The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Chris Williamson: The Shocking New Research On Why Men And Women Are No Longer Compatible!
Episode Date: April 10, 2023From a bullied and unpopular schoolboy to famous party boy appearing on some of the biggest reality shows, Chris Williamson was living the life most men in their twenties dream about. However, to Chri...s this didn’t feel like his life and he didn’t truly understand himself, instead he was just going through the motions and pretending to be a success. Since then, Chris has been on a constant mission to evolve and follow his ceaseless curiosity. He has used his podcast as his own university degree, talking to the world’s preeminent thinkers and learning alongside his listeners. In this expansive conversation Chris discusses everything from strategies in the fight against imposter syndrome and gaining confidence, the true price of success and what drives successful people, to the game of love and relationships in the modern world. Chris: Youtube: @ChrisWillx Instagram: https://bit.ly/41c1dr5 Twitter: https://bit.ly/3UjUc5i Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo
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Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want
to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can
say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would
expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America,
thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack
and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United
States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard
in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And
thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. 78% of women want to date
a man who is as educated or as employed as they are. This is just a straight up imbalance.
And this is what I've called the tall girl problem.
So, Chris Williamson.
He is an entrepreneur, former club promoter turned podcaster with more than 70 million downloads.
How did I get here?
Chris, are you aware of the dark side that's driving you?
I really want to go here.
I've been chronically unpopular throughout all of school.
Badly bullied.
Didn't have a group of friends.
So I'd compromised an awful lot
of who I truly was
to try and just be as popular
and successful in that world as possible.
But there was an ambient sense
that something is broken with me.
In a journal,
I've got a couple of different entries
and it just put,
I think I'm lonely.
15% of men say that they have
zero close friends.
Where did we go wrong? The world of social connection has been made less and less social.
The single biggest predictor of your health outcomes in life are the number of close
connections that you have. It's more than going to the gym. It's more than stopping drinking.
People that are in relationships have better health outcomes.
But one in three men between the ages of 18 and 30 hasn't had sex in the last year. 80% of men report not approaching a woman because they are scared of being seen as creepy.
And by 2040, 45% of 25 to 45-year-old women will be single and childless.
You can start to see how this imbalance could cause a problem.
This is a very difficult conversation. The first thing that we need to do is...
Chris, you do a lot of things and you do a lot of things very very well one of the struggles i had when thinking
about how to direct this conversation was really like understanding because you're so diverse and
you're thinking and your ideas and the subject matter that you're curious about how to try and
encapsulate exactly who you are so i guess the question i wanted to start with is, in your own words, what is your mission?
I'm a very curious person. I always have been. And I now have the opportunity with my podcast,
Modern Wisdom, to commercialize, utilize, weaponize that so that I can bring people in that I'm interested in. So a good example, I did a master's and a bachelor's degree at uni
in business. And I always regretted not going and doing philosophy or psychology.
And in retrospect, it always made me resentful of uni a little bit because I'd spent all of
this time learning stuff that didn't teach me anything about the business world. But then
upon starting the podcast, what I realized was that I've been able to design my perfect
university degree with the top lecturers on the planet. And I get to do it three times a week
at the cadence that I want. And not only do I get the lecturers that I want, but I get to ask them
about the specific area of their work that I want as well. So it's curiosity. The thing that drives
me is curiosity. The reason that I do this is because I want to know about everything. I want
to know about why the guy that was sat next to us at dinner last night decided to wear a suit with like converse like I want to know
what is it about that uh so curiosity that answer is um focused on what you get from it right is
there an sort of an external mission something that it gives to the world that you're particularly
and something that provides you meaning by delivering it to the world that you're particularly and something that provides you
meaning by delivering it to the world is there is there an answer there too yeah so toward the end
of my 20s i had a lot of the trappings of success that maybe society would tell you that you should
have so i'm running this big nightlife events business which i was very proud of and still am
but there was something missing despite the fact that I had the blue tick on
Twitter and the free charcoal toothpaste and I'd been on Love Island and Take Me Out and
people knew my name and I had monetary success and status and stuff. But there's something missing.
And I didn't really understand myself particularly well. And I think that that's a problem that a lot
of people get to, especially guys toward the end of their twenties, they think all of the
values that I have absorbed that are supposed to be the things that make me happy, maybe don't
fulfill me in the way that they were promised. And that required me to do some reflection.
And I realized I actually didn't have very many opinions. What I'd been doing was I'd been playing
a role as this big name on campus, party boy, club promoter, big dick around town
guy. And I'd compromised an awful lot of who I truly was to try and just be as popular and
successful in that world as possible. Right. What that meant was I didn't really understand myself.
I didn't really understand my mission or my purpose. And now looking back, I realized that
all of the steps that I took to
get from where I was to where I am now, which is still like an adult infant, but slightly less so,
all of that, they are lessons that I can gift to other people that will help them to expedite
success, avoid the pitfalls, do it in less time with less loneliness, with less pain and suffering than I had to go through
to achieve the same thing. And hopefully by speaking to people that changed my life,
that gave me lessons, I can then pass those on to other people and get them from where I was
to somewhere that's even better than where I am now.
Okay. So take me back. What are the dominoes that fell or the connecting dots that took you to that point where you were the party boy on campus that was on Take Me Out on TV and running club
nights? Take me back to the start. What are the most important things I need to know about that
early experience that took you to that moment? I arrived at university in Newcastle and I've
been chronically unpopular throughout all of school, pretty badly bullied, pretty alone, an only child and just didn't have a squad, didn't have a group of friends really. Was successful in sports and
had a team, but didn't really have a tight group of friends. Got to college and that was a little
bit better, started to come out of my shell a little bit, but still not much. And then you get
to uni and the same as every school kid, you know, you'd go home for summer and you'd be like, I'm going to reinvent
myself and I'm going to be the cool kid. So I arrived at university and that was a good intersection
of a new opportunity to be a new person and also maybe a little bit more social ability. Start
running a nightlife events business with the guy that I sit next to in my first ever seminar. After that, we get to the stage where that's very successful very quickly. I immediately
tied a lot of my identity to the first thing I've ever been super successful in, in life,
which is running a nightlife. I can get renown. I can have people that need me,
which is not really the same as wanting me, but they need me, which is close enough.
So I think, right, well,
if I just throw all of myself into this business,
then I'm going to be accepted by the world at large.
And over the space of the next 10 years or so,
that meant that I fully dedicated myself to that mission.
And we were very, very good at it.
We expanded from Newcastle to Manchester,
multiple nights per week across multiple cities. And then I did whatever it took to get more clout
as well. So take me out, then first season of Love Island, first person through the doors
on Love Island. And I spend all of this time. Love Island was an interesting reflection period
because there was nowhere for me to hide. No distractions, no TV, no phone, no laptop,
no friends, no books, no books no nothing right there's just
you and this group of people and the group of people that were in the love love island villa
were genuine versions of the person that i thought i was i thought that i was this big
name on campus party boy and then i get deposited into this inescapable weapons-grade bunker of those party boys and party girls.
And I look around and go, ah, I'm not supposed to be here.
Something's off.
Something's discordant.
It's not working.
And then I get out, and it wasn't like, and then the skies opened,
and I realized that my path was not to wear small swim shorts on TV.
However, it did make me think it was a very, I call it a fatal dose of contrast that I was no longer able to hide that there is something a little bit off here. And that was a good time.
Your Jordan Petersons, your Alanda Botton from the School of Life, your Sam Harris's, your Joe Rogan's all coming to the front.
I start consuming their stuff and it makes me think wow i i actually this speaks to me it helps
to educate me to be better and to understand myself and that's kind of how i phased out i
suppose when you talk about struggling in school socially what was the reason for that have you
ever sort of diagnosed why you didn't quote unquote fit in
in school yeah so uh quite i think any only child struggles to be socialized to the level that they
need to in order to have the same set of social skills that anyone with a brother or sister does
right like think about how much time you with a sibling spend arguing,
hitting each other, going to sleep, them knocking on your door when you're trying to get ready,
arguing for the bathroom, all of these tiny little interactions. I had none of that, right? And even
if you spent every waking moment of free time in clubs and sports and whatnot that I did,
it's going to be hard. And then I think that there is some inherent introversion in me
and it kind of combined for me to not really understand other kids.
So I used to obsess over things like the kind of hairstyle
that other kids had or the way that they tied their tie in school
or the type of shoes that they wore, the way that they carried their bag,
which shoulder their bag was on, because I was adamant I would fixate on that
and that would be the reason that they had friends and I didn't, because I couldn't understand why I
didn't have friends. What it was, was that I couldn't socially relate to kids particularly
well because I didn't have a wide variety of social skills. So I struggled, but I was taking
this super attentive, like, what is it? What's going on?
It's trying to assess.
Is it because Stephen wears his watch on his right wrist
instead of his left wrist?
Is it because of whatever, whatever?
Because I was trying to diagnose what was going on.
Do you know what's driving you from,
you know, the good and the bad,
the light and the dark?
I'm more specifically interested to start with the dark.
Do you ever have conversations with yourself
about the, when I say dark, it's a subjective term, but the dark side that's driving
you? Absolutely. Yeah. Chronically, of course. I think anybody that believes that they're driven
by a pure love and positive reinforcement is usually confused. I think that there was a study done
that looked at the three most common traits
of highly successful people, hyper-successful people.
We're talking top-level CEOs.
The first one was a crippling sense of insufficiency.
The second one was a superiority complex.
And the third one was an ability to have maniacal focus.
So what you have, and it's this Peterson story,
which you may be familiar with,
they starve rats and put them into a tube.
They attach a spring to the tail of the rat
so that they can tell how much force they're pulling with.
And that gives a proxy for desire, right?
That's how much they want it.
They waft the smell of cheese in from the front
and the rat pulls toward the cheese.
And you think these rats are starving.
They're going to be pulling very hard.
Then they take the rats out and they do another iteration of the study. This time they waft the
smell of cheese in from the front and they waft the smell of a cat in from behind. The rats pull
harder. What's the lesson? In life, not only do you need to run towards something that you want,
but you need to run away from something that you fear. And I've spent, I've spoken to 600
high performers on my show, right? I would say that
on average, most of the people that are unbelievably good at anything that they do
are driven by a fear of insufficiency, not by a perfectly balanced desire for success.
And this tension between success and happiness, I think is something that both me and you are quite interested in. So the reason it's interesting
is a lot of the time we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing which is supposed to get it.
Right? So if in service of becoming happy, we sacrifice happiness to achieve success in the
hopes that success will make us happy. If you created an equation of what's going on and you
just remove success from both sides, what are you left an equation of what's going on and you just remove
success from both sides, what are you left with? Just happiness. Now, I'm not saying that you can
recant all of your desires for status and accolade and striving and stuff like you need to go out and
do things. But I do think that a lot of the time we overcomplicate the world. And a lot of it is
because when we're kids, our parents will reinforce our successes by praising us and will
criticize us when we fail, which can metastasize as we grow up into being, I am only worthy of
love and acceptance and admiration and praise if I win. It causes you to fear being a loser more
than want to be a winner and winning salves. It's like an anesthetic,
right? That, that papers over fears of insufficiency. So yeah, I mean, when I was a
club promoter, uh, I knew that if I was stood on the front door of a nightclub that people would
need me. They want the VIP bands. They want to be in the place where the pretty girls are. They
want to get in for cheaper or a free bottle of vodka, or they, they want to skip the queue or
whatever. So they need me. And then when you roll it forward to the podcast, I have to be very careful that I don't just transmute that same energy into,
instead of gifting people entry into nightclubs, now I'm gifting them insights that I've learned,
concepts from some interesting person that's going to improve their life as we sit around
a dinner table or as we go out for a lunch or whatever, I have to be careful that that's not the case. And for the people that maybe resonate with this fear of insufficiency and this requirement to
offer the world something in order for the world to feel like they're worthy, it is possible to
deprogram it. It is possible to tune that volume down. But one of the things that you're going to
pay a price with is your drive, because the rat that is running away
from something that it fears
will pull harder than the rat
that's just running towards something that it wants.
