Michael Smoak’s Interview on Modern Wisdom (Transcript)

And there’s a Jon Bellion song, “Why,” with Luke Combs, and in it he says, “If the higher I climb is the further I fall, then why love anything at all?” He’s talking about opening up to someone, but I think the same thing works for just hard charging and overachieving. If you permanently overachieve, then eventually you might get there, but you never arrive.

Staying Tapped Into Inspiration

MICHAEL SMOAK: I think you alluded to a version of it in there, but you said something to me the other day: our desire always outpaces reality’s ability to meet it. And I chose to just listen to people like you, people like Jim Carrey, who say, “I pray that everyone gets rich and famous and has everything they ever want so they can realize it’s not the answer.” And a lot of people go, okay, great, but let me just do that anyway. And then they get to the hedonic treadmill, and then they get to the end of their rope.

There is no end, right? The goal is not money, it’s not status, it’s not even authenticity, which is something I speak on a lot. For me, the goal of authenticity is the byproduct of that. The goal is, in my opinion, to stay tapped into inspiration and deeper levels of inspiration. And there are things that always get in the way. I want more money, or I get an idea and I want to act on that idea. But I just chose to listen to you guys talking about how you get everything you want and then you realize it’s not the answer. Why would I then go, yeah, but screw what they said, I’m just going to do it anyway so I can be in the same state of not suffering but mild discomfort when I realized I didn’t get what I truly wanted.

And so with the Alexander the Great quote where he realizes how minuscule he is and he weeps over that, maybe there’s value in realizing how minuscule we are and being grateful in how minuscule we are, because then all we have to worry about is — and this is where my faith comes in — just being a servant.

For me, I feel fulfilled if I’m serving others. And that’s a really broad mission that can look a lot of different ways. It can be saying hello to Gerard, the guy I crossed the crosswalk with today outside of my building. It can be asking the barista how their day is going. It can be putting on a podcast that a whole lot of people are going to see with the intent of delivering a message that might make one of their lives better. If I just say, how can I serve someone today? Then that’s fulfillment.

And Tony Robbins says, “Material success without spiritual fulfillment can feel like the ultimate failure.” And that’s why you get people at the top with all the money and the cars and the women and the success, and they feel empty inside and they take their own life because they’re depressed. So for me, I think the antidote is realizing we’re dust and not weeping within that, but being deeply, deeply grateful that that’s all we are.

Memento Mori and Workload Entropy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s obviously a lot of sexiness around memento mori. People think about, remember that you’re going to die, the stoicism thing. They’ve got it on a coin that Ryan Holiday’s given to them. I think that there’s a memento mori for productivity. You will never get on top of all of the tasks that you have to do. This is an Oliver Burkeman thing where he says, there will never come a day where you have completed all of your tasks.

I think about the fact that one day I’ll die and my email inbox will continue to accumulate messages. People will get pissed that I’m not replying to their emails, not knowing that I’m dead. And maybe that’ll be lots of people, because it’ll happen suddenly and I’ll be young, and maybe it’ll be a few people because I’ll be old and they’ll have known about it. One day, that will happen. It will keep going. So you have this — it’s kind of like workload entropy. You are going to be defeated by the entropy of this workload bearing down on you, and it’s just never going to stop. So realizing that’s not morbid, but it should feel liberating, which is I think what you’re getting at.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Mm-hmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You should be liberated by this. Look, you’re never going to get on top of it all. Yes, there’s things that you need to do. You want accolades, you want status, acclaim, external achievements. Cool, go get it. Just know that if it feels a bit more hollow than you thought it would, that that’s kind of by design. It’s always going to be that.

And a much quicker way to try and feel fulfilled is to go, what if I just had fun? What would it be like if I had a little bit more fun? This guy asked me last night — I have this burning ambition, at the Q&A of one of my work in progress shows — I have this burning ambition, I can’t turn it off. What should I do? I said, just become really, really successful. It’s the quickest solution. Use the fuel. Hey man, I’ve got this massive gas tank and I can’t take my foot off the gas pedal. All right, drive until you run out of fuel. Just go, keep going, and then eventually you’ll run out.

So it’s a strange one though, right? Because obviously the difficulty of this discussion is that saying to anybody who has a burning ambition that the end result of their ambition is not going to make them happy is like telling a hungry man that food doesn’t really matter as a fat man. And you’re stripping away from people the very fuel that they want to use to keep going. And it feels a little bit like rug pulling someone’s dream out from underneath them.

So it’s a very contentious point to talk about, but I think I’m seeing so many more people discuss it as people speedrun careers. And people can get to the top of a career in a pretty short amount of time. And then it’s not what they expected. So I think more and more people are having this mini existential quarter-life crisis thing.

Identity Beyond Milestones

MICHAEL SMOAK: I think the objective then is not to use these things to fulfill a hole or a longing inside of you. It’s to treat it like part of the game. It’s all just fun. Growing the social media, growing the podcast, doing the things that I’m doing is not because I’m searching for a deeper meaning within myself.

Like that guy saying, I have relentless burning ambition and I can’t get rid of it. You’re right. He shouldn’t try to bury the thing that’s on top. He should explore it and go into it and understand it and then decide if it’s valid or not, and then can make a decision about his identity from there. That’s how I view this.

There was a time where I remember hearing — I alluded to it earlier — but hearing you talk about hitting the subscriber milestones for the podcast and just going, okay, on to the next one. Or the greatest you had was maybe a dinner.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

MICHAEL SMOAK: That you went through with, but you continued to dangle the carrot and you got burnt out. And I remember thinking, a million followers on TikTok is going to feel different. And then it happened, and then I just didn’t — it was, okay, I’m going to go eat dinner now. I just don’t know what to do with this.

And so it’s a fun milestone. It’s fun to celebrate, but it’s not what our identity is within. And I think that’s what a lot of people are looking for. They’re looking for the opportunity, the ability to feel whole, to feel adequate, to feel enough, important, and significant. That’s what a lot of people are looking for —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Significance, belonging, mattering.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, seen, heard, and understood.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “If you can’t talk about it, you aren’t healed from it.” What’s that mean to you?

Healing Through Grief: Processing Emotion and Loss

MICHAEL SMOAK: You’re only as healed from something as your ability to share it. It means everything to me. So my dad passed away January 19th, 2025, and it was a long, arduous, painful process. Moved home after a long breakup, lived with that person, came home to reset, thought I’d just get to spend some time with the parents before I moved to Florida.

And then my dad’s not quite right. I hadn’t seen him in about a month, so he was regressing quickly and I could tell he didn’t look right. And what I didn’t know would happen would be over the next 7 months, his health slowly regressing with no real answers as to what was wrong with him, which was really the crazy part. We didn’t know what was killing my dad, which is a really weird place to be because it was the epitome of helpless. There was nothing the doctors could do, I could do.

And maybe we’ll dive deeper into the story later, but I remember not even being able to answer the question, “How’s your dad doing?” without that pain or that tightness in my chest and my throat coming up. I couldn’t even say he’s fine, he’s not doing well. I couldn’t share anything about it.

And 36 hours before he passed, I went and gave a presentation and I battled it, but he insisted that I go give this talk at a conference in Dallas and fly right back home because I was afraid he’d pass while I was gone. And he said, “What are you worried? I’m going to die?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “So what? We said everything we need to say. Go live your life. I’ll be mad if you don’t do this.” And I did it and he hung on.

But I remember there’s a part in that presentation where I talk about conviction and how important health is and how that’s one of my core messages in my content — you can have a laundry list of problems until you have a health problem, and then there’s only one problem. And I lived it, but I couldn’t even talk about my dad because there’s a picture of him on the slide when I get to that.

And I told you about this. And it was the first time I’d ever shared that story. And it’s the day we found out he was going to die. I took that photo for me. I didn’t think I’d ever share it, but it’s powerful because it was the moment that I remember being or thinking as a kid would be the worst day of my life.

And I couldn’t — I was on stage and I just broke. I had to go silent for 30 seconds in front of 300 people and gather myself because I wasn’t healed. I hadn’t done the work. I hadn’t let myself grieve. I hadn’t let myself be angry. I hadn’t let myself be sad. And now I can sit here with you on the 8th biggest podcast in the world. Congratulations.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s super cool. Suck me off.

MICHAEL SMOAK: And tell that full story without pain because I went all the way into the emotion. So you cannot — I believe this — you cannot heal what you cannot feel, and you cannot feel what you are unwilling to reveal. And for me, it was about talking about how I felt, letting myself be angry and telling someone, “I’m angry at my dad that he didn’t look after his health more tightly.” But my first instinct was to manage the emotion. How dare I be angry? He’s dying. How dare I do that? But that’s not how you heal.

We don’t heal and do the work by burying our emotions. Because what you bury will bury you. It will come around in your subconscious mind and run the show. So instead, I allowed myself — I gave myself full permission to explore the emotion of anger and then ask myself, is this valid? Is this real? No, but I couldn’t get there until I processed it. And then it was sadness and grief and guilt and at times happiness — full permission, full permission to express the full spectrum of emotion with which I was existing in. And now I can use that story to help people. And that is an incredible source of fulfillment.

I heard a great Christian creator say once, “Your purpose in this life is to take what God delivered you from and turn around and help other people do the same thing.” And for me, my biggest fear was always my dad dying. It was the grief that would come with that. But I made it to the other side, and now I get to share that story because I am healed from it. I don’t cry or choke up when I talk about my old man. And there was a time where if you’d ask me this a year ago, I’d have to probably just say, hold on, and pause.

So that’s what that means to me. If you cannot talk about it, you are not healed from it, and it will run your life subconsciously in some way — your relationships, your work, your body, your health. So whatever is stirring around inside you that you suppress, understand that suppression of expression leads to depression. And until you express those emotions, you are not going to be delivered from them.

Accepting Emotion Without Judgment

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s interesting when we try to dictate the way that we should feel. “I’m angry, I shouldn’t be angry.” It’s like, but you are. And I think this is a big part of what ACT therapy is trying to achieve — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — that the acceptance part is this is just happening and I have to allow it to sort of move through me.

And if you don’t, that’s when you begin a relationship not just with the emotion, but with your relationship to the relationship of the emotion. “I shouldn’t feel shame,” and then you feel bitterness about your shame, and then you feel frustration at your bitterness about your shame. And it’s this infinite regress of saying things to yourself about something.

My partner did something and it really made me feel agitated, made me feel maybe envious or insecure. “I shouldn’t feel insecure.” You do. You’re allowed to feel it. It doesn’t mean that you need to act on it. And maybe you do need to act on it, but if you just deny the emotion, I think there’s a lot of insight that comes out of that. But it’s not cool to do that. We confuse suppression for strength. And they’re not the same thing at all.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah. What’s that John Mulaney bit? “I had Irish parents, so my dad’s belief was, I’m going to take this emotion and then bury it down, and then one day I’ll die.” That’s the Irish Catholic approach to a masculine emotion. But you’re right. Most people are intellectualizing and managing their emotions.

“I’m pissed, but I shouldn’t be.” Well, now you don’t get the clarity on the other side of the processed emotion. In my opinion, on the other side of processed emotion is divine revelation. I got to nothing but love and gratitude for the relationship that I had with my old man on the other side of letting myself be angry, sad, and grieve instead of burying it.

