16 Lessons From 600 Episodes - Douglas Murray, Andrew Schulz & Alex Hormozi

1. 0:00 – 0:48

   Intro

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      Your neurosis is not helping your performance. How different do you think the outcomes in your life would be if you didn't worry about them so much, if you didn't anxiously obsess and overthink and fear? How different do you think the results that you're achieving would be? All of the concern and worry and strife and thought loops and sleepless nights, distracted consciousness, all for the sake of between five and 15% better results. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. It is episode 600. And as is now becoming tradition, I thought I would go through some of my favorite lessons from the last 100 episodes, some stuff that I've picked up from guests, from research that I've been doing, reading, and just life in general outside of the show. So let's get into it. First one

2. 0:48 – 4:49

   It Isn’t Coordination, It’s Cowardice

   1. CWChris Williamson0:48

      is, "It's not coordination, it's cowardice." So this is something that Andrew Schulz taught me toward the back end of last year. What he taught me was, a lot of the time we believe that there is a, a grand plan at work to try and push a narrative or to hurt people from a particular group, and from the outside it looks like a coordinated assault. It's collusion. It's orchestrated by some malign overlord conspiracy. But on the ground, it doesn't look anything like that. From inside of said conspiracy, it doesn't look anything like that at all. It's just individuals trying to save their own skin and not get fired because they have an expensive house that they need to pay for and a wife who wants a new car and a private school for their kids. And it is much easier for them to just adhere to whatever ideology will keep them in their job rather than go against it. So sure, it might mean that they push an unhinged story about trans story hour for toddlers or someone saying something innocuous kick- getting kicked off a platform, but it doesn't mean that they've been indoctrinated into some grand plan 'cause the incentives encourage execs and influential actors and the people in power to behave in particular aligned ways, but their coordination isn't consciously conducted. It's just the path of least resistance for each person. Now, this doesn't make them any less culpable. Like, it, it's, it's still awful. It's, it's still... The outcome is still not good, but this presumption that there is a shadowy organization with hooded figures and one of those long-nose things all sacrificing children's blood and drinking adrenochrome and shadow banning you on (laughs) TikTok doesn't seem that realistic to me. Like, you can't have it both ways. You can't have it that the government is completely incompetent and inept and they can't get anything done, and also the government have managed to collude themselves and collaborate in order to stop my Instagram posts from reaching as many people as I think that they do. Like, you don't get to have it both ways. And there is a, uh, theory, Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity, which says, "Evil can be guarded against, stupidity cannot. And the world's few evil people have little power without the help of the world's many stupid people. As a result, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil." And you can combine Hanlon's razor, that you'll probably be familiar with, which is, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." You could replace stupidity with cowardice or compliance if you like. But the bottom line is that people will forego principles and rationality if it means keeping their job. Like, you know, almost everybody at some point, apart from the most staunch, integral advocates, philosophy, moral reasoning, first principles people have compromised the values at some point in their lives in order to appease a person in power or keep status or do whatever it is that they need to do to keep food on the table, even if the table is very long and expensive and in Beverly Hills. Like, coordination, to me, seems significantly less likely than cowardice. And although it is annoying in a way because it suggests that individual actors now aren't even smart enough to be part of some grand conspiracy, um, it does make it feel less insurmountable, right? If there isn't this coordination, it means that pushback and change can be done more easily through, uh, influence, through, um, a, a desire from the ground floor up, from outside of these institutions to say, "Look, we don't like what's going on." Uh, and it should be easy for all of the dominoes to fall. It's not like the people in there believe what they're doing all the time. It's just that they don't want to lose their jobs. Okay, next one.

3. 4:49 – 9:30

   Original Thinkers Are Rare

   1. CWChris Williamson4:49

      "Original thinkers are very rare." I guess this kind of relates. "The rise of social media as the primary form of social interaction changed the way that we judge people. We once used to judge people mostly based on their deeds, but in the age of social media, we judge people mostly based on their words and opinions because that's really all that we see of them. Since we're defined by our opinions, there is pressure to have an opinion on everything. The problem is people generally don't have the time or the will to research everything they are expected to have an opinion on, so they copy the opinions of others, and this results in very few precious original thinkers. In this way, the culture war is largely two armies of NPCs being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers." And that is from the fantastic Gwenda Bogle. And it is, it is very, very true. If you think about what most people's opinions are, they are a carbon copy, a, a, a poor rough-hewn version, a counterfeit of whatever the people that they look up to believe. And, you know, this is true for almost everybody. It's very hard to come up with a fresh idea. It's that, uh, quote about, um, everything is a footnote after Plato, that basically all of the ideas w- had already been come up with-... 2,000, two and a half thousand years ago, uh, and all that we're doing now is making-

   2. GUGuest6:10

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson6:10

      ... slightly worse, uh, reiterated versions. I don't think that's quite true, I do think that there are new ideas, but they're really hard to come across, right? A lot more smart people than me and you have been trying to come up with solutions to the existential challenge of being a human in this world for a very long time, um, and yes, the fact that we are judged on our opinions, forced to have an opinion, and yet don't have a, uh, easy to, um, a, a, the required wisdom to be able to just manifest it on will... Ah, there's another one, what was it? Hill to die on, let me see if this comes up. Hill to die on, is it this? Oh, it is, fantastic. Okay, so this is Gwynder, another one from him, Gwynder's Theory of Bespoke Bullshit. "Many don't have an opinion until they're asked for it, at which point they cobble together a viewpoint from whim and half-remembered hearsay before deciding that this two-minute-old makeshift opinion will be their new hill to die on." And this is Gwynder's Theory of Bespoke Bullshit. So, again, if you are your opinions, if opinions are more important than your deeds because all that we really see of people are their opinions, and most people don't have an original idea on something because it's really hard to come up with new stuff. And then the fact that you're so heavily judged on your opinion because of social media requires you to stand firm and show fealty to whatever side you've just, like, fallen into by accident because that was what your favorite thought leader said that you should believe, um, it can make for a very messy situation.

