Skills For The 21st Century | Alexander Cortes

Alexander Cortes is a trainer, writer and speaker. Expect to learn what skills Alex would give a human if he was designing them for the 21st century, why we think Gary Vaynerchuk might have been pressing on the CEO of Fyre Festival's amygdala and our strategies for reading more throughout 2019. Extra Things: Sign up to Alex's Newsletter - https://cortes.site/newsletter/ Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/AJA_Cortes (he tweets some GREAT stuff) - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  Alex, how are you today? Welcome to Modern Wisdom.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  I'm very good. How about yourself, my man?

• 0:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fantastic, thanks. It looks an awful lot nicer wherever you are. I can see there's a reflection of some good sunlight outside, which we haven't seen in the UK for a long time.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  I live right on the beach in Venice, so I'm in a pretty opportune spot for weather.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, man. That is jealousy-inducing, to say the least. So we haven't got an agenda to today. We're just going to talk about whatever's on our minds. So what have you been learning about or reading about or thinking about recently?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Recently? So I got a few things I'm working on. I don't have any real structure to my day at all. I mean, like, I do, but I don't. I basically just write an email every day and then tweet a lot and then just talk about stuff. So it's sort of like this personal brand influencer strange position.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  You can't really qualify what you do, yet people pay attention to you all the time. But, uh, I mean, the big project I'm actually working on right now that's been constructive is I developed an online website learning portal with a business partner of mine called Sovereign University to teach people how to become sovereign individuals within like the modern sort of digital virtual economy, physical world as they've merged with each other. You know, myself, I've been working online for myself about going on three years. And before that, I'd worked with other people. And I've also been a personal trainer for 10 years, training people in person. But I always found myself attracted to sort of this political conflict. I like knowing what's going on, you know, in the sense of like on a meta level, not just on the level petty politics.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  But it's been fascinating to me the last six, seven years to watch the dialogue and discourse devolve into this politicized rhetoric where everything's political and everything you say can and will be used against you. And you see people lose their jobs or what they said, you see people, you know, go under fire for every kind of comment, everything is taken out of context, but into a different context. And I realize for someone like myself, where I, because I've gone through that, because I've gone through that myself, and I know what the consequences are, uh, three years ago, I wanted to be in a position where I never had to worry about backlash of any kind. I didn't want to have to worry about an online mob. I did not want to have to worry about being doxxed. Uh, I want to be immune to all that. And I realized if you work for yourself, if you're a sovereign individual in the sense

• 2:28Speaker 01

  that you are self-made, self-paid, self-employed, you own your own businesses, and especially in the digital world where things really can't be taken from you that way, um, and then you have fiscal basis, you're very untouchable in a certain sensibility. So sovereign universities are built around that concept, but then it's also teaching people the fundamental skills they need and the mindsets to learn how to do this stuff and create high-value skills and create leverage. So it's an ambitious project.

• 2:52Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. You're liberating people from the, the monotony of a, a world where they might not be that happy at work. I was recently reading a, a study that said over 80% of Americans are either indifferent or actively unhappy with their jobs. And there's only, I think, between 18 and 20% who are actively engaged with their, with their work.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so- society isn't happy as a whole. I mean, I would say Western societies and like as a whole isn't a big cultural malice that way, uh, where everyone senses it, that something has gone wrong, or things are not going well, you know, whatever well means. But, yeah, we, we all feel it, like, we all feel, we all see it, you know, within like the media itself, where everything's an outrage every day. But, you know, at the same time, the world is a good place, and there's abundant opportunity if you know how to use it, capitalize on it, identify it. Uh, but, you know, I mean, the job unhappiness, like, the nature of work has changed over the course of 50, 60 years. Yeah, a job used to be something, uh, that you were. Now a job is just something that you do, and oftentimes temporarily.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  There's the whole gig economy now where, yeah, how many careers are there anymore where it's a reliable path and you just do the same thing for four years? Uh, that's almost nonexistent at this point. Um, I, I don't know if that exists at all, honestly. Every, everything has changed. So you have to be, you know, hyper-adaptive that way. And for most people, where they want a set vision of the future, and this is how things are going to go, you don't have it anymore. Yeah, again, that does not exist. Uh, so you have to be perceptive, you have to be self-aware.

• 4:26Chris Williamson?

  What do you think are the important skills then if we're moving into this very changeable time, which I completely agree that we are and the the old bastions of a job for life just don't seem to be there. What what would be the skills if someone was thinking if you were able to design a human now that was going to start at 18 years old or 21 years old, what would you what skills would you give them and what values would you give them?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Skill wise, I would almost approach it from a like a classical classical liberal arts education where the big skill that's been lost in the modern era is people's ability to think. Yeah, that's been the biggest one. People's ability to think, people's ability to express themselves. Yeah, but how is that a skill? It's a soft skill, but soft skills have hard consequences and hard capitalization within the modern economy. So if I had an 18 year old and I want to make them as capable as possible in the job market or a teenager, let's say 12, I three things rhetoric, logic, ability to argue, ability to speak, ability to write. If you can communicate very effectively in any environment that you're in, you're

• 5:32Speaker 01

  always going to be near the top. I've seen that so many times in so many different fields that I've worked with consulted in where the people that can talk best are the ones that get ahead. Yeah, it is. What does talking do for you? What does communication do for you? It means you pay attention to people and you can assess what their needs are. And if you're creating a product or even if you're writing code or whether you're even writing an article or if you're just doing customer service and you're receptive to people. That is, I mean, I'm being very cliched, but that has been lost by a lot of people because digitization has removed human communication. We're so used to talking through text now or or showing an image, but then you get people face to face and you see how awkward they are.

• 6:14Chris Williamson?

  They crumble. Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So those people that can speak on camera, those people that can talk at length, those people where they can. And those people where they can have a conversation with someone they know how to listen. Just doing those three things, you can identify so many opportunities. You know, within the digital economy and even in the real world economy. Social media now has become such a big market for businesses. And even online as well, the same thing. It's basic stuff like copywriting, web copy, article writing. Yeah, that's essentially what search engine optimization is on a meta level. So yeah, those, those three of being able to speak, write, argue, let's say, for persuade. That's what I would start with, you know, with a young person. Yeah. And then from there it'd be more sort of like tangible, you could say, skill sets like knowing how to build a website.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Knowing how to take good photos, knowing just basic, you know, business arithmetic and math. The way, the way modern education is set up where you go to college and you learn all this information. And then you go to, let's say, some kind of job and then you have to relearn everything again. That's, that's completely backwards. Yeah, I said this the other day on Twitter where, you know, I think the next probably year to 10 years to 20 years. What you'll see is sort of this return of apprenticeship where people get out of high school. They go work hustle jobs or they go work paid internships. And they develop these necessary skills. And then maybe they go back to school for a specific education to augment that.

