(Re-Upload) Chris Williamson | Being Pigeonholed, Cricket & Jordan Peterson

🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/chris-williamson-interview/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ryanfhogg/

This was first published in early 2021 on this podcast.

Chris Williamson is the host of the Modern Wisdom podcast, one of Europe's and quite frankly - the worlds - fastest growing and most exciting podcasts for the inquisitive mind.

Chris has created something, in Modern Wisdom, that I quietly emulate and admire from afar. The prospect of getting the opportunity to speak with whoever you want around the world who interests you most is the absolute final motivation for why I started this podcast. Chris recently had on JBP Jordan Peterson, which marked for him this high watermark and realisation of this absolute motivation. 

We spoke about much. Stereotypes, being pigeonholed, stifling ones potential, imposter syndrome and not enough about cricket. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Well, Mr. Williamson, Chris, thank you very much. Welcome.

SPEAKER_02 0:02

My pleasure, man.

SPEAKER_04 0:03

Alright, so I wanted to uh not much beating around the bush here, I really want to get straight into it. Uh there's a great quote from one of your newsletters a while ago, and it's I think it's something that a lot of us can relate to at some stage or another. And this is the quote. Being social is effortless when you're with the right people, and mind-numbing when you're with the wrong ones. Are you an introvert or do your friends just suck? So you've spoken about your time living with the sort of hyper lads at the Love Island house, and since this is an experience that sort of caused a shift in the way that you think about how you wanted to lead your life, was it these blokes that you had in mind when you wrote this, or have you had a crisis a little bit closer to home?

SPEAKER_02 0:41

No, the the guys that I was with on Love Island weren't so toxic or boring or anything that they caused me to create an entire sort of miniature philosophy around it. No. It's just a compound, it's something that I've observed. I think the vast majority of people grandfather their friends in from just where they've been over the last few years, where they were at school, the place that they grew up, the sports team that they went to, the the kids that their friends were friends with of the parents of, like the vast majority of us just go through life and kind of accumulate friends and never really actually question are these people good for me? Do they live in alignment with what I want to do? It's cliche to say that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. But we're such mimetic creatures, right? We reflect what those around us are doing, their values, their norms, their habits, their routines, everything. And it means that it's very it's very important to work out who who am I spending time with. And uh yes, I think that on average most people that think that they're introverts just haven't found the right friend group yet. And if they did, they'd just be completely immersed in conversations. I think that insight was born out of spending a lot of time in nightclubs, and there is some fantastic crack to be had in nightclubs, but it kind of tends to be the same sort of banter over and over again. Even if the stories and the names and the faces change, the narrative is essentially the same. And I wanted more than that, and I've found myself increasingly even even the sort of conversations I have with my business partner who's been a common thread throughout all of it, as I've been prepared to talk about what I want to talk about, I've even found our friendship deepen. So I genuinely think that being around people you want to be around and talking about the things that you want to talk about will make you more social. Vast majority of people that think that they're introverts are just around shitty friends.

SPEAKER_04 2:30

But I want to s I wonder if it came from like a specific moment in your life. I mean, you say that it comes from maybe a lot of sort of repetitive crack that you've had in the nightclubs over the years. But like these days, you know, there was a great quote that went sort of viral a while ago. One of the most remarkable things about Jesus was that he had 12 close friends and in his 30s. Your relationships, the people closest to you, are they are they sort of new people that have come into your life as you sort of filter through life and your interests attract other serendipitous interests and all of a sudden you find a lot of like-minded folk? Are you still really close? Like are your best friends still these boys that you grew up with?

SPEAKER_02 3:05

So no. The people that I'm friends with now, I don't think I knew any of them before I was twenty. I moved cities to go to university, which is part and parcel of that. Actually, my business partner, I suppose, I would have met him when I was 18. But for me, I don't tend to have these knee-jerk inflection point moments in life. Okay. I don't really like it's cool when someone's got, you know, man, and I woke up that morning and I saw my dad drinking a beer, and I knew at that moment that I was gonna not live life like that. Cool. Like, that's cool for the people that do it, but I've never had that. The insights that have come from life for me, um the insights that I've got from life are completely unspectacular. They've just compounded over years and years of slowly realizing the same thing. And maybe that's a comment on the fact that I uh I resist change sometimes, like we all do. But yes, I think if everybody takes a harsh assessment of the people that they spend their time with, they'll see these people in their life that they should let go of. And it's it sounds harsh, right? Because it it it sounds the same as saying I'm too good for them or something like that. It sounds like you think that they're dragging you down or you're somehow elevated above them. It's not about that. It's just look, do your values precisely, do your values and what you want to do align with their values and what they want to do? And if not, you can peacefully part ways because you are essentially just going along different paths. It's got nothing to do with better or worse, although there are certainly, as far as I'm concerned, objectively better and worse ways to live your life. Yeah, for sure. Those people can go do what they want. But I didn't want to continue having conversations about Jonathan and that girl that totally mugged him off last night, bruv, and that sort of stuff. That wasn't my bag.

SPEAKER_04 4:40

That sort of leads into this, I guess, uh what what would you say? You you've spoken about being pigeonholed as just like that jock. Have you reflected much on whether this is or not is or isn't still your image? Like, for instance, I knew nothing about the Love Island side of your life until I Googled you, for example. I just thought, oh, he's a curious guy running a podcast. Because they bleed into each other a little bit. Because it's totally separate nodes you're putting out into the world where the people that come to find you from.

SPEAKER_02 5:05

Yeah, I get that. It's quite nice when people say that they don't know me from Love Island now. It really is, because I think a lot of the time we do a thing which is big or spectacular or unique or has a little bit of accolade associated with it, and a lot of people cling on to that. You know, it's the classic tale of the high school American football guy, like if coach had just put me in in the final quarter, we could have won type thing. I like having different layered narratives that go on in my life because it reminds me that I've had adventures and I've done different things, and also it reminds me that I'm not staying stagnant and not staying as the same person. So, yes, there is a there's a juxtaposition when you can have a conversation with Jordan Peterson, but also four years ago we're talking about Shagging Birds on national TV. Like I get that, I get that it's there. The only real reason I think it's there is because we struggle to fit certain people into archetypes because they're not purposeful purpose-built for it, right? You don't you have the jock and the maiden and the villain and the nerd guy and the cool guy and the girl that's a little bit shy and whatever it might be. And as soon as you take two or three or four of these different elements and blend them together, people kind of don't really know what to do. Our brains are energy-saving machines, right? Why, when you watch a soap opera within 30 seconds or 15 seconds of seeing someone on screen, do you know exactly that their whole backstory, you know where they went to school, their values, their integrity, what they do for a job. Even if you don't know precisely, you kind of do, because it's a time-saving device. These TV programs don't have four years for you to become accustomed to who this person is. You need to know right now. And if you are a person who has slightly more nuanced or non-typical worldviews and a collection of interests, you are that non-pigeon holed character to other people. And for a long time I resisted the fact that people didn't get me. I didn't like the fact that other people made friends more quickly than me. And I I I couldn't understand why. I was like, oh, I'm a nice guy, I think I'm a pretty good friend, I think blah blah blah. But what it ended up being, and it was pretty obvious, was just the fact it takes a long time to work out who who on earth, like what is this? What's going on here? Like what's going on with the podcast and the reality TV and the training, but the philosophy and the talk about depression, but you seem extroverted and blah blah blah. But that's your unique competitive advantage. That odd combination of different talents is why you are someone that can go and do things that nobody else can. If you were pigeonholed immediately into an archetype that people can pick up straight away, that means that they've seen it a lot before. If they struggle to do that to you now, that's an indication that, oh maybe, this is a this is a unique offering.

SPEAKER_04 7:38

You said you you sort of struggle to make friends. It is a surprising thing to hear. Have you experienced like a difficulty to relate to people growing up? Are you much better at relating to them now? Or is this a sort of persistent battle that you're fighting? Do you naturally relate to people?