The traits of super competitive people
don't just include the superiority complex,
but the crippling anxiety about being a failure.
So this tension between success and failure is,
it is a driver, but it's an incredibly toxic fuel, right? To be
propelled by fear of insufficiency can work super well, but it's very dangerous. There's a final
example, Eddie Hall, world's strongest man. And he retires on the podium. He's holding this trophy
in the air and he's saying, this is for you Nana. And his grandma's passed away recently and he's crying and he's 200 kilos and six foot four.
And you know, he's worked his entire life. And he said in an interview shortly afterward that
if he hadn't won the world's strongest man, he would be dead, single with no relationship to
his kid because he was pushing his body so hard with the lifting and presumably the drugs that
he was taking. he was training so
much that his relationship with his wife was breaking down and he was out of the house so
much he had no relationship to his kid jason pargin says uh accept that all of your heroes
are full of shit your heroes aren't gods they're just regular people who got particularly good at
one thing by sacrificing literally everything else that's the price that you pay for success. And most people wouldn't pay
it. That point about reprogramming the toxic drive that you have. I often ponder with myself,
I'm like, when I think about status games, and how status games that, you know, we often think
that we're over a certain status game. So, you know, I had a guy on my podcast who talked a lot about the evolutionary
basis of status and how if you go to uh an estate in the uk where there's not a lot of money they'll
have bigger logos on their tracksuits it will store will store great guy um and then as people
get richer and richer the logos get smaller and obviously they play a different type of game right
it's about boats and other things and i that really hit me like a ton of bricks because i
i thought dressed in all black i really don't have any i have one material
possession you saw it last night which is the bag i had on which i'm waiting for it to break nice
bag it's a nice bag yeah um but outside i thought i'm over status games and i realized that i'm just
playing a different set of status games just a counter signal yeah it's the red sneaker effect
it's the reason that the ceo that's worth a billion can turn up in a hoodie but the ceo that's worth
half a million still wears a three-piece suit. There's another idea called the barber pole of status. So you can
imagine that people who are at the absolute top in terms of status, they need to make sure that
the people below them can't be confused for them, but they can counter signal by having the...
So you look at the vagabond style of flares and hoodie, even essentials essentials uh yeezy uh yay stuff all it's almost like hobo
chic why well it's because i am so cool and so trendy that i can counter signal off the top so
everyone is playing a status game everybody is at all times it's just a case of what game are you
playing and that toxic drive the the big shift i've had in my life is i'm now focusing on something
which is also driving me to a more fulfilling place.
Whereas before I was focusing on like a monetary game where I was like, how much money can I acquire?
How much, how big can I build a business?
Now I'm focusing it more on things that are more intrinsically aligned with that, which that makes me happy.
So this, for example, or writing or DJ or djing for example but it's still there
so my question to you there's kind of two questions there is what's your journey been
like with reprogramming that that toxic driving force or that dark driving force or those
feelings of insufficiency and secondly you said that we can reprogram it we can dilute it but it
comes at the cost of drive yeah how does one do such a thing? So what I was missing for me personally was I didn't
feel competent in things. I needed to feel like I was competent and I was proving something to
the world each time that I succeeded. Why did you need to feel competent? Because that would
solve my feelings of insufficiency. For every time that I won, we had a good club night,
the business was good good we broke a record
with entries at a different event or whatever that would make me feel yeah wow I'm like less
of a piece of shit was there a time where you were made to feel incompetent I think just chronically
through my childhood of not being super accepted there was a ambient sense that something is broken with me.
Something is wrong.
Because if there wasn't something wrong,
I would have friends.
People would want me, right?
I think that was just a relatively logical,
if this, then that statement that came out of it.
And when it comes to changing that,
Alex Homozy, who you had on the show recently, has this great quote where he says, you don't become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are, outwork your self-doubt. where I could no longer deny that my efforts were bearing fruits and that I was becoming competent at something.
It was a crushing amount of volume
and incontrovertible evidence
that smashed my imposter syndrome into the ground.
Did it?
Yeah, yeah.
Do the games, do the games you,
because now you're in a different category, right?
Yeah, but I feel like I'm supposed to be here.
I feel like I deserve to be here.
You know, often my guests talk about like that voice in their head, which whispers to them,
you know, words of self-doubt. And it seems to me like, I'd say 95% of them haven't managed
to shake that in some form. It still shows up at some time in some place.
Well, it's still there, but it's a lot quieter, a lot quieter. And you have to accept after a
while that if you continue to disprove your
imposter syndrome in the real world, every single time that you're faced with a challenge,
you succeed, despite the fact that you were adamant that you were going to fail,
or you had fears of insufficiency or all the rest of it. After a while, you have to accept
that it has nothing to do with your competence and everything to do with your addiction to
feeling like an imposter. You are delusional about your competence in reverse.
Every single time that you are faced with a challenge,
you succeed.
Every single time you're faced with a future challenge,
you believe that you're going to fail.
It's got nothing to do with your competence.
So Rogan calls it building a mountain
with layers of paint, right?
Incredibly thin each time,
but after 600 episodes
or however many million dollars of revenue or whatever you go, maybe there's something to this,
you know, maybe I don't, maybe I'm not a totally worthless piece of shit.
On that point of how it diminishes one's drive. Have you seen a diminishment in your drive then
as your feelings of sufficiency have improved? No, because I have changed what is
driving me to something which is much more aligned with who I am. So the curiosity for me is crippling
and I want to know about everything, which my desire to learn things is so much stronger than
any fear of insufficiency or desire for success was ever going to be, right?
That I've just supplanted one toxic type of drive for one incredibly personal, very scalable, leverageable, beautiful kind of drive. That being said, there are times, this is, I'm
speaking from, you know, the perfect version of me, that voice, that negative voice comes in a few times a week. It reminds me that I maybe I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not who I
pretend to be, but it's getting quieter and quieter and quieter. And I think it's getting
quieter because I have a stack of undeniable proof that I'm supposed to be here.
Do you remember the last time that voice came in?
Yeah, I think I told you about this last night.
I was on a podcast and my blood sugar fell through the floor.
And what it showed me was that under times of extreme stress,
we revert back to a voice from somewhere in our past.
I don't know who it was.
I don't know whether it was an angry parent or a teacher that was annoyed at me or whatever but this voice came in and it said you're
not supposed to be here you were never supposed to be here you're boring no one cares what you've
got to say you know that you're a fake everyone's going to find out everybody's laughing at you
nobody likes you and i thought as i'm talking away on this show and my head is spinning with
all of this stuff and i'm thinking where the fuck has this voice come from?
Like, who is that?
I thought that I transcended this voice.
However, in a high pressure situation,
when I felt bad, something came back through.
So I think what it does remind me
is that there is always work to be done.
There's always something there that's hiding behind
and that becoming complacent about personal growth me is that there is always work to be done there's always something there that's hiding behind and
that becoming complacent about personal growth is something that is going to allow that to seep
back in you talked about the the paint like the layers of paint that build confidence this is
something that i've been particularly compelled by because so many people that listen to this
podcast struggle with the idea of confidence and there's a big industry out there as you've said
that says you know look in the mirror tell yourself you're a millionaire um say it three
times write it in your journal but then as i reflected and as i've written in my my book um
the thing that and it relates to what alex homozy said is the thing that i've learned is it's all
evidence for better or for worse stack of undeniable proof and it goes the other way that evidence that
you got at seven years old when you went up and tried to do a public speech
and everyone laughed at you,
it's a thicker layer
than one layer of evidence to say that you're capable.
It's a harder layer to sort of strip.
If there is someone listening now
and they want to maybe orientate their drive
to the fulfilling pursuits that you talk about,
but also they want to build their confidence,
what advice would you give them? I that's 80 of the listener base here
act first okay you have to lead with action because if you are someone that deals with a
crippling sense of insufficiency your ability to discount any good thoughts you have in your mind is going to be so strong.
If you try and lead with positivity first,
I need to think it, wish it, believe it,
and I will achieve it.
Your set point of negativity
is going to just crush that into the ground.
I'm speaking from personal experience, right?
As the guy that was chronically unconfident
and still has the imposter syndrome that does creep in,
you have to start with action.
It needs to be, okay,
what would have had to have happened in a week's time
for me to look back on that week and find pride in myself?
Pride's seen as something that you should be ashamed of.
It's one of the seven deadly sins.
But David Goggins,
I did an episode with him a couple of months ago.
We can put it in the show notes
if people are interested.
And he said,
pride is something that everybody misses,
that having pride in your name,
your performance,
the way that you show up for other people
is something that you can do.
But you need to do something
that is worthy of being prideful about, right?
What would have had to have happened in a week for you to look back on that week with pride? Okay, maybe
stop breaking promises to yourself. When you say, I'm going to wake up tomorrow at 7am,
and when the option comes to hit the snooze button, don't do it. There's one win that you've
got for the day. That's action, right? And it is
just, you know, it's tried to say the Peterson clean your room thing. But the reason that that
works is that you start with the smallest ever step and you expand out from that. You want to
become a writer. You want to leave your job and become a writer. Okay. Can you commit to writing
one blog post on Substack per week for the next three weeks. That would make you feel like less of a loser if you did that.
Action has to come first if you're the sort of person who is chronically
unconfident because you will drag your sense of identity behind you.
Mark Manson says that identity lags behind our status by about one to two years.
So for both me and you, in two years time, we'll go,
I understand why I was in LA that day and look back. Start with action and make small promises
to yourself that you don't break. If you had a friend and every single time that you and your
friend decided that you're going to go out for dinner, that friend either showed up two hours
late or didn't show up at all, you would stop trusting that person. That is the relationship
that you have with yourself. You need to be able to trust your own word. And a lot of us don't
because life is very convenient and it is easy for people to not stick to the promises that they set
themselves because our ability to be idealistic is always going to outstrip reality's ability to deliver that to us as soon as you posit an ideal you then begin to
compare yourself to that ideal and true hell is when the person that you are meets the person that
you could have been sometimes i ponder how um you've probably seen this in your own life i'm
sure you have where you'll have a friend in your life i've got a couple of friends back home who
i've tried to help in some way,
maybe give some advice
when they're struggling in their hardest times.
And the advice has been ineffective.
And then you've got another friend
who will just need one idea.
They'll be listening to your podcast
and one idea will be the seed that changes their life.
I often like think that I overestimate the power of words
because everything you've said there makes perfect sense.
But we both know that 95%,
maybe more of people that have just received that,
it will not convert into any kind of behavior.
Habits are hard to break, man.
And the habit of not doing things
is unbelievably difficult to get past.
It's one of the problems with anyone
that listens to your show or my show.
You will love being cerebral, right?
You will love the idea that I can use cognitive horsepower to just get myself out of problems.
And there is a case of learning as masturbation, right?
And believing that learning about something is the same as enacting it,
and it's not. That's why it has to be action first. A quote from one of my friends that he
uses when he's thinking about a concept is, does this grow corn? Basically, is it useful? Tell me
how I can use this in my life. Does it grow fucking corn, right? It's this beautifully,
beautiful sounding concept, cognitive bias that helps me understand the way that my brain works
and my relationship with everybody else. How do I use that in my life? Give me something to apply
it to. And that's why with the confidence thing, choose promises that you will never break to
yourself. I'm going to get up on
time for the next month. I am not going to hit the snooze button. If you do that and you look back in
a month and you go, oh my God, that's the first time I've done that in forever, maybe. That's a
big win. And you can do the James Clear thing. We'll write it on a board. We'll track it, what
gets measured, et cetera, et cetera. But the main thing is just keep promises to yourself. and you can do the james clear thing we'll write it on a board we'll track it what gets like
measured etc etc but the main thing is just keep promises to yourself and that is a good way to go
from here is an insight i learned about i want to do breath work cold plunge go to the gym fast
until 12 midday get up on time sunlight in the eyes and then whatever it is right that you want
to do turn it into a promise don't break the promise
one of the really important things you said there was about the size of that first step i was
reflecting there on the way that video games are designed to make sure that every subsequent level
is not too intimidating that you lose motivation but it's not too um too small that you lose
motivation as well you can lose motivation on
both ways and so it's the same with crosswords and video games they get incrementally more
challenging to keep you engaged the size of that first step is is i think a central point there
because when people listen to podcasts with people like me and you or andrew huberman and they hear
that they've got to maybe get up at this time, go outside, gaze, earth, like put their feet on the ground, cold plunge, da, da, da, da.
