The Pomp Podcast - #1178 Chris Williamson On 10 Principles To Handle The Chaos Of Life

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Chris Williamson is the host of the Modern Wisdom Podcast. This conversation was held at Lyceum Miami. Chris talks through 10 principles to help you survive and thrive in the chaos of life. A few principles include choosing our regrets, confidence starts with action, a rich vocabulary results in a rich life, and more. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Hey guys, what's up? The following conversation is with Chris Williamson, the host of the Modern Wisdom Podcast. Chris has had conversations with a ton of awesome people, everyone from David Goggins and Jocko Wilnick to Jordan Peterson and many others. In this conversation, we talked about the 10 principles to survive and thrive in a chaotic world. This conversation was recorded during Lyceum Miami, a conference that I hosted earlier this year. I always learn a ton every single time I talk to Chris, and I hope that you guys enjoy this conversation. Here is my conversation with Chris Williamson. matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. If you pull a muscle, all of a sudden

you realize how often you use that muscle. So the bladder is exactly like that. When it's working well, we don't think about it, but when it's not working properly, you're getting up at night or in the cases of many men, you may have some leakage. If this is something that's affecting your quality of life, there are really good solutions these days. Depend makes the garden the shield the shield would be if you have some leakage on occasion if you have heavier leakage you could use the guard explain your process for modern wisdom and how you pick guests and i look at the guest selection as really the way you're programming you're learning right you're learning from these individuals and in conversation give people that context before we get into these

principles like how do you pick the guest and how do you go into a conversation trying to understand and what you're trying to learn from them. Yeah, so I got toward the end of my 20s as a guy that maybe outwardly had a lot of success, the renown, and I was running this big events business in the UK, and everything was going great. But I didn't really understand myself or the world around me. And this was a time when people like Jordan Peterson

and Alain de Botton from the School of Life and Sam Harris and Joe Rogan were coming along. And they spoke to me, and they gave me insights that helped me to understand myself. And I figured, well, if I start a podcast, I can basically do this as much as I need to I can do this as much as I want, and I can pick my own syllabus. So very much the guiding rule is, who do I like?

Who am I interested by? Who sparks my curiosity? And if they meet that criteria, that's good enough for me. And Douglas Murray once said to me that my instincts may lead me wrong, but they're the only thing that's ever led me right. And yeah, if you presume that people have enjoyed the things you've done before because you were interested in them just keep following that and that is the best

heuristic that i've found the first principle that we're going to talk about today is in life we must choose our regrets yeah so this is douglas again so this is almost exactly a year ago and i'm sat in manhattan drinking in manhattan probably my third manhattan of the evening i think about two in the morning in douglas's apartment midtown and he was talking to me about christopher hitchens the famous British philosopher, and he was lamenting to Hitch about the fact that he had a bunch of different options that he needed to choose. And because you have to deal with, by choosing one thing, you can't do another. He was suffering with this because both of the things seemed great and he was going to have this sort of avoidance concern he had. And I really

wondered, it was the first time I'd ever heard, in life, we must choose our regrets. So he's talking to Hitch about this. You can imagine he's smoking probably in some British pub somewhere, Chesterfield Sofa, and he's a bottle of scotch or something. He says, Douglas, in life, we must choose our regrets. I thought that's really interesting. What does he mean, choose our regrets? I never considered it in that way because I'd always gone through life under the assumption that any regret was due to a suboptimal decision, that had I have made the right decision, I could have avoided the regret, but because you inevitably don't do one thing by choosing another, if I want to go to the gym or go to the theme park, by going to the gym, I don't go to

the theme park. Even if the gym was the right choice, I'll always wonder what it was like to go to the theme park. So I didn't realize that regrets are baked into the fabric of life, right? They're not a bug. They're a feature of having limited optionality. So I was like, right, okay, that's interesting but what does it mean that we have to choose our regrets okay well maybe it's that when you come to make a decision given the fact that you're going to have some sense of i wonder what that other thing could have been instead of wondering about what decision you want to make it's which regret could you live with because the regret that you can live with or that you can't live with is evidently the decision that you should make like which one

You're going to live with this decision for the rest of your life, right? You're going to live with the open loop of woulda, shoulda, coulda, what would have happened. And if one of these is a regret that you can live with with more ease than the other one, that to me seemed to make a good bit of sense. And I really liked the insight in life. It's interesting when you view it as I'm making a decision, not what am I running to, but kind of what am I running away from to some degree? Because it then begs the question, would you change some of the decisions you've made in your life from a regret minimization versus what you want to do in the moment, right? Regret minimization is a good way to look at it. But yeah, it really liberated me to think, look, you're going to regret some things.

