Chris Williamson: Are we in a masculinity crisis? (E256)

0:00Watch it early on the High Performance App. Available now, Roman Kemp, the broadcaster, opens up a powerful conversation on success and mental health. What do you wish more people knew about what it's like to be a man? I feel pressure to always be in control. I have a sense of expectation that I always need to be competent and have mastery. The biggest problem is that we're not really listening to men's problems. They are being dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that men no longer feel a part of. I think that over the next two decades, we're going to see a reversal. I think that there's going to be a crisis of femininity, and I think that male body dysmorphia is going to be one of the leading conversations.

0:44That is Chris Williamson, and this is High Performance, the show that unlocks the minds of some of the most fascinating people on the planet. I'm Jake Humphrey, and alongside Damien Hughes, we learn from the stories, struggles, and successes of our guests, allowing us all to explore, be challenged and to grow. So today we're joined by the creator and host of Modern Wisdom. Chris Williamson spoke to us in Austin, where we reflected not just on his journey from club promoter and reality star to podcaster, but we also discussed modern masculinity, the price of success, and why his show has had hundreds of millions of downloads.

1:21It's a fascinating episode. I hope you enjoy. But before we get to it, a quick word from our brilliant partners.

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3:28Chris, welcome to the show. Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Look, you know the way this show starts. What is high performance to you? I think I would have given you a very different answer about five or six years ago. I think I would have told you about optimizing my day, time efficiency, ebbing house, forgetting curves and spaced repetition, time blocking, Pomodoro techniques. weeks. And now it feels a lot more like just doing work that I'm proud of. I still want to crush it. I still want to leave it all out on the field of play. But my goal is to try and do things that in retrospect, I'm glad that I did.

4:03And I think once you've spent a bit of time accumulating skills and becoming world class or close to world class at anything, you then get the opportunity to start to play with the rules that previously you followed. and I'm really enjoying that. So for me, it's creating work that I'm proud of. The performance is going to come along for the ride because I've worked so hard at it, but it's strange how that arc sort of comes into land from, and I think that you have a similar kind of journey with this when we spoke this like beforehand, it was all about like crushing it and optimization and efficiency.

4:36And then after a while you realize it kind of looks more like play. So whereabouts on that arc are you then? Have you reached the bit where you say, okay, we've had the mastery moment. Now it's about the enjoyment and the play and the exploration. Yeah, it's around about there. That's where you are. The question I have for myself this year, the theme of this year is, can you be world-class and have fun at the same time? Right. So you think the world-class bit's been achieved, but the fun hasn't? Correct. Yeah, I've sacrificed the fun in order to be world-class. So how are you bringing the fun back in?

5:06Trying to find play and ease and not put too much pressure on myself. You know, a lot of people can achieve phenomenally great things by ambient anxiety and just grinding their nose into the floor. You know, hours and hours and hours of reps and fear and vigilance and concern. And then you realize that you ask yourself the question, how much is this contributing to my performance? how much am I better on the competition floor whatever your chosen pursuit is because of this permanent concern that I will not be good enough if I don't do all of this stuff in advance and then the even more difficult question is wow maybe I could be better if I actually found a sense of ease and joy and play in the things that I do uh but I do think that you need to go through it's a mountain that you can only realize was kind of a false peak you know the concept of false peaks in mountaineering um it's a false peak you can only see once you're at the top of it and i think that it's important also like if you're going to become world-class at something you actually have to become world-class you have to achieve some degree of competence and learn the rules before you can then start breaking them and playing with them and realizing that maybe they weren't there to begin with or else you're just you don't know the physics of the system that you're playing within so when did you realize that you'd reached the world-class moment?

6:30I don't know. I mean, what does world-class mean when it comes to podcasting? I guess, like competence, a degree of competence where I don't need to fear that I'm going to mess up every single moment of every single episode, where I don't need to come into it with a scarcity mindset, with this sort of like hypervigilance that I'm going to mess up. And I think that was maybe probably about a year, year and a half ago, something like that. Just after I moved to Austin, that that kind of started to come into my head. but there's this idea from Mark Manson called identity dysmorphia. I named it, he came up with it and he says identity lags reality by one to two years.

7:06So if you think that the person that you are now sees you as the person that you were one to two years ago, it's like a person that loses a ton of weight and they still have that vision of them being the slightly sort of chubby overweight, but even though the rest of the world sees them very differently and trying to speed up the pace of that identity dysmorphia thing is something we could all benefit from. See, this is interesting because we're recording this in the States, right? And the day that we left, I was telling my wife all the things I'm worried about that might go wrong and blah, blah, blah.

7:39And she actually said to me, are you not at the point where you're going to enjoy doing this a little bit more? And you know the first thought that came in my head, as soon as I start to enjoy it, then the edge is lost. And as soon as I'm losing the edge, then I'm losing the quality. And when I lose the quality, I lose the audience. When I lose the audience, I lose the show. did you not have that fear? And if you did, how did you get through it? Of course, massively. Your fear of insufficiency and of not getting it right will drive you to do phenomenal things. But ultimately you have to ask yourself, what am I doing this for?

8:11I'm fascinated by the question of what does real success look like? Absolutely fascinated by it. It's my belief that we sacrifice the thing we want, which is happiness, to achieve success, which is the thing that's supposed to get it. You sacrifice the thing that you want for the thing which is supposed to get it. You sacrifice happiness in order to be successful so that when you're finally sufficiently successful, you can give yourself a good enough reason to be happy. So I can't remember how to do simultaneous equations. I haven't done maths in like 20 years, but I think if you made an equation of this and you just struck off success from both sides, you would be left with happiness.

8:44Now that's kind of unrealistic, right? Because we are social creatures. We need validation from the world. We need to, we want our efforts to be reaffirmed by those around us, our peers, by society at large. So I don't think that retreating from all worldly pursuits and becoming an ascetic monk living in the cave is optimal for everybody. But I also think that there is a much quicker route to happiness, which is actually finding joy in the pursuit that you are doing and not applying that degree of pressure. That being said, you also need to learn those rules. You need to apply that to the point where you have accumulated those skills.

9:20But I would guess now, I mean, what episode number is this? Go on, Will. You'll know. 270. 270? 260, 270. Right. Okay. So you're talking about 500 hours, maybe of this, plus all of the time that you guys have spent either professionally on TV, all the rest of it. You couldn't be bad at your job if you tried. Like if I paid you to try and be bad at doing a podcast, you couldn't do it because you've just accumulated this momentum and inertia. And I don't think that your neurosis is improving your performance. I don't think that that helps. People can be driven by, largely by two different things.

9:59They can run away from something that they fear. They can run towards something that they want. There's a great experiment done by starving rats in a tube and attaching a spring to their tail, which has a force measure on it. And how hard they pull is a proxy for how much they want the thing. So these rats are starving. They waft the smell of cheese in from the front of the tube and these rats pull. You think, well, these rats are starving. They've got to be running pretty hard. Then they do a second iteration where they waft the smell of a cat in from behind and the smell of cheese in from the front.