And I go, I'm going to do that.
And I set that as my first step.
I'm set up for failure.
How important do you think the size
and the subjective size of that small,
that first step you take to build trust with yourself
is, and to start that discipline?
The goal isn't to have the perfect daily routine
tomorrow the goal is to still be winning your daily routine in 50 years time if you expand your
time horizon sufficiently you will realize that very very tiny steps can compound look at the
graph of mine or your followers on spotify especially mine, right? Because I was doing my show for so
long and it's just nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, everything. Well, why? Well, it's because
it's latent leverage. It takes so many layers of paint to get there. So yes, the first step has to
be incredibly small. Do that. Make it so small that you can't say no to it. And then what's next and then what's next so when i decided that i was going to try and become a
more virtuous version of me i was going to start telling the truth i was going to
have a morning routine i was going to develop a meditation habit i was going to read all of
these things i wanted to do none of which i did right toward the end of my 20s none of which i
did all of which are now the foundation of of of my life over, I don't know, 1500 meditation sessions and all of the authors on the
podcast and et cetera, et cetera. I had to do that one step at a time. I didn't have a stable
sleep and wake pattern until COVID ever in my adult life. I'd never gone to bed and woken up
at the same time for seven days in a row until COVID because I was running nightlife events, right?
So if no matter how difficult the setback is, even if you're a shift worker, you're a nurse,
you're a parent, whatever your challenge is, just make the promise to yourself sufficiently small that even with that challenge in front of you, you can make it work.
I hear that. And I'm motivated as a lot of people will
be because that's what happens, you know, like a shower as the cliche goes, motivation comes and
then it slowly, it slowly washes over us and slowly starts to fade. How do I prepare or how
should I be preparing for the day where I've heard Chris Williams and Steve speaking about this.
And then in three and a half days time, I wake up in the morning, life has happened, the kids screaming, my motivation seems to have escaped me.
The distinction between discipline on that day, and the motivation I got from the source.
And that came from the inspiration of this conversation. What do I do?
Discipline eats motivation for breakfast. You don't need motivation. It's great if it arrives.
It's some extra fuel on the fire.
But discipline is the thing that you need. What would you tomorrow want you today to do?
You tomorrow would want you to keep that promise to yourself.
And it's why discipline is so much more valuable.
I remember this conversation between Jocko Willink and Sam Harris six years ago,
and they're talking about how you can't fake bravery because if you do a thing in spite of
being scared of doing the thing, that is bravery, right? There's no such thing as fake bravery.
Like you just, if you do the thing and you're scared, that's bravery. If you don't do the thing
and you weren't scared, that's not bravery, right? The same thing goes for discipline.
Doing the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing is discipline, right?
You don't need motivation
to get yourself up to go and do a thing.
Make the promise small, build it up step-by-step.
Know that you are going to have setbacks.
And this is my favorite rule from James Clear,
which is a habit missed once is a mistake.
A habit missed twice is the
start of a new habit. Never miss two days in a row. So ideally go for a month, build it up.
But after that, if you ever miss one day, go, okay, mistakes are going to happen. Tomorrow,
I double down. Tomorrow, I go on time, absolutely perfect. I'm straight up out of bed, or I go to
the gym, or I walk the dog, or I do my meditation or whatever. And that's a good heuristic. Stops errors snowballing into new
habits. What about if I get to day three? It's then in James Clare's definition, the start of
a new habit. Do I not just apply the same thinking that I did when I missed it on day one?
You just need to, well, I mean, if you don't ever miss two days,
you shouldn't be able to get to day three.
What if I do though?
I think about my own fitness journey.
I've been working out for the last three years
and there will be a week where motivation is gone
and there'll be multiple weeks.
So there'll be, sometimes it'll be two weeks in a row
where I'm like taking my ass to the gym,
but then my workout is absolutely atrocious.
I might as well have not have gone.
And I do that
because i'm trying to continue the behavior in spite of the motivation well it doesn't change
your worth as a person you know you you want to do this because you think that it's good for you
because you believe that it's good for you because you care about yourself you care about steven and
his body and his mind you want him to have a long and healthy life and the same for everybody else
that's listening they want to have good outcomes from the things that they do in life you don't need to lambast
yourself because you don't do a thing that is perfectly designed to make you feel good
okay like you missed three days in a row we get back on the horse we go again discipline
you talked a second ago about the fundamentals of your life. Now, the things you
wanted to put in place, you referenced meditation and these kinds of things. When I think about the,
the Chris Williams that was running those club nights was on Love Island, take me out.
And the guy that sat in front of me now, if there were a couple of key fundamental tools or devices
that have taken you from there to the guy sat in front of me here. And you know, what are, what are
those, what are those things? And I say this because and you know what are what are those what are those things and i say
this because you know when people give advice on this podcast sometimes when in books and stuff
they'll talk to things they think they're supposed to say but you never really get the true stuff
they'll say oh meditation i've never heard that before i'm like for chris williams what what took
you from from there to the chris williamson sat in front of me now? Getting up on time every day.
Every day?
Every day.
And what's on time for you?
Seven, seven to 7.30,
depending on what time I went to bed.
So it will change each night,
but I'll set an alarm and I will get up on time.
Go to bed and wake up
at around about the same time each day.
It makes a massive difference.
Go for a morning walk, first thing. So sunlight before screen light was something that I was doing before Huberman talked
about the down regulation of the amygdala response and the lateral eye movement helps blah, blah,
blah in the brain. I came upon this because I wanted to go for a walk more. I wanted to get
as many steps in as I could. Get up and go for a walk because it just,
so many people are stopped the second they wake up
because they use their phone as their alarm.
They roll over, they hit the alarm on their phone
and now their phone's in their hands.
And now they're in bed for half an hour
doing the cycle through all of their social media apps.
Sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom.
That was the number one change that I made.
Phone is outside of the bedroom and I bought,
how long have radio alarms been around?
A million years, right?
Like just get any kind of alarm clock.
Wake up, go for a walk before you use your phone.
That will change so many of the problems that people encounter.
Because the addiction to technology is primary,
I think, to a lot of people's challenges in their day.
Meditation has been interesting for me. It's definitely helped me to be calmer, to be more
peaceful. It's not an insane performance enhancer. The breath work as well. I really enjoy doing
that. It's not an insane performance enhancer. Reading, I would say some form of content
absorption that could come from reading articles, reading books,
listening to podcasts, listening to audio books.
Something that pushes your understanding is very important.
And for me, that's moved.
It was books a while ago.
Now it's more sub stack articles that I read on my Kindle.
For a long time, it's always been podcasts.
Sometimes it's audio books, sometimes it's not.
What about content creation, the other side of that coin and the obligation to create
what impact has that had on your life it's everything because by having to
talk about the things that i learn it forces me to learn them right until you can explain
something to somebody else you don't really understand it so okay prove to me that you understand it by telling me about it. I can't. Okay, well,
you don't understand it then. So this is one of the reasons I suggest to people that they should
do a fake podcast with a friend for 30 minutes every week. Phones are outside of the room. Put
one phone face down on the table, press the record button, and just have a conversation and pretend
that people are watching. Welcome back to the show. Stephen, today we're going to talk about the UFC or Tommy Fury and
Jake Paul. Who do you think is going to win? And it forces you to be rigorous and precise and
consistent with the things that you believe. And it is a forcing function that synthesizes the
things that you're doing. Other people might prefer to write or draw. One of the advantages
of doing it for an audience is that you actually feel like someone's keeping you accountable, right? If it's just, oh, I'm going to draw a drawing every week for my own
pleasure, as opposed to I'm going to draw a drawing every week and post it on my Instagram,
or I'm going to write a Substack article. I mean, I have a posting cadence on the show,
Monday, Thursday, Saturday. And if it wasn't for the fact that I know if I don't post on those days,
the audience is going to be like, hang on a second, mate, like it's Monday. Where's the podcast episode? It would be
a lot less motivating for me to do it. I'm driven by that. So I think that absolutely creating some
kind of content, whether it be just for you or whether it be to put out into the world and to
build a platform with it is a good start. The most important thing I think in hindsight that
I've gained from
content creation is in fact like honing my skill of sales because you're forced in this medium to
make your ideas as concise as you possibly can and say them in a way which is engaging and i've
reflected over the last 10 years or so of making content and recording videos and go man the impact
it's had on my business my ability to pitch and. But even if you're a guy and you're looking to pick someone up in a bar, man or woman, it's profound to me, the impact that the obligation
to create content specifically on video in, in, um, in speaking form has had on all facets of my
life. And I just don't feel like there's enough of a charge to both introspect, but then the obligation to create.
I think it's life-changing.
There's a interesting quote from Wittgenstein,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, and he says,
the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
So you could see a richer vocabulary means a richer life.
If you take the fact that you have ideas in your head,
that these sort of wishy-washy, ephemeral notions,
it's like a smell, right? An idea is kind of like a smell. It's just an amorphous blob of a thing. And you go,
yeah, I feel like this. I feel like this is an idea. Until you make it take form through spoken
word, written word or drawing, it doesn't really exist. It's not tangible. You can't see it. You
can't work out where the holes are in whatever this idea is. So what that means is that first off, the more words that you have
in your arsenal, the more precisely you can describe the thing which is in your head,
the more frictionlessly you can take ideas from your brain to your mouth, your fingertips,
or the end of a pencil, the more accurately you're going to be able to put that out into the world,
which means that when you need to turn it over and assess it and look at it, you go, oh my God, I thought that I knew this inside out. And
there's this big gaping hole here. I need to work out what's going on, which is why a loneliness
epidemic, the massive falling rates of friendlessness in the world aren't particularly
good because not only is it bad for the community and for social cohesion, but it's bad for the individual's personal growth as well. If you want to fully learn something,
you want to spend time synthesizing your ideas. And you can really only ever do that for somebody
else. Again, you can write the journal to you, for you, but it's never going to be as disciplined or
as consistent as if you're writing it for never going to be as disciplined or as consistent
as if you're writing it for an audience,
even if the audience is only five people or only your friends.
And you spoke to something,
which is because you were outside of the social circle
when you were young,
you were able to, I guess,
vicariously see the impact that small things had,
which made you kind of socially attuned.
Talking then about the loneliness epidemic.
Is it an epidemic? How bad is it? Is it something that you believe society should be paying more
attention to? I sat here with Simon Sinek the other day, and he disclosed to me that he was
going through a real struggle with loneliness at the moment. And it was somewhat surprising.
It was somewhat surprising because, because again in a very naive way
simon sinek is someone of great success he's got a career most people would um would die for he's a
man of you know that's greatly admired he goes on stages and thousands of people roar his name
but then on a personal level he's lonely and one of the things he said to me was
there's a real difference between being alone and being lonely do you can
you see the distinction between the two yeah i mean solitude is something that many of us enjoy
i know that me and you both enjoy it right loneliness isn't i used to write i've got um
in a journal that i used to keep in my phone a couple of different entries from my mid-20s and
it just put i think i'm lonely yeah because i just, I couldn't work out what was going on. I had a sense that it was
maybe something that was a little bit wrong. I think I'm lonely. When it comes to the loneliness
epidemic, in 1990, the number of men who said that they had six or more close friends was around about 55%. In 2020, that dropped to 21%.
It's less than half.
21% of men say that they have less than six close friends.
