0:02
Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
Search this video
0:02
Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
0:07
Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
0:13
The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
0:36
We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
0:49
And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
0:56
With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
1:02
Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
1:11
Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
1:17
All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
1:26
This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
1:30
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
1:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
1:39
It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with my colleague Vatsal with another episode of Infinite Loops.
1:44
And today I have a very, very special guest who really does know how to mix it up. Mr.
1:51
Chris Williamson, who is the proprietor of the Modern Wisdom Podcast.
1:58
Who we are going to put our begging bowl out and ask you for some of the guests that you've got because your guests are amazing.
2:04
One of the things I love about you, Chris, is you are just totally out there. Right?
2:09
So in your bio, it's Ex Party Boy that relates to your another business of yours that we're going to talk about later.
2:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you put up a quote today, which I really thought was kind of fun.
2:19
And it was, "Every liberal is just a conservative who hasn't grown up yet". And that made me ...
2:24
reminded me of our earlier conversation of the Churchillian Drift where you get a ton of quotes being attributed to people who never, ever set up.
2:34
The one that I thought of about Churchill was he was reported to have said, "A liberal who is 25 ...
2:39
If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart.
2:45
If you're not a conservative when you're 35, you have no head". Opine. Chris Williamson: Well. Thank you.
2:52
Thank you for having me here, man.
2:52
I'm looking forward to this. Yeah. I am ...
2:55
Not everything that I tweet is meant to be taken seriously.
2:55
I think that's the main lesson to take from that tweet.
2:58
Sometimes I just post things to see what the reaction's going to be.
3:04
But I mean, part of it is true.
3:04
I mean, young people like the idea of high income taxes because they don't have any income to tax.
3:10
Chris Williamson: People get that openness, that openness, your openness as a personality trait decreases over time.
3:11
Why do you think that your granddad loves to go to the same pub on the same night of the week and order the same fish and chips or whatever it is that Americans eat?
3:21
And why do you think that they do that?
3:21
Well it's because as you get deeper and deeper into your life you ingrain yourself in habits.
3:29
You become a little bit less open.
3:29
And yeah, I don't know, man.
3:29
I think sometimes people take things on Twitter far too.
3:32
I mean, it's no surprise, but they take things on Twitter far too seriously even when they don't warrant it.
3:33
But one of the replies was massive overgeneralization as if that's some sort of world breaking insight. Yes, of course ...
3:39
Do you really think that I didn't mean that ...
3:43
I meant like every single liberal is going to turn into a conservative that obviously not. But yes, I ...
3:48
Twitter is an interesting place especially when you start poking the bear.
3:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It really is.
3:53
And as you know, I do that occasionally just to generate data, honestly.
3:53
I have a friend who, I don't know who it is yet.
3:59
And I want to figure out who it is because I know that it is someone who knows me really well.
4:05
Because he tweeted something like, if anyone on this app thinks that we're nothing but lab rats to Jim, you got to rethink that. Like, who are you?
4:17
Chris Williamson: Here's something I've got in my head, man.
4:19
So when you watch UFC fighters and they'll have the lead hand and they'll have that lead hand and they'll just be range finding.
4:23
With that lead hand they're not throwing anything they're just checking the distance from them to their opponent or just to the other person, right?
4:30
It doesn't have to be an opponent.
4:34
I think that's what a lot of tweets are.
4:34
They're just helping you to map your location in the cultural ether, so to speak.
4:42
And it seems you definitely do that.
4:42
I mean, Jack does this as well, right?
4:46
He puts provocatively, concise tweets out, but things that are probably more simplified than they need to be. To see what ...
4:53
Or can people actually understand layer one, layer two, layer three of this.
4:58
I think maybe just troll a bit harder than that.
5:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, obviously, one of my big things is that people are for ...
5:04
First off, they're prematurely certain way too fast.
5:09
It's dangerous to understand new things too quickly.
5:09
And I'm stealing that quote by the way, I can't remember who said it.
5:15
But it brings us back to the Churchillian Drift where everything now.
5:20
Maybe 20 years from now everything will be attributed to either Churchill, Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, Play-Doh or hopefully Banks, right?
5:24
But they become prematurely certain.
5:32
They bind that to their sense of self, right?
5:32
And then questioning an idea becomes an attack on self.
5:38
What do you think about that?
5:43
Chris Williamson: Collapse of grand narratives?
5:43
What else have people got to attach themselves to now?
5:45
Other than the beliefs that they created themselves.
5:49
We're detached from the local area that we have.
5:49
We're detached from a sense of patriotism.
5:56
Even that one of the fundamental elements of where were you born, what was the country you grew up in?
6:00
You have some sort of loyalty to the state.
6:00
Even that's being disintegrated at the moment.
6:04
And I saw this tweet earlier on today, literally just before I came on.
6:09
And it said, "The loss of faith in our institutions is the number one risk to the 21st century.
6:17
And there's nothing that anyone can do about it."
6:17
If anybody has managed to emerge from the last 16 months with their faith in higher power still intact.
6:22
CDC, WHO, government policymakers ... I would be amazed.
6:30
Chris Williamson: You have to basically not read or seen anything. And what does that mean?
6:31
That means that all of the previous way markers that people would have grabbed onto, something concrete. That's gone.
6:41
There is nothing fundamental for people to hold onto anymore.
6:41
And that sounds great, right?
6:46
You can be whatever you want to be.
6:46
This is a meritocracy, we're in a capitalist society.
6:50
You can go from lower-class, underclass right all the way to upper-class in the space of no time at all.
6:56
There's unbelievable internet money out there.
6:56
You can [inaudible] put your way to an evolved startup or whatever it might be.
7:00
But when you deconstruct some of the cultural artifices that we were holding onto, there's nothing robust left.
7:07
You need some stakes in the ground.
7:13
This is why conservatism needs to stay. I'm not ...
7:13
I don't lean particularly right or left but I think that there's a Donald Kingsbury quote that says, "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems."
7:22
And that really does highlight ...
7:27
throw dispense with things that have been carefully crafted over thousands of years at your peril.
7:31
Chris Williamson: Why would you get rid of this stuff so flagrantly? It really does ... It doesn't surprise me.
7:37
It doesn't surprise me that people find faith in their own worldview because what else have you got left to have faith in?
7:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, that kind of fits perfectly into a snippet.
7:44
I pulled from a book I'm reading called The Fifth Science.
7:48
I don't want to read it to you and get your reaction.
7:48
And it's science fiction.
7:52
And so this is assuming that humans have colonized the galaxy and here's the passage, "We call it narrative collapse. When a plot ...
7:58
When a planet is connected, very connected.
8:03
At time inevitably arrives when it becomes difficult to work out.
8:03
What is actually going on?
8:08
Video and audio can be faked.
8:08
Testimony isn't reliable.
8:08
All truths fail into a relative flatness.
8:16
This is more dangerous than any doomsday weapon."
8:21
Chris Williamson: Well, it is because what have people got left to ground their certainty in.
8:23
That the whole reason that anybody does sense-making or why do we have eyes?
8:26
We have eyes to be able to judge how far we are from the next thing.
8:28
If our eyes were no longer reliable visual indicators of what was going on, we might as well have our eyes closed.
8:32
Or in fact it would probably be better for us to have our eyes closed.
8:37
I would rather not know where the car is and be able to use my other senses than think I know where the car is and get it wrong.
8:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that this ...
8:44
what's going on right now is going to change literally everything.
8:46
It's going to change education.
8:46
It's going to change the nature of work.
8:53
It's going to change the nature of how people have to think.
8:58
I think we're moving into an time when your ability to synthesize knowledge and information is going to be vastly more important.
9:05
Your ability to be non-linear in your thought is going to be vastly more important.
9:10
And I recognize that really for the first time, there's going to be a group of people who through no fault of their own.
9:17
Are going to have a harder time coming up to speed with that.
9:23
And so as we advance again, rational optimist.
9:23
I think that will help make things a lot smoother. Thoughts?
9:32
Chris Williamson: Have you spent any time looking at behavioral genetics at all?
9:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I have, yes. Chris Williamson: Cool.
9:38
I mean anyone that's looked at that knows that an unbelievable amount of all of the things that you value in yourself and in others. You didn't choose.
9:42
It's essentially the same as luck because it came from your parents.
9:47
So your IQ correlates with your parents by 0.
9:54
8 toward the end of adulthood.
9:54
It actually seems to converge as opposed to diverged as you get older, which is quite interesting.
9:59
So you can have an incredibly sort of thick or clever child but by the end of life they're not far off where you are.
10:02
I remember seeing this [inaudible] man and this dude it's really good-looking broad shouldered guy stood at the front of a bed bath and beyond.
10:12
And he's got a shirt and a tie on and there's a thought bubble coming out the side of his head.
10:16
And he said, "500 years ago, I would have been a proud warrior."
10:20
Chris Williamson: And it's just think it's purely by a quirk of this particular version of the simulation that cognitive horsepower is what's applauded at the moment.
10:26
And you're totally right, that you're going to get a Matthew principle.
10:33
Here you're going to have from those who have nothing more will be taken then from those who have everything more will be given. Because if you ...
10:40
There's a rule at the moment.
10:40
I think it's, if you have an IQ below 85, you can't join the armed forces.
10:44
Or it might be [crosstalk] or something like that.
10:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes, in the U. S. Chris Williamson: Yeah.
10:47
So you can just imagine that as the lower bound for the skill level the intellectual competency level that you need continues to rise and rise and rise.
10:56
That IQ level is just going to go up with it.
10:56
And it's not just going to be for being in the army now because why would a place of work decide to let go of the robot that can do it at 99.
11:08
99999% failure rates, lack of error rate, right? Almost no errors at all.
