How To Embrace Your Weirdness - Chris Williamson
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Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

What I realized there was that there are particular modes of existing that we get in our early twenties, many of which are kind of the lowest common denominator limbic hijack route to success that we can find, right? Like quite a base transactional transient route to success. As you grow up a little bit more, you realize, hang on, perhaps this isn't serving me quite in as much of a holistic broad view as I want. That's what I saw with fitness.

What I think you see with specifically guys, maybe with girls as well, the manopause is someone realizing that as you get toward the end of your 20s, the values that you had when you were younger aren't serving you. Hello and welcome to Deep Dive, the podcast that delves into the minds of entrepreneurs, creators, and other inspiring people to uncover their journeys towards finding joy and fulfillment at work and in life.

My name is Ali and in each episode I chat to my guests about the philosophies, strategies and tools that have helped them along the path to living a life of happiness and meaning. In this week's episode of Deep Dive, I sit down for a chat with my friend Chris Williamson. Chris is a club promoter, TEDx speaker, YouTuber and

podcaster. His podcast, Modern Wisdom, shares life lessons from the smartest people on the planet, including the likes of Jordan Peterson, Ryan Holiday and James Clear, and was born out of Chris's curiosity for self-discovery and after his existential crisis after appearing on the TV show Love Island. While I was on Love Island, I got to observe people that were that person, the pinnacle party boy, right? Because I was playing this role. I thought I was, but it kind of turned out that I wasn't really. And I

I had this fatal dose of contrast as I lived in a villa with no distractions for four weeks watching these people.

Chris, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? My pleasure, man. Thanks for having me. So we've

spoken a few times. I think I was on your podcast maybe a year or two ago, so a year ago, maybe I think. Yeah. And then we kind of kept in touch ever since. But one thing I didn't realize when we were doing research for this, I just did not know anything about your former life as a professional party boy. Yeah. And I saw that that's that's like the third thing on your Twitter. You've got YouTuber, podcaster and former professional party boy. Yeah. And I feel like you and I have a few things in common on the YouTuber and podcaster front. But I know literally nothing about the world of a professional lad. OK. And I wonder if you can like

Are you not a professional lad, Ali? I could have sworn. I wanted to be a professional lad, which is why I ended up making YouTube videos about productivity, but it kind of took me in a different direction. What was your life growing up and what was the kind of professional party boy stuff that you used to do back in the day, like pre-2015?

Cool. So I'm a club promoter by trade. I still own one of the biggest events companies in the UK called Voodoo Events. I've run about a thousand nightclubs events in my entire life. I've seen a million people go in and out of them. So I've met about a million people in my life, stood on the front door of nightclubs between 10:00 PM and three in the morning, which is a fascinating insight into human nature because when people are, their inhibitions have gone and they've had a little bit to drink, it's a pretty interesting Petri dish for things to occur. And

And that happened at uni. So I was skint at uni. I started flyering and I was like the best flyer. Then I was the best halls flyer. Then I was the best junior event manager. And I picked up a franchise when I was 19. That was called Carnage, which was a t-shirt bar crawl. Anyone who's probably 30 or older will remember it. You wore a t-shirt and you ticked off tasks on the back as you went around different bars. So we did really well with that. And then I started doing weekly club nights and then you pick up more club nights and then you get managers and then you get guest listers.

And now we have a bar in Leeds, six nights a week in Leeds, four nights a week in Newcastle. We've got over a thousand staff. We have a shots company that do shot girls and... Sorry, what?

So shot girls, girls who go around and say... What are shot girls? So they sell shots. Okay. So you want a Jägerbomb, but you can't be bothered to go to the bar. Good looking girls go around and sell shots to people that can't be asked to leave the dance floor. They charge a little bit of a premium. We take the premium and pay the girls a little bit of a cut. So we have a bunch of different sort of nightlife related businesses. And that was the formative years, man. That was until 2008.

2017, 2018. That was the bulk of what I did. So, okay. So I think, I think this is an interesting kind of divergent sort of divergence about paths. Cause when I was at uni and I was like, I need to make money. I decided to make websites. Whereas when you were at uni and you needed to make money, you decided to. So,

So how does that work? Do you just like give flyers to students and like how do you make money off of that? You must have gone out while you were at uni. Twice. Twice? Yes. In all of my uni, yeah. You are precisely the sort of student that I hate. You are precisely the sort of one, no, I need someone who is desperately lonely and wants to go out on a night out three or four nights a week with their friends. Got it.

It's a very interesting way to look at marketing because what you're playing off the back of is mimetic desire, status and cool. What makes something cool is really, really difficult to define. So what we try and do as event promoters is we create brands

for instance, Wiki Women Ibiza is this sort of pastel and pink flamingos, very girly sort of girl power, but it's a bit retro and chic as well. So we came up with Paradiso, which is this flamingo neon sign. And that was a Friday that we launched. It's all girly. Girls get pink shots and there's different types of music and stuff. And we've dressed the venue in pink. Okay. That creates a image to the market. Yeah. We put.

DJ's on the other right, we price it correctly, we deal with a venue that's the appropriate location for this.

And then people hopefully come. And then once you've got them, you network to them, you get networkers, guest listers that go and say, hey, you coming out tonight? They build up their networks. They make a commission on the people that come in. It's a pretty sophisticated... When you look at a nightclub and you go, oh, it's just people getting drunk in a room to music. It's like a whole operation. There's a lot going on behind the scenes. Okay. And so were you one of the kind of networkers? Originally, yes. Okay. So you would kind of make friends with...

Because like on my college's Facebook page, there would be a guy, his name was Sam Mellor, I think. And people used to call him Spam Mellor because he would just go around like spamming people being like, hey, are you coming out tonight? He's one of mine. So he would be one of mine.

He would be one of the little agents that we send out into the world. But yeah, I mean, the guys make good money and they have a sense of belonging and they can move their way up. So, I mean, we've got full-time members of staff now. We've got guys that do placement years that have come and done graduate stuff with us. And,

And yeah, it's fun, man. It's really good fun. - So what were you like in school to end up as that being your side hustle rather than me ending up as website design being my side hustle? - I was probably a lot more like you in school than you think. - Really? - Oh yeah. - I'm imagining you were a professional lad in school and all the football teams, all the girls interested, that kind of vibe. - No, no, no, no, no. Very much a late bloomer. So school was, I played cricket at quite a high level for a long time throughout pretty much all of school.

I went to a state school, state primary, state Stockton sixth form college. Stockton being a town that was only famous for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK and it recently lost that so it's not even the best at that anymore. And yeah very much an unpopular kid in school, like wildly unpopular. Okay. Really on the outside looking in, didn't really fit into any particular groups. Hey that was not like me for the record. Okay, okay.

And then I think that one of the advantages it gave me was when I came to be a club promoter, when you're on the outside looking in, you can see how groups coalesce. And it means that you can actually look at what it is that they want from different things and you can observe group dynamics for markets in slightly different ways. So what we're manipulating as club promoters is...

Group dynamics, cool trends, how to bring people together. Okay. And I think it's far easier to do that from the outside than from the inside. If you look at most top, top level club promoters, guys that are of my level, they are...

Not people directly in the middle of the popularity group. They're ones that are slightly actually on the outside Because I think it gives them a bit more perspective Okay, so as a club promoter you figure out like who the cool kids are you get them to come to your nightclub? You get them to build hype around it the cool kids are going to parody So therefore they're slightly less cool kids are like we want to be like the cool kids are going to parody precisely You could be a good promoter Okay

So you started off doing this as a side hustle. How did things like escalate beyond that point to where you are now? So we just launched a Saturday night in Newcastle that was very, very successful. We timed it correctly with the market and that became one of the biggest events in the country. It was just as Geordie Shore had started. So the first ever episode of Geordie Shore, season one, episode one, they're in Voodoo, which was our Saturday night. And we ran that for six or seven years, probably did...

quarter of a million people through that one event in that time maybe even more and that gave us a foundation that we could build on top of we could recruit managers we learned our processes so we very much structured and made a procedure out of club promo as best we could to try and have a formula for how you release an event how you do pre-build up to things and yeah that informs a lot of the things that I do now so to give you an example I

Whenever I release anything to do with my podcast or a new lead magnet or courses that I do, I take huge advantage of long lead times and teaser campaigns because that is my club promotion heritage showing through. I know for a fact that if we

we are teleological beings, right? We look forward to something occurring and we actually enjoy the anticipation often a lot more than we enjoy the event itself. So by having, I'm releasing a new lead magnet in seven days time, it's the modern wisdom reading list.

Here's a countdown timer on Instagram. Here's some teaser pages of it coming out. This is why people have asked me to do it. This is what it's going to look like, but you can't get it yet. This is what it's going to be like. And it's just different things. Maybe I'll talk about it on the podcast. Maybe I'll bring it up on Instagram. Maybe I'll release a little bit on Twitter. And then on that day, you get, I think that you end up with a,

overclocked amount of demand and interest because people have just been like waiting in the wings for it. We do the same thing with Club Nights, release a teaser video for the teaser video, then release a teaser video, then we do a countdown, then we finally get the event out and you turn up outside and there's 2,000 people because they're just curious about what's going on here, why is this happening? So yeah, long drawn out teaser campaigns is a great hack. Interesting.

So when you say we put on like a club night, like what does the structure of this organization look like? Cool. So myself and my business partner, Darren. There's two partners that are the parent company that work with us in Leeds, Matt and Dave. Below us, we have about 12...

Below them, there are about four or five trainees slash junior managers. And below them, there's about 500 guest list staff. So each manager has a team. And they, similar to a sales team, they recruit them, they find them. So they'll be on a night out and they'll see some girl that's really hot or some guy that's really cool or some girl that's got chat or whatever it might be. They'll say, hey, why are you in our event? You should be working for us. And then you get in for free and you get to drink for free and you get to earn money. Do

Do you want to come work for us? They usually, sometimes they say yes, they bring them on board and then that person starts bringing their friends down. Guest lister makes commission from their friends attending. Manager makes commission from all of their team's commissions. And then we take the door entry money over the top. We're going to take a very quick break to introduce our sponsor, Brilliant. Brilliant is a fantastic

online platform for learning maths, science and computer science with interactive and engaging courses that I've been using for many years. But to be honest, I wish I'd had the lessons in maths to hand when I was preparing for my BMAT when applying to medical school. A lot of the time when we're taught maths at school, the focus is on empty memorization of formulas that we can apply in our exams.

