FO512 Raj Shamani: w/ Chris Williamson on Champion Mentality (Transcript)

Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes it’s societal, sometimes it’s just about country, whatever. They can tag it differently. But at the end of the day, they’re still chasing, and they’re running the feeling of not being enough.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, the driving forces of you at 18 and 28 and 38 and 48 tend to be the same. And that means that if you don’t feel enough at 18, that’s going to keep on going. And what people do — kind of like a hungry ghost — they assume, “Well, if I just achieve enough, I’ll fix this internal void.” You can take external success, grab it, and shove it into this hole, and that’ll make it feel okay.

Now, it’s my current belief that you need to achieve your goals, but the only reason to achieve them is so that you’re free of them. The only reason that you achieve them is so that you know that that wasn’t the answer. But you can’t skip that point. I don’t think that you can speedrun through — “F* it, I thought it was a Ferrari.” I thought when I got the Ferrari that everything would be fixed. You can’t leapfrog that. You have to get the Ferrari, realize that you’re still unsatisfied, realize that you need to do deeper work, and then close the loop. The Ferrari can go away. And then we move on to what’s deeper, and then we move on to what’s deeper.

But you’re right — the richest people on the planet, the highest performers, the best sports stars, the most successful business people, all should be looked at with more pity than envy. What’s happened to you that’s caused you to drive yourself this hard?

This isn’t everyone, obviously. There are some people out there who are just lovers of their pursuit, and it’s a well-balanced desire to maximize their time on this planet and enjoy the pursuits that they do. But if I was to place a bet, I would guess that most high performers are driven by a fear of not being enough, as opposed to the inner desire to simply maximize their time and fulfill their logos and speak their truth forward and alchemize their life. I don’t think it’s that for most people.

And that means that when you look at the people who are unbelievably successful and drive themselves so hard — do I want to be that person? Probably not. What do you think is driving them to do that to themselves, to have worked so hard to have built a billion-dollar company? Like, why? Why were you not done at $10 million or $1 million? Why were you not enough already?

And again, that’s not to say that people can’t become successful from a balanced place, but I do think — and I’m going to guess in your experience too — when you sit down opposite these people, most of them are driven by this insatiable hunger to prove to the world that they matter. Has that been your experience?

RAJ SHAMANI: Absolutely. Have you met anyone who’s number one in whatever they do? I’m not talking about 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I’m talking about number one in whatever field. They are number one, they’re still to be number one, and they’re balanced.

The Cost of Being the GOAT

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, look at Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods is in the news again. He flipped a car for like the second time. Didn’t he break both of his legs not long ago in a car crash or something? He fell asleep at the wheel or he was by the side of the road. That guy’s the GOAT. He’s the GOAT of golf. But what does it take in order to do that to yourself to become that good at one thing?

Michael Jordan. Have you ever seen Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame acceptance speech? He basically — this is his crowning achievement, I think it was 1992 or 1993, toward the end of his career — and he spends almost the entire speech calling out all of the people that didn’t believe him, litigating these disputes between people that he felt had slighted him in his past. That was how driven by revenge and competition and pain he was. That even in the greatest moment of glory, he still needed to find enemies and competitions and rivalries to keep pushing him.

RAJ SHAMANI: And after that, that’s why a lot of them stop feeling the same way. Do you care about rankings?

On Rankings and What Really Matters

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was number 8 in the world last year. That was cool. But if I’m not number 7 or lower this year, that will feel like a failure, which is strange, right? The higher you climb, the further you have to fall.

I don’t know — it was nice, but I didn’t think about it. Especially now, especially after getting into the top 10 globally — like, what else have I got to prove? Is number 7 really going to feel that different to number 8? Or is number 6 really going to — and number 1 would feel very special. But there’s only one place to go from number 1, right? You can only go backward from there.

Maybe this is my inner desire not to fail showing again, but it was great. I feel very proud of getting to number 8. I thought that was awesome. But if I never charted in the top 10 again for the rest of my career, I wouldn’t see it as a failure. I love the conversations that I have. I really enjoy what I do. I think that they make the world a better place. I think that they help people to understand themselves. I think they make them less alone.

F*. I did my show, I did Modern Wisdom, before anybody listened. And I’ll do it long after everyone has stopped listening as well. I just enjoy what I do. I like these conversations. I think they’re important. It doesn’t matter.

RAJ SHAMANI: Out of all the people who you have met in terms of podcasters, who do you think really badly wants to be number one? Actually cares about it?

Who Really Wants to Be Number One?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think Joe really doesn’t. He’s the most unlikely number one. I think Stephen Bartlett is driving very hard for growth. That’s his thing. He’s the MrBeast of podcasting and he’s done a phenomenal job of working out the component parts of growth and then really driving it forward. Mel Robbins is super, super ambitious and that’s very, very impressive.

But then there are other people that are probably going to be in the top 10 this year, like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Tim Dillon. There are lots of people that are really great at what they’re doing and don’t give a f* about the ranking, or are almost anti-ranking.

But yeah, I think Stephen, Mel — a lot of that LA energy — Lewis Howes, Tom Bilyeu, Jay Shetty, these guys. But think about that: me, Jay, Stephen — that’s 3 British people in the top 10, globally. So maybe the UK isn’t — maybe we are showering ourselves in glory. I don’t know.

RAJ SHAMANI: You’ll see us Indians in the top 10 as well. We’re going to be there.

You know, I was speaking to someone, an executive at Spotify, and I was asking them — do people, podcasters, singers, pop stars, rappers, do they care about being in the top 10? They said, “Nobody cares apart from the month of the list.” In the month of the list, there are people who would care about when the list is about to happen because they know that. So they really go nuts. They’re almost paranoid about it. They’re calling again and again, trying to get the numbers and trying to figure out what their stance is. And then there are people who sulk about it for a month after the list comes, and then everybody disappears.

And then I was like, “This is interesting.” And one of the people said — and I think there’s truth in it — “The number one in all the categories almost doesn’t care.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. Right?

The Grass Is Always Greener: East vs. West

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah. But they know from the demeanor that the day they lose it, they’re going to lose a lot.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Of course. You know the loss aversion as a psychological bias, right? If I was to give you £5, that’s great. But if you were to lose £5, that would be more painful than the gifting of finding £5.

And it’s the same with— there’s a line from a John Bellion and Luke Combs song which says, “If the higher I climb is the further I fall, then why love anything at all?” And he’s talking about opening his heart to another person, a relationship. But the same thing is true in success as well. If the higher you climb is the further you fall, then why achieve anything at all? Because as soon as you become number one, you’re terrified of losing it. There is no end to this.

And this is why, I’m really glad that I managed to surprise myself by charting last year. I did top 10. Top 10 in the world in anything is f*ing crazy. And I’m really glad that I did it. And I felt no different the day after the day that I found out than the day before the day that I found out. Nothing materially changed about my life. Maybe we’ve found it easier to book some guests this year or something like that. But come on, is that really the— I probably would’ve got there in any case. We would just send a few more emails or got a better connection or spoken to the partner and it would’ve taken longer or something.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think that’s, again, a very interesting point I’m just thinking about. The way you think right now about the hustle, the number one, the ambition and all of that, it has a lot to do with the way a lot of the Western world thinks.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like meritocracy?

RAJ SHAMANI: No, like what I meant by this, like in the Western world, there’s a whole lot of a spike in understanding meaningfulness. Purpose, enjoying what you do, the mindfulness. Well, that’s gone, right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s increased in line with the decrease of religion. I think as people have lost religion, they’re trying to find meaning in other places.

RAJ SHAMANI: Okay.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And they were trying to find it in what capitalism promised. And they’ve done that and they’ve found it lacking. Some people have found it lacking, and they’re now asking themselves, what’s the next thing? That’s where meditation comes from. That’s where journaling, mindfulness, gratitude, yoga, stoicism — these are all secular solutions to what were previously religious questions. And I think that’s what’s going on, at least in part.

The East Wants Achievement, the West Wants Peace

RAJ SHAMANI: But my question was more on if you compare it with the Eastern world right now, right? And I’m not going to say Eastern as well, even the African — just think about both of these worlds. If you look at India, you look at China, you look at Africa, all of the people here, the national character almost is about go for the win, hustle hard, be like really—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

RAJ SHAMANI: Work-life balance. You need to be number one. It’s our time, like this hustle, hustle, hustle. Versus you think about the Western world, they’re like mindfulness and all of this, right? And that’s why it’s great. Like Stephen optimizes for it. Joe doesn’t, you know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

RAJ SHAMANI: There’s a lot to it. Do you think both of these civilizations are wanting something they already had, but it’s like grass is greener?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, that’s lovely. Yeah, no, I see exactly what you mean. You might be right. You might be right.

RAJ SHAMANI: Like India and China, specifically India I can talk about, we have a great history of yoga, meditation, all of these — we have given this to the world. And now it’s almost like we want what you guys had, like the hustle culture, the meritocracy, like I want to go for the ambition and the world is going to be my playground versus you guys want what I have.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Grass is always greener, dude. Grass is always greener. If you have done something— also, as you’ve got a globalized world, you begin to just look outside. It’s the same thing as if you ate a really great meal, but that was the only meal that you ate for the rest of your life. You’d probably get bored of it. There’s a lot of options here. I should try something different. And “I should try something different” can often mean I should do something different, right? I’m going to try a different path. I’m going to try and fulfill myself in a different way.

And it’s a really lovely duality that the East had peace and is seeking achievement, and the West had achievement and is seeking peace. I think you’re bang on with that.

What Do Humans Actually Need?

RAJ SHAMANI: What do you think humans need then?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Both. I think you need both, right? We’re a social species and you can’t beat the biology — and the psychology is just the biology, right? You can’t beat a few million years of evolution that’s made us care about the opinions of others, want to feel like we’re progressing, achievement, status, recognition, renown, respect, admiration from people that we admire. These things are deeply, deeply rooted in us, and they’re easy routes, easy paths toward feeling good about yourself. And so you should get them.

But the problem is assuming that that is the end of the game, or assuming that you need an infinite amount of that in order to feel fulfilled. And that’s where people get stuck. But the same thing is true on the other side, that if you just try to become an ascetic, live in a cave in the woods, renounce all worldly possessions, I think you’re going to struggle. I think that a lot of people are not built for that. The level of mindfulness that you need — your 10,000 hours needs to be multiplied by 10 in order to be able to get there. And most people can’t.

So for me, I think trying to play within the confines of a game — and this is different, I’m a little older now, I’m 38, which means the energy that I bring to my pursuits at 38 is different to what it was at 28. 28 was very much hustle, like deny how I bleed, deny how I feel, work until my eyes bleed, spit sawdust, I want to do the thing. But part of the reason that you wanted to work so hard is so that you don’t need to work so hard in future. If all that you do is work really hard so that in the future you can work hard with leverage — I mean, fine, maybe you love what you do and stuff, but even after that, okay, the rest of your life is going to be this? That’s the one pathway that you have found, is to just crush it and be competitive and face other people, and you’re always — okay, well maybe there’s something else.

False Peaks and Post-Success

And I think a lot of people achieve a level of success. I was with Chris Hemsworth in Australia a week and a bit ago. Me, him, both of his brothers, and a friend of his with a couple of my guys. We flew to Byron Bay from Brisbane for the day, and we spent an afternoon with him and his boys. All they wanted to talk about was this. All they want to talk about is the third passage, right? The middle way. I’ve done a lot of what the world told me I should achieve. I’m interested in what’s beyond that. I’m interested in what is post-success. Not trying to turn success into more success but in an easier way.

Do you know the idea of false peaks in mountaineering? Imagine that you’re trying to get to the highest point that you can in a mountain range, and you climb up a big hill and you get to the top and you go, wow, I’m really, really high. That is your local maxima. But your global maxima, if you were to take a broader perspective, if you were to look out across the vista and see, oh, there’s a higher mountain over there. But in order for me to get there, I need to descend this one. I need to go down. So that’s a false peak. Technically, a false peak would be climbing a mountain, getting to the top of a hill, and realizing that in order to get to the top of the mountain, you need to go back down to go back up to go back down.

And I think a lot of the time what people have discovered are false peaks. They’ve achieved something that they thought would bring them a level of success and happiness, and it didn’t. And it’s an interesting question that a lot of guys — in my 20s, at the end of my 20s, I asked myself, who would I be if I was able to determine my life however I wanted? That was a big question. I don’t want to be constrained by my habits, by my patterns, by the opinions of others, and that caused me to change myself a lot. And that was great.

And now I’m asking myself a deeper question, I think, or maybe just a different question, which is, who would I be if I wasn’t constrained by the need to perform? If I wasn’t constrained by the need to be seen as successful? And maybe this is why I’m never going to become a billionaire. I have no desire to become a billionaire. But why? I don’t know. I’m more interested in other things.

