Male Model Explains the Psychology of Being Beautiful and the Economics of Nightclub Promotion

Chris Williamson [00:00:00] If you think about it, having an existential crisis is an oddly fortunate position to be in. It's a, it's actually quite a luxurious place to be, to be able to have an existential crisis because 10,000 years ago, you wouldn't have had one. You'd have been terrified that you're gonna starve or be be killed by a tiny cut on the back of your hand because there's no, there was no antibacterial wipes back then.

Vance Crowe [00:00:23] I'm Jeremy Ash, a retirement community, CEO, living in Eureka, Illinois, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today is an interesting interview. It's with a man named Chris Williamson, which if you're living in the United States, that name might not mean that much to you, but if you were living in the UK, you would know that he is a highly celebrated reality TV star. He's actually been on two different reality TV shows and he spent, oh, more than 10 years being a club promoter. So we're gonna do something a little different with this interview. Chris runs a podcast called Modern Wisdom, and he is an intellectual with a curious mind, and he's interviewed some of the biggest names out there in the intellectual world. But we're gonna start off this conversation, having the rare conversation that you can ever have with a man, particularly a really good looking man, an objectively good looking man that people in the television industry realized, Hey, if we put him on tv, there will be a lot of people, maybe millions of people that will want to watch and see who he picks to date. So we start talking about what is it like to live life as a young person that is so good looking that they get paid to wear clothes and have their photos taken and that they get paid to be on shows like this. Chris has a very interesting insight into all sorts of things about the human psyche because of what he knows from being on the other side of the camera.

Vance Crowe [00:01:58] And so I am very interested to get to this interview. What actually happened at the end of the interview is Chris and I hung out and talked so long that we pretty much arranged to do another interview again sometime soon because I'd loved it so much. So I'm hopeful that you will too. Right now, many of you know that we've been experimenting with virtual reality headsets at Articulate Ventures. A whole bunch of people in the network have gotten them. We're now dealing every single day. We're hopping in at different times and practicing and playing. And if you've been one of those people that's been thinking about kind of dipping your toe in, you wanna be an early first technology adopter, but don't know what you'll do with it. Know that Articulate Ventures has some field trip days that you could join up and you could go and experiment and have other people that can teach you the controls and interact on these things with you. And if you have a corporation that wants to try and use virtual reality and see how it applies to your industry, we put on a presentation and then actually do an in-person field trip on virtual reality headsets. So if you're interested in that, go to Articulate Ventures and if you're one of those people that loves having conversations like this or you wanna get into those field trips that we're doing in the network, go to network Articulate Ventures. Okay, without further ado, we're heading to an interview with a fantastically good looking guy, but a very interesting mind as well. My man, Chris Williamson. Chris Williamson, welcome to the podcast.

Chris Williamson [00:03:27] Thank you man. Pleasure to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:03:29] So you run an interesting podcast called Modern Wisdom and your guest list has been impressive. And your tenacity, the amount that of information that you're putting out there is prolific. So what is it that drives you to run the podcast that you've built it into?

Chris Williamson [00:03:47] I'm a curious guy. I'm a very inquisitive human and I was kind of ashamed of that for quite a long time. Like it didn't seem like the sort of personality trait that the alpha male go get, a type A person I thought I wanted to be had. And then I ended up taking a bit of a left turn and doing a bit of self work and realizing, actually being curious is a really powerful tool. And yeah, I've managed to weaponize that because somehow podcasting is a medium. It's basically you ask people questions that you want to know, broadcast it to the internet, and other people get to benefit from the questions. So yeah, curiosity's a a superpower man. And it, it certainly keeps the motivation up that when you're talking about talking to a pawn star one week and then a guy on consciousness the next and then a biohacker the week after, you're just constantly feeding that curiosity wheel.

Vance Crowe [00:04:39] And when you say that you were embarrassed of being curious, I feel like there is definitely a home for curious people now in today's modern age. Was it because you were catching up with the times or you were somehow behind on like feeling comfortable with talking, like being curious and being an intellectual in this way?

Chris Williamson [00:04:57] So my background isn't necessarily this world, it's not intellectual curiosity. I went to uni, I did five years at university and a master's in international marketing, but I'm a club promoter as trade, I run nightclubs. So which which is a bit of a juxtaposition given that I spend a lot of time like thinking about thinking and what does meaning mean and are we living in a stimulation and stuff like that, but stood in the front door of a nightclub. Obviously you don't tend to ask about the nature of reality when you're trying to get pretty girls in high heels and short skirts into the club. So I was kind of living two different worlds. I had what I was interested in and then what I was successful at in business. And a lot of your listeners may be familiar with that as well, that you can actually find success, financial metrics of success within the world in something which you're good at, but perhaps doesn't actually light your fire or perfectly align with what you want.

Vance Crowe [00:05:54] Well, you're in a, in a very curious position that I would say is part of just like the genetic lottery, but then also you have to have the mental fortitude to be able to do it, which is you are, or I dunno if you were or are still a male model and have reached, you know, some of the highest levels of people wanting to put your clo their clothes on you and take photos of them. So it puts you in like kind of a, a weird environment I would think for a long time.

Chris Williamson [00:06:21] Yeah, no, you, you're very correct and that, that juxtaposition is, is a real difficult one to deconstruct. I still, I've thought about it an awful lot about what does it mean to be a a a an alright looking guy who has some sort of social status and a bunch of other things, but also has crises of meaning and is concerned with having virtue and, and trying to make the most of himself and fully fulfill his potential, not just transactionally use whatever looks or immutable characteristics he's being given, but how can you develop the other things outside of that? And there's not really an archetype for that, I don't think. We live our lives through archetypes, right? We have the hero, the nerd, the villain, the maiden, like the sporty guy and there's like the the clever guy, but there isn't one, as you get slightly more nuanced, there isn't a, where's the the good looking existential crisis guy? Like who's that one? Where's that, where's, where's that guy in the media?

Vance Crowe [00:07:27] And the one that is just on one dimension, a man that's just seen as beautiful for a short time has it, I think really good, but then all of a sudden it evaporates. One of the very first questions I had as I started to look at your reality dating history, like you were on reality TV shows twice

Chris Williamson [00:07:46] Yeah. In

Vance Crowe [00:07:46] Models. And I, I, I have to wonder if you have a unique understanding of the fading time that you get to be beautiful for, I think a lot of men don't really have the ticking time clock of how long can I do this for? But a lot of women do. But if you're a male model, you in some ways must hear that same clock in that way.

