The Nick Bare Podcast - 023: Chris Williamson - Curiosity Is The Superpower For Success

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

In this episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Williamson, a club promoter turned podcast host with over 200m+ downloads and one of the biggest shows in the world. Chris's journey of designing a new life and taking massive risks to chase his passions, including giving up a lucrative career and moving across the world, is nothing short of inspiring. We break down the "Joe Rogan Conflation" of difficult and valuable, reveal the top three traits of high achievers, and discuss why curiosity is the underrated superpower of success. Enjoy the episode! Save 10% at BPN Supps: https://bit.ly/nickbare10audio Follow for more:  IG: https://www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: https://www.youtube.com/@nickbarefitness Keep up with Chris here: IG: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx/  YT: https://youtube.com/@ChrisWillx Topics: 00:00 Intro 1:29 Party boy to podcast host 14:39 Designing a new life 29:26 Change facilitates growth 34:12 Driven by fear of insufficiency 47:18 Balancing peace and ambition 55:55 Success and desire 1:00:03 Joe Rogan’s difficulty & value conflation 1:02:27 Difficult vs. suffering 1:11:11 Benefits of voluntary suffering 1:14:15 Courage to be curious

Something you learn from Rogan, you said, was that something valuable is often difficult to achieve, but just because it is difficult does not mean that it is valuable or worthwhile. This I called Rogan's value difficulty conflation. For instance, Joe said, like, look at the car he's driving, look at the watch he's wearing, look at the girl he's with. People would look at those things and think, wow, those are difficult to get. But they're not necessarily valuable. Just because something is hard for you to achieve doesn't mean that it's something that you should desire.

Things that are truly valuable are the ones that are aligned with you. you? What do you want to want? They're the things that you want to want. You need to make sure that the reason that you're doing something is because you actually value it, not simply because it's something that's difficult. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to thank you for tuning in and supporting the brand. Now, I have spent the last decade plus of my life building bare performance nutrition, and we create effective supplements that you can trust to support your wellness, endurance, and performance goals. We offer high-quality, great-tasting weight. We offer high-quality, great tasting weight protein powders, effective pre-workouts, superfoods, sleep support,

electrolytes, and much more. So if you want to support the content that we produce and the message that I am sharing through my content and on this podcast, I would greatly appreciate it if you want to bpnsups.com and you can use code Nick Bear 10 to save 10% off your next order. So thank you guys. I appreciate you. And let's dive into the show. Okay, today on the podcast, we have Chris Williamson, and my first question to jump right into it. You've gone from model, party boy, club promoter, reality TV, to a top podcast host, having some of the deepest conversations with the most successful people. How? Yeah, it's not the normal trajectory.

I don't guess. I think for a long time, I was very curious. and throughout my 20s I was this big name on campus party boy person who was living off the back of reputation and filling nightclubs. I owned one of the biggest events companies

in all of the UK, ran a thousand parties, met a million people, stood on the front door and tight jeans with a clipboard giving out VIP bands and doing all that stuff. But I always felt

like there was something a bit missing and podcasting gave me the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity. And I think there were a lot of young guys they might feel this like the values that the world is telling them they should aspire to they can achieve but they don't feel fulfilled by so you know you can achieve success in the way that the world might tell you that you should like the dan bilzarian kind of success perhaps like the caricature of masculinity success and then you're like fuck like i did this thing and

no it doesn't it doesn't quite feel i still feel unfulfilled in some way and um yeah the podcast was the opportunity for me to do something that genuinely satisfied me intellectually in terms of my curiosity. And it was just good timing that I started talking to people on the internet and then accidentally made a career out of it, I suppose. I do want to unpack that a little bit more because the value I see in that discussion, those experiences you gained in that previous life, is I know there are so many people who are afraid to pivot in life.

I was having a conversation with Lewis House a few months ago when he released his new book. And he was talking about identity foreclosure. And when I read about identity foreclosure and he talked about identity foreclosure, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. Where essentially I'll use someone who wants to be a doctor growing up. And when you're in high school, you decide you want to be a doctor. So you apply for college. And you go through undergrad.

And then you go through graduate. And you go through residency. and before you know it, you're a decade in a school, and you're about to be a full-time doctor making half a million dollars. But at that moment in time, when all the work has been done, you don't want to be a doctor anymore. But you're afraid to pivot because that's your identity. You've been identifying with that for the last decade.

So I'd love to talk about what you learned as a model and a club promoter in this previous life. What lessons did you take away from those experiences? So they're going to provide a lot of value to encourage people to be okay with pivoting no matter how much time, money, energy they've invested into one thing. So what lessons did you learn in that chapter of life? One thing straight off the bat that everybody needs to realize is that if you are succeeding in a life that you don't enjoy, think about how much more successful you would be in a life

that you do enjoy. 85% of Americans are either actively disengaged or, or not engaged with their work, right? Think about how much better those. And tons of them are successful. Tons of them are really, they're killers, they'd be great at their job. They're doing sales. They're doing architecture, doing whatever the fuck they're doing.

Think about how much better they would be if they were actively engaged. So for me, I arrive at university at the age of 18, kind of unpopular throughout most of school, pretty lonely, was an only child and just really struggled to relate to other kids a lot. Got to uni and you know how over the summer holidays. every single year when you went back to school, you always thought, this is the opportunity for me to reinvent myself and I'm going to be one of the cool kids.

This is like the ultimate version of that, right? Because I'm moving away from the previous town, the previous expectations that I had, any of the limitations that I felt that I had previously. So I get to university and very quickly I start working for an events company. And I'd been on the outside of social groups for a very long time looking in. And what that meant was, although I didn't have a particular, particularly strong friend group, I was able to observe what caused social networks to join together

a lot because I was always observing, right? It gave me a degree of perspective that maybe other people didn't have, which means that you're really good as a club promoter, because what you're trying to do is manipulate social networks to move to different parties. I was like, yeah, I've got a bit of a talent to this, very quickly started to rise up through the ranks of this company, and then within a year, me and my business partner, who was the guy I sat down next to at my first ever seminar in university and we remained business partners for like a decade and a half afterward we did really really well and I started to attach my sense of self-worth to the success of the business because throughout most of my childhood I was pretty sure that I was a loser I was pretty

adamant that I just wasn't meant for success or love or acceptance from the world generally and it was going to be the world and me not me in the world we were never going to be working together. It was always going to be me as an outside observer. And what I found, and again, a lot of young people may notice this, that if they felt discordant in their life for a while, and then they discover something which makes them feel like they belong or gives them some sense of love or acceptance or praise, they will very quickly see themselves and that thing is fused because this is the root that I have to being accepted by the world. So for me, the success, if the business is doing well, I was good. If the business is doing badly, I was a piece of

shit. So the vacillation of what happened with the business also was causing me to feel that way personally. How common do you think that is? I think it's really common. I would agree. I think it's super common. I mean, you know, how many of the guys, even you, you know, you have an amazing six-month period with BPN and then something happens. You were telling me, I think the last time I was here about, was it the price of creatine or something? What was it? Or the price of something had gone insanely expensive and then you were stuck in this hard place because all the customers didn't want the price to go up and you were like, but the cost of this is like tripled. It was creatine.

Creighton. Yeah, it was Creightine. Yeah, through COVID or supply chains or something. Yeah, I mean, we're now paying more for creatine than we used to sell it for. It's wild. You know what I mean? Yeah. So you feel this like you get squeezed. As your margins get squeezed, you get squeezed and as the success of the business starts to, you know, become turbulent, you do as well. and learning how to separate you from your work, like you do your work, you are not your work. And that, I mean, that's taken me literally 15 years

to try and pull apart. So everything's going well and broadly, and I'm finding success and people need me. You know, if you're 20 years old and you're the person that can get everybody into every nightclub in town and you run the biggest events and you've got VIP and you know the names of all of the hot girls and blah, blah, blah. Like it's a good position to be.

and I did have tons and tons of fun, right? Like I wasn't in an existential crisis for most of the time. This is me reflecting on what happened as opposed to the way that I felt in the moment. During this time, I was just doing anything that gave me a bit more status. So I started DJing, which again, you're the guy at the front of the party. Everybody knows. Everyone's like literally dancing to your tune. I started modeling.

