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Feb. 23, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
43:03
20240223_chris-williamson-on-toxic-masculinity-sobriety-anx
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
From Party Boy to Self-Help Star 00:11:35
Chris Williamson is a record holder.
He's the first star of Love Island that I've actually been interested in speaking to.
Love Island was kind of like the Champions League final of being a professional party boy.
A former model and nightclub promoter.
He's now something of a self-help superstar.
Millions watch him for his life hacks and lessons on success.
His podcast, Modern Wisdom, is one of the biggest in the world.
But does he really have it all figured out?
Why is your name associated so much with fapping?
Are you saying I'm pro-fapping or anti-fapping or just a pathological fapper?
I didn't even know what fapping was.
I'm a fapping connoisseur.
What can I say?
Maybe you're doing it right now.
We might have passed peak woke.
Mass shootings, eating meat, hip-hop, smelling of axe body spray and saying hello or have a nice day.
All terrible examples of toxic masculinity there.
Consistency is the only route to success.
The thing that you would tell yourself 10 years ago is still the same thing that you need to hear now.
Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson.
Oh, God.
Chris, great to have you on Uncensored.
Yeah, first of all, I mean, on the Love Island thing, I sort of vowed I'd never interview a Love Islander.
You are the exception.
You've broken free from the mental prison camp, which I put them all in.
So congratulations on that.
When you were in Love Island, you're there.
I think you were out on the 19th day or something.
I think you had a kind of epiphany about your life, didn't you?
Explain that.
Yeah, not many people go on reality TV to get catapulted toward a life of meaning and alignment, but I'm an army of one here.
Yeah, so I guess I spent most of my 20s acquiring success in the way that modern society maybe tells a young man that he should with acclaim and status and people knowing who you are and money and parties and all that sort of stuff.
And then Love Island was kind of like the pinnacle of that.
It's the Champions League final of being a professional party boy, right?
And yeah, during that, you have nowhere to go.
There's no phones, no TV, no friends, no family, no internet, no distractions, no books, no nothing.
It's just you and this scenario.
And I was around people like the person I was pretending to be, which was this big name on campus, party boy type thing.
And I had a fateful dose of contrast as I lived for 24 hours for whatever 19 days plus a week in lockdown that I'd done before, plus all of the posts, press and stuff after that, and realized I don't think that I'm living in alignment.
I don't think the things that I believe are making me happy are truly what I should be doing with my life.
And yeah, from there, went on a big journey of self-discovery, a lot of introspection and meditation and breathwork and morning walks and journaling and all that stuff.
And then 750 episodes of modern wisdom and a ton of conversations later, here we are.
Yeah, and not just here, but you just did Joe Rogan's podcast, which is the biggest in the world.
And your own podcast, I think, is rocketing up the charts in America, which is pretty unusual, actually, for most people in this country to be a star in that medium in America.
So it's really...
We're slowly taking that country back over one podcast episode at a time and recolonizing it.
I love it.
I love it.
I'm with you.
I'm with you.
I'm in the trenches with you.
But it's been an amazing journey for you.
What have you learned about yourself?
I mean, you distill all this wisdom to people.
What have you actually learned about yourself?
One of the most interesting insights is that if you...
One of the most common questions people ask is something like, what would you tell you 10 years ago?
And that is, you know, I wish that I feared less.
I wish I cared less about the opinions of others.
I wish I did whatever.
Almost always, without exception, the thing that you would tell yourself 10 years ago is still the same thing that you need to hear now.
I think that we change in many ways, but fundamentally, the pathologies and fears and things that hold us back seem to remain uncomfortably stable across time.
So other little bits and pieces, caring about what other people think of you is usually pretty pointless because most people don't even like themselves.
Most people's criticisms of you are projections of what they don't like about themselves or what they don't like about the world.
It's not about you.
It's literally about them.
What else have I seen?
Certainly that consistency is the only route to success.
You know, consistency doesn't guarantee that you'll be successful, but if you're not consistent, you won't be.
So those are at least some to break down.
It's interesting because I've interviewed.
Yeah, I've interviewed Andrew Tate a number of times and he has a huge following.
There's no doubt about it.
I get so many young men, teenage boys and so on coming up to me.
What's Andrew Tate like?
What do you think of him?
They ask me.
And it's a complicated question because a lot of what Tate says, I kind of find myself nodding.
I've got three sons in their 20s.
One's 30 now.
I've been through their upbringing.
And there's no doubt a lot of young men these days feel a bit lost and they're crying out for people to try and guide them.
