Living An Alternate Reality During A Coma - Paul Evans | Modern Wisdom Podcast 258

Paul Evans is an entrepreneur and author. Out of body experiences during operations are bizarre but at least semi-common, living an entire new life in an alternate reality for two years during a seven month coma is something else entirely. Expect to learn how childhood bullying can set the tone for your entire life, what it was like to live through the Arab Spring revolts in Egypt, the mind bending detail that Paul can remember his "other life" in and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on the best coffee in Britain with Uncommon Coffee’s entire range at http://uncommoncoffee.co.uk/ (use code MW20) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy When I Woke Up - https://amzn.to/2KfDJPm Follow Paul on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/pauljohnevs/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #coma #outofbodyexperience #chriswilliamson - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  So you're put into this medically induced coma.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:02Chris Williamson?

  Can you take us through what happened next?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I woke up in Singapore and I had a full-time job, lived in an apartment similar to this in Singapore. I can remember the colour of the shower, the registration plate on my car, the suits I used to wear to work. And I ran a sales team that sold virtual reality games and I did that for two years.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  Is this common for people that are in induced comas to live another life?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  I'm still not sure today that whether that was something else or whether that was simply my mind keeping me super busy while the doctors had the chance to fix me. That's probably the most powerful thing that's ever, ever happened to me. That absolute feeling of this is your second chance.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Dubai Cast, 25th floor of the Marina.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  It's not a bad place to do a podcast, is it?

• 0:51Chris Williamson?

  Not at all. Mr Paul Evans, welcome to the show, how are you?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm good mate, I'm good.

• 0:55Chris Williamson?

  Very glad to have you.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me on.

• 0:58Chris Williamson?

  In your town?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  I'm not sure it's my town, but yeah, it's my, it's my home, that's most certainly. It's your flat, my home.

• 1:06Chris Williamson?

  Nick's flat?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Nick's flat.

• 1:07Chris Williamson?

  My podcast studio, your town.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  My home, yeah.

• 1:11Chris Williamson?

  That's almost, that's almost fair.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 1:13Chris Williamson?

  I get it. So we're going to go through a lot today, but where do we start? Where does the genesis of your story in terms of making you who you are today, where does that begin?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Um, probably begins somewhere around the age of 13 or 14 when I was a a troubled little school kid who was extremely misunderstood and, um, and considered to be quite stupid. And then the relentless journey to prove all those teachers wrong, which at 45 years of age, I'm still trying to do today, I guess.

• 1:45Chris Williamson?

  That's still in the source code?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  There's definite motivation there for that, yeah, even today. Even though probably all those teachers have, rest their souls, have passed on and there wouldn't be one of them I can say, look, I told you I was going to be somebody.

• 1:56Chris Williamson?

  So that's something that I was considering, thinking about this last night, that what happens to you as a child lays down foundations.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Infinitely.

• 2:05Chris Williamson?

  For the rest of your life. And I think that there's a really interesting implication for bullying there. Because bullies, maybe they get some recompense in the time, maybe they got to do some detention, maybe they got to do whatever. But consistent bullying throughout school, which is something that I dealt with as well.

• 2:26Chris Williamson?

  It sets a tone for the bully's life, the victim's life, for the rest of their days, unless they do an ungodly amount of deprogramming and self-work.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Or they use it to motivate themselves in the right manner. So I would imagine that you're the size you are and you have the ability to train like you do, and you build yourself into a human that can't be bullied because you didn't enjoy being bullied. And then I would imagine that also you'll have personality traits that when you see, whatever the bullying may be, obviously in later life it's a different style of bully. But if you see somebody being bullied today, be the first guy to step forward and say, behave yourself.

• 3:05Chris Williamson?

  It makes me, it makes me very, very, very uncomfortable. It's one of the few things that I'm incredibly passionate about.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  When you watch individuals bully or be bullied, whether it's in the workplace, whether it's in a venue, on a night, experience, I'm also the same. I absolutely loathe it. I loathe teacher bullies who are bullying my children at the moment through their authoritarian manners. When I see people in our venues trying to dominate other customers, it's, yeah, it's in my DNA that I don't tolerate that and I don't like it. And I'll stand in front of anybody I see being bullied. I've tried to create an environment in our, in our company today that is, is absolutely the opposite way. You know, bullying can be perceived from multiple angles, whether it's a senior colleague bullying down the track.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  I can't have that. I can't stand it. And that all stems from being, you know, kicked around in school playground when I was 12 and 13, I guess.

• 4:02Chris Williamson?

  So what did that move into? Bullying at school and then where did you go after that?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Um, bullying in school projected itself from there into bullying from kids, from being from a different town as a Liverpool fan going to a Manchester school. And being bullied by teachers, you know, it's a different style of bullying. But asking a dyslexic schoolboy to stand up in front of his entire class and spell words in front of teachers is bullying. No doubt about that. Unfortunately, that then projected itself into my work life where I became pretty good at what I could do. And then I became an arrogant prick who just decided to

• 4:42Speaker 01

  nobody, anybody that got in the way on my journey to become successful, I would walk through. I wasn't a bully, but I didn't, I didn't consider people's opinions or people's feelings or people's um, um, projection of how I was being to be concerning for me. Um, because I, success became way more important than personal perception. But I didn't know what success was then. I was just a twenty-two, twenty-three-year-old kid thinking that success was a paycheck at the end of the month.

• 5:12Chris Williamson?

  How did you define success?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Money. Money, growth, progression, possession. At twenty-two, twenty-three years of age.

• 5:21Chris Williamson?

  And what did you learn working for Jack Welsh?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  The best ten percent get promoted, the bottom ten percent get fired.

• 5:30Chris Williamson?

  Every month?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Every month.

• 5:32Chris Williamson?

  Where was that?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  GE Capital.

• 5:34Chris Williamson?

  And what is that?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Um, it was General Electric, um, corporate finance. I worked for those guys.

• 5:39Chris Williamson?

  So what do you do?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Um, I would lend people money.

• 5:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Or lend companies money that would then go off and use that money to lend to other people. So I ran the Manchester Sales Centre office at twenty-six years of age. And I just, you know, indulge myself in that culture of success is possessional financial reward. Um, until I reached a point where I really, really didn't like myself anymore. I didn't like who I'd become. At the pendulum of insecure, sad, unmotivated, scared little schoolboy had become arrogant. I am this, I am that, I am the best, I am. Look how successful I am. Look at my numbers, look at my sales, look at my car, look at my houses.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Or house, you know, it had gone the other way. So I'd gone from being timid and frightened to being an arrogant dick. And then suddenly I'm like, yeah, this is not cool.

• 6:34Chris Williamson?