Chris Williamson [00:08:11] So it's interesting. That's a really clever point. A couple of things there. First off, a really good thought experiment for everyone that's listening, think of whichever gender you're attracted to. Can you picture someone who is beautiful but not hot? Okay, sure. And now can you picture someone who is hot but not beautiful? Sure. And the distinction that you'll have there is beauty increases with age, it's timeless, hotness wanes with age. So you see on the front cover of like Maxim magazine and like sort of lad mags, you'll see hotness not beauty. Whereas the converse would be sort of like a, like a, a Jennifer Lopez would be both somehow, but like a Jennifer Aniston now is probably like she's, you know, she's beautiful, she's got this poise and grace and she's still good looking and whatever with men that gets stretched out. But the interesting thing being in the modeling world is that each different stage for men as they grow up, you just slot into a new archetype. Like the, the dilf is a genuine thing, you know, and you think about like cool young dad, there's guys on the internet who are 45 years old that are really, really good looking by anybody's standards, you know, they're in good shape and they've got the, the beard going on. They've got like the peppered gr pepper gray hair. Like that is a good look. So partly yes, there is a, a window of time within which you can utilize your looks, especially within certain pathways. Like they're not putting 45 year olds onto love island or take me out the reality TV shows. But on the flip side of that, for guys as you grow up, if you can fully embrace that age, if you can age gracefully, like you are still a hot guy, if you look after yourself at 45 years old, at 50 years old, at 55 years old, you know, like think about some of the people that trend on the internet, these dudes with like white gray hair, but you'll see them and they'll be salsa dancing with their, with their wife or whatever and you think that guy's sick, that guy's a killer.

Chris Williamson [00:10:06] So yeah, it is interesting. There is both sides of that and there's definitely an archetype that they, a stereotype cliche they go for on the dating shows. It's like the white teeth and the tan and the tiny shorts and the abs. But yeah, as you get older you can change that.

Vance Crowe [00:10:20] When you were growing up, there had to be some point in time where you started to like deeply feel the benefits of being attractive because I mean it start when you're a little kid, if you're attractive people start treating you better, but when you go towards being adult attractive, it's, it's something different. Was that something you were aware of?

Chris Williamson [00:10:42] I was wholly unpopular in school and not fantastically good looking at all. So background is an only child, which means that you're under socialized. Like it doesn't matter how socially popular your parents are, you're never spending as much time as like living in a, a house with a sibling 24 7, right? So you always struggle to connect at least a little bit. And for me that got turned up quite high at college, still not massively good looking at uni kind of started to, I guess as I got a little bit older, you see that people say it about you, but this is where it's so hard, right? It's so hard to strip back someone who looks outwardly like they've got everything sorted and not just sound like there's something really wrong with you because people look at many of the problems people have are around, I'm not leaner as I want tall as I want good looking as I want tanned teeth, whatever it might be that they think if only I had X, y, and Z fixed, then I would be fine. And they look at somebody who perhaps they think does have those physical characteristics and presumes that because outwardly they look like they've got it sorted inwardly everything's sorted as well. But that's not the case. And the problem is that you can't play the sympathy card. Now think about a singing show like X Factor or Pop Idol or whatever it is, the voice that you guys have out in America. Think about one of the archetypes, the shy guy or girl who comes out on stage and they're kind of not very good looking and they sort of shuffle out and they're, they're they're nervous and they can't really speak to the judges and they say, the judges go like, look, everybody get behind them and the the everyone starts clapping and then they belt out this tune and you're like, wow, that's so romantic, that's so beautiful.

Chris Williamson [00:12:28] Now let's flip that on its head and have a good looking 28-year-old guy shuffle out abs, teeth tan, all of it going on. But he's still got that like a little bit nervous. Everyone's like, hang on, what's going on? Why have you not got the confidence that I have decided your looks should give you? Like, it's such a unique position to be in. I appreciate that. I'm probably garbling it a little bit, but it's so hard to pinpoint what it is. I think a lot of it's down to sympathy people's preconceptions around who they are. There's a lot

Vance Crowe [00:12:59] Of, I mean it's, I've never heard this before. I think this is like fascinating and precise in a way because you know, there there's almost like, like a, a trope among men that if you date a woman that is beautiful now, but she was not beautiful when she was younger. Like that is the girl that oftentimes like falls way more head over heels in love with you than you ever expected because a woman that's that beautiful plays at a different level, but you see that that women that didn't grow up having people treat them well or having people notice them, then when they do get this attention and they do have all these doors open up to them, I think it's really, it's gotta be a frightening experience to go from the ugly duckling to the, to the swan. But I had never considered that men in particular shy men could be really isolated even if they appear to be at the top of the dominance hierarchy.

Chris Williamson [00:13:58] Absolutely correct. Like you exude this type a masculine, alpha male dominance out upfront. But if you haven't done the self work and if you've grown up perhaps being bullied in school as I was perhaps not having a massive sense of purpose or meaning, perhaps not having a role model, like it doesn't matter, like the person that you see in the mirror is not who you are. What do we tell everybody now? It's not about the, the color of your skin, it's the content of your character. It's not about, you know, all of these things that are developed within you. Therefore that means that also confidence shouldn't just be surface deep. So yeah, you, you, you are right. It's taken a long time and don't get me wrong, like I can sort of cry about how challenging it is to be a good looking guy who needed to develop his own confidence as much as I want. But you do get a lot of advantages. I fast tracked my way through my industry, which is running club nights. I was made franchise owner and got a directorship after one year of being, it's so 19 years old. And I was director of a big franchise that essentially was a license to print money while I was at uni, which was phenomenal. And then started another business, another business. And there's no way that that wouldn't have been assisted by walking into a meeting and people going, yeah, yeah, he's a good looking guy. Like I'll, he, he looks like the sort of person that's probably fun on the night out, whether or not I wasn't. But the dangerous thing is that you can actually start to live up to that persona so very quickly you can become the personality, the caricature of the party boy big dick on campus, big name around town, alpha male.

Chris Williamson [00:15:32] And that's, that's what happened.

Vance Crowe [00:15:34] Yeah. And I think like you can, you can develop some really bad communications habits because if you're on the top of the dominance hierarchy, a lot of the things that you say or reasoning that you give or rationale or the way you treat people, they let you do it. And then when you finally get to a place in adulthood where you're like, I don't, I don't wanna be valued for what I I look like or for these exterior characteristics, then you have a challenge because you actually have to learn how to deal with people to get them to value you on a different domain.

Chris Williamson [00:16:07] Yeah, well I mean think about any hot girl that says it's really hard for me to be taken seriously, you know, the the, that total freak situation where you've got some like triple PhD in astrobiology, but she also happens to look like a unbelievable top level model. And I, I don't know what's going on here, I don't know how to pigeonhole this girl. Like am I supposed to compliment her on her looks, on her brains? Is it, and another part of it is there ends up with a little bit of resentment there I think for a lot of people because it's like, hang on, you've got all of this going on for you and you're still not happy. Like how, how can that be the case? Yeah, it's very, very nuanced, but it's been fascinating to think about Mike, it's been fascinating to watch from a front row seat, the way that people respond to you, especially when you work your way up within an industry like club promo, which is all about who you are. Like it's, that is a monetized dominance hierarchy, right? That's what the industry is. It's just how high up are you, how alpha are you, are you more alpha than me? Okay, your company's earning more than me. That's it. Like can you imagine if that was, I dunno if it was like,

Vance Crowe [00:17:18] I think the, I think the, the, the thing that you're talking about promoting clubs is something that seems very clear to you. But I don't go to promoted clubs, I haven't, I haven't been out to a bar, not only just 'cause of coronavirus but in, I don't know, five, seven years, something like that since I got married. What is that world like and what dominance hierarchy are you talking about?