But that is also an uncomfortable process. It’s not suffering, but it’s pain. It’s a lot of pain. What did Arthur Brooks say on your show? “Suffering is pain times resistance.” And if you can just eliminate the resistance, pain in life is inevitable, but suffering is optional. And suffering becomes part of the equation when you resist the pain instead of letting it move through you. Not be consumed by it, but let it teach you something, understand it, and then move through it. And then on the other side, that is the work. Everyone says, “Oh, I’ve done a lot of work on myself.” That’s the work that I believe people say that they do or want to do.

The Coming-of-Man: What His Father’s Death Taught Him

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What did you learn from that process with your dad? What was it like going through that?

MICHAEL SMOAK: Oh man, I was having a conversation with my friend Chris Turner. His dad passed 8 months before mine, and it was right in the time when he got sick and I was in denial. I was trying to get him better — doctor’s appointments, supplements, you name it. I wasn’t ready to surrender to the experience.

And Chris brought up this interesting point, and I’ll never forget. He said, in tribes and other cultures all across the world, there’s a coming-of-man ritual. The boy leaves the tribe, goes and gets the lion, comes back a man. Goes and hunts the elk, comes back a man. There’s this thing that is a definitive turn in his age from boyhood to manhood. And in America, we don’t have that.

And Chris pointed out, even in The Lion King, it’s a great example of this, right? Mufasa dies and Simba goes on this great journey and acquires friends along the way, experiences adversity, develops enemies, almost dies a few times, comes out the other side king of the pride.

For me, my dad’s death and the months that led up to that of pain and suffering and anxiety — I think those were the parts of me that were still a kid, I had to familiarize myself with, but they couldn’t necessarily stay with me if I was going to endure that experience. So I think that truthfully, I think I became a man on the other side of that.

But what I learned was my nervous system’s threshold for stress was a lot greater than I thought it was. There were nights, man, where you’re constantly on edge when someone is that sick. So my dad had something called orthostatic hypotension, which means if he stands up, the blood can’t adequately pump to his brain. So his blood pressure plummets, which means —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That kind of POTS? Similar to POTS?

Lessons from Grief and Hardship

MICHAEL SMOAK: I’m not sure. It was a byproduct of a vein in his liver being totally destroyed. That was really the root of all of his issues. So he would stand up and his blood pressure would drop to like 80 over 50, and he would pass out. And so my dad was a massive fall risk. And so there was always anxiety with him just getting up to go get a glass of water.

And there were just so many nights — I remember at least half a dozen times — my mom, because I moved home to help care for him, just barreling into my room. “He’s fallen again. I need your help.” And going from a dead sleep to having to go pick your dad up off the floor and clean the blood off his head at 3:00 AM. Dude, that’ll light up your CNS. But it taught me what I was capable of. I could handle so much more stress than I realized. And it dissolved me of my ego.

I remember people kept asking me how I was doing when shit kind of hit the fan on the internet. And I was getting all the crazy comments. And I just kept thinking, I had to carry my dying father to the bath. And dress him. You think an internet comment bothers me? It doesn’t. I know what real suffering is, and I’m grateful for that. Because it raised my threshold for stress so much. I’m so much more patient. I’m so much more empathetic to people’s pain. I understand the value in hardship. I appreciate the relationship I had more, and I did a ton when he was alive, but more than I ever could now that he’s gone.

Because I remember I had Peter Crone on my podcast and we had a conversation around my dad and he started sort of coaching me through it. And he noticed I kept saying, “I lost my dad.” And he said, “I want you to stop saying that. You didn’t lose anything. You found a relationship that was wonderful enough to feel this much pain for, which means at one point there was great joy.”

And so what I learned from that is that I’m incredibly blessed. To have a man that if at the end of my life I’m half the human being he was, I’ll be proud. Half the dad, half the husband, half the person. I’ll be proud.

I learned what really matters because at the time my internet career was starting to really take off, but all I really cared about was my dad getting better. And I heard a sermon from the guy that I go to church with — I go to church in Atlanta, 2819. Pastor Philip Anthony Mitchell talks about when the church is really starting to grow. And I didn’t know this. This was the craziest part. I picked a sermon during their period of rest in December from 2 years ago. And he’s talking about the tension between what you want and what God’s will for your life is, the tension between that and how painful that can be. And his dad was dying at the time that 2819, which is now the fastest growing church in the world, was really starting to explode. And all he wanted was his dad to be better. He didn’t care about the success. He was so grounded in his real life that he was almost detached from whatever was to come next with the success of the church. And now it’s this incredible, life-changing, impactful thing for millions of people across the world.

And so it taught me to stay grounded no matter how crazy or cool the achievements of this career get. And they are incredible, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude that because people chose to watch my videos on the internet, I get to sit down with you. That’s the coolest thing in the world, man. I live in a video game and I’m just trying to steward it properly. I’m trying to steward the blessing properly.

So I’d say the biggest lesson is that I realize that every hard thing we go through makes us more of who we’re meant to be. And I think who God designed us to be. I referenced that scripture to you the other day, James 1:2-4. It says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds, because you know the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance run its course so that you may be complete and lacking nothing.”

I am more myself. I feel more myself and more rooted in my sense of identity, who I am and what I feel God’s called me to do, than I ever was before I went through that with my old man. And that’s why I think we should count it all joy. The worst thing I’ve ever been through has been, God willing, somebody else’s greatest breakthrough, because I’ve helped them battle grief, manage grief, feel grief, and come out the other side liberated from it. And that’s the greatest gift I could have ever been given.

Being Broken and the Gift of Adversity

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I had a conversation with Alain de Botton toward the back end of last year, and he has this line. He says, “The best men have been broken.” And I asked him, “How can you tell? What do you mean? And how can you tell?” He says, “There’s just a look. It’s a twinkle in the eye. There’s a kind of humility, there’s a humbleness, there’s a recognition of their own limits, even if they’re really high.”

And I definitely see that, especially after getting kicked in the nuts permanently for the last 2 years with my health and having to manage an awful lot of things. It does push you — when you’re going against the grain of life, you begin to look at your behavior and your patterns and your motivations and your goals under more of a microscope than you do when things are going well. You feel the texture of existence more, kind of like swimming into a river as opposed to being lazy-rivered down it. You feel all of the small elements come past you. And that’s a real uncomfortable situation to be in at the time, but it’s a beautiful gift afterward.

And yeah, I agree as well that almost all of the greatest accomplishments that you’ve done in your entire life have been germinated from your lowest points. And adversity is a terrible thing to waste in that regard.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Let me ask you, when you were going through all of that — and I told you how much I appreciated you — that’s probably one of the more vulnerable things you’ve ever put on the internet. I mean, it’s you in hospital beds getting blood transfusions. All kinds of crazy sht. It’s very vulnerable. And that’s a superpower, by the way. You probably empowered — I mean, I know you empowered me to talk about it because I went and made an episode that day. I was like, “Hey guys, I feel like sht all the time and I’ve been pretending I don’t.” So I’m grateful that you did that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you.

MICHAEL SMOAK: You’re welcome. But when you were in that, what really mattered to you in that moment or in those months? Because I know it got bad.

Chris’s Health Struggles

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It was very protracted. About 2 years ago was when I started trying to unearth what was going on. And about 2 and a half years ago, when I got COVID before I went on tour with James, was when I started to notice I was getting a bit more tired. I didn’t really want to see my friends so much on a nighttime. That was strange. I was feeling lassitude, which is the emotion of being ill. I didn’t want to eat new things, didn’t want to go to new places. And I was getting more tired and I was getting a bit of brain fog.

I was ripping 2023. It felt like my brain was on fire. It felt like I was permanently on cocaine. It was like being 23 again. And I noticed the change and I didn’t like it. And that got worse and worse and worse throughout 2024. And it got to the stage where we would be flying around. I remember we did a trip to New York with Gymshark, and then I flew to Florida to do Chris Bumstead and Ben Shapiro. And we arrive in f*ing Baton Rouge. Is that in Florida? Is that what I’m talking about?

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, Baton Rouge. No, that’s in Louisiana.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, where the f was it? Where the f did we go? Boca Raton. It’s close enough. It’s the right amount of syllables. Yeah, Boca Raton, whatever the f*. I mean, it’s geographically very far away, but linguistically it’s right next to—

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, they’re both sh*tholes. It’s all right. No, Boca’s nice.

The Texture of My Mind

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So we fly in and we’ve got an episode the next day, or maybe we’d recorded with Ben that day. And it was 6:30 PM at night and I went to bed and I woke up at 7:00 AM in the morning and the guys had gone for dinner and done some adventure thing. And I just felt so on the outside. I felt very much on the outside. I wasn’t me. I didn’t have access to me. And it just kept getting worse. It kept getting worse, kept getting worse. I was getting more tired and I was trying to take a break. I wasn’t pushing myself as hard. I’m being more gentle with myself, and the more gentle I am, the more tired I get. And all I wanted was to have access back to the texture of my mind. I really love inhabiting my own mind. It’s a really lovely place to be for the most part.

But I remember one of my friends, her dad was ill and ill for a long time and was getting— his mental capacities were being diminished over time. And he turned to her once in the hospital bed and he said, “This illness has taken everything from me. It’s even taken myself.” And I think what he meant by that was, especially for smart people or people that are competent and feel like they have agency and sovereignty in the world, what you rely on is your mental faculties. I think Hormozi’s got two fears in life. One is chronic pain and the other is dementia, because the first one is just suffering for the rest of time, and the second one makes him a burden that can’t fix himself. And that really stuck with me. And I don’t know why, it’s one of those random lines that somebody just says about someone else, and it stuck with me. And then as I started to go through it, I realized, oh, this is what I feel, this is how I feel. I feel like this is taking away my own capacity to fix myself. And what if this spiral just continues to go down, continues to go down?

I guess one other kind of interesting lesson is how hard it is to not try hard. You need to try hard at not trying hard. To be gentle with yourself requires effort, but if you apply too much effort, that’s no longer being gentle with yourself. And then if you get it wrong, you start to whip yourself into submission for not being sufficiently gentle with yourself, which is not being gentle about your ungentleness. And a lot of this I think is to do with the shame, the suppression of things, but it’s also to do with your patterns. What am I used to? What’s the pace that I’m used to working at?

There will be lots of people for whom this isn’t going to hit them until they’re 60. And there will also be people for whom it’ll hit them when they’re 15. And you think, f*, I really didn’t want to have to learn this lesson. Not now. Why now? Why does it have to be now? Could it not have been? I don’t deserve it now. But the realization is you’re not bulletproof, but you do have more capacity than you think. So it’s a recognition of resilience and fragility at the same time. And I think that’s where the humility comes from. That’s where the empathy comes from. That’s what Alain was talking about.

But I love that line, adversity is a terrible thing to waste because you develop a chip on your shoulder and you have something to prove again, especially after a while, people run out of gas in some regard. The kids that didn’t believe in you in school, the bullies that mocked you, or the teacher that wasn’t supportive, or the coach that benched you, that will power a young person for a good while, but not forever. And it’s kind of nice to make an existential enemy every so often. I think it’s good to just have, for this season, I’ve got a new— there’s a new bad guy in town, and this time it’s this thing, and I’m not going to be able to get my revenge on him now, but in a couple of seasons, I actually reckon that this is going to be the next metamorphosis thing that I come out of. And it’s like a little pit stop or a little lily pad that you can jump off to get to whatever the next level is. But it requires you to take a dip first.

