EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,178 words- 0:00 – 3:17
Intro
- JSJames Smith
If you go through life always taking the path of inaction, always opening these loops wondering whether or not the girl on the tube was single, whether or not your boss would have given you a pay rise, whether or not you could have got more responsibility at work, whether or not you could have told your partner how you really felt, is it all a guise? Is not being confident a guise to excuse yourself for constantly picking the source of inaction?
- CWChris Williamson
I'm very, very happy for the last couple of months for you. Some big wins. Another Sunday Times bestseller. Congrats, man.
- JSJames Smith
Mate, thank you very much and the same goes for your camp. I mean, watching your trajectory over the last few months has been really good. Probably saw it before, like, probably six months ago when you went to Austin I was like, "This guy's, this guy's serious. This guy is gonna start moving in some big circles." And then some of the guests you've had on, I think have just bolstered your credibility, like, to that next level. Like, uh, yeah, you could see it from your first few years of effort where you were going and, uh, mate, it's been a pleasure to watch you kill it as well.
- CWChris Williamson
It's awesome to have a little community of people that are crushing it from the UK now. Really, really cool. And people that are all supporting each other, whether it's the Triggernometry boys or yourself, Darren's starting to step things up. You know, people are moving away to different countries, places that they know they can get more growth in. And it's really positive, so every time that you win, it makes me feel good, which is, uh, not necessarily something that I can say is a common culture in the UK. So I think setting that example is probably pretty good as well.
- JSJames Smith
Yeah, I, um, I hired, like, my first proper employee to help me with my socials, like, uh, pretty much like a social digital manager. And when it was things like YouTube, I was like, "Chris Williamson, we need to be more like him." Your end cards, your content, the way things all connect together. See, an interest in paradox that I kind of created the other day, I call it the hater inspiration paradox and in essence, most of the people that probably hate on you or hate on me, if I use myself as an example, are often personal trainers or black belts in jujitsu. And the reason for that is they came to a fork in the roads where they could have been inspired by what I did or hate me for what I've done. And it's quite ironic that the majority of people that will criticize you could have all too easily taken the same path as you to get to success. It's very weird. They're not... The people that hate you the most aren't strangers. They're very similar to these kind of like two little forks. And they're... I'm sure that a lot of people back in the day would have seen what you'd done and could have had negati- negative things to say, but for me, I was like, "What he's doing successfully leaves clues." I was like, "I need to step my game up, even if I could just, you know, follow the spearhead, even if I could just get in your, your path of least resistance behind you, like a bird flying in formation." And, uh, yeah, it's good. When we, we kind of put up strengths, weaknesses of, you know, real basic who in the industry is killing it in these different social industries and your YouTube stuff is top level.
- CWChris Williamson
We've worked hard at it and, you know, that's something that's good that it comes across. And the same thing for you. You know, you specialize. I wonder how much of the swimmer body illusion thing comes through here with regards to socials as well, though? Like, how many people are moving toward a platform which suits them? Me being short and pithy the way that you do your stuff on Instagram wouldn't really work for me very well. But the longer form, more waffly, verbose stuff seems to align. So yeah, there's, there's a lot to learn there. Before we get into talking about your new book, which is on
- 3:17 – 11:17
Are Healthy Foods a Form of Oppression?
- CWChris Williamson
confidence, there is a food standards video that the LA School District has just been slammed for. "LA School District is slammed for posting 'woke' video that's, that calls junk food bad is wrong and promotes new concept of 'food neutrality' that claims diet culture is based on oppression. The LAUSD posted a video on Instagram condemning negative attitudes towards junk food and claiming diet culture is based on oppression. In the video, nutritionist Kira Nyembe Diop, who works with one of the world's largest snack companies, urges people to eat food without guilt. She also asks the audience to avoid thinking of foods as good or bad, and instead promotes a concept of food neutrality. Many took to social media to call out the lessons in the video and the fact that it was shared by one of the school district's departments." What do you think about this?
- JSJames Smith
Well, some of the things they said I've said before, but because I'm a straight white male (laughs) you know, people probably disregarded that. "Oh, it's okay for him. Privileged," you know, all of these things. So, to see it wokeified and then to have the finger pointed, uh, you know... I've heard that dieting is racist, it's oppressive, you know, it's capitalistic, and people are getting very sidetracked with all of this. But watching the kind of woke version of it was a bit... yeah, a bit unsettling to say the very least.
- CWChris Williamson
So, you, it feels like your content from 2018 was being repurposed by the progressives?
- JSJames Smith
Yeah, and I don't understand why they couldn't have just said, "Hey guys, there's no such thing as a bad food, just a bad diet. There's no such thing as a good food, just a good diet." Which, I've got old videos from 2017 saying that, and to make it all about, you know, oppression and... It's, it's quite annoying to see something as simple as basic diet advice being put into a political pathway where ultimately, you know, if we are going to solve childhood obesity and improve things in school, that needs to be a collective effort. And even if you're, you're extreme left or extreme right, surely everyone, or at least the majority of people, want their family household of young children to be brought up into the best world, eating the best food and being the best composition for sport, health, social activities, whatever. I don't understand why it'd be a political thing.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, there's a, a couple of sentences in here that people might not have seen if they haven't watched the video. "You're judging my food choices based on a false standard of health again, aren't you? Diet culture, fatphobia and systems of oppression have created false hierarchies of food and it shows up everywhere." The nutritionist who is then joined by M- Mya Finno, a Black feminist and advocate against fat shaming who suggests that junk food is not bad for you. "We are all incorrectly taught from a young age that our size, and therefore the food we eat, are markers of our self-worth." No, I don't think that anyone says it is. It's a marker of your health and your health's worth though, perhaps. "The only foods that are bad for you are foods that contain allergens, poisons and contaminants or foods that are spoiled or otherwise inedible."I think that this seems to me to be a way of using anything that you can get your hands on as a political football. What can you align a particular group with? How can you rally someone behind your cause and saying, "This is a pressing," insert marginalized group one and insert marginalized group two. (laughs) Like, you know, it would- it honestly wouldn't surprise me if somehow they'd managed to inject sexuality into this as well. But my point being that anybody that thinks that there are not better ways to eat over the long term and worse ways to eat over the long term, uh, what job does she have being a nutritionist? Also, she might have a little bit of a, um, how would you say? Perverse incentive given that she works for one of the world's biggest confectionary manufacturers. Like, could it be that she perhaps wants people to continue paying her wage? Maybe.
- JSJames Smith
There's one of the most powerful lessons I've learned from you, and there's quite a few that I'll explain in this podcast, but the inner citadel is rife within this kind of, you know, uh, there- there's fat phobia, which again, is used as a political tool, there's body positivity. Some of the objective things she's saying, you know, like some people go to war with E numbers and, you know, they say, "Oh, if you can't pronounce the, uh, makeup of that ingredient then you shouldn't eat it." But they've never looked at the makeup of a banana or a strawberry broken down to that level. And, you know, the- the whole... There are... I do agree with some of the elements of health at every size. If someone is obese, there are more than one ways we can make that person healthier. We don't have to just look at fat loss as a single metric for improving that person's health. We can improve their cardio, uh, you know, cardio ability. We could get them into a team sport, we could look at their sleep, we could look at all of these things, but we can't just say to people, "Being overweight is fine." That's definitely an overcompensation. And I mean, again, there's lots of examples of overcompensation here. We can even look at it, there's almost a duality here with the feminism kind of side of things. The original cause for feminism was a fantastic cause, but there is an overcompensation that goes into the realm of man hating. And, um, you know... Uh, is it misandry or misandry?
- CWChris Williamson
Misandry, yeah.
- JSJames Smith
How do you pronounce it? Yeah, misandry. So, like, they- they move into those realms of overcompensation, and it is kind of sad to see because that inner citadel effect is... it hasn't worked for me, and I'm not surprised with the current state of diet advice and, you know, some of the other things that are promoted in America. But you shouldn't go onto then a war against people trying to give health-seeking advice and calling them fat phobic in the meantime.