SPEAKER_02 7:52

I'm an only child, which I think naturally means that you spend time on your own, you're used to solitude. There's no amount of socializing that you your parents can do for you with friends from school that will catch up to how much if you had a brother or sister that you lived with 24 hours a day. So inevitably I think all only children sort of lean towards introversion at least a little bit. And yeah, for a long time I just I I did struggle to connect. And that was quite embarrassing because I was in a position of social prestige. Thousands and thousands of people knew my name. So I'm a club promoter, right, in Newcastle. We run one of the biggest events companies in all of the city, and we had the biggest Saturday night for more than half a decade. So I worked 204 Saturdays in a row without a break. And I was the guy with a huge white man afro on the front door of a nightclub. 2,000 people, between 1,000 and 2,000 people stood outside, and at least 50% of them, if you'd said who's that guy with the big hair, they would have known my name. So how can it be that you can ostensibly be popular, all the friends on Facebook, which was like the cool social network at the time, and swarms of people coming up? They even made a queue, they created a queue for people wanting to speak to me to get into the club. How could you have this situation where there's so many people that know your name and know who you are and yet feel alone? And it's because I wasn't truly being myself. So any of the accolades or praise or achievements that I got, they felt hollow. People weren't in love with me and what I truly was. They were just applauding a role that I played. Sure. And the role that I played was this big name on campus party boy around town with the big hair and yeah, mate, going on, mate, I'll see you inside for a beer, mate. Like all that sort of stuff. And that's fine, but that was born out of a place of insecurity. And all of this just laying on top, on top, on top. It was it was like shameful to think about the fact how why am I so how come I can feel so lonely? How come I can have all of these like I'm in a position that other people look up to? I have staff that work for me, and I have like an audience and a market that look up to me, and I'm the leader of this company, and and yet you can still feel something is disjointed, like walking with a stone in issue, and it took a lot of work to get rid of that.

SPEAKER_04 9:59

I I wonder how you think about this as someone looking at it from the outside. Because I was more thinking about your relatability making friends in in high school, but it sounds like you have a very distinct separation from adolescence through to high school than university on, where, like you say, you have the the promotion company, the events company, and um I also want to ask you about how you can manage 500 employees, it's very exciting. But it's kind of explicable from the outside, looking in, right? This guy who is almost a caricature of the popular guy, and he's at the door. And how weird would it be if it turned out that Chris with the white afro was maybe a touch sensitive, maybe had some insecurities, maybe had some weird political beliefs, it would destroy that character that I love to go up with and you know, maybe take some shots with. So I I think it's kind of explicable from the outside, me just looking at it.

SPEAKER_02 10:48

To be fair, I was the most unpopular kid that you could have seen throughout all of secondary school. So 11 to 16, sort of started to pull out of that towards 17, 18. Again, only child, looked different, sounded different because I don't have the accent from where I'm from. Played cricket, I played cricket at an international level again from a fucked.

SPEAKER_04 11:10

That's so exciting. I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_02 11:12

Yeah, so I mean I I I was on Durham's books, which is the county cricket up here, where they you know they're a top top flight cricket team. I was in the academy, I was taking days out of college to go play, I'd take time out of school to go play, I'd five or six games a week. So again, like these are all different elements, right, of your life. You just pick up these experiences as you go along. But again, where's the where's the posh accent working class county cricket level going to university, future club promoter, reality TV, star podcaster stereotype? Like it doesn't exist. There isn't I like that. I like the fact that if someone tries to pigeonhole me, I'll pull a samurai sword out and kick them in the balls. Like that's that's what I like. It makes it hard, it makes it difficult to fit in because there is no preset jigsaw hole that you can just slot nicely into.

SPEAKER_04 12:02

Yeah. I obviously didn't do the research well enough. I wish I'd knew about the cricket angle of things, but don't talk about it much more.

SPEAKER_02 12:09

I mean, it's are you talking like 15, 15, 16, 17 years ago now?

SPEAKER_04 12:12

Well, I mean, we'll I'll I guess I'll put it aside. So I'm trying to stack like topics here, but until I was about sixteen, I was convinced I was gonna play Test cricket for Australia. So I think we'll have a lot to s to say about each other there. But to talk about this, like, you know, Chris Winnipeg is the individual, separate him from the archetype, separate him from the the jock, the guy that loves boozing, the guy that's on Love Island, like there's a very clear judging a book by its cover for a participant of Love Island, you know, as you well know as as everyone does. But I wanted to make a commentary because now you've gone on to create one of the United Kingdom's biggest podcasts, which means one of Europe's largest podcasts, because English speakers are the podcast listeners of the world. And it's about a fucking slew of interests which are sometimes, you know, drug, sex, and rock and roll, but very rarely, very rarely, it's everything else, which is, you know, evident. Just go through the the library of episodes. But my sort of theory about this is that the and I don't know if this is, you know, spoken about much or acknowledged elsewhere, but in a world where there is so much more group identity and people latching onto their group identity, that can kind of almost go alongside with the um acknowledgement of the stereotype or of the you know, of the archetype, if you will. But what the internet does is it completely destroys barriers to entry for other interests that you might have had. And so you have this world where yourself are manifest at the public level because you've made the podcast big, and so we all know about it. But myself or millions of other just podcast enthusiasts around the world who have our own stereotype that is very easy to pigeonhole us into, mightn't realise that our interests lie way beyond that. And thanks to the internet now, those interests can become manifest. And so what I think is going forward, maybe you know, our generation is really the start of it, but certainly younger, judging a book by its cover is going to become much harder, much harder. And you could get to the point where you have like PhDs going on Love Island, and you can have the opposite example elsewhere, and like I don't know, it's like an exciting almost worldview in changing perspectives that people don't have to just be their stereotype anymore, or at least view by the rest of the world as their stereotype.

SPEAKER_02 14:26

Dude, there is a Reddit thread for everything. That's all you need to know. There is a subculture community for there'll be one for a random particular uh edition of the Captain America comics from 1975, and there'll be 50 people out there who adore this one comic and have read it a thousand times. And you're right, as you permit people to find their group more easily, the desire to compromise who they truly are in order to fit in with a group which is suboptimal in terms of fit, that's going to go away. And yes, as frictionless communication and the opportunity to network with people increases, we're going to see more and more unique individuals coming through. And I think that can only be a good thing. So I think almost everyone is far less pigeonholable than they think they are. There's only a small number of people, however, who've actually decided to do the self-work and and look at themselves and think, hang on, this is this actually me or have they sold themselves a lie, essentially? Do they believe the hype that they've created in an effort to try and fit in with another group? And that's uncomfortable. Looking at yourself and genuinely saying, Am I the person that I'm supposed to be? That's a really uncomfortable question to ask. Because terribly difficult. Well, yeah, of course, because you can bury yourself under so many personas that you genuinely don't know who you are anymore. And you dig in and dig in and dig in. That's what the majority of the last five years have been for me. And if there's guys or girls listening who are, you know, getting towards an age where they feel like they should have their shit sorted, which it kind of is, everyone, but especially as you get towards, you know, the end of your twenties and you're getting into your thirties, and you're still asking yourselves these sort of questions, like, who am I? What are my values in life? What do I want to be? How's it what what is the sort of world that I want to step into? There's part of us that feels shame because we think I should have got this sorted by now. My parents' generation, my mum and dad had got married and had me, and the dog had died by then. I can remember them being the age that I am now, and they seemed like they had all of their shit sorted out. But these are big questions. Asking what is the sort of person that I genuinely want to be is a huge question, and it you may never be finished with it, and you'll just iterate and iterate until you get closer to it. A perfect example of this who people may know is a guy called Mike Thurston. So he's a big fitness YouTuber from the UK, jacked out of his mind, just walks around at 6% body fat, just permanently looks like he's about to step on stage, including Tan in its natural. And I've been friends with him since we were both uh I I was 19, he was 18, we were the same uni together, doing the same course. And um he is a really good example of someone from the outside who looks like a very sort of meathead classic YouTube and Instagram influencer dude. When you get to spend five minutes talking to him, he's not just bothered about that, he wants to talk about a ton of other things, but he also understands from a marketable perspective that you do actually need to kind of be a person and be a thing. Yes, and this is something now that I'm trying to reintegrate, and I think that everybody needs to as well if they want to be successful socially. Loneliness is a kind of tax that you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind. The more unique that you are, the fewer people will be like you, which means that as you further embrace these odd quirks and the different ways that you see the world, you're just pushing yourself further and further out away from the mean of the normal distribution, right? And as you get out towards these tales, there's just less and less and less and less people out here. But you can curb some of those oddities when you're in other groups to just permit you to be able to flow. Like, not not everybody needs to hear me talk about how much existential risk is a massive concern for the world. Like, not everybody needs to hear me speak about some philosoph Jungian philosophy that Jordan Peterson's taught me, or something like that. You can just have a conversation about wasn't the football a bit shit, and isn't this European Super League thing a little bit mental? And that's that's fine. My problem is when people they they feel like that's all that they've got, and that's the persona that you can hide underneath for a long time.

SPEAKER_04 18:33

Yeah, absolutely. Um he said a lot of interesting stuff there, which obviously you'd like to take on. I I wonder, now I'm just sitting here, I'm realizing you've been in my position so many times. So many times. Do you have this like um I wasn't planning on talking about this? Do you have this like sort of I don't know, empathy or understanding of being the host and maybe wanting to like tag on to four things that were said, but realizing you'd totally derail something if you tried taking it down that route?