   4. GUGuest7:42

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CWChris Williamson7:42

      And the final element of this, which I really loved, was when I was with Douglas Murray last year in New York, and he... I brought up to him, "Why haven't you commented on the COVID situation as much as I thought you might do? You have four or five columns a week, um, I'm surprised to not see you wade into this topic as much as some of your contemporaries have." And he said, "Christopher, I'm going to do something which is very strange and different in the modern world, which is to not comment on something which I know nothing about." And I was like, "Oh, that is cool." And I've seen a lot of people since then saying something along the lines of, "Normalize saying, 'I don't have an opinion on that.'" I think that that's a really fantastic approach, like, I... The more that you can get yourself into the rhythm of not feeling the need to have a take on everything, like, I don't need my favorite evolutionary psychology researcher to have an opinion on the Ukraine, right? I, I, I... Maybe you also happen to moonlight as a global politics expert, but I'm going to guess that you don't, and given that, do you really need to add more noise to just put your half-baked, anecdotal, uninformed opinion, now, I can do that. It's one of the reasons that I didn't really comment on Ukraine, didn't really comment on COVID, because I just figured, look, like, there are other people out there that are having these discussions, that are prepared to put in the work, and I'm not prepared to, and I feel like me just throwing out a completely uninformed opinion muddies the waters rather than helps to make them clearer. So, yeah, all of that together, normalize saying, "I don't have an opinion," and original thinkers are very rare. Okay, next one.

4. 9:30 – 11:58

   The Problem of Presence

   1. CWChris Williamson9:30

      Uh, the problem of presence. So, this was something that I brought up on the fifth-year anniversary to do with that beautiful Sam Harris speech, uh, Death in the Present Moment, which is just phenomenal, uh, and then I found a quote from Blaise Pascal, a little passage, which I think explains the problem of presence very similarly as well. So, Blaise Pascal, "We never keep to the present. We anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming or were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us and do not think of the only one that does, so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future and think of how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching. Let each of us examine his thoughts. He will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the future are our means, the future alone our end. Thus, we never actually live but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so." And this is the same Sam Harris thing of looking over the shoulder of the present moment to, it's a guaranteed way to ensure that you're going to miss whatever is true and beautiful of your life right now. No matter how big the problems or concerns or anxieties are, the reality of your life is that it is always now. The only time that you can ever enjoy is this moment, and the guaranteed way of missing your life, of allowing it to slip by whilst you distract yourself by ruminating over things that you didn't do or worrying about things that you're going to do, is precisely that. This leads into... So this is like a, a quadruple header. I managed to find four concepts that I wanted to throw together. So that was the first one, that Blaise Pascal quote, which was actually really, really hard for me to read because he's writing in some old and worldly Victorian shit. Um, next one, this is from Jake Humphrey. So, um,

