Hardship Is An Opportunity To Improve - Bugzy Malone (4K)

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Bugzy Malone is a British rapper, actor, and entrepreneur from Manchester, England. From gang life to greatness, Bugzy Malone’s rise is a story of struggle, survival, and self-belief. As one of the most defining voices in UK rap, his journey is equal parts pain and power. Expect to learn why being a role model takes it’s toll on some people, the life altering accident that changed Bugzy forever, how Bugzy deals with pressure, fame and his recent tussle with his ego, how to stay hungry even after you achieved your goals, the story of Bugzy’s upbringing and how it shaped him as a person and an artist, what it was like for Bugzy to work with Guy Ritchie, how Bugzy survived an armed robbery and lived to tell about it, and much more… - 0:00 Pressure is the Secret to Unlocking Your Potential 6:48 Bugzy’s Key to Staying Grounded 14:38 Why You’re Never Truly Alone 19:28 The Accident That Changed Everything 31:07 Rebuilding Yourself from the Ground Up 37:03 What Actually Keeps You Going 49:01 Why Resilience is Power 58:23 Life Lessons from Guy Ritchie 01:01:24 Does Money Equal Success? 01:13:54 Is Fame a Cage? 01:25:04 What Really Matters in Life 01:29:57 How Fame Warps Reality 01:37:10 Inside the Robbery That Nearly Destroyed Everything 01:50:28 How to Push Through When Life Keeps Throwing Punches 01:55:21 Where Bugzy Finds Inspiration 02:01:32 The Turning Point That Changed Everything 02:14:55 Is Rap Beef Genuine? 02:19:21 Everything Starts with Self-Belief - Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom - 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/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - 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?

  You've got a line that says, being a role model is taking its toll.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  How so? How does being a role model take its toll?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  What song is that from now?

• 0:09Chris Williamson?

  That's a freestyle. It's from the Charlie Sloth original ten years ago. Uh, sorry, no, it's from the second one that you did, or the most recent one. It's from number two or number three.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  Being a role model is taking its toll.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  I mean, look, so.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  As I was just telling you there off camera, I've just not long come back from Miami. And I've been, I'm flirting with the idea of writing something, bit of a book. And I get this message off, off a woman. And she's like, um, you know, my, my eight year old autistic son. Wrote today in school that you're his superhero.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  I'm flipping sat there in this little quirky hotel room that's got like a record player and like Bob Marley records and stuff. And I decided to just, um.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  You know, get her contact and give her a ring. They've actually came to like meet and greet before to meet me. Um, and I just wanted to speak to her about it and just see what it is that these. Kids and these, you know, people in general. And seeing me and where they're actually taking strength. So I guess when you understand that things like that are going on, you start to take your job description more serious.

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Because you know, people are, some people are living by the things that you say. You know, and I find it keeps me sharp.

• 1:34Chris Williamson?

  Through an additional type of pressure that comes along with that. It's kind of one that you didn't ask for, right? It's a byproduct of doing what you do. It's a, a beautiful benefit, but it's a huge cost as well.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. Um, and actually I think I appreciate the pressure. Cause it's this weird like paradox, right? Of like, you wanna be the best version of you. You know, you wanna grow into this individual that you see yourself being. But without the pressure, it's too easy to just not do it. You know, I'm running off not much sleep today. I've been to the gym, I've been boxing. But the pressure of knowing I've got this, I've got the things I've got coming next. Means that I'll keep rolling.

• 2:13Chris Williamson?

  Keeps you sharp.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, if I didn't have them things, I'd have for sure laid in bed today.

• 2:18Chris Williamson?

  There's a bodybuilder called Chris Bumstead and he was sat in that seat yesterday. Six time Mr Olympia, he's kind of the Arnold of our era.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:26Chris Williamson?

  And a good friend and he had for a very long time, I think for almost all his career. Uh, his caption was pressure is a privilege.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  It is, yeah. Yeah, I've like, I've honestly, bro, I've done things in my career that I had no idea I was capable of. You know, no idea. I had a bike accident four or five years ago.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  On the hospital bed. Um, I get a message from Guy Ritchie. Would you like to be in another film? I'm like, yeah, but I need to learn to walk again first, you know? But the pressure pushed me to be in maybe the fittest I've ever been. So it's definitely a privilege for sure.

• 3:11Chris Williamson?

  Is it hard to stay hungry when you've achieved ten times all of the goals that you ever thought that you would have done?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  That's, that's interesting to say really because.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  And it's a big conversation that's coming up at the minute. In my, in my life in particular and. How I sort of planned it was, I sort of planned the bigger picture. And because I used to box, I see opponents dotted about. So I'll try and sprint past them, you know, I'll try and win certain battles. Um, so the bigger picture is not done yet. And actually the picture evolves the more that I learn more stuff. You know, so I'm not actually quite there. So some of the achievements that I get are a surprise for me. Some, some, some of the time. You know, so I think in terms of actually staying hungry.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  As I was saying to you then off camera, I've been listening to motivational videos and your voice keeps popping up. But that's because when I was about twenty twenty one, I experienced depression for about two years. I couldn't even get out of my bedroom almost. And and that's when I started to learn about the law of attraction, listening to motivational videos and and sort of creating um healthy habits to shake off this like dark place I was in, you know. So now I'm not in a dark place, but I could easily get comfortable. So you've got to act with the the same urgency, I find.

• 4:45Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say that depression occurs when you're lying dormant.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:49Chris Williamson?

  When you've not got anything better to do. I think uh an interesting challenge there is the difference between keeping yourself so busy that you don't wallow, that you don't slow up so much that dark things creep in.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 5:05Chris Williamson?

  But also not just over scheduling yourself out of being able to hear the important insights that your brain whispers to you.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:12Chris Williamson?

  Because when you're very, very busy and you're in chaos mode, you're not paying as much attention. Is this really what I should be doing? And how many artists and business owners and career people have spent so long just in the chaos? Decades later, they turn around and realize not only did they get to a place that they didn't want to get to, but one that they didn't even mean to be in. They go, I was just on this set of train tracks. I didn't realize it wasn't train tracks. It was a car and I could have turned left or right at any time.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. I mean, look, I I I think there's a time and a place for the chaos, which is the come up. I think on the come up, you you there's like a a glass ceiling that you're gonna have to break through. And by hook or crook, you gotta get through it. So the beginning ten years of my career was chaos. I'm still putting things back together and in the correct place like now. And and then I actually put on my Instagram story the other day, that balance is the answer to the majority of your questions. And what I mean by that is.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Like you say, you can go over into chaos where you're becoming like a workaholic to get away from the sort of the darkness or. Um, or you can sort of wallow in the darkness. You've got to find a middle ground with that, you know, and what I've found with dark thoughts or, you know, things that haunt you is you've got to lean into it. But you can't lean into it all the time over the top because it will, it gets heavy. So, yeah.

• 6:48Chris Williamson?

  It's such a common talking point, I think. I, I like the fact that you I call out the first 10 years of your career was chaos. And now the answer to you is balance. But if you had told you during those first 10 years to have balance, it wouldn't have worked. And I've come up with this, this insight with Chris, again, the guy that was sat there yesterday, uh, model the rise, not the result. Because if you try, if somebody at the beginning of their journey tries to do what you now as a veteran is doing. That wasn't how you got to where you are. That is how you are coping with your current position and how you're, uh, it's a more advanced technique. It's someone walks into a boxing gym. Okay, let's learn to throw a jab.

• 7:31Chris Williamson?

  Let's not try this really complex footwork pattern here. You'll do that down the line. So if someone that's a world champion says, well, a lot of what I'm doing at the moment, my competitive advantage is my amazing, complex footwork. Okay, but that's not what got you there. What got you there were the basics done really well. And the basics for most people at the start is chaos and not sleeping much and working really, really hard and no work-life balance.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  There you go. And look, let's, let's face it, like, my come up was in the rap game.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  The youngest genre of music, you know, only the Americans have pushed it over to a place where you've got Jay-Z and 50 Cent and, you know, you start getting over here, it's an embryo. Right? So you, you're looking at a situation that really lacks structure and demonstrations. So a lot of it, you, you're having to figure out as you go along. Um, and then when you talk about rap music, it is.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Well, essentially, we're looking at a guy on his come up, right? We look at a rapper we're interested in. You know, you're looking at a guy that's come from a difficult beginning. I can be quite articulate about that bit. And he talks about it and then we relate. We think, I like this guy, I relate to what he's saying. And then some label signs him or his career starts taking off and then he goes on the come up. And he starts talking about what he's spending his money on. This country's not really got past that stage yet. We're still evolving from that sort of stage. So the first, for me, the first 10 years was establishing, you know, coming from outside of where the industry was sort of based.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  It was establishing like a foothold in the game as an independent, you know? And it was chaos because there was no roadmap. You know, you're walking in undriven snow. Yeah.

• 9:30Chris Williamson?

  How therapeutic was that process? Before we started, you were talking about the fact that you worked through a lot with your music.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:39Chris Williamson?

  Do you ever think about the like therapeutic usefulness? This might not be where most people go with the rap game, right? Oh yeah, I went there to alchemize the first two decades of my life into something that made sense to me and construct a timeline.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:55Chris Williamson?

  But it kind of seems like that happened.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  So the first, this is interesting by the way, because I was on Instagram the other day and there's a Manchester guy and he's incarcerated as we speak and he's doing lyrics to camera, he's looking for his come up, he's looking to get into the rap game and get a start in his life, go on to the next sort of level. And what he's done is he's took sort of the structure of my lyrics from a song called Beauty and a Beast, where I say. Tell her that I'm coming home. And he takes that and he takes the sort of structure and and and does his own thing and tells his own story.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Now, when I first started music, fi- five, there was five years that nobody cared, right? And in that five years, I can say this now and sort of, to look back in retrospect, I was using it to transcend depression. And me sort of vocalizing the way I was feeling was the quickest way for me to get an understanding of, actually, that's not my fault and I shouldn't be embarrassed about that. And but in the mix, I sort of turned them into songs, right? And it's funny now because them songs have just become a part of the business. We've published them on iTunes and whatever. Before, there was just this like underground archive of music that was just doing numbers.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  And I'm like, how does anyone even know them songs? Then my career takes off. This is where a lot of people get me twisted because then I have a big rap battle with a big famous rapper. And a lot of people think, ah, this is the point that like, you know, this is, this is it. But there was a full sort of lead up to that point that meant when the spotlight was on me, I was five or six years in with five or six projects under my belt. And I'd been working diligently in the shadows. So when I got my opportunity, I was more than ready. I was starving, you know?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  So what I'm getting at with the rapper there that's using the structure of my lyrics is when I first sort of got exposure and my first fire in the booth or whatever, and I'm telling my story, he's foreign to everyone. No one's really doing it. And actually, I'm talking about men's mental health, which now is a really popular category, but it wasn't then. And not as a rapper, thought he was a tough kid. What do you mean he was depressed? You know, but for me, I, I, the nature of me being interested in rapping is that like, originally I was introduced to artwork, painting, art history and all that. So.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I'm a bit bone idle, so I find it like taxing to draw and paint, but I'm decent. However, I figured I can paint pictures with words in people's minds. And I find that more fluid, it just, it just comes to me fast, right? And then, yeah, I just, I feel like art is vulnerability, it's truth, truth resonates. Uh huh. That's essentially what you're trying to do as an artist is speak your truth regardless to where society is at. And what people think is cool or right or, and I've done it and for years I was, I was shunned for it. Why? Um, just cause.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Like I say, men's mental health is a big topic now. I was talking about it years before it was interesting to anybody. Is it a big topic in the rap world yet? Still not, if not noticed, you know, but that's, that's what. Um, I think the reason that you're getting an eight year old, young autistic guy looking at me and being like. He said, what did he say in his description? He said, I'm his safe space. He says, I understand him, you know, and we've only had little conversations at meet and greets. But in him saying that I understand him, it's because I'm, I'm speaking in the frequency of, of truth. And sometimes truth resonates on levels that you can't even verbalize.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  You know, it turns out that the young boy's dad is in jail and so that young man's going through things. But with his condition, he's experiencing them differently to other people. Uh huh. So in me just being open about my struggle, I'm offering another human being a place to feel understood.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Which I, I think is quite important, you know?

• 14:38Chris Williamson?

  Hearing somebody say something and it resonating in the back of your mind and telling you the lesson, fuck, it's not just me,

• 14:50Chris Williamson?

  is one of the best. It's, I don't know whether we have an emotion for that. It's like recognition, sort of resonance, a sense of being seen.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Or is it, or is it a sense of feeling human?

• 15:05Chris Williamson?

  Maybe being, at least for me, it's less broken. I think we spent, for me, I spent so much time, have spent so much time in my head. I'm an only child.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:14Chris Williamson?

  Grew up in the northeast of the UK. I don't sound like I come from there. I went to state board, state primary, state secondary, state sixth form college. Like, didn't do the things that the people in my school were doing, and that meant I was always on the outside. Plus, being an only child, you spend a lot of time in your head.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 15:30Chris Williamson?

  And that means

• 15:33Chris Williamson?

  you can get yourself into a situation where you feel like any challenges that you're facing are a personal curse. That's just you. Like, only I feel this thing.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:46Chris Williamson?

  Only I have this thought, only I criticize myself in this way, have this shortcoming. And when you hear someone that has the same fear or uncertainty that you do, you go,

• 16:03Chris Williamson?

  it's not just me.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 16:05Chris Williamson?

  Thank fuck, it's not just me. I'm not cursed by the gods. This isn't some unique designer disease that I have, this weird pathology of one. It's not that. It's, maybe I'm not quite as strange and broken as I thought I was.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  However,

• 16:27Speaker 01

  I'll throw a component on the table here.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  The more that I've sort of grown into my success, the more I understand that, like, as a spirit,

• 16:38Speaker 01

  I have a purpose. This, this, something that I've, I'm here to do. And we all feel it in us, that there's a purpose, there's a bigger meaning, there's a, you know, and I've been, I've been really trying to

• 16:52Speaker 01

  get to grips with that. And I, and I think when you

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Have real potential to do something special.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  In terms of like contributing back to the planet, I think you get individual challenges. And I think that, you know. Um, uh, my life was quite hard pretty early on and I could see lots of people that didn't have that particular challenge at that particular time, but that was my individual journey. So, you know, although you're saying, yeah, it's not like this personal attack from the gods. They are your set of challenges.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  For you as an individual that give you the opportunity to become your higher self. And the reason I say that is because i- i- if I didn't have the bike accident that I had, for an example, that for me was a huge challenge.