That's fine. But choose your regrets and choose them carefully. The second principle is you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. which when I saw you said that you wanted to talk about this, I was like, oh, man, we're going to get real deep. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, to a lot of the people that are in the crowd, they are probably type A go-getters, self-improvers.

You know, by being here, you're already in the top percentile of all people doing personal development and self-learning, right? The top, the rarefied strata flying around the earth next to the ISS. And one of the problems of that is that you will want to be good at everything that you try and do you'll start doing pickleball and you'll become obsessed with it until that's a personal vice of mine um you start something new and you don't want to suck right and there's a quote from uh essentialism by greg mckeown and he says you have to focus on progress toward a specific thing in the medium term or sacrifice meaningful progress toward

everything in the long term and that is the insight right you look at world-class athletes they periodize their training for the next cycle it's going to be strength then it's going to be speed then it's going to be agility then it's going to be skill work then it's going to be conditioning and in life one of the problems is as soon as you start to focus on one thing i want to get really good at growing my podcast let's say maybe some fledgling podcasters in the audience i want to get really good at growing my podcast but i don't really want to let my my body's condition, drop. I want to stay in good shape. And it would be nice if I didn't, you know, if I stayed on top of work. And maybe I should get a girlfriend. And maybe I should do. And you go,

okay, look, you can't do all of those things. And if you do, you're going to be beaten by somebody that focuses on one of those things for a short period of time. This isn't forever. You can periodize it. But you have to focus on progress toward a specific thing in the medium term or sacrifice progress, meaningful progress toward everything in the long term. Is there an example in your life when you've done this and it's really worked? Yeah. So for me, during the pandemic, that was when I turned pro with my podcast. And I just conceded the fact that training was not going to be a priority for me. It was good because the gyms were closed.

So I'd taken the local environment and I was like, right, this is going to actually aid me. Gyms are shut. It would kind of suck to train at home in any case. I wasn't fired up to go and do more glute bridges in the living room. But that made it easier for me. and the time that I would have spent in the gym opened up time that I could spend on the podcast. The third principle you have is a richer vocabulary means a richer life.

Yeah, so this is Ludwig Wittgenstein, and there's a quote from him that says, the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. What he means by this is that when you have an idea in your head, it's like a smell, it's a notion, right? It's just this sort of ephemeral, wishy-washy, like, what actually is it? until you put it into words, either by speaking it or writing it down, it doesn't actually form

anything concrete. You can't see it. You can't play with it. You can't work out where it's got holes. It's just a notion, right? It's an idea of an idea. What that means is that the tools with which you draw your ideas is your access to vocabulary. It is your access to language. If you have to squeeze notions from your brain into words that are either written or spoken, the breadth of the words that you have allows you to portray those ideas more precisely that's it like it's just expose yourself to new language as much as possible and this has been something that's been very fortunate for me first off being British which is a you know a genetic advantage but secondly also being able to uh get exposed to great speakers Jordan Peterson's of the world

the Rogans of the world, you know, even David Goggins, incredibly precise speaker. And that's what I use. For the people that want to become better speakers, precision is the word. It's not more, it's not less. It's the word that you meant to describe the thing that you're trying to describe. That's it. When Americans hear anyone from Britain talking, they immediately are like, oh, they sound smart. Chris, we will determine at the end whether that is true or not. That's fine. That's okay. The genetic comment dings you immediately look i had to i had to spend fourth of july in austin last year it was very difficult it was a very it was a very difficult time for me uh it was very painful um what that specific

insight uh reminds me of is i think it's eminem uh the rapper said that he used to read the dictionary because obviously when you're rapping you want to have this very robust vocabulary and be able to understand what the words mean and there's not just the rhyming of the words but also there's kind of the innuendos and all of that. But what you're really talking about is not just specifically language. You're also saying the exposure to ideas, right? The exposure to different types of content. What is your content intake? Like, do you just listen to podcasts all day and you're like, I have a podcast, so I'm going to listen to other podcasts? Or are there other things that you consume that you find really valuable that other people could use in their day

to day life? One of the things that's been really great for me has actually been Substack and the advent of articles. So there is an extension on Google Chrome called Send to Kindle. It's made by Amazon. If you have a Kindle, you press this button in the top corner of Google Chrome. Whatever the web page is, blog post, doesn't matter how long it is, it could be 20,000 words, it will send it straight to your Kindle device, optimized. You can highlight it. You can go through it. And that, for me, has been phenomenal because it's turned my Kindle into a read later app type thing that I'm not distracted from. And it also has exposed me to a bunch of other differing ideas that I wouldn't do usually.