10:28And the rats pull harder. And the lesson from that is that in life, not only do you want to run towards something that you want, but away from something that you fear. That being said, the running away from something that you fear, insufficiency, a requirement for validation and success and recognition and requirement from the world around you, proof to yourself that you are worthy of love or acceptance or praise or whatever it is. It's a very potent fuel, but it's toxic over too long of a time. So I think it's very important to realize when that fuel is spent. So tell us a little bit then around, because that running away from something is a powerful fuel at a certain stage.

11:04I'm interested in on your own journey Chris what was it you were running away from initially? I think I had a very high need to be validated by the world so growing up was super unpopular in school was an only child parents are quite introverted as well so in terms of socialization, that was relatively low, which then meant when I got to school, socially, I was quite ungainly, like I wasn't very graceful at understanding how to relate to other kids. And that meant that I always kind of fawned over having connection. I wanted connection from people that were around me and struggled to get it. I found that it was something that I was lacking.

11:51And then when I got to university, started becoming a club promoter and basically supplanted people wanting me for people needing me. If you're the guy that has the VIP wristbands and knows who all of the pretty girls are and can get you Q jump at the busiest night in town, functionally, it's the same as people wanting you. But what it actually is, is people needing you. It's a very transactional relationship. And then from there, I realized, oh, if I do something which is socially rewarded and held in high esteem, that makes people positively disposed to me. So I'll just keep running this same script.

12:27So I became a male model, was a male model for a decade, became a DJ, ran one of the biggest events companies in the North of England, went on Take Me Out, went on Love Island. So I did like the Champions League of being a professional, I need attention, please give me validation thing. And some may argue that I'm still doing the same. But what I realized sort of going through that was that I just desperately wanted connection with the people around me. I just wanted people that felt like they had my back because, you know, a lot of the time, even like murderers have got people that will visit them in prison, brothers and sisters and family and stuff like that.

13:05But when you don't go through your childhood with perhaps that safety and security of a tight social net, you try to supplant that need for validation elsewhere. And yeah, that was, that was a big sort of trend. That was a big theme, I think, coming up. What are your emotions now when you think back to that period? We have a not dissimilar story. I had similar issues at school. They still trigger me a little bit. How do you feel when you think back to those days? I feel sad for that little boy. I think I wish I could pick him up and say that he's worthy of love and he doesn't need to do these things and he doesn't need to fear because in future everything is going to be okay.

13:47And he didn't choose to not have friends. He didn't choose to not connect with people. He's trying desperately. he's just doing it in the wrong way. His intentions are in the right place, but he's just deploying it in like a very ungraceful way, like a super enthusiastic but bad dancer, which actually is what I am as well. Yeah, that's what I would say. And what's left of him?

14:16I think still a uncertainty about upsetting other people. I have a, there is a degree of fragility that I have around support in relationships, in friendships. I am able to make myself the villain and this is something that a lot of people may resonate with which is even in a situation where it wasn't your fault you somehow managed to find a way to make it your fault and I spoke about this with Jocker Willink the Navy SEAL, scary guy, big hands he came on the show and his whole thing is extreme ownership extreme responsibility it's not your fault but it's still your responsibility and I asked him this question, it's two years ago now I didn't even know what the question was but it sort of came to me and it was, is there such a thing as taking too much responsibility?

15:07And he didn't think so. And I understand why, that this is a heuristic which probably works for a victimhood culture where everybody wants to externalize their locus of control. But I think that for a small subset of people, it is true that oftentimes you will find a way to make something which wasn't your fault or your responsibility, your responsibility. Can you give us an example of it? So let's say that you are in a friendship with somebody and someone else takes offense at a behavior that you did, despite the fact that it's not warranted, that they misunderstood something that you did, your intentions or whatever.

15:48That's their fault. You didn't do anything bad. They just misinterpreted it. It is not your job to fix that. Now, you can be caring and say, hey, look, this is what I meant, so on and so forth. But this sort of the story you tell yourself about, oh, here we go again, castigating yourself because you weren't sufficiently socially deft to be able to understand how this would have landed. This is your fault. Isn't this always how it goes? And then you start to tell yourself a story that it's because you are unworthy of friendship. And that's the vestige. I've managed to get rid of a good bit of it, but that's something that's still.

16:25Your responsibility, though, is how you deal with it, isn't it? You still are 100 % responsible for that element. You're responsible for how you respond, but you're not responsible for the other person, right? Like their emotional state, especially if you didn't do it to them, is not your responsibility. And there is such a thing as taking too much responsibility, I think. So when we talk about this period of your life, how much of it were you rejecting other people before you felt they could reject you? Not at all. I don't think in retrospect, the people around me may say differently, but I think I just desperately wanted connection.

17:01But what did connection look like for you? Someone that I could talk to, someone that wanted to be around me. You know, like genuine friends that would choose, would lean into connecting with me. And all these years later, how much work are you still doing on yourself? Like us, you spend all your time asking other people questions. how much time are you asking questions of yourself a lot yeah uh i've done you know five or six years of daily journaling on a morning uh 1500 sessions of meditation maybe a thousand of breath work um 760 episodes on modern wisdom my show and now approaching nine months of psychotherapy so I'm trying um and I'm so much better than I was and I really appreciate all of the growth and stuff that I've gone through but it's like this idea of tighter and tighter circles that as you get better at something you then begin to look at it with an increased level of mastery so you kind of it's like an onion you just keep on peeling ever finer layers and trying to get to something in the middle but what would you say to a young like a young person listening to this now that might be thinking, I don't have the time to do all of that.

18:18I don't have the resources to do that. But they're in the position that you felt that you're surrounded by people but still feel disconnected. What advice would you offer them if they were watching today? You can do probably 90 % or 80 % of the big movers in 45 minutes a day if you just get up a bit earlier. like sure the is the person that's a single mother working a job for kids and all the rest of it like that's a very extreme circumstance something tells me that the people that are listening to this podcast probably have 45 minutes a day if they stop scrolling on their phone a little bit more so the best way like you know i can throw pithy aphorisms at you all day but tactically how i would do it wake up 45 minutes before you need to leave the house or 45 minutes before you need to start getting ready to leave the house 10 minute walk get back journal if you want to breath work using state app or any other type Wim Hof, meditate, waking up with Sam Harris, headspace, calm, pick your modality of choice, and journaling, five minute journal, six minute diary, something like that.