RAJ SHAMANI: Like?

Champions Are Missing an Off Switch

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Experience it. I want to start a family, experiencing some deep peace, varying my life, connecting with my friends, giving spaciousness so that I can explore my own mind. That seems interesting to me. And I’m fortunate that what I do with the show allows me to do both things at once. I have a great wealth-making vehicle that is very successful and reaches lots of people and impacts the world. It’s so many things and also is a vehicle for personal growth. It’s also this sort of transformation technology that selfishly is all about me. I get to bring on whoever I’m interested in to specifically talk on the very problem that I’m struggling with right now. And then I leave and it’s called a job. I went to work that day, but what I really did was selfishly ask a bunch of questions that I want to know about my next stage of personal transformation. And that feels like a weird hack. Whatever me and you do is a very strange glitch in the matrix that we’ve managed to sort of inject ourselves into the middle of.

But yeah, I have no desire to become a billionaire. And the likelihood of me becoming a billionaire is probably very low in any case. I’m not like I’m choosing to not be a billionaire — oh no, not for me, thank you. I’m not choosing to not be a billionaire, but just even the energy required — I look at the energy that would be required to get to that.

Sometimes you can flick it like Nutonic, right? This energy drink company that I’ve got, smarter energy drink, it’s brilliant. And maybe — I’d give it a 30% chance that we have a really, really large exit with that, like a generational wealth-sized exit. We’ve just raised $6 million on $60 million, and by the end of the year, it’ll be valued at $100 million. F*ing brilliant, right? Really cool. Super exciting. So maybe with some luck, but if I do that, am I going to desperately be ready to run it back to fold my payout, whatever I get from it into — oh, I must turn it into 10x, you know, like no.

And this is why I saw this really great tweet that said, “The more I heal, the less I’m ambitious.” And I think it’s so f*ing great. And it speaks to what you were talking about before.

Alex Hormozi, one of my really good friends, he’s got this line where he says, “People try to look at champions to work out what they have that other people are missing, but they’ve got it backward. Champions are missing something that everybody else has.” Which is an off switch. I think it’s true.

RAJ SHAMANI: So true. So true. In order to become a champion, you almost lose — you certainly lose an off switch.

The Price of Championship: Sacrifice, Obsession, and Ambition

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But you lose everything except for the pursuit, right? Everything becomes sacrificed because if you’re prepared to make a trade from your primary pursuit for something which doesn’t contribute to it, your friends, your family, your social life, your sex life, your financial position, your health— if you’re prepared to make that sacrifice, the likelihood is that you’ll be beaten by somebody that is prepared to make that sacrifice.

Eddie Hall, World’s Strongest Man, British guy, I think he won World’s Strongest Man in 2018. So you see him at the very end, he’s been working toward this thing for, you know, a decade, something more, and he’s holding this trophy in the air and he’s saying, ‘Nana,’ grandma in British, ‘Nana, this is for you.’ His grandma passed away at some point recently and he’s crying and he retires. He retires on the podium, basically retires. That’s it, I’m done. Won once.

And in an interview that I saw with him a little while afterward, he said, ‘If I hadn’t retired when I won World’s Strongest Man, I would be dead, divorced, with no relationship to my kids.’ Because he was like 180 kilos at 6’4″ with blood pressure that would power a f*ing jet engine. And he was working so hard and pushing himself with performance-enhancing drugs and eating all this food and training all this time that his relationship with his wife was falling apart and he didn’t have any time to see his kid.

In order for you to beat Eddie Hall, you need to sacrifice everything that Eddie is prepared to sacrifice, which was everything, which was his health, his family, his wife, his partnership, everything. He was prepared to sacrifice it all. The only way that you can do it without sacrificing everything is to be so good that you have additional capacity, that your 98% is better than his 101%. But most people aren’t.

And even if that is the case, who’s to say that there isn’t someone that’s more talented than you that’s going to give 99 or 100 or 101, and now your 98 is exactly the reason that you lost? And you never know. You never know whether or not that— like, how good am I really? Am I a generational talent? No, you just give everything. It’s that maniacal focus that pushes people forward, and that’s what we raise up.

That’s why Michael Jordan— The Last Dance, right? An amazing documentary series on Netflix, so cool. Do you want to be Michael Jordan? I don’t want to be Michael Jordan. I mean, I respect and admire, and he’s so cool to see what he did during his career, but he’s still ravaged by that same competitive drive, and that’s tough. And he alchemized it into something great.

Now, the worst position to be in is to have that competitive drive but not the discipline to deploy it. That’s when you’re ruthless, because you are going to spend your entire life feeling like you didn’t fulfill your potential. You want this thing and you can’t get it. And that has to be way more of the champions that never were, that we never even learn about, right? Because it can only be one, number one. I’m fascinated by this conversation. I’m fascinated by this question. I think it’s very, very interesting.

RAJ SHAMANI: Every time I think about it, because I believe from a very long time, from a very young age, I’m usually on the other hand. I’m one of those who’s extremely driven. And apart from a few moments in a year, not even a day or a month, apart from a few moments in a year, I don’t even realize that it’s all a sacrifice. I’m so blinded by probably some wound in my childhood which has caused me to be like this, that I’m just so driven.

And every time I think about it, and every time I meet a champion— and this is a very strong feeling for like 4 days after meeting Michael Phelps— champions have only one thing which you want, that’s a championship trophy. And champions don’t have everything that you want, that you have.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Hmm.

RAJ SHAMANI: Champions are thinking that they don’t have, they just have one thing. And they don’t have anything at all. And you have everything and you’re not cherishing it because you want that one thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct.

RAJ SHAMANI: It’s like 1 versus 100 and you still want that one because probably some wound or some society or somebody around you has made you believe that one thing is way more important than the 100 that you have.

Obsession, Identity, and the Engine of Drive

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Such a great point. I think Michael Phelps is a really great example of that too. I’ve heard that he is very driven by that not-enoughness energy.

One interesting element on this is I don’t want to demonize all ambition and drive. I think it’s very, very important and great. Go and get it, go and win the thing. Just know that it isn’t going to be the end. It’s not going to fix everything. There are other pathways to your fulfillment that you need to spend some time on.

But there is a relationship between discipline, motivation, and obsession. Discipline is, I will make myself do the thing. Motivation is, I want to do the thing. And obsession is, I can’t not do the thing. And a lot of people look at people who are now disciplined, and what they don’t realize is that their current discipline is just the echo of a past obsession.

For me, going to the gym and training— I started when I was 17. I was really obsessed with going to the gym. Obsession’s strange. You can’t really engineer obsession. Obsession is this weird alignment of predisposition, opportunity, desire, a little bit of wounding, some motivation, social influence. It’s this strange blend of everything together.

And what happens after a while, obsession cools off. You’re not obsessed with the same thing typically for decades on end. Some people are, but most aren’t. But what ends up happening after that is Michael Phelps will always swim. He will always swim. Michael Jordan will always have some athletic performance pursuit. I know that he doesn’t actually specifically like playing basketball, I think because he’s super competitive and he doesn’t like to lose.

Most people will cool off their obsession into identity, it just becomes a part of them. Yeah, I used to be a competitive cyclist. Now I just bike on a weekend with my friends. Yeah, I used to be a podcaster for a decade, two decades. Now I speak publicly or I do whatever. It cools off into a part of your identity, but with less velocity.

But this is me trying to counterbalance all of the shit talking that we’ve done about ambition so far. I think it’s important because I know that Indian people are very ambitious and they’re upward aiming and I don’t want to pull the rug out from underneath them. So this is for the people who are still on the drive.

If you can’t stop thinking about the pursuit that’s in front of you, that means that you have the freest motivation and discipline that you’re ever going to get, and it’s not going to be there forever. If you can’t not think about the business or the podcast or the partnership or the gym program, now is the time to let it crawl inside of you and wear you like a glove. You want to be puppeted by your obsessions, assuming they’re good, not obsessions with your ex or politics or porn.

If your obsession is something that’s positive and you’ve made the adjudication, this is something I should focus on, you are never going to be able to make so much progress with so little willpower. You can’t not do the thing. You’re going to bed every single night thinking about the podcast, thinking about how I get the camera angles better, and I need to speak to this partner, I’d love to get this guest on, and who do I know that knows that person, and I need to change the thumbnail title. You don’t have to, there’s no effort.

And at some point in future, that’s going to cool off and you’re going to have to use effort and that is going to be a lot harder. So what you should do while you have an obsession, if it’s pointing in the right direction, use it, allow it to use you. Assuming that it’s not negative, allow it to use you. It’s the freest discipline and motivation you’ll ever get.

And then once it becomes a part of your identity, you kind of coast on that for the rest of your life. The same with the gym for me. Sometimes my training’s more dialed, sometimes it’s less dialed, but I usually am training because I was obsessed with it for a decade and a half. And now it just takes over and it’s nice and it’s a part of me. And I think the same thing is true for most other obsessions as well.

Obsession as Addiction

RAJ SHAMANI: True. I was speaking to one of the doctors who’s an expert in addiction, and he said obsession is just a better word for addiction.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not far off.

RAJ SHAMANI: He said everybody is addicted to something. People who don’t understand what they’re addicted to, they usually are driven towards substances.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Well, I mean, look, addiction is just like a nature.

RAJ SHAMANI: So everybody’s addicted. Some call this addiction, and some very early on by some incident or an experience, they find some pursuit which becomes their obsession. That’s actually just an addiction. And if you’re going to take that thing away from them, they’re either going to go mad or they’re going to find a new thing to be obsessed with. It’s not that they’re obsessed with being number one, it’s just that obsession is the feeling that they’re craving.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

Making the Case for Ambition

RAJ SHAMANI: Let’s get back to the conversation of becoming a GOAT. I like that for a little while, right? The ambition part that we’re talking about, because we talked about how bad that is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We shat on ambition for a bit. Let’s make it good again.

RAJ SHAMANI: We shat on it quite a lot. So we should talk about the good side because I talk a lot about ambition. I’m very, very obsessed and I want, probably in an ideal world, everyone who’s listening to this should be ambitious in whatever field. It can be just being ambitious with having the best relationship in the world, of course, or best family, the best mother.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

RAJ SHAMANI: Or it can be just materialistic things in the world.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Good. Go and get it all, right?

RAJ SHAMANI: So first was talking about God. Why do you think everyone’s name is Michael, man? You know, Michael Phelps, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan the actor now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah. The number one name for NBA players is Michael as well. An interesting one.

RAJ SHAMANI: I didn’t know that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah.

RAJ SHAMANI: So do you think arrogance is important to become the GOAT?

The Power of Cultivated Delusion

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh yeah, I think a level of self-delusion is very important. Some people are driven by a lot of self-criticism, which is great because it causes you to pay a lot of attention. You need to really, really scrutinize — why am I speaking in that way? Why do I keep on using the word “like” as my filler word when I do a podcast? Or how come I interrupt a guest? I feel uncomfortable with silence, or I keep on offering up options when I ask a question and I need to stop doing that.

The level of scrutiny that you need to pay to your own performance — Michael Phelps obsessing over every inch of his stride and how he jumps off of the board, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of that comes from deep self-judgment and self-criticism. So it’s good. But on the other side of that, you need to believe that you can do something that’s never been done before. And the only way that you can do that is to kind of have a type of delusion where you go, “This has never been done,” or “The incumbent champion is better than me and more highly regarded than me, and I’m going to beat them,” but you haven’t yet beaten them. That’s nothing. That is at best confidence. But realistically, delusion, right? Well-informed delusion.

I think one of the best things that people can be is cultivated delusion — that would be a good way to put it. Because one of the problems that you have of overthinking too much is that you’ll usually think your way out of things more than you think your way into things. It causes you to hesitate, it causes you to be a little bit more realistic. I don’t want to be realistic. If you want 27-year-old, 28-year-old Chris to sit in front of you, I wasn’t realistic about anything that I did. I wasn’t realistic about trying to move to America and talk to people on the internet as a job. I wasn’t realistic about trying to do these live tours as someone who’s never done live before and see if I can sell out the largest venue, the largest theater in London, which is the Apollo. And we did that last year and we’ll do it again this year, 3,500 people.

None of these things are realistic. But it’s not blind confidence. It is a type of arrogance, I think, but it’s also a degree of delusion. And I think strategic ignorance is probably another good thing that you can do, right? Strategic ignorance of not actually having to overthink it that much, just letting your foot off the gas. A good place to start.

