Chris Williamson: The Shocking New Research On Why Men And Women Are No Longer Compatible! | E237

78 of women want to date a man who is as educated or as employed as they are this is just a straight up imbalance and this is what I've called the tall girl problem so Chris Williamson he is an entrepreneur former club promoter turned podcaster with more than 70 million downloads how did I get here Chris are you aware of the dark side that's driving you really want to go here I've been chronically unpopular throughout all of school badly bullied didn't have a group of friends so I'd compromised an awful lot of who I truly

was to try and just be as popular and successful in that world as possible but there was a ambient sense that something is broken with me in a journal I've got a couple of different entries and it just put I think I'm lonely 15 of men say that they have zero close friends where did we go wrong with the world of social connection has been made less and less social the single biggest predictor of your health outcomes in life are the number of close connections that you have it's more than going to the gym it's

more than stopping drinking people that are in relationships have better health outcomes but one in three men between the ages of 18 and 30 hasn't had sex in the last year 80 of men report not approaching a woman because they are scared of being seen as creepy and by 20 40 45 of 25 to 45 year old women will be single and childless you can start to see how this imbalance could cause a problem this is a very difficult conversation the first thing that we need to do is before this episode starts I have a

small favor to ask from you two months ago 74 of people that watch this channel didn't subscribe we're now down to 69 my goal is 50 so if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted if you like this channel can you do me a quick favor and hit the Subscribe button it helps this channel more than you know and the bigger the channel gets as you've seen the bigger the guests get thank you and enjoy this episode Chris [Music] you do a lot of things and you do a lot of things very very

well one of the struggles I had when thinking about how to direct this conversation was really like understanding because you're so diverse in your thinking and your ideas and the subject matter that you're curious about how to try and encapsulate exactly who you are so I guess the question I wanted to start with is in your own words what is your mission I'm a very curious person I always have been and I now have the opportunity with my podcast modern wisdom to commercialize utilize weaponize that so that I can bring people in that I'm interested

in so a good example I did a masters and a bachelor's degree at Uni in business and I always regretted not going and doing philosophy or psychology and in retrospect it always made me resentful of uni a little bit because I'd spent all of this time learning stuff that didn't teach me anything about the business world but then upon starting the podcast what I realized was that I've been able to design my perfect University degree with the top lecturers on the planet and I get to do it three times a week at the Cadence that

I want and not only do I get the lecturers that I want but I get to ask them about the specific area of their work that I want as well so it's curiosity the thing that drives me is curiosity the reason that I do this is because I want to know I want to know about everything I want to know about why the guy that was sat next to us at dinner last night decided to wear a suit with like Converse like I want to know what is it about that uh so curiosity that answer

is um focused on what you get from it right is there any sort of an external Mission something that it gives to the world that you're particularly and something that provides you meaning by delivering it to the world is there is there an answer there too yeah so toward the end of my 20s I had a lot of the trappings of success that maybe society would tell you that you should have so running this big nightlife events business which I was very proud of and still am but there was something missing despite the fact that

I had the blue tick on Twitter and the free charcoal toothpaste and I'd been on love Island and take me out and people knew my name and I had you know monetary success and status and stuff but there was something missing and I didn't really understand myself particularly well and I think that that's a problem that a lot of people get to especially guys toward the end of their 20s they think all of the values that I have absorbed that are supposed to be the things that make me happy maybe don't fulfill me in the

way that they were promised and that required me to do some reflection and I realized I actually didn't have very many opinions what I'd been doing was I'd been playing a role as this big name on campus party boy club promoter big dick around town guy and I'd compromised an awful lot of who I truly was to try and just be as popular and successful in that world as possible Right what that meant was I didn't really understand myself I didn't really understand my mission or my purpose and now looking back I realized that all

of the steps that I took to get from where I was to where I am now which is still like an adult infant but slightly less so all of that they are lessons that I can gift to other people that will help them to expedite success avoid the pitfalls do it in less time with less loneliness with less pain and suffering than I had to go through to achieve the same thing and hopefully by speaking to people that changed my life that gave me lessons I can then pass those on to other people and get

them from where I was to somewhere that's even better than where I am now okay so take me back what are The Dominoes that fell all the connecting dots that took you to that point where you were the party boy on campus that was on take me out on TV and running club nights take me back to the start what are the most important things I need to know about that early experience that took you to that moment arrive at University in Newcastle and I've been chronically unpopular throughout all of school uh pretty badly bullied

pretty alone an only child and just didn't have a squad didn't have a group of friends really was successful in in sports and had a team but didn't really have a tight group of friends got to college and that was a little bit better started to come out of my shell a little bit but still not much and then you get to UNI and the same as every school kid you know you'd go home for summer and be like I'm going to reinvent myself and I'm going to be the cool kid so I arrive at

University and that was a good intersection of a new opportunity to be a new person and also maybe a little bit more social ability start running a nightlife events business with the guy that I sit next to in my first ever seminar after that we get to the stage where that's very successful very quickly I immediately tied a lot of my identity to the first thing I've ever been super successful in in life which is running a nightlife I can get renowned I can have people that need me which is not really the same as

wanting me but they need me which is close enough so I think right well if I just throw all of myself into this business then I'm going to be accepted by The World At Large and over the space of the next 10 years or so that meant that I fully dedicated myself to that mission and we were very very good at it we expanded from Newcastle to Manchester multiple nights per week across multiple cities and then I did whatever it took to get more clout as well so take me out then first season of Love

Island first person through the doors on love Island and I spend all of this time love Island was an interesting reflection period because there was nowhere for me to hide no distractions no TV no phone no laptop no friends no books no nothing right it's just you and this group of people and the group of people that were in the love Island Villa were genuine versions of the person that I thought I was I thought that I was this big name on campus party boy and then I get deposited into this inescapable uh weapons grade

bunker of those party boys and party girls and I look around and go ah I'm not supposed to be here something's off something's discordant it's not working and then I get out and it wasn't like and then the skies opened and I realized that my path was not to wear small swim shorts on TV uh however it did make me think it was a very I call it a fatal dose of contrast that I was no longer able to hide that there is something a little bit off here and that was a good time your

Jordan Peterson's your a Lander button from the school of likes your Sam Harris is your Joe Rogan's all coming to the front I start consuming that stuff and it makes me think wow I I actually this speaks to me it helps to educate me to be better and to understand myself and that's kind of how I phased out I suppose when you talk about struggling in school socially what was the reason for that have you ever sort of diagnosed why you didn't quote unquote fit in in school yeah so uh quite I think any only

child struggles to be socialized to the level that they need to in order to have the same set of social skills that anyone with a brother or sister does right like think about how much time you with a sibling spend arguing hitting each other going to sleep them knocking on your door when you're trying to get ready arguing for the bathroom all of these tiny little interactions I had none of that right and even if you spent every waking moment of free time in clubs and sports and whatnot that I did it's going to be

hard and then I think that there is some inherent introversion in me and it kind of combined for me to not really understand other kids so I used to obsess over things like um the kind of hairstyle that other kids had or the way that they tied their tie in school or the type of shoes that they wore the way that They Carried their bag which shoulder their bag was on because I was adamant I would fixate on that and that would be the reason that they had friends and I didn't because I couldn't understand

why I didn't have friends what it was was that I couldn't socially relate to kids particularly well because I didn't have a wide variety of social skills so I struggled but I was taking this super attentive like what is it what's going on it's trying to assess is it because Steven wears his watch on his right wrist instead of his left wrist is it because of whatever whatever because I was trying to diagnose what's going on do you know what's driving you from you know the good and the bad the light and the dark I'm

I'm more specifically interested to start with the dark do you ever have conversations with yourself about the when I say dark it's the subjective term but the dark side that's driving you absolutely yeah chronically of course I think anybody that believes that they're driven by a pure love uh and positive reinforcement is uh usually confused I think that uh there was a study done that looked at the three most common traits of Highly Successful People hyper successful people we're talking top level CEOs the first one was a crippling sense of insufficiency the second one was

a superiority complex and the third one was an ability to have maniacal Focus so what you have and it's this this Peterson story which you may be familiar with they starve rats and put them into a tube they attach a spring to the tail of the Rat so that they can tell how much force they're pulling with and that gives a proxy for desire right that's how much they want it they waft the smell of cheese in from the front and the rat pulls toward the cheese you think these rats are starving they're going to

be pulling very hard then they take the rats out and they do another iteration of the study this time they want the smell of cheese in from the front and they waft the smell of a cat in from behind the rats pull harder what's the lesson in life not only do you need to run towards something that you want but you need to run away from something that you fear and I've spent I've spoken to 600 High performers on my show right I would say that on average most of the people that are unbelievably good

at anything that they do are driven by a fear of insufficiency not by a perfectly balanced desire for success and this tension between success and happiness I think is something that both me and you are quite interested in so the reason it's interesting is a lot of the time we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing which is supposed to get it right so if in service of becoming happy we sacrifice happiness to achieve success in the hopes that success will make us happy if you created an equation of what's going on and you

just removed success from both sides what are you left with just happiness now I'm not saying that you can recant all of your desires for status and Accolade and striving and stuff like you need to go out and do things but I do think that a lot of the time we over complicate the world and a lot of it is because when we're kids our parents will reinforce our successes by praising us and we'll criticize us when we fail which can metastasize as we grow up into being I am only worthy of love and acceptance

and admiration and praise if I win because it causes you to fear being a loser more than want to be a winner and winning salves it's like an anesthetic right that papers over fears of insufficiency so yeah I mean when I was a club promoter uh I knew that if I stood on the front door of a nightclub that people would need me I want the VIP bands they want to be in the place where the pretty girls are they want to get in for cheaper or a free bottle of vodka or they they want

to skip the queue or whatever so they need me and then when you roll it forward to the podcast I have to be very careful that I don't just transmute that same energy into instead of gifting people entry into nightclubs now I'm gifting them insights that I've learned Concepts from some interesting person that's going to improve their life as we sit around a dinner table or as we go out for a lunch or whatever I have to be careful that's not the case and for the people that maybe resonate with this fear of insufficiency and

this requirement to offer the world something in order for the world to feel like they're Worthy uh it is possible to deprogram it it is possible to tune that volume down but one of the things that you're going to pay a price with is your drive because the rat that is running away from something that it fears will pull harder than the right that's just running towards something that it wants the traits of super competitive people don't just include the superiority complex but the crippling anxiety about being a failure so this tension between success and

failure is it is a driver but it's an incredibly toxic fuel right to be propelled by fear of insufficiency can work super well but it it's very dangerous as a final example Eddie Hall World's Strongest Man and he retires on the podium he's holding this trophy in the air and he's saying this is for you Nana and his grandma's passed away recently and he's crying and he's 200 kilos and six foot four and you know he's worked his entire life and he said in an interview shortly afterward that if he hadn't won the world's strongest

man he would be dead single with no relationship to his kid because he was pushing his body so hard with the lifting and presumably the drugs that he was taking he was training so much his relationship with his wife was breaking down and he was out of the house so much he had no relationship to his kid Jason pargan says uh accept that all of your heroes are full of [ __ ] Your Heroes aren't Gods they're just regular people who got particularly good at One Thing by sacrificing literally everything else that's the price that

you pay for success and most people wouldn't pay it that point about reprogramming the toxic dramas that you have um I often Ponder with myself I'm like and when I think about status games and how status games that you know we often think that we're over a certain status game so you know I had a um a guy on my podcast who talked a lot about the evolutionary basis of status and how if you go to an estate in the UK where there's not a lot of money they'll have bigger logos on their tracksuits it

will still we'll store great guy um and then as people get richer and richer this logos get smaller and obviously they play a different type of game right it's about boats and other things and I that really hit me like a ton of bricks because I I thought dressed in all black I really don't have any I have one material possession you saw it last night which is the bag I had on which I'm waiting for it to break nice bag it's a nice bag yeah um but outside I thought I'm over status games and