The Biggest Lesson: Leaning on People

MICHAEL SMOAK: What’s the biggest lesson you learned from that period? Of having such an issue with cognition and energy in a world where your cognition and energy is critical for your success.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Literally the only thing that I do. It affects a particular mold, especially affects a particular area of the brain that’s associated with word recall. All I do is recall words. It was like a purpose-built curse just for me. Like somebody had designed a malady only to impact the things that I needed to do. I could have been a lumberjack and I’m sure I would have been tired, but I would have still been able to chop wood. Not this job. That was not good.

The single biggest lesson that I learned throughout all of that— one that comes to mind is recognizing the fact that the people around you really do want to help. And that sounds like a very basic bitch insight, but I think a lot of people, especially if you’re the competent one in your friend group, if you listen to podcasts like mine, watch content like yours, you’re teaching your friends. From the outside, you look like you’ve got it all together. You’re probably a leader in some form or another, or maybe you have a good education, or you go to the gym and you sort your life out, and your friends are the fat messes. Not you. Your friends are the fat messes. And that often, I think, makes it almost intimidating for our friends to help us. Because you go, why am I going to tell Michael? He’s got it all together. How can I step in and say, “Hey man, you seem a little— are you okay?” Or whatever. He’ll have it all, or there’ll be somebody way more competent than me in his life that’s able to step in and help.

But leaning on people, reaching out and genuinely asking for help. I think I probably received more hugs in 2025 than the decade prior to that, sort of all combined. Before live shows, if I was feeling really, really bad, I’d have Bennett giving me a hug while praying over me, and it just felt really nice. It was support. I’m stealing a bit of his nervous system and spirituality at the same time. That was cool. But it was just good. It was being able to lean on people. As an only child, it’s something that you have to learn through instruction, not emergence. You’re not born with it. By age 5, you’ve known what it is to have a fight with your brother and then hug and make up the next morning because you don’t hate each other. And that’s what it means for you and someone to disagree but still be on the same team. You don’t— there is no learning that at any point. So yeah, the ability to lean on people without feeling less than was a big part of it.

Fear and Feeling Like It Was Unfair

MICHAEL SMOAK: Were you scared?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, terrified. Terrified. I finally felt like I’d arrived. Like I’ve done all of this stuff and I finally got myself to this country I’ve dreamed to live in for so long. And the reason that you do the work is to get to the stage where you can do this, have my own space and have my own team and finally talk to the people that I want to for as long as I want about what I want. Just as it felt like I’d got my foot in the door and arrived, it felt like that had been whipped out from underneath me. It felt unfair.

I think that’s what a lot of people feel, unfairness. I think about this. I wonder how many people died. Someone gets hit by a car, somebody gets shot on purpose or accidentally, stray bullets or there’s a mugging that goes wrong or somebody slips and falls from something and in the final few moments before they die, how many of them were just surprised or felt like it was unfair? That has to be a huge proportion of people. I wasn’t supposed to— this wasn’t supposed to be me. And that’s it. So it felt unfair. Yeah.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Well, I’m glad you’re for the most part on the other side of that now, it seems.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Slowly, one step at a time. The world keeps on providing me new challenges to get over, but I’m definitely— I didn’t need a bigger dose of humility. I didn’t need any more ego stripping from me, but for one reason or another, that decided to happen.

Words Can Only Hurt You If You Believe Them

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve got another line that I disagree with, and I want to talk about it. Words can only hurt you to the degree that you believe they are true.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah. Why do you disagree?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Did you believe that the words of the people who tried to cancel you, soft cancellation, baby cancellation, diet cancel? You’re correct. Did you believe that they were true? No. Did you fear that other people might think that they were true? No. You didn’t fear that other people might think that they were true. Someone had never heard of you before.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Why would I fear if it’s completely out of my control? There’s nothing to fear. That’s where this lesson of surrender that I learned a long time ago comes back to. The pain that I was feeling, and this is, again, count it all joy when you face trials of many kinds. My threshold for stress is a lot higher than a few left-wing angry creators making nasty videos about me and people photoshopping the MAGA hat on my head. Pretty funny. Someone made a clown photo at one point with me holding a MAGA sign. AI is getting good. Cute. I wish I had a better answer than no, it didn’t bother me.

But a lot of the pain earlier, we talked about Arthur Brooks talking about, I think it’s the Buddhism formula for suffering, pain times resistance. The pain that I felt when my dad was sick was largely rooted in my desire to change the outcome. It was arguing with doctors. It was trying to get him to force take 20 pills a day. As a 70-year-old man, he was pretty set in his ways. And I was so agonizingly in pain because it was like I was holding this hot pan and I’m going, “Ow, this is burning me.” And God’s like, “All you got to do is put the pan down.”

Surrender Versus Passivity

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because there’s still going to be a lot of upset. I’m aware of the difference between pain and suffering. But there are things that you can do and learning to blend a desire to take control of the situation and make an impact on it, agency, sovereignty, something that I know that you care about a lot and everybody else does as well, with surrender. Surrender can quite easily turn into passivity if you’re not careful. If you don’t know how to wield it, it can become nihilism, lackadaisicalness, things that you don’t want. Does that make sense? You can see how surrender could become passiveness.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, I think if you lack the discernment to know where the line is, that that’s certainly true. So for me, putting the pan down and the analogy of losing so much of the pain, surrendering the pain to Christ in my scenario, saying like, whatever happens to my dad is God’s will for my life. I did get supernatural peace from that. It doesn’t mean I didn’t care for him, show up for him, show up for myself. Doesn’t mean I didn’t do things. See, that’s passivity, would be the absence of doing anything. Doesn’t mean I still didn’t help him and me and my mom and my siblings. So when we talk about the internet example, do you want to explain what happened?

The Soft Cancellation

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What your soft cancellation was?

MICHAEL SMOAK: Sure. Yeah, I’d love to. It’s not, you know, it’s only a few people will hear this, so it’s not like this could kick the fire back.

So I was getting a lot of heat to speak on what happened in Minneapolis and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t watch the news because I think it’s a cancer and a cortisol dump, and that’s not what my algorithm is. I don’t have the news on the TV. I mainly just watch YouTube.

And I kept getting hammered with these comments: speak about ICE, speak about Minneapolis, speak about what happened to Alex Peretti, God rest his soul. And I didn’t know what any of that meant. I truly didn’t. This was days after it happened. And so I even reached out to friends that were creators and said, are you guys getting hammered with these comments? And all of them said no. So I said, well, what did I do to curate an audience that would do this?

And I started doing research and I went, wow, that’s terrible. Someone was killed in Minneapolis by ICE agents. That’s awful. Murder under no circumstances is justified. And I kept getting hounded and I saw other creators just letting their audience sort of puppeteer them into saying something or saying what they thought their audience wanted to hear.

And then I thought and thought and thought, and I prayed on it deeply. Should I make this video? And this is where faith becomes an easy barometer for decision-making. So you ask me if these words hurt me. I made a video, and the barometer for choice of to post or not was, do I feel that what I’m about to say honors God? It’s a very simple question, yes or no. Am I attacking people or am I choosing to love on people? Am I adding flames to the fire of hatred and division or am I just stating my opinion?

So in the video I said something to the effect of, “A lot of you were asking me to give my stance on what happened in Minneapolis with the ICE agents. And my opinion is that you don’t want my opinion. You want to watch the first 5 to 8 seconds of my video and decide if I’m your enemy or not.”

And in that video I say my opinion is very simple. Murder and killing others is a tragedy, and it’s not what God calls us to do. It’s directly against what God calls us to do. Luke chapter 6 tells us to love those who hate us, that when someone slaps you, you offer them the other cheek. When someone takes your shirt, don’t hesitate then to give them your robe, because the only thing that blocks out hate is love. The only thing that changes a hateful heart is a loving one. That’s what I said.

And I said, “You don’t follow me because I’m a political commentator. And you pressuring all of these big creators who got here through fitness or mindset to now become political mouthpieces for your opinions isn’t fair. I’m not politically aligned with any party. I think there’s fools on both sides because that’s how the world works. I think there’s smart people on both sides. But I’m not your puppet. I’m not going to do what you demand of me because you think it’s what I should do. You want to hear my opinion come out of your mouth. I’m going to continue to create content that was the reason that allowed you to follow me. I’m going to help you in areas that I’m competent in, and the geopolitical climate of the world isn’t one of them. I love you. Thank you.”

Holy sh. Did that — what I thought was a fairly logical and general opinion — start an absolute shstorm? I think that video across platforms has 15,000 comments. It’s pretty split on positive, negative. So that’s what happened. That’s the scenario. And that kicked up hundreds of creators stitching my video, putting my face on their back screen and attacking me. And somehow that evolved to — I can’t believe I’m talking about this on the show with you. It’s so funny. Nazi, racist, MAGA, none of which were said in the video, by the way. So it was amazing to watch the conclusions that people drew about my character from that video. That’s the scenario, which brings us to today, which is you asking — basically what you’re asking me is, did the things that people said about me hurt my feelings?

The False Accusation Pandemic

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, not quite. Not far from. But your point is words can only hurt you to the degree that you believe they are true. Yes. I understand what you mean. And it’s the only insults that hurt are the ones that we agree with. But I think the insults that hurt most are the ones that we don’t believe, but we fear other people may believe. Because that allows a sense of injustice. And it doesn’t really matter how you feel about it if other people believe it. That is fake news. That’s having your status besmirched. That’s having your good name tarnished. And I think that that drives people absolutely insane.

Now, this is the false accusation pandemic, and if somebody goes through that, they pay all of the costs of being somebody who did the thing without having done the thing. And if you believe that other people might believe it, or if it seems to you like other people are believing it and you didn’t do it and you don’t believe it yourself, that to me feels like a special circle of hell to descend into.

And that’s why optics management and looking after the way that your brand is interpreted online is really important. Because let’s say that that has happened once and then it happened again. People got a vendetta. They decided that they were going to pick apart and selectively edit because all of the edits that were done of you got rid of the bit where you said any death is a tragedy and just kept the bit where I said, “I’m not your puppet,” and made me look incredibly condescending and arrogant. Exactly.

Imagine if 5 of those had happened in a row because they’d gone back and they’d been able to edit your videos in that manner. Well, now there’s a narrative that Michael guy, he seems like he’s behaving in a way, there’s a consistent pattern of behavior. Now, not only can you go back and say, well, no, look, that’s not what I said. I mean, even think about it, your indignation at the fact that that’s not what I said, you are pleading to people to say, what they say I am is not who I am, and I have evidence.

But imagine you didn’t have the evidence, a false accusation of some kind. “I heard Michael say this thing at some live event. I didn’t record it, but I can promise you that it’s true.” I didn’t. But you don’t have the recording either, and there’s no proof around that. And then that narrative starts to take hold, and before you know it, I agree that words hurt you to the degree that you believe they’re true, but I also believe that words hurt you to the degree that you believe others will believe that they are true. And that is where your good name, to what extent you’ve got it left, gets sideswiped and you didn’t deserve it. Good enough to get here. Ah, you’re among friends.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Well, let’s ping pong this back and forth a little bit because yeah, that can be true. If I were to have built an internet platform to the size that it is on a false identity, then I’d be really f*ing nervous. But anyone, someone said to me that, “That video you made is authentic. It feels like you.” And that’s the type of video that anyone who truly watches your stuff knows you in real life. They’re going to rock with you even harder because of that. And the people who were never really watching or just casual or just sort of get their news from TikTok, they’re going to unfollow you. They’re going to say nasty things about you, but those aren’t the people I want at my audience anyway.