The number of men who say that they have zero close friends
has increased by fivefold from 1990,
and it's now at 15%.
15% of men say that they have zero close friends.
I don't know the stats for women.
It seems like women are able to hold onto social groups
a little bit more effectively than men are.
The loneliness epidemic does seem to be hitting men
a little bit more hard.
I'm compelled by your diary entry.
Before we get into the stats and the causation you wrote in your diary in your mid-20s i think i'm lonely
yep it's funny because i i reflect on my early 20s between 20 and 25 and i was definitely lonely
but had no idea until later that was why i only that was why i only thought that i was lonely you know i was like
what is it what were we just saying it's a notion it's a it's a smell someone shouted it from the
other room fucking i what is that do you know i think i'm lonely no one's described it i didn't
have a description of it so i had this sort of innate this feeling inside my being but no one had put a word to it before
or told me what the like job description of someone that's lonely looks like so it was a
signal like something's not right but i don't know what it is yep and i only learned when i was not
lonely when i felt a real sense of connection what i was missing oh shit that's not what life's
supposed to be like so tell me about what what had caused that what factors had come together
to put you in a situation where you were lonely?
I've met about a million people in my life
and I only had a handful of friends.
That made me think my exposure to friend conversion
seems to be off.
There is something not right here.
And this was largely due to the fact
that I was playing a role.
It's this big name on campus, Party Boy. And quite rightly, who was I going to resonate with when I wasn't
being me, they were going to at best become friends with a projection of what I thought
they wanted me to be. Right. So this was almost exclusively on myself. But also I was struggling
a little bit in the industry to find the, I can't have a conversation about
like the deepest sense of human nature or the existential pain of being alive or status from
Will Storr, his brand new book, when someone's desperately trying to get a VIP wristband off me
so that they can go and see the hot girls downstairs. Like it's, it's not quite the
right environment for that. But again, largely this was due to the fact that I wasn't being
sufficiently confident that other people would be interested in what I was interested in.
And yeah, I mean, you can be, have all of the success in the world. You can be surrounded by
people and yet feel alone in a crowd and hollow in victory. Because if you're only playing a role,
anything that you do, any love that people give to you won't feel like it hits you existentially.
You'll feel praise, but you won't feel love because they're not in love with you.
They're just applauding the role that you're playing.
Does that make sense?
Makes perfect sense.
Makes perfect sense.
It's such an apt description.
It really brings in this idea of what the person
is connecting to matters the most. If they're connecting to the image that I've created,
which is inauthentic to myself, I'm never going to receive that connection. The only way to cure
my loneliness is to show up as myself and to build connection on that basis, which is, again,
makes a ton of sense to me because I was a young CEO who had hundreds of employees. My relationship to them wasn't necessarily Steve,
the true sense of Steve to them.
So Steve the CEO.
It was exactly, it was CEO to employee.
And then in my personal life in that early twenties phase,
there was maybe one person, maybe two,
that knew Steve, that were connected to Steve.
But even maybe one actually,
which is super interesting
because it also talks to Simon Sinek's thing
where I go, well, this guy's amazing.
But how many people are connected to the true Simon?
The guy behind the books,
the guy behind the admiration.
That study you referenced a second ago
about men getting increasingly lonelier.
I think I read the same thing.
The thing I read was about
the amount of people we have to turn to in a time of crisis and how that's decayed over the last
couple of decades why is that happening what is happening in culture and society that's causing
us to become more and more disconnected in terms of proximity but also in just a sense of sort of
psychological connection what is going on it's a good question uh i don't think that is a there's a single answer to this um social media
probably has a lot to answer for what's happened now is the world of social connection has been
made less and less social right you're more connected than ever before, but more atomized
than ever before as well. I think that there are some really worrying trends in rising rates of
social anxiety that are mostly downstream from people not spending enough time being social.
If you look at the average amount of hours that kids would have played outside versus the average
amount of hours that kids are spending watching television on social media and playing video games now you are basically creating an army of young
chrises right that were socially uneducated in that regard downstream does turn into adults that
similarly don't they haven't got the habits of going out and being social which means they don't
develop the skills to connect to people, to be able to make friends.
And that causes loneliness.
Like that's, I think, a large portion
of what we're talking about.
What about the like optimization of our lives
and the way that we've built cities
and the way that we're, you know,
when I say optimization of our lives,
I mean like if we order food.
Convenience.
It's a screen.
I mean, this is just.
If we date, it's a screen. If we connect to my mother or my sister in's a it's a screen i mean this this is just if we date it's a screen if we connect to my mother or my sister in australia it's a screen yeah well the problem
is that what is convenient or enjoyable is not always what's good for you right ice cream for
dinner every single night for the two-year-old is both convenient and enjoyable but probably not
good for it the issue is that we are all our own parents when it comes to our social media and social interaction lives. The pain of
rejection, whether that be from a potential friend, a potential partner, a job offer, a business,
whatever, is painful. And we have done incredible things to try and nerf the world right to wrap it in
cotton wool so that the pain of rejection is removed as much as possible this is why online
dating is so successful because the pain of rejection you don't know the people that swiped
left on you you only know the people that swiped right that's taken the pain of rejection of dating
away right what do you think of dating apps?
Do you think they're net positive or net negative for the world?
You really want to go here?
Of course I want to go.
Okay.
I think that dating apps are a perfect example of something
which is both convenient and enjoyable, but not good for you.
They have certainly opened up more opportunities for people to meet potential partners. And yet,
we are in a world with the highest rates of sexlessness ever amongst young people. One in
three men between the ages of 18 and 30 hasn't had sex in the last
year. That tripled from 8% to 28% from 2008 to 2018. 50% of men say that they are not looking
for a committed relationship. That's down from 61% of men saying that they were. Only half of men
between the ages of 18 and 30 are looking for
a relationship you go okay well if the promises of easy access online dating were so true how is it
that we've ended up with a world where people are having less sex than ever that sex uh sexlessness
has also increased for women too but for men it's increased more and they were starting at a higher baseline as well.
50.1% of women for the first time in history are mothers. There are more childless women at 30
than there are women with children, right? So for almost all of human history, more women had kids
under the age of 30 than over, and now it's switched.
There's a study from Morgan Stanley that says by 2040, 45% of 25 to 45-year-old women will be
single and childless. If online dating was creating this perfect facilitation for relationships to start how are we ending up with all of these
outcomes
it's a question what's wrong with the outcomes what do you mean why should people care about
being single all the stats you just said um i could look at them and say they're just sort of
objectively neutral like there's no adverse consequence to society or the world.
It's fine that people aren't having kids.
It's fine that people aren't having sex.
I'm playing devil's advocate here.
But like what is the negative consequence of all of those outcomes that you've described in your view?
There are people for whom a life without a partner is the right choice.
That's absolutely something that I'm prepared to accept.
But it's not most people.
It's one of the biggest levers.
In fact, the single biggest predictor of your health outcomes in life
are the number of close connections that you have.
It's the number of friends.
It's more than quitting smoking.
It's more than going to the gym.
It's more than stopping drinking. It's the number of close friends that you've got.
And a relationship is a big close friend. Robin Dunbar says that in order to get into a relationship,
you have to sacrifice two friendships because you can have around about five very close friends.
If you want to get into a relationship, you need to get rid of two of them because there is a
minimum time investment. So people that are in relationships have better health outcomes. They have onset of dementia
later. They have Alzheimer's problems later on in life. They are less lonely.
That seems pretty uncontroversial. And yet both sides of the aisle, both men and women,
are retreating from relationships and finding ways that they can justify this.
You know, boss bitch culture and sort of the lean in women's mentality or men going their
own way and incel culture and the black pill for guys are both ways that each sex is trying
to deal with the challenges that are coming out of the mating market.
Both sexes are saying, I don't want to be a part of this anymore. I'm finding it so painful and
difficult to be in this world that I'm just going to cast off any of it altogether. And then
retroactively come up with a lot of explanations that can justify why they didn't need to be in a
relationship in any case. And for some people, that's true.
But for most people, that's not.
Dating apps are clearly not, you know, as you say in your own words,
and previously aren't the only causal factor.
So my question to you is, where did we go wrong?
And how do we go right?
Okay, so I think challenges in the mating market are coming from many directions. One of the main
ones that will be pertinent to the people that are listening is the increase in female achievement
in education and employment. Now, about 50 years ago when Title IX came in, there was a 13 percentage
point swing in favor of men to women in universities. There were
significantly more men than women. What's the title of mine? It was an affirmative action
policy that helped to get more women into higher education. 50 years later, 2023, it's a 15
percentage point swing between men and women in university in the other direction. There are two
women for every one man at a four-year US college degree, around about
by 2030. Women on average between the ages of 21 and 29 earn £1,111 more than their male counterparts.
Women are roughly twice as likely as men to say that they will value financial prospects in a
partner. Around about 78% of women say that a stable job is something that is important for a partner to have,
whereas around about only sort of 45% of men say the same thing.
For a man to increase his rating on a 10-point scale by two points,
he requires around about a tenfold increase in his salary.
For a woman to achieve the same two-point improvement on a 10-point scale,
her salary would need to increase by 10,000 times. My point being that women are concerned
about a partner's socioeconomic status significantly more than men are. Now, you can start to see
that if you have a world in which women are attending
university at high rates, they are achieving more success in employment, at least in that sort of
21 to 29 range, which is when most people are perhaps looking for potential partners. And yet,
the socioeconomic status of a partner to a woman is a big determinant of their level of attraction.
You can start to see
how this imbalance could cause a problem. Similarly, when we talk about education,
a man with a master's degree on Tinder gets 90% more right swipes than a man with a bachelor's
degree. So for all of the guys that are considering going and getting a master's degree, even if you
think it's going to be useless, at least accept the fact that you'll get 90% more right swipes
for the rest of your life, or just lie about your masters. I don't know. All of this rolled together describes
something called hypergamy, which is the female tendency to date up and across. On average, women
want to date a man who is as educated or as employed as they are. Now, in a world in which,
quite rightly, women have finally been able to achieve parity in education and employment and
status and have
independence and not be financially reliant on their partner or the rest of it. That's great for
them, but it does cause some challenges for their dating. And this is what I've called the tall girl
problem. So everybody knows what it's like to have a girlfriend who is six foot without heels.
If you want to wear heels, you're looking at professional
athletes because on average, women want to date a man who is at least as tall or a little bit
taller than they are. So as women rise up through their own competence hierarchy in education and
employment, they further shorten down the potential pool of eligible men that are as educated or more
educated and as employed or more employed than
they are. This is a challenge. This is just a straight up imbalance, right? What this causes
is a very large group of men toward the bottom of this distribution to be essentially invisible
to women. It causes a very large number of women, an increasing cohort to compete for an increasingly
small group of turbo chad super performers at the top. These guys, the super high value guys have a wealth
of options. So they are commitment averse. Why would they decide to sit down with one girl for
the rest of time when they have this wealth of options, which can cause them to use and discard
many of these women, which then causes most of these women to resent men
overall. And then the guys that were forgotten at the bottom that say, well, hang on a second,
I didn't use and discard you. I haven't even been seen by you. No, no, all men are whatever it might
be, right? That they are users and abusers, that we don't need them, that we're all of the good
men at, et cetera, et cetera. It's a big group of men that feel like they are good men that are invisible. There's a big portion of women who
have finally managed to achieve educational and employment and independence that are chasing after
a smaller group of guys. These guys are commitment averse. I don't think it's necessarily good for
them either. It's the child with the ice cream, right? Like guys being able to keep it in their
pants when there's a lot of options on the table is going to be difficult for them too this is one of the main drivers this tall girl problem is a massive change i think in the dating
dynamics it obviously begs a question chris which is if everything you've said is objectively
correct and spot on and supported by the data, then how
does, if I make Chris Williamson the prime minister or president of the world, and I say,
your first job is to fix this challenge, what do you do? The first thing that you don't do
is roll back women's education and employment. And this is one of the problems with this discussion,
right? The things that I've just said there are borne out in Pew Research data, Morgan Stanley
results, like these are incontrovertible facts, right? They are there. And any girl that is
listening who earns more than 50,000 pounds a year and has got a master's or above level education
and is toward their late thirties or in the, toward their late twenties or in their thirties
knows this problem. You know, the fact that you are struggling to find a man that you feel is eligible for you, right? That needs to be out there. The problem that happens around this discourse
is that it posits men and women as adversaries and competitors of each other, right? As enemies.
