Why You Feel Like Something Is Missing - Cameron Hanes

Cameron Hanes is a bowhunter, ultramarathon runner, podcaster, and an author. How should we deal with suffering? Most people do everything they can to avoid it, but a rare few seek it out. What if pain isn't just something to survive, but something that deepens our gratitude for the moments that truly matter? Expect to learn what drives Cam to do what he does and what being “undeniable” means to him, what the biggest lesson most people learn when they first go hunting is, the hardest thing Cam has ever done physically, if hard work beats genetics and pedigree, how Cam raised his sons and and what he would do differently, how the average person can train themselves to deal better with suffering, how Cam would feel if he felt truly worthy of his achievements, and much more… - 00:00 Chris & Cam’s Last Meeting 05:05 What Drives Cam’s Relentlessness? 18:13 Cam’s Reflections on Fatherhood 35:46 Why the Internet Hates Successful Men 44:52 The Record For Running a Marathon in Crocs 47:08 Seeing the Success of Cam’s Kids 51:12 Is Love or Hate a Better Motivator? 55:44 The Trap of Meaning Without Pleasure 1:12:39 Cam’s Most Difficult Physical Tests 1:21:00 Connections Between Genetics, Talent & Hard Work 1:32:17 The Downsides of Romanticising Suffering 1:43:33 How Cam Navigates Success & Stays Humble 1:52:59 Where to Find Cam - Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom - Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at ⁠https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  I can't believe it's been two years.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 0:02Chris Williamson?

  I can't believe it is two years since I was with you.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  I know. It's a, we got a good, a lot of good material out of that discussion and that time, that day. I still see clips everywhere.

• 0:12Chris Williamson?

  Did anything stick with you from the few days that we spent together?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Um, I like, you know, you've kind of repurposed some stuff like, so I, I love seeing that, but I think it's just that

• 0:27Speaker 01

  footage going up the mountain with the rock and you chose, talking about chosen and unchosen suffering, that, that's gonna last forever for me. I mean, it's such a good, a good point, you know, and just that setting to have that message delivered at that time. Was just so powerful. So, yeah.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I really appreciate how complimentary you were about me in the book. Uh, it feels like most of the first chapter is some bullshit that I've stolen or said, well, but look, I, if we need to take a 72 pound rock up a hill, you carrying the rock and me spouting nonsense. That feels like we're specializing in where our skill sets lie.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see. Uh, yeah, but you carried the rock. You'd also, what did we do, 11 miles?

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  Too much, too many.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15Chris Williamson?

  At least, at least 10 too many.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  So that was, I mean, that's the furthest I've run maybe ever, uh, was that with you and that was trail running and.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was great.

• 1:24Chris Williamson?

  I actually felt great the next day. Uh, sometimes, I mean, you'll know this, or maybe you won't because you're always running, but the non-runners will know this. You've always got one body part, if you've taken a big break from running and you're not conditioned, there's one body part that always hurts. Like fucking for me, it's my ankles, my calves.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:41Chris Williamson?

  Like just, it is always on fire and maybe it's because we were trail running, maybe it's because the pace was right, maybe whatever. But I felt fine the next day. What I was concerned about was whether or not you would have wrecked me so much physically on day one. That when it came to like my bit, which was the sit down and spout nonsense.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:58Chris Williamson?

  Stuff that I would be sat there going, it's so much fucking pain. I can't even focus.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  You're great. Yeah. And that I, I, uh, I'm thankful we were able to go out to, you know, where I grew up and I could share that part with you too. Cause I, I just wanted, and I've heard you mention like on a few of your podcasts, you've mentioned, you know, the poser on the rock. And, and the gym and like the stuff that I do and kind of reference to. That lifestyle or how I grew up because I I wanted to share with you because it's so much different than well, in some ways different, but in some ways I felt alone too, just like you did. But I think when people they hear like little nuggets from somebody else and then they always latch on to whatever they can identify with. So there's a few things that you mentioned that that really resonated with me, but I was just thankful to share

• 2:49Speaker 01

  everything, my, my little slice of the world with you and it was awesome.

• 2:53Chris Williamson?

  Eugene, Oregon's a fun, cool place. I loved it. I, you know, there is a lot of differences growing up in the Northeast of the UK, growing up in Oregon, but I think the principles end up being the same. You know, this sort of question about what do I deserve?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:11Chris Williamson?

  From life.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  That was a great analogy and I can't, maybe it's in the book also, but that Puritan work ethic, you know, we talked about where, you know, you're, you're supposed to work. And I think you mentioned, I can't, but like the work, I can't remember how you, how you told the story, but was it about the priests that used to work out in the sun?

• 3:33Chris Williamson?

  In the fields?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So this belief that suffering was in service to God.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:41Chris Williamson?

  Right? That

• 3:42Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 3:44Chris Williamson?

  That hoeing the fields and the sun's beating down on their back. And, uh, you know, this is kind of the same as like, you know, like whipping yourself to the, the actual suffering itself was a tribute. And, uh, it's, in some ways it's noble because you're building up your resilience to difficult things. But in other ways, it's fucking pointless because the suffering is not in service of a thing. Now, obviously, if you theologically minded, then you're like, yeah, the, the, the tribute is that. But, um, yeah, I think even though very different. Places, a lot of, a lot of similarities. I was very surprised with that. And then probably in retrospect, totally shouldn't have been. Working class, you know, limited opportunity

• 4:28Chris Williamson?

  towns probably end up producing similar sorts of mindsets in that way.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably. Yeah, even though it's other side of the world, similar in some ways. But, uh, yeah, I think people, I think people love the discussion, but you're so good at articulating thoughts, ideas, sharing things you've read, um, just really putting, giving context that people can really take home. That's, you know, you just get these soundbites that are so powerful. So that's, that's your skill set. You're, you're great at it.

• 4:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I've collected the best of what other people have already figured out and repurposed it onto the internet. So I guess, like I say, I get to turn the tables today and we missed each other on the first book on Endure and then you've got Undeniable, which is a new one, which is fucking awesome, by the way.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 5:13Chris Williamson?

  I've wanted to, I wanted to ask this when we nearly spoke the first time. I'm interested in what drives you because you've done some pretty stupid, pretty extreme things to yourself across a variety of domains.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 5:28Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I'm just intrigued into where that sort of relentlessness comes from.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Man, uh, what, yeah, I don't know. What's crazy is I don't, I don't remember ever being asked this before. So what, um, man, I don't know. Now, now it's like when you go through life and there probably was decision making at some point, but now it's kind of just what I do, sort of. And, you know, I'm just gonna get up, I'm gonna get my, the, whatever work I have, I'm gonna get it in, whether that's 20 miles or whatever it is, shooting the bow. Um, you know, now it's content creation, you got, that's a never ending process. But now just the hard stuff, I think you're talking about like the challenging and, um, the mounds,

• 6:20Speaker 01

  that's just what I do. Um.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Before it was what, before it was what I do, I don't know. I think that was where that was uncertainty. It's like, where do I fit in this world? What, what do I, and it's not even like, I never even asked myself, what do I have to offer? Cause I didn't think I had anything to offer. So you never even got to that, that part. But it was just like, is this it? Is this, I'm just going to work and trying to pay bills? And it's like, I remember like even a tactic I had, I haven't even done a checkbook in a long time, but my wife's in charge of that. But like, even just writing out checks and I would just, I was never, I never thought it was gonna,

• 7:10Speaker 01

  anything that I did was gonna last. So I'd be like, if I, if I had a check for like $17, I'd just make, make it for $20, put it in a thing. And I'm like, well, at the end of the day, I should have more in here. Instead of being exact, I just wanted this cushion of like, I just want to have a little bit more than what I think. And then I can just get through a challenging time. That's as far into the future as I ever thought. It's just like, let's round up in the checkbook. Yeah. Just so I got a little buffer. And that there is no future. If I was thinking about the future, that's all I did right there.

• 7:44Chris Williamson?

  I know the difficulty of trying to put yourself in the mindset of somebody before a trait became a habit, or before sort of an effort became a habit.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:58Chris Williamson?

  In my experience, I think where most people get stuck, and this is why consistency is such an unsexy topic. What people are looking for, for the most part, is getting from zero to one. So I'm not, a lot of the habits or a lot of the ways that I show up in life and a lot of the things that I'm doing aren't going well. Please explain to me the first few steps to get to a place that I want to be. And that's great and pretty doable. You can go and explain to somebody. How to effectively run a 5K, warm up, pre-race preparation, here are some good shoes that aren't too expensive, and here's a cooldown process. But what's really difficult to explain

• 8:40Chris Williamson?

  to somebody is how you do a 5K three times a week for five years. Like, you kind of can't explain how to do that. The same thing with going to the gym. Mike Isretel, who you should have on the show, I think he'd be a great guest. I'd fucking love to see you two together, actually. He can explain how to do the perfect tricep pushdown, the maximum muscle hypertrophy, and, you know, he can, all of those things. But he can't explain how you do that with progressive overload, once a week on that cycle, and two other muscle groups on other cycles for a decade, you know, to get the physique that you want. Right. And when you look at someone like you, who is very consistent, who is disciplined

• 9:21Chris Williamson?

  in that way, you almost, it's such a part of your being the habit, is what's kept you going. And whatever the fuck it was that got you started, this fear of insufficiency, this desire to not be nothing, this need for validation or to prove yourself, this desire for control over your environment, you know, this sense that things are maybe a bit destitute or a little bit hopeless, but fuck, like, in the gym. I remember this, dude, when I, when I first started training, I started lifting weights when I was 18, when I went to university, the Center for Sporting Excellence in Newcastle University. Yeah. And I remember I had this idea in the back of my mind, which was, everything in

• 10:02Chris Williamson?

  my day can have gone to shit, like, everything, and have woken up and just, you know, faceplanted from attempt to attempt. Uni went badly, and girlfriend and me had an argument, and this thing went wrong, and that thing went wrong, but I went to the gym. And it just felt like this.

• 10:19Chris Williamson?

  Area that I had complete control over and uh that was absolutely in the first instance, what got me there and it desired to be stronger and feel a little bit less weak and vulnerable and you know, be more attractive and gain confidence in myself. And then now it's just, why do you go to the gym on a morning? It's like, I don't know, it's it's it's seven forty AM. That's where I am at seven forty AM. I'm in the gym.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  What happens? Yeah.

• 10:44Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so yeah, something gets you started and then I guess habit keeps you going.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, I mean, and that's the secret because most people, like you said, you started to get a little muscle, started to feel a little bit better about yourself. But how many people get there and then slide back and then have to start back over to get there again, you know, so they get a lot of times they get a little of that, uh, dopamine is whatever, but a little of that positive reinforcement hit and that feels great, but then they still can't, can't make that consistent, you know, because life gets in the way or I don't know, they get distracted or they they lose enthusiasm, whatever. The key is that consistency decade after decade after decade. And that's why, like I even think like me back in high school, yes, I was an athlete,

• 11:33Speaker 01

  but there was better athletes. Now I've been doing it for forty years. There's nobody that was better than me that's better than me now, right? So is that the, but who can think?

• 11:45Chris Williamson?

  No one that's still even running.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Who can think forty years in advance, right? So, so all you're thinking is about, well, this is what I do and I just gotta keep doing it, but it's, sounds really easy.

• 11:55Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting? I don't know of any books that have been written about consistency. I know about books that have been written to do with discipline uh and motivation and overcoming hard things and resilience and becoming undeniable and stuff like that.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:10Chris Williamson?

  I actually think that consistency would be such an unsexy book.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Be pretty short book.

• 12:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, don't keep doing the thing, don't stop.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, just, yeah.

• 12:19Chris Williamson?