• 7:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that's how I would set up. And then if I had, you know, a kid now, that's what I'd be telling them to do. I wouldn't, I would not be telling them, go to college. You know, you'll, you'll, you'll find yourself a college. No, you won't. You're going to be made to take two years of worthless GE classes. You're going to be in a room with a hundred people. You're probably going to be taught by TA. You'll, you'll switch majors four times. And then that's not even getting to the quality of the education, which has precipitously declined. So yeah, that's kind of like a shit show at this point.

• 8:07Chris Williamson?

  I have to say, so I did five years at Newcastle University here in the UK. Finished with a master's in international marketing. And I became incredibly disenfranchised and disenchanted with academia as I moved through that. And me and my business partner sat next to each other in our first ever seminar. And pretty much from that day, we started working together. And now almost 13 years later, I've still not got rid of him. And yeah, we, um.

• 8:34Chris Williamson?

  I was being shown a world of business in academics, which was saying one thing. And then I was experiencing one in the real world, which essentially bore very little resemblance. And I think the time that I was doing it as well was very crucial because this was two thousand six to two thousand and ten. And that was, so I did a business management course, then international marketing masters. And there was not a single course on social media for the entire time that I was there. And that's like, two thousand six was when you still needed a university address to be able to sign up to Facebook.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember that? You had to have like, like a, um, the correct suffix to your at.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  EDU, I think it was.

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, for the UK dot A C dot A U. Yeah, exactly. So, um. Yeah, we had that. And then you think like, imagine like you're doing a marketing course now and no one anywhere mentioned social media. You want your money back, um, because it's just that massive selling chat. So I, I, I think that you're right. I think that these soft skills, they're the ones that are difficult to, to acquire. But they're definitely the ones that are scalable, right? And it doesn't matter what happens to the market. If you can sell and you can communicate. Um, so I did a, I did a podcast the other day with a guy called Leon Scott from the UK. And afterwards he commented on the fact that it was the first time that he's had a one hour conversation with someone. Where he was completely focused on just what was being said, the, the content that we were going through.

• 10:03Chris Williamson?

  No one, obviously, no one has their phone out, no one's, you know, even looking, looking at anything else other than to gesture or to remember. And I think that, like, having someone to practice conversing with, it sounds so bizarre that you need that, but.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  People, people do need it. Um, I mean, I, I agree. Like, that's, it's, it's a quality of, like, the quality of focus. Um, I, I get asked that question constantly all the time. Like, yeah, how do I focus better? How do I study better? And I was a natural, well, one, one, I never really studied much at all. I was always this, I, I have a very good memory. I was not, I was not the person that was like a good studier where I was studious that way. I was not, I was a terrible student all through. High school, adolescence, college, I did the bare minimum to get by because I didn't, I never saw the point in doing something just for the sake of doing it that way, which seemed to me to be the reason for education. But that quality of focus now, I get asked that question a lot by young guys, young gentlemen, and late teens, late twenties, even lady followers. And it's always

• 11:02Speaker 01

  the same thing, like, how do I focus better? And I always tell them, focus is just doing one thing at a time. Like, that's it. It doesn't happen, there's not a complicated definition. You're doing one thing, and one thing only. You're having a conversation, you're making eye contact with somebody, even if it's through a screen, and you're just, you're talking. You're not looking at this, looking at that, clicking this, clicking that while trying to carry on. Like, it's one thing. You know, what about that so difficult? Yeah, but we live in, we live in this culture now where people pride themselves so much on multitasking, the ability to switch through apps and switch through devices, and their attention is constantly going to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. And I realize it trains your thinking to not be able to think.

• 11:42Chris Williamson?

  It's very fractured. And, you know, as a, not to deliver a sob story, but I am on the receiving end. I'm like, I feel that I am patient zero for someone who's been able to see this. So, I was a late, late adopter of an iPhone. I was still holding on to the hope that BlackBerry was going to be good until maybe five years ago, something like that, which is a shame, because, you know, I miss the buttons. I genuinely, genuinely do. Yeah, and BB pin, having to change your BB pin every time you get a new handset. So, what I've noticed is that I was a voracious reader when I was younger. I did a number of degrees, again, without a smart device that was as attention

• 12:20Chris Williamson?

  grabbing as an iPhone is now, or a similar device. And my capacity for low stimulus activities, i.e. things like reading, like deep reading, has had and is still so heavily damaged that it is,

• 12:40Chris Williamson?

  it's not even comparable. The way that I'm able to focus my attention doesn't even feel the same now. And I've had to construct this hilarious series of

• 12:52Chris Williamson?

  Instantiation initiatives, as James Clear from Atomic Habits would, implementation initiatives, as James Clear would call it, where, so no phone in the bedroom, phone is in, is outside, because I can't have it in here, because if I'm working, it's that, if I'm at work, there's a special drawer where the phone lives that goes in my desk, like I've got, my morning routine has very specific like order of things that I go through, because I'm like having to create the equivalent of like a toddler's environment where, you know, you've got the little foam cups that go on the sharp edges of all of the, the sets of drawers and the desks and stuff. I've had to create, I've had to create myself an attention equivalent of that, because I essentially am a child who can't be trusted

• 13:35Chris Williamson?

  with technology anymore. And for me to relearn this deep work, the sort of Carl Newport approach to it, this single focus onto one particular topic at one time, I'm having to essentially place myself in a hermetically sealed environment, where there's no danger of, of distraction. So I can, you know, for the guys that are listening who maybe do struggle with the focus, I can completely empathize with what they're going through and sympathize with it.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's funny, because recently, the past, I guess, past two years, I realized I did the least amount of reading I'd ever done, which, yeah, on one level, I got the most done I'd ever gotten, done. So, you know, it wasn't as if that, you know, I was at a loss, but at the end, at the end of last year, I realized, you know what, I probably read about three books last year, like in completion, like that was it, that was it. And I wanted to get back to reading. So that was my, that was a new year's resolution this year. I told myself, I'm going to read a book a week, like I, like I used to. And it's been, it's been interesting, because now, like I, so I've started reading, I got a whole bunch of books in my bed, like right here, like I read this, let's grab it. Yeah, I read this book last week, Empire of the Summer Moon. It's about Kamonche tribe and

• 14:45Speaker 01

  the history of the United States, a great, fascinating, like phenomenal book. I read it, like this awesome, awesome book, nonfiction. Yeah, I have a few others, some at like five for the year or four, so I'm on track.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  But the experience of reading again, where I was just, you know, I had days like I've had days where I just am in my room the entire day, just reading the whole book.