But the great thing about Brilliant is their courses teach you how to actually understand concepts from a first principles approach and develop the intuition to solve problems. Also, their computer science series is absolutely sick. They've got some fantastic courses on algorithms, on learning to program with Python. They've got a whole series about cryptocurrency and understanding exactly how things like Bitcoin work from the ground up, which is genuinely fascinating. So if you want to give their lessons in maths a try or even science or computer science,

then head over to brilliant.org forward slash deep dive and the first 200 people to sign up via that link will get 20% off the annual subscription to the website. So thank you so much Brilliant for sponsoring this episode. So you're managing a pretty large team. Yeah, it's huge.

While distributed. Distributed as in? You've got everybody is accountable to someone and no one's team is actually that massive. So the largest single amount of responsibility that any one person will have will probably be about 30 to 40 people. And that would be one of the managers looking after a big team of guest listers. But they don't need managing every day. It's just, are you coming out tonight? Have you sent your guest list in? You did shit last week. You did well last week. You won an award. Here's a bottle of vodka, whatever. Nice.

Like if you're this sort of professional networker, professional party boy, do you form like real friendships through that? Or like how does the social dynamics for your personal life work? Do you end up with transactional friendships from doing this? Yeah, absolutely. But you know the ones that are. And people know why you're there as well. You transcend the friendships, especially with the people that you work with. So we have a voodoo old boys group, which is the guys that have graduated and moved on. Some of them are being...

people out in China now or some of them are running stuff in London or Manchester and we all keep together and we bond really, really closely. So my business partner's wedding, 50% plus of the people that were there were people from nightlife. Mostly they were the ones that we'd worked with. There is very much a them and us type, kind of like a,

What's it called in con artistry? Is it like a mark and a con or something? There's the marks that are the people that are going out. And sometimes you make good friends with those. But for the most part, you bond with the people that you work with. But those friendships, you know, you're going through really intense experiences together. If you'd stand on the door of an event and run 2,000 people trying to fit in on Halloween. So we've got Halloween coming up. 2,000 people trying to get into a venue and it will be chaos. And people are drunk. People are throwing up. People are having fights. There's

Someone spilled something on the floor. Some girl's fallen over and twisted her ankle. We need to get the whatever whatever

It's a really strong bonding experience with some people. So you end up with a small tight-knit group of friends and then a very, very sort of disparate group of acquaintances. Interesting. So I guess it's sort of like how as a YouTuber, you're not really friends with the audience. You're friends with other YouTubers. Precisely. Precisely correct. And there is this kind of parasocial relationship between the audience and the YouTuber. Exactly the same. Both parties know it's somewhat transactional. But we both know what this is. Yes. Okay.

That's interesting. Okay. So you spent three years at uni?

Five. Five years, Ian? I did bachelor's with a year in industry which was doing club promo for ourselves. We wrote ourselves a recommendation letter and got awarded placement students of the year off our own letter. Then went to do my master's in international marketing. The reason I did that was because I was told that it would be the easiest master's to do because it was mostly my bachelor's just bundled into another year. I paid for that in cash.

So I went and paid 8,100 pounds in cash. - Oh, wow. - Because I'd saved up this money from running club nights and then paid cash to the ladies. And they said, "Oh, the safe's only rated for 500 pounds." I was like, "Well, the bank's still open. "I'm not taking it back, you've got it." So that felt quite nice. I was able to self-fund my own masters from running events. That was really, really satisfying to me. And then, yeah, five years at uni,

Take Me Out, Love Island, YouTube. Yeah, okay, hang on. So Take Me Out was your first foray into TV. Yeah. How did that happen? And what is Take Me Out for the uninitiated? It's a modern day version of Blind Date. It's a very fluffy dating show here in the UK.

Guy walks out on stage. There are 20 girls sat behind or stood behind podiums and they can keep their light on, which is I'm interested, or they can turn their light off, which is he's not for me. And you go through different rounds where you expose different pieces of information about yourself. So there'll be a VT about your life. There'll be an explanation of what you do for work. They'll maybe interview one of your friends and whatever's left at the end, whoever, whatever

has their lights on, the guy then has the power to choose who he wants to go on a date with. You're then flown off on holiday for a day with the girl and you spend a day dating her. That's all televised as well. And then you decide whether or not you want to keep in touch or not. And then you go home. So it's actually quite, the filming thing is quite condensed. But that was fun. And I'm a male model. I've been alongside Club Promo and

doing YouTube. I've been a model since pretty much I was 18. Okay. And I DJed as well. So it was just anything that was kind of like, it was the archetypal fuck boy life. Anything that made me look like a fuck boy and would earn me easy cash. That was for me. So you decide to do the male model thing and then the take me out thing comes about. Yep. What,

If, for example, I got an email saying, do you want to be on Take Me Out? Actually, I have. A couple of years ago, I got some person messaged me on Instagram saying, hey, I'm a producer for ITV something, something, something, probably one of the legions of them. Would you be interested in coming on Take Me Out, like a sort of doctor special edition? And I was like, hell no, obviously not. Because it's a good question. Why? Because it seems like cringe and scary and like... I think you do amazingly well.

I think you do phenomenally well on Take Me Out, especially as someone, you have to imagine how little time most people have spent in front of a lens and how poorly most people deal with the pressure of being on camera, which is something that you literally do for a living. If you came down the stairs and you understood your positioning, like you know who you are, you know what your offer to the market is overall, and you just leaned into that a little bit and were like, hey guys, I'm Ali. I came first in Cambridge, this, this, and this thing.

I'm a tech reviewer, I do this, that and the other. And actually on the side, I can play guitar and you pull the guitar out and you start doing that or you did your freestyle rap. Dude, you've nailed it. I promise you that's gold. That is absolute money.

Okay, but just as you're describing it, even the thought of that is filling me with this sort of like dread, like, you know, I'm kind of sweating. I'm kind of thinking that I don't want to be that guy. I think it's a fear of what other people will think, people who I know and people at large will think of me because they'll be like, oh my God, what the hell is this?

Did you have any of that when you went on it? Were you just like, screw it? I'm going to go and take me out. That's a good point. When you do take me out specifically, that's in front of a 400 person live audience, which is really, really scary. It doesn't matter that it goes out to about 4 million people on TV. You don't think about them, but the 400 people in the audience, that's pretty scary. And also when you come down, it's called the love lift. When you come down the love lift,

That is the most rickety piece of shit that has ever been created. The fact that that's got past health and safety blows my mind. So you're stood on this terrifying contraption as it slowly lowers you to the floor to be judged by a group of 20 girls and watched by a group of 400 people while Paddy McGinnis is next to you. For people that don't know, Paddy McGinnis is like a ex-TV guy that now does...

Top Gear, doesn't he? Does he? No idea. Probably. It seems like he does. I know him because he's a person in Articulate, the board game, and I never know who he is. It's like Paddy. I love how that's your reference into popular culture. First name something power, that betting company, and then the next one is some kind of alcohol. They're like, oh, Paddy McGinnis. Wow. That would be how I'd describe it. Anyway, so how did you get over that severe...

I imagine anyone, 99.99% of people listening to this, if they imagine themselves on a reality TV show where they're being judged by 20 girls and broadcast to 4 million people at a 400 person live audience would think never in a million years am I doing that. How, like what was different about you, your mindset, your approach that made you be like, you know what?

This is legit. This lesson isn't as satisfying as it should be, but it happens so much. You just end up doing it. Once you're stood at the top of the lift and you arrive at the bottom, your feet end up walking forward and you go. But at that point you will. But like the point where it's like you have to sign up for this thing and you're kind of visualizing, you're imagining. I probably just didn't think about it enough. I didn't think about the fact that I was going to be in front of. Honestly, dude, I think that one of the underrated productivity tools or life tools that far few people use than should do is YOLO.

Just the fact that you can, I'm just going to try this and see what happens and just jump feet first and learn to fly on the way down. I've been asked to go on this TV show. Am I going to be any good? Am I going to totally blow it? YOLO. And then you just do it. Like that is, it's such an effective route for living a varied life because you'll probably be fine. You'll almost definitely be fine. Yeah.

So just have faith that the future version of you will sort it out. And sure enough, that happens. So yeah, it's a bit nerve wracking before you're going to go on and you think, oh, should I do? I was 24. I didn't know anything about breathing techniques. I wasn't meditating. I wasn't doing cold plunges to try and control my parasympathetic balance. I just thought I'll have a Corona and hope for the best. So I had a beer backstage. And then before you know it, you're stood in front of girls and you're talking and you're saying things and you realize, wow, I didn't totally blow it. It was just normal. And, and,

I survived and didn't turn into a puddle of anxiety on the floor. And then you go, oh, that's fine. Maybe I can do something else like that. You know, it's either a good time or a good story. Correct. Correct. Occasionally both. So that was the take-me-out career. At this point, you're 24. What was happening next in your life? And where did Love Island come into things? So that was just pure party boy mode trying to build up the events business,

So at this point, did you start your own events business? This was, we'd started that when we were 22. Okay. So three, four years into uni, you were like, you know what, let's do this thing ourselves. Properly ourselves. Okay. And you started your business with your business partner. Correct. Yeah. So we'd done a little bit of work for other events companies previous to that and dotted around, but it always been me and my business partner. I sat next to him on my first ever seminar and we're still together 15 years later. So I haven't got rid of each other. And yeah,

That has always been the single consistent throughout, which is, again, trying to give some takeaways beyond YOLO for this podcast. Finding someone that you trust absolutely 100% implicit total trust is such a competitive advantage. I get...

Far far more than the 50% of the money that we make that he takes from our split from him because I just we know each other inside out and and finding a business partner that's like that it really makes the solo entrepreneurs Even more impressive to me because I think God like for you to be able to be that person all of those decisions There's no way that I would have been able to do that with our business. So I

We're running our events. I'm DJing a couple of nights per week. I've done the Take Me Out thing, which was just YOLO and Clout. And we start launching other events. We pick up more and more networks so that we can branch out. We start to bring in some more managers.

We learned to relinquish control, which is something that every young businessman struggles with. You've got this baby that you've built. You understand exactly how it's supposed to work. I know exactly where the inflatable is supposed to go, which railing it's supposed to be tied around and what the sort of knot is that's supposed to be used for it, where the cable ties go to put the banners on the barriers that go outside to control the queue. No, no, no, no. The cable tie is supposed to go on that rung, not that rung because there's a little bit of a crease. You know it inside out. Yeah.