And in his, you know, pretty blunt way, Tate does that to a degree.
But he also does other stuff, which I'd imagine like me, you would find very uncomfortable.
What do you feel about him generally?
He's a complex character.
I had him on the podcast about three and a half years ago and I didn't actually release the episode.
So I have two hours of unreleased Andrew Tate footage.
We were in the midst of COVID.
It was mostly a conversation about COVID and lockdowns and crackdowns and stuff like that.
And it was that time when my channel would have just been nuked for the sake of trying to get one conversation out.
So at the time, I didn't do it.
And then a lot of people have said, why didn't you release it when he was at the peak of his fame?
Obviously, that could have got an awful lot of plays.
And to be honest, I didn't do it because I thought it would be a pretty poor move on Andrew, although not like I have some obligation to do whatever.
But if someone makes a ton of comments during a rapidly moving chaotic situation and also they're a bit gregarious, three years later, releasing that out into the world kind of stitches him up a bit.
And I didn't want to do that.
So yeah, we've got two hours of unreleased Andrew Tate.
He's a complicated guy.
Is he a force for good?
Is he a force for good with young men or not?
Mixed bag.
Net, I don't know.
He's certainly brought an awful lot of attention to the plight of young men and he's tried to simplify down a world which teaches young men that they are defective women.
Most of the advice that we hear for young men at the moment is if you were just less like men, if you just behaved a little bit more like women, if you talked about your feelings a little bit more, if you communicate, if you were more gentle, if you were less concerned with mastery and competition and conquer and becoming better and stuff like that, you know, some of the typical masculine traits, your life would be better.
Many men feel like their issues are being dismissed as whining from a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the Barbie movie, the blockbuster of the year, mentioned patriarchy, I think, a dozen times.
By about the third, I'd had enough of it.
I don't even know what that is.
A company, obviously, that has a ton, way more than on average female execs at the top, which I'm sure you know about.
A leader, the director, the production crew, all of this stuff.
I didn't see much patriarchy sitting behind the scenes of that movie.
It never works the other way.
If you have an all-female cast, a female director, female studio boss, and it's based on a story that promotes women at the expense of men, that's fine.
The only narrative that needs to be dealt with is if women are not at least equal in every regard or are not portrayed as glowing heroines and then all hell breaks loose.
The problem that you have is most portrayals of women in modern cinema show them as flawless.
They don't need to overcome anything at all in order to be successful.
They're born perfectly natural.
Perfect example of this from the Critical Drinker, the two Mulan movies.
You'll remember the first one, the animated one, and then they did a live action.
In the first one, the protagonist is smaller and weaker and needs to use her cunning and her nouse and work incredibly hard to be as good as the guys that are around her.
It's a inspiring story of someone who doesn't have everything immediately, working sufficiently cleverly and sufficiently hard and consistently to overcome their challenges.
Roll that forward to the live action version of it.
She was bestowed with being the best in the world.
She didn't need to do anything.
And the only challenge that she needed to overcome were the men around her not believing in her sufficiently.
It's patronizing.
It's patronizing to women.
If I was a woman and I was basically being fed, you are perfect as you are.
You don't ever need to overcome anything.
And any challenges that you face are exclusively because of the world out there being oppressive onto you.
That's not inspiring.
How does that inspire a new generation of girls?
Totally agree.
In the same way, I believe that the problem of a lot of young men is this toxic masculinity weaponized badge of dishonor, where almost everything that's a masculine trait has been redefined as toxic.
You know, even down to when men now hold a door open for women, a lot of women almost spit in their faces.
How dare you do that?
You know, how dare you be chivalrous?
The old sort of hunter-provider idea of a male role model absolutely condemned out of hand.
You know, strong men are now traduced to somehow a problem.
Weak men or very emotional men or very vulnerable men, they're all heroic and so on.
And it's this constant narrative along those lines, which I think really unsettles and confuses young men.
They're like, well, what am I supposed to be?
Because most women they probably meet don't agree with the caricature of the men they're supposed to be told they should be liking.
Can I give you a list of headlines I found that have different things that are supposedly toxic masculinity?
Yeah.
Mass shootings, toxic masculinity, gang violence, climate change, the financial crisis, Brexit is toxic masculinity.
The election of Donald Trump, not wearing a mask, eating meat, physical fitness, fast food, capitalism is toxic masculinity and communism is toxic masculinity.
