#2418 - Chris Williamson

Summary

The Joe Rogan Experience #2418 – Chris Williamson (November 26, 2025)

Overview

In this wide-ranging, vibrant episode, Joe Rogan hosts returning guest Chris Williamson (host of "Modern Wisdom") for a freewheeling conversation covering mental health, the seduction and pitfalls of digital life, activism and climate change, the paradox of online virtue signaling, competitive sports controversies, the impact of trauma on greatness, and how happiness, fulfillment, and social pressures intersect in the modern world. With frequent returns to issues of authenticity, incentives, and meaning, both hosts examine the challenges of being a thinking person in today’s rapidly changing information landscape. The tone is energetic, irreverent, and sincere—frequently punctuated by humor and relatable anecdotes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mental Health, Exercise & Digital Distraction (00:14–04:10)

• Physical Fitness as Mental Health: Both Rogan and Williamson discuss how fitness is central to feeling sane and avoiding mental lows, highlighting the vast difference it makes:
  • “For me, it’s mental health… two totally different people.” — Chris Williamson [00:27]
• Tech Use & Attention Economy: Distraction from screens is likened to drug dependency, with society passively accepting 6+ hours/day staring at devices:
  • “If there was a drug that made people stare at their hand for six hours a day, everybody would be like, ‘My God, is this a problem?’” — Chris Williamson [00:59]
• Evolution toward AR/VR glasses and the risks of integrating humanity with machines are discussed.

2. Climate Activism, Public Protest, & Effectiveness (04:11–12:13)

• The conversation pivots to Greta Thunberg’s Venice canal protest:
  • Both hosts lament the methods, calling them self-important and ineffective, and debate appropriate penalties.
• On Escalating Rhetoric:
  • “If you care about an issue...and people don’t listen, you start to shout a bit louder… turns everyone off.” — Joe Rogan [07:01, 10:12]
  • Rogan references the "Cassandra complex"—being right but unheard—and details historical examples (Rachel Carson, Ignaz Semmelweis, Snowden).
• Climate Data & Narratives: Chris shares that glaciation cycles and global cooling may be more dangerous than warming. Rogan attacks the doomsaying side of climate activism, criticizing predicted catastrophes that never manifest.
  • “All the predictions...are totally inaccurate. Every single one.” — Joe Rogan [16:04]
• Virtue signaling and incentive structures: Both highlight the large salaries and perverse incentives in “green” nonprofit sectors.

3. Virtual Signaling, Toxic Compassion & Social Media (27:54–29:52)

• ‘Toxic Compassion’: Prioritizing emotional comfort and superficial displays of virtue over reality and genuine helpfulness.
• Quote: “What I’m interested in is the reality of doing good, not appearing good.” — Rogan paraphrasing Elon Musk [26:15]
• The episode critiques the performativity of activism on social media and the tendency to scold—as opposed to convince—others.

4. Social Media’s Effects on Behavior and Mental Health (39:48–44:14)

• Screen Time & Depression: Discusses international data on youth screen usage and the rising rates of depression in the UK.
  • “The UK came in second most depressed country in the world.” — Jamie [42:32]
• The hosts link increased screen time and online discourse to mental health risks and groupthink.

5. Free Speech, Censorship, and Social Control (47:11–54:54)

• UK Laws & Online Censorship: Chris Williamson describes draconian UK laws criminalizing speech, self-censorship through arrests, and the chilling effects on discourse.
• Rogan frames power-holders' desire to increase control as part of human nature.
  • “Under the guise of safety, you can get so much evil shit done.” — Chris Williamson [48:29]

6. Social Media Manipulation & Narratives (53:50–57:56)

• Discussion of Twitter’s algorithmic suppression (“shadow banning”), the influence of BIG TECH on politics, and the dangers of information control.
• Rogan argues that Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase “changed the course of civilization” by interrupting the censorship-to-dystopia trajectory. [55:10]

7. Existential Risk & Priorities for Humanity (22:39–25:49)

• Risk Ranking: Drawing on Toby Ord’s "The Precipice," hosts debate how climate change, pandemics, and AI stack up as threats to civilization, noting how public focus is disproportionate.
  • “Climate change… actually starts to move pretty far down [the list].” — Joe Rogan [22:39]

8. Sports, Gender Identity, and Fairness (59:14–69:29)

• Rogan and Williamson unpack controversy over trans athletes in women’s competitions:
  • Lesson: rules and incentives shape how people act and compete.
  • “Girls wouldn’t have this amazing opportunity to get scholarships, which they’re being denied…” — Chris Williamson [71:09]
• Sandbagging: They introduce the concept of ‘sandbagging’—entering easier divisions for an unfair advantage—and extend the analogy to gender-identity controversies in sports.
• The theme: when rules are bent or gamed, they encourage gaming the system and, potentially, deceit.

9. Competition, Motivation, & The Demons of Greatness (143:56–156:25)

• Why are the world’s greatest competitors often deeply unhappy or driven by trauma?
  • “Most of them had unhappy childhoods... there’s something—not good—some lack of what you needed.” — Chris Williamson [154:58]
• Stories of Mike Tyson, Dave Chappelle, and Ronnie O’Sullivan illustrate how pain, trauma, and dissatisfaction fuel relentless mastery—but rarely happiness.
• Quote: “Madness and greatness are inextricably connected.” — Chris Williamson [146:01]

10. Fulfillment, Success & Simple Pleasures (128:50–145:34)

• The emptiness at the top: A segment featuring golfer Scottie Scheffler reveals that huge accomplishments bring only fleeting satisfaction.
  • “It only lasts a few minutes… worked my entire life… and then, ok, now what are we gonna eat for dinner?” — Scottie Scheffler [128:50]
• Rogan/Williamson argue that taking joy in “small things” is both wise and rare, yet essential for happiness.
  • “We treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency… You must not have a lot going on.” — Chris Williamson [144:31]
• Discusses how obsessively chasing success often means sacrificing the simple happiness people claim to seek.

11. Authenticity and the Problem with Performative Vulnerability (163:56–166:13)

• The hosts warn that, in a world of curated identities and corporate product, audiences crave authenticity and feel especially betrayed by performative vulnerability or hypocrisy.
  • “If you lie… you’re never going to trust them again.” — Chris Williamson [165:22]
• The pursuit of relatability in media and entertainment often morphs into cynical manipulation.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “If there was a drug that made people stare at their hand for six hours a day, everybody’d be like, ‘My God, is this a problem?’” — Chris Williamson [00:59]
• “…what compels and convinces other humans… It’s not shouting.” — Joe Rogan [10:12]
• “The UK came in second most depressed country in the world.” — Jamie [42:32]
• “What I’m interested in is the reality of doing good, not appearing good.” — Rogan paraphrasing Elon Musk [26:15]
• “The dance is between success and happiness. And a lot of people achieve success but not happiness—and they’ll die a loser.” — Chris Williamson [158:55]
• “Madness and greatness are inextricably connected.” — Chris Williamson [146:01]
• “We treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency... If that tiny incident made your day, you must not have a lot going on.” — Chris Williamson [144:31]
• On performance and fulfillment: “You work your whole life for that moment… and it only lasts a few minutes.” — Scottie Scheffler [128:50]
• “Everybody loves a redemption story—they root for you to get it back together again.” — Chris Williamson [162:39]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Exercise, mental health & tech distractions: 00:14–04:10
• Climate activism, protests & incentives: 04:11–16:04
• Cassandra complex & science communication: 12:20–15:56
• Virtue signaling, activism, and digital performativity: 27:54–29:52
• Social media effect on mental health: 39:48–44:14
• Free speech, censorship in the UK: 47:11–54:54
• Twitter files, Elon Musk & censorship trajectory: 55:10–57:56
• AI risk vs. pandemics vs. climate change: 22:39–25:49
• Sports, gender identity, sandbagging, fairness: 59:14–71:09
• Chasing success, trauma, and the "demons": 143:56–146:49
• Scheffler on accomplishment’s emptiness: 128:50–131:09
• Performative authenticity & audience trust: 163:56–166:13

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Engaging Moments & Memorable Exchanges

• On Venice Canal protest:
  • “You should go to jail for that. You’re ruining this experience for thousands of people...” — Chris Williamson [06:14]
• On incentive structures and charities:
  • “If your salary’s a million dollars a year to run a charity… maybe that charity is fuckin’ horseshit.” — Joe Rogan [17:13]
• Debating shadow banning and free speech:
  • “Once Elon purchased Twitter, I gained like 5 million followers over the course of like a couple of months.” — Joe Rogan [51:43]

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Takeaways

• Exercising critical thought, maintaining perspective, and finding authenticity are harder than ever in an era of ubiquitous digital distraction, performance, and misinformation.
• Activist efforts, particularly around climate, often fall into the traps of performativity and scolding, alienating the public rather than fostering change.
• The pursuit of success can lead to greatness—but rarely to contentment. Trauma is often the fuel, and only rarely does it result in happiness.
• Real, sustainable happiness is found in appreciating “simple pleasures”—a skill as valuable, and perhaps as rare, as any form of worldly success.
• Ultimately, both hosts champion personal authenticity, skeptical inquiry, and a focus on what is meaningful over what merely appears virtuous.

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Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson: Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube.

Notable End Exchange:

• Rogan: “I appreciate the shit out of you, man.”
• Williamson: “I appreciate the shit out of you too, brother. It’s always good talking to you. It’s always fun.” [170:22]

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For listeners: This episode traverses complex currents in contemporary life—from activism to incentives, success, and digital manipulation—with humor, candor, and depth. The conversation is a goldmine for anyone interested in the intersection of culture, meaning, and lived experience today.

Transcript

[Joe Rogan]

Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.

[Chris Williamson]

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[Joe Rogan]

Feel a bit less shit about myself to stave off death.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, doesn't it do something for your mind? Doesn't it help you?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, of course it. Of course it does. But when you compare it with life and death, there's a little bit of a difference.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, there's definitely a difference. But just for mental health, that's the main reason to do it. For me, it's mental health. It's. It's such a difference between not doing it and doing it. Like two different. Totally different people. You got notes on that thing or something?

[Joe Rogan]

Always.

[Chris Williamson]

You got to get one of these babies. Little kickstand jammies. Those. The.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, sexy.

[Chris Williamson]

Look at that.

[Joe Rogan]

Sexy, sexy.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

All right, all right.

[Chris Williamson]

Encourages you to waste your time watching YouTube videos.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Without having to hold it because it props up.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. You feel like a fool sitting there, staring at your camera, holding it in your hand. I always said, like, if there was a drug that made people stare at their hand for six hours a day, everybody be like, oh, my God, we're. Was this really a problem in this country? People are just staring at their hands.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, we looked at that last time that we were on. We had the photo of that. That guy. That artist that had taken images of people looking at their phones.

[Jamie]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

With no phone in.

[Joe Rogan]

And then removed the ph.

[Chris Williamson]

It's such a crazy thing we're doing. And now, of course, there's AR glasses that are eventually going to put whatever TikTok feed in, like one eye where you're watching someone in the other eye.

[Joe Rogan]

Have you ever tried those?

[Chris Williamson]

I've messed around with them a little bit. Zuck was here and he let me try the new ones that haven't been released yet. They were really interesting. And you move a cursor around with your eyeballs and you can do things with your fingers. You can pinch and spread things and stuff with your fingers and play games with your fingers. You can like. It's not quite as responsive as you'd like it to be, but it's very beta, you know? Pretty cool. It is pretty cool, but also, we're losing humanity. We're going to. We're going to be taken in. We're going to incorporate with the machine.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, Well, I don't know. I think a lot of people feel like that would be a better version of the life that they have. And that's the saddest thing that people People of older generations look at young guys and girls and how much time they spend online and they think, this is ridiculous. Why are they caring so much about what is occurring on the Internet? But they don't realize people spend more time on screens than they do asleep. So the digital world is the real world for these people. Like, the digital world is more real than the real world is.

[Chris Williamson]

Ooh, I didn't think of it that way. There are a lot of people that do spend more time on screens than they do asleep. That's really common. Yeah, I like to balance that out. I like to spend half as much time on my phone as I do asleep.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that would be a good way to enforce it. Right? You have to. You log how much sleep time you've had and then that's.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm going to start sleeping 12 hours a day so I can spend six, six hours wasting. It's quite a resource if you think about it like. Like a lack of an appreciation of your resource. Because the resource of your time and your attention, it's very valuable and you can convert it into all sorts of amazing skills and information and, you know, knowledge and change your whole life. Or you can just stare at stupid all day long.

[Joe Rogan]

It's so compelling that, dude, it's been designed by the most profitable companies on the planet with the smartest behavioral scientists in history. Like, it's an unfair fight. It really is an unfair fight. And that's why.

[Chris Williamson]

Sorta, you could not do it though.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, you need to lean in. But it's like there isn't. There is way more willpower you need to use in order to be able to not than like just whatever the course of natural human history is or natural human behavior. Yeah, it's so easy. Just. Or alternatively, you could dye the Venice river green. That's what happens when you don't have an iPhone battery.

[Chris Williamson]

I sent that to Chris today. Greta Thunberg, she dyed the Venice canals green to protest what a lack of action and climate change.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, Pullback. A call to pull back carbon fuel in Europe. And they didn't just do it in Venice. They did it at 10 cities around Italy. But Venice has obviously got this gorgeous waterway. It's an entire city built on water.

[Chris Williamson]

Bro. Yeah, that's hard to see how ugly it is. Jamie, I could send you a video of it. Cheat. Because I sent Chris a video. It's, you know, it's just like, how much attention do you need, lady? Okay, stop.

[Joe Rogan]

Sky News Australia refers to her as a Swedish doom goblin.

[Chris Williamson]

Sky News is The one that's weirdly pro Republican American politics.

[Joe Rogan]

Super right wing.

[Chris Williamson]

It's like, who's funding that? There's no way that there's that much of an appetite in Australia for.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So that's what it looks like. That's disgusting. I was there this summer. It's fucking beautiful. It's so. Venice is so gorgeous and so ancient and so interesting. And to have this self important twat pour a bunch of green dye into that water. You should go to jail for that. Like, you're ruining this experience for thousands and thousands of people who don't. Not just the ones who live in that amazing place, but the ones who get to visit. I mean, someone figured out a way to make a whole city by shoving pylons into the ground. And they did it a long time ago. It's all wood. The whole city is stacked up on wood. They take these wood poles, they shove them into the ground. It's a specific type of wood that doesn't rot. When it gets wet and waterlogged, it actually hardens. I forget what kind of wood it is. They. I watched this whole thing on it. But I mean it's very stable. I mean sometimes they get some flooding. Like one time we were there and like the, the lobby of this place was flooded. It does flood, but it's also, it's so beautiful and the architecture is so amazing. It's such a gorgeous place and it just relaxes you like instantly when you're there. Like, wow. I just want to have a espresso and eat some pasta and just chill.

[Joe Rogan]

Last summer, it's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.

[Chris Williamson]

And this fucking dummy decides to just pour green dye and how much green dye did you put in there? And what kind of an effect is that going to have on life?

[Joe Rogan]

So they claimed that it was environmentally safe. Rah rah. I don't know how environmentally safe anything of that green color can be, but yeah. What was it? 48 hour ban and $170 fine?

[Chris Williamson]

That's it?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow. Actually, you should go to jail for a night.

[Joe Rogan]

I think about this a lot, man. The. In some ways I understand why the rhetoric gets more and more inflammatory. So if you care about an issue, if you really, really think that this issue is important and people don't listen, you start to shout a bit louder, right? And then you shout a bit louder and then you shout a bit louder.

[Chris Williamson]

The British are coming.

[Joe Rogan]

The British are coming. You know who first said that?

[Chris Williamson]

Wasn't Paul Revere.

[Joe Rogan]

Bonnie Blue.

[Chris Williamson]

Who's that?

[Joe Rogan]

She is the lady that slept with 1057 men in a day.

[Chris Williamson]

O poor lady.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, so people don't listen. Do you ever see Don't look up that movie on that?

[Chris Williamson]

Sounds funny, by the way. I missed that joke because I didn't.

[Joe Rogan]

Know Jamie got it.

[Chris Williamson]

Who that was.

[Joe Rogan]

Jamie got it from over there. Even with the ta.

[Chris Williamson]

Proud that I can't recognize her name, though. Honestly, I'll take that.

[Joe Rogan]

It's probably a good sign. People don't. So don't look up. That film with Leonardo DiCaprio. A couple of years ago, you remember it was like an asteroid coming in.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a funny movie, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Kind of half funny, but kind of. It's supposed to be a comment on the impending doom of climate change. Nobody's listening, right?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. They're not correct. That's the problem. You know, who are those two gentlemen that we had in recently? Jamie, the guy from mit and the other guy from. Was he from Yale or Stanford? Where was he from? Anyway, these two brilliant scientists who have analyzed the data, and one of them was going over the actual. Understanding the equations that you would need to understand in order to really be able to calculate what is having an effect on the climate and what is how many different factors there are. And all of them working synergistically in some weird, unexplainable way. And then the cold, hard reality of climate data over the past X amount of millions of years, where it's always done, this glaciation, and then the. The glaciers, they recede, and then you get higher ocean levels. It's like constant. Every 12,500 PL, it goes up and down and up and down. And it never stays static, ever. It's never static. And the real fear is not global warming. The real fear is global cooling.

[Joe Rogan]

Why?

[Chris Williamson]

Global cooling kills everything. And we got that close at one point in history to having such a low oxygen level at this point on this planet and such a low carbon dioxide level because there was no plant food, right, that these fucking plants almost died. We almost lost all life on this planet. We've gone like a few degrees from that happening. This is. The glaciers are fucking scary. Ice ages are scary. When it gets warm, you just move. And I know that sucks if you're living in a city of 20 million people, but it hasn't happened yet, and they've been talking about it forever. That fucking stupid movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was wrong about everything. He should have to give back every fucking penny he made from that movie. You were wrong about everything. You scared the shit out of everybody and you were 100% wrong.

[Joe Rogan]

One of the problems I think people have is if you really care about something and you're convinced whether your conviction is incorrect or not, you're convinced by it. So what you do, you say a thing, people don't listen, right? Say it a bit louder. People still don't listen, right? Say it a bit louder. Again, people slant listening. And the problem is it's a misunderstanding about what compels and convinces other humans. What we think is if people aren't listening, if I shout louder, they're going to pay attention. What we don't realize is that actually turns everybody off. Because if you just see someone throwing soup over a Van Gogh painting, turning the canals of Venice green, gluing themselves to the M25 in London, and stopping people from being able to get to work like a gets attention. But you're not looking for attention. You're looking for conviction. You're trying to compel people to believe the thing that you believe. And I think that it does the opposite. And I understand why it's so seductive because you think making it's cool to your own side to do something, flaming sword wielding, truth teller. I'm gonna charge through and look at how cool it is. But making somebody feel stupid or embarrassed or inconvenienced or upset is a really bad way to change minds. So I think if people really care about changing minds, they need to realize and assuming that they think that they're correct, they need to realize that, like intellectual chasm from where they are and where other people are. And you go, okay, I'm going to take you one step at a time. So even if you were to accept that the science and all of the stuff that the climate change people believe in is accurate, I still think that the strategies that they're using aren't going to be effective because I think it turns more people off. Right.

[Chris Williamson]

And they're scolding, they're shrieking, scolding. And they're not the type of people that you want to talk to, so you avoid them looking down from unhumb.

[Joe Rogan]

Looking down from unhealthy. Yeah, it's my British heritage. It's. It doesn't cause you to feel inclined to support them.