Those aren’t — I’m not here to appease people or make as many fans as I possibly can. I’m just here to make an impact on the people who are prepared to listen. So yeah, that’s true. There’s a bunch of people out there who probably think a thing about me based on the 8-second doctored, edited video. Sure. But frankly, those aren’t the people that are prepared to listen to my videos anyway. They could have been.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Could have been. They could have been. I understand your point. I do think that as you’re trying to grow a platform, your audience and the total available audience is always going to be massively different unless you’re MrBeast. And that means that if you are curtailed, neutered from being able to access more of these people because — how many people got turned off of Rogan because of what happened? I mean, he managed to flip, reverse it with an uno reverse card during COVID. But how many people could have, if he hadn’t managed to ride the waves appropriately, how many of them would have never watched him? How many of them would have been turned off from tuning into his content?

Or the same thing for — who else has been through a cancellation recently that could be — Chris Pratt as a good example. Like, what did he do? Was Christian. People didn’t like the fact that he’s Christian, and they don’t go watch his movie because they think that he believes a thing, which I don’t think he believes any of the things that they’re accusing him of. Well, I understand that those people, that sort of, they don’t deserve it. She doesn’t deserve you anyway. But the people make snap judgments. They make quick assessments about what someone’s character is.

And I think that we want to play sport on as smooth of a pitch as possible. And if that’s been muddied and sullied ahead of us, we want to be like, f*, like, this has made my life harder. I’m now having to climb uphill on a hill that I didn’t make. You made it. I didn’t do anything wrong. I think there’s indignation there. So that’s my additional perspective.

Radical Authenticity Over Narrative Control

MICHAEL SMOAK: No, I hear, and I appreciate that perspective. I think the closing remark for me, what I truly believe — again, I know as a believer, as a Christian myself, my identity is in Christ and my belief in God. And if what I feel, what I said honors him in everything I do, not just that video, it’s an easy barometer for decision-making for me. And I’m able to stand on that because I built a relationship with God.

And I got nods that felt like fruits, byproducts, as a result of that video. I got a nod from some of the top people in the industry saying like, “That was a very reasonable video.” And some people who I really respect and admire intellectually. And so if people who I really respect and admire are saying it’s reasonable and correct, then I probably have reason to believe it’s correct.

Oliver Emberton said, “If you’re not pissing anybody off, you’re probably not doing anything very important.” And if being at the top means winning everybody over and a version of myself that has to constantly try to control the narrative, then I don’t want that. I would rather have radical authenticity and authentic expression in a way that is intact with my character, ethics, and morals and impact as many people as I can that way. So I don’t risk building a mountain of success on a false identity that I could worry the mask slips and it all comes crumbling down because none of those people ever really knew me in the first place.

So that’s how I view that video. And by every metric in real life, things improved. The business did well, the page did well, and I got a lot of love in exchange for all those hate comments and crazy things people said. I had a ton of people come to my defense and love.

Smoak’s Razor

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The advantage that you had was — I think we can probably name it Smoak’s Razor, which everything needs a name. I got my own term. Yeah, dude. I think you can call it Smoak’s Razor, which is when anybody asks you to speak on a topic, they’re not asking you to speak on a topic, they’re asking you to agree with their position. “Speak on Iran.” You don’t want me to talk on Iran. You want me to say what you think about Iran, because if I speak on Iran, but I say the opposite thing to what you believe, you’ll be unhappy. So say what you mean to say. “Say what I want you to say about Iran.” That’s more accurate. Now we, now you’re not part of the smoke and mirrors.

But I agree. I think it’s a great take and I can’t unsee it now. Whenever anybody says, “When are you going to comment on this thing?” it’s like, you don’t want me to comment on this thing. You want me to say what you think about this thing.

MICHAEL SMOAK: You want me to echo your opinion. And I’m sure you get that just a few times a day.

The Fear of Being Perceived

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I got in a lot of trouble this year for doing that, not for not doing that. I did it too much, which is interesting because the world has two things that are true at once. You are not Iranian and you’re also not from Minneapolis, but you were supposed to comment on it.

But there’s also worlds where people are told, like, what are men doing talking about women’s bodies? I mean, if the men were in support of access to contraception, that’s speaking about women’s bodies. I’m sure that that would be fine. Like, you shouldn’t be talking about this group because you’re not a part of it. Well, gay rights are fed. Because I’m not gay. And PETA is fed as well, because I’m not a chicken or a cow. The Ukraine war, I’m afraid I’m from neither of those locations, so I can’t comment on that. I’m not a whale, so the Save the Oceans project, that’s out the window.

If we are only allowed to talk on topics that we are a member of, that restricts a lot of things. And at the same time, people will also say, you have a platform, it’s your duty to use it. The world is filled with people commenting on things that they know nothing about. I don’t intend on trying to add to that. I already do. I encroach on that territory enough already.

But I think the world would be better if people said, I don’t know much about that, so I’m not going to say anything about it. We don’t need more psychology professors turning into global terrorism experts. No. There are people who have specialities in these worlds. And if you can bro science your way through things, you can talk about whatever you would like. Don’t posit yourself as some sort of f*ing authority. And certainly don’t hamstring somebody into saying something. Yeah. Simply because you have an agenda.

MICHAEL SMOAK: We’re doing the world a favor by depriving them of— shutting the f* up? By depriving them of two mid-20s, early 30s white dudes who think they have an opinion about something.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct. Correct.

Overcoming the Fear of Perception

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The number one fear that holds people back from having everything they’ve ever wanted in life is the fear of being perceived. Most of us are operating from a place of deep fear and scarcity. Where we need to be operating from is a place of deep trust and abundance. Your slogan for the year should be simple. Where your fear is, there your task is. Lean directly into the things that make you most afraid if you want to build the life you’ve always wanted for yourself.

MICHAEL SMOAK: That’s the thing that holds people back. It’s not the fear of failure. It’s not even the fear of success, because sometimes there’s that that comes into the equation of who will I have to become if this all works? What will have to shift within me?

At every level we hit, we all have different thresholds for this, is the fear of being perceived. It’s that little middle schooler inside of us that says, what will they think of me? Will I be cast out of the cool kid crew? I’ll be cast out of the tribe. What will the internet think? Like I said, every person has a level for this. For some people, for most people that I get questions around, it’s posting for the first time online. What if I look cringe? What if I look corny? For many people, it’s the fear of public speaking. That’s the number one fear ahead of death in many psychological surveys, which I find fascinating.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think that’s true? I’ve read that too. Do you think that’s true?

MICHAEL SMOAK: I mean, it’s in the data.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m going to shoot you. I’m going to put you on stage.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, you’re going to go on stage, but your body’s probably going to have a fit. This is also not fair. You do it for a living. So you’re a bit of a biased resource on the answer. Some people might literally rather be killed. I don’t know. I did have a friend once say to me, and I quote, that we couldn’t experiment on him. He said, “No, I’d literally rather die than get on a stage in front of 2,000 people.” And he didn’t laugh. So I mean, I had to— his word was bond at that point.

But at every level, we hit a wall of perception, of fear of perception. At first it was for me posting online, and then I did it and it started to work, and then I overcame that, if you will. And then the audience got bigger and now it was— and then I got canceled for the first time. This happened last year too. It was about a different thing. And then the fear of perception kind of crept in there. And then maybe it was my first public speaking event in front of a couple of hundred people and the fear of perception came back in.

Everybody is afraid of what they will be thought of and if the narrative that the people project onto them is aligned with what they believe about themselves to be true. And really their deepest, darkest fear. What if they confirm that I am not enough? What if they confirm that I am incompetent? All the things that we deal with because someone said those things to us. You’re inadequate. You’re not enough. You can’t sit with us. You’re not good enough. Whatever. When we were a kid and we chose to believe that thing, the fear of perception gets to everybody, but there’s a level to it for everyone.

Your fear of perception is much higher than the person at home listening to this or sitting in their car on their drive to work right now. But at some point you hit a level where you go, what will they think of me if I do this? There’s something within you that could hit. Maybe it’s a new style of content. Maybe it’s throwing out that certain joke that you really know is pushing it in the new talk. Maybe it’s being vulnerable to a degree that you’ve never been online before because that’s not what the other guys are doing. So what will those guys think of me? Because you’re batting in a league that’s pretty high. What will those guys think of me if I say something totally different in my videos? It’s there somewhere.

But I think too many people view it as a fight. I can overcome the fear of perception, or if I can conquer the fear of perception. The goal is not to overcome the fear of perception, it is to stay tapped in with inspiration. Because you’re inspired until you hit the wall. The content was flowing for me and I was super inspired in creating a bunch. And then the first wall was boom, canceled because I said something polarizing. This was, like I said, a year plus ago. I made a fat joke that was pretty off the— it was off-color, but it was funny. And that was where it first crept in. People, big creators, started saying crazy stuff about me that wasn’t true. And then I got blocked from inspiration. I didn’t know what to create because I was worried what they will think of me with what came next.

And so if the goal is not to overcome the fear of perception, but to stay tapped into inspiration, then that shifts it from a fight to more of a dance. Everybody wants to maximize their potential, but I don’t think that’s the game. I think you don’t want to maximize your potential. You want to know deeply the parts of you that don’t want you to do that. Because when I decided to do seminars last year, there was a part of me that went, what if nobody shows up? Maybe a fear you had selling tickets across the world, maybe not. But that fear crept in. And so then the job is not, oh, let me just bury that. The job is then let me go explore that part of me that thinks nobody will show up so I can get to, as I said earlier, is this true? Why is that kid in me so afraid that nobody will come to my birthday party? Right? That’s the adult equivalent of the speaking tour I did last year.

And so through deeply understanding and knowing the parts of us that don’t want us to maximize our potential, it is only in doing that that the fear of perception falls away. But there’s nowhere to get. That’s the game, dude. Like, that’s the game. There’s nowhere to get. It’s an exponential curve. It never touches zero. For every new level, there’s a new devil. I love that quote. And when you went from your first episode on your couch in the UK to top 50 to top 25 to now 8, there’s a fear that creeps in at every point, something that you have to work through.

But I think the secret is knowing deeply the part of you that says you don’t deserve that, you can’t have that. And instead of saying that’s wrong, familiarize yourself with it and then you can process it. And that’s the difference between unprocessing your emotion and being run by your emotion. Because the two decisions you make, if you listen to the narrative, I’m not enough, versus observe it and understand it and move through it, are wildly different decisions.

So that’s what the fear of perception is to me. It’s the goal to stay tapped into the inspiration, what I believe the messages that God is placing on my heart are. And that’s why my content is so diverse. One day I’ll make a video about grief and what I learned from the death of my father, and the next day it’s the f*ing review of the Coke-flavored Oreo or the Oreo-flavored Coke Zero, my most viral video ever, classically, which is hilarious. There’s no— it was just inspiration. It was following the inspiration. And in doing that, I’ve built a business out of it. But conventional rules would tell me, well, you’re not sticking to the framework and the structures and the viral, and it’s all bullshit. So the goal is to stay tapped into inspiration by dancing with that fear of perception.

Scarcity vs. Abundance Mindset

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s an interesting line between scarcity and abundance. So George Mack is just the most abundance mindset person I’ve ever met. He really is. He has— this is one of my f*ing favorite George stories. I think he must be on his 30th pair of AirPods now, and he’s kept them all in his Bluetooth. I hope he has Apple Store history. And you can see George’s AirPods 1, 2, 3, 4, all the way up to 30. But because they’re all linked to his Find My, there’s one pair that’s in the United Nations building in downtown New York City. There’s one left AirPod, I think, that’s in Kandahar or something. So he’s lost them around the world. Some of them will be in the ocean. Others of them have been picked up by people where he’s left them. And he left them in Dean’s the other night.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Oh my God. When we were at dinner? Yes. Oh my gosh. Left them at Dean’s.