• 17:44Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  You know, and then I I was coming back from that and thinking, yeah, I'm bouncing back. The rap game's young, this will be like a comeback, the biggest UK comeback in history.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  And then I, then I was hit with a blood clot. And then there's, then there's a bigger challenge than the bike crash. And then you realise like, no, no, no, this is for you to sit down and reflect and, you know, really be broken and rebuild. And although I come flying out the gates, looking confident and looking strong, like it was a dark place.

• 18:19Chris Williamson?

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• 19:01Chris Williamson?

  is usually effortful and a nightmare and costs thousands, but with Function, it's four hundred and ninety. $399 and right now they're giving a thousand Modern Wisdom listeners $100 off on top of that, bringing it down to $399. So you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and save $100 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. Can you tell me the story of the bike crash and what happened after that?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  For sure, for sure. I was in a relationship at the time and the relationship, it wasn't right for a long time, but the girl was a really nice girl and it was love for sure. However, we sort of just slowly but surely growing apart bit by bit. And so I didn't know it until like I, the night I'm sitting in the hospital and I know that I've got this blood clot and it's in my leg and blood clots, you know, famously travel. I knew I was potentially in trouble that night and I had this

• 20:15Speaker 01

  moment where I'm like, I have to, there's some difficult decisions I need to make in life. There's some friends that, you know, this isn't, it's not a true friendship. The relationship, although it sort of ran well and, and it was a great girl, it wasn't necessarily right, you know. So there was just big decisions that needed to be made. In terms of the actual crash, I was just flying up the road and flipping.

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

  What was it? What's the vehicle?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  It was a three wheeler, probably inspired by Batman and a cannon. So it's fast, off the line, it's fast. And I was, yeah, I'm going through like a sort of a junction and a car just sort of pulls out on me, but like slow. So you know you're crashing for about 10 seconds, 15 seconds and you're like, ah, smash, unconscious, woke up on the floor, people's feet around my head. You all right, mate? You all right, mate? And like noise comes back slowly, like muffled and then. And it's a really strange situation to be laying on your back in public, right? Like if you've not chose to lie on the floor.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  If you chose to lie on the floor in public, you wake up on the floor in public, it's weird. And I was like, I was like, later and I've tried to get up and dropped. And I'm like, oh, I'm in some kind of trouble. So it turns out I snapped my patella, kneecap, and I'd fractured my skull in three places. So I had bleeding on the brain, but my head's open. So there's a puddle of blood next to me that's just growing. And that was a weird process because and head blood is different to other blood, I think, because it was thick. It was a deep red and it's coming, you can see it's coming from my head.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  And I'm sort of later and then people are talking to me and then and people are filming me. And in this weird moment of a guy being like that with his phone, I I realised like, oh, like, this is one of the first times in my life as an adult, I felt helpless. Because I can't even ask that guy to stop filming. So you're just being filmed, you know, and um people are like, you should be contacted. I'm like, let my girlfriend know I've wrapped up. She comes, she sees my face, she panics like horror, starts to cry. And I was like, don't cry, because of the nature of my background.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  I said to her, if anything really bad happens to me and it's a bit bloody and a bit gory, you know, don't panic and just get yourself somewhere safe. And so there we were in the situation. So I said, don't cry. And you seen her snap out of it and realise like, let me, you know, usher people out of the way. And that was that. And then her dad turned up.

• 23:16Chris Williamson?

  So she got there before the ambulance?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  She got there before the ambulance, yeah. And and then her dad turned up, he see me burst out crying. That's another weird one, because people are seeing you. And then you see their reaction, right? And when someone looks at you and they burst out crying, you know you're in some trouble. You know, so this, this blood keeps growing, the patch next to me, the puddle next to me. And then when the ambulance guy got there, he was like, all right, mate, we're gonna get you onto the stretcher. And then as my ex-girlfriend and, and people like step back, I've gone, am I dying? Like, do I die here? You know, and he was like, don't worry, mate, we're gonna get you on. I think legally they're not allowed to tell you.

• 24:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 24:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, I don't know whether you can be sued by somebody who you say isn't dying that then dies.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they're not allowed to, cause that's.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  So, and that was that. And then you're in the back of an ambulance. That's a new experience, blue lights, lots of bumping around. And then you get your head sort of flipping, boarded to the stretcher. And then you sort of rushed into hospital, I was in Salford Royal. So that's like an old sort of stomping ground. So the nurses was really kind and like endearing. He was spiritual, so he was, he was doing Reiki over me while I was, while I was relaxing, you know? So I was just in there having, having good fun, but also like morphined up. You know, and doing a lot of sleeping. So, yeah, I mean, it was a, it was a profound experience in that it needed to happen.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  For me to dig into why it needed to happen, it's a funny one because when I was coming on to this podcast, the reason I said to you over there, I'm a bit nervous is because I respect your work, right? And I respect it because it's sophisticated. You can go on to many levels with many different types of people, which I'm capable of doing also. But I heard a thing the other day, um, cause I'm trying to study some literature. I think the fans want me to write a book, all right? And I, I was looking into J K Rowling. And the interviewer said, um, do you think you're one of the people in the world that's got the, like one of the largest understandings of the class system? Because you.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  You was in a situation where you was just before being homeless. You were so poor, you was just before being homeless. And now you've climbed up to being a billionaire. And she was like, I mean, yeah, you you could say that. And to to some extent, you know, she's within her rights to say that. However, that made me think, what must I understand? Because I'm from the place beneath what people deem as to be the bottom. There's also the minus, you know. So the bike accident had to happen because eh the things were potentially getting dark, you know. And sometimes there is sort of divine intervention.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  It was better that I I hurt myself than, you know, I end up in a crazy situation.

• 26:28Chris Williamson?

  What would have happened if you hadn't gone through that bike accident? What could you envision?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  I mean, good question, right? But what I just what I know is, you know, people in in music will refer to me as the king of the north. The the first one from the north of England to get into the music industry and and make sort of leeway in the rap space.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  That comes with ramifications, you know. If you're going to be turning up in a new car every couple of weeks and a new watch and flipping, you know. And your family infrastructure fell fell to bits and you ended up in in sort of gang culture. And a gang becomes your family and you're you're you're as good as them. And you're the one that's winning. You know, it just eh it gets small, it gets it gets intense. And I'm easily provoked. So it was just a recipe for disaster. So it was just chaos, a part of chaos. And you have to just lean into it.

• 27:28Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say, I put a lot of my identity into being a guy that could look after myself. So when I was smashed to bits, I didn't know how to react.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  So you've got this very classic, came from the bottom, self-sufficient.

• 27:45Chris Williamson?

  Hansi had to be able to defend yourself and defend, not only defend yourself physically, but philosophically. What is it that I stand up for? What does my virtue look like? And if somebody crosses a line and maybe the line can be a little bit further away from you, people can cross it more easily than they might do with other people to then, I have the eyes of the world on me now, which is more pressure.

• 28:12Chris Williamson?

  And I'm back to square one. I'm now dependent again, something that I spent most of my childhood and all of my adult life trying to escape from. Dependence, needing anybody. I've got agency. I've got independence now. Fuck. And I'm back there. Was that,

• 28:31Chris Williamson?

  humbling is going to be too basic of a word. What was that to you?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Like scary is a bit of a more appropriate word. I remember in, in

• 28:44Speaker 01

  my Manchester house, it was sort of in the, on the outskirts towards the countryside, right? And I'd had this, these guys try and break in. I had a big fight with them. That's to do with, that's to do with exposure. And then all of a sudden you sort of sat there as a sitting duck flipping. And I had this little like outhouse I called the Bat Cave, right? And I'm sitting there watching a film and the film was called Bleed for this. I'll never forget this night. And I'm sat there, my legs sort of up on the, the chair, broken kneecap. I get, I get dizzy if I go like that because my, my brain's been bleeding. So you'll just start to fall.

• 29:24Chris Williamson?

  How long is this after the crash, do you think?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  This is maybe a month afterwards, but for three months after the crash, I'm dizzy if I raise my head. So I'm sat there watching this film about a boxer. It's a boxing film. I love boxing. I wanna get back like fit and strong and I'm gonna make this big comeback, right? And then partway through the film, smash, he just has the craziest car crash. And like my, my ex-girlfriend at the time, she'd jumped up awake. And I, at that point, I'm having like this mad sort of PTSD from the car crash. Cause you do experience that in, in the beginning. And when I first got in cars and cars would go over forty miles an hour.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  You start getting a bit nervous. It's weird. I had to surpass that. So there was little simple sort of challenges that I, I think some people. It sort of stays with them and they stay nervous forever. But you've got to get back on the horse, so to speak. Anyway, in being like in my adrenaline going in that moment. I sort of thought about all of the crazy situations I've been in in my life and that. Every one of those individuals that there's been problems with or altercations or are jealous of me or. And I've not been completely polite with.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  You know, if there was ever a moment where they could get me, it's no. It just like freaked me out. And then I, yeah, I realized I was probably too heavily reliant on physicality. But look, that's that world. You know, if you're gonna drop beneath, you know, into the minus and you're gonna exist in that world, then it's a, it's a huge currency. Being able to, you know, look after yourself.

• 31:07Chris Williamson?

  What did recovery look like to get yourself back to fully functional?

• 31:13Speaker 01

  You look like a message of Guy Richard, you fancy being in a film again and me saying, yeah, damn right, I'll get it done.

• 31:19Chris Williamson?

  Was that more important than some of the rehab in some ways?

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Um. Probably because I remember pulling up outside rehab one day and I had a Scottish friend. He was a boxer and he'd committed suicide. You know, so I was outside dealing with my own, I'm, I'm writing an album by the way. So I'm writing like the resurrection through these stages of recovery and I have up days. Because of the sort of life that I come from, I learnt to laugh through traumatic situations. So I love up days where I'm just laughing my head off and then I have days where it catches up with me and I feel quite alone. And then it's topped off with, you know, such and such as hung himself.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  I just remember being like sat outside physiotherapy and, and a little tear roll down my cheek. And I literally just had to suck it up and get in there and get it done because you're going through pain. Like every session, he's crazy pain, you know, but in my head, I could see Jason Statham. Cause I knew he was, he was going to be in the film.

• 32:22Chris Williamson?

  So this is the second one.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  This is the second film, yeah. I'd done the, the gentleman and I'd been offered this like action sort of.

• 32:30Chris Williamson?

  Bigger role.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Bigger role. Jason Statham notoriously known for his ability in sort of combat sports and his, his physique is, you know.

• 32:40Chris Williamson?

  So I've got to try and keep up with him.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  He's a man's man and yeah, I just felt like I'm not turning, I'm not turning up there to be like the, the tag along like. I'm going to try and on screen fit the bill.

• 32:51Chris Williamson?

  Um hum. So I think the comparison between the first, your first role, which was uh not simple. But at least you were playing an analogous character to yourself in The Gentleman, right? Not too dissimilar to.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  You're not, for all that you've got talents, you're not a weapons expert, right? Like with sniper rifles and bullshit like that. So you're, okay, I'm being really, really ripped out of the world that I know. And um I think at least what I take away from, from that is that somebody who's got a lot of self. Motivation and discipline.

• 33:31Chris Williamson?

  And is powered by what they want to achieve, still needs a goal to be moving toward in order to drag them through a very difficult time. Because had you have not had this new challenge, this new outcome, this new peak that you're aiming toward, how much harder is it going to be for you to go through? Where is the motivation? It's purely self-generated, as opposed to every single training session, every single rehab session, Jason Statham's there.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, like having a goal for sure changes it. If there was no goal, it would have just been a more thorough process of healing. Because I'd have got it done, just off the back of discipline. And some of the motivational videos I said I've been listening to and your voice is popping up, like that's some of the points it's making is that like motivation's not always there. But like, I'm gonna get the job done regardless. Yeah, like I'm getting it done regardless, you know?

• 34:26Chris Williamson?

  My favorite lesson from Jocka Willink, Navy SEAL guy.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:31Chris Williamson?

  People think that discipline is when you want to do a thing or feel like you're going to do a thing, but doing the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing is discipline. That is what discipline is.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:46Chris Williamson?

  If you want to do the thing, it doesn't take any discipline to do it. Did it take discipline to eat the cheesecake? No, it took discipline to not eat the cheesecake because you have to force yourself to do the thing that you do not want to do. That is what discipline is. He's got the same thing around bravery, says doing the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing, in spite of being scared, is what bravery is. If you're not scared, there's no such thing as bravery.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  There you go. And by the way, you've said that before, right? In another, that's, I'm sure that's the line that keeps coming up in this motivational video.

• 35:17Chris Williamson?

  You got a live rendition.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm having deja vu, but no, it's, no, it's true, it's true, like, and, and there's some of the things that were sort of resonating with me in times where, like you say, you get to a place in your career that you're successful, you know? Sleep starts to feel a bit more comfortable, you know? The cheesecake starts to look a bit more interesting and you really got to start to.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Figure out what it is you're trying to do with the time you've got on the planet.

• 35:44Chris Williamson?

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• 36:16Chris Williamson?

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• 36:31Chris Williamson?

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• 37:03Chris Williamson?

  I'm interested in if you've got a lot of pain that you're working through at the start of your career, writing, inspiration, motivation to go and achieve things.

• 37:16Chris Williamson?

  Is it a different skill to keep working hard without the pain to push you forward?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's transferring.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  I mean, there's always some pain in life, right?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  These little bits of pain and these big bits of pain. So it's it's sort of.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's sort of making them, it's a transferable skill, I think. It just feels uncomfortable at first, you know, because if you're. If at first you're motivated by pain and. Stress and and in the in my early career, I was motivated by. Sort of competition. With um.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  You know, not not very legitimate characters. And it was just a world I was I I understood and and. The the sort of fear of there being a potential problem. Would make me think, I'm not living like this forever. I'm not getting trapped in this. I I need to, I need to refine my approach to going to where I'm going. Cause right now it's a million miles away, you know, and um.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  It's interesting actually, because I I remember.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  I remember before being in a gentleman film.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Being sort of parked outside the boxing gym. And um.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Ending up in a physical altercation with a guy. That had just got out of jail. For he killed his cousin, killed his own cousin. This is, this is me bringing you into Manchester, alright? There's no rappers. There's there's rappers, but they're not earning a living from music. You know, substantially, and there's some talented guys, but they're not making inroads into the game, right? And I'm sat there, I'm a couple of years into being a bit famous and making some music and. And there's this whole sort of inspirational thing building up. And this guy that's just flipping, he's he killed his cousin nine years ago. He does nine years in jail. He's bugs him alone, sat in a car, he's banging on the door. Long story short, me and him end up in a fight.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  I'm I'm at the, I'm outside the boxing gym. I'm going to the boxing gym to do some sparring. Because I'm.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  That's the way I stay on the straight and narrow. You know, because I'm not signed to a major label or like I go into being in a really sort of famous situation. To just having free will. And that's where a lot of rappers or famous people fall to bits. Because they don't fill that middle bit with anything productive. They go to the clubs.