I was a commercial model for 10 years. Did campaigns for like every big company in the UK, basically traveling around the UK, doing shoots very regularly. And then I had this club promo stuff. Then age 23 or 24, I go on my first reality TV show, which is called Take Me Out. It's like 10 million people,

primetime Saturday evening viewing for the UK. A couple of years later, I'm the first person through the doors of season one of Love Island. So anything, like a professional fuck boy, basically, professional party boy for a decade, just accumulating status and doing things that young guys are, like young guys do. I'm selling my soul.

I was just doing like what young, dumb dudes that have got spare testosterone do it got toward the end of my 20s and it really happened on that second reality TV show that I did where I'd worked for a very long time to be the best known person in the city

I had this massive afro this huge hairdo thing which you may or may not have seen on the internet I've not seen that okay yeah it's a sight to behold I have this I'm very recognisable physically do all of the things that I can do to accumulate status and I think a lot of what I was trying to do was just like fill a hole inside of me that fundamentally said you are not worthy as you are

therefore you need to be performative you need to do something to make people want to be around you because I'd had the lesson that I'd learned throughout most of my childhood from social groups was you're not worthy like nobody wants to be around you therefore the lesson I took away was I need to offer the world something in order for them to accept me and that something could be status, or it could be VIP bands, or it could be success, or it could be a blue tick on Instagram, or whatever. And I think I was trying to fill that hole a lot with external accolades that would mean that I had something to offer the world so that it would finally accept me. So I go and do this reality TV show. Do they find you through the modeling network?

Correct. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So a lot of the time with reality TV stuff, they will go to modeling agencies. It makes sense. Because they want people that are good looking, but they also want people that are comfortable on camera. You know, if you deposit, and here's something interesting. Like a lot of people ask questions about how scripted are these reality TV shows? Because there's always conspiracies about these people were plants. They were put in there to be together or to do whatever. These people, especially in stuff like Love Island, six weeks ago, they were hairdressers. If you think that Brittany, 18-year-old nail technician from Wyoming, has been able to, at the drop of a hat, run a scene back and be like, Brittany, that was really, really great,

but we just needed to do it again with a little bit less emotion. Can we make sure that your eyes are looking to camera number two here? Like, she's not a trained actor. She's not dealing with fucking Kira Knightley here. You're dealing with a girl who was a normal person a few weeks ago. So they don't have the skills to do the level of like conspiracism that sometimes people think is going on. So I make it to basically the World Cup final of being a party boy, right?

Like it's this brand new TV show, six weeks, every single night. for an hour, for six weeks, this show is on TV. It's the biggest thing that's been dropped on TV in forever. And while I'm there, there's no phone, no TV, no internet, no books, no friends, no YouTube, no distractions, no calls, no nothing. It's just you and 13 of the people in this villa talking about, like, that guy and that girl and how she totally mugged him off last night, bro. Like, that's it.

And how old are you at this point? 27. Okay. So I probably should have known better by this. this point but didn't. So I get myself to the World Cup final of this like party boy life. And while I was there, I was around people who genuinely were the hyper extroverted, super energetic person that I thought I was. And because I no longer had any distractions, because I didn't have my phone or my friends or YouTube or my books or anything like that, it gave me a fatal

dose of contrast and I got to see the person that I thought I was, who was all of them, compared with the person that I actually was that was me. And it wasn't like, and then the skies opened and I realized that I was meant to be a podcaster. But it did teach me that there was some sort of discord going on in my life. There was friction. Something wasn't in incongruence here. And I needed to work out what was going on. And that was a good time. because that was like 2015, I think, something like that. So you've got, you know, Rogan's really picking up steam there, Jordan Peterson, Alanda Botan from the School of Life, Sam Harris, like even guys like Ben Shapiro.

A lot of people talking about the importance of telling the truth, of doing self-inquiry, of sort of standing up for the values and working out what you believe in and having a set of core values. And this was stuff that I'd never learned before. I'd never ever thought about this. And that really sort of resists. with me and made me think you need to go and do some self-work. You need to work out who you are. You don't know who you are. And yeah, getting to the end of your 20s and not having a really strong sense of self is something that I know maybe you're supposed to have sorted, but I didn't.

And yeah, starting the podcast was my route toward being able to make that into a regular occurrence. What was that journey like from the realization of this is not the person I'm supposed to be? I'm not spending my time with people I want to be. What was that journey like from identifying that contrast, that difference? And then taking this new route journey and road of having these deep conversations and discussions and more meaningful work, more meaningful mission. was that overnight? Was that one year? Was that baby stabs or was it a flip of the switch? No, it took a really long time. And one of the reasons is if you've hidden the person that you are for a very, very long time, which I had,

you don't know what you're looking for when you're looking inside of yourself. You don't know what your opinion is or what your truth is, right? Because it's biased? Yeah, because you've layered it. There's tons and there's decades. of lies and persona and performance and insecurity and anxiety and compensation all on top of something deep down that's supposed to be you. So if you want to work out who you are, you need to dig through all of that before you can get to anything that feels solid. So for a long time, I was just asking myself question. Here's a good example, right? So fundamentally because I didn't think that people wanted to like me, I remember I would think a lot of the time when someone ask me a question, like, what did you think of that film that recently came out? I would run a

script in my head that said, what does Nick want to hear from me right now? I wouldn't say what I thought. I would say what I thought you wanted to hear in order for you to like me. So I was always playing like two degrees of separation away from the person that everyone saw. And when you do that for long enough, you don't actually know what's at zero anymore. You can begin to believe the lie so much that the lie like inhabits you, the persona subsumes the person, right? Stairs out through your eyes and then you don't actually know what your own opinion is. And this is something that's really, really common. And, you know, it's such a first world problem. People have got genuine, difficult issues to deal with that pale in insignificance to the existential weight of like trying

to be popular. But the felt sense of it's really uncomfortable. And especially when you become aware of that, when you become aware of the fact that, oh, I've been kind of not really being too truthful for a very long time. And this isn't big lies. I'm not claiming to be of African-American origin or something. Like, I'm just trying to be liked by people and working out what that means. So, yeah, I had to start working out what truth felt like. And there was a really formative blog post I read called What Do You Want to Want by a guy called Kyle Esh and Rhoda. And it's a really interesting question because what do you want is determined by societal norms and the way you've dealt with past traumas and your paths of least resistance and what's easy to you and blah, blah, blah,

what do you want to want? It's a really difficult question because you have to actually design your wants and asking myself that, okay, if I could pick anything that I want to be in life, what would I want to be? And that was a question that I like grappled with for a very long time, because for a long time, I thought it was, I want to be well known and I want to have hot girls on my arm and I want to earn money and I want to be known as like the popular guy and I want to run good parties. And all of that stuff was fun and fulfilling. And I had a fantastic time. The business that we ran, I'm incredibly proud of everything we did. But there was lots missing from that. And a lot of it was compensating for other things that I wanted. And I could have probably

got there, kind of have got there in a different way. I don't know if I was ready to learn this until I was ready to learn it type thing. But I definitely feel like I could have done it in a more aligned and cohesive way. So yeah, the story when I got, off Love Island. So it's like an emotional leaving because it's a surprise eviction and all this stuff. And it was just, I'd read, um, Paulo Coelho's, uh, The Alchemist. You read that book? I have not. Oh, it's fucking phenomenal, dude. It's like 150, 200 pages. It's a fiction book. It's very symbolic, very figurative, beautiful, beautifully written. And I'd read it the week of media lockdown where you, uh, you get put in a hotel and you don't know what's going on. And then

you get put into the villa. I'd read this book. It's very psychedelic the way that you read it. So I'd gone in and it's all about this shepherd going through the hills of Spain. He's kind of falling in love. He's realizing that he's maybe his life isn't what he thought it was. So I went into the villa kind of in this weird sort of psychedelic, reflective trance from having read this really, really powerful, formative book. It was the first book I'd read probably since Harry Potter when I was like 15 or something. It's the first time I'd been without my phone. Did someone give you this book or did you choose it yourself? gave it to me. My mom told me that I should read it. And I was like, yeah, so she, she spiraled me