• 15:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  You know, for four, five, six hours, like getting a whole book this, okay, done, on to the next one.

• 15:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  It's strange because it feels good and like the process of reading, it is actually very relaxing. There's a mental nourishment to it. When I do get back on the device now or the computer, there's a harshness to it. And there's sort of this like this farcical rapidity where you're just going through everything. You're scrolling the feed over and over and over again, refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh. And you're trying to, you know, you're responding to everything at once. And it's not overwhelming. It's like, oh, I'm so overwhelmed by it, but it feels fake.

• 15:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  And there's a subsidy there. I realize there's just a lack of thought to it. There's sort of this lack of deep thought, deep focus to it.

• 15:44Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  It's just, it's training you to think on such a superficial level. And you see that with how people communicate with each other where all arguments now, all headlines, all articles, everything, it's all written in emotional soundbites. Yeah, there's, there's very little of facts, reason, context. It's just written to get your attention, fire up your emotions,

• 16:04Speaker 01

  get you pissed off or confirm your biases and then you move on to the next thing. And you can do that a thousand times a day.

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. We're not built to have this level of stimulus go through us, I don't think, not at all. And there was a, an article that I read not so long ago that said something to do with the amount of stimulus that a typical human encounters now in a single day is the equivalent to the level of stimulus that a, our Paleolithic ancestors would have done in a month. And you're like, right, okay, so that's the level to which my dopamine is being hacked by devices. And you, you're totally correct. So the listeners will know that we are evangelists of a good morning routine on this show. And mine is, is beautiful. It's my favorite part of the day by, by an absolute country mile. If I've not had to work, I run, I run nightclubs.

• 16:51Chris Williamson?

  If I've not had to work the night before and I've been able to go to bed at the time I want, which is 10 and get up at the time I want, which is six. My morning is, is beautiful. It's

• 17:01Chris Williamson?

  A smoothie, some meditation, some reading, some journaling, some gratitude, some deep work, then some Romwads or some yoga, then I'm like, you know, and I'm ju- I've finished that and I'm like, that is, if I could choose a day, I would just, I'd have an entire day that was a morning routine. And it almost feels laborious to think, I, as soon as I step out of that door, that bedroom door, I now need to enter what I feel like the, the real world and start playing the game of, here we go. And I like, sometimes I work myself up to checking my phone. And I think my, my particular device, given the industry I'm in and, and the way that we work, we have a lot of staff and there's a lot of group chats on WhatsApp and there's a lot of social media going on. So maybe I have a, a

• 17:44Chris Williamson?

  super normal level of super normal stimulus. But um, yeah, I, there's some days where I like this, the equivalent of working up to a one rep max, I need to prep myself before I pick the phone up.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  It's, I, my, my girlfriend, I, I tell her sometimes now, since I'll be looking at my phone, I get, I just, I, because of the Twitter following I have and then like the email list and, you know, all, all social media accounts, it's just a constant, um, you know, torrent of notifications and.

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  Just a barrage.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I, yeah, I'll look at it and be like, oh, like someone else wants a piece of my time. And I, I think, I read, I read an article recently, I think it might've been on BuzzFeed or maybe it was not, but it was about millennial burnout. And the article was quite insightful. And there were people, of course, commenting that this is, this is bullshit, this article, millennials are just weak. I'm like, but there was something very real to it, to the effect that millennials, um, the writer elucidated this very clearly, millennials deal with this environment of such overwhelming stimulation like we just sell the time. And there's so many things grabbing our attention and every task takes like another piece of it. Every task takes another piece of it. And at the same time, we have socioeconomic pressure of trying to just survive. And people have the socioeconomic pressure of will they ever be able to get ahead? And then you have, you know, you have all these factors that you're dealing with.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  That doing simple things like getting back to somebody on the phone or having to respond to an email or having to go send a package, is it laziness or is it just that you cannot do another thing? Like, we are so driven now towards this god of efficiency. Everything has to be efficient and optimized and fast in speed. But then we do all that, but does it make our lives better in the sense that we actually get more done? Or actually just having to store these like death by a thousand cuts or pinpricks?

• 19:27Chris Williamson?

  Totally, totally correct. Yeah, like, is it-

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Then you have to drop something off and you're like, I don't feel like doing this at all.

• 19:34Chris Williamson?

  I can't, I can't, I can't go to the post office. It's too much today.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 19:38Chris Williamson?

  It's like, um, I keep on thinking when you're talking about that, about RAM in a computer, and it's that you still have the same total amount of RAM, but that the number of tasks that it's trying to do at one time is now, you know, 10x, 100x, 1000x. And switching between those is just so exhausting. I am, I wonder, I wanted to ask someone who works in the industry similar to yourself, where personal brand is a big deal this for quite a while. How do you draw the line between when you're doing work and when you're being wasteful on social media? Because there's always that excuse, right? Oh, well, if I just do, if I spend another X amount of time on Twitter, maybe I'll find something which

• 20:21Chris Williamson?

  I quote tweet or retweet or reply to, and that bangs and that adds another 100 subs onto the this channel or that email list. How do you, how do you try and control that?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  So this is gonna be like a sort of contrarian sideways perspective. I don't control it, but I have a different model of how I see this. So my background's a fitness industry. That's where I started. I've been in personal training for 10 years. And when I got online, when I got on Facebook, about 2007, I was in the Facebook fitness community for a long time until 2016. I delayed Facebook over a year ago, well, over a year ago. But what I saw happen for people as they tried to develop their brand, like this idea of a personal brand to now, that has like become very preeminent where- Because we are in such a search for truth and authenticity and we no longer trust institutions at all. Like, we don't trust news, we don't trust government, we don't trust authority figures.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  So we're looking for individuals that we can sort of have be our digital friends and we'll trust them because it's a one-to-one interaction. So I saw people doing this in the fitness industry, you know, years ago before personal branding even became a hot term. And I realized that those people that had the healthiest relationship with their audience and had the healthiest relationship with these tools, these platforms, they didn't obsess over the value they delivered on a daily basis. They didn't obsess over productivity. They tried to be consistent in what they presented to the best of their abilities. And then those things that were not in alignment with the brand or in alignment with the domain that they were working in, they didn't worry about it because they had the perspective that, you know what, I'm human.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  I am not just one thing. I am many things. So I'm just going to show essentially my personality as it is. Yeah. And whether you connect with it or not, that's upon you. So I've said this before many times, if you want to have a really good relationship with your audience, with your work, you have to be fully invested in it on the sense that you want to be consistent in value, but you have to be detached from it in regards to the outcome that it gives you.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  It's a difficult position to be in, right?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  It's very paradoxical. Like, it's one of those, it's almost like a sort of paradox that like, if you really want, if you want to love people, then you also have to be able to hate them in equal measure. You can't only be one. It has to be both. So that's how I work it now. So on a daily basis, if ideas come into my head and, you know, things, some of the size, yeah, I'll share them. And then there'll be times where I'll just be in a humorous mood, you know, snappy mood, and I'll just, I'll tweet whatever I feel like. And it's worked for the, I realized in recent sports, if people see you and they realize you're not trying to be serious all the time, you're not trying to present yourself just one thing. You have flaws, you are person, you're not, you're not a bot. You're not, you're not boring. If you're selling on personality that way, that's highly, highly, highly effective.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And on a certain meta level, at the highest levels of any industry, the people that are most successful are the ones who have that kind of power personality.