[Chris Williamson]

The opposite. It causes you to want to burn tires. Yeah, I want to buy spray paint and fucking hairspray and just blow it by my car.

[Joe Rogan]

Have you heard of the Cassandra complex? You know what this is? No fucking Brilliant dude. So in ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra is given the gift of being able to see the future by Apollo. And then she rejects his advances, so he curses her and he says that for the rest of time, you're still going to be able to see the future, but people aren't going to believe you. So she foresees the downfall of Troy. She warns everybody. People don't listen. Troy burns anyway, and it's basically being right, but early. So Rachel Carson, she wrote that book, Silent Spring, 1962. It's about DDT, environmental epidemics. She gets mocked by scientists, castigated by everybody, but her work led to the banning of DDT.

[Chris Williamson]

What year was this?

[Joe Rogan]

1962.

[Chris Williamson]

Interesting.

[Joe Rogan]

Ignis Semmelweis, like, 1840s. He realizes that doctors are transmitting childbed fever from corpses to mothers because they're not washing their hands. So he begs his colleagues to start adopting hand washing. And he gets mocked by academia. He dies in an asylum. He dies in an asylum. That's how badly he's treated. Germ theory of disease gets. A couple of decades later, gets proven. Edward Snowden, who you've spoken to, like, some people saw him as a traitor, some people saw him as a truth teller, but I think everybody had a bit of. Really? Is that what's going on? A few years later, it turns out, yep. The government is spying on you.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, 100%.

[Joe Rogan]

And this Cassandra complex. So if somebody ever says, I'm a Cassandra, I'm feeling like Cassandra today. I foresee this thing. You don't. You're not listening to me. It's a big deal. And the problem is the difference between somebody being a righteous Cassandra with the ability to see the future and just being a crazy person who's being convinced by bad data or, like, perverse incentives, it's very hard to work out which one you are.

[Chris Williamson]

Perverse incentives is the real word. Because here's the thing, folks, we do have a horrible impact on the environment. It's factual, it's measurable. You can go see it. There's many Third World countries that have rivers that are completely clogged with garbage and plastic. That's real. If you're not trying to stop that. But you're railing about carbon. Well, carbon is a weird thing because carbon is essential to plant life. It's the. There's more green on Earth today than there was 100 years ago, and that's because of our carbon emissions. That is an inconvenient truth. All right, fuck Al Gore. That's an inconvenient truth. So carbon is a part of the. Is it good that we're burning stuff and putting it in the atmosphere? No, I do not think it is. No, I'm not arguing that.

[Joe Rogan]

That.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm saying that our impact on the environment, that is tangible and disgusting is pollution. That's the impact on the environment. And if you're really thinking about our carbon footprint and carbon taxes and carbon incentives, you got to follow the money. Like, what is happening here? Well, there's a bunch of green initiatives, and those green initiatives get funding. And they get funding to the tune of billions and billions of dollars. And if you know anything about any sort of nonprofit, like someone just pulled up some. There's a nonprofit about animals, and they just release what. What a fucking scam it is. There's so many of these nonprofits where the vast majority of the money is going to salaries, like the most of the money is going to salaries. And there's a tiny fraction of that money that gets allocated to whatever that.

[Joe Rogan]

Cause is, which is why it justifies people who work for the organization to sustain the organization's exist.

[Chris Williamson]

100%. That's the 100%. But there's no data. Here's the thing, all of their predictions, all of the climate change predictions are totally inaccurate. Every single one by all the doomsayers. So you would think they would course correct. You would think they would say, okay, no one's arguing that the particulates that get emitted into the atmosphere by coal plants are not terrible for everyone. No one's arguing that glyphosate is good for you. No one's arguing that the poisons we're putting in rivers and streams, no one's arguing that's good for you. The stuff that gets into groundwater, no one says that's good. That's our real problem. Our real problem is pollution. It's fucking terrible. There's a real problem with waste. There's a real problem with landfills. All that's real. This carbon thing is a weird one. It's a weird one to concentrate on solely because it seems to have an effect on the atmosphere. It has an effect on the temperature of earth, but not what they're saying.

[Joe Rogan]

Can you think of a perverse incentive other than people just want to keep their jobs? Is there something else?

[Chris Williamson]

It's people keeping their jobs. It's righteousness. It's virtue signaling. And it's also the extraordinary amount of money that gets put into green initiatives. It also helps people campaign when you're campaigning. If you say climate change is real, we will follow the science. Oh, thank God. You get my vote. That's what happens. And these fucking dumb asses just fall for it every time. It's. It's not that. It's a real impending doom scenario. That's not real. It's not real. It's not real. But what is real is humans impact on Earth. So you got to figure out, why is this one thing, why are they concentrating so much on carbon when it's not a measurable thing, it's not a thing where you're seeing this hugely detrimental effect by this one action that we have. Well, because someone's trying to make money. It's it. No one's doing it for your own good. There's not a fucking single person on earth that's involved in any of these big causes that's really concerned about us. No, they're all making money and they're all ma. Even if they're not making money other than their salary. If your salary is a million dollars a year to run a charity, maybe that charity is fucking horseshit, you know, because if you make a million dollars a year, you're rich as fuck. This episode is brought to you by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer. A nice cold Happy dad is low carbonation, gluten free, and is easy to drink. No bloating, no nonsense. When you're watching a football game or you're golfing, watching a fight with your boys or out on the lake, these moments call for a cold Happy Dad. People are drinking all these seltzers and skinny cans that are loaded with sugar. But Happy dad only has one gram of sugar in a normal size can. You can buy Happy dad on the GoPuff app and your local liquor and grocery store, including Walmart, Kroger, Total Wine and Circle K. And you can't decide on a flavor, grab a variety pack. Lemon, lime, watermelon, pineapple and wild cherry. They also have a grape flavor. In collaboration with Death Row Records and Snoop Dogg, they have their new lemonade coming out as well. Visit happydad.com for a Lim time offer and use code Rogan to buy one Happy dad trucker hat and get one free. Enjoy a cold Happy dad must be of legal drinking age. Please drink responsibly. Happy dad Hard Seltzer Tea and Lemonade is a malt alcohol located in Orange County, California.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, the argument would be in order to get somebody of the standard that you need to run this charity at the level that it needs to be run at, you need to give a competitive salary.

[Chris Williamson]

What an amazing job they're doing. Worth 95% of the money goes to overhead. What an amazing job you've done in having zero.

[Joe Rogan]

Please show me your efficiency plans, the blueprint.

[Chris Williamson]

Zero progress in any of your air quotes, science that you're, you're pointing to that's showing these prediction models, all their prediction models are wrong and they always quote things that are wrong. Like storms are stronger, there's more, they're more common. No, you're just looking at a strong storm. If you look overall, there's always been strong storms. They're totally unpredictable.

[Joe Rogan]

Have you had Alex Epstein on? Do you know him? I don't know the case, moral case for fossil fuels.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, okay.

[Joe Rogan]

Interesting dude. He has like one of the most interesting stats that I learned from him was climate related deaths have decreased by 98% over the last century.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So one of the things that people don't consider when they look at the cost of energy and energy production is that you need to be able to protect. More people are killed from heat than are killed from cold and you need to protect from heat by using energy. And if you're going to produce cheap energy, some by products are going to be spat out into the atmosphere. But the impact of the creation of the energy is way more effective at increasing human longevity than the side effect of the energy being made. That makes sense.

[Chris Williamson]

Totally rational. Yeah, it seems like that would make sense, dude.

[Joe Rogan]

I've had Richard Betts, director of the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the show Hannah Ritchie from Our World in data. Like I've really tried to get a good balance on all of this stuff, but Alex's position in that area, which is it's a very luxury belief to hold to talk about how green we must be in the west when you have access to unlimited energy. I think a billion people worldwide don't have access to reliable electricity. Like half a billion people are still using wood and dung in order to be able to produce their electricity. That was the data that he showed me the last time we spoke. That means that if you've got a baby that's on a ventilator in a newborn baby that needs to be put on, that baby dies. That baby dies because that particular country does not have access to clean to cheap and reliable energy. Cleanness does not matter for these people.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I've heard that argument that the best result worldwide would be to increase the power supply to all these third world countries and then you would have this ability to start manufacturing, doing a bunch of different things that we associate with the negative aspects of the West. The negative aspects of the west that cause pollution, that cause all these different things.

[Joe Rogan]

The problem is electricity is a real bastard to try and move. I think the entire Grid has got 8 minutes of battery backup, 10 minutes of battery backup. It's so little and it's so cumbersome and you lose it as you transport it further. And dude, I get it. I really believe that existential risks, climate change included, are things that humans should pay attention, attention to. But if you were to rank. Toby Ord wrote this great book called the Precipice, and he is from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. He wrote the best researchers in the world. He got them to rank what are the most dangerous existential risks to humans. And it's a 1 in 10,000 chance over the next century coming from climate change. It's 1 in 6 from AI or 1 in 10 from AI. 1 in 10 from engineered pandemics, like 1 in 30 from natural pandemics. There's so many other huge issues that are really pressing. I'm not saying that climate change isn't a priority. I'm saying that if you were to rank the priorities, it actually starts to move pretty far down. And when you think if people are worried about the future of the world, they have a worried about the future of the world budget to spend, almost all of that is going on climate change. Jamie, can you try and get up? It's a chart by Toby Ord. It's just called. If you search the Precipice chart, Toby Ord can bring it up. And you just think how much attention is being paid to all of these other things. How much attention is being paid? A nuclear war, I guess gets a little bit of attention, but slightly less so now. But natural pandemics, engineered pandemics, AGI, these are big deals. And I worry that a lot of attention has been focused onto one. Actually relatively inconsequential, at least in the immediate term. No, go back, do a Google search for me, top left. Yep, that's it. So nuclear war, one in one thousand. Climate change, one in one thousand. Other environmental damage, one in one thousand. Engineered pandemics, one in thirty. Unaligned artificial intelligence, one in ten total. The total risk is one in six. But. But climate change is one in a thousand. Over the next hundred years, a stellar explosion. There you go. One in. What's that, a billion? That's what we need.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't like that one. That one scares the shit out of me. I Remember a documentary I watched back in the day that was about hypernovas? And when they first started measuring these gamma bursts in space, they thought that maybe alien races were at war with each other because there's this enormous burst of energy and they realize it's stars going hypernova. And how many of them do it all over the universe? Because the universe is so big and.

[Joe Rogan]

There'S just a single beam of like a death ray that gets sent out across the universe.

[Chris Williamson]

Just unimaginable power. And it happens all the time. It's happening all the time in the sky.

[Joe Rogan]

Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

[Chris Williamson]

And if it happens anywhere near you, it just takes out the whole solar system. Takes out everything. You're gone. If it happens in neighboring solar systems, it takes us out. Takes out everything. Yeah, you're fucked.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. If that's not a justification for just living your life and getting the fuck on with it and not coloring the Venice Canal green, I don't know what else.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, it's the, you know, it's the thing that gets you attention, unfortunately. That's really what all this is about. You know, send her back to Israel, they'll give her attention. They gave her some great attention.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of toxic compassion, which I think is what you're talking about.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So the prioritization of like short term emotional comfort over everything else. And I remember Elon was talking a couple of years ago, someone had accused him of contributing to climate change, so on and so forth, and he says, I think I've done more to reduce climate change than any other human on the planet. That if you look at the EV revolution being started by Tesla, plus everything else from a technology perspective that we're doing, I think that there's an argument to be made that I've had a more positive impact on the future of the climate than any other human. He said, what I'm interested in is the reality of doing good, not appearing good, and not appearing to do good while doing bad. And this the opportunity people have to be able to look like they're doing good while not doing it is exactly where this toxic compassion thing leaks in. So, for instance, people will proclaim that body weight has no impact on health over a long duration, even if this causes overweight individuals to not take their health as seriously and literally die sooner. But we're here, Joe. You don't understand. We're trying to be inclusive here. We're trying to be understanding of what's going on with these People, if someone was to say that a male athlete has no advantage in a sporting competition. Because, Joe, we're trying to be inclusive, we're trying to be empathetic. We care about these people. Well, even if that's done at the exclusion of female athletes. Right. People are prepared to show. They're prepared to do whatever is needed to appear good.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

And the alternative, which it makes complete sense. Who wants to do good while looking bad? Right.

[Chris Williamson]

That's the thing you're saying is so important. They. They will sacrifice everything to appear that they're doing good. That's because that's really what they're worried about. And that. That is all stemming, at least in part, I should say not stemming, but certainly accentuated by the social media world that we're living in now. Because everyone has this opportunity to appear like they're something other than they are. They're using filters. They're standing in front of a leased car. There's all the above. They're doing things. They're wearing cheap, cheap fake jewelry. They're trying to look like something they're not. And there's a culture of that. And there's also a culture that. That gets. Well, I'm not one of those, because I don't care about material goods, but I'm really interested in climate change. And so then, you know, you join up with whatever climate change group that's yelling and shouting and you carry a sign and you do all these things you're supposed to do and you, you get free water. The whole thing is just, it's. It's a psychological game that people are playing with themselves. They try to appear that they're special and to be in competition or in battle with the other side, you know, but if you're, if you're in battle with people that are saying, hey, none of these models are correct, hey, none of these predictions have come to bear zero. Not a single one. Where they say, the sea level is going to rise, there's going to be no more Miami. Nothing, not a thing has happened. Like, you're wrong. Okay? So we need to figure out what's right. If we can all agree that if we're doing something bad to the planet and it's somehow or another avoidable, let's work towards that. But if you're telling me we're doing something bad to the planet, and then when I say, well, show me and you can't, well, what about all these predictions? Well, they're wrong. Well, what about all that movie that ever got everybody, well, it was totally inaccurate. Okay, well, you can't use that on your side anymore.

[Joe Rogan]

I never saw that movie so bad. What were the claims?

[Chris Williamson]

An inconvenient true. Oh, let's find out. Put into perplexity. What the. Incorrect.

[Jamie]

I was already asking what. What did it get right and what did it get wrong?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, what did it say?

[Jamie]

That's typing it up right now.

[Chris Williamson]

I would get. I guarantee you they didn't get nothing wrong or they didn't get nothing right.

[Jamie]

You wanna know which one you want to start with?

[Chris Williamson]

Right or wrong? What are the. The predictions for catastrophic events? What did it get wrong about the predictions for catastrophic events? Predictions that were incorrect. Rapid sea level rise 20ft. The film depicted a potential sea level rise of up to 20ft, 6 meters in the near future from the collapse of Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets. While this extreme scenario is considered possible over centuries or millennia, scientific consensus does not support this happening imminently. Current rates are much slower even with acceleration. Reaching 20ft would take many centuries. Another one, Mount Kilimanjaro glacier melt caused by global warming goal attributed the shrinking of Kilimanjaro's glaciers mainly to global warming. But later research points to other major causes like subliminal sublimation and reduced snowfall, unrelated primarily to temperature. Impression of imminent chaos. The film often implies that catastrophic outcomes like rapid ice sheep collapse and dramatic sea level rise might occur within decades, when in reality, such processes are expected to take much longer, often centuries or more. And then legal findings. A UK court found nine errors of exaggerations in the film, mostly involving a lack of clarity on time scales or oversimplified attributions like Kilimanjaro.

[Joe Rogan]

Overall, climate scientists judged An Inconvenient Truth as mostly accurate with its projections, particularly in broad trends, but criticized its presentation for occasionally exaggerating the speed and certainty of some changes. Well, I think this is.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, but this is the thing. It's most. It's. Climate scientists judged it. I'd like to keep this climate hustle going on so. Well. They were mostly accurate. We do have a sincere.

[Joe Rogan]

Putting a British accent.

[Chris Williamson]

That's not even British. That's like a fake British guy. That's like a posh shithead from Connecticut.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay, okay, okay. But no, you're right. The lack of scrutiny that people have of their behavior, the distance between our opinions and our deeds.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Never been greater. That's the Internet.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

And what it means is you're allowed to do good while appearing bad and do bad while appearing good. And it's way Easier to do bad or to just not research or. And it's significantly harder if you're like, I'm going to go out, try and invent something, try and push against an idea or an ideology or a campaign for a movement that I think is really, really important. And people are going to say that I'm doing something mean, or people are going to call me names for doing it. There's no incentive to do it. Why would someone go, why would somebody do that? And I think that's what Elon's point is. Right. What I'm interested in is doing good, not the appearance of it. And I see a lot of people who are doing bad while appearing good.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, you know, I think it's no. Through no fault of their own, young people are indoctrinated into this world when they start going to college that you have to be active. And to be an activist is to be a good person. To be involved in these campus activities is a good thing. And there's also. There's a tribal aspect to it. You know, you're on a tribe of people that are the people that are on the right side of history. These are the people that are kind and compassionate unless you disagree with them. And these. These are the people that are. They trust the science unless it's inconvenient. And these are the people that, you know, you want to be in the educated minority. You want to be the people that get it, and you want to. It's very important that you use your voice, you know, and so they think they're being good people, and I get that, and I understand that. But it's being weaponized against you. And it's probably not even funded by legitimate people. It's most likely there's at least some funding by some foreign entities that are just trying to sow discord and make sure that everybody hates everybody.

[Joe Rogan]

That'd be a wonderful way to take down any country. Right. To make it feel as if it was coming from inside.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, sure. There's a lot of that going on. That's been absolutely proven. There was a thing recently with ChatGPT where they found out that these entities in China were using ChatGPT to argue about USA shutdown. To like, they were just. They ran all these social media accounts.

[Joe Rogan]

The Twitter account thing, where you can see where the accounts are based.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes, I know the ro. One of the ones that is like a fan account of the JRE people thought it was me forever. And I was like, I didn't correct it. It says, I Made it say parody accounts go. Or it says either commentary account or parody account or whatever, fan run account. Just so you don't think it's me. Because people do things me. It's in Asia. Someone in Asia is doing that, allegedly. Unless he's got a vpn.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, you could hardworking Asian supporting the Joe Rogan podcast, but you could, right?

[Chris Williamson]

That's the question. How do they know where you're from? If you sign up with a VPN and you say, I'm in the South Pacific, like, how do they know?

[Joe Rogan]

I don't know. I don't know. I certainly know that assuming that you're on the right side of history, especially if you're in a big group, is often a bit a dangerous position to be in. So that Cassandra complex thing that I was talking about before, sometimes people might say it's your duty, if you believe in a thing, to stand firm, right?

[Chris Williamson]

You should.

[Joe Rogan]

You should make your case known. You know, you're Ignis Semmelweis, you know about the germ theory of disease, you're Rachel Carson, you know about the impacts of ddt, you're Edward Snowden, you know about the surveillance that's going on. There's a really wonderful example, the comparison between Copernicus and Galileo. So Copernicus in the 1500s, he begins to realize that the Earth might not be the center of the solar system, let alone the universe. And he has enough evidence to justify it. But he waits until his deathbed to actually sort of whisper out his great work, which is de revolutionibus, this work that he made. And he does it on his deathbed, presumably to avoid the wrath of the Church. Now, some sort of hardline freedom fighting. You should do it. Don't listen to the man. Don't back down. Like, just stand on your principles. People would say, well, that's a cowardly thing to do. You knew what the truth was and you didn't stand by it. A hundred years later, Galileo comes along. He sees the moons of Jupiter, sees the phases of Venus, sees the pockmarks on the surface of the moon. And he realizes that the heliocentric model, this like Copernican revolution is true. Proclaims it from the rooftops. What happens to him?

[Chris Williamson]

House arrest.