I realized that I'm just playing a different set of Statistics just to count the signal yeah the red sneaker effect it's the reason that the CEO that's worth a billion can turn up in a hoodie but the CEO that's worth half a million still wears a three-piece suit it's called there's another idea called the barber pole of status so you can imagine that people who are at the absolute top in terms of status they need to make sure that the people below them can't be confused for them but they can counter signal by having the

so you look at the Vagabond style of flares and Hoodie you know even Essentials uh Yeezy uh yay stuff all it's almost like hobo chic why well it's because I am so cool and so trendy that I can counter signal off the top so everyone is playing a status game everybody is at all times it's just a case of what game are you playing and that toxic Drive the the big shift I've had in my life is I'm now focusing on something which is also driving me to a more fulfilling Place whereas before I was

focusing on like a monetary game where I was like how much money can I acquire how much um how big can I build a business now I'm focusing it more on things that are more intrinsically aligned with um that which that makes me happy so this for example or writing or DJing for example but it's still there so my question to you there's kind of two questions there is what's your journey been like with reprogramming that that toxic driving force or that dark driving force or that those in feelings of insufficiency and secondly you said

that we can reprogram it we can dilute it but it comes at the cost of Drive yeah how does one do such a thing so what I was missing for me personally was I didn't feel competent in things I needed to feel like I was competent and I was proving something to the world each time that I succeeded why did you need to feel competent because that would solve my feelings of insufficiency for every time that I won we had a good club night the business was good we broke a record with entries at the

different event or whatever that would make me feel yeah wow I'm like less of a piece of [ __ ] was there a time where you were made to feel incompetent I think just chronically through my childhood of not being super accepted there was a ambient sense that something is broken with me something is wrong because if there wasn't something wrong I would have friends okay people would want me right I think that was just a relatively logical if this than that statement that came out of it and um when it comes to changing that

Alex homozy who had on the show recently as this great quote where he says you don't become Confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are outwork yourself doubt and it wasn't until I had a project where I could no longer deny that my efforts were bearing fruits and that I was becoming competent at something it was a crushing amount of volume and incontrovertible evidence that smashed my imposter syndrome into the ground it is yeah yeah did the games did the games

you because now you're in a different differently category but I feel like I'm supposed to be here I feel like I deserve to be here you know often my guests talk about like that voice in their head which Whispers to them of you know words of self-doubt and it seems to me like I'd say 95 of them haven't managed to shake that in some form it still shows up at some time in some place it's still there but it's a lot quieter A lot quieter and you have to accept after a while that if you

continue to disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world every single time that you're faced with a challenge you succeed despite the fact that you were adamant that you were going to fail or you had fears of insufficiency or all the rest of it after a while you have to accept that it has nothing to do with your competence and everything to do with your addiction to feeling like an imposter you are delusional about your competence in reverse every single time that you are faced with a challenge you succeed every single time you are faced

with a future challenge you believe that you're going to fail it's got nothing to do with your competence so Rogan calls it um building a mountain with layers of paint right incredibly thin each time but after 600 episodes or however many million dollars of Revenue or whatever you go maybe there's something to this you know maybe I don't maybe I'm not a totally worthless piece of [ __ ] on that point of how it diminishes one's Drive have you seen a diminishment in your drive then as your feelings of sufficiency have improved no because I

have changed what is driving me to something which is much more aligned with who I am so the Curiosity for me is crippling and I want to know about everything which the my desire to learn things is so much stronger than any fear of insufficiency or desire for Success was ever going to be right that I've just supplanted one toxic type of drive for one incredibly personal very scalable leverageable beautiful kind of drive that being said there are times this is I I'm speaking from you know the perfect version of me that voice that negative

voice comes in a few times a week it reminds me that I maybe I'm not supposed to be here I'm not who I pretend to be but it's getting quieter and quieter and quieter and I think it's getting quieter because I have a stack of undeniable proof that I'm supposed to be here do you remember the last time that voice came in yeah I think I told you about this last night uh I was I was on a podcast and my blood sugar fell through the floor and what it showed me was that under times

of extreme stress we revert back to a voice from somewhere in our past I don't know who it was I don't know whether it was a an angry parent or a teacher that was annoyed at me or whatever but this voice came in and it said you're not supposed to be here you were never supposed to be here you're boring no one cares what you've got to say you know that you're a fake everyone's going to find out everybody's laughing at you nobody likes you and I thought as I'm talking away on this show and

my head is spinning with all of this stuff and I'm thinking where the [ __ ] is this voice come from what like who who is that I thought that I transcended this voice however in a high pressure situation when I felt bad something came back through so I think what it does remind me is that there is always work to be done there's always something there that's hiding behind and that becoming a complacent about personal growth is something that is going to allow that to seep back in you talked about the the paint the

like the layers of paint that build confidence this is something that I've been particularly compelled by because so many people that listen to this podcast struggle with the idea of confidence and there's a big industry out there as you've said that says you know look in the mirror tell yourself you're a millionaire um say it three times write it in your Journal but then as I reflected in as I've written in my my book um the thing that and it relates to what Alex hamosi said is the thing that I've learned is it's all evidence

for Better or For Worse stack of undeniable proof and it goes the other way that evidence that you got at seven years old when you went up and tried to do a public speech and everyone laughed at you it's more it's a thicker layer right than than one layer of evidence to say that you're capable it's a harder layer to sort of strip um if there is someone listening now and they want to maybe orientate their drive to the fulfilling Pursuits that you talk about but also they want to build their confidence what advice would

you give them I imagine that's 80 of the listeners ACT first okay you have to lead with action because if you are someone that deals with a crippling sense of insufficiency your ability to discount any good thoughts you have in your mind is going to be so strong if you're trying to lead with positivity first I need to think it wish it believe it and I will achieve it your set point of negativity is going to just Crush that into the ground I'm speaking from personal experience right as the guy that was chronically unconfident and

still has you know the Imposter syndrome that does creep in you have to start with action it needs to be okay what would have had to have happened in a week's time for me to look back on that week and find pride in myself Pride's seen as something that you should be ashamed of it's one of the seven deadly sins but David Goggins did an episode with him a couple of months ago we could put it in the in the show notes if people are interested and he said pride is something that everybody misses that

having pride in your name your performance uh the way that you show up for other people is something that you can do but you need to do something that is worthy of being prideful about right what would have had to have happened in a week for you to look back on that week with pride okay maybe stop breaking promises to yourself when you say I'm going to wake up tomorrow at 7am and when the option comes to hit the snooze button don't do it there's one win that you've got for the day that's action right

and it is just you know it's tried to say that Peterson clean your room thing but the reason that that works is that you start with the smallest ever step and you expand out from that you want to become a writer you want to leave your job and become a writer okay can you commit to writing one blog post on sub stack per week for the next three weeks that would make you feel like less of a loser if you did that action has to come first if you're the sort of person who is chronically

unconfident because you will drag your sense of identity behind you Mark Manson says that identity lags behind our status by about one to two years so for both me and you in two years time we'll go I understand why I was in LA that day and and look back start with action and make small promises to yourself that you don't break if you had a friend and every single time that you and your friend decided that you're going to go out for dinner that friend either showed up two hours late or didn't show up at

all you would stop trusting that person that is the relationship that you have with yourself you need to be able to trust your own word and a lot of us don't because life is very convenient and it is easy for people to not stick to the promises that they set themselves because our ability to be idealistic is always going to outstrip reality's ability to deliver that to us as soon as you posit an ideal you then begin to compare yourself to that ideal and true hell is when the person that you are meets the person

that you could have been sometimes I Ponder how um you've probably seen this in your own life I'm sure you have where you'll have a friend in your life I've got a couple of friends back home who I've tried to help in some way maybe give some advice when they're struggling in their hardest times and the advice has been ineffective and then you've got another friend who will just need one idea they'll be listening to your podcast and one idea will be the seed that changes their life I often like think that I over overestimate

The Power of Words because everything you've said there makes perfect sense but we both know that 95 maybe more of people have just received that it will not convert into any kind of behavior and the habit of not doing things is unbelievably difficult to get past it's one of the problems with anyone that listens to your show or my show you will love being cerebral right you will love the idea that I can use cognitive horsepower to just get myself out of problems and there is a case of learning as masturbation right and believing that

learning about something is the same as enacting it and it's not that's why it has to be action first a quote from one of my friends that he uses when he's thinking about a concept is does this grow corn basically is it useful tell me how I can use this in my life does it grow [ __ ] corn right this beautifully uh beautiful sounding concept cognitive bias that helps me understand the way that my brain works and my relationship with everybody else how do I use that in my life give me something to apply

it to and that's why with the confidence thing choose promises that you will never break to yourself I'm going to get up on time for the next month I am not going to hit the snooze button if you do that and you look back in a month and you go oh my God that's the first time I've done that in forever Maybe that's a big win and you can do the James Clay thing we'll write it on a board we'll track it what gets like measured etc etc but the main thing is just keep promises

to yourself and that is a good way to go from here is an Insight I learned about I want to do breath work cold plunge go to the gym fast until 12 midday get up on time sunlight in the eyes and whatever it is right that you want to do turn it into a promise don't break the promise one of the really important things you said there was about the size of that first step I was reflecting there on the way that video games are designed to make sure that every subsequent level is not too

intimidating that you lose a motivation but it's not too um too small that you lose motivation as well you can lose motivation on both ways and so it's the same with crosswords and video games they get incrementally more challenging to keep you engaged the size of that first step is is I think a central point there because when people listen to podcasts with people like me and you or Andrew huberman and they hear that they've got to maybe get up at this time go outside gaze earth like put their feet on the ground cold Plunge