RAJ SHAMANI: You said 3 words. Explain each of them very nicely. You said “cultivated delusion,” right? Explain what is—

Breaking Down the Three Terms

# Cultivated Delusion

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because the difference between straight up delusion and cultivated delusion would be — you need to know where you can believe beyond your capacity. So it needs to be done in a manner that’s conscious. Straight delusion causes you to become a crazy person, which you don’t want. So cultivating your delusion in this area — “I’m going to allow my dreams to become boundless” — but not around your health or your sleep or your partnership or whatever, right? Not around your finances. There are a few areas where we can guarantee you should not be delusional, and your finances are one of them. You become bankrupt, it’s going over — it’s a very, very bad idea. But in the ability of you to impact other people’s lives, to grow very quickly — these are things that are good to be delusional about.

RAJ SHAMANI: Delusion.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cultivated.

RAJ SHAMANI: Okay, so that’s delusion. Because I also believe I’m dreamy and delusional, and I believe everyone should have irrational optimism in at least one field in their life. Not every field. Just one field—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, that’s a problem. You have irrational optimism everywhere and you’re like — you’re jumping off cliffs trying to fly.

RAJ SHAMANI: There are people who have tried that. Yep. So that’s one. Second term was strategic arrogance.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

RAJ SHAMANI: What do you mean by that?

# Strategic Arrogance

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Very similar, but you don’t want to be arrogant everywhere. You need to be a good operator behind the scenes. Let’s take a sports star or a musician, right? You need to deal with the venues that you work with and the roadies that are supporting you, or the referees at your game. Are you going to be arrogant with the people who are there to make the thing that you do happen? No, that’s a bad idea, right? You’re a poor operator if you do that.

But your arrogance with — “I am better than these people, I am better than the estimations that everybody around me has, the limitations that I place on myself” — you’re basically overclocking your confidence. I’m just tuning up my confidence a little bit more than it is so that I push my limits further, so that I believe that I can do more than I can.

RAJ SHAMANI: At what point do you think people who are trying to do something — they start believing in it and then they actually become almost delusional about it and they get arrogant about it? Like, what’s that point? Because I’ll quote a specific thing. When I was speaking to Michael, Michael said — and it’s fitting right here — he said, “I was asking him, were you not worried that the other guy will beat you?” And he said, “I was more prepared to beat a shark in water, forget humans. I was the most prepared person or living being on planet Earth. In that race format, no one can touch me. Maybe in the ocean people can, but in that format, I was more prepared to beat a shark.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s cool.

RAJ SHAMANI: What is that point where you become that — so delusional and arrogant?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t think that’s arrogance, dude. I mean, obviously he’s being hyperbolic, right? Talking about a shark. You put a shark in the water with Michael Phelps and only one of those animals is going to come out.

RAJ SHAMANI: But I bet Michael will come out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s right. He’s f*ing got it in a headlock. After a while, dude, you really do feel that you’re untouchable. Floyd Mayweather — you look at that guy, especially toward the mid-end of his career, he was just unstoppable. Absolutely unstoppable. It’s a combination of high ambition and high proof. You combine those two things and you’re overclocking that confidence, right? And you’re adding in more fuel. Each success furthers your ability to say, “I’m going to keep going, keep doing, keep going.”

The Champion Mindset: Who Embodies It?

RAJ SHAMANI: Who do you think, out of all your guests or everyone you have spoken to, is closest to this mindset?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, that’s a good question. Ross Edgley has a very interesting mindset. He’s the first man to swim around the UK. He basically swam 6 hours on, 6 hours off — slept biphasically for most of a year — and swam around the UK. He’s the first person, and I think the only person, to have ever done it.

He has such a fascinating mindset because he’s not doing it from a place of pain. He’s doing it from a place of suffering strategically managed. That’s how he refers to it — “suffering strategically managed.” He knows it’s going to hurt. But he knows that he can handle it. And I really, really admire the way that he approaches this stuff.

I think some of the athletes that I’ve spoken to — at least the ones I’m interested in — they tend to be the ones that are deeply unsure and still succeeded in spite of that. So the Phelpsian, Floyd Mayweather, Michael Jordan “I am the best of all time” thing — I haven’t been exposed to as many of those people. But Ross is one of these guys who — I mean, he did a triathlon with a tree. He called it the “treeathlon.” He’s got the longest ever single distance river swim that he did in Canada — 300 miles without touching land, without stopping, 50 hours. He swam for over 2 days without stopping. It was unbelievable, dude. Absolutely insane.

He’s driven by just a desire to see what he can do. He’s like an explorer, but he’s an explorer of himself. He’s an explorer of his own limits. I think that’s a really cool approach.

Suffering Strategically Managed

RAJ SHAMANI: That’s this new word I’m fascinated by — “strategic suffering managed.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s “suffering strategically managed.”

RAJ SHAMANI: Suffering strategically managed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

RAJ SHAMANI: Explain.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, he—

RAJ SHAMANI: How can people implement that in their life?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He understands that pain and difficulty is just made of component parts. There’s some willpower, there’s physical discomfort, there’s ego depletion, there is going to be fatigue. And he just looks at each of these things and says, “Well, I’m going to get tired, so I use caffeine. I’m going to run out of fuel, so I’m going to eat. I’m going to be in pain, so I’m going to have little moments of joy throughout the swim that keeps me going.”

Before you try to take on any challenge, you could simply ask yourself the question — where are the potential trapdoors that I could fall down? When I’m doing my thing — I want to lose weight, I want to get in shape — okay, when you’ve tried to lose weight previously, what have been the pitfalls? Or just imagine, game out for me over the next 6 months, what are the things? “Well, sometimes I might eat cheat meals at nighttime.” Okay, that’s a potential trapdoor that you could fall into. How do you strategically manage that? Well, if I don’t have junk food in the house, I can’t eat it. You can’t eat the cookie that isn’t there.

“Sometimes I miss training sessions.” Okay, well, what are some of the ways that can increase your compliance? “I’m going to train first thing in the morning so I don’t have time to think about it,” or “I’m going to have a training partner so I have social pressure, and if I don’t turn up, they’re going to know.” “I’m going to get a trainer, I’m going to pay for a PT, I’m going to do classes so that I outsource my motivation to everybody else.”

At each different one of these points you’re able to find — where is the challenge and how do I overcome it? And when it comes to suffering and strategically managing suffering, the same thing is true. It’s going to be difficult for you to do 3 podcast episodes a week. It was for me. So I started doing calls with a couple of the other guys on my team, so I didn’t need to do it on my own. There was suffering when I was writing — I’ve done 1,000 episodes writing descriptions for every single episode, doing ad reads and coming up with titles and thumbnails and clips and all the rest of it. I found that if I got on a call with some of my friends that work for me, I kind of didn’t mind so much. So there was some suffering and I strategically managed it by coming up with a solution.

Why Outsiders Win

RAJ SHAMANI: Interesting. What do you think — why are people who come from outside the ones who actually go very far? What in their heads causes them to win the game?

I mean, think about Einstein, Newton, or even Elon. Whatever they do, first they were considered strange. They didn’t have any right to win at the place or in the thing that they were going to win it, right? Like rockets — Elon had no business making rockets, and then he won that game. Bezos, similar thing. You go back to Einstein and Newton, similar things.

Even right now, even the smallest thing that you pick up — for example, podcasting. Joe is not a professionally trained interviewer or whatever. He’s not the best journalist out there. He hasn’t prepared years and years and tried to learn the craft, and he’s still winning. In almost every field, someone from the outside comes in and then wins. Why do you think so? What happens cognitively in their brain that they’re designed to win more?

Tangential Skills and First Principles Thinking

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They see something that other people don’t. You know, you say that Joe didn’t get trained as an interviewer or an interviewee. But he’d done 10,000, 20,000 hours of onstage comedy. What is that? Comfort with speaking. It’s an understanding of flow. It’s the ability to communicate and play with words. It’s a level of safety in silence, which is very important when you’re having a conversation with someone.

If you’ve bombed onstage in front of an audience of people, what does it mean that you asked a question and someone thinks that you’re dumb? It doesn’t matter. So he took a tangential skill and moved it across into something else.

The same goes for Elon. Elon’s got a fascinating mind, regardless of what you think of him, unbelievable mind. Joe looked at the problem of podcasting from the angle of somebody that had done Fear Factor and classic TV presenting, and comedy. And Elon looked at rocket ships from first principles.

So one of the reasons— look, what you’ll notice is that no one who spent their entire life doing baseball goes across and becomes great at cricket, right? Because the skill of cricket is relatively linear. But there are other industries where tangential, first principles, orthogonal thinkers can unlock everything. And it’s not true for all pursuits, but it’s certainly true for some pursuits.

RAJ SHAMANI: Okay, so some pursuits — is it just because they’ve been trained in similar skills in some other aspect of their life which they are now using, or is it just that they get some sort of edge in disrupting because of the way they see, or the way they cannot help but see?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Probably both, I think — the perspective that they have. You know, this is one of the wonderful things about being an underdog or an outlier, is that you can step into an industry that you weren’t supposed to be in and very quickly rise up.

And again, we were talking about cultivated delusion. Proper delusion is believing that because you’re good at baseball, you can be great at cricket. Maybe, but something tells me that the guys that have played cricket their entire life are going to be better. Understanding, well, the same thing is probably not true for rocketry that we can look at, or building electric cars. That’s actually a little bit different.

The way that I design a business experience for somebody, because I come from nightlife and I’m going to make a coffee shop — my coffee shop is going to treat building a coffee experience the way that we used to build a nightclub experience. That to me seems like a pretty good place to have some delusion. We can show people a kind of food and drink experience that they can’t get elsewhere, because everyone that’s existing within the current paradigm only sees things in the same way. It’s too mimetic and too cyclical. It’s constrained.

But if you come from outside, that’s when you get to have a really new perspective. And it’s not just the perspective — because these are the two things that you said, it’s a sort of skill set and perspective. But the two things come side by side, because where is your perspective from? It’s from your skill set. And because the skill set’s different, the perspective’s different.

Building a Mindset to See Things Differently

RAJ SHAMANI: Tell me, how do you build that mindset to see a different perspective, whether you are from the inside or from the outside, if you want to be the disruptor and you want to go really, really far? How do you build that mindset to see things differently?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: From the inside is hard. From the inside is very difficult because you’re usually constrained by everybody else that’s around you. From the outside is easier.

But for me, the greatest place of seeing opportunity is when I spend time with friends who are also in different industries and they speak to me about what they’re dealing with. My best friend’s writing a book at the moment, so he’s talking to me about all of these different ideas and what he’s struggling with and storytelling. He’s learned so much about storytelling, and from his literary approach to storytelling, I’ve changed my spoken approach to storytelling.

He has a strategy where instead of having the lead of the story up top — let me give you a story, okay? So in the mid-’90s, there was a woman living in quiet poverty in Edinburgh, and she was in an abusive marriage. She tried to leave, her husband didn’t let her leave. She fled from Portugal with her baby daughter and the early chapters of a book that she was working on hidden in a suitcase, and her partner tried to hide the manuscript to stop her from leaving.

She got to Edinburgh, said that she was clinically depressed and suicidal. She used to push her daughter’s pram to a cafe so that she could work in the warmth while she wrote her book because she couldn’t afford heating at home. Her book was rejected by 12 different publishers. That’s 12 different people saying in 12 different ways that you’re not good enough. And this wasn’t just a small slight, it was an existential crisis. Each rejection fueled her to try harder because if this book didn’t work, that was the end of the road for her and her daughter.

“J.K. Rowling went on to sell 500 million copies in the Harry Potter franchise and became richer than the Queen.”

Telling that story — if I say, “Dude, I’ve got this great story about J.K. Rowling, let me tell you this,” it completely kills all of the intrigue up top. Waiting until the very end and then doing the J.K. Rowling reveal at the end gives people that sense of satisfaction.

And I learned that from George, my best friend. He’s telling these stories in the book and he’s got this little flip reveal, kind of like a miniature thriller — the killer was hiding in the cupboard all along, he reveals it at the end. That’s a literary skill set. And applying it to storytelling and podcasting — people in podcasting are storytellers too, but they might not think about constructing it in a way that is more well-established in the industry of books and writing. Take that, put it in this thing. I think it works. That’s cool.

Sometimes it’s not going to work. Sometimes you’re going to try and take a dish that would work in fast food and put it in gourmet and it’s a total f*ing nightmare. But other times it might work.

Changing Your Environment vs. Changing Yourself

RAJ SHAMANI: True. Taking this point where you said from the inside is difficult, from the outside is easier — you left the UK and you came here, so probably now you’re the outsider here, right? Like you were the insider there. What I’ve seen usually, people who change their environments, they usually carry the same wound. So they become like the same dysfunctional version of themselves in a new costume.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct.

RAJ SHAMANI: Right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep. Very accurate. Yep. Very good.