19:22And then if you have time at the end, a little bit of reading on a Kindle, five minutes, 10 minutes of reading on a Kindle. And I think that at least for me, I understand that for a lot of people that might sound totally unrealistic, 45 minutes on a morning, God, you know, what a bourgeois luxurious way to start your day i need to get up and get the kids ready i i understand if that's your situation you need to find a different way to make it work uh but that worked really well for me and that was for you know four and a half five years i really locked into that and uh it was it was pretty powerful it was the biggest period of change that i've gone through so if anyone's listening to that thinking right i want to do it would you draw the direct line between the benefits that ensued from that in terms of addressing that sense of connectivity?

20:07So it wasn't just connectivity. The social skills and stuff is more about practice. What this is is forming a foundation, I think, of you understanding yourself. So Modern Wisdom, my podcast, the tagline from the very beginning was understand yourself and the world around you because I didn't have either of those. Understand yourself and the world around you. And I think that journaling, meditation, breath work, a little bit of reading of stuff that's cool and interests you. You don't have to read anything that anyone tells you that you have to read. Any of the authors that come on our shows, you don't need to read any of that stuff.

20:37Read a Substack article that you love, just read shit that interests you. And the line between me doing that and me understanding myself better was like exponential. It wasn't even linear. It like got better over time as I started to realize, oh, well, there's a pattern that I've noticed. And then therapy layered on top of that foundation has just been like a supercharged catalyst. What's the biggest takeaway from the therapy? I people please is the big one that I take on other people's. It is my responsibility for somebody else's emotional state almost at all times. So if I do an episode with a guest and, you know, we, you guys and me do a similar kind of show in that we're supposed to be a platform for great ideas, right?

21:24You want the guests to come on and just be at their absolute best. You want them to, it's a springboard for them in peak flow. There are other shows out there that are more cantankerous and that's not necessarily my style. But if I drop a question to a guest or a friend and I see that it makes them uncomfortable as you're watching them, sat across from them, I want to throw them a life boy and like save them in some way or another. The same thing goes for friends' emotional states, for me taking responsibility for the way that other people feel when I shouldn't do. And it sounds noble. I care about someone else's feelings, but the place that it comes from isn't a choice, it's a compulsion.

22:02And this is a big difference. And this is something that people that are listening should assess in themselves. Am I choosing to do this because I want to make this other person feel better? Or am I compelled to do this because if I don't, I feel worse? And that's, again, running away from something that you fear or running towards something that you want. So let's talk then about how we ended up in this room together in Austin, the three of us having a conversation on a podcast about your podcast, right? When did it change? We've spoken a lot about change already. So school was a struggle. University was fun, but maybe not fulfilling in the way that life is for you now.

22:37Love Island was there to scratch an itch that needed... Yeah. I'm interested in the role that that played in triggering change in your life. Yeah, so I guess Love Island is kind of like the Champions League of being a professional party boy. And I was the first person through the doors of season one. And that was, for me, right, I finally made it. Maybe this will be the thing that on the other side of it gives me validation and makes me feel sort of safe and secure. Can I just interrupt you here, Chris? Because before you get into it, you said your parents were quite introverted, quiet people.

23:12What was their reaction when you told them that you were doing this? They have a lot of faith in me. they're phenomenal with their faith in me. They've never stepped in and said that I should or shouldn't do anything, which is a real testament to them overcoming their, you know, everyone's child is like this precious, only child, this precious little ball of genetics that I've put together. And they've been really phenomenal at just sort of letting me do my own thing. Anyway, I, you know, I spend whatever it is, three weeks on the show plus a week of media lockdown beforehand. And I read Paolo Coelho's The Alchemist before I went in.

23:45And for the people that haven't read that, It is like a fever dream to read that book. It's a psychedelic trip in some ways. And I'm on the south coast of Mallorca. I'm like Santiago. What a book to read before you go into Love Island. Like your head's spinning for the whole time. That was the first book that I'd read since, you know, in school. So I go in in this sort of really odd state, this sort of existential question. And I'm south coast of Mallorca, kind of like the environment, the scenery that the protagonist is walking through. I'm doing this new thing and I'm making it on my own and this is adventure and so on and so forth.

24:15So I mean, for the future prospective Love Island contestants, do not read The Alchemist before you go on the show. It is suboptimal. And I went on and I spent time with people who were the actual version of the person that I was pretending to be. You know, they were super extroverted, professional party boys and party girls. and I'm like quite a sensitive, like thoughtful guy that doesn't, that loves to have deep, meaningful conversations and is desperate for connection with people. Love Island wasn't exactly the right place for that. It's like, you know, about me and you and why Omar's mugged that girl off last night, brov.

24:53Like that's what the conversations are about. So I was really struggling to connect, but continuing to play the role, right? And it was a fatal dose of contrast. So there was nowhere to hide. No phones, no TV, no books, no podcasts, no nothing. No friends or family, no nothing. And I just couldn't hide on that show from like, I am not supposed to be here. I thought I was supposed to be here and I'm not supposed to be here. So I had like a, it wasn't the skies opened and then I knew I was supposed to be a bro philosophy podcaster, but I knew that there was something wrong. And I had like a, it was the pebble at the top of an avalanche of like an existential crisis.

25:32and that made me start to question, okay, you thought that this was the thing that was going to answer all of your questions. You thought that it was going to be being on TV six nights a week for weeks and weeks and everybody knowing who you were and all the rest of it and it turned out to not be it. But again, if you used your metaphor of running away or running towards, so you were running towards that validation, the public recognition, and yet in there it sounds like you have this strong urge to run away from what you're experiencing, in the people that you recognize in. Yeah, I also think I was running away from a fear that I'm unlovable or unlikable or that I need the validation of people around me in order to feel enough myself.

26:13I think a lot of it was just driven by fear. But yeah, and I just, I didn't have the confidence to be able to be like, hey, I want to have a conversation. In fact, there was this moment on like the first night or something, which I remember. I don't remember much from the show. But on the first night, I was sat with whoever the date was that I'd got matched up with. and we were looking out across the field and someone commented something about, something that was in the distance. And I just sort of whacked off some fact that, oh, it's the Coriolis effect of the earth or it's whatever, whatever.

26:42And I remember the girl turning to me and saying, oh, that's really clever. Like say some more clever things. And I felt this fear that was like, that's not, you're not supposed to show that side of you. That side of you is not safe because it's not popular. So immediately like I swallowed that side and now, whatever we are, nine years, 10 years, later that's all i do all i do is embrace like my obsessive nerdy curiosities about evolutionary psychology or space or aliens or whatever um so like the thing that was my thing was the thing that i was hiding away from so how do we get from that to modern wisdom uh you know it's 2016 17 and i i landed bot on from the school of life who's been on the show phenomenal episode with you guys everyone should go and check that out um sam harris rogan peterson like even shapiro all of these people that I really respected and thought were great communicators were kind of having their heyday and their comeuppance.