and again I'm gonna do that and I set that as my first step I'm set up for failure yeah how important do you think the size and the subjective size of that small that first step you take to build trust with yourself is and to start that discipline the goal isn't to have the perfect daily routine tomorrow the goal is to still be winning your daily routine in 50 years time if you expand your time Horizon sufficiently you will realize that very very tiny steps can compound look at the graph of mine or your followers

on Spotify especially mine right because I was doing my show for so long and it's just nothing nothing nothing nothing everything well why well it's because it's latent leverage it takes so many layers of paint to get there so yes the first step has to be incredibly small do that make it so small that you can't say no to it and then what's next and then what's next so when I decided that I was going to try and become a more virtuous version of me I was going to start telling the truth I was going

to have a morning routine I was going to develop a meditation habit I was going to read all of these things I wanted to do and none of which I did right toward the end of my 20s none of which I did all of which are now the foundation of of my life over I don't know 1500 meditation sessions and all of the authors on the podcast etc etc I had to do that one step at a time I didn't have a stable sleep and wake pattern until covid ever in my adult life I'd never

gone to bed and woken up at the same time for seven days in a row until kovid because I was running nightlife events right so if no matter how difficult the setback is even if you're a shift worker you're a nurse You're a parent whatever your challenge is just make the promise to yourself sufficiently small that even with that challenge in front of you you can make it work I hear that and I'm motivated as a lot of people will be because that's what happens you know like a shower as the cliche goes motivation comes

and then it slowly it slowly washes over us and slowly starts to fade how do I prepare or how should I be preparing for the day where I've heard Chris Williams and Steve speaking about this and then in three and a half days time I wake up in the morning life has happened the kids screaming my motivation seems to have escaped me [Music] the distinction between discipline on that day and the motivation I got from the source and that came from the inspiration of this conversation what do I do discipline needs motivation for breakfast you

don't need motivation it's great if it arrives it's some extra fuel on the fire but discipline is the thing that you need what would you tomorrow want you today to do you tomorrow would want you to keep that promise to yourself and it's why discipline is so much more valuable I remember this conversation between Joker willink and Sam Harris six years ago and they're talking about how you can't fake bravery because if you do a thing in spite of being scared of doing the thing that is bravery right there's no such thing as fake bravery

like you just if you do the thing and you're scared that's bravery if you don't do the thing and you weren't scared that's not bravery right the same thing goes for discipline doing the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing is discipline right you don't need motivation to get yourself up to go and do a thing make the promise small Build It Up step by step know that you are going to have setbacks and this is my favorite rule from James Clear which is a habit missed once is a mistake a habit

missed twice is the start of a new habit never miss two days in a row so ideally go for a month build it up but after that if you ever miss one day go okay that's mistakes are going to happen tomorrow I double down tomorrow I go on time absolutely perfect I'm straight up out of bed or I go to the gym or I walk the dog or I do my meditation or whatever and that's a good heuristic stops errors snowballing into new habits what about if I get to day three it's then in James

clear's definition the start of a new habit do I not just apply the same thinking that I did when I missed it on day one you just need to well I mean if you don't ever miss two days you shouldn't be able to get to day three what if I do that I think about my own fitness journey I've been working out for the last three years and there will be a week where motivation is gone and then there'll be multiple weeks so there'll be sometimes it'll be two weeks in a row where I'm like

taking my ass to the gym but my workout is absolutely atrocious I might as well have not have gone um and I do that because I'm trying to continue the behavior correct in spite of the motivation well it doesn't change your worth as a person you know you you want to do this because you think that it's good for you because you believe that it's good for you because you care about yourself you care about Stephen and his body and his mind you want him to have a long and healthy life and the same for

everybody else that's listening they want to have good outcomes from the things that they do in life you don't need to lambast yourself because you don't do a thing that is perfectly designed to make you feel good okay like you missed three days in a row we get back on the horse We Go Again discipline you talked a second ago about the fundamentals of your life now the things you wanted to put in place you reference meditation and these kinds of things when I think about the the Chris Williams that was running those club nights

was on level Island take me out and the guy that sat in front of me now if there were a couple of key fundamental tools or devices that have taken you from there to the guy sat in front of me here and you know what what are those what are those things and I say this because you know when people give advice on this podcast sometimes when in books and stuff they'll talk to things they think they're supposed to say but you never really get the true stuff they'll say oh meditation I've never heard that

before I'm like for Chris Williams what took you from from there to the Chris Williamson San Fran to be now getting up on time every day every day every day and what's what's on time for you uh seven seven to seven thirty depending on what time I went to bed so it'll change each night but I'll set an alarm and I will get up on time go to bed and wake up at around about the same time each day makes a massive difference go for a morning walk first thing so sunlight before screen light was

something that I was doing before huberman talked about the down regulation of the amygdala response and the lateral eye movement helps blah blah blah in the brain I came up on this because I wanted to go for a walk more nowhere to get as many steps in as I could get up and go for a walk because it just so many people are stopped the second they wake up because they use their phone as their alarm they roll over they hit the alarm on their phone and now their phone's in their hands and now they're

in bed for half an hour doing the cycle through all of their social media apps sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom that was the number one change that I made phone is outside of the bedroom and I bought how long have radio alarms been around a million years right like just get any kind of alarm clock wake up go for a walk before you use your phone that will change so many of the problems that people encounter because it the addiction to technology is primary I think to a lot of people's challenges in

their day meditation has been interesting for me it it's definitely helped me to be calmer to be more peaceful it's not an insane performance enhancer the breath work as well I really enjoy doing that it's not in the same performance enhancer um reading I would say some form of content absorption that could come from Reading articles reading books listening to podcasts listening to audio books something that pushes your understanding is very important and for me that's moved it was books a while ago now it's more sub-stack articles that I read on my Kindle for a

long time it's always been podcasts sometimes it's audiobooks sometimes it's not what about content creation the other side of that coin and the obligation to create what impact has that had on your life it's everything because by having to talk about the things that I learn it forces me to learn them right until you can explain something to somebody else you don't really understand it so okay prove to me that you understand it by telling me about it I can't okay well you don't understand it then so this is one of the reasons I suggest

to people that they should do a fake podcast with a friend for 30 minutes every week phones are outside of the room put one phone face down on the table press the record button and just have a conversation and pretend that people are watching welcome back to the show Stephen today we're going to talk about the UFC or Tommy Fury and Jake Paul who do you think is going to win and it forces you to be rigorous and precise and consistent with the things that you believe and it is a forcing function that synthesizes the

things that you're doing other people might prefer to write or Draw one of the advantages of doing it for an audience is that you actually feel like someone's keeping you accountable right if it's just oh I'm going to draw a drawing every week for my own pleasure as opposed to I'm going to draw a drawing every week and post it on my Instagram or I'm going to write a sub stack article I mean I have a posting Cadence on the show Monday Thursday Saturday and if it wasn't for the fact that I know if I

don't post on those days the audience can be like hang on a second mate like it's Monday where's the podcast episode it would be a lot less motivating for me to do it driven by that so I think that absolutely creating some kind of content whether it be just for you or whether it be to put out into the world and to build a platform with is a a good start the most important thing I think in hindsight that I've gained from content creation is in fact like honing my skill of sales because you're forced

in this medium to make your ideas as concise as you possibly can and say them in a way which is engaging and I've reflect over the last 10 years or so of making content and recording videos and go man the impact it's had on my business my ability to pitch and sell but even if you're a guy and you're looking to pick someone up in a bar man or woman it's profound to me the impact that the obligation to create content specifically on video in in um in speaking form has had on all facets of

my life and I just don't feel like there's enough of a charge to both introspect but then the obligation to create I think it's life-changing there's a interesting quote from Wittgenstein Ludwig Wittgenstein and he says the limits of my language mean the limits of my world so you could see a richer vocabulary means a richer life if you take the fact that you have ideas in your head that these sort of wishy-washy ephemeral notes it's like a smell right an idea is kind of like a smell it's it's just a amorphous blob of a thing

and you go oh yeah I feel like this I feel like this is an idea until you make it take form through spoken word written word or drawing doesn't really exist it's not tangible you can't see it you can't work out where the holes are in whatever this idea is so what that means is that first off the more words that you have in your Arsenal the more precisely you can describe the thing which is in your head the more frictionlessly you can take ideas from your brain to your mouth your fingertips or the end

of a pencil the more accurately you're going to be able to put that out into the world which means that when you need to turn it over and assess it and look at it oh my God I thought that I knew this inside out and there's this big gaping hole here I need to work out what's going on which is why a loneliness epidemic uh the massive falling rates of friendlessness in in the world I'm particularly good because not only is it bad for the community and for social cohesion but it's bad for the individual's

personal growth as well if you want to fully learn something you want to spend time synthesizing your ideas and you can really only ever do that for somebody else again you can write the journal to you for you but it's never going to be as disciplined or as consistent as if you're writing it for an audience even if the audience is only five people or only your friends and you spoke to something which is because you were outside of the Social Circle when you were young you were able to I guess vicariously see the impact

that small things had which made you kind of socially attuned talking then about the loneliness epidemic is it is it an epidemic how bad is it is it something that you believe Society should be paying more attention to I sat here with Simon sinek the other day and he disclosed to me that he was going through a real struggle with loneliness at the moment and it was somewhat surprising it was somewhat surprising because again in a very naive way Simon sinek is someone of great success he's got a career most people would um would die

for he's a man of you know that's greatly admired he goes on stages and thousands of people raw his name but then on a personal level he's lonely and one of the things he said to me was there's a real difference between being alone and being lonely do you can you see the distinction between the two yeah I mean Solitude is something that many of us enjoy I know that me and you both enjoy it right loneliness isn't I used to write I've got um in a journal that I used to keep in my phone

a couple of different entries from my mid-20s and it just put I think I'm lonely yeah because I just I I couldn't work out what was going on I had a sense that it was maybe something that was a little bit wrong I think I'm lonely um when it comes to the loneliness epidemic uh in 1990 the number of men who said that they had six or more close friends was around about 55 in 2020 that dropped to 21 it's less than half right right 21 of men say that they have less than six close

friends the number of men who say that they have zero close friends has increased by five-fold from 1990 and it's now at 15 percent 15 of men say that they have zero close friends I don't know the stats for women it seems like women are able to hold on to social groups a little bit more effectively than men are the loneliest epidemic does seem to be hitting man a little bit more hard I'm compelled by your diary entry before we get into their stats in the causation you wrote in your diary in your mid-20s I

think I'm lonely yep it's funny because I I reflect on my early 20s between 20 and 25. and I was definitely lonely but I had no idea until later that was why I only thought that I was lonely you know I was like what is it what were we just saying it's a notion it's a it's a smell someone shouted it from the other room [ __ ] do you think I'm lonely no one's described it I didn't have a description of it so I had this sort of innate this feeling inside my being but

no one had put a word to it before or told me what the like job description of someone that's lonely looks like so it was a signal like something's not right but I don't know what it is yep and I only learned when I was not slowly when I felt a real sense of connection what I was missing oh [ __ ] that's not what life's supposed to be like so tell me about you what what caused that what factors had come together to put you in a situation where you were lonely I've met about

a million people in my life and I only had a handful of friends that made me think my exposure to friend conversion seems to be off there is something not right here and this was largely due to the fact that I was playing a role as this big name on campus party boy and quite rightly who was I going to resonate with when I wasn't being me they were going to at best become friends with a projection of what I thought they wanted me to be right so this was almost exclusively on myself but also