5. 11:58 – 21:38

   These Are the Golden Years

   1. CWChris Williamson11:58

      for the non-Brits, Jake Humphrey is a sports broadcaster. He also has a great podcast called The High Performance Podcast, and...... last year, he came on the show. A year and a half ago, he came on the show. Uh, and he was just talking about... I think me and him are both quite driven, and, um, it might have even been after the episode finished that he was kind of lamenting how everything was going really great, and yet he was still applying a lot of stress to himself, and he was, he was sort of putting more and more pressure on himself. This is his quote. He said, "These are the golden years. You can't wait until you've got no stress or worry in your life before you decide to be happy because guess what? You will always have stress, and worry, and anxiety, and problems, and issues to deal with. So you have to decide now that happiness is something you're going to have." And it was that throwaway line at the start which I loved, "These are the golden years." Like, it's such a lovely heuristic to always think that when you look back, these times right now will be the ones that you cherish and to approach them with the requisite joy. Like, if right now is... just imagine that right now is going to be the best that your life ever gets. And you're always looking past its shoulder, you're always seeing what's coming next, you're always remembering the past, you're always anticipating the future, and yet, in the future, these will be the moments, these will be the days that are the golden years. Like, the possibility that that could be the truth, I think, it, it really sort of opened up a new set of realizations for me that's like, "Okay, well, what if these are the golden years? What if this is the best that it's going to get?" And, and not that that should be a reason that (laughs) I, you shouldn't need an excuse to be present or happy with the moment, right? Especially if there's nothing wrong. But just that consideration that, look, this could be close to the peak of your entire life. And if that's true, you really should revel in it. You really should take some time to enjoy it and to stop presuming that there is something round the corner which is going to be more worthwhile than what you're focused on right at this moment. And I guess the, the strange thing is that only in retrospect can we see how beautiful the present actually was because problems are a feature of life, they're not a bug, and there will never come a time when you don't have any problems. Like, this is another Sam Harris thing (laughs) where he says, "What did you think? That one day, you're just going to wake up and cease having problems? Like completing a video game and getting to a map or a level where there's nothing there. That's never going to happen. Your problems will change, but having problems is going nowhere." And, "Whatever negativity is consuming your thoughts probably won't matter in three months' time. In three months, you won't remember the negative texture of your mind or the boring, repetitive things that you thought about, or maybe even what you were worried about, but the time that you spent worrying will have passed. So you are sacrificing your joy and presence in the moment for a problem which you literally won't even be able to recall in the future. And immortality is really the only situation in which such a, a flippant frivolously with the days that you have would be acceptable." This leads into a quote from Alex Hormozi, which is, "It's all going to end very soon, so make sure that you enjoy it. At your funeral, your friends and family will argue over who gets what. People will want to eat food, uh, will (laughs) want food to eat. The topic will shift away from your life to their lives. They'll drive away thinking about their looming to-do list. Some people won't be able to make it because something came up. And we worry about a low performing post on social media, or what someone thinks of us, or a bad customer review, or whether we're going to finish our to-do list in time. We die like we go to sleep, with things unsaid and unfinished. The only judge who has complete context on our lives dies with us, a reminder of the heavy weight we place on the things that matter little." That is so heavy to consider, that people will argue over food, and who wants what, and some people won't be able to make it. "And we die like we go to sleep, with things unsaid and unfinished," and we concern ourselves with so many tiny minutiae, all of the, the, the neuroses and the concerns that we get into. Uh, and that leads into the fourth of my quadruple-threat, triple, quadruple-stacked burger of, of insights around death, and presence, and stuff. Um, your neuroses is not helping your performance. Your ability to be idealistic is always going to outstrip reality's ability to deliver that to you. So, um, when I record the show, I hear the same trends and themes popping up across a lot of episodes in a short time, and obviously, I'm the common denominator between all of these guests, so it's maybe largely due to my biases. But one of the most common themes has been releasing the tiller and just accepting the results that come your way in life. So, the question that I asked myself was, how different do you think the outcomes in your life would be if you didn't worry about them so much? If you didn't anxiously obsess, and overthink, and fear, how different do you think the results that you're achieving would be? Do you think you'd be 30% less effective, or 50% less effective, or 5% less effective? And I've reflected on it a lot, and I think I've settled on somewhere between 5 and 15%, but probably closer to 5. So think about that. Think about all of the concern, and worry, and strife, and thought loops, and sleepless nights, the distracted consciousness which you will never get back from your brief time on this planet, all for the sake of between 5 and 15% better results. Or to invert the situation, you could get rid of your neurotic fears about not achieving your goals, and the price is simply 5 to 15% of your outcomes.And the thing that I've come to believe is that the results that you get in life are going to come anyway. Your fears and neuroses are doing little other than making your journey toward this more miserable. In this way, life is less like a car drive with you as an active participant, and more like a train journey while you're heading toward the same destination kind of no matter what you do. (sniffs) Now, I'm a big fan of high agency and being a sovereign individual and taking control of your life, and that's gonna be one of the rules that we come onto next. So, how do you marry these two up? This isn't me saying that you don't have any control over the outcomes that you get. It's me saying that your... a lot of the work in this particularly applies to people that are a little bit further down their maturity/self-development route. You have spent so much time building up all of the habits, and rules, and routines, and networks, and productivity tools, and strategies, and all of that stuff that you've done, and it is just a behemoth. It's like a steam train, and it's just continuing to move, and there is nothing that's going to stop it. And yet, you still apply the same level of uncertainty and anxiety and, and neurosis to it that you did when you were first starting out and had no idea whether you were going to be effective at the things that you want to try and do in life. As life continues, you're going to realize that the outcomes that you want to get are going to come to you in any case because of all of the work that came before now. So, continuing to worry, continuing to have that imposter adaptation, right? The uncertainty that you're going to be able to achieve despite the fact that every single different challenge that you faced in the past you've managed to achieve in doesn't make sense. Like, it, it simply doesn't make sense. And I do wonder how much of the overthinking and negative thought loops that we have, we hold onto because we believe that that's what's facilitating our performance when it's not. That's, that's, that's not what's driving performance. What's driving performance are the things that really move the needle. That was just, that's just your scarcity mentality manifesting and you clinging onto it, believing that it's somehow causing performance to work. So, I also think this relates maybe to the dark side of Jordan Peterson or Jocko Willink's take responsibility philosophy, which is that it's potential to take too much responsibility, so much that you lose your ability to rely on intuition and have faith that the results will come, that, like, the opposite... If you can imagine the opposite of a victim mindset, where you believe that you have no control over the outcomes you get, the opposite would be one where you believe that you have too much control over them and you lose faith in your innate ability to just get shit done. I don't think that everything has to be so deliberate and that the outcomes in life are probably going to arrive in any case because of all of the work that you've done before. This doesn't make... take your f- mean take your foot off the gas, but it means approach things with less of a scarcity mentality and more of just a open, like, abundant curiosity. That seems like a much healthier place to come from. And there's this really great, great Charlie Munger quote where he says, "At the end of the day, if you live long enough, most people get what they deserve." Pretty good. Okay, this