11:15
Chris Williamson: To let some human in, that's going to mess it all up.
11:16
So, yeah, I think, I mean, I haven't really looked into the economics of how this stuff would work morally.
11:19
I don't really have too much of a problem with it.
11:24
My interest, human motivation and human nature.
11:24
So I think the main challenge you would have is giving people a sense of purpose.
11:30
If you strip away from them that job, for a lot of people that is the reason that they get up in the morning.
11:38
I mean, people that retire at 55 die at 65. That's what happens. You retire early.
11:38
My dad's trying to retire early and I'm going, maybe just send me a retirement for a bit, or have you considered starting an allotment?
11:49
Or do want to get another five dogs or something?
11:52
Or maybe we should begin a business doing whatever?
11:52
Just because I know that, that's the thing that will keep you going.
11:56
Chris Williamson: So yes, it would be great.
11:58
It will support people that through no fault of their own don't have the competencies that can allow them to continue contributing to the workforce in a meaningful way.
12:06
It means that companies don't need to have these weird throwaway jobs that everybody knows is kind of a whole pass type thing that makes, that just be ...
12:12
It would be so disgusting to have.
12:16
You'd feel like such a loser to have that job.
12:16
And everybody would know.
12:20
It's bringing your really unfit mate along to football, just so he doesn't get left out when you were a kid.
12:25
But the main challenge I think is how do you give these people a sense of purpose?
12:28
How do you give someone that isn't a part of the workforce a reason to get up in the morning when they don't have to get up in the morning? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep. I agree.
12:34
And when you were talking about the minimum IQ for the armed services, I flashed on something that I read which I found very intriguing.
12:42
Which is for a long time in the U. S.
12:42
, if you had an IQ above I think it was 125 or 130, you could not work for the police. Chris Williamson: Yes.
12:54
I've seen this article from 1997.
12:54
I was going to bring it up. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
12:57
Because people who are brighter don't take orders very well.
13:00
And I thought that was really, really fascinating from my point of view. I had ...
13:08
It was the first time I'd ever seen a ceiling on IQ.
13:08
One other thing on IQ it's ...
13:14
why do you think it's so controversial?
13:14
Chris Williamson: People don't like the idea that there is an immutable truth that you are bestowed at the beginning of life that determines your path through life. That's all it is.
13:21
That if IQ is relatively unmalleable, which based on the fact that it's 0.
13:27
8 correlated with your parents toward the end of life. It seems so.
13:32
You've got 20% to play around.
13:32
That's not nothing but it's not everything either.
13:35
And academic competency is what's applauded in the modern world, but you've given people.
13:40
I learned this from Alain de Botton from The School of Life.
13:44
He says that, "If the people who achieve the successes at the top and their victories are worthy of their successes, what does that make the people that don't?"
13:48
And he talks about the lexical change that we saw from the unfortunates.
13:54
Lady Fortuna had not blessed these ancient Greeks, the beggars on the streets, the people that were born with one leg or with some sort of challenges.
14:04
Chris Williamson: Roll the clock forward now, what's the equivalent? It's a loser.
14:08
It's not an unfortunate, it's a loser.
14:12
It's a person who has through their own volition somehow not made it happen.
14:12
And the problem with the meritocracy is that it puts your success or your failure at your feet which is great if you achieve successes, but it sucks if you don't. And it's ...
14:25
People with compassion don't like the idea that, and rightly so, it makes me feel uncomfortable that you can have someone. It feels unfair.
14:35
But then I remember my parents telling me when I couldn't watch TV after.
14:41
When I was 11 years old I couldn't watch TV after nine o'clock and I was stomping up the stairs and then shout after me and I'd say, "This is so unfair."
14:47
And they just scream after me and go, "Life's unfair."
14:47
And I thought, well, I guess it's not very gracious but it is kind of true.
14:55
Chris Williamson: So, I mean, he's another one, man.
14:55
Imagine if we could get a quantified metric where you kind of come with a big five personality.
15:00
But imagine you could get a quantified metric for hardwork-ism or willpower or conscientiousness.
15:05
I guess you could call it like industriousness.
15:05
If you had that number that correlates very, very closely with success in life as well.
15:12
Like the willpower test that they did.
15:12
The marshmallow test correlated more closely than net worth and an IQ.
15:16
Now you can say that the different types of intelligence and so on and so forth.
15:22
But if there was like WQ or something like willpower, the willpower quotation.
15:26
And people were able to see that.
15:30
And you were born with really low willpower, you think, well, God, this is really unfair but it's just the fact that IQ is kind of been applauded.
15:34
It's sort of the biggest goose in the nest to shoot, so to speak.
15:38
Chris Williamson: Like it's the obvious one that everybody goes after but there's a whole bunch of other things.
15:44
I get injured quite easily and I adore training physically.
15:44
I tend to have probably one sort of physical elements that I'm rehabbing at one time just before I get another one in time for this one, it'd be fixed.
15:52
And that's just constantly been my ...
15:52
so should I be upset about that?
15:54
Well, the difference is that my physical fitness isn't fundamental to my ability to create a sense of purpose.
15:59
Social status resources within society.
15:59
If everybody was a hunter gatherer or if everybody had to be a foe.
16:06
If everyone made their money by playing football or something then it would be very difficult for me, but it's not.
16:08
So it's so central to our success in life.
16:13
If you don't get it, you feel very down.
16:13
People that see people that don't get it and they feel empathy toward them.
16:17
And there's very little that anyone can really do about this.
16:20
So all of that combined, it makes sense that it's an uncomfortable situation.
16:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So one of the things that I love about listening to your podcasts and everything, Hey, you've got great guests and we're going to try to sharing high some of them.
16:31
But you ask questions in a manner, at least to my ear.
16:36
That is what I'm hearing is a almost a learning system, that's kind of grabbing.
16:43
And one of the things that I actually want to talk to you about was what are the five learnings that you came away after chatting with some of your guests that you didn't have before?
16:56
But equally as important to me at least is, are there others that you deleted after listening to your guests? Chris Williamson: Yeah.
17:06
So one that certainly comes to mind was Aubrey Marcus.
17:06
And this was a couple of years ago.
17:09
He's coming back on the show soon.
17:09
So Aubrey is the CEO of Onnit, business partner with Joe Rogan, so on and so forth.
17:14
Very smart guy, very psychedelic, big into his sort of wavy drugs and his long baggy pants and stuff lives in Austin.
17:19
But very, very awakened guy in the best sense of the word.
17:23
And he taught me that the persona is incapable of receiving love, it can only receive praise.
17:29
What he means by that is if you play a role, any successes that you get will feel hollow because people aren't in love with you.
17:36
They're just applauding the role that you play.
17:41
Chris Williamson: And this formed the basis of my TEDx talk.
17:42
It was very, very, very insightful as someone that had played a role for a long time as a young guy that attached to the sense of self meaning to the success of his business.
17:52
To the amount of social renowned I had.
17:52
Going on reality TV shows all over the place and the blue tick on Twitter and free charcoal toothpaste and all this sort of stuff.
18:00
Chris Williamson: I realized that what I'd desperately been trying to do was please all the people.
18:04
I wanted to do things that I thought other people would find funny or entertaining or worthy of respect or popularity or whatever it might be.
18:13
And that had caused me to constantly be playing a persona.
18:18
And this is why I never felt loved.
18:18
This is why when someone went into one of my nightclubs, they never came out.
18:22
Well this might, there might be under a couple of reasons for this.
18:26
But nobody ever went into one of my events and came out and said to me, "Hey man, before I went in there, I was lost and alone.
18:30
And I didn't really understand myself.
18:35
And I thought no one in the world got me.
18:35
But dude, when I heard that bang in house music and I had those one pound Jager Bombs, man, it just, dude, you've changed my life, man."
18:44
Chris Williamson: But now that I get messages like that all the time with the show.
18:45
And it fulfills me in a way, it's being thirsty without knowing that you're thirsty and then taking your first drink.
18:53
That's the same level of sort of existential quenching that I get from it.
18:53
And this is what happens when you find something that you genuinely care about and you contribute to the world and you think right.
19:02
I genuinely believe that I'm leaving this place better than I found it because of this, and that persona thing.
19:05
We don't love Hugh Jackman. We love Wolverine.
19:11
We don't love Chris Hemsworth. We love Thor.
19:11
And this was a reason why after reflecting on that quote from Aubrey, the persona is incapable of receiving love, it can only receive praise.
19:22
I think you see a lot of actor suicides because they spend all of their life playing personas and they don't really know who they are anymore.
19:27
They struggle to separate themselves from the role.
19:33
Is it me that people love? Is it the script? Is it the writer? It's just too much. So that was a huge one.
19:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is amazing.
19:40
It gets us into the fictional character known as Jed McKenna territory because [crosstalk] Chris Williamson: Fucking [inaudible] [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Jed McKenna.
19:51
Even though he's a complete picture which is so meta. That I love it, right?
19:58
And because it illustrates so many things.
19:58
So just quickly, Jed McKenna says we're all fictional characters and we're all playing a persona.
20:08
And that's one of the main problems in the world.
20:08
And to wake up, you need to realize that I am saying this as a fully on awake person.
20:14
Let's get that clear, but I love that quote because I think there's so much truth in it.
20:21
And one of the things that I always kind of struggle with is are people afraid to show their true self because that level of vulnerability, right? Is, I don't know. What do you think?
20:36
Chris Williamson: Absolutely.
20:36
This is the topic of my TEDx Talk about embracing your weirdness, that the vast majority of people are terrified of showing their true selves.
20:44
They think that it's the thing that's going to get them sacked or make them single for the rest of their life, or make them never be able to connect with another human.