SPEAKER_02 19:00

Absolutely, yeah. I often think about the way that a conversation is structured like a tree. So you have this main trunk, which is the central idea that you think that you're gonna talk about, and then these branches come off, and then you branch off again, you branch off again, and then you can look back and go, I've got to go all the way back over there somehow to try and get myself to the to the main thrust of it. One thing that I would definitely say, and this is to any aspiring podcasters out there, the compulsion when you have a thing to say, you feel it rise inside of you like like like a thought, right? And you notice it and you think he's just said flicked a particular tripwire, and that is a story that I have, or I have an example that's similar to that, or that's whatever. You have to sit with that and just allow it to rise up as you're nodding away, looking at the person and and smiling and and thinking they don't they don't know that I'm thinking this. As you're nodding away and doing that, you have to question, okay, does it cross a particular threshold? How good is this thought or this piece of input? Where do I want to go next? How long have I got left in the episode? Where are we at in the episode? Is it really even time for me to talk? Or should I just let the guest go? And um this is the intangibles, I suppose, that to people who are listening hopefully just comes across like a well-flowing conversation. But when you listen to someone who's like a fifth-degree black belt in it like Rogan, he has this down so perfectly just through repetition, but that flow exists, he understands when to shut up. Sometimes he talks a lot, but we all do because we get excited. He doesn't tend one of the things that makes him so good is he doesn't tend to say things that aren't worth saying. They're very rarely throwaway lines. The things that he says, so his threshold for I've had a thought, here's a thing, it's usually if it's shallow, it's asking for clarification, and if it's not, it's it's a banger. It's the question that you would have asked if you'd had half an hour to prepare that one question, and he just continuously does it, riding the present moment. So yeah, I um I totally know what you mean. Conversations can can get wavy.

SPEAKER_04 20:58

And I wonder with Joe, like you you give him credit for saying it's just through repetition. I really wonder how conscious Joe is of this, and I've no way of saying, I don't know if he speaks about it that much.

SPEAKER_02 21:09

I've heard him I've heard him say it recently. Uh I've heard one of his guests ask him about his sort of conversational style, and he said something to the effect of I don't really know what I'm doing, man, I just know it's working, and I don't overthink it because I'm terrified of breaking it. And I don't know whether that's him just being Just humble. Yeah, precisely. Him him just pretending that he doesn't know what's going on. At the complete opposite end of the scale, you've got Tim Ferris, who listened back to hours and hours of him talking to pick out his verbal ticks and then work with a speech coach to get rid of the verbal ticks so he was more precise. So you have these two and both of these guys dominate the field. You have Rogan utilizing comedic timing and straight banter, and then you have Ferris, highly trained, highly structured, sometimes he repeats questions. Both of these guys win. And I I guess I would class myself as somewhere in between. I think to be honest, everybody when they're starting out needs to be more Ferris than Rogan. Because the only way that you can get to Rogan, it's easy for Joe to say, yeah, man, I just freestyle. It's like Joe you're 1800 episodes in. Yeah. Like you've you've done what, maybe five to eight thousand hours of talking in this format. Of course you can freestyle it, mate. You're a monster. So yes, lean towards Ferris when you start, go Rogan when you get better, I think.

SPEAKER_04 22:25

Where do you think you are at the moment on the spectrum? How much for example, for JBP last week, how much did you try to tailor that?

SPEAKER_02 22:32

Yeah, that's a good one. So Jordan's obviously very verbally agile, and I was conscious of that. I don't think I've ever concentrated on something as hard in my life, ever, sure, as talking to Jordan Peterson. Um it felt how I imagine holding on to the outside of an airplane as it's as it's in 35,000 feet, and I've got my fingernails dug in, I'm just holding on for dear life, because the guy's fast. Tell you who is just as quick, Michael Malice. So Malice, interviewing Malice is imp it's borderline impossible because the guy's so confident to sit and just let a conversation stop because he's finished, he doesn't give you any time to get ready to say anything. It's so both of those guys are challenging in different ways. But I I I feel like I'm comfortable now with pretty much anyone. There's a there's a few people that I would still get nervous before. I got nervous before Jordan but settled into it. I think I'd get nervous before Naval and Sam Harris and a couple of others, but that's not because of how good they are at podcasting, that's because I have a personal and emotional tie to their work because it's meaningful to me. I don't like 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode three, and of that 10%, another 90% don't make it past episode 20. So the vast majority vast, vast, vast majority of podcasters out there don't they're not podcasters, they just did a podcast once or three times. And yeah, you very quickly pick up skills. You know, do anything three or four times a week for a couple of hours, and you'll end up being pretty good at it.

SPEAKER_04 24:00

So now you think about yourself on the spectrum, you're much more towards the natural Joe Rogan. This is almost intuitive at this stage.

SPEAKER_02 24:07

I think so.

SPEAKER_04 24:07

Yeah, that's cool. I I think it comes across, you know, you being um what's the word? You've been validated as a very skilled podcaster, obviously, through downloads and subscriptions and so forth. But I think it's also worth saying, it's maybe it's nice to hear. You are very, very good at it. Um I thought you got as much out of Jordan Peterson as really anyone else has since he's come back, which you know, full credit to you, fantastic. If I ask you, Chris, you know, like, do you know exactly what you want to do? I'm not sure if you would say yes or not, but I'm sure you'd be able to tell me if you're doing something that you instinctually know is not what you want to do. And then that's like a good barometer for going forward.

SPEAKER_02 24:44

Think about the question of how do you make yourself happy. The question of how do you make yourself happy is actually really, really hard because happiness comes from all of these different blends of interests, and oh I could I could be this and I could be that and I could be something else. Let's flip it on its head. How would you make yourself miserable? Okay, I'd probably mess up my sleep and wait cycle, I wouldn't train, I wouldn't eat good food, I wouldn't drink enough water, I'd isolate myself from my friends, I'd have a job that didn't mean anything to me, I'd have financial worries, I'd be in a relationship that didn't care about me. There you go. I challenge anyone to deal with that and not be depressed out of their mind. Oh. If that is the opposite of happiness, flip that again on its head and say, right, well, that must be the basis that I have to that's the buy-in, that's the ticket to get me through the door of happiness. I need to do these things. This is something I realized for ages, man. Like I I would work myself into the ground, have a miniature breakdown of a couple of days in bed, drag myself back out of it, and then I'd be back back at work again, running nightclubs and doing whatever. And it took me, probably until I started reading Jordan Peterson and and listening to him talk five years ago, to think, well, you've consistently got five and a half hours sleep every night from 3 a.m. until like nine a.m. What did you think was gonna happen? Well, trying to train, obviously, God knows what sort of condition I'd have been in if I'd actually managed to get anywhere near an adequate amount of sleep. Yes, all of those things need to be sorted. The vast majority of people that think that they're depressed or suffer with on and off ambient depression are probably just underslept or nourished. They're not drinking enough, they're not training enough, they don't have a stable sleep and wake cycle, they don't have friends that make them feel good, they don't have a relationship that gives them meaning, they don't have a job that they care about. Give someone those things, the vast majority of people would be fixed. And that's something that I realized, and that's quite it's such a like embarrassing thing to realise because the fix is so obvious. Like, God, what an idiot. How much of an idiot did I need to be to not see that getting five and a half hours of sleep tracked, I was tracking my sleep. I've got fifteen hundred nights on sleep cycle, tracked, all of them averaging in at six hours and thirty minutes, and that was after I fixed tried to fix my sleep. You just think, well, no wow. Any danger? Any danger of us realizing this? But again, this is the beauty of the platforms that we have now, and as much as I don't like social media and I don't like what it's doing to personal connections and shallow mindedness and all that sort of stuff, the ability for you to be able to find out solutions like that to some of the biggest questions that you've got is literally priceless.

SPEAKER_04 27:10

For sure. It's absolutely priceless, and it's and it's totally worth the 99% noise you'll go through to eventually find that one bit of signal that makes it all worthwhile. It's funny what you say as well, it kind of it all comes back to just the health, relationships, wealth. It's like the three things that might might be defined as happiness if you could so define them. But obviously, relationships is it's hard to get them right, as we started off with, so I don't want to go back to that. Obviously, health, we all know how to make ourselves healthy, and then wealth finally, again, that's that's a difficult one to get as well. Um but you you said so you would like burn out, take a couple of days, and then drag yourself back to work. You're still heavily involved in nightclub promotion and events, right? So to me, it seems like someone who maybe doesn't need this financially, this still means a lot to you, clearly.