Abundance Mindset and Content Creation

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And he can see, he tracks them, and every so often, because you can do the Find My, he just plays a sound out of the AirPods. So the fing UN building will be beep-beep-beep-bidip-bidip-bidip. Beep-beep-beep-bidip-bidip-bidip. And it’s just him fing with like dude in Kandahar. He’s just like f*ing with him because he knows that he’s got his last AirPods. It’s so good.

But he’s just got this abundance mindset, man. I don’t think anyone’s done a full treatment on the difference between scarcity and abundance mindset. Not enough. It’s a really obvious meme, I guess if you’ve been in the personal development world for a while. I haven’t seen it fully sort of break through. And the idea that a glass half full versus half empty is a pretty sort of cliché way to think about it.

Just assuming that it’s okay, things will get better. I can take the risk. I can spend the money. I can treat myself. I can give myself time off. I can permit myself to attempt this thing that I don’t know whether or not it’s going to go well. Just assume that things are going to go well.

And it’s a particular type of advice for a particular type of person that maybe many, perhaps even most people actually need the opposite advice. They need to be told to pump the brakes on their risk tolerance. There is a big subset of people, I’m going to guess, at the very least like me, perhaps like you, who need the opposite piece of advice. I need you to read “Die with Zero” by Bill Perkins. Because otherwise I would’ve just been scrimping and saving. There’s a difference between misers and spenders. And unfortunately, I fell into the camp of I’d never had money. So I thought, well, now I’ve got it, I should hold onto it. What if it goes away?

Well, that means that you never get to arrive at a place where you arrive. And yeah, abundance mindset is a wonderful salve to the uncertainty and the fear that I think a lot of us feel.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Your episode shift — are we allowed to talk about the new style of content that’s coming up?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’ll be before this one, so yeah.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Okay. The four-way episode that we had, we had a lovely four-way the other day. It was fantastic.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Me, it’s important to have an Indian man in there for diversity. Of course.

MICHAEL SMOAK: It was great. Yes. He taught us a lot about breastfeeding. It was an interesting conversation. Go listen to that one.

The Three Pillars of Content Creation

But that’s a great example, right? You could have said, well, this isn’t what my audience expects of me. This isn’t what got me to top 8 in the world. I can’t do a 4-way podcast of me and my boys bullshitting. I’ve been the interview guy. I’ve been the solo guy giving advice.

But to me, I viewed what you did as an act of authenticity and trusting that diversifying is actually the exact thing you should do because you haven’t done it up to this point. And the more frictionless, less buttoned up, you know, pop a button and let your hair down approach to this, like us just talking and joking and some of the crazy stuff that happened in that episode, is exactly what people want to see from you because it makes you so relational.

So I view creators through this lens as well. There’s this guy who said he uses his content as direct exposure therapy to people pleasing. He posts whatever he wants. He says — I wish I knew his name so I could give him credit — “I post whatever I want. I’m not really overly mindful what my audience wants,” and he has a wide variety of topics that he speaks on. He’s an authority in some places. He’s very human and goofy in others. And he talks about his story in other facets of content.

So there are 3 pillars I think that exist. There’s informational, aspirational, and relational. Informational is the authority figure content. I’m teaching you something. And then relational is the Open Tabs podcast, if that’s what you decide to call it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Did you decide on a name? We’re still working between Rabbit Hole, Open Tabs, SideQuest and stuff I love. I like Open Tabs, dude.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Open Tabs is fun. Open Tabs is good. So informational is — we’ll use my content, for example — when I’m teaching you about creatine or the form and fashion of public speaking tips, how to limit your filler words, something I’m competent on. And then there’s relational. It’s just me saying, this is the Oreo flavored Coke. Let me review it. And it’s just total brain rot. It’s just funny. I’m cracking jokes.

And then there’s aspirational. There’s “look at what I overcame and you can too.” Leo Skeppy is a masterclass on this. I don’t know if you know who that is, but he’s a huge creator. He’s got 10 million followers on TikTok, 5 on Instagram, and a big podcast. But he is a therapist in his podcast. Basically, he does this video. It’s like, “come get ready with me and let you see my outfit before I go out in Vegas for the night.” And it’s like no value. People are saying like, “this feels like a FaceTime from you. I love you.” And then aspirationally he talks about overcoming an abusive relationship and the hardship that he dealt with to get to where he is now, which is wealthy, healthy, and abundant.

And when you combine those three pillars, you get an audience that is really bought into you because not only can you teach them something, but they can relate to you. And they can also feel that they can overcome hardship too. You’re not just this person, this man or woman in the ivory tower sitting in your beautiful podcast studio. No, you’ve been through s* because you’re human. And that’s what I think makes an incredible creator and also allows us to continuously break through the levels of the fear of perception.

And that’s honestly how I view content. My videos are me expressing myself in the purest fashion that I think is almost childlike to me. Also makes for an interesting person.

We Don’t Want the Thing, We Want the Feeling

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, an interesting life. We don’t want the thing, we want the feeling that the thing gives us. Why? Yeah, what did —

MICHAEL SMOAK: We’re speedrunning our recancellation right now with all the references we’re pulling. What did Andrew Tate say? “You don’t want the Ferrari. You want everyone to know you have the Ferrari and that they can’t have the Ferrari,” right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We don’t — having things isn’t fun, getting things is fun.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Having things isn’t fun, getting things is fun. But we don’t want the thing, we want the feeling that it gives us. Because I’ll give you my opinion on this — it’s a faith-based one yet again. We’ll come back to this a lot. My pastor Philip Mitchell that I referenced earlier says that everybody has a God-shaped hole in their heart and they try to fill it with the things of the world. And this is why biblically idolatry is a sin. Sin is actually just God’s way of protecting us from hurting ourselves because we’re stupid. We’re people, we’re dumb, and we make mistakes.

To idolize something is to put it on a pedestal, and to put it on a pedestal implies that it can never let you down. But things of the world are imperfect. They’ll always let us down. And so we don’t want the thing, we want the feeling the thing gives us, because the nice watch, the nice car, the status, the success, the money, whatever any form of material success — will it make us feel significant, seen, heard, understood, important in our place in the world? And it never does.

Like you said, it’s the hedonic treadmill. You step into the thing, it’s really cool. You get the dopamine hit and then the Ferrari just becomes, “we’ll take my car.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, don’t forget there’s a much more squirrely, pernicious version of this, which is developing yourself with your traits and your skills and maybe your knowledge as well. Naval has this cool idea where he talks about how he wasn’t that concerned about being smart, but he really wanted to appear smart. So what he did is he just wrote, memorized tons of stuff, and that gave him the illusion of being smart to other people, but it didn’t mean he actually understood what he was doing.

And that difference of when I’m able to impress people around a dinner table, when everybody else shuts up and they think I’m the most interesting person in the room, then — or a black belt in some martial art — when I get there, then. And the difference is there’s an obvious cultural meme around how cringy it is to assume that a Ferrari’s going to fix your self-worth problem.

But there’s far less about, well, you know, once I’ve done 1,000 hours of meditation, once I’ve got my black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, once I’ve finally read all of the classics and can quote them verbatim around the dinner table. Once I’ve done — even more pernicious than this, go deeper — once I’ve done every level of the Hoffman Process or Internal Family Systems, or I know every Joe Hudson Art of Accomplishment podcast off by heart, and I’ve done the work and I’ve transcended and included my Wilberian ego and everything has now become a perfect manifestation, I’ve alchemized myself.

That is just a slightly cleverer twist on the same arrival fallacy. “I will be when I will be something when I something else.” It’s the same dynamic. It’s just done in a slightly less shallow, obviously vapid way.

The Lonely Chapter and Finding Purpose

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, that’s it, man. That’s what I thought. That’s what I was talking about earlier. There’s nowhere to get. There’s nowhere to get. It doesn’t mean you don’t go there. Doesn’t mean you don’t achieve the thing and build the accolades. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun and it doesn’t feel good, but there’s nowhere to get. There are just levels to climb through. And zero is death. Zero is when your life is over. And that, in my opinion, takes all the weight off of it. It makes it more fun, easier to obtain.

And when I get to the end of my life, I will have hopefully, God willing, done a lot of cool shit. But the ultimate mission for me is — my dad said this to me like 4 weeks before he died. I thought it was very interesting that a guy who was living what I thought was the fullest life ever, the stories he told me, the things he got to do, the things him and his friends did — the last 4 to 6 weeks he was alive when he was just stuck on the couch and we would just sit and talk.

And one thing I’m really thankful for that I did, that I hope anyone listening to this with parents who are still here does, is I recorded a series of podcasts with my dad. When he got sick, I asked him all the hard questions, and it was f*ing brutal, man. Like, had to turn the camera off, had to walk away. It’s a unique pain to look at my dad and say, what do you want to say to me on my wedding day? Can you say it right there? That’s hard, but I’m grateful that I did it because now I have it.

And it goes back to, I don’t really think a lot of what the people on the internet think about me because I had to do that. My threshold for pain is so much higher, for stress is so much higher. I don’t want to control the narrative. I tried that and it created so much more pain within me.

But back to the original point, it was interesting to hear a man who I thought was 10 feet tall and bulletproof and had done everything in the world and had shown up for me every time I needed it and was a great husband, a great dad, the best I’d ever seen. When he got to the end of his life, all he could tell me about was the things he wishes he did more of. And it wasn’t anything complex. It wasn’t that he wished he sold more tracks because he was a running track salesman. It wasn’t that he wishes he did more skydive jumps or that he spent more time on the golf course.

He said three things. He said, number one, “I should have spent more time at home with your mom and less time on the golf course with my buddies.” And number two, “I should have been here for you guys more when you were growing up.” I didn’t perceive it that way. To me, my dad was always there when I needed him. Like, I was lucky to have a dad who really loved me and showed up for me and my brother and sister.

And the last thing he said was, “All I hope to hear when I get wherever I’m going is, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. You fought the good fight, you’ve run your race, here’s your crown, it’s time to rest.'” And that’s scriptural.

And to me, these achievements are fun. They’re so fun. Words cannot be put into the feeling I have of gratitude to be sitting across the table from you right now, man. Like, it’s so cool. I told my boy today, he called me, he was like, how you feeling? I was like, dude, we do downloads on Modern Wisdom. We were getting our walks together in college. Like, this is so cool. It’s incredible.

But where I stand with my belief is that God’s not going to say, “Well done, my good and faithful podcast host, my good and faithful content creator, business owner.” It’s not going to say husband or father or brother. He’s going to say servant. And if what I do glorifies God, and if I feel that way and I receive confirmation, or what I think is confirmation, that’s what I think I’m here to do. And that’s what I think we’re all here to do.

And I think if more people open their heart to the possibility of that being true, they would still have fun pursuing the thing and getting the thing and having the thing, but they’d understand that that’s really all we’re here for and that the only zero, the only arrival is the end of it and that it’s all just fun. It’s fun and service. That’s it.

The Lonely Chapter

MICHAEL SMOAK: This is total inception, listening to you tell me what I said, because I learned that from you, which is kind of hilarious.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s the Human Centipede, but we’ve both got our ass and mouth attached to each other.

