In this episode of Modern Wisdom, host Chris Williamson and guest James Smith, a podcaster, author and co-founder of the energy drink Neutonic, explore why solving problems rarely reduces worries, why extra money brings diminishing happiness, and why people rush to skip stages of life. They discuss fertility and starting a family, the guest's rebellious teenage years and schooling, and why Smith thinks gamifying life can help people stay motivated.
Listeners will hear several arguments about comparison, status and success, which the speakers present as personal views rather than settled facts.
In this episode Chris Williamson, James Smith
The transcript of this episode, on growing up, happiness and gamifying life with James Smith, was made with the technology behind HappyScribe's Teams AI note taker.
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You can spend your entire life solving your problems without ever feeling like you have fewer problems. And the more successful you become at improving your circumstances, the more absurd the problems you find yourself worrying about can become. So I had Martin Seligman on—positive psychology guy—there's this thing called conservation of dysphoria. So dysphoria, bad feelings; conservation of keeping them at the same level. So as your life gets better, some people look for worries with a bigger magnifying glass.
They make small worries bigger, so that the same amount of worries that they had in the past are what they have in the future. But because their life is better, there's actually fewer things for them to worry about. So they start inflating small things into big things. And I thought that, uh, you can spend your entire life solving your problems without ever feeling like you have fewer problems. I thought that was really cool.
It's interesting as well. There's a concept that a single coin in a vase makes the most noise. So as you eradicate the problems that you have in life, if you boil it down to one, it's going to make more noise than all the others put together. So, for instance, they say when you're young, you have your future to worry about, your career to worry about, finding a wife to worry about. You have all of these things to worry about. But then later on in life, when you've only got one issue, it is crippling because it's radiated and all your focus goes onto that. Like the purple elephant. The more you try to stop thinking about a purple elephant, the more omnipresent it is.
So there's another kind of synergistic thing there that, yeah, even you can have so much in life. And it's very difficult because when I was younger, I couldn't sympathize with people that had money. I was like, oh, you've got money, so you haven't got problems. Now I get a little bit older, I'm like, oh, it's just one of the different categories. You can still be wildly unhappy and have a good income.
I think one of the problems that people feel is, who am I to be upset about this thing when there's people that have got it worse than me? That, like, uh, velvet prison thing, champagne problems. Because not only have you got the—should I have put do not disturb on before I got started? Let's ride to war like the great Romans did. 11 Labs reaction still coming in. Uh, I think people that don't have obvious problems externally don't get that much sympathy, and then they feel guilty about having problems, which is a weird one.
It goes both ways as well, right? Well, I love to boil things down, and I'm not a neuroscientist. I'm not Andrew Huberman yet. Uh, the chemicals that you use in your brain for happiness and sadness, they're the same chemicals irrespective of circumstance. Now, I try and say to people with happiness—we've spoken about this before—that you don't get an uber surcharge, like a 1.7 ratio on serotonin or dopamine because you live in a bigger house or you are, you know, in a more privileged side of the world or whatever. Like a student having a laugh with their friends is having the same laugh and the same emotional, uh, thoughts, feelings, chemicals that someone as like a billionaire would.
But then the same—so we will accept that. We will go, yeah, of course, you know, a happy student and a happy millionaire have the same, same happiness. But we don't have the same adequate thought processes to sadness or to grief or to agony. You're like, oh, that person has nothing there sad, that's terrible. Or this person, although they have so much going right in their life, if they've got anguish, oh, why are you sad for?
Yeah. I love that uber surcharge idea that, uh, you were talking about the first time you ever made money online. UCEF has this great story. So my friend who I did a lot of podcasts with early on, he was a doctor, and he was working a night shift in a hospital. And while he was there, there was a lady who was having bowel problems. She wasn't able to sphincterly contract to push what was in her bowels out. Lots of discomfort.
