The Diary of a CEOChris Williamson: The Shocking New Research On Why Men And Women Are No Longer Compatible! | E237
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
155 min read · 30,654 words- 0:00 – 1:59
Intro
- CWChris Williamson
78% of women want to date a man who is as educated or as employed as they are. This is just a straight up imbalance, and this is what I've called the tall girl problem. So... (sighs) Chris Williamson, he is an entrepreneur.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Former club promoter turned podcaster with more than 70 million downloads.
- CWChris Williamson
How did I get here?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Chris, are you aware of the dark side that's driving you?
- CWChris Williamson
Do you really wanna go here? I've been chronically unpopular throughout all of school. Badly bullied, didn't have a group of friends, so I compromised an awful lot of who I truly was to try and just be as popular and successful in that world as possible. But there was an ambient sense that something is broken with me. In a journal, I, I've got a couple of different entries, and it just put, "I think I'm lonely." 15% of men say that they have zero close friends.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Where did we go wrong?
- CWChris Williamson
The world of social connection has been made less and less social. The single biggest predictor of your health outcomes in life are the number of close connections that you have. It's more than going to the gym, it's more than stopping drinking. People that are in relationships have better health outcomes. But one in three men between the ages of 18 and 30 hasn't had sex in the last year. 80% of men report not approaching a woman because they are scared of being seen as creepy. And by 2040, 45% of 25 to 45-year-old women will be single and childless. You can start to see how this imbalance could cause a problem. This is a very difficult conversation. The first thing that we need to do is ... (video pauses)
- SBSteven Bartlett
Before this episode starts, I have a small favor to ask from you. Two months ago, 74% of people that watched this channel didn't subscribe. We're now down to 69%. My goal is 50%, so if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if you like this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button? It helps this channel more than you know, and the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guests get. Thank you and enjoy this episode. (instrumental music plays)
- 1:59 – 5:43
Your current mission
- SBSteven Bartlett
Chris, you do a lot of things, and you do a lot of things very, very well. One of the struggles I had when thinking about how to direct this conversation was really like, understanding, because you're so diverse in your thinking and your ideas and the subject matter that you're curious about, how to try and encapsulate exactly who you are. So, I guess the question I wanted to start with is, w- in your own words, what is your mission?
- CWChris Williamson
I'm a very curious person. I always have been. And I now have the opportunity with my podcast, Modern Wisdom, to commercialize, utilize, weaponize that, so that I can bring people in that I'm interested in. So a good example, I did a masters and a bachelors degree at uni in business, and I always regretted not going and doing philosophy or psychology. And in retrospect, it always made me resentful of uni a little bit, because I'd spent all of this time learning stuff that didn't teach me anything about the business world, but then upon starting the podcast, what I realized was that I've been able to design my perfect university degree with the top lecturers on the planet, and I get to do it three times a week at the cadence that I want. And not only do I get the lecturers that I want, but I get to ask them about the specific area of their work that I want as well. So it's curiosity. The thing that drives me is curiosity. The reason that I do this is because I wanna know, I wanna know about everything. I wanna know about why the guy (laughs) that was sitting next to us at dinner last night decided to wear a suit with, like, Converse.
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Like, I wanna know, like, what is it about that? Uh, so, curiosity.
- SBSteven Bartlett
That answer is, um, focused on what you get from it, right? Is there an ex- sort of an external mission? Something that it gives to the world that you're particularly... And, uh, something that provides you meaning by delivering it to the world. Is there, is there an answer there too?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. So, toward the end of my 20s, I had a lot of the trappings of success that maybe society would tell you that you should have, so running this big nightlife events business, which I was very proud of and still am. But there was something missing, despite the fact that I had the blue tick on Twitter and the free charcoal toothpaste and I'd been on Love Island and Take Me Out and people knew my name and I had, you know, monetary success and status and stuff. But there was something missing, and I didn't really understand myself particularly well, and I think that that's a problem that a lot of people get to, especially guys, toward the end of their 20s. They think, "All of the values that I have absorbed, that are supposed to be the things that make me happy, maybe don't fulfill me in the way that they were promised," and that required me to do some reflection, and I realized I actually didn't have very many opinions. What I'd been doing was I'd been playing a role as this big name on campus, party boy, club promoter, big dick around town guy, and I'd compromised an awful lot of who I truly was to try and just be as popular and successful in that world as possible, right? What that meant was, I didn't really understand myself, I didn't really understand my mission or my purpose, and now looking back, I realize that all of the steps that I took to get from where I was to where I am now, which is still like an adult infant, but slightly less so, all of that, they are lessons that I can gift to other people that will help them to expedite success, avoid the pitfalls, do it in less time with less loneliness, with l- less pain and suffering than I had to go through to achieve the same thing. And hopefully by speaking to people that changed my life, that gave me lessons, I can then pass those on to other people and get them from where I was to somewhere
- 5:43 – 10:39
The building blocks of your life
- CWChris Williamson
that's even better than where I am now.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay, so take me back. What are the dominoes that fell, or the connecting dots, that took you to that point where you were the party boy on campus that was on Take Me Out on TV and running club nights? Take me back to the start. What are the most important things I need to know about that early experience that took you to that moment?
- CWChris Williamson
... arrive at university in Newcastle, and I've been chronically unpopular throughout all of school. Uh, pretty badly bullied, pretty alone, I'm an only child, and just didn't have a, a squad, didn't have a, a group of friends really. Was successful in, in sports and had a team, but didn't really have a, a tight group of friends. Got to college and that was a little bit better, started to come out of my shell a little bit, but still not much. And then you get to uni, and the same as every school kid, you know, you'd go home for the summer and you'd be like, "I'm gonna reinvent myself and I'm gonna be the cool kid." So I arrive at university, and that was a good intersection of a new opportunity to be a new person, and also maybe a little bit more social ability. Start running a nightlife events business with the guy that I sit next to in my first ever seminar. After that, we get to the stage where that's very successful very quickly. I immediately tied a lot of my identity to the first thing I've ever been super successful in in life, which is running a nightlife. I can get renown, I can have, uh, people that need me, which is not really the same as wanting me, but they need me, which is close enough. So I think, "Right, well, if I just throw all of myself into this business, then I'm going to be accepted by the world at large." And over the space of the next 10 years or so, that meant that I, uh, fully dedicated myself to that mission, and we were very, very good at it. We expanded from Newcastle to Manchester multiple nights per week across multiple cities, and then I did whatever it took to get more clout as well. So Take Me Out, then first season of Love Island, first person through the doors on Love Island, and I spend all of this time. And Love Island was an interesting reflection period because there was nowhere for me to hide, no distractions, no TV, no phone, no laptop, no friends, no books, no nothing, right? There's just you and this group of people. And the group of people that were in the Love Is- Love Island villa were genuine versions of the person that I thought I was. I thought that I was this big name on campus party boy, and then I get deposited into this inescapable, uh, weapons-grade bunker of those party boys and party girls, and I look around and go, "Ah, I'm not supposed to be here. Something's off. Something's discordant. It's not working." And then I get out, and it wasn't like, "And then the skies opened and I realized that my path was not to wear small swim shorts on TV." Uh, however, it did make me think it was a, a, a very, I call it a, a fatal dose of contrast, that I was no longer able to hide, that there is something a little bit off here, and that was a good time. Your Jordan Petersons, your Alain de Botton from the School of Lifes, your Sam Harrises, your Joe Rogans all coming to the front. I start consuming their stuff and it makes me think, "Wow, I, I actually... This speaks to me. It helps to educate me to be better a- and to understand myself." And that's kind of how I phased out, I suppose.