6. 21:38 – 26:42

   Your Life Should be Led by Design, Not by Default

   1. CWChris Williamson21:38

      next one I probably should have done forever ago. It- it's like the synopsis of everything that I've learned from the podcast, and it follows on from what we've just spoken about. Uh, and especially toward the beginning of this personal development/self-development journey thing, it was the main realization as somebody that had lived a very unassessed life for a very long time, kind of, uh, going with the wind, um, not really taking full agentic control over the things that I was doing. And it is, "Your life should be lived by design, not default." And there's a quote from Seneca where he says, "The best thing is to want what is right," which is also called the honesta, "and to not stray from the path." Okay, so quote, "Blindly following your desires makes you a slave to your impulses, slave to the assumptions of those around you, the advertisements you're exposed to, and the confused chemical signals of your body. If we don't pause and ask ourselves what we want to want, we will spend our lives focused on unhealthy aims defined for us by others and the worst part of ourselves. We will pass these bad assumptions about life onto our children and loved ones. We will reinforce these boring, desperate defaults in everyone we encounter. To achieve freedom, we must be able to think for ourselves. If we don't cut to the core and program our wants, then our best-case scenario is to be a rich, successful, or famous slave. If we never peer into our programming, then we may end up being the cleverest rat in the room, but that's hardly worth celebrating." So, in short, your default factory settings are absolute horseshit, and you cannot follow them. People who do will never actualize their potential, either for happiness or success. You are not choosing what you want to want. You are not doing the thing that you meant to do. And there's another Seneca quote where he talks about, um, a man who steps out of his door on a morning, and if you were to ask him what it was that he was spending his day doing, he would say, "Uh, I- I- I don't know. I'm going to go s- to some places and see some people, and I will see what happens." And Seneca says, "They do not what they intended, but what they happen to run across." And there was also Dean Rickles who was on the show. He wrote, uh, The Shortness of Life, uh, about two or three months ago, and he gives this example of, um, a fisherman or a- a- a navy man going out to sea, you know, in the medieval times, and you would want to go on an adventure, right? You could go out, sit in the ship, and it would bob around in the ocean for six months, and you would come back and it would have moved, right? You would have gone and done things.But he didn't go anywhere, he didn't have a journey, he didn't have an adventure, and this is kind of the same but from an existential state where, what is it that you want to do? Do you want to carve a path through life? Do you want to actually be moving toward a direction that you have defined? And this again, uh, "Desires define our own paths of least resistance. Through deliberate training that at first feels tedious, we can eventually find, arrive at a point where we want what we want to want. Life should be lived by design, not default." Like, that to me just really encapsulates the most important lessons that I learned from the podcast over the last (sighs) five years, that you get to choose your desires. Then you spend a good amount of time repurposing your skill set in order to be able to help you achieve them, and once you've got to that stage, nothing can stop you. Like, you're- you- you know what you want, you have the capacity to go and get it, (sniffs) it's game over from there. But not knowing what you want to want, and even for the people who decide that they're going to focus on personal development first, this is why there can't be any growth without goals, really. If you don't have any goals, growth is pointless because you're just spinning your wheels and going faster and faster and faster, but not in service of anything. There's another, uh, quote from, uh, Ralph Waldo Emerson where he says, "My life is for itself and not for a spectacle." Or another one for La Rochefoucauld, who I can't really pronounce, and he says, "We go through far less trouble about making ourselves happy than about appearing to be so." Like, your life is supposed to be for you. It is you that makes the choice, it's you that's deciding the direction, it's you that is the person who is focused on where you are going and builds the skill set to enable that to happen. (inhales) Not spending time to decide on your desires means that you're going to be the man that steps out of his front door and doesn't know where he's going to go. He's going to see some people, he'll talk to some, he'll, uh, spend a bit of time, we might be getting coffee, do whatever. Like, that's not agentic. That's living life by default, not by design. Okay, next one. So this is from

7. 26:42 – 32:26

   Mastering First Impressions

   1. CWChris Williamson26:42

      Charlie Houpert, the guy behind Charisma on Command, and this is a much more less... We've had some, like, dark existentially things. This is a nice light one. And, he gave some really great, um, advice on how to appear charismatic, uh, even if you're not. Which I, I thought was really funny, and it was the first time that I'd heard a lot of these different conversations too. So, some of the favorite insights I got from this; one was when you meet someone for the first time and they ask what you do, they don't actually care about what you, what you do. What they're asking for is "Please give me any remotely interesting information which I can connect with my own life." So, it's an opportunity for you to give, uh, an engaging and interesting answer which can lead, uh, leave a good impression and lead to a fun conversation. So you could say, like, uh, "I'm in sales now but I did two psychology degrees at university and then I dropped my life and went to Brazil for six months and I've got a business coaching thing online, but I really just want to retire and spend my time with dogs and, uh, start a film school," or something. Like, in that, there are so many different little barbs and touch points that the other person can grab onto and they can say, "Oh, I, I did psychology," or, "I'd love to go to Brazil," or, "I'm into dogs," whatever it might be. Like, those are the most interesting ways, I think, to go around, um, starting a conversation and it w- it made so much sense. 'Cause when you say, "Oh, what do you do?" "I'm a business owner," "I'm a PT," "I'm a whatever," you go, "Okay, fascinating." Like, that's not going to get them to remember you. It's such a... And you, you have to have a little pre-prepared script, right? You, you know when someone says to you, "What do you do?" you already know what you're going to say, so just make the thing that you're going to pre-prepare more interesting. Right? You can pre-prepare it now or tomorrow. You can work out, "Okay, so I would tell them about this and I'd tell them about that and I'd tell them about the other thing." It's still pre-prepared. It's not gonna take you any more effort, it's gonna take you another 20 seconds and yet you're, like, ten times more interesting and the conversation's going to go further. All right, so the next one was, uh, how to add humor into conversations by purposefully misanswering questions. So this has been the biggest one that I've taken away from it and it is (laughs) like so stupid, it's so ridiculous to think that I didn't consider this as an easy way to add humor into conversations. But, um, m- maybe, like me, a lot of people listening take questions very literally. We're taught in schools to answer the question as we read it, in a logical, logistical manner, right? Uh, however, Russell Brand got asked on an interview, "Is it right that you're addicted to sex?" And he replied and said, "I don't know if it's right, but it's definitely fun." And (laughs) it's such a stupid thing to do, to like purposefully misanswer the question or to give, to give an answer that is evidently wrong. So for instance, if- if someone asked where you're from and you could reply that you're from the Congo or some other place that you're evidently not given your skin tone, that... It- it's just, it just makes people giggle. Like yeah, it's stupid, but it makes people giggle and it's the same as with the greeting. Like, most people aren't after a literal answer to their question when they're speaking to you. What they're looking for is a vibe that you're giving off and the opportunity to just be a little bit more playful. Not every question, right? Because it's going to end up sounding like you're doing improv. Like, you don't wanna tell- (laughs) answer every single question, uh, like untruthfully. You want to be truthful (laughs) for at least a good chunk of it. But-... trying to just inject a little bit of misdirection or looking for, um, opportunities to take, purposefully take, "Is it right that you're addicted to sex?" "I don't know if it's right, but it is a lot of fun." Like, that's him taking a, uh, dual meaning that could've been, uh, like evidently misdirecting the, the person that asked the question, and it's fun. Uh, and then one other element... What was his final one here? "A tip for how you can speak more attractively on a date: Lead with your values when you're speaking. Instead of saying that you have a job at a recruitment company which you can't wait to leave, say why you're doing that job and what it means to you. You've al- for instance, you've always wanted to buy a house for your mum, or travel abroad, or start a business, or whatever, so you're working in recruitment now to create some wealth before you pursue your dreams." That's nice. I, I quite like that. There was another one about how, um, you can use negative, uh, examples to get people to see you as higher value. So for instance, if, um, if someone was in a bar with you and you were talking to them and they said, uh, uh, y- you could say something like, um, "I, I absolutely hate people that don't hug. Like, I'm such a hugger. I'm such a physical person," um, that immediately posits you as the kind of person whom nonphysical people would want to spend time talking to, but you're already choosing and deciding to l- select yourself out from that group. That was a, just a, a really interesting way to invert... As opposed to saying, "I am a very affectionate person," you could say, "Oh, I... You know what it is? I, I... Fair play to them, but I... Non-affectionate people are just not for me. Like, I'm such a hugger. That's, that's me all over." The subtext to that is, "Lots of people who are non-affectionate want me, but I'm sorry, I have too high standards for that." Uh, okay. Next one.

