanted to be. And letting go of that past version of you is actually quite difficult. We live in these epochs, right? You've got

• 6:18Chris Williamson?

  Student Chris and then club promoter Chris and young businessman Chris and young dad Chris and married Chris and blah, blah, blah. But then it's quite hard to let go of that because you don't really know what's next. And it's even harder if you've been hiding that version of you under a bunch of other personas. So you don't actually know which one it is like, who am I letting go of? Am I letting go of this or this or this or this? And you have to excavate it out like an archaeologist. So it was challenging and incredibly worthwhile. I'm very, very thankful for the past version of me for doing what has allowed the future version of me to live the life that I do.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  So if somebody's listening to this and they think that maybe their values, who they are, who they present themselves to be is a bit out of date and they're not actually living a true version of themselves, how, how does somebody, given that you've been through it, right? How does somebody cultivate that fertile ground to be able to give themselves permission to change who they are on quite fundamental levels? And there's a reason I ask this, right? Because I produced, produced is a strong word. This was pre content production days. I made a video a couple of years ago on Instagram, IGTV. And I basically said that paraphrasing here, but if you're not slightly embarrassed of the person you were two years ago, it means one of two things. The first is that you've worked everything out and you're living like your absolute best

• 7:38Speaker 01

  self, which is very unlikely. Or the second is that you're not progressing at a sufficient rate relative to what you could be, which is very likely. And there were two clear camps of people who reacted to that video, right? It was Camp A was people who were like, yeah, cool. I get it. I'm on board. And Camp B were almost like deeply offended that I dare suggest that people should be progressing. It seems like people hold on to who they are in the present or maybe even the past so much because they don't want to let go. How do you give yourself permission to let go?

• 8:09Chris Williamson?

  It's very common. People quite rightly should be and are terrified of someone telling them that they should be embarrassed by the person they were a couple of years ago, because it highlights their lack of growth. This is the issue, if you're the person that likes to improve and likes to change and likes to do different things, your friends, if they're not growth minded, and if they're a bit immature and juvenile, they'll bring it up. They'll say like, "Oh, you're gonna go and read more books? Are you like fucking SWAT? What is this? Like, are we 12 years old now? But why is it like, what is it that they're saying? They're saying, 'You are moving away from me. I can't keep up, so I'm going to try and claw my way to drag you back down to what it is.'" The same thing happens if

• 8:54Chris Williamson?

  anyone tries to go sober. It's difficult because your friends say, "Hang on, why are you not drinking?" The subtext in that is, "Do you think you're too good to waste your life with us?" That's what people are saying. In terms of how can people get over that inertia? Man, it's unbelievably difficult, and I don't really know. I don't really know what caused it for me. I actually think this is one of the times where trauma can be useful. If you have a really messy breakup, I had a couple of messy breakups, or I'd just been a prick. I just hadn't treated the girls well. I class myself as a recovering fuckboy, and I don't think that they would, my exes would disagree too much either, actually. I'd spent a lot

• 9:35Chris Williamson?

  of time treating girls pretty poorly, just classic young lad behavior, nothing out of the ordinary, but just being a prick. And a couple of those really got to me, and I thought, like, is this the person that you want to be? Like, breaking young girls' hearts that have done nothing wrong? And that was part of it. People need to really spend time, if they want to go on this journey, if you want to change the person that you are fundamentally, you have to know that this is a lifelong pursuit. This isn't something that is going to happen in six years. This is something that's going to happen in 60 years. You can't just...

• 10:21Chris Williamson?

  Booty blast, booty fucking like juice cleanse your way through this. And given the fact that it's such a long project, planning it and sitting down before you start makes sense. So take some time to think about who is the sort of person that I want to be. What is it that I do in my life at the moment that isn't aligned with that person? What is it that I do in my life that is aligned with that person? I'm not massively good at doing long, like 25 year, 50 year plans. What do you want written on your obituary type thing? Like, I'm not particularly good at that. But I do think that asking yourself those questions gives you a good sense of perspective. So ask them, like, what is it that you want to be doing in 30 years' time?

• 11:07Chris Williamson?

  That's a genuinely good question to ask yourself because it highlights the incongruence between what you're doing now and where that vision takes you. Okay, I want to be working with people in childcare because I really think that the education system needs to be reformed or I really want to do. Okay, are you in any way associated with that now? I want to be a family man. Okay, well, are you fucking three girls a week and then ignoring their texts after after they reply to you? Okay, well, I mean, that's also not going to work. So we very rarely sit back and actually look at the components of our life. I actually think, how am I spending my days? And the problem is that life's quite short.

• 11:51Chris Williamson?

  Life is far, far shorter than everybody realizes. You just don't have that many days anymore. Adding a sense of urgency, adding a realization that this is all there is. There isn't anything else. The only reason that you are here is to live a life which, in retrospect, you are glad that you lived. That's it.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  I want to pick up on something you said there because I know that you've been big on this recently. I saw a post of yours maybe yesterday about post-traumatic growth. Is that the phrase? So.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Bit of a tangent, but this this almost explains the the turning point in my life. Right. So five or six years ago, I was like running businesses, but it wasn't anything serious. And I my mum and I could kind of tell that my dad, something was wrong with him. I've cut a very long story short, he was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And it was at that moment when I realized like, nothing is going to be the same again, period, that that is what forced me to ask those big questions that you just mentioned, right? It was what forced me to ask, am I actually living in accordance with the the values that I want to? Am I heading towards where I want to be heading? And literally

• 13:05Speaker 01

  like a binary switch, as soon as I realized the answer to that was no, I just I changed everything.

• 13:11Chris Williamson?

  What did you change? What were the biggest changes you made?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  This sounds so bad. I would be far busier trying to look like I'm being productive online than actually working, right? That meant the business was going nowhere. I would be far busier trying to look like I had money to people I know than trying to earn money. That means my finances are going nowhere. I would be far busier trying to live the like party boy lifestyle and go out every weekend because I thought that that's what fulfillment felt like, rather than building real, long term fulfillment. And, you know, I maybe I'm post rationalizing, but I can almost directly attribute to that moment when I realized, shit, like, the first 19 years of life, they were fun, they were great, but like, now I need to switch on, immediate and irreversible. And so I think that, you know, particularly for anyone who's going through their own unique, difficult challenge

• 13:58Speaker 01

  right now, it is an incredible catalyst to just to ask yourself who you are, I think, because, you know, you get maybe two or three opportunities in your life to look at yourself that deeply. And if you miss them, you miss them.