20:53
And the bar stool has been completely turned upside down by them that no one in history has ever fallen.
20:56
If you ask anyone, "Why did you fall in love with your partner?"
20:59
No one has ever said, "Do you know what it is?
20:59
I just adore how easily replaceable they are."
21:04
Like, it's just the fact that they've got this sort of beautiful blend of like vanilla and bland views.
21:09
"I'm very turned on by how predictable everything is that they say.
21:09
I know one thing about them and I can accurately represent everything else."
21:18
Chris Williamson: They're going to come out with like, no one's ever said that, no, we fall in love with people for their idiosyncrasies and for their quirks. But we have the fear.
21:24
And I think this is born out of the schoolyard that we map a school yard popularity dynamic onto the real world.
21:29
And we presume that it still works because being different in school really isn't very highly valued. It's like a race.
21:33
It's like the most limbic place in the world, right?
21:37
It's just sort of these that will bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep.
21:41
Machines totting around, but it can also be very vicious and it informs the way that we behave in later life.
21:45
The same goes for business.
21:45
Like you trying to do what everybody else does guarantees you average results.
21:50
Like that's the one way that you can guarantee average.
21:56
Or in fact, if you try and do what everyone else does, and that's not what you do, you're probably going to be worse than average because you can't even do that.
22:04
Chris Williamson: Like just do what you do.
22:05
This is the Navarro quote.
22:05
Like, "No one can beat you at being you."
22:09
So, yeah, but it's fear, man. And it makes sense.
22:09
I understand why people are scared.
22:12
Like, again, this is me speaking as someone that's always terrified, like concerned about whether or not it's the right thing.
22:17
There's still huge artifact of old Chris looming in the background behind me.
22:22
But when you get rid of them, it's a very liberating way to live.
22:26
And learning stuff like that.
22:26
Another one that Aubrey said, he said, "You do not serve people from your cup.
22:30
You serve them from the source of that overflows around your cup."
22:34
Which is sought your shit first, before you try and go fix the world, which is a Jordan Petersonism.
22:39
Chris Williamson: There's a little bit more than that as well.
22:40
It's the fact that look, "You can benefit other people by sorting yourself, not just that you sought yourself, then get after the world."
22:49
And this is another Navalism.
22:49
And I think where he says that, "You can't make other people be happy.
22:53
You can be happy yourself and other people will be happy because of it."
22:58
So that overflowing coping allergy and the persona and the loved one, that episode really blew me away.
23:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Those are all great.
23:03
Obviously, I'm a big fan of that way of looking at the world.
23:03
I was lucky in that I realized pretty early on that other people weren't thinking about me at all.
23:14
And so that is very liberating and helpful.
23:14
And Tony de Mello is another guy who I've read extensively.
23:21
This is also his message.
23:21
You got to change yourself first.
23:29
And a lot of people don't like that.
23:29
And again, back to Jed McKenna, he goes, basically we are fear-based creatures and everything starts from fear.
23:34
And if you're a Dune fan, which I can't wait for the new movie, and I know I'll be disappointed because I'm so excited about it.
23:45
But if you're a Dune fan, there's a big theme there and in literature as well.
23:51
And that kind of brings me to the idea of how do you go about with all of these incredibly fascinating people?
23:56
How do you go about, is there a process where you synthesize and then add to knowledge base?
24:00
But again, I want to get you to tell me something you deleted from the knowledge base.
24:06
Chris Williamson: I'll do the deletion first, because this is quite an interesting one.
24:07
So it's Jordan Peterson and I didn't get to bring it up with him on the show, which is a shame, but I learned it from him.
24:16
And it's such a like stupid, but I found it really profound insight given my background as a club promoter and a party boy.
24:22
It was very attractive to many women, but choose just one.
24:27
And for me, it had always been, be attractive to many women and choose all of them.
24:32
And that was my pathway for success, right?
24:32
Like I'm a cool promoter. That's my clout. That's my social status.
24:37
And especially where I come from, like I talk about sobriety a lot as well, because I used to as a productivity tool very frequently, I'll do blocks of sobriety because it means that I get focused.
24:46
I don't go out late on a night.
24:49
Chris Williamson: And to some people that seems so obvious, like, "Obvious nah," like, "You shouldn't drink when you do that."
24:51
And I'm like, "Hmm, you're not from a working class town in the Northeast of the UK the last time before Scotland."
24:59
Like this is the culture here.
24:59
This is the biggest red pill that you can take.
24:59
It's completely programing because this is what people live for.
25:06
Thursday night, light one, Friday night, heavy one, Saturday night, heavy one, Sunday, recover, Monday, go back to work. That's the routine.
25:14
And then the same thing goes for being a young guy, that if you were the one that was sleeping with the most girls or with the hottest chick or breaking the most hot stuff like that, that was applauded.
25:23
But it always made me feel a bit icky.
25:23
And I didn't really understand why.
25:27
Chris Williamson: And I'd been a bit of a shit boyfriend for quite a-while and actually realized this doesn't make me feel proud of myself at all.
25:32
And regardless of how nice the relationship is for the other person, even if I cast that aside, which I wasn't, even if I cast that aside, I had so much more fulfillment and self respect by being a good partner or by just not being a shit.
25:47
I mean, just not being a little shit to these girls and that completely upended everything.
25:53
Because I was like, yeah.
25:53
Like the hero in the story doesn't go around each of the different castles, leaving the maidens bedspreads in the morning.
25:56
He goes through fire and brimstone, maybe tons of maidens, one in, but he chooses one.
26:00
And maybe there's a sequel and there's another sequel and there's another sequel, but at least within batches he's monogamous, right?
26:05
Chris Williamson: And I thought that was a really good antidote to a lot of the unwritten cultural programming that I'd been given as a young guy about why should do.
26:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's really interesting.
26:12
And in literature, of course, [inaudible] where the king goes and sleeps with the bride to be before her husband is seen as pure evil, right?
26:19
And a lot of good movies made about it.
26:19
You brought up a point that I've spoken.
26:21
So, our interior designer is from a working class Britain and she's quite beautiful her husband's totally switched on. He's a ad guy.
26:28
He's run agencies all around the world.
26:34
And we were at dinner with them one night and maybe a little too much wine.
26:39
But by the way, I do the whole not drinking for long periods of time as well.
26:44
It's just such an easy and good thing to do.
26:44
Anyway, she was like, "I got to tell you something." And I'm like, "What?"
26:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And she's like, "If we were in the UK you would never hire me." And I'm like, "What? Why?
26:58
You're incredibly talented."
26:58
And she asserted that even though no one really talks about it, the class system is very much alive in the UK and that someone in my position that I wouldn't even have any exposure to her.
27:13
Number one, is that true?
27:13
Are you finding that, that's also true?
27:18
And how do you change it?
27:21
Chris Williamson: I think that you wouldn't be aware of her existence. Yeah.
27:24
It's very deeply ingrained.
27:24
So, the difference between the UK and the US, in the US the problem that you guys have is that everybody believes they can be anything that they want to be.
27:33
Which leads to you having too many school shooters and too many people that have huge out of control egos, because there's no one to bring them back down to earth.
27:43
In the UK, we have the opposite problem.
27:43
We have tall poppy syndrome.
27:43
We have, "What do you think you're doing?
27:48
Why are you going and doing modeling, deejaying, starting a business, building a podcasting, a YouTube channel?" Whatever it might be. And I don't know why.
27:55
I mean, we've got a much bigger population density than you guys.
27:55
So we're just crammed in a lot closer together.
27:58
There's a lot more people in a smaller space of not more people per square mile than there is in the US, perhaps that's part of it.
28:03
Perhaps it's the fact that the weather is a little bit crap.
28:08
Chris Williamson: So people always focus on social issues, because there isn't actually that much to do.
28:11
This a real serious influence on people's time.
28:15
Because when you don't have leisure activities that are given to you freely by nature, you actually just focus on more rivalrous games, I think. We're an older country.
28:18
We're 1000s of years old, people are embedded in, the places that you live.
28:24
There's no weapons [inaudible] coming in the UK, like Austin's up and coming and Miami's up and coming.
28:29
And especially this last 16 months in America, we've seen the stocks of particular cities rise and fall.
28:38
That doesn't happen here, right?
28:38
It's very established where people live.
28:38
So I live in a sort of middle-class area of New Castle.
28:42
And then that way there's a lower class area.
28:46
And in that way, there's a whatever area.
28:46
Chris Williamson: Like you're talking within a half a mile and there's these boundaries and you know what, "Oh, well the council houses are over there, but the mansions are over that side."
28:52
Maybe even on the same street, but just at different ends of the street, but everybody knows it.
28:59
And yeah, it's very interesting.
28:59
In terms of how you fix it, man, I really don't know.
29:02
I try to give as good of an example as I can, if someone that's just doing what he wants to do, but I was at the mercy and still I'm almost 99% of me is still at the mercy of my programming.
29:13
But for a long time I was 100% at the mercy of it.
29:13
Like just completely being pulled along by the wind.
29:19
So I see why people get caught up like that.
29:19
And this is why you get these guys that will drink every weekend, weekend warriors party guys until 40 years old, 45 years old, 50 years old.
29:28
Chris Williamson: So living for the weekend, still can't wait for Dave Stag do in Vegas this year, stuff like that. It makes me sad.
29:35
Like, it's the worst thing about the UK, the rigidness of the class system.
29:39
There's not a lot of assortative mating. Sorry.
29:39
Like cross assortative mating. So you don't have...
29:41
Because people just don't mingle. You don't mix.
29:41
Yeah, it's an interesting one.
29:45
Vatsal: Everything you've just said about the class system in the UK stands true for India as well.
29:49
Chris Williamson: How so?