Hip-hop, smelling of axe body spray, being stoic, risk-taking, religion, but also secularism and atheism, playing board games, being interested in cars and saying hello or have a nice day.
All terrible examples of toxic masculinity there.
And you know, the reality is like when you saw what Gillette did with their, so Gillette always had these big masculine commercials all about being a big, you know, hunter-provider kind of man.
But then there's huge U-turn after the Me Too campaign.
And suddenly it was prove you're not Harvey Weinstein or you can't have a Gillette product.
And they absolutely tanked their sales in the same way that Budweiser did when they used Dylan Mulvaney, who suddenly decided in the mid-20s that this biological woman, a man would be identifying as a woman and make tens of millions of dollars by almost mocking biological females.
Why We Passed Peak Woke 00:02:51
And you see it time and again where they so grotesquely misjudged their audience.
And look at now.
They've just brought Shane Gillis on board, a comedian who was so spicy that SNL had to get rid of him.
And in the same week, SNL bring him back as well.
I think we might have passed peak woke.
I feel like we have.
I feel that.
I think that.
Yeah, I think that's the occurrence.
The silent majority, which is a massive number of people, the silent majority just has got sick of it.
They've got sick of everything they enjoy in life being redefined as somehow evil and corrupting and worthy of cancellation.
They find the idea of the cancel culture completely ridiculous, but they also specifically like everything in their daily life that they enjoy from comedy shows to movies to music to statues to heroes, whatever it is.
The woke brigade's only response to all of it is it's all evil.
It must all be cancelled.
And we must go to a form of extreme puritanism where if you even crack a joke at work, you must be expunged from human life if it hasn't passed their humor test, which is obviously the worst outside of North Korea in the world.
Yeah, I think this tyranny of the minority has gotten very old and it was enforced through fear.
It was enforced because if you make a joke or say a thing which is outside of this purity spiral overton window of appropriateness, that is used as an indicator.
It's a smoking gun.
Oh, see, that one thing that Piers said, that slip up or that misspeak or that general speak that was a little bit closer.
Original joke, which I just thought was a bit inappropriate, but still funny.
Exactly.
We used to laugh at this.
Secretly the racist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-Semite, whatever, that we always knew that he was.
And I think that people should turn their eye much more on the ones that throw accusations than the people that are being accused, because I think it's a defense mechanism.
I think that any time that someone is overly purity, nicey, nicey, like that evil headmistress from Harry Potter, it's an indicator that, oh, hang on, what about you?
What's going on behind the scenes with you?
And we see this with late night shows in America.
They're tyrannical behind the scenes, but out front, nicer than nice.
We see this with Lizzo, someone who's supposed to be standing up for these bigger girls and giving up.
I thought Ellen DeGeneres was the best one.
Ellen DeGeneres, who led the kind of woke campaign, turned out to be an awful piece of work and ends up, of course, being cancelled herself at the altar of her own cancel culture.
Yeah, the standards you judge others by will be the standards that you are judged by.
The Ellen DeGeneres Controversy Explained 00:06:19
You should be very, very careful with that.
Let me ask you, one thing that struck me about young people is the amount of anxiety that exists in people between the age of maybe like 25 and 17, 16 is unbelievable and terrifying.
And people are wrestling with why this is.
And it's leading in many cases to them taking their own lives, but also masses amounts of medication in that age bracket.
What is going on here?
I think that there is a pathologization and a medicalization and a glorification of normal human emotions.
If you live in a world which is incredibly comfortable and typically day to day, you don't have to deal with that much discomfort.
You just did a segment and you were in a room that is purposefully designed to have heavy things in that you go in and pick up and put down in the same place.
It's called a gym.
And that's because we have removed so many of the heavy objects that we need to live from daily life that we have to artificially create this and add it in.
My point being that when existence is very comfortable, any discomfort feels like an aberration.
It feels like a curse.
And the more that we make existence comfortable and convenient, not to say, I want air conditioning, I like cruise control on a car, all of those things, but it makes people hypersensitized.
I think on top of that, there is this very strange therapy culture speak where it is the pathologization of normal human emotions.
It's not that you're upset, it's that you're depressed.
It's not that someone was mean to you, it's that they caused you trauma.
We need to be very, very careful.
And an ex-Love Island contestant, Dr. Alex, who I think actually has some role at the British government, started a campaign that was like happy pills or take your, like share your SSRI thing.
And it's videos, IG videos of him putting with SSRIs on his tongue.
The amount of over-prescription that we have at the moment for SSRIs is insane.