Chris Williamson [00:17:38] Cool venues that own a site will understand how to stock and staff a bar. They know how to make cocktails, they understand how to do a rotor and they have the capital to put up to purchase the building. Promoters are a marketing agency. Me and my business partner and the people that work for us, we understand branding, we understand how we do social media, we can write good copy. We do marketing and we have a team of about 500 guys and girls that work for us who network, they go out and they bring their friends down. So the gap in between a venue that needs people to party in it but doesn't know anyone that parties and people who know people that party but don't have a building to put them in. The gap in between those two re people are, is exactly where the relationship lies, right? So essentially we're an out of house marketing company, but obviously we're using any tools at our disposal to get people to come to our events. And you can make an awful lot of money really, really quickly doing this because the costs are super low once you've paid your fixed costs, if you walk past the front of my club or if you come in and give me 10 pounds, there is no difference to my costs. So once you've broken, even everything is profit. So there is no, there is no variable cost. It's not like, oh, you come in and so I've got to take 10 pounds off for the drink that I give you. No, no, no, you go downstairs and pay for the drink yourself. And what that means in terms of the dominance hierarchy is that it's all about popularity. So think back to the venues that you used to go to whenever you used to party consistently. And if one of your friends rang you up and said, Hey man, how was he night last night?

Chris Williamson [00:19:13] One of the first things that you would've said is, dude, it was so good, there was loads of girls there and such and such a thing happened and Jonathan got in a fight and you're like, no, no, hang on. I asked you how was the event? Not who were the other consumers of the event that you were at. And it is the only business in the world where the value of the product is directly correlated with the other people also consuming that product. Can you imagine if I said to you like, Hey man, what sort of phone do you use? And he goes, I use a an LG swimming. Swimming, why do you use that? Oh well Lil Wayne's got one. And he go, no, no, no, no. Like you don't choose your phone, you choose your phone based on the features of the phone, but people go to a night out based on the other people who are also choosing that night out. So that makes it a very unique industry.

Vance Crowe [00:20:02] Well, you know, you're describing Renee Gerard is one of those writers that I love. Reading is very dense, but one of the things he talks about is mimetic desire that human beings don't actually know what to want. And so what they do is they look up at like, what are other people pointing at and looking at? And when whatever they're pointing up towards, then that means if I get that, then I get what other people want and therefore I keep moving up. And so it's, it's a, it's a fascinating thing to think of a club promoter as basically the the peddler of of mimetic desire.

Chris Williamson [00:20:35] That's it man. It's collective effervescence is the reason that people go to the nightclub and then it is, it's that, it's that mimetic desire because I've seen businesses that are worth hundreds of, of thousands of pounds a year, not events a weekly Friday night, let's say. And they're putting two and a half thousand people in a week and they make around about maybe a hundred to 200 grand a year, bottom line profit walk home. And within three weeks they've gone from being the biggest thing in town to shut because the bigger cooler, newer club just opened around the corner and that business goes kaput. Like can you imagine if Samsung bring out a good new tv and that means that LG stops selling TVs and has to sell up shop. Like that's just not how it works. But yeah, it's a, it's a really unique industry man. And then when it comes to the dominant hierarchy stuff, you have to think like why, why are people following the guys at the top? It's because they party harder, they drink more, they've got more followers on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. They write more outlandish statuses, they go to more after parties, they sleep with more girls. Like those are the metrics of success that people are judging you based on. And obviously what that causes is it's the race to the bottom. Alright, well I'm gonna party harder than that guy. Okay, well I'm going to write more statuses than that guy. Okay, well I'm gonna put myself on one, two multiple different dating shows, blue tick, et cetera, et cetera. And it very much becomes like weaponizing social equity.

Vance Crowe [00:22:06] You mentioned this social equity and the social currency that comes along with having followers and really that was a very interesting thing because you're right, it is a non fak way to demonstrate some level of popularity or if not popularity, at least the ability to garner attention on these platforms.

Chris Williamson [00:22:27] Yeah, well I mean think if you sit down for dinner when non pandemic sit down for dinner at a table and you get introduced to some new guy or girl sat next to you, somebody's wife, Hey how are you? I'm good, blah blah blah blah, blah, blah. Have a chat. Talking to them about anything. They go to the bathroom and you say to someone, oh who's, who is that? Oh it's, do you not know such and such from Instagram? And you go onto their Instagram and they have a million followers immediately the dynamic of your relationship with that person has changed. And I challenge anybody to not think about that person differently. Maybe better, maybe worse, but that's another data point that tells you holy shit, like what the fuck's this person done to get a million followers? Why what all of these questions start coming up, right? And it very much is, it's a objective measure of how far up the dominance hierarchy one particular type of dominance hierarchy you are. And we now have a like a quantified ladder that shows us, oh you are here. He's here. Oh, I'm nearly catching up to you.

Vance Crowe [00:23:30] So is your a person that is playing in the game of, of dominant hierarchies and status positions and drinking and drugs, do you yourself have an addictive personality? Are you like dancing right next to, to the doors of the inferno and you're going to go do bad things for yourself?

Chris Williamson [00:23:50] So thankfully for me, I've never been a big drinker. I've never been a big partier, very much saw it as a business rather than a hobby. But there is another type, there's two types of club promoters. One, they see it as a business that can generate cash quickly. That was me and my business partner and the other type of professional party boys who love to party and think, holy shit, I can get paid for this. So I've chosen to be that one. I've also not drank for two years now because I wanted to spend time focusing on the podcast. I wanted to build some new habits. I another juxtaposition, I'm a club promoter who also thinks that choosing to go sober regularly has unbelievable performance enhancing benefits. I think it's the number one competitive advantage that almost everyone leaves on the table after sleeping more. Like if you can get eight hours of sleep a night for a year and stop drinking, you will be so much further ahead than almost all of your competition. And I utilize that in an industry built on drinking, right? Like I can say that because I've been in the trenches, I've stood on the door of a thousand club nights and watched a million people go into them. So I've served my time in nightlife. I'm only 32, so I've like a significant portion of my twenties was spent standing being cold on nightclub doors. Looking back, it's just like such an odd way to spend your time like the, between the hours of 10:00 PM and 3:00 AM a couple of nights a week for a decade.

Vance Crowe [00:25:14] It's a lot of time, you know, and, and it's a lot of experiences with other people that are, that are pursuing that mimetic desire. You're kind of watching people as they, as they try and climb up that path.

Chris Williamson [00:25:27] Man, it's a, you know, the, it's a fascinating insight into human nature. Absolutely fascinating.

Vance Crowe [00:25:32] So between the, the, the people that are trying to get into the effervescent clubs and your experience of being on like a reality dating show or reality show, what do you know about the behind the other side, the side where you are the focus of the attention on the TV show where where 20 women are competing to be on a date with you? Like what is that like on the other side?