And then you need to learn, okay, if I want to scale this business, I need to relinquish this control. And that's very difficult. And we did that more slowly than was optimal. Okay. I held on to control for longer than I should have done. And...

But over time, we got used to it. We started to bring in more and more guys that we trusted that could come in underneath us. We started to outsource more and more of that workload. Picked up more nights, more events, more entries per night, more staff, more managers to manage the staff. And you just slowly build and build and build over time. How did you kind of...

How did you learn to relinquish control? Was there like a book? Was there like a pivotal moment? So at this period, man, I'm a really good avatar for the bro businessman. Okay. Up until about four years ago. And sometimes I think that with the podcasts that I do, Modern Wisdom, there's not...

It doesn't speak to the person that I used to be quite so much because I wasn't reading books. I wasn't bothered about personal development. I was bothered about effectiveness in business and I was happy to develop my own business strategies, but I was quite just in the moment doing my thing. And there wasn't this sort of metacognizant step back to look at it. And yeah, that's a strategy. Yeah.

So Jordan Peterson was on the show and he talked about this, about the ability to step back and look at yourself. I can give you the link to put in the show notes if you want. But the ability to step back and look at it is something that I only developed far later in life. And when you're in it, the thinking I am going to let go of this baby, which is mine, it feels like someone's pulling something out of you, like pulling a child away from you. And it's incredibly difficult.

But what we realized was if we want to scale and grow the business, I have to learn to do this. Had I have read Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited, that would have been fine. But I didn't. I didn't even know that existed. And even if I had known that it had existed, I would have probably been eating Domino's and drinking Budweiser. So I probably wouldn't have been able to focus. So I wasn't in the right place to receive the message, even if I'd seen it.

The other thing, so two things, right? The businessman, young businessmen and women really, really need to remember. The first one is you can relinquish far more control of your business than you think. The second one is you can raise your price far more than you think. Almost everyone is undercharging for their product. Almost everybody is doing that because they err on the side of terror.

imposter syndrome comes through in the way that you market yourself and you put your products out there, you don't think that they're worth as much as they are because you want to have demand as opposed to profit sometimes. That's until you can have the equanimity to see it from a bit more perspective, right? Yeah.

But I was just so terrified of doing it. So yeah, you can outsource far more of the work that you're doing than you think because you're holding onto it too much and you can raise the price far more than you think because you're terrified of people not buying your product. - I have a lot of conversations with people about those two exact points when it comes to the outsourcing thing, when it comes to you're usually creators or kind of

creative businesses where they were the technician, they were doing everything by themselves. And then the thought of outsourcing editing, oh my God, no one can edit like I can. I have my unique style of editing. Therefore kind of the fear of outsourcing it. But every single person I've spoken to who has managed to outsource editing says, oh my God, I freed up 30 hours of my life every single week to be able to make more content or do the things I want to do or spend more time with my friends and family rather than sit on Final Cut. Yes. Cutting out pauses and ums and ahs and adding B-roll here and there.

And on the pricing thing as well, I really had this fear when we first launched our YouTuber Academy. And initially it was going to be like a $200 product, self-paced. I was like, all right, I'm not going to suffer the risk of a single person saying this is not worth it or that I'm selling snake oil. Therefore, I'm going to overload them with value and charge very, very low, basically no money for it. And it was speaking to a few of our mutual friends, Tiago Forte and David Perel, who talked me into not having this fear of selling and recognizing

recognizing that actually you can raise the prices, you can do it as a more high touch thing and that provides a specific service to people. It doesn't target everyone. It's not going to target the bulk of your audience, but that's okay. And just that feeling of like, oh shit, what are people going to think when I start charging real money for something? Really scary. Serious. So you're finishing uni, you're building up this business, scaling. What was the motivation there?

Was it a kind of money thing, a status thing, a prestige thing? Why trying to scale business? Yeah, good question. So I think for a long time I found my sense of self-worth in success in business. This was probably not having tons of success socially when I was younger and me wanting to prove to the world that I'm worth something, that I can have people need me, that I have monetary success, that I have accolade, that I have renown, prestige.

that I'm sleeping with the right girls, that I'm spending time with the right friends, that I'm standing on the door of the correct clubs. These were the things that were making me feel like I was worth something in the real world. And that was, I mean, don't get me wrong, it's pretty satisfying. It's pretty good at satisfying you on a surface level. And it can go for a fair while. And I rode that until the wheels came off. But then I did Love Island. And that was when I was 28.

And the same casting director that worked on Take Me Out also worked on Love Island. Did exactly the same thing. Hey, man, I need someone for this new show. Can you come and just screen test for me? Yeah, sure, I will. And before I knew it, I was in a pair of swim shorts in the back of a Jeep about to go into a bill. That's literally how it worked. Hey, man, can you come and screen test in Newcastle? I just want to ask you some questions. Yeah, whatever, mate. Like, we became friends. I'll do that. And then I had the most...

thorough sexual health and psychometric evaluation that you've ever seen in your life in Harley Street somewhere in London and then literally before I knew it as I am. Okay, so what is Love Island for the uninitiated? It is kind of like a cross between Big Brother and The Bachelor. The Bachelor in Paradise if you watch the American version. It's a dating show, people get thrown into a villa and there is usually about 14 to 20 guys and girls at 10

between 10 and 7 of each and you have half the number of beds that you do people so everyone has to couple up you couple up with a partner and then you swap and then there's eliminations and there's tasks and it's all about people that are trying to find love supposedly and every so often there's eliminations and you get to the end and then there is a prize for the people that win of 50 000 pounds or something like that and i did i was the first person through the doors of season one so the first ever person through on this particular iteration of the

of the series and that was just another YOLO. It's like, right, this will get me clout, this will get me accolade. Clout as in? Clout, renown, status. And I thought, it'll be fun, free holiday. Okay. Good tan. Yeah. Why not? Why not do it? Yeah. So I did. So these days, Love Island is like ridiculously huge. Yeah. At least in the UK. I don't know about internationally, but...

The people who are on Love Island then, and the 50,000 is nothing compared to the millions of followers they'll get on Instagram overnight. Endless, endless. You don't need to work for probably five to 10 years after you've been on if you're on for a couple of weeks. So what was it like back in the day, kind of season one? What was that experience like? And they were focusing, the first season they focused on Snapchat a lot, whereas now it's all Instagram, which was great because it means you can monetize your Instagram off the back of it.

we didn't know if it was going to be like Geordie Shore X on the beach where you were going to be getting drunk every night and going on nights out or if it was going to be like Big Brother and there was going to be tasks and you were going to have food taken away from you and your sleep pattern was going to be it ended up being quite fluffy but we didn't know that I also didn't know that you could have someone manage your social media while you were inside so I just had my Instagram locked off so people could follow me or whatever but so anyway uh very different don't

Don't get as much attention as you do now. Now, if you're on for as long as I was, you would come out with probably one or two million followers. And if you can correctly monetize that, you're sorted. It blows my mind. Here's the thing. For the people that may have been on Love Island that are watching, that were on season two to three or after, and were on for more than a couple of weeks, if you haven't built a business off the back of that and you wanted to, that's a you problem. You had...

what every marketer, every internet marketer desires, which is free clicks for a long time and a huge amount of edge rank.

And just didn't monetize it. But for us, I think the person that won came off with 100,000 followers on Instagram, which now, even if your name gets mentioned, even if someone says, oh, did you watch that Ali Abdaal on YouTube? That's 100,000 followers there. So yeah, it was smaller in terms of viewership, smaller in terms of footprint digitally. But it was a really interesting experience. Yeah. What was the experience like? It was...

It's actually quite boring, to be honest, because all that you're allowed to talk about is stuff that's happened in the villa. So you can't actually talk about that mutual friend you've both got that's outside or that place that you both like to go to to run or to go for coffee or for almond croissants or whatever. You can't talk about that. And they will come over the PA and say, Islanders, can you please stop talking about the outside world? Because they can't publish that content. Because...

Who that's watching the show gives a shit about the fact that me and you both like almond croissants. No one cares. What they care about is the fact that me and you are fighting over Katie and she totally mugged you off last night, bruv. Like, that's what they're bothered about. So that's what they try and push. They're constantly asking you to create content. And that's fine. They don't finesse or finagle the storylines too much. They try and catalyze them a little bit. But they don't really...

impose themselves in terms of what's happening. But it's pretty boring. You've got no friends, no phone, no family, no contact with the outside world, nothing to distract you, no books, no nothing. It's just you and some people that are trying to have sex with each other, constantly talking about who's having sex with who. That's it. That's what the show is. And it was kind of, I guess it was an interesting thing to watch, but this was the pinnacle of me getting toward the end of my 20s.

And the guys that are listening may feel this as well. It's what I call the Mano pause. Oh, okay. What is that?

Toward the end of your 20s, if you've grown up living quite a bro-y life, what I think a lot of guys find is that the values that served them when they were in their early 20s, maybe 21, are not going to serve them when they're 31. And they realize this quite profoundly sometimes. So you see this, I first noticed it with training. So guys would do bodybuilding style training because it's the lowest barrier to entry. It gives them confidence, it makes them bigger and more muscular and it makes them feel attractive.

But as they get towards 28, 29, they realize that they get out of breath going up a set of stairs and that they can't touch their toes and they haven't really been that functional. And maybe they get back into playing football with some mates and they realize that they've just got no cardio and they're not very functional. So then you see guys that are toward the end of their 20s, they'll go and do CrossFit or they'll go do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or fighting or yoga. Or girls might go back and do dance that they haven't done since they were a kid. They might start doing ballet again or go and do those exercises.

Pilates classes, group Pilates classes, spinning. What I realized there was that there are particular modes of existing that we get in our early twenties, many of which are kind of the lowest common denominator limbic hijack route to success that we can find, right? Like quite a base transactional transient route to success. I want a training methodology that's going to make me look good. I will do the one that makes me look the most good. But does it fulfill you and make you feel good? I don't care if it makes me feel good. I just want to look nice. Okay.