• 14:12Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations, man. I'm really happy for you that, I mean, your intellectual awakening and casting off of the trappings of a fuckboy happened nine years, eight or nine years earlier than mine. So you're ahead of the game.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  So I want to actually go back to your, let's call them your fuckboy days, right? I saw you update your Twitter bio recently to recovering fuckboy because something else that is a bit of a paradox with you is your broad stance on alcohol, right? From the pie boy lifestyle that I guess you lived in the reality shows, but more importantly than that, the fact that your company, Voodoo Events, I think you've heard, I've heard you say in the past, has literally welcomed through the doors of clubs over a million people and essentially encouraged them to get drunk. And yet, over the past few years, particularly most recently, I think you've done about two years sober, you've cast away alcohol and looked at the benefits of not drinking for a while. So I guess my question here is twofold.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Firstly, talk to me about your lived benefits of not drinking, but then also tell me through your eyes, having been in the nightlife industry, basically since you were of legal drinking age, what can you tell us about society's wider relationship with alcohol?

• 15:24Chris Williamson?

  The benefits that you get from stopping drinking alcohol, as far as I'm concerned, stopping drinking is the biggest competitive advantage that everybody is leaving on the table, except for sleep.

• 15:35Chris Williamson?

  If you take two versions of your universe, in one of them, you continue to drink twice a week for the rest of your life, in the other one, you drink once every two months. The one where you drink once every two months is so much further ahead than the other one, and it compounds as well.

• 15:55Chris Williamson?

  The main, the big three, the key three benefits is more time, more money and more calories to spend on things that you truly care about. You're not wasting time being drunk on a night, you can finish your night, you can go out sober, you can finish your night at 1am, get a taxi or drive home and wake up having enjoyed, I would guess, probably 70%. There is some enjoyment that comes from alcohol, and we'll get on to this in a bit. That's why I'm not a sobriety absolutist, and I'm also not going to be sober for the rest of my life. Sobriety is a productivity tool, not a way of life, as far as I'm concerned.

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  You can have, go out, do the pre-drinks, you're having soft drinks, go to the pre-bar, you're doing whatever with your friends, you still get to enjoy all the social stuff, you're not quite as loose, you're not quite as Larry, and then you get to leave at 1:00 in the morning, maybe you're a little bit tired, you know, you've got an 8:00 AM wake-up in the morning, you're still going to be a little bit fatigued, but you are a world apart from everybody else, they are dying, they're ordering a Domino's the next day. When you get drunk, you're essentially electing to be ill for 24 hours, and sometimes people do that numerous times a week, just throwing themselves out of their diet, throwing themselves off their training, their productivity's out of the window, their willpower's through the floor, and this is just accepted as a part of society. Not only is it accepted,

• 17:13Chris Williamson?

  it's a rite of passage for young people. It is what you do as a young person, it's how you bond with those that are around you, it's how you create the stories that allow you to relate to people when you get older. Hey man, tell me, tell me about some, you've been to Vegas, haven't you? Tell me about some crazy times when you've, oh, you've been, you've been to Manchester, haven't you? Tell me about some crazy times when you were in Manchester. These stories are worn like badges of honour, and I'm fine, if you want to grow up in 2021, you need to go out and party because that's what allows you to relate to other people. My problem is when someone does that every week, week in, week out, for decades at a time. If you're 40 years old and the height of your life is getting a bag in with the boys on a weekend and getting off your face, that's a life wasted

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  as far as I'm concerned. And I'm all for simple pleasures, but I'm for simple pleasures that allow you to grow as a human, not one that stagnates you and keeps you in the same place. So, more time, more money, obviously not spending money on the alcohol, not spending money on the takeaways the next day, it allows you to work more because you have more time, you can work more, which earns you more. You only need to work 10% more to earn 40% more money, that's a Jordan Peterson quote, and then more energy to spend on things, you have the consistency, right? You're able to do difficult things. It's hard enough to instantiate habits already. Now add a hangover on top of it. It's basically fucking impossible.

• 18:39Chris Williamson?

  You can't do anything. So those are my main benefits. There are so many others. It forces you to develop genuine confidence. Going sober means that you have to be properly confident because you can't rely on Dutch courage to get you to go over to that girl on the other side of the club. If you want to go and speak to that guy or girl over the other side and you're sober, you either have to develop the confidence to go and do it naturally or not speak to them. And if you want to get laid, if you're doing six months sober and you want to have sex at some point during those six months, you're either going to pound Tinder or learn to speak to people. And I realised very quickly upon going sober, just how much of what I considered confidence was buttressed very heavily by alcohol. Take that buttress away and I had to properly develop it.

• 19:25Chris Williamson?

  It's like the guy that's on performance enhancing drugs. So, well, how strong are you without the drugs? You go, well, not as strong. I wouldn't compete quite as well. So that's the same thing. You are forced to be more selective with the sort of events that you go to because you don't, you can't anaesthetise yourself from shit events by being drunk. If you get invited out to do something and you don't really care whether it's good or not, because you know that as long as you can get five pints and a couple of vodkas in you, it's going to be fun in any case and you probably won't remember how bad it is. You're not going to be very picky. It also forces you to really look at the people that you're spending your time with. If the only way that you can spend time with your friends is by being drunk,

• 20:06Chris Williamson?

  then you definitely need better friends. So there's some. I could go on, dude. I could do 20 of these advantages, right? But all of the things that people want in life, more money, more energy, more calories, more time, all of those things can be got by going sober for a period. My advice, my prescription is six months every five years, two months every two years and 28 days every year. So you can build that up however you want, but. There are people on this planet who, from the day that they turn of legal drinking age, until the day that they die, will not go for more than two weeks without putting that drug into their system. And if you said that about anything else other than caffeine,

• 20:48Chris Williamson?

  they would look at you like you're mental. Even if you said it was paracetamol or ibuprofen, someone would look at you and say, "Well, that doesn't sound very healthy, mate." "What, every two weeks? Every two weeks?" I managed to piss off both the sobriety community and the drinking community within the space of about two days, a couple of years ago. The drinking community, especially promoters, have an issue with me talking about sobriety, and rightly so, because I'm red pilling the audience that is their market on why they don't need to consume their product, or my product. But that's not necessarily true, because we make money on the door, not on the bar. And I'm more than happy to charge people to get in, whether they're drinking