• 39:55Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  They see different women. You know, there's no structure to it, so they fall to bits. So boxing has played sort of a role in just sort of keeping me focused until sort of the next assignment. Anyway, I get into this flipping big fuffle with this guy. And then I come out of the situation and because of the way that the situation went, he he wanted retribution or whatever you'd call it. And it was, it it was. I took motivation from that. The fact that this guy says, when when I see you, I'm gonna do whatever. I would take motivation from situations like that. You sort of climb in your career and them situations subside. And.

• 40:34Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  You're right, and you you're just dealing with your own ambition. Your own sort of goals. And you're you're no longer fueled by fear or, you know, anxiety or whatever it is.

• 40:50Chris Williamson?

  Chip on your shoulder.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and and I did, I found that difficult. I, and that's where the whole sort of be inspired motto sort of came from.

• 40:59Chris Williamson?

  Um hum.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Um, because if I see people have done well for themselves. I wanna I wanna study the history. How did he do well for himself? Why did he do well for himself? Where did it go wrong? Did it go wrong?

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  You know, and in in studying different people, the Roman Empire, emperors, kings. You know, I sort of seen the people that failed and the patterns as to why they failed. And the people that sustained and remained impressive throughout their life.

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  What are some of those patterns that you've noticed?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Vices.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Vices. And that's why I say, and and what I sort of seen is that some of them people didn't come from the streets or the minors. They had good parents and nice life. But life still presents bits of pain, right? And I think that undertone, Garbo Mate is quite good around this topic. I think the sort of undertone, um.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  To any vice is like a sort of low level pain. It's like having a headache all the time and you wanna suppress the headaches. You want paracetamol, right? Um, but then people do it by way of vices, gambling, drinking, drugs, smoking, all of the vices. Um, and I, I feel like them vices grab people.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  The seven deadly sins, lust gets people, greed gets people. And I think, and I think you, you're attacked by them things. I think the higher you sort of climbing towards doing something positive for the world and sort of instilling love back into a world that's always like battling and battling each other. I think the more you're attacked by these, um, you know, lust, greed.

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting that it is a counterweight. As you put things into the world that you think are good, you are tempted by ever more seductive and ever more advanced.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Well, let's give it biblical framework, right? Which is fair. Since we've got these, these stained glass windows, you know, if you, if you look at it from a position of if you're, if you believe you're a soldier of God, you're doing God's work on the planet and that's just being a good person, you know, helping, contributing. You might be a teacher, you might do charity work, you might do a podcast and inspire people, music, whatever it is. And your intention is to be as helpful to the planet as you possibly can. And we're using this biblical framework and seeing it like it's a film, then, you know, it's as if, it's as if demons are now triggered by you and the light that you carry. And they're

• 43:45Speaker 01

  like, how can we stop him seeing his highest potential? Because if he sees it, he's gonna create more light and the shadow, a shadow can't exist in the light.

• 43:56Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  You know, so you're a threat. So you get attacked from all different angles, you know, and if we're talking quite spiritually there, in the sort of physical world, that comes by way of lots more girls approaching now, but it's not girls with good intentions. Lots more friends wanna be around, you know, but they ain't got good intentions either. You know, like I say, the cheesecake looks a bit nicer. The nightclub seems a bit more interesting, you know, and without saying any names, we've, we've all seen people that have. That's throughout history. And if you look at it, it's the same thing that over and over again that grabs him and pulls him. So on the flip side of that coin, we're talking about the people resilient enough to transcend

• 44:43Speaker 01

  the urge to give in to vices. And in the process of that, you've got to lean into the pain, whether it's old situations you went through or family situations. Whatever pain it is you feel, you've got to face it. And that's what anybody that's been interested in my music has sort of witnessed has been the process of me looking my traumas in the face and becoming comfortable with them. Yeah, and understanding that I'm strong enough now to withstand the pressure that that makes me feel or the sadness it makes me feel and understanding that it's okay to feel sad about a trauma traumatic event that happened.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  That's how you should feel because you're human. And so they're the people that I'm impressed by. So when you're talking about Matthew McConaughey, Denzel Washington, these people have just sort of figured out a job description and and become really good at it and then and then just kept climbing and building and refining themselves. And I think I've seen McConaughey's talking about how he used to drink a lot or you know, he's human and he's been through his stages to then for him to get to where he's landed. He's double impressive.

• 46:01Chris Williamson?

  That's the

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  unique challenge, I think, of being somebody who's started to achieve some success and then has a pullback. Because at the very beginning, there's nobility, there's every single underdog movie in history is some guy coming from nothing and working hard to win the girl, free his family from poverty, fix whatever the problem is. When you have something that involves, there's a guy who's got it,

• 46:38Chris Williamson?

  lost it. Okay, now what are you going to do? Because that feels very different for.

• 46:45Chris Williamson?

  Glory kind of only exists in retrospect. It doesn't happen in the moment. And if you are somebody that is currently on a pullback. Well, I thought you said that you'd stop drinking. Or you're drinking again. Or you're back there.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Ah, so pull by pullback, you mean like a relapse type?

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, or a crash. Where you start to self, oh, I thought I'd overcome myself doubt. Or you've been thrown a heavier challenge.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:07Chris Williamson?

  You've been given something that you in the past would not have been able to get over. But luck's from the outside, like kind of a similar situation. Okay, we're back to something close to zero. How are we going to deal with this? Well, if I don't come back from this, this is the footnote. This is how it ends. This is the, this is the final chapter of the story. If I don't overcome this. And that's the difference between being the person who did continue and did stay resilient. Or the one who gets added to the much bigger pile of people who were caught by their vices and fear is certainly one of those big vices.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree, by the way. And like, so I've been doing some writing at the, at the moment and I'm sort of doing. I don't know if I should be saying this because it's very early on in the process, right? But it's like a sort of a biography, but it's sort of self-help in that. What I'm basically saying is that life is a set of battles. It's a set of fights. And all you can really do is be prepared for them fights when they, when they turn up. So a lot of people will see me boxing to quite a high level. And they're like, why is he boxing so much? Is he going to fight? But for me, the, the framework of boxing, when I'm performing well in boxing,

• 48:27Speaker 01

  I know I'm physically and psychologically and spiritually ready for whatever lands on my desk. You know, and, and that's just, that's just the way that I feel life is structured. I feel like no matter who you are and how you live in, what world you come from. You like, life is going to challenge you. And I think it's the ability to be able to overcome each one of them challenges with a bespoke strategy each time. Um, which separates the, the champions from the, like you say, the people that fail essentially.

• 49:01Chris Williamson?

  I think my favorite idea I've learned from you since doing my research is it's easy to be inspirational and everything's going well.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:10Chris Williamson?

  You can talk about.

• 49:13Chris Williamson?

  How important discipline is and that motivation is fleeting. It comes and goes. Discipline is always there, doing the hard thing in spite of not wanting to do the hard. It's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 49:23Chris Williamson?

  That's like being generous when you're rich.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:27Chris Williamson?

  When things are going badly and you're suffering, how tough is it to put your motivation where your mouth was? To put your discipline where your mouth was? Oh, you said that this was important. You said that overcoming hard things was important. Okay.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Game time.

• 49:43Chris Williamson?

  Let's see how well you can do.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's, that's been my experience of um, the success journey because one, at some point it's, you know, the boat's floating and it's fine. And then the next thing, there's a storm.

• 49:57Chris Williamson?

  Bailing water.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Right? You know, and like in, in that sort of happening. Um, it's game time at that point. Are you who you say you are? Or did you lose it? You know, have you gone soft? Have you got the silk pajamas on now? You know, and, and you find out about yourself. So the bike accident taught me about myself. I used to judge myself on these sort of small situations that I'd overcome in the streets. And then you have a blood clot pass through your heart and you survive that. Because your arteries are clean, because you've ate well and you've continued training for many years and, and you've got the resilience to survive the two or three hour process that it takes to sort of go through your heart.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  You, you, you understand you've got a, a different kind of strength. You know, and you sort of respect yourself more. Because it's not a, it's not a bravado. It's not, it's not, it's nothing to do with anything like that. It's just a resilience and a

• 51:00Speaker 01

  a, a, a passion to live. Yeah. And I didn't know that about myself. And actually, I think to go on a deeper level with you, I think the bike accident happened to me. It was if, it was if I was being asked.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Do you wanna live or not? I think the the sort of past that I've come from makes you so self-destructive that in moments of madness, you're like, I don't care what happens.

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  And actually, when I fell off my bike and I was lay on the floor and this little puddle of blood keep keeps growing, there's a, there was a part of me that was like, this might be easier, you know? If that's just gonna keep leaking until I'm fading out and then I'm gone.

• 51:40Chris Williamson?

  Uh.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  It could be easier than the complications of family situations I've had to go through and pains I've had to live through and, you know, that that was my attitude and that's why I'm sort of just lay on the floor, accepting it, cause I'm like, we'll see what happens and then when you get to the blood clot going through your heart and it's lodged, it's like, there's a question being asked, do you wanna live or not? Before I bless you with all of these great things that you've imagined happening in your mind, you're gonna do all these great things and contribute back to the world. At first, you have to commit to loving yourself. And that's what I think I'd lost the ability to do through all the abuse that I went through growing up or whatever. Abuse is is like, um,

• 52:27Speaker 01

  the the between the lines says that you're not lovable. Do you get me? And I'd sort of embraced that thinking. So it was all bravado. My self-esteem was it was bravado, but like, deep down, you know, I was like, I'd sort of don't care what happens to me.

• 52:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  And and the crash brought that to a head. It's like, now we're gonna have to have this conversation.

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  Because you have nothing to be to to base your bravado on? How are you gonna flex if you can't move your head without feeling?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's game, set and match. And what what do you want? Cause you're talking big, like you wanna be this this motivation to the world, you wanna you you wanna earn yourself some money, you wanna bring, you wanna have a functional family, a functional wife, functional kids and a beautiful house, that's a creative space and all these mad ideas and plans, but you've not yet figured out how to love yourself. But if you can't love yourself, who can you love? And and that's what I learned about like trauma. Trauma sort of chips away at the ability to to love yourself. And in losing the ability to love yourself, you lose the ability to love anybody else. Or the world or creatures in the world, you know, you see people being cruel to dogs. It's all coming from inside.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  You can't love themselves. So that's what happened when the night of that blood clot.

• 53:48Chris Williamson?

  What was this, was the blood clot uh due to the crash, something related to the?

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Like, so I'm in Salford Royal Hospital, right, and the nurses are a great laugh. We're sitting there, I'm like, nurse, she's like, what? I'm like, I wanna watch a film. She's like, click on the film, then I'm like, it costs money. I've had a crash.

• 54:04Chris Williamson?

  You being a diva.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  I've got no dough. She's like, do you want me to lend you some dough? I'm like, let me some dough. So we're laughing our heads off all day. And I'm on morphine. Turns out I'm a great laugh on morphine. I've never took it before, so I didn't know. So I'm just laughing my head off, right? And then it's Covid, so loved ones aren't allowed into the into the hospital, right? Um, and when I was getting discharged, they said you should put weight on your foot. Cause I've got this broken kneecap and I'm in a cast. Um, like a brace. And I um, I forgot because morphine is one hell of a drug. You know, so I'm not, I wasn't bad, I just thought it hurts. I'm not gonna put weight on it. I've got crutches, I'm not gonna put weight on it. Didn't put weight on it.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  And then the, and then I changed my diet a little bit. I started eating things I wouldn't normally eat, right? I was the guy training and eating salmon and eggs for breakfast and all that. All of a sudden, I'm having like scones, clotted cream, jam, cup of teas in the morning, and I'm going mad. And like, it's thickened my blood. You know, and it's resulted in a in a clot. And once a clot's there, it does one or two things. You know, it either lies dormant and and sort of. Um, it dissipates, if you like, dilutes or whatever, or it travels. And then with me, because I had bleeding on the brain, they couldn't give me the full dose of blood thinners.

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  So there was two weeks.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  There was two weeks that I knew I had a blood clot in my leg. My girlfriend at the time, her uncle died from a blood clot in the leg because it went through his heart and killed him. So I know what I'm up against. I've got two weeks of that where they put me on half the um, the dosage of blood thinners I should be on. Because my brain's bleeding and if my blood goes too thin, I am in all sorts of trouble. You know, and through that stage, it was, it was Guy Ritchie that sort of leaned in, in closer to me. And um, he said, me and you'll speak every day. Until you come through this. And he just used to chat to me at some point and I'd have my dinner and flipping, then Guy chatted to me, what are you up to?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  And we just have a little chit chat and it was a, it was just a strange period of my life. And the weirdest thing is it was bliss.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  The only way I can describe that to you is it's out of your hands. It's like it's imminent death or not. It isn't, you can't manipulate it. You can't run from it. It's not like. Someone's gonna turn up and beat you up and you can run out the back door. It's like this, you're, you're condemned. And in feeling condemned, I just felt bliss. It's hard to explain. I was happy. I was like, I was free. Because all of a sudden, it didn't matter whether I failed. Do you know what I'm saying? You, you, surely you understand the, the sort of climb of like building, I think. And the pressure that you put yourself under to achieve the things you believe you're capable of achieving.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  All of a sudden, that was just out the window. So I felt relaxed about the whole thing.

• 57:16Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:18Chris Williamson?

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• 58:03Chris Williamson?

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• 58:23Chris Williamson?

  What have you learned from your time with Guy Ritchie?

• 58:30Speaker 01

  I mean, look, I've done a film, I spent some time with him off set. And I guess what you saw witnessing is just, is excellence, is just somebody that I could relate to and somebody that I, somebody that makes you sort of understand that success in what we deem as success, we look at his brand, right? And we see success. It's the result of years of sort of work and refinement. And when you understand that, it breaks it down because it's such a big brand that if you're not careful, you just see a giant. And then when you speak to the human being behind it, you're like, oh, oh, like you've really worked your arse off for years.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  You know, so I learned that. And there's lots of other little sort of details I saw learn, but like, that was the sort of main thing that I understood.

• 59:30Chris Williamson?