into this psychedelic, like little tiz that I had for most of the time I was there. Anyway, I get out of this thing, surprise eviction. And for the first time in four weeks or five weeks, I'm on my own for the first time. And it's the south coast of Mallorca. And on the south coast of New Yorker. It's one of the best night sky viewing spots in the world. Like unbelievably low light pollution, very clear skies, whatever the things are. So anyway, I get dropped off and it's been this whirlwind and all this stuff's happened. I've read this book and I'm losing my mind and all this. And then I go in, dump my stuff in this hotel room, step outside and it's pitch black everywhere

outside. And I look up and it's the first and only time I've ever seen this, the entire Milky Way is just spread across the sky. looks like someone's taken a handful of glitter and just thrown it. It's just the whole Milky Way, right? I can see it running from horizon to horizon, either side. And I was like, what the fuck is going on? Like, it just felt like such a awe-inspiring and dreadful and grand situation. Like, it was the wildest, one of the wildest things that I've ever seen. And that kind of really cemented home, like, okay, like, there's bigger things out there, like, more stuff that you should do. I don't think it was a sign sense to me by anybody,

but it was just a nice symbolic experience. And from that, it was months, months and months and months, like 1,500 meditation sessions, 10 full journals, daily journals filled, of me just reflecting on, like, who am I? What do I want to be? And part of me regrets the fact that I set myself back so much, that I then had to do all of this work just to get to zero, to work out who I am to then begin trying to become the person that I want to be.

But on the flip side, it also means that I've got these insights. And I think that there's far more people who have lost themselves and need to get from minus five to zero than people who are already at zero and looking to get ahead now. So I really love the fact that I've got that insight and I can kind of reflect on that journey. Did you navigate that transition alone, or did you have a guide, mentor, therapy? Totally alone.

Have you used any form of therapy before? Yeah, I'm a big fan of coaching where I can use it. But throughout that, I definitely could have done it more efficiently. Like, it was just crushing, crushing amounts of introspective content, like lots and lots and lots of reps. Kind of the same as I'm sure that somebody could get a program written by you that would be, you know, perfectly periodized with delode weeks and all the rest of it. But someone can also achieve quite a lot of work if they just spend tons of time in the gym. It's less efficient, but the outcome is not a million miles away.

from the same. And that was kind of the same for me, I suppose. But yeah, I'm a big fan of using therapy wherever people can. I think that having somebody to talk to, having the podcast for me is phenomenal because it forces me to be rigorous and precise and scrutinize the things that I say and believe three times a week, like an hour and a half. I think a lot of people don't even have that. Yeah. So, yeah, I've constructed a life now where I have that therapeutic sort of mental work built in. It's my job. So, yeah. But at the time, there was no plan.

It was just keep digging, keep reflecting, try and work out what's true, read, listen, watch as much as I can and see if anything sticks. And some of the stuff did. Did you cut cold turkey the previous life? Did you stop club promoting? Did you stop partying? No. So I stopped partying for a number of reasons.

the main one being I wanted more time and consistency. So I'd always wanted to have a meditation practice. But if you're hung over once every two or three weeks, that meditation practice is out of the window. And so is your breathwork practice. You're not doing it when you hung over. Then the day after you hung over, you're still probably not doing it.

And then a couple of days later, you're maybe starting to build the habit back up. And then just as you begin to gain momentum with that same habit again, you go out and party, and then you wake up hung over again. And it's one step forward, one step back all the time. So I did six months of,

sobriety twice and then I did a thousand days sober too I never had a problem with alcohol in terms of a dependency I'd drink maybe one seven three weeks but it'd be like larry young lad drinking you know like heavy hangovers type stuff but I loved going sober it was like anybody that is feeling like they're struggling to make progress the thing which is holding you back could very much be at the bottom of like a shot glass like just if you're going out partying with your mates and you're 24 25 and you think fuck like I really want to be a head from where I am. It's like, are you going out and partying more than once every couple of months? That very well could be it. And you can go out and party. Just don't drink and be home by one.

Nothing good. This is coming from a guy that's run a thousand club nights, right? Like, I've been in the trenches. Nothing fun happens after 1 a.m. I'm telling you, you miss nothing if you leave, if you leave at 1 a.m. It's like sloppy fights and kissing and and and just, it's nothing happened. Nothing good happens. So it was a very slow realization. And also because I was having to let go of the person that I thought I was and the role that I played, you know, I was the co-director, founder of this huge events company with thousands of members of staff across three different cities in the UK,

who assisted with this other city in Leeds. We ran Newcastle and Manchester, tons and tons of people. We had a shots company and we did all sorts of stuff. My sense of status was still very much tied up in this. So even as I was trying to work out who I, I was. I didn't know that it wasn't going to be the club promoter person because I thought maybe I'm a businessman or maybe I'm whatever, right? There wasn't really a moment where I thought I'm going to have to stop doing this because the price that I'm going to pay is me forgetting or me

losing the person that I was. I never wanted to slow down. I was always much more interested in finding out what was going to be next, like who I genuinely was. However, it didn't exactly come easily like to let go of that and had it not been for COVID, which shut down every nightclub immediately, I don't know how much more quickly I would have hurried that along. COVID basically came in and made the choice for me in terms of, right, you're basically not going to be a club promoter in the UK for two years. And I learned what it was like to be a full-time podcaster instead

and realized that I preferred that life that I'd, you know, I was ready for me to move on from the nightlife stuff. But without that, I don't know how quickly I would have been able to pull the pin because that was the thing that had given me everything. It had given me acceptance, status, prestige, bought the house that I was living in. It'd done everything for me. So, yeah, I think COVID had a lot of bad things, but that was definitely one of the positives. I'm curious if people thought you were crazy when you made this massive transition.

Because from the outside looking in, people thought you were crushing it. You were crushing it. Yeah. You were on reality TV. You were a model. You were on these nightclubs. Did you think that everything you added onto your life would add more fulfillment and happiness,

but in reality there was a point of diminishing return or the more you added on, the less happiness and fulfillment you gained? Yeah, I don't know if any of those individual things added anything on. It wasn't a case of diminishing returns. It was like me trying to make myself less hungry by drinking more. It just wasn't fulfilling the right thing, right? I wasn't in alignment with this stuff.

What I wanted was to do things that I had a genuine interest in, that I could be paid for, that people would recognize, that would move the world in a good direction. Modeling wasn't doing that. DJing wasn't doing that. Running the nightlife stuff was fulfilling in some ways, but it didn't move the world in a better direction. Like no one ever came out of one of my nightclubs and said, dude, you know what it is? I was feeling lost and alone. But after those one pound Yeager bombs and that banging house music, dude, you changed my life. I'm like, that doesn't happen. But it happens like 20 times a day on the podcast. So I wouldn't say that I was reticent about making the change because I knew that something had to change. But in terms of what other people thought, yeah, like, mom and dad, thankfully have been very supportive and just let me do my own thing. But fuck knows what they thought. Like, are you going to let go of this business that is by anybody to stand.

standards. Paying well, very comfortable, you're competent. It's not taxing on you. You know it inside out to try and talk to people on the internet. Was it easy? Yeah, because I knew that, I just knew that I couldn't go back and do more of the nightlife stuff. Had I have been more brought into the life that was living previously, moving on to a new one would have been harder. But that wasn't so much the case. And then, yeah, winter of 2021, come out to Austin for one month, love it, just really, really felt aligned when I came out here and then. Start of last year, I made the move to go full time. So that's another degree of like insanity, right?

Not just leave the business behind to try and talk to people on the internet, but then leave your entire country behind that you've lived in for 33 years to go to this brand new city and a brand new country. I didn't have a visa at the time. So I was like hoping that I was going to get accepted for my 01 visa, which I ended up getting, which was brilliant. I didn't know anybody here except for a couple of people that I met on the internet through the show.

And yeah, but it was, it's by far the best single decision that I've made. Almost every meaningful decision that you make in life has got risk on the other side of it. I've come to believe that there is no meaningful decision that doesn't have an in-kind, massive amount of risk. The risk means it's meaningful. Correct. Correct. I mean, you made two huge changes to your life that obviously facilitated a lot of growth.

One was leaving a previous successful life. as a club promoter. And then the other change is moving to a whole new country and starting fresh. And there's a lot of risk with both of those decisions. They can end very poorly. But when there's a lot of risk on the line, you have to increase the amount you work to make it successful, to make it work.

