Self-reinvention & building leverage in podcasts with Chris Williamson
In today’s episode, I dive into the world of the godcaster Chris Williamson, who also happens to be a model, club promoter, and reality TV star.
Chris’s podcast Modern Wisdom is among the most popular in the UK, with around 4 to 5 million listens per month and over 400 episodes produced.
During university, Chris began building an extremely successful club promotion business which he continues to operate today. He went on to create Modern Wisdom over the last few years after realizing this brought him more aligned with his true internal self. His podcast features guests like Jordan Peterson, Ryan Holiday, and James Clear. (I was fortunate enough to also be a guest on an episode too.)
In this episode, Chris and I explore the ins and outs of the club promotion business, making a radical change in self-image, and his journey to becoming a great podcast host.
Here’s what I learned from the episode:
To be the best of the best, "make the most of your minutes."
Chris has a true Mountain of Leverage. He has ~5 million listeners every month -- a scale that was completely impossible in an analog world. That's more reach than would ever be physically possible, even if you filled the biggest stadiums in the world with 100,000+ people every single night.
You don’t have to live life by default, you can live it by design.
The reinvention of self involves digging to discover your base principles.
Role models are important, but so are reverse role models, people you know you don’t want to be like.
One of Chris’s core talents is his ability to embrace his curiosity to ask good questions.
Being a successful club promoter involves understanding group dynamics, what’s cool, how to entice and incentive people, and to keep pulse on who’s in and who’s out -- which all translated to his podcast.
Club Promoters are like the contract marketers for venue owners.
Joining an events company in university can be a great way to learn marketing in the real world.
Going on a reality TV show can apparently serve as a forced meditation--at least that’s how it played out for Chris.
Worrying doesn’t lead to better outcomes, and your feelings of insufficiency are not helping you.
Don’t be bankrupt, be happy, and don’t focus on little things: Chris recommends reading Essentialism by Greg McKeown, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel to help you achieve these. (Thanks Chris!)
It is hard (impossible?) to become less famous.
Figure out what your highest point of contribution is and focus on that.
The best conversations are the ones that you lose yourself in and can’t remember what you said.
Loneliness is a tax you have to pay for a certain complexity of mind, but often loneliness is a matter of scope, and if you widen that scope, you can find other like-minded people.
Explore before you exploit.
If you enjoyed this show (or even this list of things I learned) you will likely enjoy our course + community about building your own Mountain of Levers.
Learn more about Chris Williamson
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Episode Transcript:
Chris Williamson: The outcomes you get in life are going to happen no matter what you do. Maybe they're going to- you still need to work hard. But the feelings of insufficiency, they can fuck off. You do not need them. You do not need them. They are not helping you. They are not motivating you. Not after a certain point. They get you over the line. They're good for getting over the inertia. But after a while, it's just this momentum and you can't slow it down. You go, okay, so enjoy the ride. Let's say that- let's treat your success and your journey toward doing something great in life or whatever it is that you're going to do in life less like a car ride and more like a train journey, less like being an active participant and more like being somebody that gets to enjoy the view as it goes by. If you think that you’re sat in a car, trying to drive a train, not realizing that the train is going to the same destination kind of no matter what you do, and all that you're doing is obsessing over the fact that there's a tiny little crack above that door and this fork that I'm supposed to be eating off the table with has got a little bit of a prong wrong on it, it's not the way to spend your time.
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends, and welcome to Jorgenson Soundbox. This show is a series of conversations where I have the privilege of learning from my very smart friends. Today, it's Chris Williamson. Chris is a podcaster, one of the great podcasters. His show Modern Wisdom has grown over the past few years to have 4 or 5 million listens per month. He does about 400 episodes, three a week. The guy's an absolute beast. This podcast is one of the biggest in the UK, which makes it one of the biggest in all of Europe and features guests like Jordan Peterson, Ryan Holiday, and James Clear. I actually was lucky to be on the podcast as well. He built Modern Wisdom over the past few years after realizing that the very successful life he'd built in his twenties as a club promoter, model, and reality TV star weren't truly, deeply the path that he was meant to be on. We explore that journey which is something that we can actually all relate to. And he's a very introspective man and we get into some of those thoughts and challenges and in ways that I think are generalizable to all of us, just trying to find out if what we're doing on a daily basis deeply reflects who we are. Along the way, we learn some of the details of the club promotion business, which is quite interesting, what he thinks about attractiveness and podcasting as a skill. If you enjoy this conversation, please take a second to review it or go to ejorgenson.com and subscribe to my newsletter or text the episode to a friend that you think might like it, all incredibly helpful things that I deeply appreciate. Another way to support this podcast is to check out my course about building your personal leverage. We now have a few hundred people who've joined, mostly entrepreneurs, investors, and creators, and we're all in there sharing tools and playbooks and frameworks with each other. Leverage is really the art of accomplishing more. With the right combination of tools, media, people, and capital, you can accomplish a hundred times or a thousand times what you could by yourself. We're living in an age of infinite leverage, and those who learn to wield leverage properly are those who will rise. Go to ejorgenson.com/leverage to learn more and join the community. We've helped dozens of people so far to scale, hire, automate, delegate, and grow. If you have something working that you want to grow, or you just want to reclaim some time from a project, I think we can help. Now, please enjoy this conversation with a lord of leverage in his own right, Chris Williamson.
Chris Williamson, at long last, we make it official on my podcast instead of just guesting on yours, man. I am psyched to have you here.
Chris Williamson: Thanks for having me.
Eric Jorgenson: I want to start by asking you what I find to be the most helpful question to get to know somebody which is who are your heroes?
Chris Williamson: Oh, that is a good question. I would say Jordan Peterson is one of them. He was the gateway drug I think that got me from being a professional party boy, which is what I did for a long time, into doing a little bit more of this. Matt Fraser who was a CrossFit games champion. I very, very admire his work ethic, the way that he goes about things. Who else would I say? A lot of my friends actually inspire me. We have a mutual friend Sky, and I find that being inspired by people that are around you. He's just a very nice guy. I aspire to be as nice as he is. So, those would be three off the top of my head, Sky, Jordan, and Matt Fraser.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. Yeah, Sky King is a wonderful dude and friend of mine as well. Yeah, I admire his vision and his independence and incredibly nice guy. And Matt Fraser is unbelievable. It is incredible that he stood so far above what seems like a sport that seems like it should have such narrow margins of victory, that everyone else is so tight, and he just Lionel Messi-ed all of them. And it's insane.
Chris Williamson: Yeah, totally different breed. There was this story from Chasing Excellence, Ben Bergeron's book, where he was explaining Matt used to be an engineering student and he would be in the library before an exam, and he would have the textbook in front of him and he would recite the entirety of a chapter to himself verbatim. And if he got one word wrong, he would go back and start the whole thing again. He wouldn't let himself leave the library until he'd got it done. And then you see that same no stone left unturned approach when it comes to his training as well. And the outcome is you become the best on the planet and that making the most of minutes pursuit of excellence that he went for, the outcomes speak for themselves.
Eric Jorgenson: I imagine, I mean, CrossFit seems like one of those sports that's just so all consuming. I think that minute-to-minute excellence or something like that, like to win an event like that, you have to work perfectly for years leading up to it, like every day has to be fully optimized.
Chris Williamson: Everyone's getting specialized now. I'm not sure that there's many sports that have accolade in terms of status or in terms of money that aren’t like that. Everybody is becoming a specialist at everything now. You can't just have someone that decides to- An MMA guy that decides to try and do boxing or a boxing guy that decides to do an MMA or whatever. It just doesn't happen because the people within their domain are so specialized that they're going to wipe the floor with you.
Eric Jorgenson: So, what are some of those things in your case that you are exceptional at or world-class at, or I guess the Naval way to ask the question is what's your specific knowledge?
Chris Williamson: I ask pretty good questions, I think. I'm able to work out the point of- the hole in a conversation that someone isn't filling. So, for instance, last night I was at dinner with Jordan and his wife Tammy and a bunch of other people, and part of the conversation was going and going. And two sides of the table weren't really talking to each other. And it was just one question that needed to be asked, and rather than try and put my own thought across, because I don’t really know what I'm talking about, but I know where the two different groups of people weren't communicating with each other. And I asked a question and that clarified everything. I mean, not only did it happen once. I was by far the dumbest person at the table, but my point is that I’m asking questions, following curiosity, and using that inquisitiveness to try and elicit some sort of a response. Also, not bad at essentializing stuff. So, somebody talks and talks and talks and talks about an interesting concept, about training or philosophy or life or relationships or the weather or space or whatever, essentializing that into something which is a little bit more easy to remember and just summarizing stuff in that way is something else that I'm pretty good at. But other than that, man, I make an all-right pasta. I do an all-right pasta Bolognese. That's kind of it for world-class talents.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm going to suggest a few others and just see if you agree with them. You have an incredibly successful, I should say, like club promotion business that you started when you were in college, that I'd love to hear the story of. And it's interesting, I've heard you talk about that on a few different interviews, and I think there may be a world-class skill in there around understanding motivation, social dynamics, some of the dating market that sort of happens in that ecosystem. So, I wouldn't sell yourself short on that. Do you think that is a world-class skill of yours?
Chris Williamson: Actually, that's probably right. It's one of those things where you've done it for so long that you almost forget that it's a skill of yours. Yeah, if you put me in any city on the planet, I am pretty sure that I'd be able to make any nightclub that's there one of the best in the city in not too long. That's something that I've done for a very, very long time. And that's, you're right, it's understanding group dynamics, what's cool, how to entice people and incentivize people to find something cool, and also, to keep your finger on the pulse of sort of who's in and who's out. And that leads into the podcasting stuff as well. You need to see who's on the up who's on the down, and do I want to have this person on? And is it in three months’ time, they're going to be a bit bigger, I'll wait until then. Or it'd be a good connection to have or whatever. So, yeah, you're probably right.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm going to make two more proposals for things that you're world-class at.