29:50
Vatsal: It's right from the moment you're born, you're born either in the upper class or in the lower class.
29:56
And then it gets into the education.
29:56
Whether you're highly educated, or lowly educated and then gets into when you start doing a job, it then transcends into how much you're earning.
30:04
So that class system, right from the family that you're born into until the very end of your late career, it's still intact.
30:09
A very huge part of your identity in India.
30:13
Chris Williamson: Well, think about that, right?
30:13
One of the reasons that people feel uncomfortable about a class system is that it's a obvious representation of where somebody was born in life.
30:21
But what we'll be talking about at the start, IQ is exactly the same thing. It's bestowed on you.
30:25
I mean, at least you can get lucky and win the lottery and get out of the...
30:29
There's no IQ lottery once it's been given to you, unless you take an appropriately angled blow to the head or something and become a superhuman. I'm not really too sure.
30:37
But you said about learning and sort of how I map all of the different things that I get from my guests. Man, it's so messy.
30:42
And this is like an ode to everyone that hasn't got their shit together because I'm friends with buddies like Tiago Forte, or David Perell or Ali Abdaal.
30:52
Chris Williamson: All these guys who have external second brain personal knowledge management system that's completely synchronized on notion and whatever backs up to the cloud and all this stuff.
31:03
And Tim Ferris has a concept that he calls the good shit sticks.
31:03
And that's the one that I follow, that you guys 350 episodes, whatever of the show and the things that come to mind, to the memories that by their nature have stuck with me.
31:15
Like if the thing that you tell me doesn't affect me sufficiently profoundly for me to remember it, then I probably don't need to remember it.
31:25
So I kind of allow my memory to be a self-selection mechanism for this stuff.
31:29
And especially when we've got such a high input of information, everybody now has a surplus of stimulation and content that they can consume.
31:37
Chris Williamson: There's two ways to go about it.
31:37
One is ruthlessly index everything that you can.
31:40
This will lead to you having an unbelievable insight into the world, but it's only for a very specifically sort of built person.
31:45
And for everyone else to just release the tiller, man, just let go of it.
31:50
Just allow the rudder of the ship to see you wherever you go.
31:54
The old Barry Marcus episode, that you do ends up with creating a TEDx Talk from it two years later, and then maybe you go for 30 episodes and they just make you feel good because you have a nice conversation with someone they don't profoundly change you.
32:07
So just think letting the good shit stick is that's the way to do it.
32:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's kind of perfect.
32:12
It reminds me of the line from Zorba the Greek where Zorba is this free spirit.
32:13
And he's talking to his boss who is not a free spirit.
32:18
And Zorba goes to the boss, "You lack one thing, boss."
32:18
And the boss goes, "What's that?"
32:24
And Zorba says, "You can't cut the rope and be free." And so it's like, yeah.
32:31
When you get into that kind of space, I think that just amazing things happen.
32:35
And kind of back to the class thing for a minute, I view that as actually one of the major positives of the great reshuffle, because geography as far as I'm concerned no longer matters.
32:47
And I understand your point of view right in your local scene, but Vatsal is now working with me and I have no doubt he will go on to far greater things.
32:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But even that, if we go back to where we started the podcast, it's like that isn't getting transmitted.
33:03
I don't think too many of our younger people. I tease people.
33:09
Because I like you by the way.
33:09
There is one thing that defines me politically, and that is, I am fiercely anti-authoritarian.
33:13
If you asked me my opinions on a variety of other issues, you're going to get confused because you're going to say, "Well, wait a minute, if you're in favor of a woman's right to choose, that means you have to believe X, Y, and Z." "No, it doesn't."
33:28
And I thought that was a great part of our conversation, but one of the things that I do to kind of tease younger people is capitalism sucks, tweeted from my iPhone while getting a Starbucks.
33:36
Is that going on in the UK too?
33:44
Chris Williamson: So I don't see it here as much.
33:45
We're very much salt of the earth people.
33:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes, you are.
33:49
Chris Williamson: So one of the- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Let's get this out there.
33:50
I have tons of British friends and you are, and that's one of the reasons why .
33:54
Chris Williamson: I think that it's made us very resilient to a lot of bad ideas.
33:56
The press for all that they're trying to do.
33:56
So here's something, man.
34:00
Here's a really good example of it.
34:00
It made me really uncomfortable a couple of weeks ago.
34:04
So England lost the Euros final, right?
34:04
And in the penalty shoot out some black players missed some penalty kicks and there was some online racism that was directed at them.
34:10
And I was away in Ibiza and it's just as well, because I only spent a tiny bit of time on the internet.
34:21
And even that made me feel very uncomfortable for the next few days. So this is why.
34:25
On one side, you had people who had said despicable things to world's champion athletes from their armchair.
34:33
And on the other side, you had a press that had decided that this was going to be the headline because we played well, but we lost.
34:42
Chris Williamson: It doesn't actually make for a tremendously good limbic hijack.
34:43
So you had one group that had done something heinous and terrible.
34:43
And another group that had decided this is going to be our talking point for the next seven days.
34:53
But even with that, you see people in the UK saying, "Why are you talking about this?
34:59
Why are you giving these idiots the attention that they want?
34:59
Why are you even bringing it up?"
35:02
When you think that there was tens of millions of tweets about this.
35:06
And I think that they'd managed to find 100 tweets that had been directed in a racist manner.
35:11
I mean, that's 100 more than it would be correct to have, but if you take a sample of a bunch of million people, there's going to be psychopaths and sociopaths and people with learning disabilities.
35:20
If you get the sample size widen, if you're going to get one of everything, monkeys on a typewriter writing racist stuff in the ether.
35:27
Chris Williamson: So that really highlighted to me that British people kicked back against the press overtly trying to push a disintegrative narrative that they wanted to have this England.
35:35
We've always known that this is the way the England's being safe. Is it really?
35:39
Because none of my friends are like that.
35:39
And no one that I ever know is like that.
35:44
And I've met a million people on the front door of nightclubs and maybe seen like three racist things ever.
35:49
So maybe observation selection effect, but that was one thing.
35:54
We're resilient about ideas, a progressive pushed sort of wacky bad ideas because people in the UK... Here's another reason.
35:58
It's not cosmopolitan enough.
36:02
No one's coming to Newcastle upon Tyne to import their bad ideas from somewhere else to stage a march.
36:08
So the threshold, the same as the good shit sticks, like the serious shit and act.
36:13
Chris Williamson: So we had BLM protests last year, but we haven't had some of the other less well populated protests, whereas in the US somebody trips over a brick and there's the opportunity for crowds in the streets.
36:28
So yeah, we're resilient in that way.
36:28
And again, this is the tall poppy thing, right?
36:31
It's the advantage that you can't be anything that you want to be.
36:31
Other people tell you to kind of calm down because it acts as a control mechanism for people going in.
36:38
I don't think that we've quite found the right balance, but it definitely helps in these situations. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
36:43
I'm fascinated by cultures around the world and how they form up in terms of things that we're talking about right now.
36:50
So one of the things that I find happened more in America because of the Hypomanic Edge, and there was a book written about it by a Wall Street journal editor, like in the late '70s or early '80s.
37:02
And it was his lamentation, essentially that what had happened in America was that because of the fluidity of our society, like was marrying like i. e.
37:17
really smart people were marrying other really smart people.
37:17
And if you know anything about genetics, that means that they're going to probably have really smart kids.
37:28
And one of his first points that I still think about, because I don't know and I want your opinion here.
37:35
He said, for a long time in America, we rejected the idea of class, right?
37:41
Because you know America, but he said, if you looked at how things actually work, you could have a brilliant baker and an idiot banker.
37:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And they stayed the banker, they stayed the banker.
37:58
And then that started changing dramatically in the late 20th century. What do you think?
38:05
Chris Williamson: So assortative mating there is when you have people that are similar phenotypes sleep with other people and they make up.
38:09
And this is something that Robert Plomin, the guy that wrote Blueprint that I had on my show last week, he really red pilled me on behavioral genetics.
38:17
What he was talking about that Silicon Valley is becoming this now, that you have this Mathew principle occurring, that these super geniuses are mating with the super geniuses.
38:26
And as you start to pull that out further and further and further away, you're going to create these sort of weird insular little communities.
38:35
And yeah, I mean, it's strange because I got accused of promoting eugenics when I talked about behavioral genetics, because you're like, "Well, what do you think other people judge their partners' attractiveness based on?"
38:45
Like, "What do you think fitness signals and beauty signals are?"
38:50
Like, good hair, good teeth, good nails.
38:54
Chris Williamson: A symmetrical face is genetically harder to grow than non-symmetrical face.
38:57
Women that have feminine features are statistically more fertile than women that don't.
39:03
Men who have more masculine features are statistically more fertile than men that don't have higher test.
39:08
So on and so forth, all the way down.
39:12
So, yeah, I mean, again, it's uncomfortable, but there's only so far that you can force people's preferences in the situation.
39:17
And there's a couple of things I've noticed over the last couple of years, that sort of capitalism will always win and desire will always win.
39:26
So there's a few boundaries where the impetus of a crowd to make a forcing function, to try and match their preconceived idea of how the world should be, where it stops dead.
39:41
And a few of those occur with desires either for mating or desires for products as well.
39:47
So for instance, you saw on Love Island, which is the reality TV show that I went on that's recently come out.
39:51
And on that show, they are trying to diversify the cast.
39:51
And on there, people's desires cannot be pushed around.
39:59
You are statistically more likely to be attracted to people of your own race.
40:04
That's fairly uncontroversial, but it's kind of awkward when there's maybe only two black people on the show and it's kind of expected that they get together and then they do because that seemed to be kind of reinforcing these dating stereotypes that you get.