And her family was there saying, look, look at how much pain she's in. This needs to be sorted. There's something called decompacting. And decompacting is putting a gauntlet glove on and getting into the rectum and manually pulling this stuff out. So he rings the specialist, the specialist, some South African guy, and he goes, um, no, no, no, I'm not coming in to sort that. You can decompact it yourself. It'll be fine. So he does this thing, spends half an hour, family shouting at him. He spent all of this time. He gets out, like, pulls the glove off, does all of the sanitary stuff, checks his phone, and he sold a PDF that he had written five years ago for £7.50 and realized that net after taxes he'd made more money from that PDF in the last hour than he had from decompacting this patient.
And your idea of the uber surcharge, I think, where did that come from? What was the first example of that?
So I was saying, for instance, put it very simply, $10,000 a month. I was like, wow, this is going to be amazing to accommodate until I hit it. And it was amazing. But then the first $100k a month, you would think on a linear basis would be 10 times the enjoyment. But I actually got about an 0.8 surcharge. The 10k made me happier. And I've heard this before on my quote unquote way up. And I was like, these people are mental. They are all wrong. And then I experienced it myself. And I was like, oh, they're kind of right in some respects. And there's almost diminishing returns as you go on. But every person will lie to themselves and go, oh, but the next thing will yield to the surcharge.
You've already achieved goals that you said would make you happy. Yeah, I mean, it's obvious when you see it with money. And I think people have got a pretty twitchy relationship with talking about money, especially given how completely horrendous. I mean, we're in the UK, and I think I saw a poll that was put up earlier on. 74% of people in the UK say that they feel like their quality of life is worse than five years ago. 74% of people say that they feel like it's worse. So cost of living, all the rest of it. But like, forget the money thing.
Just talk about experiences. Like the first time that you got to take a trip abroad with your friends. Wide-eyed, you're so excited, you're having a beer at 6 a.m. in the departure lounge.
Mali Aero 7.
Yeah. Unbelievable. And then.
Did you have the polo shirts with the team, like, with the names on the back?
We couldn't afford polo shirts. I'm from a working-class family.
Mine was Jimbo. I had 23 on the back.
Jimbo.
That was my name until I went to uni.
Okay. I'm glad that went. And then you go on holiday again and you need this sort of ever-increasing dose. Like, this is what habituation is. It's a tonic adaptation. I think talking about it kind of like a drug addict or seeing it like a drug addict throughout your life. Before he made the hard right pivot into professional anti-Semite, I spoke to Dan Bilzerian about this. And he said, I asked him this question because he's like this guy who's maybe speed ran hedonism more quickly than anyone, at least in the public eye, right?
Like all of the women, all of the drugs, all of the flights, all of the holidays, and the houses and the cars and the guns and everything. And I asked, do you ever feel like you sort of went through it too quickly? Do you wish that you could have slowed down? Because once you've bought your dream car, or once you've been to the dream holiday, or once you've got the house that you've always wanted, where do you go from that? And the same thing is true at whatever level you're at. You basically want to try and stretch out your achievement of different things and goals.
Like, for instance, we're in Exeter at the moment. We're on tour. Hello to everyone, by the way. It's a very unceremonious introduction to the tour bus. Look at that. Oh, it's raining. Fucking brilliant. So for the people that are just listening, James has lifted up the window on the tour bus to expose an enterprise rent-a-van to Peugeot Boxster. That's a '26 model, though. That's nice. Um, one, two, three, four.
Four biffer bins.
Five non-recyclable. Non-recyclable though.
Oh.
Biffer bins out there. And a yellow parking.
Bollard.
Bollard thing. That's lovely. It also took, oh, hello. That's someone throwing rubbish out. It also took maybe over a hundred point turn to park the bus here this morning. Like, we got to the parking spot on time, and we were late for the rest of our day. Not because of traffic, but not because of not finding a parking spot, but simply because of not being able to get into the parking spot.
It's because you've got a trailer on the back full of Newtonic.
That is true.