The amount of people that are on these drugs that have very, very spurious effects, they've been replication crisis quite heavily.
There is a use for them, but it's not as wide as they should think.
And there was a study that came out last week that said exercise is more effective than SSRIs.
And then you just had a video that you put on the segment before this of some guy in the gym, maybe trying to battle away his demons, maybe trying to stave off his mind.
He's humiliating a woman.
Who if it had been the other way around, all hell would have broken loose.
The hypocrisy and double standard is real.
Also, I think with young people, and this is not just about young men, it's about women as well.
Social media and phones, cell phones have completely changed things as well.
And I think, obviously, a lot for good.
I think they're very intelligent as a group of people, the ones I meet.
They're very bright, they're sparky, they're well-informed, but they're getting a constant churn of dopamine, a lot of it very negative.
They're seeing wars in real time all over their social media, the most horrific imagery.
And they're seeing loads of other stuff just constantly bombarded with negative imagery in a way that, you know, when I was young, it was unthinkable.
You didn't have cell phones.
There was, you know, maybe a television with two channels, very heavily sanitized and regulated.
The newspapers were very cautious about what they put on their front pages and so on.
You just did not get exposed to anything like this kind of sensory overload.
How much do you think that is playing into this?
Hugely.
Jonathan Haidt's work and the coddling of the American mind, he's got a new book out soon called The Anxious Generation.
It seems to be a huge impact.
The human brain is not designed to consume the entire world's news, the worst of the world's news, disproportionately selected 24 hours a day in real time, fed into our brains.
I saw a meme the other day that said, sorry I didn't reply to you.
I'm trying to handle the entire world's information with a brain that was designed to collect nuts in a forest.
And it's so true.
We're not built for this.
Yeah, it's what's referred to as an evolutionary mismatch, that we have hypernormal stimuli in the modern world that we are not developed to be able to deal with.
I think one of the best things that everybody can do, I'm big into life hacks, right?
You mentioned it on the show on Modern Wisdom.
We did this huge series of life hacks.
The most high impact thing that people can do right now, sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom.
If you put the charging cable for your phone right now in the kitchen or in the hallway or somewhere else that isn't your bedroom, and before you go to bed in the nighttime, plug it in there.
It will save your sleep will improve.
You won't be spending as much time on your phone.
You won't be rolling over when you can't sleep during the middle of the night and using it.
Oh, YouTube's only ever three feet away from you.
And then on a morning, just try and delay that time as much as possible before you pick it up.
Cause once you're in it, you get sucked in.
So intermittent fasting for your phone.
I'm all for it.
You're also all for something called fapping, which I have to say, I wasn't familiar with until I...
I'm not convinced that this sounds like fake news to me.
Oh, really?
So you're not fit.
You've now, you've gone from mainstream media to YouTube and you're just prepared to throw fake news.
Is it completely invented this thing?
Well, fapping is a thing, but are you saying I'm pro-fapping or anti-fapping or just a pathological fapper?
I didn't even know what fapping was, but apparently you...
Fapping, explain what?
Why is your name associated so much with fapping?
I mean, look, I'm a fapping connoisseur.
What can I say?
No, I've done a number of videos.
No fapp is a movement online of men holding themselves back from touching themselves.
It is a movement that's tangential to anti-porn, but there's also varying degrees of depth to this.
One, including that some guys on the Reddit thread think that they can levitate after a while if they do it for long enough.
I'm not sure where the research team pulled the no-fapp thing out, but I'm happy to be associated with it.
If you want me as the frontrunner for fapping, so be it.
I don't want you to be anything you don't want to be.
I mean, you're Chris Williams.
Let's just talk about fapping, Piers.
We're on YouTube now.
It doesn't matter.
You can just let loose.
Debunking the Fapping Movement Myths 00:07:59
It's kind of, I mean, it's kind of interesting.
I have no idea if it's right or not.
I mean, maybe it is.
Maybe we should all be heading down that road.
Maybe you're doing it right now under the dust.
Who knows?
Do you find a lot of mythology grows about you, the bigger you get on YouTube?
Mythology.
I have a very effective, I seem to have a really good sweet spot at the moment.
The amount of exposure that I have hasn't caused there to be any crazy security scares or any sort of really unwanted attention.
It's perfect, but I know that that's maybe not always going to be the way that it is.
I also have, I think, not too obsessive of a fan base.
They love what I do and they support what I do, but it's not the same way as, you know, they're not digging into the lore of my background.
Maybe because it's, you know, mostly been out there on the internet.