This means that worthwhile compassion, which is needed to both women and men. If you're a woman who has gone
through your education, you've dedicated yourself to achieving a degree, you know, your mother's
generation wasn't able to achieve this. And you're the first person that's maybe gone to uni or got
a bachelor's or got a master's or got a PhD. And then you spend some time in a career grinding
away and you now own 150 grand a year. And you think, right, I'm 31. I'd love to settle down.
This would be amazing for me. Where are all of the men at? Hang on a year. And you think, right, I'm 31. I'd love to settle down. This would be amazing for me.
Where are all of the men at?
Hang on a second.
And what you realize is that not only now are you competing with all of the other
increasing cohort of women that are high achievers
with status, employment, and education,
but you're also competing with a 21-year-old barista
who still lives at home with her parents
for this small cohort of guys.
That requires sympathy for women, okay?
That is not a good position for women to be in. At the same time, this huge cohort of sexless men,
30% of men haven't had sex in the last year. 50% of men say that they are not looking for a
relationship. You are a man. You have been through your 20s. You know
the power of the male sex drive between the ages of 18 and 30. Can you imagine getting yourself
into a situation where you say, I'm not bothered about pursuing women? That is an unbelievably
extreme statement for men to make. And they're self-identifying as this in Pew Research data.
This isn't on incel forums. This is Pew Research. 50% of men
aren't looking for a relationship. When they say aren't looking for a relationship, do they mean
I'm not looking for a woman or I'm not looking for commitment? Not actively pursuing any
kind of interaction with women. Oh shit. Casual included. What? 50%.
Here's the point, right?
You asked about solutions.
The first thing that we need to do
is turn down the volume of adversarial nature
between these two.
Anybody that listens to those two stories, right?
The plight of men and the plight of women
in the modern dating world
and doesn't see it as,
wow, that's fucked.
That really, really sucks for both sex sexes men have it worse in some ways
women have it worse in different ways right this isn't a competition of like oh let's wave the flag
of who's actually accumulated more victimhood points the first thing that needs to happen
before anything is the volume of the conversation needs to be turned down we need to see the
challenges that are faced by both sexes the second thing that needs to be put out front is that there
needs to be a way to raise men up without bringing women down, because it is very easy for you to say,
okay, so women are out achieving men in education and employment. Let's just put the reins on them.
And then everything's going to be brought back. Look, I am not trying to roll back any of the gains that have been made by women over the last 50 years.
But you do want to have eligible male partners, right?
If the thermodynamics of attraction include the fact that women tend to want to date across and up in terms of status, employment, and education, you need to do something, right?
Some of the things that you could look at doing in terms of solutions would be
red-shirting boys, so starting boys in school one year later. This is something that was put
forward by Richard Reeves. The reason for this is that boys tend to mature less quickly than girls.
If you were to start boys one
year later in school, it would mean that they would be more effective at their age. They would
be more mature mentally. That's one start. Another one that I think is probably more controversial,
but would make a big impact, would be to stop derogating motherhood, right? To start pedestalizing motherhood again.
There is a huge movement in certain corners of women's advice that any woman who decides to become a mother is essentially a second-class citizen. I don't think that that's true.
I don't think that a woman that chooses to become a mother is a second-class citizen. But women often fear becoming just a mother, right? Or just a wife
or at worst, a domestic prostitute. And they flee from this specter of family life into the open
arms of a corporate employer. And laughably, we call this process freedom. How can it be that the thing that most of us are grateful for, a great mother in our life, has now been derogated as some sort of...
It's like somebody's been rubed into a role that the patriarchy always wanted them to do.
There was an article a little while ago that said maternal instinct is a myth.
That basically the only reason that maternal instinct exists is because the patriarchy has convinced women that they're actually supposed to like kids.
I can't even begin to explain how ridiculous that is if you look at all of the sex differences in terms of the way that humans work.
Pedestalizing motherhood would make women
fear being a mother less.
It would make it an aspirational goal
for them to pursue.
One of the scariest stats that I learned
was from a guy called Stephen Shaw.
He did a documentary called Birth Gap.
And in it, he talks about this declining birth rate.
A meta-analysis by Professor Rinske Kaiser says that 80% of women who aren't mothers
after their fertility window closes didn't intend to not be mothers.
Involuntary childlessness.
Around about 10% of women
are physiologically incapable of having kids.
Very unfortunate.
Around about 10% of women
intended to not have children,
which leaves a whopping four out of five
non-mother women
who didn't intend to not be mothers.
And these women have support groups
where they come together to grieve for families that they never had. women who didn't intend to not be mothers. And these women have support groups where
they come together to grieve for families that they never had. And it breaks their hearts
that they weren't able to find the right partner in time before their fertility window closed.
And Professor Kaiser talks about the pain that these women feel.
And Stephen Shaw's been to these support groups,
that women who thought that they had more time,
that struggled to find a partner in time,
they grieve for families that they never had.
And that sentence just, it makes me feel so upset.
Like it's so painful to hear the prospect of a woman that
that wanted to have a family and couldn't very difficult
so there's there's two solutions there that you've kind of offered up as potential solutions to that
um does that alone fix the other side of the coin which is the huge quantity of men that are avoiding relationships,
intimacy, women altogether? Not particularly. Raising men up somehow would be great. But I mean,
where we begin with that, I don't know. I think men are heavily checked out of education
and employment. Men have been retreating from the US labor force market by 0.1% per year since 1950. 87% in 1950, it's about 67%
now. By 2050 or 2040 or 2050, it'll be 65%. Given that women want, on average, about 80% of women
want a man with a stable job, this retreat is not good. Each step that men take where they take
themselves out of education and employment not only isolates them
and makes them economically less viable as contributors to society, it also makes them
less eligible as mates. On average, men between 18 and 30 in the US spend 2000 hours per year
playing video games, stoned, or on prescription drugs. That's not the eligible partner, right?
So one of the things that you could look at doing is re-encouraging in-person dating.
So online dating does worsen this issue because it allows you to optimize for objective metrics
of success, right? On a dating app,
and this is for both men and women, on a dating app, particularly for men, you can have your
education level, you can have the car that you're with, you can talk about your job, you can...
So women are very much encouraged by the platform itself to take a incredibly low resolution view of this person. So all of the things that
guys are able to work on, like, you know, vibe and humor, being pleasant, being kind, being caring,
being charming, none of that can come across on a Tinder profile. And this means that it further
worsens the tall girl problem. You see how it would make the objective metrics even more
and more worsened. Let's not forget that there are three men for every one woman on a dating app.
So even if every man matched off with a woman, there would still be this huge number of men
that didn't have a partner, right? So online dating hasn't delivered on the promises I think that anybody
wanted for it. Women swipe right on around about 4.5% of profiles for men. Men swipe right on about
60% of profiles for women. This means that a lot of men see online dating as a waste of time. We spoke about how it buffers rejection and that
it helps people to not feel rejection so much. But when you spend a lot of time on apps,
swiping right on 60% of people on average, and you don't get very many matches or any matches,
or the few matches you do get never turn into dates, that would quite rightly make
people feel disenchanted with the world of dating. Downstream from the problems of social media that
we spoke about before are a lack of ability to flirt. I actually think that flirting is a lost
art at the moment. You know, it's a very complex thing to do. It's a push and pull. You have to
understand a lot of intricacies about sort of social dynamics
and interaction. You need to be able to tease, but not too much. And the art of flirting is
incredibly difficult to get right. And it's even more difficult if you've never interacted with a
woman in the real world, especially as guys and girls. Now let's touch another third rail, Stephen. Me Too. So Me Too was a necessary requirement to call powerful men to account
for misbehaving and using their power to gain sexual access to women. What it sought to do
was to sanitize the toxic elements of certain males' behavior. What it's ended up doing is it's sterilized almost all of it.
Eighty-four percent, 80% of men report not approaching a woman because they are scared
of being seen as creepy. Eighty-four percent of women say that they want the man to make the first
move. Women are terrified of being approached by men because of stories of sexual assault,
of dangers within the workplace, of overreach by men that are both in power and out of power. Men are terrified of
approaching women for fear of being accused of all of those things. So we have a epidemic of
loneliness and sexlessness amongst the sexes for the first time in our four million year history,
we have large cohorts of both men and women who want relationships and can't get into them.
Men feel invisible on dating apps and are terrified of approaching women in the real world.
Women yearn for men who they want to be in a relationship with, but either are not spoken to by or are used and abused by.
In person, both of them are terrified of talking to each other in any case for fear of
either being accused of or becoming the victim of some sort of terrible interaction.
I think that re-enabling in-person dating would make a massive difference.
It would reduce down the tall girl problem because you would have the ability for guys to gain status in the eyes of, for instance, a guy that maybe doesn't have a university degree but is unbelievably funny.
It's still very statusful, right?
Because humor engenders a sense of status.
It's called clown maxing in the the black pill
world um but that guy might not get a chance if he was just on online dating so that would be
another thing uh and you can see as well how the incredibly uh righteous ideas of Me Too, when taken to an extreme,
could end up causing some externalities
that disadvantage women in the dating market.
Do you see what I mean?
Of course.
As you were saying that,
I was thinking about that video that went viral
of the young girl in the gym
who was filming the guy that came over to ask her if she needed help
with the weights yeah do you know the video i'm talking about yeah so for anybody that doesn't
have the context um a young lady on tiktok um set up her camera while she was in the gym and she was
filming a guy and she's sort of anticipating him coming over to help and lo and behold the guy
walks over and says do you want a hand with the weight and tries to give her a hand with the weight and then as he walks off she like she
cusses him out and says he's a basically portrays him as this like predator slash monster and the
reaction online was the inverse the reaction online was like was siding with the man because
he just came over and asked her if she wanted a hand of course we both know that there are very
predatory men in gyms correct i've got female friends that have spoken to that my girlfriend speaks to that all the time she
tells me how of her experiences in the gym but there is another side to highlighting this issue
which causes perfectly reasonable polite men who are genuinely offering a hand in something or
let's be honest flirting yeah to be totally fucking terrified
absolutely and and this is the this is the difficult conversation that we don't have a lot
which is what's the the net we can see the net positive of that we can see the positive side of
that but what is the downside everything in life has a cost is that now that we are scared to broker
conversations with strangers through fear of being put on blast on TikTok.
If you optimize for absolute safety,
what you're going to end up with is nobody ever approaching a girl in the gym.
Now, I don't know, maybe there are girls that say,
do you know what it is?
It is worth it for no girl to ever be flirted with
in the gym, for no girl to ever be made to feel
like they are being stared at in the gym.
You know, like if the price that we have to pay is that no one ever gets a date, a gym date,
then that's fine because the benefit that we get is that no one ever is made to feel uncomfortable.