- CWChris Williamson
I was in Rome this week with my mom, and one of the things that I noticed while I was there was the difference in portion sizes. Frankly, I was still hungry after I finished some meals, but I was satisfied. Now, that's because I'm used to... My satiated level is starter, main, side, and big dessert, and I was getting an all right sized main, but it wasn't that big, and then maybe some gelato on the way past and I was still hungry. But I was thinking to myself as I looked around the center of Rome, which is a cosmopolitan city with people of all backgrounds and ethnicities and probably a big chunk of people in different classes as well, the difference in BMI between that city and a lot of the ones in America is pretty stark. And that, I think, can probably almost exclusively be laid at the feet of portion sizes.
- JSJames Smith
Yeah, Joe, I was in Italy a few months ago (laughs) and it's so funny, the Italian culture, um, I got on like a- an easyJet flight, the 7:00 AM easyJet flight, so when you're traveling around Europe seems so appealing until you do the maths after you paid for it. Okay, that needs to be at the airport for 5:00. Shit, that means I've got to get up at 4:00 with a four in it. Anytime waking up with a four, so I was pretty gr- grumpy on my way there. And the way the Italians don't queue or they have a very different way of queuing to us. So I'm tired, I'm at the airport, and people are just walking into the front and I'm like messaging my man- manager Luke, I'm like, "Man, Italians are rude." He's like, "That's what they're like." And I was like, "Oh God, I've got to get used to this." And, uh, the food is incredible in Italy. Like, it's incredible, but it is crazy going to like the Mediterranean or somewhere like that and like you say, people are slimmer, they're in better shape, they seem to be drinking all the time as well. I'm there like, "How do you guys do this?" Like, there's a new system I want to sell. Is it having a cigarette with a bit of coffee at breakfast? And then is it having wine with every meal? Maybe we're missing out on something that they've... We need to take over to America and sell.
- CWChris Williamson
I think it's just make the portion sizes smaller, man. Honestly, make the portion sizes smaller seems to be the biggest difference I can find. But yeah, to round that off, uh, I think that any opportunity for people to use intersectionality and/or oppression as the vehicle with which to, uh, i- i- it latches itself onto something that is a common talking point like diet, fat phobia, body image, body shaming, uh, yeah, it- it's- it's pretty dangerous because you're talking about things that impact people's health, gener- genuinely impact people's health. This isn't just a- a fashion choice. This isn't about whether guys should be allowed to paint their nails or something. Like, this is, uh, one of the fundamental elements that's going to contribute to your health long term.
- 11:17 – 17:12
New Things Learned about Confidence
- CWChris Williamson
Moving on to confidence. What do you think, given all of the research that you did for your book, what do you think that most people misbelieve about confidence?
- JSJames Smith
Uh, it's interesting that there were- there are several kind of lines of thought, and I'll say that half of what I wrote in the book I knew before, half I didn't. And, you know, s- Joe, I'm still not solid. The whole book doesn't say this is exactly what it is. I go through many theories where I see confidence on loads of spectrums, you know, confidence and anxiety, confidence predicting the outcome of success, anxiety predicting the outcome of failure. Then we could look at confidence alongside failure. Is confidence being okay with failure or is confidence something tied to winning? Um, one of my favorite elements that I'll credit you for was when we were in Austin together sinking a few beers, you told me about the Zeigarnik effect?... and you started telling me about how you can open and close loops in your lives, and if you don't do anything, it's gonna take a mental drain on you. And something that now, that's something that you can leave with someone and they can never forget, so I say to people, "Is confidence bullshit in some respects that the majority of people use it as a reason to pick a path of inaction?" So, you hit a fork in the road, you can either take action or take inaction. If you go through life always taking the path of inaction, always opening these loops wondering whether or not the girl on the tube was single, whether or not your boss would've given you a pay rise, whether or not you could have got more responsibility at work, whether or not you could have told your partner how you really felt, is it all a guise? Is not being confident a guise to excuse yourself for constantly picking the source of inaction? And if we can call bullshit on this concept of low confidence, can we start looking things more pragmatically as an ability to close loops? And not even for confidence, let's pile that to the side, for anxiety, mental, mental drain, insomnia. You know, everyone's had it probably where you've had a big night out, this is the easiest way to explain it, and you wake up and straight away you think you've lost your phone, and you know you haven't lost your phone. You know you were texting or firing flares when you got in, "You up, babe?" or whatever it was. But you have to close the loop by getting up and holding the phone and going, "It's here." And so one of the first things that I kind of learned and I speak about in the book and the talk is, are we using low confidence as an excuse to get away with not picking a path of action continually in life? And that really is a really hard point for people to think about, 'cause once you've planted that seed in my mind, it couldn't go away. And that was kind of liberating and then I was quite excited to plant that seed into everyone else's mind afterwards.
- CWChris Williamson
It's a dangerous thing to know, to think about the fact that maybe I use "I'm not very confident" as an excuse to not put myself into situations where I can potentially face failure, because by inoculating myself from making action in the real world, I ensure that failure never comes up against me by never actually stepping onto the arena floor. And I think that, that- that's a- that's a concern for a lot of people, man. It- it... the open loops thing, I'd never thought about applying it to confidence and to the, uh, the fact that people cause inaction to occur in their life. And you're right, the number of times that you think, "I wonder what if," how many what ifs are you going to have? What if I'd spoken to the girl on the metro? What if I decided to ask my j- my boss for a pay rise? What if I decided to move to another country? What if I'd left that toxic relationship I didn't want to... what if I stepped in and told my dad or my mom that their health habits were terrible and they shouldn't listen to that LA school district lady? All of these different things are continuing to open something in the back of your mind, and even if you're not consciously keeping track of them, I do believe that the subconscious is. I do believe that every time that you decide to lean out as opposed to lean in, you are making yourself into the sort of person who is going to continue to lean out in future when difficulty arises, when you are faced with an opportunity or a challenge that you need to try and overcome. Okay, every single decision that you make now is going to engender a type of person that will make that same kind of decision in future. So, it's not just about what are you doing now, how much do you want to speak to that girl? It's do you want to be the sort of person in five years' time that would speak to the girl or not?
- JSJames Smith
It's, uh, objectively known as well, in psychology, that when you, uh, question people on their deathbed, especially old people, and you ask them about their life, people regret the things they didn't do, not the things they did do that didn't work out. And we need to instill and kind of haunt people a little bit to fully appreciate that. When you are 50 years older than you are now, if you're lucky, you are going to regret all of these open loops, these what ifs, you're gonna regret them and they're all gonna cause, um, a lot of mental carnage in your mind. And there's something so beautiful about getting closure on something and realizing it wasn't that bad. And another thing, uh, I'm sure you've read quite a bit of Tim Ferriss's work as well, and one of his most famous, uh, kind of tasks was about asking for a 10% discount on a coffee. And I just wanted to insert that in the book, I just wanted to take that beautiful idea of asking for 10% and put it in. But what I realized is by putting it in the book, I opened my own loop, and then I had (laughs) to go do the task that I never wanted to do, I just wanted to put it in there, and I thought, "No one will know." And I thought, "Oh, no, this is gonna haunt me. I'm not even gonna be able to release the book." And I remind people that asking for 10% off a coffee isn't to get the 10% off, it's to look like a complete imbecile, a buffoon. It's to embarrass yourself. It's to comple- completely disintegrate any comfort that you have. But it's only past that point you can appreciate how valuable it was putting yourself out there and how it wasn't that scary. And when you can accrue enough of these little victories, whether it's the number, asking someone if they're single, even if that girl says, "No, thanks, I've got a boyfriend," even if she's lying, there is a euphoria after. Not because of the outcome, because of the- the action that you perceived so scarily big that you do it and you realize it wasn't that bad at all.
- 17:12 – 23:20
The Power of Rejection Therapy
- JSJames Smith
- CWChris Williamson
Did you come across, when you were looking at the ask for 10% off a coffee, did you come across rejection therapy and their 100 days of rejection program?