• 23:15Chris Williamson?

  You're totally right. I mean, as a good example, Elon Musk, forty million, I think it's about twenty million followers or forty million followers. SpaceX, like, four million. And he deleted, he deleted Tesla's Facebook. Like Cristiano Ronaldo, thirty to forty million, Real Madrid, twelve million.

• 23:33Chris Williamson?

  Like people connect with people, they don't connect with brands.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:38Chris Williamson?

  And you can do the mistakes that you make. Like, imagine if, um, imagine if Real Madrid started tweeting stuff with typos in and or like, you know, accidentally putting up just random bits of content and stuff like that. Everyone will be like, what are you doing? You're supposed to be this professional, but you can get away with that when you're a person. That's definitely an asymmetry in the delivery of, in the ability to deliver a message between personal brand and corporate brand.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  I use this, I use this example when I was training personal trainers where like the term personal trainer, what's the first word in it? It's personal. So you should be personable with the people you train and it's a two humans having a conversation and you're trying to help them and they're teaching you something. The trainer part comes second. Yeah. And I would say that because, you know, for a lot of trainers where people get into these very prescriptive, dogmatic mindsets as to how they're supposed to interact and what they're supposed to say. And they want to fit people into boxes and like that, that's not what it is. There is no prescription. There's no ultimate philosophy. There's no magic solution. It's speaking to people's individuals. You know, you are a human being, they're a human being. It's personal first and then you train them second. Yeah. So even

• 24:51Speaker 01

  personal branding, are you a person who has a brand that has co-host around you? Or are you this sort of contrived brand and you're trying to be personable through that brand? You know, the former people will take to you. The latter, they'll think you're boring or just clearly just full of shit.

• 25:07Chris Williamson?

  Or a sociopath.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, or a sociopath. You see that online all the time where people, people will turn on their, their guru or their, you know, whoever they idolized after a while because they realize it's just the same repetitive message and there's no real depth to it. They're just basically being this ad hoc.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I get that with Tai Lopez. Like, you know, Tai Lopez for me now, I don't know what I've clicked on, but that man has pixelled me hard and I'm getting retargeted like a bastard on every form of social media that I log on to. It's like, it's like the Tai Lopez machine now. Like when I go on and a lot of, a lot of his stuff, like Tai, if I see another video of you telling me in front of a jet or in front of a Lamborghini or in your garage about how people need to start working online, I'm like, man, like it just, it has lost an awful lot of that authenticity. In my opinion, I totally get what you mean there.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Oh, well, that's a good example, too. I talked about this in an email last night where I called it sort of like predatory capitalism. Which, so I mean, I say that, like, let me give some context. So capitalism, you know, as an idea, as a concept, obviously, we could say it's done great good for the world. You know, free markets, you know, the ability to, you know, the ability to earn, you know, like everyone having, you know, the equal opportunity, at least to create earning power to, you know, have the work value, meritocracy, so on and so forth. But, you know, like, like any system, like any idea, there's always negatives to anything. And I was using the term last night, predatory capitalism. I was referring to the Fyre Festival, which, you'll remember, two years ago, was this spectacular, massive

• 26:45Speaker 01

  failure, this sort of like peak apogee of millennial narcissism and the desire for beauty and envy and wanting to be known and wanting to be where the action is and living for, living for the gram, living for Instagram. I was talking about the Fyre Festival and the guy that came up with it, Billy McFarland, and I said, this is a guy's examples for predatory capitalism and sociopathy where he created this, created a cool idea for the festival. He wanted to deliver this experience. But his actual regards for the people that signed up, he didn't regard anybody as being valuable at all because he just doesn't. He doesn't because he is legitimately sociopathic. And, you know, even after the Fyre Festival ended and very, like, hardly anyone got refunded and everyone lost money, he was still using that email list he had from everyone that had bought tickets.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  And he was saying them fake offers for other tickets, other, you know, fake offers for concert tickets, fake offers for, you know, going to be Beyonce and Jay-Z. And he's trying to get cash out of them. And like, and is that capitalism? Like, yes, it is. Like, he's trying to earn money and he has an email list. Like, absolutely is. But is it exploitation of people? Like, 100% it's exploitation. You see that now with Within the personal branding realm and even on like the larger realm of like, you know, to serve big food, big pharma, the opioid crisis in the United States where this motivation for profit at any cost, you know, and, you know, with complete disregard for the human cost. And then the argument, well, you know, it's making money, it's creating, it's creating jobs or like, you know, someone's profiting from that. Like, that's great.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. But for someone like Tai Lopez, like, I don't think it's Tai Lopez. Obviously, it seems like he has helped people. Like what you just said, you realize like, you know what, like, as soon as I get marked within your, whatever your social media network web is, I'm just another target for you to hopefully eventually get some cash out of.

• 28:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  So I'm keep getting ads over and over again. I'm gonna keep seeing your stuff over and over and over again. Like, does Tai Lopez really care? Maybe he does. Maybe he thinks that's a good thing. I don't know.

• 28:35Chris Williamson?

  But if he does, if he does, it's not coming across, which is the issue. But, you know, like, if I can sense, if someone's trying to sell me something and I get the sensation that they don't care, they either are being willfully neglectful of my feelings as a potential customer of theirs, or they're shit and naive about what their message is that's coming across. And I don't want to be coached by either of those people. So, you know, that, but I mean, to go back to the Fyre Festival thing, man, I, I've watched that twice, the Netflix documentary. I know that I know we said on Twitter, I was gonna try and hack the Hulu version, but I haven't been able to do that.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  And I watched the one too. Yeah, yes, day before yesterday.

• 29:17Chris Williamson?

  Is it, is there any new information or is it just similar sort of stuff?

• 29:20Speaker 01

  It was really insightful. I did not expect to watch the documentary at all. I remember when I was on Twitter, you know, two years ago and the Fyre Festival went down on Twitter and I was, it was a pile on and everyone was like making fun of it and all these stupid rich kids.