As you grow up a little bit more, you realize, hang on, perhaps this isn't serving me quite in as much of a holistic broad view as I want. That's what I saw with fitness. What I think you see with specifically guys, maybe with girls as well, the manopause is someone realizing that as you get toward the end of your 20s, the values that you had when you were younger aren't serving you. So me realizing that the girls that I was sleeping with or the money that I was making or the club nights that I was running

Is that really the highest calling that I have for myself? Is the fact that I've been on a reality TV show going to be my crowning achievement? Is this what I'm bringing to the world? Oh, well, you know, the world was pretty bad before he came, but after he left, at least he went on a lot of reality TV shows. Like, come on. So while I was on Love Island, I got to observe people that were that person, the pinnacle party boy, right? Because I was playing this role. I thought I was, but it kind of turned out that I wasn't really that.

And I had this fatal dose of contrast as I lived in a villa with no distractions for four weeks watching these people and being with them, but really still feeling on the outside. So I was like, right, there is a problem here. I thought I was this. I thought I was this party going, fun loving, extroverted, big name on campus, big dick around town guy. And I'm not. There's something up here. So after that was when I thought, right, I really need to do some self-inquiry and kind of work out

Who am I? What are my values? Why am I here? Now, I feel like because of the proliferation of podcasts and self-development and personal growth, YouTube and stuff like that, people are getting exposed to these sorts of messages at a much younger age. But it took me until I was 27 for me to actually really think, probably need to work out like who I am and that.

And then got to coming out of Love Island and the final night came out after about a month, looked up at the sky in the south coast of Majorca, which is one of the astronomy spots of the world, low light pollution, high visibility.

no moon, and I saw the full Milky Way for the first time. And that was quite a profound experience because I'd been in this really intense emotional thing and I hadn't seen anyone or spoken to anyone. Stepped outside, first night on my own without cameras on me for a month, looked up at the sky and saw the Milky Way. And I'd had this weird sort of existential discordant thing going on where I thought, who am I? I'm not this person. Looked up, I thought, fuck, right, okay. I just need to do some self-work here. So that was kind of the...

kick toward my manopause. So what happened then? I did some self-work, spent a lot of time just crushing amounts of content, School of Life by Alain de Botton, Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson. This was when all of these people were coming to the front and didn't really know what I was looking for, but just thought if I watch enough of it, something will come out of it. And it kind of did. And then a year and a half later, I'd been asked on a bunch of different podcasts because people had said, oh,

you've been on this reality TV thing. Can we ask you about that? And I was like, oh yeah, what's a podcast? Cool, I'll come and do that. Really enjoyed the process. Enjoyed it so much that I realized I want to do this more. The best way for me to do it as much as I want to is to start my own. So I started my own and that was start of 2018. In that one year gap between being on Love Island and sort of when you were consuming all this content and stuff, what were the learnings from that? Tell the truth was the first one, the most important one.

I'd spent a very long time playing a persona on the front door of this nightclub, right? Well, a lot of nightclubs. In Manchester and in Newcastle, working about a thousand nights and being Chris, the club promoter, being the guy that sorts them out with guest list and he shagged my mate and blah, blah, blah. Being that guy. And...

What I realized was that that was a role that I was playing. That wasn't a genuine representation of the person that I was. I was being the person that I thought other people wanted me to be because it was effective. And it was. I was world-class at playing Chris Williamson on the front door of a nightclub, like literally Oscar-winning performance. But it wasn't me. That wasn't the person that I genuinely was.

So I needed to unearth and sort of scrape away all of the different personas that I had that were lying over the top of the person that I genuinely was. And that involved turning over tons and tons of different stones and looking at what was underneath and going, okay, here's a belief that I have about the world. Here's something that I think, is this true?

And I'd spent so long lying to myself and to other people about what I genuinely wanted and what my values were. Yeah, mate, mint tonight, mate. Yeah, there's loads of birds in there, mate. Yeah, see you later on, mate. Like all of that for a decade.

When that wasn't really my logos speaking forward, right? That wasn't my truth coming out of me. That was me just doing something. I needed to get past all of that. So I'm doing this archaeology thing going like, right, am I going to hit something that's solid as I try to unearth all of the different behaviors and the thinking patterns and the beliefs that I've got? And that eventually I got to

something that felt a little bit more stable, which was intellectual curiosity, a desire to learn and improve myself, a desire to sort of connect with people around me, a genuine desire to be open and vulnerable, and to show other people that being open and vulnerable and truthful is something that can help them and makes them feel good. But it took over a year, it took 18 months for me to even start to really glimpse that. - What sort of questions were you asking yourself? Like, what do you mean by, like, what does this unearthing process look like in practice?

A lot of it was just thinking about how do I spend my time? Does that, is that the way that I want to spend my time? Does that serve the person that I want to be? So I wake up at different times every day. Is that the sort of, does the Chris that I want to become wake up at different times every day? Okay. I pay, I take a high amount of self-worth from the amount of people that go into my club night. Should I be paying?

hinging my self-worth on what the market does. Probably not, that's probably a bad idea. But it took me a long time. It sounds so dumb looking back and going like, "Oh, obviously mate." You and the performance of your event and business are not the same thing. It is not you and its success or failure does not make any sort of change to your worth as a person.

But that's the world that I create for myself. That's a hard realization. I remember when I was in school where I was equating my personal self-worth to how well I did in exams and then at university to how well my business did. And then even now, well, I had a whole like five hours of soul searching, typing, journaling on Apple Notes four days ago where I was like, oh my God, I take too much self-worth away from how well my videos do. Like I think this...

I love how kind of open you're being about this, but I think this journey of like dissociating our self-worth from these other random bullshitty external metrics, it's not an easy one. And I think it's a lifelong journey for all of us. Here's a question for you, man. Do you think that people love you for what you do or for who you are? I've been... So over the last few months, I really thought it was for what I do, especially when it came to friendship and stuff. I thought that I just didn't quite...

I thought it was the things that I was doing that were the reasons why people wanted to be friends with me. And it was surprising when I mentioned this to a few friends and they were like, no, you actually don't need to do any... Because if I think about...

the people I'm friends with, I'm not friends with them for what they do. I'm friends with them for who they are. And it took other people pointing out to me that, well, that's how other people feel about you for me to think, oh my God. And that was quite like a profound realization for me and made me realize that I can just sort of be myself. But before I'd been like, oh, be yourself. It's all just BS because like choose yourself and all that kind of stuff. I got another question. Yeah. Do you love yourself for who you are or for what you do? Oh, good question. I think I love myself for what I do. Yeah. So here's the problem, right? Yeah.

We want the world to love us for who we are, not for what we do. We don't want people to love our achievements. We want to feel like we're worth something ourselves. However, we love ourselves for what we do, not who we are. So we're asking the world to do something that we don't do ourselves. I want you to love me for who I am, not what I do. Meanwhile, I'm gonna love myself for what I do, not who I am. Because I feel like when I achieved something that I feel like I'm worth something more to myself. When I hit that next subscriber count, when I get that...

gold plaque, diamond plaque when I hit a new best number of plays, when I get more people on my academy, when I put more people into my club night, when I sleep with a more popular girl, when I hit a new number of followers on Instagram. All of these different metrics are things that are hiding the fact that we don't want to give ourselves self-love for what it is that we, who we genuinely are. What do you mean by love yourself? Feel comfortable and feel like you are sufficient, independent of how you perform day to day in the world.

The fact that you stripped of all of your achievements, YouTube channels gone, podcasts gone, degrees are gone, all of that stuff. Are you isolated and stripped bare still worth something to the world? And do you feel like people would still love you and still care about you? That's a good question.

It's a difficult one. It's a very difficult one. So I got that realization from Aubrey Marcus. Anyone that's resonating with this, I'll give you the link for this episode with Aubrey. He's just sold Onnit to Unilever for a huge undisclosed number, like hundreds of millions of dollars, right? The link will be in the show notes below. He said he'd bolstered his entire life with sex and money. So he'd spent his entire life chasing women and trying to earn it.

He's just sold his company for hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars and he's just got married. What's left for him? All of the things that he used to be chasing now, he's completed them and he had an existential crisis because he said all of these things that I thought would fulfill me, I've now done it. So who am I? I'd wrapped up so much of my self-worth in the fact that I was chasing this dream dragon of a woman and of a figure in my bank account. And now it's got to the stage where actually who am I without all of that?

or who am I once all of that's been completed? And this comes back to what happened when I first started a business. And again, this is another element for young business people. If you attach your sense of self-worth to the success of the business, you are on a path toward misery. The reason is that

You don't get to control the fucking market, right? The market will do what the market will do and it does not give one single shit about you. It doesn't care. So why would you say that your self-worth is based on trends in the market? You're literally externalizing your sense of well-being to other people. That's the same as people that leave notifications on their phone.

It's exactly the same. You're allowing the entire world, anybody on the planet to intrude on your day whenever they want. This is the same with your business. You're allowing the response of the market to determine your self worth every time that you put a product out or run an event or release a YouTube video. If you feel crap when your YouTube video underperforms but feel amazing when your YouTube video overperforms, that's fine. That's realistic. You care about performing well. But if you genuinely feel like you are worth more

or worth less, that's a different step. You've crossed a line there. And this is something that I still fight with all the time. I still struggle with it. This is me understanding the path, but not having completed the path. So you're on this kind of 12 to 18 month journey of self-discovery. And you said that one of the things that helped is asking yourself,

Is this thing that I'm doing consistent with the person that I want to be? Yes. What were some other things that you figured out about yourself along that path? Not telling the truth was a huge one. That I'd just been... People would ask me my opinion on something and I would tell them what I thought they wanted to hear, not what I genuinely believed because I presumed that that would make them like me because I just wanted to be liked. And this was funded or fueled by being a club promoter, which is very transient and transactional. And there is a degree of performative...

on the front door of a club night. If someone says, all right, mate, how are you? And you go, actually, man, my dog just died and blah, blah, blah. They're like, no, I just wanted you to say yes and give me a stamp and let me in. So there is, that was reinforced by work. Some of the other things were mostly to do with opening up and being vulnerable because I was in a hyper-masculine, very cool guy world. And it wasn't, how would you say, conducive to...