  What was that point? Was there something, was there an incident, was it compounding over time?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, um, I was, how's the best way to phrase this? I was caught cheating. I was not a, I was not a traditionally good one on one boyfriend versus girlfriend. So yeah, I was messing around and getting carried away with the, the life in London. Um, and then I decided that that wasn't the right, the way I wanted to live my life. I didn't want to be that individual. And I needed to change. So I resigned from GE, um, I jumped on an aeroplane, flew to Egypt. Um, and went to be a diver instructor for a year. Completely get out of that corporate, successful, dog-eat-dog world.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting how our behaviour in relationships often is like a distilled version of other stuff that's going on? It sometimes identifies areas that were not quite going right in our life.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you, you know, I began to believe the hype. I began to believe my own bullshit. I began to believe that I was this rock star of a salesperson and, you know, all the things that, or what you perceive to be the glory that comes with that. The, the bars, the, the clubs, the women, the, the cash. Um, and I had to break that mould and that's what I did. And, you know, went and jumped under the sea and went and played with nature and got out of bed at five o'clock in the morning. Grew my hair long, got in good shape again. Um, and, and got in touch with, with nature and diving in the Red Sea.

• 8:01Chris Williamson?

  So let's think about the sort of different ways we've gone. So you've gone from like this timid.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:07Chris Williamson?

  Bullied, bottom of the pile.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:09Chris Williamson?

  To a very brash, very projecting, overtly successful, top of the pile.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Prick.

• 8:18Chris Williamson?

  To now this kind of monastic lifestyle, very in touch with nature, very spiritual. So it's kind of bouncing around these different.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  All part of the journey of trying to find yourself, you know. I hadn't, I hadn't found myself then, I just realised that I didn't wanna be this timid schoolboy, that had then catapulted itself into this wolf on wolf street arrogant, do whatever I want, money grabbing individual, and I didn't wanna be that guy. Um, so come as far away from that guy as I can possibly be, earn six hundred dollars a month as a diving instructor, that's, couldn't be any further away. And that was all part of the process of building the guy who I eventually would become, and I'm, I'm still on that journey and I'll stop that journey when, when my time is done. There will never, ever be the final version of me, it will just be a continual path of,

• 9:09Speaker 01

  I've tried that, I like that, I'm gonna take that from it, that stuff I'm not gonna take, that's, that's not cool, I'm gonna leave that there and then, you know, I can't be a diving instructor. Unfortunately, it doesn't, it doesn't generate enough to look after the family that, that I wanna look after. But, the idea of it and some of the mythologies of being a diving instructor, I quite like, so I'm gonna take those. Now what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna get drunk in a bar one night and invest in a nightclub.

• 9:36Chris Williamson?

  Take us there, so you've been diving for a while?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd been a, I'd been a, my, my plan was to be a diving instructor for a year, figure my shit out and then decide what I was gonna do.

• 9:45Chris Williamson?

  In?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Egypt, in the Red Sea.

• 9:47Chris Williamson?

  Why did you choose?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Uh, my father was building a, a safari boat over there, so that was an easy gig. And randomly enough, I mean, that's, that's another journey of a story. My father was a salesman marketing consultant for thirty-five years, hit his fortieth birthday and decided he'd had enough and was gonna sell up and go and build a diving safari boat. He's probably on a similar, similar thought process to me. Um, so that was an easy fit. Um, then I met a Dutch guy called Frek, um, uh, around five o'clock in the morning, I must have told this story a thousand times, agreed to lend him ten thousand dollars to finish a beach club. And I got into the bar business at that moment there. And that took me to a, a completely, you know, I recircled back to the, the, the type

• 10:29Speaker 01

  of individual I was in GE to a certain degree, way, way more partying. Um, drank my ass off for eighteen months, um, put myself in a coma, um, flatlined on operating table, three times, um.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  And completely changed my life.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Take us through that eighteen months.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of fun, a lot of fun. I was learning a completely new industry. I brought a sales and marketing thought process to a bar business in Egypt. There was lots of hotels coming up, I saw lots of opportunity. I started to see a desire to work for myself. That started to manifest itself in me where I'd learned from these massive conglomerates like GE. I wanted to be my own boss, but I didn't know what I wanted to be my own boss in. What a lifestyle, you know, waking up every morning, bit of a hangover, go to the office, design a flyer on Clipart, I'm not shitting you, that's how we did it. You know, a poster in the toilet, advertising a band, that was how we marketed our venues.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  All these hotels were starting to crop up, you know, how do we talk to the hotel? How do we get the guests out of the hotel? It was that whole process in the daytime. And then at night time, you know, eight thirty, I would start drinking and we'd finish at about six in the morning and we'd go again and we'd go again and we'd go again. And that just continued to go around and around until the twenty seventh of July, when it all stopped. What happened? I woke up in the morning, my stomach looked like the biggest piece of blue cheese you've ever seen in your life. I looked nine months pregnant, I was a hundred and eighteen kilos, which was what, twenty odd stone? A big fella. That was a eunuch.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  I'll show you some pictures. So then they took me to the hospital.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Within twelve hours, my lungs had collapsed. I was in intensive care within a day. I was given four days to live. My father had to try and raise the money to get an air ambulance and get me out of that country. The doctors had said, we can't keep him alive. Just not sufficiently sophisticated? Just they couldn't deal with the shit that was going on. My lungs had collapsed, I had E. coli. I was dying, and I was dying fast.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  You know, I had acute pancreatitis, which has a pretty much eighty percent mortality rate. And I was deep on that process. My dad managed to convince four friends to lend him the money, twenty eight thousand quid or twenty five thousand quid for an air ambulance to get me home. And you know, there was, there was some processes in that where I was very lucky to get an air ambulance, you know, there's not, they're not sitting on runways waiting to fly idiots home that drank themselves into a stupor. Um, but eventually, you know, the big man looked after me, I got, managed to get on an aeroplane. I was flown back into um Manchester, I was taken to Leyton Hospital. And the number one pancreatic surgeon on the planet was in that hospital.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Um, my dad finally got them to admit me, um, and he promised to look after me and try and save my life and. Six months later, I left hospital.

• 13:49Chris Williamson?

  So you go in, what's the operations, what are the procedures that need to occur?

• 13:53Speaker 01

  I don't know, I was in a coma, so I've got no clue.

• 13:56Chris Williamson?

  Induced or?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Um medically induced a coma, yeah.

• 13:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  That was, I was put into that, I think on the twenty ninth of July and I woke up from that on my birthday, thirty first of August. Uh, and then went back to sleep again and woke up again in um, um, on the ninth of September.

• 14:16Chris Williamson?

  Can you remember the journey?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Eighteen years ago.

• 14:18Chris Williamson?

  You remember the, the flight?

• 14:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:20Chris Williamson?

  From Egypt, you know, were you induced during that time as well?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I was gone, I didn't from the mo-, uh, so the last memory I have was being awake when they um banged a. Twelve inch metal spike into my ribs to um give me a lung puncture.

• 14:34Chris Williamson?

  You still got the scar?

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was awake for that.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  Is that the worst pain of the?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  No, that was, it's the weirdest thing, actually. It was like a red hot poker being shoved into you, but it meant I could breathe. So that, that, that.

• 14:51Chris Williamson?

  Satisfaction.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  I couldn't talk, so you've got this, this doctor coming towards you with this thing and you're like, what the fuck are you gonna do with that?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Well, that's not good, is it?

• 15:01Chris Williamson?

  There's only a few places that that can go and I don't want to go in any of them.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. What, what are you planning to do with that? But, you know, I'm.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  There was nothing, you know, both, both lungs were, were filled with fluid. Pancreas had swelled up, lungs had, had filled with fluid and this thing had to go into me or, or there was no oxygen going in. So when, when he banged it in, you know, it's, yeah, it was, that was a moment to let you know you're alive.