The point you were making before, the hedonism thing.
Yeah.
Uh, permission to be evangelic.
Run it.
Having kids. And this isn't me trying to say to people they need to have kids.
Say it.
I have done every hedonistic thing to excess. Whatever amount, I've done more. Dan Bilzerian, like, he had the more, the flashier version, the jets.
You had the working-class version.
Mate, I had the front three seats on easy jet. That was my jet. You know, uh, so I've run hedonism. I never want, you know, if you, if we sat here, or even when we did the pod where I was laying in bed on a pregnancy pillow and you were at your house in Newcastle, if you in that pod you said, do you want to have kids? I go, no. I was like, not really. Not really bothered. Then even at 30, 31, 32, had the books, had the tours, I had one of these buses, not one part of my brain was thinking about kids. Then I've had my son since we last had this, and I cannot believe the amount of happiness I derived from it.
You see me, all I do is moan that I'm too far away from my son. So people out there, when you talk about a decline of happiness, and I know there's a decline in birth rate, I know the correlation.
Pregnancy things might be like.
Yeah. Like, obviously it's, you can't point causation, but it's crazy to me how many people in their 30s feel a little bit lost. I've never had that, but having my son has been this, like, this homing beacon, something that never experienced. And again, there's got to be a part of it. I've spoken to you about this before. Being adopted, I've never seen a blood relative.
Crazy.
So, like, never.
First time you told me that, that when you pick your son up, it will be the first time in your entire conscious life that you touch another blood relative.
Yes. It's mad.
Insane.
And then when I look at him, I'm like, what, what is, what of this is from me? What is it from my fiance? It's amazing, but it's crazy. It's actually made me a lot less ambitious in other areas of my life. And I really love it. So I joke a bit, uh, with falling off, joking with these boys. Everyone we talk to, I'm like, oh, I used to be relevant or whatever. But like, success now for me is such a metric of, like, my son. So, uh, I've not really spoken about this publicly, but when I had my son, we got pregnant straight away. Boom. No problems, no issues. Now we're going through secondary infertility.
Yes, I'm on TIT, but my sperm numbers are good with an IVF clinic. Uh, TAZ count is great. We are in a beta region paradox where if my sperm quality was worse or her egg count was worse, we would have started IVF sooner. But because everything's fine, the IVF clinic is like, yeah, just keep going, just keep going. And, um, so we're now experiencing difficulty in, uh, conceiving. By the time this goes out, it could be different, hopefully. But a lot of my friends now, they're like 34, 35. They've told me their whole life they really want to have kids. And they're like, oh, but I want to buy a house first, or I want to do this. I want financial security and all of these things, which I get.
And I'm not saying that their values are, uh, you know, not worthy or whatever. But I said to one of them, if you knew it was going to take you two years to get pregnant, would you start now? They went, of course. I went, well, you don't know that you're going to fall pregnant straight away.
Yeah.
So why not start now?
Talking, talking as a man who's currently going through some fertility complications.
Yeah. And now I'm just looking at my friends and I'm like, oh, if you could relive my life and you could say to me, like, what could be the worst thing that could ever happen to me? I mean, imagine we do decide eventually to have a child and we couldn't. There is no amount of, and this is coming from someone that was indifferent about having kids.
Yeah.
So the reason I'm saying this and kind of being vulnerable and talking about my personal affairs is there'll be people listening to this, potentially teens, 20s, 30s, maybe even 40s, who if you're anything like me felt indifferent to the idea of having children, I'm now telling you, it is my, and family, I would say, is my sole driver of happiness. Everything else is noise. I want to be wealthy for my family, for my child. I want him to be spoiled.
Well, it gives you a purpose beyond just this, like, selfish, self-aggrandizing, please, me, me, me, fulfill me more, fulfill me more. I totally get it. And yeah, uh, it's a ruthless realization that there might be complications down the line.