Chris Williamson: Continue with the flattery, please, Eric. That will be very good.
Eric Jorgenson: You've been a model since you were 18 years old. You are, according to the women in my life who have seen photos of you and many others around the world, objectively an attractive man. There's a lot of like philosophy around that I feel like people don't talk about. Do you think that being attractive is a skill and something that is like learned over time that you've developed?
Chris Williamson: I would say no, actually. I would say that I don't think that being attractive is a skill. I think that for the most part of it, at least physically when you're looking at photos of someone, it's mostly just endowed. Now that's enhanced by making sure that you go to the gym and that you eat right and you sleep enough and blah, blah. But what I see as the skill element of being attractive is how you hold yourself, how you move, your poise, your comfort, all of the nonverbal communication that you do, and then the verbal communication that you do and your eye contact and all of that sort of stuff. But that's something that I've been able to work at. And that's what I'm much more proud of. The elements that you're able to control, I'm much more proud of that than whatever career of being- and let's get this straight, man. Yes, model, but the things that I was modeling for this wasn't David Gandy, this wasn't Burberry's new campaign. This is Lays crisps’ new campaign, for instance, or I don't know, a local dental, cosmetic dental clinic or something like that. I’m very much sort of the bottom end of the world of commercial male modeling. So, I need to keep that, my feet on the ground.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. All right. So, yeah, we'll keep you out of the clouds there. Even though I think it's an interesting conversation of like what counts as a world-class skill. Like from I think the outside world, getting paid to hold a bag of Lay's and just be professionally beautiful and be on reality TV is like a pretty high bar. But for like inside that world, you see so much more nuance to it and you see people doing what you consider world-class work.
Chris Williamson: Yeah. There's layers to everything. You can say, oh man, your podcast is so whatever. But in comparison with Joe Rogan, everybody's basically a beginner. So, there are, there's layers to everything.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, I'm going to suggest one more thing and then I'll be done and that'll be our table of contents and we'll just like run through some of these in detail. So, I think that you are also among the best in the world, or at least in my sort of purview, at this cycle of self-awareness and reinvention. It seems, from my understanding of your story, that you have radically changed your self-image and your focus in life at least a few times already. And I think that that is rare enough that anybody who's done it multiple times is in a pretty special place and sort of then given license to talk through it more and help bring others along, even through their first and maybe only transition. But that's an important thing that is not obvious that it's a skill, but it seems like it to me.
Chris Williamson: I think you're right. Yeah, that would be something, the ability to self-reflect is something that I pride myself on, again, whatever world-class and stuff aside. For a long time, some of the things that I valued or I thought that I valued, turned out that the rug got pulled out from underneath me, and I started to sort of see the world for actually what appeared to be a bit more truthful than I'd believed for a long time. And I thought, oh, okay, well, I need to be able to reflect on this. I need to be able to dispense of the stuff that I don't care about, and I need to try and make myself into a person that I'm going to be proud of. And it's only really been one serious time that that's happened, but it happens. I iterate on that on a daily basis. I look at- when you asked me at the beginning, so who do I really, really admire? And I admire bits of people, but there's very few people that I admire in wholesale, but Sky is a good example of someone that I've only known for maybe three or four months, but I spend time around him, and I think right, there are elements of this man that I really, really want to inculcate in myself – the selflessness, the energy, the enthusiasm, the excitability, these are things I think fuck, that's really cool. That would be really cool to be a little bit more enthusiastic and excitable about things. It'd be really cool to just do nice things for people simply because because. So, I think that you can find inspiration in people all the time. And what you can also do, I was talking to a friend about this recently, is the concept of a reverse role model. So sometimes people say that they don't have anybody in their life who is super positive to model off that they want to be like, yeah, that sucks. It's good to have someone to aim towards. But it's also pretty useful to have someone to run away from. And if you've had a crappy father or a bad big brother or a bad best friend in school or an awful first relationship, yeah, it sucks, and yeah, you need to be really, really careful that you don't start trying to inculcate some of those ways of being, but you know what you don't want to be. And a big part of life is avoiding stupidity rather than being smart. And if you've spent some time around some stupid people, you've got some pretty good examples of people that you don't want to be like. So, you can find role models in a weird way in a place where no role models essentially exist.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that's- one of my favorite questions is finding things- like of the things that your parents did, what are the things that you are going to be very certain to do the same way with your kids and what are the things that you are going to be very certain to do the opposite of, which is a really sort of learning that takes place at a generational pace, one at a time. I want to start with somewhat chronologically like with your business. Let's talk about the club business a little bit, how it got started, and what it's become, and sort of use that as the- because that was really the launchpad of whatever you're doing now. That was your transition. You started the business in school?
Chris Williamson: 18, yeah. The first day that I arrived at university, yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: Tell me, take me from there.
Chris Williamson: Cool. Yeah. So, I went to Newcastle University, which is a red brick. It's good, fairly highly regarded university in the UK. And I spent all of my money during freshers week partying and didn't have any more cash to dig into. So, I thought, right, I need to get a job, sat down next to this guy in my first ever seminar and said, dude, I'm scint. I've spent all of my cash partying and doing all these things. He said, well, I used to work for this company in Leeds, which is another city in the north of the UK. Why don't you come to this meeting, and they can give you a flyering job, handing out flyers. And 15 years later, that guy that I sat next to is still my business partner now. So, we just became mates, started flyering, became junior event managers, senior event managers, city manager, then we got our first franchise within the first year, and it was a good time. 2006, ’07, ’08, ’09, ’10 was a golden era for running parties and using Facebook because the algorithm and the news feed just delivered things in a very different way. There was no such thing as pages. There was only groups. Events would be delivered to ridiculous amounts of people. You could invite all of your friends to an event in one go and we had the right brands and blah, blah, blah. So, it's a very different world then, but there was a brief period where you could use that weakness in the system to propel yourself, to get a ton of brand equity. And we did that. And then we started running weekly club nights and we just continued to grow the company from there.
Eric Jorgenson: So, I have barely ever been to a nightclub. I know almost nothing about this world.
Chris Williamson: As a mogul, as one of the normies.
Eric Jorgenson: Yes, please. How do you start that? How do you go from being an 18-year-old kid-? How do you win the game of flyering and then win the game-? Like what are the goals? How do you level up? Because you kind of ascended this organization like a junior crime lord or something.
Chris Williamson: Yeah. I mean, it is a wild west. Everywhere all over the world, the way that club promotion works is it's very much a wild west. First off, it's populated with people who are mostly drunk or around people that are mostly drunk. I mean, that creates just a- that's the code that this is written in.
Eric Jorgenson: Wildly unpredictable.
Chris Williamson: Precisely. Yeah, exactly. And it's very, very much to do with status and who knows you and who do you know and who's coming to your parties. So, it's very fickle, which creates a sense of ambient anxiety. A lot of the reasons why, if you ever speak to club promoters, they won't ever be able to make long-term plans. They'll never be able to tell you what they're going to do in a year or 18 months’ time. They can tell you what they're going to do next week. They’ve got DJ booked or they got some parties or whatever. They can't tell you what's going to happen in 18 months’ time because they don't know. I became the best flyerer because I was enthusiastic and PRing is all about not minding being rejected. So, hi guys, where are you going tonight? Put a wristband on them and try and get them to go. So, it is a crash course in dealing with rejection, which is quite useful, I suppose, it's been useful later in life. And we just found a niche in the partying world because most people treated club promoting like I can't believe that I love to drink and I am now being paid to party professionally. Whereas we said we see a vehicle for making cash flow very quickly and nobody else is treating this like a business. Everyone else is a professional party boy. It's like a tongue in cheek thing for me because I never was. I treated it absolutely like a business. We were trying to be as professional and commercial as possible, spreadsheets that would track how different networkers were performing and contributing to the events. What were the most effective flyering locations? So, if we put two people on this corner of this street, how many does that generate? Okay, what if we put one on that corner and one on the next corner, how does that change week on week, and then we'd analyze a little bit of the data and feed it back up. And this is, I mean, it's super basic, there'll be quants listening that think duh, obviously, hope you had a V lock up in that spreadsheet, but whereas for us, this was worlds apart. We just found that by being meticulous and caring about stuff, you could actually generate a good party. And there's a lot of luck in it as well. A ton of luck, especially with stuff like this, which is so dependent on social trends. You need to be in the right place at the right time with the right product and the right DJ playing the right music policy in the right venue with the right drink prices with no one else stepping in. And then once you corner the market, you just put your foot down and you go, okay, we’re the cool thing now. And when you are the cool thing, you just start to release the Kraken. And the Kraken for us was a bunch of different weekly club nights. And we got to the stage where I finished the season in Ibiza in between my bachelor's and my master's. I came back and my business partner said we're starting a weekly Saturday. And from them, every single Saturday for 204 Saturdays in a row, I didn't miss a single Saturday at this place. I was taking four day holidays from Sunday to Thursday so that I would be back. So, this was for me, age 23 till 27, something like that. I didn't miss a single Saturday at this event that we did. So, we were very meticulous about it.
Eric Jorgenson: So, tell me the relationship between you as the promoter and the club itself. Are you like an affiliate for everything that kind of happens in the club?
Chris Williamson: Yeah, it's an interesting one. So, this is typically the way that it works in the UK, and I imagine it must be similar in the US. Venues own a property. They have a license to serve alcohol. They understand how to stock and staff a bar. They know what goes into what cocktail. They train people and have health and safety and stuff. And they have their money tied up in the building. But they don't actually know anybody that wants to party. Club promoters on the other hand, we either don't have the capital or choose not to invest the capital into a venue. We don't know how to stock and staff a bar or couldn't care. However, we understand how social media works. We understand branding. We know what's cool in terms of music. We know how to use social proof. We have a team of networkers, of other people who all like to go out and party. And the gap in between those two people, the fact that we have people that want to party but no venue, and the venue has a venue but no people that want to party, that gap between the two is where the relationship lies. Typically, the promoter will take the door. I'll take what comes from the ticket revenue and the door entry. The venue will take the bar. We will pay for the DJ and the promo. They will pay for the security and the bar staff. And there may be a little bit of a rental agreement that goes from the promoter back over to the venue. Main reason for that being that the costs usually for the promoter are pretty low. Once you've got your people into the venue, somebody decides to come in and pay you 5 pounds or 10 pounds or 20 pounds, or they walk past, it makes no difference to your costs. So once you hit your break even, pretty much everything is pure profit. Whereas in the venue, you've got to pay for the stock to serve the vodka with the mixer with whatever, the amount of glass breakage that you're going to get and all that sort of stuff. So that's the relationship between the two.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, that sounds like the perfect business to start in as a college kid and a young person. Like you don't need a ton of capital. You just need hustle and organization and social network connections. That’s awesome.