  Keep doing the thing, don't stop.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And you know, I think that in, you asked that question, you know, why or how or whatever, but I wonder if like. Everybody goes back to their childhood. I mean, childhood trauma does kind of affect us forever, right? But like my childhood, childhood was pretty, a lot of upheaval, a lot of ups and downs. So maybe the one thing I could control was what I was doing, you know, like even in, in the first book, I talked about as a five year old, I was in first grade and I would go before school and run a mile by myself. And I would do is 31 times from the fence to the fence. You had to do that 31 times back and forth for a mile. And I would, I started school early. I'd do that as a five year old. So maybe

• 13:06Speaker 01

  nothing was, I wasn't in control of anything, but I was in control of that. So maybe that hasn't changed. Maybe like, no matter what happens, I know I'm getting my run in. I know I'm gonna, even if the whole day goes to shit, I think you kind of mentioned this, you at least got one win. There's a win in there somewhere.

• 13:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think this is one of the reasons why injuries for people are just feel like such an unfortunate curse. You know, it's this weird fucking irony that all of the people who sit on the couch and don't have a health and fitness routine have perfect spines. And it's all of the people that have tried to do CrossFit and yoga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu that are all bulging, hemorrhaging, degenerated disc, you lost half an inch in my height, blah, blah. And this was something toward the end of my twenties that I had to deal with where I had, you know, five year period where I was pretty much always injured in one form or another. So annoying,

• 14:02Chris Williamson?

  bulging disc, second bulging disc, ruptured Achilles, hurt shoulder. I was, you know, my entire identity, a lot of my identity was wrapped up in being, you know, like the big muscular guy in his twenties around other big sort of dudes and that giving me confidence and making me attractive and then. I had to be in the corner doing bird dog rehab in the CrossFit gym while everybody else was sending it and getting after it. And I was watching myself get fatter, slower and skinnier all at the same time.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's rough.

• 14:32Chris Williamson?

  And um, an interesting thing there is, okay, so where do you take your sense of self-worth and wellbeing from?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  When your coping mechanism, because let's, you know, it is a coping mechanism.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Training is, yeah.

• 14:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for a lot of people, if you wanted to be really, you know, uh, RX plus super difficulty level resilience, it's okay. How good can your mindset be when you're not allowed to train?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  Because to you, the thing that's easiest is going out and going for the run, right? The hardest thing would be, okay, for the next two weeks, you got to sit on the couch in the morning.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08Chris Williamson?

  Like, what? No, you can't meditate either. You can't use it to do something else productive.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:14Chris Williamson?

  It would tear people up inside.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, I've been, I've been injured and I have a big race coming up Monday and I've been injured at stem for my foot, but now it's up to the hamstring where every time I tried to run hard, it would tweak my hamstring. So I was supposed to do Boston with Truitt, my son, I was supposed to do Eugene, we're gonna do that as a family and race and do all that. And I couldn't do either one of them, right? So, but I knew I had this big 250 mile race coming up on Monday. And I'm like, well, I can't just not train. So I just had been walking around Eugene. And I was, one day I walked 27 miles. Took me like

• 15:50Chris Williamson?

  How long did that take?

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Uh, six hours?

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, quite quick walking, I think as well.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so, you know, and that's kind of like these long races, like 250 miles, you are walking because you can't run all the uphill. You can't run for three days with no sleep, right? So you have to, there's strategic walking. So I'm like, okay, fuck it. I guess I'm just gonna hone my walking game. And I've just been trying to get 15 minute miles, which is a pretty good walk, you know, if you try to get four miles an hour.

• 16:20Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  And I was just doing that. So that, I think it was last week, I walked 150 miles.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I would, instead of sitting and rehabbing like I should, I'm not, I'm not running. I'll just fucking walk all day. So that's what I did.

• 16:40Chris Williamson?

  Right. That sounds like a very sort of litigious way to get around. I've been told that I can't run, but they didn't say anything about walking.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. Yeah.

• 16:48Chris Williamson?

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• 17:33Chris Williamson?

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• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  Modern wisdom. Yeah dudes, I, we need to have a chat about Truett. What the fuck is, what is he built of?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  He's, yeah, he's a machine right now. Um, you know, it's.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  It's weird because I'd get credit for my kids, you know, and they're like, oh, you must have done such a good job. I didn't. I mean, I pushed those boys way too hard. I mean, I was just, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was young. I was in my twenties. So I didn't know how to be a dad. My dad was never around. I hated my stepdad. So I was, I knew I definitely didn't want to be like him, but I didn't know what a dad was supposed to be. And I'm like, well, okay, I'm just going to prepare these kids. I know how life is. I know life will fucking kick you in the nuts. So they're going to be ready for anything. Life is competition.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  They're going to be ready to compete. So I had, I pushed them really hard and it was not great all the time.

• 19:17Chris Williamson?

  So what, what did you do?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Um, you know, it was just always a battle. It's just like,

• 19:26Speaker 01

  you know, it's, we're running every day. You guys got home from school. Okay. Get your stuff on. We're going to go do Pisco. No kid wants to go run a mountain. And I'm like, no, this is, because the way I thought it, thought it of, of it was, I had a terrible childhood, but it made me tough. So I'm like, you guys have everything. You have everything I ever wanted. Your dad's around. Your mom is here. She loves you. You have, you have every shoe you want. Every basketball camp you want to go to, you go to. I said, so the way this is going, you're going to grow up to be a couple of big pussies. We're going to make you tough.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  So I would just make them do hard things. And, and I made, they both did half marathons when they were seven and eight years old. True. Just put up a picture. He looks like he's this tall. He was tiny at eight years, eight years old, but he ran a 154 half, like this tall, which is eight something minute miles. And,

• 20:29Speaker 01

  That all that to say that, yeah, I I had the kids do really hard things for many years to prepare them for what I said was life's challenges. And it made it.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  You know, if I was, it reminded me, did you ever see the movie Tree of Life?

• 20:45Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  So Brad Brad Pitt's in it and great movie, but he was super hard dad there. When he would leave, it was like fucking playtime, right? Mom, kids jumping on the beds. Every and then Dad Dad would come home and be like, oh, God. So I said, this reminds me of me when I was when you go out of town is just playtime. Come back. It's like, oh, shit. So that's not great when you're the bad guy all the time. You know, dads are usually the disciplinarian. That's whatever. But I was also like, you know, making them do these really hard things. So they see now and they see all the success, but it wasn't great. And anybody from the outside in would look and say that what's wrong with that? That dad is pushing those kids too hard, you know?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  It's like any basketball game. I'm just like a loose ball. You better be on that floor. And I said, I want to see floor burns on your knees. I want you diving on. I want you playing the harder than any kid out there. So that's a hard, that's a hard um thing to live up to. Kids just want to have fun. They want to play. They're not looking to compete every day. But I made them compete. So it was a challenge. Now you see what that results in, you know, and, you know, Tanner, he was a Ranger. He's fricking badass. It's probably tougher than Truitt. And then Truitt's, you know, doing these crazy things and getting all this attention.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  And, yeah, I mean, it's great. I'm I'm glad to see it, but I didn't, I wasn't perfect raising.

• 22:19Chris Williamson?

  Do you regret it?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I regret.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I regret, I remember when Tanner went to the army. He's a deputy back home, very proud of him. Such an important job. He, you know, a corrections officer just worked at the jail, but still it's, you know, a good job. It's like paid, paid the bills. I was proud of him. We need people, we need men to do that. So, um, he said he was going to join the army. And he wanted to be a ranger. And I'm just like, you know, you get deployed and I'm thinking, what if, you know, he, I think it was because I would tell them that average is failing. If you look around, you see the average person, that's not us. That's not what we want to be.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  So we're not, yes, I know people need to work at gas stations and do things, whatever. That's fine. That's, but that's not what we're settled for. So he, he said he wanted to quit. He didn't want to be deputy more. He wanted to be a ranger because he had more to offer this world. And I was thinking, was that me who fucked up and, and said this at being, just having a regular job was somehow failing? And I just had so many regrets and I was just like, I told him, he's getting ready to go to basic training. And I'm like, I said, Tanner, I'm like, there's nothing wrong with, with having a regular job. Being a family man. And I said, there's nothing, I was wrong. I was wrong to say what I said, raising new kids.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  And, um, cause I was thinking about what if he got deployed and was killed? And it's just like, because of shit I said, trying to make my boys tough? And this is a result? So, yeah, I was like, yeah. I definitely have had regrets over how, how hard I pushed them.

• 24:23Chris Williamson?

  I think.

• 24:26Chris Williamson?

  It's such a delicate balance to give your kids the life that you never had and the life that you worked so hard to be able to afford them with. Whilst also knowing where most of the important realizations that made you into the sort of person who could provide came about due to restriction and difficulty and tough times and toil. And a little bit of, maybe a bit of resentment and a little bit of unfairness. Yeah. In childhood that galvanized you to sort of do something great with your life. Every single, look dude, every single parent that I know.

• 25:10Chris Williamson?

  And even more, be, I tell you what, be fucking grateful that you had your kids in your twenties, because if you'd had them now, imagine how much of a differential your lifestyle is materially, in terms of resources, in terms of status and notoriety and opportunity and all of this stuff. You would be like floating out in space. You know, you would have no, the total frame of reference would be out of the window.

• 25:34Chris Williamson?

  There's not a single dad that I know who has sort of crawled out from the place that they were as a kid and made something of themselves. Who doesn't have that exact concern about their children? I think it is one of the most common worries. Ben Francis, he's the guy that founded Jim Shock. Jim Shock's completely bootstrapped, he still owns 70% of it. Jim Shock's worth over, it's nearly $3 billion, a $3 billion company. This guy's like, worth like $2 billion, like $3 billion, and he's 31. He's got twin, he's got twin boys. But he grew up like as rough as they come in Birmingham with a granddad that made him go and work in like a clay mine. Also like a pottery barn, something like that.

• 26:19Chris Williamson?

  And I've asked him this question, like, how do you intend on navigating this one? How do you intend on teaching your kids the lessons that you learned from a very working class grandfather, their great grandfather? Whilst also not throwing away the entire reason for working as hard as you did, which was to be able to afford your fucking family. Yeah. The life that you never had. Right. So, you know, first off, I think you did the best that you could, so you need to give yourself some grace with that. And look.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  If this was, if 50% was like the middle of the bell curve of how much toughness versus easiness you could give kids, I would guess that most kids and most parents are too far on the easy side. I think snowplow parenting, helicopter parenting, gentle parenting, whilst noble in its intentions, is usually kind of over pattern matched and results in soft entitled adults. Right. Narcissistic, soft entitled adults when they grow up. Given the choice between the two, sort of being pushed a little bit further on the other side, is a very strange kind

• 27:30Chris Williamson?

  of gift. I, I think what would be interesting would be to know how much of that is actually because of the way that you raised them and how much of that is just your genes. The more that I learn about behavioral genetics, heritability of different traits and so on and so forth. Like, I, this, I, this should be comforting. As far as I can see, there is no such thing as really getting parenting right. There is only getting it wrong. And getting it wrong, kids are pretty fucking resilient. Like, they're really, really tough.

• 28:11Chris Williamson?

  And you see perfectly balanced adults that grew up in horrendous childhood environments. And I think as long as there's no really extreme, well, maybe you would say some of the, the climbs with the rock would slightly extreme. My point is, I get the sense that if they're made out of the same stuff that you're made out of, they didn't really have a choice whether you made them go up the mountain or not. I think that there is a lot more built into you. You know, you're talking about consistently running for four decades.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:49Chris Williamson?

  And thinking about framing that up against what that meant in your childhood. And, you know, this sort of relentlessness that you approach, even the pod, when you started that, I think it was episode three, two, three, four, something like that. It's now like, what, one sixty, some shit. Like, even with that, that's, that's not, that's a level of work rate that most people don't hold up. It's just a minor little area then in the hunting and then in the lifting and then in the bow stuff and then in the running and then in the, so, you know.