I was struggling a little bit in the industry to find um the I can't have a conversation about like the deeper sense of human nature or the existential pain of being alive or status from will stored his brand new book when someone's desperately trying to get a VIP wristband off me so that they can go and see the hot girls downstairs like it's it's not quite the right environment for that but again largely this was due to the fact that I wasn't being sufficiently confident that other people would be interested in what I was interested

in and yeah I mean you can be have all of the success in the world you can be surrounded by people and yet feel alone in a crowd and Hollow in Victory because if you're only playing a role anything that you do any love that people give to you won't feel like it hits you existentially you'll feel praise but you won't feel love because they're not in love with you they're just applauding the role that you're playing does that make sense makes perfect sense makes perfect sense it's such an app description it really brings in

this idea of what the person is connecting to matters the most I.E if they're connecting to the image that I've created which is inauthentic to myself I'm never going to receive that connection the only way to cure my loneliness is to show up as myself and to build connection on that basis which is again makes a ton of sense to me because I was a young CEO who had hundreds of employees my relationship to them wasn't necessarily Steve the true sense of Steve to them so are they the CEO it was exactly it was CEO

to employee and then in my personal life in the early 20s phase there was maybe one person maybe two that new state that were connected to Steve but even maybe one actually um which is super interesting because we don't it also talks to Simon sinek's thing where I go well he's this guy's something amazing of it but how many people are connected to the true Simon the guy behind the books the guy behind the admiration that study you referenced a second ago about men getting increasingly lonelier I I think I read the same thing the

thing I read was about the amount of people we have to turn to in a time of Crisis and how that's decayed over the last couple of decades why is that happening what is happening in culture and Society that's causing us to become more and more disconnected in terms of proximity but also in just in terms of sort of psychological connection what is going on it's a good question uh I don't think that there's a there's a single answer to this um social media probably has a lot to answer for what's happened now is the

world of social connection has been made less and less social right you're more more connected than ever before but more atomized than ever before as well I think that there are some really worrying Trends in Rising rates of social anxiety that are mostly Downstream from people not spending enough time being social if you look at the average amount of hours that kids would have played outside versus the average amount of hours that kids are spending watching television on social media and playing video games now you are basically creating an army of young Chris's right that

were socially uneducated in that regard Downstream does turn into adults that similarly don't they haven't got the habits of going out and being social which means that they don't develop the skills to connect to people to be able to make friends and that causes loneliness like that's I think a large portion of what we're talking about what about the like optimization of our lives and the way that we've built cities and the way that we're you know when I say optimization of Our Lives I mean like if we order food convenience it's a screen I

mean this this is just if we date it's the screen if we connect to my mother or my sister in Australia it's a screen yeah well the problem is that what is convenient or enjoyable is not always what's good for you right ice cream for dinner every single night for the two-year-old is both convenient and enjoyable but probably not good for it the issue is that we are all our own parents when it comes to our social media and uh social interaction lives the pain of rejection whether that be from a potential friend a potential

partner or a job offer a business whatever it is is painful and we have done incredible things to try and Nerf the world right to wrap it in Cotton wool so that the pain of rejection is removed as much as possible this is why online dating is so successful because the pain of rejection you don't know the people that swiped left on you you only know the people that swiped right that's taken the pain of rejection of dating away right what do you think of dating apps do you think they're net positive or net negative

for the world you really want to go here of course I want to go okay I think that dating apps are a perfect example of something which is both convenient and enjoyable but not good for you they have certainly opened up more opportunities for people to meet potential partners and yet we are in a world with the highest rates of sexlessness ever amongst young people one in three men between the ages of 18 and 30 hasn't had sex in the last year that tripled from 8 to 28 from 2008 to 2018. 50 of men say

that they are not looking for a committed relationship that's down from 61 of men saying that they were only half of men between the ages of 18 and 30 are looking for a relationship you go okay well if the promises of easy access online dating were so true how is it that we've ended up with a world where people are having less sex than ever that sex uh sexlessness is also increased for women too but for men it's increased more and they were starting at a higher Baseline as well 50.1 of women for the first

time in history uh are mothers there are more childless women at 30 than there are women with children right so for almost all of human history more women had kids under the age of 30 than over and now it's switched does a study from Morgan Stanley that says by 2040 45 of 25 to 45 year old women will be single and childless if online dating was creating this perfect facilitation for relationships to start how are we ending up with all of these outcomes the question what's wrong with the outcomes what do you mean why should

people care about being single all the stats you've just said um I could look at them and say they're just sort of objectively neutral like there's no adverse consequence to society or the world it's fine that people aren't having kids it's fine that people are aren't having sex I'm playing devil's advocate here but like what what is the what is the negative consequence of all of those outcomes that you've described in your view there are people for whom a life without a partner is the right choice that's absolutely something that I'm prepared to accept but

it's not most people it's one of the biggest levers in fact the single biggest predictor of your health outcomes in life are the number of close connections that you have it's the number of friends it's more than quitting smoking it's more than going to the gym it's more than stopping drinking it's a number of close friends that you've got and a relationship is a big close friend Robin Dunbar says that in order to get into a relationship you have to sacrifice two friendships because you can have around about five very close friends if you want

to get into a relationship you need to get rid of two of them because there is a minimum time investment so people that are in relationships have better health outcomes they have onset of dementia later they have alzheimeric problems later on in life they are less lonely that seems pretty uncontroversial and yet both sides of the aisle both men and women are retreating from relationships and finding ways that they can justify this uh you know Boss [ __ ] culture and sort of the lean in um women's mentality or men going their own way and

in cell culture and the black pill for guys are both ways that each sex is trying to deal with the challenges that are coming out of the mating Market both sexes are saying I don't want to be a part of this anymore I'm finding it so painful and difficult to be in this world that I'm just gonna cast off any of it altogether and then retroactively come up with a lot of explanations that can justify why they didn't need to be in a relationship in any case and for some people that's true but for most

people that's not dating out abs are clearly not you know as you say in your own words and previously aren't the only causal Factor so my question to you is where did we go wrong and how do we go right okay so I think challenges in The Mating Market are coming from many directions one of the main ones that will be pertinent to the people that are listening is the increase in female achievement in education and employment now about 50 years ago when Title IX came in there was a 13 percentage Point swing in favor

of men to women in universities that were significantly more men than women it was an affirmative action uh policy that helped to get more women into higher education 50 years later 2023 it's a 15 percentage Point swing between men and women in University in the other direction there are two women for every one man at a four-year U.S college degree around about by 2030. women on average between the ages of 21 and 29 earn 111 pounds more than their male counterparts women are roughly twice as likely as men to say that they will value Financial

prospects in a partner about 78 of women say that a stable job is something that is important for a partner to have whereas around about only sort of 45 of men say the same thing for a man to increase his uh rating on a 10-point scale by two points he requires around about a tenfold increase in his salary for a woman to achieve these same two-point Improvement on a ten point scale a salary would need to increase by 10 000 times my point being that women are they are concerned about a partner's socioeconomic status significantly

more than manner now you can start to see that if you have a world in which women are attending University at high rates they are achieving uh more success in employment at least in that sort of 21 to 29 range which is when most people are perhaps looking for potential partners and yet the socioeconomic status of a partner to a woman is a big determinant of their level of attraction you can start to see how this imbalance could cause a problem similarly when we talk about education a man with a master's degree on Tinder gets

90 more right swipes than a man with a bachelor's degree so for all of the guys that are considering going and getting a master's degree even if you think it's going to be useless at least accept the fact that you get 90 more right swipes for the rest of your life or just lie about your Masters I don't know all of this rolled together describes something called hypergamy which is the female tendency to date up and across on average women want to date a man who is as educated or as employed as they are now

in a world in which quite rightly women have finally been able to achieve parity in education and employment and status and have Independence and not be financially reliant on their partner all the rest of it that's great for them but it it does cause some challenges for their dating and this is what I've called the tall girl problem so everybody knows what it's like to have a girl friend who is six foot without heels you go if you want to wear heels you're looking at professional athletes because on average women want to date a man

who is at least as tall or a little bit taller than they are so as women rise up through their own competence hierarchy in education and employment they further shorten down the potential pool of eligible men that are as educated or more educated and as employed or more employed than they are this is a challenge this is just a straight up imbalance right what this causes is is a very large group of men toward the bottom of this distribution to be essentially invisible to women it causes a very large number of women in increasing cohort

to compete for an increasingly small group of turbocharged super performers at the top these guys the super high value guys have a wealth of options so they are commitment to verse why would they decide to sit down with one girl for the rest of time when they have this wealth of options which can cause them to use and discard many of these women which then causes most of these women to resent men overall and then the guys that were forgotten at the bottom that say well hang on a second I didn't use and discard you