  Especially given that Guy makes very British films.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:34Chris Williamson?

  That feels like a very British philosophy, very British sort of takeaway.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess so.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  The not getting too big for your boots, it's sort of uh keeping your feet on the ground.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:45Chris Williamson?

  And that's difficult, you know, this it's a double edged sword with British culture that we like to take the piss. There is a little bit of tall poppy syndrome and that's good for keeping people humble and for making some people driven.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:00:01Chris Williamson?

  But it's also disincentivizing for people that want to take a risk because they're worried, well, what are people going to say? You know, in America, it's got a lot of problems, but they're very supportive of people being uh exploratory, adventurous, trying new things, aiming for the stars. We don't quite have that same.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Bit different.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  Positive some influence in the UK, maybe because it's a smaller country where water locked, the weather's not as good. That's just the culture. I'm not sure. But to think that you've got like England's Christopher Nolan, uh and he is still focusing on the basics.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Chris Williamson?

  And and still turning up every day and doing the hard thing.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Chris Williamson?

  It's inspiring.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it changes your thinking because you think you've gone to a different level and at this point you you can like kick back, chill a little bit and you know, but you sort of see someone that's

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  probably outworking the the common man that that turns up and you know, goes to work or whatever, somebody that's putting in like hours into the craft.

• 1:01:07Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  You understand that it's time to just sort of um double down and go again.

• 1:01:13Chris Williamson?

  Also reminds you that there's problems that money and fame can't fix.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Chris Williamson?

  Challenges that money and fame doesn't overcome.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:01:23Chris Williamson?

  Given that you're in an alternate universe, like you're literally a different universe from the one that you started in.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Were there things that you thought the right amount of wealth and the right amount of attention would have just, oh, you know, that's not going to be, that's not going to be an issue for me anymore.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:01:44Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to be, that is a byproduct of my situation, not of myself.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:01:51Chris Williamson?

  Does that make sense?

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Well, you, you, you know, it's a blur, right? You grow up in a household that's chaos and it's fallen to bits and the finances are low and the morale's low and, you know, it's chaotic and violent and stressful and the blinds are closed because the bailiffs knock on every day, like it, it, it clouds what the answers are because the answers are actually quite sophisticated. But for me, it's interesting. I've got a song called the Ten Graph Commandments, you know, and I, and I say, stage one is make it, maintain it. And what I'm talking about is, you know, in society, if you've got no money, you're

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  just going to come unstuck just because it's the way that, it's the way that things are sort of built up. You're just not going to get much free time. You're not going to get time to think, not going to get time to be yourself. You've got no social mobility. You can't, you can't go to the places you want to go and, you know, some people need to heal, man. And that's why I've tried to make songs that touch on certain topics because people sort of are out there desperately needing to heal, but without the freedom that money can bring, you don't get the time to address. And certain situations, you know? So, yeah, in, in my calculations, which I'm quite accurate, by the way, a lot of the

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  time, I feel like even when I'm wrong, I was right. And in my calculations, I thought, first of all, I need some dough, point blank, and I'll get more sophisticated when I get there, you know? So when I got to a place where the dust had settled and I wasn't like new money anymore and I didn't feel like I was going to go tumbling back to level one, which you probably felt like that for 10 years, I.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  I started to study on a sort of deeper, deeper level because these, these, these facets.

• 1:03:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, rule two is protect, protect your energy.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:02Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting when.

• 1:04:07Chris Williamson?

  You're right. It wasn't everything, but it was the first thing.

• 1:04:12Chris Williamson?

  It's the launch velocity that gets you off the, the launch pad.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Chris Williamson?

  Right. It's that initial start and without that, there is a, there's multiple costs that you pay.

• 1:04:23Chris Williamson?

  And you can't do much without it. But I think assuming that that was good and got me here. Means that that is all I'll ever need and is what will fix the remainder of the problems in my life.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:04:35Chris Williamson?

  Is where people get stuck.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, cause you, you. And like, look, by the way, that's why I say sort of be inspired because. If somebody comes from a two parent household where the parents done well. And the kid was able to go to university and whatever, like it don't make that person any less of a, a person, right? They're still gonna have their challenges and, and you gotta sort of respect the parents for building a platform. But that child has still got his own challenges moving forward. He can still fall to complete pieces, you know, so it, it, it applies no matter. Where anybody sort of starts, but if you've got no.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Financial intelligence, there's no one to teach you about money. Then you just think that money changes everything. You just think that it's the answer to everything. And it's not until you achieve them sort of financial goals or certain car, certain house size or whatever that you like. Cause you can see the trophy, right? It's there. And then you pick it up and it's completely hollow and you're like, oh no. Because I thought inside that trophy was going to be the answers to all my trauma, all my pain, all my. Fractured and damaged relationships with family members that are dysfunctional and haven't transcended it. And I thought it was gonna really, and he's like, no, no, no.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  What this does is gives you the, the freedom to do the work. I knew that.

• 1:06:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you're telling me that this money is the entry ticket.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Chris Williamson?

  Into the assault course, which I now have to go and do.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  You go invest in yourself, self-investment all the way through. And, and that's what, that's what had to happen. I, I remember, I remember, I'm buying a Lamborghini off the showroom. Right? I'm, say five, six, seven years ago, I'm much younger and I'm brash. I need rappers in London to know I'm serious. You guys think you're serious? Like, we're not playing. So I'm big and boisterous about it. I'm filming myself on Instagram. I was one of the early adopters of like doing dumb shit on Instagram to like have people take notice. So I'm in the bank like, yeah, I need to put two hundred thousand down, please. So I buy this car and then I get it all blacked out. So everybody knows like it's paid for, you know, my name on the wheels and stuff.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  I remember like, as I go to drive off the showroom, I don't know what I thought was gonna happen. I probably thought I was gonna take off and fly to Mars and like the rest was history. I come off the showroom and I was like, oh, oh, like nothing's changed. Not only has nothing changed, now I actually understand that financial gain isn't gonna change certain things. Like I'm still stressed out about that thing I was stressed out about this morning. I'm excited because I'm driving a Lamborghini. But like, that's gonna fade. The novelty will wear off in ten minutes and we're back to square one. And at that point, by the way, I've only really ever, in the come up of my career, I only really spent money on investments.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  That was an investment in the brand to show people that like, you know, I'm not, I'm not just saying it. I think a lot of successful people are just sort of saying it and they're telling you how to, you know, I've been around.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  People where all these like females that'll have a B B R, but they'll sell a workout plan. It's not the real thing. So I was trying to put my money where my mouth was and just be like, look, man, I'm saying I'm big and boisterous and I can back it up. So there was all self-investment. However, then I had to invest time, energy and finances into sort of healing. Um, and understanding what the other great people that have existed on the planet understood.

• 1:08:31Chris Williamson?

  You know, people say I'd rather be sad in a Lambo than sad in a Fiesta.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're they're not thinking straight.

• 1:08:38Chris Williamson?

  I think that that's completely backward because

• 1:08:43Chris Williamson?

  if you're sad in the Fiesta, you still have the pipe dream that the Lambo might fix it. So Will Smith's memoir, he says, um, when I was poor and miserable, I had hope. When I was rich and miserable, I was despondent. The point being that when you think the thing that was going to fix your problems is in your possession and your problems are still there. You ask yourself much deeper, much more difficult questions and that sucks.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  So it's interesting, right? Because one night I end up sat with Jordan Peterson. He's around a table, I'm sorry.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  And I was able to tell him that I'm hundreds of hours into your work, you know, because I'm hundreds and hundreds of hours into psychology. Because, you know, a lot of people will go to a therapist and perhaps that works for them. But then a lot of people are trying to find somebody to or something to depend on, to give them the answers. And I think that's going to null and void any process. Me, I just started doing the work and getting an understanding. I needed to break it down into sort of basic framework where I could get to the essence of what I was trying to figure out because the money didn't make it go away. And then the the sort of key word that I figured was functionality.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  You know, functionality.

• 1:10:04Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean to you?

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's what it's what we're looking for, right? So when you're saying that what Will Smith is, you know, rich and sad. Well, it's because you've not focused on functionality. It should become sort of the main focus in your in your journey. Once you've got some finances, like some people want a billion pounds, they're not sure what they want a billion pounds for. And then they get there and they get sad and some of these people commit suicide, it's bad marriages, divorces, it's just a mess. And that's because what you've got to do is you've got to get some dough, park up for a minute and um.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  And and start your march towards towards functionality.

• 1:10:48Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Because if you've come from a bit of a broken background, you're going to be dysfunctional. The people that brought you up are going to have been dysfunctional, the people you was brought up around dysfunctional. So you've got traits and habits and neurological pathways that need reversing and breaking and snapping and half.

• 1:11:04Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  And at that point, it's for you to understand this is a bigger job than getting some dough. Because actually you shouldn't be greedy, you should earn enough to be financially free. Right? And and once you've got to that stage, you've got freedom. So what you do with it is is up to you. So if you want to build a business that sort of runs itself and keeps some money coming in, good for you because you're clever. But if you're going to invest your full time energy and everything into being more rich than, you know. It's the tortoise and the hare, like the tortoise walks past you in the end.

• 1:11:40Chris Williamson?

  Was there something that you learned from Jordan in person that you hadn't picked up online? Was there anything you took away from your time with him?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  I'm like an obs- I'm like an obsessed person, right? So when I'm researching, I'm I'm I'm going all the way. I'm reading the books, I'm listening to the the podcasts, I'm I'm looking for the things that aren't.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  There to be easily found, you know? So there was, there wasn't really. The conversation didn't go down that route because it's like me meeting you outside of sort of your work for me to pull you into a conversation about your work can just put a dampener on the conversation because I'm objectifying you as that guy that does that podcast instead of seeing you as a human being, right? So I was able to have um just conversation with with Jordan with the understanding of a lot of his sort of philosophy and you know, and he's sort of one of many people that I've I've studied, you know?

• 1:12:43Chris Williamson?

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• 1:13:27Chris Williamson?

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• 1:13:53Chris Williamson?

  A checkout. I love the idea of objectification. Uh, I've been thinking about this a lot. I was sat next to Tucker Max, you know, he is?

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:14:03Chris Williamson?

  So he wrote a book called I Hope This Is Beer in Hell. He was a, it was called Fratire. So it was um. Ten fifteen years ago, he was a young guy, drinking and partying and fucking women and writing about his exploits. It was like um American Pie, the book, right? Like, kind of like that. It was like semi memoir-y stuff and he was really fantastic. Then he went away, did a ton, like five years of daily psychotherapy and came back a changed person, much more aligned, still very confident, but much more aligned. And I sat next to him at dinner in Austin, where I live now, and we were talking about

• 1:14:47Chris Williamson?

  objectification and he was saying to become successful as a man is to agree to allow the world to see you as a resource to be extracted from or a human to be objectified. So that women have it in a different way. Women get objectified because of what they are, how they present, how people see them in the world.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Chris Williamson?

  Men get objectified because of who they are and what they can offer you and people see you as a resource to be extracted from. And just that idea, whenever I think about male objectification, because we think about McConaughey or Brad Pitt or, you know, but I don't think that that's most objectification that happens toward men. I think it's somebody that has fame and you want to be in the blast radius of that. You want to be in the containment zone.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Good way of putting it, yeah.

• 1:15:43Chris Williamson?

  Trickle down effect. If somebody that has wealth and you want the opportunities or they get first access to investment deals or maybe they can give me some advice and it's not reciprocal and it's transactional and transient and disposable. And I like

• 1:16:03Chris Williamson?

  The idea of sitting with somebody and not even necessarily having to talk about their work, not having to talk about the thing, but just seeing how they operate. And you can learn just as much from that as you can. Matthew McConaughey, I mentioned before we started, he's coming back on soon. I learned as much from watching the way that he talked about his tennis shoes. He wouldn't fucking shut up about these tennis shoes. These are the fastest tennis shoes on the market. I go straight from here to the tennis court. But just passion, commitment, charisma, kindness, open to the room. So he wasn't bothered about sitting straight. He decided to come in and he put his chair right out to the side.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:41Chris Williamson?

  He sat like this and he's like, these tennis shoes, fastest tennis shoes on the market. And he's just talking to everybody that was sat there. And I just thought, so fucking cool. Nothing about how you do a movie, nothing about how you act. And he's there and he's got nothing in his mouth. He's like, the way he does, like does this.

• 1:17:00Chris Williamson?

  So cool. But yeah, to become,

• 1:17:05Chris Williamson?

  to be successful as a man is to agree to be a resource to be extracted from or

• 1:17:12Chris Williamson?

  a human to be objectified.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, it's a, that's a difficult position to, to exist in.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Especially if you're street smart.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  You know, they say the terminology, you can't kid a kidder.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  And people are trying to warm you up and, you know, they've, they've, they've got a goal in mind of what they're going to extract from you. And what you're supposed to be is you're supposed to be

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  blind to the fact that that's what they're doing. And if you're not, and if you do come from a situation where you're street smart now or sharp, you see it coming every single time. And it's problematic because it changes your relationship to, to people.

• 1:18:01Chris Williamson?

  Much more skeptical.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, just, I mean, you don't have to be, you can withdraw a little bit, right? And yeah, actually much more skeptical. Because exposure means that everybody can, people can sort of see.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  People can see you more, you're more low. But actually, you can see them more, and that's what they don't take into consideration. They're forgetting the fact that you're experiencing, if they're not creative, six people just used your same approach today.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Right? And you're supposed to, you're supposed to act like you can't see what they're doing.

• 1:18:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay, we're going through this again. That must be, you know, to fly the flag for the other side. I imagine that's what it's like to be a really attractive woman.

• 1:18:48Chris Williamson?

  That I always thought this.

• 1:18:53Chris Williamson?

  Hot girls on the internet complain that they struggle to get guys to treat them well, treat them normally. And I think that's because there's this weird reality distortion field.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  I'm gonna try your drink.

• 1:19:06Chris Williamson?

  Get this in, come on, if you're lagging.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  Let me see what's happening. No, I'm not lagging. I don't normally do.

• 1:19:10Chris Williamson?

  I don't think you're lagging.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Don't normally do coffee.

• 1:19:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well, just a little, just a little.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  I'm just, I'm very interested to see what it takes.

• 1:19:16Chris Williamson?

  Alright, okay. First sip review.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, it's nice.

• 1:19:24Chris Williamson?

  Good, I'll do.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  And I'm not just saying it because you sat across the table.

• 1:19:26Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Yeah, well, like.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  And that, and that fuel your focus, so I'm gonna get more focus now.