- JSJames Smith
No. Tell me more.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. So, uh, rejectiontherapy.com, and there is 100 days of rejection principle here and you're supposed to do this one per day for 100 days, and it's basically the same as what you're talking about, right? It's exposure therapy for people that don't like to do awkward things. Uh, borrow $100 from a stranger, request a burger refill, ask for an Olympic symbol donut, deliver pizza for Domino's, have a tour in a grocery store warehouse, play soccer in someone else's backyard, uh, speak over Costco's intercom, get a- get number one spot in Best Buy's Thanksgiving line, send stuff to Santa Claus- Santa Claus through FedEx, uh, listen to a happy birthday song when it's not your birthday, learn sales from the number two car salesman in the country. Like, these are all different things that you can do. There's a- a- a TEDx Talk of the same, uh, the same name that people can go and have a look at, but lots of people have done it and I think it is, it's just exposure therapy about...... learning how un-scary and undestructive receiving a no is. A lot of people, I think, have this tantamount to complete annihilation fear that if they go up to someone and they don't get the response that they're expecting, that, I don't know, just on the other side of that is obliteration.
- JSJames Smith
They think it's Pyrrhic, which is another thing you, I think you might mention. Pyrrhic victories is from your email that you sent out before, is this victory tantamount to defeat? In many cases, no. And do you know what? I, I've kind of tripped up into this be- through being poor. So when I was a student, I had no money. I, you know, would take anything for work. I worked in a pub on a, on a like a, pretty much like a caravan site when I was 16. When it was my 18th birthday, the guy who hired me was like, "How old are you?" I was like, "18." He's like, "Are you kidding me? You've been working in this pub for two years." He's like, "I thought you were 18 before." So I used to work up there. We used to have like, you know, builders in all the time, whatever it was, and then, uh, I got offered a job working in shopping centers, stopping people to, to sell to them. So this is (sighs) 10, 15 years ago. Do you remember when Blockbuster started facing its demise? Lovefilm came out, where you get posted your DVDs. So I worked as a contractor for Lovefilm, and for every person I stopped and signed up to a membership, I got seven pounds, which will get you two coffees from Costa nowadays. So I used to do that in shopping centers, so the majority of things I experienced were nos. Then I got a job in door-to-door sales working for Npower in Gloucester, knocking on doors trying to convert people from the big giant British Gas over to Npower. In some cases, I could save people four pounds a month and then I had to be like, "Hey, look, 40, 50 pounds a year, that's a good saving." So I got rejected so much that I didn't even realize how brilliant that was for me, you know? Having things, doors shut in your face, people telling you to fuck off, people getting angry that you're there trying to save them money or whatever, and I kind of went through that rejection therapy as part of work. And it's weird, 'cause at the time, I was like, I didn't enjoy it, but looking back now, it's one of the things I'm most grateful for.
- CWChris Williamson
How much did that cross over into o- other areas of rejection fear and confidence though? Because I know that you've spoken about how you drink or drank a lot before going on first dates because of anxiety about going up and speaking to a girl for the first time, even one that you've organized to go on a date with, or if you were given the choice between going and giving a presentation in front of a thousand people unprepared or asking for a girl's number in a bar, you would happily go and give the presentation. So it does seem like there's different buckets or domains that confidence doesn't necessarily always cross over into.
- JSJames Smith
Oh, 100%. And again, the public speaking thing, for some reason, it relaxes me. Do you know what's really weird? And this is gonna sound like such a narcissistic thing. The bigger the crowd, the more I can relax, because the less I can actually appreciate how many people are in the room. So if there's 20, I don't know, 25, 30 people, I can actually lock eyes and, you know, actually appreciate they're there. When you get past 1,000 people, it's beautiful because you can't lock in to anyone that's there. But I think the rejection thing, you're completely right, and I speak about this in the talk, saying that in essence, I'm an insecurity machine, because I became a PT through working on my insecurities. I wanted to be less insecure and feel less inferior to other men, so then I did that, and then when I became a PT, it was, you know, inadequacies and inferiorities that didn't really make prospecting a good thing, because someone might not be able to afford PT, they might not want PT, they might be doing another plan, but it's very difficult to not take that personally, especially when you do appreciate... I never really appreciated Lovefilm, I never really appreciated Npower, but I appreciated myself as a trainer. I was like, "I work hard, I'm good, I'm worth the money." So when I got rejected there, I was like, "Oh, that kind of hurts." So then (laughs) I'm, through being insecure there, that's what led me down the path of making social media content. So I made content so people would organically come to me, they were warm lead. It would make the whole idea of prospecting or conversion a lot easier. But then I became insecure about my content being right, so now out of fear of judgment and fear of, uh, you know, all of this, then I started going out and searching and educating myself on evidence-based courses. In essence, a lot of the success I've had in my life has come through working on my insecurities, which then I only really clocked that this is one of the main lessons of Jordan Peterson, where if you're in an existential crisis, you're not sure what to do with your life, take stock of your insecurities and work on them. And I was like, I look back and I'm like, "Wow, I didn't even know that and I was doing it."
- CWChris Williamson
There are a lot of places that people can look. Uh, I mean, Peterson said this on the second episode that I did with him earlier this year. If you don't think that you have anything that you need to work on in your life, look inward. You know, you're not telling the truth sufficiently, you are not living up to your highest ideals, you're making promises to yourself and other people that you're not keeping, just this endless list of inadequacies, the small things, you know, the tiny little things. "I promised that I would wash up tonight." To myself, I promised that I would wash the dish and the glass that I had dinner in, and I didn't do it. Well, that, that's a thing, that's a thing that you can work on. A lot
- 23:20 – 34:40
Does Fake It ‘Til You Make It Work?
- CWChris Williamson
of people will have probably thought when it comes to confidence, especially looking at you, what's the chicken and egg scenario here? Does confidence come first or does competence come first? Can you fake it until you make it? What's your thoughts there?
- JSJames Smith
So I don't like the fake it till you make it thing. I think it's kind of a, a bit of a, a check out the conversation. That's a chicken and egg thing itself, but you're completely right. What I don't like, and I'll bring this into a context that you'll be familiar with, is when people see success, straightaway, they like to connect their own dots. It's like a heuristic, where suddenly they're like, "Bum, bum. Okay, cool." And some of the ways that I don't like they do it is they go, "Oh, you know, Chris Williamson, he's, he's a confident guy. He's got a podcast." And you're like, "Okay, was he confident and then he started a podcast or did he start a podcast that built his confidence?" You know, the fact that you can jump into a, uh, a podcast for three hours without show notes, is that competence or confidence? Exactly like you said. Then they'll sprinkle that with some ideology that's rife at the moment, they'll go, "Oh, he's a straight white male as well. You know, he got everything he wanted in school. He got picked for sports teams." All of these things which makes it a lot more of a complex debate. But with me, I think that it's only in retrospect that people now go, "Oh, he's, he's confident." I'm like, part of me be, wants to say, "Fuck you."... I was frightened at the beginning, I was petrified. I was, you know, scared, alone. I was, uh, you know, as a PT on my own, even though it's, doesn't seem like a scary kind of job, it was. I left the corporate world. I moved back in with my parents. I could have all too easily ended up skint, broke, and going back to door-to-door sales so, you know, even that industry is quite siloed off because although you have banter with other PTs, you're competitors. You're not colleagues. You're in there fighting for the same thing, and then it's just through consistent being okay with failing, turning up, and, you know, I'm coming up to 10 years now. If you, if you've got anyone to do anything for 10 years, they'd appear fucking confident. You know, not some... My, my mate Cam is a carpenter. I watch him do stuff, I'm like, "Mate, you're a wizard." And he's like, "Mate, I've been doing this since I was 15," and I'm like, "Okay, yeah, that makes sense." So, it does kind of annoy me that people look at 10 years hard work and they can almost use this elixir of confidence as a reason to not fully appreciate what you've done. I mean, what episode of podcasts will this be? What number?
- CWChris Williamson
530, 540.