• 29:34Chris Williamson?

  That cheese, that cheese sandwich photo.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Which, yeah, so like, it was funny and I remembered it and I couldn't tell you why I actually watched the first documentary. I think I was just, I know why. I was talking about with my girlfriend. And she had no idea what the Fyre Festival was. So she she's very sort of out of the loop on like social media stuff, which is great.

• 29:52Chris Williamson?

  She sounds perfect.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Like, oh, we should watch the documentary. Like, oh, you know, you can see what it is. She she works in the tech. She actually works in tech and she has a company. But, you know, she's sort of like she manages to stay out of the loop of the daily, whatever Twitter.

• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  She's got the balance right. We need to we need to get her. We need to get her to prescribe us the digital, the digital reduction method.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  I'll ask her. But so, yeah, that's why we watched the Fyre Festival documentary. And I watched it and it was actually quite fascinating. Because, you know, I just assumed it was this music festival that went down and went down playing, ha ha. But it started actually as this idea for an app, which was a very legitimate idea, where Billy McFarlane, the guy who was the entrepreneur, he had this idea that what if you could book talent directly through like one network and you didn't have to go through middlemen. So it was very similar, actually, to what Jerry Weintraub did in 1970s. Jerry Weintraub, for background context, he was an American band talent manager in the 1970s. And he was known for changing music industry where he signed up a gazillion acts under his management company.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  He had like Led Zeppelin, Frank Sinatra, very big names. And then rather than when he would go and do tours with his talent, rather than have to negotiate with like the middlemen promoters in different areas across the United States, he would go directly to the theater where the show would be held. And this was a big idea back in 1970s. And he'd negotiate whoever owned the venue. So he was taking, you know, he was still a middleman. He's like, you know, rather than have to add another step, I got the talent, let's just go talk, we're going to perform. And that was it. So the idea for the Fyre Festival, it was actually supposed to be promotion for an app, where if you want to book, I don't know, you want to book, you want to book Rihanna for your birthday party, you could just

• 31:39Speaker 01

  open up the app. Her booking fee was right there. It'd take you directly to her agent. You'd have to like put down the money, like, you know, a deposit. And, you know, it was supposed to

• 31:48Chris Williamson?

  Done.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  take steps transaction. So the Fyre Festival started this idea like, we'll use this to promote the app. And then the guys, Billy McFarlane and Ja Rule is the other one who was sort of the hype man for this project. They got to the Bahamas and then they just had this idea to this fly in like the top 20 models in the world. And, you know, spent a lot of money doing this and let's just film ourselves partying for a bunch of days. And then we'll try and make like some sort of scissor reel out of it. And that became the Fyre Festival documentary. And they never expected it to work at all, but then when it became popular and they realized, okay, we got something. Let's just launch this festival. So I mean, you know, talk about getting in way over your head. So seeing that happen and seeing like every human misstep along the way of trying to do this grand project. It was like never got to ground and it was like doomed from the start.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  But then you also sort of saw the power of personality where the guy Billy, despite everything breaking down every single day, despite being behind on money and like defrauding and frauding people and not paying people and just like every, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It was like Browns, you know, sort of law that way. He still managed to make it happen because he just was so like, and this is where sociopathy is a good thing. He was so determined that, no, this will work. I swear to God that everybody just kind of went along this personality. It's like, you know, Billy says it's going to work. So I know it's not and it's failing. I haven't paid in four months, but screw it. Let's just do it anyway.

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  It's, there's something, I'm so conflicted about him, right? And my, my appreciation of this and for the club promoters that are listening as well, they will, they'll know it's rare that we have something that's talked, that talks about our industry. And this was one and it is a club promoter's worst nightmare. Like, and we've all, you know, we run weekly club nights. We've had, I've done a thousand events probably over my career. And, you know, there's times we've opened a club in Newcastle, where the painters were still painting the toilets while customers were going in. And we were hoping, because it had just opened and we were, we were hoping no one would need the toilet for like the first 15 minutes. Because then that means that the painters could have finished and like we've, we've, we've done ones where we've had to

• 33:55Chris Williamson?

  get like a generator in because the power had been cut off because the bill hadn't been paid and stuff. And you're like, right, okay, like this is, yeah, I know, this is.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  You can relate.

• 34:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I can relate on a slightly deeper level. I've got that, that degree of anxiety. But you're totally right. The Billy McFarlane character I'm so conflicted about because. There is, there's something so seductive and, and romantic and admirable about someone who has this single-minded purpose and is able to, to follow something through like that. The difference is, he wasn't doing it from a place of passion, he was doing it from a place where he wanted the status and he wanted the money and he wanted all the stuff that's associated with it. But because naturally, especially in this world, we're so drawn to success. Like, success is this, it is the zenith on the hill of,

• 34:48Chris Williamson?

  of what everybody wants in this world. And here's the thing that a, a friend said to me a few weeks ago and I can't get it out of my head, that Billy McFarland, his virtue and his integrity was basically non-existent throughout the whole festival, the whole project. All he wanted to do was look cool on as grand of a scale as possible. And the only reason that anybody on the planet is slating him, or that the vast majority of people are slating him, is because it didn't work. Now, if all of the stars had aligned, and that guy, his operations director or whatever, had sucked the cock of the customs

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  guy and got the water out, and then, and then, you know, somehow they'd managed to get some villas and maybe it hadn't been that weekend where the population doubled for like basically yacht week, and maybe the food had arrived and maybe the catering had worked and blah, blah, blah. Let's say that in a different set of random circumstances, another iteration of this particular festival, everything had come together correctly, but none of it had been due to preparation, it was just a more look upon, look upon, look. And somehow, maybe they'd petered out like a six out of 10, seven out of 10 festival. We would be hailing this guy as the new festival creator on the planet. We would. The difference, the only difference between iteration one in the real world and

• 36:13Chris Williamson?