• 1:19:32Chris Williamson?

  A little bit.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Could I potentially change here as the?

• 1:19:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, if we start seeing you levitate, we'll know you've had too much.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Oh, is that what that is?

• 1:19:38Chris Williamson?

  That does what happened. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  My vocabulary could increase and things like that.

• 1:19:41Chris Williamson?

  Well, if you start rapping, we'll know that it's. Um, but yeah, that must be what it's like to be a, uh,

• 1:19:48Chris Williamson?

  to be an attractive woman. Your value to the world is immediately available for everybody to see. And you have, how are you able to discern whether or not this person who's talking to you and seems nice? And seems like they've got your best interests at heart? What do they really want? What do they really want from you? So I guess on the same vein as that, have you found that fame has brought more freedom or more cages in that way?

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Do you know what? I don't take it too seriously, you know, because I'm independent. You know, I, so the actual term fame, I just don't take it too serious. I'm just, I'm just who I am and I'm exposed. Sometimes I lean into it and do a bit more. Um, and sometimes I take a step back and relax and, um.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  I guess I've, I've, I've been sort of magnetic since I was a kid. Always attracted a lot of attention. For no particular reason, it's like from my spirit or something, just people gravitate towards me. And it's been like that since I was young. So it's always been the same process. So getting famous was just the accelerated version of that. Like I'm not used to it, do you know what I mean?

• 1:21:05Chris Williamson?

  So interesting.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's just the way it's sort of been. And I think when I see people that take fame too seriously, you know, I just know that they're gonna come unstuck. It's like you're gonna come unstuck because you're, you're taking a thing serious that doesn't take you serious. Fame doesn't take anyone serious, man. It's just not, it's just not gonna like, because there's time and there's changes in trends and there's, you know, so one minute you're famous and you're popping and you've done that last thing. And now people are treating you like this. And then the thing you've just done, everybody hates. And now people are treating you like that, you know, that's gonna, it's just gonna run, run riot with your mindset.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  If that's something that you identify with being a famous person. So I always sort of say, I'm not a celebrity. But that's because that's how I'm framing it to myself. I think if I sort of walked around thinking I'm a celebrity and X, Y and Z. If I walk in a room and nobody has a clue who I am, which happens a lot. Cause you're in different places in the world and whatever, then you're gonna be like, you know, yeah, like your identity's been messed with, you know, but if you can, if you can derive a sense of identity from, from who you actually are, you've got to get in tune with your spirit. You know, and, and, and when you start to sort of get in tune with your spirit,

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  then no matter what changes around you, the environment, the surroundings, you, you know what you are. You know where you stand, you know, so me coming to do this podcast today, I told you before, I was, I'm nervous. But it's because I, I know that it's different, you know, it's a, it's a different situation. However, I also understand that I deserve to be here as much as a guy that might be fifty four and has way more experience than me, has, has way more accolades than me, you know, you.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  There comes a point where you start to understand that like you're you're enough. And it's like a shame because society doesn't encourage that thinking. You know, so when I I bump into a fan and he's like, bro, like, you're my idol or I'm trying to be like you. He's like, no, no, you're you're trying to be like you. And that's what you should be trying to do. Be the best version of you. Because for all you know, the best version of you is better than me. Or where I.

• 1:23:35Chris Williamson?

  The best that you can hope for if you're trying to be somebody else is being the second best in the world at something. No one's gonna beat you at being you.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:23:44Chris Williamson?

  The best you can hope for is to be the second best Bugzy Malone.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no one can beat you at your personal set of skills. So before, when you were saying, you know, you're a single child and you start to talk about the components that sort of make you as a as a a whole in terms of psychologically and physiologically. That these are your, these are all of your specialities, man. You know, and and and that's how I sort of feel. I feel like you bolt on discipline to all of your quirks. You know, I'm sure I'm on some end of the spectrum. Sure, I've got ADHD, you know, I'm sure I've got a load of these labels, right? But if you if you bolt on discipline to that and you get the mind under control, then all of a sudden the hyper focus in ADHD just becomes a superpower.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  You know, and so so that's that's my thinking and I and I think that like when I see people that become like they feel helpless. Because I think society encourages that helplessness because then you're dependent on a drug or a a certain chocolate bar or whatever it is they can sell you. Um, you know, I I think you're in trouble when you become dependent and you don't understand that, like, actually, like, um, I'm I'm I'm enough. I mean, I can be whoever I want.

• 1:25:04Chris Williamson?

  I looked at this really interesting study about bariatric surgery and gastric bands.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:09Chris Williamson?

  So less popular now that Ozempic exists because we've got a pharmacological replacement.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Chris Williamson?

  But when people who are overweight and want to stop eating so much, they get a gastric band fitted. Now, there is an increased suicide risk after people have the surgery.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  Why?

• 1:25:25Chris Williamson?

  It's a very serious surgery. A lot of the time, there can be complications. It's a big, open wound that can get infected, there can be general complications. People can struggle with just the pain and the recovery. But the big underlying psychological reason typically is in the past, people had an issue that they were coping with through food. They now no longer have the ability to eat the food.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Chris Williamson?

  And the issue persists.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:58Chris Williamson?

  So the coping mechanism has been taken away from them.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Chris Williamson?

  And the problem that they were coping with has not. So their ability to sedate themselves with food, to hide from whatever that challenge was, has gone away.

• 1:26:11Chris Williamson?

  And the problem's still there.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  So again, functionality, that's a dysfunction. And you really got to be ironing them out. And by the way, I'm saying this from a position of being the most dysfunctional man on the planet. You know what I'm saying? Like these, these, these times in my life where I'm sure it was psychosis, these times where it's been depression, flipping, like I've gone through, in my songs, you hear me talk about borderline personality disorder, and that's because I'm Googling away. And I'm looking at all of the, you know, explanations.

• 1:26:42Chris Williamson?

  Got that, got that.

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's that, I'm experiencing that, I'm experiencing, you know, and if you're not careful and you start taking them labels seriously, you, you know, we, we, we've all got everything to some different extent. But what are you gonna do? Are you gonna accept the fact, you know, you, you, there's, there's a point where you just have to stop accepting

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  the fact that you lose control of your emotions. Get it under control. Build discipline, like these ways, you know, and that's what I sort of had to study and figure out. And actually, when you actually break it down, it's all quite, it's all the basics. It's doing the fundamentals well. And you start doing the fundamentals well. Things just sort of drop into play. You you just have to do that on repeat.

• 1:27:33Chris Williamson?

  What are the, what are the fundamentals to you?

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  I think diet's a big one. Um. Gut health, again, you hear people talking about it. Problem is with people talking about things like that is then people turn up to capitalize on it being a popular category and people wanna sell crap. I was gonna make, not to deviate, I'll get back to it in a second, my fundamentals, but like, I was gonna make a protein brand. Um, with a guy and what I sort of figured out is he wanted to make um like a like a a prime type drink. Um, what I was interested in is making something um more beneficial in terms of people's health, just because

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  when you've got a job that involves exposure, when you say to someone, buy this thing, they're trusting that you've done the research and this is gonna help their life. Right? So at that point, I feel

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  guilty if I'm selling somebody something that's not helpful. So I I had to pull out on the business venture. Anyway, so one of them is

• 1:28:38Chris Williamson?

  Diet.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  He's got it. It's a big deal. Training. Um, it's not, it's it's more the mind, exercising the mind, you know. And the body, I just think that like, as we all know,

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  it's one of the biggest deals. Um, expanding your understanding.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Uh, I think if you're naive to history and like what's going on in the world before you was here,

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  you just and you and you're just existing in this day and age blind and not knowing the like, the patterns of of history, the the cycles, sorry, you know, things reoccur. Um, so yeah, in that respect, study. You really gotta study. And um, when I say protect your energy, again, I don't, I don't think, I don't think everybody's got the best intention for you. You should probably understand that. You should probably, probably try and pick.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  People with the correct sort of morals and integrity. And sometimes it's that people don't have control of themselves. Do you know what I mean? That they're they give into their impulses.

• 1:29:57Chris Williamson?

  It's a a challenge as well. Successful guy, attractive woman, successful woman, attractive guy.

• 1:30:05Chris Williamson?

  You warp reality around you and it makes it harder for people to treat you normally, even if they're trying. I see this with Joe Rogan in Austin. He has this comedy club, super popular. And sometimes after the show, they'll kick everybody out. And then all of the comedians and their friends will go to the bar downstairs, Mitzi's. And there is, it's almost like someone flicks a switch and a frequency comes on that changes the whole room's behavior.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  I get you.

• 1:30:38Chris Williamson?

  If he walks in or if he leaves.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:40Chris Williamson?

  Because it's this very specific niche where somebody just changes the dynamic. And the people that know him well and are his friends typically don't change that much. This frequency only affects the people who don't yet know him. And they're like, I'm trying to be normal. It's like a really, any guy trying to talk to an unbelievably hot girl, like I ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba, like she's she's so hot, just stop thinking that she's so hot. Why can't you just say something like you're in your own head about it? And it's kind of the same in that regard. And that was my point, I think, around fame, bringing more freedom or being more of a cage, that it makes you an object to be looked at.

• 1:31:20Chris Williamson?

  It gives people a difficulty in treating you in the way that they might even want to. And then you've got to work out, is this person honest and awkward or contrived and conniving? Are they trying to get something and extract something from me?

• 1:31:40Chris Williamson?

  These and the, you mentioned before about shame.

• 1:31:45Chris Williamson?

  I think the shame of dealing with a problem which only comes as a byproduct of now privilege is a real challenge.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:55Chris Williamson?

  Because who's going to give you sympathy for that?

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:31:57Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I'm so sorry that your fame is causing the amount of attention where you need to discern between people who are simply nervous, conniving, and actually good friends. Like, what a, what a challenge. I'm so sorry that you need to deal with that. And that causes you shame because you think, I shouldn't feel discomfort at this problem because there are much bigger problems and I have had much bigger problems in the past. What would previous me think of me thinking of this as a problem? You go, well.

• 1:32:29Chris Williamson?

  As you move up through the grades of whatever art you're trying to do, the challenges become more refined and this is a more refined challenge.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's nuanced, it's not simple no more. And that's why you, you've got to learn to rely on your, you've got to learn to rely on yourself, man. And, and really, you know, I'm somebody that believes in God and I've recently understood that it's not my own strength that I'm relying on, you know? It's the, the strength of, and whether you call people, some people understand God is the universe, but his source, that, that source of, of like love, right? And I've, I've found myself relying on that as opposed to my own. I thought I was this cool guy, thought I was strong, but depending on where your belief

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  system's at, you sort of understand there's, there's, there's something more going on here. And I found that I've been taking strength from, from the source, if that makes sense. And when you was just talking, then I was thinking, I'm making a fragrance, right? I'm doing my second fragrance.

• 1:33:40Chris Williamson?

  I've got it on. I've got the first one on.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  Have you got the first one, fortitude? Fortitude means strength. And with the second one, I've called it intention.

• 1:33:48Chris Williamson?

  I love that one.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  So when you, when you're talking about before the, the way people change around Joe Rogan or, you know, you're talking to a hot girl, you know? I remember, I remember when, you know, you, my career exposes me to types of people I've not been exposed to before, not the type of people that are walking around the estates I was walking around and.

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  It's your intention that defines the way you're gonna treat them people. Because if you're talking to a hot woman, your intention is to try and get her in bed by the end of the night. Obviously, you're gonna be stuttering your words. You're trying to negotiate a pretty serious deal.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Do you know what I'm trying to say? Who's to say you're enough or she's interesting or she's interested or, you know, if your intention is just the same as having a conversation with the next person at the bar, you know, then all of a sudden, it's a more natural interaction because at the end of the day, she's gonna like you or not. And you're, you know, you're saying she's a hot woman, you're gonna like her or not. But I think if you if you become a man in a certain position and and you don't feel like you're

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  you you you don't have options, so to speak, then you're gonna look into who she actually is. Because a lot of hot women aren't what they look like. It looks like a great.

• 1:35:16Chris Williamson?

  Pretty on the outside.

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks like a great person with with that can bring great things into a person's life. Um, and I think some of them may neglect um their other attributes, you know.

• 1:35:29Chris Williamson?

  And it's dangerous. It's dangerous for anybody who has an outsized capacity anywhere. Because it Paul Graham's got this wonderful quote where he says, a lot of people look at those who are successful jerks and assume the reason they're successful is because they're a jerk, but that's not true. The reason they're a jerk, the reason that they are a jerk is because their success allows them to get away with it.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:54Chris Williamson?

  And it's the same as not being a very nice person or somebody that's rich and an asshole. Or a girl who's hot and has um no loyalty, um isn't very kind.

• 1:36:06Chris Williamson?

  Their richness or their hotness is what permits them to get away with it. That's not why they have achieved the things they've achieved.

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's like it's like being a boxer that's got a big punch, right? Very powerful. And he leans on that attribute. And he wins the area title. And if he's lucky, he gets the European title. But to be a world champion and to compete at world level, like you need to have rounded off your skill set. It's as simple as that. So, you know, I meet a really pretty girl and she's relied on that. Up until this point, now I'm speaking to her, it's just so uninteresting. Because it smells of that, that's what it is. You know, where, and like you say, you become successful, you get some money and or fame or whatever it is. If you've sort of leaned on that and just you're identified with that and that's who you are now.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  And you've not gone and studied and you've not tried to heal and you've not tried to. It just becomes a very unimpressive interaction, you know?

• 1:37:02Chris Williamson?

  I'm not interesting, I'm not regulated, I'm not kind, I'm not self-aware.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Chris Williamson?

  I'm not giving.

• 1:37:10Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned that story of the guys who tried to rob your house.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:16Chris Williamson?

  We talk about that?

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  If you like.

• 1:37:18Chris Williamson?

  I do want to, yes. What happened?