- SBSteven Bartlett
When you talk about struggling in school socially, what was the reason for that? Have you ever sort of diagnosed why you didn't, quote unquote, fit in in school?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, so, uh, quite... I, I think any only child struggles to be socialized to the level that they need to in order to have the same set of social skills that anyone with a, a brother or sister does, right? Like, think about how much time you with a sibling spend arguing, hitting each other, going to sleep, them knocking on your door when you're trying to get ready, arguing for the bathroom, all of these tiny little interactions. I had none of that, right? And even if you spent every waking moment of free time in clubs and sports and whatnot that I did, it's gonna be hard, and then I think that there is some inherent introversion in me, and it kind of combined for me to not really understand other kids. Uh, so I used to obsess over things like, um, the kind of hairstyle that other kids had, or the way that they tied their tie in school, or the type of shoes that they wore, the way that they carried their bag, which shoulder their bag was on, because I was adamant, I would fixate on that, and that would be the reason that they had friends and I didn't, because I couldn't understand why I didn't have friends. What it was was that I couldn't socially relate to kids particularly well because I didn't have a wide variety of social skills, so I struggled, but I was taking this super attentive, like, "What is it? What's going on?" Just trying to, like, assess, "Is it because Steven wears his watch on his right wrist instead of his left wrist? Is it because of whatever, whatever?" Uh, because I was trying to diagnose what was going on.
- 10:39 – 23:16
What's driving you?
- CWChris Williamson
- SBSteven Bartlett
Do you know what's driving you from, you know, the good and the bad, the light and the dark? I'm, I'm more specifically interested to start with the dark. Do you ever have conversations with yourself about the, when I say dark, it's a subjective term, but the dark side that's driving you?
- CWChris Williamson
Absolutely. Yeah, chronically. Of course. I think anybody that believes that they're driven by a pure love, uh, and positive reinforcement is usually confused. I think that, uh, there was a, a study done that looked at the three most common traits of highly successful people, hyper-successful people, we're talking top level CEOs. The first one was a crippling sense of insufficiency.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
The second one was a superiority complex, and the third one was, uh, an ability to have maniacal focus. So what you have, and it's this, this Peterson story which you may be familiar with, they starve rats and put them into a tube. They attach a spring to the tail of the rat so that they can tell how much force they're pulling with, and that gives a, uh, proxy for desire, right? That's how much they want it. They waft the smell of cheese in from the front and the rat pulls toward the cheese, and you think, "These rats are starving, they're gonna be pulling very hard." Then they take the rats out and they do another iteration of the study. This time, they waft the smell of cheese in from the front and they waft the smell of a cat in from behind. The rats pull harder. What's the lesson? In life, not only do you need to run towards something that you want, but you need to run away from something that you fear. And...... I've spent- I've spoken to 600 high performers on my show, right? I would say that, on average, most of the people that are unbelievably good at anything that they do are driven by a fear of insufficiency, not by a perfectly balanced desire for success. And this tension between success and happiness, I think, is something that both me and you are quite, uh, interested in. So, the reason it's interesting is, a lot of the time, we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing which is supposed to get it, right? So if, in service of becoming happy, we sacrifice happiness to achieve success in the hopes that success will make us happy, if you created an equation of what's going on, and you just remove success from both sides, what are you left with?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hm.
- CWChris Williamson
Just happiness. Now, I'm not saying that you can recant all of your desires for status and accolade and, and striving and stuff. Like, you need to go out and, and do things. But I do think that, a lot of the time, we overcomplicate the world, and a lot of it is because, when we're kids, our parents will reinforce our, um, successes by praising us and will criticize us when we fail, which can metastasize as we grow up into being, "I am only worthy of love and acceptance and admiration and praise if I win." It cause- it causes you to fear being a loser more than want to be a winner. And winning salves ... it's like an, uh, anesthetic, right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
That, that papers over fears of insufficiency. So yeah, I mean, when I was a club promoter, uh, I knew that if I stood on the front door of a nightclub that people would need me. They want the VIP bands. They want to be in the place where the pretty girls are. They want to get in for cheaper or a free bottle of vodka, or they, they want to skip the queue or whatever, so they need me. And then, when you roll it forward to the podcast, I have to be very careful that I don't just transmute that same energy into, instead of gifting people entry into nightclubs, now I'm gifting them insights that I've learned, concepts from some interesting person that's going to improve their life as we sit around a dinner table or as we go out for a lunch or whatever. I have to be careful that that's not the case. And for the people that maybe resonate with this fear of insufficiency and this requirement to offer the world something in order for the world to feel like they're worthy, uh, it is possible to deprogram it. It is possible to tune that volume down. But one of the things that you're going to pay a price with is your drive, because the rat that is running away from something that it fears will pull harder than the rat that's just running towards something that it wants. The traits of super competitive people don't just include the superiority complex, but the crippling anxiety about being a failure. So this tension between success and failure is ... it is a driver, but it's an incredibly toxic fuel, right? To be propelled by fear of insufficiency can work super well, but it- i- i- it's very dangerous. As a final example, Eddie Hall, world's strongest man, and he retires on the podium. He's holding this trophy in the air, and he's saying, "This is for you, Nana," and his grandma's passed away recently, and he's crying, and he's 200 kilos and six foot four and, you know, he's worked his entire life! And he said in an interview shortly afterward that if he hadn't won The World's Strongest Man, he would be dead, single, with no relationship to his kid, because he was pushing his body so hard with the lifting and presumably the drugs that he was taking. He was training so much that his relationship with his wife was breaking down, and he was out of the house so much he had no relationship to his kid. Jason Pargin says, uh, "Accept that all of your heroes are full of shit. Your heroes aren't gods. They're just regular people who got particularly good at one thing by sacrificing literally everything else." That's the price that you pay for success, and most people wouldn't pay it.