• 15:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so you put into this medically induced coma.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:31Chris Williamson?

  Can you take us through what happened next?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  I, um, woke up in Singapore, um, and I had a full-time job. I got up in the morning, lived in an apartment similar to this in Singapore. Um, can remember the colour of the shower, the registration plate on my car, the suits I used to work, uh, wear to work. And I ran a sales team that sold virtual reality games and I did that for, for two years.

• 15:54Chris Williamson?

  How fine are the memories, how fine-grained are the memories from that time?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  That I can remember the spelling that was on your top if I went to dinner with you that night. The most, not like, not like a holiday when you were fourteen, no, like a significant career that you had in your life.

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  What do you think was happening there? Is this common for people that are in induced comas to live another life?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, you have to have a load of psychiatric treatment when you come out of a coma, they have to, um, they have to help you through that process, you know, I went to sleep with hair shorter than yours and I woke up with hair longer than mine. I mean, seriously, I bite my nails, I woke up with things like this. I'm like one of those Instagram girls. Um, so yeah, I, uh, I had to have some treatment and, you know, you asked the questions.

• 16:43Chris Williamson?

  What the hell was that?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  I'm still not sure today that, um, you know, we can get into some really deep rabbit holes on that one. Whether that was something else or whether that was simply my mind keeping me super busy while the doctors had the chance to fix me. You know, it's four months, just under four months I was away. So, you know, that's that's that is a shitload of time.

• 17:06Chris Williamson?

  And how long did it feel being there?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Two years.

• 17:09Chris Williamson?

  So you were working a job?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:11Chris Williamson?

  Selling people's memories in VR?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  No, what this VR was, was I could buy your life. So I would go and buy your life story. And I would plug it in, I'd put the headset, I'd go into this pod and I would wake up in the morning, I would be you. And whatever you do, I would do and I would live your life. So you could buy Muhammad Ali, you could buy Mike Tyson, you could buy Pele, you could buy. I don't even think Ronaldo was out there. So you could buy famous people's lives. And then you would go into a virtual reality experience, come into his life or her life, and then you would live their life. And we were testing the latest version of this software and I was the kid who tested it. Um, and it got blocked and locked. And I got taken into this black room, plastic membrane.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  I spent six months in this room trying to find my way out. And as I went into that room, the computer software people were talking to me. Um, don't worry, we'll patch it, we'll fix it. It's, you know, I'm, I'm just stuck in this black space. I can't find, I could kind of feel the sides, but I couldn't find the edges, if you know what I mean. It was like a black membrane. Um. And then slowly over time, their conversations changed from talking me through the code that they were gonna fix, they were gonna change, to telling me the sports results and talking to me about what's happening in the news. I started to realise that

• 18:38Speaker 01

  the only way I was gonna get out of this room was if I got my out. These people, these programmers were not going to get me out of this room. It was gonna be me. Um, what I know now is it was not computer programmers, it was my parents and my family and my friends around my hospital bed, just talking to me. You know, my dad sat there every single day, reading the newspaper to me, reading the sports results. In my virtual world, this was the computer programmers losing faith that they could fix this problem. And I'd be stuck here forever. And I started to realise that the only way I was going to get out of this was if I started to get out of it, if I found a way. So instead of sleeping all day in this room, I was awake and I was looking, I was picking, I was trying to find some way of breaking through this membrane. And then after six months of picking away, I eventually got a finger through.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  And then another finger through, and then I opened this membrane and stick my head out. And I woke up in the hospital bed on my birthday and the entire family were there. And that was me out of coma.

• 19:33Chris Williamson?

  It sounds unbelievable. I've heard the story before, but it sounds insane.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  It was nuts.

• 19:40Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like some inception.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  I, I see, look, have you seen The Matrix?

• 19:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  So I saw it like that. That's how I sort of, kind of put some place to it after, you know, you come out of that shit and you lose four months of your life. You know, I, I did, I did, I've lost chunks of my life for, for different purpose, for different reasons, whether it was having to stay in a one-star hotel in force for a while, or whether it was a bit of time that we, we spent in a Cairo facility. So I've lost chunks of my life and I've had to learn to deal with those chunks and some of them were because of my own stupid actions in my younger life. Um, and some of them were for things that were not my fault. This was my fault. I drank myself into that position. I put myself in, in real harms way.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  But I massively believe that it was a wake-up call that I talk about regularly today of, you know, shit adversity, it happens. What do we do with that? And how do we use that to fuel the person that we become? That's the powerful stuff. There was a reason I went through that experience. There was a reason I watched them operate on me and take it all out. Somebody was showing me that I screwed my life up so badly that I shouldn't wake up and that should be the end of it. And I'm going to make you watch it.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  But actually, I'm gonna make you wake up. I'm actually gonna give you another chance. Do not fuck it up again. That's why it was so clear to me that I was awake during that entire coma, why I was given an experience like I was given. Why I buried my father in my dream. He died and we had to go through that whole thing and I can, I remember crying. My, my family remember me in the coma crying.

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  Weeping in real life.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Fucking breaking down. That was at my father's funeral. No, my family remember me waking up and sort of on my birthday and sort of looking at the end of the bed and there was my dad and I kind of looked at everybody.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And I just stared at him like, you shouldn't be here. Cause it was so real. I had lost him in my dream. In my virtual world, in my job in Singapore, he'd gone.

• 21:49Chris Williamson?

  Is dad still here now?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. He's in England, but he's all right.

• 21:53Chris Williamson?

  How do you think you'll feel inevitably at some point you are gonna have to say goodbye to him twice? That's a pain that no one really should go through.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Fucking demolish me. But that will be the toughest thing I've ever had to go through.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Like, like I would imagine with ninety-five percent of other children that walk this planet.

• 22:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but you had to do it twice.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I did kind of. Um.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  It was, and still is today, an incredibly powerful experience that keeps me true to being the person I wanna be. You know, when there's, when there's moments where I have doubt, I have questions and, you know, Covid at the moment and the situation that we're all faced with, this, this incredible thing that's happened to the world in the last eight or nine months. You know, I always look back to that point in my life where I was able to come through that and I was able to gain so much from it.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  I just have to, I have to think about this as the same sort of thought process. There is a reason why this is happening. Every single road we ever go down, no matter how painful it is, there is a purpose to that road. Why have we been presented with it? Why are we gonna go down it and why are we gonna come out the other side of it? The key to Paul Evans today and who I've become is finding the purpose of all of those adverse roads, whatever they are, whatever the reason is, there's a reason I have to deal with that. What am I going to learn from it? How can I use that? And then how can I pass that knowledge on to others?