I haven't even been seen by you no no all men are whatever it might be right that they are users and abusers that we don't need them that we're all of the Good Men at etc etc it's a big group of men that feel like they are good men that are invisible there's a big portion of women who have finally managed to achieve educational and employment and Independence that are chasing after a smaller group of guys these guys are commitment to verse I don't think it's necessarily good for them either it's the child with the

ice cream right like guys being able to keep it in their pants when there's a lot of options on the table is going to be difficult for them too this is one of the main drivers this tall girl problem is a massive change I think in the dating Dynamics it obviously begs a question Chris which is if everything you've said is objectively correct and spot on and supported by the data then how does if I make Chris Williamson the prime minister or president of the world and I say your first job is to fix this

challenge what'd you do the first thing that you don't do is roll back women's education and employment and this is one of the problems with this discussion right the things that I've just said there are borne out in peer research data Morgan Stanley results like these are incontrovertible facts right they are there and any girl that is listening who earns more than 50 000 pounds a year and has got a Masters or above level education and is toward their late 30s or in the uh their late 20s or in their 30s knows this problem you

know the fact that you are struggling to find a man that you feel is eligible for you right that needs to be out there the problem that happens around this discourse is that it posits men and women as adversaries and competitors of each other right as enemies this means that worthwhile compassion which is needed to both women and men if you're a woman who has gone through your education you've dedicated yourself to achieving a degree you know your mother's generation wasn't able to achieve this and you're the first person that's maybe gone to UNI or

got a Bachelor's I've got a masters I've got a PhD and then you spend some time in a career grinding away and you now own 150 Grand a year you think right I'm 31 I'd love to settle down this would be amazing for me where all of the men are hang on a second and what you realize is that not only now are you competing with all of the other increasing cohort of women that are high Achievers with status employment and education but you're also competing with a 21 year old Barista who still lives at

home with her parents for this small cohort of guys that requires sympathy for women okay that is not a good position for women to be in at the same time this huge cohort of sexless men thirty percent of men haven't had sex in the last year 50 of men say that they are not looking for a relationship you were a man you have been through your twenties you know the power of the male sex drive between the ages of 18 and 30. can you imagine getting yourself into a situation where you say I'm not bothered

about pursuing women that is an unbelievably extreme statement for men to make and their self-identifying as this in Pew research data this isn't on in-cell forums this is pure research 50 of men aren't looking for a relationship when they say aren't looking for a relationship do they mean I'm not looking for a woman or I'm not looking for commitment and not actively pursuing any kind of interaction with women oh [ __ ] casual included what 50 percent here's the point right you asked about Solutions the first thing that we need to do is turn down

the volume of adversarial uh nature between these two anybody that listens to those two stories right the plight of men and the plight of women in the modern dating world and doesn't see it as wow that's [ __ ] that that really really sucks for both sexes men have it worse in some ways women have it worse in different ways right this isn't a competition of like oh let's wave the flag of who's actually accumulated more victimhood points the first thing that needs to happen before anything is the volume of the conversation needs to be

turned down we need to see the challenges that are faced by both sexes the second thing that needs to be put out front is that there needs to be a way to raise men up without bringing women down because it is very easy for you to say okay so women are out achieving men in education and employment let's just put the reins on them and then everything is going to be brought back good look I am not trying to roll back any of the gains that have been made by women over the last 50 years

but you do want to have eligible mail Partners right if the thermodynamics of Attraction include the fact that women tend to want to date across and up in terms of status employment and education you need to do something right some of the things that you could look at doing in terms of solutions would be uh red shirting boys of starting Boys in school one year later this is something that was performed by Richard Reeves the reason for this is that boys tend to mature less quickly than girls if you were to start boys one year

later in school it would mean that they would be more effective at their age they would be more mature mentally uh that's one start another one that I think is probably more controversial but would make a big impact would be to stop derogating motherhood right to start pedestalizing motherhood again there is a huge movement in certain corners of women's advice that any woman who decides to become a mother is a second essentially a second-class citizen I don't think that that's true I don't think that a woman that chooses to become a mother is a second

class citizen but women often fear becoming just a mother right or just a wife or at worst a domestic prostitute and they flee from this Specter of family life into the Open Arms of a corporate employer and laughably we call this process freedom how can it be that the thing that most of us are grateful for a great mother in our life has now been derogated as some sort of uh it's not it's like somebody's been rubed into a role that the patriarchy always wanted them to do right there was an article a little while

ago that said a maternal instinct is a myth that basically the only reason that maternal Instinct exists is because the patriarchy has convinced women that they're actually supposed to like kids it's like I can't even begin to explain how ridiculous that is if you look at all of the sex differences in terms of the way that humans work pedestalizing motherhood would make women fear being a mother less it would make it an aspirational goal for them to to pursue one of the scariest stats that I learned was from a guy called Stephen Shaw he wrote

a did a documentary called birth Gap and in it he talks about this declining Birthright a meta-analysis by Professor rinska Kaiser says that 80 percent of women aren't mothers after their fertility window closes didn't intend to not be mothers involuntary childlessness run about 10 of women are physiologically incapable of having kids very unfortunate around about 10 of women intended to not have children which leaves a whopping four out of five non-mother women who didn't intend to not be mothers and these women have support groups where they come together to grieve for families that they never

had and it breaks their hearts that they weren't able to find the right partner in time before their fertility window closed and Professor Kaiser talks about the pain that these women feel and Stephen Shaw's been to these support groups that women who thought that they had more time that struggled to find a partner in time they grieve for families that they never had and that that sentence just it makes me it makes me feel so upset like it's so painful to hear the prospect of a woman that that wanted to have a family and couldn't

very difficult so there's there's two solutions there that you've kind of offered up as potential solutions to that um does that alone fix the other side of the coin which is the huge quantity of men that are avoiding relationships intimacy women altogether particularly um raising man up somehow would be great but I mean where we begin with that I don't know I think men are heavily checked out of Education uh and employment uh men have been retreating from the U.S labor force Market by 0.1 percent per year since 1950 87 in 1950 it's about 67

Now by 2050 or 2040 or 2050 it'll be 65 percent given that women want on average about 80 of women want a man with a stable job this Retreat is not good each step that men take where they take themselves out of education and employment not only isolates them and makes them economically less viable as contributors to society it also makes them less eligible as mates on average men between 18 and 30 in the US spend 2 000 hours per year playing video games stoned or on prescription drugs that's not the eligible partner right so

one other thing that you could look at doing is re encouraging in-person dating so online dating does worsen this issue because it allows you to optimize for object objective metrics of success right on a dating app and this is for both men and women on a dating app particularly for men you can have your education level you can have the car that you're with you can talk about your job you can so women are very much encouraged by the platform itself to take a incredibly low resolution view of this person so all of the things

that guys are able to work on like you know Vibe and humor being Pleasant being kind being caring being Charming none of that can come across on a Tinder profile and this means that it further worsens the tall girl problem you see how it would it would make the objective metrics even more and more worsened let's not forget that there are three men for every one woman on a dating app so even if every man matched off with a woman there would still be this huge number of men that didn't have a partner right so

online dating hasn't delivered on the Promises I think that anybody wanted for it women swipe right on around about 4.5 percent of profiles for men men swipe right on about 60 of profiles for women this means that a lot of men see online dating as a waste of time we spoke about how it buffers rejection and that it helps people to not feel rejection so much but when you spend a lot of time on apps swiping right on 60 of people on average and you don't get very many matches or any matches or the few

matches you do get never turn into dates that would quite rightly make people feel disenchanted with the world of dating Downstream from the problems of social media that we spoke about before are a lack of ability to flirt I actually think that flirting is a lost art at the moment you know it's a very complex thing to do it's a push and pull it you have to understand a lot of intricacies about sort of social dynamics and interaction you need to be able to tease but not too much and the Art of flirting is incredibly

difficult to get right and it's even more difficult if you've never interacted with a woman in the real world especially as guys and girls now let's touch another third rail Stephen me too so metoo was a uh necessary requirement to call powerful men to account for misbehaving and using their power to gain sexual access to women what it sought to do was to sanitize the toxic elements of certain males Behavior what it's ended up doing is it's sterilized almost all of it 84 80 of men report not approaching a woman because they are scared of

being seen as creepy 84 of women say that they want the man to make the first move women are terrified of being approached by men because of stories of sexual assault of dangers within the workplace of overreach by men that are both in power and out of power men are terrified of approaching women for fear of being accused of all of those things so we have a epidemic of loneliness and sexlessness amongst the Sexes for the first time in our four million year history we have large cohorts of both men and women who want relationships

and can't get into them men feel invisible on dating apps and a terrified of approaching women in the real world women yearn for men who they want to be in a relationship with but either are not spoken to by or are used and abused by in person both of them are terrified of talking to each other in any case for fear of either being accused of or becoming the victim of some sort of terrible interaction I think that re-enabling in-person dating would make a massive difference it would reduce down the tall girl problem because you

would have the ability for guys to gain status in the eyes for instance a guy that maybe not doesn't have a University degree but is unbelievably funny it's still very statusful right because humor and gender is a sense of status it's called clown maxing in the black pill World um but that guy might not get a chance if he was just on online dating so that would be another thing uh and you can see as well how the incredibly uh righteous ideas of me too when taken to an extreme could end up causing some externalities

that disadvantaged women in the dating Market do you see what I mean of course as you were saying that I was thinking about that video that went viral of the young girl in the gym who was filming the guy that came over to ask her if she needed help with the weights yeah do you know the video I'm talking about yeah so for anybody that it doesn't have a context um a young lady on Tick Tock um set up her camera while she was in the gym and she was filming a guy and sort of

anticipating him coming over to help and lo and behold the guy walks over and says do you want to hand with the way and tries to give her hand with the weight and then as he walks off she like she cusses him out and says he's a basically portrays him as this like Predator monster and the reaction online was the inverse the reaction online was like was siding with the man because he just came over and asked her if she wanted a hand of course we both know that there are very predatory men in gyms

correct I've I've got female friends that have spoken to that my girlfriend speaks to that all the time she tells me how of her experiences in the gym but there is another side to highlighting this issue which causes perfectly reasonable polite men who are genuinely offering a hand in something or let's honest flirting yeah to be totally [ __ ] terrified absolutely and and this is the this is the difficult conversation that we don't have a lot which is what's the the net we can see the net positive of that we can see the positive

side of that but what is the downside everything in life has a cost is that now that we are scared to broker conversations with strangers through fear of being put on blast on Tick Tock if you optimize for absolute safety what you're going to end up with is nobody ever approaching a girl in the gym now I don't know maybe maybe there are girls that say do you know what it is it is worth it for no girl to ever be flirted with in the gym for no girl to ever be made to feel like

they are being uh stared at in the gym you know like if the price that we have to pay is that no one ever gets a date a gym date then that's fine because the benefit that we get is that no one ever is made to feel uncomfortable right a few things to say on that first off almost all uh indiscretions from men that are where they do creepy Behavior are a very very small cohort of men that repeatedly do it this is from David buss's Men Behaving Badly it is one man doing a thousand

bad things to women not a thousand men doing one bad thing to women now the problem is that that can still cause a massive that's still a thousand bad interactions with women right but you have 999 men that are saying well I don't behave like that I've been smeared with this with this bad this bad brush and this is an incredibly difficult uh line for both of us to thread here how is it that we can talk about some of the challenges that women face in the dating world when there are so many obvious benefits

that have occurred to their safety as a byproduct of this one of the interesting things that I learned about that uh Jim the toxic Jim gays video was it could have gone either way when it went on to tick tock right it was a knife edge if you'd showed me that video and the comments were hidden and you said what do you think the reaction is going to be are you going to toss a coin toss a coin and that will be this guy's either push in my opinion I don't think that he had overstepped

but I don't understand how the world is going to react to this now the interesting thing there is that a lot of people take their cues about what is and is not acceptable social behavior from the way that other people view what is and is not acceptable social behavior so those sorts of landmark episodes actually end up creating a trend of what people in the real world will consider to be acceptable behavior so let's say we have a different version of the universe and in that Universe everybody decided that that actually was too much from