• 29:22Chris Williamson?

  Maybe there is, maybe it's contributed, but what I would, if I could sort of bet a couple of chips on the roulette wheel of a couple of other universes in which you'd approached your kids differently. I think they'd be probably ninety percent, eighty or ninety percent of the way there, just with less experience about how to deal with it.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:45Chris Williamson?

  And one of the best things you can do for your kids, I think, as a fucking, look at me, spouting nonsense as a non-father, the internet loves when I do this. One of the best things that you can do is set a good example. You know, you can read all of the books about healthy attachment and child education and socialization and all the rest of it. But they will learn more from the way that you and your wife show up for each other around the dinner table than every lesson that you try and force into them. Like, you can top down, try and tell them how they're supposed to behave. This is how you're supposed to treat girls. You don't hit girls and you don't do this and you must hold the door and you gotta be this way and be blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, all right, but then when you're around the dinner table, you're a prick. You look at your phone instead of looking at your wife.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:25Chris Williamson?

  Or you ignore her or you don't laugh at her jokes or you guys don't relate well or they never see you be physically affectionate to each other or whatever it is. It's not for me to say that you need to like force a relationship, but.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:36Chris Williamson?

  The point is, I think that kids learn by seeing a lot more than they get learned by being told. And that's what you're doing, even if you hadn't made them go up the mountain and you were like, I'm off to go up the mountain. Dad's going up the mountain, like, I come up the mountain, you know, so.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a and I was thinking also too, it's not just like what you do, but when you have that mindset about life is competition, um, hard work is the, is the, the key, whatever that's, that is impacting how you talk and how you carry yourself. Cause everybody says, says the right thing. They, they tell their kids what you're supposed to tell your kids. It's like, as you said, no, you hold the door for women, you, you know, be respectful. Everybody says the right stuff, but how you carry yourself and then how you, how you talk, not when you're delivering some ultimatum or some direction, but just how you, what's

• 31:30Speaker 01

  your mindset? And that's when it's not controlled, when it's not, you're not thinking about it. So my mindset was always, let's do more, perform more, push harder. Like I guess to your point that even if I wasn't, they were seeing that. Of course. It's, um, yeah, it's, you know, you, you talked about Truitt, you know, originally, but even for him, it reminded, your story sort of reminded me of his, like, people see him now and they're like, I mean, he's easy to, he gets hate too, cause he's easy to hate, definitely. Um, he's got a lot going for him and that's, that will build some resentment

• 32:14Speaker 01

  over with some guys, but for him, he lost for years. He, he didn't miss a day lifting weights for like 14 years, still hasn't. I started them lifting when they're 14, both him and Tanner. And since that time, he hasn't missed more than a day. So it was loss after loss after loss. He's like tiny, not getting big. He, and he mentioned this, we did this, we're doing this video on his pull-ups that, you know, he broke the world record and he's just like, he goes, I don't think, he goes, I didn't realize that. Tanner was kicking my ass every day as his older brother.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Anytime we'd compete, me against him, I would never let the kids win. It was always like, it was always a battle. Always crying. I mean, kicking the basketball down the street because they're so mad. Go get it. Tanner, uh, I was throwing like football as hard as I could, making him catch it because he's a receiver. Drops it, punches the ground, breaks his hand. So there's like all these losses essentially. So Truitt said, I didn't know that, yeah, I was getting beat by my older brother. I was getting beat by you every day. He goes, I didn't realize Tanner was the biggest beast, one of the biggest beasts he's ever met. And he goes, and I didn't know you were who you were.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  I thought, he said, I just thought I was weak and a loser. I didn't know that I was going against these, these people that were making me. So people see him now and I'm like, if you could see him back when 14 years old. And you know, when he's in high school, he get, he was five foot, like 90 pounds, got cut from the basketball team. Even though he was really good and most skilled because he was too small. They don't see all that. They see now and they're just like, oh, what is he on steroids? And it's just like, no, this is, this is a kid who hasn't missed a day in the gym for 14 years.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  And trains for hours every day and doesn't drink, doesn't do anything but get enough rest to perform every single day. This is what you get when you're that dedicated. But people, they want to ignore that part.

• 34:36Chris Williamson?

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• 34:48Chris Williamson?

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• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernd wisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. There's a very special type of distaste and envy that the internet has toward

• 35:53Chris Williamson?

  certain types of successful men.

• 35:57Chris Williamson?

  I still haven't kind of fully worked out what it is. It's kind of like the inverse of pretty privilege that. Girls have. Yeah, that girls get, but you know, dude, chicks do not have it easy around other women. Like, if you're an attractive woman, you better watch your back. Because holy fuck, they're coming for you. Yeah. Like, they are coming for you hard, but in the same way.

• 36:21Chris Williamson?

  Men, masculine men, guys that certainly seem like competent, especially if you're young. If you're a bit older,

• 36:30Chris Williamson?

  I think guys are a tiny little bit less threatened. I think a lot of this, you know, from both sides just comes down to mating. That if you're a hot woman, then you with your hand in your boyfriend's hand thinks, you better not be fucking looking at her, bitch. Like, was she wearing a skirt that short for?

• 36:50Chris Williamson?

  And the same thing in reverse. And here's an interesting stat. The only, one of the most predictive.

• 36:58Chris Williamson?

  Traits around enhancing attractiveness is masculinity measured by muscularity. So if you're a guy and you are a five out of 10 and you get yourself in the gym for a decade, you're probably going to be like a six or a seven, you know, assuming that you don't fuck your face up in the process by dropping weights on it. Basically, there was this fascinating study done by a guy called David Putz and he got women to rate the attractiveness of men, these images of men, and he got men to rate the same men as how likely do you think it is that you would beat this man in a fight? Okay.

• 37:41Chris Williamson?

  So you have a female rating of attractiveness. Yeah. And male rating of formidability. Right? And then 12 months later, they brought the men that were the photos into the study. And they said, how many sexual partners have you had over the last 12 months? The female rating of attractiveness had zero predictive power. The male rating of formidability almost exactly predicted the most, the level of like sexual partners. Really? So what it seems is formidability, especially as sort of shown by that typically masculine. And this isn't the only way to, you know, get into a woman's pants or whatever.

• 38:23Chris Williamson?

  It's not the only thing, you know, cool artsy heroin looking fucking guitar player. It can be hot too. But there's exceptions. Typically, this seems to be one of those things. And I wonder whether if you look at someone like a Truett, who is a young kid, who's full of energy, kind of doesn't give a fuck, who is only going to get better.

• 38:45Chris Williamson?

  Like in some ways it's inspiring, but it's only inspiring if you're remotely close to his level. Right. Because if you're looking at someone who doesn't have anything special about them, not in the same way that Usain Bolt has something special about like he's godly, right? And he's in a sport that feels a bit untouchable. Yeah. Everybody's tried to do a pull up. Right? Everybody's thought about running a marathon slowly in jeans, maybe, maybe not.

• 39:14Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether the the closeness that people feel and the fact that there's nothing ostensibly special there, it throws into very harsh contrast. Well, why is that not me? Why can he do that and not me? And the easiest place to go to would be privileged upbringing, silver spoon, unfair assistance, enhanced genetics, enhanced hormones,

• 39:44Chris Williamson?

  cheating with form, whatever. I don't know what the criticisms are. But it helps people to close the gap between somebody they would want to be like and themselves.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, they reckon with it. Yeah, it's a, you know, that's, it's kind of a double edged sword because nobody can identify or relate to Usain Bolt because he's got that God given talent. But and it's, it's kind of been what I've used also is like, you can come from nothing, a regular job and had success. So then it kind of, it puts a pressure on other regular guys.

• 40:22Chris Williamson?

  You've got no excuse.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so both Truitt and I have benefited from that. It's just like, he looks like a regular guy running in jeans, but he's doing these incredible things. It was like, and then, so it does allow him, because if you look at his followers, it resonates more with regular people because it gives them hope that, oh, maybe I can be better. Then like an elite Olympic athlete doesn't have near the followers. Truitt, who is like a runfluencer is what, you know, they, some of these elites say this new craze of marathon excitement and these run groups and all this. It's just like, they don't deserve it because they're not,

• 41:02Speaker 01

  they're not elite like I am, but because they can relate to the average person, that's where they get the power. So yes, you, you get criticized by the regular people who feel threatened like, okay, now, so I'm expected to do shit like this too. But you also benefit from it because.

• 41:18Chris Williamson?

  Well, just to sit on that for a little bit longer, I think it's a really, really good point that this sort of narcissism of small differences, the fact that you don't, you haven't come from a different place, you're not in a sport that's untouchable or unreachable. And there's two ways to respond to that. One is, holy fuck, this normal person did something extraordinary, that means I can too. The other one is, this normal person did something extraordinary, that means that I am expected to too.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:46Chris Williamson?

  And the expected to thing shows you all of the places that you're falling behind. Because you know that if not for my discipline and my consistency, there could have gone I, right? That could have been me, in principle. But it's not. Why? And when you get to the why question.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a problem.

• 42:07Chris Williamson?

  You have to face facts that, well, because I didn't not miss a training session for more than two days in a row.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  You're not gonna like the why.

• 42:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's an ugly realization, because the realization's boring.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:18Chris Williamson?

  And the realization points the finger at you. And I see this in myself, dude. I see, you know, especially when I was a bit younger, this fucking bitterness that used to come out. I mean, it still does now, sometimes in my more juvenile, less equanimous moments, if I've not been fucking meditating enough. I'm like, fuck that guy. Like, he had this thing, or this was unfair, that's not it. And it's just ego. It's just, it's just you trying to protect yourself from this weird status game. Because previously, we knew, we were in thirty people pods in a hundred and fifty person tribe, and you knew the best hunter and the best everything else are, and you were probably not that bad at a couple of things.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  Which meant that you had some value.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Compared to the small, little group.

• 43:03Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. Whereas now, we're, even though we know that we're not friends with Truett Haines, we don't know that we're not supposed to compare ourselves to him.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 43:13Chris Williamson?

  So our, like, status mapping ability has just spread out across the entire planet, which is why so many people feel inferior.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:20Chris Williamson?

  And you can take it as inspirational, you can take it as a threat. And I see why, I see why people take it as a threat. And then if you've got fuck you energy and you're doing it in glasses, like, you know what I mean? If you're gonna twist the knife a little bit, people are gonna say, go fuck yourself.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, uh, yeah, it's been crazy to see. I mean, and it's not like, nobody's immune to being criticized, or nobody's immune to the fact of being criticized. You know, nobody likes to read. The shit people say. So and he's no different, but I just would, I would just encourage people to take a look and think about it. It's like, I mean, cause I can think when I first started training and I was bow hunting and having success and I was running marathons and I remember the, the old guard or the gatekeepers would say, oh yeah. So you have to, now you have to run a marathon to kill an elk. And I'm like, nobody ever said that. I'm just, I'm just showing you what I do. You know, you can do whatever you want, but it like puts

• 44:18Speaker 01

  this expectation there. And you know, and now when people look at, at Truitt, I just want, honor remind people that there was a time when he, I could help him up on the pull-up bar. He was not getting a pull-up done. He had new skinny fat. You've heard that term? You couldn't get any more skinny fat than my boys were. They, they were just skinny, regular, young boys, skinny arms, two bodies. It's just like nothing special, but that's where it starts. That's where everybody starts.

• 44:50Chris Williamson?

  I've just realized that the world marathon record for wearing Crocs just got broken this weekend.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:01Chris Williamson?

  Fourth time's a charm. That was the UK's Tommy Trees mindset as he made his fourth attempt to put his name in the Guinness Book of World Records. And finally he came out successful. Sunday's London Marathon Trees put his Crocs into sport mode and clocked a two forty-eight, forty-eight.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Pretty fast.