40:17
But you're like, "Well, hang on a second, do you want these people to date someone that they're not attracted to?"
40:23
Chris Williamson: And the same thing goes for...
40:23
Well, to continue the reality TV analogy, why haven't we got a gay version of Love Island?
40:25
Or, why aren't we representing all different types of sexual preference on there?
40:30
And you go, "Well, okay, so you need two gay people at least.
40:33
Or else it's just going to be one person in the corner, which is going to be weird.
40:36
And then you'd need to represent two lesbians as well, presumably, because that would make it equal."
40:40
And then you go, "Okay, well, I mean, there's a big trans community and then there's big bi community."
40:43
Chris Williamson: And you can just continue to slice and dice until you're like, "Right, okay well, in order to represent everyone that you want to..."
40:48
And the argument would be, "...
40:48
okay well, why don't you create a show that goes and does that?
40:51
If you think that, that's what the market wants, then you can go into it.
40:56
And if the market does want it, then it will be rewarded."
40:59
But again, in that situation, no matter how you want the world to be desire of, commercially and sexually will kind of always butt up against that.
41:05
And for some reason, it's like an immutable truth.
41:10
People don't really seem to want to complain about that because they're like, "Well, we know that this is the case."
41:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And, you see it happening here in the US in Hollywood.
41:20
They are continually, people who watch award shows, plummeting. No one's interested.
41:25
The movies they put out for the most part, unless they're for kids, plummeting. Nobody's interested.
41:30
I was talking to a good friend of mine who's a director and I'm like, "What's going on?
41:34
I mean, clearly the market is telling you something here.
41:34
The market is telling you this is shit.
41:38
We're not interested in this."
41:42
I mean, there's so much richness out there, but do you think that they're just going to...
41:46
Do you really see them saying, "Nope, we're going to stick with this.
41:46
We're going to keep putting these shows out and fuck you.
41:49
You're going to watch them."
41:53
Chris Williamson: I can't see how that's going to work, man.
41:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, I cannot.
41:56
Chris Williamson: Like capitalism is a hell of a drug and the market will win out.
41:58
The market will always win out, and we can't force people's preferences into a box that we...
42:06
Like, if you decide that sleeves in shirts is oppressive all of a sudden.
42:13
Let's just pick the most arbitrary thing that you can.
42:13
But, no one wants to wear ponchos.
42:18
You go, "Well, I can't believe, look at all of these people that aren't supporting this new virtuous movement that we've got."
42:22
Chris Williamson: I'm not generalizing everything here.
42:24
Obviously, I'm trivializing it for the people from Twitter that are listening.
42:29
But, the fact of the matter is our desires come from a very, very base place, right.
42:35
Base in all of the terms, and you can't play around with that.
42:35
And when people's bottom lines really, really start to get squeezed, they're going to go...
42:40
I mean, I was listening to Bill Bird the other day and he was talking about- Jim O'Shaughnessy: So as I.
42:48
Very synchronicity moment there.
42:51
Chris Williamson: He was talking about the fact that...
42:51
He said, "If you're going to fucking destroy the country, at least give us some good films to watch."
42:58
Like, if you think about the Oscars, man.
42:58
Think about what's won Oscars and awards over the last few years, what was the last one?
43:04
Was it maybe one of the Batman films that kind of was an absolute super stonker sort of blockbuster commercial success that maybe did well there?
43:14
I don't know, but- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I think so.
43:15
Chris Williamson: That'll be up there, but you think like, "Come on, come on."
43:16
And, then if you do get something that's kind of interesting like Joker, it gets loaded with all sorts of awful terminology. I didn't know, man.
43:24
So, here's an interesting one for you.
43:24
So, here's another lesson that I learned from somewhere that I probably wasn't expecting to, do you know Ryan Long? He's a comedian. Jim O'Shaughnessy: No.
43:32
Chris Williamson: He does this sort of very incisive cultural commentary online.
43:33
So, he did the how racists and anti-racists basically agree on everything.
43:39
He did a video about that.
43:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I actually have seen that. I didn't know the name.
43:47
Chris Williamson: It went hyper viral.
43:49
Yeah, it went mega, mega viral.
43:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It was really funny.
43:51
Chris Williamson: Yeah, so that was him and he came on a couple of weeks ago.
43:52
And he's similar age to me, he's maybe a couple of years older than me but he's a cool guy.
43:56
So, he was in a ska punk band when he was 18 in Canada and then he's been doing standup since then.
44:01
And, he's got a nose ring.
44:01
He's infinitely more cool than I'll ever be, and he has his finger on the absolute bleeding edge of the pulse of the internet. Like he really gets it.
44:12
The same way that Tim Dillon does, right.
44:12
Tim Dillon is working three years ahead of everybody else.
44:17
Pretty much everybody else, right, on the internet.
44:21
Chris Williamson: And, the lesson that I learned from Ryan Long is that if you look close enough at the internet, the real cutting edge of the culture, you can predict things that are going to happen one, two, three years out from that.
44:31
So, some interesting examples would be Dan Bilzerian.
44:38
So, if you actually look at the real cutting edge guys that do commentary on YouTube and stuff like that, they were making critical videos around Dan Bilzerian about two years ago.
44:45
And then maybe about sort of 18 months ago, you see people like Philion and Tom Nash who are these sort of young people commentate as Tom Nash does finance analysis on YouTube.
44:55
And they're saying, "Something doesn't really work out here."
44:55
And, now most people on the internet think that Dan Bilzerian's a man-child.
44:58
Chris Williamson: Like most people really don't...
45:00
He's not got the Hugh Hefner thing, he got rumbled for not owning that house on the top of Hollywood Hills.
45:03
He actually was renting it.
45:03
The finances and his company have gone backward, how did you lose money when the entire industry increased by 20% in the year of 2020?
45:10
All this sort of stuff, right.
45:10
And then Brian Rose from London Real.
45:14
Brian Rose from London Real, tune a bit years ago.
45:14
You start to see these sort of rumblings in the odd corners of the internet.
45:19
Chris Williamson: Dave Rubin at the moment, I think is a hockey stick inflection point where if he continues to take the wrong sort of a turn that he may sell his integrity so hard that he can't buy it back. And you're seeing... It's everywhere.
45:30
It's everywhere, but you need to listen very, very carefully.
45:30
And this is what I learned from Ryan that first off, if you do sell your integrity, you can't buy it back.
45:32
There's no amount of hustle that can outwork being uncool.
45:37
And once you go down that line, you're done. You are done.
45:44
And especially if you've got personal accountability and a brand that's attached to you and you've taken the naval thing, but you didn't get the cool memo.
45:48
If you didn't decide to try and stay cool, and relevant, and stress test people's ideas...
45:57
Because the internet's grift radar, the shill alert is so hyper tuned that if you're not careful, your own audience will come for you.
46:05
Chris Williamson: Perfect example, look at the fighter and the kid, Brendan Schaub and Brian Carlin.
46:08
Their own subreddit has been hijacked by people that troll them. Same as Dave Rubin's.
46:12
And you're like, "Oh my God, this was supposed to be for you and now this is a collection of people who go out of their way to make incredibly smart funny jokes about you."
46:22
And because people are mimetic creatures, let's say that your mind hasn't...
46:29
You've stumbled upon something of Brendan Schaub's and you say, "I wonder if I like Brendan Schaub.
46:33
I'm going to go and read it."
46:37
And, you find that everybody else thinks that he's like a wasteman.
46:41
You go, "Oh, well maybe, yeah I always knew he was because the mimesis is strong, right."
46:45
Chris Williamson: Well, you saw this with GB News.
46:45
So, the UK started a center, a news station.
46:47
Independently owned, started by a lot of people from all over the...
46:52
It was accused of being the UK's answer to Fox news, but I don't think that was quite a fair characterization.
46:56
But there's certainly some right-leaning voices on that.
46:59
That being said, when the overturn windows shifted so far left that anything center seems far right, it kind of makes sense, right.
47:03
Chris Williamson: And, the worst piece of information that could have been put out about them with some viewing figures from a couple of weeks ago that said that the viewing figures were low.
47:10
And I thought, even though watching the news is by its very definition, a transactional solitary affair, no one wants to watch the news station that nobody else watches.
47:22
And yet, don't sell your integrity, you can never buy it back.
47:25
And, you can't out-hustle being uncool.
47:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Could not agree more.
47:28
It's like when I give advice to younger people, especially is be your authentic self because you don't have to try, right.
47:38
Like I did a podcast with Pomp. You might know Pomp.
47:38
He's actually a very nice young guy.
47:41
He's a little promotional with Bitcoin.
47:41
Like he's- Chris Williamson: He plays the game.
47:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, he plays the game.
47:45
Anyway, he wanted to have me on the podcast because I will always infrequently say, "I don't know, right. I have no idea."
47:51
And, it's one of these things that really annoys me in that if...
47:51
Again, we're back to human nature here, right.
47:57
It is human nature to want to pay more attention to the person who seems certain than to pay attention to the person who is like, "Certainty is only for Madmen." And, what do you think?
48:11
I mean, does that play out?
48:11
Is that part of this underlying kind of biological soup, that is kind of there and we're not going to change the ingredients?
48:21
Chris Williamson: Fluency and precision of speech definitely gets conflated with truthfulness.
48:22
This is how conmen get away with it, right.
48:26
They have a sexy sales pitch, and they flog some insurance that your grandma doesn't need for a thousand dollar a month repeating payment or something like that.
48:37
Yeah, it's a difficult one, man, because although there is a lot of nuance in the world, you can't just go...
48:42
The rubber has to meet the road at some point and you have to actually commit to a decision.
48:45
Chris Williamson: And, I think that what I try and do is essentialize a lot of the concepts that some of the bigger picture guests that I have on talk about.