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  soft drinks or not. So those people weren't happy. Someone scrolled back to 2016, to a time when I was doing a gig for Grey Goose, and managed to find a photo of me holding a bottle, because I was saying, "The height of spending your weekend is not holding a bottle in a club." Fair play to the people that went back and did that, because I was like, "Well, you know, that's the dick pic nude that's lurking around on the internet." That was like my alcoholic equivalent of that. But then I went and gave a talk at a sobriety festival. And as with a lot of things at the moment, the collapse of grand narratives, we don't have religion, we don't have the traditions that used to hold us together. People want to find their gods in something else. And sobriety of the gaps,

• 22:11Chris Williamson?

  it would appear, is now a thing. So the people that were there, sober for life, a lot of them are recovering, but some of them aren't. Some of them are elective, as I would class myself. But no one was there talking about it as a productivity tool. They would talk about the advantages of being sober that could contribute to your productivity, but it wasn't there as a tool, like Pomodoro's, or like Deep Work, or like using the First Things First method.

• 22:39Chris Williamson?

  That's how I see it. I see sobriety as a competitive advantage tool that you can use as you need. If you want to have more money, more time, more calories, more energy to spend on things that you truly care about, cut out drinking. Cut out drinking for six months and tell me that you're not world's better. So many people think that the problem with their habits is the fact that they're undisciplined, or they don't have focus, or things are just too hard. And they don't realise that they're just resetting their progress every week or every two weeks by getting off their face on a weekend. So I went, I gave this talk, I said, I'm actually going to start drinking again in two weeks' time. And there was an audible intake of air from the room, like the pressure of the

• 23:23Chris Williamson?

  room went and my ears popped. And sure enough, afterward, I put a post up saying, I've completed this period of sobriety. I'm now going to start drinking. I garnered some followers from this event, and then immediately got a lot of criticism saying that it's triggering talking about reintroducing alcohol. It's something that shouldn't be spoken about because people in the sobriety community might be looking up to me as an example for their sobriety. And I'm now saying that I'm drinking again. And I was like, I get it. If you're a recovering alcoholic, then you shouldn't be looking to reintroduce alcohol. But if you're a recovering alcoholic, I'm not your role model. Plus, anyone that says that alcohol doesn't make a night out better, hasn't had a good night out. Like, I'm a

• 24:06Chris Williamson?

  club promoter through and through. Don't get me wrong, for all of my Zeni mindful exterior and the talks about physics and fucking psychology with Jordan Peterson, like, I'm still a party boy at heart. But I'm a party boy that has grander goals than just being a party boy. So what was my solution? Okay, I'm going to, the same way as a powerlifter does competition prep when he's got a huge meet coming up, I treated my intake of alcohol in the same way. I have some goals that I want to achieve. Alcohol isn't facilitating those goals. I need to get rid of alcohol. If that's the price that I need to pay, then fine. So I'm about to hit 1,000 days sober. This is the current block. I would have

• 24:49Chris Williamson?

  broken this sobriety last year if it hadn't been for the pandemic, because I was ready, I'd learned everything that I had to learn from being sober, right? I don't really have much else to learn from it, I don't think. Not at this point. I've done it a lot. I've done two stints of six months. And then I've done this thousand days one, and I've done it through summers. I've done it through winters. I've done it over Christmas. I've done it over my birthday. I don't really have much else to learn. But the reason that I stopped drinking was because I didn't have anything else to learn from alcohol. So moving between the two, and I appreciate that this is speaking from a position of privilege, that I don't have a dependency on alcohol. So I can bring it in and take out of my life as I, as I wish.

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  But I've deprogrammed that desire. Do you have the word clucking? Do you know what clucking is? Like a desire for a drink? I'm clucking for a drink on a Friday night. That Friday afternoon itch that a lot of people get. Deprogramming that was worth all of the discomfort, just getting rid of that compulsion. I don't know what it feels like to want a drink anymore. Even after the first couple of stints of sobriety, when it was sunny outside and I'd drive past a beer garden on Osborne Road, which is this famous road in Jesmond in Newcastle with tons of bars and there's gardens outside and all the girls are in maxi dresses and the guys are in shirts and everyone's having a good time. Cold Copperberg with ice. And I just thought like, that was still a bit of a compulsion.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  But after a couple of goes, and then especially this thousand days thing, I'm in complete control. My relationship with alcohol is now on my terms. And I don't, I would be interested to see how long before I can habituate it back in that alcohol is in control. I don't think I'm ever going to get back to drinking in that particular mode. So again, all of this came about at the same time. This intellectual awakening, the manopause, the fitness menopause with me stopping doing bro lifting and starting to do other things that facilitated my health, not just my physique. And then this sobriety, all of this happened at the same time. And I think perhaps that is something else that people can consider.

• 26:54Chris Williamson?

  I know that if you subscribe to the James Clear approach for habits, that you should be doing small incremental goals, focus on a single habit at a time, nail that and then move on to the next one. I would maybe say that there's an argument to be made for a wholesale fire sale of everything. Okay, let's just strip all of the things that I do back. My entire routine can go out of the window. And if you make a fundamental single change, like taking alcohol out of your life, it opens up so much more because now Saturday daytime and Sunday morning are available to you. Because now you have more money and more time to spend on working and you can build things. There is no way that I would have been able to launch the podcast and do all the shit that I've done over the last three

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  years if I was still drinking. Not in a million years. I'm already working at close to my maximum level of capacity. I'd hangovers and a couple of nights out into that and I'd have been wrecked. So yeah, I think everybody would benefit from a period of focused sobriety far more than they think. And I challenge anybody to do it and say that their life isn't better. It takes a very, very rare human for that to be the case.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  It's interesting because I only ever intended to do, actually, I intended to do four days to begin with. It was the 4th of January. I had just had the most ridiculous December, like client parties, Mahiki surfboard, like wild shit, right? And I'm like, I don't feel too good about drinking this, like January the 4th on a client night out. So I tweeted, I'm like, I wonder if I could do January without alcohol. And the further I moved from that point of, I couldn't diagnose it at the time, but looking back, you could probably call it anxiety, waking up with a hangover, feeling awful, blackout drunk, just stupid situations. For example, got myself mugged in London at like 2am in Islington by two guys. Can't even tell you what they looked like. That's how blackout drunk used to get, like terrifying.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  It was never supposed to be this long term thing, but as two things happen in tandem, the further away I move from that point of shit, I didn't like that. And the more benefits I reap, I can't ever see myself going back to drinking. And it's not for the same reasons as those who gasped as you gave your talk because I hold sobriety quite loosely. You know, we have, for example, we have two alcohol brands who are clients of ours. I actively help sell alcohol and I have no issue with it. It's just that once you have lived the benefits of not drinking, it's very, very hard to at least dip your toe in the water of returning to, or at least it is for me. It sounds like you're, you're more liberal with it, but for me, I just wonder whether

• 29:33Speaker 01

  in the same way that I accidentally went down the path of not drinking, if I go back to it, will I be?