Just watch Love Island a little bit and go to a few club nights in the mid-naughties and the mid-10s and you'd be able to find me.
But no, right now I'm really enjoying this balance.
It feels good.
But I'm also aware that this is maybe a Goldilocks zone when there's enough attention that it's nice, but very quickly that might change into something else.
So I'm kind of starting to emotionally and psychologically prepare myself for that.
There are other topics that you talk a lot about, and you talk a lot about alcohol, diet, sport, all that kind of thing.
Are they all interwoven?
I mean, you're a fit guy, obviously, pretty clean living from what I've read and heard.
Is that also part of the secret cocktail of contentment?
Or what's the answer?
The alcohol thing was interesting because I was a club promoter for a decade and a half.
I adored working in that industry.
I loved and was very proud of what I achieved.
But I got toward the end of my 20s and realized that all of the personal development things I wanted to do seemed to be held back by me electing to ruin 36 or 48 hours, depending on how hard I went, every couple of weeks.
I wasn't a big drinker.
I didn't drink all the time, but I drank enough to kind of reset my meditation streak or my diet or my training or whatever.
And I decided to go sober, elective sobriety.
And it was very, very useful for me.
I found it unbelievably productive.
I was very focused.
I had great consistency.
And I actually preferred being sober to going back drinking.
Now, alcohol is in a unique category of drugs where it's the only drug where if you don't do it, people assume that you have a problem.
People aren't asking you why you're not on cocaine.
Are you okay?
What would you mean?
Yeah.
Whereas with alcohol, there's an assumption that, oh my God, there must be something wrong because that's how ingrained it is into the culture.
And for me, again, it's all about consistency.
Consistency is the important thing.
And if you want to make really, really big changes, you need a routine.
And unfortunately, the British, Larry, lad drinking culture that we have that I wholeheartedly contribute to and still think has its place in a young person's upbringing isn't always conducive if you want to try and make big changes in your life.
Do you end up though with by default almost a more boring friendship group?
I mean, do you avoid people who like a drink and a laugh and a party?
Do you end up having a, by comparison, a more boring life?
And is it consumed by people who are all pretty straight-laced and clean living?
And for many people watching who are not as disciplined might find that a bit of a turnoff.
That assumes that people who drink a lot are interesting.
And in my experience, that is actually the opposite.
So many people don't have friends.
They have drinking partners, especially in their early 20s.
They have a group of people that they go out and get wrecked with.
They do not have a community of people that are really interesting to them.
If the only way that you can hang around with your friends is to get drunk, to sedate yourself so that they actually seem interesting, that's not the group of friends for you.
You can find significantly better friends that you can go out and get drunken.
Maybe that makes it.
Okay, let me pull you up on that.
So I grew up in a country pub.
So I grew up around people when I was young who would come in, they'd be incredibly dull for about 20 minutes, have a couple of pints, and suddenly they'll have a life and soul.
So I could see that alcohol, as long as it wasn't being abused, could actually be an enhancing tool to making people who are perhaps a little bit introvert or a little bit boring, whatever it may be.
I think.
And I can tell you from my own sons, for example, my oldest boy likes to go out a couple of times a week and hit the nightclub scene.
He's got loads of great mates.
They have a good time.
It's in moderation.
The other five days are pretty obstamous and so on.
But they love that.
And he's got really nice friends, but they love to go and have a bit of a party twice a week.
My middle boy is an actor and boxer and so on.
He thinks, you know, his body's a temple like you.
And he'll be nodding away to everything you're saying.
But I can see that both of them have really good groups of friends.
They're just a little bit different.
And I don't see that alcohol needs to be demonized unless you're basically using it like a demon.
No, I would agree.
And this is where I got in trouble with both the partying community for being a hypocrite that I ran nightclubs and was going sober.
And then I got in trouble with the sobriety community for being someone who had gone sober and then extolled the virtues of alcohol.
Anyone who thinks that alcohol can't make a night out better hasn't had a good night out.
And they should come to Newcastle in the northeast of the UK.
I've got a couple of nights in the New York Castle.
I can attest to that.
Yes.
So look, that's the first thing that I need to say about it.
Secondly, I think that you can periodize these things.
And this is what I found was really useful for me.
So I would do six months of sobriety, usually from the start of the year or maybe just before Christmas, because you can get through the hardest bit, which is the Christmas period when your willpower is at its highest, as opposed to at the very end where you go, ah, I'll just finish it a little bit.
And I worked very hard on introspection and reflection and all the rest of the stuff.