[Joe Rogan]

He gets put under house arrest. He gets forced to recant under the threat of torture and spends the rest of his life under house arrest. So what you have here, and I fucking love this example so much, I think it's so cool. It's two guys hundred years apart with the Same realization. And the justification for the first one not saying what he didn't say loudly is the treatment of the second. I think it's like just this perfect explanation of irony. You know what I mean? Like, so perfect.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You go, well, the main issue that I have with, like, Cassandra basically being right and early often feels a lot like being wrong. And if you make an example of somebody in that way, it is basically you saying, if you step out of line too far, this is what's going to happen to you. And it causes people who are trying to move conceptual inertia forward. We're trying to do research. I'm trying to assess whether or not this is actually the way that the world should be. It causes them to be more Copernicus, not more Galileo. And I think that's. That is not what you would want in a civilization that's trying to continue to make progress. You would want to be accepting of new ideas and you would want to encourage them as opposed to castigating people.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you think that social media and the influence of other people's opinions, it makes someone more likely to be able to think for themselves or less likely? Like, more likely to be able to examine preconceived notions, recognize like, oh, my God, maybe I'm biased, or maybe it's just like a group bias that I've accepted because of all the people around me, and I think this is wrong, and I think this is what I think is really going on. Or do you think it encourages that kind of thinking or discourages it?

[Joe Rogan]

I think it certainly encourages groupthink, very much so, but both.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

It would open up the opportunity for some people with a very unique psychological profile to be able to step back against black helicopters.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, there's a few guys out there I can think of.

[Joe Rogan]

But I think on average, what you're seeing is basically this huge, big swath of people. For the first time ever, you're able to aggregate just how much support or criticism something has. Yeah, you know, this is what like to dislike ratios are. This is what upvote to down votes are. Reddit. And I think that that that causes people. Most people don't want to have to do the thinking of coming up with an original opinion. I'm sure that most of mine aren't original, but given the fact that doing the original thinking is hard, most of the culture war is actually two armies of puppets being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers. Most people are just being brought along and pushed along by people who came up with an idea and they're assuming, well, we've done. We know, we know this for a fact. Well, it's interesting because both sides know for a fact the thing that the other side says is a lie. So that can't be true. See, I get the sense that it causes people to adhere to the crowd more, more than they would have done previously.

[Chris Williamson]

And you also have to think that if you're spending that much time on it, like six hours a day, it's one of the primary influences of your life. Probably more so than any other media in the past. Because it was very rare as a child that you would listen to six hours of the news. You wouldn't really be indoctrinated into six hours of whatever the latest cultural dilemma was or the latest social issue was. You wouldn't get that much of it. You get people talking about it like normal people do during the day. Or maybe you'd be talking about a newspaper article you read, but you're not getting six hours of it all day long. But now we are. At least six hours. I mean, what is the. Let's find that out. What's the average number of hours a 18 year old kid is on social media?

[Joe Rogan]

I would get at least, I would get social media. Maybe four.

[Chris Williamson]

Let's just say their phone screen time.

[Joe Rogan]

Screen time. At least six, probably more. Yeah, at least six, probably more. And the mad thing to consider here is your parasocial relationships. People think about this. People will listen to your show and listen to my show more than they see their parents. By, by a huge margin.

[Chris Williamson]

Huge margin. If you saw your parents that much, it'd be kind of creepy. The average screen time for 18 year olds, seven to eight hours.

[Joe Rogan]

There you go.

[Chris Williamson]

Of total screen time per day is common, though it varies a lot by person and country. Okay, what country has the least amount of screen usage?

[Jamie]

Would you want to discount school time too? Because aren't they on screens technically in school? You're asking phone time, I guess, right?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I think it's personal phones they're talking.

[Joe Rogan]

Are they on screens?

[Chris Williamson]

Some of them. I mean a lot of kids I've.

[Jamie]

Noticed my laptop open in my screen time because I'm connected to the same like iOS system. So I'm getting like 18 hours a day, but I'm like, I'm not on my phone 18 hours a day.

[Chris Williamson]

Interesting. So let's guess like what countries? Well, you'd have to have first world countries for it to count. You know, like if you're in the Congo, you probably don't get as much screen time.

[Joe Rogan]

No. You're busy mining the fucking.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Raw materials.

[Chris Williamson]

Exactly.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. You're making the phones, not using them.

[Chris Williamson]

Which is the craziest thing of all. That. The thing that people. Virtue signal on the most at the end of the line. Japan, Someone pulling it out.

[Joe Rogan]

Lowest global average.

[Chris Williamson]

Interesting. 3 hours and 56 minutes is still a lot of time. That's kind of crazy, but they're probably a little healthier with it.

[Joe Rogan]

How is 9 hours and 24 minutes less than 10 hours and 56 minutes? Like, how is that the highest global average if 10 hours is the.

[Chris Williamson]

That's weird.

[Joe Rogan]

I don't understand.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, close. Contender is more than the highest global average. I don't get it. But either way, the Philippines. They're killing the game. 10 hours and 56 minutes.

[Jamie]

Dude.

[Joe Rogan]

There was a 2023 mental health report. The UK came in. Second most depressed country in the world. Second second most depressed country in the world.

[Chris Williamson]

UK.

[Joe Rogan]

UK. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

What's number one?

[Joe Rogan]

Uzbekistan. So it's just. Just above Uzbekistan and just below South Africa.

[Chris Williamson]

Did the UK used to rank higher?

[Joe Rogan]

Yes. It's tracked down over time, but it's never been superbly. I mean, we're. Misery is our. Like, melancholy is sort of our personality trait. It's our national sport. Right. Being a bit more melancholic. But yet the Ukraine, who are just about to go into their fourth year of war, came in higher. And Yemen, who apparently are going through, like, one of the worst humanitarian crises in human history, also ranked higher than the uk so, yeah, second most depressed country in the world.

[Chris Williamson]

That's crazy. That's a wild number, man.

[Joe Rogan]

That.

[Chris Williamson]

It can't just be the weather. It has to be like, a.

[Joe Rogan]

Weather might contribute a little bit.

[Chris Williamson]

A little bit. Like, Seattle does. Like, people in Seattle are depressed as fuck.

[Joe Rogan]

Maybe it's the online safety bill.

[Chris Williamson]

Could be. That would get me depressed. I would be so depressed if I lived in England right now. I'd be like, I'm fucked. Like, legitimately fucked. Like, imagine if I was running this podcast the exact same way out of England. Yeah. I'd get arrested. I'd get arrested. I saw them. They arrested a teacher because he refused to refer to one of his students as a they. And this is like his second infraction. And so they arrested him for failure to recognize a singular plural.

[Joe Rogan]

Look, I really don't like. I don't like shitting on the E. The UK because it feels like I'm pulling the ladder up after I've just got out of it, but it's just. I don't know how many more ways you can face plant over and over again. And there's this bit, there's a strange kind of romanticization of the past of the uk, where we are English Common law and we stopped the transatlantic slave trade and we use the navy and so on and so forth. But like. Well, we're really living on borrowed time now as the uk. It's been a good while since the UK sort of contributed in that sort of a way. There was a, you know, Alan Turing, the touring effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was the guy that decoded the Enigma machine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was gay and he was chemically castrated by the British, despite the fact that he was literally our equivalent of the atomic bomb. Right. He was a very British version as well. It wasn't kinetic, it was cognitive. So he decodes the machine that the Germans are using to send their secret messages. This means that we're able to detect exactly where the U boats are going to be. And it results in some really awkward situations. Like if we. Before we're going to use all of our force to try and take Germany down, if we avoid all of their planned bombings, they're going to guess that we might have the keys to some of their communication. So they had to start making decisions about which boats needed to be let attacked and which boats needed to be saved.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, my God.

[Joe Rogan]

They knew all of the different attacks that were coming, but if they got rid of all of them, if they were safe from all of them, the Germans would start to catch on. So they had this really.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, God.

[Joe Rogan]

So this guy, this guy is. Is our equivalent of the atomic bomb, right? He's our Oppenheimer. He gets chemically castrated just after World War II, it was in the 50s, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he kills himself. He takes his own life. He puts a cyanide in an apple. Oscar wilde in the 1800s, one of the greatest writers of all time. He's jailed and then dies in exile as a peasant in France because he was gay. And then 70 years after touring Gordon Brown, it's like 2008, 2009, publicly apologizes. They bring out this thing called the Turing act, which gets rid of the criminal records of all of these people from history, like posthumous. And some of them are probably still alive, actually. Like some of these people that had been whatever it was convicted of indecent behavior, improper behavior at the time. And then they put turing on the 50 pound note. So Britain has, for all that it's fantastic and I love it. And it's the country that I came from. Like, it does have a history of fucking persecuting people for what's deemed improper behavior at the time and then apologizing for it a couple of decades later. And I think with the online safety bill thing, just, I think it's gonna be the sort of thing that you look back on and go, that that was not in no one's world. Was that a smart move? I don't think that it's a. I don't think that it's helping anybody at all.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, it just appears that they want total, complete control over what people say over there and that they don't want criticism of the government, criticism about immigration, criticism about, you know, fill in the blank. They don't want it. And the best way to stop that is to keep everybody scared. Make everybody self censor. What's the best way to make everybody self censor? Put a bunch of fucking people in jail. So last year, what was it, 12,000. 12,000 people got arrested for social media posts.

[Joe Rogan]

Supposedly more than Russia, although the Russian, the Russian stats might not be.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, they didn't arrest him. They just shot him in the face.

[Joe Rogan]

They don't like that gulag for you.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, they just kill folks over there. But yeah, it's really bad. It's really bad. And it just doesn't seem very progressive. It doesn't seem like you're moving towards the future. It's not progress like this. We figured out a long time ago that free speech is very important to figure out what's right and what's wrong. And when you suppress people's speech, you can get away with a lot of fucking horrible things because you stop people from being able to protest it. You know, in a small part, we saw a lot of that during the pandemic. And you know, and you see what the consequences of that are. You can't trust people that want power. You just can't.

[Joe Rogan]

What do you mean?

[Chris Williamson]

Anybody that wants any kind of control over a group of people. If you want to control what they say, if you want to control where they go, you want to put them in 15 minute cities. Like, you can't trust that. Because the natural inclination when someone has power is to never let it go and to ramp it up. They're in the power business. If you're in the power business, you don't want to keep making the same amount of money every year. You don't want to have the same power every year. That's boring, right? Like, if you're an insurance salesman, you want to be the fucking employee of the month, you want to make more money next year, you got your eyes on a new Lexus. You're trying to make more. You're not trying to stay maintained. That's not the game you're in. And if you're in the power game, and if you're in the game of enacting new laws in order to. We need safety. Safety. Under the guise of safety, you can get so much evil shit done. And if you start doing that, you're not going to say, you know what, guys, we were that safety bill. We were really wrong. And what's really important is discourse. What's really important is that maybe, I wonder why you think the way you think. And you know, maybe part of this polarization process is not enabling us to see valid points. The other side has. Let's all come together and talk about this as reasonable human beings. No, that's not what they're gonna do. They're gonna just come up with more fucking reasons to put you in a cage. They want you to shut the fuck up because they want to make more, they want to have more, they want to get more power. They want to be the best leader. They want to be the most powerful leader.

[Joe Rogan]

Isn't that a ruthless part of human nature? That trajectory is more important than position. Jimmy Carr taught me this. So your industry. Imagine that you're the 250th best comedian in the world. Let's imagine there's a ranking. And last year you were the 300th. You were in a more psychologically preferable position than somebody who's number two in the world, but last year was number one. This sense that humans have of where am I now compared to where I was previously? I spoke to Dan Bilzerian about this forever ago and I was like, dude, you've kind of climbed the peak of the mountain of hedonism. Did you ever think that you kind of front loaded it too much and that it's going to be really, really difficult for you to ever, like, reset, Like a. Do a hedonic reset. How do you go from the most amount of girls in the cars and all the dopamine that the world has to offer, like, where do you go from there? And he basically said, yeah. He was like, I'm gonna try. I would consider shaving my head and my beard and going and working in an Amazon warehouse for six months to see if I can do like a hard reset. But you Always know that you've got the get out of jail free card. So it's not going to be the same. And just the idea as you're saying somebody has power, they want more power, right? They want more power, they want more control. That sense, that's the sport.

[Chris Williamson]

They're playing bingo. Scoring. They're scoring. You have to keep score.

[Joe Rogan]

Greta Thunberg. The same thing. We need more eyeballs. We need a bigger, bigger. Because where do you go after you've made the rivers of Venice green?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you need to do something bigger, something more.

[Chris Williamson]

I need more likes. That didn't get me enough likes. I need more likes. I need to go viral.

[Joe Rogan]

It's a ruthless.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm being shadow banned.

[Joe Rogan]

No, you're not. Your content just sucks. No one. Some people get shadow banned, but most people that are shadow band, they just suck.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, most people just don't understand that they're not interesting. But there's definitely real shadow banning going on. One of the things that was interesting is that once Elon purchased Twitter, I gained like 5 million followers over the course of like a couple of months. I was like, what's going on? That's because I was. I was. Somehow or another, they had locked my followers down. I'm not complaining about this, I'm just observing. I know I have a lot of followers. It's ridiculous. But I started, I think I had 7 million. And I used to go up pretty steady. And then somewhere during the woke days, during the dark days of woke, when it all started happening, which is around, I think, 2014, 15, 16, it started really ramping up. And then it seems like from 16 on, real censorship started really kicking into high gear because then they had a reason for it. Donald Trump is our president. We have to make sure this never happens again. In fact, there was a meeting, I believe. I don't want to say the tech company, because I might be incorrect, but one of the people, one of the main people at this tech company specifically said at the meeting, we have to make sure this doesn't happen again, as in Trump being president.

[Joe Rogan]

They did a fucking horrendous job that did well.

[Chris Williamson]

They fucked up. But the point being, imagine you are in control of an enormous platform, an enormous media platform that controls the discourse of untold billions of people in the world. And you have a very specific mandate that you've given to the people that work for you. We have to make sure that we control who the king is. Because that's what you're saying. Are you saying we gotta make sure. This doesn't happen again. Well, how do you do that? How do you do that if 50% of the people don't agree by force. There's only one way. You have to do it by force. Or if you control the narrative, then you just hide information, accelerate information that's incorrect. You just ban people from communicating. You kick people out.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I mean, some people would say that getting to choose who's king is what you do. If you then buy that social media platform, sure, there's a.

[Chris Williamson]

There's an argument for that. Like what Elon did. There's a real argument for that. But there's also an argument for. Don't you think it's a good idea if we have at least one of these. That's huge. That you can go wild, wild west on and say whatever you want. I think that's very important. You don't have to agree with them. There's all these tools you can use. One of them is the moot button. You can mute people. Bye, bye, I don't want to hear you anymore. You're annoying. Or you can ban them. I don't even want you looking at my page. Get out of here. There's those things exist, like you can curate who you're communicating and interacting with. But if you don't have one of these groups that's resistant to intelligence agencies shutting down legitimate voices, including during the COVID times, it was guys like Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, guy from mit, because they were saying something that didn't jive with what the agenda that Fauci was pushing through.

[Joe Rogan]

Where do you think we're at now? If you were to sort of predict what the trajectory of the speech stuff is online? Talk about America. The UK I think is just a lost cause. Do you think that we're going to continue on this general path, which seems to be a little bit more sanity than the peak?

[Chris Williamson]

This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Have you ever lost your keys and ended up tearing your house apart trying to find them? What makes it even worse is when it's the most conspicuous, obvious place. You could have sworn you checked already. It'd be nice we had the ability to find whatever we're looking for right away. And at least for hiring managers on the hunt for talented people, that's Possible thanks to ZipRecruiter. Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com Rogan Using ZipRecruiter almost feels like having superpowers. It works quickly and efficiently at Finding qualified candidates for your role, largely because they have incredible matching technology and an advanced resume database that can help you connect with people instantly. No more wasting time and energy. ZipRecruiter can help you find exactly what you want. Want to know right away how many qualified candidates are in your area? Look no further than ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan again that ziprecruiter.com/rogan ziprecruiter the smartest way to hire. I think people realize from the peak and most importantly realize from Elon's purchase of Twitter. When Elon purchased Twitter, and I don't say this lightly, I think he changed the course of civilization. I really do. I think we were on our way to this weird dystopian censorship, censorship complex that was already moving. We had already had intelligence agencies that were contacting Twitter. We know this through the Twitter files. And they were banning certain people that weren't saying incorrect things, but they were saying things that were inconvenient. And they turned out to all be accurate. All the things that they were warning about, all the things that they're saying all turned out to be accurate. They stopped the distribution of the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post. The New York Post, the second oldest newspaper in America. It's a fucking huge newspaper. To stop that from being able to be distributed on Twitter, which turned out to be a totally accurate story. And to stop that accurate story is wild. That is scary stuff that if Elon didn't purchase Twitter, we would have just had to deal with that kind of stuff. Stuff that would be. And it would accelerate. It wouldn't stay where it is. It would ramp up. It would get more. There were. They were starting to use the term malinformation. So there's misinformation, disinformation, and then mal information. Mal information is factual information that might cause harm.

[Joe Rogan]

Can you give me an example of mal information?

[Chris Williamson]

Children don't need a COVID vaccine. That's malinformation because it is true, statistically speaking. Like, especially healthy kids, they kick it off like it's nothing. They don't need a vaccine for that. But that might cause people to not get vaccinated and that might kill your grandmother. So that's malinformation.

[Joe Rogan]

Can you think of an example of mal information where it's justified in doing that, Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

I would say, like, if you had some information and you were. You were releasing it online, that was an accurate depiction of some things that the federal government is involved with that would compromise national security to achieve.

[Joe Rogan]

People overseas.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Would get people killed, start conflicts.

[Joe Rogan]

Here's another one that I've just thought of. How to. You know those desktop DNA printers? This is how to put smallpox together. Right, right, right.

[Chris Williamson]

Something like that.

[Joe Rogan]

Something which is true would be. Would be dangerous. And this is the devil's in the fucking details.

[Chris Williamson]

100%. Stuff like this, it's never binary. It's never incorrect.

[Joe Rogan]

Sometimes it's binary.

[Chris Williamson]

Sometimes I should say never.

[Joe Rogan]

Some things are binary.

[Chris Williamson]

Sure.

[Joe Rogan]

Like whether or not you should win a fucking World's Woman, stronglifting, strongman, power woman competition.

[Chris Williamson]

That just happened. I thought we were done with that. It just happened.

[Joe Rogan]

Would you know why it was able to happen? It's because that person lied. That person lied about their sex.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, interesting.

[Joe Rogan]

Jamie, can you try and pull up an image of the current 2025 World's Strongest Woman winner, please, just for clarity? Mitchell Hooper. That is the World's Strongest Man. Canadian dude. He's 6'3, 330. The person who won Woman's Strongest man is 6'4 and £400. She makes the current World's Strongest man look like an infant.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh. World's Strongest Woman stripped of title after organizer discover she was born a man.

[Joe Rogan]

That was an hour ago, dude.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, so an hour ago they stripped her. Is that the person?

[Joe Rogan]

Yep. Jamie Booker. Disqualified.

[Chris Williamson]

That's a man. Are you sure?

[Joe Rogan]

It appears the athlete who is biologically male and now identifies as female competed in the Women's open category. They were unaware of this fact ahead of the competition and have been urgently investigating. I want to know what urgent investigation is.

[Chris Williamson]

They went on Twitter. So that's a biological male. That's interesting.

[Joe Rogan]

Correct.

[Chris Williamson]

It looks like just a big lady.