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  What did you learn from being in that, other than stop drinking?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  That I had a greater purpose in life and the purpose was not me, it was others. If I made my journey about everyone else, then by default, my journey would become so enlightening. When it's only about me, it's selfish, it's self-centered, it's egotistical, then it's worthless really. What are you doing it for? Today I have two children, I never wanted children prior to that. They are my absolute everything. I have a team of five hundred people today. If I make the journey about them and their path and their career and their growth and their redevelopment and their becoming the best version of themselves. If I have five hundred people suddenly becoming better than they were yesterday and I'm fortunate enough to sit with those people,

• 24:17Speaker 01

  their power and their energy will drive me to become, wow, where's that? That's limitless. And that was the big change that the coma did for me. It made me understand it's nothing to do with me. It's about everyone else. And if I am being given a second chance to project that message and to help that, then by default, my life is going to be absolutely amazing. Because I'm five hundred, six hundred, eight hundred, thousand, two thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand. No limits there.

• 24:46Chris Williamson?

  Why, after being in the coma, did you go back into nightlife? With these insights, I-

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Because it became, it became a business, not a lifestyle. I didn't realise that at the time. I didn't invest in the nightclub because I wanted to be an owner or a business owner or a mentor or a CEO eventually. I wanted to have a bit of a riot. I wanted to have a bit of fun. I wanted to be excitable. Understand that it was the glory hunter. You know, in our industry today and you're in our industry, there are two types of, of, of guy that operate in the food and beverage industry. There's guys like me who love what we do. And there's guys that love the glory of what we think we do. There's a guy who stands in an office and talks to his team and helps develop and grow them. And there's a guy who sits on a table with a bottle of Belvedere. Everything that sits around it.

• 25:39Chris Williamson?

  My equivalent insight from fourteen years of running nightclubs is that some people realise that you can quickly acquire capital and have influence in a quite low barrier to entry industry.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Industry, yeah.

• 25:55Chris Williamson?

  And other people love to drink and party and realise they can monetise it.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:59Chris Williamson?

  And professional party boys will, they're able to move fast and break things very quickly, which is impressive. And if you can weaponise them as a good businessman, they're incredibly powerful.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:12Chris Williamson?

  But there's a glass ceiling on how much they can scale, because there's only one of them and they can only drink so much and there's a lifespan on it. Like the promoter that you know that's still doing it at thirty years old, at thirty-five years old, it's a depreciating asset.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:27Chris Williamson?

  That person by health, coma, wife, family, lack of energy, just sheer demotivation is on that trajectory. It's scalable to do it the way that you have spoken about that.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Well, we've had those guys that worked for us and they've been incredibly valuable for us.

• 26:44Chris Williamson?

  Still need them, right? They're your foot, they're your footshot. They're, they're not the foot soldiers, they're the SAS operatives that you send in.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  I think the end, I think the industry is changing, especially when you, you have a scalable business. If you've got one venue, you can have the guy who sits on the table and invites whoever he invites to come and have a drink with him. When you have multi-site, multi-purpose, multi-location, global desire, then you have to have a strategy at the top of how that guy on the table becomes the digital way of advertising the consumer. And in all honesty, you use a great terminology, you weaponise them, weapons explode and you can't use them again.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  True.

• 27:27Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Push the button, bang, there's my impact and another one.

• 27:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  I can't do it.

• 27:33Chris Williamson?

  Can someone send in the replacement?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  I can't keep doing that to these twenty-eight-year-old kids because I was the twenty-eight-year-old kid and that ruined me.

• 27:42Chris Williamson?

  How did you?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Or it made me.

• 27:45Chris Williamson?

  One or the other. How did you reintegrate after this experience?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  What do you bench press now?

• 27:51Chris Williamson?

  Uh, one forty kilos.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Wow, right. At my peak, I was one twenty and I'm banging them out. And then I went into my coma. And then I became this. So from a hundred and twenty kilos to seventy kilos. You could put your hand round my, round my leg. I couldn't even lift a bar. I never mind a hundred and twenty, a hundred and forty. Full respect as well. We'll touch on that later. Um. I just became this little timid mouse of vulnerability and, and, and, and shit. I break. I didn't realise I broke. You know, I was like every twenty five year old kid, I'm indestructible.

• 28:30Chris Williamson?

  How, how old were you at this point?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Twenty nine.

• 28:32Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Twenty nine. So all of a sudden you realise you can get sick, you can get ill, you, you're not indestructible. You need to be careful how you treat your body. You know, no fifteen year old kid today is running around thinking, I get hurt. He doesn't give a shit. He does anything. He'll jump off a, you know, he'll jump off a multi storey car park because he had a few too many beers because he doesn't care.

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

  You're made of rubber and magic.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Rubber, aren't you? Rubber and magic. Yeah, exactly. Um. So all of a sudden I realised that, you know, I, I can break. And if I don't take care of myself and, um. Be careful how I move forward, then I could have a problem. On the flip side. The birds were singing, everything smelled beautiful and the sun was shining. It was the most humble, embracing part of my entire life. I've never been more thankful. Even now today, with all the wonderful people I have around me, that year of feeling insecure and feeling vulnerable and feeling broken.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  But also feeling like, wow, I've got a second chance and I'm, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna maximise that to the absolute most. Sort of helped me through that process of feeling vulnerable and, and gradually rebuilding myself and probably realising that actually I don't need to lift a hundred and twenty kilos. And I don't need to stand on the door and stop people coming in. There's somebody bigger and stronger than me. You, you can do that. I'll stand behind you and train you so you never have to stop people coming in. And it was just that, that gradual process of believing, wow, I have a second chance and. That's the most powerful thing in the world. That's that's probably the most powerful thing that's ever, ever happened to me, that absolute feeling of this is your second chance. Do some good.

• 30:15Chris Williamson?

  And how's that impacted beyond wanting to serve and facilitate other people? How's that impacted the way that you live your day to day life or see day to day life?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Um, the the stuff doesn't matter. So whatever that stuff may be, the flash car, the big house, the fancy watch, I don't care about it. I'm not interested in it. It's a byproduct of of doing what I love well. Um, I really value relationships today. I have so many people in my life that, um,

• 30:47Speaker 01

  really, really mean something. You know, you talk about having friends that you can count on one hand. I'm blessed to have people I can count on two hands because I, you know, I put a lot of time and effort into into relationships and having real purposeful relationships.

• 31:00Chris Williamson?

  Not like that before?

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Not as much as I am now, you know, I have a I have a I have a partner in my life, Dom, who is, you know, my absolute soulmate. It took me a long time to find that level of person where I I I believed in a certain level of relationship and how enhancing your partner makes you a better version of yourself. There's so many people today that run around relationships destabilising their partner because they're afraid that they're going to leave them or, you know, if I'm if I if I big them up too much, they'll leave me. So I'll just keep them unbalanced. I also used to be that guy, where today I want that person on the absolute mountain of this world. Because they pick me. And if I can put them there, whoever that may be, my best friend, my girlfriend, my children, make them feel amazing.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  The fact that they choose to spend time with me by default makes me feel amazing because if they're so amazing and they want to hang out with me, I must be so amazing. So so that was a was a big step of how I evolved my.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Outside of work activity, you know, I do a lot of, I do a lot of diving today, a lot of experience stuff that, you know. Success, if you like, as everyone else perceives it, allows you, in my opinion, the facility to do the stuff. That's good stuff, that's wholesome stuff that I get to live in Dubai, this amazing country that gives you limitless opportunities. And if you give to Dubai, it will give you back what you give it. And I talked about this a long time ago, put my foundations here, this is my home, this is where I'm gonna live. I'm gonna dedicate myself to this place, Dubai says thank you, there you go, there's your opportunity. There's no jealousy here, there's no, or I don't, you know, I don't get to see a lot of that.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  I only see people being encouraged to do well. You don't hear about people keying cars in Dubai. If you have a Lamborghini in England, someone's gonna key it, that doesn't happen here. Somebody goes, well, full respect.