  iteration two that we're talking about here, is the fact that it didn't work. So we're so seduced by success at any costs, that we forget, you'd be like, oh, yeah, but it doesn't matter about his virtues, man, like, look, like, you know, he knew it was gonna be okay in the end. And you're like, right, but does the ends justify the means? And do the means, are the means justifying the value? His values?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. Like, I don't have, I don't have an answer. I have to think about that myself. And the thing with the Hulu documentary, which I mean, I would suggest watching it since the Hulu documentary goes more into the psychology of like himself. Like, he's interviewed a lot more. Ah, right. The festival ending. And you see, and it goes more his personal history. Uh, and like, so how he started as an entrepreneur where he was like in kindergarten and he charged a girl like $1 for like fixing her crown. That like, that was, that was his first entrepreneurial endeavor. Where he, he taught himself how to code like on this 1999 computer and hacked his school network and sent out this message. I'll fix everybody's crowns for a dollar. I'm not, I'm not kidding. Wow. It's like he had instinct, like, yeah, at a very young age. He's obviously quite, quite brilliant that way.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, then later on in college, it showed his sort of like entrepreneurial, you know, you know, projects, you know, which some of which failed. Maybe to New York, he wanted to, you know, create something important. But his, his first project, Magnesis, uh, which it also highlighted where he created this credit card company, which is actually fraudulent, but he made it. But yeah, it was interesting though, because like, like you said, it shows like, so like it's success and cost. And he still got ahead despite this for a very long time, but yeah, it makes, makes me question some of this entrepreneurial mindset that some people have, such as Silicon Valley where like move fast and break things, fail, fail, fail. I'm like, what are the human consequences of doing this? You know, like in his first case, he was never really truly successful, I would say, like his first business, did he get venture capital? Yeah, he did.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Did the people that bought the cards get what they were promised? No, they never did, but he still managed to walk away with money. Okay. Yeah. With the fire festival, like the Hulu documentary goes more, much more, much more into like the inception of it, like the nitty gritty details. From the very beginning, it was this very doomed idea. Um, like every step of the way where like there was, it wasn't just a series of like, oh, this is kind of like a problem. It was, this is a red flag. This can't get done. We're going to have to either lie to people, rip them off, or do both. And well, it's okay, you'll be, we need to be solution oriented. Yeah. You see, you see these entrepreneurial cliches all the time. It's all about solutions. We, you know, we, we gotta sell the problem. We gotta sell the problem.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  You know, you know, let's not talk about problems, talk about solutions and like, it like, so he goes through this and then later on, when he's being interviewed and like, you know, compared versus like his, you know, court transcripts. And he's still compulsively lying and he doesn't have any sense that he even is. He's still compulsively lying. Like, well, you said this, but then you're saying this right now. Yeah, you can see that you can see the cognitive dissonance that people have that are legitimately sociopathic where they're they're caught in a lie, but they can't even acknowledge it's like Which one's the truth? Yeah, like they don't they don't even know. Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  You know, but like, again, what you said, like, what if he had successfully done it? I'm like, to have done that, it would have taken a more, you know, sort of like psychopathic person that had some sense of consciousness. Like, this is the messed up thing. I was thinking about this. I'm like, man, I wonder if I could pull this idea off like in LA. Like, I was thinking about this because it was a great idea. It was. Yep. Like, it was an amazing idea. The the marketing for it was so brilliant, especially the the use of the models was the biggest thing. Like, I felt like that was overlooked. Where what did it take to make that fire festival campaign a success? They got the 20 most beautiful women in the world, the biggest followings. They had them post an orange tile.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  And then just because people wanted proximity to beautiful women, they want to be where beautiful women were. To be a beautiful woman, it's a woman that everyone wants to be, and it's a woman that every man wishes he could have. Like, that is so desired. On some level, beauty is purely authentic because we can't truly fake it. We can try, but we can't fake it. Yep. So like, for models are sort of like this unknowing agent for truth in a certain way. They may have no depth at all. They have nothing to them. But because they're beautiful, well, at least I know that's real. So. That's so correct. People signed up for it and like there are people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to be there with the hopes that they're gonna be able to be next to somebody who's a 10.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  And they can take a photo with her and say, look at me and who I'm with. And, you know, I'm important now. Like, my existence has been validated. Yep. Yeah. Had you pulled that off? Like, my God. But, you know, like, could it be pulled off? I think it honestly could, except now everyone's gonna be self-aware. It's like, oh, this is another fire festival? Yeah.

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  That's it. Well, you can pull that switch once and any time, which sucks actually, because had that have worked, the, because influencer marketing is a big industry at the moment as it is, but had that have worked, you would have had this hyper influencer marketing, there would have been a new market that would have opened up. And you know, like Kendall Jenner's doing her own things, but you know, like those kind, that echelon of influencer would be, you know, would there be the new opening of a particular casino that was in association with them? And, you know. Yes, yes. I, man, the whole documentary just completely blew my mind. And like I say,

• 41:38Chris Williamson?

  having been, having watched a number of failed festivals, much smaller, but watched a number of failed festivals over the years, I, it's, it takes a very special level of boneheadedness and single-mindedness to even believe that you can create a festival on an island. Like, try, they make the perfect example and they say in Miami, like you have Ultra Music Festival, which is one of the biggest, best festivals on the planet, best lineups. And even that is a logistical nightmare. And these guys were wanting to do it somewhere with like

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  no bio waste disposal, no running water, no air conditioning. You're like, I can't work out if it's a love of the idea that drew them through the obstacles or an ignorance to the obstacles in terms of Billy and Ja Rule as well. Like Ja Rule doesn't get enough stick in the Netflix documentary. It's like, once it's all gone down, you'll remember this scene and they're in the conference room and it's got like, it must be from like Google, like Google Hangout and they've got all the little faces across the bottom of the screen. And Ja Rule's in there going like, no, listen, guys, like, you know, everybody has setbacks, man. And then he uses some inane, pithy example. And you're like, listen,

• 43:00Chris Williamson?

  Ja Rule, mate, honestly, like you just need to go back to making music because you are shite at business and you're just getting in the way of people who had a potentially profitable app.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember that. He's like, what was the example? He's like, nobody died, no one's in jail. So like, we're all fine. I'm like, there are times that is appropriate and there are times that's not appropriate. I felt bad, you know, for the guys that designed like the software for this app, which is probably an app by looks of it. And they're all out of a job, never got paid. And now they're the thing that the project they worked on that might have been totally viable, had it been done on a smaller scale, that's just all gone lost.

• 43:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, especially considering that that was the project.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  And it was a good idea.

• 43:42Chris Williamson?

  It's like, it's like someone saying, let's launch this particular car. And then one guy on the board decides to open up like an ice cream store that happens to have like class A drugs in the ice cream to promote the car. And then the car gets scrapped and you're like, for fuck's sake, mate. But yeah, the, the guys who make that happen, you know, again, coming from a club promoter's perspective, it's difficult to book talent. You know, we're fortunate in the UK that Voodoo Events, the company that I own, we have good connections and existing relationships with these big bookers, people like Big Bang and, and, and other large booking agencies know who we are and we have a contact in there.

• 44:24Chris Williamson?