27:35And I just really fell in love with what they were talking about. I got invited on a podcast and then thought, if I do my own, I can do this as much as I want. And yeah, it's 770 episodes later. Here we are. Now, this is the interesting part from my perspective, because setting up a podcast is not unique or special these days. But being here after over 700 episodes. You've moved out to the States, one of the most recognizable podcasts in America, in the UK, you've had some amazing guests. You know, it's up there on my list of podcasts that I listen to on a weekly basis. You know that already. So it's getting from thinking I want to do a podcast to get into this point here.

28:13So you said right at the beginning of the conversation that you have this deep obsession with, you know, what is success? What is mastery? How do we get to that point so i'd love to find out from you what you think has put modern wisdom where it is today there's only like two things i guess that's made modern wisdom super successful uh curiosity and consistency yeah like i'm just unbelievably curious about pretty much everything uh and i'm prepared to embrace that uh and i didn't stop i love that quote that you you know you don't have to be great to start but you do have to start to be great and given that you eventually achieved mastery tell us about the early steps into podcasting then when you first did it people can go back and listen to episode one on the you know it's still there on the youtube channel six years ago me and my friend stew morton that was going to row the atlantic solo you know 40 million ore strokes across the space of three months at talus talus whiskey style race which you guys are probably familiar with and he was going to try and do it solo i did this long before anybody listened and 85 % of my audience came last year and I've been doing it for five years at the start of last year 85 % of listeners found me last year and the same will be true like we did more subs and plays in the last 28 days than we did in the entire first three and a half years but it's the fact that but what I really admire on that is that that's only happened because you persevered and kept going so i'm interested in you spoke so we spoke about connection we've spoken about being able to embrace your inner geek and that curiosity of what you want to talk about how did these initial conversations that you were having address the needs that you'd started to recognize were important to you i just followed my curiosity there's this it's a myth in content creation that you're supposed to niche down dominate a niche and then you broaden out from there.

30:08Because if you scattergun yourself across too many audiences, you can't own any one audience. And I think that it's fundamentally flawed because there is no one that is only interested in one thing. You love 80s jazz and yoga and Renaissance philosophy and knitting, right? Like that's your thing. And then you don't know what you like either. So the way that I see the job of any content creator is like a museum curator. So you walk in and you don't know what all of the exhibits are going to be. Some of them are brand new to you and you can't believe that you didn't know about it. And it's so amazing.

30:43Some of them you already kind of knew, or maybe he'd even seen before, but were fans of that and other stuff. You're like, you know, that's maybe not quite so much for me, but it's your job to curate that. So all I did was follow my instincts. And the other advantage of following your instinct is that you're always going to have fun because you're only ever talking about something that you are interested in. So it sounds, you know, people look back on any, uh, come up story and look at the flat line before the, this thing. And they say, you know, it's so impressive to, to stick at this thing when no one was listening.

31:15And it's like, yeah, but that presumes that the reason that I was doing it was because people were listening and it wasn't, it was because I wanted to understand myself and the world around me. And I wanted an excuse to speak to people. I always had this resentment about university. I did two degrees. I did a bachelor's and a master's both in business. neither of them I can remember. I don't remember anything from them. Maybe they're like in there somewhere, but I always resented not having the bravery to go and do philosophy or psychology because I didn't know what a philosopher or a psychologist would do as a job.

31:46And, you know, I was at the end of my tether with academia when I finished Newcastle after five years and then realized that basically what I did with the show was create my own perfect university syllabus, only with the very professors that I wanted to, only talking about the specific microcosm of their work that I wanted to on my schedule. And I didn't have to do work for it other than the stuff that I chose. So I basically recreated the education that I never had. When did you, if you have, prioritize instinct over data collection and following the crowd and doing what everyone else has done and leaning into all of the incredible amounts of information you can get from podcast providers and YouTube and everywhere else?

32:28That's still an ongoing process because the things that are measured get managed more easily. You know, I can see the plays or the subscribers or whatever, but I can't see the impact that it has on people. I can't see how meaningful it is. You can kind of get a sense in terms of comments, but it's not quite the same. In terms of guest selection, it's always been that. You know, I brought you on the show because I really wanted to connect with you and I really, really wanted to dig into some of the insights that you had. And it was like a unique, you can go back and listen to my episode with you like three years ago.

32:59Was it three years ago? I think so. I like you though, it'd be quite different now, I reckon. Maybe, maybe a little bit. But that's because we're always evolving, right? But that's instinct. It's like, hey, at this point of my life, this is where I was at. And this is kind of the beautiful thing for anyone that's trying to start a project, which is sort of an expression of their personal interest. You kind of can't get it wrong as long as you're being true to yourself. Like if right now you are obsessed about AI risk, guess what? Write about AI risk for six months and then you can move on to something else.

33:29Like that's not you being flaky to your audience. That's you being true to yourself. And I think that the only other thing is consistency. Like I say, 90 % of podcasts don't make it past episode three. And of the 10 % that do, 90 % of those don't make it past episode 20. So by making 21 podcasts, You're in the top percentile of all podcasters ever in history. That's how low the bar is. That's how low the bar is for consistency. I've seen you say that before. The bar of greatness is set low in your opinion. It's so low. It's so low. Like a gram of talent and a bit of consistency and a good work ethic will put you so much further ahead of everybody else.

34:12So many people are prepared to give up at doing a thing because they haven't had immediate rewards. So if you can find a thing which to you feels like play, but to everybody else looks like work, you will absolutely annihilate them. And it won't feel like you're using any willpower. I wonder whether you had that sort of period of loneliness, if you like, where you're walking a path that no one else is walking and it's easy at that point to stop. In some ways, but, you know, a lot of the things that we are ashamed of about ourselves are the dark side of something light that we're the most proud of.

34:43So for instance, me growing up a little bit socially isolated, it sucked for that boy. And again, I wish I could pick him up and tell him that it would be okay. But on the flip side, it meant that I didn't care about working in solitude for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, seeing no reward or moving out to a brand new country on my own where I knew no one to try and talk to people on the internet and make it a job. So that's a good exercise, I think, for people to do, to ask themselves, what about me that I think is a weakness could be a secret strength? And that's certainly one of them.

35:21And is there a benefit to suffering? Voluntary suffering? Your capacity to suffer, yeah, for sure. Like, I would be lying if I said that every single moment of the show and my operation of it was like some joyful expression of my logo speaking forward. It's not. I've been stressed at three in the morning in Guatemala airport trying to upload an episode on like 3G cellular data because I'm trying to work out the time difference and I'm getting my O1 visa. And, you know, because I want to actually have a life, but we do three episodes a week. It means that I've got to do five episodes this week so I can get half a weekend off next week.