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  I mean, look. There was.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  There were some, um. Like teenagers, I've just moved into this house. I made a big thing online, I'm getting a new house, because this is the game, right? This is the rap game. You're gonna get to a place where you're doing well. And people wanna know if it's true or not. Did you, have you really transcended the bottom? Is that really possible? Because that is like in the Batman film, right? And there's that that prison and to get out the prison, you've got to escape and and jump out the hole at the top. And that's crabs in a bucket. We're all looking at the top of the bucket, thinking, can we get out of there? And once you're in the process, it's interesting really, because you've got to fake it till you make it, right? So you're sort of demonstrating that, like, here's where I'm at.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  You know, some people are less honest about it. I was trying to be sort of accurate. So like, it's like, I've bought this house. And I've not really built up the walls on the outside or these not blinds up at the time. And he's like a group of like teenagers up on the wall and the shower in there.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Bugzy, Bugzy, Bugzy. And I'm flipping, thinking, whatever. And then my, my girlfriend at the time gets out of the shower. And he's walking through the house naked and they're looking in through the window. She's like, the kids outside have seen me naked, right? And I'm like, yeah, just give them time to go. Cause I'm thinking I've not moved here to then start like going out and just even chatting to the kids. Do you know what I mean? Like I'm gonna try not to get too involved at where I live, right? So time goes by and time goes by and then eventually they just come a situation where I'd sort of left the house. Thought the coast was clear, left the house.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  On this particular day, I was trying to get my little sister to make friends with my mum. And so we're doing a bit of domestic healing. Or whatever you call it. And then I go and collect my little sister. I've not seen her in a long time. And I'm gonna take her to town first, on the way to town. And at this point now, the, the kids are trying to like terrorize the house. My ex-girlfriend phones me up on the wall again and, and it's all going on. So then I drive back to the park and the house and the park. I pull up and I see the kids and they see the car and they just wanna see it's me. I get the situation, I get, I'm a famous guy, I live in the area.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  So then, um, as I like pull up, um, they start to jog off through the park, looking. And whoever they must have been in the area, their brothers and family were tough guys. And they've come back and broke into the house, broke onto the land, smashed the windows. Tell him when he gets back, he's dead. So that was the, that was the situation. I'm with my little sister in the car. And we had to, we had to fly home. I drove home nervous. Cause you, you don't like, you're just in a situation where.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  You you're not sure. And by the way, there was a few little things happening around the house of like, it it it was a big house and you don't understand the ramifications of living in a big house, but it attracts a lot of attention. You know, and that, to be honest, has put me off, like, them kinds of luxuries, because people see you as something different. So now I'm like doing a lot of travelling and opening my mind and being in places with just a backpack, you know, to go back to basics. Anyway, so the the yeah, so the they um, I went back, I was nervous.

• 1:41:20Chris Williamson?

  You're driving back to deal with this issue.

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  I'm yeah, I'm flying back, flying back. My mum's on the phone to the police in the background. When my ex girlfriend's screaming on the phone.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  And my heart's just beating. I'm just like, oh my days, because you don't, I'm saying to my ex girlfriend, do they have balaclavas on? Do they have gloves on? Do they have weapons? She's like, I don't know. And and you were and they're breaking in, right? And um, yeah, I sort of, I sort of pull up and you're straight into the chaos of the situation. And I think luckily, at that point,

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  again, I've just kept up boxing for so long that as I was getting into these interactions with these guys, I was able to gauge distance enough to make one move and then threat nullified. What's happening next? Do you understand what I'm saying? And and

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  and and that was that. I mean, these deeper detail, I don't, I don't know how much I should go into, but they sort of barricaded the road off. It's like a country road that takes you to the house. And me and my sister are in the car. It's been the first allocation. We get into the car. We're driving down this country road. It barricaded off with big boulders like that. So I know there's an ambush coming. So I look in the bush and there's a big guy with a brick. So I put my sister's head down like that. And really, what he should have done is he should have just thrown that brick straight through the car.

• 1:42:50Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Created panic and attacked me.

• 1:42:52Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  But what he done is he tried to play Mister Intimidating and tried to um. Have me a fight with this brick. But what he doesn't understand is what I understood is you have to jab me with that brick. Because if you start swinging it out, man, it's gonna end up knocked out of your hand. It's the nature of a heavy. You know, weapon of whatever description. So he stood there and put my hands up in the air and psychology says that if I say to you, what T-shirt is that again? That you exactly, your brain starts to answer the question. You like your nervous system starts to answer the question before you get a chance to think. So I jump out of the car and I've gone. No way is it you. Is that blue T-shirt?

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  Fuck off, you could. And I'm asking him these questions and you can see his brain doing all, but I'm closing the distance and I'm sparring every day. And I know how close I need to get and he won't think I can touch him, but I can. And I'm getting closer and closer and he's not getting the time to get his feet in place to swing the brick properly. And when by the time he realising I'm I'm close enough and he tries to do something with the brick, I've managed to hit him. And it just, it just skimmed him and he spun around and dropped the brick. So then. It all goes to court, obviously. He doesn't try and press charges because me and him had a decent fight.

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  You know, to be fair to him, we had a decent fight, but I won the fight. And um and then I'd get in the car, I move the bricks. Boulders, I get back to my house and that's the video that surfaces online of me flying down the drive.

• 1:44:27Chris Williamson?

  I'm taking your top off.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  The, well, the reason I'm taking my top off is because a van then comes screeching onto the path of their backup. So now there's a van full of guys to come and back them guys up. So I'm taking my top off because I'm going now to get back involved again. And honestly, like when I, when I turned up for the second time, like. I just turned up and was just shouting my head off like a lunatic, frothing at the mouth. And I was just like, what I was explaining to them is like, you're at, you're at my family home.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  My mum's in there. You know, you guys have turned up to beat me up. I've turned up, I've turned up here to die for my family. This is two different situations, you know, and you think I'm like a celebrity. I really come from the dark, you know, and you you look like a bit of a plumber. You look like you go to the pub on a weekend. It's like you don't like that you're at my family home. I ain't got nowhere to run. And it wasn't as articulate as that, by the way. But, you know, that was the.

• 1:45:25Chris Williamson?

  Shouting and screaming.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  I was shouting my head off, yeah, because, you know, I didn't want to hurt anybody else. And it was getting out of hand, you know, because boxing allowed me to be able to deal with it clean cut. But if I didn't have boxing, then I'd have got into a fight with the first guy, thrown onto the floor and maybe beaten up outside my own house, you know, so boxing was able to get me through the situation. That was that. There was a.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  After the situation, then they tried to phone the police.

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  You know, and there was, so there was a court case and there was this moment in court. At this point, the court case was a couple of years later, and at this point I broke up with my ex-girlfriend and she had to come and give evidence, which was this mad situation for me. And there was just this point where I had to speak to the jurors. You know, that are going to judge her, there's like a panel of people that are going to judge. And do you know what I'd done? I just, I've told them who I was because I understand that people look at a guy that looks like a tough street guy and always a rapper and all these sort of stereotypes go with these people. Look at things in categories, right?

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Because sometimes people are too lazy to understand that everyone's just an individual. So I, I just spoke to him on a really human level and explained who I am and what my intention was going into that situation. And I was simply to protect my family and I, and I could have lost my temper and I could have took that over the top, but I feel like I dealt with every situation perfectly. There's many a man that would have pulled out a weapon and it would have been a different story in the news. You know, but I risked, I risked it. I risked having a fair fight and luckily by the skin of my teeth. Well, maybe not the skin of my teeth, but I I come out on top.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  You know, and I feel as if I I was blessed because yeah, I was put, my back was up against the wall, you know. So I got not guilty. Do you know, do you know, I've never really spoke about with this, yeah. I'm sitting in the room with my uh lawyers and that. And they're like, right, today's the verdict. You're either gonna get guilty. Bro, if I get guilty, as a kid, I was a persistent young offender.

• 1:47:47Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 1:47:47Speaker 01

  I was in lots of trouble all the time. That was something I had to overcome and get out of the habit of being. So I'm thinking it like for the criminal record I had when I was young, like if I get a guilty here, this is looking like jail.

• 1:48:03Chris Williamson?

  Did it feel like you were backed up?

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  It hmm, I thought.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  Oh, man, what did it feel like? Because it's all over social media and the paparazzi are coming to my hotel. I'm not signed to a record label. I'm independent. You know, so for the newspapers to be turning up when I fell off my bike is in the newspapers. When I got engaged, it's in the newspapers. It's sort of unheard of. I'm independent. I'm not a record label's cash cow. Right? So you go in past paparazzi every day. It was just a bizarre experience. Um, and on the day when he's like, today you get the not guilty or the guilty or not guilty, my heart's beating, shit in my pants a little bit. And um, and he's like, we've got a prepared statement for if you get not guilty. I said, that's the one I'm interested in.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  Because now I'm doing the law of attraction in my head. I'm like, there's no way I'm getting a guilty today, right? He reads it to me. I said, okay, it's Covid, we're just coming out, we're sort of in Covid. I'm doing a tour. Tour tickets aren't selling because people aren't sure whether to put the money into concerts. Cause they might get pulled.

• 1:49:08Chris Williamson?

  Be inside.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  Do you, yeah, do you remember that stage? So I'm I'm putting a concert on in the most controversial stage, right? I said, at the bottom of that statement, just right, the Bugzy is gonna go away now and concentrate on the on the ticket sales of his UK tour.

• 1:49:26Chris Williamson?

  You used your statement as an ad read for the tour.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  Listen, it's it's turning a negative into a positive. Right? And in my heart, I believed I was righteous. What the judge was gonna believe on the day is, you know, who knows sort of thing. But they they did, they judged me fairly and I got this not guilty. And then and then I was on the stairs, stood there in this pinstripe suit that I got made after John got his suit. When he got off his court cases, I quite liked it. It was tailored well. I'm like stood there and I remembered, oh yeah, we've got all the news in front of us. And he goes, and Bugzy is gonna go away now to concentrate on the sales of his UK tour. And bro, the tickets are sold out. So I'd fell off my bike, I'd come back from the bike accident.

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  I had this big court case from these guys that smashed my house up and the I ended up selling out the tour. You know, so it was a triumphant, it was a triumphant moment. It was a negative into a positive, you know?

• 1:50:28Chris Williamson?

  The number of guys who hear stories like that, some dudes break into the grounds of my house and I would have had the top off and I would have had it and that would have been me. I think it says an awful lot about what someone does when their back's up against the wall like that. Because we were talking before about Velvet Prison, Silk Pyjamas.

• 1:50:54Chris Williamson?

  I have a I have a friend who went through a rough time a few years ago. And he was explaining to me, he said,

• 1:51:02Chris Williamson?

  all my life I thought I was a coward.

• 1:51:05Chris Williamson?

  So I I spend my time around hard men, you know, I like I like fighting. I like being around operators, special forces people. But all my life I was worried that I was a coward, that I'd never fully tested myself. I'd been tested, I'd done hard things, I'd chased after stuff. It was always kind of on my terms.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:26Chris Williamson?

  It was always, I was electing to step into whatever the challenge was.

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:33Chris Williamson?

  And

• 1:51:36Chris Williamson?

  I wondered, he used this line, so fucking brilliant. He said, I wondered when my better self was going to stop clearing his throat in the room next door.

• 1:51:49Chris Williamson?

  So he could just hear him coughing next door, like his, his better self, his best self. And then he went through a really, really rough situation. He's like, okay, I'm going to work out whether or not he's going to stop clearing his throat or he's going to kick the door down and come in. And sure enough, he kicked the door down and he was there. I just love that idea. And I, I wonder how many people never get the blessing of being tested, fully.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  No, here's the thing, I think we do get the, the blessing of being tested, but I think the test starts small. And I think if you fail on the small tests, you don't even get to the big tests. If the small tests make you depressed, make you think, oh, it's not working and make you give up on your dreams and you sort of become a victim. It's harder for me, it's easy for them. And you just end up sort of stagnant, then you don't get to the bigger tests. I think the bigger test came for me in life because the little tests I was, I was plowing through them. And also it's like a boxer in his career or a Jiu Jitsu practitioner. You know, he, he's, he's building up, building up, he gets his blue belt and then he gets to brown, he gets to a black belt. It's the, it's that you get to the black belt of challenges.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  And that's the interesting challenge because they're the, they're the ones that are like make or break, you know.

• 1:53:07Chris Williamson?

  And that's when the opponents get harder.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  Oh, that's when the opponents are also world level. You know, because you do like, once you've, once you've overcome certain challenges, you start to think, I'm getting pretty good at this, like, I don't think life can beat me up. You know, and then.

• 1:53:23Chris Williamson?

  Bike accident, court case, pandemic, no ticket sales, bad selling album.

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, like real, real, you know, you wake up on the floor with a, in a puddle of blood. It's like, there's the moment, but there's the like, there's the transcending, the moment, there's the fight. You've got a 12 round fight ahead of you. And the, the people don't talk about the details of that, they just, they'll see someone like me on a screen, they'll be like, oh, he's bound back well. It's like, no, that was every single day for months and months and months. And, and do you want to know what the main fight? What I find is, is the ability to believe in, in yourself and the bigger picture every single day.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  You can't, you can't take your eye off it. I think the moment you've sort of took your eye off it. It's like the momentum slows. If, you know, you're in a car crash and you break your legs or whatever it is. And you think, um, I'll never be that person I said I was gonna be now. It's like the momentum starts slowing and slowing and slowing. And before you know it, it's at a standstill. And you've got to start all over again. So the seven years you've just been climbing for to get to that level of momentum can go. So when I'd fell off my bike, that's what I was fighting against. It's like every day when I woke up, I used to crack a joke every day when I woke up. I was like, oh, I'm achy breaking. I make a big laugh first thing in the morning. Cause I thought it's not changing my morale. It's not putting me in a bad mood, you know?

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  And I just kept, so that's the first trick that I use is laughter. I make a joke out of whatever's bad is going on. And it has to be a funny joke, by the way, can't be a shit joke. It won't work. And then once you've, and then once you've done that, then it's having in your mind who you are and where it's all gonna go. And again, the new fragrance intention, these are all the things I'm talking about with intention. You have to have the intention of becoming your higher self, or I don't think it will happen.

• 1:55:22Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to finding inspiration for your art form, for rapping.

• 1:55:28Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say for me to find inspiration, I have to live some life and almost forget about writing lyrics. One of my favorite lines around this is in order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life. The comedians that spend a lot of time on the road, all of their jokes are about airports, hotels and dinner. Cause that's all.

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:55:49Chris Williamson?

  I'm interested when it comes to creativity and the well that you're able to draw from.

• 1:55:58Chris Williamson?

  How you still try and give yourself enough silence and enough slowness in a very chaotic life with lots of opportunities and the fragrance and the clothing and the shoes and the tour and the shows and attention.

• 1:56:16Chris Williamson?

  How do you continue to create something that is honest and resonates when there is so many distractions and potential avenues that you could go down?