Again, we spoke about those brain chemicals. We got dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. Now, those we can get from video games. We can get them from scrolling on TikTok. We can get them from like a myriad of things. But synthetically, it's never been easier. And I think that people are filling their cup with those things from, and I'm not saying, do you know what? I was having a discussion with Will Store, and I kind of said to him, like, oh, scrolling on social media at night's bad. He goes, well, well, well, explain that to me. And I tried to explain it to him. He goes, do you enjoy scrolling on your phone before bed?
I go, yeah. He goes, what's the problem then? What's the problem? And I think that so many people can get so much from their devices, from their phones, from movies, from Netflix, whatever. Is that the reason that people, if you sat in an empty house with just three TV channels and there's nothing else to do?
You're probably going to crack on and get some other stuff done. Speaking of that, there's a line that I learned from Dr. K a couple of weeks ago. Growing up is abandoning what works over and over again. Growing up is abandoning what works over and over again.
I've got another one for you.
Yep.
On this. It's a quote, and I'm probably going to butcher it because I can't remember it. It was a person looking at a picture of their parents who were the same age they are now when they were a child. They go, now I look at my parents and realize they were just old teenagers that didn't know what they were doing. Because they now, as a teenager, or they as a parent now for the exact same. So myself, as a father, feel like a teenager plus 20 years.
We were walking around, we're, I said, we're in Exeter today on tour. This is the tour bus. It's a bit of a shit tip. Sorry. Um, we were walking around the university today, and I look at students, and I'm like, yeah, that's me. That's me. But it's evidently not. It's me 20 years ago.
How old do you feel saying that? I remember when I was young, people were like, oh, yeah, just you were when you get older. In 20 years, I'm like, shut up, mate. I'm 20. I'm invincible.
Quiet, Hank.
Mate, I am, do you get a, I get this like weird anxiety now where if I have a pain in my side.
Cancer.
That's, yeah, I'm going to die.
I'm dead.
Yeah. I get a toothache now, and I'm like, that's probably a brain tumor. At 20, anything would happen. I'd be fine.
Made of rubber and magic. I'll sniff it away.
In Laos, you know, there's people dying and drinking the ethanol in Laos. I drank out of a tub with a dead gecko in it. It was pretty much ethanol. I got a free vest. I was buzzing. What are you laughing at? Mate, in Laos, I'd do anything. The whiskey was cheaper than water.
What were you doing in Laos?
Uh, tubing. Know that tubing?
No.
Lang Vien.
What's that?
Oh, I get to teach Chris Williamson something. You go to this town, and there's going to be some old boys nodding along to this. So you, um, usually start in Thailand, then you go into Laos. The best way to describe Laos is instead of chilling their beer, they just put ice in it. Right? You've got this area called Lang Vien. Uh, and Luang Prabang, great words. And in Lang Vien, they have this tubing, and you see people, they've got like the tubing vests on. You get a rubber insert from a tire.
Okay.
They pump it up. You go downstream, then you jump in the river. The river goes downstream. You're floating in a rubber tire.
Like a lazy river.
Yeah. Then there's bars, shacks at the side. They chuck out ropes. You grab them, they pull you in. Drinking games.
This sounds great.
Straight arm in pines. You get absolutely smashed. But Australia had to shut it down because too many Aussies were dying.
I thought you were in Laos.
Yeah. But the Austrian.
How did Australia get and shut it down?
Because the insurance companies, the travel insurance companies, they were breaking their backs, breaking their legs. You're a five-hour trip from the nearest hospital. There's rope swings, but the river depth changes. So as we're going downstream, I'm catching my ass on rocks. Then the rope swings are massive. So these Aussies are like, yeah, fucking hell, mate. Let's go fucking tubing, cat. That's what they're like. You see them in Bali, they're just going nuts. They were doing rope swings into shallow water, fucking themselves up. But anyway, as you go down, you look at the prices, and like the whiskey was like almost free, but you drank it.