[Joe Rogan]

Had we been aware or had this been declared at any point before or during the competition, this athlete would not have been permitted to compete in the Women's Open category. The move comes after runner up Andrea Thompson. British. Hey. Was filmed storming off the podium as she raged about the bullshit decision toward the title. So the other competitors evidently knew.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, so Thompson is now the winner. So the UK gets the gold.

[Joe Rogan]

I think I think about this so much when it comes to sporting competitions, and it's not just with the trans thing. Although this is a huge deal, and I did think that we kind of got past it. How horrible is it to be the Person who won but had that moment, the podium moment stolen from you by somebody. I think there's a weightlifting Olympics, weightlifting championship final, where currently, like, the 11th place finisher is now first because each person has progressively got popped for PEDs. Number one, did the. Number two, did the number three. It's like 11 people have been popped for PEDs now.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, that's the Tour de France. You know, when they took away Lance Armstrong's title of the Tour de France, what they didn't tell you that if you want to go and remove all of the people that have tested positive for something, you got to go down, like, 18th place. For real? For real. Like, all those guys were doing something. They were all blood doping. They were all taking epo. They were all. They were putting motors in their fucking bikes.

[Joe Rogan]

I've seen a video of that.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, they were. These guys try for fucking every edge humanly possible. So, you know, he was just a scapegoat, but what he was doing was he was suing people that were saying that he did PEDs.

[Joe Rogan]

It's a smart way to silence them. But, yeah, I mean, sort of thinking about. I would be really interested to see what the reaction is. That's hot fucking wet clay stuff, right? Hot off the press a couple of hours ago that it's been rescinded.

[Chris Williamson]

I think we would be more outraged if they accepted this transgender person as a female and then say, oh, a trans woman's a woman, let her compete. It seems like this person lied, and so that's different.

[Joe Rogan]

But still identify. So I agree that it's reassuring to see what the World's Strongest Person organization decided that they were going to do in sort of repercussion to it. But you can already predict, both of us can already predict what's going to happen online, that this person shouldn't have been stripped of their title. Maybe they lied, but they should be competing inside of this, the. The side of the aisle that always agrees with this. Do you not think that they're going to be pro?

[Chris Williamson]

I think that is slowly but surely losing traction and support. I really believe that. I believe that's where the rubber meets the road. Because you're going to lose most women that have ever done a sport. You know, if you are a sedentary woman that has no interest whatsoever in athletic competition, and you think it's more than a good price to pay to let biological males who identify as women because we want them to be exclusive, it's more important to recognize and affirm their identity than it is to be fair, you haven't done any sports. So you're going to lose not just most of the men. You're gonna lose a lot of. You're gonna lose anyone right of center, like libertarian anyone, anyone. You're gonna not just lose all of the right, you're gonna lose a giant chunk of the center. Cuz I think the center in this country is probably the most rational of all groups. Those are the people that recognize kind of a little bit of everything here, you know, and right of center or left of center, you're gonna lose all those people and you're gonna lose most women. You're going to lose most women that have gone to most women that have daughters. You're going to lose them. The only ones you're not going to lose are the kooks. The SSRI filled up. Anti anxiety medication, transitioning happy kooks. Those kooks that you know, think that you, you have a hierarchy of who's oppressed the most. And trans people are people, trans women are women. And they want to scream it out and yell it. They're just crazy. You're gonna have those people that are gonna be with it no matter what.

[Joe Rogan]

Get into the boxing ring with that trans woman who's a woman.

[Chris Williamson]

I love the one that was a man that lied, that the Olympic champion, that they just took away his gold medal.

[Joe Rogan]

I saw that flip flop, that story, flip flop back and forth like 10 times. It was like a Christopher Nolan movie.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, because that person was threatening to sue a bunch of people, right? They were threatening to sue a bunch of people that called them a male.

[Joe Rogan]

But they rescinded it. It made a statement.

[Chris Williamson]

Let's put this through perplexity or something where we can figure out, I want to know what the number is. I want to know what, what, what's, what's true. Because what I think is there was another organization that did a chromosome analysis and found out this person had an XY chromosome. So this is specific type of disease or genetic abnormality where your testicles don't.

[Joe Rogan]

Fucking drop cases again.

[Chris Williamson]

Edge cases.

[Joe Rogan]

So strange.

[Chris Williamson]

It ask it did that person get their gold medal taken away? And why.

[Joe Rogan]

But they.

[Jamie]

Well, yes, they did.

[Chris Williamson]

Right? But like. And why? Just see what I know. But let's see what it says as far in terms of why.

[Joe Rogan]

Why?

[Chris Williamson]

Because they're a man. And how did they find out? Find out how they found out. Because I think the narrative is that there was another boxing organization that had already suspected something was up, did some testing, did some testing, found out this person has an XY chromosome. Own, you know, so won the golden women's 66 kilogram boxing event. Strip. Now, a de recognized International Boxing association previously disqualified khalif from the 2023 Women's World Championships after she failed eligibility tests under its own rules. Later claimed those tests showed she was ineligible for women's competition. Because of these tests, IBA officials, some media and advocacy groups have publicly demanded the IOC strip or reclaim her gold medal, arguing that she could not have been allowed in the women's. Should not have been allowed in the woman's category. Like they're still saying she. Despite those demands, IOC has defended allowing Kalief to compete in Paris, describing the IBA's disqualification decision as arbitrary and saying she met the IOC's eligibility criteria at the time. So what is the IOCs credit? What is their eligibility criteria?

[Joe Rogan]

Boxing must be a fucking nightmare for this because of all of the different organizations that exist and each one is going to have its own different set. We have a coordination problem here.

[Chris Williamson]

Here's an even more. Here's a bigger nightmare. Prisons. Prisons have a self identity thing. In order to be eligible for female prisons, there's a lot of prisons, including I believe New Jersey, California. California has 47 biological males that are housed in women's prisons.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay.

[Chris Williamson]

At least are they.

[Joe Rogan]

Who runs a prison? Is it the state? Is it an independent organization?

[Chris Williamson]

Some of them are independent. Some of them are privately owned. Chromosome test results were kept confidential by the IBA but were leaked after and widely reported. The IOC nonetheless rejected IBA's findings as arbitrary. Even with the chromosome test, that's really.

[Joe Rogan]

Standing your ground, boy.

[Chris Williamson]

You silly gooses.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, see, this was only. This was only 20, 24. So to say that maybe this is the landmark case, maybe it wasn't Lia Thomas as a swimmer, maybe it was somebody in a physical sport. But I mean, when we're talking about the strong woman competition, dude, if you're six, four, I think the next tallest woman was five, eight or five, seven. Think about what you're doing. You're like wrapping your arms around you can. It always gets slippery, right? Because it's like, well, there's not very many of them, so why are we making such a big deal out of it? And it's like, hey, if there's one rapist in the local community, you don't go, well, there's only one of them. Like, what's the chances that you run into? It's like, no, no, no, we go. We try and, you know, treat this problem. So first Off. There's not many of them then. Well, you know, look at what happens when you take these estrogen. You down regulate your testosterone. It's below this particular level. Therapeutic. Da, da, da, da, da. And you go, well, yeah, but it's like being on a heavy course of steroids up until you stopped doing that. And then how much of that does carry over? That gets a bit slippery. But just the size, the size of the hands of a person who's 6 foot 4 and 400 pounds compared with a woman who's probably like 220 and 5 foot 8. Like, grip strength, being able to do like that's pretty important in the sport of strong women. All of so good, so good, so good.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Joe Rogan]

List from brands like Vince Cole, Haan.

[Chris Williamson]

Sam Edelman and more. All sales final and restrictions apply. The best stuff goes fast. So bring your gift list and your.

[Joe Rogan]

Wish list to your nearest Nordstrom rack today. Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall.

[Chris Williamson]

Peacemakers, risk takers for the optimists, pessimists.

[Joe Rogan]

For long distance love for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for.

[Chris Williamson]

Old friends and new Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a store near you.

[Joe Rogan]

Wrapping your arms around an Atlas star.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, you could do this forever. It's all ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's not the same. You know, it doesn't mean that someone shouldn't be able to change their name and identify as a woman. It's just like you can't dominate women's sports, can't dominate women's spaces. You can't, you can't. You're not a woman. You know, we'll call you one if we want to be nice. But the reality is there's a. There's biological. Sex is a real thing. And when it comes to competition, physical competition, there's a reason we have title nine in America. There's a reason why we recognize women's sports. There's a reason why you have it set up that women will compete against each other because it's fair. It's not fair to make women.

[Joe Rogan]

Or else you just have a unisex category.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

And it would be dominated by men.

[Chris Williamson]

Dominated by men. And then girls wouldn't have this amazing opportunity to get scholarships, which they're being Denied. Because biological males are winning in their category because they allow them to compete. And there's a thing called. This is what people don't want to believe, but it's true. It always has existed. No, they. They doing this because they really are a woman. There's a thing called sandbagging, okay? And sandbagging has always existed. Sandbagging is. Let's. Let's say that you're going to enter into a Jiu Jitsu tournament and you're going into the purple belt division, but you've been a purple belt for eight years and you're supposed to be a brown belt. And they, you know, for whatever reason you, or you could even. Here's a worse one, maybe you're a black belt in judo, like an elite black belt, and you enter into a Jiu Jitsu tournament in the white belt division and you're in there with some fucking dork who's a plumber who's just started taking classes. I think it'll be fun to compete. And you fucking flip him on his head and break his arm and an arm bar in like 15 seconds. Like that's sandbagging. Because you're an elite athlete. You're a. You're like a world class judo guy that's just thought it would be fun to put a white belt on and enter into Jiu Jitsu tournament. There's people that do that because they just want to win. That's why people cheat at video games. That's why people cheat at golf, right? People cheat because they want to win. They just want to get that w. And there will be, there's people that will pretend they're a woman to beat up women. If you don't think that's the case, you haven't met enough psychos. Because are there people that are in the wrong body? I don't know. I'll give them that respect. I'll give them that dignity. Are there also people that are out of their fucking mind and want an excuse to beat up women and pretend they're a woman? If you tell them they could wear a dress and they could just run past all the ladies and dominate them on the field? Yeah, they're going to do that too. That's a. That's a real type of human being. And if you don't have an accurate test for that, if you don't have a thing, you make them lick. Oh, you're a fucking psycho. If you don't have that, then you have to judge each individual situation based entirely on why Would someone do this?

[Joe Rogan]

How much crossover would that be? If somebody was a black belt in judo, how much crossover is there to.

[Chris Williamson]

An immense amount. Yeah, an immense, an immense, immense, immense, immense, immense amount. Especially if it's a GI tournament. Oh my God. You're virtually helpless. Helpless.

[Joe Rogan]

Even though judo's primarily done on the.

[Chris Williamson]

Feet, it is, but they do arm bars. They do. So look at Ronda Rousey. She's one of the best arm bars in the history of the sport. Look at Kayla Harrison. Look at all these. Carl Parisian. There's elite judo people that were wizards at arm bars, wizards at chokes and leg locks. And of course they're, they're submitting each other as well. It's not exactly the same. And if they went like gi to gi with, with, you know, some prime Leo Vieira black belt, you know, ghee master, you know, one of you likely would give the jiu jitsu person a giant advantage because they'd spend way more time submitting people. They've spent way more time working on submissions. So judo to jiu jitsu in a tournament, I would say black belt to black belt, they probably have a disadvantage in judo, but a huge advantage over a white belt.

[Joe Rogan]

What do you think about Jake Paul Anthony Joshua boy?

[Chris Williamson]

Well, realistically, it's one of the craziest propositions of all time. You take a guy who just had a boxing match that looks like a sparring match with a 58 year old Mike Tyson, and then you're gonna fight one of the absolute scariest knockout artists in the heavyweight division. Maybe we should watch the Francis Ngannou fight so you could see. Let's watch that real quick just so you can see what Anthony Joshua is capable if he's fighting someone that's not in his league. Okay, look, Usyk beat him and he beat him twice. And Andy Ruiz caught him in the first fight and, and dropped him and stopped him. It was spectacular. Andy Ruiz is super fucking talented. Usyk is perhaps the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time. Maybe one of the, maybe, maybe one of the greatest of all time in any weight class. Usyk, you know, and Usyk beat him and he beat him twice. But Francis Ngannou is coming off of this fight with like go a little bit before that so we could see this happen. Watch this. So he drops him with a right hand early and this is like two minutes into the first round. And, and Francis gets up, he survives. And then Joshua, check out this, this combination he hits him with. I mean, dude, the speed that he hits him with, this he's so dangerous, man. It's like you're dealing with a guy who's an Olympic gold medalist and he's enormous and he's got vicious knockout power and he's got immense amount of experience at world class levels. Just think about what we said earlier. Fought Usyk twice, fought Andy Ruiz twice.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, man.

[Chris Williamson]

Bro, the timing in that right hand, just spectacular. Over the top. I mean, that was a full four shot to the temple. I mean, he's Foxville right now. So they wipe off his gloves. But you look at him like he's really feeling it right now. I mean, he probably has no idea where he is. And Anthony Joshua, oh my God.

[Joe Rogan]

Absolutely folded in half.

[Chris Williamson]

Watch back that up again. Watch this. I mean, just steps into it with every ounce of his body. Perfect right hand. So the fact that Jake Paul wants to fight that guy.

[Joe Rogan]

Guy.

[Chris Williamson]

Hey, I'll watch. I'm going to watch. I'm definitely going to watch. So you got me there. And if you want to show you're legit by taking on one of the scariest heavyweights alive, can you get the.

[Joe Rogan]

Tail of the tape of the, of Paul and Joshua? I was going say he has to.

[Jamie]

They got him to weigh a grade of 245. That's only like £7 less.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, that's nothing but. And there's some sort of a rehydration clause. Listen, kids, it ain't going to matter. You know, there's not a chance that Anthony Joshua is not going to just lose the weight beforehand. He's not going to come in drained. What he's going to do is just do extra cardio and that's just going to make him more dangerous. He's going to be terrifying and he's going to have a lot to prove. He's going to be very angry that Jake Paul wants to fight him. Very upset that this YouTuber who's fought Tommy Fury, who's a legit boxer, and you know, a couple other guys that were legit boxers, that's it. Like everyone else he's fought, he's fought Ben Askren, who was really a wrestler. You know, he fought Tyron Woodley, who was an elite MMA fighter, but you know, not an elite boxer. He fought Nate Robinson, who was a basketball player. He's fought these guys. He fought Anderson Silva and he dropped Anderson Silva and Anderson Silva's a really good striker, but also in his 40s, you know, different time. It's, you know, not the same guy he used to be. This is, this, this is a 34 year old Anthony Joshua. This is a terrifying human being. Terrifying again. A guy who survived Usyk twice. You know, you saw what Usyk did to Dubois. You see Usyk take out Dubois. Did you see that? I mean, that's the USYK you're talking about. There's an Usyk that rocked Tyson Fury, who's fucking six nine.

[Joe Rogan]

So Jake Paul's six foot one versus six foot six. Anthony Joshua. Jake weighed in for the Tyson fight at 199, Joshua against 252.

[Chris Williamson]

6 6. Just not just 6 6, but 66 and knows how to use every inch of it. Knows how to keep that stick in your face. He was keep that jab in his face and that right hand. If it hits you, you're fucked. And he's not worried about you the way he's worried about Usyk. You can't move like Usyk. You can't constantly be frustrating and overloading his nervous system. USYK is overloading every aspect of your senses at every moment. He's constantly moving and then punches are coming, loops, punches around your guard. And he's constantly shifting his feet and you think he's going to be there and he's over here. And it's like this overload of thinking. It's not a casual relaxed fight where you can kind of move around and get your groove and he's going to stay on the outside and you're gonna. No, it's just constant. He survived that guy twice. He survived, in my opinion, the most skillful heavyweight of all time. Twice. And you're gonna go box him. And the toughest guy you fought before was 40 years old, Anderson Silva. That was the toughest guy so far you fought. You lost to Tommy Fury, who's a very good boxer. But this is a giant Olympic gold medalist heavyweight. I mean, Anthony Joshua is terrible.

[Joe Rogan]

Nightmares are made up and he's got.

[Chris Williamson]

That one punch, nuclear power, one punch and he's fast. It's an explo like these certain guys that like in kickboxing, couldn't translate over to MMA because they didn't have the kind of speed like Peter Aerts is a good example. He was a world class kickboxer, one of the best of all time, but didn't have the style that would allow him to tramp. But then there was Mirko CRO Cop. Mirko CRO Cop, who was violently explosive, would perfectly transition to MMA because you got to be able to hit people quick. It was like a big part of it is speed. Anthony Joshua has that kind of speed.

[Joe Rogan]

That it's kind of 252 pounds.

[Chris Williamson]

You don't have the skill to get away from that kind of power. What happens is Francis Ngado and Anthony Joshua. You have to be a very. You can't judge that guy based on Dubois, who's a murderer. Daniel Dubois a tank, and he took out Joshua. But that guy's terrifying. You're staring in front of that guy. But Usyk didn't stand in front of him. Usyk moved all over the place. Joshua's. And he's gonna have a lot to prove. He's gonna be very angry.

[Joe Rogan]

Do you think they'll let everybody take the brakes off? Because there's all rumors about Tyson vs. Jake, that both of them were sort of pulling punches and not fully letting it go.

[Chris Williamson]

I think that's a different deal, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Do you think there was something probably just below the table?

[Chris Williamson]

I do not know. I do not know if it was said. I did not know if it was understood. I do not know.

[Joe Rogan]

In your professional opinion, based on what you saw, do you think that the people were.

[Chris Williamson]

It definitely looked like sparring, but it could be that he didn't want to hurt Mike Tyson because Mike Tyson's 58 years old, or it could be that Mike Tyson didn't want to hurt him because he likes him. I don't fucking know. But it wasn't what I was tuning in for.

[Joe Rogan]

It was not for me. I was there. I went. I went to it live.

[Chris Williamson]

I was tuning in for Mike TYSON Coming. Full 1988, Mike Tyson, full chaos. That's what I was hoping for.

[Joe Rogan]

We walked out like that.

[Chris Williamson]

It looked like it, yeah. But that's what everybody signed up for, so they got us. Whatever.

[Joe Rogan]

And do you think that this is different?

[Chris Williamson]

I don't think this is that. I don't think this is that at all. First of all, it can't be that because Joshua is still competitive in the heavyweight division, and he's only doing this for money. Like, he's still set up for world title fights after he knocked out Ngannou. You could still set him up like Joseph Parker just lost. You could set him up with Joseph Parker. You could have. Until a year ago. He could fight Deontay Wilder.

[Joe Rogan]

You're saying that the lineage and the trajectory that Anthony Joshua is on, if he happens to go a little bit too gentle and lose by decision to Jake Paul, it doesn't exactly look great for his future heavyweight championship.

[Chris Williamson]

It fucks up all of his marketing opportunities.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. So that's a really so what we.

[Chris Williamson]

Were saying before the Ngannou fight is a godsend to him.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Chris Williamson]

The Ngannou fight is like, hey, boxing's back. This guy knocked down Tyson Fury. This is how it was supposed to go. Anthony Joshua, you carry the torch for the boxing community. Because I know a lot of, like, straight up boxers and they absolutely felt that way. Like, this is what needed to happen. These guys can't come over from MMA and think they can box the best.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, you need to put them in their place. It's what's great that it loops back to what we were talking about before is incentives. Incentives align the incentives.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Like if you've got Joshua's. I mean, this is.

[Chris Williamson]

However, I should. I should.

[Joe Rogan]

Caveat.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, here's the caveat. This might earn him $200 million. So if it earns him so much.

[Joe Rogan]

Money, Joshua rejected Paul.