8. 32:26 – 35:24

   If You Can’t Live Without Caffeine, is Really Helping You?

   1. CWChris Williamson32:26

      Uh, so this is a Hormozi thing, which you'll have heard me probably say before, to do with caffeine. I did 500 days without caffeine, which was incredibly illuminating and it reminded me that most people are totally dependent on their coffee intake to facilitate their, not only performance, but literally just their life. And the quote from Hormozi is, "If you can't function without it, it's stopped conferring a benefit. You need to be able to stop and only use it when you really need to know that you can crush. Off and on, off and on, is typically good enough for most." So, if you can't function without caffeine, can you really say that it's a performance enhancer? No. It's, like, mandatory. It's like air or something. It's, it's not assisting your performance. It, it re- it's required to get you from negative back to baseline or neutral, and that's not the way that it should be. Like, when you hear people talk about caffeine, especially, or alcohol as well, but specifically caffeine, they'll say, um... They won't say, "I'm tired." They'll say, "I need a coffee." Well, no, no, no, hang on a second. Like, it... Mm. You, you can be tired and not need a coffee. The other thing that constantly being reliant on caffeine does is it papers over the cracks of why you're tired at 11:00 AM in the morning every single day. It shouldn't be the case that you're tired at 11:00 AM. You know, even the most ardent parent of five with the late night job and all that sort of stuff, mid-morning you shouldn't be that tired that you need to have a coffee. So, by using caffeine to cover and fill in all of the concerns that you have, you're never actually forced to stare in the face, "Well, how was my sleep? Like, how's, how's my sleep hygiene? Am I using my phone too much on a nighttime? Am I exposing myself to too much blue light? Is my caffeine consumption actually causing my sleep to be bad, which means that I feel tired the next day, which means that I need to have more caffeine? Is that what's causing this vicious cycle?" Off and on, off and on being typically good enough for most, Alex's thing is exactly how I've done my caffeine. So I think since... This, this would be right to say. The most frequently that I've ever taken caffeine since stopping and then starting again, which would've been (inhales) a year and a half ago probably, something like that, 18 months, is one day. So I've never taken it two days in a row, and for the most part, I'm not taking it even, like, three days or, or within three, or four, or five days (sniffs) . Maybe twice a week. But if I have it one day, I can't have it the next. And the best... The reason that that rule is so great, and that's an inversion of James Clear's, um, Never Miss, uh, what is it? "A habit missed once is an error. A habit missed twice is the start of a new habit." So, caffeine taken once is fine, but caffeine taken twice is the start of a new dependency (sniffs) . All right, next one (laughs) . Uh, okay.