• 45:13Chris Williamson?

  Surpassing the previous record for the fastest marathon wearing foam Crocs. Forty-one new world records. Uh, over the past year, the record for the fastest marathon in Crocs was broken four times. So this is really heating up.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 45:24Chris Williamson?

  Um, the London race marked Trees 12th marathon and followed three failed attempts to break the fastest marathon dressed as Santa Claus, which stands at two thirty-three, twenty-three. And uh, he's also got two twenty-nine, forty-one when he's not in Crocs. Uh, so he pivoted from, uh, dressing as Santa to doing it in, in Crocs. So I think Crocs and jeans is, that's the perfect blend.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  They.

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  What's happening with his, what's happening with his jeans, the marathon thing? What's he doing next?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Um, next, uh, oh, he's doing a last man standing race here in Austin.

• 45:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Next place.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Next race. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's a four point two mile loop every hour for as long as you can do it.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  So that's, but Guinness won't approve a jeans marathon.

• 46:09Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 46:10Speaker 01

  I have no idea. Because Truitt tried to do that, too. And I tried to do like, I was gonna run a marathon with a bow.

• 46:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Like, just run with it.

• 46:20Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  They wouldn't approve that either. And so I don't know why, but they'll approve dressed as Santa, wearing Crocs. A guy just, it's the other guy in Boston, Jordan Madocks. He ran in dressed as a banana. Set the world record.

• 46:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  As a fruit.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  So, but they won't.

• 46:40Chris Williamson?

  Oh, he broke the banana and the fruit world record. Like, he could be the quickest banana, but an orange beat you.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  I don't know. Actually, I don't know.

• 46:48Chris Williamson?

  They break this down by fruit type.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's banana, fruit, oranges.

• 46:53Chris Williamson?

  Banana, as far as fruits go, the banana is probably pretty aerodynamic.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:57Chris Williamson?

  You know, you wanna be.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:58Chris Williamson?

  Pretty, you know, slicing through the.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Good choice.

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  You don't wanna be a pear. This is real slowing you down.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  No. Or a watermelon.

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  No, also bad. Yeah.

• 47:09Chris Williamson?

  It's, I don't know. It's fascinating, dude, watching this thing unfold. And obviously after getting to hang at you with you and kids at your house and get to meet everybody. And sort of watching the last two years, it's been kind of unsurprising, you know, to be honest.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  It's unsurprising or surprising?

• 47:22Chris Williamson?

  Unsurprising.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 47:23Chris Williamson?

  Totally unsurprised. It's like the least surprising thing that could have happened.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd love to see it. I mean, yeah, Truitt's doing good as far as like, he's selling his sponsorships. And he's doing like, Road to Sub 230 or Diet Trine. So, you know, it's like a weekly video series. So, yeah, he's, I love to see it.

• 47:45Chris Williamson?

  What was watching him do that, the most recent pull-up record like?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  I just remember, it's a big, it's a big ask. 10,000 pull-ups. You got two contact points, basically, your hands.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  That's a lot of pressure, a lot of reps, a lot of little stuff that can go wrong. Ligaments, tendons, you know, Goggins tried it a few times before he got it. And one time, I think, live on Good Morning American, got injured. So, did it live some other time and got injured. So, there's no guarantee you're gonna make it unscathed through a challenge, 24 hours of pull-ups. But for Truitt, I mean, he's so dedicated and obsessed. He trained so hard. It's like, and when he got it, I just, you know, that night, I just remember saying. You know, good job. Not surprised. This is. This is what you're supposed to do. This is.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  If if you weren't doing shit like this, then I'd be like, what the fuck's going on? So this is what this is what I expected. This is this is the. Expectation that's always been there. You guys, I told the boys and my daughter too, for that matter, but you guys aren't normal.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  I'm not. Normal isn't okay. Average isn't okay. You're supposed to be doing stuff like this.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  That's why we're here. So it's like, I said, good job, but yeah, not surprised.

• 49:20Chris Williamson?

  Expected job.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was it. He did what he's supposed to do.

• 49:24Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. It's like I said, dude, it was not. It was. It was like the least surprising thing.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:30Chris Williamson?

  That happened.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  It is. I think it's cool that. I think it's cool that it's something that no human has ever done. He did ten thousand. No human's ever been to ten thousand in twenty four hours on pull ups. So it's a in, as you mentioned earlier, anybody who's tried to do a pull up.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Fucking five pull ups is hard.

• 49:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Five pull ups is hard for for me. It's like ten thousand? Crazy.

• 49:57Chris Williamson?

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• 50:43Chris Williamson?

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• 51:08Chris Williamson?

  Dot com slash modern wisdom. You've said, I've seen you say that you think love is the most powerful form of motivation. What's the role of love and passion in this? A lot of what we're talking about so far is it's like aggression, it's gripping, some resentment in there, there's, you know, sort of wanting to prove people wrong. And then you talk about love and passion. Where does that come from?

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I think I might, I might say passion, love. Sometimes the, the saying I have with love is like, love makes me strong, hate makes me unstoppable.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  So I still lean, for whatever reason, I am motivated by hate, by people talking shit, by people not believing in me. If somebody supports you, I mean, it's, that's great.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  I don't want to say I don't give a fuck, but

• 52:07Speaker 01

  hate is what pushes me. Hate and people discounting what I've done or my effort or my goals, that, that's what drives me. I don't know why. But love is great, support, I appreciate support. But I just think that, you know, how, I, I will, you said love and passion, so passion, yes, because in, in my book, I talk about outliers and, you know, you're one of them, but what, what makes somebody an outlier in my mind is this passion, passion for this thing. What's this thing? What's this thing they do? For you, it's this, you know, thought provoking intellectual discussions, like peeling back the onions, figuring out, you know, modern wisdom.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  And you're the best at it, right? So whatever, you had this passion to learn, to learn more about human behavior and, and the brain and the body and sexual attractiveness and different, different things like that, that's, that's passion drove that, right? So I think passion is what sets people apart. Love and hate, that can go either way.

• 53:16Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. It's interesting thinking about. How hate is a better motivator or a bigger motivator for you. Because it puts anybody that wants to bring you down in a very awkward position. That they have to compliment you in order to not drive you further. They have to say something nice if they want to slow you down.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, but when somebody says, you know how many people say, yeah, you know. Love you. It's just like. Is that real? But hate. Hate.

• 53:44Chris Williamson?

  That's usually pretty real.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  It's real.

• 53:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. People are flippant with their love, but they're not that flippant with their hate.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  If they hate you. That that means something. That's deep. That's why it's like, I think that's why that drives me.

• 53:58Chris Williamson?

  That's fascinating. Yeah, I've never, I've never considered that. Maybe because it's sort of socially desirable to sort of say that you love something. Typically, you don't want to be seen as a hater all that much.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:14Chris Williamson?

  Uh, that there is maybe more emotional activation in someone's hatred than there is in someone's love. And you're like, holy fuck, like I, I got to this person.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:23Chris Williamson?

  I did got to this person.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, so that's where I get, I'm more fueled by that.

• 54:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, I, I, this is one of the things that I, one of many things that I learned spending a couple of days with you. Having must be nice written in the gym. And poser written on the rock. And I, you know, I've mentioned this on the show a bunch of times, like, huh? Like, why, why poser? And I asked you about this and you explained that in the sort of, it's 72 pounds is 72 pounds. And there's not, you can do about it and you can say what you want, but come and carry this fucking rock up the hill and see if, see if you think that it's, you know, all for show. After that, I didn't realize until now that that's because you were. Fueled way more by people's distaste than people's support.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's a, that if somebody's telling you how good you are all the time. For one, you can start to believe it. And then you, to me, if I'm hearing that, I'm losing my edge. I'm like, I don't want to hear that shit. That's, I appreciate it, but I want, I want an edge. I want, I want to know why you don't think I'm. So that's what, that's what poser, that's why it's so powerful to me. I like when people say, oh yeah, fucking Cam poser.

• 55:42Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:44Chris Williamson?

  I've been thinking about this for a while. I haven't written it out yet, so I'm gonna try and play with this idea live with you. There's a quote from Viktor Frankl that says, when a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure. Right? And his point is, I think that if your life is bereft of a higher purpose, you look at hedonism and short-term gratification and stuff like that. I think there's an inverse, and I think that you and maybe me as well are good examples of the inverse, that when a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with

• 56:22Chris Williamson?

  meaning. And that if your day-to-day experience of life, I don't know, just sort of joy and like play and ease and fun and lightness, if that's just not what you grew up being taught, or that's not sort of your psychological set point or disposition, or it just doesn't come as easily to you as it does maybe to other people, I think I see in a lot of the people that are like overachievers in the winning the marshmallow test of life, just permanently delaying gratification. I think I see that as quite a common archetype, that how easily do you just switch off, smoke

• 57:05Chris Williamson?

  weed and play Xbox? It's like, fucking, impossibly. Like, it doesn't happen. And how much sort of play and ease and grace and, you know, how easy does sort of enjoyment and lightness come? It's like, oh, you know, sometimes things are kind of heavy and I apply pressure to myself, or even when it's not needed, and sometimes I struggle to give myself a break, and so on and so forth. So I think that, yeah, that when a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning, you know, instead of just having a fun Saturday morning with the kids. It's like we're taking a big rock and a couple of small rocks and we're going up that fucking hill again.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, when you were saying that, I was thinking about, yeah, I don't know, it's, I'm happiest when I'm suffering. So I've heard people say, like, they said this mostly about Goggins, I don't know, you've talked to him too, but it's just like, asking him, it's like, are you ever happy? It's just like, For him, he's happy when he's miserable. So it's like, well, whose definition of happy you're talking about? Is you're happy eating fucking donuts, watching TV? That sounds miserable to me. So it's like, the people that get these words and they're like, are you happy? Are you enjoying yourself? Do you ever have fun? It's like, running up that mountain is fun.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  That's what I like. So, yeah, it's, uh, when you talk about pleasure and passion, I was trying to, to weigh that out there. On what is, what is happiness for people? You know, and also another thing, um, I see you put up like 3 million subscribers. So it's like, is that, what type of, does that do anything for you? Is that, I mean, cause you'll never let off. You're like, okay, I made it. I'm good. I got 3 million. That was my goal. But you put that up like sometimes people will put up things like, like I made it. Like this is my, I'm here, but

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  I've arrived.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  To you, that's just, what is that?

• 59:09Chris Williamson?

  Just

• 59:10Speaker 01

  A benchmark?

• 59:11Chris Williamson?

  Just another little destination, I suppose. I, I

• 59:13Speaker 01

  What, what is the goal? Do you have a goal?

• 59:16Chris Williamson?

  Uh, not in terms of sort of money or follower count or anything like that. Uh, I think I did originally, even though I didn't have a number in mind. Um, I, I think I wanted to be, I wanted to become really proficient at something. I wanted to be able to say that I was like, I'd reached something close to mastery or competence. And I go as competent at this thing and, and people respected that and recognized that, especially people that I respected and that

• 59:45Speaker 01

  So

• 59:45Chris Williamson?

  I admired.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  How do you, is that a measurable that tells you that?

• 59:49Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  So, cause some people like look at, I haven't looked at where your podcast is on the charts today.

• 59:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  You know, so I'm, I like measurables. Like I like, I need to do this many miles, this fast, at this pace. I want, you know, this many downloads to the pod. It's like, I love measurables. And I think the, my boys have kind of taken on that.

• 1:00:12Chris Williamson?

  I, I love that too. I think it's a good way to bring some control into a messy world. Um, I, I have just tried to sort of put a bit of a speed limiter on how much I rely on it because

• 1:00:24Chris Williamson?