There's another thing called The Browser. I think it's actually thebrowser.com. They send you five articles every day. Sometimes it's about how the city of Jericho fell, and the next one's about knitting and the advent of knitting in the 1600s or something. And it's just, that's really great. And other than that, it's crushing volumes of YouTube and podcasts. Are you 1x, 1.5, or 2x speed on YouTube?

2x is the speed I've worked myself up to but I remember well, you know You do need to match up. How much can I comprehend and retain with how quick is this going? but if you do want to speed up the listen that you the Pace that you listen to things that just do little increments, especially on Spotify. You can do it in point one increments Just creep it up over time and you'll get there The next insight is just because something is difficult to obtain does not mean it's valuable more yeah so this was um i very fortunately got to do rogan's show in uh august of last year and he dropped this bomb in the middle of the episode that i'd never heard anybody speak about before

and it's plain and obvious in retrospect so he says this is what i've uh termed rogan's value difficulty conflation what can i say i like to mean things uh look at the car he's driving look at the watch he's wearing look at the girl he's with that's unattainable to many people so it seems like it's valuable but then you attained it and then you realized oh this isn't valuable this is just difficult to get and there's a difference there's a big difference what's valuable is something that fulfills you intellectually emotionally spiritually lovingly and most smart people i think realize that there is value in stepping outside of your comfort right on the other side of discomfort is something valuable and we're told that worthwhile

things are difficult to attain because if they weren't difficult to attain they wouldn't be worthwhile. This is how non-valuable but difficult things get slipped into our desires without us noticing. And it's people who are actually using difficulty as the measurement for value rather than what the actual true value is. 100%. Difficulty is the proxy. How do you avoid that? Are there measurements? With difficulty. The guy should be a comedian. it's very hard because we're memetic beings right we see what other people want and we want to want what they want um the memetic desire correct precisely yeah we see that's a successful person why don't i do what he does why don't i try and that guy has a great british accent i want one

you really should try and take this on for a day it'd be great for you um yeah it's it's incredibly hard but certainly spending a good bit of time working on your values what is it that you like what is it that you genuinely want to want in life what is it that you take pleasure in for yourself uh what are you prideful about in a good way um those are the things once you've got those down you can just run everything through this heuristic bridge it's a businessy sort of talk uh really interesting lesson that i learned about both bezos and musk so both of them had Unidirectional ordinating principles for both of their Operations. So every single question that

Bezos was asked in the business went through, does this make The customer experience better? one ordinating principle. Unbelievably simple for you to work out whether or not you Should say yes or no to something if you only have one Criteria it's moving through. For musk it was, does this get Us closer to mars? everything gets fed through that. I'm not saying you should have a single question that your Entire life is built around. You probably have multiple

conflicting, sometimes even idiosyncrasies and bits and pieces you want to do. However, if you can reduce them down, and if you can maybe even write them down, or if you can have an idea of them in your head, it's going to make it easier. The next one is, it's not coordination, it's cowardice. Yeah, so this is great. So this is from Andrew Schultz, and he may not, for the people that know him, he's a great comedian out of New York, but you may not think of him as like a font of philosophical wisdom, but this genuinely is. So this is from an episode that I did with him. A lot of the time, we believe that there is a grand plan at work to try and push a narrative or hurt people from a particular group. From the outside, it looks a lot like a coordinated assault,

collusion orchestrated by some malign overlord conspiracy. But on the ground, it doesn't look anything like that. It's just individuals trying to save their own skin and not get fired. They've got an expensive house they can barely pay, and the mortgage, and a wife who wants a new car and private school for the kids, it's much easier for them to adhere to whatever ideology will keep them in their job rather than go against it. Sure, it might mean that they push an unhinged story about whatever ideology people don't like, but this doesn't mean that they've been indoctrinated into some grand plan. The incentives encourage execs and influential actors and the people in power to behave in particular and aligned ways, but the coordination is not consciously conducted.