And I have found that sometimes when I'm in a period of life where things are going good, they could be going great and it's easy for me. That's where I know I need to create a shake-up or massive change. And sometimes when I'm too comfortable, and I know I'm just kind of on autopilot and coasting and, like I said, passively things could be growing and scaling and making more money, but I want to be challenged. And I want things that are going to facilitate growth, massive growth.

do you ever find yourself in a period of life or time now where you feel like you're on autopilot? Things are going good. It could be going better and you you purposefully create change to facilitate that growth. Yes, yes. Applying additional pressure to yourself or trying to take risks is part of that. I think I'm by nature very, very risk-averse, like unbelievably conservative. financially, in terms of decision making, personally, professionally, everything is so, so risk-averse for me. So I have to observe this, like, dynamic that you're talking about super carefully,

or else I will just continue to play it safe and justify it as being the conservative and right way to move. You know, like my set point is so far away from risk that I'll probably leave a lot on the table. And this is going to be me throughout the rest of my life, right? Like my ability to judge risk is quite poor. I'll always err on the side of caution, which is fine. And it's done me incredibly well in my business. It's made a lot of things very successful. But I also know that I am leaving a lot on the table because I very rarely fail. The reason that I very rarely fail is that I very rarely take risks that push me close to the brink of failure. But the times that I do, the times that I do put my foot down, like pivoting from one career into another, like moving out

to Austin. We're going to do some stuff. We've done some stuff with the show. We've been spending, I was telling you about the shoot that we did with Chris Bumsted a couple of weeks ago. Like over 100 grand's worth of equipment flown in, 10 guys, this full production team,

doing all of this stuff, just to see what happens if we put it out there. It's a massive, massive time, effort, energy, monetary investment to try and create something cool. But I believe strongly enough that on the other side of trying to do that will be, it'll be something very special and that that'll give us recognition

and it'll push the boundaries of what people can expect from the world of podcasting and independent media production and it was meaningful to me so we did it. But it's like a huge, massive gamble to just see if this is going to be worthy or worthwhile at all. It's also calculated. Correct. Yes, it's not reckless. I don't think I'm gladly never going to really deal

with reckless risk, I don't think. But no, I agree, man. If you are just ticking over and everything feels pretty comfortable, it's probably a warning sign that you need to make a change somewhere because if you see discomfort as a signal that growth is happening,

that's something that you should lean into. This is the same with you when you'll be doing your runs, when you're doing your training, when you're doing your dieting down for competitions. Every other person that you're coming up against is feeling this as well. This is what hard feels like. Did you expect it not to be hard?

Did you expect this thing that you're trying to achieve not to be difficult. Every other person feels the exact same way. They also feel the hunger. They also feel the fatigue. They also feel the double digit testosterone level and the lack of motivation and I've got to keep the business going and I've got to keep the relationship steady and I've got to do the rest of it. Every other person that you're competing with also feels this. So when you feel that, know that this is your opportunity to separate yourself out from the pack. It's not a personal curse that's been bestowed on you because you are somehow deficient or worthy of being besmirched

with this difficult situation. This is the selection criteria of why most people can't do it and why most people quit. Beyond that is the thing that's going to make you stand out from the crowd. Obviously, some of these choices you've made, you've taken risks, have placed you in a, I'm sure at times, compromised position, but there was a return. into those decisions and now you're at where you are today hosting one of the largest podcast in the world. You've had some amazing conversations and discussions with outliers.

Yes. Nick Baugh. Well, thank you for that. I appreciate that. Guests who have done amazing things and changed the world and change your trajectory of science and mankind. So I want to ask some questions about things you've learned from some of these amazing guests. And I heard that you said that many of the highly successful people you've interviewed,

on average, most of them are driven by a fear of insufficiency and not driven by a balanced desire for success itself. Can you explain that? Yeah. So there was a study done on the traits that the most successful people on the planet have, and there's three of them that almost all of them have in common. One is a superiority complex. They believe that they can do more than other people. Second is a crippling fear of insufficiency that they're terrified of not being good enough. And third is impulse control, that they can control the things that they look at as they go forward. It's my belief that fear is a much more powerful driver than desire, that most people are running away from things that they don't want, as opposed to running toward things that they do.

I would actually class you as probably one of the outliers that I haven't seen massive amounts of insufficiency, but with almost all of the other high performers that I've spent time with, these guys have got something in their past that drives them forward. You know, the amount of discomfort that you need to go through to become someone of note in any field, whether it be sports or academia or art or creativity or poetry or like fucking pickleball, whatever it is, right? It requires such a massive activation energy that most people have more pain than they do love in life. And pain is a significantly more potent fuel.

I think that that's what gets people over the line. Now, the people that have longevity, I think actually pivot. I think that they use what they have in the beginning, which is often a mean parent, bullies in school, being an outcast, not feeling good enough, whatever kind of mental or social or whatever setback, they went through some previous trauma. They use that as the activation energy,

and then they transcend and include that, and they get themselves into a place that is more positive moving forward. This might be my personal bias that I had a lot of things to prove to the world, and I had a chip on my shoulder, and now I've tried to get rid of that. I've done a good job at getting rid of trying to prove people wrong and just doing things because I want to do things to help the world and to learn more about it and to help the people that listen to my show.

but yeah it's my belief that most people are running away from a life that they don't want as opposed to running toward a life that they do you find that you still operate with a chip on your shoulder and trying to prove other people wrong or have you transitioned that energy elsewhere yeah i've got rid of that the chip on my shoulder is largely gone there's very little of me that that wants to prove people that doubted me wrong in the past i did an interview for the BBC um back end of last year and it reached a lot of people. It was like just a written interview or whatever, but it went out on the main BBC website front page of the BBC. So like millions and millions of people saw it. And I haven't, I didn't really open up about bullying much throughout the first four years of the

show. And then I started to toward the back end of last year. And I spoke about it in this interview. And I got this Instagram DM request, like the arse end of my DMs from this guy whose name I kind of recognized, but I didn't really. And he said, hi Chris, you might not remember me, but we went to school together, I bullied you. And me and my wife are about to have our daughter go to preschool or primary school. And we started talking about what sort of a child we want her to become. And it made me reflect on my time that I'd spent in school. And it made me feel pretty disgusted at the way that I'd treated some people and you were one of them. And then, you know, I'd been thinking about it. I'd spent a lot of sleepless nights kind of vacillating and reflecting on whatever.

I went through and what I put other people through. And then I saw that article from the BBC and I just had to reach out. And I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry. I'm happy that you seem to be happy. And I promise that I'm not going to let my daughter become anything like the person that I was. And I'm going to ensure that she's going to step in if she sees any situation similar to this happening.

Thanks. And I was like, holy fuck. I sent the screenshot to my mom. I was like, do you remember this person and she did? as probably every parent does of a child that's bullied their child I honestly honestly like barely remember this kid's name

but he would have been part I guess that's even worse that like some parts of my childhood I'd had it was like get in line if you're gonna bully me type thing like I can't even remember the people that they were so traumatized that I couldn't remember them individually but there was so many of them that

like they were just part of a sea of like whatever oppression or some shit what were you getting bullied for when you're younger not being able to fit in I just didn't understand socially how to fit in with young kids. I was a late bloomer, like physically as a guy as well. I think I probably had whatever the opposite of precocious puberty is. So like, I don't know, maybe like 13 or 14 I started to grow a little bit, which is wild now

as somebody that was a fitness model throughout his 20s. Even that, you know, like even the desire to get bigger and stronger to prove yourself like physically for me was born out of feeling very weak and vulnerable when I was younger. So a lot of the things that we value in ourselves as we grow up are the light side of something dark that we're not a massive fan of. So for instance, mine or anybody else's ability to work in solitude to be able to take risks and go do stuff on their own,

well, that's the other side of being lonely as a kid. I learned that through spending a lot of time alone, but it's one of my superpowers now. You can put me anywhere on the planet with an internet connection on my own, and I will just put my nose to the grindstone and I will get shit done and I will get shit done

until three in the morning and I will get up and I will go and I will do it again and I won't stop. That's born out of me spending so much time alone as a kid which I didn't enjoy and I'm not,

I wish that I didn't have. But if the price that I have to pay for the skills that I admire in myself today were the pains that I had to go through previously I'd happily pay that price again. So anyway, talking to this guy and it's like dude,

I really appreciate you reaching out. I very much accept the apology if what you are going through and what I went through means that your daughter is going to be the sort of person that will move the world toward a better, lighter, more virtuous place than I think it was worth it for both of us to go through it. Like, for what it's worth, I forgive you. And you sent a couple more messages and that was it. But yeah, fucking Instagram gets deep sometimes. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think one of the greatest benefits for me at least from this podcast is, you know, being a new dad, my daughter turns one in less than three weeks,

which is wild to think about. But as a new dad and as I'm thinking about raising children, raising a family in, and mentoring them and guiding them as they grow up and become young adults and adults, through the podcast, I've noticed and I've learned that so many people's adult lives are shaped by their childhood. And just rising. how foundational those years are to guide someone to the next couple decades of their life, they're formative.