Having a bad day and opening up to someone about it. It's another challenge as well for anyone That's a business owner or at the top of the tree that's listening You can feel like because you are the head of your business that showing any form of weakness shows a weakness in the business that if you underperform or you have a bad day that the people who look up to you your subordinates and your employees within the business and

will see you as less, will see you as unworthy of leading them because whose leader would spend a couple of days in bed because he's feeling down about whatever might have occurred. Another thing that I realized was working so hard that you have a miniature breakdown, which for me manifested as being in bed for a couple of days and I just couldn't be bothered to get out. And it felt like depression, but I think it was just like,

smaller, cute breakdowns. It always happened around Freshers' Week. So one month of constant buildup, constant buildup. And this is when I'd stop partying so much as well. Releasing event after event after event, all on social media, then going and working on the night, four or five hours sleep, then get up the next day, go to the office, make sure that everything was sorted, run another event, fill it, cash the tills, go home, do the next thing. Oh, is this working? This DJ's cancelled, blah, blah, blah. Just constant intensity.

Start of October every single year. I would always spend a couple of days in bed. Why? Why is it that I always end up feeling a little bit sort of shitty after this because Going so hard that you end up snapping is not a sustainable work protocol just doesn't you can't keep doing that and expect to get consistent results and Punishing yourself because you don't have the tolerance. It's like having eyes that are bigger than your stomach and

It's like having an appetite for work which is bigger than your capacity for work. And this is something in a productivity world, look, I'll get more. I'll just get more done. That is a route toward disaster. Chris Sparks says, in order to pick something up, you have to put something down. And the presumption is, if I want to be more productive, I will just down-regulate my sleep or up-regulate my efficiency until I fit this new thing in. Yeah.

you're already working close to your maximum capacity because if you weren't you would be doing more most people that are driven type A personalities are already working close to their capacity and then when you because you see all of your own inefficiencies right you think yeah but I spent 30 minutes today on YouTube so if I add this new thing in I'll just get rid of that 30 minutes today it's like no the 30 minutes today on YouTube is there because you need a fucking break from all the work you're doing

That's going to stay. When you add this in, the place it's going to come off of is going to be optional things that really matter, like spending time with friends and family, like chilling out on a weekend, like getting more sleep. That's what's going to really, really sting. So those are some of the realizations. Work less, open up more, be truthful, realize that you have curiosities and intellectual desires and stuff that maybe don't align with the person that you thought you were. And a final one was...

I'd never really connected with any of the success of the business, not in a meaningful way, not in an existential way. I'd felt proud that we'd achieved a lot and had tons of people come to the event and that felt mint, but I never really, really felt it. And I think the reason for that was if you're playing a persona, I was club promo Chris, you don't feel like your achievements are yours. You feel like they're people applauding a character that you're playing. So

the same way that we don't love Russell Crowe, we love Gladiator, we don't love Chris Hemsworth, we love Thor. You're always one step removed from the things that you're doing if you're not being truthful and open. Whereas if you do something that is genuinely you putting yourself out into the world, when someone says, "Ali, I really love what you've done with this." And that's your truth. You go, "That's me."

As opposed to, Ali, I really love what you've done with YouTuber Ali over here. You go, yeah, well done, YouTuber Ali. Like, pat on the back for you. And that's the difference between doing something that feels fulfilling existentially and doing something that just feels like pride. So interestingly, on that point, yesterday we put out a video, the first one in a while on the channel where I felt it was like authentically me. I didn't really have a script. I just had a few talking points, 45 minutes long, me just rambling about stuff.

And the response to that video was just insane. And I was going through all the comments and the comments were really nice. And I woke up early this morning, I did the thing that you shouldn't do and grabbed my phone. And I was like, you know what? Let's see how the comments are doing. I was just like, oh, this is so nice, hotting every single one. And I haven't read YouTube comments in months because I've, and hearing you say that made me realize that the videos that I think we've been putting out over the last few months haven't really felt particularly authentic. It felt like I was playing a character. Whereas this one, it was like, all right, you know what? Let's just do it basically uncut.

felt so much more authentic. And so the comments really resonated with me more than a comment on a video that I felt, I mean, I had the idea, but like someone else wrote the script for it and kind of vibes. Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about masculinity. This is something that I struggle with.

And I think you're an interesting person to talk to about this because you seem to not worry about coming across as woke or like, you know, saying the right thing, you know, saying things that fit into the Overton window of acceptability. And, you know, some of the stuff on the podcast, some people say is somewhat controversial. And so I'd love to hear your take on like what,

What's the deal with masculinity? A broad open question. And I have a few sub-questions that I'd like to ask, but what's your thesis on masculinity? It's an interesting one. I think it's a word that has been co-opted to mean a lot of different things now. You're right, with some of the people that I have on the show, on Modern Wisdom, which is my podcast, their views perhaps go against a progressive orthodoxy that exists at the moment.

That being said, I don't think that they're tremendously controversial. I've never ever been on the verge of any sort of cancellation or really, I don't get negative comments on the videos. The vast majority of people that watch the show, they understand that I'm coming from a place of genuine intellectual curiosity and trying to understand things. That being said,

I think that it is very difficult to have a wholesome role model as a young guy at the moment. I don't think that young men know what they should grow up to be, and by that I mean what sort of a man, what sort of values they should have. I wholeheartedly agree that the #MeToo movement was a long overdue reckoning for men in positions of power that used those positions in order to get sexual access, in order to manipulate women,

That was something that had to happen. That being said, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that any masculine traits are part of a cis-hetero-patriarchal construct that runs below the surface of everything that we see and these are oppressive patriarchal ideas to do with gender and misogyny and gender roles and blah, blah, blah.

What you end up there with is men who make up 50% of the entire world's population not knowing what the fuck to do with their life. They don't know what they're supposed to do, how they're supposed to exist in the world. We've already got rid of religion. So...

Some of the things that gave us a sense of meaning have gone. We've got rid of jobs for life which meant that our craft we might have been a stonemason or a builder or a farmer or something that worked with our hands where we could see our physical creations in front of us and this is for women as well those things have gone for everybody and then when you say okay and the things that you used to rely on to do with masculinity things like competence hard work courage bravery trustworthiness

industriousness, conscientiousness, when these things are also perhaps lambasted and labeled negatively, that doesn't really give men much of a place to stand. You go, okay, so what am I supposed to, what is a man now? We're not getting into the gender debate. What is a masculine portrayal of somebody's personality? Like what are the characteristics that make someone masculine that are positive?

And that's kind of a difficult question to answer. So when it comes to masculinity from my side,

I just know that I'm an only child, right? So I had no older brother. Our generation's gaps, our parents' generation is quite large. A lot of the rules and the procedures that our parents had don't really work for us. So role models in terms of your parents, you're also a little bit of a distance away from that. There's a delta to work there. And I didn't know what I wanted to be. And you've just heard a story about how most of my 20s as someone who did two degrees at uni, who can be an idiot, but isn't a complete idiot, was lost, really, really lost. So I think

right, I want to try and give young guys the advice that I wish that I'd had when I was younger. And this isn't,

real social dynamics pick-up artists, that weirdo stuff. It's not negging and neuro-linguistic programming to get girls to go to bed with you. It's how are you a confident person in the world as a man that feels proud about yourself, that's proud about your masculinity, that's proud about the achievements that you've got, that doesn't mind about being vulnerable, but doesn't identify with being vulnerable. You know, finding somewhere to stand, I think, is...

has been a difficulty why do we need concepts like masculinity and femininity why can't we just say you know what courage bravery confidence being integrity honesty these are all universally good qualities and therefore we should strive for these universal good qualities and not label them some of them masculine and some of them feminine for example because men and women aren't the same

They're not the same. For all that deconstructionist ideology may wish that they were the same, they're not. There are certain things that men have a proclivity toward and there are certain things that women have a proclivity toward. On average, on average, it does not mean that you cannot get masculine women in feminine men. It does not mean that this girl that I know is really, really masculine and she's more masculine than you are. Yeah, I'm sure that there very well may be, but those are outliers if you are to throw them across. Sure.

We also need them because we live our life through archetypes. We look to people as examples. And for the most part, we model ourselves on stories. We model ourselves. Why, when you watch the Big Bang Theory, do you immediately know what each character is? The...

heroes big chested and muscled and has a large jaw and the nerd always wears glasses and there's the damsel and the villain the villains always in black or he's got a fringe or something it's because we need to be able to shortcut our way to understand what people are about and when we're trying to design our own lives as well we also look to archetypes from history I think that it's an important learning procedure for both men and women

to have role models that they can look up to. And I don't know at the moment that there are very many well-accepted role models for men to look up to. For all that Harry Styles is an awesome singer, I don't know that every man wants to be Harry Styles. Not every man wants to be like The Rock either, but you have to have some role models for guys to look up to. So...

There also needs to be a synthesis. What is the average on average? What is a good principle for men to try and achieve? The same thing goes for women. And my concern is that we've thrown a lot of baby and bath waters out. It's easier for me to make an example with girls than it is with guys for this.

So for instance, women being encouraged to have careers over families is something that absolutely should be a choice for them. And if you are a go-getter girl, that's sick. More power to you. However, I think that you need to be an incredibly unique woman to make it to 50, look back without a family and say that it was a good decision.

That is not to say that there are not women out there for whom it is the perfect decision. But I think that you need to be quite a unique woman for that to be the case. Great. Pushing every woman should have a career, should prioritize their career. You don't need no man. You shouldn't settle for less. Clap back. You're a boss bitch. And almost creating an environment in which women who do prioritize families over careers are seen as compromising toward a...

archaic view of what a woman should be when a lot of women take very, very large amounts of pleasure from raising a family. I don't think that that's tremendously respectful to the women that want to go and do that. There is a framing to the situation that presumes that going and getting a career is the thing that everybody should endeavor to achieve. And that's not to say that men can't stay at home and be the primary, how would you say, child carer, but...

In relationships where the man is not the primary breadwinner, they are 50% more likely to end in divorce. In relationships where the man is not the primary breadwinner, he is statistically more likely to need to use erectile dysfunction medication. Almost two-thirds of women say that they would not be in a relationship with a man who is less educated, less wealthy, and lower in status than them. If this seems like it's a bizarre set of statistics, think about if you're a girl, think about would you date a man that's shorter than you?

Maybe. Okay, would you date a man that is 10 inches shorter than you? Well, probably not. Well, okay. That is just the same but ported across onto status and wealth and education as well. I think...

Overall, a man needs to be three of four from taller, richer, smarter, and more status. You can get away with being a short guy who's rich, smart, with high status, or you can get away with being a tall guy with status who's maybe not rich yet, but is well-educated. If you're only getting two of those four, you're starting to struggle. This isn't to say...

that women are callous resource extractors, right? What it's to say is that women like men who are on average trustworthy, hardworking, conscientious, they're the sort of man that you can depend on that will get things done. And if you have status, intelligence through education and wealth, that is a signal that you have these things. But what we've been told is that if a man is to try and achieve status, wealth or education, he shouldn't go and do it.