SPEAKER_02 27:58

Yeah. I think the problem was me and my business partner were classic young entrepreneurs who had a small business that we'd grown from the ground floor up. We knew the bread and butter inside out, but we weren't prepared to delegate responsibility to the subordinates because we were terrified that they would mess it up. And if they did, it came from a place of insecurity. We were terrified the business was going to fail. And dude, I set up the nightclub that we ran on a Saturday, every Saturday afternoon for three years, and it took me between tables and stuff. Yeah, dude, like throwing the roll of gaffer tape with a piece of rope attached to it over this specific spot in the lighting rig so that we could hoist up one of the inflatables every week. Every single week. I could have paid dude, I could have paid a student £25 every single Saturday, had the Saturday to myself, it I wouldn't have even felt it. It would have come out of the company budget, but no, no, no, no, because if the light's a little bit to the left and it's not quite in the middle, I'll f maybe that's the downfall of the entire company because people are gonna look and that's gonna be the avalanche pebble at the top. It was just neuroticism and a fear of a fear of fragile success. I think the first time that you achieve success, especially if you come from a situation where you haven't had much of that, you're desperate to hold on to it. And you grip onto it as hard as you can, and you I don't know what's working, but I'm just gonna hold on to everything in the hopes that it doesn't stop working. But then over time you actually realise, well, no, the situation I'm in is far more robust than I thought. And this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently to do with imposter syndrome. There's up there's only so many times that you can disprove your own imposter syndrome and it still survive. There should be Dude, how many times do you need to succeed in life before your imposter syndrome goes, Alright mate, you won? Because there's just this person, there's this monologue going along in the back of your mind, going, You're not good at this, and you're not good at that, and then every single time that you're tested, or the vast majority of times that you're tested, you step out into the world, you crush it, you do well, you're proud of yourself, and then that's so short-lived, and this voice comes back up in the back of your head. And for me, I would say, yeah, I have, I've I've locked my imposter syndrome up in a cage built by a thousand tiny achievements. And this is the thing that people don't really realize because they look at confidence and self-esteem and extroversion and they see them all as these the same words, but confidence isn't given, it's earned. You have to earn confidence. You have to earn it by a thousand, a hundred thousand tiny little repetitions of you making a promise to yourself and keeping it. Why would you be confident in yourself if every time that you say you're going to do something you don't do it? Oh, I'm gonna start my diet on Monday and then you don't. Oh, I'm not gonna drink when I go out on Saturday night and then you drink. Oh, I'm not gonna cheat on my girlfriend when I go away on a holiday with the lads and then you do. You're constantly reinforcing you rightfully have imposter syndrome. Why wouldn't you have imposter syndrome? That should be there for you. In fact, that's not imposter syndrome, that's just an accurate representation of how unreliable you are as a human. Imposter syndrome can be beaten by you consistently keeping promises to yourself. Tiny, tiny little things. That's why the wisdom of making your bed and cleaning your room exists. What is the smallest thing that you can do that is a promise that you can keep to yourself? And then what's the next step? The kitchen. Can you do the kitchen? Can you do the hallway? Can you do the upstairs bedrooms? Can you do the garden? Can you do that? And then you expand. That's the domain of competence, that's the proximal zone of development. But yeah, imposter syndrome on its face seems like such a huge big problem that people talk about, and they don't realise that it's your job to beat it, and you can do it. You just need to start small and hold yourself to a high standard.

SPEAKER_04 31:37

And you said earlier that you don't have these like light bulb moments or anything, but you're speaking about beating imposter syndrome. Was there a time where you sort of realized, wait a minute, I don't feel like I'm an imposter anymore speaking to this qualified person over the internet that a million people are going to listen to? Was there was there a time in your life where you've just realized, okay, I guess I'm over it now?

SPEAKER_02 31:58

Yeah, I well I suppose oddly, probably Jordan speaking to Jordan Peterson is Oh yeah, really. That recently. It's just uh it's another obvious milestone, right? Sure. That's it's just another, okay, that's A-grade whale level guest. You know, probably one of the most sought-after podcast guests on the planet. And I think I've got as good of a conversation out of him as anyone ever. And that was something that I really wanted. I wanted to I knew that previously when Jordan goes to see Rogan and he sits down in his studio and Joe's got Jamie with him and this beautiful studio and a nice audio visual setup, and they've spent all afternoon together and blah blah blah. There's an unfair competitive advantage there, and they've got an existing relationship. I was really looking forward to this opportunity for Jordan to do his rounds on his tour because I knew that everybody had the same thing. Yeah, Lewis Howe's got two at two and a half hours and I got one and a half. Yeah, maybe Tom Billie's spoken to him before. Yeah, maybe Brett Weinstein's got an existing relationship with him. But broadly, it's just a level playing field. And I was like, alright, gloves are off. Like, let's see who can get the best conversation out of this guy. Just using the raw horsepower that you've got, brain to mouth, same setup, it doesn't matter about the camera, it doesn't matter about the microphone, it doesn't matter about young Jamie being there, no one's using researchers, there's no one in anyone's ear feeding them stats, that's it. And I wanted that, I was hungry for that. I was like, I want to prove to people, I want them to hear that given the same foundation, I can be better than the best in the world at my chosen pursuit. And I think I did it. I genuinely think that that conversation with Jordan for the topic that I wanted to get out of him, which was personal responsibility, identity change, empowering yourself. I don't think he's had many better conversations about that. Now that's not necessarily due to me, it was his words, but you know, the con the conductor makes the music go.

SPEAKER_04 33:47

Yes, um like the man's got infinite wealth in him, but you brought out the wealth you wanted to see on that particular day, which might have been elsewhere.

SPEAKER_02 33:54

So yeah, the imposter syndrome thing, it just gets ground down over time, you know? But you have to prove it to yourself. It's taken three hundred and fifteen episodes for me to get to the stage where I can be confident going into a conversation like that. And this is another thing as well. A lot of people, because of the reality TV world and the fact that people can be plucked out of normality and just given fame for existing, basically. You know, for tweeting a thing or for taking a photo of a thing or whatever, because of that, we forget that fame is actually supposed to be earned. Previously you would have been famous for doing something, not just for being someone. Fame wasn't an end in itself, fame was a byproduct of something that you'd achieved. But at the moment, that's changed. People get famous it's literally for nothing. And what you have to remember, if you are that person that's grinding away, that's doing hard things, that's cultivating a craft, you're a designer, you're a coder, you're an artist, you're a musician, you're a whatever it is, you're a mum, all of those little iterations are the difference between you and the person that wants to just be plucked out of obscurity and given some sort of talent. If you'd decided to give me Jordan Peterson when I'd done fifty episodes, I'd have fucked it. I wouldn't have been able to create. No way would I've dude, I I was nowhere near the level of podcaster that I was that I am now then, at all. I'm sure I would have prepped hard and got a semi-okay episode out. Sure. But but it's like saying, you know, the bodybuilder when he's 18 versus the bodybuilder when he's 25. Like evidently, once he's spent more time working on his craft, he's going to be better. And this is for the people that are grinding away and do feel like well, I'm doing things that are virtuous, I'm taking my time with these things, the opportunities will come. And if you stay ready, then you're going to be able to take advantage of them when they arise. And that was something that I really felt really felt like a nice sort of culmination with Jordan. And um yeah, I think I think it's a nice little microcosm lesson that other people can learn from too.

SPEAKER_04 35:48

What what you said at the end that makes a lot of sense is something that I think has been spoken about in certain circles of Twitter, I guess, which circles you're a part of. But this idea of like the serendipity vehicle, the idea of doing something can expose you to that piece of serendipity that can then go project and be that little moment that gives you the big opportunity, which you can then either take advantage of or fail with completely. Do you think that your interview with Jordan Peterson was serendipitous, or do you think rather it was just like it's it's almost earned after a period of time?