They're so formative. And I have conversations people who have gone through trauma and experiences and good and bad and wins and losses and seeing kind of how those experiences have shaped them to become the person they are today. Now as a father, I feel that responsibility so heavy. Does it ever make you know?

about making decisions? You think, oh God, if I get this wrong, then maybe she's going to have trauma for the rest of her life and she's going to have to go to therapy. No, it doesn't make me nervous in that sense, but it's made me very hyper aware of what I'm doing when I'm around her and how I'm sitting up these next couple years

to be a part of my daughter's life, be an active husband, be a part of my family's life. Because before my daughter was born, it was work, work, work, work, work. It's all I cared about. And I can honestly say that even my wife was the second thought. Work was always priority. And I would say that family was priority.

When in reality, work was priority, family was always second. I didn't mean for it to be that way, but it just worked out that way. When my daughter was born, it completely shifted my perspective. And I felt this massive responsibility. It's really made me hyper-focused on what I'm doing in the time that I spend with her and I'm around her. And now we started to talk about, you know, sending her to school one day and the use of social media in the world and society and culture and all these things we're trying to help her

navigate and make her own decision on, you know, and that's what makes me nervous is there's things that I can't control that she's going to be exposed to, like bullying and other kids. And my solution might be to beat up those kids' parents. But man, that's like, that's one thing that's always my mind is as she gets older and older and older, it's, you know, protecting, but also educating them and teaching them how to make their own decisions that are the right decision. Because that is going to ultimately decide and guide who they are when they're 15, 18, 20, 24, 30. And they're having kids and they're building families. I feel that responsibility massively.

It doesn't surprise me, man. Yeah, it's reflecting on just how important those first, you know, five or six years are, before you can even remember them. It seems based on the developmental psychologists that I've spent time with, it's crazy. There are things that you literally can't remember that shape the remainder of your life and they're like the physics of your internal experience, like literally like the laws that govern them. what is your inbuilt expectation of other people around you?

Are the people around you there to help you or to hurt you? Are people trustworthy or are they inherently something to be scared of? And this just rolls on and on and on and you don't even know where it comes from. Plus there's genetic predispositions which play an absolutely massive role, etc, etc, etc. Yeah, man, it's a big challenge. And the control thing, especially is somebody who self-employed, very agentic, sovereign sort of guy,

I'm going to get lean, or I'm going to get fit, or I'm going to get big, or I'm going to get strong, or I'm going to start a family, or I'm going to start a business. All of that's under your control. And you've got this thing that you care about. You're like, no, like usually I just get to pick what happens. Yeah.

What do you mean? What do you mean that she goes to school and there's people there that I don't get to choose whether she's around them? Like, I don't get to choose if people, like if there's someone that I don't like in my business, I fire them. If there's a branding change that I don't like with the company, then we alter it. If there's something about my body that I don't enjoy, then I get in the gym and I change it.

What do you mean that there's like parts of her life that I don't get to be in control of? And I've just got to hope that she is able to do it on her own. So yeah, that control factor, I imagine, is a big challenge. That's the challenge that I'm so excited to embrace. because I know that my responsibility is not to control my children. It's not to constantly punish and create these very tight guidelines, these left and right limits where they can operate, but it's telling them stories and teaching them lessons

and sharing experiences with them, that they ultimately make their own decision. That's the right decision, I'd hope, hard right over the easy wrong based off of what I've taught them as they've grown. Well, think about it this way. How brute of a red pill would it be to realize that your children have been given foundations by you that don't just mean that they can do things without you there, but they can do them better than you could? Like, that's the goal, right? Well, that's, in my opinion, it's legacy.

Yeah. So I was listening to a conversation between you and campaigns. We were just talking about your trip down to- To Oregon. And this concept came up about being content and finding peace and being at peace with your life and what you're doing and being at peace with your past, whether good, bad, ugly, beautiful. Do you think we have the ability to be at peace but also be absolutely ruthlessly ambitious as well? can you have both of those things in life?

It's a really good question, and it's one that I spoke to Chris Bumstead about. This is probably one of the fundamental questions that I've been grappling with. And it plays off the first question you asked about, you know, people running away from insufficiency as opposed to running towards something that they want because the implication of that is that in order to be successful,

you need to have fear, you need to have insufficiency. You go, well, I don't want that. I mean, I want the success, but I don't want the insufficiency. I don't want the crippling sense of lack of self. worth. So, okay, like, how do I balance these two? How do we find a world in which we can feel like we are enough that we can have dealt with the things that we've dealt with in the past and that we're happy with how they've, we've integrated them into our lives and maintain our drive and go forward? I think habit has an awful lot to count for here. I think that, like I say,

the activation energy that a lot of people have is pain and desire to prove the world wrong or to prove themselves to be sufficient to the world, and that will get you going. And after a while, if you do something for long enough, you just, that's just what you do. It's like someone who's starting going to the gym and training versus you, right? Like, you're going to the gym now. If you haven't achieved all of the things that you want to with your body and physically, like you're never going to, right? You've done literally more than most even athletes, extreme athletes, have done with the endurance stuff, with the long distance, with the short distance, with the bodybuilding. But the reason that you go now is because of habit.

So I do think that there are ways that you can work on getting rid of the trauma, work on getting rid of the difficulties whilst holding on to the drive for success. But I would be lying if I said that a lot of people's competitive edge, even as they grow older, and even as they transcend the industries that they're in and they move further and further up the hierarchy, I would be lying if I said that I didn't think that getting rid of that results in lowering their performance. Like I think that the person who is still dealing with that chronic insufficiency,

that feeling of not being enough, I think that they'll outwork the other person. The next question is, what are you optimizing for? So you might think, well, am I optimizing for just being as successful as possible? Or am I optimizing for an enjoyable life? And an enjoyable life would include being successful, but it would also probably include not being filled with crippling insufficiency all the time. So this is a more important question, right? What does it mean that the people who we admire the most have the least desirable internal mental states?

Right? If we accept the fact that lots of people are driven by insufficiency, you know, the massive sense of superiority, insufficiency, and the ability to impulse control, what does it say about us and about what we value in? society that we disregard what we know or what we can induce about other people's internal states and we just applaud the things that they do in public. You know, like Elon Musk, for example, or Connor McGregor, both two great examples.

We don't know if Elon Musk hasn't had an erection in like 18 months, right? You don't know what his relationship with his father's like. You don't know if the texture of his mind when he falls asleep on an evening is absolutely disgusting. But he's the richest man on the planet. So that means he's pretty admirable. Connor McGregor. Everybody wants to be Connor McGregor. But do you want to have, he literally said in an interview I watched once that he'd been turned mad by his pursuit. He's like, I've been turned mad by this game. And I think that based on some of the videos that you've seen of him coming out recently, that might be true. The guy is a maniac, but he's a maniac that is probably the most

famous mixed martial artist of all time. Okay. Do you want to pick up? pay that price in order to be successful. Do you want success so much that you're prepared to give up your internal peace of mind? And the question is what are you optimizing for? And I think that most people, if they really, really dug deep, would realize that success is important. You want the world to give you some degree of validation. You want to feel like you're worthy. Your confidence can't just be built on your own internal sense of how well you've done. You actually need the world to kind of prove to you, yeah, like, you did good as well. You didn't just think that you did good. You actually did do good. And you can prove that by the way that it was effective and the way

that people responded to it. It's kind of like that question you asked in beginning. What do you want to want? Yeah. Do you just want to be ruthlessly successful? Because if that's the case, then sure. Like never deal with any of your insufficiencies. Like use them as fuel, keep the chip on your shoulder, prove the bullies wrong, continue to never accept people's apologies, all of that stuff, because that's going to be great fuel. Most people don't want that. Most people want somewhere between, They want to go to war, but they want to go to war in a serene manner. Like they want to be able to be a warrior by day and go to bed with somebody they care about and put their head on the pillow and it'd be nice and peaceful on an evening time.