Chris Williamson [00:25:58] It's bizarre. It's bizarre because you don't believe, especially if you don't believe your own bullshit, like if you have an interest in human nature, you don't just see things for what they are. You question the motivations. You're like, oh, isn't it interesting that this is the way that people react when X happens? And this is kind of the double-edged sword of curiosity. Curiosity is fantastic when you want to ask questions, but it's fucking shit when you want to be in the moment because I'm like, I just, I don't want to keep asking questions about things, but I'm so here's a good example. I became more interested almost as interested if not more interested in the production process of how you create a TV show live that goes out five nights a week as I was with having conversations with the people that were in there. So I was like observing the cameramen rushing, they're called rushes, the tapes that hold the data on that's been stored throughout the day. So I was spending a lot of time doing that. But it is, it's an interesting world to be surrounded by girls in bikinis who are there and a single and the purpose of them being on the show is to get a date and you are one of the ones that are there. It oddly feels like being in a zoo and you can kind of see, although you don't get to see the people on the other side of the glass, you can imagine that they would be like tap, tap tapping on the Glasgow and like, oh I like that one over there. I wonder what he's doing. Isn't he interesting? And you do actually think like,

Vance Crowe [00:27:23] Oh this is

Chris Williamson [00:27:24] Odd, but I loved it man. I'd do anything for a free holiday. But I like even the adventures of that. The first TV show that I went on, I got taken home by the Spanish military police because I woke up on the central reservation of 10 ten's, the largest motorway I'd lost my phone, I'd lost my wallet, I'd gone, I'd just gone like full send the night before, been completely detached from the filming crew, gone back to an after party with the barman and all of his mates from this bar that we were in. And then nearly missed my flight home the next day, spent 20 hours traveling back to the UK through traffic, through a train, picked my suitcase up out of the front of Newcastle train station, got into a taxi, arrived outside the door of our nightclub at 9:55 PM and at 10:00 PM I was working on the door, started partying again, just went straight through until three in the morning. It's basically drunk for like 30 hours. That, that probably doesn't play too well into the, I didn't party that much mentality, but that was, that was a one-off.

Vance Crowe [00:28:24] And so you're in this environment and you're around on the other side of the camera. Do you think that the women and the other participants that are there, are they, is the desire they had to get there filled by the time they're done?

Chris Williamson [00:28:39] What do you mean?

Vance Crowe [00:28:40] I mean like they thought something was gonna be on the other side. They were gonna marry somebody that

Chris Williamson [00:28:45] Could

Vance Crowe [00:28:46] Take care of them. They were going to get fabulously popular and wealthy, you know like I think that it's always presented on television as the other side getting to that spot and winning. You get something and I think maybe all of us know like, nah it's gotta be harder than that. But you're, you're kind of convinced not to think about it.

Chris Williamson [00:29:05] It depends on what that person's values are coming into it. I think a lot of people go onto reality TV not hoping that it'll be a springboard for their career, but it will become their career, right? They want this to be their thing. Everybody intrinsically I think believes that they're special because we only ever get to observe our own consciousness out into the world and everybody else is kind of a bit like a non playable character, whereas we're the ones we have this rich experience, right? And a lot of the time when someone has the opportunity, maybe this is my thing, maybe this is the thing that's going to make me special, that's going to give me adoration and that sense of fulfillment and there's a lot of broken people that go into reality TV shows trying to do that. I would say that my reason for going on was I want to know what it's like to be on a reality TV show Curiosity again plus free holiday plus good tan plus some hot girls. But dating shows are awful if you want to try and get a long-term relationship out of it. Like the success rate of it is less than 10%. The people that leave these, these dating shows in a relationship, nine out of 10 of them are not still in the relationship after two years. So like really it's not about that. It's like brief relationship island, not love island.

Vance Crowe [00:30:26] And so when you came off of that experience, what was your life like that you didn't expect?

Chris Williamson [00:30:33] Yeah, so there's, you do the nightclub PAs, which was fascinating, where you get booked to go to a club and they pay you money and you get photos taken with people that were fans of you on the show. Oh

Vance Crowe [00:30:43] You were that famous that that people would be like, oh Chris Williamson's gonna be at this bar then I wanna go there too.

Chris Williamson [00:30:48] Yeah man, we did a tour of the uk so I'm getting paid to go do nightclub PAs and I've got my face on a flyer, but remember that I'm 27 at this time, so for nearly 10 years I'd been pre paying other pricks just like me to come and do that at my venues. So I was finally felt like I had redemption. I was like all of those years that I had to pay other people to come and do it. I'm like, I'm gonna rinse this until it goes home. So yeah man, you're doing the nightclub tours and obviously there's loads of girls coming up to you. They want to, they they want to get a photo like, I mean it's, it's shooting fish in a barrel from a like a sex selection perspective. And for the guys that continue to tick that over that keep going back to the reality TV and the fame world that just keeps on going. It was odd. Like you come off and people know things about you that you didn't know about you because lot the press are talking, some news stories being released about what you got up to when you were this age. Some girls says that you were an awful kisser or a good kisser or that you did this in bed or didn't do that in bed. Like all of these situations are like very bizarre. And for me personally, again, I just found it all so interesting. Like I was just like, this is fucking fascinating. I, I can't help but be like in in fully involved in what's going on, but I didn't ever identify myself with like being this reality TV star.

Vance Crowe [00:32:15] So the, you keep kind of talking about this curiosity that you have and kind of the, the deeper inner drive. And in the podcast that my, my audience and I talk a lot about this concept called the Damon, which is like GTA's way of saying that inner voice that tells you, hey, this is the stuff I've gotta do. Do you identify at like a Damon? Do you have that voice?

Chris Williamson [00:32:38] Yeah. That's interesting. I probably wouldn't have identified it as that, but there's a strong inner monologue and I think this would be interesting question to ask you, has your inner monologue been more preoccupied with virtue as you've got older? Like the question of what it means to be a good man, to do good in itself, to have integrity. Is that the sort of thing that you felt sort of increase as you've grown up?

Vance Crowe [00:33:06] Yeah, absolutely. I mean like my father was very big on integrity and we had, you know, very strong principles as growing up. But when I got to college, the world was my oyster. I ran around, I explored, I said, you know, all the rules that I had, they're gone. And you know what, whatever, you know the god that, that I was taught about, that's so quaint and you know, there's no reason that we should be held bound by these crazy bureaucratic traditions, you know? And I did all of those things that a, that a regular young person does and I would say probably maxed them out on a level that is shocking, but not because I was waking up on, on motor speedways, but I like traveled to Africa and the Peace Corps and reoriented my life to go work at the World Bank and in public radio. And so I was of this, I mean David Goodheart refers to it as somewhere versus anywhere people where the anywhere people are transactional. They think, Hey, I can pick up and move, I can do whatever I want. And somewhere people say, well I I don't live here 'cause it's beautiful or because it's easy or they love the climate. I live here because the people that are here and as I got older I became a somewhere person. And as you grow those roots, all of a sudden you start saying like, what soil do I want to be in? Do I want to have virtue? Do I want to keep trying to drink until, you know, like what's the most I can drink without a hangover or do I want to be pursuing something deeper? And that's what happened to me as I got older, probably in large part because my body started giving me hangovers that were so bad I couldn't think.

Chris Williamson [00:34:40] So there is a, I dunno how much you know about young British culture, but it's very louy, it's a very leery drinking culture. We're a small country. There's not a lot to do. The weather's not very good, but we can party, we can party really hard and there's a strong nightlife industry, obviously aided by people like me, weaponizing it, you know, there's there's, there's, there's three or four of me in every big city in the uk.

Vance Crowe [00:35:08] Yeah. If people haven't been to the UK, they don't really have a sense. So like I spent some time in Glasgow and London and you have all these cities that have real high young people density in a way that the Midwest doesn't really have, which is where I live. So you maybe have this a little bit in the coast, but like, you know, in in the Midwest you'd have a promoter or a few promoters in St. Louis and a few promoters in Chicago, but those are hundreds of miles apart. So it's very, very different I think where you're at.