Chris Williamson: Dude, if someone was going to start doing one thing at university in the UK, I would say join an events company because you get a ready-made group of friends, between a hundred and five hundred people who all know you, who will have your back. We've had people that have worked for us that have got married, that live together, that have gone away on holiday together. They're all best friends. It's amazing. It's the best support system I think you can have for everybody at university.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. And you went on to do a master’s in marketing, right?
Chris Williamson: Yeah, international marketing.
Eric Jorgenson: What was the experience of like sitting in there in a lecture hall with like a professor telling you how to do marketing, when you'd been running a very successful events business with like hundreds of thousands of people paying you like every weekend? Are you kind of like this is a joke? Are you like this is a helpful framework for things that I kind of already know tactically? What was that like?
Chris Williamson: I very quickly became disenfranchised with university within six months. I just happened to stick about for another four and a half years after that. So, it very much became a what's that Goodhart's law where you're simply looking for the outcome. I wasn't bothered about the process of getting there. So, I just didn't care. I was learning things like Henry Ford scientific models of management and Kaizen and lean production. I'm thinking this does not- first off, I'm not interested. Secondly, it doesn't relate to anything that I'm seeing in the real business world. And thirdly, I can't see a situation in which I'm going to need this, but I know that I need to learn it. So, I'll just do the bare minimum, and I got through uni. I mean, we did a placement year, we did our own placement year working for ourselves on the franchise. We wrote our own reference of recommendation and we got awarded Placement Students of the Year from the university having written our own recommendation. They didn’t know that we'd written it ourselves, but we got awarded Placement Students of the Year, but we didn't think- we didn't care with that either. And then I went on to do the masters, and that ended up being the same thing, completed the dissertation for it in 36 hours leading up to it. I basically did nothing over the entirety of the year for it, 36 hours beforehand. So, I do- I kind of I regret not spending my time at university learning something that I would have genuinely cared about because the business degree and the marketing degree contributed zero to my ability to perform as a businessman. So, in that time I was sat in lectures, messaging people on Facebook saying, all right, mate, you coming out tonight, I could have actually been learning something that I would have cared about, a philosophy degree or psychology degree would have probably been pretty good shout. And then I would have actually had a foundational understanding of that stuff as opposed to bro sciencing it, which is what I do now. But I would say the lesson that I take from that is and that I will give to my kids or anyone that cares is follow what you are interested in at university. Do not try and get a degree unless you really, really, really know that this is the outcome that you want. You want to be a doctor, you want to be a microbiologist or whatever, do something that's going to interest you because you're going to probably get the outcomes in terms of a career that you want no matter in any case. And you can always pivot. You can do a law conversion in one year after you've done a normal degree. So yeah, that's the lesson that I took from it. But I did have a lot of fun.
Eric Jorgenson: That's good. Yeah, the environment is amazing even if the classes don't unlock a gateway to another level of performance necessarily. So, what's the state of the business today? You're still sort of operating it on the side, right?
Chris Williamson: Correct. Yeah. So that still ticks over, business partner has got everything on lock in the UK. We do a Thursday, a Friday and a Saturday in Newcastle at the moment. We also do some social media marketing for local companies. We do some content creation and some other bits. And we have a team of about 350 staff or so that work for us. We have a bunch of full-timers, some part-timers and then some of the guest listers that are kind of just contributors.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, is it to the point where it's somewhat passive for you now?
Chris Williamson: Yeah, very much so. Even that man, you can do it in your sleep. I don't know whether there's something that you used to do or you've done for so long that it does feel like breathing or walking or putting your shoes on in the morning. That's kind of what it feels like.
Eric Jorgenson: Is it a sellable business? Like, it's one of those things, like there's no assets to it, but it does have momentum.
Chris Williamson: Very, very, very, very good insight. Yeah, there is nothing. What people are paying for, if they were to buy the business, they would be paying for the brand equity of the name, which is very, very, very difficult to build up. But what they would actually be paying for is me and my business partner because of brand equity, everybody knows that the name itself doesn't really matter. What you're getting with the name of the venue- the name of the events company is the power of the people that run it and the insights of the people that run it. So, sadly, it's one of those things where I spent 15 years building a business that essentially I can never sell. But it's a great vehicle for cashflow. The margins on it are fantastic. It's a really good business. It's cash rich. No one's coming into your nightclub and saying, oh, I'm going to pay you in 30 days. We're going to pay you this 5 pound door entry in 30 days. There's none of that. And yeah, it's good. It's a very, very interesting way to learn how business works.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I love that. And I'm kind of always on the lookout for what I think are really good entry-level businesses. I think there's amazing- some of the people I see with the best careers in like the mid to long-term had some sort of like starter business that they got their hands dirty with really early on and just learned a ton of these sort of tactics and got the confidence to go through the motions and pull people together and see the market respond to what they do. And I think it changes. Do you feel like it changed you? I mean, it happened for you at 19, so maybe it didn't, maybe you just took it for granted.
Chris Williamson: It was the most formative thing that I've done. Yeah. It still informs so much of the way that I operate. That was what created whatever version of me is here now. Because it gives you a mode of thinking about the world that is so intense, and yeah, it's almost impossible to get rid. What are the other businesses – let's say that if I was to put one in the ring, people should consider working for an events company because you are going to get a lot of friends, it's cash rich, you get to see marketing and HR and B2B and B2C and operations and logistics and blah, blah, it gets you all of that – what would one or two of yours be as suggestions for how someone should get an intro to business?
Eric Jorgenson: I think the importance of it being like low investment and asset light are pretty high. So, like similar dynamic there. I think agencies are okay. Like freelancing is actually a totally reasonable kind of place to start. I think something with like digital businesses, digital product businesses are kind of tough to start with, but decent if you can get them going. The businesses I started in college, I started importing bamboo t-shirts from China, that kind of didn't work and was like too cash heavy and logistics, a little like somewhat kind of live tutoring business, and then building websites for companies worked out okay. So, stuff like that, like you just kind of start with selling your time and it shows you the market. But yours is awesome because it's like you're playing with- it's a simple, basic business, but also, you're responsible for filling a nightclub and you're partnering with real adults with massive line-item budgets. And I don't know what the teeth are, like your cost of failure if you totally flop on a nightclub.
Chris Williamson: It's not too big. I mean, the pressures, they are more socially from the venue and from the people that go, because everyone's been in a nightclub that's empty and even the customers feel awkward, so imagine what it feels like to be the guy that ran it. So, when you do that, there is pressure there, so it teaches you to learn how to deal with a high pressure situation where there's money on the line and there's social gravitas on the line and a deadline. And it happens every single week. And you need to make sure that if you have a bad one, that you have a really, really good one next week. But yeah, man, it's about as good as you can get.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Let's talk about one of the sort of transitions because that had a certain kind of life, too, that I know kind of came with that and that. Well, how many times- you said there has really only been one like radically- like radical change to your self-image. Was it sort of the transition- I guess you haven't really transitioned out of that world really, you're still kind of running that business. So, when did the radical self-image change, the one that you would say was the biggest?
Chris Williamson: Yeah, so there was really only one. I guess, everyone's iterating all the time; anyone that's self-reflective and interested in that stuff is constantly changing. I did as a part of being professional party boy guy, I wanted to get as much status and clout as possible. So, I did reality TV. I did Take Me Out, which is a very sort of fluffy dating show in the UK, reaches about 4 to 10 million people on a Saturday at 7:30 PM. It's like pure, pure primetime stuff, but it's before what we have as the watersheds, there's no swearing, there's no sex, there's no fights. It's very fluffy and nice, which was cool. So, I did that. And then I did another one called Love Island, which is now I think being exported to your country and to Australia and a few other places. And I was the first person through the doors of season one of that. And this, again, 50% of it was a YOLO, 50% of it was this is going to be great for increasing my exposure and status and prestige and such like. But man, I got on there and I thought I was this big name on campus party boy. And I was surrounded by these people who genuinely are that, who lived and breathed super extroverted socially involved lives. And I just couldn't find any common ground at all. And I was just feeling really disjointed, and I thought, wow, this is not what I thought. I thought that this was my place, and with regards to Newcastle, the city that I'm from, I was about as well-known as it's possible to be, like literally one of the most well-known people in the entire city. And it’s only a million people, so it's not that hard to do in any case. But anyway, and I get to this thing and I'm like, oh my God, I thought I was world championship level. And it turns out that I'm basically an amateur. Okay, well, if I've thought I'm this sort of a person and I'm not, there is a discordance between who I think I am and who I really am. And when I was on the show, you don't have any contact with the outside world, no phone, no internet, no books, no distractions, no family, no nothing. It's you and the situations that are happening in that villa for four- I was there for about a month and there's 24 hours a day cameras, and it's kind of intense. And I thought, well, okay, that's not me. Let's work out what is. And the solution was self-inquiry, start reading and listening to things that are going to help me work out who I am. And yeah, I ended up dispensing with a lot of values that I'd created and I'd relied on throughout my twenties and I thought were me. And I find this with a lot of guys, I call it the man-opause because toward the end of your twenties, guys realize that the values they had at 21 are not going to serve them when they are 31. And they think am I really going to continue getting a bag in with the boys on a weekend and think that that's the epitome of what I've got to do. And especially where I'm from, working class town in the Northeast of the UK, people are born, live, and die in these places, and that's kind of the way that they go about it. And for the people that want to do it, that's sweet, but that wasn't for me. And I thought really is this the most that you've got to offer the world? You and a small pair of swim shorts, like talking about Jonathan and that girl that totally mugged him off last night, bruv. And that wasn't for me. So yeah, that was the change, came out the other side of that TV show and thought I need to make some sort of pivot here and that was the beginning of the trajectory.