• 32:59Chris Williamson?

  Nick's let me into this apartment to record just by leaving the door open.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 33:03Chris Williamson?

  And I, I couldn't believe it, I was like, mate, this is, this is really expensive and, and, and it's, you know, it's right on the marina. And he was like, no, mate, you, you don't understand, like, this is Dubai.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  This is Dubai, what a beautiful statement. We are safe, proper safe. What a great place to bring up a family, what a great place to bring up children. I was blessed that, that my, both my children had a good six years, seven years here.

• 33:26Chris Williamson?

  So, moving forward now, you come back, you do your recovery, you start to grow an awful lot of venues. Eighteen venues or something in, in eighteen months, something like that?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Uh, no, a bit longer than that, but I think we, overall, we did, we probably did twenty, there was, when I went into the coma, there was three. We had three venues, um, by the end.

• 33:46Chris Williamson?

  How did they perform while you were in?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Hmm, don't know, actually, I never really asked that question. Yeah, just let everyone get on with it.

• 33:53Chris Williamson?

  That could have been the first thing that you'd done. If my business partner went into a coma, the first thing that he would do would be, show me the Excel sheet, I wanna see the balance.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's probably a bit stronger than I was, I don't think I was worried too much about that, I think, um. Yeah, it was, um, I let them just get on and do what they had to do. Everybody stepped up and did what, and look, I was not the only owner. I've, I've, I've been blessed to be in a partnership since, since day one on this process and, you know, I have a, I have a great team of people that take care of. Obviously, they took care of stuff when I was in a coma and even today, you know, we're, we're, we're going through some very challenging moments now. I'm not around all the time. I have a team of people that look after it, so I guess they did okay. Managed to come out of it. So in the end, we had, um. We built twen-, I think we built about twenty five across Egypt over a eight to nine year period.

• 34:41Chris Williamson?

  What separates you and your particular working process? That's a non-typical result, right? That's not what most, even the best of the best promoters don't tend to have that much aggressive growth. What is it that you're doing that's causing that to occur?

• 35:03Speaker 01

  If I don't keep building this business, there's no opportunity for the people that are in this business. Everybody wants growth. Everybody wants to become the, I believe, or I try to create an environment where everybody be, wants to become the best version of themselves. So I have a responsibility to all of those people to provide them with the next opportunity. Not you or not somebody else or not one of the different operators in this city. It's my job to make sure that you're, you as a bartender has got the opportunity to become a bar manager. And you as a bar manager have got the opportunity to become a floor manager and you as a floor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that appetite of the team that I'm trying to build to become the best version of themselves drives me every day to get out there and go and find the next opportunity.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  So by default, that energy that they push me to create more opportunities gives me the opportunity to do what I love. And I love to build, whatever that may be. Build you, build a team, build my children, build a son, build a house, build a tree house in lockdown. Whatever it may be, I just love to build stuff. I love to create something. I talk about, you know, whatever you're doing, you should be building something. I don't mean you should be building a bar, should be building you.

• 36:12Chris Williamson?

  And a family.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Whatever it may be, somebody, something. Growth is a fabulous thing in it. You know, we today have, however many venues we've got, every single one of those general managers that runs the show started at least two positions lower. Some of them started in three or four positions. That's, that's the cool shit. You know, I've got twenty six year old G M's. In any other business on the planet, there shouldn't be G M's.

• 36:39Chris Williamson?

  Shit, oh yeah.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  I, I pushed them and I let them make mistakes. I want them to make mistakes because I want them to learn, I want them to grow. And they drive me, you know, the second I hear one of my G M's is looking at somewhere else. I'm like, right, where can I move that kid? I put years into that boy, I'm not losing it, I need to find something else. So in Covid, when the rest of the world is, is sort of, what are we gonna do? I'm out there looking for opportunities. So we're, we're gonna do five more as it sits today. And I'll probably find another couple over the next few months. So when the world wakes up again, we've got some footprint. And it was the same in Egypt. Great opportunity, great brands, great reputation. Um, and it's exciting stuff. No one likes to do the same stuff every day. And every deal that you do is slightly different.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  The negotiation's different, the personnel are different, the project's different, the venue's different, the demographic's different, the consumer's different. It's, it's variety. That keeps me engaged.

• 37:34Chris Williamson?

  Take us through what happened toward leaving Egypt, towards the back end. You had some more adventures there.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did. Um, I got involved, um, in a huge marina development, um, where I was asked to come in and do the sales and the marketing and the leasing. And every opportunity that came with that, and I grabbed hold of it with everything I had. We built this marina, rented out a hundred and forty odd shops, built ten of our own, did all the sales, all the marketing, all the entertainment. Launched the opening weekend with like fifty thousand visitors, biggest tourist attraction outside of the pyramids. It was, it was amazing. Because we did it so bloody fast, certain things got forgotten along the journey, and one of which was permits.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  So I get a phone call from my company G M at the time saying, um, can I, um, can I take, I need to take some money to Cairo and pay for the licence for one of your venues? Uh, I said, yeah, of course, can I, how much is it? He said, it's three grand for the, for the guy at the Ministry of Tourism. I said, okay, cool, take it from the safe. Uh, that call was recorded, um, and that was apparently a bribery case. So Internal Affairs started and needed me. And I'm like, well, I haven't done anything. He said, well, you bribed a government official. I didn't bribe anyone. I just said yes to my G M asking me for money. Would you need to come to Cairo and admit that you were the beneficiary? So I know, but I'll do that. Bring your passport and a toothbrush. Why would I need a toothbrush for? Will you have to go in jail for four days?

• 38:59Speaker 01

  I'm not going in jail for four days. Would you have to do that? That's how it works. We'll arrest you. You'll say you did it and then we'll release you. I'm like, no chance. I'm a dad and I'm diabetic. You're not putting me in a Cairo jail for four days. Um, so the guy said, well, then we'll come and get you. And because I was pretty well connected in that country, I was, I mean, I won't go into that level of detail, but there was not a lot I couldn't have got solved in that country. So I said, then come and get me, knock yourself out. So he did. So I went on the run and rang all my friends and all my powerful people in that country to say, look, I need to solve this problem. Every one of them were saying, this is bullshit. It's ridiculous. Um, we'll fix it for you. Just stay out of the way.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  So everyone gave me the keys to different apartments around Egypt and I spent four months avoiding being grabbed. Hiding in alleyways and waking up in the middle of the night because they were coming for me.

• 39:51Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, what's the closest call you had?

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Uh, three o'clock in the morning, they know where you are. Get out of bed, go now. Burn, throw all your phones. I was working, I had burners and everything on. Brilliant. Yeah, I'd watched the James Bond movie and thought I'd get away with it.

• 40:04Chris Williamson?