And then I was like, okay, it's the back end of summer and maybe I can have a couple of, and how do I feel about alcohol?
And I tell you something else, resetting your alcohol sensitivity is so fantastic because lots of the bad effects come from the overconsumption.
The reason you're overconsuming is because you're not feeling the effects.
So if you make yourself more sensitive, you can have a little bit of a buzz on and not feel so bad the next day.
So I think six months of sobriety every couple of years for people is a very good thing.
Well, I actually had it because I got COVID and then got long COVID.
It's a couple of years ago and I lost my taste and smell.
So there's no point drinking alcohol because I couldn't smell it or taste it.
It was all like water, literally.
And it was heartbreaking to crack open a bottle of my favorite French, you know, chateau batay and discover it literally tasted like a glass of water.
It was the weirdest thing.
But so I gave up all alcohol for about six months, shredded the weight.
I mean, I've never been as fit.
In fact, my nutritionist, and don't laugh, I do have one.
She said that my numbers when she tested me after six months were actually better than hers, right?
Because I wasn't basically pouring stuff into my body that I didn't need to.
But I can't begin to tell you the joy when my taste came back, that first glass of wine afterwards.
And I can't lie about it.
Well, that's what life is.
Life is push and pull.
It is vacancy and it is saturation of things.
And I think that that dance is good.
But how many people that are listening to this right now, especially a lot of the British people, the last time that they went more than a month without consuming alcohol was when they were 14.
It was before they had their first drink.
And if there was any other drug, people talk about something like creatine, one of the most researched compounds in health and fitness.
Oh, well, you know, you don't want to be on something all the time.
Dating Anxiety and Modern Rules 00:05:59
So maybe you could cycle off.
Meanwhile, this person goes out to the pub once or twice a week for eternity.
I completely agree.
You talk a lot also about men versus women, not verses, but men and women and that interaction.
There was a bombshell survey came out this week revealing there are differences between the two sexes, which was probably the least surprising news I've ever seen described as news in the history of planet Earth.
But you talk a lot about things like what do modern women actually want from men?
Why aren't men approaching women in person anymore?
Red flags in dating you should never ignore.
My take on this is that the whole dating game has become extremely nerve-wracking for both sides, actually, but for particularly for men who no longer feel comfortable that they know the rules of engagement.
And it may be that women themselves aren't that clued up to what they should be doing, shouldn't be doing, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, because it's been so much stuff, me too, time's up, all these campaigns, demonizing not just bad men, but actually men generally, until they can prove otherwise, it's led to a very perilous environment, I would say, for dating, right?
Massive risk aversion across the board.
And this isn't just in dating.
This is in everything else.
Young people are getting their driver's licenses later.
They're moving out of the house later.
They're getting their first job later.
But they're also particularly sensitive and tentative when it comes to the world of dating.
And who could be surprised?
The post-MeToo world made men potential attackers of women and made women potential accusers of men.
So I'm not surprised that we're talking about a very sensitive, very risk-averse dating environment.
86% of women say that they want a man to make the first move.
76% of men say that they are scared of making a first move for being seen as creepy.
And 20% of Gen Z guys and girls say that a man approaching a woman in public always or usually constitutes harassment.
So let's try and square this circle, okay?
Women mostly want to be approached, but are scared of being approached because this person might not be safe or have their best interests at heart.
Men know that if they don't do the approaching, that nothing's going to happen because most women want to be the gatekeeper and the receptacle rather than the protagonist.
But if they do do it, then maybe they're going to make her feel uncomfortable.
And I wouldn't want to make her feel uncomfortable.
Maybe I'm a part of some terrible Me Too thing or I'm part of some gym TikTok video where I approach a girl and then I'm going to go viral online and everyone's going to call me awful things.
So you just have two completely different worlds and these two groups are moving apart.
I think that two things can be two quite easy remedies for this.
For guys, an understanding that approach anxiety has always been there and that if you're respectful and delicate and take signals appropriately, nothing bad is probably going to happen.
And then secondly, for women, cultivating receptiveness.
So there was a time during the British aristocracy where ladies would drop a handkerchief near a gentleman that they liked and it would give that opportunity.
Handkerchief dropping.
I'm telling you.
But my point being, like, if you're at a bar, assume that the guy that you're assume the guy that you're potentially attracted to and would like to come over and speak to you is a particularly slow golden retriever.
Like that's the level of signaling that guys need, especially in this world where no doesn't just mean no.