  At least for me, it is not the most important metric. The most important metric is something that's pretty intangible, which is how much did I connect with the guest? How much did it impact the people that were listening? And a lot of the time, the episodes that do, sometimes the episodes that do the most plays are the ones that are the most impactful. And they certainly reach the most people, right? But I don't know how deeply that really changes people.

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  And I'm at the stage now, at least with this particular art form, where I'm trying to really, really connect with the person I'm sitting opposite. And I'm really, really trying to understand why they are the way they are or what it is that people should understand or learn about them. And none of that is going to appear on a YouTube analytics spreadsheet. It simply doesn't. And the measurement stuff is good and it ensures that you're at least keeping an eye on one or a few things. I'm the sort of person, I think, that would become very obsessed by it.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Chris Williamson?

  And I need to be aware of that and I need to account for that because it's not all that matters. You know, it would be something else.

• 1:01:42Chris Williamson?

  A lot of people trade intensity. In the very beginning, they use intensity, but the thing that keeps you going is your longevity, right? That's what we said, the consistency thing. And they trade longevity for intensity. And if you're just chase, chase, chase, chasing the numbers, you're able to see the immediate effect of your work. This is the same with powerlifters, let's say. So you're a powerlifter in the gym and you're pushing yourself RP nine, RP nine point five, RP 10 over and over again. You're not periodizing, you're not taking weeks off and you're going, dude, my numbers are going up. I'm fucking crushing it. I'm crushing it. I'm crushing it. Snap.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:19Chris Williamson?

  You go, okay, well, what was the goal? What really, what was the goal? The goal was to get the numbers to go up, but the goal is to get the numbers to go up steadily over 10 years. And all that you can see is such a short amount of time in front of you. And I think that you should be careful about trading longevity for intensity. Because, and at least with the show for me.

• 1:02:42Chris Williamson?

  The more fired up I am when I wake up on a morning, and I think this is just the best judgment of sort of where your life's at at the moment and how much joy you're getting out of life. When you wake up, when your alarm goes off on a morning, how excited are you to get out of bed? I think that's a pretty good rubric for how's life going right now? It's not going to be like that forever, you know, it's going to be better and worse and sometimes really worse and sometimes better. And if I wake up on a morning and I go, fuck yeah, I get to speak to Cam today, like, that's real exciting. Tomorrow I've got Will Store, like science of storytelling, fucking awesome author. He did the state of the game. I'm fucking fired. I can't wait. And then, you know, there was periods in the show where I wake up and I'm like, oh, who am I talking to today? Oh, yeah, that'll be all right. You know, maybe the episode be great, maybe it would even be a really great performance, but if it didn't speak to me.

• 1:03:28Chris Williamson?

  So very much in that sort of, I know,

• 1:03:34Chris Williamson?

  post-growth thing, uh, where I've already got, at least with regards to the show, so much further than I ever thought I was going to.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Chris Williamson?

  Fucking moved continents and came over to this, this new country and made all of these friends and, you know, have lifted myself out of a area of the UK that's, it was literally only famous for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. And then it lost that, so it didn't even have that anymore.

• 1:04:05Chris Williamson?

  I, I've already won, I've already won. So trying to find ease, grace, joy, and just seeing how that works for me for a little bit. Because I very much applied the sort of Cam Hanes, Goggins.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Chris Williamson?

  Mindset for a while and I can totally see me turning around in six months or two years or whatever and being like, all right, time to really fucking grip the bar again. I'm just seeing, okay, what happens if I try and have a little bit more play with this? And what happens if I go back in the other direction?

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was curious about that just because we're so inundated with these measurables every day with the follower count, the likes, the. You know, when you start getting into podcasts, then it is a downloads because then that affects what you can ask for advertisers and that's all they give a fuck about. They don't care about what type of connection you had with your guests. They're like, okay, cool. How many downloads was it? You know, so it's like we get kind of roped into this, to this trap of everything is measurable. And it's like, you're not successful unless you're here.

• 1:05:04Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  And then when you're here, you better be here. So I was just kind of curious how you, how you navigated that just because it is, it's life nowadays.

• 1:05:13Chris Williamson?

  It is.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  And it's, and it's easy. It's an easy, like, everybody loves, like, how do I compare? So it's an easy comparison. That's why you look at the lists on like, who's podcast is highest rated, right? But uh, I think Joe's done a really good job of this too. It's like, and I want to kind of adopt, well, your mindset is very similar now. Um, that's why he can have on somebody like me, who, when I first went on there, nobody, nobody knew who I was, but he, Joe doesn't care. He's just like, am I interested in this person? Most podcasts are like, let's go with the biggest guest that's going to give me the biggest.

• 1:05:51Chris Williamson?

  I, dude, I really, I really think that you can look back on a body of work that was

• 1:06:00Chris Williamson?

  like disembodied, disconnected successes, or you can look back on something and be like, yeah, that was me.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:06Chris Williamson?

  Like, that was really me. I put myself out there and there's some people, let's say that you're in a sport, right? Let's say that you're a powerlifter or something like that. You want to be the best in the world. You want to be the best in the world. It's not about manifest, manifesting your fucking artistic expression on the lifting platform. Pick the fucking weight up. Okay. You know what I mean?

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Can you pick it up or not?

• 1:06:27Chris Williamson?

  Can you pick it up or not? And the goal is to pick the fucking weight up. And however you get there is how you do it. Now you may feel transcendent. You may feel like this is you really sort of actualizing your potential and doing it in the world. But uh, my goal is to look back on this period of life and look back on, you know, the library of work that I do and go, yeah, like that was really me. That was exactly where I was. I really tried to be open and honest with myself. It's a selfish project and I think that the best ones are, and not everyone can do this. Not everyone can be selfish with, with what it is that they get to do for art because if you're a trader. Oh, please tell me about how your artistic fucking expression helped you lose money on

• 1:07:08Chris Williamson?

  that USD JPY trade. No, you have a very, very tightly defined outcome. But in some other writing books and stuff like that, you could write a book, it would sell tons and tons of copies, but you weren't connected to, and you get loads of success. How do you feel after that? And for some people, they may take a ton of well being and satisfaction and joy and all the rest of this stuff, meaning from it just being successful. They just wanted the success. And I get the sense that maybe the first few bucks or the first few projects or the first few businesses or the first few years of the podcast or whatever, might be you playing that game. But then after a while, you go, okay, well, kind of satiated my desire

• 1:07:50Chris Williamson?

  for status and, and, and maybe money or being recognized by all of these people. I had this, I made this joke with regards to the show that I kind of had the five infinity stones from Manos's glove. I had Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Alain de Botton from the School of Life, Naval Ravikant and Joe Rogan as like the five people that I wanted. And I've got four of them. And Joe texted after the last episode and was like, don't forget, we need to do an episode on Modern Wisdom. So I'm like, right, okay. Well, once I do that, if all it was, was about being, I've got gold medalist syndrome. Why'd you go from that? And that's a genuine question. And that's still something.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:08:28Chris Williamson?

  Every time that you complete a new goal, you have to ask yourself, okay, well, what is my life now that I've completed this thing that I was working toward for a long time? And that's the danger of goals, right? You know, James Clear got this right in Atomic Habits, where he said, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And so you just need to iterate and keep going and keep going. And it, it helps with longevity. But there is no growth without goals, because you need a goal to give you a fucking direction to move in, or else you're just like, growing outwardly, but not moving toward a particular thing. It's not great for the way that motivation works, dopamine, positive reinforcement, all that stuff. So again, it's this tension, it's this balance between the two. But I get the sense, and it'll be interesting, you know, in a year's

• 1:09:09Chris Williamson?

  time, couple of years' time, when we chat in your episode 300, for me to go, okay, and what's driving you now? Like, how, how do you feel about the show? And I would guess that you're gonna say, you know, it is like, actually, I'm kind of taking my eye off the ball with regards to the metrics a little bit. I'm really interested in. Having conversations with underground, I'm really platforming people that, you know, no one knows about, or I've really enjoyed delving into this area of whatever. And I think that is a realization that lots of people come to. I think they come to it maybe with even raising kids. That you think, I'm gonna get the kid into the Harvard, Ivy League University. I'm gonna get them to be the captain of this team. Are they gonna be the top in this particular pursuit or whatever?

• 1:09:54Chris Williamson?

  And then after a while, you go, I just kind of want them to have fun. I just want them to be happy.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  And I thought that I could get them there through that. But you kind of need to.

• 1:10:05Chris Williamson?

  It's far easier to achieve it than it is to get rid of it.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Chris Williamson?

  Because if you haven't achieved it, it's always in the back of your mind as, wow, you know, that might have been the answer.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:17Chris Williamson?

  So you need to do it to see that it isn't it. Like Naval says, the reason to win the game is to be rid of the game.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:10:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's a tough one. It's like, you know, you want to be successful. You want, I like, I think when I was, you were kind of explaining that. The best feedback is when somebody says they really enjoyed whatever discussion you had. Or, and they're not talking about how many people listened to it. You know, it's just how it impacted them. And it's like, I'm not, I'm not great at quote podcasting, which is why I do the lift, run, shoot with my guests to make, to, because I can connect on that. And then that hopefully helps the conversation. But yeah, it's a, it's tough. It's tough sitting down and really.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe it's not tough. Maybe it's just, we don't do this. Maybe we, how often do you sit down and just talk to somebody? I never do it, like, not like this. So maybe it's like. Maybe you can learn a lot just by having a discussion and maybe a podcast is an excuse that we wouldn't, we wouldn't do this normally.

• 1:11:31Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Cause I'm not going to be like, call up one of my buddies and say, hey, you want to go talk for a couple hours? It's like, nobody would say, sure.

• 1:11:41Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like you're saying that you find sort of doing the podcast is one of the more or most difficult things that it is that you do. Before we continue, if you've been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus and your performance, but most people have no idea what theirs are or what to do if something's off, which is why I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, they run lab tests that monitor over a hundred biomarkers and their team of expert physicians will analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. Seeing your testosterone levels and dozens of other biomarkers charted over the course

• 1:12:22Chris Williamson?

  of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. And right now you can get the exact same blood panels that I get by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. So what, what are the most difficult things that you've done physically? You've got this long illustrious career of doing fucking stupid things to yourself.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Chris Williamson?

  What rank in the, the, the top few?

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Oh, it's the long race, you know, the, well, this race I've coming up is 250 miles. I've done 240 miles, I've been 200 miles, 100 miles is hard. Marathons are hard when you're pushing a lot of hard hunts where you're just miserable, you know, in the snow, long hunt Kodiak Island for 12 days. So it's, um, though, but those are.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Those, they're not predictable, but you know what you're getting into. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, you know, it's going to be terrible and it's gonna, you're going to be miserable probably for a while. But that's part of the deal. That's just like, that's why you sign up is that test. I'm trying to test myself. I want to see if I'm tough enough to do this. So those, when I think of hard, it's those.

• 1:13:44Chris Williamson?

  Are there any in particular that come to mind from the hunts or the races perspective?