Eric Jorgenson: That's so interesting. I feel like that mirrors in different ways like Naval’s story and Bill Gates’ story. I have heard people say- or like Steve Jobs. Like you were put in a situation where you saw what the extreme version of where you thought you were going looked like. I remember Naval being like I remember meeting what a truly great like physics mind or math mind was, and I realized that wasn't me, or like Steve Jobs going to the ashram in India and doing this long meditative sort of like vision quest and being like, ah, I see the walls of the universe falling in front of me and now I can craft myself to be whatever I want to be. I just fucking love the fact that that happened to you on like a forced meditation during a reality show with a bunch of party people. Like that's amazing.
Chris Williamson: Not many people go on a reality TV show to be catapulted toward a life of virtue and integrity after having had an existential crisis. But you know, it is what it is.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, you can’t say it doesn't happen.
Chris Williamson: That's the reverse role model thing again, man. A lot of the time, we want people that we want to model ourselves off, but a lot of the time we can find it just as easy to find people that we don't want to model ourselves off. And that was it. It was a contrast between who I was- who I thought I was and who I genuinely was.
Eric Jorgenson: So, I think there's an epiphany around realizing that we are each a character that we have crafted, like our character is literally a character. And in a case like yours, you sort of realize there's a large- there's a surprise moment where you're like, oh, this is actually kind of a big divergence. But as you say, we are making small adjustments to that actually every day as we like improve or decide where to focus our energy or attention or change. And realizing how incredibly malleable and like changeable those characters are, that we can become whoever we choose to become if we direct sufficient sort of energy and creativity towards it is kind of incredible.
Chris Williamson: It's powerful, man. I mean, that's one of the things that made me fall in love with reinvention of the self. The fact that if there was one thing that I would say I've learned from doing my podcast over the last four years, it's that you don't have to live life by design- sorry, you don't have to live life by default, you can live it by design. Like the default settings that you get in life are horse shit for the most part, the ways that you've dealt with past trauma and social norms and the values that your family had, all of that stuff is mostly bollocks. And when you actually look at it, you can completely repurpose this into something which is much more aligned with where you want to go in life and it's powerful. It's really, really exciting.
Eric Jorgenson: So, what were the new headings that you- how did you go about sort of learning and charting that new path and conceiving of a new character that you wanted to move towards?
Chris Williamson: Biggest thing was I didn't know what the truth was, what my own truth was. I couldn't tell the truth because I'd played this persona for so long – I’m Chris, this big name on campus party boy. And again, guys see this in themselves. I am this very sort of base juvenile young guy, single, partying, who have I slept with last week, who am I going out with, blah, blah, blah. And that meant that I'd layered on top of me a version of me that was that person. So when I went to try and make my own opinion about something, I couldn't get through the persona. There was this, I lied so many times to play this role that I didn't actually know what inside felt, I didn't know what the person inside of that felt. And that was the first thing. Let's excavate all of this stuff. Let's erode all of this thing away and see if there's something. And you dig and dig and dig and dig, and then eventually hit something that feels a bit more solid. You go, okay, well maybe this is an actual opinion of mine, maybe this is something I actually care about. And the main thing was finding out what the core values are that are in my life. Because those are the principles, the stuff that the character and the layer and things on top. I'm not a father at the moment, but I hope to be in future. Okay, so that means that I will have presumably some principles now that I will also have when I'm a father, but I'm not a father now and I will be then. So, the character is going to change, but the underlying principles that are driving that are not going to change quite so much. I needed to look at what are the things that are in my life and I'd hidden a bunch of those. Curiosity was a huge one. I'd just hidden it away because it's not very cool to be curious on the front door of a nightclub. It's you having a conversation with someone about whether they were off their face last night. You don't want to ask them have you ever actually thought about the likelihood of us finding like prokaryotic or eucaryotic life single cellular or multicellular organisms and whether or not that proves or disproves a great filter, because that would be what I would watch on YouTube, but I'd never think about having a conversation because that's not what club promoter Chris would say. Yeah, get rid of that discordance and work out the principles and that made everything a lot easier. So, okay, well here's this, these are the building blocks of what I want to do. I'll grow out of that.
Eric Jorgenson: And how do you go about finding those values and excavating that? I mean, is that a process of- is that conversation? Is it journaling? Is it reading more broadly? Is it just staring at the clouds until you arrive at a truth?
Chris Williamson: Yeah. If I'd been- if I was Ali Abdaal, I would have had a very perfectly formatted notion template that would have taken me through it step-by-step.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm sure there's a course, an online course you can buy to-
Chris Williamson: Probably is, man. But to sing a song for the people who aren't that organized and don't index stuff perfectly well and don't have this beautifully formatted laid out plan for how they do things, the solution for me was crushing amounts of content that spoke to me. A lot of Alain de Botton from the School of Life, a lot of Sam Harris, a lot of Jordan Peterson. This is a period of time where 2016, ’17, ’18 was really, really good for the sort of mindful content that we've come to now find 10 a penny. And I just watched and listened to an awful lot of that and reflected, and then started to find Taylor Pearson has some amazing exercises online, Chris Sparks, he's been a help. You pick up exercises along the way, but a big part of it was kind of making the community of people that you wanted to be like by having them around you. And you can quite easily do that when you've got people with hundreds of hours of podcasts or lectures or talks or whatever online, just listen to that.
Eric Jorgenson: That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that as a golden era, but I think that's true. I mean, that's when Farnam Street was cranking stuff out. I'm also a big fan of Taylor Pearson. There was a lot of great stuff, still is a lot of great stuff, but it was easy to kind of create a world of peers and mentors and find your way through some of that stuff. Yeah. Surround yourself with good influences and impossible no matter where you were. Where's your progress bar do you think on re-establishing those values or how aligned are you with is your character with the character that you want to be today?
Chris Williamson: I'm always quite a big critic of myself. So, I'll always probably always sell myself short, I think. But I feel infinitely closer. The person I am now, I really, really like him. And that's something that I couldn't have said probably four or five years ago. I didn't have a lot of respect for myself. And I didn't know why I didn't. But it makes sense. I wasn't the sort of person that would keep his word. I wasn't the sort of person that would be faithful to a girlfriend. I wasn't the sort of person that would be- just these aren't- I wasn't killing people and eating them, but I was just a bit of a juvenile dick. I valued the wrong things. I didn't care about the right things, the things that I genuinely cared about and that add value to the world. And now I'm closer to that. So that's the- I'm really, really proud of it. And there has been another change. There probably has been another change over the last year or so, which has been unconscious. And this one's been really interesting for me to watch, which is going from being somebody who didn't feel like he belonged in this space, whatever this space is, to one that actually feels like there's a reason for me being here and I actually add value. And that's a really interesting one because that one I didn't mean to happen. It was great, and it was lovely that it did and I would have wanted it to happen. But it just kind of came about as a by-product of things, kind of the same way as you want to be muscular, but you go to the gym in the hopes of being muscular, and then over time someone says, fucking hell, man, you're looking big. I go, oh actually, yeah, I am, you're right. I guess I am one of those gym people now. The question about when did you get old? Well, gradually, one day at a time. And yeah, it's self-belief has been one of the last things that's come along for the ride, but that's here in pretty big swats now as well, which is lovely.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's a very interesting thing to try to- figuring out when it's productive and when it's counterproductive to attach kind of your opinion of yourself to your opinion of your work, being so easy to become critical of your own work and try to keep improving it, but finding the right balance of appreciating your hard work, being glad you went to the gym every day, but not over analyzing how far you have to go or criticizing yourself or that feeling like you haven't yet reached maybe that level of belonging that like you now have.
Chris Williamson: That difference between the gap and the gain, as Ben Hardy calls it, is everything. I've thought about that an awful, awful lot. Because people can become addicted to this. There is a big group of people out there who realize that that poor self-image motivates them to do more. And they are addicted to the fact that they don't feel like they're enough because insufficiency is a motivator. Insufficiency is a motivator. And the reason that you don't want to feel like you're enough is because you know that you're going to be less competitive if you do. And we need to accept that. And I do. I do. I do. However, I would argue that the difference between you feeling neurotic and anxious and scared and insufficient and jealous and resentful and bitter and concerned and worried, and all of those things about your future, the difference between that version of you and the version of you that feels like you're enough, in terms of outcomes, is probably about 5%. I think that you might get yourself another 5 to 10% of outcomes by being the person that worries all the time. Now this isn't the case if you're a beginner. If you are a beginner, I think that worrying about where you are going to go is really important, but what got you from not to 50 is not the same thing that's going to get you from 50 to 100 and definitely not the thing that's going to get you from 90 to 95 and 95 to 100. And I'm adamant, man, that most people that have put a good amount of work in are going to get the outcomes that they're going to get in life no matter what they do. You could try and stop yourself from working and you are going to find that your programming, your innate desire to do stuff just carries you forward. You go, God, I meant to not work today. And look, I've just ended up recording this podcast or building this business or starting this website or doing something. You think, oh, well, I guess this is just going to happen. So, my point is that if the outcomes that you get in life are probably going to arrive no matter what you think on route to getting them, by being neurotic and worried and concerned, all that you're doing is making the time between now and getting to the place that you are getting to any way miserable. That's all that you're doing. There's this Aubrey Marcus video, man, this is what made the penny drop for me. Aubrey is at the opening of his book, which became a New York Times Bestseller, and he's answering this question. People ask me if you could go back and change anything, what would you change? And he says, if I could go back, I wouldn't change anything. I would do everything exactly the same, except I would feel less. He said I spent so much time when I should've been laughing or smiling or eating a sandwich just being worried that I wasn't going to get right here, the place that I was going anyway. I spent so much time being distracted from the things that I should have been doing, worrying that I wasn't going to be right here right now, the place that I was going to arrive at no matter what. Dude, that makes chills go down the back of my neck, thinking about the fact that the outcomes you get in life are going to happen no matter what you do. Maybe they're going to- you still need to work hard. But the feelings of insufficiency, they can fuck off. You do not need them. You do not need them. They're not helping you. They're not motivating you. Not after a certain point. They get you over the line. They're good for getting over the inertia. But after a while, it's just, there's this momentum and you can't slow it down. You go, okay, so enjoy the ride. Let's say that- let's treat your success and your journey toward doing something great in life or whatever it is that you're going to do in life less like a car ride and more like a train journey, less like being an active participant and more like being somebody that gets to enjoy the view as it goes by. And if you think that you’re sat in a car trying to drive a train, not realizing that the train is going to the same destination, kind of no matter what you do and all that you're doing is obsessing over the fact that there is a tiny little crack above that door and this fork that I'm supposed to be eating off the table with has got a little bit of a prong wrong on it, it's not the way to spend your time.