SPEAKER_02 36:21

I think that kind of the the dark truth of guest booking for podcasting is that the podcasts that get the most plays aren't necessarily the best ones. There are up-and-coming podcasters who are absolute monsters. But the same as that, there's a garage band somewhere or a local singer who would crush American Idol or Pop Factor or whatever the voice, they'd absolutely annihilate it, but they're not in that situation. So should they be there? Are we existing solely on merit? Like, is it literally just the best conversation wins? And it's not, it's somewhere in between. You need to get yourself through the gate, and this is why my view on fame has become increasingly more nuanced recently. I don't like the fact that you can become famous for nothing, despite the fact that I was part of that ecosystem with Love Island. And I think that's why I'm allowed to say it, right? Because I can criticize it from within the trench. I don't like the fact that you can become famous for nothing, but fame is a very useful vehicle. Some of the best things that I've done throughout my life have happened because I'm famous or because people know who I am. Like it will never get boring being walked to the front of a thing and put through a velvet rope by someone. It it and it means that you have further access. So Jordan came on the show in part due to the fact that I've been mates with Mick for two years. So I'm good friends with Michaela, but he still wasn't going to come on a show that didn't have the requisite number of plays and wasn't going to be with a competent interviewer and all the rest of the stuff. If that's not a perfect example of look slash contacts plus preparation slash grind, like that's literally it coming together there. And then think about the network effect. So Shane Parrish from FS Stopblog, he's coming on soon. Michio Michio Kaku, the physicist, he's coming on soon. Yeah, nice. Like, you know, all of these different people that you get, reason that people feel uncomfortable about power laws is that it really does feel like the Matthew principle in effect, right? From those who have everything more will be given, from those who have nothing more will be taken. Rich get richer. Yes, precisely. Or the the podcasts get podcastier. Like you end up having this, you have the guys that do the rounds across these same big shows. You know that Lewis Howe's School of Greatness is going to get them, you know that Tom Billion Impact Theory is going to get them, you know that Brett Weinstein's Star Course is going to get them, you know they're probably going to go on Rogan, you know that Lex Friedman might get them if he's got time and blah blah blah. But they deserve that. Because not only do they have the reach, but they perform awesome podcasts. And this is the same for everything. It's like you can shit talk 6ix9ine as much as you want, but when that guy can drive hundreds of millions of plays in hours, like if you can get yourself to that stage and he's still being picked over you, then you have perfect reason to say this shouldn't be the case. But my my dad my dad has this quote, he's not a massively um sort of wisdom-based guy, he's very much a spit and sorter sort of dude. But he has this quote where he says, form is temporary, class is permanent, and I think that that really kind of shows through. Yeah. Over time, you can only be good for so long before people have to start taking notice of you. Because everybody wants to be associated with success. They want to be associated, they want to be the person holding on to the outside of the coattails of the rocket that's going to Mars, right? Like that's essentially what Twitter is. It's just people investing. It's an early version of BitCloud. It's just people investing themselves into a per oh yeah, I followed him when he only had 10,000 followers and now he's got a million. I was I was listening to Naval reading his blog, you know, well before Angel List started, and blah blah blah. So yeah, you have to put yourself in the right situations to take advantage of these opportunities.

SPEAKER_04 39:53

You you said you had like fame before you started the podcast. I wonder how much of your fame translated into podcast growths, because from my just perspective, not knowing. I would guess that there wouldn't have been much of a translation there. And therefore you essentially did just start from the same place as everyone else. Like you had to cold email people you were interested in, and they didn't give a fuck that you had, I don't know, 10,000 Instagram followers, right? They were just like, well, you've got a podcast with no downloads, so what's it worth? Did it help you at all having the Instagram account?

SPEAKER_02 40:27

Not in the slightest. This no, I I understand what you mean, man, and we this is the beauty of social media. I think this is why people the the good side of social media that you get to see the people that you admire or look up to or consume their content or have an affinity with, you get to see them in a more humanistic, naturalistic setting. You know, you get to know the president's dogs' names. Not not that anyone's looking up to Joe Biden as a fantastic role model of like where they want to go in life, but my point is that you get to see behind the scenes, right? But no, anybody that thinks that fame in one area crosses over to success in another now, that's becoming increasingly narrow as the internet becomes more specialized. So you can have a huge Instagram account. Look at those people that have got those influencers that have got one million followers on Instagram, go look at their YouTube channel. Their YouTube channel sucks dick. It sucks dick because they don't know what they're doing, because they understand the game of Instagram, but the people that do YouTube, the Mr. Beasts of the world, the Ali Abdals of the world, these people understand it so much more sophisticatedly with nuance than the the guy that just thinks, oh well, I was successful and had clout on Instagram, therefore I can put my booty pictures or my my my workout videos across onto YouTube and it's gonna work. And the same thing goes even more so for podcasts because there's no virality, and also a podcast specifically, or writing as well, I guess. If you were blogging, it's such a time-intensive investment from the consumer that I'll follow someone on Instagram. I used to, I don't anymore. I'd follow someone on Instagram that I hated just because I liked watching a car crash of their life going on, right? I'm not going to listen to statistically, yeah, very much so. But everyone's got that. Everyone's got the person that they low-key hate, but they follow because they I can't believe that they that she's still posting. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. But no one listens to the podcast of that person. Why? Because it's so much time under tension that it's unbearable. And this is why I think the the few industries that you're going to see moving forward, longer form YouTube and the existing sort of 10-minute stuff, audio, podcast, writing, sort of the blogger sphere and newsletters. I think all of these things are going to continue to grow because there's a selection effect for really good content. The Matthew principle will be in effect here because it's such a big investment from the audience to the listener. You're essentially, as a podcaster, you're essentially a god walking around in this person's ears, they can hear nothing of the world, especially you've got AirPod Pros. They can't even hear the traffic going past them. They can hear your voice and maybe your guests. Like that's that's intense and it it's investment, it's genuine investment. So if someone wants to get rich quick or grow a platform fast, podcasting isn't for you. It's shit for that. It's the worst thing in the world for that. If you want to make a connection with an audience that's going to adore you in ten years' time, then it's the right platform.

SPEAKER_04 43:23

There's a very distinct separation between the different domains, you know. Like, I've never really flirted with TikTok. I'm not sure if you have, or maybe if you have social media people, I'm not sure how that works. But like, it's clear that you're not going to convert a TikTok user to a podcaster at a high percentage. You'll have a the sum will come, but it'll be s it'll be marginally low, not even worth your time. And I think similarly, definitely with Instagram. I haven't been on Instagram in years actually, but I am on YouTube and I'm a hate to say it, probably addicted to YouTube. I spend more time on that social media than I do any others. Is it a social media? I'm not sure. But it's true that the the the conversion doesn't work as much.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Be losing some real estate to YouTube and to podcasts. David Perrell, who I'm sure that you'll be familiar with, is a huge advocate of the written word. I think David's right. I think it's a massive competitive advantage. I think that as more and more people get taken toward doing podcasting in YouTube because it seems easy and it's it's obvious and it's what they consume, if there's less competition as a writer, that's a fantastic place to be, but there's also less of an audience. So yes, there is a bit of a challenge. Flip that around. To create a good YouTube video, all that you're doing is scripting. Like you can make an amazing YouTube video with a shit hot script and a teleprompter. So writing really is kind of the the source code, it's the the genesis of a lot of very good work. You can do an email newsletter from there, you can turn it into tweet storms, you can write compelling Instagram captions, you can do good copy if you try to sell a product, you can create a product, you can do YouTube scripts, you know, you can come up with good questions for and little tripwire situations that you have when you're in a podcast. You know, some of the things that you've said me today to me today, I bet you've written in a blog post. You'll have just had a little story or done a little thing, and you'll go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I wrote that, and then I can say it. So a couple of the different things I've said today have come from my TED talk, which was 2,800 words that I had to write, and then I had to memorize. I mean it is a talk, but it's basically a blog post. Talking is writing, it's just less eloquent. Yes. I'm not so sure about whether it's it's it would be like that for free-flowing. I think that that's a lot more unencumbered. I think that's kind of just like brain to mouth. But when you're giving a talk, when you're giving a presentation or a speech, that literally is just write the words and then and then learn how to present them, obviously, right? But um yeah, I don't think that you should have any concerns with regards to writing. I certainly think that building an email list, and I I would maybe go as far as to say that I think email lists are going to be bigger than blogging relatively soon. I know that I consume the majority of my written content via email lists or some form of email list. So maybe it's a Substack the browser, which you might be familiar with or you might not, but it's awesome. Okay, so they curate five articles a day from around the internet, they deliver it through Substack on an email list, and you just get it in your inbox. So I'm opening, I'm technically opening articles, but I'm opening articles that have been delivered via via an email list. Astral Codex 10, Scott Alexander's new place where he's at, that's delivered via Substack. So I'm reading that, I can read it in inbox, which I often do. Five Bullet Friday, my three-minute Monday newsletter that I do, etc. etc. That's how I consume the majority of my written word. So yeah, I think newsletter's a strong place to go.

SPEAKER_04 46:36

What is the most amazing upside of having your podcast that isn't obvious to us?

SPEAKER_02 46:41

Being able to platform individuals that deserve more reach. No.

SPEAKER_04 46:46

Okay, interesting. Can you give an example of some people that deserve more reach that you've given a platform to?