[Chris Williamson]

Joshua, like either one. Which.

[Joe Rogan]

How much money is $1 million?

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, dude, this is a Saudi organization, right? This is reality season. Isn't this that what that was, putting this on?

[Joe Rogan]

Probably. They seem to own everything. I think they own me now and you and Jamie and Carl.

[Chris Williamson]

Netflix, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Right. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

This is going to be on Netflix. Okay. So I don't know, maybe it's not. Maybe Riyadh season's not involved. But the money they threw Canelo Alvarez to get him to find Terence Crawford, this is like they're throwing insane money. They're throwing nutty sums of cash at people to make amazing fights happen. Like, this is. This has always been the hiccup in boxing is that people don't want to fight certain people because they want to protect their record. The Saudis are like, how much?

[Joe Rogan]

Everybody's got a price.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, everyone's got a price.

[Joe Rogan]

We've got the bank account to pay it.

[Chris Williamson]

So here it is. The reported total prize purse for Jake Paul versus Anthony Joshua is a 184 million million. With an even split expected, meaning each fighter will earn approximately 92 million. Some reports initially suggest a different figure. 184 is the most frequently cited total from sources like Daily Mail and Wikipedia. Okay, that doesn't mean anything. Some have also mentioned Jake Paul's cryptic 267 million dollar tweet, which may have fueled rumors. I listen. It really depends on who's setting it up. Netflix doesn't have to tell you how much they're paying. But the thing about Anthony Joshua, if he loses this, if he. So let's say he's only getting the 92 million, which I bet he's getting more let's say he's getting 92 million. If he loses this fight, he misses out on that Saudi money. Because they could set up a Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua fight and each one of them gets $200 million. You can, you could do a fight like that. The Saudis can do a fight like that. That they can do a fight, they have enough resources to throw at boxing, where they could change the entire landscape of boxing.

[Joe Rogan]

If you had the guy that stands in between 6 foot 6, 250 pound Anthony Joshua and $200 million. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

[Chris Williamson]

He's not gonna, I don't think he's gonna lose you on purpose.

[Joe Rogan]

I don't want to be that guy.

[Chris Williamson]

But I'm not saying that anybody lost to anybody on purpose. I don't think that's happened. But what I do think is that people take it easier on people if they like them. And it looked like they were taking it easier on each other than you'd expect. I'll just say that that's just my personal opinion. I don't think that's going to happen with this fight. I don't think there's any chance in the world knowing what Anthony Joshua is a specialist at. He's a specialist at putting knuckles through your fucking brain, you know, and that's what he's going to try to do to Jake Paul. And anything other than that from a 34 year old Anthony Joshua will make us all think it's a fixed fight. Whether or not Josh can do it, whether or not, I mean, Jake Paul shocks the world and shows us that he really does know how to box really well and moves really good and, and uses his jab and blows us all away with a strategy and a lot of footwork and movement. Brings Usyk into his camp and. Or Lomachenko's dad even better. Who's the guy who trained Usyk?

[Joe Rogan]

Usyk.

[Chris Williamson]

He trained Usyk as well, Lomachenko's father. That's why they both are the best moving fighters in this generation. By far, by far. They're, they're in a group of the greatest of all time, like Willie Pep and Purnell Whitaker. There's like a group of like defensive wizards that exist today that they're in that group and two of them that exist in that group are trained by the same guy, Lomachenko and Usyk.

[Joe Rogan]

I don't want to be Jake. That's what I. Yeah, fuck that. I know that I do not want to be.

[Chris Williamson]

But what better way to show the world, you're legit. Go get knocked out by Olympic gold medalist, former world heavyweight champion, 6 foot 6, 250 pounds.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I mean, it's show the world you're.

[Chris Williamson]

You're in it to win it.

[Joe Rogan]

You're definitely not fucking about. I had this guy in my podcast, Bugsy Malone. So he's a British grime artist and he had this ho. What's a grime artist like? Like drill rap. Like British rap.

[Bugsy Malone]

Oh, okay.

[Chris Williamson]

Did you know what that means? You did?

[Joe Rogan]

Keep up with the times.

[Chris Williamson]

I can't. It's too late. Missed it. I missed everything.

[Joe Rogan]

He grows up in the north of the UK in gangs, Manchester. And he's in juvenile detention. As a teenager, he gets stabbed with a screwdriver. Like, rough stuff. Rough, rough northern stuff. But some part of his upbringing just sort of really compels him to try and bring himself out of this situation. Starts making music, gets super successful. Does this fire in the booth with Charlie Sloth that gets like 35 million plays. And he starts boxing. Boxing is like one of his salvages. It's one of his safe havens. And it's the thing, one of the things that's kept him very disciplined throughout his whole life. He starts accumulating some money and he buys a nice house in Manchester. Very, very nice house. And the local kids nearby sort of starting to take a little bit of notice. Maybe they know who he is as an artist. And word starts to get around that he's living there. There'd been some concerns, some security concerns for a little while. And he gets a phone call from his girlfriend at the time. She says, there's some men here, they're trying to break in, and they're in a van. And he. As she's on the phone, he hears the glass shatter of this house. His mum's in the house and his girlfriend at the time is in the house. He's driving around. He's got his sister in the car. So he drives back in the car. This is a guy who's like world famous as a rapper. This would be like, it happening to, like, the British 50 cent or the British Jay Z or P. Diddy or something like that. Drives back, getting down the driveway toward this house. There's a blockade. There's boulders that have been laid out in front. So he knows that there's going to be an ambush of some kind. And he sees this guy in the bushes on the right with a brick. This guy's hiding in the bushes waiting. And he thinks he's gonna Throw it through the window. But he doesn't. He wants to hit him with the brick. So Bugsy stops the car, opens the door, and immediately he's massively into Jordan Peterson. Personal development, self growth. It's like an odd blend of rough upbringing, self discipline, and sort of transcendent personal growth. And he gets out of the car and points at the guy and he goes, no way. Is that you? Is that a blue T shirt? And the guy's like. And as he's doing it, because he's been training so much, he's coming toward him, distracting him the same way as I go, what's on that T shirt there? Immediately you go. And before he knew it, Bugsy's hit him, spun him around, bricks fallen out of his hand because this guy hasn't set his feet in time. It's the problem of having a big weapon, Bugsy said, Like, you need to set yourself and you need to be able to throw it. Like it's. It's good because it can hurt someone, but it's slow and it's cumbersome and you can't move as fast. And he's training every day. Every single day. No matter whether he's rapping, he's on tour, he's training, and he's boxing and he's fighting and he's sharp. He knows his distance. Hits this guy, they have a scrap. Bugsy wins, moves the stuff out of the way, gets back in the car, drives in. Jamie, can you just. Cctv, search, search. Bugsy Malone cctv. So there's footage from his house of when he pulls up in the Mercedes. And so go back, back, back a little bit. Yeah, just to the start. So this is him pulling in in his car, having just beaten someone up. This is a van filled with guys. Gets out of the car, pulls his top off, and then sprints to go and get the rest of the guys that are waiting outside. That is not the behavior of a dude who gives a single fucking. This is the British Jay Z ripping his top off and then sprinting out to try and chase people away. The real kicker of it there was like.

[Chris Williamson]

This episode is brought to you by NETFLIX Global superstar and comedy sensation Kevin Hart returns for his fifth Netflix special. Acting my age.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm not the same man that I used to be.

[Chris Williamson]

I go down the stairs sideways.

[Joe Rogan]

Go ahead. You in a rush.

[Chris Williamson]

Go around with a fresh perspective on life, family, and getting older.

[Joe Rogan]

Older you get, the less you can have. Is this sesame seeds on that bun? Get it out of here.

[Chris Williamson]

Kevin's Bringing his signature high energy humor and physical comedy in a true return to his standup origins. Watch Kevin Hart Acting My Age now streaming only on Netflix.

[Joe Rogan]

Tons of guys not in that van, but in some other van behind. The real kicker was the dudes that he fought. They pressed charges. They pressed charges against him because he's rich. They press charges because he him up. And then at, at the.

[Chris Williamson]

They pressed charges, they pressed charges. Did they actually wind up going to court over this?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, went to court and this is. It was so brilliant. He told this story to me and he said it was the middle of COVID and people weren't sure whether venues were going to be open. And he had this tour, this tour was going on, but it wasn't selling as well. No tours were selling as well as he would have liked. So he spoke to a, his lawyer before his lawyer went to go and do the not guilty verdict. And they had two statements that were ready. He came out, he said, very pleased to say that Aaron Davies has been acquitted today. He's not been found guilty. He is now getting back to preparing for his upcoming tour and tickets are available now at. He used his lawyer did a mid roll ad read that's a liar for his tour as part of his not guilty verdict. Having just beaten up like a van filled with blokes, one of whom looked like a plumber. It was your plumber comment that got me thinking about it. Like just some white belt that decided, you know, some guy that thinks he's a bit hard, like he's had a little bit of a throw and this guy's training every single day, sharpening his skills and he's been doing it since he was a kid.

[Chris Williamson]

That's hilarious.

[Joe Rogan]

He's dangerous and he's nasty.

[Chris Williamson]

It's wonderful when a story like that works out in America. People have guns. It's a different, different sport.

[Joe Rogan]

Have you looked at appropriate force in the uk? Do you know what that is? The use of appropriate force?

[Chris Williamson]

There's a lot of that in America as well.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay.

[Chris Williamson]

Pending state, state by state, they have different, there's different standards the different states impose. Like Florida, stand your ground. Florida, you just get away with killing people. California, it's very different. They were actually trying to pass a thing in California saying it's your obligation to leave your house if someone breaks into it. I don't know, it's that house. You, it's your obligation to not shoot them. Them that you can't, you can't harm them because they're Just trying to steal something. They're not trying to harm you.

[Joe Rogan]

Like the assumption they're not trying to harm you.

[Chris Williamson]

Exactly. It's. I've had this conversation with people on the podcast, but actually with Tommy Chong, it was a mind numbing conversation that, you know, you should not think of this person as trying to attack you. That their life is not less valuable than yours, it's just as valuable as your life. You shouldn't take their life.

[Joe Rogan]

Despite the fact that they're on your property.

[Chris Williamson]

That despite the fact. I can't talk despite the fact rather that historically a lot of people have broken into people's houses and killed them. It's happened over and over and over again. You're just assuming that this time is going to be different. Cuz they just want your watch or whatever like off. Like this is. That's a dumb way to live. Like you. You have to be able to protect yourself. There's crazy people. That's a real thing.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. I think the, the appropriate force thing becomes interesting in the uk, where you don't have as many guns because there's more levels of weapon in between. Nothing, just hands.

[Chris Williamson]

Baseball bat.

[Joe Rogan]

This guy's got a brick. Yeah, this guy's got a brick. So you're allowed a brick. But if you bring a gun to a knife fight, that's not appropriate force.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, you know, you had a knife.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

So you cheated.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. It's like, oh, God, I don't know. It's very gentlemanly.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh God. So stupid.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, the UK's got like some odd archaic laws. Like the distance between the front benches in the House of Commons is the same as two broadswords held out at arm's length.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, that's also why you guys drive on the other side of the road, right? Why I think you drive on the left side of the road so you can use your right arm to slash each other.

[Joe Rogan]

No way.

[Chris Williamson]

Sword. Yeah. I believe that's what it is.

[Joe Rogan]

What? In case you were jousting in a vehicle, someone.

[Chris Williamson]

If you're on a horse or if you're in a car, someone's. You want to be able to get them on that side. That's a strong side. Someone told me that when I was over there. I hope I'm not. I'm not incorrect.

[Joe Rogan]

I like it as a story. Whether it's right or wrong, I don't care. There's a reason that women's shirts button from the left and not the right. Have you ever accidentally put your wife's hoodie on Instead it goes in the.

[Chris Williamson]

Middle Ages, you knew you were going to meet when traveling on horseback. Most people are right handed. So if a stranger passed the right of you, your right hand would be free to use your sword if required. Yeah, that's why you guys do it with your cars.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, this is the problem. If you don't have a medieval country like ours, you end up driving on the other side of the road. But yeah. So women's shirts, if you've ever accidentally put your wife's hoodie on or something, zipped it up. Women's shirts button from the other side. They button from the left, not the right. The reason for that is that when buttons were first introduced in the 1700s, they were mostly for the aristocracy. And the aristocratic women were dressed by mostly right handed servants.

[Chris Williamson]

Whoa.

[Joe Rogan]

So they dressed them this way. So the women's shirts button for. If you put it still to this day, same thing. Dude, I promise you now, anybody that's watching, any guy that's watching, go and put your wife's shirt on. This is how it begins. Go and put your wife's shirt on. And see, it doesn't fold that way.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

It folds the other way and you have to push the buttons through with your left hand. How fucking cool is that?

[Chris Williamson]

That's crazy.

[Joe Rogan]

And it's the same with hoodies. You know, we zip our hoodies with our right hand. Girls zip their hoodies with their left hand. Oh, wow. So fucking cool. One other element is the gentlemen of the days, they would have a sword on the left hip drawn by the right hand. The way that our shirts are put together at the moment, it can't get caught in the folds because the left fold is over the top of the right. So as you draw it, there's no chance that the hilt would get caught.

[Chris Williamson]

So if you're a left handed person, you have to wear women's clothes.

[Joe Rogan]

That might actually explain more than you think, probably. So this is an example of path dependency. So what you're talking about like some shit from the past that influences the future. QWERTY keyboards. Same thing.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I know that one.

[Joe Rogan]

Typewriters. Yeah. So it was made to be inefficient, to slow people down. And if you take a normal typer from a QWERTY keyboard and put them on and some other formulation that's allowed, they're like 50 to 70% faster. So we still using a designed to be inefficient keyboard. Because if you type too quickly on a typewriter and you use letters that are close Together, the typewriter jams, so the letters that were used most frequently were put out onto the edges. And it was less often that you were going to put two next to each other so they wouldn't jam.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't know a single person who switched to a different type of keyboard, do you?

[Joe Rogan]

No, no one.

[Chris Williamson]

But they do.

[Joe Rogan]

Lex Friedman's got some, like, weird, super.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, but his is just separated. He's just got to separate. It's still qwerty.

[Jamie]

Like this?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Jamie]

Oh, it's like.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, that's kind of interesting. But that's not the point. The point is the layout of the keys in a regular keyboard. There's other layouts. So there's. There's. It's not just. Qwerty's not available. You could actually buy keyboards that have the most efficient layout. I forget what the name of it is.

[Joe Rogan]

I think it might be the dactyl thing. Hot Swap Dactyl.

[Chris Williamson]

I think that's. I think that's it. I think.

[Joe Rogan]

Up and right. Yeah, yeah. Hot Swap Dactyl.

[Chris Williamson]

Maybe that's just for sale, though. What is it?

[Joe Rogan]

It's still a QWERTY keyboard. I can't get away from it.

[Chris Williamson]

So there's other layouts. If you could search what styles of key. What is the most efficient layout of keys for typing speed? That's what I did.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Jamie]

Yeah, that's what.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Jamie]

This. This what's coming up. This is way faster than typing.

[Chris Williamson]

Typing. Okay. Yeah, Right, right, right. But that's a different. That's a different thing.

[Jamie]

That's fastest.

[Chris Williamson]

Skype.

[Jamie]

Fastest keyboard for typing.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it comes up.

[Chris Williamson]

You can type. Hold on. Let's look at that for a second.

[Jamie]

You haven't seen this before?

[Chris Williamson]

No.

[Jamie]

Yeah, it's like. I'll show you on a demo.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

This is crazy.

[Chris Williamson]

And each one of those is a letter, and some of them, you, like.

[Jamie]

Make words real fast.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, This. So this is a. What we're talking about right here is a totally different device than a keyboard. But what I mean is, like, there's another keyboard layout that super nerds use, like a tiny amount. Like the kind of people that have, like, they. They have those Google phones that don't connect to the servers.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, Eric Prince make those.

[Chris Williamson]

No, that's a different one.

[Joe Rogan]

1.

[Chris Williamson]

He's got his own.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I just. That path dependency thing, like from the past, that's still influencing us now.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Why your shirt is going in the other direction.

[Chris Williamson]

That's pretty crazy. Oh, so here it is. Is a new class of peripheral device. That allows ordinary people to type at the speed of thought. Whoa.

[Joe Rogan]

Everything your keyboard can. And much more. Whether you're coding, gaming, gaming, designing, or just typing.

[Chris Williamson]

Whatever you do, do it at the speed of thought. Hmm. I wonder how much of a learning curve there is to figuring out how to type with that thing, because it looks pretty dope. Ooh, they have different ones. Scroll up to that image at the top. That's a different one.

[Jamie]

I think it's the same. It's just.

[Chris Williamson]

But shaped different.

[Jamie]

Yeah, Just like made out of metal.

[Chris Williamson]

Right. But it's a different shape.

[Jamie]

You probably put your hand. Well, maybe put your hands on the same.

[Chris Williamson]

It's very different. The other one was curved.

[Joe Rogan]

The problem that you have is.

[Chris Williamson]

Is this the new one? The forge. The master forge. Let me see what you got here.

[Jamie]

It's not showing any way to use it. That's how I was trying to find a good. Using it to show you how they type, like, words really fast.

[Chris Williamson]

I think it's a matter of time before you're typing with your brain anyway. I think this is like learning to code.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Well, I think about this with prompt engineering. Like, if AI gets progressively better and better. The idea of being a prompt engineer. I understand how to get the AI to do what I want is a job that only shortly after it becomes a job, might be made completely obsolete.

[Chris Williamson]

100%. Yeah. Yeah. That. That's not going to work. That's like opening up a blockbuster video in 1999. It's like. It's too. You know, they've so little time.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, the problem that you have with the QWERTY keyboard thing is it's a coordination problem. Like, if you want to borrow your friend's laptop, you're. Unless everybody decides we're going to switch to the better type of keybo keyboard and we're gonna do it now.

[Chris Williamson]

There you go. Oh, here he goes. He's moving.

[Jamie]

He's typing it right there. That's. He's typing these words as. He's what? Looking at the screen.

[Chris Williamson]

Holy. How's he doing that?

[Jamie]

That guy's a like 300 words a minute.

[Chris Williamson]

I think.

[Jamie]

Get to.

[Chris Williamson]

And. But here's the question, like, how do you learn? Do you have to play a game? Give her. Do that. Like Mavis Bacon's typing. You do that?

[Joe Rogan]

No. What was that?

[Chris Williamson]

It's fun. It's a game you play. It teaches you how to type.

[Joe Rogan]

Teaches you how to do it.

[Chris Williamson]

Type fast. Yeah. You like type things that they tell you to type. They time you like a race it's like five.

[Jamie]

So he's like hitting all these letters at once. I think with his fingers. You can see them popping up and then it creates the word. I think it's a little bit of mixture of, like. Do remember the T9 typing you could do on your phone?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Jamie]

And you could, like, you could hit 4. 4 numbers and you know what word it would be. And if it wasn't that word, you'd hit next, like three times. Can you get really good at that? I think it's a little.

[Joe Rogan]

I think it's predictive.

[Chris Williamson]

Could you rewind that again so I could see him doing that? Because that. Can you give me some volume so I can hear what he said? There's no question that typing sentences at over 200 words per minute is extremely satisfying. But does typing fast actually transfer to productivity in the real world? That's the question we'll be answering together in today's video.

[Joe Rogan]

Does typing speed really matter?

[Chris Williamson]

That's nuts.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Chris Williamson]

He just did that. Wow. And he made. But large. Yeah, like he. He made it all caps. Like how.