  You know it's done.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Well, I thought I knew how it was done. Those lads are smart, way smarter than I thought they were. Um, so in the end, um, some dude grasped me up. So I was some bullshit story. Um, we know the judge who's gonna try the case. If you come and interview, if you come and tell your story to him, give him your passport, he'll release you into his custody and you don't have to go into a jail. I'm like, all right, cool, I'll do that. Uh, walked into this room. Um, and as I walked in, there was just him sat on his own. I'm like, you fucker. And then bang, in they came, M P five. Threw me in the back of a van and then. Proper abused me for a while to to remind to remind me of I'm just a British kid and we won't have that arrogance.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Um. And then I got thrown in a Cairo jail, which was um an extremely unpleasant experience.

• 40:53Chris Williamson?

  How long for?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  I did twelve days in the the darkest places you can imagine.

• 41:00Chris Williamson?

  Are there many jails in Cairo? Just one?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  I don't know. I only saw one. I only saw one. Yeah, not um not something I would wish on my worst enemy. That's probably like that.

• 41:10Chris Williamson?

  Lawless inside?

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. Read it. You've read about it in the book. Um. So then eventually my my biggest friend in Egypt and in the book, he's known as M B F, my big friend, uh flew in um and intervened, met the uh head of the district attorney and said, what's going on? Why do you need this kid? What what's what's the what's the big situation? And it turned out that the guy who was after me, it was his brother who was the guy in the Ministry of Tourism. And he didn't want him prosecuting. So the minute he could get hold of me, his brother, because his brother was arrested. So the minute I was grabbed, the case could be done, lost, and his brother could go out. And that's why he had such a hard on for me.

• 41:55Chris Williamson?

  What happened to his brother in the end?

• 41:57Speaker 01

  The whole case disappeared. There was no no charges, nothing. My general manager spent four months in jail. I was away from my family for four months. I had the most horrific experience of my entire life in that Cairo jail. Um. And there was no consequence to anybody whatsoever.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  That was the end of it. So then I decided it was probably a good time to leave that country. I'd lost faith there. I was uh that really upset me. I'd given so much to that country. You know, at one point, we we employed over a thousand people. You know, and and I worked so hard to do great stuff in that country. I gave it way more than it gave me. And I felt betrayed. I hadn't done anything wrong. The way I was treated was bang out of order. I was a good person. I I was doing good things in that country. I was introducing nightlife. I was the first guy to bring house music into Egypt. I, you know, we brought the Ministry of Sound, we brought head candy. We were doing some really cool stuff and we're doing it properly. We're doing it right. And that was just a shitty experience. So I'd I'd kind of said to myself, you know, I'm I'm

• 42:54Speaker 01

  I don't really want to be here anymore. I don't feel safe any longer. And once you don't feel safe somewhere, that's a scary place to be. Um. But then bam, revolution happened. So then we didn't really get a chance to plan our exit or strategize how we were going to move.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Eighteenth of January, everybody went into the streets and started protesting against the president and seven days later, I'd lost eighty-five percent of my business and I was done, that was the end of it.

• 43:19Chris Williamson?

  It became, uh, how would you say, kind of repatriated, private businesses became just repatriated towards the government, right? People just came and took businesses and then they released criminals into the street and stuff?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  They opened every single, uh, prison. And we had, we had, I remember one night when I'd managed to get all of the, um, all of the foreign workers that, or employers, team members that we had to my villa. And we fuelled a boat that sat offshore. And we had, you know, makeshift weapons because there was a bunch of prisoners coming to our compound to basically rape and loot. And we'd heard about this, it had hit that coastal, that compound, it had hit that one, it had that one, we'd come into ours and and we're sitting there with fucking baseball bats waiting for to protect our homes. I mean, that was the most frightening forty hours of my life.

• 44:11Chris Williamson?

  Was it, there was two revolutions, is that right?

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what, what, how did that work?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  So, they, they, they didn't like the existing, um, government and so he stood down and that panned out the way it did and then in came the Muslim Brotherhood. Um, and they didn't like that and so they, they went back and did it again and they went back and Dubai was gone by then, I was gone. So I, I left everything, what we had, you know, we'd gone from, we had eighteen operating places in January. And by February, we had six. That was it, it was over. I moved here with twenty thousand bucks. And we, we had a business that was doing millions still in a month, half a million still in a month. Yeah, it was gone, it was done.

• 44:55Chris Williamson?

  And then you arrived in Dubai?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, arrived in Dubai and, um, bought and sold cars on the bizel for eighteen months to put my kids through school and pay the rent and convince, um, some investors to back me in a, in a bar play. And eventually in two thirteen, I managed to convince a consortium of individuals to lend me some money. And I built Q forty-three. And that was it, the journey began then. You know, then we spent the next six years. We've done fourteen venues, fifteen venues now, um.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  It's been incredible, absolutely. I couldn't have, I couldn't have wished it in my wildest dreams. It would have been as enjoyable and successful and fruitful as it has been.

• 45:38Chris Williamson?

  Happier in Dubai than you were at your happiest in Egypt?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Happier, happier today than I've ever been in my entire life. Even in Covid. This is the happiest I've ever been. And tomorrow, I'll be a little bit more happy.

• 45:50Chris Williamson?

  What's that built around, other than serving other people?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  The ability to deal with, the ability to know that you can come through pretty much anything. We talked about this off, off, off the camera, that unchosen adversity is actually one of the greatest gifts you'll ever be given.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  The, the real understanding of what the body can deal with when it has to deal with it. What the mind can deal with when it has to. You know, you touched on, you know, whether it's a triathlete or a, or a mar, an ultra marathon runner who chooses to take himself in deep water. The reward at the end of that is amazing. You know, I chose to, to do an ultra marathon. I'm speaking in the third person, I can't do the ultra marathon. I have no desire to do an ultra marathon. Um, and at the end of it, you've done it. Wow. Boom. Amazing. But you chose to go there. You chose to put yourself through that. And you choose to feel the reward of that. When something happens to you that absolutely slaps you up the side of the head and is relentless in its pursuit of demolishing you, and you're able to come through it.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  The foundations and the, the strength that that gives you to overcome whatever this globe is going to throw at you. And believe me now, your ankle is not the only shit that's coming your way. Your ankle will show you, I can deal with this shit. I never thought I could. So whatever you're going to give me, I believe today, whatever you're going to give me is just a puzzle that I need to start fixing. No, I have not, and this sounds, and I, I mean this in the most humble of manners. I have not flinched once in Covid. Not once. Not once have I sat there and gone, "Oh my God, how am I gonna..." No. "Hmm, this is the chance for me to prove how good I really am. I think I might be very good at this bar business, malarkey.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Now's my chance to prove it. Cause when it's easy and they're just all walking in, yeah, it doesn't need a guy like me to run it. Any one of us can run it. These are the moments when you get the opportunity to really shine. How do I navigate through the most challenging food and beverage marketplace ever? And when I do? Wow, look at the version that's gonna come at the end of that. That's how I see it. And I was able, I'm able to see that because of all the other shit. You know, as I'm hiding in an alleyway in Cairo, thinking shit, what's gonna happen to me? Nothing, really. Okay, what happened was horrific. But I'm still able to sit in your beautiful apartment and you, you are talking to me about it. So what came of it? I became more interested.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  I became more able to help individuals come through that bullshit. Because I've proved it, I've come through it. I'm a, I am the, the living, sleeping, breathing proof. That a thirteen year old boy who's never gonna do anything in his life. Can become a guy today that you reach out to and say, hey, listen, shall we chew the fat a little bit?