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, it's a good question. And I think it's a case of

• 1:56:35Speaker 01

  the pursuit of excellence. There comes a point where you have to forget about money and financial gain. There comes a point where you have to forget about accolades and fans and, you know, screaming supporters. And you have to really figure out what you're doing it for. And if you're an artist, you better be in it to to make the best work that you can make. Because essentially, this is what I'm going to be judged by. Um, when it's all said and done, if my if my life is a book, when it might have been Kevin Hart that I heard say that your life's like a book, what's your book going to be like? If my life's like a book,

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  in the end of it, what's that? How is it actually going to look? And if I've not dug deep to do my best work, then I don't know how happy I'd be with myself. And in terms of the well that you talk about, um, I've just figured that you have to absorb in order to radiate. So for me to

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  for me to create on the next level, I have to I have to go away and absorb. I have to watch lots of films. I have to study whatever it is I'm interested in studying at that time. Live lots of life, you know, I have to just absorb and and forget about being creative. And then all of a sudden, a switch will just flick one day and you go back into creative mode. And you've got all of these sort of inspir- like inspirations and, um, you know, influences that are being filtered through your outlook on the world, you know, and then you're able to, you know, I'm I'm a storyteller. And that's what's mad because I'm not. I'm not a rapper, I'm an artist.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  Um rap music has been my way up.

• 1:58:29Chris Williamson?

  It's one medium.

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  It's one medium. And at this point in my career, I'm interested in a more credible job description. One that uses my full array of skills. So people look at my, the, the brand that I've built and my, my business and I can tell that they can't really wrap their mind around what they're looking at.

• 1:58:49Chris Williamson?

  Who is this?

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:50Chris Williamson?

  What is this?

• 1:58:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm a very diverse person. That's just the way it's become. I've been through lots of different things. Been through lots of hardship, lots of trauma, lots of abuse. You know, I've, I've witnessed areas of life that you only read about in the newspaper and that's been my reality. And, and then on the flip side of the coin, I've had the discipline to be a legitimate person, to run a business, to, you know, so you become a, a really sort of diverse package in one and it's hard for not even just people, but for you to understand like what category is it that I saw sitting here and you have to.

• 1:59:31Chris Williamson?

  That makes people nervous. Not being able to easily categorize someone makes a lot of people nervous.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:38Chris Williamson?

  Uh, it's the reason that we have archetypes when there's movies. All right. The hero has big shoulders and the villain wears black. And the maiden has big eyes and the nerd wears glasses.

• 1:59:48Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59:48Chris Williamson?

  Because, oh, that's a shortcut. I can work out who this is. I don't need to do as much thinking and I can box that up. And you don't need to do as much exposition. I need to ask myself, it's not as effortful. Cognitive shortcut.

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:00:02Chris Williamson?

  And

• 2:00:05Chris Williamson?

  we in many ways love people who have depth and are interesting and unique.

• 2:00:14Chris Williamson?

  But on the flip side, it's very effortful, very effortful thing to, okay, so it it's it's rap, but it's art, but it's got this sort of self reflective thing and it's growth, but then it's film and then it's like this.

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  Oh, impossible, impossible to understand at this stage in the in the trajectory. Impossible, you know, it it's one of them things that consolidates as as time goes by, but actually, I think it I think I think it's new. I think what I am is new. I think people that come from the the place where I've come from don't necessarily survive the initial stages of being famous, coming into lots of money. I think it plateaus. You know, and a lot of rappers, they get shot. They they don't even get through the the stage of being a rapper. They don't even get to diversifying and because they're too busy with having them same vices that they had in their old life, that worked in their old life.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  It's like you can't come into the light and have bad vices. It's gonna cause you, it's gonna cause you problems.

• 2:01:19Chris Williamson?

  You need to do the work before you get there. You know, look at, this is something when doing the research, which involved listening to a lot of freestyle from you, which is good.

• 2:01:32Chris Williamson?

  That first fire in the boot that you did with Charlie Sloth over ten years ago now.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:38Chris Williamson?

  Just, uh.

• 2:01:41Chris Williamson?

  Did you realize at the time, oh, this is a moment, this is a real, the door has just been opened a little crack and I can wedge myself in. Was that, did you sort of feel the gravity of the potential opportunity on the other side of that?

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  I mean, look, so so I've I've been writing this book, like I like I say, and I talk about this sort of moment and it was a stage where I'd been making music for five years, but in making the music, I was trying to make something that was palatable and for a record label to sell. So I was trying to make something that that I deemed as.

• 2:02:20Speaker 01

  Good, uh, generic and universal for commercially, yeah. So I was softening my stories, right? And then they just come a point where I'm like, I'm exposing myself, like with no reward. You know, I've just done five mixtapes and I've invested in them all and no one's listening. I put it on YouTube and a tumbleweed goes by. And I'm just like, they just come a point where I thought I have to throw caution to the wind. And I remember in the book, what I talk about is the turning point. And the turning point was my, my, my mum had been evicted from Berry New Road that I talk about in the fire in the booth. She was living in a little, um, flat, a one bedroom flat with her ex partner.

• 2:03:03Speaker 01

  It's, it, it was going wrong and she was stick thin. My mum was about five stone and on the verge of death. And I was having these reoccurring nightmares that either my mum or her boyfriend hit one another with an ashtray. I was just, just after this nightmare and sometimes my mum would get hit and sometimes she'd hit him and someone would die. Because the arguments between them was getting that bad. And I'm driving around in this blue Audi A three that I loved and I'm a bit of a street guy. I'm in the mix and I'm making music and I'm, and I've got this dream in my head. I'm gonna be a millionaire, I'm gonna be a multi-millionaire, because that'll fix everything. I'll be able to pay for my mum's problems to go away.

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  And I remember seeing my mum and I was sitting in her house and it was a bit like this. It was derelict, there was no carpet on the floors. This was my mum's like reality and I remember taking her out for a little bit of food. And her boyfriend had let himself back into the house and locked her out. And when we came back, she was locked out.

• 2:04:11Speaker 01

  And he'd rang the police. And when I understood that the police was coming, I've gone and sat back into the Audi. Because I was a bit of a street guy at the time, don't judge me. And as I'm sat there, the police come. They pick my mum up and slam her into the floor.

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  And as I sat and watched that.

• 2:04:35Speaker 01

  It was a, I I've never felt so helpless. Because what am I gonna do now? I'm gonna jump out and what? Start beating up policemen. You just sort of sat there, she's on the floor getting wrestled and her arms twisted up, up her back like she's a football hooligan. And then I had a little pit bull at the time, Kruger, he was called. He jumps over the fence and he runs over. Yeah, and he's capable, you know, because he he grew up with me through my troublesome days. He's very capable. However, his relationship with my mum was different to his his with me. I was like one of the boys. My mum was like an authority figure with him. So he like licks her face and she's like, it's okay.

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  At this point, I've got my hand on the door, ready to open the door, because if that dog starts attacking police, like it's gonna be a mess and I'm gonna be the only one that that can fix it.

• 2:05:29Speaker 01

  And the police were able to usher him. I brought him up. Well, the police was able to usher him back into the garden. My mum gets wrestled into the back of the police van. I go home from that situation, yeah, shaking. And I'm. And then that's when I wrote a a freestyle on a platform called JDZ. JDZ Media Spitfire. And it was the first time that I just threw caution to the wind. And I was like, do you know what? Like, you'll fuck these songs that like, I'm trying to be a nice guy. I'm I'm seeing like Ed Sheeran on my television and I'm like, how do I act like I'm employable like him? But it's like, I'm not.

• 2:06:09Speaker 01

  You know, when I'm when I'm flipping nine, ten, eleven years old, I I know of when a man was murdered in my uncle's house. I used to stay over. My uncle was holding his head together, waiting until the ambulance got there. Shot in his face. These are my realities, you know, and it and it's hard to sort of get your mind around. You know what I'm saying? So I was I was I was attempting to try and be something that I wasn't. And in this liberating moment of, fuck it. Because I even need to, I even need to start taking making money more more seriously. Because my mum's gonna die in this mess. I can tell. That's what's gonna happen. I used to wake up in these cold sweats. My mum would die in these mad nightmares. And my ex-girlfriend was like, what's up? And I'd be sweating.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  I never used, I didn't have the courage to tell her, my mum's died in my dream again. You know, because I knew the violence was getting worse. I've seen my mum got her nose broken. Big gash in her arm, she needed stitches down her arm, cause he'd threw her for a table. You know, it, things like that are hard to wrap your mind around without going and overreacting. That's another thing I'm proud of myself for, because my stepdad actually died about a year ago. And they've called, the lawyers have called me to give me some money that his mum has tried to leave for me. And I, and I was like, I can't, I feel like I can't accept it because I didn't see her in the later stages of my life. I didn't make the effort as a teenager that thought he was a bad boy to go and see her.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  I sort of forgot the fact that she's shown me so much love or whatever. Anyway, so, you know, he died and I was just proud of myself that like, I didn't take it over the top. I was a boxer. I had a reputation on the streets and he was, he broke my mum's nose. And I didn't, I didn't try and take retribution. My strategy was to succeed. I'm gonna succeed and I'm gonna change this situation. You know, so I drove home that night. I'd done that J D Z media and I just exposed the truth. I'm like, easy way I'm actually. And actually I can't be bothered smiling, cause my head's fucked. You know, and I, and I just sort of let it fly. And that was the first video any, anyone give a shit about.

• 2:08:19Chris Williamson?

  Is that your Audi A three behind with the door open?

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's that. And then off the back of that, that started to do numbers. And then a, a manager from London messaged me, I think he used to manage Ed Sheeran in the early days. He's like, come over to London. I went over to London. He's like, by the way, we'd have to change your accent. Like, you can't let people know you're from Manchester.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  Right? So I'm like bamboozled, you know? And he, he, he had this really sort of snobby thing going on where he's like, mate, you're just some guy from Manchester. You wanna get in the music industry, it's kind of not gonna happen. And he was treating me in that way. And I thought, I'm not used to authority. I'm in jail when I'm a sixteen year old kid. So he's like, the way he's treating me is not gonna work. So when the freestyle, I remember posting the, the freestyle. And I was like, tell that guy that used to manage me, just being boisterous, um, that I'm from Manchester. And I'm coming to put money on the map and that that's where it sort of come from was the attitude in London towards someone that's from Manchester. And I knew that attitude wasn't personal to me as an individual. It was like, you're from out of town.

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  And I thought I'm gonna break that door down. So that that at that point sort of became my challenge. So then in the freestyle after that. I'm like, tell, you know, cause Stormzy was signed to a label and he was doing good things and X Y and Z. And I'm like. Tell, tell Charlie Sloth, it's not just Stormzy that can get a reload. It's not just, and I'm just like letting him know like I'm. I'm like a silverback gorilla just like crawling towards the fucking booth. Like let me in if I can get that opportunity. And actually, that was the nature of the um the clash between me and Chipmunk was. He he'd done the fire in the booth before me or a couple before me. And I was so passionate about this um platform.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  And the opportunity that that was to me, that in his one, he was at a different stage in his career to me. He'd made it. He was like a a star, right? I was growing up watching him, quite liked his music, right? And but he sort of got to a stage where he must have been a bit like at a lost stage in his career. So he was like doing, he had points to put across. So he was doing a lot of talking. In the fire in the booth, which I seen as boring. In the stand, like if he'd he would have gone in and just spied his lyrics, he's a talented lyricist, I would have just liked it. But in him talking and all that, I thought. You you've lost that thing. You forgot that it's still an opportunity firing a booth. I'd kill for that opportunity. I can't even get it.

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  So by the time I got the opportunity, I was saying, you know, fuck Chipmunk and his A's and B's. I didn't think I'm gonna have a clash with him. That's just me thinking when I was in a position to get my A's and B's and I went to school with people that got A's and B's, I was sat in jail. You know, my family are addicts. You know, I don't know what's gonna happen to my mom in the end. And, you know, I'm sat in solitary confinement. As a sixteen year old kid. And so there was probably a resentment to people that got the GCSEs, cause I didn't get to. There was no way it was gonna happen for me. Yeah, there was just no way I was could have made it happen. I couldn't make it happen, you know? So I was I was just, it was a, it was an observation that that that like fucking got out of control, right?

• 2:11:29Speaker 01

  But I knew going into that fire in the booth that like, this has to be the turning point for me. If I don't kick this door off now, then I have to take. My other life more seriously.

• 2:11:42Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:11:43Speaker 01

  And it just wasn't gonna end well. You know, so that, you know, that was, that was that. I went in there and I let my soul bleed out into the microphone. That the frequency, the frequency of authenticity. And I was nervous in life. I was worried. I was scared. I was angry. I was, I was pissed off. I was, I was six years into making music that no one cared about like. You know, I was starving and I'd looked at the guys that had done their best fire in the booth. And it's weird because this was the moment that like the law of attraction really kicked in. Because you think you're doing the law of attraction, right? But it's not until necessity kicks in that you'll pull it off and you will. You, you sort of vibration comes up.

• 2:12:29Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  So because it was a, um, a real big moment, when I'm looking at, you know, rappers like Nines, rappers like flipping Katie Coke and. These sort of pioneers in London that had got big numbers on the fire in the booth. I was telling myself, I'm gonna outdo these guys. In fact, I'm gonna have the, the most viewed fire in the booth of all time. It's just little dreams that you've got in your own head, but that, that's what, that's what happened because of how much I needed it.

• 2:12:58Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  And how much I wanted it, you know? So that was that. That gave me a start. And, and yeah, here we are.

• 2:13:08Chris Williamson?

  Thirty five million views on just that one video later?

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  No, no. I mean, so look, if we're looking at British rap music, it's young. Um, but I think things like my career take things forward. I think there's a whole generation of kids. That see, can see a documented journey of me going from the minors. To having things in life and being able to pay my mum's bills and. Yeah, and I don't have a relationship with my family, but I'm able to look after certain people regardless, you know?

• 2:13:40Chris Williamson?

  Is there a verse or a lyric of yours that still gives you goosebumps when you say it live?

• 2:13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's lots of those.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  Um, I think when I done the tour in Manchester, I sold out the arena. It had not been done before in the, in the rap space. And um. I, I think I made friends with my mom at the time and, and, and brought her over to the, to the situation. The, the tour, sorry. And um.

• 2:14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, in M M three where I'm saying that these. I told the nurse that there's no way I'm dying on this bed. Fuck that.

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  And it was a moment where, when, when the, when the blood clot started growing through my heart, I went to get a nurse on my crutches. She was very blasé about the whole thing because it's just their job, right? Like people are dying all the time. And I'm like, no, no, no, nurse, like I'm.

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  Do you know what I mean? And she was just looking at me as if to say like, this is, this is what it's like, like. And I'm like, no, I, like, I need the doctor. I'm gonna need like. You know, and, and yeah, that moment happened. So on tour.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a few goosebumps moments. There's a few little goosebumps moments, yeah.