35:54Do I really want to read yet another book? Do I really want to make yet another set of notes? Do I really want to do that? No, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't. But like, that's the price that I've chosen to pay to be great. Like, there's a quote from Jason Pargin that says, all of your heroes are full of shit. Your heroes aren't gods. They're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by sacrificing literally everything else and asking yourself, what is the price that you pay to be successful? Eddie Hall, a lot of Brits listening, Eddie Hall, world's strongest man. And he said when he won, I think it's 2018 that he won, when he won 2018 world's strongest man, he said, if I hadn't won that year, I would be dead, divorced with no relationship to my kid because he was pushing his body from PEDs and weight and training so hard that he was close to failure.

36:45He was pushing his relationship so hard that he was close to breaking and he had no relationship to his kid. So that's the price that Eddie Hall had to pay to be world's strongest man. Tiger Woods, one of the greatest golfers in the world, not a fantastic husband, right? Like these people pay unbelievable prices to be world-class. It's something that they choose. and it's my question to work out, okay, is it possible to get close to world class and also not have to pay all of those prices? How much of your world class performance do you need to sacrifice in order to be able to enjoy 90 % more or like four times more?

37:22And that's the equation that I'm trying to play about with.

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41:09We recently interviewed a guy called Charles Duhigg. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning author. And when we asked that opening question of what is high performance to you, his answer was your ability to define what success means and then not achieve it without ruining your life in the process. Which really resonated. He's talking about minimizing the price that you pay to have the success that you desire. So there's two interesting ideas that I'm pretty obsessed with. One is intentionalism and the other is agency. So intentionalism is doing what you mean to do and wanting what you want to want. And agency is once you've chosen the video game that you're going to play, winning it no matter what obstacles are in your way.

41:50So one of them is I'm doing the thing I mean to do. I'm not getting distracted. I'm not doing something that society has told me I need to do, or that my past traumas have told me that I need to do, or my compensatory mechanisms, or my requirements for validation. So choosing the direction is one, and then not stopping along the way and working around all of the different questions. So George, one of my friends, has an amazing question he asks for agency, which is you are stuck in a South American jail and you have 24 hours to get out and you get one phone call, who'd you ring? That's the person that's got the most age in senior life.

42:25That's the person who will, they need no instruction. They need no assistance. They will overcome challenges. They can think for themselves. That's the person. Who would you ring? Torn between two people, Tim Kennedy, Green Beret, Special Forces sniper, terrifying human, lives here in Austin. and another guy, ex-SEAL, called Tim Larkin, who basically built the same. That being said, if I didn't need the military experience, George, the guy that asked that question, he'd probably have me out and he would have hacked the system somehow. He'll know some guy that, like, actually constructed the security protocols for the prison and I'd just walk out.

43:03He wouldn't even need to come and get me. He'd do it from his bedroom. Who would you ring? It's a brilliant question. Probably my wife. Yeah, I would ring my wife. A, because I think she would get stuff done because she's a doer, but also if stuff didn't get done, at least you could say goodbye to the kids on my behalf. So I can leave an additional message there. Can we talk about intentionalism briefly? It sounds like a bit of a golden bullet. It also sounds like a difficult thing to find and achieve. So if people are struggling to work out how to get there, what have you learned? Working out what you want to want is probably one of the most important things that you can do.

43:40It's different to what you want, right? What you want is what society tells you or the paths of least resistance or how you've dealt with past traumas. What you want to want is to ask yourself the question, if I could step in and define my desires, my desires are the paths of least resistance, what would I want to want? Unbelievably difficult question. What do I want to want in my life? Phenomenally fundamental question. like I want to want to be peaceful to be a good friend to people to go to sleep on a night time and my head hit the pillow and me feel fulfilled a lot of the things that people think that they want fame money recognition adoration by the crowd but like where's that coming from why do you want that well it's because I don't feel like I'm worthy what do you want to want to be able to to follow my curiosity unencumbered from everything else, like to just permanently be riding the crest of now and not be worried about how it's going to land and create something beautiful.

44:44I think that's how you do create something beautiful. So you want freedom? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Freedom from other people's judgments, freedom from fear about myself, about not being good enough. But again, you know, as you've said, and a lot of people listening will have that same sense that you did. If I let go of that fear, that sense of insufficiency, will I still have the edge? Maybe that's the thing that has caused me to be so successful. And it's my belief that that's not true. And it's also my belief that even if it is true in part, you can sacrifice a huge amount of fear for only a tiny amount of performance.

45:24enjoy it so much more. And again, what are we looking for? Do not sacrifice the thing you want happiness for the thing, which is supposed to get it success. But yeah, with, with regards to, um, asking yourself what you want to want, there's this great, uh, story from Seneca. He talks about a man who steps out of his house on the morning and you would ask him, uh, where are you going? What are you doing? And he says, I don't know. I'm going to see some people do some things. And he likens that man to a cork that's sort of been thrown into the ocean. And this cork bobs around and let's say that you threw it into the ocean for 10 years it's bobbed around and it's you know been moved by the tides and you could take it out and talk to it and say what did you do you say well you know i i went to some places and i saw some people and i did some things but that's very different to being a person in a boat that chooses to use the wind and actually go on an adventure that moved places but it didn't like it didn't have an adventure and uh yeah my goal is to be the guy in the boat not the cork in the ocean i'd love to talk about the modern view of masculinity and the importance of these kinds of conversations for, I'd imagine, I don't know, that you have a predominantly male audience for your show.

46:29That'd be correct. Yeah. So here's a question for you. What are the conversations we should be having for that audience to be of the greatest benefit to them and society as a whole? I think a couple of questions that you could quite easily ask is what do you wish more people knew about what it's like to be a man? Like that's a cool question to ask. And I would guess they'll say something like, I feel pressure to always be in control. I have a sense of expectation that I always need to be competent and have mastery. And these are things that I care about in myself and yet feel like are over-indexed by society.

47:12And that sort of determines my value. I think a lot of them would say, I desperately want a partner that I can trust and that I can build a life with. But in this sort of modern world, I feel like there's a lot of objective metrics of success that maybe I don't meet or I'm concerned that I'm going to be traded up from to some other person that's going to be better than me. And it makes me nervous and nervousness and neediness, I know are fundamentally unattractive in a guy. So the exact thing that is being instigated by the modern dating world is the thing that's keeping me out of it. I think it's tough.

47:49I think that, you know, I must have had 50 or 100 episodes on my podcast about this. People can go and listen to them. I think that the biggest problem is that we're not really listening to men's problems. They are being dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that men no longer feel a part of. I think that we're being made to pay for the advantages of our fathers and grandfathers in that way. Like, Just look at the mental health of young men. In 1990, the number of men, percentage of men who said that they had zero close friends was 3%. And in 2020, it was 15%. So it 5X'd over the space of 30 years.