48:55
So, Daniel Schmachtenberger is this huge galaxy brain guy who legitimately is from a different species.
48:59
And, my sole goal is to try and wrangle him down and think, right okay, I need to concretize this.
49:04
You have to say something that I can understand and that the audience can understand.
49:09
So, yeah part of it is people being seduced by a sense of orderliness because the world's chaotic, right.
49:14
And, if I tell you that I've got the answer or that the answer is far simpler than you think it is, why would someone want to have to understand nutrition, and sleep, and training to be able to get lean?
49:31
Why can't they just take a pill because it's a more orderly, easiest solution to it, right?
49:36
Our brains are built for those sorts of pathways.
49:36
And, yeah I don't know, I don't know.
49:38
Chris Williamson: I mean, there's a lot of certainty in religion and we spoke about something that I see regularly repost about on the episode you did on my show called Conceptual Inertia.
49:44
Which is the previous intellectual frameworks that underpin the way that we see the world, but they linger long after those actual institutions have gone away.
49:53
Yep, and you think about the way that we still see the worlds now, that came out of a conversation about existential risk.
50:05
That as soon as you go from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the solar system, people still take...
50:10
Even though it's been absolutely proven, this sort of cultural behemoth gets dragged along behind like a dog that doesn't want to go for a walk.
50:14
And, I'm wondering whether the certainty that came out of religion may be play.
50:23
Chris Williamson: You can attest to a higher power, you have a small number of gatekeepers that are your window between you and the divine.
50:26
That's the person that's able to give you the information, that's the priest, or the preacher, or the vicar or whatever.
50:34
And, yeah I'm wondering how much that plays through.
50:34
There's all sorts of reasons for it, man.
50:38
I mean, it's probably just limbic hijack gain but that's definitely an element to it.
50:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Our last episode featured The Religion With No Name, which is fantastic.
50:44
But if you keep digging, keep digging, keep digging, keep digging, what you find is they all start as marketing campaigns, right.
50:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Our gods are better than these gods, and here's why.
50:56
Which is maybe why the early Christians borrowed, at least allegedly, psychedelic beer from the cult of Dionysus to get people switched on.
51:09
But, that gets me back to the whole idea of when you fuck with people's beliefs, that is a very, very dangerous thing to do.
51:16
And so I have tried many, many different ways to put things, right.
51:25
And hypothesis, thesis, bets.
51:25
I think bets works, right.
51:25
So, if you're going to be...
51:33
Like, you had a guy in the UK, I can't remember his name.
51:33
But, he was making these apocalyptic projections in the Independent about COVID and he was like off by power laws.
51:45
And, I had a conversation with a friend and it was simply like, "We should just make them put money on it and guess what's going to happen." Whoa.
51:54
Chris Williamson: No skin in the game, man.
51:54
Yeah, yeah, yeah no skin in the game.
51:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's another one.
51:56
You and I totally agree on this, you've got to have skin in the game because if you don't, you can say anything. You can, whatever.
52:00
And- Chris Williamson: Here's a really good one for you, man, so I learned this while watching Sam Harris.
52:04
So, this is not a lesson I've learned from someone who's been on the podcast, but someone that hopefully at some point in the future will be on.
52:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I watched that piece, I loved it by the way.
52:13
Chris Williamson: Yeah, so- Jim O'Shaughnessy: [crosstalk], Sam Harris- Chris Williamson: Yes, so basically the suggestion was that you can put skin in the game by paying a social cost to hold the view that you do.
52:22
So, audience capture is something that every creator and every viewer as well should be really, really concerned about.
52:28
That if you say left things then people from the left will start to love you more as long as you continue to say left things, which forces you to say more left things, which dah, dah, dah and then you go down a complete rabbit hole.
52:40
And the same goes for the right as well, or the same goes for any position that you want to hold, whether it's anarchy or libertarianism.
52:44
I'm talking politics at the moment, because that's what everybody seems to want to talk about.
52:51
Chris Williamson: But the same could be true for transhumanism, the same could be true for biohacking, a longevity, or CrossFit over powerlifting, or bodybuilding of weightlifting.
52:57
Whatever it might be, you get captured by the audience.
52:57
The reason that I really respect Sam Harris and the reason that I trust that he's a good actor is he pays an incredibly high price for every view that he holds.
53:05
Because it's so multi-polar, it's so multi-variant, it's so non-typical.
53:12
And every episode, I imagine, pisses off at least 13% to 20% of his audience.
53:19
Chris Williamson: He's incredibly anti-Trump, incredibly pro-vaccine, incredibly pro-lockdown and mask measures.
53:29
But also very anti-woke, very pro-personal sovereignty and you think like, "Where the fuck is this guy getting it from?"
53:34
And you go, "Well, he's getting it from his own personal values."
53:37
So, we're talking about skin in the game.
53:37
You can put skin in the game by showing that you are prepared to...
53:40
You don't need to die on your hill, but you do need to not fold at the first sign of pressure.
53:46
And this is what Sam does really, really well.
53:46
I trust that Sam believes the things that he believes, because the price for him believing them is so high that nobody that didn't believe them would do it.
53:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree.
54:00
Chris Williamson: That's it.
54:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And again, I've been pitching this book so hard, but The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, he does an amazing job of explaining this idea that we can't prophesize about knowledge that hasn't been created yet.
54:10
And, it's our natural default to be like all Club of Rome doom, right.
54:18
So Malthus is a great example, was he using data that was absolutely correct? Yes, he was.
54:26
Was he missing data that was not present, because it hadn't been invented yet? Yes, he was.
54:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, this idea and default to pessimism is, I think, another one of the things that's kind of baked into the human DNA.
54:40
And, I just think that I find it so refreshing why I love you, for example, because I don't know what I'm going to get when I'm watching your podcast, which I love. It's kind of like...
54:48
Again, distinctiveness, you demonstrate every time I watch or listen, I'm kind of excited because I don't know what you're going to say, which I think is great.
54:59
And, I just wish that more people could be much more comfortable with that because- Chris Williamson: It takes a lot of work, man.
55:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It does.
55:09
Chris Williamson: It takes an awful lot of work.
55:09
It'd be nice if everyone was 8% body fat with a six pack, but it takes a lot of grafts to do all of these things.
55:17
And, I understand it's a lifelong pursuit.
55:17
Here's another thing, so I think I've got two lessons left for you. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Good.
55:23
Chris Williamson: So, one of them is actually from Jed McKenna.
55:24
So, this is from someone that I went on a podcast with which is you that you forced me to get, and it's released the tiller so I've got it written on my board over there.
55:32
So for the people that don't know sailing, the tiller is the thing that's attached to the top of the rudder.
55:36
It's basically the steering wheel of the boat, and Jed implores us to release the tiller.
55:38
He says that, "Most of the suffering that we encounter in life comes from gripping it too hard and trying to force our way through the current."
55:48
Chris Williamson: And, I only found this out after speaking to a sailor recently, but it turns out that this analogy actually maps on to sailing itself as well.
55:55
That if you try and force against the waves, the ship can actually steer itself through waves better than you can because its tiller will allow itself to move, and that's the most efficient way to go through it.
56:08
And, this has been a lesson I've learned from a ton of different people.
56:08
Most of them have done something to do with embodiment, so yoga guests I've had on or people to do with meditation.
56:17
Especially the behavioral genetics stuff as well, that there is so much sort of embodied knowledge, and understanding, and wisdom that you have that you do not have access to.
56:26
Chris Williamson: And for those of us that pray at the altar of cognitive horsepower, and love to be cerebral, and love to understand the world and have a real fascination with human nature, we can think that, well, if I just learn more, know more, have a better personal knowledge management system.
56:41
If I just update my notion page a little bit more efficiently, then I will be able to wrangle the world from chaos into order in the way that I want and that is not the way that it works.
56:49
It's never been the way that it works.
56:52
Chris Williamson: There is so much embodied knowledge inside of you.
56:54
The reason that you cross the street when you see someone that just looks a little bit shifty on there.
56:57
The reason that you naturally feel warm, and associated, and familiar with someone new at work that ends up being a really good person.
57:01
And, the reason that you don't the person that ends up cheating on his masses in six months time, because he knew that there was something up with that guy.
57:08
And if I held a gun to your head and said, "What's going on?" You wouldn't know.
57:11
But you knew, something in you knew.
57:15
Chris Williamson: You know when you're feeling a little bit off, you can sense it in your body two days before the illness actually manifest itself.
57:22
Whatever it might be, myriad of these situations there is embodied wisdom inside of us.
57:22
And this isn't woo-woo stuff, this is the way that your system works.
57:27
And, I think that one of the things I need to remember a lot is to release that tiller.
57:32
It's written on the board over there for me to remind me every time I walk in and out of my room, that I don't need to take things so very seriously.
57:40
That what would this be like if life was fun?
57:46
That trying to control all of the different outcomes isn't going to happen, and that going to happen anyway.
57:50
The things that are going to happen are going to happen.
57:53
Chris Williamson: Imagine how much work people have put into trying to change their IQs, not knowing that only 20% of it was even under their control by the end of their life.
58:03
Or, it would be like finding out that most people spent most of their life trying to become taller.
58:07
And, it just makes me think it's liberating, it's uncomfortable because you think, well, I want to control the direction that I'm going in.
58:14
I want to be a sovereign individual.
58:14
There is nothing unsovereign about allowing your nature to take you forward at all.
58:19
Chris Williamson: And, yeah that's something that's taken time for me to realize, right.
58:21
You have this sort of Hegelian vacillation between a desire to let go of everything and a desire to control everything.
58:30
And, now I'm trying to come back down to just be like, "Look, utilize what you've got, but allow the rest of it.