I think it is possible to do. And I think that the more important question is, what are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for just outright success by any costs? Because if that's the case, you're going to have to sacrifice an awful lot, including your own mental state of mind and you're on peace. Most people, when they look deeply enough, I don't think are after that. I think that success is one of the many things that they want.

But you can probably sacrifice 10% or 15% of success for like 50% more peace of mind. And I think that's a pretty good trade. I spent years and years and years hyper focused on success and zero focused on fulfillment, happiness, peace for myself. And it got me to a certain point.

It really did. I kind of look at my operating ability in sprints. There are certain sprints in my life where I have to sacrifice peace and happiness and fulfillment and leisure time to really just go all in on a project or a period of time that is very, very important. And there's sprints that are more focused on family and, leisure and balance and peace. But for years, years and years and years, it's what got the business to this point was head down work. And I think anyone who has gone through that journey starts to become a little mad,

like you said. You start to lose your mind a little bit. I think I've done some permanent damage to my mental capacity and ability where it's a little more mad than it was years ago. But I quickly had the realization in the last only 12 to 18 months of this, this capacity, this level that I'm working to achieve and what I'm working towards is one not sustainable. But it's also, you reach a point of diminishing returns. I'm going after the next big thing or chasing the next big challenge, the next race,

the next triathlon, the next competition, the next YouTube series. and while it's crushing me and it's building the business, it's bringing in more success, it's hurting the people around me, it's hurting my relationships, it's hurting my happiness. And once I had that realization, I realized that I was in control of the decisions.

I could move that lever of where I'm trying to go and what I'm trying to chase and how far and how fast. I can also directly control, my happiness and my fulfillment. It's all a choice that I make. Now, when you realize you're finally in control, you can change the trajectory of your life in a matter of time overnight, like right now.

I think it's just having that realization that you can and then you do. Yeah. A lot of people still need to prove to the world that they're worthy. I think that that's the, you know, to fly a flag for the psychotic workers amongst us it's one of the reasons why I think that, you know, if you're a guy who has this inside of you

that has this like grind set ability and the desire, do it. Like, see what happens if you work 16 hours a day for six months? Like, do it because you can do it. I promise you that you can do it. We've all done it. We've all been there. Every single day without rest, every single day over and over and over again,

obsessing, going to sleep, thinking about it, waking up, thinking about it, missing meals because you're doing it, missing family. Go and do it for a while. you will prove to yourself that you have the work capacity to be able to do this. And there's some power in that because you know that. You know that when push comes to shove, fuck, it's Black Friday and the supply chains have meant that creatine prices have tripled. What are we going to do?

We're going to spend the next two weeks in the office working out how we're going to fix this problem. Okay, like order pizza, diets out the window, health out of the window, sleeps out of the window, text the misses, tell what's going to happen. And you know you have it in the tank, right? It's very important. It's the difference between running away from a fight because you feel weak and running away from a fight because you're so strong that you don't need to prove anything. I know I've got that.

Just in case they ever did need to, I know that I've got it in the tank. So I think that that's a very important skill to develop. But what it'll also teach you is it's probably not worth it, man. Like you do, I think about this a lot, not necessarily with the damage that's been done mentally, but I think about how many probably years I've lost off my life from the amount of stress and work and late nights and sleep deprivation that I put myself through. Wouldn't surprise me if it's like you would have lived five years longer if you hadn't done X or Y or Z in your 20s.

There's prices that you pay, there's tradeoffs that you pay for everything. And like it's heroic to think back about that as well. You know, to go back and realize that you managed to achieve five years of growth in the space of one year. You're like, fuck yeah. That's good. That's what I wanted to do. But it doesn't last forever.

And here's another thing. I learned this idea from Bill Perkins, who wrote a phenomenal book called Die with Zero. It's probably one of the best financial philosophy books that I've ever read. I just listened to that podcast. You guys did it was incredible. Fucking phenomenal. We'll link it. It can be in the show notes below if people want to go check it out.

Bill Perkins on the Modern Wisdom podcast. And in it, he talks about the fact that there are certain experiences that you can only have at certain periods of your life. And you could also look at this to do with work. You are now the father of one-year-old, nearly. There are things that you could have done 10 years ago for the business, for your physique, for your lifestyle, that you can no longer do now, but without being irresponsible. Okay. So that means that if you want to try and do these things,

you have to do them when you can do them. And usually when you can do them is earlier. So this is actually a counterbalance to what we were talking about earlier on in my risk aversion thing. It's like maybe there are some risks that you should take pretty early. Because as you get older, the risks that you can take in some ways, you can take more risks with finances, right?

Because you just have more money overall. you can't take risks to go and like trek up Everest for like six months or you know try and beat NIMS purges time across the 14 peaks. It's like I can't do that I've got a fucking one year old. So yeah, it's interesting. I love this sort of balance between

success and desire and and trying to find a way to work it altogether. I think in that podcast it was described as a game of Tetris right before you're born, for example. You meet God. and God asks you, what do you want to do in your lifetime?

You throw on all these things. I want to get married. I want to be with a lot of women. I want to have a successful job. I want to travel the world. I want to go to school. I want to get this degree. So on and so forth.

You want to do all these things. And then God says, well, you can do all those things, but you have to do them in the right order. That's a hard thing. It's finding them in the right order to achieve and playing that game of Tetris. So good. I really, really love that. So you're on the Joe Rogan podcast.

And something you learn from Rogan, you said, was that something valuable is often difficult to achieve, but just because it is difficult does not mean that it is valuable or worthwhile. What does this mean to you? Yeah, so this is just a passing comment from Joe. And I'm a big fan of aphorisms, so pithy little statements that encapsulate a much bigger philosophy. And this I called Rogan's Value Difficulty Conflation. So as you said, most things that are valuable are difficult to get, but just because something is difficult to get doesn't mean that it's valuable.

And this is how non-valiable but difficult things get slipped into your desires. So for instance, Joe said, like look at the car he's driving, look at the watch he's wearing, look at the watch he's and look at the girl he's with. People would look at those things and think, wow, those are difficult to get. But they're not necessarily valuable. Just because something is hard for you to achieve doesn't mean that it's something that you should desire. There's many, many things that are difficult for people to get. And this was me speaking to me, right?

It was difficult for me to become one of the best known people in a city, to build this business, to do all of this stuff. All of those things were difficult. That didn't necessarily mean that they were valuable or worthwhile for me to spend my time on. things that are truly valuable are the ones that are aligned with you. What do you want to want? They're the things that you want to want, and that's what you end up going for. Most hardworking people realize that on the other side of difficulty,

on the other side of effort, is something that is worthwhile. There are very few things that are worthwhile getting that aren't difficult, because if they weren't difficult, they wouldn't be worthwhile, right? But just because something is difficult doesn't mean that you should put it upon a pedestal. You could say that becoming an arms dealer is very difficult. I'm sure it is. I'm sure the arms dealer industry is incredibly competitive and ruthless. But it doesn't mean that it's a worthwhile industry to try and get into.

So you need to make sure, especially if you're the sort of person who realizes that you have a capacity for dealing with difficult things, suffering, working hard, grinding. You need to make sure that the reason that you're doing something is because you actually value it, not simply because it's something that's difficult. So Seth Godin is one of my favorite authors. And in his book, Purple Cow, he says that the opposite of great is remarkable. Remarkable is held to such a high standard. You only use the word remarkable in very specific in certain situations.

And I'm using those two words, great versus remarkable. There's such a massive contrast and difference between the two. I want to compare difficult and suffering. I know you had conversations with David Goggins about the importance of suffering. Sometimes suffering is involuntary. Things happen to us. And there's also a voluntary suffering. Now, you can use a 100-mile ultramarathon through the Rocky Mountains as voluntary suffering.