48:27It's not good. And yet, all of the benefits that men have had throughout history are continuing to be used to dismiss any of the concerns that they have now. and also outlier successes are being used to forget what the normal area of the distribution, the bulk of that is actually doing. Look at how many male CEOs there are. It's like, yeah, okay, but look at how many guys kill themselves or look at how many guys are in prison or addicted to drugs or homeless. Like you can't use Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to excuse 14 million unemployed needs not in employment education or training in the u.s like that did those two people somehow like make those 14 million feel better i don't think so it's funny isn't it like last year we had we were at an event where it was a it was one of our tours wasn't it and some we did a q a session with the crowd and a lady sort of said she was surprised at how many men were in the audience and it felt very skewed towards males in the audience.

49:38And we had the conversation afterwards, didn't we, where we felt our answer hadn't captured what you've just told us. But also there's lots of men out there searching for answers. There's lots of men out there struggling with their mental health. I would have asked that lady whether or not she would have felt better if those men had stayed home. Like, would you have felt better if these guys that are desperate for connection, that have found someone that they can listen to on the internet that makes them feel less broken or personally cursed or isolated, would you have preferred that they stayed home so that there was more seats for women?

50:12Like, what does that mean? What do you mean when you ask that question? Like, I'm surprised at how skewed it is toward men. If what you mean is, wow, this tells me how much men need a hand in the modern world. This is how desperate they are for community and connection. I'm all on board. don't forget that you don't get to choose your audience either. Like an interesting question to have asked that lady would have been, why are you here? What makes you such an outlier that none of your female brethren have, or few of your female brethren have decided to come with you? And I think that there is a dearth.

50:47I absolutely agree that there is a massive lack of positive female role models. I think that you kind of have this weird split at the moment, which is like outside of like the Mel Robbins kind of world, which is, I think, just wholly fucking phenomenal, outstanding. If you're a woman that's listening and you want more female leaders, like she's great. But really when you think like who's the female Jocka Willink, Jordan Peterson, like pick whoever it is. It doesn't matter whether you like those people. You don't need to like those people, but you can't deny that they have a following. Like who is the figurehead for modern female empowerment that's holistic and well-balanced and, you know, integrated and all of the things that you want.

51:27It's not leaning into like anti-male misandrist tropes. It's not sort of boss bitching your way through life and saying that any housewife has been rubed by the patriarchy into becoming a domestic prostitute. It's not the reverse, which is like just trad wifing your way through everything and saying that women shouldn't be able to be financially independent. Who is it? I think that there's a dearth of that. And the data seems to suggest, I would guess, this is my like, throw it out into the future prediction. I think that over the next two decades, we're going to see a reversal. I think that there's going to be a crisis of femininity.

51:58And I think that male body dysmorphia is going to be one of the leading conversations. Male body dysmorphia is on track to overtake female body dysmorphia within the next couple of decades. And I think that the current dearth of positive female role models in cinema, look at all of the movies that you've seen with like these awful patronizing female leads. They never have to overcome anything. They don't deal with challenges. The only challenge they ever deal with is that the men around them don't believe in them enough. How's that an empowering story? to tell young girls. Like if and when I have a family and I hope to have daughters and sons, I wouldn't want my daughter looking up to that and thinking, oh, the only time that the world ever gives me a challenge is if something is unfair.

52:37Like it's juvenile and it's patronizing. And if I was a woman, I wouldn't want that to be the story that's being told to me. Do you think that there are the female versions of the Jordan Petersons and others out there, but for some reason their voices just aren't being heard? Maybe. but the internet's pretty egalitarian. Like there was no gatekeeper that helped or stopped me from doing a thing. Alex Cooper is one of the biggest podcasters in the world. Second biggest after Joe Rogan by numbers. She got the big Spotify deal. Like if you look at what Spotify studios acquired, so many of them are female led or female partnered shows.

53:16You know, I don't see any gatekeeper to this. Like that's the beauty of the internet, right? Like if you do something that's great, The YouTube algorithm does not discriminate. Now, YouTube is a male-dominated platform. So maybe if you are an influencer on Instagram or Tumblr or Pinterest or something, like maybe that skews female. But yeah, there's also like a, I call it the soft bigotry of male expectations, which is whatever men do is judged as being the optimal standard and anything that women do is being seen as inferior. So for instance, there was a study that came out recently talking about hunter-gatherers ancestrally and how much big game hunting women did.

53:56Turns out that that analysis, sorry to poop on the party, that analysis was wrong. And it was upending the male myth of big game hunting, that men were the ones that did most of it. They said, no, they weren't. Women contributed almost just as much and maybe even more in some places. That's wrong. But why is there a motivation to try and make the male default the aspirational or preferred thing? It's like, who's to say that big game hunting is somehow more worthy of accolade than doing the nuts and berries collecting? So inbuilt into a lot of this rhetoric is this like soft bigotry against what women do.

54:36That somehow being a stay-at-home mother is not as important as being a CEO. Like, I don't think that that's the case. Are you trying to tell millions and millions of stay-at-home mums around the world that their job is somehow less important? My wife feels that actually on a daily basis. She doesn't tell people that she's given up work to look after her kids because she feels judged. Yeah, I don't think that that's an empowering story to tell young women. I really don't. So interesting. Can we talk about the drink that you've been sipping on while we've been sitting here? So I think this is another really interesting story because you've worked so hard to create the brand you've created and then suddenly something new comes.

55:16You've moved from the podcast space to the physical brand space. Yeah, I just, look, with regards to Nutonic, it's the same as anything. If there is something that you need and it doesn't exist, you should probably make it. Modern Wisdom was the podcast I wanted when I was 26 and it didn't exist. So I made it. And Nutonic is the drink that I wanted a few years ago to dial me in, to have evidence-based, research-backed compounds. The sourcing of it is unbelievably rigorous. The dosage is efficacious. It's healthy human-only trials, no rodent studies, no elderly people, all that stuff. And it makes me feel fantastic.

55:53And I'm proud that I made it. So how did you go about making it? We went to a formulation team that used to work at Science and Sport, SIS. We worked with a company called Genflow who helped to actually bring the sourcing to life, me and James Smith, who is a sweary PT. He's like the Gordon Ramsay of fitness. We decided to be the leads on it. And it took a year to develop, six months of taste testing. We just reformulated it again. Everything in there is what we worked hard on. That being said, I am a nightmare to work with. I will fully admit that I'm a nightmare to work with. Because? I can't not notice things.

56:30And this has been a huge competitive advantage. and it's one that I was ashamed of for a long time. And an obsession with quality is really, really great and gives you huge amounts of competitive advantage in the market. But frankly, it's probably a bit of a nightmare to work with. Why? Because my standard for Dunn is higher than almost anybody else's. Like I just, and I don't think that I have an unrealistic standard and the team is also at that level, but it can feel like I'm being a pest. So how do you share that? I think you can tell the people around you a very empowering story. And this is something I'm really trying to do in personal relationships, professionally as well.