• 2:14:55Chris Williamson?

  Is rap beef genuine? How much of it is just marketing in disguise?

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think what was happening at the time, yeah, is that I was, I was coming from being a street guy into an industry that I don't understand and I'm just trying to bulldoze my way through. It's like, I need some dough. I need some dough.

• 2:15:14Chris Williamson?

  And attention.

• 2:15:14Speaker 01

  I need, yeah, because I need my career to take off. I need these songs. I'm, I feel like my story's like worth listening to. I feel like the music I'm making is interesting. Especially compared to what's going on. And so I was trying to just bulldoze my way through. And um, and in doing so, I was just being, I was just being clumsy and not caring. Was what it was, right? And so then when, I remember when Chipmunk dissed me back, I was like, um.

• 2:15:43Speaker 01

  I was a happier body. And in a sense, I was like, like, I remember being at my mum's house, actually, and, and I was like, mum, Chipmunks made a diss track. And she's like, she's listening to it. She's like, who does he think he's talking to? I'm like, mum, you don't understand. I'm a hustler. You can't give me numbers.

• 2:16:03Speaker 01

  You can't give me numbers because I just know what to do with them. So I just, from that, what I think people don't understand is, you know, when you watch a boxing match, and one fighter, say Mayweather, he just wins the first seven rounds.

• 2:16:19Speaker 01

  And then the other fighter is desperately trying to come back and he wins a round and Mayweather's sort of backing off and moving and slipping and being neat. Because he knows he's won. Like, I was never interested in the back and forth of calling names. I sort of respected Chipmunk as a lyricist. It was like the last thing I wanted to happen. I couldn't be bothered with someone calling me names because I was, I wasn't a rapper, I wasn't a music guy. It's like, I take it personally if people say things about me. So I wasn't playing that game, really. I was strategically making my way up because I had a goal. And with all due respect, I couldn't give a fuck about Chipmunk. Or any, or the industry, or it's like, my mum can't die in this stage that she's going through and I don't give a fuck.

• 2:17:00Speaker 01

  I don't care what I have to do to get up in the stand. And that was the nature of me turning up to Tottenham. And, you know, I was doing things that my whole heart was on the line. You know, when we was out, people say, oh, you went to Tottenham for half an hour. It's like, no, we wasn't. We was there all night. And, and it was, it was a serious situation. Tottenham's not a joke place, you know, but, you know, we went there and anything could have happened. It was, it was, it was dangerous.

• 2:17:28Chris Williamson?

  You were turning those things around really quickly as well. I seem to remember you time stamping.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:34Chris Williamson?

  When different, when things were posted, things were responded to.

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like, I'm using boxing analogies because that's the thing I understand, right? But it's like.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  Fighting a dangerous fighter with a big punch. Sometimes, sometimes you've got to try and get him out of there early. So I was just firing back quick. That was my strategy for the situation was bam, bam and knock him off.

• 2:17:57Chris Williamson?

  Putting pressure on him to do it quickly.

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  Just, I was just applying pressure because it was like, if I can, if I can put this to bed early doors, Conor McGregor Aldo. If the fight would have gone on.

• 2:18:07Chris Williamson?

  More than thirteen seconds.

• 2:18:08Speaker 01

  More than two minutes. Would it have been the same fight? When fatigue starts to kick in and everyone's sweating and the punches are less impactful, you know, but Conor got in there and got it done early doors. And that's what goes down in history. You know, so I was going in to, to try and take the win early doors. So then the end bit of the situation that was like all a little bit confusing. I, I was just sort of playing chess then because at the end of the day, it's like, I've got a career. Like I've got numbers enough to build like a future. At that point, I'm not interested in calling names. I like Chip Mung, I think he's a nice guy. Who cares?

• 2:18:49Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't work in a diss track though.

• 2:18:50Speaker 01

  Like, who, like, who care? Yeah, like you call me names and we're gonna do it like whatever, but who cares? I don't care. These real shit going on. You understand what I'm saying?

• 2:18:58Chris Williamson?

  And this is an opportunity to fix it.

• 2:19:00Speaker 01

  I had to focus on the real shit. I was doing three or four festivals a week and I was just banking the cash. And that's why by the time it comes to getting the Lambo, I was just focused on building the brand. You understand? And unfortunately, this day and age is Instagram and exposure. I don't necessarily like it. But when it's a part of your job description, you better get it done.

• 2:19:21Chris Williamson?

  How much was the solutions that you came up with? How much of them were emergent? Uh, I just trust my taste. I trust my ability to make decisions now and to follow principles. And how much of this was a plan? How much of this was I have goal, I've reverse engineered the direction? Does that make sense? How, how much are you sort of making decisions as you go and how much of it is prescriptive and prescribed in advance to help you get through things?

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  In terms of sort of that particular situation.

• 2:19:48Chris Williamson?

  All of that, it seems in retrospect, life makes a lot of sense. You can string a narrative together. I knew that I needed to do this. The bike crash helped me to get over. But at least in the beginning, these first opportunities. You understood that, okay, this, this feels serious. This feels like it's worth putting my entire heart on the line for. I have nothing else to lose here. I need to do this or I'm going to go in this. Darker, more difficult direction because that's the only other one that's available to me.

• 2:20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:20Chris Williamson?

  How much of that were you aware of while it was happening?

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  So, so, so this book that I'm writing is on unorthodox strategy. Because that's what it's been all the way through. Because you come from an unorthodox situation. You've got a plan. I believe strategy is at the, is at the foundation of all victory. No matter what game you're in. And I think if you're just walking into something blind and like hoping it goes well. It's like it's unsustainable and unrealistic because at some point you will come unstuck. And it's snakes and ladders. And once you've gone down one of the, the snakes, you've gone backwards. So for me, I boxed for four years, pretty seriously. And what I realised during boxing is at the time I was emotionally unstable because of what I had going on at home.

• 2:21:08Speaker 01

  Which would mean some days I'd go in and be the, the sort of biggest amateur prospect in the gym. And some days I'd go in, have a quick cry in the changing room and just get my head punched off all day. So I, I, I could understand that like I've got a journey to go on in terms of like healing and dealing with this sort of family situation I've got going on. So then I decided to step into music. Um, because I felt like I had a skill set. Essentially, I'm a storyteller. And I felt like I'm, I'm good with language, descriptive language or whatever. But I always just had the bigger picture in mind of where I'm going. So therefore when opportunities to propel me towards my bigger picture turn up, I take them. Without hesitation. And that's why I'm faster than a lot of people.

• 2:21:52Speaker 01

  Because a lot of people don't have their intentions set, clearing the mind. And then when an opportunity does arise.

• 2:21:57Chris Williamson?

  They hesitate.

• 2:21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're too busy like laughing with the mates about it or they've not even prepared. They've not even tried to become the person that is ready to receive the, the, the situation. Does that make sense?

• 2:22:13Chris Williamson?

  A hundred percent. Yeah, it's the, it's the old adage of, uh, you don't have to get ready if you stay ready.

• 2:22:18Speaker 01

  You've got to be him before it happens. So by the time I had Limelight and, you know, I'm a rapper that's doing the most numbers, I set the record in this and the record in, I was, I was, I was him walking into that. Because in my mind, I was already living it every day. I was looking at, like, you know, I've, I, I had nothing to say nice about any of, any of the rappers because I come from boxing. I'd just seen them all as my opponents. So I'd watch what he was doing. I think, I think, he ain't like me. He can't do it like I've done it. And, you know, he makes a gangster song. I think, he's not lived the way I've lived.

• 2:22:52Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to that self-belief,

• 2:22:56Chris Williamson?

  how do you have, like, what is the evidence if you don't already have proof? If that makes sense. Like, you are believing that you can do a thing that you haven't yet done, and don't have any reliable evidence you can do yet, other than, I think I got this.

• 2:23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, it's the small things. So when, before, when we spoke about the small challenges, lead to the big challenges not coming if you don't overcome them. It's overcoming the small challenges that sort of give you the confidence to know that you can, you can do it. So I just started small, like a driving licence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna get my driving licence and I'm gonna get a car and I'm gonna be driving on the roads. Simple thing, right? But what people don't take into consideration is, if you're in jail when you're sixteen, you didn't get your GCSEs, you still, when you go out into the world, into like, you know, official situations,

• 2:23:50Speaker 01

  you, you, you feel like you're a, a jungle creature in the zoo, right? You're a wild animal. So, you know, studying for a driving test every night before bed is foreign. Like, it's not your remit. So I've started with simple things and believing I can study for six weeks straight, turn up on my test, ace the test and get myself a car. I started with little things like that and then I take the confidence from that. I put it under my belt and then, and then you start dreaming bigger and bigger. And then eventually I just had the, the minerals to.

• 2:24:29Speaker 01

  Design the bigger picture in my head.

• 2:24:31Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  Thought if all these little things are are working here, it means that I can I can sort of design my own future.

• 2:24:38Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 2:24:39Speaker 01

  So I just started to picture it and these big ones like your house, where you're gonna live. I I I I explain it as a description box that you gotta fill. Right, and if you don't fill in a box of on the description box, you're you leave it to random chance.

• 2:24:57Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 2:24:58Speaker 01

  Do you know what I mean? So if you if you leave the house box on thing, then whatever house you're gonna live in, you've just left that to random selection.

• 2:25:06Chris Williamson?

  That's intention.

• 2:25:07Speaker 01

  Intention and but it has to be, you need to be pinpoint accurate. I was walking past a guy in London the other day, he's like, you know, the the up and coming guys now, they respect me because I've done good or whatever. And he's like, he's like, bro, I'm trying to do well. And I'm like, where are you gonna be in five years? And he just couldn't answer the question. It was a bad answer they gave me. I said, it's a bad answer. So you need to know. You need to really know. It needs needs to be in detail. And that's who I was. I knew in detail how I was gonna live. You know, what car I was gonna drive, you know, what what what life I was gonna live, how that I'd be functional, I would be my higher self, you know, and it's all just things that like I've just spent time designing. So when it does drop into play, I'm like.

• 2:25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always believed that that's what was gonna happen, you know.

• 2:25:57Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of opportunities, you don't do that many collabs.

• 2:26:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:26:02Chris Williamson?

  Why T D?

• 2:26:06Speaker 01

  T D.

• 2:26:08Speaker 01

  Is this guy that was sat in his mum's house in his bedroom at his computer desk at the exact same stage where I was when I had five mixtapes that no one give a shit about. Right? And that's not to say that like, nobody give a shit about what he was doing at that time, but I related to his situation. You know what I mean? He's he's he's about to transcend and he's from.

• 2:26:31Chris Williamson?

  Sheffield.

• 2:26:32Speaker 01

  Sheffield is the north and people saying up to me, king of the north or whatever, like. It's that journey of there was a snobbery in London for anybody outside of London coming into the industry and breaking bread and someone had to kick that door off because that's not fair. Right? And and so for me, T D was a direct representative of the guys, of the people I was representing. You know, and I seen, um, and by by the way, like he'd done the work, do you know what I mean? And he'd he'd he'd made a beat, um, and he'd like called me out and enough people.

• 2:27:07Chris Williamson?

  He used to get uh his fans to tag.

• 2:27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:11Chris Williamson?

  The person he wanted to do lyrics over an existing beat.

• 2:27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:17Chris Williamson?

  In the car, he was like, tag Bugzy Malone in the comments or whatever.

• 2:27:19Speaker 01

  So I just respected that work because, you know, by the time I got on fire in the booth with Charlie Sloth, I'd done the work to be there. I was five mixtapes in, five years in, and however many freestyles. So I deserved my opportunity, you know, so um by the time T D had done the work. And I heard the beat, I was like, oh, right? And I and I seen his energy. I I I just leaned into it because I thought you're the exact type of an individual that like I relate to. You've been sat at that desk in your mum's house, in your bedroom for for years.

• 2:27:55Chris Williamson?

  Your fallout four blue chair, office chair thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:59Speaker 01

  And you've been doing the work and you've you've had them moments where no one believes in you and you're starting to struggle to believe in yourself. So I just relate, you know, so I leaned into it. Um, and then I'd I'd I'd done the track and then I went to the mum's house. You know what I'm saying? And just like went and had a chat to him and and and looked him in his eyes and and, you know, just had that moment that that allows him to feel that flipping it actually, I'm enough.

• 2:28:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:28:33Speaker 01

  Do you know what I'm saying?

• 2:28:34Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it funny that it comes back to that, you know, we're giving ourselves, I think everybody is trying to find a good enough reason externally to believe that they are enough internally. It's like, I just want to know that I'm enough.

• 2:28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of us, that's like the human condition, isn't it? And I think that's the thing that we all struggle with. I definitely like. Did and do at some point. I think when I get into new territory, I am. Yeah, I still suffer with doubting myself. Yeah, and I think that's the challenge of of of climbing to the next level.

• 2:29:09Chris Williamson?

  I think it's interesting with authenticity and and what it means to remain authentic. When that treadmill of fame switches on, authenticity is an interesting challenge when you're living in a different universe to where you started, keeping perspective about what that was, keeping your eye on the ball, not getting distracted from what the main thing is. And then also not not trying to continue climbing a mountain that you're already at the top of. Yeah, I've already done this thing. I don't need to do that thing again.

• 2:29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's um it's evolution. I always talk about like um crocodiles and they're from the dinosaur days, man. They're like the

• 2:29:55Speaker 01

  only creature to have evolved all the way through to like modern day. You know, that level of adapting to the terrain. It's unheard of. The T-Rex has gone, they're all gone. And that's how I look at any game. In rap music, I'm the one that just kept evolving, evolving, adapting, evolving. To the new terrain, it's snowing now or whatever it is. Um and and diversifying. I just think I think it's a big deal. I think if you if you don't have the ability to evolve, then it's game over at some point. I think it's that simple.

• 2:30:35Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I really appreciate you. I think you are a really fantastic role model for the North and a fucking fascinating human. I'm so, so glad that you came through today.

• 2:30:44Speaker 01

  Thank you. I appreciate you having me on. I feel like um.

• 2:30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a moment in my career that I'm happy about. You know, because I'm on the other side of the camera.

• 2:31:00Speaker 01

  In a situation that I've been sort of watching and respecting yourself and respecting the types of guests that you get on. So for you to sit, hopefully I've shared something of value, you know. Hopefully I've shared something of value.

• 2:31:15Chris Williamson?

  You absolutely have. Bugs him alone, ladies and gentlemen.

• 2:31:18Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:31:20Speaker 02

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