Eric Jorgenson: I love that. The train ride versus driving framework is perfect because you can visualize it. And it's just something relaxing about sitting on a train, looking out the window, dozing off, playing cards, and knowing that the travel is taking care of itself. That is awesome. And something that I like need to tell myself or have you tell me more often than I than I tell myself today. It's so easy to forget, to lose that context.
Chris Williamson: I think that- I said this to Jordan Peterson the other day, I did an episode with him, and I said, is it possible to take too much responsibility for your outcomes in life? You can have a victim mindset where you don't believe that you have any control over the outcomes, but then there is an opposite where you believe that you have too much control and you stop allowing yourself to have faith that future you is going to sort it. And in this way, I feel there's a tension between cognition and intuition. The people that are smart, they can think themselves into more problems than they can think themselves out of a lot of the time. And they find problems where there aren't any. Dude, everything's going fine. It's going absolutely fine. Stop worrying about it. And this is me. I'm saying it to myself here as much as I'm saying it to anybody else. But yeah, you're on the train. Just allow the destination to come toward you and enjoy the journey.
Eric Jorgenson: So where is your train headed, Chris? What's your vision for- I don't want to use the word career for either of us, especially you, but what is your vision for your body of work and sort of the direction that you're headed?
Chris Williamson: I'm not really very good at long-term plans. And I think that this is maybe off the back of being a club promoter for so long and not knowing if you had a business in six months’ time. I really want to have- this year, we're going to try and grow hard. We need to do a little bit, a couple more doublings on the show, and then it's going to get to a size of cultural influence which is enough for me to then really be able to sink into it. I just want to have some impact, man. Like the conversations that I have on the show, the people that I'm getting access to, the things that I hear, especially the last week and a bit since I've been traveling around with Jordan and I've spent time with Douglas Murray and a bunch of other very fascinating people in New York and in Texas, there is so many interesting conversations and insights to be had. And I wished that I'd had them when I was 23. And I'm 33 now. And I think if I'd known this when I was 23, man, I would have expedited success and avoided pitfalls in a way that would have been fantastic for me and really useful. And I'm the sort of person that works very well with role models. I've always wanted role models, always wanted someone to look up to, whether they're negative role models or positive ones. I just want to have some impact. There's a lot of information out there that can counter the malaise, ambient anxiety that people have at the moment. And the more that I can facilitate that. So that's on one side. And then on the other side, one of the coolest things that I've found is that since the show has got itself to the stage of being sizable enough that not everybody that comes on is doing a favor to me, some of them I'm actually able to be a springboard for, I can find people who are unbelievably interesting humans and finally be a platform for them to then springboard the rest of their career. And that feels amazing. And I find some guy out of nowhere that writes some dope Twitter thread, bring him on the show, and then, a couple of hundred thousand people watch him and then maybe he gets invited on some more shows and then maybe he releases a course and maybe he decides that he's going to go do something else. That to me is amazing. The ability to find people who deserve a platform and don't yet have one and just to be that. You see this with Rogan; how many people has Rogan made? He made Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, Jocko Willink, David Goggins, just this bottomless list of behemoths, cultural behemoths now that one guy gets to make, and these people deserve platforms. They deserve platforms, but they don't have one. Okay, you can be that person. That's cool. So, more impact for the audience and more platform for the creators.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think, I mean, the most satisfying thing about having even a baby podcast is getting to do that. I barely have a springboard. I have a slinky that I like- to help people along, but I find it so fulfilling to share. It's just like being able to cast a very big vote about how you want the world to look. And I can't imagine the responsibility that you carry with that because you have to make a decision about that like once or twice a week. I wrote one book about- that's my vote about how I want the world to look.
Chris Williamson: Unbelievable book though, man. I tell everybody that I speak to that if you're going to read three books in the world, Essentialism by Greg McKeown, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Like those for me, if you want to just be an effective human in the modern world, those are the three books that you need. Like stop worrying about all of the trivial stuff. Here is wisdom across all of the things that you care about and here's how not to go skint. That's it. Don't be bankrupt. Be happy and don't focus on little things. Like, there you go. That's it. You did an amazing job, man.
Eric Jorgenson: And I love Psychology of Money too. I haven't read Essentialism yet. But maybe I should.
Chris Williamson: It's a counter to everything. Everything that we have in the modern world as a type A go getting hard charger person, like that's the solution.
Eric Jorgenson: Perfect. How does your fame sort of feed into the other businesses? Like, are you pursuing like fame for its own sake? Is it an unnecessary by-product of what comes out of that? I have a lot of these questions for myself when I'm like why am I tweeting? Like what am I actually trying to accomplish here? And I know that in some ways it feeds into businesses. I know that it feels good to my little like ego animal, but I also believe Naval when he says like fame is not the prize, it's the cost. But you're one of the most famous people that I know on like a bro to bro basis. So, I'm curious how you think about that, if it's a tax to you or a reward in some way, or how you think about it.
Chris Williamson: Dude, this is a really, really well-timed question. So, I feel like I'm at a little bit of an inflection point on my position to do with this, so maybe you can help me work it out. I think fame and being famous and being well-known was one of those values that I'd inculcated while I was young. And especially while I was a young club promoter, because the more famous you are, the more people know you, the more people come to your event, the more money you make, the more successful your business is. So, all of these things are tied together. I never, ever, ever really questioned whether fame was a good thing or not. It's like someone saying, oh, you can have too much money. And you go, no, shut up. Like of course not. It's like being too strong or too fast or too tanned. Like, it's just not going to happen. More is always going to be good. And I read Tim Ferriss’s 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous, and that's a terrifying situation, I think, how many people overshoot fame? Like three. It's just more fame, more fame is a good idea. And man, last couple of months, I've really been thinking about the fact that I don't think that you need it anywhere near as much as you think you do. You want everybody to know your name and nobody to know your face is not a bad philosophy. But I've just been around a lot of people who haven't got super, super stardom fame, but have been a little bit down and they pay some really, really high costs for it. And you can't take fame back. It's really hard to become less famous. In fact, it's almost harder to become less famous than it is to become more famous in a way. Once you're at that point, once everybody knows you as being the guy that wrote this book or did this movie or whatever, does the podcast, you can't stop that anymore. Now I don't know how you go about creating content and doing things online in the way that we might want to without that being a by-product. However, I certainly think that the pursuit of fame and the attachment of that which isn't directly in service of the core goal and mission that you have, I think all of that can probably go out the window. And you've caught me on a really, really good, interesting week about this because I've been thinking about it a lot. This is the message of essentialism as well. The very, very few high points of contribution that you have are the ones that are important and the trivial many that you get distracted by are probably not. And for me it's okay, where am I really, really adding contribution? It's the quality of the guests that I bring on. It's the quality of the conversations that I have. It's not the cool Instagram photo of me with Douglas Murray and Coleman Hughes at the Superbowl. It's not me tweeting about whatever the newest culture war topic of the day is because I know it's going to get me a ton of retweets. But the line between someone watching me make some pithy comment about truckers in Canada to them then watching a podcast of mine is so wiggly that it's basically pointless for me to do. So, okay, what are the points of contribution that really, really matter? And then can I let that go because it's a cost and it's an ego attachment that I don't need. What are your thoughts?
Eric Jorgenson: I think that's an interesting, well-articulated thing. I think for you, I think in your work in particular, it's going to be very difficult to separate the fame of your name and face from the outcome. I always looked at it as being a tax. Like they don't pay actors that much- like they pay them because they have to get famous in order to do their jobs. If fame was that great, they wouldn't have to pay them because people would just show up and get famous on their own voluntarily. Which you see happen in reality shows all the time, but it's because they can turn that- like they're either misguided or they can turn that fame into more money through their social or whatever. But yeah, I really- I spend a lot of time looking at people who are like a little farther ahead of me on these tracks and being like, oh, I want 200,000 followers just because that's the next goal. And then I remind myself that's not actually my goal. Like I'd be much happier with the meaningful respect of a relatively small audience that I care about and that I'm helpful to, and to me, scale is not the indication of success. Like growth to some extent shows quality, I think, because people share something that had an impact on them and that's great. But I don't- I try to suppress the part of me that like instinctively wants more fame for fame’s sake. And I already- I mean, like I have no fame compared to you, literally a rounding error, and I already feel uncomfortable with the amount of like times I have to say no to people who just message me for random favors or requests or asks. And just like that hurts my stomach every time I have to do it because I always want to default to generosity. And I just can't imagine how much worse that gets in Rogan or Ferriss's world.
Chris Williamson: I also don't think that downregulating the number of opportunities that you get is the best way to decide which opportunities to take. You don't want to limit the number of incoming things that are cool that you might want to do, but to make it easier for you to choose which things you want to do, like that's a cop out.