• 29:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe. I think, um, I think you'll be surprised. After a period of time, if you're a curious individual, after a period of time, your curiosity around, I wonder what drinking is like now, will start to grow so strong that you may not be able to control it. And that's quite kind of where I'm at now. I can't switch that off. I'm like, I want to know, I want to know what, I can't remember what it feels like to be drunk. I know kind of globally, I know what it is. I don't actually know what it feels like, but yeah, people are right to bring up the fact, how can you promote nightclubs and talk about the virtues of sobriety at the same time? And the reason is I'm a party boy at heart. I love events. I've booked to go and see ABGT 450 in London at the Dockyards.

• 30:23Chris Williamson?

  I like nights out and I love being a promoter. But if you are approaching your 30s or in your 30s and you've never taken a break from being a party boy or a party girl. I would like to think that there is more for life, more to life for you. And for those of us that are growth minded and want to do things and don't just want to live with societal programming and social norms and genetic predisposition and passive least resistance and all that sort of stuff. If that's the case, you need to make a change and the easiest change that you can make is stopping drinking.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  So you're in a small minority of people who for the past year or so haven't drank right since lockdown, but you're in the overwhelming majority of people who for the past 383 days did my research, hasn't been in a nightclub because it was then when Boris said that, you know, barring a couple of, I think you guys did some, actually barring a couple of relatively unnatural feeling events, you haven't been able to work. So as a club promoter, as somebody whose life and livelihood revolves around the hospitality industry, talk to me about the last year and a bit. How's it been?

• 31:34Chris Williamson?

  The last year has been challenging for the nightlife industry. I think that most of the promoters that I know, we can look like fuckboys outwardly, but inwardly, everybody knew that we should have been closed. No one's complained. No one genuinely believes that nightlife should be open. I know that Sasha that runs Parklife has been talking very loudly on Twitter and getting tons of clout from talking about how hospitality isn't a vector for transmission and all this sort of stuff. But man, like if gyms are shut, how the fuck are you going to convince me that nightclubs need to be open? And it's my money. I own an events company

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  and I don't think that nightlife should be open ahead of gyms. I don't think that nightlife should be open ahead of non-essential shopping. That's not because I don't care about nightlife. It's because I understand the way that public impression sees this sort of thing. Like nightlife, going out on the lash is not a necessity. You can socialize with people through other means, like what's referred to as vertical drinking. So your dance floor through your general admits, that is, how anyone's going to try and convince me that that's not a vector for transmission is insane. People literally put their mouths in each other's mouths. Like it's obviously a vector for transmission. So anyway, it's been a challenging

• 32:57Chris Williamson?

  year for the nightlife industry and I think it's forced a lot of club promoters, venue managers, bar staff, DJs to take quite a hard look at what they've been doing with their life. I imagine that the last year would have been good for a lot of people, that it would have made them question, hang on, what am I doing? Do I actually want to be in this industry? Do I want to be waiting tables? Do I want to be a chef in a restaurant? Do I want to be the manager of a hotel?

• 33:27Chris Williamson?

  From a business owner's perspective, that puts you at a position of risk because staff who didn't want to be there, but didn't know that they didn't want to be there may leave. Thankfully for us, all of the guys and girls that work for us, everybody's pretty much stayed on. We have a big staff base and we have a good, good bunch of managers. All of them have stayed, which is great. But yeah, man, it's been a challenge. It's been difficult.

• 33:52Chris Williamson?

  Putting up with a pandemic as a club promoter is an existential risk, but it's permitted a lot of people to find other hobbies, to maybe re-center how it is that they're going to work. And, you know, if the worst thing, if the price that we need to pay is to be shut for a year, when people are dying left, right and center and businesses. Remember as well, specifically from a club promoter perspective, I'm not talking for the operators here that own venues. We have no costs. You have your office, maybe have a couple of guys that work full time that you manage. And then the rest of the staff are on commission or they're on a zero hour contract because they're dancers or the hostesses or the guest listers or whatever.

• 34:36Chris Williamson?

  Like, life could be so much harder. What about the guy that's just bought the trampoline park and decked it out? And this is all of his money. What about the fellow that's just decided to start up doing hairdressers or a boutique nail salon or something like that? These places, they've got rent, they've got rates, they've got business tax, they've got all of this sort of stuff. It's not been fantastic for us because the front end of money in hasn't been too good, but it's not been too bad for us because the back end of money out hasn't been too bad.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Was there ever a moment in the past year where despite knowing that things, yes, will eventually get back to normal, you kind of felt yourself in a bit of a hole? Like, where do we go from here?

• 35:19Chris Williamson?