That is him sticking to an out-of-date personality type that men no longer need to adhere to. There's a few things going on here. There's number one, that men and women are different. And while both men and women exhibit all traits across all the spectrums, men are on average higher in age.

in some traits and women are on average higher in other traits. And are we saying that it's those traits that we can broadly label with all the caveating that goes with broadly trying to label anything based on large numbers as like masculine traits and feminine traits? I would say so. So for example, masculine, like men are on average higher on trait aggression or conscientiousness, I guess. Less so on empathy, less so on caringness, more so on competitiveness.

less on warmth. Yeah. And so men are interested in things, women are interested in people. And so when it comes to, I guess with the role model discussion, yeah, for some reason, like no one bats an eye at the fact that people want role models of their own race. You often hear people say that, oh, there are no black X in whatever, or there are no Pakistani, whatever, or there are no Chinese people in films. And therefore Asian people lack a role model of that particular type.

And I guess what is, I guess when it comes to role models in general, it's very hard for someone to have a role model who's not like them. Like, I guess the anti-gender, anti-masculinity, anti-feminity brigade would say that if I'm looking for a role model, I should be just as likely to choose a female role model as a male role model, which is just unlikely. Similarly, a woman is very unlikely, like,

I don't know, a white woman is very unlikely to have a black man as their role model. Or you. Or me as their role model, yeah. And so is what you're saying that as a dude, it's hard to find... Because I guess if we think about who would be in the running as a role model? James Bond, famously, but then the whole misogyny stuff, which means that James Bond is not allowed as a role model. The Rock, potentially. The Rock's a pretty good shout, man. Yeah. The Rock's a guy who is able to tick a lot of boxes. Like, when you're the guy that's

simultaneously able to be top in an action movie and potentially president of the United States. Like there's a campaign to make The Rock the president of the United States. Like you've done a lot right. You got a lot right. Yeah, you're correct with The Rock. You know, he's in touch with his own emotions, but even that sort of thing, I haven't seen any criticisms of The Rock. Maybe he's like the outlier that proves the rule. I'm not sure. I think that the challenge is

If you don't have any role models, people get lost. I think that there are a lot of role models for how girls should behave at the moment. And there's a lot of support for girls and rightly so for a very, very long time. There wasn't, girls weren't encouraged to do whatever they want, but yeah,

It feels a little bit like men are not being encouraged to do whatever they want now. And that's not whatever they want. That is to try and achieve in the world in a way that they think is going to make them feel fulfilled. We've talked a little bit about the dating marketplace. And you've touched on the thing, the trades that women on average look for in men are different than the trades that men on average look for in women. Correct. And I guess...

Given that you have experienced the professional party boy lifestyle, you've been on Take Me Out, you've been on Love Island, what's your take on what are the things that men in general seem to like in women and vice versa? Cool.

On average, this is before every single sentence, right? On average, we can caveat everything in this episode with on average. On average, men are interested in youth and fertility from women. On average, women are interested in resources from men. This is shown out in a number of different ways. Why is it that throughout all of time, the

Optimal weight for women in terms of what's culturally being seen as attractive does fluctuate. So across different cultures and across different ages, it fluctuates. However, the waist to hip ratio always remains the same at around about 0.8%.

Why is that? Well, it's because a high waist to hip ratio is a signal of fertility. Why is it that girls who have bigger eyes and flusher cheeks tend to be seen as more attractive? Well, it's because bigger eyes and flusher cheeks are associated with youthfulness and youthfulness is associated with fertility. Women who have more symmetrical faces are more fertile, which is why we are attracted to symmetry. It's also...

More costly in order to be able to grow a symmetrical face than a non symmetrical face Which is why we're attracted to that as well spin it around in the other direction men's body sizes have changed

Over time exactly the same but the optimal shoulder to waist ratio for men almost exactly stays the same Why is that it shows that you can get excess calories on top of what you need? Well, who cares about excess calories? We have more calories than we need Yes, but not for almost all of our revolutionary past for almost all of time men were underfed not overfed and if you could show that look I have so much access to resources and food that I can sustain this stupid big body with these big shoulders and this small waist that is that's good sign and

The dynamics and the way that this bears out is so interesting and it's difficult to not sound like you're trying to make prescriptions for people's relationships, which is not what I'm doing. I find it fascinating, endlessly fascinating to look at the dating market and to look at why people like the things that they do. The difference in right swipes on Tinder for a man with a bachelor's degree versus a master's degree is the master's degree gets 90% more right swipes.

That's all that you need to do. So if you're thinking about doing a master's degree and you want to get more right swipes on Tinder as a guy, just do it. For every 15 IQ, for every standard deviation that a woman's intelligence increases over about 110 to 115, every standard deviation, which is about 12,

her chance of getting married goes down quite significantly. It's about 20 to 30% for each standard deviation. The chance of marriage continues to drop. And why is this? Well, it's because women tend to want to date a man that is richer, smarter, and more successful than she is. They date up and across. It's called hypergamy. So...

If you are atop your own dominance hierarchy, quite rightly so, you as a woman should be able to go and achieve as much as you want, start your own business, be as educated with a PhD and a thousand people that work for you, make a billion pounds. But if your fundamental attraction is to men that are higher in status, wealthier and more intelligent than you are, how are you going to date across and above a dominance hierarchy if you sit on the top of your own? If you're the richest, smartest, best status woman on the planet, who's above you that's a man? There's no one.

So high performing women narrow their own dating pool, sadly. And this is a real difficulty. It's like being the tall friend. If you have a girl friend who is six foot two, she's probably stuck looking at professional athletes. If she wants to date, on average, women like to date a man that's about 20 centimeters taller than them. That seems to be the optimal height difference. If you're six foot two as a girl,

You've narrowed your own dating pool because you are so tall. The equivalent happens with earning. The equivalent happens with education because typically you want to date someone that is above and across. Yeah, I think the height example is interesting because I think when you say...

I've had these sorts of conversations so often with people and when you use things like intelligence or IQ, well, oh, but like, IQ's been debunked and intelligence is not really a thing because it's all a social construct. When you use things like, when you use any kind of personality traits, it's like, oh, but that's socially predetermined. Like, obviously that's not a thing. But as soon as you use the height example, people are like, oh shit. Rubber's met the road now. Yeah. Yeah. Really? Well, I mean, yeah.

For the people who don't believe in gender differences to do with personality and to do with attraction, I'm not speaking to those people. This may be interesting to them, but they're not on the same plane of talking that I am right now. There's some asymmetries that occur in the dating market that are really unfair. One of them is...

The fact that men are allowed to be as sexually liberal as they want when they're young and that women aren't, that sucks for women, not so much for men. But the single biggest predictor of extramarital sex is premarital sex. Single biggest predictor. Probably confounded by the fact that very religious people wouldn't have premarital sex. Yeah, good point. But...

With that in mind, what you see is a myth that's unfortunate also being reflected in reality in terms of what your preferences would have been. So most people don't want to be with a partner that's going to cheat on them. That means that you have an awkwardness when you're in your youth because you need to think, okay, like over my shoulder is someone kind of watching to see how many people I sleep with? Am I judging my sense of self-worth on how many people I sleep with? That's something that,

I think that it would be great to get past for women. I think that that would emancipate women from it. But the problem is that the desire is still going to be there. Like if you found out that your girlfriend had slept with

Number of people or ten times that number of people it's very difficult for you to not feel some sort of a difference to that But I don't know if the same thing happens in Reverse from girls with guys so For all that something may be a social construct we may be able to do some some good work to deprogram this and to be able to help liberate women like when the rubber meets the road It's going to be hard to actually stop that from happening. Yeah, I think I think you want to share a

an academic interest in the dating market because it really is where preferences are realized great way to put it and you can you can talk all you like about how you don't care about looks you don't care about height you don't care about weight you don't care about number on a bank account i think there's like two things here there's like obviously no one is going to disagree with you know someone's height does not reflect at all on the value as a human being someone's money does not reflect on the value as a human being there is like a sense of

These are arbitrary measurements. Hopefully does not need to be stated. These arbitrary measurements correlate with someone's actual worth as a human being.

But that's not the market we're talking about. We're talking about a market which is different to that, which is the dating marketplace, which is very sort of a specific, interesting use case where as much as you would like for there to be no difference, as much as I would love to be equally attracted to women of all insert trait here, X here,

In reality, I'm attracted to women who are more on a particular end of the spectrum of whatever trait we're thinking about. And there's very little I can actually do to change that.

Whereas obviously if women are on one end of a spectrum of trait X compared to another end I'm not valuing them any more or less as a human being. Yeah, so that's it. That's one of the problems that we've had is that Preferences have been conflated with some sort of value judgment about the people's worth and that's not the case But you can't deny the fact that if you prefer Something to something else that's simply your biology bearing it out now we can

we can have some sort of judgments around our preferences, but the vast majority of this is limbic as hell. Like it's just some bit of the brain back here. You're not consciously choosing the things that you're attracted to. If you're a girl and you like black guys, like did you choose the fact that you like black guys or do you just tend to like the construct, the way that those people look? Do you tend to like artists or musicians or whatever it might be? Who chose that?

Did you choose it or did something else choose it from you? And you're right. It's where preferences really get borne out. So you see the same thing in the marketplace. There's two things that you can't really defeat. One of them is desire and the other one's money. So people can virtually signal all they want. But there's been, to bring it back to the Love Island example, there has been criticisms around lack of diversity in terms of sexual expression, in terms of race, in terms of a bunch of other things.

if is it itv's job to make a show which is diverse or is itv's job to make a show which is successful because the market will reward the one which is successful so people should vote with their feet or their eyes if they want to change something in the market if you don't want love island to be the way that it is then stop watching it and decide to try and campaign to get something else or make something yourself the same thing goes for in the dating market like

desire will always win out. The person that will be campaigning for why gender is a social construct and why masculine traits are completely arbitrary and look at the person that that person is dating and they will almost definitely have some of the predictable traits that someone is looking for in a partner. Again, it's, I don't understand why it's controversial

to bring up the fact that people have preferences and those preferences are not just ones that we've chosen, they're ones that have been embedded in us for quite a while. It makes sense that men want women that are fertile because that's what we're here for, we're here to survive and reproduce. It makes sense that women want men who can get access to resources. Status gave you access to resources, money is a proxy for resources, education is a predictor of future ability to attain resources.