• 48:39Chris Williamson?

  Wow. With too much caffeine in us. Couple of things I've got in my mind. First one being my newsletter that I put out this week. I was spending some time with ultra endurance athletes.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 48:50Chris Williamson?

  And one of the realizations that I got was that this is why you're here. Is a very good sentence to tell yourself when things get challenging. We can start to flinch and turn away when discomfort comes in. Right? Discomfort naturally is uncomfortable. But that discomfort is a sign of growth. Whether it's building a relationship, building a business, learning a new skill in the gym, whatever it might be. The discomfort is a feature, not a bug.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 49:20Chris Williamson?

  That is the reason that we're doing the thing that we're here for. So lean into it. Because the time's gonna pass in any case. So you might as well spend it well. So that's one of the, the lessons I'll certainly be taking away from Dubai. That there are, I spoke to Marcus Smith, a guy who hit a wall at fifty four kilometers an hour, snapped. Seven ribs, punctured a lung and ripped his scapula off and had to focus on just keeping himself alive by breathing. Until he got picked up by an ambulance three hours later. And then ran for the shake last year, thirty marathons in thirty days. Like. Hearing people who go through that level of adversity, we were talking before we started about how brilliant it would be for everybody if there was an inverted Instagram.

• 50:04Chris Williamson?

  Where instead of seeing the best of everyone's lives, you get to see the worst. The real. What is, what is the absolute worst scenario that you can imagine? A, a person who lives some weird form of like panic room torture inception movie with their father dying and then wakes up having lost a third of their body weight. And then, you know, like that, that's a story that people need to hear. And I think that contrasting effect is so important. And the other thing that I've got in my mind is, especially this year, all of our problems in the 21st century are problems of abundance and not scarcity. We have too much stimulus, we have too much convenience, we have too much food.

• 50:45Chris Williamson?

  And what that leads to is people who are inexperienced with adversity, inexperienced with discomfort. One of the reasons why sports like CrossFit and ultra endurance races have an attraction is that it gives people the opportunity to do that.

• 51:03Chris Williamson?

  But I think that this, for a lot of people, especially in the West, Covid will be the first real adversity they'd ever faced. My friend asked me a couple, probably about a year ago, he said, when was the last time that you failed at doing something? And I was like, bro, I, I really don't know. Like, I haven't failed up until about 30 years. Stuff hadn't gone perfectly and there would have been businesses I'd started that it kind of fizzled out or whatever, but no big catastrophes, no major failures. And he was like, man, I, I, I think that you are missing out on valuable learning opportunities. I don't know how you can make yourself fail, but there is something to be learned through failure and.

• 51:50Chris Williamson?

  This year for a lot of people will be their first experience of failure. Now, I've happened to get a double hit of it in that I've experienced Covid and ruptured my Achilles during Covid, which is like, okay, like, that's two things. But very quickly, when that happened, especially with the Achilles, less so with Covid, I dealt with that fairly easily. I was so surprised at the resilience and the fortitude that my system was able to create that I didn't even know was there. It was like opening a door inside of a house I'd lived in my entire life to a room that I didn't even know existed. And that was very, a very, very interesting experience. And I wonder, I, I wonder how many people can reframe the experience of 2020

• 52:35Chris Williamson?

  in a way that makes them better than if it hadn't happened, that brings them closer together with their family.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  That's, that's the key. The key is to take from this what it's giving you. You know, you, you talk about failure and, you know, when was the last time you failed? It's a fabulous question. I've never failed.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  I'm still practising. You only fail when you quit. And then if you go back at it again, then you remove the failure. So I'm not, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna, I'm gonna learn to run a marathon, right? And off I go, training marathon, train, train, train, train, train. And I get to seventeen kilometres and I quit, right? Then I've quit, then I've failed.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  And until I start that journey again, I still have the failure ticked. The second I go, I'm not having that, and I start again, I've just rubbed out failure, not failed, because I'm still at it. I'm still going. And at some point in my life, I'll run that marathon. I never, ever failed. I've had bars that didn't work, could be considered failures. I consider them to be educational messages to make sure I never build a bar like that again. I'll fail. I don't need to fail. What I need to do is figure out the solution to what's put in front of us. I think, you know, one of the biggest messages of people that have platforms that are growing like your Good Self is the ability for people, and why people are watching it, because they wanna get hope, they wanna get,

• 53:56Speaker 01

  they wanna get answers to questions they don't have, you know? So many people are asking, no, when is this thing over? I'm not asking that. I can't control that, so why focus on it? What I can control is what I do in the moment. I'm not chasing down that vaccine. How can I possibly, possibly make a difference to a vaccine process? I might be able to sell if you haven't where to get it. But don't focus on the end of it. You're in the middle of it. Focus on now. How are you going to deal with the now? Don't focus on when am I going to come out of it? We all want to come out of it. We all want it to be over. But we let the people who are busy with that be busy with it. You be busy with what you can control.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  You won't hear me asking the question, you know, shoot, I can't wait till this thing's over. That's so obvious. Course we all want to go back to normal. Quite not that impressed by normal. Not that impressed by instant gratification. Earn it. I had that challenge with my children, you know. They want it so easy. I had to fight with every tooth and nail to get to where I am today. And I've enjoyed that process. Today, we knock on a door of our neighbour and we go, what do you think? And the neighbour goes, what are you talking about? Well, it's just Instagram, really. It's the same thing, but I just want that personal interaction.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Cause this photo of me in this T-shirt only got hundred and twenty seven likes. This one got hundred, two hundred, five hundred, whatever the number may be. When I was a kid, it's the same as knocking on your neighbour's door and going, what do you think? Your neighbour think you're a lunatic. In today's world, we want the now. We're not prepared to do the graft. Covid isn't a graft. This is the world showing us, the universe showing us, ain't meant to be easy, mate. It's meant to be hard. Because if you work at it and it's hard, it has a value. Easy money, easy gun, you know, easy go. You go and gamble and you put five hundred dollars on red and it comes up and you win a grand. You're going to spunk the grand on a pair of shoes because you just won it. You wouldn't have bought a grand, a grand shoes prior to winning it. If you've earned that thousand, it has a value. And I've said that from our bar business.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Be busy with the guy who spends the fifty diram on a pint. Because he earns his money and it means something to him. So say thank you to him. The guy who comes and spends a million dirhams on a certain cheque at the moment, he doesn't give a shit about you. He's got no loyalty to you whatsoever and he's got no value to money. Don't be busy with him. Be busy with the normal man that understands how hard it is to earn that money. Because he'll be your guy who's in your bar four times a week. He's your guy who comes to you in Covid. Because he remembers what you were like in the good days. The dude spending a million, he didn't give a shit about money, he doesn't know it. Never, he's got no comprehension of what it takes to earn a million dirhams. That's why he's prepared to spunk it on a cheque. It's disgusting.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Be after the guy that's earned it. Covid should teach us all, let's earn it a little bit. Whatever it may be, earn the right to run the triathlon, earn the right to run the marathon, earn the right to go from fifty thousand to seventy thousand to ninety thousand to a hundred thousand followers. You've earned it. I asked you how many shows you did at the beginning of this. Two and a half thousand shows.