SPEAKER_02 46:51

Adam Lane Smith, who had him on last Monday, he wrote an awesome Twitter thread, Harsh Psychology Truths. I stumbled across it because it got retweeted five thousand times. I messaged him, I said, dude, this is this is sick. I want to bring you on. I noted down some of my favourite ones. We talked about it for an hour and a half, and now Michaela Peterson's gonna try and get him on her dad's show, and she's gonna try and get him on her show and blah blah blah. It's it's awesome. This is That's really cool. It's sick. And Rogan said it before, he said the best thing about having a podcast is being able to give a platform to people who deserve one. And if that's not if that's not like such an awesome way, because you can grind away and grind away and grind away for years and years and years, basically asking favours from people, you're asking someone for more clout or more reputability than you to come on your show, and then you get to shape the narrative of the world by bringing on people that you think have ideas that are worthwhile at that is cool. That is really cool. So if I want to pivot the entire podcast into existential risk in five years' time, and there's uh five hundred thousand people or a million people listening to every single episode, and they're bought in and they believe and they trust the the things that I give them. But this is the danger as well, because you can have someone who has more nefarious or objectively less uh good worldviews, and they can start to lead people down different sorts of paths, right? This is the definition of influence, but you can start giving people obviously Apple and Spotify and YouTube and stuff wouldn't allow it, but you could start giving people really pejorative views or really racist views or really whatever sexist views about the world, you could start to push people into less accurate positions, you could platform people that don't necessarily make the world a better place. I I this is this is an interesting paradox that I haven't quite sorted out yet. That I've had Stefan Molyneux on the show.

SPEAKER_04 48:42

Someone's responsibility almost.

SPEAKER_02 48:44

Yeah. So I got a lot of stick for bringing Stefan on the show because of his background. I've had Douglas Murray on the show. Douglas not massively popular in the Muslim community. It's it's a soft one though. But my point is there's a lot of people that have been on the show who have a background that other people were going to take offense to. On one hand, I don't I'm the reason that I'm not on mainstream media is because I don't want to be beholden to anyone. I want to have the conversations that I want to have, and if you want to choose to listen, that's great.

SPEAKER_04 49:11

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:12

I wonder whether that changes. I wonder when you when you start to get 50,000 downloads an episode and you've got a couple of million subscribers on YouTube, I wonder whether there is a level of responsibility on the creator to curate the sort of messages that they're putting across. Because in the same way as the kid that's got a toy gun can shoot whoever he wants, the kid that's got an atomic bomb needs to be really careful where he puts it. And as the externalities of the messages that you put online have bigger and bigger impact and people are more and more bought in. So I I haven't really I'm I'm still at the stage now where I just talk to whoever the hell I find a guy on Twitter who wrote an interesting thread and I speak to him. Right. He could have been a white supremacist, like piece of shit for all I knew, but he what he turned out to not be. Yeah, the best thing about doing it is being able to take ideas and people who deserve a platform and use mine to give them one.

SPEAKER_04 50:03

I think that's um a terrific answer, which I actually hadn't even considered because I was thinking about what what it might be. But that is a really, really terrific answer. On the other point about uh this almost responsibility for being a kid with a with a nuclear weapon, you know, being a giant podcast who just wants an extension of his interests, right? But it you're also just a guy. There isn't a team around you to be like, let's vet this guy to make sure he's good, let's make sure that everything he's saying is factually true. Because, you know, we're we're quite malleable, right? If if I'm if I'm exposed to a really good argument, I might start changing my idea about some things, right? But you want to make sure that argument is fucking factually correct. And then I guess that's the sort of angst you might have, like, shit, you know, am I am I spreading some bullshit here? Am I am I complicit in this? Am I a bad guy? Yeah, so um so you have a huge range of interests. The name of this podcast is a curious worldview, right? So I think myself and the small audience who are listening to this as well, we have a huge range of interests. I'm not sure where it comes from for myself. Do you know where your just big range of interests come from? Have you always been a curious kid?

SPEAKER_02 51:09

Yeah, very much so. I didn't really know it for a long time and I didn't embrace it. I almost thought I was almost a bit ashamed of always wanting to know stuff. Because I didn't think, especially where I'm from, man, like classic northern working class, they're the last city before Scotland in the UK. It's not cosmopolitan, people are born, live, and die in these cities. Intellectual curiosity is not a like a celebrated insight. It's what girl did you shag last week, what's the new car that you've got on PCP Finance, what's the whatever? Like that's that's what people are kind of mostly concerned about. And yeah, I'm I'm glad. And I'm also glad that as someone who is looked up to by uh a number of like younger dudes who are maybe a little bit lost and searching for a sense of identity, I can go, man, if you have this sort of an interest, if you're genuinely intellectually curious about something, weaponize it. Weaponize it now because that's your competitive advantage, as opposed to me who had to discover through God knows how many YouTube videos years and years ago or five years ago, that hang on, the way that you've spent the last ten years of your life kind of really wasn't that aligned, and you could have embraced this and you would have maybe I I did a business degree because I was terrified of what job would I get with a philosophy or psychology degree, and now I spend all of my time on my podcast talking about philosophy or psychology, or at least a significant amount of it.

SPEAKER_04 52:26

You could have taken a more worthless degree.

SPEAKER_02 52:28

Yeah, dude, it was a complete waste of time. I learned more running I I ran my business throughout all of university. I'm I learned more in the first month of running my business at uni than I did during the bachelor's and masters that took me five years to get. And now I'm going back and ad hocing my way through philosophy and psychology by having conversations with people who did the who teach the course that I could have gone to go and do, but I didn't because I wanted this well, what job am I gonna get out the other side of it? So yeah, all of this stuff, man. Like one of the best ways I think that you can overcome traumas and bad decisions is by using the learnings that you've got from it to teach other people how to not make those same mistakes. And if that's not the biggest middle finger that you can get to challenges that you've had in your life, I don't know what is. It's so good, it's so good. It feels like it feels like not only transcending what you did, but it feels like allowing creating a bridge so that other people can step over it too. It's like you didn't get me, you didn't get me, and I'm not gonna let you get those people either. And that's sick. I like that.

SPEAKER_04 53:26

Yeah, I like that too. Um, I want to make another comparison, just trying to map where I am on my on my journey here. When you were in the early days, um you just sent emails to people, right, that you were interested in.

SPEAKER_02 53:38

I think the vast majority of them realize that this is a burgeoning industry and it's an opportunity to speak to people. I don't know specifically. I I've been pretty fortunate, man, I think. I don't know whether it's my pitch, I don't know whether it's that they've gone and searched me, I don't know whether it's that I got some alright guests early on. But yeah. It went it went okay, and now it's got to the stage where and this feels so mad to say because it's only been three years running this show, but there's not really many people on the circuit now that are out of reach. There's you know, when I'm sure that Sam will be writing a new book and when that comes out, I'm gonna push really, really hard to try and get him. Because I thought I remember saying three years ago, I was like Jordan Peterson's like, you know, peak guest, that where'd you go from Jordan Peterson? And you go, Well when that happens, you actually think, Well, hang on a second, if you did it and it went well, where'd you go? But this is there's a microcosm here going on with the hedonic treadmill of us thinking that a thing is going to make us feel satisfied, because it's got nothing to do with finally getting the guest, and it's got everything to do with how you enjoyed the journey of getting there and how you enjoyed the journey of having the conversation with them as well. Um yeah, there's a lot that you can learn from that, but yeah, I think just dig at it, man. Like if you keep digging at it, people people will respond.

SPEAKER_04 54:49

I imagine you're the same. Um, is that the case? Were you a massive podcast listener before you got into it? Yeah. And these days you still are.

SPEAKER_02 54:57

I still am, man. Yeah, I I listen every single morning. It's part of my morning routine. Once I've done my little morning stuff over here and I've done my meditation and my reading, my journaling, the little treat that I give myself is okay, you've got to do your Achilles rehab because I snapped my Achilles last year, playing cricket for the first time in ten years, which is dumb.

SPEAKER_04 55:13

How the fuck did you do that? No secret.

SPEAKER_02 55:16

Setting off to run. 33 not out after a decade away from the crease, set off to run, ping. Oh my god, that's such a shame, man. So unfortunate. And they ran me out, the bastards. I was laid in the middle of the pitch and losing the guys went over and took the bails off. I was like, come on, boys, I've only got one ankle in. Um, yeah, I I I I'm a huge fan of the platform, and it's a competitive advantage if you're a podcaster, because what I do for fun is also what I call work.

SPEAKER_04 55:38

Apart from the big guys, are there some smaller podcasts that are really good that you want to give a shout out to?