RAJ SHAMANI: How do you — when you want to change your identity and change your reality, how do you change that reality by going to a new place where you know that you’re not going to be the same person or trying to wear the same costume? You genuinely change. You’re not just —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t know, man. I get what you mean — that people’s patterns, in the same way as you’ve got the same feet that you had 10 years ago, you have the same patterns and wounds that you had 10 years ago.

At least in my experience, though, it is really hard for the exact same flavor of your coping strategies and your difficulties to survive a new environment and a new job and a new culture. And the more different that you can make where you’re inhabiting, the harder it is for those old patterns to exist. So yes, people can — new costumes, same problem. That can happen. But at least in my experience, only for so long. Your patterns aren’t indestructible.

And if you spend time around — look, social influence is a huge part here. If you move somewhere new, different industry, different career, different company, different city, different relationship, you will be influenced by the people around you. What sort of person do I want to be like? Am I around people like that person? If so, you are more likely to become that person. If not, you are less likely to become that person. So think carefully about what the influences are.

RAJ SHAMANI: But doesn’t that happen in a lot of cases where you change your circle, you change your people, you change your influence, but you’re the same person inside? So if you were feeling inferior somewhere else, you’re going to feel inferior here as well. If you were feeling like a loser, you’re still going to feel like a loser no matter how many achievers you surround yourself with.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The loser thing, it would be true.

RAJ SHAMANI: So what’s the genuine mechanism of change?

The Genuine Mechanism of Change

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: For me, I can only speak for me — desire. You have to want to change. People talk about, you know, it would be great to be in shape. Would you want to be in shape? Kind of. Okay, do you want to live the lifestyle required to have the life? If you want the life without the lifestyle, you’re guaranteeing yourself disappointment.

I want to be a touring rock star. Okay, do you want to spend 10 years playing guitar and learning chords? No. Okay, rid yourself of the desire because you’re guaranteeing disappointment. If you want the life without the lifestyle, you guarantee disappointment. And so many people want the outcome but not the training ground. That doesn’t work.

The loser thing or the inferiority thing is inherently relative, so that is the sort of thing that can persist no matter where you go. Genuine change, if you’re talking about the confidence, inferiority, insecurity thing — I think you just need more proof. After a while, you can kind of crush your imposter syndrome under mountains and mountains of evidence. At least it worked for me.

Identity and Performance in the Social Media Age

RAJ SHAMANI: True, true. I’ve heard that you and Alex were talking about it for a very long time, and multiple times you guys have spoken about it. I like that — the stack of proof thing.

Talking about identity, here’s something that I keep questioning and I keep observing in the people right now, at least in my generation. If you look at an average 16-year-old today, before they realize who they are, they learn to perform — for the Instagram, for the world, constantly online. So they want a version of them to be liked. How can somebody find themselves in a world where before they even realize who they are, they end up becoming just performers? They keep changing themselves based on just a different version of performance and validation that they want.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t know how new this is. I’m aware that it’s been amplified. I don’t think it’s that new.

RAJ SHAMANI: Okay, what do you mean by that?

The Performance Trap and the Nature of Friendship

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think that for almost all of human history, people have tried to make themselves appear better than they are. The only difference now is that we’re able to do it globally, 24 hours a day, in real time, and we’re able to compare ourselves to 8 billion others. So yes, it’s been tuned up, but I don’t think that the dynamic’s new.

And I try to hesitate laying too much at the feet of the modern world because it makes people feel like this is an unfair challenge on them now that other people didn’t have to deal with. And I think realistically, this is something that humans have had to deal with for all of their lives. We want to be perceived in a good light. So we curate our persona and our presentation to try and achieve that. So that people make us feel good and so that other people see us as good. So I wonder how new it is, not to say that it’s not been amplified.

When it comes to stopping the performing thing, the number one solution for this is to be around people who you feel like yourself around. If you’re around friends where you don’t need to perform, like, I just like you. I just want to hang with you. You’re funny and sometimes you f* up or whatever, but I like you for you. It’s very rare that people say it out loud.

But the way to judge if that’s the case is, do you feel like you can be yourself? Are the people that you’re spending time with able to encourage you to dig deeper? Do you feel more like you or less like you when you’re around them? Once you’ve finished up, do you feel more whole or more broken?

And if you’re moving in the right direction, I think what you very quickly become comfortable with is, I don’t need to be anybody else. My friends like me, or my partner likes me, or my family like me, or my colleagues like me. I don’t need to do anything else.

But what you’re talking about, the performance, is inherently relative. It’s not something that you do on your own. It’s performing for someone else, right? And you’re performing for someone else in the hopes of reflectively being made to feel enough or happy or whatever, fulfilled. But that means that what is powered or broken in you needs to be fixed in union too, with somebody else. So just be around people that you want to be yourself around.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think being around people and friendships, it’s getting messed up and messed up just because more and more people are falling into this trap of actually choosing their friends?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, as opposed to those 4 people in your tribe that are of your age?

RAJ SHAMANI: Like, the whole friendship, the purpose of friendship— forget purpose, just the friendship was supposed to be you end up meeting 4 jerks just like you, random dudes, and you don’t judge them based on ROI. You don’t judge them based on, what’s going to be— oh, are they making me better? Are they making me worse? Am I going to get something out of them, etc., etc., etc. All this, you’re the average of 5 people, all that bullshit has actually probably made friendships worse.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It made it more transactional, for sure.

RAJ SHAMANI: So the essence of friendship is not transactional.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It shouldn’t be, but then you also don’t want to be friends with someone who makes your life worse. Right? That’s not a very good friend.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right? I don’t think that it’s a malady of the modern times to say that cutting toxic people out of your life is a good idea, right? It’s a great idea to do that. That’s not new. You should have done that.

RAJ SHAMANI: But what’s the thin line of being able to balance both in friendships? Because one can be extremely transactional and you’re only trying to fit in in the room. Probably you don’t belong, but you don’t even enjoy it, but there’s something to offer to you.

Emotional vs. Strategic Friendships

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You said it — enjoy it. So there are maybe two broad categories here. One is emotionally fulfilling, socially makes you feel like you belong. The other is strategically useful, furthers your ambitions for life. And sometimes the two cross over, but other times they don’t, right?

Everybody has a boss or a colleague or a person in their industry, or whatever, the mother of a son that your son plays with. You don’t really like the mother, but you know that her son likes your son. You’re going to be friends with the mother that you don’t like because it’s strategically useful. There’s a guy in your industry who’s real powerful and seems to like you, but he’s a bit annoying. Okay, fine. It’s transactional. It’s there to be transactional. But you know that it is.

The problem is when you apply that mindset to what should be your emotionally fulfilling friendships. Does that make sense? So asking yourself the question, “What do I get out of this person?” with the right parameters, I don’t think is a bad question. Like, do I feel good? Do they make me feel happy? Do they make me feel more like myself? Can I sit in silence with them and not need to fill it? I’m just chill. I’m just happy being here with you. Isn’t this cool? Isn’t this nice that we get to have this dinner? We get to go for this walk. Are we going to go on that trip? And that’s good. That’s great.

So making sure that your friendships are places for you to feel whole and not to perform — very important. Not the same when it comes to your business relationships or the parents of the kids that your kid plays with. Slightly different.

RAJ SHAMANI: True, true. Do you think knowing a lot of these frameworks and just listening, reading, understanding all this information about friendships and dating and optimizing yourself actually makes you worse or better?

The Danger of Over-Optimizing Your Life

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It made me worse for a while. It made me tactically better, but emotionally more challenged. But one of the reasons that, as you’ve been talking today, I’ve had to sort of pull myself back into a more tactical style of speaking is that I don’t really think in this kind of a way that much anymore. I really try to just vibe code my way through a lot of life. Does this make me feel good?

I’ve managed to avoid the addictions, the gambling, the porn, the video games, the alcohol. Because if you say, “Does this make me feel good?” you’ll tend to revert to the bottom of the brainstem, right? You’ll do the caveman-y, very limbically hijacked stuff. But assuming that you’ve managed to beat those and you’ve put frameworks and constraints in place — which is what I spent most of my 20s and 30s doing — now I’m just kind of going to follow what feels good.

Who do I want to hang around with? And a lot of the friends that I want to hang around with, strategically, tactically, I don’t get anything out of. But inasmuch as feeling good is the only reason that we’re f*ing here in any case, I get everything out of them. And it means that my performance improves because the next morning I wake up and I go, “Damn, I had such a great dinner last night and I learned nothing, and I thought it was brilliant. I had no stories to tell on the podcast, but I feel good, and because I feel good, I’m going to operate better.”

RAJ SHAMANI: At what point should somebody start operating like this?

Learning the Rules Before Breaking Them

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It takes a while. You can’t do it at the start, right? You can’t vibe code your way through. This is why we said it earlier — you need to learn the rules of the game before you can break the rules of the game. Breaking the rules of the game having not learned them is just not playing the game, right?

And this is why somebody like Joe, for instance — one of the secrets to Joe’s success in podcasting is that he is able to ask a question with a statement. So he says a statement that encourages an answer from a guest. He treats statements as questions. What that sounds like is you hearing someone just talk. It’s just a conversation, not an interview. And the fact that he’s cultivated that, now his hands are off the wheel. Maybe it was native, maybe it was natural, maybe it was the way that he came into it. But even if it wasn’t, he just says a statement and he gets an answer back as if he’d asked a question. That’s brilliant. That’s f*ing genius. It’s the simplest thing. Say a statement, get an answer. Don’t need to ask questions in the same way. And then when you do ask a question, it’s more pointed and more direct. And that’s brilliant too.

You can’t do that from the off because you need to learn what a good and a bad question is like, what a good and a bad statement is like. And only after that — the number of times on the pod, for instance, that I just say, “Why?” or “What do you mean by that?” Very short, snappy questions. I love doing that. But if you haven’t built up the understanding of when you can deploy that, because if you do that too much, it sounds very harsh. It sounds almost confrontational. But if you have understood the — and I didn’t even think about it, I’m not thinking about it — I used to think about it. “Oh, I can ask the why question now because I feel like I’ve got enough warmth between me and the guest to show that this isn’t a pointed, difficult question.” It takes time. It takes time to learn. But I would say no sooner than 5 years and no later than 20 years, but your results may vary.

RAJ SHAMANI: That’s a good framework to think about. At least for 5 years, play by the rules. Play by the rules.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Play by the rules.

RAJ SHAMANI: Learn tactically about it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Exactly. Even with Elon, the f*ing rocket thing, first principles — but remember where he took the first rocket designs from? They were the publicly available NASA blueprints. And only after that did he do the Falcon and the Raptor engine, right? Did 3, then 2, then 1, or 1, then 2, then 3. And it gets progressively simpler over time.

If you look at the first one, you’ve seen that image, right? The first one, the second one, the third one. The first one — what is this? It’s some crazy contraption. There are all of these different parts. And you get down to the final one and it’s this sleek design. Super simple. We had to learn the rules before we could break the rules. Because how do you know to get to this? How do you know what is surplus to requirements if you haven’t put everything in and then eliminated individually?

What Men Are Taught About Being a Man

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah. You know, talking about rules — you talk a lot about men, right? And their way of dealing with the world and loneliness and stuff like that. There’s one rule which men have been taught, and this is, I believe, everywhere around the world, is to not be a woman. They’re not taught mostly about how to be a man, right? They’re usually taught about how not to be a woman.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

RAJ SHAMANI: So every time you ask a man what being a man means, or what it feels like, they just talk about strength and not crying. And everything which is not woman. And you ask a woman about what being a woman is about and they start mentioning the qualities. What do you think? What happens to the brain of a man when they are just perpetually trained to not be something?

Vulnerability and Emotional Strength

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, it makes them very confused. It’s very confusing if you’re defined around what you are not. And in the modern world, at least in the West at the moment, I don’t know how it is in India, men are told, actually, by much of the contemporary advice, that if they were only less masculine, they would be better, right? Your main problem, men, is your masculinity. If you were more like the women, if you spoke more about your emotions, if you were softer, if you were less concerned with conquer and mastery and emotional containment, you’d be fine.

So you’re right to say that. Do you feel that’s true? It certainly is in terms of the advice publicly. I don’t think that it’s true, but that’s what men are being told. And yeah, it’s horrendous. This opens up all of the doorways for guys to feel confused without any of the solutions, and then it blames men for not knowing what direction to go in, and then it says that they’re in a position of privilege for being part of a patriarchy they no longer feel a part of, and are cut adrift with no advice, and are told that the main problem that they have is with their masculinity, which was poorly defined to begin with.

It’s confusing. It’s a confusing time to be a guy. I’m glad that I’m older because it was less confusing when I was growing up. And that means that even though it’s still confusing now, I had a little bit of time before it became insane.