  With regards to the business, there's been some challenges. I think me and my business partner specifically are in a good position. Darren, who is my business partner of 14 years, has two kids and a third one on the way. He has two dogs, he has a very big house that needs a lot of DIY doing to it. So he's had a lot to do over the last year. If I hadn't had the podcast during the pandemic, I would have been in a really bad place. But the podcast is my passion project. Like, I love running club nights, I love my business, and that hasn't changed. But it's not where my passion is. Like, my passion isn't in partying. I like running a good event, but my real true compulsion now,

• 36:00Chris Williamson?

  what I feel compelled to do is have conversations with people. Like this, I won't have conversations with people all the time. And that has been one of the anchors that's dragged me through the pandemic. Because I've been able to do more of what I like. Now, I would have much preferred to have been able to do more of what I like and also earn the money from nightclubs being open. That would have been great. You know, 100,000 people not dying in the UK would have also been lovely. And being able to go abroad and see my friends and so on and so forth. But yeah, I would, I would go as far as to say that the podcast pretty much sort of saved my sanity over the last 12 months, because it's allowed me to, and it's not about the,

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  the money that it earns, it's not about the growth, it's about the fact that I've had something that I can put my passion into that's allowed me to feel like I'm developing, like I'm contributing to something which is a bigger project. And I feel for the people who haven't had that. If you don't have a, something that you contribute to that feels like it's part of your wider goals, I can imagine the last year has been, been pretty challenging. But if that's the case, it's maybe made you take a stark look at the way that your life is structured to actually think, oh, maybe I need to, maybe I need to find something, because maybe my passion was going out and going on the lash with the boys on the weekend. That's been taken away from me. So now I actually have to develop something which isn't buttressed by alcohol and

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  party culture. Or maybe I have to find something which isn't, no one can flex, you know, it doesn't matter how much money you've got, or how flashy the new car is, if you're only allowed to leave the house to go to the shop, kind of mutates your ability to flex. So I think the last year oddly should have re-centered people's priorities and shit the bed. If you're coming out of this and you haven't had your, your priorities checked.

• 37:50Chris Williamson?

  I think that you've missed the opportunity to learn a lesson.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  From a priority alignment point of view, is your day to day going to look any different when clubs reopen? Because yes, modern wisdom existed pre pandemic, but you must have done what 170, 180 episodes since lockdown began. Do you think that you will want to live the same day to day in the business? Might you take a step back? Might things change? Or will it just be, you know, that the necessity of making money and running the business, which is something bigger than you, will take over once again? Where do you stand on that?

• 38:22Chris Williamson?

  Good question. So my business partner has already taken a bit more of a step up recently, which is great. He knows where my availability is at, and I still fill in and do the things that I do. I think I've taken a step back from working the nights because a 3am finish is difficult enough as it is, but at 33 years old, a 3am finish is, it ends your world. And tomorrow night, from the night when we're speaking, I've got Jordan Peterson on the show. Like, if I'd been up till, if I'm up till three o'clock in the morning tonight, counting cash, and then I've got to try and hold water with the quickest intellectual on the planet, I'm not going to do very well. Everything in my life right now is geared toward me being

• 39:04Chris Williamson?

  the best podcaster that I can. Everything, from my sleep to the things that I read, to the way that I construct my habits, to the way that my day is put together. That's all that I'm bothered about. That's all that I think about. Now, I don't actually think that running a business in nightlife is contrary to that. I don't think it necessarily takes away from that. I think that maybe it can even contribute to it, because I'll have more stories to talk about, because I'll vary the environment that I'm in, which will make me feel refreshed. I get to go into meetings and meet new people and see new things and have different modes of thinking and stuff like that. That's fantastic. Um, yes, there will be some changes, but it will only be, there'll be structural, not value led, I don't think. It's going to be,

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  I sort of turned pro with the podcast around about a year ago, and that was, that was a fairly big turning point, because it went from being just a passion project to it being the thing that I do, like my reason for being.

• 40:02Chris Williamson?

  But the reintroduction of club nights and nightlife, I think for me will just be, it'll just be nice, man. I drove to Leeds yesterday and it felt like a holiday because that's how little I've left the house. It shouldn't be the case that a trip to Leeds, three hours, three and a half hours under A1 feels like a treat. You know, what's the world come to that that's my, my idea of an adventure?

• 40:25Speaker 01

  I know that something you were big on, particularly in the first lockdown, is this idea of asking yourself, what would you need to achieve during this lockdown to consider it a success? And whilst I'm sure many people took, took that advice and ran with it, many others inevitably didn't, right? As we edge closer and closer to normality, as these restrictions which take our freedoms but give us time are slowly pulled away from us. If somebody's listening to this and they think, actually, I haven't really achieved anything in the past year or so, but I have the desire to do so now. What advice would you give to somebody to make the most of these last few weeks?

• 41:03Chris Williamson?

  Good question. So you need to ask yourself the question now, what would have to happen within the next couple of weeks for you to look back on this period and consider it a success? Genuinely, just think down and sit, what would it be?

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  If there's silence, if there's just nothing there, that's where you need to go first. Like, do you want to start a website? Do you want to lose body fat? Do you want to get up on time and build a new sleep and wake habit? Do you want to read a couple of books? Do you want to start meditating? Do you want to reconnect with your spouse and make the relationship less shit? Do you want to do whatever it is? Like, pick your thing and just do it. Jordan Peterson's new book, which obviously I'm balls deep in at the moment in a desperate attempt to try and get on his level ready for tomorrow. He's got this chapter, I think it's chapter 10, where he says, try as hard as you can at one thing, or commit yourself as hard as you can to one thing and see what happens.

• 42:03Chris Williamson?

  An element of that which I totally didn't realise is the commit yourself to one thing part. A lot of the time, we don't make a choice because we have opportunity anxiety around the things that doing that means that we can no longer do. Think, oh, well, like, it'd be great to do meditation, but that's going to take away from my time in the gym. So I'll meditate for five minutes and I'll do the gym for five minutes or an equivalent. Or I'd love to make the relationship with my missus better, but I also know that there's loads of fit girls on Tinder at the same time. So maybe, maybe I'll try and warm her up a little bit, but I'll get backup girls on Tinder to see just in case it goes crap. If you just choose the thing, just pick the thing. After this podcast finishes,

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  sit down and think, what is a thing that I want to do? What is something that I've been thinking about? It's maybe it's been in the back of your mind. It keeps on repeating and repeating itself. I really need to X. Build a reading habit. Habit stuff's going to be easier because you're going to have fewer external stimulus that come in and knock you off your routine. Just pick the thing and never miss two days in a row for the rest of lockdown. That's it. That's all that you need to do. And by the end of it, this is a gift that you will give your future self. You now can give you in the future the gift of the hard work that you're going to pay. And then for the rest of your life, potentially, you're going to build up. There's things that I did. There's habits that I

• 43:30Chris Williamson?