MICHAEL SMOAK: We’re oral-burrsing each other or whatever the f* it’s called. Yeah. My mouth to Chris’s ass. Clip that.

Yeah. You and Hormozi talked about the lonely chapter, and I remember going through that being 22 years old and wondering. I really had one friend, my best friend, still the guy I just told you I was on the phone with earlier. Will, I love you if you’re listening to this. It was just he and I.

I would have these feelings of, why do I care this much about resistance training, progressive overload? Why do I want to learn about hormesis and heat exposure and listen to Dr. Rhonda Patrick talk for 3 hours about those things with Joe Rogan? Why do I care what Chris Williamson and Andrew Huberman are going to talk about for 2 hours? And when I go talk about it to my friends, they go, “Sick, dude.” It’s like, you can’t expect everyone to have the same interest as you. I get that.

You want to slide me one of those?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, get in there. Appreciate it. A little nicotine bump.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Go on. What is this?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is this the mint one? This is the watermelon peppermint, I think. Yeah, we’re just finding different ways to stimulate ourselves. I have an oral fixation, which is great to say after we just talked about ass to mouth.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, Chris loves finding ways to get orally stimulated, for sure.

I remember being very confused about why nobody gave a shit about the things I gave a shit about. And I just had this one friend. It was me and Will, and he was up in New York at college and I was down in Georgia. And so we’d do these things we called NEAT chats where we’d go out and go for a walk. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Walking. NEAT chats. He just texts me like “NEAT” and we go and we do downloads on the podcast we were listening to, but we were each other’s only outlet and that can feel lonely.

And I remember a girl I was dating at the time — I talked to her about the first time I heard about the anterior midcingulate cortex. And I went, this is groundbreaking f*ing information. I’ve got to tell the world, like the British are coming. The British are coming. The AMCC is growing. The AMCC is growing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F* you, it’s boring.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, exactly. And it was a very loving, “You should like make content or something.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You should talk about this.

MICHAEL SMOAK: But not to me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s exactly right. It’d be really great if you didn’t talk to me about it.

MICHAEL SMOAK: That’s exactly right. And at the time it felt like rejection, but in hindsight I’m like, yeah, I can’t expect you to care about the things I care about.

So for me, this period of losing weight — I was overweight. I lost 60 pounds when I was 21 and kept the weight off, became passionate about understanding that it’s actually not that hard. My life got better when I did that. People treated me better. My energy was better. My clothes fit. I felt better about myself. Look good, feel good, play good. Why does everybody think this is so hard?

And then it got deeper. My grandma died of Alzheimer’s, so I became interested in cognitive decline as it pertains to exercise and lifestyle. And this passion just kept growing within me where all I was consuming was podcasts and information on this at any chance I could, but I wasn’t really doing anything with it other than my own benefit.

And I realize now so clearly looking back that that was God preparing me for this. I use everything I learned over that 7-year period in my job every day. And people ask me, how do you know all this? I just spent 6 years alone, walking by yourself, listening to podcasts for 1,000 hours. That’s what it takes.

And that was my lonely chapter. And it felt like it was for nothing. And looking back, I laugh at the idea of that because it’s part of why I’m in this room with you — my obsession with those things with no seeming or visible horizon of payoff in the future. What does Hormozi say? Being able to do the work without the promise or expectation of it paying off at any given point. I did that and eventually it paid off. But that’s where my love came from and that’s where the understanding came from.

I tell people, if you feel like you’ve outgrown — in your words, you’ve outgrown your old group and you haven’t found your new one yet — that is a barometer that you’re actually on exactly the path that you’re supposed to be. At least that’s my take, and it’s what I’ve seen in people who consider themselves high performers as well. And I think you feel similarly given that clip that —

The Lonely Path of Personal Development

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Of course, of course. Yeah, I mean, it was the central thrust of the last live show that I did. It was the thing that people spoke about the most. It’s kind of taken on a life of its own, which is really cool. And I think what’s coolest about it is that it puts a name to something that a lot of people feel and that nobody had actually come up with the term for previously.

And yeah, it’s not romantic. There’s no point in that process that makes you feel like there’s glory happening. Your entire journey of personal development is just steeped in uncertainty and self-doubt. It’s not cool. It’s not sexy. You think The Rocky cutscene was 3 and a half minutes in the movies. It’s been 4 years for me. What the f* is going on? That’s it. There’s no promise of any success on the other side of it. Permanently questioning if you’re making any progress. Am I doing this right?

And it isn’t like every month, every training montage that you’ve seen where the hero goes from realizing he needs to change to the change with ups and downs in the journey and the progress. But no loss of conviction. I lost conviction all the fing time. Like, am I, what should I be doing? Should I be, maybe I need to do more yoga. I’m actually CrossFit. I should be doing CrossFit. And if I did more CrossFit, no, f. ‘Cause I need to meditate more. If I meditate more, I should learn. What should I learn? Should I learn the classic? Maybe I should read philosophy. No, I should do evolutionary psych. Just constantly trying to work out what I’m self-generating and self-educating.

And yeah, when I look back, I’ve got this couch in Newcastle, the old studio, the one that I had to paint the ceiling of ’cause it had candle soot ’cause I had a candle obsession for a while. And everybody said that it was mold. It wasn’t mold. Wasn’t my mum’s basement. It was my bedroom in my house that I bought and I loved, but it didn’t look that great. So I did have to get it painted. The internet bullied me into getting painters around, two gay painters. It was brilliant. And they came around and did this thing. And then it was a Douglas Murray episode actually that put the final, like, ’cause he said, “What’s that on the ceiling?” And I was like, “Right, okay, I’m f*ing doing it.”

Right next to that set, right? Remembering this is the first studio I’ve ever owned that wasn’t in my house. The last decade, every single house that I’ve stayed in, every Airbnb I’ve stayed in, every hotel I’ve stayed in for more than 3 weeks has had some form of studio in it. And this is the first one that isn’t in my abode.

Right next to that studio setup, which had my bed in the background, and then there would be a bear on the bed, was a couch. This leather couch that came with the house, and I kind of liked it. It was comfy. And I spent hundreds, probably over 1,000 hours. In fact, it must be over 1,000 hours. Just sat on one half of this couch. I had this little wooden table next to me. And I’d have a little coaster like this, a little coaster with my salt and lemon in water, like just table salt, because before Element was available in the UK, maybe I didn’t even know it existed, maybe it didn’t even exist. And I’d have my Kindle and I’d have this little blanket and I’d put this blanket over my knees and I’d have a cushion and I’d put my Kindle on the cushion and I’d sit down and try and read.

I remember when I first started trying to read, after a decade of being a club promoter. And that’s just, I think I sent and received, the last time I checked my stats, I sent and received 8 million messages on WhatsApp with thumbs. So I’m just used to bings and bongs and notifications and colors. And I sit down and it’s just this black and white screen with words on it. And my body used to move. My body used to sort of twitch a little bit.

MICHAEL SMOAK: It was trying to search for extra dopamine inside of it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I literally think it was trying, it was learning what lower stimulus felt like. And then I’d maybe try and meditate or I’d do whatever. That whole process now in retrospect is just one of the coolest periods of my life. And it was me in this ex-garage extension of a house in bumfuck village near Newcastle upon Tyne, around the corner from a primary school. And I just spent thousands of hours sat there just doing shit, experimenting with myself, I guess, and learning about me.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Experimenting with yourself, you say?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mostly trying to fit my own mouth around my own ass so that I don’t need you anymore. I just want to feed my own ideas back into myself. That’s an echo chamber. True Ouroboros. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s f*ing awesome.

And lots of people, even the most powerful and successful ones, Hormozi talks about sleeping on the gym floor. There’s cars, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. Da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk, driving over the top of the gym where he slept, and he would hear the kids that were his age partying above him, and he was still downstairs. And I would hear families coming and going from the school, and I’d still be sat there, and I’d have heard them drop the kids off in the morning, and I’d still be there, and they’d have left later that day, and then maybe I’d be working on my laptop doing whatever now. It’s cool.

And I think that, yeah, the path to being the best version of yourself should be lonely, or at the very least, being lonely is not an indication that you are not on the path to becoming the best version of yourself. That people sort of rage against the fact that there is lots of self-doubt and there isn’t that much glory, and it does seem like it’s tarnishing the experience, and I don’t know if it’s going to work, and I’m wracked with this lack of belief. Yet that is par for the course.

Because if you’re going to try and break out of the mold of wherever you are, you need to do something that’s unbelievably weird and different and strange. And that means that there’s going to be very few people by design like you. Very few people are going to be self-selecting to go and do this thing, which means that you have to go off on your own. And maybe you’re super fortunate and you’ve got a brother or a friend or whatever that is on the journey with you. But for the most part, people are born in towns if you’re into this sort of stuff, you’re the one person within a 5-year age bracket where you live that you know that’s into this and there’s no one else. So yeah, it’s an indication that you’re on the right path. I think you’re correct.

Grand Plans and Falling Forward

MICHAEL SMOAK: Did you think this would all happen when you started on that couch in Newcastle?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, I mean, look, grand plans, sort of big impressive goals for life is never something I’ve been particularly good at. Really? But this wasn’t a plan, right? This was emergent. This was me failing forward, falling forward. Someone once described adulthood as being pushed down a set of stairs at age 18 and trying to catch your feet until you die. And it does feel a little bit like that. I’m performing adulthood and performing competence. Or whatever it is.

But no, it absolutely wasn’t the plan. I didn’t have any plan at all, but I really enjoyed the process of following my passions, which I’d suppressed for a long time. So I did two degrees at university. I did a bachelor’s in business management, then a master’s in international marketing, and I did a year in industry. So I was at university for 5 years, left at 23.

And I remember when I completed my master’s dissertation. I finished it. I started and finished it in 36 hours. I’d been given the entire summer to write it and technically the entire year to write it, and I’ve started and finished it in 36 hours. And I did it on a case of Red Bull and 3 bags of very, very questionable cocaine from my local dealer. And I was so wired and just screwy by the end of it. My housemate had had a party downstairs and I kept going downstairs to do a line. To then come back upstairs. I was like watching the party slowly degenerate as I was finishing my dissertation. I was completely sober. I mean, apart from the cocaine.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Cocaine. Completely sober is a crazy thing to say when you were railing. Completely cocaine.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, but I’m coke sober. Yeah, sure. And I didn’t trust myself to hand my dissertation in. I didn’t trust myself to drive it in, so I walked it into town. I walked to town from my house because I wouldn’t drive, obviously, because I was completely, but I was like, you did just dedicate a year of your life and kind of the crowning achievement of your academic career to this thing. So you were prepared to roll the dice with this. And it came back and I got one of the highest marks of like my entire module was around that dissertation. So cocaine’s a hell of a drug.

My point being, when I decided I’m going to try and do something that’s just for me, I look back on my degrees and realized I should have done philosophy or psychology. I wasn’t fired up about business. I didn’t want to do business, but I couldn’t work out what job a philosopher would get. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what job a psychologist would get. Psychology was interesting to me, so I suppressed what I was interested in and did it in service of a thing that I thought would be functional. And then, 15 years later, I can’t remember anything that I learned. So it was completely pointless.