Chris Williamson [00:35:34] Yeah, very much so. And at each of these, you know, you've got two, two or three universities with 30 to 40,000 students at each. So these situations can foster, and this is what I saw on Love Island, this fostering of what I would consider very skewed values. Like I remember I was sat once around the pool and you've got all of the cameras going and everyone's micd up and all the girls are strutting up and down and you're like, it's two in the afternoon, what have you got high heels on for? And they, you sat there talking, one of the boys was going on and on about this particular car that he wanted to buy when he got out of the, out of the show because he was gonna earn all of this money from the nightclub PAs. It's gonna be the a MG 63 Black Edition, but it's not, it's, it's like the racing version with the RO seats and it's got the, this calipers. And it took me until the next, the two days later for me to find out that he didn't have a driving license. And I was like, what, what is going on? Like what is the world that I'm living in where someone is so preoccupied with the car that they want to drive that they think gives them status that they're going to waste half an afternoon of my time hearing them talk about it when they can't drive it. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:36:49] The Kurt before the horse on a whole different level,

Chris Williamson [00:36:52] The car before the license. Yeah, things like that. And I, I spend a lot of time on my show and speaking to people in on my socials as well just trying to deprogram that like desperately, desperately trying to teach people that there is so much more to life but it keeps going in the other direction man. Like the people that have taken that red pill and have realized that if you desire things that are outside of you, these external metrics of accomplishment that it is going to end up with you being hollow. And this is coming from someone who's done it, who's got the free charcoal toothpaste on Instagram, the a hundred K followers, the blue ticks, the being on tv, you know, all of that stuff. Like I, I'm trying to, the same as I can say about sobriety because I've been a party boy for ages. I'm saying about external measures of success don't matter but it's hard. Like I'm fighting against the tide over here in the UK and I think that reality shows like the ones that I've been on contributing to that.

Vance Crowe [00:37:51] So when you look back and you say, well I'd love to go back on again, it was great to get a holiday. Do you think that they are just a part of nature the same way that other aspects of our culture are? Or do you think reality TV is one of those things that, you know, people should try and walk away from in some way

Chris Williamson [00:38:08] As a audience member?

Vance Crowe [00:38:10] Yeah,

Chris Williamson [00:38:11] It depends man very much. You can have someone five pints a couple of nights a week to one person can be perfectly balanced and to another person can be the crux upon which their entire life is held. And some people can watch it and kind of cringe at it or enjoy it for the simple shallow entertainment that it is. And other people use it as the beacon that is directing them, the compass that's directing them towards their future values. And sadly a lot of young people. Perfect example of this. I'm away on holiday talking to a bunch of young kids that are sons and daughters of a family that I'm with and we're just just talking about what do you do? And this the other, I was talking about nightclubs and a few of the little things and then partway through dinner my dad mentioned that I used to be on Love island and that was it for the rest of the night, 14, 15 and a 16-year-old. And all they wanted to talk about was who's this guy like and what's this person like? And oh you are on season one. I started watching on season two, so did they have the same pool and was the villa like this? And you think, right, okay, like this is where you are taking your values from and a potentially, I've only just thought of this now, but a potentially good reason for that might be that the gap between our generation and our parents' generation culturally is so vast, right? You think the difference between someone who is thirties, like twenties to thirties now to someone who is fifties to sixties now it's a different world. There wasn't internet, there wasn't be a wanderlust, nomadic internet entrepreneur wherever you want on the planet.

Chris Williamson [00:39:43] There was no tinder and sexy selfies like all of that stuff. So you don't have perhaps the existing frameworks and structures that their parents, your parents' parents may have passed down to them because the world's changed so quickly. All of the functioning rules that your parents could have taught you, they don't apply anymore. So you think, right, well mom and dad don't know what they're on about so I need to look somewhere else for relationship advice. They can't teach me how to get into a dating market that's got Tinder and Instagram. So I'm gonna look to those people 'cause they're professional daters essentially.

Vance Crowe [00:40:18] So I mean like you've now referenced twice that the tide is going in the direction of faster, more desire for quick, I mean like do you see the Aldis Huxley like, we're gonna be on pleasure island so much that we'll give up all of our freedoms because we don't want to give up pleasure. Or where do you think this ends?

Chris Williamson [00:40:39] I don't think it's going to spiral that way. I think you've got a counter culture coming with platforms like this with this desire for long form content with the rise in stoicism, like Marcus Aurelius's meditations was sold out, it was unavailable for purchase on Amazon at the beginning of 2020. I know there was a pandemic happening, but like Marcus Aurelius ain't gonna teach you how to race to the bottom of the brainstem, right? Like he's going to teach you how to do hard things over and over again. Why? It's because people want meaning. Yes, there are a lot of psychological tricks and behavioral biases that social media and everybody else can tap into. But I think that I, I'm quite confident that given the rise in long form podcasting, given the distrust of the legacy media, the mainstream media as it's now called, I don't think that they're going to be able to keep their hold on things. And the more that you have people who have direct creator to audience markets who say things that resonate with them truly properly, properly resonate with them, you can destroy barriers like that very quickly. And when you've got, you know, Joe Rogan puts up a podcast episode, it'll get more views than anything on any channel ever apart from like the World Cup and the Olympic opening ceremony. Like he wipes the floor with cable news shows in terms of viewership. So who's got the power now and what are they talking about? Those people are talking about things that are genuinely meaningful to people.

Vance Crowe [00:42:13] I think it would seem like that the big tech companies have a lot of power here because all of the distribution has to go through platforms. And so I'm, I'm very much looking forward to the day when Rogan is no longer has any relationship with YouTube, and I don't think he's going to then make some big reveal. But I would love it when his, when his like contract with YouTube is over to see if he says why he left. Because like to me it seems like there's a lot brewing over there. There I, I saw Apple talking about how they feel like maybe they need to start policing podcasts more. And so I, I don't know who has the power. I like to think that this one to many works well, but there's so many people in between me and the audience that are doing a service for me to make that happen. But there's a lot there. It's not just one me to them.

Chris Williamson [00:43:06] That's correct, yeah. That's a structural problem. In terms of the cultural problem, I don't think that there's anybody in between you and the audience. You just need to get the message to them. Like perfect example of this is Alex Jones. Like Alex Jones got wiped off the face of the internet and had to retreat to his own member site and now he gets more views on some of his videos on his own pay walled member site. He gets more views than some of the legacy media do. So the structural problems I think can be worked around the cultural problems as well. Yeah, like we're in a, we're in a time where hyper normal stimuli, supernormal versions, this runaway fish reproduction that you get where attractive sexual characteristics get further and further char caricatured over time. Big eyes, big boobs, big lips, guys with big muscles taller, taller like ends up with basketball players being the only desirable people on the planet. But I think that that is being counted by people being a step, being able to step into their own programming, being able to slow down a little bit and check, you know, calm headspace, all different meditation apps that people are using at the moment. These things don't help you to race to the top of the dominance hierarchy. No, not many people would stick out a six month meditation practice thinking that it's going to help them to be more dominant. It's about becoming more present with yourself. It's the first time in history that we've got an abundance of information as opposed to a scarcity.

Chris Williamson [00:44:37] And now people are looking for ways to glean that out. How can I make some signal from the noise? How can I bring some order to the chaos?