- JSJames Smith
So when you look at that times the hours, sometimes I, I'm not saying "fuck you" to the people, I'm saying "fuck you" to their heuristics, their, their mental, uh, tendency to just take the reality and squish it and pull it apart to make it seem like it's trivial, because that completely undermines the cheat code to success. What people need to be doing is to stop that, that tendency to just make a snapshot decision of how it happened and look into it. Someone's going, "Fucking hell, 500 podcasts. How many hours is that? Oh, two hours a, a fucking podcast, 1,000 hours." This guy's, you know, on his way to mastery, not to mention everything else you've done outside of it. So, yeah, the competency thing is, is big and one of my favorite, kind of, lessons is about saying to people, "Stop avoiding failure 'cause there is a massive utility to failing." Failing is brilliant because it brings you closer to competency. It also shows you the path to not do things. So, even if we go back to my door-to-door sales, if I was too cheeky, too crass, too provocative, too facetious, too, you know, nonchalant, it didn't work. So, and again, my YouTube strategy at the moment is to put out 100 videos and take stock of what works and what doesn't. Ultimately, the algorithm wants people to watch my videos. If a video doesn't do well, it's on me. Double down on what does work. If I didn't or are so fearful of putting out a video that underperformed that I didn't put it out, I wouldn't be able to take that utility of it not performing. So, you know, if people don't look at failure that way, you know, having a go and just go, "Ew, no, gross. That was a horrible chat up," although that is devastating to your ego and your confidence and your morale, that could be a lesson in which you can take upon yourself to then improve. And if people don't look at failure as having this incredible utility, they're gonna really struggle to ever develop their competence. And I say to people, "If you become competent at something, two years time someone's gonna say to you, 'You're confident.'" It's not, it's almost like a byproduct of seeking competency that we get this magical superpower of being confident.
- CWChris Williamson
It seems like your expectations around what you can do and the challenges that the world is going to put up against you are one of the fundamental elements that this is. The first time that you do a live or a podcast or write a Substack or pitch to someone on the front door of their house on a cold December evening or something, you don't know what your capacities are and you don't know the challenges that you're up against. And then even after you do know what your capacities are, sometimes the challenge can be so much further beyond anything that you've done before that you think, "Oh, God, like this is really, really scary to me." But if you can get yourself into the mindset that on the edge of your zone of development is exactly where you're going to find out just how good you are, and if it, if you're not that good then fantastic because it's going to give you feedback. Think I've heard you say that, um, winning can cause you to become weak. Too much winning can cause weakness. And, I mean, anyone that's been through a difficult breakup, like not one of the ones that completely destroyed your life, but one where you felt a little bit bitter and resentful afterward. Your gym discipline, your diet discipline, your personal development, at least for me and a lot of my friends, for the next three to six months, was unbelievable, turbo-powered by that. Well, why? You've just come out the back of a failure. You've come out the back of something that shouldn't have happened, or you get scorned or someone takes the piss out of you or a person that you respected rebuffs your efforts or something like that. That is motivation for a lot of people as well, and there definitely is a case of comfortable complacency that comes along with too many wins, or at least too many wins that are within a, uh, domain that you are never going to be challenged. If you keep on winning and you're always beating new records and always pushing yourself, I'm not sure that that would cause you to, uh, lose the edge. But certainly the opportunity to use failure as fuel is, uh, a pretty big blessing for people.
- JSJames Smith
I think this is why I love jujitsu so much because I had a, a period, 2020, came out the pandemic, I trained a bit during the pandemic, uh, you know, I did some sneaky privates with the local black belts and I went to compete and I was like, "This is my opportunity to shine." And I even, this is the only time I've truly been overconfident with jujitsu, this is exactly the humbling I needed, and I said to my housemates, "I'll be pretty annoyed if I don't get gold," and I lost all my matches, like embarrassingly so. My first match I tried too hard and I gassed out, and the most horrible feeling was knowing I'd lost. I'm tying my belt three minutes into the match and I was like, "I'm done." And I, the only time I'd competed and said, "I don't want to be here." And he kind of finished me, and my whole team were there in the corner and I couldn't look at them. They're like, "Well done." I'm like, "Don't say well done to me, I didn't deserve it." Then the next match, my mates were like, "Relax, relax. You'll be fine." This guy just took my back and choked me out and they were like, "He didn't even try." They weren't even, they weren't even trying coaching me. They were like, "Why didn't you just try it?" I was like, "My head had gone." And the next day was probably the only day that I felt, like depressed about something in years. It had nothing to do with business, work, whatever.... and then there was that little switch in my mind, where I just started taking things so much more seriously. I started doing privates with people, I started studying, I started looking into positions a bit more. And, like, the next six months, I was a monster at training. I was like, it didn't matter who you were, I was like, "I need to start scalping the higher belts," or whatever it was. And then when I get through a period of being really comfortable with my training, I sit there and I go, "Fuck, I'm gonna have to compete again." And when I compete, I can't- I hate losing, but I welcome it. If I lose, I'm gonna get that kind of beast, trainee person back who eats more vegetables, hits their protein, goes to sleep earlier, says no to the beers. And the last time I competed, it was a really weird emotion. I wanted to win with everything I had, but I kind of wanted to get beaten as well. And I won all my matches. It's the hardest I've ever worked in comp, and at the end of it, I couldn't believe how hard I'd worked for someone who kind of wanted to get beaten. And it was beautiful, it was euphoric, it was amazing. And then I came to the conclusion, "I've got to compete at a bigger tournament now." And obviously, jujitsu is in my life. I don't get paid to do jujitsu, I teach a class for free on a Friday, like, whatever it is. That, to instill the values and the, the lessons that I needed to take into everything else is, is such a beautiful thing, and I think that's why so many people love jujitsu because even Rogan, Lex Friedman, Jocko Willink, all these people, if they ever feel like they're winning too much in their life, they can put themselves in a room where they get humbled and they realize they're not that great. And yeah, your podcast might be doing well. Yeah, you might have made $100 million last year. Yeah, you might have got this big deal. But come to this room and get, get truly scorned, get beaten, get scalped, get humiliated in some respects, and it's such a beautiful feeling because if you remain in this echo chamber, the room of winning and you're the best, you're the greatest, which is all too easy with success, you have too many yes men, and I think they can really diminish your full potential. It's always good once in a while just to put yourself in that room and be terrified. When I trained in Austin, I, I relished the fact I was probably, if you put everyone in competency order, I was in the bottom three and there were two guys that were in that bottom three with me. I was like, "We're in it. We're in this together, guys."
- CWChris Williamson
How heritable is confidence? Did you look at that?
- JSJames Smith
Yeah. So heritability and confidence is an interesting one. I actually found an interesting study about adopted children. And so me, myself being adopted, I was like, "Is there, am I, are some of my personality traits, you know, in my genes?" And it was saying that adoptive kids resemble the traits of their parents up until their young teenage years and then they start moving into more of their genetic sequence and code. Then I started getting into this debate of gender and confidence, but I s- I stayed clear of some of the debates because I was like, "Are men genuinely more competent or are they more disillusioned? Are they more, you know, programmed through evolution to be more competitive for things?" And I was like, "Do you know what? I probably don't know enough about gender to delve into this." But what I kind of came to the conclusion was if you wanna be a woman that's taller than a man, you've got it up against you. If you wanna be a woman who's stronger than a man, okay, things are more in your control. You could be, you know, you start working towards the higher echelon. That's something that you could really work towards. But I was like, if you wanna be more confident than the majority of people, that's something you can actually do. And I could point out anyone, no matter what disadvantages they had from a genetic standpoint, uh, upbringing standpoint, a trauma standpoint, give me that person for a year and get them to do enough practice, you can make someone incredibly confident. Whereas you can't make people taller, you can't make them, you know, more symmetrical in the face. You can't give them w- whatever it is that people say you like when you're looking at social content. And I think there's a beauty to even if you've got it against you from a hereditary standpoint or a genetic standpoint, you can do the fucking work and get over it. If you wanna play in the NBA and you're five foot two, you know, that's something where I'm like, "Uh, maybe, maybe you need a better goal."
- 34:40 – 44:20
The Matthew Principle
- CWChris Williamson
It's interesting to think how low the bar is set for most people. This is one of the things that I think the black pill, incel sort of discussion really gets wrong when it comes to men that aren't in the top 20% of men, aren't being looked at by almost any women, and blah, blah, blah. Do you realize how little almost every guy works on himself? Almost, when you step outside of the world of internet personalities and look at the normal humans on the street, almost no one is doing pretty much anything to develop themselves and make themselves better. The people that are listening to this podcast simply by being interested in longer form conversations about personal development are in the top probably percentile, if not maybe 5% globally, right? So all of the grandmothers that don't know that podcasts exist, all of the... Okay, and then we'll reduce it down to men only, and all of the grandfathers that don't know that it exists, and all of the people that are too young, and all of the people that are too busy working, and all of the people that don't have an interest or an intellectual pursuit, all of it, da, da, da, da, da, all the way down. Then to the point when all of the people that can't be bothered, that don't have the motivation to do it, that don't feel like it's going to be worth their time, that are too busy thinking about other things, that haven't got the inclination to do it. The bar is set so low because the selection effect is unbelievably low as well and I think that if, if more people understood that the competition is minute and all of the challenges that people come up against, the boredom, the repetition, the loss of faith, the fear of rejection, everybody else faces that as well. So you have to presume that if you're facing it and you just get an inch past it, you have selected yourself out from what everybody feels into what only a tiny, tiny sliver of what is already a tiny subsection of everybody feels. To become an extraordinary individual, to me, doesn't seem like a particularly difficult pursuit. It just requires a little bit of movement. And this is something that, going through your book, I kind of realized, which is the Matthew Principle. Are you familiar with this? Okay.