57:13So the goal internally for the podcast this year is make the most beautiful podcast in the world, right? The most beautiful podcast in the world. That's an empowering story that we tell each other. And if someone does something, copy for a thumbnail, the way that a color grade comes out for one of the episodes that we do, that's a bit more complex. And I'm like, it's good, man, but it's not world-class. Like, is it the best in the world? If it's not the best in the world, it's not good enough. That's the barometer, right? And the other thing is like, it's hard if you entered into a culture that you either don't have control over or that already exists at a standard, which is below yours, because you're trying to really sort of rip people up and bring them along with you.

57:55but control freak is a word that people with low standards use to describe people with high standards and i don't care about it being i don't have an insane standard my standard is just perfect right that's it like it's just done and to me there is no other standard than perfect do we mess up all the time i put typos in my newsletter and all the rest of the things but that's the standard that i think you can try and go for and that's what we're trying to do with the show that's what i'm trying to do with the drink but i'm interested in in in when that developed because you described when you started Modern Wisdom, it was the recording in a studio in Newcastle and it looks very different today.

58:31So there's been an evolution. But that was my capacity. That was what I knew about AV. That was what I knew about mastering. That was what I knew about conversations then. So as your capacity gets bigger, remember what I said about tighter and tighter circles, about the layers of an onion becoming ever finer, you look at things with more and more dexterity. And that's the beautiful thing about mastery is that it's kind of never done. There's always another, a slightly more precise way to deliver a sentence, slightly better way that you could have framed an episode, a slightly better color grade that you could have done with stuff.

59:02So if you are a leader or if you're an employer or if you're an employee that has that compulsion in someone that you work with, do not derogate it. But that skill will make you world-class at whatever you do. You just need to aim it in the right direction. But the world, most people don't want to work that hard. Most people don't want to work that consistently. Most people don't pay that much attention to the stuff that they're doing. And if there's anything that the show has proven, it's that if you pay attention to stuff, you will get good results. So what I'm interested in then is for those that are listening to that and going, he's speaking to me.

59:39Chris is articulating how I feel about the world. How do you bring others with you that don't want to work as hard, that don't want to care as much? Tell us what you've learned on that. I mean, it depends, again, this is the problem. You guys and me are in a luxurious position that we get to choose the people we work with. And if someone doesn't want to make the most beautiful podcast in the world, cool. There's like a not the most beautiful podcast in the world team that you can go and work for. So hire very carefully, fire kind of easily, I suppose. Like if there was a great study that was done where they brought, they wanted to work out whether or not low performers brought down a high performing team or whether high performers bring up a low-performing individual.

1:00:19So they had, I think it was groups of six, and they tried one low performer with five good, two low performers with four, et cetera, et cetera. The entire study, if you have one low performer, the performance of the entire team drops. You fall to the standard of the slowest person that's in there. And I think I'm not a great leader. Actually, no, I'm an okay leader, but I'm a terrible boss. I don't like disciplining people. That's not my skillset. My skill set is the show. That being said, creating a positive vision for why this is important. Like why is me telling my editor, Dean, for the 10th time that I'm not happy with this color grade because the skin tones look a little bit off?

1:01:02Why is that? Oh, but when you look at YouTube on mobile, it actually turns down the colors a little bit. Everything's a bit more muted and a bit darker. So we need to compensate for that. I know it looks good on your screen. And I know that it's two in the morning. We need to do it. We need to keep pushing through this. that's because I want to be world-class. That is a positive vision for something that you're moving toward. Elon Musk had this really great like situation that occurred. He went into Twitter and basically kind of opened up the hood and said, underneath here are a shit ton of people doing absolutely no work.

1:01:36I'm going to basically run this company on a skeleton crew. I want people that are going to work until their eyes bleed and want to do something that's never been done before. and a shit ton of people on the internet said, this is a throwback to oppressive working environments. What is this? Is this the industrial revolution? Every single one of those people that had a problem with it doesn't understand what it's like to be someone that wants to make something which is world-class. There is a very small, very select group of people out there who want that. They want to sleep under the desk and order dominoes and make something that's never been done before.

1:02:12And just because you don't understand that those people want to do it, they will self-select. The people that want to send it and become world-class will self-select for that kind of environment. And you get to choose it. It's like, hey, are we the sort of place that allows standards to slip? Or are we the sort of place that demands just done? And done happens to be perfect. So how excited are you about your future and the future of modern wisdom? Yeah, pretty excited. Are you pretty excited? Pretty excited. I think I pay quite a high price to keep the show going. And what do you mean? A year ago, just over a year ago, the entire show consisted of me, a video editor, an assistant in the UK and a Facebook messenger thread.

1:02:56And now there's like ad executives and four strategists and all of these things. And every single one of them reports to me. so I pay in order to be able to get the show to where it is which is world-class which is an ever-increasing goal as our capacity increases it's like I've paid quite a high personal price uh in terms of ambient anxiety vigilance all of that stuff and I'm learning now to kind of like let go but this is your baby right this is the thing you've learned how to do this thing I know if I just do everything and work hard and obsess over quality and and and basically this like weird sword of Damocles panopticon thing hanging above everybody's head.

1:03:39I know it will get done because I have proof, but now I need to like learn to let go of that. And that's something that is difficult. So when it comes to what we're doing at the moment, I want to make the most beautiful podcast in the world. We just did the world's first LED volume video wall podcast, which was incredibly fun and very exciting and very expensive. Um, and that was cool. And that felt like, wow, like there's not much stuff you can do that no one else has ever done before. And I really, I really loved doing that. Um, and I love having the conversations. We got a bit of pushback, uh, from doing that, that it was like, uh, an accusation of all style, no substance.

1:04:19Like, you know, this is like a sort of narcissistic endeavor. Like, look at me, this is ego incarnate on an LED wall. And I was like, bro, I did 600 episodes in the spare bedroom of my house speaking to dusty academics with a fucking unpronounceable surname. Like, you don't get to tell me that this is all ego. Can I ask you what you would want your epitaph to be? Because if we start with the end in mind, I'm interested in you're squeezing a lot in. Like, the energy you permit, that you give off is incredible. I'm interested in how you want to be perceived at the end of the day. so

1:05:02I am a good role model for people that suck at long-term planning I understand I come from a productivity background in many ways like the start of the show was time blocking and pomodoros and 25 year epigraphs splitting down into 5 year chunks into 1 year sprints into 90 day goals into daily actions and all that stuff and as soon as it got beyond about 2 years I just I couldn't do it I just, I really struggle. So when you say, what is it that you want to like be remembered for or any of that stuff? First off in 75 years, no, like what's your great, great, great grandfather's name? No one knows, right?