[Joe Rogan]

I suppose this is kind of.

[Chris Williamson]

I need to know if that dude's Rain Man. You know what I'm saying? I need. I need to ask him some questions about math.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I. It's mad to think how quickly we can think and how slowly we can communicate that to other people. Even with speech. Right.

[Chris Williamson]

Can you just please search? Is there a more efficient key layout than qwerty? Because that's what I'm looking for. Because I know there is, because I remember I went down a rabbit hole with this and I was really thinking about trying it and then I was like, God, what are you doing?

[Joe Rogan]

You'd have to change your phone.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. It wasn't phone days. This was way before phone days. This was the days of just typing. More efficient keyboard layout than query. That's it. Dvorak. That's. It puts about 60 to 65 to 70 cent of keystrokes in the home row versus roughly 30 on Kword. So fingers move much less. So now that we know that, can you search for images of Dvorak keyboard? So that's the. What the keys look like right there. Oh, that's it right there. See how different that is?

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, Very different.

[Joe Rogan]

How long do you reckon it would take you to write out a short email?

[Chris Williamson]

It would take forever. My stupid fingers would go right back to where they always go. You know, that was one of the things that I learned really early on from teaching martial arts. I was. I way would Rather, I would way rather teach someone who didn't know anything than teach someone who learned things wrong. Because someone who learned things wrong, it's very difficult to correct their technique. They. They have a mode in their mind that they shift to when they're panicky or when they're being pressured. They always go back to the bad technique. Always. It's very hard to get someone to learn technique correctly when they know it incorrectly. You got to re. Teach them everything you see with every. You see it with pool. There's a certain tendencies that people have with their arm being out that a lot of people just accept the bad relationship between your elbow and your. As long as it's consistent, even though it's more inefficient, it's going to add extra English to the ball and spin and all these different. And probably make you less accurate. Maybe better that than try to like, make your arm drop down and hang 90 because it'll feel so alien. But that's way less. Less than in martial arts. In martial arts, like, God, if you learn how to throw a sidekick with your knee down versus your knee up, it's so hard to. To do it the other way. When you're being pressured. You're always going to do it the wrong way and you're not going to have the. The correct amount of power. And those tendencies that are burned into you. I've been typing for 30 years. Like, they are. I don't have to look at a keyboard. I can just talk to you and I can type and I'm not really good, but I'm good enough. You know, I'm. I don't look at the keys. Like, I don't have to peck like I used to go. It just drive me crazy watching videos of Hunter Thompson, who never learned how to type. He would type like this. He would type with like one finger at a time, poke and peck. I'm like, dude, it would take so little time for you to just put your fingers there and learn how to do that. Right. He never did. He poked and pecked his way to some of the greatest books ever.

[Joe Rogan]

Maybe that was a performance enhancer. But yeah, I.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, he was poking and pecking while he was on coke.

[Joe Rogan]

That's true. Yeah. It's probably for the best that he didn't type more quickly. Imagine the crazy shit that would have come out of him then.

[Chris Williamson]

Right? Right. Yeah. You ever seen him type? It's so frustrating.

[Joe Rogan]

No. Can we see. Is it videos?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[Chris Williamson]

Find Hunter Thompson typing. Yeah. You'll see It. It's pokey pecky. And Johnny Depp actually mimicked it really accurately in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when he's sitting in front of the thing. Like pecking. Yeah, like doing his Hunter Thompson impression. Poking. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, your brain can think at about 4,000 words a minute, and that's the same rate of fire as an M134 machine gun.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

So anything even. And it's your point of. Very soon, I think, that keyboards are going to be obsolete. When you think about how much fucking fidelity and speed is lost with you going from brain to thumb. Like, I wonder what another type of keyboard is. And you gotta think, okay, how do I convert this into words? Where am I gonna go? Open the app, type the. Oh, crap, man. Fucking keyboard. Keyboard, duh. It is so slow compared with when we just get neuralinked up to each other.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. And I'm sure you've seen that demonstration where the two guys are sitting across from each other and they have the headsets on. They're asking each other a question and answering the question questions without using words. No, I've not seen that. All right, we'll show you that next. Show that we just look it up now.

[Joe Rogan]

I can't.

[Jamie]

I find pictures of him typing, but not video of him typing.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, God. Thinking of it from the movie. Let me get the bathroom.

[Chris Williamson]

We'll be right back. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to pee. Where were we?

[Joe Rogan]

Somebody typing like a grandma.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, the Hunter Thompson thing. He couldn't really find it. You got Johnny Depp doing it. Okay, this is how he typed. This is a completely accurate it. This is a great video, by the way. She listens. It's really. It's an amazing piece. You got to cut it out. It never comes again.

[Jamie]

It's not a good YouTube.

[Chris Williamson]

Ah, okay, we'll cut it out. But that's it. That's how he. That's how he poked. He poked impact like that. So that's how Hunter Thompson used to type out of his bird. Just poking.

[Joe Rogan]

Telepathic video, too.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, you found that. Okay, okay, this is the crazy one. The telepathic thing is nuts because they have these headsets on. These guys are laughing because they're asking each other questions and they're answering the questions and they hear the answer in their heads. They hear that the other person hears the question and then they hear the answer. So it's a new.

[Jamie]

I think. I don't know if it's a product or what, but it's called Alter Ego. This is the same guy who developed that device where he could look things up without opening his mouth or talking and just sort of like mimicking the words in is. We all have moments when inspiration doing the same thing. I'll sort of skip past it. So he's talking. He's showing it on his own here. The cool part is when he brings in someone else to talk to. And this guy also has it. So they're communicating.

[Chris Williamson]

Where do you want to get lunch after this? He's saying, you want to get lunch after this.

[Jamie]

For the demo, they hooked it up to audio so that the video could hear it.

[Joe Rogan]

Typhoon could be good.

[Chris Williamson]

So they're laughing because they're. Doesn't matter where AR and I are.

[Joe Rogan]

It could be a noisy environment.

[Chris Williamson]

So would they hear having direct conversations?

[Joe Rogan]

It could be a noisy environment or a quiet office. Having a direct conversation is possible without saying a word.

[Chris Williamson]

The signals Alter ego detects aren't affected by environmental noise.

[Joe Rogan]

So even even if you're walking past.

[Chris Williamson]

A wind tunnel or a construction zone.

[Joe Rogan]

What you want to say will always get across. It's like having infinite noise cancellation.

[Chris Williamson]

Exactly what people say happens when they encounter aliens. Exactly, exactly. Someone's talking in your head and you hear it. So imagine this technology scaled out a thousand years, and they probably don't need the other person to have a headset.

[Joe Rogan]

Anymore, and they just would make for an interesting podcast.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I guess.

[Joe Rogan]

And you could just tune in and nobody needs to actually listen to anything. So where's the sound? Are they hearing the sound in a set of headphones?

[Chris Williamson]

It's hard.

[Jamie]

Not headphones.

[Chris Williamson]

They know it, right? They're not hearing it.

[Joe Rogan]

It's not like I understand how I don't understand, but because it was really.

[Chris Williamson]

Loud then you wouldn't be able to hear it.

[Jamie]

So, yeah, for the. For the demo we just watched, they have hooked up to a speaker so we can hear what they're hearing. But I think if anything, it's got be some sort of jaw induction, but I don't know that for sure.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, there's weird earphones that you could put on that don't go in your ear. They go behind your ear and they send the sound into your dome.

[Joe Rogan]

People use that for running. Right. So they can still hear the sound that's going.

[Chris Williamson]

Creeps hiding in the bushes.

[Joe Rogan]

They can hear the creeps so they can get ready for them.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, you know Cam Haynes, right? My buddy Cam, his brother almost got killed by a mountain lion. Crazy story. He put it on his Instagram the day the Next day, like, he talked about the story. What happened? He was running, and there was a mountain lion in the bushes. And at first he thought it was a coyote. He just saw the eyes. He yelled and then stood up and he realized it was a cat, and it started running after him. And he's running at night, as in California, and he kicked rocks at it, he screamed at it. And ultimately there's some dogs barking. And he thinks maybe the dogs barking scared the mountain lion off. But he said it was like, I couldn't have used his quote. He said, I couldn't have used bear spray even if I had it, because it would have got on me. That's how close it was. Said it was right there, like, right on him. So it's the most scary he's ever been in his life.

[Joe Rogan]

I've seen that video of the guy tracking backward.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

As it's coming toward him.

[Chris Williamson]

It's coming.

[Joe Rogan]

Hey.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Hey. Hey.

[Chris Williamson]

The only thing that gives me comfort about that video, if I was there, is like, that thing just wants to scare me. It's not trying to kill me. It wants to scare me. That's a mother that's trying to get you away from the cubs. Because the way it's doing it, it's throwing its arms in the air in a very intimidating way. If an animal is trying to kill you, it wouldn't do that. It'd be running full clip at you and just dive on your neck. That's the difference between a cat that wants to kill you and something that's trying to scare you off. So he was. The problem is you're backing up. Right. And the. The instincts of these predators, like, if you throw a ball of yarn by a kitten, they dive on that ball of yarn. They can't help themselves. Themselves. And that's the thing about you backing up, or you even you running, it's like you're exciting their prey. Drive.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. They're going to keep tracking, Right.

[Chris Williamson]

So they tell you to stand tall and be loud and make a lot of noise, but there's a fine line between you being a threat and then them being scared off. Like you. You being something they have to deal with depending upon the distance between each other. That's the thing.

[Joe Rogan]

Makes so much sense.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Have you ever had any run?

[Chris Williamson]

I have never had, like, an encounter like that, but I did, in the wild, see an enormous mountain lion once, but fortunately, it was from inside of a truck. Yeah, Me and my friend Colton, we were in Utah. We were taking this turn, and it was at dusk. So the sun was setting and he stops the truck and he goes, look at that cat. And I go, where? And we look over and I see the glowing eyes from the setting sun. The glowing eyes reflecting underneath this tree. And it's got this pumpkin head this big. These mandible muscles that just crush things and these massive forearms and it's just sitting. It's a big cat, man. Like I've seen two other mountain lions before, but they were small. They were like a dog sized. This thing was big.

[Joe Rogan]

You reckon you'd be able to take a dog sized mountain lion or are you still dead?

[Chris Williamson]

You're dead. Yeah. I mean, a cat size cat might fuck you up. A house cat might fuck you up. A bobcat might fuck you up. A mountain lion will kill you. You know, you'd have to be an extraordinary person with weapons to survive a mountain lion hand to hand fight. You'd have to be an extraordinary person who's really fighting to survive. And you won't. You don't like, you don't panic at all. You have to be willing to stay calm. This thing's gonna tear your arms apart. It might tear your face apart.

[Joe Rogan]

What are the basic. I mean, you must, you hunt all the time and you do. Was it like end of September? You went and did another big one.

[Chris Williamson]

Last year, elk hunting. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You must have been given whatever the safety briefing that you have at the start of an act like aircraft taking off is of, hey man, if you see a this, if you see a this or if you see a this, these are the ways that you're supposed to behave.

[Chris Williamson]

No, we don't get any safety briefings.

[Joe Rogan]

But you must have learned it in the past.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

As a part of safety reasons.

[Chris Williamson]

Carry a gun, bring a gun with.

[Joe Rogan]

You, point at big scary things.

[Chris Williamson]

Even if you're bow hunting, carry a pistol. Especially if you're in bear country. If you're in bear country, you can't, you can't depend on this, this mist making their eyes hurt, keeping them off you. Because it might not work.

[Joe Rogan]

I'll just run through it.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. There was a recent case in B.C. where a bear mauled 11 people and they used bear spray on it. It didn't work. It's real. I think it was a teacher protecting his students. So shout out to that teacher. He got up, but they tried bear spray. Bear sprays, not effective. My friend John, who lives up in Alberta, he used bear spray on a grizzly once. He said it walked right through. It was nothing is best spray.

[Joe Rogan]

Basically like Hardcore pepper spray?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, it's like vicious pepper spray, but you're just gonna get a mad bear.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, why don't they make more hardcore best spray then?

[Chris Williamson]

It's as hardcore as it gets without killing you.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Chris Williamson]

You know, if it gets on you, if it's.

[Joe Rogan]

That knocks it noxious.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. It's supposed to be a deterrent and sometimes it can work. Like sometimes maybe they're just curious and you spray them and they're like this guy and they get out of there. But maybe sometimes no, you know, because it's. It's like. It's like tasing a guy. You ever see a guy get tased and they just run through it? There's. Guys have get tased and they just go stiff and they fall down. And I've seen other guys get tased where they rip it right out of their arm. Four people, including children, were hospitalized. A teacher on crutches, second adult with a second adult with bear spray, and a third person who punched and kicked a grizzly, despite serious injuries, are being praised for their actions. Saved a school group attacked by a bear near Bella Coola, British Columbia. Four people, including children, were hospitalized Thursday after a bear attack on students and teachers in the Nux walk First nation while out on a school trip near the boy. I'm gonna this up. School east of the remote community. Oh, so it was a very remote place. Yeah. Bear spray didn't do anything, man. He said, look, nothing. Phased. It didn't do anything to the bear. Two cans of spray in the eyes of the animal. Look at that.

[Joe Rogan]

That.

[Chris Williamson]

The. This said the teacher unloaded two cans of bear spray into the eyes of the animal and it didn't do anything.

[Joe Rogan]

It blows my mind that people who have been through something that scary.

[Chris Williamson]

When the kids were getting attacked, one of my cousins who had his skull ripped ran towards the bear and jumped on it with his bare hands. Holy.

[Joe Rogan]

It's pretty hardcore.

[Chris Williamson]

That's hard. Well, that's. That's primal life, you know, that's survival in like a real situation where you're like, your. Your language goes away.

[Joe Rogan]

Another down to a teacher with crutches was whacking it, hitting it in the eyes, the face, the head for minutes. And then the bear finally imagine being on crutches.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, my God, you have cr. Well, you just. It's just survival. It's so reptilian. It's like. It's like a savage, savage moment.

[Joe Rogan]

That's what blows my mind about these situations where emotions are running so high, how people are Able to come back with any kind of memory at all. Right, Because.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Amount of adrenaline just completely warps people's memories. I was learning about this. This case from Australia in the 70s. This lady gets attacked inside of a home. So guy breaks into the house and assaults her inside of her home. And she identifies this TV psychologist, this guy called Donald Thompson. Says it was. This was the person who assaulted me.

[Chris Williamson]

The TV psychologist.

[Joe Rogan]

TV psychologist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she knew this guy from the tv. He was the guy that assaulted me that night. The police go and they arrest Donald Thompson, take him in. The next day, there's a lineup, and the woman positively identifies him. And Donald Thompson's like, that couldn't have been me because I was actually on television in front of a live audience at the time. The arresting officer, like, scoffs at him and basically says, you might as well have Jesus and the Queen of England as your alibis as well. Like, this is ridiculous. We know that she's been assaulted. We've got photographic evidence of the marks on her. We've done a DNA test, which is gonna come back soon. She's positively identified you from the lineup, and she called you out before you were in the lineup as well. Like, you're bang to rights. But there was a wrinkle that when they actually looked at the timing, he was on TV at the time that this was happening. And what had occurred was the woman had had that television program on while the attacker broke in and sexually assaulted her.

[Chris Williamson]

Whoa. And it imprinted that guy's face in her memory.

[Joe Rogan]

Bingo. Wow. Blended the attacker's identity with what she was seeing on TV while it happened. Wow. And the kicker, Donald Thompson was on TV to discuss an area of psychological specialty that he had had, which was the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.

[Chris Williamson]

Whoa.

[Joe Rogan]

Dude. Whoa.

[Chris Williamson]

Did you see that? There's. Someone sent me this video. Give me pause this for a second. Darren Brown, the psychic. Have you seen the one?

[Joe Rogan]

Dude, yes.

[Chris Williamson]

You seen the one where he. He got a guy to assassinate Stephen Fry?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah. Fuck, yeah. Like, got, like, MK Ultra, the guy to take out an assassin called, like.

[Joe Rogan]

The Jump or something. Or the Push. Was it the Push?

[Chris Williamson]

I don't remember, but I watched a clip of it the other day. I'm like, this is. This is so crazy that you can actually do this to someone. And it just. And the point of the article that I was reading on or the post on X was, was you're. You're telling Me that MK Ultra has not figured out a way to do this. You. You can get a guy to do it with cameras to do it on Stephen Fry, the comedian. And it obviously did. He didn't really kill him, but I.

[Joe Rogan]

Had a. Oh, yeah, here it is.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. So the assassin with Stephen Fry. So he somehow or another gets this guy to do it.

[Joe Rogan]

It.

[Chris Williamson]

I guess we can't play it. Yeah, but.

[Joe Rogan]

The point is fake gun.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't remember what he did.

[Joe Rogan]

Yep.

[Jamie]

Oh, they acted it all out, too.

[Chris Williamson]

That is so crazy.

[Jamie]

That's crazy.

[Chris Williamson]

That's so crazy. So that guy really thought he killed Stephen Fry?

[Jamie]

Imagine being in the crowd.

[Chris Williamson]

How about those people next to him? Didn't even flinch. I'd be like, what kind of psychos.

[Jamie]

The one whispering to watch. He whispers like a job. I think she's the one who set him off.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh.

[Jamie]

She'S in on it.

[Chris Williamson]

Now. Here's the question. Is this. Can anybody. Yeah, can anybody fall into that kind of a hypnosis? Can it? Is that. So there's only certain people that are suggestible.

[Joe Rogan]

There's high, medium, and low suggestibility people. And there's a couple of tests. Dr. David Spiegel from at Stanford, he. He's like one of the world leaders in hypnosis. And he explained some people are more susceptible to hypnosis than others. I have to assume that Darren will have done a profile and this guy is like, really, really susceptible.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, what's that about?

[Joe Rogan]

Why is that around susceptibility to hypnosis?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So I think that dopamine plays a big part of it. And if you process dopamine more quickly, you are more susceptible. I process dopamine really slowly. I know that from doing some genetic tests. So I know that my susceptibility to hypnosis would be lower. There's some personality traits that make you more or less likely as well. I think agreeableness versus disagreeableness is one of them. I think there'll be a sex difference too. I don't know why it's there. It's kind of the same as saying, like, why are some people taller than others? Like, they just are. And there's like a byproduct that comes along for the ride.

[Chris Williamson]

But it's a weird thing to be able to manipulate a person's mind and to have it so clearly. I mean, this is the. The clearest example of it you're ever going to see. He just shot a famous person in a room full of people.

[Joe Rogan]

It does feel like a weird back Door.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Like, it's like the, those voting systems that can be hacked.

[Joe Rogan]

Well.

[Chris Williamson]

Like those, those cell phone towers they buy from China that turned out.

[Joe Rogan]

To be transcending everything back to China. I think. Why does it exist that David Spiegel guy taught me that 25% of people that do a single session intervention for smoking cessation quit for life from hypnosis. One session, 25% get this. And I think if you do a couple of sessions, that number starts to go up and go up. So hypnosis is this really weird backdoor into the human psyche. But yeah, the memory thing thing is fucking crazy when you think about what do I actually know? Like how do I know that this thing happened in the past?

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So most people understand there's like two types of memory failure. One is I can't remember that thing. And the other is I remember it, but I remember it incorrectly.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

That's broadly two categories. And I think people are really happy with the first one because there's tons of shit that has happened to you and you go, yeah, I forget my memory or whatever, whatever. But, but your experience of your own memory is your only experience of your own memory. So for you to be able to say my recollection is wrong, what does that mean? That's like saying this dimension that I'm in is wrong. So a lot of the time I think people struggle to understand how often their memory of a thing is present but inaccurate. So for instance, there's only 17 colors that we remember on average. We don't remember. Like if I ask you what colors are tomorrow.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I would say red, but really it's not if it's heirloom, typically red.