- JSJames Smith
No.
- CWChris Williamson
So this-
- JSJames Smith
Save it. It'll be in my next book (laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
I'm sure it will. Uh-In the Bible, they talk about, it's in, it's in Matthew, which is, uh, why it's called the Matthew Principle, and they say, um, "From those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, more will be taken." And it describes, well, you call it what you want, the Pareto principle or power laws, right? These are ways that people who are winning accrue more wins, and wins accrue to the people that already have them. People that are losing accrue more losses, and losses continue to push down. And it seems to me that confidence works like this as well, that people who have even a tiny amount, they've decided to take that first step, that inertia that they've got past, and then they get a little bit of positive feedback from the world, so they have a bit of self-belief. And then they decide to go a little bit further and they get a bit more self-belief. That is how you look at a, a, a Rogan or a Dave Chappelle or a, a, a Odell Beckham Jr., or whoever you hold in high esteem as somebody that's incredibly confident, they have drilled this Matthew Principle where confidence breeds competence, breeds confidence, breeds competence. And after a while they look superhuman. You know, I, I, I, I can't believe the capability that this person has. And then especially perhaps Rogan might be a good example for this, where you have someone that has crossed that confidence into multiple domains, so it's somebody that's not just prepared to do the podcasting, but then the live shows, but then the jujitsu, but then the commentary, but then the... all that stuff, right? Douglas Murray is a, not only a speaker, but he's a writer, but he does the journalism thing. Like, someone that has gone through all of these, you think it, uh, that person is so unbelievably willing to do things to the point where I can't recognize them as, as-
- JSJames Smith
(laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
... someone that is from the same species as me. And then you look at the people at the bottom and it's brutal because if you don't have the confidence to develop competence, you are going to reinforce that same cycle. And I think that this Matthew Principle, "From those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, more will be taken," just continues to diverge people. And this isn't some cis heteronormative patriarchal superstructure, right? This is simply the reinforcement mechanism. Peterson spoke about this on the podcast, he said almost all of the rivers, uh, almost all of the water in rivers are held by only the biggest ones. Almost all of the mass that's held by a star are only held in the biggest ones. Like, this is the way that things work in the world. This isn't due to some cultural artifact. This is simply due to the fact that people who do things and objects that have-
- JSJames Smith
I love this.
- CWChris Williamson
... capability continue to do it more and more and more.
- JSJames Smith
(inhales) Someone said to me, "Oh, it's impressive you wrote a book." And I said, "No." And I, I went in on them, I said, I said, "Fuck you." I was like, "No." I was like, "You've annoyed me with the way you've thought about this." And I said to them, "I sit you down on a Monday. Uh, I give you a laptop. I give you unlimited coffee. I give you the internet. And I put a pistol to the back of your head and I say, 'Here's your topic. I want you to research for 15 minutes and write for 15 minutes.' We're gonna meet at the same time every day. We're gonna do this for 30 minutes every day. There's gonna be a gun in the back of your head every day. If you don't do it, I'll shoot you. And in a year's time, we're gonna assimilate all your work and we're going to look to see whether or not you've put something together worth 10 pounds.'" Cool. Suddenly you realize it's not impressive to write a book. It's not impressive to write a good book. All it takes is work and consistency. The hardest barrier to writing a good book is the belief that you can do it, the belief that you can turn up every day and put this together. Then the belief that you're willing to do the work and preparation required to sell it, promote it, go to the book signings, whatever it is. It's not an impressive feat to write a book. It's an impressive feat to believe you can do all of it together. And it's interesting what you say about Joe. I've, I've really been thinking about this whole s- status and men thing, and it is a really, really interesting thing, and there are some things that men can't do. And again, something, I'm not sure if I'm appalled, disgusted, offended, or, or warped about it, but the six sixes, you heard of this?
- CWChris Williamson
No.
- JSJames Smith
In men. So women over the years have, uh, whether or not it's made up by women or this was made up by men, I'm not sure, but it says women want the six sixes. Over six foot, over a six figure salary, over 600 brake horsepower car-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) .
- JSJames Smith
... six months since next girlfriend, six pack, and six inches below the waist. Now, the majority of women, not probably publicly on camera, are looking for that. And the statistics on dating apps, 80% of women want a woman over, uh, a man over six foot, which is 15% of the population. So there are unrealistic expectations from women, especially when it comes to dating. I didn't even know on Hinge you can actually, uh, take off, uh, the height requirement so they even get blind swiped. A friend of mine, I won't name him, uh, he had to change his ethnicity 'cause he was getting no s- no swipes. So to the point that, you know, I was saying to him, "Mate, your, your account is broken." Or, "You've been shadow banned." Or whatever it was. And he had to lie about his ethnicity to white just to get matches. And I was like-
- CWChris Williamson
What was his original one?
- JSJames Smith
Well, he's from Morocco, right? So I'm not sure what, what he put in. But he's, he-
- CWChris Williamson
Is that Arab? I feel like it might be.
- JSJames Smith
Maybe, maybe something like that. But for him to lie about his ethnicity, and he definitely lied about his height. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JSJames Smith
I was like, "Five foot, five foot eleven." He's shorter than me. And I was like, wow, trying to jump through all of these hoops. But if we were to look as a statistic of how many men are actually within the six sixes, you're talking a, a fraction of a percentage. And if the majority of women are after that, not only is that fucked, but I- I've often thought about how could I help men with the things that are obtainable? And I would love to put together a program where you can mix a good mindset, an entrepreneurial brain, and a martial art. And, you know, the competency, con- confidence thing, once you have mastered or got your blue belt in, you know, martial arts or you've got to the gym and you've sorted yourself out, once you can get someone to deadlift their body weight, do a chin up, strangle out someone at the same belt level, you know, run a 5K without having a heart attack-... have a online business where they put their laptop out for a few hours at night and they can create money or whatever, suddenly not only do you create a lifestyle that's congruent to happiness in a lot of people, not only do you improve their self-worth, their competency in the gym, whatever it is, you start to build their status from the inside up. And there are so many tools, like you say, that are just uncomfortable for people. People that wanna sell a product don't wanna put themselves out there, people that wanna, you know, lift in the gym don't wanna be embarrassed or to get in the front of someone else. People that go to martial arts are worried about sucking for the first two years, although that is the only way you can get better. And I do often think that, you know, if a man out there wanted the six sixes, he's looking at the wrong things, 'cause I don't even think that the, those six elements are backed up by literature. The height thing especially. I believe you said it was, it's not a predictor in a success in a relationship.
- CWChris Williamson
No. So, i- i- th- there's a, uh, issue that we have here that the desired preferences from both men and women on the front end are not the things that predict relationship happiness long term, but there is an argument to be made that those are the things that get you past the front door. However, if you get past the front door regularly and the relationships aren't effective, you go, "Well, what's the point of, uh, of doing this in the first place? This is just like transactional sex. I'm just masturbating with someone else's body here." Um, so-
- JSJames Smith
(laughs) I've heard that (laughs) I love it.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- 44:20 – 55:10
Relationship Between Confidence & Anxiety
- CWChris Williamson
Um, all right. So t- talk to me about, i- it seems like anxiety and this sort of fear of failure is one of the key elements of confidence, or a lack of it. What did you discover is the relationship between confidence and anxiety?