9. 35:24 – 42:30

   Difference Between Male & Female Self-Improvement

   1. CWChris Williamson35:24

      So, um, I am in a couple of, uh, neurodivergent degenerate group chats here in Austin, and I saw what one of the boys posted that I thought was a fantastic breakdown of the difference between the way that the world views female self-development and male self-development, and he said, "My current belief is that male self-improvement sees the person as mutable and the world as immutable, so you need to be able to be the best person possible whilst accepting the rules and environment you are in. This is in contrast with female self-improvement, who sees the person as immutable and the world as mutable. So women are taught to accept yourself and try to change the support structures and society you are in." And you see this reflected in modern cinema. That conversation that I had with Baggage Claim and the one that I had with Critical Drinker, both of them are saying the same thing. The role models that women have that are being put forward in popular media is, "You are perfect as you are. Uh, all that you need to do is believe in yourself. The only restrictions, and limitations, and challenges that you need to overcome are society's lack of belief in you." I mean, th- there is literally a scene in Doctor Strange 2 where a zombie version of Benedict Cumberbatch goes-... to a different universe to tell America Chavez, the female lead, daughter of a lesbian couple, also South American, who's never done any training at all, but also happens to have the greatest power in the universe, that all she has to do is believe in herself. Zombie Benedict Cumberbatch, alternate universe, "I just came here to tell you that you need to believe in yourself." Like, is that really an inspiring message for girls to have? Like, is it... should it not be that you can face down whatever it is that you're overcoming, that with hard work you can achieve things? And there was a, a contrast between the two different versions of Mulan. So, the first one, the Disney movie from like the original Aladdin days, whatever it must be, the '90s, that was, uh, I think she styled her hair as a guy and sort of snuck in and no one knew that she wasn't a, a, a... that she was a girl until later in the movie. And she's failing at everything because she's smaller and weaker and more fragile and doesn't have the skills, but she actually ends up working around that and using her size to her advantage. And then she develops all of these different tools and different strategies and she becomes better in a different way because she is forced to work harder. Then you contrast that with the live action remake of Mulan, which I think was in the last five years, and this girl, the exact same character, right, except for the fact that she's in the real world, the exact same character goes through none of the trials and tribulations. She's not asked to change herself in any way. She's perfect and super powerful already as she is, uh, and the only oppression that she sees is from the world outside. And that difference, the male, male self-invelvement (sic) -development sees the person as mutable and the world as immutable. The world isn't changing, you need to change yourself. As opposed to female self-development that sees the person as immutable, you are already perfect as you are, and the world is mutable, we must wrap and change and warp reality around you in order to make yourself feel better. Like, I, I... No, no. I- if, if I was a girl, that would make me feel incredibly patronized. Um, this is linked to another one, which is to do this- with this conversation around the sexual revolution and what Louise Perry has been talking about recently and this stuff about motherhood and population collapse. So this is a quote from Helen Roy, and she says, "Today, women especially, are sincerely frightened by the idea of becoming just a wife and a mother. American women willingly run from the home, from the specter of becoming a prisoner, or a parasite, or even worse, a glorified prostitute, into the open arms of the corporate employer. Laughably, we call this process freedom." I mean, the fact that no one is pointing the finger at the very obvious, uh, how would you say, perverse incentives that businesses have, businesses that have, um, impact on the media that can influence the sort of headlines that women read, and say, "Is it totally altruistic to push women to become worker drones in jobs that they may not love, to buy shoes that they may not need, to impress colleagues that they may not like?" Like, is that really exclusively coming from a place of third wave, perfect liberation, unfettered belief in women's opportunities? Or is it that you have an incentive to have as many people working in the workplace as possible? Like, I would have thought that there would have been questions, especially from the left, around, like, "Hang on a second, like, are we, are we really, are we really allowing surrogate families to come from an employer who, if you were sick for too long, would literally get rid of you?" Uh, I don't know. Uh, here's a final one, actually, as well, uh, which has... bears zero, um, philosophical or existential insight other than the fact it was interesting, which is why women's shirts button from the left (laughs) . Uh, "90% of the world's population is right-handed, yet only men's shirts button from the right. When buttons first appeared in the 17th century, they were only for the wealthy women who were dressed by right-handed servants. Placing buttons on the left made it easier for the servants to button them up. Having men's shirts button from the right made sense because men dressed themselves and because a sword drawn from the left hip with the right hand would be less likely to become caught." So guys, if you think about the way that your shirt goes, you go right side in, then left side over the top, right? And then you button like that. And now if you imagine that you take a sword from your left hip and draw it out, it's actually not going to get caught because the fold is running in the other direction. Whereas for women (laughs) , because they were dressed by maids, also because they were wearing those ridiculous bodices and those, like, huge bumblebee arse things, and I imagine it probably took a, a, a team of women and a, a scaffolder to be able to get a, a, a Bridgerton style lady put together. Um, but yeah, they reversed it because right-handed servants needed to be able to dress women. And it's just so- such a funny example of, like, conceptual lock-in that you have this thing that vestigially decides to be stuck... I'm just gonna... we'll just leave it. We... It's too difficult to change. I'm pretty sure, I might be wrong about this, I'm pretty sure that girls' hoodies zip from the left as well. I'm pretty sure that you need to pull it up with your left hand. Which, I mean, like the... when was the zip created? I have no idea, but it's definitely not in a time when people were mostly dressed by servants, right? So, it's just so funny (laughs) how you get this concept creep that comes out over the top. Anyway, okay, next