[Joe Rogan]

But it's like a ready orange sort of color.

[Chris Williamson]

Sure, but those are the tomatoes. Like a real heirloom tomato.

[Joe Rogan]

Different sort of tomato.

[Chris Williamson]

That's a real tomato though. That's what a tomato really looks like.

[Joe Rogan]

Sorry, I know.

[Chris Williamson]

Supermarket tomato kind of reddish.

[Joe Rogan]

Reddish, Reddish orangish. But most people would default to the red flag thing.

[Chris Williamson]

Right, but not really.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, but it's not. And we sort of, we adjust.

[Chris Williamson]

Right. So if you're like, we're white people.

[Joe Rogan]

Uh huh.

[Chris Williamson]

But we're not really white.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I mean, you're a bit flush.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, but we're not white, you know what I'm saying?

[Joe Rogan]

Like comparatively white.

[Chris Williamson]

My friend Jamie, not this one, but another one, he's from England and he's white like paper. And when my daughter first met him, that's what she said. She goes, mommy, he's so white. And she goes, yeah, he's white. And she goes, no, no, he's white like paper.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, if you live in England, you will be referred to as white like paper.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

If you've got. I mean, this must be the same with fighters. Even if you forget the TBI head trauma Y stuff, just the dump of adrenaline from going through. I mean, you must have done this when you've done your biggest shows and you go out.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. You don't remember much.

[Joe Rogan]

You come back and you're like, I've worked my whole life to get to the stage where I can achieve this thing. And in the achievement of this thing, I kind of wasn't really that. Well, I was there for it. But in retrospect, I can't really recall where I was. It's this odd duality that you want to be in a flow state.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Because it's very fulfilling. It's where you're at your best. This word's just coming out of you perfectly. And when you look back, you're like, I. I don't know if I was there fully. I feel like I was kind of absent.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, it's not that you're absent, but that you're empty. You empty out all your expectations and you're on it for the ride. You're not really piloting it as much as you're just, like, making sure it doesn't hit the rocks. You're there for the ride. The thing takes over. And I think that's the case with everything. That's the case when you're in the flow state of anything you're doing. When you're really, like, you're. The more you think about you being there, which is what you have to do. If you're there, you're thinking about you. So it's like wasted resources. You're better off being empty and just, like, being a vessel and just, like, taking this thing like you've done the work already. Like, take it along for the ride. Just go. Go for the ride. That's what it is. And so the problem with that is if you don't record your set, sometimes you'll say things that you don't remember. Like, they were really funny and you're like, oh, there's a. I had a totally different point that I went off and it really worked, but I don't remember what it was. If you don't record it, you're fucked. The only way you can get it back is you have to get back to that exact spot and hope it's still there for the next show. Sometimes it will be. Sometimes it will be.

[Joe Rogan]

It's waiting for you as a little gift.

[Chris Williamson]

Sometimes that angle pops up again. You're like, oh, yeah, But. But why are we doing this?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I almost forgot it.

[Joe Rogan]

That must be a nightmare or must have been a nightmare before you could record sets.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, but you've always been able to record sets.

[Joe Rogan]

One.

[Chris Williamson]

That's one of the things I learned, like, really early in the on from this guy, Mike Donovan, who's one of, like, the big comics in Boston. He goes, always record your sets, because you never know when you're gonna say something, and you'll. It'll be lost forever if you don't have a recording.

[Joe Rogan]

There was a Scotty Scheffler, a golfer. He won. Jamie, you'll have seen this video. Yeah, can we get the. That. It's a. There's a New York sports video, like, cut. He does this. It's such a fucking cool explanation of what somebody who's got to the peak of their sport, the absolute pinnacle, like, in the moments of winning, and he just breaks the fourth wall open about kind of the hollowness of what this is really. Yeah, it's really fascinating.

[Jamie]

What's the point? That thing.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just. It's just such a great explainer because we always assume. Here we go.

[Chris Williamson]

Let me hear this.

[Jamie]

He might have just won the US Open here, too, by the way. The biggest event of the year, playing life.

[Bugsy Malone]

It's. It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of, like, the deepest, you know, places of your heart. You know, I think it's kind of funny. I think, you know, I think I said something after the Byron this year about, like. It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for, like, a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes. That kind of euphoric feeling. And I like to win the Byron Nelson Championship at home. I literally worked my entire life to become good at golf, to have an opportunity to win that tournament. And you win it, you celebrate. Get to hug my family. My sister's there. It's such an amazing moment. And then it's like, okay, now. Now what are we gonna eat for dinner? You know, life goes on. This is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf yet.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, it.

[Bugsy Malone]

It brings tears my eyes just to think About. Because it's literally worked my entire life to become good at the sport and to have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think is. Is a pretty cool feeling. You know, to get to live out your dreams is very special. But at the end of the day, it's like, I'm not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I don't. I'm not here to. To inspire somebody else to be the best player in the world, because what's the point? You know, this is not a fulfilling life. It's. It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of, like, the deepest, you know, places of your heart. You know, there's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life. And then you get there, and all of a sudden you get to number one in the world, and then they're like, what's the point? And, you know, I. I really do believe that, because, you know, what is the point? You're like, why do I want to win this tournament so bad? That's something that I wrestle with on a daily basis. It's like showing up at the Masters every year. It's like, why do I want to win this golf tournament so badly? Why do I want to win the Open Championship so badly? I don't know. Because if I win, it's going to be awesome for about two minutes, and then we're going to get to the next week, and it's going to be like, hey, you won two majors this year. How important is it for you to win the FedEx cup playoffs? And it's just like, we're back here again. So we really do. We work so hard for such little moments. And, you know, I'm kind of a sicko. I love putting in the work. I love being able to practice. I love getting out to live out my dreams. But at the end of the day, sometimes I just don't understand the point.

[Joe Rogan]

This.

[Chris Williamson]

That's honest. That's what that is.

[Joe Rogan]

That's why that video.

[Chris Williamson]

That's why he's so good.

[Joe Rogan]

I love that video.

[Chris Williamson]

Guarantee you that's why he's so good. Because I guarantee you that guy has to be that honest with himself about everything. Otherwise, you'd never fix the. The hitch in your swing. You know, you. You have to be honest about every single thing. You have to be. You have to be aware of all of it, every little weird thing you do. Why am I doing this? Like, what is the point of this. And then when you're done, like, yeah, I did it. And then it's going to creep right back in. Creep right back in.

[Joe Rogan]

Nike did a Back to work, a commercial after that, and it's him with his son sort of kneeling down on. On the. The green. And it says, you've already won. And then I think the next slide is. But let's get another one. And it's so cool, dude. There it is. You've already won. But another. Another major never hurt. That was it, bro.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Unbelievable. So I think I kind of become obsessed with people sacrificing what they want, which is happy, happiness, for the thing that's supposed to get it, which is success. So they sacrifice the thing that they want, being happy in the moment. They make themselves miserable in order to be able to achieve a thing, so that when they finally have sufficient success, they will allow themselves to be happy. It's like, very strange trade. Imagine if you had some simultaneous equation and you just crossed off success from both sides. You would sort of be left with happiness. I think that's unrealistic, right? Because we need social validation from people, and we want to be recognized. We want to do stuff, and we've got to put food on the table and social creatures and all the rest of it. But I think videos like that are really important for people to see when they look up to someone about how much there is there at the end of the rainbow. Like, Elon was on Lex's show a couple of years ago, and I think Lex asked him some question, like, how are you doing? He replied, and he said, people think they want to be me. They do not want to be me. They don't know. They don't understand. My mind is a storm. I'm like, that's the price you need to pay to be Elon Musk.

[Chris Williamson]

I think that was on this podcast.

[Joe Rogan]

Was it this one?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Because I asked him, like, what is it like to be you? Like, he's like, you wouldn't want to do it. You wouldn't want to be me. And you could tell, like, when you're in his eyes, like, there's. It's not a normal thought process, us. It's like this chaotic tornado of ideas that's running around in his head, you know, and that sometimes he spits them out on Twitter and they're not good.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it's a problem when you own the platform, right? It's kind of like, I can say what I want. It's my own house.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, he can, though, like, but he's like that all the time. He's fun. He's like, what I would want to see from a guy who's a super genius, like a playful guy who wants to go to Mars, who's making like. Jamie and I went on a tour of Starship Starbase. What is it? SpaceX? Starbase, whatever the fuck it is. We saw the launch, we went to the SpaceX launch, and so we got a tour of the rocket factory, which is fucking insane. It's so much more insane than I thought it was going to be. It's. I mean, I can't really. I don't know how much we could even say, but it is nuts. It's nuts. And the sheer quantity of rockets that they're making, making is mind blowing. Like, you're like, I had no, I thought they had a couple rockets, you know, just a couple rockets laying around. They're just making rockets.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm pretty sure they've put more stuff into space, just that one company, than like the entirety of the load that's been transported into space globally up until now.

[Chris Williamson]

They put stuff in space for their competitors. Yeah, they. They use their space rockets to put stuff in space for people that they're in competition with. Yeah, they take the money.

[Joe Rogan]

Show me the color.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, we know how to do it. We're better at it than you, so we'll do it.

[Joe Rogan]

Fucking unbelievable, dude.

[Chris Williamson]

It's kind of nuts, I think about.

[Joe Rogan]

That, like the sort of person you need to be to drive that, though.

[Chris Williamson]

It's a different kind of person, right? Like, that's what he wants to do, that's what he desires to do. And you know, this gentleman talking about golf, like, this is a different. That's a totally different thing because he's in a competition all the time. Time, you know, and it's really hard to just enjoy the process when you're in this competition where, especially if your livelihood depends upon a very specific result, like, you have to be better at this thing than everybody else. Not just do the best yourself, but better than the other people that are also doing their best. So you're in this constant, just never escaping this pressure. Fighters feel that, I think more than anybody because it's like an actual physical person coming to harm even you all the time.

[Joe Rogan]

And you're very outcome focused.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And so it's all well and good, him saying, I love the process. I'm a bit of a sicko. I like my training, so on and so forth, but it's very different saying, I enjoy the process of training when you've just won than I enjoy the process of training when you've just come second or fifth or 20th.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

And especially if you're laid out flat on the canvas.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Oh, especially that because you see the humiliation, there's also the damage that was just done to you where you might not really might not be the same again. There's certain fighters that you could point to one fight and they, they never recovered from it. Meldrick Taylor vs Julio Cesar Chavez is my personal one that I always point to because Julio Cesar Chavez knocked him out with like, I think it was like a couple seconds left in the last round, stopped him. And it was a fight that Meldrick Taylor was winning a decision. But Julio Cesar Chavez was wearing him down. He was one of the greatest of all time, just ripping the body, constantly attacking him and eventually broke him down. Had him in a corner, boom, dropped him with a right hand and he got up and the referee called the fight with like a couple of seconds to go and it was a hugely controversial call. But then when Meldrick Taylor returned, he was never the same again. He started slurring his words really badly.

[Joe Rogan]

So that's physical issues.

[Chris Williamson]

He's getting knocked out easily. He's getting dropped easily. He was just. It was gone. It was all gone. That fight just took it all out. The of of them, you see that. So there's that too. It's not just you're going to lose a golf tournament, like you might get your brains punched in. Physical repercussions, Huge physical repercussions for a vicious knockout. Huge. Some guys are never the same again and much more likely to get knocked out again once they get knocked out really badly.

[Joe Rogan]

Who do you think of all of the people that you know has got the right balance of, is successful and is also having fun at the same time. Because it seems like that's a trade that a lot of people can make where they are successful, but they sacrifice their happiness or they're kind of happy, but they're not pursuing external successes in the same way.

[Chris Williamson]

I would say comedians, I would say Chappelle. Chappelle's probably the most successful guy that's genuinely happy. I mean, he certainly has a lot of moments in deep thought, but when you're hanging around with him, he's a lovely person. He's a happy, lovely guy. He's so sweet and so smart and so, so like self deprecating and interesting and so great at what he does. But when you're hanging out with him, it's Just. It's just a hang. It's just. He's just having fun, laughing a lot, got a great crew. He always, you know, stays. Keeps his circle tight, cool people, and just has a great time, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Have you deconstructed what that is? Like, what the contributing elements are?

[Chris Williamson]

I think he just. He's doing it well. He's a very unusual person. Right, so you're talking about Dave Chappelle. When Chappelle's show was the number one comedy in the country, it was the greatest sketch show. I think it was the greatest sketch show of all time. And it was only two seasons, right? And then they offered him an enormous amount of money. I think it was $50 million. And they wanted to change a bunch of stuff. They wanted him to stop saying certain words. They wanted him stop doing this, stop doing that. And he didn't like it. And she said, I quit. And he went to Africa and just hung out in Africa and then came back. When he came back, he stopped doing stand up. He would do stand up. I remember one time he did stand up in a park in Seattle. So he showed up, he had little speakers with him and a microphone and just did stand up for free to these people. Just hung out in Seattle, just did stand up, stand up. And he would do stuff like that. Show up places and just do stand up occasionally. I mean, for 10 years, he was like a monk on a walkabout.

[Joe Rogan]

And how did he stay sharp?

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I don't think he ever stopped thinking about things the same way. And he wasn't as sharp when he came back. There's one, like, famous video from him in Hartford, Connecticut, where he bombed, where I always tell people, stay out of Connecticut, but just that's not the point. It's like, you know, I think England's depressed. But the point was then eventually he started touring regularly, got it all back, plus then some, and then is now widely regarded as, if not the greatest of all time. He's in the consideration. There's like, prior him, Murphy Kinison, Lenny Bruce, Carlin, for some. There's like a bunch of different people that you put into, like, the greatest of all time. And Dave is certainly in that group, but he's very happy. He's a happy guy. I mean, certainly there's cultural issues that play that trouble him and life issues that everybody goes through that trouble him. But genuinely a pretty balanced guy for someone who's ultra successful. But he's not stepping outside of his lane either. What he's really concentrating on and almost exclusively Concentrating on is doing standup comedy. And he will travel. He would get in a jet and fly to New York, New York, unannounced and just show up at clubs and start doing stand up. And he's done this forever. One time I was in Colorado and I've known Dave forever. I met Dave when he was like 19 and I was like, I guess I was like 23 or 24. We were both very young and even back then I was like, this kid is so talented. It was, it was like remarkable how poised he was on stage. Like as a 19 year old kid. Kid. He will just show up places. I was in Colorado doing standup. I was at the Comedy Works. I get off stage, it was on a Friday night. I go into the green room and Dave's there. He doesn't live in Colorado. He just flew to Colorado because he knew I was going to be there and he wanted to do comedy. And so I go, do you want to do a set? He goes, should I go, yes. I go, hold on. So I went back on stage, the show was over. I go, everybody yell at the people that are on the stairs to come back. Back. Dave Chappelle is here. And the half the crowd had already like got up and left. They all come back. Everyone, everyone tells everyone they're yelling it up the stairs. Dave Chappell's here, come back. I bring him on stage, everybody goes crazy. And he does like 45 minutes just around. It was back in the. Grab him by the days. So he had this whole, like he said, grab him by the puss. This whole bit like it just happened that week. And he had this like giant and he just wanted to just go places and do comedy. So he's not doing it for money. Money, right? He's not getting paid to do this show. He would show up in New York. He's not getting paid to do the stand or wherever these clubs that he just shows up in. He's just working. He's just working on the craft of comedy. So his mindset is not try to make the most amount of money with stand up because if he was doing that, he would do an arena every night, right? But he could do an arena every night of the week all over the world and make way more money. But that's not what he's doing. What he's doing is working on the craft of comedy. He has plenty of money. Money, right? He has all this money from all these Netflix specials. They pay him an exorbitant amount of money and he makes all this money, when he does do the big show. So he's got plenty of money. So it's not money, it's just the craft. It's just the art. The new set, the new bits, the new thing. He has a guy who films all of his sets, so he's got, like, a guy there filming every one of his sets. And they break them down like this rant, that rant, because he'll, like, ask questions to people in the audience. He'll do like an hour and a half on stage, just around with a small crowd somewhere, but there's a gem in there somewhere. And then they take that gem and then they expands upon it. He'll go over it and break it down. So his process is all just about the art. And I think because of that, the love of the art is what keeps him happy. I think if it's just the love of the money and you're constantly keeping score, who's the number one touring act? And you're looking at the fucking Ticketmaster. Oh, Jesus Christ. Kevin Hart's got me beat. Son of a pitch. I gotta do two shows a night now.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, let's matinee.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. People get nutty. They get nutty and they really do get themselves. You see it in the podcast world as well. People really get obsessed with the number of the rankings and, like, who's making more and who's doing this and.

[Joe Rogan]

Just.

[Chris Williamson]

Do what you do.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you're. The problem that you're going to come up against there is you are going to try and trade the outcome that you're looking for for the fuel that gets you there. The fuel that gets you there is how much you love what you're doing.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So I've been thinking that's what gets.

[Chris Williamson]

You to the dance.

[Joe Rogan]

Correct. I've been thinking so much about the shame of simple pleasures. So there's this quote from a guy called Visakhan Verasamy that says, I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things. And I just love the idea of it that most of us are kind of terrible accountants of our own joy, that we only accept deposits when the transaction's large enough. Right. The day that we get married or the night that we play the main stage at Glastonbury or sell out the arena. Anything less than that.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And it doesn't even make the ledger. So we treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency. And we think, like we have a kind of. Not disgust, but rejection of, oh, that small thing made your week. That tiny incident made your day. You must not have a lot going on. Like how weak and how small must your life be that seeing a cute golden retriever this afternoon was like a fucking sick part of your day?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I think about Scotty Scheffler as a good example. Him making it all the way to the top. And if all that you were doing was waiting for that final moment, for this main stage at Glastonbury day that I get married business for $500 million, whatever. You are forgetting almost all of the journey and then just cashing in at the destination. And as the guy that's just won everything in all the fucking golf, like the goat of right now is saying it's fleeting.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It's really, really short. It's not gonna last for very long. And that shame that people have, I certainly know that I do as well, that it almost feels like a reflection on the smallness of my life if I take pleasure in little things. But when you take pleasure in little things, you don't just get more of them. You get them right now. You don't need to wait. You don't need to, like, be a fucking world champion at the winning the marshmallow test. Just delaying gratification so long that you never actually end up getting any gratification.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. The problem with that thought process is to achieve true greatness, you must be master. Mad. Madness and greatness are inextricably connected. You can't separate them to treat. To get true greatness, you have to. There has to be some demons. There has to be a mad struggle in your mind. And you have to want it so badly. You want to have to want that result so badly that you are willing to put in more time, more effort, more focus, more hours and just. You don't get to smell the roses, man. You don't. You don't get to pet the puppies. You do, but you don't. You're petting the puppy. Thinking about the thing that you do, thinking about getting better because you need those resources.

[Joe Rogan]

It's like a demon that sort of climbs inside of you and wears you.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. You know, Ronnie o' Sullivan is.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. The. The snooker player.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. The greatest of all time. Like what? Like there's certain people in certain sports. I'm gonna send you something. Jam me. So you see what a wizard this guy is. I'm actually in the middle of his book. My friend Billy Thorpe, who's a top flight pool player, recommended this book. Oh, no, I'm sorry. Tyler Styler, who's another top flight pool player. Like world class pool player recommended this book and I started the book and I can't stop it. It's so good. It's about. I think it's fairly recent because it's post Covid. I thought it was going. He recommended it because of the way Ronnie describes picking the perfect cue. Like the relationship that he has with the cue. But it is so eloquent and so. But the story, the whole story, the whole book rather the story of his life is really more of. It's an exercise in him trying to explain like what it's like to be this good and this mad. Like he's a madman. Like, watch this, watch this, watch what he does here. This is crazy from o'.