SPEAKER_02 55:45

Yes. The End of the World with Josh Clark. Okay. That's that's phenomenal. End of the world with Josh Clark. People should go and check that out. It's beautifully soundscaped with CD sounds and it integrates interviews and the production on it. Phenomenal. It's it's as high calibre as you can get, and it's a very unique way to use the platform. That's what I particularly liked about that. I dude, I've listened to all sorts, I've listened to True Crime Up and Vanished is for not a phenomenal true crime podcast. But to be honest, uh the Matthew principle still works for me as well. I listen to a lot less Rogan now that he's switched to Spotify, a lot less, tons less. I listen to a lot of may get some dislikes for this. I listen to a lot of stuff from the Daily Wire. And it's not just because it's I lean sort of centre, center, centre, right, politically. It's not because what Ben and Matt Walsh say on their shows affirms my beliefs, it's that their delivery is something to behold. Listening to Ben Shapiro speak for 45 minutes on a monologue, including ad reads, and him not tripping up once is a sight to behold. And I enjoy reminding myself, Matt Walsh has got a different cadence, but does the same thing. Very slow, very deliberate. Sam Harris is precisely the same. So now I think I listen, I listen a lot more like a scout on the bench watching a game. I can enjoy the game, but I'm also looking at the tactics and the skills of the players that are on the field. And there's a lot to be taken from those sort of guys. Carl Benjamin, man, like Sargon's pivot to this Lotus Eaters podcast. He is he is crushing it. They've got this awesome membership site, they're doing really good with that. Um Shane Parrish, I used to listen to a lot of Knowledge Project, I listened to a little bit less of that. He's he's not as consistent with the show as he needs to be to hook me.

SPEAKER_04 57:38

He's not getting on the big financial guests anymore.

SPEAKER_02 57:40

No, but I mean, you know, once you've got Naval and Esther Perrell and these guys, he was the guy that taught me who Rory Sutherland was, and Rory's been on mine twice, and he's outstanding. I'm trying to think about some other underground ones that people might not know of. There's one called Reflecting History, which is just it's just a history podcast. One dude, just some American guy with his mouth like this really close to the mic. And um man, it's just a and I just sit and listen to him talk about the Crimean War. I don't know anything about the Crimean War. But it's it's nice sometimes, hardcore history as well is is similar to Dan Carlin's thing. It's nice to listen and not have to recall it, especially given that a lot of the non-fiction podcasts that are out there, they're glorified book summaries, you know, and that's what I'm trying to move away from, especially with my show. I get James Clear or Aubrey Marcus or Robert Green or Brian Holiday on. And I don't just want like people can go read the book if they want to read the book, if they want a summary of the book. It's like what's the what's not in the book? That's specifically why I asked Jordan. I was like, what's the rule that wasn't in the original 42 that you would have added? Like that's I don't want to know what's in the book. I can see what's in the book, and people can go buy it. Links in the show notes below, it's an Amazon affiliate link. I want to know what's what got left out and what the process was like from doing it. Um and it's nice every so often to just have a conversation where you don't need to remember. So like history podcasts and true crime. No one's coming up and quizzing me. I'm not gonna wake up tomorrow and feel guilty about the fact that I can't remember who killed who in last yesterday's episode of Up and Vanished. So yeah, that there's some.

SPEAKER_04 59:12

On the on the topic of like appreciating someone's delivery, I just want to add two more to the list. One you definitely know, maybe one not. Charles Sonnen. Fantastic, phenomenal delivery, yeah. Unbelievable, and Christopher Hitchens as well.

SPEAKER_02 59:24

If you go in if Hitch was if Hitch was still around now, he'd be the number one podcast guest, man.

SPEAKER_04 59:29

There's no doubt about it.

SPEAKER_02 59:31

Here's one for you, actually. So my buddy Alex O'Connor, cosmic skeptic, um he models himself after Hitch's speaking style. Yeah. And um it it really comes across. He's he told me he taught me this thing that Hitch used to do during a debate, and it's so clever. And this is what I what I mean when I say someone's like a scout on the sidelines watching. So Alex is big into debates, he's done these big debates about atheism and veganism and stuff like that. And he what what Hitch used to do when he wanted to take a little break but didn't want his opponent to chime in, is he'd begin the next sentence with the first word of the next sentence and then take a sip of water or do something else or take a breath. So good. He'd be saying a sentence and saying a sentence and talking about this thing when we talk about this and it's like fuck, like you've just held everyone's attention, and just little things like that that you can take, because you'll have your own verbal ticks, and everyone that's listening will as well. And you think, okay, I need to stop saying like or you know, whatever the different ticks that you've got are you'll have some that are appropriate and that are advantageous, you want to keep them, but then you can take these little weapons from other people that you've got. Repetition, Shapiro and Matt Walsh from The Daily Wire, they use repetition really, really well. Tell you the same thing, and they'll tell you the same thing, and they'll tell you the same thing in a slightly different way, and then they'll tell you the same thing, and you go, repetition's not actually boring when it's said with a little bit of energy. So, yeah, I I don't know how many other podcasters think sort of about this. I think this is one of the differences between someone that takes it as a that's turned pro and someone that's just doing it as an amateur, and then also someone maybe like Sean O'Malley, whose podcast is done in an amateur way, but it's about him just being hit as much him as it is. It's like it's it's the Sean O'Malley show, right? Like it's the Sugar Sean show, like that's the point. Point is for it to just be him being him, and that's why people are there. But yeah, I like I like adding to the the verbal repertoire, and every time you record with a a Michael Malice or someone like that, you realise just how much further there still is to go up the mountain. So you're like, this guy's so fast, so quick. And if you were to speak to a Shapiro, it would be that turned up to eleven.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:34

And and I do wonder sometimes is how much of it is natural versus something you can build, but it's definitely something you can build. On the Alex O'Connor thing, yeah. I actually I wrote last year an open letter to the cosmic skeptic because I wanted to sit down with him and just discuss Christopher Hitchens for as long as I could. Because he made this great video about the Hitchens sophistry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did he reply to you? No, I never I never heard back from him.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:57

I'll get you I'll I'll link you in once we're done, man. We'll I'll link you in and uh and you'll speak to him. He's I talked to him, I must ring him once a week now. We became real and that's the other thing. Here's another thing. That's the the second thing, probably, of podcasting that I should have should have admitted to. So the first one is to do with the platform and platforming people that don't have one. The second thing is making friends. God man, like I flew out to America a couple of years ago. I had one day in between Hawaii and Virginia. I was in Hawaii on the third, I needed to be in Virginia by the night of the fifth. So I had the fourth of July in America. Michael Cashu, four times I was two times CrossFit Games champion. I'd spoken to him a a year before that, and we'd kind of kept in touch because we got on well, and I sent him a meditation course. And he mistakenly said, Anytime that you're in the country, just come and stay. It'll be mint. And I was like, It's the 4th of July, what should I do? And I messaged him and I was like, dude, look, I'm going from Hawaii to Virginia, it's kind of over the top of Austin. I I I could come see you for the 4th of July if you want to. He was like, dude, like, book the flight. So he left the left the door to his five million dollar ranch open at 10 o'clock at night. I just let myself in. He was like, You're in the far bedroom. He wasn't even awake, he was in bed. He's like, he texted me, you're in the far bedroom, you've got a glass of you've got bottles of water, get yourself a protein shake, anything you want out of the fridge. I woke up the next morning at 10 a.m., walked into the kitchen, he's there, his wife's there, assistant's there, the marketing guy's there. Chris, dude, what's going on? Right, let's go and train. And I'm like, I've just arrived at this podcast guest's house, who's a multi-multi-millionaire, who's real successful, who's well known in the CrossFit world. And it's just that over and over and over again. I got to go and see Dr. David Sinclair, the one of the premier longevity experts in the world. He invited me into Harvard Medical School. I've got the the past still with my name on somewhere in my drawers over there. Like the adventures that you can go on by really committing yourself to something is phenomenal. And that's the worst thing, probably, about the pandemic. It's all well and good me being able to crank out loads of episodes. But those adventures, dude, I've been to Boston. I've done I've done a podcast with James Clear where I made us a standing desk on with like different tables in Hawaii. I was in the middle of like next to Waikiki Beach talking to James Clear about stuff. It's just it's sick. Like that's that's a really, really cool way to spend life.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:12

Yeah, no, that that's it's really inspiring message as well, because that's also this is the fruits of the like forced serendipity that you you know couldn't have predicted, right? But is nonetheless the un um yeah, unpredictable consequences of doing something well for a long time that's hard, that actually adds a little bit of value. Like I said, I got a zillion questions, so please don't let me take advantage of your goodwill. Tell me what a good cutoff time is. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:38