Right. A few things to say on that. First off, almost all
indiscretions from men that are where they do creepy behavior are a very, very small cohort of
men that repeatedly do it. This is from David Buss's Men Behaving Badly. It is one man doing
a thousand bad things to women, not a thousand men doing one bad thing to women. And the problem is
that that can still cause a massive, that's still a thousand bad interactions with women, right? But you have 999 men that are saying, well, I don't behave like
that. I've been smeared with this bad brush. And this is an incredibly difficult line for both of
us to thread here. How is it that we can talk about some of the challenges that women face
in the dating world when there are
so many obvious benefits that have occurred to their safety as a byproduct of this? One of the
interesting things that I learned about that gym, the toxic gym gaze video was it could have gone
either way when it went on to TikTok, right? It was a knife edge. If you'd
showed me that video and the comments were hidden and you said, what do you think the reaction is
going to be? I'd go, toss a coin, toss a coin. And that will be this guy's either push. In my
opinion, I don't think that he had overstepped, but I don't understand how the world is going to react to this. But the interesting thing there is that a lot of people take their cues about what is and is not
acceptable social behavior from the way that other people view what is and is not acceptable social
behavior. So those sorts of landmark episodes actually end up creating a trend of what people in the real world will consider to
be acceptable behavior. So let's say we have a different version of the universe, and in that
universe, everybody decided that that actually was too much from a man. What you have then is all of
the girls that watch that video seeing it and saying, oh my god, if a guy glances over at me more than three times in 90 seconds
and tries to help me deload a glute bridge, that constitutes worthy concern about
abuse and a toxic male gaze, right? So we have now reset expectations down to a much tighter
sensitivity level. Similarly for men, they think, okay, I know that three glances in 90 seconds plus assisting someone
to deload the plates from a bar is too much therefore at most i can have one glance during
90 seconds do you understand i mean do you see how we we would further nerf the world we would
wrap it in more and more and more cotton wool and then downstream from that you concept creep this
out to the stage where anything is toxically masculine.
Like-
But there's a really interesting point of nuance as well
on top of that, which is,
what if that guy was Channing Tatum?
Do you see what I mean?
Another third rail here.
And that's, because if Chan, I tell you what,
if that video was Channing Tatum,
actually Channing Tatum,
and I'd watched that video with the sound off
and I couldn't hear what she was saying,
I would think she was bragging to her friends.
Oh my God, I can't believe he's looking at me.
Oh my God, he's looking at me again.
Channing Tatum's come over and he's helping with...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, again, this is...
Some of the manosphere advice online
is that the difference between a creep
and a guy that you fancy is just how hot he is.
That it's not to do with how the person approaches
you. It's all to do with whether or not they're attractive. I do think that there's a little bit
of truth in that. I think that a guy that comes up to you who is a one out of 10 or a guy that
comes up to you that's a 10 out of 10, let's say that you're in a relationship, let's say that
you're married, right? And you are at the front desk of a hotel just checking in and you're you're in a little queue. And the guy behind you happens to be either Channing Tatum or one
out of 10 guy. He says, okay, sorry, I just had to tell you, I think you look really, really nice
today. I hope that you're having a great day. The difference in terms of experience there isn't
nothing, right? And for certain girls and the expectations that they have around men and their relationship
to men and their fear of men and their anxiety of it, it could be very different sorts of experiences.
Let's give the other side of the coin, men overstepping the mark and how men can be better.
That's what I, that's what I want to make sure we're balanced in this conversation
because there are, as we both have spoken to, there are a huge amount
there is a huge amount of inappropriate behavior that happens throughout society
through the corporate world, throughout everyday lives
how as men do you think we can be better?
and when I say better, really what I'm speaking to here is
know how to approach a woman in a way that is not going to make them feel uncomfortable, intimidated, fearful.
And that's what women speak to all the time.
They talk about how they have to walk home with their car keys in their hand because they pretend they're on phone calls when they're walking down the street.
These are all things that my sister, my female friends have spoken to.
So how as men can we be better the first thing i think is to actually spend some time
sandboxing this like practicing like you need the only way that you're going to learn
how to how to interact with a woman is by doing it it's not the sort of thing that you're going
to be able to work out on the internet i mean mean, like basic stuff, like don't stand super close to her.
Don't do it in a dark alleyway at night. Don't stare for ages without saying anything, right?
These are very basic, like rudimentary, objective metrics that we can give. But really what it comes down to is just have a bit of charm about you. Understand that if you go up and say something to a girl,
hi, I just wanted to ask how your day's going. I just wanted to tell you that you looked really
nice today. If there is a girl that has a problem with that, presuming that it's not in a cul-de-sac
alleyway at the dead of night and you've got your hood up, right?
Or your hair employer.
Or your hair employer. Well, here's another interesting one, right? Bill and Melinda Gates,
right? Melinda Gates works for Microsoft. Bill is the founder and CEO. Bill sees Melinda around the office. This is in the 1980s. And he thinks, wow, yeah, she's a bit of all right. So he decides
to ring her and say, Melinda, it's Bill.
I wondered if you wanted to go out with me one evening.
And she said, when, when are you thinking?
He says, how's three weeks tomorrow?
She said, Bill, I don't think
that you're spontaneous enough for me.
I don't think that this is going to work.
He put the phone down.
30 minutes later, he rings back and says,
how's this for spontaneous?
You've got the rest of the day off.
Let's go on a date.
2023, founder, CEO of large tech company rings receptionist asking her to date him. And after she says no, rings back again, pulls her out of work and takes her on a date. Game over,
right? Done. Where is the line in between bill gates and harvey weinstein what weinstein
well it it's precisely in the details right everybody can say what harvey weinstein did
was wrong some people would say that what bill gates did was wrong but okay is it wrong for two
people a guy and a girl who spend every day, every single time that
they go to the water cooler, one of them sees the other one gets up and like escapes from their
chair so that they get the opportunity to go to the water cooler together. And they've been doing
it for six months and it's this super platonic thing, but the guy's terrified and the girl's
terrified. You go, okay, like, should we nerf every relationship so that that interaction can
never move to the next level, given the fact that we've
got high rates of loneliness, given the fact that we've got massive amounts of sexlessness.
20% of relationships begin on online dating. 20% of relationships begin in online media,
social media, right? That's two out of five relationships begin online. And they're the
most fragile. They're the ones that drop the quickest. They're the ones that stay together
the least long. Workplace, better. Friends, better friends even better church even better than that right but it is a
it is we are in uncharted waters here people with regards to the mating world we are in uncharted
waters the harvey weinstein example is where i was like that guy was a fucking monster well of course
yeah but the bill gates when i get it's kind of the old fashioned,
the old fashioned way of doing things.
You know, when we used to,
when our worlds used to be a village
and we would, you know, maybe write a letter
or we'd take the girl out from the church or whatever.
But the Harvey Weinstein,
this guy was a fucking monster.
Like he was, I remember listening
to some of the tapes and the victims
and this guy was a fucking predator.
He was like-
I haven't listened to any of those.
Really?
Are they harrowing?
It's just,
it's one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard,
where even a journalist would come and interview him,
and he would just be sexually assaulting and physically assaulting her
during the interview.
So this guy just had no boundaries.
He is just a disgusting monster.
But do you see what I mean?
That quite rightly, there needed to be a reckoning
around that there had to be a reckoning around that kind of a man using that kind of a position
to get that kind of access yeah that needed sanitizing that sort of behavior needed sanitizing
and there was going to be fallout from it downstream from that how sanitized should behavior
be up to the point at which it's been sterilized?
And there is 84% of women say
that they want the man to make the first move, right?
It is still on.
I mean, for the girls that are listening,
how many times have you been the one
that's approached a guy?
Like I've been in nightclubs for 15 years, right?
Met about a million people in there.
Twice it's ever happened to me
that girls have come up and been like forthright about chatting million people in there. Twice, it's ever happened to me that girls have come up
and been like forthright about chatting me up. Twice. And I've worked a thousand nights in my-
That's actually pretty good going, actually.
Yeah, two out of a thousand, that's actually about-
I mean, that could also be my fault, right? But this is very difficult, man. And again,
for the guys and girls that would say, well, what does it matter? You know, what does it matter that we, that people are going to be single, especially for women. If you're a high achieving woman, who's got the PhD and I have a friend, PhD, millionaire, self-made millionaire in the fitness world, mid thirties, now going sperm donor route. She's really struggling to find a partner. So she is going to use her very vast resources to be able to support these kids, to bring them into the
world, to have a fantastic life. But make no mistake, that's a single parent household, right?
That's a single parent household. The outcomes that you have from single parent households
seem to be sociosexually, the daughters don't do particularly well. You have higher rates of
sociosexuality, which is more casual sex, more complexes around sex from single parent households.
But what we hear about a lot is that education and employment outcomes of single parent households,
on average, tend to be worse. For women, for the girls in that situation, it doesn't really seem
to impact them all that much. So however big you think that effect is, double it and put it
just on boys. It's only boys that seem to have that kind of a problem. And quite rightly, you're
not going to have a patriarch in the family that's maybe able to deal with a rambunctious,
disagreeable boy. I don't think, for the women that want to have kids and you have the resources,
absolutely. But for anyone to say that that's the optimal approach, that this is what would
be amazing. And again, I'm not saying women become domestic prostitutes, take yourself out
of the boardroom and get yourself back in the kitchen. Like that's not what either of us
are saying that we want women to do here. But most people, eight out of 10 women that are childless once they reach their 40s and
later didn't intend to not be. This is a very difficult conversation that we need to have to
warn people about the impact of not thinking ahead in their relationships you have less time than you think
you need to be aware of that if i on the other side of the coin when we're talking about men
again if i delete the dating apps then so you know first thing we're doing we're deleting all
dating apps that still leaves us in a world where there's this kind of pseudo sexual fake digital
relationship in porn.
Pornography still exists.
So I'm wondering about that 50% of men.
I'm assuming, and I don't know this 50% of men,
but I'm assuming pornography is probably quite a big part
of their replacement therapy for the connection
and sexual intimacy that they're missing.
Correct.
So I have a theory called the male sedation hypothesis, right?
There is a phenomenon called young male syndrome. If you have a large number of non-partnered childless men in a society, that tends to be an unstable civilization.
There's examples throughout history where men who don't have a reason to behave,
who don't buy into the social contract of cohesing everything together, tend to cause problems.
They revolt, they cause riots, they spray paint cars and they push over granny and they do domestic violence and sexual assault. There have been a number of incel killings
of disaffected, disenfranchised young men
that have gone out and done horrible things.
But it is not increasing in line
with the amount of sexlessness, right?
It's tripled.
2008 to 2018 tripled 8% to 28%.
The number of associated young male syndrome
incidents hasn't increased in kind. So you think, okay, something going on here. Something is
happening, which is causing men to not enact this very well established throughout all of history
response. When men get into a relationship, their testosterone drops. When they have kids,
their testosterone drops again and reduced testosterone reduces risk-taking behavior.
If you've just had a kid, you're in a relationship, don't try and jump off that cliff because then
maybe you've got a kid that doesn't have a father anymore. You can see why that would be adaptive.
So the question is, why is it that we have greater rates of sexlessness amongst young men than ever, but we don't have this in-kind amount of violence and disruption?
And it's my belief that porn, video games, and social media are sedating men out of this status-seeking and reproductive- reproductive seeking behavior. So I think that you get a titrated dose,
just an ever so slight, just a little, little bit of reproductive cues from porn that helps to
sedate men's desire to go out and pursue women. I think that what video games do is they create
a sense of camaraderie, of goal-seeking behavior, status within the online world.
It satisfies a lot of what men would have been trying to achieve with that young male syndrome
revolution in the past. So my belief is that we have this male sedation occurring. Now, given the choice between a society of men
who are dangerous
and a society of men who are sedated,
right now, the group of sedated men
are ever so marginally better.
But the only reason for that
is that we're at a time of peace, right?
If there was an alien
civilization that came down to earth today, the best thing that we could do would be to switch
off all porn, turn off all social media. You want men to be angry. You want men to be riled up when
there is something that they can direct that anger at. Right now there isn't. And if they did,
it would just foment and it would cause problems and it would be bad, right?
So yes, the sedating of this kind of reproductive seeking behavior in a way has made the world calmer.
But it's not particularly, you wouldn't say it's optimal, right?
This isn't great.
Oh no, absolutely not.