10. 42:30 – 48:22

    Gauging the Honesty of Creators

    1. CWChris Williamson42:30

       one. Okay, so this was, um, this was something that I only came up with really recently, and I was out for dinner with Oliver Heldens, DJ that did that song Gecko and does Hilo which is his techno thing, and he's a very, very nice guy, and he's a fan of the show.... did dinner with him and he asked, "How do I gauge the honesty of other creators and how can I be sure that they're trustworthy and not audience captured and creating their work for the right reasons?" And I ended up just off the top of my head describing a little, um, process that I must go through, and I, I, it made sense and I noticed myself going through it. And I was like, "Oh wow, that's the first time that I've written this down or said it out loud." Um, but it might be useful to you as well. So, first thing that I do is I ask myself, "When was the last time that I heard this person change their mind?" Side point, this doesn't actually necessarily just need to be for creators. It can be for anybody (inhales) that you want to work out, whether you think they are a, um, an adequate or trustworthy thinker. So the first one, "When was the last time that you heard them change their mind?" If no amount of evidence would change someone's opinion, then they don't hold a rational opinion, they hold an ideological belief. Like i- i- if there is no... If they can't tell you what it would take for them to alter their stance, you're not talking to somebody that is in the world of evidence and rationality and the scientific reason, right? All of the thinkers that I respect the least see changing their opinions as tantamount to destruction of their sense of self. Because when your ego and your stances have become fused so tightly that you can no longer separate them, you become less and less objective. And if someone doesn't regularly alter their opinions, they're either an unserious thinker or a godlike deity with omniscience. The second one is, "Do they primarily identify out-groups as a mode of bonding for their in-group? Do they primarily identify out-groups as a mode of bonding for their in-group?" So this is straight out of the Charlatan Playbook, which my housemate, Zach Telander, taught me about. Leaning into tribal biases is a fast track way to getting people onto your side because humans are naturally super tribal, so manifesting any enemy group to galvanize everyone into battle against will be superbly effective at encouraging affiliation. However, bonding together over the mutual distaste of an out-group is inherently fragile, right? Because everyone is only bonded together because the enemy of their enemy is a friend. The purity spiral happens as well, which means that you're, the only way that you can hold together a group that is bound together over the mutual hatred of an out-group is to continue to find out-groups to hate. So this is how intersectionality works with regards to some of the social justice victimhood stuff you've been seeing, whereby, um, if you're gay, you were part of the LGBT movement, but if you're gay and white, you're kind of a bit less gay because you're less oppressed, which means that the purity spiral will start to shave people off, and that's the way that it continues to bond the in-group together. Heretics that don't conform to the in-group ideology get identified and they get shamed. So, the rule would be to check whether the people who you are talking to or who you love the work of, you actually look up to them or if you just dislike the people who dislike them and who they say they dislike. That's a big difference and it, it sneaks in under the surface and it's very, it's very easy to get confused. Number three, "How often do they admit mistakes?" Genuinely, not performatively. So openness and vulnerability is a costly signal because it means that the person who you're following cares more about being accurate than seeming perfect. They're prepared to identify their own blind spots in the service of being honest and obviously one problem here is performative mistake porn is a tool that smart charlatans can use to pretend that they're owning up to a mistake, but it's just a smokescreen. It's not a real mistake that's actually vulnerable or embarrassing to them. All that they're trying to do is create a wall of, um, culpable, uh, justified realism so that you can't, they can't be accused of being t- too hubristic, right? Um, but just identifying mistakes, like it, does this person admit that they're wrong? Do they identify it? Do they bring it up? Um, that's usually a pretty good signal. Uh, and the final one, number four, "Do they want to hear alternative points of view for reasons other than mocking them?" Again, related to all of the above, if their entire body of work is an echo chamber where the only divergent voices are ones that they speak to in order to make them feel silly or galvanize out-group hatred or simply for clickbait, then they're not concerned with the truth. Not only is it important for your and their learning to be exposed to different opinions, but it's also important to show that you can talk to people who you disagree with without it turning into the sort of slanging match that literally everybody on the internet says that they hate to hate. So I'm sure that there's other problems here as well, but the alternative points of view, uh, uh, for instance, the episode that I did with, um, David Ley about cuckolding, uh, and porn, he's like a pro-porn researcher who's pro-cuckoldry and (laughs) like I was very, very impressed with how that episode was received. Obviously it still triggered quite a lot of people, but for the most part it was really, really like, "This is interesting, I can't see myself doing it, but I very much appreciate a respectful conversation between two people who maybe don't agree on this particular point of view, um, but I learned some new stuff." Uh, and, and it also sets a tone, right, that you can have conversations with people that have differing points of view. Um, in service of

11. 48:22 – 50:20

    Loneliness Comes With a Higher Complexity of Mind

    1. CWChris Williamson48:22

       what we've just gone through, uh, and not performatively, I promise, um, I was going to highlight something that I previously believed that I think is a mistake and that I now don't believe. Uh, and that is a quote from Alain de Botton that says, "Loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind." I must have said this 100, 200, 300 times. Uh, I love it. "Loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind. The more unique you are, the fewer people are like you and the fewer people will get you. This is fine because the increase in depth of insight is worth the entry price."I'm not convinced that this is true. I'm not convinced that this is true mostly because of my N of one incredibly representative (laughs) life, but that was the reason I agreed with it before. So I guess I've just proven the evidence that I was relying on previously. But since I've been in Austin... (smacks lips) I've noticed that the complexity of mind thing is actually facilitating greater depth of communication. It's helping me to find friends. It's helping me to, um... meet people that I genuinely have an affinity with and, um, I don't know what, maybe I'm gonna come full horseshoe and loop back around and be like, "Oh, actually, no. I was wrong. That was just like a smoke screen in front of (sniffs) or that was a trap door that I fell through." Uh, but I don't think that loneliness is a tax that you have to pay to atone for a com- complexity of mind. I think that you can, if you work hard enough to put yourself into an environment that has people who are like the sort of person that you are like, that complexity of mind can actually help to bind you together in a, a really great group. So, (sniffs) that was one of them. Oh, and here's a final thing, actually. So this is, uh, Claire Layman, who's the founder of Quillette.

12. 50:20 – 53:43

    How Audience Capture Has Distorted Media

    1. CWChris Williamson50:21

       A quote from her, "Optimizing for engagement has distorted mainstream media, but it's just as distorting to independent and alternative media as well, if not more so. It's sad to see the best minds of my generation destroyed by algorithms." And this is around the audience capture conversation, so when a creator finds a particular type of messaging that resonates really well online with their audience, they're incentivized to do that messaging more and more because it grows their channel. And as the channel grows, they get more positive feedback, the creator begins to make more editorial decisions about what topics to focus on based on what their prediction is of what the audience wants, as opposed to what they want to create. They're playing the game purely to appease the audience, and the problem is that just like with any drug, the user requires an ever-intensifying dose to be able to get the same effect. So, the creator has to have evermore outlandish and extreme views, more clickbait, even more red meat for the audience with even less nuance, because any subtlety or deviation from the audience's expectations will result in poor performance and pushback from this audience that you've basically become a simp to. Like, you- you, as the creator, have started simping for your own audience, so the incentive to challenge the audience with differing points of views is no longer there. And you can see how a creator who desires growth at all costs would easily be seduced by this. Like if, they would think, "If I continue being more extreme and predictable, I get more positive feedback and growth and money. If I move in the opposite direction, I get negative feedback and less growth and less money. So why would I do anything other than just, like, get on my knees and simp for the audience?" So instead of being an outlet for their own curiosity, the channel has now become a limbic hijack prediction engine for the creator's audience. It leads to hacky, clickbait-y, tribal, overblown work, and it's easy to tell, right? You can very simply tell which online creators have become audience captured because can you accurately predict this person's opinion on any topic without having them heard- without having heard them talk about it? Like, if the creator has become a caricature of themselves and they rarely surprise you with what they believe in or the guests that they bring on or the stories that they feature, if not, you've probably got someone who's audience captured. And the internet is so tribal that some audiences are only prepared to support a creator that agrees with their entire worldview and the slightest deviation from it can identify them as no longer a member of their in group and just an enemy. This was something I've said to do with Sam Harris, which is, agree with him or not, some of his takes are accurate. And you shouldn't support... Your, your, your support for someone that you believe in, or that has accurate takes shouldn't flip-flop between hatred and love based on whether or not you think that they're batting for your side. Like, it doesn't change the veracity or the accuracy of their insights. All that you're doing is basically saying, "Look, if you're gonna say all of the things I want you to say, then I'm on your side. As soon as you say one of the things that I don't want you to say, that's it, everything's out of the window." Yeah, well, look, like, you're limiting your own growth there. You know? You- you are stopping yourself from taking on board some genuinely valuable and useful insights because you don't like, like this bit or that bit. (sniffs) Okay, next one. Uh, this is