- SBSteven Bartlett
That point about reprogramming the toxic drive that you have, um, I- I often ponder with myself. I'm like ... and when I think about status games and how status games that, you know, we often think that we're over a certain status game. So, you know, I had a, um, a guy on my podcast who talked a lot about the evolutionary basis of status and how, if you go to, uh, an estate in the UK where there's not a lot of money, they'll have bigger logos on their tracksuits.
- CWChris Williamson
Will Storr?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Will Storr.
- CWChris Williamson
Great guy.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Um, and then, as people get richer and richer, the s- logos get smaller, and obviously, they play a different type of game.
- CWChris Williamson
Correct.
- SBSteven Bartlett
It's about boats and other things. And I, uh, that really hit me like a ton of bricks, 'cause I, I thought, dressed in all black, I really don't have any ... I have one material possession. You saw it last night, which was the bag I had on, which I'm waiting for it to break.
- CWChris Williamson
Nice bag.
- SBSteven Bartlett
It's a nice bag, yeah. Um, but outside, I thought, "I'm over status games," and I realized that I'm just playing a different set of status games now.
- CWChris Williamson
It's just a counter signal, yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It's the red sneaker effect. It's the reason that the CEO that's worth a billion can turn up in a hoodie, but the CEO that's worth half a million still wears a three-piece suit.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hm.
- CWChris Williamson
It's called the- there's another idea called the barber pole of status. So you can imagine that, uh, people who are at the absolute top in terms of status, they need to make sure that the people below them can't be confused for them, but they can counter signal by having the ... so you look at the vagabond style of flares and hoodie, you know, even Essentials, uh, Yeezy, uh, Yeast stuff, all- it's almost like hobo chic. Why? Well, it's because I am so cool and so trendy that I can counter signal off the top. So everyone is playing a status game. Everybody is at all times. It's just a case of, what game are you playing?
- SBSteven Bartlett
And that toxic drive, the- the big shift I've had in my life is I'm now focusing it on something which is also driving me to a more fulfilling place, whereas before I was focusing on, like, a monetary game, where I was like, "How much money can I acquire? How much, um, how big can I build a business?" Now, I'm focusing it more on things that are more intrinsically aligned with, um, that which that makes me happy, so this, for example, or writing, or DJing, for example. But it's still there. So my question to you, there's kind of two questions there, is what's your journey been like with reprogramming that- that toxic driving force or that dark driving force or th- those in- feelings of insufficiency? And secondly, you said that we can reprogram it. We can dilute it, but it comes at the cost of drive.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SBSteven Bartlett
How does one do such- such a thing?
- CWChris Williamson
So, what I was missing for me personally, was I didn't feel competent in things. I needed to feel like I was competent and I was proving something to the world each time that I succeeded.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Why did you used to feel competent?
- CWChris Williamson
Because that would salve my feelings of insufficiency. For every time that I won, we had a good club night, th- the business was good, we broke a record with entries at a different event or whatever, that would make me feel, "Yeah, wow. I'm, like, less of a piece of shit."
- SBSteven Bartlett
Was there a time where you were made to feel incompetent?
- 23:16 – 32:26
How to build confidence
- CWChris Williamson
back in.
- SBSteven Bartlett
You talked about the, the paint.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SBSteven Bartlett
The like, the layers of paint that build confidence. This is something that I've been particularly compelled by, because so many people that listen to this podcast struggle with the idea of confidence, and there's a big industry out there, as you've said, that says, you know, "Look in the mirror, tell yourself you're a millionaire. Um, say it three times, write it in your journal." (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
But then as I reflected and as I've written in my, in my book, um, the thing that... And it relates to what Alex Hormozi said, is the thing that I've learned is it's all evidence, for better or for worse.
- CWChris Williamson
Stack of undeniable proof.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And it goes the other way. That evidence that you got at seven years old when you went up and tried to do a public s- speech and everyone laughed at you-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... is more, it's a thicker layer-
- CWChris Williamson
Correct.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... than, than one layer of evidence to say that you're, you're capable. It's a harder layer to sort of strip. Um, if there is someone listening now and they want to maybe orientate their drive to the fulfilling pursuits that you talk about, but also they wanna build their confidence, what advice would you give them? I imagine that's 80% of the listener base here.
- CWChris Williamson
Act first.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
You have to lead with action.... because if you are someone that deals with a crippling sense of insufficiency, your ability to discount any good thoughts you have in your mind is going to be so strong. If you try and lead with positivity first, "I need to think it, wish it, believe it, and I will achieve it," your set point of negativity is going to just crush that into the ground. I'm speaking from personal experience, right, as the guy that was chronically unconfident and still has, you know, the imposter syndrome that does creep in. You have to start with action. It needs to be, "Okay, what would have had to have happened in a week's time for me to look back on that week and find pride in myself?" Pride's seen as, uh, something that you, uh, should be ashamed of. It's one of the seven deadly sins. Uh, but David Goggins, I did an episode with him a couple of months ago, we can put it in the, in the show notes if people are interested, and he said pride is something that everybody misses, that having pride in your name, your performance, uh, the way that you show up for other people is something that you can do. But you need to do something that is worthy of being prideful about, right? What would have had to have happened in a week for you to look back on that week with pride? Okay, maybe stop breaking promises to yourself. When you say, "I'm going to wake up tomorrow at 7:00 AM," and when the option comes to hit the snooze button, don't do it. There's one win that you've got for the day. That's action, right? And it is just, you know, it's trite to say the Peterson clean your room thing, but the reason that that works is that you start with the smallest ever step and you expand out from that. You want to become a writer. You want to leave your job and become a writer. Okay, can you commit to writing one blog post on Substack per week for the next three weeks that would make you feel like less of a loser if you did that? Action has to come first if you're the sort of person who is chronically unconfident, because you will drag your sense of identity behind you. Mark Manson says that identity lags behind our, uh, status by about one to two years. So, for both me and you, in two years time we'll go, "Ah, I understand why I was in LA that day," and, and, and look back. Start with action and make small promises to yourself that you don't break. If you had a friend and every single time that you and your friend decided that you were going to go out for dinner that friend either showed up two hours late or didn't show up at all, you would stop trusting that person. That is the relationship that you have with yourself. You need to be able to trust your own word. And a lot of us don't, because life is very convenient and it is easy for people to not stick to the promises that they set themselves, because our ability to be idealistic is always going to outstrip reality's ability to deliver that to us. As soon as you posit an ideal, you then begin to compare yourself to that ideal. And true hell is when the person that you are meets the person that you could have been.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Sometimes I ponder how, um, you've probably seen this in your own life, I'm sure you have, where you, you'll have a friend in your life, I've got a fr- couple of friends back home who I've tried to help in some way, maybe give some advice when they're struggling in their hardest times, and the advice has been ineffective. And then you've got another friend who will just need one idea, they'll be listening to your podcast and one idea will be the seed that changes their life. I often, like, think that I over- overestimate the power of words, because everything you've said there makes perfect sense.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
But we both know that 95%, maybe more, of people that have just received that, it will not convert into any kind of behavior.