Why would this be a surprise? But the last few years is kind of turn things upside down a little bit like this. So we've talked a lot about and I think when having these sorts of discussions, this is the stuff that my brother and I often talk about on a podcast as well. And we find that when we get emails about it afterwards from people who are upset with the way a certain thing was discussed, there's.

One thing which they point out very recently actually, and I agree with this, is that there's a difference between talking in broad generalities about averages and how those averages bear out for a specific individual, and then a step further, how the knowledge of the averages should dictate the behavior of an individual. And so what I mean by that is, to use a personal example,

Women are on average attracted to men that display more alpha male tendencies. It's probably not a particularly controversial point like, you know traits like assertiveness, confidence, aggression, bordering on aggression. Those sorts of kind of things that you would expect if you think alpha male, for example.

On average, women are attracted to those and there's very little they can actually do about it. I actually recently read My Secret Garden by Nancy someone, which is like a book that was released a few decades ago. The first time women's sexual fantasies was published in writing. And apparently that book had like, I was doing a bunch of research on this, took the world by storm and became an instant bestseller because people were like, oh my God, like,

This is what women's sexual fantasies are. And all the women were like, oh my God, I didn't realize other people were like this too. And a lot of them, the vast majority are around the things that you know, things that display overly alpha male tendencies on a man's part. It's not to say women want these things to bear out in real life, but on average, we can like, let's assume women are more attracted to those sorts of traits.

Then when it comes, okay, cool, that's fine. That's an academic point based on maybe an average, maybe 51% of women are more attracted to that, say. But there's still a vast proportion of women who are not. And so for someone like me reading about this stuff,

I think the danger is then I can start to think that, okay, if women are more attracted to alpha male traits and that is not really the sort of person who I am because of various reasons, the way that I may be some nature, maybe some nurture, the way that I was raised is a very sort of feminized kind of culture where alpha male traits are sort of considered to be downtrodden and this is like not a good way to be. But given that I'm not particularly having success in the dating marketplace,

hypothetically, then should I try to adopt such as these alpha male traits? And should I mold my personality in a way that makes me more attractive to women? Because, you know, I've got to find a wife, you know, for the first half, for the first X number of years of my life. There was a good quote from someone who said that life is always in two stages. The first stage is when you're trying to find a partner. And the second stage is when you actually take it. Once you've done that, you realize, okay, who the hell am I and what do I do?

And so given that I'm competing in this dating marketplace, should I try and get that master's degree? Should I try and be more domineering, be more confident, be more aggressive? Should I try and go to the gym and get more hench because, you know, should I put a topless picture on Tinder that shows me smiling without my teeth because that's considered higher? I don't know. So this is one of the problems like generally with dating. And I appreciate, you know, all of the people that send in their thoughts and

My mind isn't fixed on these things, right? Like I just have a real perverse curiosity around all of the things to do with the dating market. And I hope that that comes across in good faith because that's genuinely how it is. There's two things going on. One of them is how much can you play the game without compromising who you are truthfully? And the other one is how far do you go before you

basically play persona, which is what we spent the first half of this conversation talking about, right? You don't want to, you don't want to make someone fall in love with a version of you that you're not, but also like maximizing your attractiveness, understanding the rules of the game. Like,

You can't pick the ball up in football, but you can run faster with it. You understand that if there's a good tactic that means that you can score a bit more if you have this particular set piece, that's not too bad. What happened and the problem with pickup artistry, and this is something that I really, really got icked by, the whole negging and you've got to...

If people don't know what pick-up artistry is it was sort of during the early 2000s and the mid 2010s where men had found particular neuro linguistic programming tricks that allowed them to bed women by utilizing different cognitive biases basically, it's kind of like Tricking web was psychologically tricking women into bed or tricking women into being attracted by them and that's kind of been really thrown out of the window and

That being said, there are certain rules and procedures that will make you more attractive to a woman. The first thing that I would do is go to the gym. Like it is the most robust way

to make, it's more attractive than having a beard or having a low voice, which are two other signs of high testosterone. So this is Rob Henderson's work, looked at this, that it's the most robust way to become more attractive as a guy is to be in good shape. This doesn't mean single digit body fat at 220 pounds. This just means that, you know, slightly visible abs and probably a medium sized t-shirt or above. That is, you are top probably 5%

of physiques on the planet if you're able to get yourself to sub 14% body fat with a little bit of vascularity on your arms. And that's not, oy oy. So it's a difficult question, man. How far are you supposed to push yourself in the effort to become attractive to the opposite sex? It's a really difficult question. You don't want to make someone fall in love with you for something that you're not. And this is for guys and girls. So a good question to ask yourself is, am I the sort of person

That the sort of person I'm attracted to would be attracted to. What's the sort of person that I want to get? If I really, really, really love guys that go to the gym, but I'm a chick that has never been to the gym, you got to go to the gym because he's probably going to want a partner that goes to the gym as well. If you're a dude who really loves music and really wants a partner that's into music, you need to start going out to gigs and trying to find girls that are there. Stop looking for them in the library. So yeah,

Models by Mark Manson. Have you read this? Yeah. Phenomenal. So that's, as far as I'm concerned, it's the one-stop shop for men on dating. How to become a more confident human. Yes, you should take the knowledge that you know around the dating market as men and as women, and you should utilize it to inform the way that you try and date.

But there has to be a point at which you go, okay, I can't compromise myself too much. And a final piece of framing that actually I did take from pickup artistry, but that is as ethical as you can get, is to control the frame. So you are the prize in the interaction. This doesn't mean that you don't think that the other person's important or interesting or valuable, but entering a frame of a conversation saying, I am...

Inherently valuable interesting person this person is fortunate to be going out for a walking date with me and to grab a coffee like how cool like I'm gonna get to find out about them and they're gonna get to find out about me if I was them I would be about to have a really cool afternoon Like that is a great way to enter a frame. I think for dating high value you're controlling the context you're coming across confident and competent and

Like those are good ways to step into things. Certainly better than like, oh, I'll start speaking to a friend and then I won't look at her. And then when I do look at her, I'll tell her that her hair looks shit. And like that was never going to be a sustainable strategy. I like this way of approaching things. Like understand the rules of the game, use those rules of the game to inform, to maybe inform what you're going to do to maximize your chances in the game. But don't do it in a way that feels to you inauthentic to who you truly are.

That makes a lot of sense. On that note, we did have a comment on one of the videos that I did with my brother where I was like, oh, these guys are acting as if finding love is a game. It's like, okay, no, it's just a metaphor. Just like life is a game in a way. But yeah, I think that's interesting. So the kind of one specific example that I often think about is

A few months ago, I was on a date and afterwards we went out driving to the- - What's a typical Ali Abdaal date? Give me the quintessential, Ali's taking you out for a date, where does he take you and what does he do?

I feel like a day in three parts is ideal where kind of, you know, the whole, again, from the, from the world of pick a pottery, where I think this is actually a good, a good shout bouncing from one location to another. So starting off with maybe grabbing a coffee, then going for a walk and then you've gone for the walk, had a bit of a chat, then go for food somewhere. And then after the food somewhere, like a third part, maybe go for a drive or go for another walk or go for dessert or, you know, just something that allegedly the way it

the way the dating thing works. If you've been sitting at dinner talking for three hours, that's psychologically a less... It feels like you're less close than if you've been talking for one hour at three different venues, which is just how we experience memories. But one thing I like to do is go for a drive afterwards, especially if it's a place I've driven to. In the Tesla? In the Tesla, of course, with the heated seats. And we were driving to the McDonald's drive-thru, which is, again, one of my favorite spots because I love McDonald's drive-thrus. And I think, weirdly...

Going on a McDonald's drive-thru on a date is like very me. And if someone doesn't like that, then great. That's like a perfect filter. I like that. It's a stress test. It's a stress test, quite, yeah. But then on one of these dates a few months ago, en route to the McDonald's drive-thru, we put some music on and played Driver's License by Olivia Rodrigo.

bang a song. Basically, or let's imagine like a Disney song. Okay. That kind of vibe. Okay, cool. And I knew all the lyrics to actually Driver's License and Good For You by Olivia Rodrigo, which is like, I knew all the lyrics to this Disney song. And I was thinking at that point, I could make a choice. Do I be myself and sing along to this Disney song? Or do I...

Recognize that all girls are more attracted to masculine traits this me love freaking loving Olivia Rodrigo and Disney songs and knowing all the words too good for you is not a particularly masculine trait at least by traditional definitions maybe it's only date number two maybe I'll just like turn that down a bit and and and weave it in and I made the decision at that point to be like screw it let's sing the songs and Turns out she also bring in love singing Disney songs and Olivia Rodrigo We're just singing along together and it was great, but I was kind of thinking that hmm have I ever

in a sense, shot myself in the foot by revealing this aspect of me. And then afterwards I was like, nah, it's fine. Like this is who I am authentically. This is my true self. It's all good. If it turns out the girl is not into guys who like singing Disney songs, she's not going to enjoy being with me because I sing Disney songs all the time, all day, every day. But the fact that I had that thought process made me wonder, oh, have I drunk too much Kool-Aid of like red pill, rational male type shit? That's a really, really good insight that

You get a, it's the midwit meme, man. It's the midwit meme. It's like the idiot and the genius do the same thing. Just, I just be myself. I just be myself. I will optimize my red pill pick up artistry so that I understand the negging of the blah, blah. Like, no, no, just be yourself. But you are right. Like understanding the dynamics, I think is different to making, letting them change you.

I think that you did the right thing. I think that just being yourself with somebody is a really good way to try and do that. Now, if yourself is becoming a more competent, more trustworthy, more hardworking, more attractive human over time, that's a win.

but trying to this was one of the reasons why all of the pickup artist guys if you look at them now they're all wrecked like look at uh neil strauss yeah who's gone total awakened like dmt guy why tucker max tucker max is a perfect example man the guy did what he wrote he created the fratire genre didn't he oh did he oh i didn't realize all of his new york times bestsellers were him

throwing up in bathrooms after drinking and having sex with women. That's all he did. I just know him from being the publishing guy. He wrote What Women Want with Jeffrey Miller, the evolutionary psychologist. Oh, dude, his entire back catalogue of books is just him having sex and partying. That's all it is. I've got a lot of reading to do. Yeah, precisely.