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I mean, yeah, I've been on, oh, I don't know, a lot of hard hunts in the mountains, just being soaking, soaking wet. I mean, one time me and Roy were sheep hunting, Roy's my friend who fell. But before, obviously before he fell, we were sheep hunting. Miserable weather conditions, super steep. We were blood trailing this ram and it wasn't a good shot. So it's like, uh, it's gonna be a long, hard blood trail to kind of decipher and get this animal. And it got dark and then a grizzly was kind of circling the tents. And, uh, I was just like, I don't give a fuck. I'm going to bed and I'm, I'm not even, I don't care about this bear.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  I don't know what's gonna, whatever. Went so tired, just went to bed. That's, that's being miserable. On Kodiak, you know, you get dropped off and I remember in my, in my book, backcountry bow hunting, the pilot like wrote down the day he's supposed to come back and pick us up on his jeans with a pen. So it's like, hopefully he doesn't wash those jeans. He's gonna come back in what 12 days, two weeks to get us. And then this is first week in November, so it's pouring down rain every day. Kodiak is just south, south of the mainland there. And it's, uh, it's just miserable. Every day you're wet, it's just miserable.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  So, um, yeah, then if you talk about the races, you're going the, the long races. So in Moab 240, I think I slept for about, I don't know, I can't remember now. It's been a few years, but two to four hours and it took me 79 hours to finish a race. So over three days and slept, you know, maybe four hours total. So that, when.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  You know what it feels like to get a good night's rest. It's just like nothing feels better. It seems like so on the opposite of that, when all you want to do is sleep, but you have to keep pushing for 240 miles.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  It's that seems overwhelming. So to just to build a muster up the strength to still take another step where every step is an effort.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  And so if you think when I go running, every mile is 2000 steps. So if I'm doing 200, you know, so it's 500,000 steps, 500,000 steps roughly in every one is an effort.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  It's tough. That hurts. So those, those experiences stand out.

• 1:16:30Chris Williamson?

  The first guy I ever had on the podcast, episode one, and that people should not go back and listen to. But it's interesting episode. It's a guy called Stu Morton, who was training to row the Atlantic solo.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:16:43Chris Williamson?

  So this is a the Taliska whiskey race. It's pretty common.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:46Chris Williamson?

  Thing. But it's very extreme. You go from, I think, the coast of Portugal to kind of the Caribbean. And the interesting thing with that is that people that do it in groups of two or three or four are really no quicker than the person that does it on their own. Because for every additional person, you need a bigger boat and more supplies and another person, which is more drag.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Chris Williamson?

  So everybody kind of nets out at the same pace you can go at. Now, obviously, I guess physically it must be a little.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Shared workload, probably.

• 1:17:22Chris Williamson?

  A little easier. But now I remember speaking to him and I can't, he's like something like 14 million all strokes or something he needed to do to get him. So it's just 14 million.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Chris Williamson?

  Go across that thing. It's so funny when you break down races like 200 miles into five, like it's 500,000 steps.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Chris Williamson?

  You got to take 500,000 steps.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Chris Williamson?

  And it's so hilarious when that happens.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  I, you know, because most people are like, their goal is 10,000 steps a day. And that's a good day.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  Okay. 500,000.

• 1:17:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I love the uh, I love the idea of these backyard ultras. It was the dude from

• 1:18:01Chris Williamson?

  the Barclay marathon that invented it, right?

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, Laz.

• 1:18:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and uh, just his insight that he hated the fact that sometimes people won.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Chris Williamson?

  He wanted a race where no one won.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:15Chris Williamson?

  Like, everybody loses. Everybody loses at this race.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  At Barclay for sure.

• 1:18:19Chris Williamson?

  People that lose less than others.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, Barclay, there's no finisher sometimes, but the backyards, there's always gonna be one person who outlasts the other. So it's that also called last man standing is kind of what they're called, but uh, yeah, it's

• 1:18:34Chris Williamson?

  They still don't beat the race though.

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  No, I mean, the race is still there. It's just you needed somebody else to go with you to go to the next level. Yeah. So the race never loses. You never, never really win the race.

• 1:18:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  You just outlast.

• 1:18:48Chris Williamson?

  Less than the last, the next guy.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  You outlast the other man or woman, but uh, yeah, those fascinating, isn't it? That how long can you run? Four miles an hour? It's crazy. Is now, there's guys who have went 400 miles. Do you know this?

• 1:19:06Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  450 miles.

• 1:19:07Chris Williamson?

  That's the current record for this thing? Wow.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so God, what would that? So that'd have to be a hundred and some hours. How many days is that? That's over four, over four days with never getting more than, so if you finish and say 50 minutes, you get 10 minutes before you have to be on the start line. So never getting more than 10 minutes of rest.

• 1:19:34Chris Williamson?

  Is that typical? What's the sort of pace that people are doing? Cause you could do eight miles an hour, right? You could move at eight miles an hour and get done in half an hour.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you could, um, but for how long, you know? So the thing with these is the more you break your body down, the less distance you're gonna be able to go. If you run fast, you're stretching.

• 1:19:52Chris Williamson?

  That intensity longevity.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Your, your muscles out, your, which stretching muscles out is essentially breaking them down over time.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  So yeah, it's like finding that sweet spot. I think Courtney, she's won one of those before. And I think she was doing her laps in about 50 or 52 minutes.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  So just got, if you get eight minutes, get a little food in, sit down for a sec, get back on the line.

• 1:20:23Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure it's gonna do one of these.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:25Chris Williamson?

  In jeans.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Ah shit, I don't know. I told him, I'm like, I mean, he needs a win. Like, if you had,

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  he hasn't won a race. So it's like, yes, he's went viral in Boston and Austin Marathon, Eugene. He just, you know, a lot of news stories. And he does have the world record in the pull ups. That's all great. I said, but you need a win. You need to be, come across, break that tape. Cause I, you haven't had a win yet. So you show me a win. That's the goal.

• 1:21:01Chris Williamson?

  What's your perspective on genetics, pedigree, talent and hard work? And how all of these things fit together?

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we always joke that Truitt always joke, he got shitty genetics. That's why he had to overcome his genetics. Because really, I mean, I don't have, I have never thought I've, I've had great genetics. If I had great genetics, I would have been able to play college football for a while. And so I've, I always said, you know, I've just, either you're average or obsessed. It's kind of been my thing. It's just like, I had, if I didn't want to be average, I had to be obsessed. So I just put it, tied it all into hard work. When I see the boys, I do see, they have some genetic advantage, for sure. But what do genetic advantages give you?

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  If you don't capitalize on them? Not much, right? So they've just both done a good job of capitalizing on whatever gifts they've had. And then Truitt is definitely maximizing them.

• 1:22:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, it's weird with, I guess.

• 1:22:17Chris Williamson?

  Talent.

• 1:22:20Chris Williamson?

  Something like motivation or enthusiasm and consistency or discipline. Because at the very beginning, you're, no matter how talented you are, you haven't spent enough time and attention to unlock that talent. Now, sure, you begin the race a little bit further ahead than the other guy that's also starting. But you're, you know, the most virtuoso keyboard pianist ever, right? The first time that they sat down at a piano, they fucking sucked. So even if they had all of the raw materials to learn very, very quickly, this insight that you kind of unlock your own potential, you unlock your own talent through the only thing that matters, which is the consistency. Now, I will say, do you know who Craig Jones is?

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  He's a.

• 1:23:06Chris Williamson?

  Craig may be the most. He may be the biggest outlier, I think, in the entire world of sort of elite sports.

• 1:23:16Chris Williamson?

  In that. He doesn't train consistently. He doesn't have a strength and conditioning routine. He doesn't care about his body or what he puts in it. He sometimes cares about what he puts his body in. And he, as far as I can see, is a professional partier.

• 1:23:33Chris Williamson?

  Who still is probably top five grapplers on the planet.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Chris Williamson?

  And, you know, Nicky Rod, who trains here at B Team in Austin, will eat, sleep, lift, train, recover, study tape, or do all of the things. And Craig will roll back in from a session with a cigarette in his hand and still give him a, like, as good of a run for his money as anyone and oftentimes win.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:01Chris Williamson?

  And that.

• 1:24:04Chris Williamson?

  In some ways is just like really fucking cool. But in other ways must just be so disheartening if you're in that. If you're in that.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, for sure. When I hear that story, what I think about is how, how great could he, could he be being dedicated?

• 1:24:17Chris Williamson?

  Put the cocaine down.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean. Because he's comparing himself to, yes, they're elites, but could he be a legend?

• 1:24:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, could he be the best? Yeah. He's a legend in certain disciplines that just not.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  But could he be the best ever? You know what I mean? Like, I mean, I don't know. Cause Gordon Ryan, does he live pretty? I think he, does he live pretty clean?

• 1:24:41Chris Williamson?

  I think, yeah. Yeah, pretty, pretty, pretty much. Apart from when he's injured. But even that, like, there's a degree of, of commitment during your injury.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48Chris Williamson?

  Right? If your stomach's upset and you kind of got to focus on yourself. But yeah, I think for a lot of people, what they end up realizing is it doesn't really matter how talented I am. The consistency and the hard work really is the only solution. It's the only pathway I have to sort of capitalize on this stuff. And I think that's one of the reasons, again, why somebody who largely is pretty untalented is such a trigger for a lot of people. Because there's two ways you could look at it and you could say, holy fuck, like, there's nothing special about them. Why did they get that?

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:27Chris Williamson?

  Holy fuck, there's nothing special about them. There's nothing special about me either. That means that I too can do it.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Make it, yeah.

• 1:25:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because what people want, I think a lot of the time is what is the super secret squirrel technique? Or what was the unique combination cocktail of upbringing and genetics? And whatever it was that this person had in order to be able to get them to this place?

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:50Chris Williamson?

  And the more boring the answer, the less satisfactory it is.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:56Chris Williamson?

  And I think part of the reason that it's not very satisfactory is that it actually, it doesn't take it further away from you.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:03Chris Williamson?

  It brings it closer to you. Because if you say, well, what's the reason that you send what's the fastest man on the planet? And someone explains about how his fast twitch type A muscle fibers have a particular like ATP output and his lactate threshold and his limb length and the way that his biomechanics and spinal flexion and all of this stuff.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:19Chris Williamson?

  And you go, that's beautiful. Like, what a romantic, what a gorgeous distillation of the fastest man on the planet ever. How the fuck am I supposed to replicate that? You say, well, I just sort of, I just trained for a decade and a half and I didn't stop. You go, yeah, that's fucking lame. Like that's.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:38Chris Williamson?

  But it's also enlivening.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:40Chris Williamson?

  Because you say it's at your feet too.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, yeah, because when I think about, you know, if I think, I don't know, if you think truet,

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  you're like, I, I hear people say all the time, well, if I was in this situation or of, or they've even said like, if, if I, you know, if they were raised like truet was raised type thing. Or, you know, people.

• 1:27:05Chris Williamson?

  The privilege of being made to suffer as a seven year old.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, God, yeah, they, they, well, oh, that's another thing that I get worried about is some of the dads watching what he's doing and then thinking like.

• 1:27:15Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna have a child that does a 10,001 plus.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  And, and I, I feel bad for those kids because it, it was like the perfect storm for my boys. And they were built for it. So, you know, people say I'm built for this, whatever, I don't, whatever the case. But they did eventually flourish.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  A lot of kids aren't going to. It's gonna be a disaster.

• 1:27:39Chris Williamson?

  Get crushed under the weight.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  It's gonna be disaster and the dad is probably not gonna be like living that example every day like I was. So it's like, then it's just like, what, you don't do this? Why am I do? It's gonna be tough.

• 1:27:51Chris Williamson?

  It comes back to authenticity.

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:27:54Chris Williamson?

  It was a natural outgrowth. And I think this is where you can hopefully give yourself a break, even though I know you're terrible at doing that.

• 1:28:03Chris Williamson?

  You did probably what comes most naturally to you, which was your way of showing love, which is world's tough. You need to be tougher than it is, at least, and ideally about between five and 10 times tougher than it is.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:17Chris Williamson?

  And this is the way that I'm gonna show you that I love you because I'm gonna prepare you for the world and I'm gonna make sure that nothing can hurt you and that you're going to be resilient and that you're gonna have, you know, this is my, this is my, my showing of love. And if that is not how you actually want to show up, sooner or later, there's gonna be cracks.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:38Chris Williamson?

  And things you can't force stuff.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:40Chris Williamson?

  Long enough. It's, you know, the trite old thing about the man who loves to walk will walk further than the man who has to.

• 1:28:49Chris Williamson?