a man what you have then is all of the girls that watch that video seeing it and saying oh my God if a guy glances over at me more than three times in 90 seconds and tries to help me deload a glute Bridge that constitutes worthy uh worthy concern about abuse and the toxic male gaze right so we have now reset expectations down to a much tighter sensitivity level similarly for men they think okay I know that three glances in 90 seconds plus assisting someone to deload the plates from a bar is too much therefore

at most I can have one glance during 90 seconds do you understand what I mean do you see how we we would further Nerf the world we would wrap it in more and more and more cotton wool and then Downstream from that you concept creep this out to the stage where anything is toxically masculine like let's give the other side of the coin men overstepping the mark and how men can be better um that's what I that's what I want to make sure we're balanced in this conversation because there are as we both have spoken

to there are um a huge amount there is a huge amount of inappropriate behavior that happens throughout Society through the corporate world throughout everyday lives how as men do you think we can be better and when I say better really what I'm speaking to here is be is know how to approach a woman in a way that is not going to make them feel uncomfortable intimidated um fearful and that's the the what women speak to all the time they talk about how they have to walk home with their car keys in their hand because if

they pretend they're on phone calls when they're walking down the street these are all things that my you know my sister my female friends have spoken to so how is men can we be better the first thing I think is to actually spend some time sandboxing this like practicing like you need the only way that you're going to learn how to how to interact with a woman is by doing it it's not the sort of thing that you're going to be able to work out on the internet I mean like basic stuff like don't stand

super close to her don't do it in a dark alleyway at night uh don't stare for ages without saying anything right these are very basic like rudimentary objective metrics that we can give but really what it comes down to is just have a bit of charm about you understand that if you go up and say something to a girl hi I just wanted to ask how your day is going I just wanted to tell you that you looked really nice today if there is a girl that has a problem with that presuming that it's not

in a cul-de-sac Alleyway at the dead of night and you've got your hood up right or you're her employer or you're her employer well here's here's another interesting one right right Melinda Gates works for Microsoft bill is the founder and CEO Bill sees Melinda around the office this is in the 1980s and he thinks wow yeah she's she's a bit of all right so he decides to ring her and say uh Melinda it's Bill wondered if you wanted to go out with me one evening and she said uh when when are you thinking he says

how's uh three weeks tomorrow you said uh bill I I don't think that you're spontaneous enough for me I don't think that this is going to work put the phone down 30 minutes later he Rings back and says how's this for spontaneous you've got the rest of the day off let's go on a date 2023 founder CEO of large tech company Rings receptionist asking her to date him and after she says no Rings back again pulls her out of work and takes her on a date game over right done where is the line in between

Bill Gates and Harvey Weinstein Weinstein well it it's precisely in the details right everybody can say what Harvey Weinstein did was wrong some people would say that what Bill Gates did was wrong but okay is it wrong for two people a guy and a girl who spend every day every single time that they go to the water cooler one of them sees the other one gets up and like escapes from their chair so that they get the opportunity to go to the water cooler together and they've been doing it for six months and it's this

super platonic thing but the guy's terrified and the girls terrified you go okay like should we Nerf every relationship so that that interaction can never move to the next level given the fact that we've got high rates of loneliness given the fact that we've got massive amounts of sexlessness 20 of relationships begin on online dating 20 of relationships begin in online media social media right that's two out of five relationships begin online and they're the most fragile they're the ones that drop the quickest they're the ones that stay together the least long workplace better friends

even better Church even better than that right but it is a it is we are in uncharted waters here people with regards to the mating world we are in uncharted waters the Harvey Weinstein example is where I was like that guy was a [ __ ] monster well of course yeah but the Bill Gates want to get it's kind of like the old-fashioned the old-fashioned way of doing things you know when we used to when our worlds used to be a village and we would you know maybe write a letter or we'd take the girl

out from the church whatever but the Harvey Weinstein this guy was a [ __ ] monster like he was I remember listening to some of the tapes and the victims and this guy was a [ __ ] Predator he was like listen to any of those really harrowing it's it's it's it's just it's one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard where even like a journalist would come and interview him and he would just be like you know sexually assaulting and physically assaulting her during the interview so this guy just had no boundaries he

is he is just a disgusting moment do you see what I mean that like quite rightly there needed to be a reckoning around that there had to be a reckoning around that kind of a man using that kind of a position to get that kind of access yeah that needed sanitizing that sort of behavior needed sanitizing and there was going to be Fallout from it Downstream from that how sanitized should Behavior be up to the point at which it's been sterilized and there is 84 of women say that they want the man to make the

first move right it is still on I mean for the girls that are listening how many times have you been the one that's approached a guy like I've been in nightclubs for 15 years right met about a million people in there twice it's ever happened to me that girls have come up and been like forthright about chatting me up twice and I've worked a Thousand Nights in my it's actually pretty good going yeah two out of a thousand that's not too bad and that could also be my fault right like but this is very difficult

man and again for the guys and girls that would say well what does it matter you know what does it matter that we uh that people are going to be single especially for women if you're a high achieving woman who's got the PHD and I have a friend PhD millionaire self-made millionaire in the Fitness World mid-30s now going sperm donor route she's really struggling to find a partner so she is going to use her very vast resources to be able to support these kids to bring them into the world to have a fantastic life but

make no mistake that's a single parent household right that's a single parent household the outcomes that you have from single-parent households seem to be sociosexually the daughter's don't do particularly well you have high rates of sociosexuality which is more casual sex uh more complex complexes around sex from single-parent households but what we hear about a lot is that um education and employment outcomes of single-parent households on average tend to be worse for women for the girls in that situation doesn't really seem to impact them all that much so however big you think that effect is

double it and put it just on boys it's only boys that seem to have that kind of a problem and quite rightly you're not going to have a patriarch in the family that's maybe able to deal with a rambunctious disagreeable boy I I don't think for the women that want to have kids and you have the resources absolutely but for anyone to say that that's the optimal approach that this is what would be amazing and again I'm not saying women become domestic prostitutes take yourself out of the boardroom and get yourself back in the kitchen

like that's not what either of us are saying that we want women to do here but most people eight out of 10 women that are childless once they reach their 40s and later didn't intend to not be this is a very difficult conversation that we need to have to warn people about the impact of not thinking ahead in their relationships you have less time than you think you need to be aware of that if I on the other side of the queen when we're talking about men again if I delete the dating apps then so

you know first thing we're doing we're deleting all dating apps that still leaves us in a world where there's this kind of pseudo-sexual fake digital relationship in porn pornography still exists so I'm wondering about that 50 of men I'm assuming and I don't know this 50 of men but I'm assuming pornography is probably quite a big part of their replacement therapy for the connection and sexual um intimacy that they're missing correct so I have a theory called the male sedation hypothesis right there is a phenomenon called young male syndrome if you have a large number

of non-partnered childless men in a society that tends to be an unstable civilization there's examples throughout history where men who don't have a reason to behave who don't buy into the social contract of cohesing everything together tentacles problems they Revolt they cause riots they spray paint cars and they push over granny and they do domestic violence and sexual assault there have been a number of in-cell killings of um disaffected disenfranchised young men that have gone out and done horrible things but it is not increasing in line with the amount of sexlessness right it's tripled 2008

to 2018 tripled eight percent to 28 the number of associated young male syndrome incidents hasn't increased in kind so you think okay something going on here something is happening which is causing men to not enact this uh very well established throughout all of history uh response when men get into a relationship their testosterone drops when they have kids their testosterone drops again and reduce testosterone reduces risk-taking Behavior if you've just had a kid you're in a relationship don't try and jump off that Cliff because then maybe you've got a kid that doesn't have a father

anymore can see why that would be adaptive so the question is why is it that we have greater rates of sexlessness amongst young men than ever but we don't have this in-kind amount of violence and disruption and it's my belief that porn video games and social media are sedating men out of this status seeking and reproductive seeking Behavior so I think that you get a titrated dose just an Ever So slight just a little little bit of reproductive cues from Pawn that helps to sedate men's desire to go out and pursue women I think that

what video games do is they create a sense of camaraderie of goal-seeking behavior status within the uh online world it's satisfies a lot of what men would have been trying to achieve with that young male syndrome revolution in the past so my belief is that we have this male sedation occurring now given the choice between a society of men who are dangerous and a society of men who are sedated right now the group of sedated men are ever so marginally better but the only reason for that is that we're at a time of peace right

if there was an alien civilization that that came down to Earth today the best thing that we could do would be to switch off all pawn turn off our social media we want men to be angry you want men to be riled up when there is something that they can direct that anger at right now there isn't and if they did it would just foment and it would cause problems and it would be it would be bad right so yes the sedating of this kind of reproductive seeking Behavior in a way has made the world

calmer but it's not particularly even say it's optimal right this isn't great oh no absolutely not I mean you know the the uh Advent of the nofap movement men who identify as not masturbating they self-identify as not masturbating they have no faps streaks uh you heard of this Stephen you've not heard of nofa no I hang around in the wrong you're on chronically online how have you not heard of nofa how have you uh Chris uh look I I know about my nofa Okay so there is a very big community of guys online that have

recanted Pawn the same this is what we were talking about before right for every movement there is a counter counter culture for every um sex positive there is someone that will decide to push it away for every uh woman that struggles to find somebody in the dating Market there is the boss [ __ ] culture which is the cope then there is the lean in which is like the Trad wife thing there is the guy that becomes the Chad and has sex with all of the women there is the guy that Retreats from that and

goes men going their own way and completely recounts it as well right so you have the push and pull on both sides nofap is a group of men who have uh self-identified as people that don't masturbate right this is because they see the impact of Pawn on their psychological Health on their physical health and they don't like what it does to them so they have formed a community around this for men who feel like they have a problem with porn something that gives them a sense of pride about being able to defeat what they see

as a vice is a a place that quite rightly they're going to get yes I have control over this even if I don't have friends even if I don't have a partner at least I have control over this and it gives them what are we doing here it is another goal for men to chase after right it just happens to be a goal of not touching your penis it's actually quite a hard uh thing for a guy not to do speak for yourself Chris okay even if I can see where your hands are um but

there's something I find really compelling about we've talked a lot about people that are single that are searching for love but when you think about the context of relationship we're both in relationships um and the role masturbation plays in the reduction of desire for our partner because some of my friends are struggling with something I've talked about before with sex in their relationships I've talked about my own struggles with sex and relationships and one of the things we've kind of diagnosed is pornography has a reductive value on the desire we have for our partners so

do we abstain it depends man I mean people have varying degrees of sexual drive what's your approach what's my Approach uh I think that I I certainly feel like the story that you tell yourself around porn and around masturbation seems to be the biggest determinant of how it makes you feel and this has been backed up by a bunch of data from Dr David lay who is a porn researcher uh coming out I think he's the University of uh Arizona perhaps or New Mexico and the story that you tell yourself has a massive impact on