It's just a path of least resistance for each person. So what that shows is that the people who you are concerned are trying to take over from an ideological perspective aren't coordinated. They're just cowardly. And that actually makes any concern you have about the direction that the world is going in a little bit easier. So another thing that you said was so much content and ideology is curated by a pool getting installed in an executive's yard. um so there's two two more great ideas here that that relate to this that i love one's called bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity evil can be guarded against stupidity cannot and the world's few evil people have little power without the help of the world's many stupid people

as a result stupidity is a far greater threat than evil and obviously as well one other thing that you know is uh hanlon's razor never a tribute to malice that which can be explained by So it's fascinating because I think that there's a lot of people over the last three years that if I polled the audience, whether it is public health related, whether it's economic and federal related, or even things in their local communities, they would be like, this is literally insane. And really, it's one thing for the people who are making the decisions. It's not coordination. It's cowardice. What about the people who are either subjected to it or who are participating in it, although they are not making the decision? Are they simply just trying not to step out of line and it's kind of like this like groupthink and kind of social cohesion or is there something else going on there?

I think it's just very difficult. How are you going to be this one person trying to hold back a flood of the entire organization behind you? Yeah, you've got the mimetic desire. You don't want to be the one that stands out. You don't want to be the person that's pointed out as being the transphobe or the racist or the whatever that it is in your office. But it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, for all that I can say, it's not coordination, it's cowardice. It doesn't make the impact of these sorts of policies any easier on the people that they impact. You know, if you're somebody who's lost a job due to saying some unspeakable thing, me going, oh, well, at least it wasn't a coordinated conspiracy, mate.

Like that doesn't it's not going to help you feel any better about about the fact that you're now unemployed. So it's very difficult, but I think understanding that makes the foe, if you want to call it that, less impressive, less grand. And you realize that if people are acting in this mimetic way, all that you need to do is change the ideology du jour at the moment into something which they also want to replicate, which you may see as being better for the world. And speaking of Schultz, I told him this. There was a point where people went after Joe Rogan and there was like a pendulum swinging. And it was very much like, are they going to try to cancel the largest podcast in the world? Right. And Andrew was one of the first people to stand up and be like, dude, I know this guy. This guy's done incredible things for my career. He has been an incredible friend behind the scenes, you know, all kind of went out and put his reputation on the line and put a flag in the ground. And I was like, I know this guy.

He is not a racist. Almost like dominoes. Another comedian, another comedian, another comedian, right? And they all came. And so what it begs the question of is you always have to have the first, right? The person who's willing to kind of put the flag on the ground first. And then it is fascinating to watch people go from following the crowd out of fear or wanting to fit in to, oh, it's okay to say this other thing. Oh, let me go follow and I want to be in that group.

it needs to be the right person that says it first as well you know if it was some unknown upcoming well-respected but relatively small comedian it wouldn't have worked but because it's schultz you know massive time very big reach here's the other thing right here's the reason that rogan didn't get cancelled last year in my opinion it's that most of the news stories that try and find the smoking gun that suggests the racist bigot that whoever it is is that they're trying to accuse it of what they're saying is this is the tip of the iceberg and you know nothing about what looks below the surface but we do and we always have the reason that it didn't work for rogan is that you have even a casual fan of him having listened to 200 hours of this man

a thousand hours five thousand hours of this man they go you're telling me this is the tip of the iceberg it's like i've seen the whole iceberg i know that there's nothing lurking down there And this is one of the great protectionist strategies that you have if you do have direct connection with your audience and if you produce regularly and frequently, because you expand the degrees of freedom within which you could mess up, so to speak, because your audience is still going to have faith that you are a good person. And they think of you as a human. Precisely. It humanizes you. The next one is absurd ideological beliefs are shows of fealty. Yes.

So this is, it falls straight on from what we've just spoken about. This is from Gwenda Bogle, one of my favorite sub-stacks. An absurd ideological belief is actually a form of tribal signaling. It signals to one's ideology is more important to them than reason itself, than truth, sanity. To one's allies, this is an oath of unwavering loyalty. To one's enemies, this is a threat display. It's not always about what's true. It's often about how does this make me look to my tribal compatriots and to my enemies.

and this again helps people to understand how could this person hold this ridiculous belief we all know that this isn't true this flies in the face of reality you go well what if the belief isn't about what you're believing what if the belief is about trying to hold a flag in the air that says i am this kind of a person and the more ridiculous the belief the stronger your show of fealty is to the organization or the group that you're a part of because if you have to put aside an awful lot of reality in order to be able to believe this thing they go wow like pomps a reliable ally you know he just disregarded the laws of thermodynamics in place of in place of like us and this so that was just a very nice succinct way it's not coordination it's cowardice

and ideological beliefs are like shows of fealty and threat displays that really to me helped to turn down the volume of the culture war back and forth. And everybody gets caught up in it. No matter how much you try to avoid this stuff, you'll see something, some ridiculous video from whichever side you do or don't like. And both of those things really help to kind of just turn the volume down a bit.