And I got the opportunity to run it back and basically create my own university course. And the one thing that I knew that I did want, like the one goal that I did have was to be respected by people that I respected. I really wanted to be seen as a peer by people who I admired. And I think that’s one of the coolest things to have someone who you go, “Dude, I really f*ing love your work. I really like this way that you approach the world.” And for them to say, “Oh yeah, I like this about you too.” That is a fuel I think that will drive people. It’s not as transactional as just status growth. It’s wow, this person is discerning and they’re good at what they do and they like what I do too. Amazing. What a great stamp, commendation. That I’ve received.

And that was something that I really wanted. And yeah, I had my f*ing Mount Rushmore of guests, and that was largely around Mount Rushmore of people that I wanted to respect what I did. And that was what drove me for a good while.

Turning Idols into Peers

MICHAEL SMOAK: But so do you feel like you’ve done that now?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Still need to get Rogan on. He’s f*ing skittish and he keeps on going elk hunting, so he’s busy. But yeah, I think so. I think all of the people that I started off wanting to turn from an idol into a rival and a peer, I managed to do. And that was awesome.

And now it’s a case of, okay, what does it look like to start to forge something new? Right. What’s next? I don’t know. More of this. I’m just enjoying f*ing having fun on the show, speaking to people like you and seeing what a new generation of creators that I can collaborate with is like, guys like you, Joe Folly, Alex O’Connor, Dylan O’Sullivan, Chris Griffin, Elliot Buick. There’s a lot of young talent, younger talent that’s, an entire generation in internet speak, but realistically only between 10 and 15 years in real life. And that’s cool. I think that’s really fun.

Okay, well, what other angles have we got that we can play around with here? Who else is coming up? And then you get to be a platform for other people, which is sick, because for almost all of your career in something like this, you’re basically riding off the coattails of people who are more successful than you and like suckling at the teat of someone who’s already, suckling today, accumulated a lot of that on his mind. I don’t, what can I say?

And then eventually you get to the stage where you can pay it forward. And you go, wow, I really fing like this person. I’m going to give him a crack. Angelo Summers, fing unreal. One of the best video essayists. So good and criminally undersubscribed. I just loved his essays. I’m like, I want to talk to him. Come to Austin. I want to talk to you. It’s sick. And I’m not quite yet a kingmaker, but it’s good. We’re getting there.

MICHAEL SMOAK: And that’s really, really fun. Is that, I was going to ask you a question. I feel like you kind of answered it. What would you do for free right now? What would make you really happy? Is it to have that next generation around and on?

The Power of Consistency

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I would sit down and have these conversations for free. I did this before anybody listened. I did this long before anybody listened. It took, I think, 2 years to hit 10K subs. So that’s 150 episodes. And then it took 3 years to hit 100K. So we’re now at 300 episodes. And then when I moved to America, we were at 250K subs. And that was 450 episodes. We’ve only done 1,000. Nearly 50% of the show was done before I moved to America and under 250K subs. And then I came out here and all of this stuff happened and it was really amazing, but I’d already done it when nobody was watching for a long time.

Now we were stuck at, I think it was like 7K for nearly a year. And I didn’t care. I just loved what I was doing and it’s still the same. And so there’s nothing else that I want to do at 5:20 PM Central Time than be here and chat to you. There’s nothing else that I want to do. I’m enjoying the stage stuff. That’s fun. Going and doing the live stuff’s cool. But there’s nothing else. All right, I’ve got another one. I want to harass you about this one. If you want exceptional things, you have to be willing to work toward them for exceptional periods of time. I’m willing to bet 90% of people who didn’t get where they wanted did so simply because they stopped too early.

MICHAEL SMOAK: I’m going to do the thing, the aphorism thing. Do it. “90% of success can be boiled down to doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time. Without convincing yourself you’re smarter than you are.” That’s the end of that quote from Mr. Hormozi himself. What was the obvious thing with growing the podcast? One of the obvious things that you did that got it to where it is today?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not stopping. That’s it.

MICHAEL SMOAK: With social media growth, people ask me all the time, what’s the number one thing you’d recommend? Post every day for 6 months. I would guarantee you 90 plus percent of people wash out after 90 days of posting. And so extraordinary success comes from just doing the boring stuff, but you can’t package that. You can’t make an incredible viral clip out of it or a multimillion-dollar business if you just tell people, if you want to get jacked, you should probably just not stop working out and not stop eating well and not stop walking. And if you want to have a successful podcast, you should probably just not stop uploading an episode a week or 2 episodes a week.

It’s the same with social media. I haven’t missed an upload in 2 and a half years. On social media. So yeah, the byproduct is the growth, but it’s the obvious thing. And it’s not easy to do because things get in the way. You have all these ideas or creative blocks or reasons you can’t post, but it’s simple to understand: if you want to be where you want to be, you have to do the boring sht for a long time. And that’s what I’ve noticed from everybody at the top. There was never this game-changing revolutionary formula for how they got there. They just kept fing showing up.

And if they had 10% to give that day, if I had 10% to give that day and I gave it, I gave 100% because I truly understand that that is so much better than nothing. And I do think so many people on social media stop right before they pop. So many people in the gym stop right before they hit that flow state with their workouts that gets them in the best shape of their life, where they find that way of eating that feels comfortable and that they can sustain forever. Most people stop right before they strike gold. And I know if I just keep showing up, even if it all falls away, like you just said, I’d still do this for free. If all the sponsors and the platform got stripped, you’d still come into this room and record, which means you’d climb again. But not many people have the testicular fortitude to be able to do that.

Discipline, Motivation, and Obsession

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think also one of the things is people mistake doing something they feel they should be doing instead of doing something that they’re obsessed with. So I’ve got the difference 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. It sort of climbed inside of you and it’s staring out through your eyes.

And what we look at with a lot of people now, it appears like discipline. But what it is is just the remnant of what was previously an obsession. Going to the gym for me was something that I did because I was obsessed with it. I wouldn’t go on nights out at university because I wanted to stay in and read bodybuilding.com forums to see if this blueberry extract would get me more jacked or whatever the f*. And now my training pattern is just like the hard rock that’s cooled after that lava erupted. For a while. And it looks like discipline from the outside, but it’s actually just the remnant of this thing that kind of wore me for a while.

And I don’t know whether you have heard me talk about this before, but 90% of podcasts don’t make it past episode 3. And of the 10% that do, 90% of them don’t make it past episode 20. So by making 21 podcasts, you were in the top percentile of all podcasters ever. We did it. And it just sort of goes to show how rare consistency is. And if you want to be in the top percentile of all podcasters ever, just do 21. They can be sh*t. Do 21 and you have already won. And consistency is not sexy and it doesn’t really fit very well on an Instagram reel because it’s not a quick fix. So it doesn’t surprise me that people don’t want to do it.

I think another element, a lot of people didn’t get to where they are because of a lack of support. I was for a very long time, still maybe deep down now, uncertain. Am I doing this right? Is it okay for me to want to do this thing? And I basically have a lifestyle-wide praise kink. And if you just say to me the thing that encouraged me, that is a really good fuel source for me. But that means that in the UK, somewhere which is quite disparaging of anybody that wants to do anything different, it’s the opposite. And I know that the lonely chapter thing particularly resonated with people in the UK because it’s one big f* off lonely chapter. And that’s also one of the reasons I think that we’ve got such millionaire flight happening from the UK. Because if you’re the sort of person that wants to make a lot of yourself, it’s not a wonderful culture to be in. And I really would love to change that.

MICHAEL SMOAK: But the praise kink is a super funny way to put that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: A lifestyle-wide praise kink.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Good boy, Chris. Good boy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Don’t you do it. I don’t need it from you.

Embracing the Early Struggle

MICHAEL SMOAK: But I love what you just said there. The 21 episodes about putting you in the top 1%, they are probably going to be sht. That’s the other thing. Mine were. MrBeast says create 100 videos and understand they’re all going to suck. And then maybe you can start to get kind of good at it. That’s the best creator on the planet by every observable metric. I look back at my old content. It’s horrific. I cringe. It’s awful, but it has to be shtty before it can get good. I listened to episode 1 actually.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you think?

MICHAEL SMOAK: I mean, compared to this, you suck. Listenable. Yeah. But comparatively sh*tty. And it’s the same thing with my pod and my first videos. It’s suspending the ego long enough for the skill sets to catch up. That’s what it really is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And because your inspirations are not the people that are only one step ahead of you, they’re the people that are 15 steps ahead of you or 100 steps ahead of you. So you compare that to where you are, but nobody does that. Nobody starts playing football on a weekend and says, well, Cristiano Ronaldo is so much better than me. It’s f*ing pointless me even trying.

I was talking to Louis Theroux this morning and he said about the two jobs that British young boys want. Number one is still to be a Premier League footballer. I think that’s a good sign. But number two is to be a YouTuber. And it’s this weird world where what young boys need is more resilience if they’re going to do that. And more patience as well. It’s a particularly impatient culture for people who want to be YouTubers an awful lot.

Childlike Wonder and the Joy of Creating

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, I love that phrase. Why do grown men love pro athletes so much? Because it’s a kid that never gave up on their dreams, and they want to be like that. And so it’s cool to hear that there are kids that are still wanting that. And I think that that childlike wonder gets taken from us at some point along the way in many people. And I still see that in what you do, the Open Tabs episodes, the way you f* around talking about how you were railing lines of coke like this. It’s a playful— not that kids should do coke, not what I’m saying.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, it’s a great nootropic. It’s a great—

MICHAEL SMOAK: It’s laser focused, but at some point something happens to us and we just forget to play and have fun. And that’s why content is so easy for me to create. Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” And I view the tree of life in that quote as inspiration. And the hope deferred was me not creating the content. And when people ask me what my strategy is for videos, I don’t have one because I treat it like a kid in a sandbox building castles. It’s just all content. It’s all ideas. And when I suspend the disbelief that it has to be anything, the inspiration just continues to flow.

And that’s— I encourage all the adults out there to unpucker their asses and have fun. Find a way to have fun like you and I in the park the other day, throwing the f*ing—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Unwinding our f*ing rotator cuffs for 15 minutes. I was not—

MICHAEL SMOAK: I was truly— oh yeah, I forgot it cracked. Let’s see if we can get this on the microphone. Oh, it’s popping inside my shoulder. But I went like this on the pod the other day and it just— the whole studio heard. But we were— it was so funny the way, like, the 12-year-old inside of all of us, or inside of you and I, on that walk, as I bent down for the ball, we both went, “Yep.” And then it just— no words— directly into a game of catch. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Clarity and conviction is perceived by those who hear it as confidence and competence.

The Power of Communication

MICHAEL SMOAK: One of the most important things someone ever said to me, it was a mentor of mine. “Clarity and conviction is perceived by those who hear it as competence and confidence.”

I think communication is the number one skill you can develop in this life. You’ve built a career off of it, and you’re only as good as your ability to tell a story or tell your story or tell other people’s stories on their behalf. But everybody seems to think, or so many people think, “I am just this way with my speaking, my words.” It’s viewed as this static thing, but it’s a muscle that you can train.

So when you speak clearly, when you enunciate properly and with conviction, when you sit across the table from me, whether you agree with me or not, you can tell that I believe what I’m saying. You’re perceived by the people around you as competent, intelligent, and confident. And people follow competent, confident people.

I mean, look at politicians. They might not always be telling the truth, but they sure do speak with clarity and conviction. Someone like Barack Obama is touted as one of the best speakers in the entire presidential candidacy in the history of the presidency. And people loved him because he spoke clearly and with conviction. And then people perceived him as competent and confident enough to elect him twice.