I mean, you know, the advent of the nofap movement men who identify
as not masturbating they self-identify as not masturbating they have nofap streaks
uh you heard of this steven you've not heard of nofap no i'd hang around in the wrong
you're chronically online how have you not heard of nofap how have you
chris uh look i i know about my nofap okay so there is a very big
community of guys online that have recanted porn the same this is what we were talking about before
right for every movement there is a counterculture counterculture for every um sex positive there is
someone that will decide to push it away for every every woman that struggles to find somebody in the dating market, there is
the boss bitch culture, which is the cope. Then there is the lean in, which is like the trad wife
thing. There is the guy that becomes the Chad and has sex with all of the women. There is the guy
that retreats from that and goes men going their own way and completely recants it as well, right?
So you have the push and pull on both sides.
NoFap is a group of men who have self-identified as people that don't masturbate, right? This is because they see the impact of porn on their psychological health, on their physical health,
and they don't like what it does to them. So they have formed a community around this.
For men who feel like they have a problem with porn,
something that gives them a sense of pride
about being able to defeat what they see as a vice
is a place that quite rightly they're going to get,
yes, I have control over this.
Even if I don't have friends,
even if I don't have a partner,
at least I have control over this.
And it gives them, what are we doing here?
It is another goal for men to chase after, right?
It just happens to be a goal of not touching your penis,
which is actually quite a hard thing for a guy not to do.
Speak for yourself, Chris.
Look, Stephen, I can see where your hands are.
But there's something I find really compelling about,
we've talked a lot about people that are single
that are searching for love.
But when you think about the context of relationship,
we're both in relationships.
And the role masturbation plays
in the reduction of desire for our partner.
Because some of my friends are struggling
with something I've talked about before,
with sex in their relationships.
I've talked about my own struggles
with sex in relationships.
And one of the things we've kind of diagnosed
is pornography has a reductive value on the desire we have for our partners
so do we abstain it depends man i mean people have varying degrees of sexual drive what's your
approach what's my approach uh i think that i i i certainly feel like the story that you tell yourself around porn and around
masturbation seems to be the biggest determinant of how it makes you feel. And this has been
backed up by a bunch of data from Dr. David Lay, who is a porn researcher coming out,
I think he's University of Arizona, perhaps, or New Mexico. And the story that you tell yourself has a massive
impact on how you feel. If you feel like masturbating is a dirty, bad action that you
shouldn't do, that you should feel ashamed about, downstream from that, you're going to feel shame. If you don't communicate it with your partner, that is a,
if you're hiding porn use from your partner, that is a huge, huge red flag. Personally,
partner is another concern, but for you, it's a big deal because you're going to feel that sort of
disgust, self-hatred, shame, guilt thing come through. But I do think that if you want to
increase the sex drive in your relationship, just saying, okay, if we want to do anything sexual,
we do it together. Try and tell me that that's not going to increase sex drive in a relationship.
But, you know, almost all of the sex that happens, happens in relationships. If you look at how much sex,
if you took a pie chart of sex, right, almost all of it is in relationships. Very, very small amount
of sex is in casual relationships. There was one point you said about
motherhood and that kind of opened a doorway in my mind about the broader subject of regret in life.
And, you know, where, if you look at sort of a meta-analysis
of where people at different ages
and different genders are experiencing
the highest levels of regret,
where does that fall?
But no, regret is something
that I've been thinking about an awful lot.
And it makes for,
considering regret,
considering the things that we regret in life
and trying to reframe it
has been one of the most useful mental models that I've gained. So Douglas Murray,
British writer, columnist, spectator, multiple New York Times bestseller. I was in Manhattan
with him and he was telling me a story about Christopher Hitchens, the famous atheist,
new atheist guy, one of the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse.
And he, Douglas, earlier in his career,
was lamenting to Hitch about the fact that he had to choose a thing,
and by choosing a thing, he couldn't do a different thing.
So he had this opportunity cost, and he's saying,
okay, all of these problems, I don't know whether I want to do this thing,
I want to do that thing.
And you can imagine they're probably
in some British pub somewhere in Westminster or whatever.
And Hitch is probably smoking.
He goes, Douglas, in life, we must choose our regrets.
And he told me the story.
And I thought, that's really interesting.
What does he mean, choose our regrets?
And I reflected on it so much.
And it made me think, well, what I'd always presumed was that in life, the only reason
that I had a regret is because I made a suboptimal decision.
If only I'd been able to make the perfect decision, I could have ameliorated the regret.
And the reason that it's there is because I didn't make the right decision. I could have ameliorated the regret. And the reason that it's there is because I didn't make the right decision. But when you accept the fact that opportunity cost is baked
into the fabric of life, me and you can go to the gym or we can go to the theme park. By going to
the gym, we don't go to the theme park. Even if the gym was the right decision to make, we're
always going to have the open loop of, I wonder what the theme park was like that day. So I go, oh,
that's interesting. Regrets aren't a bug. They're a feature. Regrets are a feature of life, right?
They are a natural byproduct of us always being curious about what could have been.
And given the fact that opportunity cost exists, they're always going to be there. So, okay,
that's interesting. It's kind of liberating liberating right makes you feel less culpable for the suboptimal decision that you made so but what does he mean that
you have to choose your regrets what's that what's the choose bit well
if you accept the fact that regrets are inevitable that you're going to do things in your life even
if you choose the right thing and you're going to consider in retrospect that you wonder what
the other thing could have been. If you can't escape regrets, when it comes to making a decision
between multiple choices, what you have to look at is not only what thing do I want, but which regret could I live with? If regrets are inescapable, you have to choose
which one you want. Okay, so I have to choose which regret I want. So you're looking at a choice.
You have things in front of you. Which of these two could I bear living with the regret of?
And that makes decisions an awful lot easier, right? Because
it switches us from a place of scarcity and fear about the future. And it helps to project us
forward and think, okay, which of these am I really, which of these could I not bear myself
to live without? So for instance, with me moving to America last year, it was a big move. I was 33, 34 at the time. Not exactly the
archetype. I always felt like I should have had my shit together and my life sorted by the age of 34.
So moving to a new country at this time is a bit, oh, really? But if I had the opportunity to do this podcast to become one of the best in the world
at what i do to pursue my passion my curiosity and i didn't do it i couldn't have lived with
that regret but in that case hindsight's a wonderful thing right because you could have
come here and it could have just fucking bombed it could have done and you would have then looked back on that decision as um but at least i don't have the
open loop anymore right i can live with the regret of selling an events business in the uk
and trying to make it work in america and then going back to the uk with my tail between my
legs and going i gave it a shot it didn work. I couldn't live with the regret of wondering what if I'd had the conviction to follow my
passions and go out to America and see if I can make it work.
When people are at that fork in the road, the problem is they look off into the two
directions that are in front of them is both both directions are completely shrouded in darkness there's so
it's it's that we go down one of the routes and then you know based on the outcome in hindsight
we then attach regret or you can post-hoc rationalize yeah pretty much anything i do agree
uh but a few things here people i've got one particular example in my mind where i was meant
to buy i was going to buy, I was going to buy,
I was going to acquire a business. And we've been acquiring a few businesses recently at Flight
Story. I was going to acquire a business and I didn't in the end. And it turned out to be a
really, really fantastic business. And so in hindsight, I'm going, I fucked up. That's a
regret. And I think about it sometimes. I'm like, damn, I should have bought that business. But it
could have gone another way. And my perspective of the regret now
would be entirely different.
I'd be like, I'm amazing.
I made a fantastic decision.
But the answer and my like regret
didn't come until
the game had been played out.
And that's what I'm thinking about
with the nature of regret.
It's like...
Well, it's difficult, right?
Because you are correct.
If you take a chance
and that chance doesn't work out,
then maybe you regret the other thing.
But you can believe in advance, okay, even if I take the chance and it doesn't work out,
at least I know that it didn't work out. For business decisions, ones that are a little bit
more easily replaceable, as opposed to big life decisions. I remember when i was uh much younger 21 i think 22 and i i needed to decide about whether
or not i was going to go into the season in ibiza or i was going to stay at home and earn and save
money and stuff i was 21 like 22 i think it doesn't matter you know what i mean and i i realized even
though i didn't have this model in my mind at the time i was like this might be the last time that
i get the opportunity to do this i'm going to go and do a master's next year. And then I'm going to
go straight into running this nightlife business. I probably should do this. I probably should. And
there was just something that compelled me to go and do it. And I went and spent, and the seven
weeks that I spent in Ibiza, although I don't remember all of it, my memories of it are quite
fond. And I think, fuck yeah, like I did, I did the did the i did the thing and it just helps i think
people to get past the fear of failure and of regret especially in retrospect
regret isn't necessarily a bad thing the reason that it exists is because you cared about something
you cared about something enough to actually be bothered by it.
And you know what, when you were describing the liberating first point of the reason why regret
exists, it made me think of this thing I read about jugglers, which I wrote about a little bit
in my first book, where they believe that no juggler can juggle more than 14 balls at once.
They think there's just because of the laws of physics, the size of the human hand,
it's impossible for a juggler to juggle more than 14 balls at once and that speaks to the nature of
limitation there's only a certain amount of balls you can pick and all the ones you don't pick and
it's kind of like the the old analogy i used to sometimes talk about with like i love waffles
but i love a six pack i'd love to have like a six pack or an eight pack or whatever i can't have
both the the story that i can't have both the the
story that i can only have one is what makes either special yeah correct waffles you know like
the six pack is only great because it's the story of the waffles i didn't have correct and so i
might regret have it but it's but it's because of the scarcity and the nature of us having to make
like a finite set of choices in life that's why six packs are um having a six pack is so admirable
and it's the same like you can't have a world where things are special where you don't have
regret precisely so there's another another rule that i absolutely love which is you can have
anything you want but you can't have everything you want yeah right you have to sacrifice
most things in the medium term in order to be able to facilitate progress toward
one thing right uh this is a really great insight from oliver berkman's 4 000 weeks
is he been on yeah yeah yeah great guy did you when you were going through that do you remember
the choose in advance what you're going to suck at. Mindset. I can't remember that. Really good. Really cool. Very interesting mental model to use.
So you have a plan for the next six months, right?
Or the next year.
By doing a thing,
other things are going to have to be sacrificed.
I want to grow my business.
Okay, maybe your social life
is going to take a little bit of a hit.
Maybe your fitness is going to take a bit of a hit. or I want to become, I want to get into a relationship. Okay.
Well, you're probably not going to be able to get as much sleep. Maybe you're going to have to,
your business is going to get less of your attention, whatever it might be.
By focusing on one thing, you inevitably end up having to sacrifice focus on other things.
Now, the problem that you and me, and maybe a lot of the people listening to this that are type A go-getters that want to be able to have it all will feel is as soon as they start to feel something slip, they go, oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Like, I'm supposed to stay lean.
I'm supposed to stay healthy and fit and whatever, whatever. the things that you're going to suck at, the price that you're going to pay in order for success within whichever domain it is,
it allows you to feel ease and acceptance
when that particular domain does start to drop away.
So for instance, this year, writing a book,
I'm going to do some live shows
toward the end of the year,
going to continue doing the podcast
and I'm doing some other bits and pieces as well.
My fitness is going to have to take a hit. The start of this year, I accepted the fact
that I'm probably going to get a combination of smaller, fatter, and slower throughout this year.
But that's fine. That's the price that I'm prepared to pay. And I made that deal with
myself in advance. Okay, condition fitness is going to take a little bit of a hit. I'll hold
onto it as best I can. This isn't me being complacent about it. I'm going to let it, let it slip. And it is such a powerful insight that you
can have anything you want, but not everything you want. And I think that's liberating.
It's all the things you couldn't have. And like I said, a second ago with a six pack,
I often think about a six pack because I look, I think what makes that socially valuable?
There's a social currency to it and all it is is lines on your
stomach it's a story though oh yeah i mean this is the the thing about people that go to the gym
the physique that you build is attractive feels good when you're naked and the other person's got
their arms wrapped around you or whatever right like that's that's a big part of it don't get me
wrong but what it's also a part of is it shows the kind of person that you are to be able to achieve that kind of physique. Someone who is self-disciplined, who is
self-motivated, who can do hard things, who can deal with pain, which is like kind of sexy.