But just because something is difficult doesn't mean that we will. voluntary suffer through it and learn something through. And here's what I'm trying to get across with this. Try to follow me with it because I want to hear your perspective. People like David Goggins have really promoted voluntary suffering and what you learn through it, physically and mentally. I think people often confuse that as continuously doing something very difficult, thinking that they're going to get the same result from suffering.

but just because you're doing something difficult over and over and over again but you're not getting anything out of it doesn't mean you should keep doing it so you have someone that say for example goes out and runs 30 miles every single morning

because I think it makes them harder or tougher and it's difficult it's challenging maybe they're not suffering through it anymore because maybe the difference between difficult and suffering is the contrast between great and remarkable

but they keep doing it because they think they're going to get this return, this reward. Do you find that people often keep doing things that they believe are just difficult in hopes that it's going to provoke effects of suffering? Is the contrast between difficult and suffering that massive? Yeah, I guess there's very few things that are going to cause you to suffer that aren't difficult. like it's uh how would you say it's necessary but not sufficient right to be in there i mean i can ask you this you've been through more suffering than at least physically self-induced than most people do you believe that on the other side of suffering there's important lessons absolutely but i also say

there's a lot of things that i've done that are difficult that i have not been suffering through that process. What like? Marathons. Running a marathon is and can be very difficult and challenging. And it hurts. It's painful. But you know it's going to be done in three, four hours. You've got to get there. I mean, it hurts. It's tough. A hundred mile ultra marathon like Leadville 100 that was almost 30 hours long. I suffered through that. There was such a massive deal. difference between a marathon and an ultra. Ranger School. I suffered the Ranger School. Yes, it was obviously difficult and challenging and hard, but there was like, there's only a few moments in my life that I can say I was actually suffering. But when I was suffering,

it completely changed the direction of my life. It was monumental. I think a big part of that is because of your work capacity. You know, for a lot of people, the marathon would be both difficult and worthy of suffering. You know, the fact that you have the capacity to be able to get through something in three or four hours. Somebody else, it might be five,

it might be pushing somebody to their absolute limit with regards to their work capacity. That's relative. Correct. I think that that's a big chunk of it. And, you know, it might be to do with business, right? Me and you, probably good examples. If you ask me, there's a project that's coming up,

it's going to be launched in eight weeks' time, and I need you to work every single day and every single night until two in the morning to get it done, fine. It'll be difficult, but I won't suffer. Like, that's well within my work capacity. I've done it for a decade and a half. I think that what you're talking about is pushing yourself beyond your perceived limits and the problem that you have, the example of the guy that was running 30 miles every day, 30 miles for probably a year is going to suck. But after a while, his work capacity is going to catch up to the demands that he's got. And that's why you need to continue to do difficult

things. You need to do things that you basically can't believe that you can do. Michael Easter, got this great book, The Comfort Crisis, which you might have seen. He was on Rogan. Great episode on Rogan. I've heard of it, but I've never, never read it. Really, it's just ways and tactics to beat a set point of relying on comfort. And he has this idea that once a year you're supposed to do something that there is a 50% chance of you being able to finish. So he uses this example, I think, maybe it's in Rangers or probably the Seals or something. They have to carry a rock. Team of four guys has to walk a rock across the bottom of the ocean for one kilometer.

The one swims down, picks the rock up, walks. I think I've seen videos of this. Drops it, goes back up, tags the next one, next one comes down. The other ones are still treading water, right, for the entirety of the time. And the reason he said, you know, like you pick your own tolerance of whatever 50% is 50% for you. Running distance is going to be significantly different 50% for me, as was shown by how much cam both made each of us run when we went out to go and see him.

So, yeah, I think just finding something, the suffering part and trying to find, if you're looking to find lessons through suffering, I think that you're going to be able to get them more reliably by doing something that is well beyond the bounds of what you think that you can do. And I think that in that is where you're going to find that the ceiling of what you thought your capacity was has been lifted. And the lesson that you learn from that is, okay, well, where else do I have limiting beliefs in my life? What are the other areas of my life that I think that this is as good as I can be?

And wow, I didn't think that me and my three buddies could walk this rock across the bottom of the ocean for one kilometer, but we did it. It took us six hours, but we did it. Okay, what else? Maybe the way I'm showing up for my partner, maybe the way that I'm dealing with bad, difficult conversations with my parents, maybe the way that I'm drinking on an evening time, maybe all of these things, it blows open your expectations because one lesson spreads across into all different domains. Have you found that a lot of people you've interviewed and had conversations with who have reached levels of success? They voluntarily suffer on a regular and consistent basis. One of the most common traits amongst the high performers, mostly the men, but amongst the high

performers that I speak to, they are electing to put themselves through hard things very frequently. especially as a good example you mentioned Rogan you know he is a guy who could have the entire world coddle him for the rest of time and the only way that I think he's been able to keep his ego small is by humbling himself with fucking 72 pound kettlebells

and ice baths at 30 degrees and saunas at 210 I think that he is permanently reminding himself you've heard this story of Marcus Aurelius, right, when he was walking through the streets of Rome. And he was this philosopher, god, king, emperor that was loved by almost all of the realm. And he would pay a guy to walk behind him over his shoulder as he was being bestowed with all of this praise from the common folk.

And this guy behind him would be whispering in his ear, you are only a man. You are only a man. And I think that it's important for people as they achieve success. This is something I'm thinking about now. I've never had this much attention on me and all of the rest of it. And I don't have a particularly big ego naturally. But there's times from like, fuck yeah, like I can do this and I can do this and I can do this. And every time that I go and do, I trained with Tim Kennedy last week at Roka.

And after that, my ego was like fucking one nanometer high. I thought, I just got beat up by gravity. And it's a good way. It's a good way to keep yourself in check. And I think that, yeah, consistency is the most reliable. trait that all of the successful people that I've been around have got. No one is successful who isn't consistent. Consistency won't guarantee success,

but not being consistent will guarantee that you won't be successful. And electing to do hard things very regularly would probably be a close second, I think. To get to a certain point, you know, in life and reach success, there's a stimulus that is constantly being applied to you, which is stress, it's struggle, it's pain, it's chaos, it's work.

This stimulus is just always feeding into you. I think that that stimulus kind of changes the way you feel. When I first started my business, before I joined the Army, things happened to me and I could have like this, the highest of high or the lowest of low.

And the longer that I did it, the more experience, the more stimulus, that was applied, that higher didn't get as high, that low didn't get as low. And I was able to maintain baseline very well, the longer idea what I was doing. Sometimes the only way to feel the highest of highs and the lowest of lows is through voluntary suffering. It's the only extremes that are left. Exactly.

That's what I found with suffering. That's why I searched for these moments. Well, that's what I meant by, you know, Rogan could be coddled for the rest of time. you know, you are a wealthy, successful guy. You could allow this company to just tick over, and you would be perfectly well off, probably greater than your material dreams that you had when you were a kid.

But you'd know inside that you were leaving a lot on the table. Right. Okay, so where does the desire to continue to push when you've already achieved enough come from? And how do we know when we're pushing too hard that we're compromising things that we truly do care about, right? Because we get distracted by the desire for success. much. And yeah, the doing hard things thing pushes you into a place that the world can't.

You know, when you are the guy that runs the company or that has done the self-work, that has found the wife, that has done the whatever. And this is one of the reasons why I think that, you know, you look at older dudes that are getting, Jocco is a good example. I think he's in his 50s. And he, 430 or 422 a.m. or whenever that watch photo goes up every single day. he's up, he's working out, he's doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, he's trying to build a company, all the products in the company that he's trying to build a responsibly sourced or like, you know, no preservatives and all this stuff.

So he's like trying to be ethical as ethical as possible, building boots made in Idaho or wherever it is, American sourced, American made, all of these things, like really trying to live the ethos of being aligned. He's sold millions of copies of his book. He didn't need to do this. But if he didn't go out of his way to find things that were difficult for him, there would be no difficulty left in his life.

His success has snow plowed so much stuff out of the way. And this is why, as guys age, I think it's even more important because your success is going to make life even more comfortable for you as you grow up. So you need to continue to find things. Okay, where can I be humbled? I'm going to do Brazilian jiu-jitsu

with someone who's got twice the skill set that I do. So my last question for you is, what happens when we stop becoming curious? I know you said in other interviews and podcasts that one of the reason you started the podcast and one of the driving forces behind growing and scaling the podcast, sustaining the podcast, has been that you were just genuinely curious about a lot of different things from other people. And that drives a lot of what high achievers do. You're just curious.