13. 53:43 – 56:30

    Be Clear About What You Want

    1. CWChris Williamson53:43

       the answer to every productivity problem, or at least that's what I think it's not far off, and it's John Maxwell who says, "You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything." And it's the core tenet of Essentialism by Greg McKeown. So, for the first time in history, most of our problems are due to abundance and not scarcity. Too much stimulation, too much convenience, too much information, too much calories, and too many options on how to spend our time. There are more things that we can do than we have time to do them in, and the allure of novelty means that we're pretty compelled to try and do as many of them as we can. Which is a recipe for disaster, because rather than creating a varied and engaging buffet of life options, it's an erratic seduction by everything, which then causes us to move incredibly fast in no particular direction, which means that you stay still in relation to what you actually care about. So, you have to decide what it is that you want and just ruthlessly cull everything else. Like, I- I- I genuinely believe that the ultimate productivity tool is just getting really, really clear on what it is that you want and just ruthlessly getting rid of everything that doesn't contribute to it. This doesn't mean that you need to be some...... cutthroat monk mode, hardcore, like, work all the time person, like if one of the things that you want is a flourishing social life or a great relationship with your partner or your kids or your parents or your environment or whatever it is, like that gets folded into this. What doesn't contribute to that may be spending two hours a day on TikTok, or pressing the snooze button for 30 minutes every morning, or never actually showing up to your workouts. Like, the ultimate productivity tool is something close to getting really, really clear on what you want and ruthlessly culling everything else. There isn't really anything more that you need to do. Like if, if all that you did was just work on the vital few tasks which are a part of your path of highest contribution, you wouldn't need a fancy to-do list system or Notion template to hold your entire life together. I think most overwhelming busyness comes from caring about what doesn't matter rather than working too inefficiently. And getting distracted by the many trivial options that we have every single day feels like work in the moment, but it looks like a waste in retrospect. So get clear on what you want, identify what moves you toward it, start to neuter everything else, and I'm pretty sure that this is the answer to all of the modern productivity maladies. What time we got? Mm, we got time for maybe one or two more. Okay, so I learned about a Kafka

14. 56:30 – 1:00:40

    The Trap of Defensiveness Being Proof of Guilt

    1. CWChris Williamson56:30

       trap, which is, uh, I probably should have learned about a long time ago, it's a pretty common thought experiment. But a Kafka trap is a fallacy where if someone denies being X, it is taken as evidence that the person is X since someone who is X would deny being X. It's the classic, uh, she's a witch, she's, um, a human if she drowns and she's a witch if she floats, so let's throw her in the sea. Uh, if someone is accused of something and they defend themselves, then it's considered proof of their guilt. It lumps together people who genuinely are not guilty of a perceived offense in with people who have committed the perceived offense and are trying to escape punishment. So, you could imagine a totalitarian government that were purging its political opponents and someone denied being an opponent of the government, but the government decided that since an opponent of the government would indeed deny being one that that person must be an enemy of the government. Uh, or hypothetically, uh, if an author claimed that all white people are racist secretly, uh, and suffer with white fragility and then decides that any denial of the racism is evidence of their white fragility and complicity in racist superstructures, that would also be a Kafka trap hypothetically, as I said. And this is another Gwendolyn Bogle quote here that says, "Smart people plus ideology is a terrifying cocktail. When intelligent people affiliate themselves to ideology, their intellect ceases to guard against wishful thinking and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently mastermind their own delusion and to very cleverly become stupid." So these two combined together, um, the prevalence of the public intellectual and the, uh, going right back to the start, that, uh, sense of need that you sh-... are your opinions, that you should have a take on everything, um, and the unfalsifiability of like performative compliance, again that Andrew Schulz thing, that all of this you can see if you start to piece some of the different things, even just the stuff that we've gone through today which is like, what, like, I don't know, 15, 10 or 15 concepts, you can start to see how some of the different trends and, uh, social contagions and, um, rhythms of communication that we've seen over the last 10 years or so, we can see where they come from, right? All of the incentives align for people to behave in very particular ways, for them to be their opinions, for them to go along with the crowd as opposed to push back against it, for them to coddle and patronize women, for them to, to sort of, um, point the finger at perpetrators when it comes to men. Uh, the Kafka trap thing is this very easy to claim unfalsifiable, uh, like thought trap that people can fall into, uh, and when you wrap all of this up in ideology that has stepped in to replace the fact that no one's got any religion or any grand narratives to hold themselves together anymore, all this ability to believe that you're very smart actually insulates them from being able to see the world. They're terrified of admitting that they're wrong or admitting their mistakes. Like all of this stuff today, uh, really does, apart from the thing about getting dressed from the left that maybe doesn't quite make as much sense, but it was interesting. So anyway look, uh, I love you all. Thank you. Um, roll on Episode 700. Don't forget chriswillx.com/books if you want to get a list of 100 life changing books that I absolutely love. They're interesting and impactful and there's links to go and buy them and there's descriptions about why I liked them so if you need new books just go there chriswillx.com/books. And I'll see you next time. (instrumental music plays) What's happening people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:00:40