Yeah, those are great. The key to confidence starts with action. Okay, so this is probably the best thing that I learned last year, and it's from Alex Hormozy. 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. That to me is like such a mic drop.

That's money. That's what I do my podcast for, to hear people say things like that. And I was chronically unconfident for a long time in my 20s as somebody that was standing in the front door of a nightclub, that was a male model, that did two reality TV shows. but i was very performative with the way that i was doing this stuff because inside i still didn't have that genuine rock hard sense of of something to be confident about and i always wondered about why other people had confidence and i presumed that it was a mindset thing what i have come to believe is that it's because i hadn't created a stack of work that i genuinely felt existentially

connected to and was proud of. I loved the work that I did with my nightclub business, but there was always so many degrees of freedom between the success of the business and me and my inputs. Oh, it's because of market conditions. Oh, it's because of how effective all of the managers are. Oh, it's because all of our competitors went away. And this is one of the beautiful things about any individual pursuit, especially where you've got immediate feedback. It's why sports stars and athletes, although it's in some ways a very difficult existence, it's a great existence as well because they can see the fruits of their labor immediately. You spend an amazing off-season building up your strength, you crush it next year. So for me, Rogan calls it building a mountain with

layers of paint, right? One layer of paint at a time. You go, what's a layer of paint? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But after thousands of iterations of this, you end up with a really big-sized mountain. And that, 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, just encapsulates that perfectly. And the key to confidence starts with action. For me, it's rejigging your mental state to be like, right, tomorrow I'm going to wake up and I'm going to be positive. Cool. That's not a bad thing. More power to you. But reality is going to come and smash you in the face. If you want confidence without competence, you want delusion. And if

you want competence without confidence, you want fantasy. So it's like, look, those things need to grow together. In my opinion, it is much easier to do a thing, start doing it, do it well, and then go, okay, after a while, your old imposter syndrome has no choice but to be eroded by this mountain of evidence that you've got and that for me was the easiest way that i built up my confidence i enjoy always talking to you because a lot of these ideas start to intertwine and uh i read a lot of books and there's things that i will read in one book that i'll see in another and then in another and another and they usually come from different walks of life it's very similar with the podcast we talked a lot of different people you start to see these commonalities and this

idea of the key to confidence starts with action is almost perfectly overlaid with almost every book you read from someone who is successful at something there is a theme of practice whether they knew they were practicing or not and so confidence comes from the ability to know i've done this before yes right and i can keep doing it um and like maybe you start out and you're like i suck at this and that's kind of the first couple layers of paint and then eventually it's like okay well i'm better than i was but i still suck and eventually you're like hey i'm not half bad and then like maybe you get to the point where you're like okay i'll like show somebody else what i can do yeah and then you build that confidence which really came again from that

action there's a quote from seth godin uh that he said on my show and he said um a lot of the time you need support but only the first time around and his point there was that when you're starting out with something you haven't done it before how do you expect to be confident at something you've literally never done before you have no evidence and this is where the um lone wolf super Chad alpha guy going and Lone Ranger-ing it on his own doesn't really work too well if you're starting out. It's all well and good if you've gained mastery in some domain and have a huge audience and loads of people like you and stuff. And then you say, right, I'm going to stick my middle finger up all of these people. I'm going my own way. You can't do that when you're starting

out because you need the support of people around you just to get over the hump of how hard becoming good at anything is so yeah you need support the first time around lean more heavily on your social circles and then as you become better and better you can actually refine it a bit more the next one is how to deal with the pain of feeling things so very deeply yes so this is from um why buddhism is true by robert wright robert wright an evolutionary psychologist who then turned to to meditation later in his career. Evolutionary psychology and meditation might not be two things that you immediately bring together.

So he tried to battle with this sort of polarity in a book, why Buddhism is true. And the quote from Yungi Menger Rinpoche is, ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. become aware of them or become ruled by them.

And this pain of feeling things deeply, which many people in the audience, given that you're here learning and trying to improve yourself and reflecting and doing the introspection, is something that you might resonate with. And it was certainly something that I resonated with and still do for a long time. It's like opening Pandora's box.