- CWChris Williamson
Habits are hard to break, man.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Maybe.
- CWChris Williamson
And the habit of not doing things is unbelievably difficult to get past. It's one of the problems with anyone that listens to your show or my show, you will love being cerebral, right? You will love the idea that I can use cognitive horsepower to just get myself out of problems. And there is a case of learning is masturbation, right? Uh, and believing that learning about something is the same as enacting it. And it's not. That's why it has to be action first. Uh, a quote from one of my friends that he uses when he's thinking about a concept is, "Does this grow corn?" Basically, "Is it useful? Tell me how I can use this in my life." Does it grow fucking corn, right? Uh, uh, i- it's th- this beautifully, uh, beautiful sounding concept, cognitive bias that helps me understand the way that my brain works and my relationship with everybody else, how do I use that in my life? Give me something to apply it to. And that's why with the confidence thing, choose promises that you will never break to yourself. "I'm going to get up on time for the next month. I'm not going to hit the snooze button." If you do that and you look back in a month and you go, "Oh my God, like, that's the first time I've done that in forever," maybe, that's a big win. And you can do the James Clear thing, "We'll write it on a board, we'll track it, what gets, like, measured," et cetera, et cetera. But the main thing is just keep promises to yourself. And that is a good way to go from, "Here is an insight I learned about I want to do breath work, cold plunge, go to the gym, fast until 12 midday, get up on time, sunlight in the eyes in the m-" whatever it is, right, that you wanna do, turn it into a promise, don't break the promise.
- SBSteven Bartlett
One of the really important things you said there was about the size of that first step. I, I was reflecting there on the way that video games are designed to make sure that every subsequent level is not too intimidating that you lose, uh, motivation, but it's not too, um, too small that you lose motivation as well. You can lose motivation on both ways. And so it's the same with crosswords and video games, they get incrementally more challenging to k- keep you engaged. The size of that first step is, is I think a central point there, because when people listen to podcasts with people like me and you or Andrew Huberman and they hear that they've gotta maybe get up at this time, go outside, gaze, earth, like, put their feet on the ground, cold plunge, da-da-da-da, you-... and I go, (snaps fingers) "I'm gonna do that-"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
... and I set that as my first step-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... I'm set up for failure.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SBSteven Bartlett
How important do you think the size, and, and, uh, the subjective size of that small s- that first step you take to build trust with yourself is, and to start that discipline?
- CWChris Williamson
The goal isn't to have the perfect daily routine tomorrow. The goal is to still be winning your daily routine in 50 years time. If you expand your time horizon sufficiently, you will realize that very, very tiny steps can compound. Look at the graph of mine or your followers on Spotify, especially mine, right, because I was doing my show for so long, and it's just nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, everything. Well, why? Well, it's because it's latent leverage. It takes so many layers of paint to get there. So yes, the first step has to be incredibly small. Do that, make it so small that you can't say no to it, and then what's next, and then what's next? So when I decided that I was going to try and become a more virtuous version of me, I was gonna start telling the truth, I was going to, uh, have a morning routine, I was going to develop a meditation habit, I was going to read, all of these things that I wanted to do, none of which I did, right, toward the end of my 20s, none of which I did, all of which are now the foundation of, of my life, over, I don't know, 1,500 meditation sessions, and all of the authors on the podcast, and et cetera, et cetera. I had to do that one step at a time. I didn't have a stable sleep and wake pattern until COVID ever in my adult life. I'd never gone to bed and woken up at the same time for seven days in a row until COVID because I was running Nightlife events, right? So if, no matter how difficult the setback is, even if you're a shift worker, you're a nurse, you're a parent, whatever your challenge is, just make the promise to yourself sufficiently small that even with that challenge in front of you, you can make it work.
- 32:26 – 35:46
How do we prepare for a loss in motivation
- CWChris Williamson
- SBSteven Bartlett
I hear that, and I'm motivated, as a lot of people will be, because that's what happens, you know, like a shower, as the cliché goes, motivation comes, and then it slowly, it slowly washes over us and slowly starts to fade. How do I prepare, or how, should I be preparing for the day where, I've heard Chris Williams and Steve speaking about this, and then in three and a half days' time, I wake up in the morning, life has happened, the kids screaming, my motivation seems to have escaped me?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
The distinction between discipline on that day and the motivation I got from the source, and that came from the inspiration of this conversation, what do I do?
- CWChris Williamson
Discipline eats motivation for breakfast. Right, you don't need motivation. It's great if it arrives. It's some extra fuel on the fire. But discipline is the thing that you need. What would you tomorrow want you today to do? You tomorrow would want you to keep that promise to yourself, and it's why discipline is so much more valuable. I remember this conversation between, uh, Jocko Willink and Sam Harris six years ago, and they're talking about how you can't fake bravery, because if you do a thing in spite of being scared of doing the thing, that is bravery. Right? There's no such thing as fake bravery. Like you just, if you do the thing and you're scared, that's bravery. If you don't do the thing and you weren't scared, that's not bravery, right? The same thing goes for discipline. Doing the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing is discipline, right? You don't need motivation to get yourself up to go and do a thing. Make the promise small, build it up step by step, know that you are going to have setbacks, and this is my favorite rule from James Clear, which is, "A habit missed once is a mistake. A habit missed twice is the start of a new habit." Never miss two days in a row. So ideally, go for a month, build it up, but after that, if you ever miss one day, go, "Okay, that's, mistakes are gonna happen. Tomorrow, I double down. Tomorrow, I go on time, absolutely perfect, I'm straight up out of bed, or I go to the gym, or I walk the dog, or I do my meditation or whatever." And that's a good heuristic. It stops errors snowballing into new habits.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What about if I get to day three? It's then, in James Clear's definition, the start of a new habit. Do I not just apply the same thinking that I did a- when I missed it on day one?