Vance Crowe [00:44:45] So I noticed that you do some Wim Hof cold water work and so I run a network called the Articulate Ventures Network. And a few months ago or a few weeks ago, somebody said, Hey, we ought to do a month of everybody in the network take cold showers. And immediately I was like, oh hell no, I do not want to do this. I've, I've done it before when I, when I last summer and I was like, I've learned everything I needed to learn, but I started doing it again and I wanted to like hear from somebody that has not been clouded by my way of thinking. Why do you do it? And what happens when you first embrace the and step into cold water?

Chris Williamson [00:45:25] I enjoy doing things that challenge me mentally. And for me, the effects physically are great. It feels like having a about 10 cup of coffees at once for, for about half an hour afterward. I enjoy the clarity of thought that it gives me, and I enjoy the, I enjoy the fact that I've done something hard first thing in the morning. But what's more important than that to me is the moment just before you get into the water, because I feel like there is so much that we have to learn from adversity, which is cliche to say now, right? That in a time where there's hyper convenience and you can deliveroo or Uber eats a Michelin star meal to your couch while you watch Amazon Prime shit, like this is a counter to that. But more than that, it teaches you that so many of the programmed responses you, your body has aren't to be feared. Like a lot of the things that we get anxious about, we get anxious about that meeting. I've got at work tomorrow in the same way as if there was a cheetah 500 yards away from us on the planes. But they are not the same thing. Like, you will be fine. Even if you get fired, you're still gonna be fine. And the more that we can expose ourselves to these things voluntarily expose ourselves to these things of discomfort, I think there's so much wisdom to be gleaned from that. So I enjoy the way it makes me feel and more, but more than that, I enjoy the place it forces me to go mentally before I do it. Tell me your justification.

Vance Crowe [00:46:53] Well, so, you know, one thing I think is everybody that does it has to have a reason. So you're right, you turn that knob all the way to cold and then you step into it. And my belief is there has to be something that is more powerful than the voice of resistance telling you, you don't have to do this, you're fine, take a step back, it's no big deal. But then once you do it, like, and you have control over it, I kind of think of it as riding over a bucking bronco. It's, it's a little bit like being in a rodeo because there's so many times in our lives when we give into our will that wants us to just stop or not even start or I don't know how to try. And so for me being able to be like, I know every other part of me except for whatever my Damon or something wants to get outta here. And the fact that I'm able to stay here is just like riding, riding a bull or something. And then as soon as I am done with my 60 seconds or a hundred seconds, one of the new things that I've added in is instead of stepping out of the water and then turning it up and then having the warm part of the shower at the end, I just turn the water back up just a little bit warmer and it feels so much more comfortable. So to your point, I've just taken the set point, which was probably, you know, three quarters warm, one quarter cold, and now made it three quarters cold and one quarter cold and or one quarter warm. And that means I am at a different place with my myself psychologically. And, and so I think these are the weird things that you can get by choosing completely benign ways of suffering for small amounts of talent.

Chris Williamson [00:48:32] Yeah, it's a perfect way to put it, man. I mean, why do people go flocked CrossFit and, and spinning and Brazilian jiujitsu? Like I know it's a, a technically beautiful art, but if you actually do it, it's savage, you're knackered, you wanna throw up like you're tired, you're sweating, you've got another person stopping you from breathing and you just keep giving it everything so that you hopefully don't get strangled, right? Like, but people do these things because it reminds them, I think it reminds us that we're human. Like there's not many extreme things left to do. Like the people that are listening, A good thought experiment for this is when was the last time, the last time that you were genuinely scared? Like absolutely terrified? Afraid like I can't remember for me years perhaps. And it's very infrequent. Like we don't do things that cause us to get into extreme levels of discomfort and most of them, most of the things that we do choose to do, this is a, a total nother rabbit hole. I think there's another level of learning to be gleaned from unchosen adversity. So perfect example of this is, I ruptured my Achilles playing cricket last year, which is like the most British way that you could rupture an

Vance Crowe [00:49:42] Achilles.

Chris Williamson [00:49:45] And I did that and I learned more in the month and a half after my Achilles repair and during my Achilles repair operation than I've learned in three and a half years of cricket and cold showers because I didn't choose it. Even though you've stepped into the shower, you know, you chose to do it, you got yourself to that place, right? But for almost all of human history, our adversities have been bestowed honest, not chosen bias. What does that mean? That means that I am in the fire, I'm in the crucible of whatever the hell is going on and I didn't choose to be here, but I still need to find a way to make it work. And yeah, I learned, I learned so much from that and it was beautiful in a way that it, you will get something from a situation that you don't want from some adversity that's gonna befall you, a loved one's going to die or a business is going to collapse or something's going to happen. But the saving grace of that is that you are going to get some wisdom from that situation, which you couldn't get in any other way. No matter how many cold showers and CrossFit workouts you do, you are not going to learn that unless you get thrown in. And it's a very reassuring thing to know when you're facing adversity.

Vance Crowe [00:51:05] Yeah, that's, I mean it's one of those things that, it's hard to say we wanna go back to the forced adversity of life, but if you think about the man that woke up every morning and knew that if he didn't get out there and plow or pull weeds or water things, then there wasn't gonna be food and the fall and in the winter for his family every single day he had meaning. And I don't, I don't know that we wanna go back to subsistence level in order to give people meaning, but I think that there's something weird about the human psychology. Like you made the great comparison about, you know, some meeting you're worried about at work having the same impact as a cheetah just standing right outside the fire, right? Like that's not the same thing. And I find Well, like you mentioned, sleep. This is one of those areas that I have to force myself into. And I've started doing that where I say, I'm gonna quit stealing from tomorrow by making sure I go to sleep at a good time tonight. And you're exactly right. I had no idea how much of the darkness and the loneliness that just appeared when you wake up in the morning and you're tired and no one necessarily is depending on you to deliver results today. Right? Like I think in our modern world, we kind of have an abstracted results that you can deliver over time, but that's a lot harder for the human mind to be able to grapple with. So if you're tired and you're, you don't have meaning and you don't have some role that you're supposed to play, who are you?

Chris Williamson [00:52:32] It's not a very nice way to start the day. Being tired. Being tired makes everything worse. If anyone hasn't taken this red pill yet, then Joe Rogan, episode 1109 with Matthew Walker, it's two hours and it will teach you everything that you need to know. And you will, after you listen to that, if you listen to it properly, you will start to prioritize sleep. But man, yeah, the, that rolling existential crisis is, it's a hell of a drug.

Vance Crowe [00:52:54] Yeah. But where do you think that that, like, do you think this is just the modern man's like plight, the, the meaninglessness that that goes on?