how you feel if you feel like masturbating is a dirty bad uh action that you shouldn't do that you should feel ashamed about Downstream from that you're going to feel shame if you don't communicate it with your partner that is a if you're hiding porn news from your partner that is a huge huge red flag personally partner is another concern but for you it's a big deal because you're going to feel that sort of disgust self-hatred shame guilt thing come through but I do think that if you want to increase the sex drive in your

relationship just saying okay if we want to do anything sexual we do it together try and tell me that that's not going to increase sex thriving relationship but you know almost all of the sex that happens happens in relationships if you look at how much sex if you took a pie chart of sex right almost all of it is in relationships very very small amount of sex is in casual relationships as you might know the show's not sponsored by Airbnb absolutely love Airbnb always have always been a you know saved my life on so many

occasions and my team when we first got in touch with Airbnb were talking about how most people don't realize that their place where they currently live could become an Airbnb and I guess the second question there is how much could your place be worth and it turns out you could be sitting on an Airbnb gold mine without even knowing it some people Airbnb their entire homes when they're away that's what I did in New York whenever I left New York my place was on Airbnb and people rented it out sometimes for a day sometimes for

two days sometimes for a week and it's a great way to cover some of the bills while you're away so whether you're looking to go on holiday or you just want some extra cash for bills or you want to buy something nice for a valentine that you love whatever it might be head over to airbnb.co.uk host and you can find out how much your current property where you live can earn while you're not there I suspect it might blow your mind because it certainly blew mine there was one point you said about motherhood and that

kind of opened my opened a doorway in my mind about the broader subject of regret in life and you know where if you look at sort of a meta-analysis of where people at different ages and different genders are experiencing the highest levels of regret where does that fall but no regret is is something that I've been thinking about an awful lot and it makes for considering regret considering the things that we regret in life and trying to reframe it has been one of the most useful mental models that I've gained so Douglas Murray British writer

columnist spectator multiple New York Times bestseller I was in Manhattan with him and he was telling me a story about Christopher Hitchens the famous atheist new atheist guy one of the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse and he Douglas earlier in his career was lamenting to Hitch about the fact that he had to choose a thing and by choosing a thing he couldn't do a different thing so he had this opportunity cost and he's saying okay all of these problems I don't know whether I want to do this thing I want to do that thing

and you can imagine they're probably in some British pub somewhere in Westminster or whatever and which is probably smoking he goes Douglas in life we must choose our regrets and he told me the story and I thought that's really interesting what does he mean choose our regrets and I reflected on it so much and it made me think well what I'd always presumed was that in life the only reason that I had a regret is because I made a sub-optimal decision if only I'd been able to make the perfect decision I could have ameliorated the

regret and the reason that it's there is because I didn't make the right decision but when you accept the fact that opportunity cost is baked into the fabric of Life me and you can go to the gym or we can go to the theme park by going to the gym we don't go to the theme park even if the gym was the right decision to make we're always going to have the open loop of I wonder what the theme park was like that day so I go oh that's interesting regrets aren't a bug they're a

feature regrets are a feature of life right they are a natural byproduct of us always been curious about what could have been and given the fact that opportunity cost exists they're always going to be there okay that's interesting it's kind of liberating right makes you feel less culpable for the sub-optimal decision that you made so but what does it mean that you have to choose your regrets what's that what's the choose bit well if you accept the fact that regrets are inevitable that you're going to do things in your life even if you choose the

right thing and you're going to consider in retrospect that you wonder what the other thing could have been you can't escape regrets when it comes to making a decision between multiple choices what you have to look at is not only what thing do I want but which regret could I live with if regrets are inescapable you have to choose which one you want okay so I have to choose which regret I want so you're looking at the choice you have things in front of you which of these two could I bear living with the regret

of and that makes decisions an awful lot easier right because it switches us from a place of uh scarcity and fear about the future and it helps to project us forward and think okay which of these am I really which of these could I not bear myself to live without so for instance with me moving to America last year it was a big move I'm I was 33 34 at the time not exactly the archetype you should have I always felt like I should have had my [ __ ] together in my life sorted by

the age of 34 so moving to a new country at this time is a bit oh really but if I had the opportunity to do this podcast to become one of the best in the world at what I do to pursue my passion my curiosity and I didn't do it I couldn't have lived with that regret but in that case hindsight's a wonderful thing right because you could have come here and it kind of just [ __ ] bombed it could have done and you would have then looked back on that decision as um but

at least I don't have the open loop anymore right I can live with the regret of selling an events business in the UK and trying to make it work in America and then going back to the UK with my tail between my legs and going I gave it a shot it didn't work I couldn't live with the regret of wondering what if I'd had the conviction to follow my passions and go out to America and see if I can make it work when people are at that fork in the road the problem is they look

off into the two directions that are in front of them is both both directions are completely shrouded in darkness there's correct so it's it's that we go down one of the routes and then you know based on the outcome in hindsight we then attach regret or um pretty much anything I do agree uh but a few things here people I've got one particular example in my mind where I was meant to buy I was going to buy um it's going to require a business and we've been acquiring a few businesses recently at flight story it's

going to acquire a business and I didn't in the end and it turned out to be a really really fantastic business and so in hindsight I'm going I [ __ ] up that's a regret and I think about it sometimes I'm like damn should have bought that business but it could have gone another way and my my perspective of the regret now be entirely different I'd be like I'm amazing I made a fantastic decision but but the answer and my like regret didn't come until the game had been played out and that's what I'm thinking

about with the nature of regret it's like well it's difficult right because you are correct if you take a chance and that chance doesn't work out then maybe you regret the other thing but you can you can believe in advance okay even if I take the chance and it doesn't work out at least I know that it didn't work out for business decisions ones that are a little bit more easily replaceable as opposed to Big life decisions you know I remember when I was uh much younger 21 I think 22 and I I needed to

decide about whether or not I was going to go and do the season in Ibiza I was going to stay at home and earn and save money and stuff I was 21 like oh 22 I think it doesn't matter you know what I mean and I I realized even though I didn't have this model in my mind at the time I was like this might be the last time that I get the opportunity to do this I'm going to go and do a masters next year and then I'm going to go straight into running this

nightlife business I I probably should do this I probably should and there was just something that compelled me to go and do it and I went and spent and the seven weeks that I spent in Ibiza although I don't remember all of it my memories of it are quite fond and I think [ __ ] yeah like I did I did the I did the thing and it just helps I think people to get past the fear of failure and of regret especially in retrospect hmm regret isn't necessarily A Bad Thing the reason that it

exists is because you cared about something you cared about something enough to actually be bothered by it and you know what when you're describing the liberating first point of um the reason why I regret exists it made me think of this thing I read about jugglers which I wrote about a little bit um in my first book where they they believe that no juggler can juggle more than 14 balls at once they think there's just because of the laws of physics the size of the human hand it's impossible for a juggler to juggle more than

14 balls at once and that speaks to the nature of um limitation there's only a certain amount of balls you can pick and all the ones you don't pick and it's kind of like the old analogous to sometimes talk about with like I love waffles but I love a six-pack I'd love to have like a six-pack or an eight pack or whatever I can't have both the the story that I can only have one is what makes either special yeah waffles you know like the six-pack is only great because it's the story of the waffles

I didn't have correct and so I might regret have but it's but it's because of the scarcity and the the nature of us having to make like a finite set of choices in life that's why six packs are um having a six pack is so admirable and it's the same like you can't have a world where things are special where you don't have regret precisely so there's another another rule that I absolutely love which is you can have anything you want but you can't have everything you want yeah right you have to sacrifice most things

in the medium term in order to be able to facilitate progress toward one thing right uh this is a really great Insight from Oliver berkman's four thousand weeks who has he been on yeah yeah great guy did you when you were going through that do you remember the choose and Advance what you're going to suck at mindset I can't remember that really good really cool very interesting uh mental model to use so you have a uh plan for the next six months right or the next year by doing a thing other things are going to

have to be sacrificed I want to grow my business okay maybe your social life is going to take a little bit of a hit maybe your Fitness is going to take a bit of a hit or I want to become I want to get into a relationship okay well you're probably not going to be able to get as much sleep maybe you're gonna have to uh your business is going to get less of your attention whatever it might be by focusing on one thing you inevitably end up having to sacrifice focus on other things now

the problem that you and me and maybe a lot of the people listening to this that are type A go-getters that want to be able to have it all will feel is as soon as they start to feel something slip they go oh [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] like I'm I'm supposed to stay lean I'm supposed to say stay healthy and fit and whatever whatever and you go by choosing in advance the things that you're going to suck at the price that you're going to pay in order for Success within which

whichever domain it is it allows you to feel ease and acceptance when that particular domain does start to drop away so for instance this year writing a book I'm going to do some live shows toward the end of the year going to continue doing the podcast and I'm doing some other bits and pieces as well my fitness is going to have to take a hit the start of this year I accepted the fact that I'm probably going to get a combination of smaller fatter and slower throughout this year but that's fine that's the price that

I'm prepared to pay and I I made that deal with myself in advance okay I'm condition Fitness is going to take a little bit of a hit I'll hold on to it as best I can this isn't me being complacent about it I'm going to let it let it slip and it is such a powerful Insight that you can have anything you want but not everything you want and I think that's liberating it's all the things you couldn't have and like I said a second ago with a six-pack I often think about a six-pack because

I look I think what makes that socially valuable if there's a social currency to it and all it is is lines on your stomach it's a story though oh yeah I mean this is the the thing about people that go to the gym the physique that you build is attractive feels good when you're naked and the other person's got their arms wrapped around you or whatever right like that's that's a big part of it don't get me wrong but what it's also a part of is it shows the kind of person that you are to

be able to achieve that kind of physique someone who is self-disciplined who is self-motivated who can do hard things who can deal with pain which is like kind of sexy uh they're conscientious they're reliable they're disciplined delay gratification delay gratification uh all of these things that is the story which is told by the way that you look right by your physique and I really really like that that a six-pack is a story of all of the waffles I didn't eat is great and the same thing goes for whatever Pursuit you choose you know the the

podcasting thing right and the differences that you've noticed in your ability to go from brain to mouth over the last three years or so since you've been doing the podcast and mine as well definitely that is a story of all of the hours that I didn't spend watching Netflix or scrolling Tick Tock or doing whatever you know it's the days and days and days of research and listening back to myself and time with my speech coach working on diction sitting in front of a microphone with a guest doing all of these things and that's the

layers of paint again you know to look at one of the best communicators in the world or artists in the world are dancers or musicians or Sports people or whatever it is it is a story of all of the things that they sacrifice in order to get themselves there okay do you want that don't look at the things that they've got look at the things that they've sacrificed because that's the price that you have to pay to be in that position when you're alone at night and you're mulling contemplating when you're in the gym lifting

weights and you think about the work you still have to do to become the optimal version of Chris Williamson what is that what is the work you have left to do on a personal level be mindful pay attention be focused be disciplined keep promises to myself tell the truth those are the principles those are most of the principles and the reason is we spoke about this last night the number of paths that your life can go down in the future are so varied and so difficult to predict that any hard and fast plan will be

completely destroyed by six months of intense growth two years ago I couldn't have predicted that I would be living in America doing this thing two years ago you wouldn't have predicted that the show is where you are and you're on British Airways and etc etc right so having any rigid plan isn't going to work having a bunch of principles is the things that I still need to work on in terms of deficiencies are I need to be more disciplined with my user on my phone I know that that's a huge Crux for me I need

to continue to work on being emotionally open and vulnerable specifically publicly uh as someone that was very ashamed about being made to feel weak in school that is a large hurdle for me to get over because I only recently opened up about bullying with David Goggins of all people because I felt like you know this guy's been through so much who is it what is it for me to say oh I was a bit lonely in school and like people like picked on me and stuff why does that matter what solving the the vulnerability hurdle