- CWChris Williamson
You just need to- well, I mean, if you don't ever miss two days, you shouldn't be able to get to day three.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What if I do, though? I mean, I think about my own fitness journey. I've been working out for the last three years.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And there will be a week where motivation is gone. And th- there'll be mul- multiple weeks, so there'll be, sometimes it'll be two weeks in a row where I'm, like, taking my ass to the gym-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... but then m- my workout is absolutely atrocious. I might as well have not have gone. Um, and I do that because I'm trying to continue the behavior-
- CWChris Williamson
Correct.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... in spite of the motivation.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Well, it doesn't change your worth as a person, you know? You, you want to do this because you think that it's good for you, because you believe that it's good for you because you care about yourself, you care about Steven and his body and his mind, you want him to have a long and healthy life, and the same for everybody else that's listening. They want to have good outcomes from the things that they do in life. You don't need to lambast yourself because you don't do a thing that is perfectly designed to make you feel good. Okay, like, you missed three days in a row. We get back on the horse, we go again. Discipline.
- 35:46 – 43:02
What tools have you used to change?
- CWChris Williamson
- SBSteven Bartlett
You talked a second ago about the fundamentals of your life now, the things you wanted to put in place, you referenced meditation and these kinds of things. When I think about the, the Chris Williams that was running those club nights, was on Love Island: Take Me Out, and the guy that's sat in front of me now, if there were a couple of key fundamental tools or devices that have taken you from there to the guy sat in front of me here, and you know, pe- uh, what are, what are those, what are those things? And I say this because, you know, when people give advice on this podcast sometimes or when, in books and stuff, they'll talk to things they think they're supposed to say-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... but you never really get the true stuff. They'll say, "Oh, meditation, I don't know, I've never heard that before." I'm like, for Chris Williams, what, what took you from, from there to the Chris Williamson sat in front of me now?
- CWChris Williamson
Getting up on time every day.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Every day?
- CWChris Williamson
Every day.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And what's, what's on time for you?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, 7:00, 7:00 to 7:30, depending on what time I went to bed, so it'll change each night. But I'll set an alarm and I will get up on time. Go to bed and wake up at around about the same time each day. It makes a massive difference. Go for a morning walk first thing. So, sunlight before screen light was something that I was doing before Huberman talked about the downregulation of the amygdala response, and the lateral eye movement helps blah, blah, blah, in the brain. I came upon this because I wanted to go for a walk more, in order to get as many steps in as I could. Uh, get up and go for a walk because it just, so many people are stopped the second they wake up because they use their phone as their alarm. They roll over, they hit the alarm on their phone, and now their phone's in their hand, and now they're in bed for half an hour doing the cycle through all of their social media apps. Sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. That was the number one change that I made. Phone is outside of the bedroom. And I bought, how long have radio alarms been around? A million years, right? Like, just get any kind of alarm clock, wake up, go for a walk before you use your phone. That will change so many of the problems that people encounter, because it, it, the addiction to technology is primary, I think, to a lot of people's challenges in their day. Meditation has been interesting for me. It- it- it's definitely helped me to be calmer, to be more peaceful. It's not an insane performance enhancer. The breath work as well, I really enjoy doing that, it's not an insane performance enhancer. Um, reading. I would say some form of content absorption. That could come from reading articles, reading books, listening to podcasts, listening to audiobooks. Something that pushes your understanding is- is very important, uh, and for me that's moved. It was books a while ago, now it's more Substack articles that I read on my Kindle. For a long time it's always been podcasts. Sometimes it's audiobooks, sometimes it's not.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What about content creation, the other side of that coin, and the obligation to create? What impact has that had on your life?
- CWChris Williamson
It's everything, because by having to talk about the things that I learn, it forces me to learn them, right? Until you can explain something to somebody else, you don't really understand it. It's like, okay, prove to me that you understand it by telling me about it. "Well, I can't." Okay, well you don't understand it then. So, uh, this is one of the reasons I suggest to people that they should do a- a fake podcast with a friend, uh, for 30 minutes every week. Uh, phones are outside of the room, put one phone face down on the table, press the record button, and just have a conversation, and pretend that people are watching. Welcome back to the show. Stephen, today we're going to talk about the UFC or Tommy Fury and Jake Paul. Who do you think is gonna win? And it forces you to be rigorous and precise and consistent with the things that you believe, and it is a forcing function that synthesizes the things that you're doing. Other people might prefer to write or draw. One of the advantages of doing it for an audience is that you actually feel like someone's keeping you accountable, right? If it's just, "Oh, I'm gonna draw a drawing every week for my own pleasure," as opposed to, "I'm going to draw a drawing every week and post it on my Instagram," or, "I'm gonna write a Substack article," I mean, I have a- a posting cadence on the show, Monday, Thursday, Saturday, uh, and if it wasn't for the fact that I know if I don't post on those days, the audience are gonna be like, "Hang on a second, mate. Like, it's Monday. Where's the- where's the podcast episode?" It would be a lot less motivating for me to do it. I'm driven by that. So I think that, absolutely, creating some kind of content, whether it be just for you or whether it be to put out into the world and to build a platform with it is a- a good start.
- SBSteven Bartlett
The most important thing I think in hindsight that I've gained from content creation is in fact, like, honing my skill of sales. Because you're forced in this medium to make your ideas as concise as you possibly can and say them in a way which is engaging. And I've reflected over the last 10 years or so of making content and recording videos and go, man, the impact it's had on my business, my ability to pitch and sell. But even if you're a guy and you're looking to pick someone up in a bar, man or woman, it's profound to me the impact that the obligation to create content specifically on video-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... in- in, um, in speaking form has had on all facets of my life, and I just don't feel like there's enough of a charge to both introspect, but then the obligation to create. I think it's life-changing.