  Because eventually, over a long enough time horizon, people end up just regressing to the mean. They just go back to what their patterns are. And then maybe you can change your patterns over a very, very, very long time. But how many people do you know that have really made changes in their life? It's so few. People lose five pounds, you know, they'll go from one company to another. They'll, you know, read a book about arguments and change their communication style. But how many people do you know that have lost a hundred pounds? Or moved, changed their career at forty?

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:20Chris Williamson?

  Or gone to a new country.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Chris Williamson?

  Or got out of that abusive relationship and entered a new one that was flourishing and taken all of the things that they learned. Like, that's alchemy. It's like taking something that was awful and useless and pointless in your life and turning it into something that's beautiful and valuable. And it's so fucking rare.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:36Chris Williamson?

  Just doesn't happen all that much. And again, to kind of bring this back down, one of my favorite realizations, and one I think that you share as well, is, well,

• 1:29:47Chris Williamson?

  in some ways, that's kind of terrifying because, oh, my God, look at how many people don't end up actualizing everything that they could. And it's not that the only thing to do in life that's great is to actualize your potential. A lot of it can just be flourishing and living it fully, fully, and maximizing your time on this planet in experience and presence and all that sort of stuff. But most people don't get that. Fuck, that's terrifying. Or, most people don't get that. Holy shit, how low is the bar?

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:17Chris Williamson?

  Like, the average American is obese, divorced, and with less than one K in the bank. That's the average American.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  That's nuts.

• 1:30:26Chris Williamson?

  How low is the bar?

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  And with more opportunity than anywhere else in the world. And that's, that's the average American. That's what's crazy. I was, I was curious about what you think about this because I've heard people say that, you know, I couldn't have done it without whatever, their wife or their, their whatever. It's like, um, and as, you know, my wife has been supportive. Truett's wife is very supportive. But to me, it's just like, I, so, I don't know, I'm curious. That's why I want to hear what you think because, yes, I think.

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  So if if say true is saying, oh, I'm gonna go, I need to go train. And his wife was saying, again. But so I could see where that would be an issue. But to me, it's just like, maybe it goes back to the point you've started to make this whole time about like parenting or whatever. It's like, I don't know. I don't want to say if it's fate, but to me, it's like, yeah, support is nice. I fucking don't need anything. I'd I'd do the same shit, whether you love me, hate me, support me or don't. Nothing's gonna stop me. I wonder if so, can people say, well, I didn't have that environment or the support you had. That's why I didn't achieve this.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Or are there people who who are like, and I think of Goggins. I think he, I don't care who the fuck was in his life. He was gonna be who he is, no matter what.

• 1:31:58Chris Williamson?

  There's a difference between doing something because and doing something in spite. Right? I I achieve this in spite of the way that my wife hates that I go out for a run at five thirty in the morning. Right?

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:10Chris Williamson?

  I did this because my wife encourages me to go and do it.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Right, okay.

• 1:32:14Chris Williamson?

  And I think this is, it's a good point to talk about that. I do worry about the romanticization of suffering too much on men, especially that.

• 1:32:24Chris Williamson?

  There is a certain type of personality. I certainly have this. Maybe you do too. I I definitely get the sense that that Goggins has this.

• 1:32:35Chris Williamson?

  That is someone who like, like the priest's hoeing. Seeks out suffering beyond its utility. Right? It's like I've taken everything that I can from this. And I'm making it harder than it needs to be. So a great cue that one of my friends gives in the gym is what would this be like if it was easier? So you're carrying the rock, right? This is a perfect example. You've got to carry your seventy two pound pole as a rock up a hill. There are a variety of different ways. I learned all of them with you. And you can have it in freaking bear hugging.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09Chris Williamson?

  Shoulders, you can have it in the center of the back, you can have it there. Why not carry it on the top of your head? Genuine question, why not carry it on the top of your head? Cause that would be harder.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Chris Williamson?

  That would make the seventy two pound rock harder. Well, you know, I'm calcifying the top of my skull and attempted like this is real suffering. You go, well, you don't do that. So we're always making a kind of value judgment around how hard should the hard thing be?

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Right, yep.

• 1:33:34Chris Williamson?

  And I just get the sense that a supportive wife or, you know, if you really want your kids to know what suffering is, break up with your wife when they're one year old. You know what I mean?

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:48Chris Williamson?

  Leave them, don't pay the alimony, leave them in a broken home. See if you can leave some needles around like.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  This is for you.

• 1:33:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. A nice systemic infection will really toughen them up. So we understand, but we just make value judgments. Like all of this is like, I feel like this is about the right amount.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:04Chris Williamson?

  You didn't make the kids do the mountain three times. Right, okay, so why one? Why not one in a bit? Why not three? Why not five? So with that, I just get the sense that if you have the choice of flying with the wind behind you, giving you a little bit of a push, being like, huh, the thing that I want to do that's really fucking hard is made easier by my partner. So I can run, let's say you can run a hundred miles on a day. If I have partner that's total asshole, I can get to like ninety five. If I have partner that's total hero, I can get to a hundred and five. How in the partner that gets me to a hundred and five? That doesn't mean that the thing is less virtuous or any easier,

• 1:34:46Chris Williamson?

  but that my capacity gets unlocked because I'm not wasting it carrying a rock on my head.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:50Chris Williamson?

  I'm carrying a rock on my shoulder.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  Right, that makes sense, yeah. I knew, that's why, I knew I, there's a reason I brought it up, because you could distill it down perfectly. But yeah, I was just curious about, I've never really thought about it past like just the basics like that. So thank you for.

• 1:35:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, if true it was in a relationship and his wife was permanently saying, fuck, I wish that you could do any exercise, but pull ups, like I just hate them. Like I'm mortally offended by pull ups. You'd be like, hey darling, come here, let me have a, let's, let's have a little chat about this. Like, can we just fucking ikne with the, with the pull up, the pull up?

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  The pull up hate?

• 1:35:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he's trying to, he's trying to break a world record here. So I do think that's important and I, as well, the. Learning when to actually just go, I'm gonna enjoy this. I'm gonna fucking enjoy the end of the race, right? Like you've run the marathon, you've run the ultra, you've run the 250. It's like, well, if you went 3% faster at the very, very end, then you'd shave four seconds off your time.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:51Chris Williamson?

  It's like, okay, but why did you do this? Did you do this to get the fastest time possible? You didn't win, someone else fucking won, right? You didn't win. Or did you do it so that you can take a tiny little bit off the top and be like, yes, I crossed the finish line, I fucking felt that, that's positive reinforcement, that's why I'm here. I'm here to experience it. And maybe this is why I'll never be a turbo billionaire or, you know, like the absolute world champion at some super difficult pursuit, uh, because I, I just sort of value other things. And this is not natural. So it's very much me like dictating it to me, not expressing it out of me, if that makes sense. I'm like, uh, saying what I want to be true and how I want to show up, not how I show up.

• 1:36:35Chris Williamson?

  It's still very much just like a fucking Japanese torture chamber inside of my head, me telling me that I'm not good enough and that could have been better and I shouldn't have done that thing and so on and so forth.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  Is that like, is that mostly a man thing? Like, uh, being, being judged on performance and worth and, um, do you think it's like more?

• 1:36:56Chris Williamson?

  Certainly contributes, I think.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz it's like, I heard somebody say the other day, cuz I, now I'm thinking, thinking about like what it means to be a man and a provider type thing.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that, I don't know, it's, it's hard, it's hard. I just know the pressure I felt as being a dad and a husband and like making sure everybody was taken care of, the bills were paid and all this. I just know, yeah, I don't know. I think, I think men get roped into this trap of.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Worth sometimes and it's just that's fine because that's how it works, you know. Not many women are out there saying, I need to work harder because I need to to get my husband a bigger house and a nicer car. I mean.

• 1:37:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's funny.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 1:37:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  You ever hear that?

• 1:37:51Chris Williamson?

  No, no, I don't. I don't know that much. The biggest house in Austin that was ever sold, actually, is owned by a friend and that was built by the the founder of Bumble. It was a woman and I do, I don't know what her partner does or whatever, but like you didn't build a fucking forty million dollar house. I know that. Unless you were, I don't know, also like a total freak.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11Chris Williamson?

  Business person. But there is a little bit of me that goes like.

• 1:38:16Chris Williamson?

  I wonder what it's like to be with someone who outwardly is that high achieving.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:23Chris Williamson?

  You know, and that's not to say that's the only way to achieve.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:27Chris Williamson?

  There's many, many other things that are more valuable than than how much money you bring, but.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 1:38:34Chris Williamson?

  The dynamic typically is, you know, protect a provider and then help me. And even if that's not the way that the dynamic needs to be, or even like structurally quite is, even if you've got two breadwinners in the household. There's still this sort of expectation that the guy's gonna.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:50Chris Williamson?

  Show up in that way, but.

• 1:38:55Chris Williamson?

  One of the saddest things to me is to see somebody who's won the game and is still playing it.

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  Um, like what's an example?

• 1:39:03Chris Williamson?

  A seventies year old businessman who is now a grandfather, high powered, you know, CEO of a company, founded a bunch, built and sold. And still going to the expos and still walking around hustling and grinding and giving out their card and, you know, staying up late and scrutinizing all the stuff. It's like, dude, you've got a legacy that is so fucking far beyond this business thing that you did. Now, maybe in a minority of cases, it's your passion. It's like you just adore printer ink or whatever. Turnip farming, whatever the fuck it is that you're great at.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Chris Williamson?

  For the most part, what I see is people that just want to be validated by the world around them and they just need that, that.

• 1:39:45Chris Williamson?

  I would say I've got a lot more grace for the people who haven't yet achieved it and are still chasing it.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:54Chris Williamson?

  You know, if it's, I want to become, but this is the problem with not having milestones and with the game being infinite, that you can get to a situation where you never feel like you've arrived.

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:02Chris Williamson?

  I think this is exactly what these people are struggling with. They're like, no, no, no, no, but it's when I get to 10 million subscribers on YouTube. But no, no, no, it's when the business hits, I sell it for three billion. Cause the first one that was at one billion, that just wasn't quite enough. I need to repeat it twice. It's not just doing it once, cause that could have been a fluke. I need to do it twice. Well, no, three times, cause I timed the market, cause of COVID. Like, you know, there's always a excuse, excuse, excuse.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:23Chris Williamson?

  And after a while, you need to kind of admit to yourself that this is just an addiction

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:28Chris Williamson?

  to wanting to be validated by the world and it's never going to be enough. And you're trying to fill a hole internally with accolades and love externally. And that's for the most part, not the way that it works. But in slight part is, if you never run a fucking hundred mile race, you'd be like, come on. Like, I've got to do it. I've got to do this thing.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Chris Williamson?

  You look, you did two forty. What's the next one?

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:51Chris Williamson?

  It'll be two fifty.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  I know, it has to.

• 1:40:52Chris Williamson?

  Where is that?

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  Arizona.

• 1:40:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay, what's the, we're in, it's gonna be the first of May soon.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:00Chris Williamson?

  So it's like the fifth of May or something you're running it?

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's from Jackson, or is it, is it Jackson's? Or no, no, what, uh, shit, no, I can't remember. Oh, no, Black, fuck, no, I can't remember. Black Canyon City? I don't know, two, two, uh, Flagstaff.

• 1:41:18Chris Williamson?

  What's the temperature like in Arizona at this time of the year?

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  Uh, it'll, I mean, it'll be hot during the day, of course, but it's, it's kind of high desert. So it'll be, could be cold at night.

• 1:41:28Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, like when, when I did Moab, for example, it was maybe ninety during the day. And then one night it got down to nine in the mountains. Quite a swing.

• 1:41:40Chris Williamson?