Chris Williamson [00:53:05] So this is, this kind of goes back to my complaint about being misunderstood as a young, introspective, good looking guy, right? It just sounds like such a bourgeois problem to have. You're like, God, like I, it's, it's like having too much gold or something. You're like, oh, what, what? So you've got too much convenience and not enough adversity. Like what are you complaining about? But I genuinely do think that this is finding meaning and purpose in a world where the entire bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have been looked after. If you think about it, having an existential crisis is an oddly fortunate position to be in. It's a, it's actually quite a luxurious place to be, to be able to have an existential crisis because 10,000 years ago, you wouldn't have had one. You'd have been terrified that you're gonna starve or be, be killed by a tiny cut on the back of your hand because there's no, there was no antibacterial wipes back then. So yeah, very much. Now this anami, this lessness that we have, let's think about some of the traditions that have been broken down, increasingly secular society. So you don't have religion telling you how to live a good life, what it means to live a good life, less people going into military service. That would also have been a traditional structure of how men would've become boys. What else? Like marriage, breaking down, people getting married later in life. If you don't have kids, if you have kids by the age of 20 years old, you've got a lot of meaning. Like you need to do things for them. Whereas I'm 32 and I'm still single. I can't wait to be a dad.

Chris Williamson [00:54:37] I'm excited to be a dad. I'm looking forward to having a family. And yet I'm not bothered that I don't have one yet. So me finding meaning I have to wake up and generate my own meaning every single morning. And if I don't, no one's gonna shout at me.

Vance Crowe [00:54:51] Yeah, that's, I mean, so I had a daughter about five months ago, my first child. And you're exactly right. That child will give you meaning because it gives you a role that if you don't play, nobody will. And I think having a child was one of the first times in my life where I realized like, you're not a gear here. Like in every other place, whether I was a deckhand or a Peace Corps volunteer or working here or there, would the person have done it the way I did it? Probably not. But in, and would the work have gotten done? Yes. 'cause they were gonna put a gear in there somewhere. But when it's your child, suddenly your spin on this has the, the, you know, the kind of butterfly effect impact on it. So then your meaning is like, okay, I've gotta get awake 'cause I've gotta take care of something. But you're, I think very smart because when I was 32, I was still of the mindset that I didn't even know if having children was a good idea for me. I, I look back when I hear you say that, I'm like, yeah, man, you're on the right path.

Chris Williamson [00:55:48] When did that change?

Vance Crowe [00:55:51] When three years before we had our child, my wife and I decided that we wanted to have a child. And once we started and then we went down that path and it didn't work for us for a long time, and we got to the point where we were actually told, Hey, you guys really need to consider the fact that you, it might not work. And that was like you were talking about the, the unasked for suffering or the, the burden. That was when, for the very first time in my life, I wasn't getting something that I wanted every other time in my life, if I actually wanted something, I could get it. And this was the first time that I was like, not only could you not get it, but you might not get it and you might miss out on this part of life. So what will your life be worth? And that's when you have to, like you're talking about that existential crisis, working your way through that is, it changes who you are fundamentally.

Chris Williamson [00:56:41] Man, congratulations for getting through that. I'm incredibly happy for you. That's like, that's like a heroic story, you know, to go through something that tough,

Vance Crowe [00:56:48] That's brutal. Well the thing that, the thing that's the hardest part about it, so for anybody out there that has a wife that's struggling is as a man to watch your wife not be able to get pregnant and not be able to do anything, and that she will feel like the burden is entirely on her. And you know, there's not enough flowers or chocolates or nice words in the world to, to change that

Chris Williamson [00:57:12] Man. Yeah. I mean that's, it's torturous that situation. But yeah, I, again, we don't have another archetype that I think is missing, missing from modern society. The young guy who is single and wants a family, like what, what is that? Because you, you have the dotting girl hits 30, tries to marry whatever is available archetype, which is kind of, there's some truth to it, but it's sort of pretty ugly as well. But there isn't an equivalent for guys. There isn't an equivalent for a guy who's like, yeah, I really want a family. I can't wait to be a dad. I think I'm gonna make sick kids and they're gonna be like doing cool stuff and I got some pretty strong genetics. Maybe they take over the world, maybe they become a psychopath. I dunno.

Vance Crowe [00:58:01] So I'll tell you, there is, and they're in the ag world and it was shocking to me. So when I went away to college and I went to my fancy university and it was in the city and I went to New York and then I ended up working in agriculture as a 27, 20 8-year-old and traveling all over the country. And I actually got to meet a bunch of young kids at ag colleges. And as we became friends and stayed in touch, I'd have a young person that's 22 or 23 years old writing me to tell me how excited they were that they got engaged. And I was like, you fool, how could you do this? But then you realize like no, their whole family structure is set up differently. Like if they bring home four different girlfriends before they get married, the fourth girl is gonna be treated pretty badly, pretty cold. Like the family doesn't want that. They have the entire culture built up around in some pockets about having young men and young women getting married and having kids.

Chris Williamson [00:58:55] Man, that tradition is something that we should be very scared about casting away. And again, I'm saying this to someone who has spent a lot of time having a lot of transactional sex, right? Like that's what most of my twenties was spent doing, standing in the front door of clubs and going home with girls. But I saw a statistic the other day from my good buddy Rob Henderson on Twitter. If anyone's interested in dating dynamics, like he's unbelievable to follow.

Vance Crowe [00:59:20] He's just on the podcast, he's great.

Chris Williamson [00:59:22] He's a phenomenal human. And he tweeted, you may have seen this yesterday, saying the single biggest predictor of extramarital affairs is premarital sex. So the more sexual partners you've had before you get married, the more likely you are to cheat on your partner.

Vance Crowe [00:59:41] Whoa.

Chris Williamson [00:59:43] Kind of puts a different spin on, have some fun in your early twenties or get some experience under your belt. We keep coming back to this man, this an me, this normalness, right? Like why are we here? This Donald Kingsbury quote always comes back to me, tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems.

Vance Crowe [01:00:03] Yes, that's exactly right. And it's actually exactly why I think your, your name for your podcast is very interesting. 'cause modern wisdom is in some way almost a dichotomy. They're almost opposites, right? It's wisdom is something that's timeless, something that we've known for so long. And modernity is the present moment. All of the newness, the the, the crashing wave of the future.

Chris Williamson [01:00:27] Why is that the case? Why shouldn't it be the case that wisdom compounds over time? So modern wisdom should be compounded wisdom, but it's not. It's because we're currently praying at the altar of the materialist reductionist scientific world. Science comes in and makes some unbelievable progress from the 18 hundreds into the 19 hundreds into the 21st century. And everybody thinks that's going to fix everything. Religion gets tossed out the window because, well, the earth wasn't obviously created in five days and evolution and blah blah blah blah blah. And then slowly all of these different values that had been accumulated over years, centuries, millennia of time were washed away. And people thought, well actually the new God is science. The new answer is science and tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Like we should be careful about it, man. Like think about, think about how many women is an uncomfortable truth. Think about how many women have had fewer children than they wanted to because they were told that they had to have a career when they were younger.