- CWChris Williamson
There's a- a interesting quote from Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and he says, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
So you could see a richer vocabulary means a richer life. If you take the fact that you have ideas in your head, they're these sort of wishy-washy ephemeral notion, it's like a smell, right? An idea is kind of like a smell.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
It's the, it's just an amorphous blob of a thing. And you go, oh, yeah, I feel like this. I feel like this is an idea. Until you make it take form through spoken word, written word, or drawing, it- it doesn't really exist. It's not tangible. You can't see it. You can't work out where the holes are in whatever this idea is. So what that means is that, first off, the more words that you have in your arsenal, the more precisely you can describe the thing which is in your head. The more frictionlessly you can take ideas from your brain to your mouth, your fingertips, or the end of a pencil, the more accurately you're going to be able to put that out into the world, which means that when you need to turn it over and assess it and look at it, you go, "Oh my God, I thought that I knew this inside out and there's this big gaping hole here. I need to work out what's going on." Which is why a loneliness epidemic, uh, the massive falling rates of friendlessness in- in the world aren't particularly good because not only is it bad for the community and for social cohesion, but it's bad for the individual's personal growth as well. If you want to fully learn something, you want to spend time synthesizing your ideas, and you can really only ever do that for somebody else. Again, you can write the journal to you, for you, but it's never gonna be as disciplined or as consistent as if you're writing it for an audience, even if the audience is only five people or only your friends.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And you spoke to something which is, because you were outside of the social circle when you were young, you were able to, I guess, vicariously see the impact that small things had which made you kind of socially attuned. Talking then about the loneliness epidemic, is it an- is it an epidemic? How bad is it? Is it something that you believe society should be p- paying more attention to? Um, I sat here with Simon Sinek the other day, and he disclosed to me that he was going
- 43:02 – 51:10
Being alone vs being lonely
- SBSteven Bartlett
through a real s- struggle with loneliness at the moment, and it was somewhat surprising. It was somewhat surprising because, again, in a very naive way, Simon Sinek is someone of great success, he's got a career most people would, um, would die for. He's a man, you know, that's greatly admired. He goes on stages and thousands of people roar his name. But then on a personal level, he's lonely. And one of the things he said to me was, "There's a real difference between being alone and being lonely." Do you, can you see the distinction between the two?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I mean, solitude is something that many of us enjoy and I know that me and you both enjoy it.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Right? Loneliness isn't. I used to write, I- I've got, um, in a journal that I used to keep in my phone, a couple of different entries from my mid-20s and it just put, "I think I'm lonely." Yeah, because I just, I- I- I couldn't work out what was going on. I had a sense that there was maybe something that was a little bit wrong. "I think I'm lonely." Um, when it comes to the loneliness epidemic, uh, in 1990, the number of men who said that they had six or more close friends was around about 55%. In 2020, that had dropped to 21%. It's less than halved, right? 21% of men say that they have less than six close friends. The number of men who say that they have zero close friends has increased by five-fold from 1990, and it's now at 15%. 15% of men say that they have zero close friends. I don't have the stats for women. It seems like women are able to hold onto social groups a little bit more effectively than men are. Uh, the loneliness epidemic does seem to be hitting men a little bit more hard.
- SBSteven Bartlett
I'm compelled by your diary entry, before we get into the stats and the cau- causation, you wrote in your diary in your mid-20s, "I think I'm lonely."
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SBSteven Bartlett
It's funny, 'cause I- I reflect on my early 20s, between 20 and 25, and I was definitely lonely but had no idea until later. Until I was an activist-
- CWChris Williamson
Well, that was why I on- that was why I only thought-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Thought... yeah, yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that I was lonely, you know?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I was like, "And it, what is it?" What we were just saying, it's a notion, it's a, aye, it's a smell.
- SBSteven Bartlett
A signal.
- CWChris Williamson
Someone shouted it from the other room. Fucking I th- what is that?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Do you know-
- CWChris Williamson
How do I think I'm lonely?
- SBSteven Bartlett
... no one's described it. I didn't have a description of it, so I had this sort of innate f- this feeling inside my being, but no one had put a word to it before or told me what the, like, job description of someone that's lonely looks like.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So, it was a signal, like, something's not right, but I don't know what it is.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And I only learned when I was not lonely, when I felt a s- real sense of connection, what I was missing.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, shit. That's not what life's supposed to be like.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah. So t- tell me about y- what- what had caused the, what factors had come together to put you in a situation where you were lonely?
- CWChris Williamson
I've met about a million people in my life, and I o- only had a handful of friends. That made me think my exposure to friend conversion seems to be off. There is something not right here. And this was largely due to the fact that I was playing a role as this big name on campus, party boy, and quite rightly, who was I going to resonate with when I wasn't being me? They were going to, at best, become friends with a projection of what I thought they wanted me to be. Right? So, this was almost exclusively on myself. Uh, but also, I was struggling a little bit in the industry to find, um, the, I- I can't have a conversation about like the deeper sense of human nature or the existential pain of being alive or, uh, Status from Will Storr, his brand new book, when someone's desperately trying to get a VIP wristband off me so that they can go and see the hot girls downstairs. Like, it's- it- it's not quite the right environment for that. But again, it largely, this was due to the fact that I wasn't being sufficiently confident that other people would be interested in what I was interested in. And yeah, I mean, you can be, have all of the success in the world, you can be, uh, surrounded by people, and yet feel alone in a crowd and hollow in victory. Because if you're only playing a role, anything that you do, any love that people give to you, won't feel like it hits you existentially. You'll feel praise, but you won't feel love, because they're not in love with you, they're just applauding the role that you're playing. Does that make sense?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Makes perfect sense. Makes perfect sense. It's s- such an apt description. Uh, uh, it really brings in this idea of what the person is connecting to matters the most, i.e. if they're connecting to the image that I've created, which is inauthentic to myself, I'm never gonna receive that connection. The only way to cure my loneliness is to show up as myself and to build connection on that basis, which is, again, makes a ton of sense to me because I was a young CEO who had hundreds of employees. My relationship- ship to them wasn't necessarily Steve, the true sense of Steve-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... to them. So what they were-
- CWChris Williamson
Steve the CEO.
- SBSteven Bartlett
It was, exactly, it was CEO to employee.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- 51:10 – 1:21:17
Dating apps
- SBSteven Bartlett
of dating apps? Do you think they're net positive or net negative for the world?
- CWChris Williamson
(sighs) Where do you wanna go here?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Of course I wanna go here. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Okay. I think that dating apps are a perfect example of something which is both convenient and enjoyable, but not good for you. They have certainly opened up more opportunities for people to meet potential partners, and yet we are in a world with the highest rates of sexlessness ever amongst young people. One in three men between the ages of 18 and 30 hasn't had sex in the last year. That tripled from 8% to 28% from 2008 to 2018. 50% of men say that they are not looking for a committed relationship. That's down from 61% of men saying that they were. Only half of men between the ages of 18 and 30 are looking for a relationship. You go, "Okay." Well, if the promises of easy access online dating were so true, how is it that we've ended up with a world where people are having less sex than ever? That sex, uh, sexlessness has also increased for women too, but for men, it's increased more, and they were starting at a higher baseline as well. 50.1% of women for the first time in history, uh, are, uh, mothers, there are more childless women at 30 than there are women with children, right? So, for almost all of human history, more women had kids under the age of 30 than over, and now it's switched. There's a study from Morgan Stanley that says by 2040, 45% of 25 to 45-year-old women will be single and childless. If online dating was creating this perfect facilitation for relationships to start, how are we ending up with all of these outcomes? It's a question.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What's wrong with the outcomes?