The next day you didn't have a hangover. You felt like you'd been poisoned. But genuinely, people have gone blind. They've died from drinking these fucking options.
Exciting.
You know, like Thailand, formalin, you get the bottles with all the same safety tops. It's like that. But no, funny thing you don't know about this town. The town where you're hung over, I don't know if it's the same now, you've got maybe like 20, 30 cafes, and all of them play Friends all day, every day.
Why?
It's just what they do in the town. And you go in there for breakfast.
Why?
You have breakfast and a drink.
Friends is a national sport.
Yeah, but you sit down, and then suddenly you're having a bit of food, then you're there, and then someone's like, let's go out. I'm like, it's the Los Rachel saga. They're like, we've seen it four times. I'm like, I don't care. And then like you're in there, but then the funny thing is all the workers in the restaurants have American accents, and they can speak along to it because all day every day.
They've learned English from Friends.
But then they mime across to it, and they sound more like Roscella than Roscella sounds like Roscella. So all the people, they've done tubing. So they shut it down because too many people were dying. You went back and it was a lot more tame. I remember one night I got so drunk, it got dark. I'm going down a river in the dark, and these tuk-tuks are like, and you just get scared, and you pull in, you pay whatever to get back into town.
Because you don't want to be left stranded in the middle of the water.
So quick story, if you're here, call out the Newtonics hit. Um, I was backpacking six months. I did six months in Asia. I spent 3,000 pounds. Like it was unreal. And I'll probably spend that in pret on this tour.
You definitely spent it on Nando's.
We get to Luang Prabang, and we've got to decide how we get to Hanoi. We're going to Vietnam for the first time.
Who are you with?
Uh, an ex. Classic. Fell in love with a girl from uni. She wants to go back to Asia. I said, I'll come with you. I saw my rent a Megane for this. Got it.
R26.
R26.
Oh, no.
Rent a Megane R26 Formula One edition is the go-to car.
We both had the same car. Both had the same car. If I can find that in left-hand drive, I would import it to America today. They'll have them in France. I'll be able to get a French one.
That'd be the best thing you could do.
Mate, could you imagine Camaro R26 F1 Megane?
Recaro bucket seats.
Two cup, yeah, Alcantara though.
I do worry if you went back, it's not the same. So we had to decide whether or not we're going to go across. And you make friends. Funny enough, one of the friends that I made traveling sent me a picture drinking Newtonics the other day. I was like, this is weird.
Unreal.
But we decided we're going to fly. But the flight was 51 pounds. And that's a lot of money for a backpacker. But I was like, look, let's just go. I think it's like a 12 or 15-hour bus journey. And you get the sleeper buses when you go around. But a sleeper bus can be a nightmare. On the way to Chiang Mai, someone left the door open and all the mosquitoes got in.
I love Chiang Mai.
You're just getting attacked by the mosquitoes. Cooks anyway. So we arrived there, and I look at the people that got the bus, and I was like, oh, did I make a mistake flying? They look at me. They go, there were these two beautiful French girls, but they had a stomach bug on the bus. Mad diarrhea. They kept shitting in the toilet. They blocked the toilet.
Not supposed to shit on the bus.
The bus driver comes back, locks the toilet. They had to shit themselves in their seat. And I'm talking for like 15-hour bus journey.
Surely you can't keep going. I guess it is Thailand. They don't give a fuck.
Between Luang Prabang and Hanoi, it's like mountain roads. Everyone talks about how dangerous the cliff roads are. The driver's just trying not to get you killed. So he's like, I don't give a fuck. You shit yourself. So they had to sit there with beautiful French girls that shut themselves for hours.
Some people could be into that. I did Chiang Mai to Pai, which is.
Best place to learn a moped.
One of the most northerly, uh, cities, towns, I guess.
Beautiful town.
Did you do Pai? Oh, yeah. So that.
That's where you go to learn how to ride a moped because you fall off and they're like, you're in Pai.