You start a product because you're curious how you can make it better. you're curious if you can make $100 million through a business that you start. You're curious if you can run a marathon. You're curious if you can move 100 miles in under 30 hours. Curiosity is what drives our decisions. It's what drives success and desire.

But what happens when we stop becoming curious? Is that the end-all be-all of humanity? Is that the end-all be-all of your success? Is that the end-all be-all of you as a person? If it was me and that curiosity went away, I have no idea what would be left. It is by far, it is weapons grade, pharmaceutical grade, the desire that I have inside to understand myself and the world around me. I'm interested in things.

I'm interested in everything. Good example. Went to a friend's party when I first moved here to Austin. And as people do, people take their shoes off at the door. But not everybody did. Some people kept their shoes on. And for about 15 minutes, in a party surrounded by interesting people in a city, that I just moved to, I was obsessing inside my own mind about why I was part of the no-shoes

people as opposed to the shoes people. It's like, what, what, what, what is it that all of the shoes people have got in common? And what is it that all of the non-shoes people have got in common? And I just, I was curious. I wonder what's going on here? Why would that be the case? Why is it the, da-da-da-da-da. It was with Chris Bumstead this weekend, massive guy, super alpha guy, but very quiet, very introverted. And I was in, I was having dinner with him and a bunch of the boys that work for him, were also jacked out of their minds, all like young dudes full of testosterone, gym goers, but everybody was quite quiet and quite serene. And I was curious about that as well. It's like, what is it that Chris has managed to do where there's a trickle-down effect

of his mindset, of his internal state that has set a tone for all of the guys that work for him as well. In an environment like this, you know, six dudes after a training session, eating beef, I would have thought it would have been like hooting and hollering and very outgoing, who's big chunks of time for three and five seconds where there was silence and everyone was being considerate and thinking about a thing. And then it came back in. I was like, wow, isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting that Chris has cultivated a culture which is almost him? It's like scaled himself into these young dudes and they're learning from him in a different way to if it was David Goggins's company, perhaps, or something else. If people stop being curious as far as I'm

concerned, I'm sure that you can, there's tons of people that aren't curious who have perfectly happy and successful lives, but I think that you are missing out on one of the most powerful fuels. And it's so beautiful because it keeps your ego just as small as doing difficult, suffering things because you don't have an agenda. You just want to know. Inbuilt in being curious and interested on what's on the other side of this question that you're asking is the truth. Because what you're asking is to find out what the truth is. I want to know. I want to what is on the other side of this question I have. Why the shoes people and the not shoes people? Why is it that these guys have acted in a way different to how I would have expected

because Chris is the leader and Chris has this type of demeanor as well? What is it that's causing this to happen? Isn't that interesting that it's different to some other company? I've been around other companies with guys of a similar age and a similar demographic and they're totally different in the way that they're... Okay, well, I'm not coming into this with some ideology. I'm coming into this because I want to find out what's real. I want to find out what's true. And it's just such a beautiful, powerful driving force for you to go out and work hard. And on the other side of it, the degree of satisfaction that is available for people when they have two different concepts that they haven't realized a linked together

and they put them together is, it's like Arnold's in that documentary. It's like coming. It's not quite like coming, but it's pretty fucking good. Oh, I know that feeling. It's great. When you're like, fuck, I've been thinking about this thing, thinking about this thing, thinking about this thing,

and you learn something new and you go, holy fuck. There it is. There it is. I understand how these two ideas fit together in a really interesting way. Let me give you one from something that I'm working on at the moment. So there is a question about why young people aren't dating quite so much at the moment. A study showed that 86% of women say they want a man to make the first move. A different study said that 50% of men say that they're afraid of making the first move

for being seen as creepy. Another study said that 20% of Gen Zeders say that a man approaching a woman sometimes or always constitutes harassment. So you have a world in which women are scared of being approached, men are scared of doing the approaching. People will judge many men, at least one in five men that do that as being harassers. But everybody understands that if the guys don't make the first move, nothing's going to happen.

If guys do make the first move, they're scared of being me-toed. Girls are scared of being approached by guys that they don't know, but also still know that they need the guys to make the first move 86% of the time. because that's the percentage. I was like, isn't that fucking interesting? Isn't this a difficult circle to square when you put all of this stuff together? Wow, I need to work out what's going on here.

I need to understand what the driving forces are behind that. And as each different layer of information and knowledge comes in, it's just so satisfying. So to me, if people lose their desire to be curious, even if you don't fully embrace it, you are neutering your ability to grow. You're neutering your ability to be driven forward. you will be more easily captured by ideology,

you will be more easily led astray by the biases and the confused chemical signals of your body and your mind. It's like a superpower. Being curious is like a superpower. And it's one of the reasons why when I started the show, it gave me an excuse to be professionally curious, basically. And that gave me a degree of satisfaction that I hadn't really felt before.

So, yeah, I think it's incredibly important for people to cultivate. curiosity is it's depth I keep thinking the way you're describing this I keep thinking about like a dinner and

you know I've gone and I'm sure you have two you've gone to dinner with people and you have great conversation because you're both equally curious about each other and the things that you're talking about

and then you go to dinner with another group of people or another individual and they may be very curious but they're afraid to ask the question or they're afraid to probe so that conversation stays very surface level.

You're talking about the weather. You're talking about your dogs. Just talking about it kind of bullshit. And I never remember those dinners. I never remember those conversations. I rarely remember those people. But I can remember, right, I can pull multiple dinners off the top of my head right now that have been very deep conversations and meetings because they've been driven by curiosity from both parties.

So I think a lot of people are curious, but they're afraid to explore. The courage to be curious. Exactly. The courage to be, yes, 100%. The courage to be curious. That is like spot on. Well, remember as well, man. If you've said it there, one of the big differences is whether people open up about it.

And some people might think, oh, I don't know probe too much because what if they think that it's me being overbearing or what if it's being whatever? look, if you ask somebody a genuinely interesting question about themselves, they'll tell you if you've gone too far. And simply showing the fact that you're interested is worth way more than not potentially offending. Anybody that gets offended by a well-meaning question from somebody that's being curious, they were going to get offended by anything.

Yeah. Like it was just a matter of time before you stepped on some trip wire that was accidentally laid down there for you to hit. I found, you know, as somebody that was desperately, desperately wanted, wanted to be liked for a very long time and now gets to like turn idols into rivals and then rivals into friends since I've moved to Austin. Just sitting at dinner and asking people interesting questions is like the most likable thing that you can do. And the best part is it's not disingenuous. You're not playing a role. You genuinely do care about what this thing is.

It's not performative in any way. And then when they tell you something, you get to learn. Like you come out of that situation. It's asking questions is by far. the most selfish thing that you can do. Because you get to find everything that's in the other person's head. And yeah, maybe they ask you a question and then you get to give them something in return. But if they don't ask you a question back, you're like, okay, well, I just get to keep on mining away in this psychologist or this endurance racer or this sociologist or this sex worker, like whatever. I just continue to find out interesting shit from what's been going in in their life. Well, most people want to talk about themselves too. So if you show interest in them,

most people are going to open up and view it as a compliment. There was a cool study that was done. They put a guy on a plane next to another passenger. It was a long flight, maybe eight-hour flight. And this person had to keep the other guy talking for the entire flight, but reveal no information about themselves. So he did it, gets off the flight. The participant that he was asking the questions of came,

and they said, so we're just doing a little survey about the other clients and passengers that were on the plane. Could you tell us who you're sitting next? So he said, ah, I was sitting next to this. It's such an interesting guy. You know, really, really fantastic. One of the best flights I've had in ages, actually. They said, oh, can you tell us what his name is?

What did he do? Where was he from? Nothing. This person was just so enthralled by somebody that took an interest. And everybody's interesting. Everyone's got interesting shit to say if you dig deep enough. I agree with that. Well, Chris, man.

I appreciate it. It's been a great conversation. And now that you're in Austin, We'll have to train more together. Yes. Get some dinners, get some food. Good man. Yeah, I appreciate that.

And it's been great to having you on. So thank you. Thank you for having me.