58:34
Allow your programming and your sort of embodiment to take the rest of it and carry it forward."
58:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: My mom would call that being comfortable in your own skin, and I learned so much from her.
58:46
And again, just learning that is amazing.
58:46
If you have the unconditional love of one parent, it doesn't need to be both.
58:54
It's best when it's both, but if you have the unconditional love of one parent, man, the imprinting that goes on there, it carries you through the rest of your life. And, I was...
59:05
So every night I say, "Thank you."
59:05
Just to the universe, basically, because I won the cosmic lottery.
59:10
So did you, so did Vatsal.
59:10
Anyone who's actually here, you know what the odds against us being here and being conscious?
59:19
Chris Williamson: Did you end up watching my TEDx talk? Did you ever see that?
59:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I started it and I haven't finished it.
59:23
So, I started it last night. Chris Williamson: Okay.
59:27
There's a number for this.
59:27
It's one in 10 to the power of 2,685,000.
59:29
So it's one with 2,685,000 zeros after it.
59:29
So that number is not just larger than all the particles in the universe, it's larger than all the particles in the universe if each particle was another universe.
59:41
That's how big that number is.
59:46
It's basically unbelievable.
59:46
The chance of you existing is zero.
59:46
And you're right, if only there was a way to get the anchoring bias to work on that figure, you could spend 90 years in horrific crucifying pain and still feel blessed.
1:00:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly, well and Tony de Mello, when he had his Satori and became enlightened.
1:00:03
Interesting guy because he was Indian like Vatsal, but he was a Jesuit priest which is an odd combination.
1:00:09
But he was in Calcutta and the rickshaw driver was clearly ill and dying and yet he seemed to de Mello to be such... the idea of a free soul.
1:00:23
Bukowski talks about it, I love that quote. So he notices right?
1:00:23
And so he asked him, "How much do you make a day?"
1:00:29
And he tells him, I can't remember what it was. Tiny amount of money.
1:00:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so de Mello goes, "Will you take the rest of the day off and talk to me? Of course I'll pay you."
1:00:39
And literally in that moment when he started talking about his life and one of the things that he mentioned to de Mello is, "Yeah, I'm dying but I got to live."
1:00:46
And de Mello had never put it that way in his own brain before.
1:00:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But that brings me to another thing I wanted to talk to you about because it's really fascinating for me because I've come to you always as this thinker, this intellectual who puts out really, really good stuff.
1:01:04
But tell me about your nightclub? Chris Williamson: Okay.
1:01:11
So I arrived at Uni at 18 and I'd spent all of my money in freshers week, drinking and partying which is the week before inductions begin.
1:01:16
And I sat down next to this guy in my first ever seminar and I said, "I'm skinned."
1:01:20
And he said, "Well, if you come with me I used to work for this company in Leeds and I'm going to go and get a flyering job, giving out flyers for a nightclub." "Dude I'll do anything. I'm completely skinned."
1:01:33
Chris Williamson: So I went with him and that guy now, 16 years later, is still my business partner.
1:01:36
That guy that I sat next to, we've been business partners.
1:01:41
I was groomsman at his wedding and christenings and all this sort of stuff.
1:01:41
And we just started, I was a professional party boy.
1:01:46
I was good at giving out flyers.
1:01:49
Chris Williamson: I was aggressive with what I did.
1:01:49
I treated it like a professional as opposed to someone that just loved getting drunk and didn't realize they could monetize it.
1:01:55
And then I got my first franchise at 19.
1:01:55
It's an event called Carnage, which people from the UK, everyone from the UK that's over the age of sort of 28 will remember.
1:02:04
It was this big t-shirt bar crawl and you had to wear a t-shirt and you ticked off tasks on the back like pull a pig or kiss three randoms or went upside down in whatever, some of the stuff.
1:02:13
Chris Williamson: And we used to do that and that got me through Uni.
1:02:14
Then finished Uni, went on to do a Master's and started up a weekly events company.
1:02:18
The entire events business is fascinating because what you're weaponizing is mimesis.
1:02:22
And I never knew it at the time.
1:02:22
I never ever knew it but club promoters know inherently, even if they don't have a name for it.
1:02:25
So a typical tactic amongst club promoters is to hold the queue at the front door upon opening so you can get an insane queue shot and post it online.
1:02:35
Chris Williamson: Well, what's that?
1:02:38
The queue is what people try to avoid but why are you posting it?
1:02:38
Look at all of these other people that are coming, you should come as well.
1:02:42
So the insight into human nature is endlessly fascinating because you see people at their least encumbered.
1:02:51
They are complete and just the collective effervescence is so strong that the DJ can tell them to sit on the floor, they'll sit on the floor.
1:02:55
The DJ can tell them to do a handstand, they'll do a handstand.
1:02:59
Chris Williamson: They're just so in the moment.
1:03:00
And it's a great vehicle to make money.
1:03:00
I did very well out of it for a long time.
1:03:05
It's paid for the property portfolio that I now look after which I absolutely love.
1:03:08
That was a really cool pivot that I made. And it shaped me.
1:03:08
It shaped me profoundly as a person but there are a lot of externalities that people don't see coming out of that industry.
1:03:16
It's very much a cowboy sort of place to work.
1:03:16
The industry is very, very cutthroat.
1:03:21
No one has anything contractually obliged.
1:03:24
Chris Williamson: It's just constant anxiety.
1:03:24
Think of a more fickle industry than nightlife.
1:03:28
If somebody brings out a bad iPhone on the next one, the 13th iPhone's bad, the 14th iPhone will still sell a ton but you can go from having a 100 grand, 200 grand a year event, to it being shut within three weeks because someone's opened a slightly cooler one a couple of blocks away.
1:03:48
Chris Williamson: And this led to again a very particular sort of worldview around business, around marketing.
1:03:52
One of the main lessons that I took from it actually is how much anticipatory pleasure people take.
1:03:58
And this is such a hack for any of the entrepreneurs that are listening or someone who wants to start up anything, anything at all.
1:04:09
You can artificially increase the popularity of the thing that you're going to do by drawing out the amount of time from when you announce it until when you do it and then opening up the fourth wall of the process as you go.
1:04:22
Chris Williamson: So for instance with us, let's say we've got a new event coming and it's going to launch in September when the students come back.
1:04:28
In a couple of weeks time in the middle of August we'll, something new is coming.
1:04:28
Some really dramatic cinema, over the top cinematic video and get people talking.
1:04:32
And then maybe we'll spread some rumors around about where it might be but none of them will be right.
1:04:40
So we'll accidentally leak a WhatsApp message in one place or another and it gets people talking.
1:04:44
Chris Williamson: Or maybe we'll say that we're going to move an event to somewhere else and the more that you can try and just build people up...
1:04:49
I've done this with the lead magnets for my mailing list.
1:04:54
So my new lead magnet which is a 100 books to read before you die, I'm going to do a full one week teaser campaign of here's one, but maybe a book a day or whatever.
1:04:59
And there'll be a reminder that you can set on your Instagram.
1:05:05
Humans are such teleological beings that their desire to look forward to something, it's so compulsive and anyone that wants to launch anything, my single piece of advice to you would be build out a launch sequence six weeks out and just plan it.
1:05:22
Chris Williamson: Okay, so I'm going to talk about this and then I'm going to announce where it's going to be and I'm going to announce when it's going to happen and then we'll release a logo and then we'll release a branding.
1:05:31
And then maybe it's a restaurant and we'll release some photos of the food or maybe we'll really sort of a dark and black and white photo where people can't really see where it is and blah, blah, blah.
1:05:38
Most people don't have that much going on and creating some drama around this, it signals I really care about this business.
1:05:49
Look at all of the effort I'm putting in.
1:05:49
It signals you should care about this business.
1:05:52
This is something to look forward to.
1:05:52
Chris Williamson: You should book your table.
1:05:54
You should get your spot at the new gym.
1:05:54
Someone's opening a new gym or starting a new PT business or something like that.
1:05:58
Get people excited about the thing that you're going to release.
1:06:02
And it is incredible how powerful this tactic is.
1:06:09
I got shut down from ConvertKit when I launched my mailing list last year because they thought that the only way that someone could be driving this much traffic to a brand new complete zero newsletter list was if there was some sort of hack going on.
1:06:23
Chris Williamson: So they just killed the account.
1:06:23
And I had to email them and say, "Look, I've actually done this."
1:06:25
Like latent leverage, I suppose.
1:06:29
And then I've released it all in on one day.
1:06:29
But yeah man, it's amazing.
1:06:29
It's a really, really fascinating industry to be in.
1:06:33
And I very much appreciate what I've learned from it but the late nights they kill me now.
1:06:36
So I'm a little bit more advisory than I used to be. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:06:43
One of the rituals on wall street is whoever your biggest broker doing your institutional trades are, they take you out to these ridiculously fancy dinners where there's lots of wine. I had to tag out. I was just like, no. I can't do that.
1:06:57
Chris Williamson: Not got it in the tank. Yeah.
1:06:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, I'm not doing that.
1:07:02
Chris Williamson: Can we move the table forward by three hours? Is that an option?
1:07:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:07:09
I agree entirely about the pre-releasing and building excitement.
1:07:09
When my book, What Works On Wall Street was coming out, without asking for permission, I always prefer to ask for forgiveness.
1:07:20
I walked it down to Barron's, which at the time was the financial newspaper here in the US.
1:07:29
And I gave it to a guy by the name of Andrew Bary.
1:07:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And he's like, "This is amazing.
1:07:33
I'm going to write an article" And I'm like, "Knock yourself out."
1:07:37
The problem was the book hadn't been released and it wouldn't be released for five weeks.