And he's done a thousand sessions of psychotherapy, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Now this fully awakened human talking on Twitter about real deep and meaningful things. Why? I think it's because when guys in their youth, in their 20s, tried to be the sort of man that they thought women wanted to be attracted to,

they ended up realizing how far that was from the person that they truly were and it made them feel really, really unhappy and uncomfortable and they relapsed after a lot of self-work to a much more virtuous, much more aligned and awakened place which is them just fully being themselves. Neil Strauss now incredibly vulnerable online, Tucker Max incredibly vulnerable online. Why? Because for a long time he wasn't. For a long time he was doing the things that he thought he was supposed to do.

And I think that you've played it right. I think that the way to go about things is to have confident competence that this is you and own it and be like, look, yeah, maybe this isn't whatever typical masculine trait 101, the red pill guys say that you shouldn't do this. It's like, all right, but also if you want to try and be your version of someone else, the best that you can hope for is being the second best in the world at it. Like if I want to do my podcast like Joe Rogan, the best I can hope for is being the second best Joe Rogan on the planet.

And when you're going into a dating environment, I just, setting the tone in that way is going to be bad. That being said, if you have more extreme quirks, if it was, I can't think of any that are PG-13, but if you had something that was a little bit more out there than you singing Disney songs, perhaps you do slowly introduce people to that. But the prospect of never bringing that up, I don't think that really works. I'm just thinking, so I guess if I had a strong...

if for example it was just part of my part of the way i live life that i never have a shower and i don't believe in washing that's uh you know i think that a future partner would would want to know but it's probably the sort of thing i shouldn't mention on date number one it's just you know well i think that what you would be aiming to do and what everyone's aiming to do is to try and construct a world in which they are the sort of person that the sort of person they're attracted to would be attracted to that's what you want this is

This is the sort of quick fix to dating problems. It's like, okay, what sort of partner do I want? Genuinely, what are their interests? What are the non-negotiables that I want from a partner? They have to, and choose three things, non-negotiables. They have to be like this. They have to be, pick them.

And then all of the other things you can just kind of learn to love people around them. That doesn't mean that you need to settle, but it does mean that I think you end up in a situation where you have the things that really matter

being there and then you starting to love people for their quirks like a lot of the times when you fall in love you end up falling in love and going i can't believe it was you it was never going to be you you you with all of your you-ness and all of the different things that you have how is it you it was supposed to be her but it's you and you can't believe it why because you are absolutely shit at predicting what you're going to be attracted to you know some things that you will not compromise on and then the rest of them you end up

falling in love with the way that he drives the car or you end up falling in love with the way that she makes the bed or the way that she looks on him like all of the things that you wouldn't have thought it was going to be like this is where love seems to come out and it's those quirks and those uniquenesses that give you a competitive advantage in the dating market so you not utilizing the fact that you do sing Disney songs and you do know that the words to them that puts you at a disadvantage because you're just being like

version 0.9, you're the beta tester version of that because you're not fully utilizing all of the different features you have. Yeah, I think, I guess it is that everyone has to make that decision for themselves. What is the balance between

i am doing this thing to become more attractive versus uh and and not it and it not bordering into territory of this thing is straying far from who i am for example i'll hold my hands up and say the reason i go to the gym is to be more attractive um but the sort of person i want to be is the sort of person who takes the health seriously yeah and it just so happens that the proximal reason like the main reason is currently to look more attractive but it's also a sort of life that i would like to lead and therefore i think

Oh, dude, if you can win on multiple different domains, like take it, take it. It's like saying my YouTube channel gets plays, which means that I have access to making new friends, but it also earns ad revenue. But I should feel bad about the ad revenue because I'm supposed to be here for the friends. It's like, no, like just take them all. If there's a ton of wins to get out of something. But to come back to what we said for the first half of the conversation about being yourself and about trying to kind of work out who it is that you are. I think that...

Coming at something from a place of I'm already enough, but I want to be better is very different to I am insufficient unless I have this. Unless I get 8% body fat and massive set of arms and I can outbench everybody in the gym, unless I get there, then I am not worthy of having a partner. It's very different to...

I am already worthy of having a partner and I know that this will make them happier like and or this will improve my chances of finding someone who is going to be attracted to me and I'm going to be attracted to as well. How do you think about the balance between be yourself versus choose yourself? Elaborate, sink into them for me. So we've talked a lot about how you're, you know, you went on this journey trying to uncover your true self.

One school of thought is that, well, we don't really have a true self. That true self is just a result of the accidents of the way that we were brought up and the traits we got from our parents and from our friends at school.

And you can do a lot to change who you are if that's what you want to do. For example, when I was in school, I wasn't particularly outgoing or particularly charismatic or particularly confident. And I recognized that, you know, me being myself would have been me just continuing on that route. I decided, you know what, I'm going to make an active decision at university to change myself to become someone who's more confident and more charismatic.

and someone who is a little bit more outgoing. And although that was not a natural transformation initially, it felt uncomfortable, like any change, which always feels uncomfortable. I am now much more confident, charismatic, open in social settings, that kind of stuff. But if I'd been told, oh bro, just be yourself, that probably wouldn't have happened. And so I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on that. So I believe that your life should be lived by design, not by default.

that you should be intentionally doing things because the default quite often is actually a bit shit. The default setting that you would go to would be the Netflix and bag of chips and not doing hard things and not having new experiences and all of the biases or you would just be ruled by your biases, right? Which is definitely not what you want. That being said,

We are not infinitely malleable. We are not complete blank slates. There are predispositions that you have that I do not. And there are predispositions I have that you do not. 50% pretty much of everything you are psychologically is genetic on average. And what that means is that you are inclined towards certain things more than others. By hook or by crook, you haven't ended up being an artist or a designer.

painter or a club promoter or a reality TV guy. Like there is something inside of you that has caused you to lean toward the particular life that you do. Now, understanding yourself and saying, right, I'm going to play to my strengths. I'm going to enhance it. So one of your strengths is being able to learn things quickly, right? So,

You have a meta power that permits you to be more malleable than most people. But it's not unlimited. You can't learn to be anything that you want. You can just learn to be... You can manipulate certain areas of you to enhance some and to downregulate others. The difference between be yourself and choose yourself is interesting. But especially as you grow up, you're...

Life paths they do start to get closed off more right because you have less and less time Presumably most people will want to start a family of some kind which again is something that you're working toward as you grow up and Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think um, I think that choosing yourself has a beauty to it and a sense of achievement once you've completed it I think that's really really nice and you can feel proud of the person that you are and

but that needs to come from a place of inner truth or else you're just going to end up playing a role. You're not going to be, so if you decided tomorrow that you wanted to wake up and be a PT in a gym and just be some super alpha, go out, sniff a bag with the boys on a weekend, like five pints and watch the footy. Oh, did you see the West Ham game last night, mate? Like if you decided to be that guy, I'm sure that you could probably, well, you absolutely could force yourself into it. If someone held a gun to your head and said, right, you've got to be the biggest lad that you can for the next year, you could do it, but it wouldn't,

be you. So you can't fully choose yourself. You could yourself, but the difference between choose and be is basically does this feel like it's cohesive with my inner desire? And what you're trying to do is you're trying to remove the distance from what you would do and what you want to do. So what would I do if I woke up this morning? I would

maybe do some meditation and do some walking. It's can I get something from system two to system one? And the more that you get the things that you want in system two to system one, that's you creating yourself to be yourself. Does that make sense?

Like if you can choose the things that you want to have in life and you can make them so much a part of you that they actually end up embodying you and you embody them, that feels like you've managed to merge the two together. - Yeah, it's sort of like habit formation but for personality traits, I guess. - Yeah, and also for the values that you have. For me, I was a guy that took a lot of pride from the success of his club night and from the way that he was seen and blah, blah, blah. Don't get me wrong, I probably just transmuted them into other different desires and wants and shit.

But I got rid of those ones because I didn't want them anymore. So yes, you can choose yourself, but you're not infinitely malleable. Amazing. I think that's a good place to end this. We still have so much to talk about, about your podcast, about your journey, about the whole weirdness stuff, authenticity, wanting to want things. I think we'll save that for a part two because this is officially the longest episode we've ever recorded on The Deep Dive. I have a few rapid fire questions for you. Hit me. To end with that we're asking everyone. What advice, number one, what advice would you give to your younger self? Fear less. Fear less.

Fear less. Fear less. Okay. Who has had the biggest influence on your career? Dave, my older business partner, the guy that is the...

CEO of the company that we're twinned with. Okay. What was the influence that he had? He was the first boss that I ever had. He was the first role model that I ever had. He's about four or five years older than me. And he is just a very, very shrewd guy when it comes to business. Almost all of the business acumen that I have can be attributed, the genesis of it can be attributed to that guy. Nice. What's one tip for someone looking for success? Sleep more. What does the first and last hour of your day look like? Upon waking up,

element salt in water, walk for 15 minutes, journal, meditate, breathwork, read, cook.

And then at night time, usually watching some sport or whatever with my flatmate in the living room and then some sort of reading, probably half and half. Nice. I need to ask you more about your morning routine next time we speak. What material item under £100 could you not live without slash that's added the most value to your life in recent memory? Under £100. Steel shaker.

Just steel protein shaker. It's about 15 quid. Cool. What book would you recommend to anyone? The Almanac of Naval Ravikant. Nice. If you lost everything, how would you start a business again? Fill a club night. Easy. What quote or mantra do you live by? Don't practice what you do not want to become. Nice. And finally, a journey or destination? Journey. Very nice. Chris, thanks for coming on. Links to all of your things in the video description. Anything in particular you'd like to plug?

Yeah, those episodes that we mentioned will be linked in the show notes below. Modern Wisdom, wherever you listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Chris Williamson. And if you want a list of 100 books, we've talked about a lot today, chriswillx.com slash books is a free list of 100 of the most impactful and interesting books that I've ever read. Thanks for having me on, man. And we'll link my appearances on your podcast as well in addition to those. Which were awesome. Oh, thank you.

Great. Thanks for coming on and see you later, everyone. Cheers. That's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you very much for listening. All of Chris's links and all the resources we discussed will be in the show notes and the description if you're watching this on YouTube. Thank you again for tuning in. And if you did enjoy this episode, don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts so more people can discover the podcast. Catch you later.