- JSJames Smith
So we need to have... It ties into expectations as well, similar to what you said. Because if we see anxieties predicting an outcome of failure, that is also governed by a lot of mental biases we have. We have loss aversion, negativity bias. We've got all of these kind of things, uh, pretty much. You know like, uh, when you go to a ba... I've just thought of this, this analogy, and then you roll the ball and it always is tilted to one way, so it usually curves in the, the direction of the weighted ball. If you had pessimism on the left and optimism on the right, the way the human brain works is if you roll it down the middle, it's gonna curve off towards the pessimism side. So we have that. So this tendency to predict things as a negative outcome is going to happen, so how is it that we predict an outcome of success? How is it we can bolster our expectations? It's not a simple exercise, but we do need to go into things, you know, being more optimistic about it. And if, if we're really crippled by this fear of anxiety or whatever, can we redefine the metrics for success? So let's say you are a single man, you feel like you're a low status, you feel like you're petrified, can you just say hello to someone? Can you compliment them on what they're wearing? Can you ask them what they do? Not invasive, not creepy, be chivalrous, hold a door open for someone. "Hey, uh, you know, my name's James. Uh, I haven't seen you around here before. Do you study here? Are you, you know... Is this your local coffee shop?" You know, I usually say hello to people, whatever. There's something within people's capability that they have the confidence to do, whether it's prospecting or talking someone for their business. If you set the bars too far, it's always gonna be very daunting. And again, we can always relate this back to fitness. You w- you never as a trainer would get someone into the gym and get them to do something they can't do. That's gonna diminish their confidence, their ego, their self-esteem, whatever. It's all about finding what they can do and working with them to decide what's the next logical step, and that's why we have little 2.5 kilogram discs, you know? That's why we have these things. So if people can just snap out of this mentality of being pessimistic, expecting things to go badly, if I get someone to squat 50 kilograms, I've now instilled into them that they're strong enough to do it. You can then work along with them and say, "Look, I think 55 is within your reach. If you can do 50 for five, you can do 52.5 fucking 3," whatever it is. And we need to instill progressive overload into people. We would never chuck 40 kilograms onto someone's back squat and expect them to do it. So when people do take stock of this appreciation that they're going to predict a negative outcome, okay, why is that? Are we setting the metrics for success too high? Can we break this down to, okay, jujitsu scares the fuck out of you. Could you go to your local gym and say hello? Could you watch 10 minutes of a class? Okay, dating scares the shit out of you. Could you talk to a stranger? You know, uh, okay, business scares the shit out of you. Okay, could you cold call one person a day to pitch for business? Whatever it is. And yet, in essence, the anxiety is sometimes caused by having a lack of evidence that you're good at it, but you can't accrue evidence without action. So it has to be almost action first, create evidence that you're competent, diminish anxiety over time. But it is such a complex, nuanced debate that's case-specific. In essence, we kind of just need to get people and, and rattle them up and say, "You need to take action. You're not gonna know anything about yourself, your capabilities until you start doing it." And it's so much about getting moving and correcting the course on the way. Have you ever noticed that, like, you write brilliant email marketing emails? Sometimes you just gotta start writing, and then you can always delete the first third, and then you have a br- beautiful, brilliant email. The worst thing is being sat there with nothing on your screen, being crippled by this notion that you don't know what you're gonna do. A lot of the time I'll just start typing, get in a flow, ge- realize that this isn't even the topic I wanna write about, go back, delete the first part, and I'm suddenly there. Action precedes motivation. Action precedes competence. Action precedes, you know, confidence. All of these things. And it's about taking the step first and correcting it on the way.
- CWChris Williamson
I think that's right. I think that people being stuck in inaction, spinning their wheels with the anxiety cost, or there's the open loops from the Zeigarnic effect just playing rampant in their mind. Another thing to consider as well is that failure under conditions of optimism is very different to failure under conditions of pessimism, because failure under pessimism confirms your fears. Failure under optimism feels like an aberration. And this is something that I- I've been thinking about a little bit, that having a single vehicle for developing your confidence seems like a good idea. Now, we mentioned earlier on that confidence in one area doesn't necessarily always cross over. Just because you're great at rugby doesn't mean that you're going to be able to speak to girls in a bar. But-... I do think that having a primary vehicle that you build that confidence-competence feedback loop is a really good idea. And the reason for it is, you become ever more attuned to how your performance within that particular domain is going and I think that maybe for you, it's Brazilian jiu-jitsu and, and writing perhaps, or Brazilian jiu-jitsu and social media, or something like that. Certainly for me, looking, and I reflected a lot reading the book on sort of my journey from pretty unconfident person to now, at least within certain domains, feeling fine to go on Rogan or to speak to Jordan.
- JSJames Smith
You were very, very fucking composed on that. I messaged you, I was like, "How's he doing this? How's he doing this?" 'Cause any person that's got any digital persona or presence always imagines what it'd be like to get a message from Rogan. And you got it, you went on, and it was like it was your third episode. It was like (laughs) you're one of his mates. And I remember I messaged you, I was like, "Fucking hell, how are you doing this? I wanna know. How many ice baths have you been having?"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah, maybe that contributed. Well, uh, it's interesting with that, like, people brought that up about, you know, the, the Rogan thing. It's a big deal, but it would've been a bigger deal for me to go through this entire journey of making 500 podcasts and speaking to all of these people and then to get a message and, and feel like it was a shock. It's like, no, uh, this is what you were working towards. This is what you meant to happen. Like, yeah, maybe you've jumped ahead a few moves that you were pleasantly surprised by, but this is literally the, the goal of what you, you didn't mean for this to not happen. Therefore, congratulations. But yeah, the journey and having a single pursuit that you can focus on. Look, this is my vehicle for me developing my confidence, and I think that it, it's so interesting reflecting on the person that I was maybe four or five years ago, especially starting the show or the way that I would've framed things, 'cause it was very, very anxious-centric. It was very much loss aversion. I would be playing not to lose rather than to win. That would've been my approach. I would've always been trying to take a very easy, no-failure potential route. That would've been how I would've gone about stuff. And now, if I have a bad episode on the show, one that I consider to be bad when my performance isn't quite right, rather than saying, "This is some moral judgment on my worth as a person. This is because I am useless, bad, inconsistent, undisciplined," whatever, whatever, I can just look at it as what it is. I'm a lot more detached from my performance and my self-worth because I can say, "Well, look, what's the reason for why you performed the way you performed? Maybe you were under-slept. Maybe you hadn't hydrated enough. Maybe you were too hungry. Maybe you hadn't prepared enough for the guest. Perhaps the guest was having a bad day. Maybe it's not your fault, maybe it's them that, uh... What, what else can you do?" And that's what I mean when failure under conditions of pessimism versus failure under conditions of optimism are very, very different experiences. It's that Jon Kavanaugh thing, you win or you learn. And whereas in reverse, it's either, I don't know, you fail and your preconceived ideas about what you were going to do are confirmed or you're surprised. Like, that's the alternative, right? That's pessimism versus optimism.