Eric Jorgenson: That's true. And it lowers your net opportunity cost.
Chris Williamson: Yeah, precisely. But the question there is why do I want to reach 200,000 followers? What's this in service of? Or why do I want to do whatever it is? And this is why it's so important to constantly come back to what is my highest point of contribution? Like what's the mission? And the mission for me long-term – have impact and make the world a better place than it was when I was there. Not that it was bad when I was there, but just that had I had the sort of show that I create, life would have been easier for me. It would have been more enjoyable. I would have been happier, all of these things. And let's continue to do that. And anything else, anything else shouldn't be figured into the equation unless it contributes to that or facilitates it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That's a very good rule. I like that a lot. I'm curious what makes- your highest point of contribution you said is having a great conversation, featuring a wonderful guest, bringing awareness to a new set of ideas that can help sort of either our generation or the next generation and bring people along and leave the path a little more paved than you found it. What makes a great conversation in your eyes? Like how do you know when you're like that was a home run, I connected on that one, I feel great about it, and you just have got the conversation pump and you walk out proud of yourself for a job well done? How do you know this?
Chris Williamson: Yeah. So, it changes between different people a lot. You can have- There's many different ways to get up the mountain of awesome conversation. Some of them are really fast, backward and forward. Some of them are very adversarial and you kind of work against them. Some of them are monologues where you just need to poke people in the right direction. Some of them are essentializing where you need to distill down whatever this person is saying. You need to get them to clarify, and you're constantly sort of pushing and touching. That's very much sort of the Jordan, the JBP way of podcasting with him is that you're trying to just essentially clarification, clarification, clarification. But you know that it's good when you come out of it and you can't remember anything that you said. That's the best way to have a conversation. I can't remember a single thing that I said during the last two hours, because all I was thinking about was what was going on next. And that to me is the pinnacle really of just losing yourself in the conversation. And you go back and you realize that there are all of these little concepts, these little quotes. For me, from today, thinking about the fact that fame is the price not the benefit or whatever it was that you said, like that little bit of an insight there is a really, really lovely way to frame things and it encapsulates, so that's essentializing an overall topic. Okay, I can take that away. So, when you go back and listen to it and realizing that this can be split down into five little parts that I can synthesize and take away with me. But you just lose yourself, having a conversation where you can't remember what you said is probably about as good as it gets.
Eric Jorgenson: How did you become good at this? I can imagine a lot of sort of potential answers to that question, but you're basically a professional conversationalist and speaker. Is there a discipline, a training? Do you just sort of let the water sand off your rough edges over the reps and hours that you put in?
Chris Williamson: Yeah, that's probably about right. It's just you do something three times a week for an hour and a bit, and you're going to get good at it. You can go and do karate or break dancing or crochet stitching or something, you are probably going to end up being pretty good at it. And yeah, it was intentional though. It was very much listening back to episodes, listening back to the thing. I had a bunch of weird verbal ticks. So, I'd say umhmm a lot. I would provide clarity to when people were speaking, and if you watch Oprah as a good example, she nods, she uses huge use of nods. She's got this huge repertoire of different nods. There's the short one up and down. There's the big one like this, yes, keep going, keep going. Or you say, okay, well useful. I can use nods then. Nods are a very good thing. And then you start to take it from system two, being deliberate and system one being automate. Okay. What's the next thing? Being quiet and learning to deal with silence is a huge part of this. We had that Elon time video that went out from his episode with Lex Fridman, where it was like 23 seconds or 32 seconds or something of silence because Lex knows that good podcasters talk well and great podcasters don't talk well. Being able to sit with the silence of something is really important. Listening to the art form. So listening to people that are fantastic. Rogan's got some great things that you can take from him. And Sam Harrison's got some great things that you can take from him. Learning when to ask questions and probe. So, one of the best questions you can do is: what do you mean? Just, you can throw that in whenever anybody says something, but remembering that you're not supposed to be an authority as well. Significantly easier being a podcaster than being an interviewee, so much easier, man, because you're allowed to be an idiot. You don't need to get anything right. You're not supposed to posit yourself as some sort of intellect or insight about things. You're just constantly going not sure, not sure, not sure. And as soon as you feel that arise, you just go hang on, hang on, what do you mean by that exactly? And then away, the brilliant person in front of you goes and tells you exactly what they meant. You go brilliant, now I know. It's so easy. It's so easy when you just allow the curiosity to come forward. I worked with a speech coach for a while. I've worked with a comedy coach for a while in an effort to try and improve on my timing, improve on my diction. So, I had some sort of specialist stuff in there as well, but for the most part, repetitions, intentionality, saying less than you probably think that you need to, especially as an interviewee- sorry, an interviewer. You just don't need to ask questions that are that long. They'll get to the point. And if they misinterpret the question, a lot of the time, it's really, really interesting. They misinterpret a question, you go, oh, this shows something about them. This is a little bit of a bias that they have because they want to answer that. Well, the questions that you have, what you're doing as the podcaster, you're trying to move the guest towards something that they think is interesting. That's basically what your questions are or something the audience thinks is interesting. And if you ask a sufficiently open-ended question, the guest is going to take you there. Imagine that. Imagine them choosing not only the question but also the answer as well. Brilliant. Just do the whole thing. You can sit back and watch.
Eric Jorgenson: I love it. How much do you think about the scale of your podcasts and like the inherent leverage of it? Like was that part of your decision to go into the medium?
Chris Williamson: No, not at all. Leverage is a word that I really only learned since spending time being exposed to the work that you've helped to promulgate. Yeah, I don't really think- I didn't think about it at all. I always wanted to have conversations with interesting people. I wanted to be able to have the excuse to speak to people that I respected and I thought were cool and to learn from them. And then it's just ended up being this thing. And still in the grand scheme of things, when we're at what like 280,000 something subscribers on YouTube and we do a million plays or whatever per month on audio, a couple of million plays on YouTube. It's still very much mid-tier in the grand scheme of things. But there is a lot of- there is a huge amount of leverage with it. So, from that, the fact that your efforts become completely decoupled from your ability to distribute after a very, very short amount of time. You do it for three or four years and you go, okay, I'm still having the same sort of conversations that I feel like I was having a few years ago, and now a hundred times or a thousand times more people are listening to them, and I haven't changed anything. Skills got a bit better and got a slightly nicer camera and stuff like that and slightly better contacts for guests, not really much has changed. So, the same thing goes for club nights as well, man. You put a good night on, you open the doors, 500 people come, a thousand people come, two thousand people come, well, nothing really has changed, but the momentum of picking up that gravitas and that cool and people want to be there and they want to be seen there, and it's kind of the same thing.
Eric Jorgenson: The feeling of doing something that becomes sort of self-perpetuating and growing is really incredible. And I remind myself of this, even my tiny podcast scale, the way I think about the leverage that you have, and I don't know if you think about it this way, but I want to like talk through it with you and see if I can give you a new appreciation for it. But I think of what we're doing now, recording a new podcast, as creating this sort of digital clone of Chris. It's a purpose built, single function machine that then goes off into the world and can do this one repetitive task of having this one conversation for anybody on demand at any point in parallel or in the future. And you've done, what, 400 episodes?
Chris Williamson: Yeah, 430, 440, something like that.
Eric Jorgenson: Of just yours plus other podcasts that you've been on. And so maybe there's 500 digital clones of Chris out there in the world, ready to run this one to two hour like program, script. And you've got, did you say a million plays a month?
Chris Williamson: Across everything, it’d be 3 to 4 million plays a month.
Eric Jorgenson: There is no stadium in the world that can hold that many people. You're performing shows at digital scale at global reach at a rate that like Keith Richards could never have upheld. Like the reach and the leverage that comes with that just totally blows my fucking mind. If you don't think of it that way and just like wake up and look in the mirror and be like I stand atop leverage mountain every day, like my life is a miracle of modern tools and technology, please add that to your morning routine.
Chris Williamson: That's a good way to look at it, man. I think Rogan has a really good insight around this, which is that after a while you kind of have to stop thinking about how many people are listening. And I don't know whether I'm quite there yet, but I kind of get the sense that I might be soon. Because one of the things that people want is they want such a naturalistic listening experience. They don't want to feel like you are aware that they're listening because that really, really kind of takes out of some of the beauty of it. And it's twofold here. The first one is that it actually destroys the- can damage the quality of the conversation. But the other one is that people listen because they hope that they're getting, it's almost like a behind the scenes access where they realize they don't want you to know that they're there and they want to get you in your most unencumbered, most flow state conversation. That's what they're after. So, overthinking it, I think actually is probably going to be to the detriment of the conversation because you're going to be so in your own head that you're like, oh fuck, thinking of all of these people that are going to listen. And what about the question and, oh, I didn't say that thing right. Whereas if you just have the beginner's mindset that you did when you did episode 150, I think is when you've got it absolutely right. 150 episodes, you've spent enough time building up your skills and you still don't care about whoever it is that's listening and that's about bang on.
Eric Jorgenson: That's perfect. Yeah, that's what I enjoy about- I mean, it's an intimate thing, a real good conversation, even between two people, is an intimate thing. And then when you feel like you're just the third person kind of sitting there absorbing it. Small conversations is where I've learned most of the important things that I know. And part of what made me want to do this podcast is to scale that out and bring what I've learned from you and make that accessible for other people who might not have the ability to access that conversation on their own. And that feels like magic. What do you think you give up when you record a conversation versus have it offline? Some of the people that you've had conversations with publicly versus privately, I don't expect them to be different people, but there is definitely a filter or a change of focus, I guess, that exists there.