  Holy fuck.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's a, it's a tough one, but yeah, it'll be good. But yeah, it's, it's always like finding that limit essentially, cause.

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  You know, when you're saying that I was thinking back to like, I mean, when I grew up, I didn't even know people actually paid off cars. I thought you just had a car payment like, you know, it's like, I didn't know, or I thought like that little mobile home I showed you, I thought I'd live there and I didn't actually know people paid off their houses. I thought you just paid rent or your house payment forever. And I was just like, so now, now it's just like, I have to readjust, you know, my house is paid off my, and I'm just like, okay, I now I don't really know what to do. I really know what the goal is supposed to be.

• 1:42:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I mean, that's gold medalist syndrome.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:32Chris Williamson?

  Right. And a small, small regard. I know my mom and dad felt the same. My dad, one of my dad's proudest things is, you know, is mortgage free.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:39Chris Williamson?

  And, uh,

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  I didn't know that happened.

• 1:42:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. He just, I, well, I remember you showing me when we were driving around Eugene.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Chris Williamson?

  It wasn't like a trailer park. It's like a barn, like a mobile, like a single, small thing.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:51Chris Williamson?

  And you were saying, you know, when I grew up, I thought, wow, that would, you know, one of those in a truck, like, holy shit.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, that was awesome.

• 1:42:57Chris Williamson?

  That was the dream.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, those are called manufactured homes. Do they not have those here?

• 1:43:02Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, they will do. I just don't know what the name would have been.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  It's like an old tra, they used to have a trailer park where it's like they're made out of metal and now they look more like houses, but they're still sort of, they still come in on wheels.

• 1:43:13Chris Williamson?

  Internally, it's still the same. It gets set down.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Still the same. Yeah. But for, you know, for out there, like where I showed you where we drove, which is like, shit, that's awesome.

• 1:43:20Chris Williamson?

  You remember we went over that bridge that your sons used to jump off and there was a logger?

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:25Chris Williamson?

  That was pulled up by the side of the road.

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:27Chris Williamson?

  We had a little chat with him.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:29Chris Williamson?

  So cool.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  I know. Truck driver.

• 1:43:31Chris Williamson?

  I'm interested in how you've navigated success or your relationship with success, warping sort of the original mission and not getting a. A set of velvet handcuffs or a champagne problem prison or whatever where

• 1:43:53Chris Williamson?

  you want to keep your foot on the gas, you want to keep pushing hard, you also materially have a very different life to the one that you were used to and that you expected and that you grew up with and that even your kids grew up with, you know, you've sort of arced this across time.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08Chris Williamson?

  How does success warp your relationship with the the original mission in that way? How have you found navigating that?

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I just, well, I lean into the hate. So I'm always any negative about me is being reinforced. So I never feel like a success, so to speak, because I'm I'm reading these hateful things people say about me. It's hard to feel successful when you're reading what a piece of shit you are, right? So I get reminded of that daily, but also it's like, you know, even when I had my regular job, I was a superintendent at the water and power company. I felt like I never deserved that job. I'm like, no, they're going to figure out I'm not, even though I was good at it, I was good, but I always felt like I'm supposed to just be a worker.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  I'm I'm a worker. That's that's my talent level. That's my ability. That's my intelligence is we need workers. That's me. And so I've never, that's always, even though I I retired from that job and now I'm doing the other thing, it's just like I I'm a worker. That's that's what I do. So whether it's running miles, lifting weights, doing the podcast, a hundred and sixty episodes or whatever it is, it's just like, yeah, it's just a different form of being in the ditch. I thought that I was just going to be in a ditch, you know, putting water line in the ground when I work for the utility till I retired. So it's just, it's the same. It's just work. It's just in a different form.

• 1:45:44Chris Williamson?

  I got a question and I don't

• 1:45:47Chris Williamson?

  quite know how to phrase it, but I want you to try and think about it quite deeply if you can. What do you think? How do you think you would feel?

• 1:45:57Chris Williamson?

  If

• 1:45:59Chris Williamson?

  you believed that you were worthy of the things that you've achieved, or if you believed that you were good enough?

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  If I felt like I deserved this, because this is part of it. Um, man, I don't even, I've never felt that way. I've never, um, how would I feel?

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  Seems like it'd feel good. Would it feel, if, wouldn't it? I'm guessing. I mean, wouldn't it feel good to feel like you're a success? I think that'd feel good. I've never felt that. So I don't, um,

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  because even, even if somebody told me that, or if you, if you, if somebody says that right now, like, I would just be like, I would just discount it. I'd be like, no, no, they're fucking full of shit. They're just saying, that's what you're supposed to say to people. I mean, I wouldn't believe it. So I don't know. I'm not, I don't know.

• 1:47:07Chris Williamson?

  What if, let me give you another one. What if the next mountain that you need to climb is to be able to feel resonance and connection with the things that you've achieved in life?

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, um,

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  you just like take a step back and say,

• 1:47:27Chris Williamson?

  wow, I made it. Look at what I did.

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30Chris Williamson?

  I am good enough. I raised some fucking kid, I raised kids that are world record breakers and protect our country.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  Hmm. Um,

• 1:47:41Speaker 01

  I felt like that's, that I did what I was supposed to do. So if I didn't raise the kids to be that way, I failed. Because they had it. Obviously, they have it.

• 1:47:52Chris Williamson?

  So you have made it. So you were a success.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:47:55Chris Williamson?

  You're like a fuck, you're like the Gordon Ryan of, of taking compliments.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  I just, I just, I, I'm not a, I just did what I was supposed to do.

• 1:48:03Chris Williamson?

  I understand.

• 1:48:04Speaker 01

  So you can only fail.

• 1:48:07Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. So it was an obligation.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:48:09Chris Williamson?

  Right. In some ways, it was a minimum, minimum accepted level of.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  To them, because what if I, what if I, what if they weren't achieving these things? Then I failed because they had it in them. So as a parent, aren't you supposed to get the most, have your kids believe that they can achieve incredible things and, and get them to do it?

• 1:48:31Chris Williamson?

  But I mean, you know, you could argue, well, why is it not two world records? Why wasn't he a SEAL and a Ranger?

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  Cause you're not carrying it on your head.

• 1:48:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you gotta carry it on your head. It's very important. No, I, look, I, um, I really, I'm very, very impressed with everything that the fucking Haynes household does. And I just wonder what, I wonder what, I wonder whether you could fly with a little bit more breeze behind you, like internally with this stuff. God, fuck, yeah. Like, you know, just little glimmers, not all the time, right? I don't think it's going to kill your edge, but, uh, I'd love, and this is again, me very much speaking to me, which is why, again, I am, I'm saying it how I want it to be, not how it is.

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:49:17Chris Williamson?

  For me. Uh, yeah, I just love for you and for Goggins as well, you know, these, these guys that are really, really driven, you know, hatred and, and a chip on your shoulder and this bitterness and the resentment and stuff like that. Great fuel, but I just wonder if there's, you know, can this be a hybrid car as opposed to just a diesel one? And, uh, I'd, maybe that's a, maybe that's an interesting mountain for you to, or an interesting race, uh, for you to assess the difficulty of, because in the same way that, uh, spending a day on the couch, uh, would be, uh, incredibly uncomfortable in a manner that running 250 miles isn't for you. I wonder, okay, well.

• 1:50:02Chris Williamson?

  Let's look inward. What is the that I can do here with regards to this? Like, how can I? Oh, fuck. Congratulating myself? No, dude, I give me 200 kilos to deadlift a few hundred times. You know, like, that's that's what I want to do.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  I I I understand that. It's that's that is really hard.

• 1:50:24Speaker 01

  Because I, when I think about even this race coming up, you know, I broke my foot, I've had all these injuries. And it's like, of course, my wife, people that care about me is like, we can't do the race. I'm like, I have to do the race. Well, what what did? Well, because Speedland has these shoes coming out. It's a big promotion about me doing this race with the Coca Dona 250 shoes. Got a road shoe and a what in like this, what I have expectations. The race let me in.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  You know, to drive awareness and to drive interest. It's like I got people.

• 1:50:59Chris Williamson?

  Relying on me.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Relying on me. I I not doing it is not an option. Well, you're hurt. Doesn't matter. So it's like.

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not quite there. I'm not quite there yet to where I can be like. Because normally it'd be like, most people would probably be like, I'm injured. I was going to do it, but I broke my foot.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  And anybody would say, oh. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:51:27Chris Williamson?

  Good reason.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  That's a good reason, but I can't do it. So I can't.

• 1:51:31Chris Williamson?

  I wonder, have you got grandkids yet?

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  I'm gonna have one here on the 12th. Tanner.

• 1:51:38Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations, Tanner. I wonder what granddad life is going to be like for you.

• 1:51:45Speaker 01

  I mean, if kids don't change you.

• 1:51:49Chris Williamson?

  Run it back. We'll do it again. Fucking one generation down. I looked, dude. That's one of the things that you would typically hear about the maniacal solo ranger guy that, you know, keeps working out, but he's softened by kids. Like, no, no, no, no, his kids were a vehicle for it. Like, you know, it went even harder. But I don't know, you you. It'll be fascinating. Like, you're a fascinating guy, and I'm going to be really, really interested to watch what happens over the next few years is presumably more. The Haynes household grows more and more and and and the grandkids thing. And you go, fuck, like, I'm revisiting this.

• 1:52:29Chris Williamson?

  Babying childhood thing and running this back. Hmm. Where was I at the last time this was the case? And how do I want to show up this time for grandkid Haynes?

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:39Chris Williamson?

  You know?

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  I think it'll be different because as you said, like even if I had kids now with where I am socially, economically, you know, when they were born, we didn't have anything, you know? So it was just like, it was a grind. Different now. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe, maybe we'll be different.

• 1:52:59Chris Williamson?

  Cam Haynes, ladies and gentlemen. Cam, you're awesome, man. I'm so glad that you got to come on.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  Thank you. And your drink is amazing.

• 1:53:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, fantastic. Tell people about your book, most importantly.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Get me dialed in.

• 1:53:09Chris Williamson?

  Good, good, good, good. That's all we need.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  Undeniable. Chris Williamson is featured. Modern Wisdom.

• 1:53:14Chris Williamson?

  First chapter and on the back.

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  Outlier.

• 1:53:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, undeniable. It's available everywhere. It's ships on May 6th. The goal is last time.

• 1:53:24Chris Williamson?

  So you're in the middle of this fucking run.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:27Chris Williamson?

  When your book releases.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:53:28Chris Williamson?

  So your publisher wants to, will be chasing you down.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  That's why I'm doing this now.

• 1:53:32Chris Williamson?

  To run away from the book?

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:34Chris Williamson?

  Oh, right. Okay.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  Well, I just said that the book, you know, a book release is usually pretty predictable. You go and you do these appearances and that. I said, mine's gonna be a little different. I'm gonna be doing a 250 mile race when the book comes out. And that's, to me, that means undeniable. You are undeniable.

• 1:53:51Chris Williamson?

  You're living the philosophy.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's like, last time they had Endure, they, they got it up to number seven on New York Times. So I got screwed. I was the best seller of those, but it's an editorial. So just give me what I deserve. I just want number one this time.

• 1:54:05Chris Williamson?

  All right. Okay. Well, I, I'd love it, dude. Not just because I'm plastered throughout it. It's fucking awesome and I appreciate the fuck out of you.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you, Chris. It's a, I mean, it's, it's been, getting to know you has been amazing. Getting to watch your growth and success is incredible. You put the pressure on me to, to thank and to be smart.

• 1:54:26Chris Williamson?

  You made me run 11 miles. Go fuck yourself.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  So we, yeah, I guess it's reciprocal, but thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. Big fan of you and Modern Wisdom. So thank you.

• 1:54:34Chris Williamson?

  Appreciate you too, dude.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:54:36Speaker 02

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