RAJ SHAMANI: Tell me, because you said, be more like women and that’s the way to be, etc., etc. So let’s boil it down to vulnerability. That’s the word. Do you think it’s good to show vulnerability or no?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I do personally. I think vulnerability is the only way that you can have true strength. I think if there’s nothing on the line, if you’re not risking anything, then there’s no such thing as courage. Courage is not not being scared. Courage is being scared and doing it anyway. It has to be. There’s no bravery if there’s nothing risked because you just didn’t feel anything.

If I say to you, we’re going to toss a coin and you can just pick, what bravery is involved in just picking? Say we’re going to toss a coin and it’s for your entire net worth — f*ing hell. We’re going to run into that house and everybody’s got Nerf guns with foam bullets. How much bravery do you need for that? Not much. We’re going to run into that house and everyone’s got real guns. You need a lot because there’s something on the line. Without any risk, there can be no such thing as courage.

And vulnerability to me is speaking your truth even when it’s scary. If it’s not scary, then what does it matter? I think a lot of people see vulnerability as crying, oversharing emotions unnecessarily. And it’s not. It’s saying what’s true for you, regardless of how scary it feels.

RAJ SHAMANI: At what point is it strength and at what point does it become weakness?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, we praise suppression as strength, right? That’s not the same thing. Suppressing your emotions is not the same thing as being strong. Strength is feeling your feelings and doing it anyway. Moving through them, embodying them, allowing them to become part of you and continuing. It is absolutely not suppressing what you feel.

RAJ SHAMANI: But you know how a lot of people actually — that’s what they say, that if you show a lot of emotions, if you show a lot of vulnerability, people stop relying on you too much. People stop seeing you in a very strong way.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s true. Yeah. I mean, it’s not just necessarily showing emotion. If your emotion was excitement, people probably don’t see you differently. What you’re talking about is a lack of emotional containment, right? That your emotion has come up at the wrong time. There’s a big difference — like emotional leakage.

RAJ SHAMANI: That’s what I’m talking about.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Of course. And yeah, I think so. If you’re the leader of a military platoon, now is not the time to cry in the middle of a war. But when you get back and you’re with your group — I don’t know, maybe you’re right that you get less respect if you get back to the base and you show emotion about how much that meant to you. But there are very specific situations where this is true, and I think that far fewer of them are true than people think.

There are very few situations when, done at the right time, more emotion contained appropriately — not out of control — more openness about emotion, is a bad thing. I think we’re in an increasingly autistic culture, right? It’s one that fears emotions or demonizes them.

“F* Your Feelings, Just Work Harder”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ll give you this: a lot of guys especially, and hard-charging ambitious people, use the mantra “f* your feelings, just work harder” to get them to push aside their emotions in order to keep on with the mission. That’s great, and I think that is a huge step that lots of people can take, but that’s only level 1.

If you pray at the altar of “f your feelings, just work harder,” how can you be surprised when you achieve but you don’t feel? Think about that for a second. “F your feelings, just work harder.” Then you reach the top of the mountain and you complain about the fact that it’s passed through you. Well, you have cause and effect happening right in front of your eyes. Of course you do. The very fuel that got you here is the thing denying you your satisfaction once you arrive.

“F* your feelings, just work harder. I don’t feel when I achieve.” That’s the same thing, dude. So what are you doing it for? If the only way that you can achieve success is to deny yourself the one reason that you did it for — I don’t know, man. It feels like an overly complex solution.

I’m way less impressed by somebody that’s successful now. I’m way more impressed by somebody who is embodied in their success, who feels it. I think all that success is, is appropriate strategy, good timing and consistency for a significantly long enough duration. Largely anybody can achieve success through that. Yeah, there are limitations, not everyone’s got the same head start, et cetera. But to do that and feel it is way rarer. So for me now, I’m much more interested and impressed by people who have managed to do it and feel it, not just do it.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, I agree. I found myself living in this duality. When there’s some shit happening in my team, you will never see me panicking. You will never see me showing any emotion, even though inside I’m burning like the world’s ending and I want to cry out loud.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The job of a leader.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, nobody will ever get to see that. I’m this “feelings and work harder” kind of person, right? Always work, work, work, work, work. And almost like the price to pay for that is because I don’t feel paranoid and I don’t panic at the time when everything is breaking, I don’t enjoy the high. I don’t celebrate.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, you have to feel it all.

RAJ SHAMANI: So I don’t do either. But then when I’m back home, when I’m with my family, with my girl, I just become this baby and I’m crying like a—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Good.

RAJ SHAMANI: I’m crying like a kid.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Good. I think it’s good, dude. But don’t show the guys. It’s important.

RAJ SHAMANI: But sometimes I question myself — which part of me is true?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think you’re allowed to be a professional. There are times for you to show emotion and there are times for you to show up and do your f*ing job. And sometimes those things can cross over, but sometimes they shouldn’t.

There’s this great book called Endurance by Alfred Lansing, and it’s about Sir Ernest Shackleton’s crossing of the Antarctic. For the people that haven’t read the book and don’t know the story, it didn’t go well. It was a real challenge. For a long time they were stuck in Antarctica. What you find is that Shackleton, who was the leader of the expedition, publicly showed his team only competence and containment. He always had a plan. He knew what he was doing. He was confident about what was going to happen. But you read his diary and he’s drowning in self-doubt. He’s permanently self-pitying. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t know if this is going to work.” And then he closes the book, goes outside, and does his job. He’s a professional. Same thing for you.

And how cool is this? What a Renaissance man — somebody that’s able to fully feel the fear privately and then step out. Because again, if you didn’t have the soft side, where would the glory be on the other side of it?

That’s not to say people have varying levels of emotional depth and varying levels of emotional exposure. There’s nothing less about being someone who feels less, but you are going to live a less rich life. There are types of experience that you will have access to — a sort of resolution. You can see the world in 4K. Other people kind of see it in 720p. And this is a blessing and a curse. It’s a double-edged sword of feeling things deeply. You get to do the thing, that’s great, man. It’s going to hold you back and you’re going to feel it. But it seems like a good deal to me.

Coming-of-Age Rituals: India vs. the West

RAJ SHAMANI: Talking about being a man — I think you left a thread open. If I have to compare India versus the Western world.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

RAJ SHAMANI: In India, a boy becomes a man because he goes through certain rituals. It’s like you’re almost told that you have to take care of the family, the responsibilities. In some parts, there’s a proper ritual where you’re being handed over — like you’re the man of the house now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right.

RAJ SHAMANI: And it almost like your path is paved. You have to walk a certain thing, there’s society pressure, there’s responsibility. In the Western world, nothing’s like that. You’re not being told to do certain things. You don’t have to maybe follow a strict way of religion or family responsibilities. It’s much more lenient here, right? Which one do you think is better? Knowing a path where you’re going to become a man?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think that definitely helps. I think—

RAJ SHAMANI: Like knowing a path?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I think coming-of-age rituals are really useful, and it’s a shame that we don’t have them in the West anymore. I think it would have made me happy to have had a little bit more of an understanding about the path that I was taking and the route that I would go down.

RAJ SHAMANI: What do you think can be one ritual?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, that’s good. I think something around 14, 16, 18 — some transitionary moment, something that feels like an occasion or a ritual. “Okay, childhood is over, adulthood has begun.” I think that’s kind of important. In the West, what’s the closest thing we’ve got? Getting a driver’s license, maybe. That’s like it. There isn’t an equivalent.

And I think it would help a lot of young boys realize that they’re supposed to take on more responsibility earlier and feel pride in it, right? As opposed to obligation or this weird “I used to have fun doing this and now I can’t” sensation. Like, “I’ve arrived and I should behave as such.”

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, there is in India that moment in every household. In their different age groups, different people, different backgrounds, different financial freedom levels. But at some point in your house, you’re made to realize — either by a ceremony or by just making you sit down amongst other family members — that you’re going to be next and your time’s coming and it’s now, you better start behaving.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I like that. I think it’s good.

RAJ SHAMANI: And then almost like at the time when the head of the family — if your father or grandfather, somebody dies — there’s a ritual called pagri, which is like a turban, right? It’s like a hypothetical turban. It’s like the turban’s been given to you that now you’re the head of the family. So 20, 50, 100 people, whoever you consider family — now you are the caretaker of that. So from that point, a boy becomes a man.

Colonial History and British Identity

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Responsible. I like it.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah. So what do you think, if you had to pinpoint one ritual or experience which turns a boy into a man, what would that be?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t know, man. I mean, I’m constrained by the culture that I grew up in. There wasn’t one. There wasn’t. Is it the first time you have sex? Is it when you get your driver’s license? Is it when you move out of the house? Is it when you get your first job? Your first bank account. There wasn’t a demarcation, there wasn’t a line. I honestly don’t even know what that would look like.

RAJ SHAMANI: But what do you think it would look like? Think about it. What one experience can— if you feel like, okay, maybe this pain, this suffering, this particular thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Look, do you do a misogi, like a Japanese misogi, where you’ve got 50% chance of success? Are you thrown out into the wilderness for 40 days to fend for yourself? I think what you guys have done there seems like a good start because it needs to be done socially. It needs to— everybody else sees you as different and treats you differently. I think that seems to be a clever idea. But you could do it at an 18th birthday and have somebody call out, “This is who you are now,” in front of all of your family and friends. And for you to feel that and take on that new identity, I think that would be a good start.

Growing Up with Colonial Hangover

RAJ SHAMANI: I grew up in India, which means I’ve grown up with colonial hangover. There are so many things in our head, in our history books, which has just taught us that Britishers came over, they ruled us hundreds of years. So we grew up with almost— there’s a sense of dislike, hatred, revenge, avenge, a lot of societies and sociology and my thinking and everyone’s thinking around me, it’s shaped by either hating Britishers or pleasing Britishers, right?

Because a lot of the rules that you guys set, I mean, the Britishers set, ended up becoming where we wanted to just please and we just played the rule because we thought that’s the ultimate supremacy and that’s it. And exactly opposite is like revenge. Like, how the f*? Like, we’re not going to follow anything that these guys do, right? So we grew up with that.

I want to understand, when you grow up in a country where that country has colonized everybody, you are the colonizer, your history is— you’re literally taught that you are the supremacists. Like, you guys went ahead, set the world order, structured things, right? Do you grow up differently?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Good question. I have to say, I didn’t ever grow up feeling like British people owned the world. I felt like Americans owned the world. I was born in ’88, and most of my school time when I would have learned this would have been the ’90s and the early 2000s. I didn’t feel like we were some global force. I learned stuff about how we responded in World War II. I learned the Battle of Hastings and the War of the Roses and our history being invaded by the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans and things like that. That was what I learned.

I never learned about, “Yeah, and then we kind of went and took Australia and took India and Canada and we made them colonies. And then we had a— we stopped the Atlantic slave trade and we started the East India Trading Company.” We didn’t really learn about that. And I don’t know whether that’s the schooling system trying to sweep it under the rug, or if it’s just not seen as being that important.

But I don’t know any British person who thinks that by virtue of their nationality they own the world, especially not now. Maybe 100 years ago they would have had some sort of vestige of past glory, but the UK is putting both feet in its mouth at the moment. It’s not showering itself in wonder. In a lot of ways, it’s one of the laughingstocks of the world. It’s like, look at this fallen empire. Even 200 years ago, you guys had everything, and now you can’t even secure your own borders, or you have these insane benefit scams going on, or you have all of this strife internally and no one can agree on how the country is supposed to be run, wasteful spending and inefficiency.

I love the UK. I love all of my friends that are there. I’m very, very grateful for what it did for me, but it’s not in its golden era at the moment, I don’t think, and holding on to past victories of some sort. Apart from World War II, I never really thought about that.

What British Schools Taught — and Didn’t

RAJ SHAMANI: But are you guys taught, like, were you guys ever taught that you colonized India or Australia or stuff like that? Never?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No.

RAJ SHAMANI: And nobody even talks about that? That’s interesting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No one talks about it.

RAJ SHAMANI: And do you ever get to know about— I mean, at some point you must be knowing about it, right? That British used to own the world at some point.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To a degree, yeah. I suppose so. But I think I learned that through novels and historical dramas and stuff like that.

RAJ SHAMANI: Interesting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I didn’t learn it in school.

RAJ SHAMANI: Why do you think they’re hiding this part of the history?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Good question. Maybe shame, maybe just a lack of importance. You don’t have that much time in terms of history, right? You’ve got an hour a week, 2 hours a week. There’s some pretty important, cool stuff that we’ve got. But I suppose one challenge that you have in the UK, especially England, is we have 1,000 years of history, right? Unbroken, uninvaded history. There’s a lot to get through. And for India, what might be the most important thing, for us is a footnote as a part of 1,000 years, a millennia of learning. From 1066, right, all the way up to today. So much stuff to go through.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, this is also debatable now in India that this is also just a footnote in Indian history because our civilizational history is the oldest in the world. So we should be taught about that, not just these 200 years.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s a lot focused around the sort of British colonizer. That’s interesting. Well, so what—

RAJ SHAMANI: Because they did the— they wrote our schooling system.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Really?