1:05:36Okay, within the next century, everybody that knew about you is going to forget you. Like I don't have an answer to that question. I know that I want to leave the world in a better place than I came. I know that I want to look back on my life and have as few regrets as possible. I know that I want to do things that I connect with, that I genuinely sort of show some of me to the world. But all of those are intermediary goals. They're all like functions as opposed to outcomes. But you've also spoke to us here around, at some stage you'd like a family you spoke about wanting children. Where's the space in your life to be able to create and facilitate that desire that you want?

1:06:21That's where I need to let go of the vigilant panopticon of death. internally in the business. There's this beautiful quote from my friend David, who successful guy runs a online writing course called Rite of Passage. And he said, I realized that most of my twenties and half of my thirties was spent building myself up to be the kind of father I need to be to my kids. And I think that when any guy that's done a ton of personal development and self-growth after a while, it begins to feel a bit narcissistic. Like it begins to feel a little bit in solitude and kind of masturbatory. And you think like, what am I doing this for?

1:06:57Am I just doing like this mindfulness thing for like peace and whatever? Like you kind of top out at least, or maybe it's just me, but I kind of like started to top out and go, okay, like, why am I doing this? What is the greater reason for doing this? And I think that that's a beautiful way to pay it forward. Look, look at all of the patterns that you had, that you accumulated through the first 21 years of your life. And then you slowly tried to unwind over the next 10 or 15 years of your life. And then that means that all of the things that you picked up, which your parents didn't mean to give to you, but that you did, you don't pass down to the next generation.

1:07:32They get, you know, the most beautiful covering of perfect white snow that they can go and play in and that you're going to make them feel safe and loved and competent and secure and that they're allowed to express their emotions and that no one's going to leave them. Like that's what more beautiful of a way is there for you to front load making yourself better. And then on the back end, like reap the investment of making your kids better. But I need to let go of, I need to like wind down my involvement in the operations of the show and just stick to what it is that I do, which is stories and guests.

1:08:07Ready for some quick fire questions. Hit me. Three non-negotiables that you and the people around you should buy into. tell the truth yeah have fun do things with beauty what's the best piece of advice you've ever received and why contemplate the price you pay for inaction so i think a lot of the time we presume that inaction has no cost that it's like an impartial strategy and it can cause us to continue to manana, manana, manana decisions. But it does. Inaction does have a cost because your attention is the most important thing that you have. And it's not time. People think that time is the most important resource you have in life.

1:08:51It's not. It's attention because you can spend your time in ways where your attention is captured such that you didn't enjoy the time or realize the time has passed. So contemplate the price that you pay for inaction. It's a justification for you doing things sooner rather than later and committing. What's your biggest strength? What's your greatest weakness? Paying attention. Fearing the judgment of others. What advice would you give to a teenage Chris growing up in the Northeast who's just starting out on his journey? Keep legs spinning would be good. For real, I would say to feel less. It's my belief that life is a lot closer to a train journey than a car ride.

1:09:39Like you are a passenger watching the scenery go by as opposed to a driver. I think that for most of the people that are listening to this, the outcomes in your life, they're not predestined. You do have agency over the outcomes that you get, but you are going to get there no matter how much neuroticism you pile on top of yourself. And like why fear about whether or not you're going to get to the place that you were going anyway? So I'd say fear less. What is your one golden rule for living a high performance life? Pay attention. It's been the single greatest resource that I've had. Most people just do not pay that much attention.

1:10:19They're not that precise with things. And the difference between the average amount of attention and just a little bit is so huge. That's where a lot of competitive advantages lie, I think. What a great conversation. Thank you so much. Appreciate you, James.

1:10:40Damien. Jake. What an interesting, wide-ranging, thought-provoking conversation. It was one of those ones where you were scribbling down notes constantly. Yeah, well, I always think that, like, Chris's title of modern wisdom is that wisdom's like having money in the bank. It doesn't mean anything unless you do something with it. And I think what Chris was offering us there was not only the wisdom, but also the steps of how we can apply this stuff into our own life. And I really like the fact that, you know, he's gleaned so much incredible and interesting information from people. But what he gave us, I think, today was a little look under his own skin, the way that he thinks, the way he operates.

1:11:19And he's in a really interesting place because there's been a huge amount of change in his life, right? And he doesn't sit here and go, well, I've changed and this is now me. He's like, well, I've changed. This is where I am now. And I now need to be thinking about the next stage of change. and i think all of us have to be comfortable with change because society is changing all around us the world is changing all around us for us to remain solid in that it's such a life limiting way to be yeah and his just his mindset of exploration i find it personally really inspiring two words that jumped out to me on that jake in relation to it was intentionality and agency so being really clear about what you do want as equally and the power of what i don't want and being able to articulate them, but then the agency and the confidence to go after in the direction of travel that you want is really powerful.

1:12:10And Chris is a great testimony to it, for growing up in the northeast of England, going through those experiences in the public eye of what a lot of people would deem as being successful and then deciding that there's more substance to it. I think that's incredibly powerful. I have just one fear for him, right? and I know what it feels like to be the least important person in your household because I am certainly number four right out of the four of us in my house I don't know whether you feel the same in yours and the truth is you know I had to walk away from Formula One to have children I had to walk away from hosting Premier League football to be a more present father right you know Chris is absolutely all in on modern wisdom you know you can tell the way he talks he's in the weeds you know he talks and in some ways I was well having the conversation thinking I better up my game on high performance because he's talking about thumbnails and sitting with the editor i don't do any of that stuff on this show because i have a wife i have two kids i have a couple of different sort of businesses that are going on and i know that i have had to take a step back and learn to trust people i feel that that's the biggest challenge that is in front of him now is having the ability or learning that he's gonna have to step back he's gonna have to trust someone else and guess what, there's 100 % going to be moments where it's not as good as he wants it to be or it's not how he would have done it.

1:13:31And that is such a hard thing for somebody. Well, it is. And it reminds me, as you were saying, do you remember a conversation we had the other day when we were walking through Las Vegas and there was those guys that were ripped and toned and you were talking about how... I wish I could look like that. I wish I could look like that. And I said, yeah, but you've also got responsibilities to Harriet and the kids and your businesses and you've got lots of other demands on your time. So to go all in and look like that would require you to trade off somewhere else. And so I think it's easy to go all in for something that we want when we want it to be an all-consuming passion.

1:14:09But I think balance is a really interesting concept that, yeah, I agree with you. But I think we're all struggling to find that sweet spot on the seesaw, aren't we? Yeah. You know what? Attention to detail, the number one thing. You should never apologise for wanting the very, very best and pushing for it. Thanks, mate. Thank you, mate. Loved it. Thanks, Chris, as well.

1:14:31And that brings us to the end of this conversation with Chris. Thank you so much for joining us. Don't forget, you can listen before anyone else by downloading the High Performance app from the App Store. There's also loads of incredible content there that you won't see or hear anywhere else. Check it out in the App Store. But for now, thanks for joining us. and remember to remain humble, curious and empathetic and we'll see you again soon.

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