1:07:41
So the story came out, I made a bet with one of my coworkers how quickly the phone was going to ring.
1:07:49
I took under five minutes and I won.
1:07:53
And it was the publisher and my editor screaming at me at the top of their lungs.
1:08:01
"You have no idea how book publishing works. That you did that is...
1:08:01
we don't think we're going to recover.
1:08:08
We're not going to recover because there are no books, idiot. You got it.
1:08:12
You've got to have the books for them to go buy them."
1:08:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I went, "I'll make a bet with you."
1:08:17
And they're like, "What?"
1:08:21
And I said, "You don't get it.
1:08:21
Barron's is the Imperato."
1:08:21
If Barron's says that you should read something, people are going to keep going and what's going to happen is you're going to get more orders because people are going to walk in to the bookstore, back when we had bookstores, and say, "Hey, do you have this book?
1:08:38
What Works On Wall Street?"
1:08:42
And that's exactly what happened.
1:08:42
So it's really interesting that it seems counterintuitive but it really, really does work.
1:08:52
And so I find it interesting the way it extends to a lot of different endeavors.
1:08:57
Vatsal, you have been incredibly patient so I want to bring you in here.
1:09:03
I bet you've got a good question.
1:09:06
Vatsal: I just wanted to ask about your podcast, Chris, Modern Wisdom.
1:09:09
We have about 350 guests now.
1:09:09
How do you get so many amazing diverse guests?
1:09:16
Chris Williamson: I'm very persistent and quite annoying on the internet.
1:09:19
Vatsal: That's how I got my job. Chris Williamson: Yeah. Precisely. The same way as you man. I don't know. I'm good at networking.
1:09:24
That's what I did for my entire life. That's what I know. I know how to network.
1:09:28
That's what club promoters do.
1:09:34
And I'm putting that across. It is a superpower.
1:09:34
It is an unfair advantage, the number of contacts that you can make.
1:09:39
It's a sort of a mindset that once you've monetized your friends and your connections and their friends and who does he know and where does that know?
1:09:47
Yeah, once you've got into that it's almost impossible to switch it off.
1:09:50
And it's really, really powerful. So that's a good thing.
1:09:50
I've got some good friends.
1:09:54
I'm really good friends with Mikhaila Peterson.
1:09:56
Chris Williamson: I'm good friends with Jim.
1:09:56
I'm good friends with other people.
1:09:58
And after a while you see this Matthew principle play out in podcasting as well because the circles that people move in.
1:10:03
Somebody sees someone that's good on a podcast and I reach out to a buddy and say, "Hey man.
1:10:08
Can you intro me to Andrew Huberman or whatever because he's crushing it at the moment." Perfect example of this.
1:10:12
So Andrew Huberman, I reached out to him via a friend.
1:10:16
The guy that looks after Andrew's podcast bookings said, "Sorry, he's a little bit busy at the moment.
1:10:20
He can come on in a few months time.
1:10:24
However, I've got this guy called Rich Diviney.
1:10:24
He created the Navy SEAL Mind Gym. He was in SEAL Team Six.
1:10:28
He's this super hardcore guy.
1:10:28
Do you want to have him on?"
1:10:32
Chris Williamson: And I was like, well, this is like a double win.
1:10:34
Not only do I get to further ingratiate myself with the team from Andrew Huberman, but I've managed to pick up another guest, who is this absolute monster I didn't even know existed all through just networking.
1:10:40
I think that being a club promoter, working on the streets or being what's called a street PR almost entirely eviscerates any fear of rejection when it comes to proposing things to people.
1:10:52
When you go onto the internet, you're like, "Dude, why would I be scared about someone saying no to me over email?
1:11:00
I've been knocked back by 10,000 people trying to get them to come into a nightclub on a cold rainy Tuesday night in the middle of Newcastle."
1:11:07
Chris Williamson: So that again, that's another one...
1:11:07
But it's just networking dude.
1:11:08
A lot of it's down to that.
1:11:08
Obviously I think people like the show which is great and you need a sort of a minimum entry requirement to get through the door.
1:11:15
But if you just keep on sort of banging away and being in good faith as well and respecting people's time.
1:11:20
Here's what I want from you. Can you do it?
1:11:20
This is why you should do it. Let me know. A full sentence invite. That's it. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. And I can attest to... Oh, sorry Vatsal. Go ahead. Vatsal: Yeah.
1:11:29
I was just wondering what advice would you give to people who just don't get networking inherently?
1:11:33
Let's say they're on the introvert side of the spectrum.
1:11:33
They’re just born with it genetically speaking, as we were talking about in the beginning of our discussion.
1:11:39
Are they supposed to forcefully change themselves because this is what works?
1:11:39
And they continue to… Chris Williamson: I think that you can play the game but know that it's not about the game.
1:11:46
Believing that you need motivation to do a thing that you really want to do is a bit of a misnomer.
1:11:54
So an example would be imagine two different girls.
1:11:54
One of them spends all day obsessing about the fact that she needs to go to the gym later on and she's worried, "I'm I going to go? I might not go."
1:12:02
Spends her lunch break getting all anxious thinking about it.
1:12:05
Chris Williamson: Finally at the end of work drags herself into the car and goes, "Right, I'm going to go to the gym."
1:12:08
Gets to the gym and puts her stuff on and trains.
1:12:10
There's no difference between her and another girl that just goes to the gym.
1:12:14
Adding in this extra degree of freedom around motivation being needed, it doesn't really matter.
1:12:21
If it makes you feel better, write out the message that you need to send to someone or even write out the script.
1:12:26
Chris Williamson: If you're a PR that needs to work on the street and you're an introvert just write the script out and then say, "Okay.
1:12:32
So that's what I'm going to say and the person that I say it to is completely irrelevant." There is no anything.
1:12:36
It's just this is what I'm going to say.
1:12:41
The fact that there happens to be a person in front of me makes no difference.
1:12:44
And I'm aware you can ratchet this up.
1:12:44
One of the things that people are most scared about is public speaking or going up and cold approaching a girl solo in a bar or something like that.
1:12:53
These are the things of nightmares.
1:12:53
But you can work around it.
1:12:56
Chris Williamson: Be prepared, know what you're going to say, respect this person's time and have faith nothing's going to go wrong.
1:12:59
And this is where the evolutionary mismatch comes in.
1:13:03
We feel like giving a talk on stage or in front of a work group of 10 people in a conference room feels like being chased down by a tiger because rejection by the tribe 50,000 years ago would have meant death.
1:13:16
If we stood up and said something that lowered our status so low that we couldn't get any children then we're kicked out.
1:13:24
Chris Williamson: But just observing that emotion arise inside of you, your neck feels hot, your shoulders start to come up.
1:13:30
There's sort of a ringing in your ears, can feel your cheeks are starting to flush and your palms are starting to sweat and you're all tense.
1:13:34
And you just open gaze, notice your peripherals, slow breaths through your nose and you think, it's fine.
1:13:40
I live a better life than any hunter-gatherer in all of history.
1:13:46
I have absolutely nothing to worry about.
1:13:50
Even if I lose my job, nothing's going to go wrong here.
1:13:50
And just that, transcending your programming through remembering that the stakes are nowhere near as high as you think they are and that the blessing you have of being on this planet is much greater than you realize it. There you go. You're unbeatable.
1:14:04
You're literally invincible.
1:14:04
You're immune to anything.
1:14:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Talk about an end quote, man. I love that.
1:14:08
And I will attest to Chris's ability to share.
1:14:15
He's always the first to DM me or text me and say, "Hey, you got to have this guy on."
1:14:19
And I'm going to after watching them.
1:14:19
And so I do appreciate that and I hope I'll be able to get...
1:14:24
You should probably have Tim urban on. Have you had him on?
1:14:27
Chris Williamson: No, no, no. I'm a big fan.
1:14:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, he's amazing. So you and he...
1:14:28
I would wait with bated breath for that conversation.
1:14:32
Chris Williamson: I'll swap you Tim for one of mine.
1:14:35
You can tell me anyone that you need and I'll swap you Tim.
1:14:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Done and done. All right.
1:14:40
So we always end these, which I really don't want to do this has been so much fun, by asking our guests that we are going to make you the emperor of the world.
1:14:50
You can't kill anyone, you can't put anybody in a camp, but what you can do is you can incept people where you're going to incept two ideas into the population and they're going to wake up the next day thinking it was their own idea.
1:15:06
And they're going to start doing that.
1:15:10
What have you got for me?
1:15:10
Chris Williamson: That's a really good question.
1:15:12
I would say have faith that their passion and their curiosity is going to lead them forward. So lead with that first.
1:15:18
Stop wrangling the environment and the world and what they think should happen to fit some preconceived idea of what they want to happen to release the tiller, I suppose.
1:15:30
And then potentially the other side of this, and that would maybe be broadly 50% of the population.
1:15:38
Chris Williamson: And then the other 50% of the population would be hopefully aided by just questioning the beliefs that they hold at a fundamental level.
1:15:47
So as far as I can see, the choice in life is becoming aware of the mental afflictions that you have and the discomfort that's associated with that or the discomfort of being ruled by them.
1:15:58
So those are the two choices.
1:15:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Those are outstanding.
1:16:01
I'm always fascinated by the answers that I get from people because these are the kind I love.
1:16:07
Because these are universals that...
1:16:07
Your second point is something that I bang on about endlessly and the first for that matter.
1:16:12
Listen man, I'm going to have you back on because I think...
1:16:17
I didn't even get to have my notes.
1:16:17
You amaze me and delight me. You are an amazing guy.
1:16:23
So thank you very much for being on the pod and we'll have you back on again.
1:16:29
Chris Williamson: Boys, thank you so much for having me.
1:16:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Cheers.