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, a lot of it is still followed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But do you think that that is the British trying to indoctrinate Indian people into understanding, “We came, civilized this nation, we should be held up as some sort of glorious—” Why do you think they would have tried to put that in?

How Colonial Schooling Shaped Indian Ambitions

RAJ SHAMANI: The version which is most known, and most people who— like, most people, what they know about is Britishers tried to build our schooling system in a way where we only learn to follow orders and learn to become and get into professions which will serve them, not become innovators, not become original thinkers, not become risk takers.

So all the professions which are still till date being very celebrated by the masses are the ones which are in administration. Like, government bodies, people who are in the position of power in the government, not the elected ones, but the officials who are selected for administrating things. That’s one of the most celebrated professions in the country.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But it’s inherently kind of servitude. You’re serving in that way. You’re not breaking new ground. You’re not being innovative.

RAJ SHAMANI: Because see, all our lives we were— at least in the schooling books, now it’s getting changed— we were taught that Britishers came here, they ruined everything, and they were the ones who were celebrating.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about cricket?

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about cricket?

RAJ SHAMANI: What about it?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Was cricket in India before we came? No. Cricket’s good. We did one good thing. I feel like I’m having to apologize for an entire nation here. But I’m desperately clamoring for something that we’ve done that’s good. I’m going to take cricket. I’m going to take cricket if that’s one of the options.

RAJ SHAMANI: Now we dominate it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s true. We shouldn’t have taught you that. We should have kept you in business administration so you didn’t learn cricket so that we would have been able to win the World Cup more effectively.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, no, that’s— I was just telling you, like, the kind of stuff that we read, it’s pretty different than what you have read. So that’s why I wanted—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s not the same, dude.

RAJ SHAMANI: But it’s fascinating that you guys don’t even talk about it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, never. I would have never talked about it in school.

Class, Privilege, and Identity in Britain

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think people around you, like your friends or anyone, like just Britishers in general, you’ve ever felt you were privileged and entitled?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Inside of the country?

RAJ SHAMANI: Inside of the country.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No. Never. I’m as working class as you can get, right? I come from a town which is famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK, and then it lost that. A very unremarkable working-class Northern British town, nobody thinks that they’re special. Nobody feels like they’re entitled at all.

Everybody in the UK is obsessed with class, absolutely obsessed with class and status. We have the word “posh.” Do you know what the word “posh” is? Yeah, okay, so somebody’s sort of from an upper-class background, but not necessarily from money, right? In the US, you would say “rich,” or “well-to-do,” or maybe even “upper class,” but you wouldn’t say “posh.” Posh is a kind of old money way of speaking and behaving, but it’s all internal.

We don’t think about ourselves in relation to other cultures. I never thought about a level of superiority. It was all within the hierarchy of the country. “That person went to that school. Oh, that’s an expensive school. They must be—” But at no point was I thinking me or my friends or my family or whatever, as just some random little community in England, had anything over the rest of the world at all.

RAJ SHAMANI: Interesting. Why do you think people obsess with class? Because they’re obsessed with class in India as well.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In India? Well, in India you have a little bit more of a rigid system. I think in the UK one of the reasons for that was kind of the aristocracy, this history for a very long time of birthright. Who are your parents? What do they do? Do they own land?

Another thing is the population density of the UK is 10 times that of the US. We only have 50 million people-ish, 50, 60 million people. The US has got 5 times more people, but in like 50 times more land. So we’ve got like 10 times the population density. It’s crazy. So that means everyone’s very close. There’s not really that much room to escape. You can see what everybody is doing.

But it’s part of the culture, dude. People are obsessed with class in the UK, absolutely obsessed with it. It’s status games. I will never not be working class. What’s more sneaky about it is it’s never spoken about. No one would ever say, “Oh, you’re working class,” but they know where I went to school, what my parents did, where I was born, the sort of house I grew up in. I’ve got 2 degrees and moved to America and own a bunch of businesses, but I’m still working class and I always will be no matter what I do.

RAJ SHAMANI: So they will never be able to see you in the same light as them?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, it depends what we’re talking about here because my generation is more influenced, I think, by America, meritocracy. You know, “You are what you do and you are as good as you do it,” as opposed to “You are who your parents are and you’re as good as your schooling and your accent and your place of birth.”

RAJ SHAMANI: But not your parents’ generation. They would still see— the parents’ generation would still see you as working class versus—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To a degree, yeah. To a degree, yeah.

RAJ SHAMANI: Interesting. So it’s diminishing as we speak with generation after generation.

The UK’s Cultural Challenges and Entrepreneurial Landscape

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think so. Yeah. The influence of meritocracy, of people, the world becoming more globalized, especially the influence of America.

RAJ SHAMANI: And why do you think it’s in terrible shit right now? Like, why is it going down?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re going to get me in trouble. I’ve just had to apologize for all of the crimes that we committed against India, and now I’m going to have to try and work out why it’s in such a shithole.

There is a holding onto some of the past victories. Some of the glories of the past kind of does happen a little bit in the UK, but not over other countries, but in a sort of laziness, lackadaisical, taking for granted that, well, I mean, you know, what a wonderful heritage and history that we have as a country. We don’t need to maybe be quite so efficient. We don’t maybe need to be quite as well thought out internally.

Like there’s this high-speed train line, it’s called HS2, and the country has been trying to build this high-speed train line from the middle of England to London so that people who work way outside, you know, a 3-hour drive could maybe get into London in less than an hour. HS2, this has had an infinite amount of money poured into it, like an unlimited amount of money. It’s not even remotely close to being started, let alone finished. And it’s been going on for decades.

The NHS in the UK, the National Health Service, is just, it’s a mess. Up until I think 10 years ago, they were using Windows XP. They still use fax machines, right? It’s just, if you have a system which is very old, which our country is, it takes so long to just update the systems. And if you have that as the mindset, the US is move fast, break things. There is innovation in places like India. We’re going to, we don’t quite know how to put this together, but we’re going to do it. We’re going to come up with a solution that actually makes this thing work. The UK is just a bit less. It’s still very spit and sawdust, but it’s way less innovative.

The UK has the same number of graduates out of the top 10 universities in the world as the US does, but graduates from those universities in the US become entrepreneurs at 5 times the rate. So the US produces 5 times more entrepreneurs out of the top 10 unis than the UK does, despite us having basically the same number of people graduating. Why? I don’t think that there’s a culture of innovation. I don’t think that there’s a culture of moving fast and breaking things.

But one of the advantages of that is the bar is set incredibly low. So if you are somebody who’s got some agency and some innovation and is able to pick yourself up by your bootstraps in the UK, you can very quickly make a change. You can very quickly rise above because the culture is holding everyone back. And if you just about manage to reach escape velocity, you can very quickly set yourself apart from everyone else because the competition is not as strong as it would be somewhere else.

RAJ SHAMANI: You said it’s holding you back. Is it because of the will? Like, people don’t have the will and the intention to grow?

Tall Poppy Syndrome and the Fear of Standing Out

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To a degree, the influence. I think a lot of people want to, but there’s very much a tall poppy syndrome sense. You do not want to do something different in the UK. If you do, you stand out, you’re mocked for it. It’s not upheld. In the US, if you do something, if you try and fail, people in the US will usually support you. If you try in the UK, you’re going to get the piss taken out of you.

There’s a line: “In the US, people want to see you succeed in case you take them with you. In the UK, people want to see you fail in case you leave them behind.” And I think that that’s pretty true. It’s interesting.

RAJ SHAMANI: I’m thinking, where is India in the middle? India is in the middle, I guess. There are places and states and cities and organizations where people just want you to go out and be disruptors and go out and you’ll get supported by millions of people. And then there are places where it seems like UK where you’re going to be pulled down.

But no matter what you do, because there’s a saying that this is the best place to be alive in the world right now is India because it’s growing. There’s an insane amount of opportunity. So even if you are a little focused, there’s so many people and so many things which are still about to come. So that’s why you’re going to be more successful in this part of the world than any other place.

And then there’s a saying that don’t try too much because you’re going to be pulled down. Because India doesn’t have— like, a part of India doesn’t have a good relationship with failure, which is changing now. I’m asking you, is that the same in the UK? Because in the US, what I’ve seen, you’re not being called out if you fail. Like, they have a good relationship with failure. It’s like, if you’re a second-time failed entrepreneur, you’re still going to get a chance for the third time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s true.

RAJ SHAMANI: You’re not going to get more by not having a great track record.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I think in the UK, again, if you’re obsessed with status, what you’re saying by trying to do something different is, “I am better than where I am now.” And implicitly in that is, while my status isn’t an accurate representation of who I am, but we know that it is. We know that your status, really your class, the level of posh that you’re supposed to be. You’re working class, or you’re lower middle class, or you’re middle class, or you’re upper class, or you’re very well-to-do. So I think that’s part of it.

And also there’s just a big unspoken competitive landscape in the UK. No one really calls it out. So everybody is competing, but nobody wants to be seen like they’re competing. So one of the benefits that you have for this is if you can find a pocket of friends like I have. A lot of my best friends are from the UK and have moved, no longer live there. All of us have done really, really well to hold on to each other because we found a community. But these aren’t geographic, these aren’t really even cultural, they’re subcultural. They’re just little— it’s one person from each town or three people from each town who maybe meet each other or meet people from other towns and go, “Oh, you like to improve or try and build businesses or work on yourself or get in shape or do whatever. I’m going to become friends with you because it’s really hard to find other people that are like you.”

And yeah, that’s why, the UK had the second highest millionaire exits in 2024. Number one was China, even though they’ve got 20 times the population. And the UK was number two. Like 10,000 people, I think, left China. 3,000 millionaires left the UK in 2024. We do not have that many millionaires. And the founder of Revolut left, and I think his tax bill is the equivalent of tens of thousands of normal people. He left because the entrepreneurial landscape is not fantastic.

Now, dude, I love the UK. I miss my friends in the UK. There’s lots of things that I like about it, but the quality of life is not that fantastic. The weather f*ing sucks. The weather blows. And you get taxed very, very highly. Plus the culture is not particularly supportive. It’s not a supportive environment to try and do something different or to be an entrepreneur. And that is a death spiral because fewer and fewer people will try. And of the people that do and succeed, they leave.

So this is why the UK is struggling a little bit at the moment. And it’s a top-down issue — there need to be more pro-entrepreneurial initiatives so that people want to do it. And it needs to be bottom-up as well. The culture needs to change. People need to start to celebrate those that are doing different things, that are trying, even if they’re failing.

The British Exodus to Dubai

RAJ SHAMANI: Interesting. And the same, something similar — the stat I also read that in Dubai, I was just reading specifically about Dubai and UAE, the highest number of buyers who were foreign, who had never been, like newcomers, were British in 2025.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Didn’t surprise me.

RAJ SHAMANI: Like, just, Dubai is like, for Indians, it’s like a hub. Like, it’s— we almost call it, it’s a part of India. It’s so close to us. Like, there’s a joke that the most expensive city in India is Dubai.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah.

RAJ SHAMANI: Even after that, the newcomers, people who are coming for the first time and buying their houses and living there, were highest with Britishers. So they’re just moving all around the world now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think Dubai took the highest number of millionaire exits from the UK, of one country. Dubai is not that big, dude. It’s basically a very large city.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s one very large city.

RAJ SHAMANI: True.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And it’s not even that large. Well, yeah, that’s right. And some desert around it and the sea. So yeah. Crazy.

Meritocracy, Failure, and Personal Responsibility

RAJ SHAMANI: Coming back to a UK, US, India conversation. Okay. I really love that. What do you think? So, okay. Let me just point out things that you said. You said there are people in the US who think that they’re entitled to be— some, you know, sometimes I think there are people like some adults who want something because they thought, as when they were growing up, they were promised the world. Now they’re not being given that world.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Also, just to add another wrinkle in that — if you live in a meritocracy, especially a capitalist meritocracy, which the US absolutely is, if the people who win are worthy of their successes, what does that say about the people that lose? They’re worthy of their losses, right? You are completely in charge of the outcomes that you get in life. And that means that if you don’t get the outcomes you want in life, it feels like a personal insult. It feels like you are not enough, you’re not good enough, you should have been better. And if only you’d worked harder or done something else, you could have become that.

Whereas in the UK, your path is kind of predestined. A little. And I think that that restricts what people believe and hope, but it also makes them kind of take their hands off the wheel somewhat. You know, how high could I climb?