- JSJames Smith
Yeah, and it's interesting. I joked there about ice baths, and I'm not, I'm not a fan of ice baths. It doesn't mean I don't rate what they do for people. I just don't like cold water. And I think there is, with confidence as well, if you can do things that really disturb you, like not (laughs) , not from trauma, but like competing for me, I hate it, because I put so much pressure on myself to, to win. And I also just put so much pressure on myself. I'm like, "This is my identity. This is what I love. This is what I wanna do," that it's frightening, it's terrifying. And especially when you can get injured. So in training, people won't try and injure you. In competition, it's about making your opponent submit. If a leg breaks, if a knee pops, anything, it's kind of fair game. You put yourself in the competition bracket. You don't know anything about your opponent. You don't know what they're like. I joke and I go, "Maybe he's been to jail. Maybe, you know, whatever it is."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JSJames Smith
So everything's on the line, my meniscus, my ACLs, my rotator cuff. I saw like a spiral fracture in someone's humerus from someone not topping. So s- shit can get pretty gnarly. But by putting myself in there... And when I'm competing I say to people, "I hate competing. I hate it." When I'm stood there on the mat and my feet are sliding around in sweat inside my flip-flops, I'm stood there and for the moment before I step on, I go, "Why am I here? Why have I ruined my weekend by doing this?" But the second is all over, suddenly everything else isn't so bad. Suddenly the podcast, the FaceTime, the talking on stage, whatever. And I think that's why a lot of people get, you know, such benefit out of ice baths, 'cause when they're sat there, their mind's saying, "Stay," their body's saying, "What are you doing? We're gonna die." And if you can, if you can harness the monster of that discomfort, suddenly get outta that ice bath and go, "Oh, I'm single. I'm lonely. That's a pain point. I'd like to address it. There's a loop here I could close. I'm gonna take my headphones out. Hey, look, never seen you in this Starbucks before. Uh, you know, I think you're really pretty. Uh, if you haven't got a boyfriend, here's my number. Uh, if you do have a boyfriend or you wanna lie to me, that's completely fine."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JSJames Smith
"Have a great day." You know what I mean? Suddenly if someone was to go, "Ice bath for five minutes," or ask to go, "Oh, ask 10 birds out. You know, ask 10 of them." So, I think-
- CWChris Williamson
That's why you need to do it, man, I think. And this is something I realized living with Zach, 'cause we've got an ice bath now at the back of the house, which you'll be forced into when you come back to Austin. And for me, I find it, it's difficult, but it's not that hard, 40-degree water for three, five minutes we've, we've worked ourselves up to now, and it's just not that hard for me. So although it's, I, I can almost kid myself into convincing me that I've done something hard, because for Zach it is. Zach was getting in and out talking to himself. He'd been in for 20 seconds, he'd get out, call himself a bitch, get back in, get back out for 10 seconds, get back in, and he'd be shouting at himself. I've seen, I've watched that boy get in and out of cold tubs re- like in reps. He's done reps of cold tubs, not sets. And it's easy to kid yourself that the thing that you're doing is difficult. A lot of the time I think that's people playing within their own inner citadel perhaps, or just like their zone of competence. And another
- 55:10 – 1:03:50
Celebrating Wins Vs Maintaining Focus
- CWChris Williamson
thing that I was considering as well is how rarely driven people celebrate their wins.You're very, very quickly looking past whatever it is that you've just done, peering over its shoulder, even as it's only just finished, to then think about what's next. And this is a real delicate balance, I think, that people need to be able to be grateful, thankful and, uh, and celebrity of their own victories, whilst not letting themselves lose that edge. It's a very, very hard balance to strike.
- JSJames Smith
This is something, um, I'm struggling with. If you were to say, "What's your biggest mental downfall at the moment?" it would be the ability to celebrate victories. And I'm the one that says, you know, "We need to be setting the metrics." And I think that anyone that's in my position, it's very easy to be a hypocrite. (laughs) It's very easy. Some of the advice I give, I can't take myself. And one of it is about celebrating small wins. And I've been good at it before, but I've also been terrible. This weekend, Eventim Apollo, we got three and a half thousand people, sold out event. And in my mind, like, people are like, "You must be buzzing." I'm like, "I don't think I am." Because to me, one, I wanna make sure it goes well. I can't be happy until it's gone well. And even if it goes well and afterwards people come up to me and go, "That's the best year you've ever spoken," in my head, I'm like, "Well, what next?" And I'm really... I did it with a million followers on Insta, you know, had a beer, then a million on TikTok. These were things I looked forward to for years. Then, um, third time bestseller. My publisher at HarperCollins, he goes, "You and Luke have just done the exact same thing." He goes, "What?" He goes, "You should've celebrated, but instead you were relieved, because the idea of failing, to you, was such a big thing you wanted to avoid that you shouldn't feel a sense of relief when you conquer things that you wanted to conquer." He's like, "You should be happy." And I think about this quite a lot, because I don't take stock of any achievements or accomplishments and where it's... What you always wanna do is have someone slightly above you, similar to the humility thing in jujitsu. They're always higher belts. Even when you're at black belt, there's someone who's higher than you as a black belt. And the gradings at black belt go on time, so if someone's a black belt now, I can never overtake him. So that's impossible. But like, I did a really cool show, did Manchester Apollo, and then I was like, "Oh, Pete's sold it out two nights in a row." And then, I go- did the Eventim Apollo and then they're like, "Oh, Pete's did that and yeah, I did Wembley." And I'm like, "Fuck. No, I'm not doing Wembley." And, you know, if I could only go back to 2018 James and knock him on the fucking face and be like, "Hey, mate, you're doing 50 people at a venue now, you're gonna be doing three and a half thousand soon." 2018 James would be like, "Fuck, oh, you're gonna have a million followers? Shut the fuck up. You know, three bestselling books. Fuck, what, oh my God, I can't wait to be 33." But now at 33, I'm kind of like, "Oh." You know, and it is a difficult thing where... Did, did this happen for you after Rogan?
- CWChris Williamson
A little, but not much. A little bit, not much. Um, mostly because it was... It's like a step change, I think, in how you're perceived or whatever, within the industry, that you've got the stamp of approval of the guy that's currently the, the leader. But I learned about a term called championship ring or it's g- uh, gold medal syndrome, uh, which is-
- JSJames Smith
Depression in gold medal athletes?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JSJames Smith
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Well, what do you do after you've done one? But I did mention one, one of the guys from Triggernometry, I took them out the week before I went on, and they were going on Rogan the next day, and we did the ice bath and cold tub and went for barbecue at Terry Black's. And they were going through, vacillating through the same emotions that I was about to the next week. So it was kind of funny to see them six days ahead of me doing the thing that I was about to go and do. And, uh, one of the guys mentioned, "I'm concerned about this, sort of, gold medal depression thing." And I was like, "Well, yeah, but there's a reason that you've got 10 fingers and a championship ring only fits on one."
- JSJames Smith
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
So the goal of going on and doing it is to go and do it again. Like, y- you know, if you're Gordon Ryan, right, and he's got a couple more challenges for this year, maybe two more challenges, I think, and then if he does those, there is no way that anybody could say he's not the greatest grappler that's ever lived. Okay, well, if you've won this title for the first time of greatest grappler, how long can you hold onto it? Can you do it for two years? Can you do it for three years? Can you sustain it without any injuries? Can you do it flawlessly? Can you beat everybody in under a minute? There is always a next level, I think, to get yourself to. But it's interesting, I think it's important for people to hear the challenges that you would have that they will face as well. You know, the guy that's sold all of the tickets at the live shows and does the thing, for some reason, despite the fact that he literally wrote a book on trying to be as grateful as possible and celebrating small victories, and he's got this big academy of people and he's saying, "You lost, you lost a pound this week. You've lost 10 pounds so far this year. Congratulations. This is something that you should..." Is struggling to imbibe his own advice. And this is why the insights that people that are genuinely writing content and creating stuff from the heart, that's why they're valuable. This is the big difference, I think, between somebody like yourself and somebody like Brian Rose, let's say, who I think is completely creating content exclusively to try and get an effect. I don't think that he's personally invested. And I watched one video from him a few years ago, and I've been very public of my distaste for Brian online, and I know that you've been on his podcast, so you don't, you don't need to comment. But I saw a video from him talking about his alcohol addiction, and he'd faced the camera and he's walking around near Bethnal Green or something like that, and he is genuinely opening up about the fact that he's struggled with, uh, alcohol daily for decades, maybe, maybe multiple decades. And I was like, "If this was what this guy's content was like all the time, not only would I not be a hater, I would be a genuine fan." This feels like him opening up. This is evidently something which not only is valuable, but is something that is super, super personal to him. This is, this is a different version of this man.So my point being, when people do things, I think it's very important for those that have got positions of success on the come up, to continue to remind people that the challenges that everybody else is facing are still the ones that the people that are leading the space are as well.
- JSJames Smith
I think the, the ... And this sounds really privileged to say this, there becomes a numbing effect the higher echelons you go to, because you become conditioned to it. Like, I even, I flew first class, uh, about a month ago and when I sat there, I- I wasn't buzzing like I used to. And I was like, "James, you fucking piece of shit. Like, you were fucking emotional the first time that you sat in business class. You had a glass of wine, you sat there, you go like, 'Oh my God, this is amazing.'" I don't even drink on them anymore. I'm like, "Oh no, I don't want to be tired when I get to the other end." I'm like, this is the fucking pinnacle of most business people's lives so I kind of do have to remind myself. But weirdly, this numbness to success is making me broody, right? To have kids. Because part of me is like, you get, you get kind of above the parapet in a certain sense, my life's great or whatever, and I kind of think like in the next three to five years what would be great would be the inclusion of kids as a project, as something to then, not to be constantly dissatisfied with the, the wins but to have something completely ... And I could be wrong by all means. I could be on a podcast in a few years going, "Mate, don't have kids."