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean? Why should people care about being single?
- SBSteven Bartlett
W- all the stats you just said-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... um, I could look at them and say they're just sort of objectively neutral. Like, there's no adverse consequence to society or the world. It's fine that people aren't having kids. It's fine that people are- aren't having sex. I'm playing devil's advocate here-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... but, like, what, what is the, what is the negative consequence of all of those outcomes that you've described in your view?
- CWChris Williamson
There are people for whom a life without a partner is the right choice. That's absolutely something that I'm prepared to accept. But it's not most people. It's, uh, one of the biggest levers, in fact, the single biggest predictor of your health outcomes in life are the number of close connections that you have. It's the number of friends. It's more than quitting smoking. It's more than going to the gym. It's more than stopping drinking. It's the number of close friends that you've got. And a relationship is a big close friend. Robin Dunbar says that in order to get into a relationship, you have to sacrifice two friendships-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... because you can have around about five very close friends. If you want to get into a relationship, you need to get rid of two of them, because there is a minimum time investment. So, people that are in relationships have better health outcomes. They have onset of dementia later. They have alzheimer, uh, problems later on in life. Uh, they are less lonely.... that seems pretty uncontroversial, and yet both sides of the aisle, both men and women, are retreating from relationships and finding ways that they can, uh, justify this. Uh, you know, uh, boss bitch culture and sort of the lean in, um, women's mentality, or men going their own way, and incel culture, and the black pill for guys are both ways that each sex is trying to deal with the challenges that are coming out of the mating market. Both sexes are saying, "I don't want to be a part of this anymore. I'm finding it so painful and difficult to be in this world that I'm just gonna cast off any of it all together," and then retroactively come up with a lot of explanations that can justify why they didn't need to be in a relationship in any case! And for some people, that's true, but for most people that's not.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Dating app- apps are clearly not, you know, and as you say in your own words, um, previously, aren't the only causal factor. So my question to you is where did we go wrong and how do we go right?
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so I think challenges in the mating market are coming from many directions. One of the main ones that will be pertinent to the people that are listening is the increase in female achievement in education and employment. Now, uh, about 50 years ago when Title IX came in, there was a 13 percentage point swing in favor of men to women in universities. There were significantly more men than women.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What's Title IX?
- CWChris Williamson
It was, uh, an affirmative action, uh, policy that helped to get more, uh, women into higher education. 50 years later, 2023, it's a 15 percentage point swing between men and women in university in the other direction. There are two women for every one man at a four-year US college degree roundabout by 2030. Women on average between the ages of 21 and 29 earn £1,111 more than their male counterparts. Women are roughly twice as likely as men to say that they will value financial prospects in a partner, roundabout 78% of women say that a stable job is something that is important for a partner to have, whereas roundabout only sort of 45% of men say the same thing. For a man to increase his, uh, rating on a 10-point scale by two points, he requires roundabout a tenfold, uh, increase in his salary. For a woman to achieve the same two-point improvement on a 10-point scale, her salary would need to increase by 10,000 times. My point being that women are, they are concerned about a partner's socioeconomic status significantly more than men are. Now you can start to see that if you have a world in which women are attending university at high rates, they are achieving, uh, more success in employment, at least in that sort of 21 to 29 range, which is when most people are perhaps looking for potential partners, and yet the socioeconomic status of a partner to a woman is a big determinant of their level of attraction, you can start to see how this imbalance could cause a problem. Similarly, when we talk about education. A man with a master's degree on Tinder gets 90% more right swipes than a man with a bachelor's degree. So, uh, f- for all of the guys that are considering going and getting a master's degree, even if you think it's going to be useless, at least accept the fact that you'll get 90% more right swipes for the rest of your life, or just lie about your master's. I don't know. (laughs) All of this rolled together describes something called hypergamy, which is the female tendency to date up and across. On average, women want to date a man who is as educated or as employed as they are. Now in a world in which quite rightly women have finally been able to achieve parity in education and employment and status, and have independence and not be financially reliant on their partner, all the rest of it, that's great for them, but it- it does cause some challenges for their dating, and this is what I've called the tall girl problem. So everybody knows what it's like to have a girlfriend who is six foot without heels. You know, if you wanna wear heels, you're looking at professional athletes, because on average women want to date a man who is at least as tall or a little bit taller than they are. So as women rise up through their own competence hierarchy in education and employment, they further shorten down the potential pool of eligible men that are as educated or more educated and as employed or more employed than they are. This is a challenge. This is just a straight-up imbalance, right? What this causes is a very large group of men toward the bottom of this distribution to be essentially invisible to women. It causes a very large number of women, an increasing cohort, to compete for an increasingly small group of turbo-charged super performers at the top. These guys, the super high value guys, have a wealth of options so they are commitment-averse. Why would they decide to sit down with one girl for the rest of time when they have this wealth of options which can cause them to, uh, use and discard many of these women? Which then causes most of these women to resent men overall. And then the guys that were forgotten, at the bottom, that say, "Well hang on a second, I didn't use and discard you. I haven't even been seen by you." "No, no, all men are..." uh, whatever it might be, right, that they are, uh, users and abusers, that we don't need them, that where all of the good men at? Et cetera, et cetera. There's a big group of men that feel like they are good men that are invisible. There's a big portion of women who have finally managed to achieve educational and employment in- independence that are chasing after a smaller group of guys. These guys are commitment-averse. I don't think it's necessarily good for them either. It's the child with the ice cream, right? Like guys being able to keep it in their pants when there's a lot of options on the table is going to be difficult for them too. This is one of the main drivers, this, uh, tall girl problem, is a massive change, I think, in, uh, the dating dynamics.
- SBSteven Bartlett
It obviously begs the question, Chris, which is-If everything you've said is objectively correct and spot on and supported by the data, then how does... If I make Chris Williamson the prime minister or president of the world, and I say, "Your first job is to fix this challenge-"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... what do you do?