• 57:11Chris Williamson?

  Two hundred and fifty.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Two hundred and fifty shows. How many hours is that?

• 57:17Chris Williamson?

  Hundreds, hundreds of thousands.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Plus research, plus reaching out, plus convincing someone to come on the show, plus the editing. You have grafted to get eighty thousand, ninety, two thousand, whatever the number may be. You've earned it. So it feels like you've been, it feels like you got it. You didn't go and buy ninety thousand followers, did you? No, you weren't grafted, you weren't earned it. So that would be my message to anybody who's looking to what can you take from, from this Covid experience? Take the fact that it's not actually meant to be easy. It's meant to be tough because tough is worth something.

• 57:50Chris Williamson?

  One of the concerns that I have, especially with Covid, that's been weaponised by social media, I've seen it increasingly with um my dad, with all of my friends, anyone that posts on Facebook, less so on Twitter, but Facebook seems to be the social media of choice for speculation in twenty twenty, you know what I mean? And. I worry about how much people are externalizing their locus of control. So our locus of control should always be as close to ourselves as possible. So you have social media, which prioritizes socialized metrics of success. This is something that you can see easily, it's outward facing.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  There's no chart above your head where I can see your peace level or your happiness level. There's no happiness counter. Um, and sadly, I worry that the primary impact Covid has had on people are those socialized metrics of success. The twenty-five-year-old, thirty-year-old, thirty-five-year-old guy or girl who harnessed a lot of their self-worth from being in the right place with the right people, with the right car, with the right shoes, with the right friends, the right follower count on Instagram. Now no longer can you use that. They've had to focus, if they pivot correctly, on internal measures of success.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Does it not scare the shit out of you that our world today genuinely values that level of matrix as a barometer of success?

• 59:22Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Famous for being famous.

• 59:24Chris Williamson?

  I don't like it. I've got strong opinions about it. Um, but

• 59:32Chris Williamson?

  status signaling has been around for millions of years in biology. And the fact that it's now been weaponized and been given a metric

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:42Chris Williamson?

  by some companies like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  Yes, the war for our dopamine and our ability to see what's truly going on has the power of the weapons has swayed now away from us and that locus of control is outside a little bit more. But the game is the same.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  When your fourteen-year-old girl says dad can have an Instagram account, what are you gonna tell her?

• 1:00:12Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:00:16Chris Williamson?

  The only other industry, the only other industry that causes their customers, users are drug dealers. And social media is that one.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  You're both in the same documentary.

• 1:00:25Chris Williamson?

  Yes, so Tristan.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  But he's so right.

• 1:00:27Chris Williamson?

  Tristan Harris, the guy that's on that, I've been a fan of him for three years. Tristan, if you're listening, answer my emails, please, mate. Um, I've been a fan of him for three years and I went deep, deep, deep down the rabbit hole within a long time ago. Uh, and the other insight, which I thought was really, really interesting from that was looking at how uh, Steve Jobs didn't let his kids have an iPad.

• 1:00:52Chris Williamson?

  What does that say?

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Says everything and says nothing.

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Says it's a great bit of a PR tool. It's a great story from a, from a, from a man who's, you know, probably one of the greatest corporate leaders of our generation at least. Like him, loathe him, you've got to respect him. Um, it's a great story, whether his kids have iPads or not, you'll ever know. You don't, we don't know any, we know what people want us to know, you know? Um, my son has an Instagram account, he's not posted a single thing. Why is he busy with Instagram? It's the route to the quickest success rate of what's, but he's busy with at the moment. He doesn't give a shit whether he gets likes or not likes, he's not in it for that. Uh, he's in it to see pretty little girls dressed up, looking nice, cause he's a fifteen year old kid full of testosterone. I get it. Um, the second he starts posting

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  and then he starts changing the type of post that he posts to see the level of, then that's when dad will step in and say, yeah, listen, mate. I did it for a purpose. I'm in an industry where fortunately or unfortunately, it's a requirement of what we do. Um, I, but I know what it is. I, I don't count likes, I'm not bothered by it, it doesn't matter to me. Um, but I, I did count followers because the more followers, the bigger the message, the louder the message, the more, you know, when I woke up the book and can get out there and help people. I will not make a single pound out of when I woke up, but I've made so much from personal growth of, first of all, going through the experience of writing it and going deep in those.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  In a dark moments that I had to go through to become who I was and then to tell people that, you know, that is some enlightenment shit. For example, I won't dance on a stage because I'm petrified of people laughing at me. From when I was thirteen, called up in a ball being kicked in a playground. Um, I still won't dance because I can't stand the thought process that you laugh at me. Because the echoes of the children laughing at me when I couldn't spell library still ring true in my head. The ability to release that was something I was never prepared to do. I'm going to keep that inside of me. That's, that's my demon. When I released it into a book, eventually I was like, wow, that's, wow, that's amazing. Show my vulnerability, show my me.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  I'm not this hard dude covering his toes. I'm actually, I cry, I cut, I bleed. I'm, I'm a normal, decent human being. Um, that was a process that I went through. Everybody that reads the book and writes me one comment is worth way more than any money I'll ever make out of that book. Way, way more. So I needed a following. I needed people to listen so I could help. That was my thought process on it. I've kind of backed off that. In Covid, I went completely away from it. The only thing I shared during Covid was the little projects of the things I was building with the kids in, uh, in the, in the garden. But

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  an interesting thought process that you wouldn't let your fourteen year old girl go on it. Would you let your fifteen year old boy go on it?

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  So, yes, probably, probably fifteen to sixteen, I think, would be the line. And it would be older for girls and it would be for boys. There's some interesting insights from The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt. And any parents or fledgling parents with teenage children should probably consider reading it. And it looks at, um, uh, stats to do with depression, anxiety, et cetera.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Fine.

• 1:04:12Chris Williamson?

  You can tally the line to when Instagram became popular. And you just see a, a hockey, a hockey stick of an increase in anxiety and depression, uh, self harm. And one of the reasons that they give is that.

• 1:04:33Chris Williamson?

  Boys or males tend to fix problems with physical violence, which isn't facilitated by social media. So you might call someone out on social media, have a rubbish scrap at school with them the next day, shake hands and be best mates. Whereas girls tend to enact violence more verbally and that is weaponized by social media. So, yeah, I think there is definitely a lot that we still need to kind of work out and erring on the side of caution probably seems like a smart way to go.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:05:07Chris Williamson?

  Man, thank you so much for today. People want to check out your stuff, where should they go?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Um, Paul John Eves, I think is my Instagram, uh, website, wheniwokeup.com.

• 1:05:17Chris Williamson?

  Everything will be linked in the show notes below, including the fantastic When I Woke Up the book.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:05:22Chris Williamson?

  Thank you, man.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:05:55Speaker 04

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

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:06:03Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.