  instantiated, and I'm sure there are for you as well. Three years ago, four years ago, I paid the price for them. The activity inertia, getting over the discomfort at the very beginning, and I'm still reaping the benefits now, which is mental. Like, my meditation habit was built four years ago. I'm a thousand days deep now, and it feels harder for me not to meditate than to meditate on a morning. So just do it. What would make the next few weeks a success? Think about what it would be. Pick a thing, one thing, and just do that.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  So here comes one of those, those big departures where what I'm about to ask is nothing to do with what I've just asked. Something I find myself having more and more conversations about recently is council culture, because who isn't talking about it right? Or the sense that there's an abundance of outrage on the internet and that you can't escape it. And, you know, notably Jordan Peterson, who you're speaking to tomorrow, but a lot of your other guests have been victim of the Twitter mob, right? And I had Tom Harwood on here a few weeks ago. Tom was the senior editor at Guido Forks at the time. He ran the Vote Leave arm, the student Vote Leave arm, and now he's just gone to GB News, right? And just before I sat down with him, I did some in-depth research of searching his name on Twitter. And in the 24 hours before we sat down to speak, he had been tweeted just

• 44:47Speaker 01

  over a thousand times. There was like a plethora of swears in there. And I think two people had called him a prick. And he explained to me that as soon as you have any sort of notoriety on the internet, people have an image of who they think you are. They read everything through the paradigm of that image, and then you instantly become a target, right? And this is something I've heard you speak about before. I couldn't actually find the tweet to reference it. But I remember maybe a year ago, you tweeted that you're almost just holding your breath. You're almost waiting as, as modern wisdom gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and as you reach bigger guests, you're almost waiting for that story or that rumor or that claim to creep out of nowhere and try and stop you in your tracks. So firstly, given that you've spoken to so many people who are at the forefront of this quote unquote

• 45:32Speaker 01

  "culture war" and everything that comes along with it, what is your view on council culture? And with that in mind, as modern wisdom grows, as Tom suggested, do you think that people who have reach or who have success are suddenly held to a very different standard?

• 45:47Chris Williamson?

  No one cares what you say until you've got clout. Nobody gives a shit about you. You can be the most racist, misogynistic, homophobic idiot prick on the internet. If you've only got three followers, no one cares.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference? Well, it's that if you have status, you should act in a way which is more responsible somehow, maybe. Or you should show more capability, perhaps, something like that, I think. Because people see you with something that they want. If you've got clout, they think, well, hang on, he's got it. Or he's a rival of mine for the clout that I have. Maybe I'm a bit further ahead of him, or maybe we're similar, or whatever.

• 46:32Chris Williamson?

  Man, this whole cancel culture thing, I think it's been... I've had so many conversations on my podcast about it. The best that I can see is that cancel culture exists because people are struggling to gain status now. And the easiest way to gain status, if you're someone that can't compete in a meritocracy, is to criticize status structures as a whole. If you step outside of the status hierarchy and say, criticize it wholesale, it almost feels like, well, I could be anywhere within it, but I don't care about that game. Because like, you know, that's for the misandry, or the misogyny, or the patriarchy,

• 47:15Chris Williamson?

  or the whatever you want to pick, whatever you want to say. So I think it's an ugly situation to watch unfold. Moral grandstanding is a huge thing that... Here's an interesting insight, actually, something that I learned the other day. The reason that people love scandal and watching the takedown of people on the internet is because it allows them to feel a moral emotion, superiority, without having to actually do anything moral. Like, if that's not the freest fucking lunch that anyone's going to get, I don't know what is. You are allowed to feel moral because no one is scrutinizing the things that you do.

• 48:00Chris Williamson?

  And all that you need to do is scrutinize something that someone else has done. And this is why, I think internally, man, so many of the people that jump on these cancel mobs on the internet, don't bother reading what someone's done, don't bother doing their research, just dislike the person that's tweeted, see a couple of other tweets and then decide to jump in. I think a lot of these people dislike themselves fundamentally. I have never left a bad YouTube comment on someone's video, ever.

• 48:32Chris Williamson?

  Like if I want to call someone out for something because I think that they're being disingenuous or they don't have integrity, I'm gonna do it in a way that they're gonna see. I'm not gonna contribute to this flood of sort of general malaise that I'm just throwing at them like that. I'm not bothered about that. So yeah, the cancel culture thing is it increases in line with clout. As people become more notorious, the desire to take them down also increases in kind because if you can be the person that finds Darren Grimes' secret racist tweet, like Darren Grimes is, for people that don't know, he's a one of the leaders of the Leave movement when Brexit was happening, but he's also

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  a working class lad from Durham. So he's got a broad northern accent and he's gay. And that's really disliked because working class, northern, gay, should be super lefty, should be super Labour, should have been Remain, and he wasn't. And people didn't like that about him. So they now try and find the things. He tweeted the other day that he was leaving London for his mental health because he was going back home. And he got annihilated on the internet, people laughing about the fact that he couldn't bear to live on his own. Oh, poor Darren wanted to leave the EU but can't stay in the house on his own, blah, blah, blah. And you think, hang on, I thought that the left were the party of mental health. I thought you were the ones of compassion and politeness and all

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  this sort of stuff. But no. And the the point of that is that people only want to adhere to their highest virtues when it suits them.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  You know, there were two examples. I've been so detached from caring about this stuff until it almost happened to two people I follow closely recently, right? And I'll give you both examples because I think it just highlights exactly what you've just said and the ridiculousness of this whole thing. The first was, I won't name him, but there was a, there's like a prominent media entrepreneur in the UK, young guy, and he tweeted like a meme. Which could have been misconstrued to like make fun of domestic violence or something. He tweeted this picture. He removed it within about 40 seconds, right? I just happened to be in the office on my phone, looked at it, saw it, fuck, you know, like whatever, got on my day. An hour and a half later, I opened Twitter again. The tweet's obviously gone and he's number two trend in the UK.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  And thousands of people were like outraged about something they didn't see. And so already I'm thinking this is a bit mad. And then a couple of weeks ago, the rapper Dave, um, the man who used the arguably the biggest reach performance of his career so far to stand on the stage at the Brits and perform his song Black, which is about being proud of being black, right? And he added in this verse at the end, which was like, it is racist, whether or not it feels racist. The truth is our prime minister is a real racist. All of these things like using his platform. And then out of the blue, the other night, someone found a tweet from when he was 15 and the whole of Twitter blew up. Dave's racist. And I'm just like, surely fucking not.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Surely we're not holding to a higher standard, what somebody said when they were 15 than the platform he had at the Brits to clearly show his stance on, you know, being black and British and just I, I'm, I'm lost for words as to how we've arrived here or even where we go from here. Because, you know, I think you hit the nail on the head, which is that people see clout, for want of a better word, as a zero sum game. And the only way you gain some is by taking it from somebody else. And it's, it couldn't be further from the truth. But yeah, I don't know where I'm going with that for. It just, it stresses me.