Chris Williamson: Absolutely. You have a degree of a performative aspect because you know that you're being held to a high rigorous standard by whoever it is that's listening. There's definitely the specter of cancellation that looms over you no matter what you're talking about. You can be the least cancelable topic of all time, and there's still a way that you would be able to find yourself on the wrong side of the mob. So, you definitely play with ideas less. You play it more safe. There's more of a temptation to fall into scripts. So, everybody has a common answer for questions that they get asked frequently. If someone says to you, hey man, so tell me about the process of writing the Almanack of Naval Ravikant, you don't generate a new answer every time. What you do is you came up with an answer within the first 10 times that someone asked you that question, realized that was the best one, maybe edited it, AB split tested it a little bit. And now you've just got this distillation of this script that you just bunk. Okay, there we go, and you're offline, you're offline. And that script is running in the foreground. Then you come back online once it's finished. You need to be very careful with that because it stops you from thinking, and it's such a dangerous situation to be in. Because one option is to say the thing that you know is effective. The other option is to try and come up with a new answer, which might be worse, which might make for a worse episode. And you might gobble it, or you might say something that's wrong or whatever, but the other one engenders lazy thinking. So that's something that, especially if you podcast a lot and you do it consistently, you need to be careful of, because you just fall into these routines. You can have the same conversation over and over again. I think it's called the golden hammer is what [Gerwin De Bogle 1:17:20] calls it. He says that it's when a public intellectual or a particular public intellectual has one concept that they’re so obsessed with that they start to retrofit all of reality to that single concept. And this is kind of the same thing, that you have one answer that you give for questions. There's a couple of guests I've had on the show where no matter what question I asked them, they were going to answer it in a way that I'd heard on five other podcasts previously. Like, dude, that wasn't the question. Like, that wasn't the question. But you have these scripts running and that's what you fall into. So that's something else that you need to be careful of. But yeah, I mean, not playing with ideas sufficiently, which actually over time, it's difficult to work out am I not playing with ideas because I don't have any ideas to play with, or I'm not playing with ideas because I'm terrified of getting canceled or whatever it might be. Those are some of them. And plus, I like talking about ideas, but I like talking about people as well. I'm a gossip monger by profession for 15 years. I find it interesting. I find interpersonal dynamics very interesting. So, I want to ask people about other people that they know, but you can never do that on a podcast. That's kind of one of the unwritten rules of it that you don't, unless someone's got out and outbeat, unless it's Jordan, tell me about Ethan Klein calling you out on Instagram or Twitter or whatever, it's not- you can't really do that. And those are some of the most interesting ones, finding out the dynamics of how stuff works. So those are some of the prices that you pay.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it’s very interesting. Gossip is a thread that we can maybe pull because I think there's always a version of gossip that people look down upon that like they don't participate in, but there's a version of gossip that exists in almost every domain. Tech Twitter would be like, oh, we don't care about the Kardashians, like that's worthless gossip, and then like have eons of memes about like some CEO who did something stupid.
Chris Williamson: Meanwhile, Chamath goes on and says something dodgy about China and that's all that anyone talks about for three weeks. Yeah, okay, you don't talk about gossip guys, sure.
Eric Jorgenson: Sure. Yeah, there's always gossip to be had of different flavors. Everybody just cares about a different type of it.
Chris Williamson: I tweeted something a couple of months ago saying stupid people talk about people. Smart people talk about ideas. Podcasters talk about people talking about ideas.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That's the new version.
Chris Williamson: Yeah. It's not that there's a hierarchy there at all, but yeah, gossip is interesting. You learn a lot from it. It's not about gossiping about other people, it's saying, hey, have you seen this thing that occurred with this person? What are your thoughts on it? Like that's interesting, especially if the person knows the person, especially if they know both of the people that are involved or maybe they know some information from behind the scenes. And it's not this Machiavellian I want to be able to get ahead so I can find this. It's okay, this is a dynamic that's interesting. And I had some presuppositions about it because there's an asymmetry of information. I know this much about it from what I've found publicly. I know this much about it from what I know personally, and then someone's going to add some more information in, and let's see how my biases and my assumptions about this get completely unended, and now let's see where I'm at.
Eric Jorgenson: And it seems like a mechanism for people to orient socially. It's like, hey, here's an event that happened. Do we share the same judgment of it? Are we on the same team? Can we feel good that we share an opinion about this sort of thing? Which is also interesting to kind of watch unfold.
Chris Williamson: Yeah, very much so.
Eric Jorgenson: You have a line that I really love. I think it was in the context of you kind of leaving behind an old character and forging into kind of uncharted territory as you examined your values, but it's: loneliness is a tax you have to pay for a certain uniqueness of mind.
Chris Williamson: Yeah, that's stolen from Alain de Botton.
Eric Jorgenson: Alain de Batton is fantastic.
Chris Williamson: Dude’s a freak, an absolutely freak. So, if you'd allow me, I can expand on basically that entire thing. So, it's a video called Why You are Fated to be Lonely. And the argument is that the more unique and nuanced you're thinking, the fewer people are going to be like you. And that loneliness is a tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind, that no matter how well-meaning or kind or good other people are, ultimately in the sea of life, they are stood on the shore waving cheerly while you drown in the swell. And that you are given a choice between compromising what it is that you think, and the person that you are in order to become closer toward what you think will get you acceptance, or you can continue to pursue the thing that you're genuinely interested in and to think the way that you want to think or think the way that you're programmed to think and pursue those things. And for a long time, this resonated with me massively because throughout all of my twenties, I'd compromise the things that I thought in an effort to become accepted. And then realized after a little while, hang on a second, not only has this not made me be accepted because people can tell that you're playing a role, it doesn't make you fully accepted, it also provides a buffer in between anything that you do ever and what people tell you about it and the praise that you receive for it. So, if you're playing a role, anything that people tell you that's good about the role that you played is never going to resonate on an existential level because you know that they’re just applauding a role that you played. People don't love Chris Hemsworth; they love Thor. They don't love Russel Crowe; they love Gladiator. Why? Because they're not in love with the person behind the scenes. They're in love with the person that's playing a role. And this is how you can feel alone in a crowd or hollow in victory. I've stood on the dance floor of thousands of club nights and not felt connected to the success of them because I was doing it from behind a persona. And it's only by putting yourself out there and actually being a little bit more vulnerable and a little bit more connected to the things that you do, that you can feel love as opposed to praise. You're not going to feel love for any of the things that you achieve in life, you're only going to fail praise if you're playing a persona and hiding who you truly are.
Eric Jorgenson: So, did you find that the bar for gratification was much- but it doesn't- I was going to say it is much lower when you're pursuing something that's aligned with who you really are and what you really want to do. But it's more that there is no bar, no matter how high you achieve when you're misaligned.
Chris Williamson: Precisely. And it doesn't matter about the bar when you're completely aligned because you're doing something for its sake, and you would be happy. I've always said it, I would do my show if no one listened. I did to my show when no one listened. It's the same thing. Like I've done this when we did five- there was one week in March of 2018, we did five plays in one week and I still went and did an episode the next week, and it didn't feel bad because I was interested in what was going on. So, it doesn't matter. And the same thing goes for- this is the beautiful side of do something that you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Now that was interesting. I’ve got a cool story about Tim Cook here actually. One of my friends is one of the branding guys at Apple and they had this webinar, all hands thing. Tim Cook was there and someone said something to the extent of, people say that if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. And Tim Cook said, well, here at Apple, I found that not to be the case. He said if you do something that you love, you'll work harder than you ever had in your life before, but the tools will feel light in your hands. I think fucking hell if that's not the case. You are going to find the thing that you love, find the thing that you really care about doing, and this could be the business, the project, the sport, the family, the support system, the friendship, whatever it is. Keep on searching until you find that thing or that combination of things, and then turn yourself into a husk, making it the most extreme version of that that you can. Like completely leave it all out on the field of play pursuing that. That's, I think, what everybody should be pursuing. They should be aiming to find the thing that they really, really want to do and then empty the tank on that thing. And why not? What else are you going to do with your time? Time's going to go by anyway. The time is going to pass in any case, find the thing that you want to do, and then just put your foot to the floor and don't stop. Douglas- I spent a lot of time with Douglas Murray since I've been here. And he says he has this voice in the back of his head when he's writing and the voice says you mustn’t stop, you mustn't stop, over and over again. It just reminds him that he needs to keep going. This is the thing, this is his highest point of contribution. It's what he's best at in his life. You mustn't stop. You must keep going. Why? well, because this is the thing.
Eric Jorgenson: Did you struggle to find the thing? It seems in the narrative you went from, well, I was doing the club thing and then I started a podcast and then it turned out that that was my highest contribution, and I put the hammer down. Were there dead ends? And was there a maze in between you and finding your way to the Modern Wisdom podcast?
Chris Williamson: Yeah, a little bit. I DJed a lot, I've modeled a lot. I was kind of like seeking something that was going to be fulfilling. Yeah, it was fortunate, man. It was really, really lucky that I got invited on some shows and I enjoyed it. I was like, oh, this is cool. And then I found out that I didn't totally suck at it. And then, yeah, I feel the fortune and the knife edge of just how tight it was for me to have not found something. And especially if we say that there's multiple domains that this could have been, and maybe it would have been sports commentary or sports punditry or something, maybe that would be interesting, whatever, there's not that many things I don't think that would have lit a fire underneath me as much as doing my show does. And that's scary, man. Because that means that you're not actually that far- There's not that many degrees of freedom for you to get it wrong. And you think, well, if there's not that many degrees of freedom, then it means that the chances of me not finding it and the chances of other people not finding it are pretty high. And this is why I think that there needs to be a little bit more empathy when it comes to dude, just do what you love. You know what, fucking hell, I don't know what I love. I don't know what I love. I'm trying, I'm not going out of my way to find things that I don't enjoy to do, obviously, but I just haven't been exposed to the things that I do enjoy to do. So, yeah, it's fortunate. But there is a format for this as well, explore before you exploit. Spend your twenties doing lots of different things, go to different places, travel, meet people, try and do different pursuits and see what really resonates and then go for that. That's a good solution.
Eric Jorgenson: Do you still feel any loneliness as a penalty for your uniqueness of mind?