So the Bible says life and death is in the tongue. What you say is incredibly powerful, both about yourself and the message that you’re able to portray about whatever it is. So I encourage people to develop those skill sets and understand it’s just a muscle. Communication skills are just a muscle. It’s like the first time you went to the gym and your hands were soft, and now you look at my palms and I’ve got these calluses, as you do from all the times I’ve picked up the dumbbell or the barbell. But the first time I did it, it hurt. And then over time, the hands got harder and more durable. Communication and public speaking are the same way.

The Higher Up Wellness Public Speaking Challenge

And that’s how this crazy public speaking challenge that I’ve somehow become tied to has just grown on the internet. I think there’s something like 60 or 70,000 people doing it. Did I tell you about this?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Maybe not.

MICHAEL SMOAK: If you search on Instagram — I know it’s more on TikTok — if you search on Instagram, #HigherUpWellnessChallenge, it says 28,000 posts. A year ago I made a video, maybe more than this, maybe 2 years ago I made it. Yeah, 2 years ago I made a video and I said the number one skill that can change your life is the ability to communicate efficiently and effectively. And if you don’t think you can do it, I promise you can. You just need to practice.

So here’s what I recommend. I recommend you pick up the phone, turn the front camera on, hit record, and talk for 60 seconds unbroken. Whatever comes up, whatever comes out, no topics, it doesn’t have to be about anything. Anything goes. Try not to use too many filler words, and just speak for 60 seconds with no cuts and do it for a minimum of 30 days.

I didn’t say tag me and hashtag it this. I didn’t try to start a challenge. What happened was this kid, Brandon, he took that video and sort of cut it up and he said, “I’m really terrified to post online and public speaking scares me. And this video convicted me to do it. So I’m just going to title this the Higher Up Wellness Public Speaking Challenge. First video ever.”

Mind you, I said post on a burner account. Nobody will see it. First video ever, 5 million views overnight. Gymshark comments. I think the Cincinnati Bengals comment, like crazy huge accounts comment on this kid just saying, “I’m very nervous and I’m going to spend the next 30 days practicing my public speaking skills.” And he went from 0 to 40,000 followers overnight. And that started just this storm of people practicing their communication skills.

I’m just — I think it’s very cool, and I’m honored to even be tied to it, but this kid and this other creator, Reagan, did this and their videos blew up. And now I’m watching, when I click on the hashtag, I’m watching all these people. What I like to do is go to their day 1 video and then go to their day 30. Some of these people have been doing this for 380 days. There’s a guy who’s on day 381, and the transformation in their ability to show up, their confidence is unbelievable.

I mean, it’s direct evidence of the fruit of battling the fear of perception because everybody says, “I was so scared to post online in case I looked like a cornball.” Some of them have developed social media followings. One creator, Jett Fransen, went from 0 to 500,000 across his platforms and just blew up and does incredible philosophical takes now. And it’s because he just decided to get out of his own way and do this silly challenge. And it’s so f*ing cool to watch, but it’s proof that these are skills. You can build clarity, you can build conviction, you can learn how to speak in stream of consciousness. We’re not all just gifted with the ability to do it or not do it.

Style vs. Substance

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a skill and you have to hone it. There’s definitely an interesting duality to it — that clarity and conviction is certainly perceived as confidence and competence and insight and expertise. But as you said, people who don’t have expertise or competence can reverse engineer their way into seeming like somebody that you should listen to. It’s the criticism of all style and no substance, right? But I think all substance and no style doesn’t tend to get listened to.

James Smith had this f*ing unbelievable line about his first podcast. He’s now on his second one. He’s like a guy with multiple wives — serially dating his own podcast and renaming them and then flipping the channel.

MICHAEL SMOAK: You meant literally married? I was like, damn, James on blast right now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, no, not at all. He’s f*ing living a dad life in Australia. And he had this line and he said, “On my podcast, I speak to people who are far smarter than me, but much more boring.” It’s so true, dude. And I just thought, oh, that’s so great.

Or another way to look at it is everything worth saying has been said before, but nobody was listening. So it has to be said again. It has to be said with more clarity and conviction. And I think that’s where James got it really right — that a lot of people’s ideas are f*ing fantastic, but they just haven’t yet quite worked out how to package them or promote them fully.

And if you can, lots of people feel like the things that they have to contribute are really wonderful. And wouldn’t it be great if more people knew about it? Like, “I’ve got a good take on what should happen with the WNBA. Like, I really think that I can contribute to this. I think I could improve the WNBA, which I imagine needs improving. And why is no one listening to me? I think that my ideas have got veracity. I think that there’s some truth in them. I think that they’re really, really useful.” Oh, no one listens to me because of the style thing.

And it’s kind of like being in a band and your band’s music is just too cool. It’s just so progressive, man. Like, people just don’t get it. It’s a strange kind of protectionist strategy. It keeps you at arm’s distance because the fact that nobody gets it means that you’re safe from ever having to compete in the landscape of ideas or music, whatever. With people who have got their foot in the door.

And I think that’s one of the reasons the underground hero band is seen as a little bit sexy in that way. “Oh, you wouldn’t get it, man. It’s so sophisticated.” And you think, well, what if you knew how to promote it? And what if it was a little bit more attuned to the market and you still had all of this amazing technical ability on the f*ing guitar or whatever it is that you’re doing? And it at least adapted itself to the market somewhat.

Also, you need to play the game until you can start to change the rules of it. You don’t get to change anything sat in the stands. You have to sort of earn your keep and then, okay, these are the rules of the game and now I can break them. Breaking the rules of the game before knowing them is just not playing the game. You just don’t understand what you’re doing.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, that’s it. The buy-in is to play by the rules, or I guess the only other option would be sitting on the sideline and bitching about how the rules of the game are unfair. And nothing gets done there. So you might as well play and then learn them, just like you said.

The Shopping Cart Theory

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If you cannot do something as simple as return the shopping cart to its designated area, I’m going to assume you’re a degenerate and your life is in shambles.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Shopping cart theory. The litmus test for a good person. Okay. We’ve got two new razors out of this podcast. This has been revolutionary.

I really believe that, man. I posted that video just the other day, but it’s an old one. And every time — the comment to like to view ratio is just totally f*ed because it clearly stirs up negative emotion in people. And every time somebody comments, “What a silly thing to care about,” or “This is just stupid,” I would say, just say you’re a bad person. You just outed yourself completely. Just say you don’t return the shopping cart.

Jokes aside, yeah, it’s a bit inflammatory and hyperbolic intentionally, but there’s this great Reddit green text about how the shopping cart theory is the litmus test for if you’re a functioning self-governing member of society. If you can’t even return your shopping cart? What can you do? What does your home life look like? What does your health look like?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Everything’s probably in shambles. It’s a Jordan Peterson “clean your room” for the Walmart generation.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yes, that’s it, for the Walmart generation. Yeah, that’s exactly right. It is the test of self-agency and self-governing. It’s just one of those things like, why would you not do it? Anyone who voluntarily doesn’t do it, I’d safely assume you probably also hate dogs and treat service workers poorly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just the other character test. The way that you treat waiters and waitresses is a good indication of this. Such a good one.

American Driving Culture

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I’m just going to say it. I think that Americans are the rudest f*ing drivers on the planet. You guys treat lanes like they’re your property. You ever been to Atlanta?

MICHAEL SMOAK: Only the airport, a lot, but only the airport.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, you’ve never seen driving like that before. But you’re right. Atlanta driving is like Atlanta women.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Well, you’re going to get me in trouble with all my friends back home. I can’t answer that. I plead the fifth. My opinion is that you don’t want my opinion.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You don’t want to hear what I’ve got to say about Atlanta.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Atlanta driving is like eyes peeled, bring a gun just in case sort of situation. If you’re not 15 over, you’re 15 under and everybody’s really angry and got somewhere to be. But it’s whatever you know to be true about Americans times 3 in Atlanta — third worst traffic city in the world.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just for clarity, if you’re in the UK and you are in front of the car that’s in the lane that you’re moving into, unless that car’s going very quickly, they slow down and let you in. They flash you in. If you’re in front of the car and you indicate, you get to move across, you get let in. And if you don’t do that, it is incredibly bad form. F*ing unbelievably bad form.

In the US, it almost feels like someone speeds up and slows down to make it impossible for you to enter the lane, even behind them. That’s been one of the biggest changes of being here. And I feel like this is the driving equivalent of the shopping cart theory. How nice of a person can you be if you can’t let somebody into the lane in front of you? Not very. We’re touching on something close to your heart now, aren’t we, Atlanta driver?

MICHAEL SMOAK: Yeah, but I’m very intentional. If you were in front of me, I’d let you in — unless I was in a hurry, of course, and then it’s f* you. But everybody’s just in a hurry, I guess.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, maybe. What was the biggest culture shock coming over here in terms of behaviors of people when you first got here?

MICHAEL SMOAK: What was that?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Driving’s a big one. Yeah. The driving quality here is horrendous. And I had to take my test and that explained why. It’s not necessarily stupid, just distractible, I think. Caffeine-fueled WhatsApp messaging.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Dude, we don’t use WhatsApp over here.

Wrapping Up

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I tried to tell you. Telegram messaging, whatever the f*. I messaged. You should use, I mean, it would probably be fixed if you’re using WhatsApp. Probably.

The driving was a huge one. Tipping culture, massive, done to death, but just, it’s not a thing. Like, if you tip in the UK, if you tip, it’s, oh, you’re being generous. And if you tip 10%, it’s f*ing insane. Like, you just don’t need to. People don’t.

And then I went to the Moody Centre to go and see Jelly Roleplay. And there’s a fully automated self-serve checkout kiosk. Beers and snacks and stuff like that. And it asks for a tip.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Dude, that shit infuriates me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There is no human — who am I tipping?

MICHAEL SMOAK: Or the barista that you give them a black coffee, you ask for a black coffee in a 6-second interaction, they flip the screen and then stare at you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So that, that is because supposedly service workers are paid poorly. I don’t know what they get paid in the US, but if it’s just a fing robot, dude, Sam Altman, sorry, your downstream fing progeny don’t get my — I’m not paying your fing robot assistants. It wouldn’t be Sam. Who would it be? Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics. I’m sorry, I’m not fing paying you, your little robot assistants.

Dude, we gotta go to dinner. We got dinner with Trigonometry and Richard Reeves. Where should people go? You f*ing rule. I think your content’s great. And thank you, brother. I look forward to seeing what you do. So where should people go?

MICHAEL SMOAK: Higher Up Wellness on all platforms, the Higher Up Podcast. I will say I don’t have the name memorized, but I’d love to share this because it just got news today. Marathon weekend in London. I’m doing my first live show at the Bush Hall, the Bush Hall Theater. April 25th, marathon weekend. Tickets for that go on sale this week. I will be promoting it. So just be on the lookout. We’re going to let people get tickets. It’s going to be posted to my Instagram story. The link’s not live. I tried to ask him, “Where can they get them?” And he said, “I can’t tell you that yet. We don’t have it.” So it’ll be posted like hell on my social medias across the board.

But thank you so much for giving me the time, man. I was sitting here before the episode went on and we were chatting and I said, I think I hold a pretty esteemed accolade. I think I was reviewing the guest list and I think I’m top 10 least formally educated guests you’ve ever had on the show. So to you community college grads, there’s hope for you out there.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well done. I ranked in the most retarded Modern Wisdom guest. All right. Appreciate you. Goodbye, everybody.

MICHAEL SMOAK: Bye.

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