• 52:08Chris Williamson?

  No, man, I think, um, the vast majority of people that are part of cancel culture mobs online fundamentally dislike themselves inside. And they project their low self-image onto others. Like what, what are we actually trying to do? When you see someone tweet a thing and you then take that one little sliver of their personality to expand out to their whole being. You presume that this person is unidimensional, that this one tweet is so representative that it is slap bang in the bullseye of this person's being, "Oh, no, no, no, no. The way that he cooks is racist, the way that he sleeps is racist, the way that he

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  walks his dog is racist, everything that he does is infused with this one tweet from 15 years ago," or whatever it might be, "when he was 15 years old." People are looking for that one thing to extrapolate it out because fundamentally, the cancel culture mob believes that other people are like them, and that is someone that is living a life which is show on the front and internally lacks virtue. Like, if you... I don't look at someone and think that any one thing that they did ever is representative of even murderers get out of jail.

• 53:33Chris Williamson?

  You know, we don't say, "The criminal record's going to be with you for the rest of your life," but you're allowed to leave the punishment. And yet tweeting something from 15 years ago isn't the case. That's not the same. We need to hold the actions of yesterday by the standards of today. That's what the cancel culture mob thinks. And that's not true, because the standards of today change all the time. We don't know what in 10 years' time is going to be reprehensible that we're still doing today. Animal rights, as one good example. I think it's probably safe to assume that in 100 years, people will look back on factory farming and think that we were absolute savages. So if that's the case, if ethics and morality and the way that values in a society change

• 54:18Chris Williamson?

  so much, 100 years ago, the segregation of whites and blacks probably wouldn't have been, I don't know where, I'm not a racial history expert, but I imagine that it wouldn't have been as big of a deal as it is now, right? They wouldn't have the same levels of equality that you do now. So in 100 years' time, you presuming that you know what's right now is also the, what is it, solipsism, the way you believe that you are the only thing that matters and you are the only one that knows.

• 54:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man, those people aren't serious thinkers. I'm not interested in what those people have to say. I'm bothered with trying to find interesting insights. And it says a lot that someone who is from the UK, that is pro most of the things that the actual left is supposed to be for, ends up finding far more to talk about with people that are centre-right. Yeah, it's interesting. I kind of do get the impression that the whole cancel culture thing will eat its own tail. When you start to have intersecting grievance hierarchies, inevitably it's self-defeating. Because this person doesn't just want to go against the out-group, there's also an in-group which has been split off from them that's part of another out-group.

• 55:33Chris Williamson?

  If it's like blacks versus whites, then surely it's also female blacks versus male blacks. And then if it's female gay blacks versus female straight blacks. And you just continue to slice and dice every single hierarchy that you can. And it comes back to the fact that being able to tear somebody else down or find scandal about them allows you to feel moral whilst having done nothing moral yourself. So, yeah, I think inevitably it is going to be self-defeating. And just, I hope it hurries up. I'm sick of having conversations woke bashing as well, man. I've had people like Douglas Murray on the show and Andrew Doyle. These guys went to the best universities on the planet, studying hardcore English literature, theatre, art.

• 56:15Chris Williamson?

  Like, they understand stuff about the history of human development that is timeless and evergreen. And yet, the smartest minds on the planet have had most of their time taken up arguing about whether men are men and women are women over the last few years. Like, fuck me if that's not the way to send our civilisation back a couple of generations in terms of the development of where it could be. You know, I said about like, imagine the person that you could be if you went sober for six months. Like, imagine the civilisation we could have if we stopped debating stupid shit for a decade.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  So I want to end here, which is, I love reading books because you can essentially take a lifetime's worth of learning from a person and what consume it in 10 hours. You've spoken to an awful lot of authors, an awful lot of interesting people on Modern Wisdom. And, you know, without exaggerating here, and I'm sure you'll agree, you've literally spoken to some of the smartest, most interesting and most unique thinkers on the planet, right? So, as you've just reached 300 episodes, 300 conversations, taking everything you've learned, and by the way, you can make this answer as long as you want. Imagine that you're writing your own book, you're an author now. What are the chapters that need to be in there? What are the lessons you've learned from those 300 people that you now live with? And that you need to give to other people?

• 57:30Chris Williamson?

  What a question. Right, okay, this is a magnum, a magnum opus.

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  If I was to write a book right now, I think it would be advising people to deprogram the things that they don't actually want to want from their life. And some of the principles that they would need to get past with that. One chapter would be called, "Don't practice what you do not want to become." It's a Jordan Peterson quote. "You do not have the choice around whether or not you make a habit. You simply get to choose what habit you make." So if you decide to hit the snooze button, that's not just not getting up early. That's choosing to get up late. That's embedding the habit of being a person that gets up late. Don't practice what you do not want to become.

• 58:22Chris Williamson?

  That would be one of them. "Life is dissatisfaction" is another one. "Life is unsatisfactoriness" actually would be the technically correct thing. So the Buddha said, "Life is suffering." But the suffering word dukkha, D U K K H A, has been contested by some scholars as actually being unsatisfactoriness. What does that mean? It means that you are always going to be chasing something. You're always going to be looking for that thing that's next, that's going to fill the hole, and that thing will never come, ever. It's not the new relationship. It's not the next kid. It's not the bigger house. It's not even the growth-minded book completion insight about the world, because every insight

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  that you get just leads you to wanting more. It's constantly chasing the rabbit of productivity gains or of money gains. It doesn't just need to be the hedonic treadmill. It can simply be the growth treadmill. And realizing that that's not a feature, sorry, that's not a bug, it's a feature. Life is unsatisfactoriness is a feature, not a bug. It's always going to be there. What else would I put in? I would say question your assumptions around things as well. A lot of the time in 2021, it's a meritocracy. People are what they do. And we're so busy that we very rarely get the opportunity to actually assess what we're doing. What did we say about making changes and plans?

• 59:49Chris Williamson?