- CWChris Williamson
The first thing that you don't do is roll back women's education and employment. And this is one of the problems with this discussion, right? The things that I've just said there are borne out in Pew Research data, Morgan Stanley results. Like, these are incontrovertible facts, right? They are there. And any girl that is listening who earns more than 50,000 pounds a year and has got a master's or above level education and is toward their late 30s or in the, uh, toward their late 20s or in their 30s knows this problem. You know the fact that you are struggling to find a man that you feel is eligible for you, right? That needs to be out there. The problem that happens around this discourse is that it posits men and women as adversaries and competitors of each other, right? As enemies. This means that worthwhile compassion, which is needed to both women and men... If you're a woman who has gone through your education, you've dedicated yourself to achieving a degree, you know, your mother's generation wasn't able to achieve this, and you're the first person that's maybe gone to uni or got a bachelor's or got a master's or got a PhD, and then you spend some time in a career grinding away and you now earn 150 grand a year, and you think, "Right, I'm 31, I'd love to settle down. This would be amazing for me." Where are all of the men at? I... Hang on a second. And what you realize is that not only now are you competing with all of the other increasing cohort of women that are high achievers with status, employment, and education, but you're also competing with a 21-year-old barista who still lives at home with her parents for this small cohort of guys. That requires sympathy for women, okay? That is not a good position for women to be in. At the same time, this huge cohort of sexless men, 30% of men haven't had sex in the last year, 50% of men say that they are not looking for a relationship. You are a man, you have been through your 20s, you know the power of the male sex drive between the ages of 18 and 30. Can you imagine getting yourself into a situation where you say, "I'm not bothered about pursuing women." That is an unbelievably extreme statement for men to make. And they're self-identifying as this in Pew Research data. This isn't on incel forums. This is Pew Research. 50% of men aren't looking for a relationship.
- SBSteven Bartlett
When they say aren't looking for a relationship, do they mean, "I'm not looking for a woman," or, "I'm not looking for commitment"?
- CWChris Williamson
Not actively pursuing any kind of interaction with women.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Oh, shit.
- CWChris Williamson
Casual included.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What?
- CWChris Williamson
50%. Here's the point, right? You asked about solutions. The first thing that we need to do is turn down the volume of adversarial, uh, nature between these two. Anybody that listens to those two stories, right? The plight of men and the plight of women in the modern dating world, and doesn't see it as, "Wow, that's fucked. That, that really, really sucks for both sexes." Men have it worse in some ways, women have it worse in different ways, right? This isn't a competition of like, "Oh, let's wave the flag of who's actually accumulated more victimhood points." The first thing that needs to happen, before anything, is the volume of the conversation needs to be turned down. We need to see the challenges that are faced by both sexes. The second thing that needs to be put out front is that there needs to be a way to raise men up without bringing women down. Because it is very easy for you to say, "Okay, so women are outachieving men in education and employment, let's just put the reins on them, and then everything's gonna be brought back." Look, I am not trying to roll back any of the gains that have been made by women over the last 50 years, but you do want to have eligible male partners, right? If the thermodynamics of attraction include the fact that women tend to want to date across and up in terms of status, employment, and education, you need to do something, right? Some of the things that you could look at doing in terms of solutions would be, uh, redshirting boys, so starting boys in school one year later. This is something that was put forward by Richard Reeves. The reason for this is that boys tend to mature less quickly than girls. If you were to start boys one year later in school, it would mean that they would be more effective at their age, they would be more mature mentally. Uh, that's one start. Another one that I think is probably more controversial, but would make a big impact, would be to stop derogating motherhood, right? To start pedestalizing motherhood again. There is a huge movement in certain corners of women's advice that any woman who decides to become a mother is a second, essentially a second-class citizen. I don't think that that's true. I don't think that a woman that chooses to become a mother is a second-class citizen. But women often fear becoming just a mother, right, or just a wife, or at worst, a domestic prostitute, and they flee from this specter of family life into the open arms of a corporate employer. And laughably, we call this process freedom. How can it be that the thing that most of us are m- are grateful for, a great mother in our life, has now been derogated as some sort of, uh... It's like, it's like somebody's been rube-d into a role that the patriarchy always wanted them to do, right? There was an article a little while ago, uh, that said, uh, "Maternal instinct is a myth." Uh, that basically, uh, the only reason that maternal instinct exists is because the patriarchy has convinced women that they're actually supposed to like kids. It's like, I, I can't even begin to explain how ridiculous that is, if you look at all of the sex differences in terms of the way that humans work.Pedestalizing motherhood would make women fear being a mother less. It would make it an aspirational goal for them to, to pursue. One of the scariest stats that I learned was from a guy called Stephen Shaw, he wrote, uh, did a documentary called Birthgap, and in it, he talks about this declining birth rate. (sniffs) A meta-analysis by Professor Rinske Dyes says that 80% of women who aren't mothers after their fertility window closes didn't intend to not be mothers, involuntary childlessness. Right about 10% of women are physiologically incapable of having kids. Very unfortunate. Right about 10% of women intended to not have children, which leaves a whopping four out of five non-mother women who didn't intend to not be mothers, and these women have support groups where they come together to grieve for families that they never had, and it breaks their hearts that they weren't able to find the right partner in time before their fertility window closed, and Professor Kaiser talks about the pain that these women feel, and Stephen Shaw's been to these support groups that women who thought that they had more time, that struggled to find a partner in time, they grieved for families that they never had, and that- that sentence just, it makes me, it makes me feel so upset, like it's so painful to hear the prospect of a woman that- that wanted to have a family and couldn't. Very difficult.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So there's- there's two solutions there, y- that you've kind of offered up as potential solutions to that. Um, does that alone fix the other side of the coin, which is the- the huge quantity of men that are avoiding relationships, intimacy, women altogether?
- CWChris Williamson
Not particularly. Um, raising men up somehow would be great, but, I mean, w- where we begin with that, I don't know. I think men are heavily checked out of education, uh, and employment. Uh, men have been retreating from the US labor force market by 0.1% per year since 1950, so 87% in 1950, it's about 67% now. By 2050, or 2040 or 2050 it'll be 65%. Given that women want, on average about 80% of women want a man with a stable job, this retreat is not good. Each step that men take where they take themselves out of education and employment not only isolates them and makes them economically, uh, less viable as contributors to society, it also makes them less eligible as mates. On average, men between 18 and 30 in the US spend 2,000 hours per year playing video games, stoned, or on prescription drugs. That's not the eligible partner, right? So, one other thing that you could look at doing is re-encouraging in-person dating. So, online dating does worsen this issue because it allows you to optimize for objec- objective metrics of success, right? On, uh, a dating app, and this is for both men and women, on a dating app, particularly for men, you can have your education level, you can have the car that you're with, you can talk about your job, you can... So women are very much encouraged by the platform-
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