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck it.
- JSJames Smith
But part of me is like, it, I want to take things away from venues, revenue, all this thing and have like a little project that can sit by the side of it, so I have my humility in jujitsu and my ultimate project being my kids and then I have business as just like one leg of everything, so that you can kind of like diversify your attention to different things. But yeah, I think that ... I don't know whether or not it's actually in there but the last couple of years I was like, oh, kind of getting a bit broody for that because you kind of complete these, these fields in, you know, certain areas with podcasts and whatever it is, but it's almost not real. You know what I mean? It's not real. If the money comes, you spend it, it's gone. Boom. The podcast, they come, people listen, they go into like a library and then sometimes you just want to make sure that you're winning the right races because ultimately what you don't want is to have this mega podcast, mega loads of money but not have a family in the little slot.
- CWChris Williamson
No one to share it with.
- JSJames Smith
Yeah, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, dude, I think we're both in a similar situation here. I've been saying, people have been asking
- 1:03:50 – 1:08:15
Preparing for Fatherhood & Family
- CWChris Williamson
me, "Do you want to have kids?" And I ... It's only been the last two years probably that I've genuinely been able to say that I can't wait to become a dad. Genuinely cannot wait to become a dad because all of this time that you've spent working on yourself and building yourself up and helping other people to upskill their world and it's fantastic and fulfilling but it's, it doesn't feel as altruistic as funneling all of that toward some tiny little human that is your genetic heritage. And one of my friends, David Perrall, was talking to me and he was, he's someone that's very, very successful. He does Write of Passage, which is this cohort based online course and it's un- ... It, it makes a terrifying amount of money and is very, very successful and helps people to enact their dream of becoming writers online so it's fulfilling and all the rest of it. And we were out for dinner and he said something along the lines of, "I think I spent most of my 20s preparing myself to become the father that I want to be." And that is a beautiful way to look at it, even though you weren't doing it at the time, even though that was, it was your, uh, inefficiencies and fears of self-worth and your desire to chase tail and get drunk and do whatever. All of those experiences created a person downstream from that, that is going to be the sort of father that you want to be and I think it's one of the justifications. You know, for all of the more 50.1% of women at the age of 30 and blah, blah, blah, and all of this sort of stuff, there is a non-small cohort of people for whom the kinds of parents they will be in their 30s are orders of magnitude greater than what they would have been in their 20s and I think that me and you probably fall into that camp.
- JSJames Smith
Yeah. I think it's kind of sad when I listen. Do you know what, sometimes when I listen to entrepreneurs talk sometimes, I feel sorry for them. It's a really weird thing like people that are so caught up with money, I think you're never going to love anything as much as you love making money. And money, although it opens up experiences, whatever, I was like, I really, I look at them and I go, "I really hope I never have that relationship with money."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JSJames Smith
Because you'll probably like that more than your kids or whatever. But also when people say like, "Oh, how do I even know I like my kids?" You know, I think it was Alex Hormozi, you know Hormozi?
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- JSJames Smith
That guy. Him and Derek, More Plates More Dates, talking about, oh, why would you have kids? It would ruin your productivity. Why would you have kids? It would do all this. And part of me like, I bought ... I said this to quite a wealthy person the other day and I don't think he liked it, I said, "I'm wealthier than you. You've just got more money." And I really didn't see it work- sit well with him and I was like, "I kind of feel sorry for people that are like that because ultimately it's, it's like their ultimate sacrifice." You know back in the day you could like be in-
- CWChris Williamson
James, is that your, is that your dog? Can you go unstrangle it?
- JSJames Smith
Mate, I'd take a free kick into its arse.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JSJames Smith
It's the most yappiest ... You can tell it's a Jack Russell, right? It's got, that dog's got anxiety. You know like back in the day you could be like a Spartan warrior and you'd be like, the best thing we could do is die in battle. Like now you can't even do that properly because, you know, you would just be sent off to some little conflicts that's a political thing, you die and it would just be-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- JSJames Smith
... a waste. Now I feel like the best way to fall on your sword is to be like a proper good parent.
- CWChris Williamson
I think that's not, uh, not far off. Hormozi and Layla when they came on Modern Wisdom, they spoke with a little bit more nuance about the position and they said that a lot of what people are trying to do with kids, there's ... Alex had read something about it and it was in a nice framework, six areas, uh, service, legacy, improvement, something else, something else, something else, and he said we feel like we already get that from the particular construct that we have to our life now. And that seems like a more balanced version than it's going to damage my productivity. But one of those may be the real one and the other one may be the public facing version, I don't know which one's which. But yeah, I think, um...... for me and you, it- from where we are now, which, if you'd told me this, I, I guess if you'd told either of this, what, five years ago? Yeah, man, you're going to feel paternal broodiness. You're going to w-
- JSJames Smith
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Not, not actively hate kids or they're annoying or they're the thing that stops your business partner from being able to go out on the lash with you or whatever, that they were, but you're actively going to, when you see one on holiday, go like, "Ah, he's pretty cool isn't he? He's cool."
- JSJames Smith
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
You, you spend longer than you should grinning at them and then the parents see you and you're like, "Oh, uh, uh, uh."
- JSJames Smith
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Sorry. Because the, the nonce radar is like, "No, no, he's j-, he's j- he's like, he's cute, he's cute. I'm not attracted to him." Um, but yeah, another thing that you
- 1:08:15 – 1:18:07
James’s Relationship with Alcohol
- CWChris Williamson
mentioned earlier on was, uh, alcohol and I brought it up to do with Brian as well. Alcohol is bottled confidence is something that I've heard a lot of people talk about, but I also know that your relationship with alcohol has changed a good bit recently. Talk me through that.
- JSJames Smith
Yeah. You know what, like, um, it, it just makes me feel like shit more than ever and I'm not sure if that's physiological or psychological. And it's quite interesting because now, if I go back through my rugby pictures, I've got a beer in my hand all the time and I used to drink heavily every weekend. Part of me looks back now, I kind of cringe looking at my younger self going, "Cor, James, you were..." If I could just snap into your life and go, "Mate, why are you getting blackout drunk every, one in every seven days?" Um, I still drink now, but for the right occasion. Like, we finished the event the other day, "Oh, do you want a beer?" I'm like, "No, I'm cool." But then we had, uh, Phil Graham host us in Belfast for this, like, big feed and I was like, "Yeah, I'll have some wines here." But then with dating, taking alcohol out the equation was another utility of deprivation. So, I ask people with dating apps, I'm not gonna say I'm better than you 'cause I didn't use one. Could removing dating apps make you a more confident person? If the answer is yes, you should consider to do it. Cool, now you're going on dates. Could removing alcohol from that situation make you more confident on dates? It's kind of a double-edged sword this one, because in essence, it will make you have to do the practice you need rather than alcohol, just masking it, covering it up. Cool. I also, uh, I have a big bit about this on my live show, where I talk about the effects of drinking on dates. Where you meet someone and you're like, "Nah, that's not me." One drink, you're like, "Hey, I'm being sociable."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JSJames Smith
I'm being sociable, I'm out, I'm enjoying myself. Then you have two drinks and you're like, "I really should stop judging a book by its front cover." And then by six drinks, you're like, "Wow, this is gonna work."
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, no.
- JSJames Smith
Yeah. And then the next day, you're like, "Fuck, I shouldn't have done that." So, like, alcohol, I think there's a dif- there's definitely a utility of depriving it. Then JP's utility of deprivation with porn. So, porn stops you from going on dates 'cause if you have a wank, there's no way you're dating anyone for the next six hours. I've probably pulled out more dates than I have women. And then when I go on dates, I've got a utility of deprivation of drinking. Okay, I don't drink, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, there's definitely... Alcohol should be used kind of sparingly. I know you've done stints as well of sobriety, but I think that I'm in a happy relationship now and that's a massive, um, kind of benefit to not wanting to drink. 'Cause I'm kind of like, "What's the point?"
Episode duration: 1:37:47
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