  If this is for the rest of your life and you're about to choose the trajectory that you're going to go on, you'd better fucking get it right. Like you'd better choose the right direction. So assessing your assumptions means, do I actually believe that I should be going out and getting drunk every weekend? Do I actually believe that it doesn't matter if I cheat on my girlfriend? Because the relationship's not going to go anywhere anyway. Do I? And so on and so on. Just continue to assess the assumptions that you've got. The more that I sit back and do that and question, is there an easier way for me to do this? Is there a better way for me to do this? Do I even need to do this? These things are important.

• 1:00:34Chris Williamson?

  I would say that

• 1:00:38Chris Williamson?

  fame doesn't matter, but is still useful. And that's quite an embarrassing thing for some people to admit because accepting that you want fame makes you sound a bit uncouth, makes you sound sort of a bit primal and showy. But let me tell you, like, some of the most useful things that have happened in my life have been due to the fact that people know me. It is never going to get boring or dull being walked to the front of a queue and put through a velvet rope in wherever it is, whatever it is that you do. And I can go probably most of the continents on the planet now. And there'll be someone there that owes me a favor in one kind or another. That's a, that's a good position to be in. So it doesn't necessarily have to be about the fame.

• 1:01:23Chris Williamson?

  You can get the fame, but know that it doesn't have to be about the fame. And the same thing's true with money. Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly Media has this amazing quote where he says, money is like gasoline on a road trip. You need to make sure that you don't run out of gas, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations either.

• 1:01:40Chris Williamson?

  If all that you do is spend your life mindlessly accumulating wealth, you're not going to get anywhere. You need enough wealth to make sure that you're not going to break down and you need to never be out of the game. Like, how much is enough? How much is enough, really? Genuine question. Like, is a million pounds or a million dollars enough? I don't see a world in which I'm going to have a million pounds or a million dollars and think like, "Oh, yeah, but I wish it was, I wish it was five." Why? So, deprogramming some of that, and then definitely one of the final chapters, or one of the first chapters probably, would be working out what do you want to want? This is a red pill I got from Kyle Eschenroda, who's been on the show, episode 189,

• 1:02:22Chris Williamson?

  anyone that wants to listen to it on Modern Wisdom. Amazing guy, fantastic blog post. A lot of the time, the things that we think that we want aren't true. We think we want fame, or money, or an easy life, or luxury, or whatever it might be. And when we actually assess those assumptions, we realise that we don't care. We don't want that. It's just what other people want, or it's what my parents told me that I was supposed to want, or it's what my genetic programming wants me to do, or it's what the paths of least resistance are. Do you want to spend tonight on Netflix? Well, it feels like you do.

• 1:03:00Chris Williamson?

  But do you actually want to spend the night watching Netflix? Or would you prefer going to that open mic comedy club with a couple of mates? Because tomorrow, you're not going to remember what you even watched on Netflix, and it's just going to be like a million other nights that you've spent. But you might actually really enjoy the comedy club, even if it's a bit shit. Even if the comedians suck, you're going to have these memories about that night that we went to that open mic night, and it was totally terrible, mate. Like, this is assessing assumptions. This is working out what you truly want to want. I mean, the number of lessons that I've got from the show are essentially endless, and will be for as long as I don't get kicked off Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

• 1:03:43Chris Williamson?

  So I'll continue to grow like that, but those are certainly some of the big ones. I would maybe say...

• 1:03:52Chris Williamson?

  Two lessons that I learned from Aubrey Marcus that really hit me in the chest were, "You do not serve other people from your cup, you serve them from the saucer which overflows around your cup." And what you learn from that is that, in order to serve, you need to be fit for service. If you want to be able to bear a burden, if you want to be able to lift a weight, if you want to be an impressive human that helps other people, you need to be all that you can be before you can help everybody else. In an aircraft malfunction, the instruction is, "You put your mask on first before you help other people, because a person that's suffocating is of little use to everybody around them." And there are people out there who need you. There are people out there

• 1:04:37Chris Williamson?

  who want what only you can give them because only you can. So I'll give you a little preview of the TEDx talk, actually. In it, I came up with something I called the weirdness imperative, which is that it is your duty to give the world what only you can give it because only you can. As brilliant as he was, Da Vinci didn't do Dali, and Michelangelo didn't do Dali. Anything other than the absolute truest manifestation of Dali's being would have left the world fundamentally less. The likelihood of you being alive is essentially zero. It's 1 in 10 to the power of 2,685,000, which is more particles than every particle

• 1:05:18Chris Williamson?

  in the universe if each particle was another universe. That's how big that number is. It's astronomically ridiculously big. And if you choose to not do the thing which this insanely unlikely series of events has caused you to exist to do, the world will be fundamentally less complex and beautiful because you are not enacting what only you can. So if you allow status games, or social norms, or internal fears to curb your weirdness, you're not giving the universe what you can. This isn't some esoteric, ephemeral, wishy-washy, new age bullshit. This is how it works. If you do what everyone else does, you get what

• 1:06:03Chris Williamson?

  everyone else has got, but you deliver what everyone else delivers. I don't need 7.7 billion people all trying to race to the middle of the distribution of the mean. I want 7.7 billion people all doing what only they can because that's the way that you get the richest world. That's the way that you get the vastest access to human potential. And if you think, okay, I want to do something that really makes a difference, do what only you can. Don't allow yourself to compromise because of social norms or internal fears. Don't allow yourself to be pulled away by

• 1:06:43Chris Williamson?

  the conception that you have around what you should and shouldn't do. Just do what you're supposed to do. Do what you want to do. If you go after that, I think you'll probably end up in a pretty good place. So there's, there's some chapters of the book for you.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Amazing. Just when I thought I couldn't learn any more from you. You go and hit me with that. Chris, this has been incredible. Thank you so much. If people want to go and find you, where can they go?

• 1:07:06Chris Williamson?

  Modern Wisdom, wherever you listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. Oh, no, sorry. The YouTube channel is now Chris Williamson and then Chris Will X, at Chris Will X, wherever you follow me, Instagram, Twitter, et cetera. If you want to be signed up to my newsletter, just chriswillx.com. And I send out a newsletter every Monday with some insights and some life hacks. And there will be, you mentioned about books, there will be a reading list coming out soon, and that will be available on the newsletter. So just go to chriswillx.com and you'll be alerted when that's live.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Amazing. Thank you so much.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd, causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:07:58Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there. That's what?

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:08:05Speaker 04

  I'm not the earth, Danny.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 and under 17 without parent.