I think that anything that you are not fully prepared to open up about and this doesn't mean that we're supposed to be you know transparent to the world around us but even to yourself you know to be able to take the idea the smell the notion in your head and form it into words suggests that you haven't internalized it understood it transcended it done the work right on it and also when you asked at the very beginning what is it that you're trying to serve people through the podcast and then through the work that I

do it's very difficult for people to find a role model that they can genuinely feel an affinity with because most of the people that you look up to are talented or or successful in some way and by design that means that you don't have that much in common if you're just starting out on your journey the difference is and the beauty of this kind of a platform people can scroll back five years on my podcast on the Chris Williamson YouTube channel and they can see episode one in my old office in Newcastle upon time with

a single Blue Yeti on a 16 pound mic stand with my friend that was rowing the Atlantic solo and hear me bumble my way through an episode as I say every other second with a different accent with different lighting and cameras and skills and everything so you can track that Journey over time and you go if you have even a modicum of admiration or appreciation for many people if you can see them from the very beginning and think wow that's even [ __ ] than I am that gives people hope that they can go through

it and I think that being able to be more open and vulnerable about the challenges that I've faced in my past should help other people to feel less alone now I've opened up a lot I've opened up about depression throughout my 20s about the bullying about all these sorts of things but it's like okay so where's the deeper lesson where's the deeper lesson what else can I take from this and I think that would be that would be good that would be a good thing for me to to learn and one final thing would maybe

be uh getting out of my head a little bit um we both of us are monetizing cerebral horsepower right like the primary resource that we have are our thoughts and then our ability to communicate them but the problem with that is that it means that you live a lot of your life up in your head and the people that are listening may feel the same you love listening to Steve's podcast or my podcast or whatever okay how do we go from thought to action it's what we were talking about earlier on how do you avoid

being so cerebral that you don't ever get into this sort of embodied State this really great guy called Ian mcgilchrist he wrote a book called The Master in his Emissary neuroscientist but also a philosopher he looked at the Isle of Man TT Riders so the people that don't know Isle of Man is a small island off the coast of the UK and these super bikes race around it but it's potholes and dry stone walls and B roads and grass verges and every single year people die and they looked at the speed of the decisions that

the Riders were making and what they realized was that it was so quick that it couldn't be conscious that there wasn't time for the prefrontal cortex to get the decision through it had to be more limbic it had to be more ease and Grace so the goal is for them to get out of their own way right it's for them to be embodied and I think that you know if if you were to say what's the price that you pay to be me one of them would be very very much in my head very much

thinking assessing over assessing analyzing and it's beautiful I love the takeaways that I get I love the insights that I have around the world around theories around mental models around oh my God so if we look at the fact that um women want to be approached but men are scared of approaching because of this creepiness oh my God there's two theories and we bring them together and we go wow that's how Downstream from me too there can be challenges that are both created for men and women in this dating world I'm like [ __ ]

that's cool but the only way that you can do that is if you think and think and think and think you're 35. you referenced how ideas generally are like a smell that that appears and gradually we try and figure out where that smell is coming from we also talked about regret so bringing those Concepts together as a 35 year old man now if you were to forecast off into the future what your regrets are what smells of regret would you forecast now that you're going to experience when we sit here when you're 14 you go

do you know what the mistake I made at 35. yeah well I mean the embarrassing thing about this is if you look back at what you regret from 10 years ago it's probably still the same [ __ ] that you regret now yeah I think that I regret to stay with us because we're the same you know you are the common denominator between all of the experiences in your life all of my partners all of the breakups that I go through are bitter and my ex ends up being a dick okay well what do all

of your exes have in common you you you're the common denominator between all of them so I think if someone is asking themselves this question and goes what am I going to regret in 10 years time what do you regret from 10 years ago it's a good place to start so for me um fearing less so fear uh making big changes I move very slowly with decisions whether this be with uh life whether this be with the business um bringing in team members delegating control and responsibilities taking risks doing new things new projects it served

me very well because I make very few errors in business but I leave an awful lot on the table because I don't take risk so and the reason that I don't take risk is because of scarcity mindset fear concern of the future um self-doubt you talked about imposter syndrome The Voice self-doubt self-doubt to a degree but it is more fear than that it's just it's more ambient than it being self-doubt it's just there it's just this Cloud that lurks uncertainty what about the uncertainty right and this is another thing from Peterson uh where he says

you have to consider the price you pay for inaction people presume that inaction has no cost you don't get to not make a choice not making a choice is still making a choice every minute that goes by that this decision is undone is a choice I teach you about one of my favorite Bro Science Concepts that I came up with so it's called anxiety cost right you know about opportunity costs by doing a thing you don't do another thing I believe that the longer that you wait before you do a thing that needs doing all

of those minutes that you spend thinking about the thing that needs to be done could have been gotten rid of had you just done the thing so for an example your daily routine resets every morning when you wake up you have to walk the dog and meditate and do your breath work and read a new journal and do whatever if you do those things earlier in the day you get to spend the rest of the day in just this Bliss right this self-congratulatory Noble High Horse Bliss about all of these things he did whereas if

you leave them until the end of the day you have to spend all of those minutes thinking I gotta do the meditation when I get home can't forget to write in the journal that's anxiety cost and that's a really good compelling reason why you should make decisions as soon as you're ready to make them because you will get rid of these wasted minutes which you'll never get back you're never going to get those back your brief time on this planet 4 000 weeks and you're going to minimize the anxiety cost by doing things sooner so

for me definitely fearing less would be one of them Chris this conversation has been immense diverse honest vulnerable everything I love about this show you're an incredibly talented wise speaker and within that what I see is I see repetitions I don't see someone that came out of the womb with your Insight but I also see a really genuine curiosity which you just can't fake I will never be able to fake that I don't you know we were talking at dinner last night about the guy sat next to us with the shoes on and the and

you're saying why is he wearing those shoes and why is the waitress got that belt on that is your your sort of natural disposition to curiosity and it is of tremendous value for the world because I can take so much from it without having to do the hard work and the I think the secondary piece there is your ability to distill the complex into the simple that is incredibly powerful and that's exactly what you do on Modern wisdom over and over again and I've I've watched and observed that show evolve and continue to evolve into

something which is I mean if I could invest I would invest I would back that train where that Train's going so it's I think it's incredibly important for people to go and check out your show about wisdom if they haven't already I'm sure a lot of people have but it is just such an unbelievably rich source of inspiration um education and Humanity as well and I think that's a lot of what we lean towards here is that The Human Side of these things and you provide that in abundance so thank you for this conversation I

feel like we could talk for [ __ ] hours this is the problem where these things actually have to end at some point because I'm sure there'll be a part two in the future I hope um we do have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest as you know and there's a question been left for you this is maybe the longest paragraph I've seen in this book so far okay so the question left for you is go back to the most painful or emotionally challenging moment

or period you had as a boy what would you say to that boy now speaking directly to him to help him through that experience differences I know who wrote that question you do yeah yeah it's the problem of having too many friends in Austin that fly out here so uh thanks for that mate and I have to say we might as well let the cat out of the bag he also knew that you were coming on next right so he wrote that question for you I also bumped him for coffee yesterday so he might have

written a particularly yeah yeah yeah sorry um so both of us have taken an interest in psychedelics recently and on a small dose of mushrooms a long while ago I saw a version of me in the corner and what I realized was that that boy was worthy of love and acceptance and if I could see him struggling through loneliness at school and a lack of support from Friends uh a sense of Solitude that like was pathological like just straight up loneliness right I would have told him that I was proud of him for getting through

the things that he's got through I would have said you're working hard you're worthy of acceptance and love you don't need to offer the world anything in order for it to love you back you don't need to offer people gifts or VIP entries or insights from a podcast it's hard to be someone that thinks about things deeply because there is a in-kind Association of suffering that comes along with it like it's both a blessing and a curse to fill things so very deeply but I think that the price is worth it I think that the

depth of enjoyment that you get out of life is worth it and for that young boy that I saw that was sat on the ground that was alone but I picked him up and killed him and said you doing great Chris thank you thank you mate thank you so much that's honestly beautiful and I think um I speak for many when I say that that's the message a lot of people in their own lives will need to hear right now so thank you so much I appreciate it I've really enjoyed coming on it's been great

that both of us are following this little path parallel train tracks going forward just I see where it takes us over the last couple of how long maybe four months I've been changing my diet shall I say many of you have really been paying attention to this podcast will know why I've sat here with some incredible Health experts and one of the things that's really come through for me which has caused a big change in my life is the need for us to have these superfoods these green Foods these vegetables and then a company I

love so much and a company I'm an investor in and then a company that sponsors this podcast and I'm on the board of recently announced a new product which absolutely spoke to exactly where I was in my life and that is huel and they announced Daily Greens Daily Greens is a product that contains 91 superfoods nutrients and plant-based ingredients which helps me meet that dietary requirement with the convenience that hewell always offers unfortunately it's only currently available in the US but I hope pray that it'll be with you guys in the UK too so if

you're in the US check it out it's an incredible product I've been having it here in La for the last couple of weeks and it's a game changer ladies and gentlemen I am so delighted to finally be able to announce that one of my all-time favorite brands are now sponsoring this podcast and that is whoop all of you know that I've been on a bit of a journey in terms of health performance cognitive performance sleep and all those kinds of things that's kind of been reflected in the guests we've had on this podcast and woof

has been a huge part of my life for many many many years that's part of the reason I also had the founder come on the podcast after having will on the podcast I love the brand even more hearing about his vision his passion for the project where it came from his own Obsession was solving a problem which turned into the product that is whoop whoop is a wearable health and fitness coach that provides you with the feedback and real actionable insights into sleep into recovery into how you're training into your stress levels and your overall

health and for me it's empowered me to be the best version of myself across all of those aspects of my life the working team have very kindly offered to give all of you a free month so just head to join.woop.com CEO to claim your device and your first free month on us [Music] foreign [Music]