Like once you peer in and realize that you are not all that you could be, that there is something better that you could get out of yourself and out of life and how you could contribute to the world, As soon as you realize that, you can't close the lid on that box anymore, and you spend the remainder of your days trying to meet the ideal that you've set for yourself, right? And if true hell is when the person that you are meets the person that you could have been, this can be very painful. And you can think, you know, you look at a dog, and it's just wagging its tail and having a great time.

You think, oh, it would be so amazing to just be that golden retriever. You know, I wouldn't have to go to work. I wouldn't have to worry about whether I'm enacting my logos. I wouldn't get involved in culture wars. I wouldn't have to reply to DMs and emails. And yeah, you know, like being a golden retriever, probably pretty fun. But I do think that for the people who have peered inside of Pandora's box, who know that there is more that they could bring to the world,

you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube. You can't regress back to some other version of you where you're not trying for mastery and self-fulfillment and improving the entire globe and leaving it a better place than when you came. you can't do that so the choice is between learning more about these challenges becoming as competent as possible mastering whatever you can in order to be able to wrangle this peterson says uh you take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic

that allows you to girdle the world around you and this is the way out is through right it's not oh god i'm interested in some things and i find the world difficult let's back away from it it's like, okay, cool. Game on. I'm ready for this. And ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. For me, I don't want to be ruled by them. I would much sooner deal with the discomfort of becoming aware of them. Last one I want to talk about is accept that all of your heroes are full of shit. Very, very apt for both me and you to finish on this one, I think. um when i saw this i literally was like man that is spot on sorry yes so uh this is from

jason pargan and he says your heroes aren't gods they're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else and this is the description of every single high performer that i've seen in order to be good at one thing you have to sacrifice more than the other people that are only doing one thing and prepared to sacrifice and the example that i use for this all the time is eddie hall so eddie hall british guy world's strongest man 2018 and he retires with the world's strongest man trophy in the air right his grandma died a while ago and he's holding it up he's saying no no this is for you and he's crying he's this big 200 kilo guy it's beautiful but he also says in an interview shortly afterward that had he have not won the

the world's strongest man on that date he would have been dead divorced and with no relationship to his kid because how hard he was pushing his body presumably the drugs that he was having to take as well six foot four 440 pounds training every day uh he was training so hard that his relationship with his wife was breaking down he spent no time with his kid because of how much he was traveling to compete that is a man who has sacrificed everything in order to be good at one thing, only in light of seeing the entirety of someone's experience that is a high performer and taking into account the price that they pay for brilliance and greatness, can you see truly whether you want that life? To look at Eddie Hall and say, I want to be the world's

strongest man. That sounds amazing. I hold it in the air and cry. Brilliant. Okay, well, do you want to nearly die because of how high your blood pressure is? Do you want to have the relationship with your wife glance off the bottom of divorce because of how destroyed the relationship has become? Do you want to lose every single moment that you've got with your daughter? Probably not. You wouldn't pay that price. That's not to say that people shouldn't chase excellence or high performance. What it is to say, beware of the price that you need to pay in order to become great and make sure that you're prepared to pay it before you go down that route. Before I let you go, I want everyone to take out your phone and immediately go subscribe to the

modern wisdom podcast but can you share maybe one specific episode that we can send people to that you think can help whether it's critical thinking independent thinking uh or something that they'll get some value out of absolutely yeah so um david goggins only did two podcast episodes uh for his most recent book one of them is rogue and one of them was mine um if you need some motivation david goggins is there spotify is the best place to go there's a follow button in the middle of the page, just press that for me. There's also a five-star thing, and there's a website. You can ding them for the accent, but the follow is the important one. What can I say? David Goggins would be good. Another one that's very interesting from a

completely different line of thinking would be Gwinder Bogle, G-U-R-W-I-N-D-E-R. It's from the back end of last year. If you search Modern Wisdom Gwinder or Modern Wisdom Goggins, both of them will come up on whatever you listen on uh and the reason i love that guy is that it's that the entire episode is like this so i'll find some of his concepts and we'll spend five minutes just riffing on each of them um and i really love this quick sort of back and forth we've got here's a concept we'll we'll do it you know you guys maybe only one or two of those things resonated with you but you're like holy fuck like that's cool i'm gonna go learn about that that inaction thing or i'm gonna go learn about that that coordination thing uh i really appreciate it i really appreciate

everybody being so welcoming to me. Since I've been here, I appreciate you for having me here, man. This event's really, really cool. It's one of the first live shows that I've done, and I hope that everyone enjoyed it. Chris Williamson, everyone. Thank you.