[Bugsy Malone]

Sullivan.

[Chris Williamson]

Now if you don't know how difficult it is to make these ball. He doesn't give a. That that guy's in front of him, that the referee's in front of him. Watch how quickly he does this. I mean he's making the off audience laugh. He's moving around that guy. He can't miss. This is, this is the zone personified. He gets to a point in this where he's feeling so good he decides to start shooting things one handed. Watch this, watch this. One handed money. Now he's doing it one handed, one handed. These are tiny little pockets. He's shooting one handed with English and getting position. Everyone's going crazy. I mean that's how, how good Ronnie o' Sullivan was like, oh my God, this, the book is really about managing madness. It's about him being sober and now he's trans. He's kind of taken a lot of that insane competitive drive. Now he runs like he's a runner, like he runs long distances and he talks about that, meets up with his running club and they all get together and go on runs together. But it's like it's just managing whatever the that in, in, in. And he's also describing, describing even in his prime he was saying he was thinking he's worthless. He's thinking he's not good enough. He's going to fall apart, he's going to choke. He's going to this. He's like all these demons are popping up and meanwhile he's just. Everybody's like terrified of him. He shows up, it's like, oh gee, the genius is here because he's a genius. Like he's a snooker playing genius. There's, there's something about what he does. It's just different than everybody else. But the book is like it's not just about, like, picking the perfect cue. It's really about. About managing madness. And everyone who's great is fucking crazy. There's. But you can. I think, like Chappelle does, you can take that greatness and just throw it into the thing you do and love it while you're doing it. You can't. It doesn't have to be a demon, doesn't have to be an adversary. It could be like just this romantic affair. Care of you being so fortunate to be able to pursue this thing, but maintaining that same level of enthusiasm. I don't know if the same level of enthusiasm, though, can be maintained in something that has, like, a winner and a loser. Like a game where there's so much riding on each outcome. Yes. Versus art, which is like, Dave goes to. He's already won. They're gonna. They're. The show sold out. He knows how to do comedy. He gets out there, they all cheer. He's got great material. He can't wait to make them laugh. He already won.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that's the problem with turning the art into the competition.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

She said there, right? The rankings. Well, that means that even if I did it and enjoyed it, but I'm number three or whatever. Yeah, that's horrendous. That's not good. Yeah, I.

[Chris Williamson]

There's podcasts that game the system. So this podcast that release multiple episodes a day, and they're short podcasts, so they have more downloads than everybody else. Else. And so because downloads speaking, you know this. So it's. It's like a scam. And so, like, they'll be very highly ranked, but no one's ever watched it.

[Joe Rogan]

Or heard of it, I think.

[Chris Williamson]

But they'll get quoted in magazines as being the number two podcast in the world. Oh, dear. But that's really what it is. It's like you've. You figured out a way which is. Nothing wrong with that. If you want to do that, you. You can game the system, but it doesn't matter like, what. What is. What are you doing? Like, are you doing something that you're putting out?

[Joe Rogan]

Like.

[Chris Williamson]

Like, I don't talk to anybody that I'm not interested in talking to. That's it. It's the only reason why I do this. I talk to people that I think will be fun, and I look forward to it, and I still do. That's why I do it. That's why, you know, it continues to work, because I do it the same way I've always done it. I just talk to people that I like to talk to. No, no, like, oh, if I got that guy on, he's super famous, like, that'll, that'll get a big game. Yeah, there's a lot of famous people that I've said no to because I'm just not interested them. I'm like, yeah, maybe that'll get a lot of people, but I don't, I don't want to do that.

[Joe Rogan]

What I found the single best determinant for when I know that modern wisdom is going well, is if I wake up on the morning of the episode and I can't wait for it to be 2:00pm yeah, I'm like, yes, I get to speak to such and such today. And then I finish up and I go, I learned something that was cool. Like, that was a good 1, 2, 3, 4 hours. That was a good day. Day. And then there's other days when I've like, I don't know, I wake up and I just think I should have, I should have thought a little bit more about it. I'm like, I'm looking forward to this, but I'm not super fired up. And the more that you push away from that instinct with whatever you're doing, like, because your instinct is ultimately your only competitive advantage that you have because it's the most non fungible thing that you've got. So Douglas Murray told me this story. It's really fascinating one about this guy. When Douglas was first, first on the scene, this guy that was the head of the paper that he was at, accumulated all of the fans and all of the foes that you would in an industry like that over the space of a couple of decades. And he decides that he's going to release a West End show about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets. This is like, what? Okay, do you trust him? This guy, this illustrious history, so on, and so he must know what he's doing. And by the opening night interval, there is nobody left in the entire auditorium, including the cast. Everybody's left. And this guy is dejected. And all of the people, all of the enemies that he's accumulated throughout his career, they start sharpening the knives and they come out and he's just despondent, like, so, so sad. Douglas sees him a couple of weeks later and he goes, oh, he fucking West End show about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets. What were you thinking? He said, douglas, I followed my instincts. And the thing is instincts, they may sometimes lead you wrong, but they're the only thing that's ever led you Right. I thought that's such a cool insight about. Yes. You're going to make some errors if you follow that. And maybe you need a team around you or a friend to go. Ah, not with that one, but.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

You just going, I think this guy's interesting. I think this girl's interesting. I think this topic's important and I'm gonna talk about it.

[Chris Williamson]

Maybe he just did a bad job. Like, look at Hamilton. They did a rap about Alexander Hamilton. It's fucking huge.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay. Yes. You might have the great idea, but the delivery is wrong. Yeah, yeah. That's an interesting one.

[Chris Williamson]

Totally.

[Joe Rogan]

I.

[Chris Williamson]

If you think about Hamilton, like, Hamilton is a great example. That's. That play is gigantic.

[Joe Rogan]

It's on Netflix now and it keeps on crushing.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, it's killing it.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And it's so preposterous if you think about it in the. Like they're. They're talking in modern language about a guy who lived hundreds of years ago. Like, that doesn't even make any sense. They have black people playing white people. Like, this is gonna be weird. It's great. It's fucking great.

[Joe Rogan]

Where do you think that drive comes from in people? You know, that demon thing? Is there a common thread that you've seen with the people that have got.

[Jamie]

Got it.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Most of them had unhappy childhoods. Yeah. It's very rare that someone has like the. The best in the world demon and their childhood was awesome. It's very rare. Generally speaking, there's something there. Something. Some loss, some trauma, something not good, some lack of what you needed when you were young, you didn't get it. And, you know, and then you'll like, I'm gonna show everyone, like Mike Tyson maybe the best example that ever, like, for a period of time, the scariest heavyweight that ever walked the face of the planet and redefined the heavyweight division in modern boxing. And, you know, he was 13 years old when Customato had adopted him. And his. His life was hell. Before that, it was hell. No. Love was crime. And being around the worst people. And then all of a sudden he's in the Catskills with this guy who's a psychologist and one of the greatest boxing coaches of all time.

[Joe Rogan]

Time.

[Chris Williamson]

And also a hypnotist and is hypnotizing him on a regular basis when he's 13 years old and teaches him to be the best. And so then he's got this. I will show you that I'm worth something. I will show you that I'm special. This one thing that I'm good At. And that is separating men from their consciousness, finding a way to get in touch with them, finding. Get close enough at launching. Launching bombs and watching them drop. And he was the best at.

[Joe Rogan]

At it.

[Chris Williamson]

And it was, I think, the drive to be the best. It has to come from some. There's got to be something wrong where you. You have that fire inside of you.

[Joe Rogan]

I love thinking about this. I think it's been the. The question that I've probably been the most obsessed by since doing the show. The. The price that people pay to be somebody that you admire. And I think it's just. It's just endlessly interesting. So one thing that. That comes to mind there is. Do you know what the fundamental attribution error is? It's like we. We attribute to other people motive for their action. It's like their character, but for us, it's situation. So, for instance, I cut you off in traffic because I'm late for work. You cut me off in traffic because you're a dick.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So we have this asymmetry in how we judge other people's behaviors as opposed to our own. I think that there's an equivalent here when we think about our parents. So you could call it the fundamental, like, parental attribution error, maybe, which would be we attribute to our parents our shortcomings, but not necessarily our strengths.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So we're very happy. Like modern pop psychology, it's like a rite of passage to lay at the feet of our parents. I've got anxious attachment because nobody ever came to look after me. You go, yeah, maybe. But also, isn't this the reason that your hyper vigilance means that no one ever gets to take advantage of you. It's like I am unable to relax and chill out because love was always predicated on me performing. It's like, yes. But also it's driven you to be an incredibly successful person. And I think we should just be a little bit cautious when laying at the feet of our parents. Only our shortcomings. They can either have both. You can either say that my strengths and my shortcomings come from my parents, or my strengths and my shortcomings come from my own agency. But you can't say I authored the things that I like about myself, but the things that I don't like about myself came from some, like, past situation.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes. Victim mentality.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah. And also bad things that happened to you when you're a kid. Being bullied. Being bullied is terrible at the time, but it leads many a person to say I'll fucking show you. You know, and then you get this incredible result. But then the thing is, like, are you happy? That's. That's the. That's the real dance. The dance is between success and happiness. And a lot of people have achieved success, but have not achieved happiness, and they'll die a loser.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that's you sacrificing the thing you want for the thing that's supposed to get it. And that's why, like, okay, what's your definition of success? Right, Interesting question. Would you just want to be the best in the world? That's not bad. That's not a bad.

[Chris Williamson]

But it's this thing we talked about before, too, that just because something's difficult doesn't mean it's good. And there's a lot of things that you do that are very difficult to do, and then you see other people have achieved them. You say, that must be really worthwhile. And then you do it and you realize, like, oh, this isn't worth anything. This is just hard to do. This sucks. That's often the case with success because if you become incredibly successful and then you have all these haters and, you know, like the guy who wrote the shitty play, you know, like, they. They come for you and they. They want to chop you down. And that's part of the game that you're playing. And if you don't like that, if you don't like that, but then you've gotten trapped in it, and you're constantly being attacked, and you listen to it and you pay attention to it. So you're. And you see, with successful people, you see it really with famous people, especially young people, they have no history with this. And then all of a sudden, it's just thrown at them. And then they are both the thing they wanted and something they would never want, which is to be, like, constantly under attack.

[Joe Rogan]

I've thought about how brutal it must be to have the talent, but not the constitution to be able to handle success and fame. So I don't know whether you've been tracking Lewis Capald, the Scottish singer. So there's a great documentary on Netflix. You got to watch it. How I'm feeling now, It's a bit old now. It's like maybe four or five years old. Lewis Capaldi breaks onto the scene. Unbelievable voice. He's been playing working men's pubs around Scotland and is just a fucking phenom, right? Billions of streams, billions and billions of plays. Arena tour, global tour, all the rest of it. Covid happens. He's Back in his mum and dad's house near Glasgow in Scotland. And he's in the hut out the back, trying to do the difficult second album. And there's the pressure of the world on him now. He's got the talent, but the pressure from agencies, from record label, from fans, from himself, from his parents, from his peers, from everybody, starts to get on him. It weighs on him so heavily that he develops a tick.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, Jesus.

[Joe Rogan]

Like to Tourette's. It turns out he's always had Tourette's, but the pressure has caused him to, like, he can't. He can't perform. And toward the end of the documentary, he goes back out on stage at the O2 in London, does the thing, walks out on stage, and he's still doing this. And you've tracked this whole journey. This is toward the end, and he can't get his words out. This is his calling in life. This is what he was built to do. This is what he was made for. And his talent has been taken away from him by the pressure of trying to do the thing, not by his inability to do the thing. And this is such a fucking unique kind of hell. Like, think about that. I think about fighters that have performance anxiety that just can't get themselves into the octagon with the lights on them. Put them in the training camp that they're sparring. There's not that same amount of pressure. Not yet. And they. They're unbelievable. And Lewis Capaldi did Glastonbury, I think, two years ago, and the same thing happened. Comes out on stage and basically, I can't sing. He can't. You're hearing these little croaks and squeaks come out of him. And then this year, he comes back out. He's done a ton of mindfulness, got his health in order. Mental health, work therapy comes out and destroys it.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, wow, dude.

[Joe Rogan]

It's like. It makes the hairs on my arms stand up. It's so fucking cool.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow. That's awesome. That's a great story. That's what I like to see. I like to see someone who fucks their whole life up and gets back together again. I love that. I really do, because I think that's what people really root for. They really root for you to get it back together again. What they don't root for is once you're on top, like, staying on top, they like you to fall.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. That's a little too much.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I mean, I. I think especially with. With what most people feel, they want to see a little bit of themselves in that story. And they want to see a little bit of struggle.

[Chris Williamson]

Right. And they also know that they fucked up their life because everybody's fucked up their life at some point in time.

[Joe Rogan]

Redemption.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

If this person can be there and lose it and then come back, maybe.

[Chris Williamson]

I can get my shit together.

[Joe Rogan]

That's the problem.

[Chris Williamson]

As a 42 year old alcoholic, you're.

[Joe Rogan]

Not gonna be Louis Capaldi, but maybe you are.

[Chris Williamson]

Maybe you're Oliver.

[Joe Rogan]

And you know, Churchill didn't get into power until he was 65.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

So all of my life up until now would be less than 2/3 of the warm up set for Churchill starting his thing.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So I just. You never know sort of when this stuff's gonna come along. I do love though, the. The idea of watching somebody climb to the top, lose it, and then turn it back around again. I think it's just such a fun, wonderful idea.

[Chris Williamson]

We all love that. But I think it's because we try to see some of ourself in someone, which is why we don't like things that are created by a corporation where they put together a band like the Monkeys or something like that.

[Joe Rogan]

And fake nepotism. Silver spoon baby.

[Chris Williamson]

We hate all of that. We hate all of that. We hate all the people handed their life a silver platter if it feels.

[Joe Rogan]

Like somebody didn't earn it.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I worry, I worry about where motivation comes from for people. In a way, if you are able to game the system, which people are now, they can like speedrun relatability and authenticity. But you don't know if this is some K pop thing, that's some industry plant style scenario that's just been placed together to try and get this. Give you a sense of resonance with this person that doesn't deserve. Deserve it. They didn't actually struggle in that sort of a way, but they can construct the narrative that they did. And I think in a world that's become increasingly prefabricated, like people are looking, they're scrutinizing very aggressively. Is this person who they say they are? This is the hypocrisy that points out that they're not. And that's where you get performative vulnerability. Oh, woe is me. They pretend to not pretend to have Tourette's, Although I'm sure some people do.

[Chris Williamson]

They pretend they're struggling.

[Joe Rogan]

Correct?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Because I need the sympathy vote.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Isn't that an interesting.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, the real problem was when someone pretends and you catch them pretending like that, then you're never going to trust them again, you could fail. You can fail. And up. You could think you got it right and you got it wrong, and you just. Oh. But if you pretend, if you. If you lie, if you show deception, if you pretend you're something that you're not, and they find out, like. Like Ellen, you know, she's a nice lady. She's all dancing. Meanwhile, she's fucking screaming at people and mean.

[Joe Rogan]

Yep.

[Chris Williamson]

You know, that's like, oh, you were lying.

[Joe Rogan]

That is fucking catnip.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

To people.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, they love it.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Well, there's nothing that the Internet wants more than to find somebody that's a hypocrite.

[Chris Williamson]

Sure.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. Because the Internet is basically one big spot. The difference. Competition.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You said this thing here. Here. You behave this way here.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

I can compare the two. You have fallen short, like. And the jury comes down and smashes you in the head.

[Chris Williamson]

It's also because we crave authenticity. We wish we had it. We crave it in other people. We want, like, we're all trying to. We're watching all these different people, like, this guy play golf and that guy play music, and watching all these people do all these different things, and we're. We're getting something out of. Of it all. There's a reason why you like that thing on Netflix. It's like the. There's. It fuels the human condition. It gives you happiness. It's like. It's some. There's some. In a genuine moment like that. It's like a very special element that it adds to your life, and we crave that. And it's hard to know what's real and what's not real. That's why people get mad at me when I say I like AI music. I know. I know it's not real. I still like, like it, but I don't like it the same way I like listening to Johnny Cash sing Hurt. You know what I mean? It's like there's a. There's an authenticity to that. There's a real thing to that that's like. It's very tangible. It's different.

[Joe Rogan]

There's an upper bound on it. I certainly think I'm friends with a lot of musicians, and one of the issues I think that they have with the AI revolution, apart from the fact that, like, they're coming for our jobs, which is, like, obvious, is that learning a musical instrument is really fucking hard, and it takes a very long time. I think that the revolution for podcasting has made it fucking fantastic for people to feel less lonely and have exposure to conversations and information they never would have done. But anybody that sticks a microphone in front of them can record a podcast. It may be a totally shit podcast, but if you give me a guitar, I can't make notes come out of it. So the bar that you need to get over to just be acceptably proficient enough to be able to do, to have the conversation right. Everybody does what is equivalent of a pod. Everybody that has never recorded a podcast has had a great conversation over dinner and gone, dude. If we recorded that, that would have got millions of plays on YouTube. So everyone is a little bit closer to this. And I think that one of the issues that the music industry or musicians within the industry have, have is that AI feels like it's allowing people to leapfrog the first very long, very boring, very grindy stage of, well, this is where your fingers need to go on the saxophone or this is how you need to pick the strings in order to make the sound come out of the guitar.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And if you leapfrog it, that feels like a little bit like a technology enabled nepotism in a way. You've got yourself toward the end. You shouldn't be able to make this. This is like a guarded and highly invested is this. I mean, you guys see this in comedy. In comedy, you're like, dude, until you're eight, like the first seven years, like they're just you earning your keep. And then you're right, whatever it is, like it's a thousand shows. And once you've done a thousand spots, then you can say that you've started doing comedy or whatever it is for podcasting. I think it's like 150 episodes before anyone that asks me, like, I'm beginning my podcast and what's your advice? And I'm like, once episode 150 starts, yeah, you have begun doing a podcast. Up until then, it's basically a warm up. So set. And I think with music, because it's such a high investment that people need to have at the very, very beginning, this sense that there is a shortcut that allows people who haven't earned their way to get there. It would be like if you were using AI to write comedy sets.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. And I think you're correct. But I also think that's probably what lions felt when people invented guns. Like, this is bullshit. I've been chasing you motherfuckers down and eating you for thousands of years. Now all of a sudden you just squeeze your little finger and instantaneously that's it's coming. It's coming it's coming in all forms of entertainment it's gonna they've figured out what you like they've got a giant catalog of billions of hours of human beings paying attention to things and it's coming, it's coming it's going to overwhelm you and it's going to be indiscernible from reality eventually it's going to be something that you've physically experienced as well as visual audio you're gonna, you're gonna have the whole experience.

[Joe Rogan]

We'd better enjoy ourselves while we can.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah have fun while you can Chris, I appreciate you very much it's always awesome talking to you. Your podcast is excellent Tell everybody where they can get it where they can.

[Joe Rogan]

Find you modern wisdom on Apple podcasts and Spotify Chris Williamson on YouTube etc etc I appreciate the out of you man.

[Chris Williamson]

I appreciate the out of you too brother it's always good talking to it's always fun. Goodbye everybody.

[Joe Rogan]

Peace.