Anything appropriating not hell yeah is stay away from me and you might end up on the wrong side of a call out.
I mean, I've read that 40% of marriages used to begin in the workplace and historically where a man would be in a higher position than the woman, just because historically men were in the senior jobs.
That's obviously changed dramatically.
But also, I can't imagine how anybody finds anyone to date, let alone marry at work, given all the new rules of workplace engagement.
I'm pretty sure, I think it's Netflix that has a stipulation or had a stipulation about the amount of time that a man's eyes could linger on a person of the opposite sex, that there was an upper bound.
Beyond seven seconds, that's the toxic male gaze.
I know that there were adverts on the London Underground warning about this.
And as with all of the things, you know, you spoke about this sort of tyranny of the minority and then this sort of woke thing earlier on as well.
As with all of these things, there's kernels of truth in all of this.
There absolutely are super weird guys that stare at women on the tube and make them feel uncomfortable.
And there was a lot of them.
But that doesn't mean that everything has to change to accommodate a sense that everyone's like that.
Otherwise, nothing is ever going to, it'll be the death of mankind.
Well, the issue and the priority of safetyism, of trying to remove any of the edge cases of risk in an attempt to make all risk cases removed, what is the downstream consequence of this?
Like how many weird guys on tubes are stopped for how many millions of guys not approaching a girl?
And you may say your balance sheet may say no woman should ever be made to feel uncomfortable on a tube.
And that's your prerogative of your value set.
But if it was, and this is going to stop a million relationships or 10,000 relationships or 1,000 relationships, there is a balance sheet that we have to think about.
And this is the same.
It's the same for everything.
It's not just about men and women in dating.
It's about what sort of jokes should be taught.
Where should we have the watershed?
Why is it nine o'clock or 9.30?
Why isn't it 8.30?
Why isn't it 10 o'clock?
All of these things are adjudications that we make and we're getting increasingly bad at making them.
Balancing Humor with Social Impact 00:07:38
You've moved to America pretty much full time now.
How do you find that?
I've lived and worked in America for the last 20 years.
It's an amazing country with amazing people.
The can-do mentality absolutely exists there.
And they don't have the kind of class structure issues that we have here.
They have other issues, obviously.
But how do you find the difference culturally between the two countries?
They are a very enthusiastic people.
And I flourish around enthusiasm and excitement.
Americans kind of have permanent first-line cocaine energy at all times.
And I really wish that I could re-import it back over to the UK.
I want to make enthusiasm great again.
I really think that's what I'm saying.
The trouble is, you see, the British people, we tend to view overly enthusiastic people with deep suspicion because we're naturally quite a cynical, piss-taking bunch.
And so, if someone's like, someone's too hyper-enthusiastic, you know, you come along, Chris, you're bouncing off the walls, you're handsome, you're fit, everything's going for you, you're making millions.
Please keep going.
And you're giving it the full nine enthusiastic yards.
Not a British blokes will be like, oh, shut up, Williamson.
They want to play.
That's the line of cocaine that I have.
They'll want to bring you down a peg or two.
That's the British way.
I know the difference, but I'm not sure it's necessarily a bad thing.
No, look, horses for courses.
I understand the British desire for sardonic wit and banter and all of that sort of stuff.
But a couple of things that I realized, despite the fact that I was the director leader of this events company, you know, crafting British culture for a long time, was on Love Island, was on Take Me Out, you know, did all of the things, model TV, all that stuff.
I flourish significantly more around people that are positive, some around people that when you tell them, dude, I just got an invite to go on Joe Rogan, they don't go, ooh, look at you.
Instead, they go, dude, that is so awesome.
I'm really proud of you.
Well done.
Those are my people.
And if you want to be around the sort of people who, when you tell them good news, take the mick out of you, totally fine.
I've got to say, I do.
Personally, I prefer to be amongst people who will just constantly bring me down a peg or two.
Well, maybe that's something that you need to adjust the current situation.
No, but why though?
I think it's healthy.
Otherwise, my egoism would run even more riotous than it does.
So again, this is to do with my constitution.
I need more people to inflate me because I have imposter syndrome and a little bit of social anxiety.
And I'm a little bit introverted.
And I need that.
I need a little bit more of that.
And I've flourished since being alongside that.
That being said, maybe I'm just a normal level of ego, but I spent 32 years having the mick taken out of me in the UK, like every other British person does.
And this is just starting to compensate to even the scales.
I'm not really too sure.
We've done a little quickfire wisdom quiz for you to round things off.