For instance, I remember this when I used to play cricket when I was 11 or 12 years old. So you’ll know this. Do you have the term “thanks for coming” in India when you play cricket? It’s called a TFC, thanks for coming, and it’s when you don’t bat and you don’t bowl. And the captain, at the end of the game, shakes your hand and goes, “Thanks for coming, mate.” Because all you’ve done is field. Right?

And I remember that I used to sometimes have this weird sense of satisfaction if I had a TFC because I knew that I didn’t have the opportunity to fail. I didn’t bat, so I couldn’t get out or score low. I didn’t bowl, so I couldn’t have bowled a couple of overs and got taken off because I bowled badly or something like that. Got hit for 18 in 2 overs or something. And then the captain’s like, “Sorry, mate. Take a spell.”

And that I think is partly, you know, fear, it’s avoidance, it’s certainly a bit of me. I’m not saying that British culture’s got that much to do with it, but I certainly do see people in the UK inoculating themselves from failing publicly by assuring their failure privately by not even engaging, right? If I don’t try, I can’t fail, at least publicly. And remember, when status is such a big deal and if trying and failing is this huge big catastrophe, you don’t want to try and fail. It would be easier just to not try.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, yeah, I agree. This is the same in India, by the way, but shame, embarrassment attached to failure.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep. I came off a moped in Bali 10 years ago, so I’m just the most garden variety, standard issue, stupid white tourist thing to do. I rent a moped for 50 cents a day.

RAJ SHAMANI: Okay.

The Shame of Falling Off a Moped

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I’m riding down the street, truck pulls out in front of me, I pull both of the brakes. The back brake is completely gone because the bike was worth 50 cents a day. The front brake goes, the bike slides out from underneath me. You’ll remember when you were riding a push bike as a kid, you pull the front brake, the bike goes. And I come off the bike and I’ve the whole side of my arm up on my shoulder, the outside of my knee, the top of my foot, just me versus Balinese road in a tiny pair of swim shorts and a vest. I lost, right? Balinese road won. It was a TKO.

The first emotion that I felt as I stood up, having just come off this bike bleeding, covered in grazes and scrapes, and no skin left on one side of my body— the first emotion that I felt was embarrassment. The first emotion that I felt was shame. It wasn’t fear for my own life, my own health, whether or not I’m going to get infected, how am I going to deal with this, can I get home safely. It was, oh, this sort of British ‘Are people seeing? Are they laughing at me?’ That was the first emotion that I had.

RAJ SHAMANI: But isn’t that good? Because that actually motivates you to become better.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think so.

RAJ SHAMANI: Let me be more specific with the shame question on this. Do you think if a society— if you’re born in a society where you’re motivated or demotivated by shame and you attach your sense of worth by the fact how much shame you’re going to be experiencing in the eyes of society. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Shame as a Social Tool

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It certainly makes sure that people behave in a pro-social manner, right? The judgment of others— people don’t want that. So that’s good. I don’t like shame as an emotion. I don’t think it’s a powerful tool. I think that you’re better off trying to get people to do what they should do through incentivizing them as opposed to punishing them.

I think punishment largely is, especially in the modern world, unless somebody’s broken the law or done something genuinely unethical— like, oh, you get shamed for trying and failing. Really? Really? That’s the middle.

RAJ SHAMANI: You—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I felt the fear of shame of bowling and bowling badly, or of batting and not scoring or of coming off a moped and it being because of my skill on a moped, which it wasn’t. I mean, I also don’t have great skills on a moped, but it was because I got a bike that I hadn’t checked the brakes of fully. I didn’t think that you would be able to rent a bike where the back brake didn’t work.

Okay, but is that really worthy of shame? I don’t think so. So look, shame can be useful, but it needs to be useful around very specific things. Does it incentivize people to work harder? Kind of. But I would rather encourage them to work harder than punish them to work harder.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think then people should become shameless?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, you need your shame. It’s very important. This is where I will stand up for my British heritage. It’s very important to have shame, right? Because without shame, you can become a very antisocial psychopath. You can start to use people in ways that are unethical. You can hurt people and do things that you shouldn’t do. So I think shame’s important.

A Framework for When to Feel Shame

RAJ SHAMANI: So let’s make it easy for people, okay? Because I like this conversation, a lot of people would relate to it because we’ve all felt embarrassed and shameful in some part or some situation of our lives, right? Give me some sort of framework or something to think about in what kind of situation I should feel shame and in what situation I should not.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Hmm. Okay. That’s interesting. I think shame is useful. Shame is certainly useful when your actions have damaged or hurt other people, not just you. You know, if I bat badly, yeah, I guess it’s influenced the team. But really, shame around that— did you try?

I think another thing is, did you try to do this? Good example. You should feel shame if you said to your captain that you were going to turn up and play, but you didn’t. You just didn’t want to and you didn’t tell him and he played with 10 men or had to get his uncle who doesn’t play cricket. You shouldn’t feel shame if you set off on time but hit traffic and got locked up in some insane traffic jam on the way there. You’ll feel the same, oh my God, I’ve let my captain down. But in one of those, you could have done differently and didn’t. And in another it was kind of out of your hands.

Also, if you do something that’s just on you where you did something that’s brave and courageous and kind of aligned with what is generally pro-social values, good, keep going. If it’s not, like the way you do some crypto pump and dump rug pull thing, like yeah, feel a f* ton of shame. You should do. That was a bad thing to do.

Freedom of Speech and Shame

RAJ SHAMANI: Let’s just extrapolate this particular insight to speaking out freely. Should people be shameful when they say something which they’re thinking about and probably can be not aligned with the societal values?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I guess it depends on what they say, you know?

RAJ SHAMANI: I mean, but it’s so subjective because freedom of speech is so subjective.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Of course it is.

RAJ SHAMANI: In some countries you can be jailed for saying one thing, in another country it’s completely fine.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Of course.

RAJ SHAMANI: Well, look, should people be feeling shameful?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, it depends what you say. It very much depends what you say.

RAJ SHAMANI: So how do they actually put out the filter?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wisdom, right? This is what taste— the difference between good and not good. That’s what we’re looking to try and achieve here. And this is why, as people get older, they tend to become wiser, because it takes experience. You can’t speedrun this stuff. It’s going to take you time to work out how do I have a difficult conversation with my partner, in a way that doesn’t hurt them and that seems genuine and honest and gentle but firm, and it holds a boundary. That’s very skillful, very, very skillful. How do I hold this bat correctly? How do I play a nice cover drive? Okay, it’s going to take a little bit of time to do, and it’s accumulated one step, one day, one interaction, one iteration at a time.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think it’s important to have that kind of experience to learn this?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t think you can speedrun wisdom.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think it’s important to actually also suffer in order to get there?

Adversity as a Catalyst for Growth

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s certainly useful because when things go badly or when you suffer, you assess your actions with a level of dexterity and resolution that you don’t when things are going well. When you’re brushing up against the grain of life, you look at your actions so much more closely as opposed to when you’re just going with the flow. When things are going well, I’ll assess how stuff is, but I don’t really need to look at it that closely. But if you’ve just gone through a breakup or you’ve lost a parent or your business has gone under, you’re going to try and work out why that happened, and you’re going to try and make sure it doesn’t happen again. And that’s why you assess things very, very closely. And I think that that’s great periods of growth.

It’s this wonderful line— “Adversity is a terrible thing to waste.” Adversity is a terrible thing to waste because during your toughest moments, that is when most growth is available. But not everybody is catalyzed by adversity. Some people are crushed by it. And it’s a case of asking, how are you going to respond? Life has kicked you in the nuts. How are you going to respond?

RAJ SHAMANI: Who do you think are the people who actually come off better out of adversities versus people who don’t?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: People who are able to alchemize it into something good. People who were able to say, that situation was very difficult to me and I’m going to keep going. I mean, it’s definitely not the people that give up. I can guarantee that the one way to ensure that you fail is to give up when you face adversity. That feels a lot like victim blaming, right? You don’t know how hard it is.

Dude, I get it. Breakup and lost a mum and broke a leg in the same week. That’s rough. But you do have two choices when this situation happens, like either give up or not. And for me, I think the not is always the way to go.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, because you’re wired that way, or somebody taught you this?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wired that way, and I want to be that way because I want to be that more.

RAJ SHAMANI: Are they two different things?

Disposition vs. Self-Determination

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think so. I think there’s a difference between what is my disposition or predisposition and where do I want to be. Like, your predisposition might be to be fat and out of shape, but I don’t want to be that way. I want to train. I want to be in good shape. I want my health to be good for me so that I can operate well, so I can enjoy life, so I can have a long healthy life, so I can support my family and pick my kids up and my wife. Okay, that’s not your disposition, right? That’s not your traits, but it is what you’ve trained yourself into doing. And self-authorship, self-determination, agency, they’re very, very important to me. Very important.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think people who change and come off better, they’re always operating from the point of “I’m not enough”?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a great question. So there is certainly a limit to how much personal development you should rapidly do, right? If you’re in your late 60s and still operating from the “not enough” energy, I get the sense, especially if you’ve been doing it for a long time— if you’ve just entered the world of personal development in your 60s, sorry dude, you got to pay your dues, right?

But I think there’s a period, usually as far as I can see, between sort of 5 and 15 years where people work off of the “not enough” energy. I need to change myself in order to be worthy, loved, belong, to matter. And then after a while you realize, I’m really glad that I made these changes, but I don’t like the place that that motivation is coming from. And that is the next stage that you tend to get into. I certainly think that you can generate a lot of growth through shame. But after a while it just becomes toxic fuel and it’s sapping you from enjoying the one thing that you were here to do in any case, right? The reason that you wanted to grow ultimately was so that you could enjoy life.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah.

The Arrival Fallacy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And if you’re making yourself miserable in the pursuit of the thing which is supposed to make you happy, what are you doing? What are we doing here, right? You have to at some point begin to congratulate yourself at least a little bit.

And what’s that? Again, it’s very subjective, but typically it’s when people have done a lot of the things that they thought they needed to do— got themselves in shape, they fixed their attachment system, they’ve done some therapy, they’ve built a business, they’ve got some kind of financial freedom, they found a partner and related to them in a really deep and meaningful way. Okay, I’ve done a lot of these things, and I’ve got a meditation practice, and I learned that skill, and I got myself in shape. All right, I’ve done these things. At what point do I feel like I’ve arrived?

There’s this idea called the arrival fallacy, which is we are constantly running toward goals like a man running toward the horizon. Every step that we take toward it, the goal moves one further step away. And if you have dedicated a good bit of time to trying to really make yourself into the sort of person you want to be, eventually you need to actually enjoy it or else this is just going to be a perpetual run toward the horizon.

But you’re not running toward the horizon, you’re running toward your grave and you will fall into that grave looking back on a series of miserable successes as opposed to, “Wow, I really did that. Isn’t that cool? Look at how much I changed myself and I helped the people around me too.” That’s good. Now you need to congratulate yourself, dude. I don’t think people congratulate themselves anywhere near enough.

Arranged Marriage vs. Love Marriage

RAJ SHAMANI: Another thing which I like, which is India versus the West, because we’re talking about it, and I’m going to end in this way only, right? Couple of questions on this. Do you know about the concept of arranged marriage? Yeah. So in our part of the world, arranged marriage is most popular. Your love marriage, which one do you think? Because you— I read your newsletter, like they’re all about men, women dating and all that stuff.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you think is— I mean, the successes of arranged marriage seem pretty high. So, if you’re just looking for outcome, I mean, I don’t know how happy everybody is. They seem pretty happy. I don’t know. Indian weddings are f*ing epic, dude. They last for like 5 weeks. Your guys’ weddings last for months.

RAJ SHAMANI: See, happiness level, they both, if you talk about both parts of the world, people aren’t happy. It’s just here you can file for a divorce. There, probably if 100 people want to file divorce, maybe 0.1% people.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Lower.

RAJ SHAMANI: Because rest of the people, they have been told to compromise and be in a broken marriage because societally, it’s a society— according to society, it’s a bad thing. It’s a bad sign. So you have to live under that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you being ostracized if you decided to do it? I don’t know, dude. I mean, look, the success of marriage at the moment in the West is not fantastic. Do we go to an arranged marriage solution? I’m not sure. But I certainly think that there’s a lot to be said for the challenges of optionality. Like too much choice is a really— it sounds like something that you want, but functionally ends up being an absolute catastrophe. And if you can always sort of swipe your partner away, why stick about to make this work?

It’s hard. Relationships are hard. And if you know that there is an infinite number of people coming down the path— I think people leave marriages and relationships sooner than they should. There’s a certain cohort of people that leave way later or don’t leave at all and should have done, and I understand. But it seems to me like a little bit more India would perhaps be— some more of that social pressure might be useful.