Chris Williamson: That's a very good question. No. And I asked Jordan this question the other day, and he said no as well. And looking back, it was a stupid question because I would have answered it the way that he did. No, I don't. And I think that it's because the problem you have when you talk about loneliness as a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind, loneliness within which group? Loneliness from whom? The problem that I found was that I was in a working-class town in the Northeast of the UK, wanting to talk about all of the things that I talk about on my podcast. As soon as I get onto my podcast, I have not only a person across from me that desperately wants to talk about whatever it is I want to talk about at a far richer resolution than I can talk about it, because they're the specialist and I've just read the book, but then there's 4 million people a month that want to listen to it. And then, they'll message me about it or tag me in something on Twitter or Instagram that was their thought about it that I hadn't thought of. And I think, okay, well I've just created the world of people that think the way that I want to think. So, I think that it's just scope neglect really. Loneliness due to complexity of mind is due to you not being around the right people. I found this with alcohol, that a lot of people bond with their friends because they like to drink in the same places on the same nights of the week. And if you take the alcohol away, a lot of the time, you will find that you're not actually particularly good friends with people, they are just convenient drinking buddies. And if you can't stand to be around your friends when you don't have a drink in your hand, then you definitely need to get better friends.
Eric Jorgenson: And I think your answer means- like just because you answered no doesn't mean it's a stupid question. Like I think it's a very important question and the answer is important because you shouldn't feel like you have to be lonely because you have unique thoughts. Like there's a very huge global community, and I've heard you say, there's a Reddit thread for absolutely everything. Like loneliness is about scope and that there's a community for almost any set of thoughts that you have and that you have more than ever the ability to change your environment and go find that community or create that community and the rewards for doing that are incredible, that it will help you lessen that gap between who you might want to be or what your core values are and the character that you play on a daily basis.
Chris Williamson: Well, think about it this way. Think about the fact that maybe what you want to talk about would be really advantageous to some other people as well. And maybe if you were the first mover in this situation, maybe you would bring a bunch of other people along with you. And then maybe their lives would get better, and then maybe they would bring some people along with them as well. Imagine that.
Eric Jorgenson: I love- I mean, your whole life seems like an attack on the entire concept of a stereotype. I mean, you’ve just combined such a beautiful disparate set of like traits and opinions and outlooks and experiences. I mean, things that we entirely glazed over in this is that you played cricket at some incredibly high level, we touch barely on modeling and reality TV and club promoting and marketing. And I know you and George, like you've traveled internationally. There's just so much to you and you embrace the fact that there is no conceivable stereotype that you will fit in and you just want to reach out and pull as many unique things in.
Chris Williamson: There is a price to pay for that. There's a price to pay for not being an archetype. And this is something that I've battled with for a very long time, that most people want to be able to get you very quickly. Why is it when you watch a sitcom that the nerd wears glasses or the villain was black or the hero has muscles or the maiden has big eyes or whatever? Well, it's because within the space of five seconds, they want to be able to expedite you understanding the narrative. They want you to be able to understand exactly the role that this person plays. And I think that because partly of popular culture, partly because we're lazy thinkers, people want to see those archetypes in those around us. They want to be able to put you into a pigeonhole. And another thing is that it makes you easier to trust because I can predict what Eric's going to think or do next. If I know that Eric's the hero or whatever, I know that he's going to get up and go to the gym and come back and do whatever. Like I know what your behavior is going to be like. When somebody continues to pattern interrupt what it is that you think that they're going to do, inherent in that is, well, I'm not actually too sure if I can predict what this person is going to do. I'm not really even too sure- It's not not trust them. But it's definitely not be able to extrapolate out what I can expect from them quite so easily and definitely not understand them. There is a price to pay for breaking those stereotypes. And there is a beauty in simplicity, in predictability as well. It certainly means that it's easier for you to resonate with people. Think about the most popular kid in school, the most popular kid in school wasn't the most nuanced kid in school. He was the one that was really obvious and easy to understand. Now that's not to say that in this world of infinite connection that you can't become popular by being the nuance guy. Sam Harris is a perfect example of this. He's somebody who perpetually breaks the expectations that people have around him. You have someone who's anti-Trump, anti-woke, pro-vax, anti-Biden like with a huge public platform. He's anti against all of these things. He has cultivated a very specific position, being that guy and people seek him out because they want to have their viewpoints challenged and so on and so forth. But it's doesn't come without its costs.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, what are the form of the costs that you feel?
Chris Williamson: People don't get you. People don't understand you very easily. So until you find the right group that you're supposed to be with or until you find a way of communicating whatever non-typical person it is that you might be, and everyone's non-typical, no one is the average of the average, but until you find a way to communicate it effectively, and until you find people with whom that message is going to resonate, you're going to feel lonely because you're going to be given a choice between compromising the person that you truly are so that people will learn and understand you more or people not understanding you and you're feeling more lonely whilst sticking to the truth.
Eric Jorgenson: Finding the people who are willing to do the work to unpack and understand and accept all of the nuances.
Chris Williamson: Yeah, precisely. And that's not very common. Someone somewhere will have been born into the most eccentric family that understands how to blah, blah, but for the most part, people that just born in working class town B and working-class town, country B, it's not going to make a difference.
Eric Jorgenson: This is something that I've actually changed my mind on I think since, or at least like broke the default that I was given during my upbringing. But you're kind of taught by your parents coming up that anybody who strays off the path is taking a risk. Oh, they went to a different school. They took a gap year. They started work instead of just going straight to college. They skipped class to, I don't know, do some like pro sports thing. And in adulthood, it's much more clear to me that there's an advantage to being unique and having a wide set of experiences and a unique background. Like interestingness is much more of an advantage than performing, even performing really well, on the trodden path. And so, I think there's a huge benefit to the sort of, I don't know, this non stereotype, super unique character too. Like that's what makes you such an interesting interviewer and curious and gives you this sort of background credential to unpack all of these things. I'm sure it helps you navigate the broad world and all the different relationships that you kind of come into as well.
Chris Williamson: The reason that our parents thought that way is because things were much more scarce 30 years ago. You couldn't- What do you mean that you're going to talk to people on the internet and you're going to travel around, having a conversation with them? How's that going to work? Because there wasn't an option then, with leverage, with the way that all of the things that you talk about to do with scale are capable now, you can. And I'm going to be very interested to see what our children's generation thinks about this because we are the ones that learned one thing and experienced another. But hopefully the ones that are coming will learn one thing and experience the same, and hopefully that's going to be much more liberating. But yeah, that's a lesson that everybody needs to learn. And the price for failure now is so low, I think, the price for taking a little risk. Don't multiply by zero, don't get face tattoo, don't drive without your seatbelt on, simple things. But the price for failure of just going and trying it, I'm going to go see what it's like to do a season abroad, working in a bar. What's the worst that happens? You turn around, you come back after because it's not for you. You go on a TV show. You go, well, that was a bit weird. Well, maybe you learned something. And I think that optimizing for adventure or optimizing for insight is one of the best things that you can start to do.
Eric Jorgenson: I love that. Chris, dude, thank you so much for taking this time, teaching me. I don’t know, showing a little bit more of yourself than I've learned before and bringing some of your world-class talents. I love your podcast to death and look forward to seeing hundreds more episodes and seeing what happens as you keep unleashing and honing your talent even more.
Chris Williamson: Thank you, man. Well, look, I need to thank you as well. The work that you put in with the Almanack of Naval Ravikant, it was monstrous, absolutely monstrous. And you don't know the level of impact that that's had on people, the joy and the pleasure and the insight and the improvement and all of that stuff it has brought to people, that really is a magnum opus. And yeah, maybe it's not an original body of work, but it wasn't going to happen if you didn't do it. So, thank you as well. Thank you for bringing me on. I'm excited for whatever comes next. We've seen a couple of little bits in your newsletter about what it might be and stuff, and I'm excited for that too. So, whatever comes next from Eric Jorgenson, I’m behind it.
Eric Jorgenson: And I’m following rabidly for your next tweets, your next podcasts. It's an exciting thing to see the squad come up together.
Chris Williamson: Yeah, I think so. That's one of the coolest things, man. Everyone's got everyone else's back in this, and it's really, really cool. It's really cool. It's like, I don't know, in a really lame way, similar to what sort of a good rock scene would have been like in the seventies or the eighties, the bands that you loved listening to and that you traveled to go and watch, you see them 10 years later playing stadium gigs, and you go dude, I’m so happy for you. That's what we want. So, when we're playing stadium gigs in ten years’ time, then we'll be able to look back at this.
Eric Jorgenson: You’ve got an amazing- the British cohort of creators right now is off the charts, I mean, between Tom Osman and Jack Butcher and George Mac. And I don't even know how tight all you guys are, but it's a squad. It's amazing.
Chris Williamson: Strong genetic pool, man. The British are coming.
Eric Jorgenson: Yes. Well, the Americans aren't afraid, but we're on the same team now. And you're like a Texas podcaster. Are you full-time in Austin now? What's going on?
Chris Williamson: No, not yet. Not yet. Maybe in future, we'll have to see what happens. I’m in New York at the moment, braving the minus eight weather and back to Texas in a couple of weeks’ time.
Eric Jorgenson: Beautiful. I love it. Thank you, Chris, talk to you soon, man.
Chris Williamson: Thanks, man.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, you will also love my episode with Sky King who we mentioned a few times in our conversation. Sky was the very first guest on this podcast. He actually helped bring the podcast into existence with his immense energy and generosity. And another episode that you might like is Andrew Finn, the co-founder of G64 Ventures and Wait But Why. We touch on a lot of the same themes and wrestle with some of the same ideas that we have here. Though Andrew has a background in buying and managing small businesses, so it was a little bit of a different context but some of the same core issues, and also a very interesting, sweet and thoughtful man. My final thought to share with you today, who is your character? In what ways are you behaving in ways other than the way you feel you have to act every day? Are the actions you take aligned or not aligned with your deepest self? I think it's an interesting question and something that we could all take a glance at once in a while.