Let's get another 10 minutes out, dude. I'll be I'll be quick and disciplined with the next one so we can do a quick fire round.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:44

You said in your interview with JBP that you try to expose uncomfortable truths. What are a few of the most uncomfortable truths that you believe in? Wow, that's okay, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:55

Well, the first one that I always answer Quick and dry, like you said. The first one I always answer this question with is non-acting paedophiles require sympathy, not disgust. So if you are someone that's been cursed with that particular sexual proclivity, being demonized by society must be awful. There's a difference between someone that is attracted to children and somebody that touches children. There is a massive difference. In fact, that's everything, because the neuroscience suggests that we don't get to choose what we're attracted to. And I I just I had I've had a couple of conversations about this and it's really, really impacted me quite profoundly on just how tormented these people's lives must be. Hated by society, absolutely detested by society. They they hate themselves. They can't have a functioning relationship with another human because they know that the the sort of relationships that they want to have are immoral. So that that's that's one of them. Oh, it's some of the other uncomfortable truths. Ninety per cent of birds are fathered by a dad other than the social father that they have, so being cooked, being cuckooed, um happens. Across 90% of birds. Also, 90% of birds don't have penises. I don't know whether that's an uncomfortable truth or not. The worst age to lose a child at is around about 11 or 12 years old. That's because it is the age where they're just about to hit fertility. So if you are unfortunate enough to lose a child that's one or eighteen, you might think, oh, they're one, they had so much life ahead of them. They're 18, they're just about to go out into the world. Genes come in, genes take over. Evolutionary need. Correct. The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 20% of women, and the top 80% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. Wow.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:36

That leaves from quite an awkward middle ground.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:38

Yeah, hugely. Hugely, right? You've got a forcing function on one side and not on the other, and you have some very unhappy women. Almost all women wouldn't date a man that's shorter than them, almost all women wouldn't date a man that's less educated than them. Almost all women wouldn't date a man that's less that earns less than them. And as women get taller, earn more, and are more educated, that is another forcing function. So all of these things, man, like a lot of them are insights from evolutionary psychology just because it kind of gives you what's going on.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:05

But uh yeah, there's there's some nice, fantastic ones. The last one's very thought-provoking. Look, you're at such an exciting place at the moment. You know, you've got you've got a company that you love. We didn't touch on the fact that you've got 500 employees there. I think that's I think that's in itself a very interesting thing to think about. You're financially independent and you've got this, you know, massive podcasts. So there aren't many sort of like you know limitations, there's no financial limitations. Uh I don't know. What are your big ambitions now looking forward? And I mean big ambitions, don't be afraid to put it out there. What's the goal?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:38

Yeah, I'm I'm not very good at making big long plans. Uh I've never been good at that. Optionality is something that I value a lot. So doing a thing and getting real good at a thing, but not necessarily having an agenda about the direction that I'm going in. Right now, I'm bothered about becoming the best podcaster that I can be. I don't think that I'm far off becoming one of the best in the UK or one of the best in Europe. Continuing to refine that craft, continuing to have the most insightful conversations I can. It's not about the most plays. I don't care about the most plays. I care about the best conversations, the ones that impact people the most. So that's it. Everything that I do right now is geared towards me being the best podcaster I can. The things I consume, the way that I sleep, the way that I train, the hours that I sleep, everything. Every all of the things that I do are cultivated around me building an ecosystem to permit me to be the best person that I can in front of the mic. And there's still an infinite amount of progress to be made. But I'm enjoying doing that. And wherever that takes me, the same as you with your writing talent, it's such a fundamental particle to an individual's ability that it kind of doesn't really matter, I don't think, what the long-term agenda is. From the position of someone who's able to speak precisely and well with good cadence and blah blah blah, and has a bit of a platform. You can go wherever you want. Do you want to go into public speaking? Do you want to go into coaching? Do you want to go into punditry? Do you want to do sports commentary? Do you want to be an actor? Do you want to do theatre? Do you want to do what do you want to do? Do you want to be a writer? Okay, well, do you want to do screenplays? Do you want to do comedy? Do you want to do newspapers, magazines? Do you want to work on web stuff? Why don't you ghost write for someone? You do a book? You know what I mean? Endless. This is just a chosen profession that you can uh a chosen uh avenue that you can deploy that into.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:18

But they're so the ambition is is exclusively just be the best podcaster that you can and have the best conversations that you possibly can. Correct. Okay. Now and the UK will be home as far as you can tell.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:31

Yeah, yeah, at the moment. I mean Newcastle's hardly the the central hub for crossing traffic. It seems like Austin's kind of the the capital for for podcasting at the moment, but right now, just I'm not thinking about uh about stuff like that. Everything's going really well. We're growing faster than I could have ever hoped. So I'm just trying as Rogan says, like, I'm trying not to break it.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:50

Nice. Alright, mate, final two, the baseline for absolutely everyone. First off, what country are you most bullish on?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:57

Wow. Dubai is a very rapidly growing, well-situated country with zero tax. Um, I mean, it's pretty difficult to beat. I would be bullish on America if it wasn't for the fact that they're tearing themselves apart from the inside. I think that there's so much about it. Anybody that that claims with a straight face that America is the greatest country on earth, there was probably an argument to be made of that, you know, 30 years ago or something. It's an amazing country, but they just have some they have some stuff that they need to work on. And uh hopefully they'll get that done.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:25

But yeah, Dubai, bullish. And finally, very a question that's very apt for a podcaster. If you could witness conversation between any two people of history, dead or alive, who would they be?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:36

I don't need to go back too far. I think I would like to see Naval and Jordan Peterson sit down together. I think that that would make for a wonderful conversation. I think Jordan would bring the academic side out of Naval. I think Naval would bring Jordan back down to earth. That's the that's the podcast episode the world needs, but it doesn't know it needs.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:52

Great answer. I think you can make it happen too. You put it out there.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:56

We'll s we'll send it out, we'll do a Rhonda Burn and put it in put it into the ether. Um Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if if that's the sort of thing longer term that Rogan should do. Here's here's a a cool parting thought for the people that are listening after an hour and a half still. We're seeing in every other different area of the world these super fights occurring, the Jake Paul Ben Askarin and and the the the guy that's been retired for twenty years and comes back, the Roy Jones Jr. Mike Tyson fight, right? I I do think that compulsion to see the superstars weigh down against each other and these kind of cross-platform competitions, I think that's great for the entertainment world industry as well. Because it means that these hyper mega events, you know, the the Naval Jordan Peterson podcast on Rogan, the Tim Dylan Alex Jones podcast on Rogan, you know what I mean? Like these are the things that we want. Um and I I think that it's setting a tone in a way that how do we one up what we've done before? Well we we need to just what what's the perfect podcast? What's the best YouTube video that we can make? Like can we make a video where we send a guy to the there will be a YouTube video, presuming that the platform doesn't crash, within the next 20 years where a creator gets themselves to the moon? Like think about that. That's totally true. Yeah, that's totally true. Think about that. We went to the moon. Uh-huh. Why not? Why not? So as you continue to try and one up everybody with this, as long as it's the the externalities aren't dangerous, I just think it's so exciting. There's so I'm a huge fan of YouTube, I'm a huge fan of podcasts, and I think that there's a an amazing opportunity for everyone to be highly entertained over the next few years.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:34

Totally. As the as the value compounds at that tail end of the YouTube distribution, the podcast distribution, they were talking about Joe and Trump, uh Joe Biden and Donald Trump having a presidential band Joe Rogan on Rogan in a couple more years of compounded podcast growth, there is absolutely no reason why that would be.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:50

That would be that would get more reach. That would potentially get more reach than putting it on CBS or some shit like that. And imagine this. Let's say that we get to the virtual reality world. Let's say that you can you know that Rogan is has got Alex Jones and Tim Dylan coming on on Tuesday at 5 p.m. At Tuesday at 4 55 pm, you put your virtual headset on, you sit down, and you're in the studio with Rogan watching, turning around, looking between the two of them as they're talking. And they've got three 3D, 360 degree cameras. You can maybe even tune in, you can watch with friends, you can maybe have them sat either side of you, and you're in the podcast. How sick's that gonna be?

SPEAKER_04 1:13:27

That's a it's pure entertainment as well. It would yeah. The internet, man. It's uh the the possibilities are absolutely uncapped, unlized, the potential is limitless. Chris are um yeah, quite an inspirational figure to me, and I uh really appreciate you giving me this amount of time and you know keep doing the good work. Cheers, mate. Appreciate it. My pleasure, man.