Just a quick answer.
You've got to choose.
There's no sitting on a fence here.
You're a straight talker.
Texas or Stockton on Tees?
Texas.
Wow.
Really?
What a start.
Stockton on Tees was famous only for having the UK's highest teen pregnancy rating, and then it lost that.
It doesn't even have that anymore.
Psychology or spirituality?
Psychology.
Left-wing or right-wing?
Ooh, right-wing.
You hesitated.
Yeah, because I think that anyone who takes the entirety of their worldview from a single side is probably an idiot and someone that shouldn't be trusted or listened to.
But you gave me a binary choice, so I had to pick something.
Yeah, I used to think I was left-wing, and then the woke phenomenon began.
And I've just veered apparently ever further to the right because I just can't stop it.
It's you and Tommy Robinson just chilling out together.
Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson?
This will test you.
Oh, God.
Rogan.
I was on his show last week.
I can't say that.
You're chucking Peterson under the bus.
Wow.
Look, he's coming through to Austin soon.
I'll buy him a steak and some salt and some water.
It'll be okay.
Cricket or UFC?
Used to play cricket.
You were very good cricketer.
Cricket or UFC?
Cricket all day.
Good man.
Monogamy or playing the field?
Monogamy.
Beef burger or veggie burger?
It's the easiest one by far.
Beef burger all day.
That veggie burger can get flamethrowered by one of Elon Musk's things.
Oh, thank God you said that.
Love or money?
Love.
But you can say that because you're rich.
Speak for yourself.
You're the one that's just pivoted.
You're the one that's just pivoted from big time TV to that sweet, sweet YouTube ad sense money.
That's what we're talking about.
Well, you know what?
It's very interesting because I've watched what happens with you and with Joe Rogan and all these guys, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro.
There is a whole different world out there.
But one of the best things for me, I love interviewing people in a way I can really, hopefully unlock what they're really like.
You can't do that in a restricted 47-minute television format.
Correct.
So I was constantly having to cut off people right when I felt like I was getting to them.
Whereas today, we've had a really interesting conversation.
So I've never met you.
I've never spoken to you, but I've really enjoyed it.
But as it's gone on, we've kind of, as you do in interviews, it's a little bit like sparring.
You kind of work each other out a bit and then you start to relax and enjoy it more, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I spent a little bit of time doing the old school TV thing.
Take me out was my first introduction and then I did Love Island.
And in between that, I did, you know, a decade of commercial mail modeling and stuff like that.
It feels so contrived and cynical and restrictive and just not fun.
And then you get to rock up.
And if someone has had a bad beef burger the night before, guess what?
We can spend five minutes talking about beef burgers.
And it just feels so normal.
It is liberating.
Yeah.
It is.
And I imagine that for you on the frontier of stepping into the muck in the mire of YouTube podcast world along with the rest of us, it must be nice.
I really, really hope that you have a ton of fun.
And if and when you come out to Austin next or you're through America, I'd love to bring your modern wisdom.
I think that we'd have a great chat.
I think we would.
I'd enjoy that.
Let's finish off the quiz.
Just a couple more.
Podcast or book?
Podcast.
Mental strength or physical strength?
Physical strength.
Mental strength is downstream from it.
See, I think mental first.
I think mental strength is the number one issue in the world right now.
I think we need to make our young people mentally stronger.
They're all gym money.
I don't disagree.
They're all gym money.
They're all piling the weights on, but they don't have it up here.
I think that most people are neither.
I think that most people have atrophied physically and mentally.
And I think that the easiest change that you can do, trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction.
And you can't really change the mind with the mind.
You have to change it with the body first.
So going for a walk will do way more for your mood than sitting and thinking about and vacillating about whatever's dealing with you.
If I had the choice between a good night's sleep or a hard training session, I would go to the gym because the difference in my mood before and after the gym is way more than before and after a night's sleep.
Move Your Body to Change Your Mind 00:00:35
So I don't disagree.
The two work sympatico together.
But for me, if you do not have a physical practice of some kind and you're struggling with mental health, you need to look at the physical side before you look at the mental side.
That is the foundation.
That's the raw materials of what your mentality is going to grow out of.
Chris Williams said, a fascinating interview.
Thank you very much indeed.
I know the impact you have on people is real.
I know it's expanding.
I think you're a force for good.
I think there's no ambiguity about that in comparison to people like Andrew Tate.
And I think you are doing great work.
Keep it up.
I appreciate you.
Thank you, Piers.
Take care.
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