Why Relationships Are Failing

RAJ SHAMANI: What do you think is the single most uncomfortable thing which men and women today need to hear about why relationship is failing in the world where there— it looks like there are unlimited options?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s very hard to force desire. And this is maybe one of the biggest challenges of arranged marriage. The people that we desire and the things that we like are not really of our making. Like, yeah, being around someone can cause you to become familiar with them, and that familiarity can lead to desire, but you don’t really get to choose who you love.

And assuming that you want to be in love with the person that you’re partnered with, you can’t really force that. And that’s both magical, because it means that it kind of comes out of nowhere and it feels like a blessing, and terrifying, because it can be taken away from you or be taken away from your partner without them choosing, and really without you doing anything.

You can’t engineer your way into love in the same way as you can engineer your way into a good body or something. Like, yeah, there’s ways that you can reliably make someone more or less likely to fall in love with you, or more or less likely to fall out of love with you. You don’t get to force desire in that way. And I think we don’t like to hear that because it makes our relationship feel like it’s outside of our control. Both as the person who may fall into love and the person who may fall out of love— that’s pretty uncomfortable.

RAJ SHAMANI: But desire is a tricky thing, right? Like, you just can’t operate out of desire.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, of course not. But a relationship that has no desire in it—

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, that’s also bad.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s going to be horrendous.

RAJ SHAMANI: But the relationship which is only built on the foundation of only desire, it’s also not good.

What Makes a Relationship Work

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, no, you need compatibility, you need to have a degree of regulation, friendship. Like, I think that everybody should get into a relationship with a podcaster. I think that’s my number one piece of advice. And the reason is— yeah, hold on, I know this sounds self-serving— the reason is a relationship is basically one long conversation. The sort of person that you’re looking for is someone you can speak to for 20,000 hours and not get bored, because ultimately that’s what you’re going to be doing. You’re going to be relating to this person, talking.

Do they interest you? Do they surprise you with their opinions? Are they learning and growing? Do they make you become more of you? Can you sit in silence and not need to fill it? Can you speak without a filter? Like, these are really, really important things.

I guess one other interesting insight around relationships: the success of most relationships is determined by the bad times, not the good ones. So you don’t want to judge whether or not your partner is the right person based on how many peak moments you have. You should judge it based on how well you deal with the bad ones, because far more relationships end because a challenge occurs that you can’t get through than because there are insufficient peak experience moments. Right? It’s the bad times, not the good times, that make or break a relationship. People break up over arguments. They don’t break up over slightly subpar holidays, you know what I mean?

Looks vs. Power: How Men and Women Choose Partners

RAJ SHAMANI: Okay, last two questions. One is about— because we’re on topic of men and women in relationships— there’s something which I read from your post or like a newsletter, I think, a while ago. I’m loosely paraphrasing it. It’s about a lot of men, they choose their partner based on who’s going to elevate their status in the room, some stuff like that. Right? Is that true?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I certainly think that people have trophy wives and trophy husbands. Yeah.

RAJ SHAMANI: So a lot of people choose— so this is men and women. I’m going to— let me paraphrase it rightly. Men choose their partner based on who’s going to elevate their status in terms of looks. Women choose their partner based on who’s probably the highest status or highest protector or highest, like, based on power. So looks versus power.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think that’s true? To a degree, yeah. I would say that, well, it seems to show up in the data. That men are more concerned with looks than women are on average, and that women are more concerned with resources and status than men are. Very few guys will say— oh, fewer guys will say, “Well, you know, she’s not that hot or that cool, but dude, she’s got a great job.” And again, that’s not to say that lots of women would want that relationship in the reverse, but it’s more likely to hear that kind of thing. Again, massive generalizations, rah rah rah, but that’s what the data says.

RAJ SHAMANI: Your research, like your newsletter, also spoke about certain data and research around it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yes, I think that the trophy wife, trophy husband thing tends to be more trophy wives than trophy husbands.

RAJ SHAMANI: Why do you think men choose looks and women choose more power?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is evolutionary, I would guess.

RAJ SHAMANI: Again, I’m changing, so things should be changed right now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Our preferences take a long time to update, dude. You know, a few million years to build us into the creatures that we are because we don’t need the same level of resources as we did 10,000 years ago when we weren’t agriculturally developed and we didn’t know whether or not we were going to have a meal tomorrow. The dynamics that drove us then are still driving us now, right?

Like men are looking for fertility. Fertility is largely in youth. It’s in long hair and good skin and good nails. And women are looking for a guy that can protect them. Again, like this is the ancestral version of this. What is money when it comes to a mating—

RAJ SHAMANI: Market.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Perspective, yeah. This person has been able to accumulate a lot of spare resources. And what are looks? Well, this person has got good genes and fertility.

Like, I was looking at a baby this morning as I walked to the coffee shop, and this kid was so cute. It had this corner of a cinnamon roll, and it was shoving the cinnamon roll in its face. Like, the cinnamon roll was this big and its mouth was this big. Trying to shove this cinnamon roll in its face. I remember looking at it going, “That is the f*ing cutest thing.” But the only reason that I think it’s cute is because I have evolved to see that as cute. Some alien from another planet would see that baby and me as an equally disgusting or cute creature, right? There’s nothing special about that. It’s simply because big eyes, blobby face, fat arms, small stature, like boneless sort of floppy thing. That’s cute, but that’s cute because it’s evolutionary advantageous for it to be cute to us.

And the same thing goes for this. Like we can’t go, “Oh well, you know, babies have got daycare so we don’t need to find them cute anymore.” Well, we do. It’s the same reason that we find symmetrical faces attractive because it means that there’s a low mutation load. Like why do we find symmetrical faces attractive? Because the only way you can get a symmetrical face is with a low mutation load.

Which means that— perfect example of this— do you know why most Formula 1 drivers are good-looking? Have you ever thought about this? Formula 1 drivers, all of them are super chads. They’re all like models. Why would that be the case? Well, if you’re performing at the absolute peak of reaction speed and ability to do spatial reasoning and spatial rotation, you need to have unbelievably slick and well-aligned genetics. Like, your predisposition has to be very, very, very— and that means that’s going to show up in your face. That’s why all of the Formula 1 drivers are f*ing good looking. I just thought that was funny.

RAJ SHAMANI: That’s true though. There might be some truth to it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think it is. I think it is true. I just don’t want to be chatting up a ton of Formula 1 drivers.

The Pursuit of Power and Mating Value

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah. Do you think then to increase your mating value or like your value in the market?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Drive Formula 1.

RAJ SHAMANI: No, just pursuit of power is good.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I think so.

RAJ SHAMANI: I think so as a guy, that you can be a terrible person inside and just—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, I think that— I mean, there’s lots of terrible people that are powerful and have got into relationships. I wouldn’t want to be in one with them. I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship.

RAJ SHAMANI: Would they attract more?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To a degree, yeah, I think so. People look at power and bravado and they see it as competence. Which it’s not, right? You can fake competence with confidence and ego and slick speaking. And again, this is why to me somebody that’s merely achieved becomes less interesting, less attractive. Somebody who’s achieved and has embodied it and has felt it, has overcome some difficulties— like that’s— they’ve really got some skin in the game.

RAJ SHAMANI: And you know, you can actually make that thing about the world as well, right? If you depict power, you almost win in almost every game, at least for the short term.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

RAJ SHAMANI: And you look at the world leaders right now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You also don’t need to get power in a way which is unethical. You can accumulate power by being a good person. Now, it might be quicker or easier to accumulate power whilst being a bad person, but you don’t need to. Again, I’m not that interested in people that have accumulated power. I’m interested in people that have accumulated power and kept their humanity.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think we should change this definition to what you are saying? Because we just celebrate people who are powerful. We don’t care about are they human anymore or not.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct. So, I mean, a good example here is Kanye West. Kanye West just sold out 2 nights at SoFi Stadium in California, in LA. I think his music’s great. He hasn’t been the best person over the last half decade, right? Lots of things that I’m sure that he regrets saying, lots of actions I’m sure he regrets taking. Sold out SoFi Stadium 2 nights in a row. Everybody just— 3 hours of straight bangers. If you’re successful and powerful, people will forgive an awful lot of crimes. Kanye West.

Power, Agency, and the Hollow Pursuit of Success

RAJ SHAMANI: So here’s my second last question to you, which is about the power thing. What do you tell, let’s say, an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old who’s listening to this right now, who seems to look around and see that every powerful person is being celebrated?

So that person just wants power because he sees a powerful jerk in his college or school gets to get along with the best girls. He sees the most powerful guy, whether ethical or unethical, gets to become the president of the world. Just power is being celebrated. Being a bully is being celebrated. Being just bravado is being celebrated without being human.

How do we change the definition in someone’s head who’s 18? Be like, hey, being human is also a good way to celebrate your life.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: People look at powerful people who are jerks and assume that the reason they’re powerful is because they’re a jerk. But that’s not true. They’re powerful in spite of being a jerk. And people don’t want to be around jerks. They do want to be around people that are powerful. So if you’re a powerful jerk, you’ve done it in spite of your jerkiness. It’s as simple as that.

You don’t need to be a bad person in order to become successful. And what’s that line about you sell your soul and win the world? You do not want to do that. You’ll look back on a series of miserable successes that you don’t want to tell anybody about.

Or alternatively, you’re 18, 20 years old — try it, try and accumulate power as quickly as possible. Find out that it’s hollow. Win, complete your ambitions so that you can be free of them. Win the game so you know that you don’t need to play it anymore. And then go and play something more important.

It’s fine. If you’re really, really driven to accumulate a ton of power, have a go, have a go. See how it works out for you. I don’t need to teach you that you shouldn’t do it. I think it’s quicker to achieve your ambitions than it is to rid yourself of them. So just go and achieve the ambition, find out that it’s hollow, remember this bit of this podcast, go, f*, okay, well now I’ve done it, I can be free of it.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, yeah. What’s power for you?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t think about power all that much. I really don’t.

RAJ SHAMANI: Define power.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Influence. The ability to do what you want, the ability to get other people to follow you when needed. I don’t think about power all that much. I want sovereignty. I want not to be told what to do by other people. I want to be able to determine my own life. I want agency. I want to be able to be intentional. Not so fussed about power.

RAJ SHAMANI: But you never achieve complete agency ever.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, not ever. But I try and get close to it.

Closing Remarks

RAJ SHAMANI: Thank you so much.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I appreciate you, man.

RAJ SHAMANI: Thank you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: My first Indian podcast. We did it.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. I’ve re-colonialised the internet.

RAJ SHAMANI: I love the fact that you apologize.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m sorry, I felt like I was being f*ing shouted at for a while. But dude, I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you, it’s been really lovely.

RAJ SHAMANI: Thank you so much.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Appreciate you, man.

Behind the Scenes

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was talking to the boys, I’m a little jet-lagged. I think I’m more jet-lagged than you guys.

RAJ SHAMANI: Oh, thank you so much. I was hoping that you’re going to get this.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Come bearing gifts, dude. You’ve done a good job with this, dude. Well done.

RAJ SHAMANI: Thank you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Turning around a simple Airbnb into a fully fledged studio. Wow.

RAJ SHAMANI: I’m excited, man.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you for doing this.

RAJ SHAMANI: Thank you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you for coming out. I appreciate it. It’s not exactly around the corner, so.

RAJ SHAMANI: No, but it’s nothing like your studio and the way you — why do you do that? I was just very curious to know that as a podcaster.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I like pretty things. I like aesthetic stuff, dude. I think podcasting is great because it’s seamless and anybody can do it. But I think it elevates the experience a little bit to look at something beautiful while listening to something interesting, as opposed to just listening to something interesting while looking at something a bit ugly.

RAJ SHAMANI: You keep changing it, like you just want to make — is that —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, if you’re a band and you release a new album and the album’s got a different feel to it, you change the artwork, right? If I’m having a conversation that’s really dark and moody, I don’t want to do it in a big airy space. I want to do it somewhere that feels a bit gritty. And then if I’m having a conversation that’s sort of soft and fluffy with a woman, I don’t necessarily want to do that somewhere that feels really hardcore. It just feels like — but do you have a question?

RAJ SHAMANI: Then maybe then that — oh, f*. Oh, brilliant. We’ve got enough BTS now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s okay. Good, good, good. Look, dude, even I can’t open my own drinks without exploding them everywhere. It’s fine.

RAJ SHAMANI: Thank you so much for watching this episode till the end. Now you have to do 3 things. Number 1, subscribe to this channel right now. The more you subscribe, the better the guests we will be able to get for you. Number 2, please comment and let us know what did we do wrong and what did we do right, because the more you give us feedback, the better we will be able to make episodes for you. And number 3, please share this episode with at least one person, because one conversation can change someone’s entire life. I’ll see you next time. Until then, keep figuring out.

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