  We'll get preferable rates. And, but if you were a new fledgling festival or club night, or even like a, you know, 16 year olds dad who wants to run a birthday party or something like that, like, like trying to book big talent is a nightmare. So there was 100, 100% a gap in the market for that digitalized version of the, the guy from the seventies that you said, one stop shop, like an eBay for, for the best talent on the planet. Like if you could book and imagine the downstream effects of that, like you would have an awful lot more festivals and startups in terms of events going on, the artists, you know, how many more times would Blink 182 get booked?

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  If people knew how easy it was to book Blink 182? Like, you know, they'd be getting deposits all the time.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Oh, constantly, constantly. Um, I, that's, I, I, I know, I've been thinking about that. Like, that was a very legitimately good idea. And so I, I've, I've had some proximity there in team history, being in Los Angeles and working in Hollywood. And that's just, it's this very constant old nightmare of, okay, let's try to get a hold of this person. How do we get a hold of this person? All right. Well, contact this person first and sweet talk them. Or maybe talk to this person second, and then you got sweet talk, maybe pay them. And then maybe they'll pass on a message to like a third person. And then maybe that third person might have like some direct line of access to the talent who maybe will get back to them, who maybe will call you.

• 45:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  But only if you talk like it, like it's just this.

• 45:54Chris Williamson?

  The stars need to align so well, right?

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, I mean, so much of it comes down to almost this luck where it's like, okay, hopefully, I'm hoping this works out, hoping this works out.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I, I, I wonder if that will happen at some point, since it seems like, especially for, especially for talent, let's say, the people that are up and coming. They're trying to sort of like, you know, become known, be seen, um, you know, develop like their own, you know, develop their presence that way. You know, for like lower level, middle level acts, that could be very revitalizing for their career on a certain level, because like I, I wonder how much of. I want to say success. It makes you question how much success is not just from like a talent's lack of hustle, but from just like this, this poor management.

• 46:34Chris Williamson?

  Accessibility.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, because really, I mean, that's a very common thing in Hollywood too. Like if you have a bad manager, uh, you know, a bad agent. You might be missing opportunities all the time and you have no idea.

• 46:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get that. Um, I didn't know that most of the people didn't get refunded. Is that the case?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  There are, some people got their, I think that they were like the people that lower level tickets, they got their money back, but they're like, so one of the things that came out was like, like the wrist, like the wristband.

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  Yep. The RSID payment.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Know that was refunded actually, since they, he's still like, he got sued for spending like 25 million dollars.

• 47:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  So I don't like that. Some of that money was not refunded at all. Um, yeah, I mean, even that wristband was a cash grab because they had to pay off other stuff from other loans he'd taken out. So.

• 47:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that was the, apparently there's that guy on the Netflix documentary who says that there was a woman who rang him aggressively, saying that he hadn't loaded up his wristband yet. And. It would appear that the the tickets were maybe like three to five thousand pounds and then they were being suggested to put almost that amount again.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:38Chris Williamson?

  Wristband so they could do jet ski higher and alcohol this and all the rest of it. So what what happened because he didn't have he didn't have festival insurance.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 47:48Chris Williamson?

  What is the the situation moving forward with getting that money out? But I mean, you know, he's in jail, which is, I mean, like, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred pounds. Like, that is jail is the like, no one's getting debt out of you in jail. I'm going to presume that they will have gone through, they'll have done his forensic accounts and they'll have gone through every asset he has with a fine tooth comb. And once you've sold off like a couple of bottles of Siroc and probably some shit hairs of Labutons, like what's left?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that was so I mean, after watching the second one, I did a bit of research. Essentially, like, nobody got paid. Like, I mean, like, almost nobody got paid like a lot of people, a lot of people, like Bahamian workers, no one got their money back. Yes, some of the reason being that when they even before the festival ever was like an idea and they were just on the island filming. He basically ran a Ponzi scheme of just debt where he got capital from one person, you know, or short term loans. And then the next round of funding would pay off the first round and the next round would pay off the second round. So like when everything was accounted for with forensic analysis, there was no money anywhere because like it doesn't it didn't exist. He got five hundred thousand dollars, spent all of it and then got a loan of five hundred thousand dollars.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  You know, telling the other guy, don't worry, you'll get the money back eventually, like it's going towards something. So there was nothing to, you know, even, um, what's the term looking for? There was nothing to liquidate.

• 49:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  I feel like this was nothing.

• 49:12Chris Williamson?

  So it kind of just evaporates into thin air because there'll be some things that they won't have been able to been able to get on credit. So they'll have had to have paid deposits, for instance, for some of the artists. They literally won't have been able to book them without that. And there's certain things that will have needed to have been paid upfront. The Instagram models and the guys who made the video and people like that, like especially the early stuff. So I guess the early people get paid and then there's just, it's like this, this black hole vacuum that's just sucked up. Everybody's money from both sides. So you've sucked up money from one side and time or resources from the the contributor's side.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  I think the only ones that seem to have gotten paid like for sure were just the models. That was it.

• 49:58Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, like that was clearly yet everybody else. Um, like they weren't getting paid or they're getting paid sporadically, like they never got back what they wrote at all. Um, yeah, I mean, he and he burned through money at just insane rate himself because he was, you know, like he bought a fricking Bugatti for, you know, a million dollars. The alcohol bill, you know, his dining out bill, his, his, his paying for everything while no one was actually getting paid. Uh, so yeah, it's just, that's just an unfortunate situation. But I mean, it was interesting too, that you can see how like debt, you can just keep, um, this allocating it somewhere else over and over again to stay ahead of it. But you'll be eventually it will catch up to you.

• 50:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Like you, you can't keep going back to the same investors and still trying to fundraise from your own customers. Yeah, eventually it runs out.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  There's, um, there's a thing that's been going through my head. Sam Harris, uh, in his book, Waking Up, talks about, um, an individual, I think it was in the States in the seventies or the eighties, who began partway through his life to have this compulsion for aggression, really severe compulsion for aggression. And I think he went up onto a bell tower and started shooting random people, wrote a note saying that, something needs to be looked at about myself, then killed himself and potentially even killed his family as well. And when they did an autopsy on him, they decided to, uh, conduct a thorough one on his brain. And they found that there was a, um, tumor which was affecting his amygdala, which I think is what mediates aggression in people.

• 51:27Chris Williamson?