Vance Crowe [01:01:34] This goes on in my family, my wife and I right now. I mean we, my wife was an aerospace engineer. She is a brilliant woman and and very driven, left that career to, to join physical therapy. 'cause she was like, I'm gonna spend some time with my kids after I've now done this aerospace and then we're gonna have children. And then we found out like, wait a second. When you start having children in your thirties, you don't get to have as many as what you maybe wanted. And you maybe didn't realize that having a child was gonna fill a child size hole in your heart. So this I I, and I feel I should take it on as responsibility of my own, but I feel a level of bitterness towards my college education where I was at a Catholic university no less. And I, it was still pounded into you. If you get married and just start thinking about children, you're messing things up. You're, you're going against what we know to be modern and true

Chris Williamson [01:02:26] Man. This is, so I had this guy on my show, Daniel Achtenberg, if anybody wants to fry their brains, just search for him on the internet. He's a wonderful thinker, incredibly deep. And he gave the best definition of self-development that I've ever heard. And he said, increasing self-development is the ability to cope with increased complexity in your mind at one time. And this is why what we get with politics, with the way that we spend our time on social media are tiny little snippets of absolutism. What is the hundred percent version of this answer? Like you have to be an entrepreneur until the age of 40 and then you can start maybe thinking about kissing a girl until then just like grind, build Instagram followers and invest in the s and p 500. Like that's how you should spend your time or settle down, you're like you're a Mormon, like settle down, go do your thing and then come back. And then it's, you create a family. This increasing complexity, can it be true that it is amazing for women to be able to go into whichever industry they want and if they want to be a career woman, they can do it. And at the same time that pushing women to have careers can end up with them having less meaning in their life because they have fewer children. And children are a source of massive meaning. Like can it be that a man can be a breadwinner and also a young dad at the same time that it isn't any more masculine necessarily to go chasing paper in your early twenties or sleeping with women or for a woman to go and have lots of sexual partners early on so that she's experienced when she finally meets her husband.

Chris Williamson [01:04:01] Like virginity before marriage now is seen as an extremist position. Like it's a rare position for people to be in and you think, well it wouldn't have been in the olden days. And the ti the science now backs up that more premarital sexual partners means more likelihood of extramarital sex during marriage. Like we should, we should dispense with tradition incredibly delicately.

Vance Crowe [01:04:27] But tradition can also be used to, to keep people down, you know, like we have right now. So ar ardent of traditions that the only people that can be elected in the United States are people that are over 70 years old, right? Like the, we have, we have these body politics that are so entrenched and they have convinced everybody of the holiness of the process that they're doing it with. That it just keeps producing the same answer. And so tradition can also bog you down.

Chris Williamson [01:04:55] Yeah, well this is increasing complexity. You have to be able to understand that there are multiple things which can be true. And sometimes so many things that can be true at once that you need to restart. You need to turn over a fresh page and begin again with all of that information in there. But this is why modern wisdom, like why are we not compounding on the knowledge and the understanding and the insights that we have to get to an ever more precise and fair and just and truthful answer that allows people to fully become what they should be. And I think it's gida that talks about how societies vacillate from one extreme to the other and then eventually they end up somewhere in the middle. And you look back at like the Victorian era, like the 18 hundreds for us. And you think, yeah, they had some pretty backward views about women's roles in society and yeah, they weren't too good to gaze and yeah, they weren't too good to ethnic minorities. And then you roll that forward and you think, okay, if you draw this slingshot back so far, what happens when you let go of it? Like what happens when the counterculture comes and then the countercultures got fucking Twitter? Like that's a dangerous, that's a dangerous set of whiplash going in the other direction. So I'm, and I think yourself as well and anybody else that's having long form meaningful conversations, which are not just reactionary, is trying to slow down that whiplash. It's like, look, we have to take an hour to have a conversation on a podcast because the discussion that we're having and the end goal we're trying to get to is nuanced and it's subtle and it's complex and we try to get there slowly over time step by step as we build all the different things in.

Chris Williamson [01:06:33] And that's really how culture and society should be built. But sadly because of the dominance hierarchy and the mimetic desires that you talked about earlier on, people just want what everyone else seems to want. And that can cause things to go into extremes rather than into subtleties.

Vance Crowe [01:06:50] So Chris, I know we have to wrap up for time, but I am very interested in hearing how you think about your future. If we were to check back in with you in six months, in a year, five years, where will we find you?

Chris Williamson [01:07:03] Yeah, that's an interesting one. I've never been good at long-term planning. I went to uni and did a business degree because I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. So I was like, right, I'll just do, I'll do business and then that means I can start a business like anyone that's not chosen their major in college in the US you do not learn how to run a business by doing a business degree. Like there is no such thing as the subject of business I'm afraid. Sorry, that's like the, the big red pill about the MBA thing. Like it looks good on a piece of paper, but you learn more in the first week of running a business than doing it this year. I'm focusing on YouTube so I want to be as comfortable speaking face to camera. Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. This day we're talking about some interesting thing as I am on a podcast, so I need to eat some frogs this year. I need to go through some discomfort and just build up my capacity on that. I have a TEDx talk coming up in three months time, which I'm super excited about. So public speaking, again, something new, rolling forward to a year. Hopefully the show will be at the stage where, and the you, the world where I can start to fly around and see people and go visit guests. Because I've always wanted to travel a lot and my business has always tethered me to one place because your assets within the business are the networks that you know, and you can't just pick those up. If I move to Georgia or like New York or something, no one knows who I am and I can't just pick up all the cool kids I've got here and drop them over there 'cause they don't know anyone. And then five years, man, I want to, I want to be in a very happy long-term marriage with a woman that I love.

Chris Williamson [01:08:35] Would I have kids even? It depends how young she is. But definitely dogs, multiple dogs. And just find out what there is to learn of life by making, making some little humans that hopefully I can give some advice to the same way as I do to, you know, a couple of million people on the internet every month. Like try and do it to someone that's got my genetics for once.

Vance Crowe [01:09:02] Man I am i that it makes me feel like a sense of joy to hear your dreams about this and, and to watch how excited you are. The one thing I'll tell you about when you have a child, this is something nobody told me, and that is that for the first four to six weeks, your child does not know how to smile. Smiling is something that a child learns over time. So for the first four to six weeks, all you have is a hostage taker. She either is crying or she's neutral and it isn't until she gets the smiling at six weeks. That makes her somebody that you can engage with and you can start negotiating with. And I think that's an important thing because it tells you a lot about human communication because then you go from six weeks to about a year where the only thing that baby can do, it can hear words, but it can only read your facial cues and you can only read its facial cues. So our language written on our faces is actually deeper than our language with words. And that's one of those things that you'll discover all sorts of things like this when you have a kid. 'cause you're so observant and so curious.

Chris Williamson [01:10:04] Man, that's fascinating. Like you must be feeling like it's having a child, bringing a child into this world is like supercharging your self-development as well. Oh yeah. Questioning your values, questioning why you do the things you do. Well, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not advocating having a child as a personal development strategy. Like obviously it's an end, it's an end in itself, but you must be learning loads.

Vance Crowe [01:10:26] Well, I care deeply about human communication. So for me, I, I really care about why is it that some people are able to take an idea and format it in such a way that, like you said, millions of people can listen and understand and take something away from it. And other people are so terrified that they can't get their words out. And how do you, how do you communicate when things matter? So for me, watching a baby, it's actually helping me write a theory of human communication based entirely on this. I know all of the inputs and now I'm seeing what the outputs are as we go.

Chris Williamson [01:11:00] I can't wait for that man. I'm really, really excited for it.

Vance Crowe [01:11:03] Well Chris Williamson, if people wanted to follow you on YouTube or check out your Twitter, how would they find you

Chris Williamson [01:11:08] At Chris will X on all the social medias that you spend time on and modern wisdom wherever you listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.

Vance Crowe [01:11:20] Well, you've got a fan in me and I'm so glad you were willing to come on. Thank you so much Chris.

Chris Williamson [01:11:25] I really enjoyed it, man. Thank you.