They're conscientious, they're reliable, they're disciplined.
Delay gratification.
Delay gratification. All of these things, that is the story which is told by the way that you look,
right? By your physique. And I really, really
like that, that a six pack is a story of all of the waffles I didn't eat. It's great. And the
same thing goes for whatever pursuit you choose, you know, the podcasting thing, right? And the
differences that you've noticed in your ability to go from brain to mouth over the last three
years or so since you've been doing the podcast and mine as well.
Definitely.
That is a story of all of the hours
that I didn't spend watching Netflix
or scrolling TikTok or doing whatever.
It's the days and days and days of research
and listening back to myself
and time with my speech coach,
working on diction,
sitting in front of a microphone
with a guest, doing all of these things.
And that's the layers of paint again.
You know, to look at one of the best communicators
in the world or artists in the world or dancers
or musicians or sports people or whatever it is,
it is a story of all of the things that they sacrifice
in order to get themselves there.
Okay, do you want that?
Don't look at the things that they've got.
Look at the things that they've sacrificed
because that's the price that you have to pay to be in that position.
When you're alone at night and you're mulling, contemplating, when you're in the gym lifting
weights and you think about the work you still have to do to become the optimal version of
Chris Williamson, what is that? What is the work you have left to do
on a personal level?
Be mindful.
Pay attention.
Be focused.
Be disciplined.
Keep promises to myself.
Tell the truth.
Those are the principles.
Those are most of the principles.
And the reason is we spoke about this last night.
The number of paths that your life can go down in the future
are so varied and so difficult to predict
that any hard and fast plan will be completely destroyed by six
months of intense growth. Two years ago, I couldn't have predicted that I would be living in America
doing this thing. Two years ago, you wouldn't have predicted that the show is where you are and
you're on British Airways and et cetera, et cetera, right? So having any rigid plan isn't going to
work. Having a bunch of principles is. The things that I still need to work on in terms of deficiencies
are I need to be more disciplined with my use around my phone. I know that that's a huge crux for me. I need to continue to work on being emotionally
open and vulnerable, specifically publicly. As someone that was very ashamed about being made to feel weak in school that is a large hurdle for me to get over
because i only recently opened up about bullying with david goggins of all people because i felt
like you know this guy's been through so much who is it what is it for me to say oh i was a
bit lonely in school and people like picked on me and stuff why does that matter what solving the the vulnerability hurdle
i think that anything that you are not fully prepared to open up about and this doesn't mean
that we're supposed to be you know transparent to the world around us but even to yourself you
know to be able to take the idea,
the smell, the notion in your head and form it into words suggests that you haven't
internalized it, understood it, transcended it, done the work right on it.
And also when you asked at the very beginning, what is it that you're trying to serve people through the podcast and through the work that I do?
It's very difficult for people to find a role model that they can genuinely feel an affinity with.
Because most of the people that you look up to are talented or successful in some way.
And by design, that means that you don't have that much in common if you're
just starting out on your journey. The difference is, and the beauty of this kind of a platform,
people can scroll back five years on my podcast on the Chris Williamson YouTube channel,
and they can see episode one in my old office in Newcastle-upon-Tyne with a single blue Yeti
on a 16-pound mic stand with my friend that was rowing the Atlantic solo and hear me bumble my way
through an episode as I say, every other second with a different accent, with different lighting
and cameras and skills and everything. So you can track that journey over time. And you go,
if you have even a modicum of admiration or appreciation for many people, if you can see them from their very beginning
and think, wow, that's even shitter than I am,
that gives people hope that they can go through it.
And I think that being able to be more open
and vulnerable about the challenges
that I've faced in my past
should help other people to feel less alone. Now, I've opened up a lot that I've faced in my past should help other
people to feel less alone. Now I've opened up a lot. I've opened up about depression
throughout my twenties, about the bullying, about all these sorts of things, but it's like, okay,
so where's the deeper lesson? Where's the deeper lesson? What else can I take from this? And
I think that would be, that'd be good. That'd be a good thing for me to,
to learn. And one final thing would maybe be
getting out of my head a little bit.
We, both of us,
are monetizing cerebral horsepower, right?
Like the primary resource that we have are our thoughts and then our ability to
communicate them. But the problem with that is that it means that you live a lot of your life
up in your head and the people that are listening may feel the same. You love listening to Steve's
podcast or my podcast or whatever. Okay. How do we go from thought to action? That's what we were
talking about earlier on. How do you avoid being so cerebral
that you don't ever get into this sort of embodied state?
So this really great guy called Ian McGilchrist,
he wrote a book called The Master and His Emissary,
neuroscientist, but also a philosopher.
He looked at the Isle of Man TT riders.
So for the people that don't know,
Isle of Man is a small island off the coast of the UK
and these super bikes race around it, but it's
potholes and dry stone walls and B roads and grass verges. And every single year people die.
And they looked at the speed of the decisions that the riders were making. And what they realized
was that it was so quick that it couldn't be conscious that there wasn't time for the
prefrontal cortex to get the decision through. It had to be more limbic. It had to be
more ease and grace. So the goal is for them to get out of their own way, right? It's for them
to be embodied. And I think that, you know, if you were to say, what's the price that you pay
to be me, one of them would be very, very much in my head, very much thinking, assessing,
over-assessing, analyzing. And it's beautiful. I love the takeaways that I get. I love the
insights that I have around the world, around theories, around mental models, around, oh my
God. So if we look at the fact that women want to be approached, but men are scared of approaching
because of this creepiness,
oh my God, there's two theories.
And we bring them together and we go,
wow, that's how downstream from Me Too,
there can be challenges that are both created for men and women in this dating world.
I'm like, fuck, that's cool.
But the only way that you can do that is if you think and think and think and think.
You're 35.
You referenced how ideas generally are like a smell.
That appears and
gradually we try and figure out where that smell is coming from we also talked about regret so
bringing those concepts together as a 35 year old man now if you were to forecast off into the future
what your regrets are what smells of regret would you forecast now that you're going to experience
when we sit here when you're
14 you go do you know what the mistake i made at 35 done this and that yeah well i mean the
embarrassing thing about this is if you look back at what you regret from 10 years ago it's probably
still the same shit that you regret now yeah i think that our regrets stay with us because we're
the same you know you are the common denominator between all of the experiences in your life. All of my partners,
all of the breakups that I go through are bitter
and my ex ends up being a dick.
Okay, well, what do all of your exes have in common?
You.
You.
You're the common denominator between all of them.
So I think if someone is asking themselves this question
and goes, what am I going to regret in 10 years time?
What'd you regret from 10 years ago? It's a good place to start. So for me, um, fearing less. So I fear, uh, making big changes.
I move very slowly with decisions, whether this be with, uh, life, whether this be with the business, bringing in team members, delegating control
and responsibilities, taking risks, doing new things, new projects. It served me very well
because I make very few errors in business, but I leave an awful lot on the table because I don't
take risk. So, and the reason that I don't take risk is because of scarcity mindset, fear, concern of the future.
Self-doubt?
You talked about imposter syndrome, the voice.
Self-doubt.
Self-doubt to a degree, but it is more fear than that.
It's just, it's more ambient than it being self-doubt.
It's just there.
It's just this cloud that lurks.
And I go, uncertainty.
What about the uncertainty, right?
And this is another thing from Peterson,
where he says,
you have to consider the price you pay for inaction.
People presume that inaction has no cost.
You don't get to not make a choice.
Not making a choice is still making a choice.
Every minute that goes by that this decision is undone
is a choice. I teach you about one of my favorite bro science concepts that I came up with.
So it's called anxiety cost, right? You know about opportunity cost by doing a thing,
you don't do another thing. I believe that the longer that you wait before you do a thing that
needs doing, all of those minutes that you spend thinking about the thing that you wait before you do a thing that needs doing,
all of those minutes that you spend
thinking about the thing that needs to be done
could have been gotten rid of
had you have just done the thing.
So for an example,
your daily routine resets every morning when you wake up.
You have to walk the dog and meditate
and do your breath work
and read a new journal and do whatever.
If you do those things earlier in the day, you get to spend
the rest of the day in just this bliss, right? This self-congratulatory, noble, high horse bliss
about all of these things you did. Whereas if you leave them until the end of the day, you have to
spend all of those minutes thinking, oh, I got to do the meditation when I get home and can't forget
to write in the journal. That's anxiety cost. And that's a really good compelling reason
why you should make decisions as soon as you're ready to make them, because you will get rid of
these wasted minutes, which you'll never get back. You're never going to get those back. Your brief
time on this planet, 4,000 weeks, and you're going to minimize the anxiety cost by doing things
sooner. So for me, definitely fearing less would be one of them chris this conversation's been
immense diverse honest vulnerable everything i love about this show you're an incredibly
talented wise speaker and within that what i see is i see repetitions i don't see someone that came
out of the womb with your insight but but I also see a really genuine curiosity,
which you just can't fake.
I will never be able to fake that.
I don't, you know,
we were talking at dinner last night
about the guy sat next to us with the shoes on
and you're saying,
why is he wearing those shoes?
And why has the waitress got that belt on?
That is your sort of natural disposition to curiosity.
And it is of tremendous value for the world
because I can take so much from it
without having to do the hard work. And i think the secondary piece there is your ability to
distill the complex into the simple that is incredibly powerful and that's exactly what
you do on modern wisdom over and over again and i've i've watched and observed that show evolve
and continue to evolve into something which is i mean if i could invest i would invest i would
back that train where that
train's going. So I think it's incredibly important for people to go and check out your show,
Modern Wisdom, if they haven't already. I'm sure a lot of people have, but it is just such an
unbelievably rich source of inspiration, education, and humanity as well. And I think that's a lot of
what we lean towards here is that the human side of these things, and you provide that in abundance.
So thank you for this conversation.
I feel like we could talk for fucking hours.
This is a problem where these things
actually have to end at some point
because I'm sure there'll be a part two in the future, I hope.
We do have a closing tradition on this podcast
where the last guest leaves a question
for the next guest, as you know.
And there's a question been left for you.
This is maybe the longest paragraph
I've seen in this book so far.
Okay, so the question left for you is,
go back to the most painful
or emotionally challenging moment or period you had as a boy.
What would you say to that boy now,
speaking directly to him to help him through that experience?
Difference is, I know who wrote that question.
You do, yeah.
That's the problem of having too many friends in Austin that fly out here.
So thanks for that, mate.
And I have to say, we might as well let the cat out of the bag.
He also knew that you were coming on next.
So he wrote that question for you.
I also bumped him for coffee yesterday.
So he might have written a particularly difficult question.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sorry.
So both of us have taken an interest
in psychedelics recently.
And on a small dose of mushrooms a long while ago,
I saw a version of me in the corner.
And what I realized was that that boy
was worthy of love and acceptance.
And if I could see him struggling through loneliness at school
and a lack of support from friends,
a sense of solitude that like was pathological like just straight up loneliness right
i would have told him that i was proud of him for getting through the things that he's got through
i would have said you're working hard you're worthy of acceptance and love. You don't need to offer the world anything
in order for it to love you back. You don't need to offer people gifts or
VIP entries or insights from a podcast.
It's hard to be someone that thinks about things deeply because there is a in-kind association of
suffering that comes along with it like it's both a blessing and a curse to feel things so very
deeply but i think that the price is worth it i think that the depth of enjoyment that you get
out of life is worth it and for that young boy that i saw that was sat on the ground, that was alone, I'd have picked him up and cuddled him
and said, you're doing great.
Chris, thank you.
Thank you, mate.
Thank you so much.
That's honestly beautiful.
And I think I speak for many when I say that
that's the message a lot of people in their own lives
will need to hear right now.
So thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
I've really enjoyed coming on.
It's been great that both of us are following this little path, parallel train tracks going forward.
Cheers.
Let's see where it takes us. Thank you.