  And it was literally like someone pressing the aggression button in your brain. So this guy's free will essentially had been taken away from him. And I wonder if Billy McFarlane has a entrepreneurial equivalent of this. Like he's just, he's got, uh, this like hustle button. The hustle is just, it's like Gary Vee is standing on his neck like the entire time, just going like grind, hustle, grind, hustle. Like the whole day.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  I can believe it. I can believe. I mean, I've met, yeah, I've had some experience in the tech space. I mean, I've met people like that where they're just, they have to constantly be creating, selling something. And it is, it is the essence of their being and they can't not be doing that. And they couldn't really tell you why they need to. It's just a compulsion for them. They just do.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, it's weird, right? Because if we're in an industry yourself and me, we are self-employed. Our value is derived from how hard we work and how much we do get on that hustle. But I've, there's limits to it. There's, there's, there's like, I have a safety, a safety catch in place, where if it was three days before a festival and someone had made a website detailing the fact that I had like Hurricane Katrina storm tents outside or whatever it was, as, and there was no water and I'm asking the ops director to suck off the man who does the customs thing. And I'm

• 52:59Chris Williamson?

  just like, I would have, that would have been a point at which, I mean, long before there, but I would have had to pull the plug. But there is a lack of that. The hustle button's getting depressed so hard that he's just able to plow on through. And again, that's why people, that's why people seem to be so seduced by it. Like people, people are aghast, but almost in awe as well. Like a lot of the statuses and tweets I've seen about it, there's a lot of awe in there of this guy.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Well, again, this is one of those paradoxical things in human nature. Like everyone loves success. We also hate the people that are successful. But the idea of this being a human engine of movement where like you never stop ever. Yeah, everyone on some level like aspires to that. If they had the, if they had the motivation to do that, or if they could only be that way, you know, how much more would they get done? But I mean, we also live in a culture where we worship work. You know, that, I realize that's so ingrained, like sort of a 19.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  40s, 30s, like sort of the greatest generation where it's this cultural sentiment that sort of has taken over sort of the western world. And I've tried to trace why it is. I think it started in the 30s, 40s during like the Great Depression, during the stock market crash where you had, you know, the world economy had completely, you know, sort of this collapse on itself. Everyone was economically depressed. And the only way to survive, you know, this was over 80 years ago, 90 years ago, was that you had to work. You had to work, otherwise you are getting nothing. So like that, I truly believe like if I had a pinpoint, like where's the inception of hustle and grind culture? It was then. It was then and that that that had followed the automation revolution of the industrial era where now you can get so much work done through automation. You could leverage

• 54:44Speaker 01

  productivity. So you have this leveraging of productivity and then you have this crash and then you have the instinctual and the the predication of desire where you have to work, otherwise you're not going to survive. And that carries over into World War II and then, you know, post-World War II during like at least the United States boom. And then like, you know, how do you rebuild Europe? We're going to have to work to rebuild the rebel, literally. You have this generation of people where they are raised with that mindset and they instill that. And then they actually do create a air of prosperity, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, you know, overall, relatively speaking, where if you worked and you could get a job and you just you put in the hours, you would get something in return. And the more you work, the higher you would rise.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  But then, yeah, then we get to the thing is that we get to like the era of technology, late 1990s, 2000s. And now with the advent of AI and the advent of digital media and the advent of social platforms, you could be working hard and you're running faster and faster just to stay in the same place.

• 55:41Chris Williamson?

  The Red Queen effect for those people who know the Venn model models.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a Red Queen trap. So now your hard work really doesn't mean much because someone could be working less than you, but their work leverages way more than yours does. But at the same time, what if you work really hard and it's all leveraged work too? Then you're just like a god of work.

• 56:00Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  No one will stop you ever.

• 56:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you are right. It's an artifact of this quite noble approach to work, right? When, you know, but now that we don't, you know, going back to the very beginning of the conversation, when you don't have a job for life anymore.

• 56:17Chris Williamson?

  Where choosing choosing what is almost more important than choosing how? Whereas in the past, I think how by any means would have probably, are you a hard worker? Yes. When you work in a factory, when you're not a knowledge worker, essentially, when IQ is of a IQ, I'm going to get in trouble if I say that. When when your intellectual capacity is less important. A lot of the promotion will be based on seniority. Like, well, Bob's been here 50 years and John's been here 45, so Bob gets the promotion. Even if John's maybe a tiny little bit more competent, because that's the kind of the way that the business is worked, like a family.

• 56:59Chris Williamson?

  Or like a like heirs to a kingdom, almost. Like the eldest brother gets it, even if he's a complete tit. And the the younger brother would be a much better choice, but he's the older one, so he gets it. And you have that noble approach to work. But now you no longer have the same lineage moving forward. Where you can know that you're going to be staying in the same place. Like, you know, as a perfect example, self-driving cars. Like this, what is it between two and four million workers, I think, or no, one, one million workers in America. Are what they call professional drivers. Like, that is a huge displacement of labor.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's I think like Uber's ultimate plan, I think, with everyone driving the cars, it's just the data. They have this massive, massive, massive, massive database now of driving patterns and vehicles. Yeah, you know, with self-driving cars, like you think about the the US economy, like how much, how much time gets lost? How much productivity gets lost from people having to drive? Once you have cars that can drive themselves, okay, well, now you have more time to work, one, but you free up human capital, like again, so like even, you know, that desire for efficiency. Yeah, but is that a bad thing? I don't think so, but I mean, it's interesting that all these things, they create this confluence effect. Yeah, I think the seniority factor arises from when work was artisanal.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  It's like artisan work where for most of human history, you couldn't really mass produce anything. Like if you did, you just had to have a bunch of people working on it all at once. And the people that were the best had been the people that had been working the longest. Like that was probably up until 1800, that was most things before mechanization to really took over.

• 58:44Chris Williamson?

  Something that relies on craft.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, yeah, well, like, everything was craftsmanship on a certain level, literally everything. You know, how much, you know, what could you reproduce that was just, you know, in 20 minutes you could get done? There was really nothing. Yeah, but then we get to the industrial era and now we get the era of machines. And then machines get digitized into computers. And now you can produce things, you know, within minutes, within seconds. You can punch in, yeah, like you had 3D printing, you know, like it's still in infancy, but you can type in a code and oh, it just made it for you. And you don't have to do anything.

• 59:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  It's the idea. Yeah, even coding itself is starting to change with the advent of machine learning. You know, coding, the idea like everyone learned to code, it's a ha, ha, ha kind of thing. But even like the language of coding now, they're getting simpler where you don't even need to be able to code. Five years from now, you'll be, you won't have to code. You'll just type in what you'd like to have coded and then the AI will code it for you.

• 59:35Chris Williamson?

  It'll be like Squarespace for websites, but for coding, like drag and drop coding. Well, learn to code is not going to go down very well there, is it? But look, Alex, man, today has been awesome. I've really enjoyed it. It's been an awesome catch up. I'd love, I'd love to have you back on. I'm sure that a lot of the listeners are going to want you back on as well.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 59:54Chris Williamson?

  Man, have a good day. It's been sweet. Thank you.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Take care.