The bus that you take up there, what is it? It's called a Vomit Alley. 350 turns in a six-hour journey. So just hairpins all the way up. And then when you're coming back, you'd think that the going up would be worse, but it's not because it's slower. It's the coming down in a 18-person shithouse sprinter van, some Thai sprinter van. And on the way back, I was with my business partner's sister. We were going back together. So we were sat together and there were two Chinese students behind us. And they were, I could hear, like that.
And all that happened, bus driver sat there. You know the classic bus driver underhand pose? Like holding the bottom of the steering wheel. You know exactly what I mean. Like this.
Like Donald Trump.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like somebody that's got like sauces giving out hors d'oeuvres, but he's just controlling the bus. All that he did, didn't even look back. He just heard the, like that, one hand off the steering wheel. Just grabbed two plastic bags, just went like that. Just put them behind. We passed plastic bags back and they just threw.
How long were you in Thailand for?
Month and a half.
So there's this rumor when you're there that the big Chang bottles, to be careful, because they're stronger beer. I don't know if you heard this. You heard this, team? So I didn't know if it was true, but one day.
Test it.
This girl that I ended up going traveling with. By the way, if you're thinking of going traveling with your girlfriend, absolutely do not do it.
Destroy the relationship.
My mom told me before I went, she's like, James, you are making a big mistake. I was. I'm sorry, mom. You're right. So we just argued.
Moms are always right, dude.
So if we're arguing, I just get hammered. So we're in, um, we're in Thailand. I think we're in Koh Samui, and I'm just necking these big bottles of Chang. The next thing, I black out. But I wake up, oh, I kind of remember. You know when you black out, but you just, you suddenly just got memory. I'm walking down the side of the road. They found me, and the first thing they say to me is, you've been in a moped crash. And I'm like, what? And then I look, and all the skin is off my shoulder, all the skin's off my leg. They're getting the ID now. They're rubbing me down. They're like, you've obviously ridden your moped and you've crashed. And I'm like, oh, shit. But like, I don't remember anything.
No helmet, nothing. This is crazy. Then we get back and we find my moped. There's not a scratch on it. And we have no idea where I've been or who I've been with. They just said, you just walked out the hotel. You've been gone like two hours. I must have got.
Came back missing half of your skin.
But the craziest thing, it was kind of scary in Thailand. You go drinking for a bit that I could have broken a leg, lost a leg, got concussed. Crazy. The amount of times I've done stupid shit like that and made it out alive. Then the locals come out with the ID and get it on you so you don't get infected.
I had to leave Bali for that. My first time in Bali, I came off a moped after seven days, laid up in a bed taking trazodone, which was not trazodone, tramadol, which is fucking lovely. That was fun. But apart from the fact that you get really acclimatized to it, I can see why people get addicted to that stuff. Came back and I couldn't get it anymore. I was like, oh, well, that's an easy way to kill. It was like the, uh, the Vietnam vets that were on heroin while they were away and they came back and they're like, but yeah, I got infected and had to fly home. Momentous just made one of my favorite products significantly better and $50 cheaper. They have reformulated their sleep packs with a better and more research-backed form of magnesium, making the new formula even stronger than before.
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You know, um, we're like unk status now.
Right.
Where we were just helping a guy pick his future.
Peacock.
We've been walking around with students, giving them life advice for a lot of today. But, um, I now, when I'm in Bali, will find people getting on their mopeds and sometimes wear a helmet. Where the one time in Vietnam.
You're the least cool person in Bali.
Yeah. The funny thing was, um, in Vietnam, I'm pretty sure it was, yeah, I was turning right. Yeah, it might have driven left in Vietnam. I can't remember. But anyway, I was packing bags to get to a bus to move on in Vietnam. So I'm on a moped. I'm shuttling back and forth. I put all my bags on me, and I had to put a bag under the seat, and my helmet was there that I never wore. So I was like, oh, for fuck's sake, I'm going to have to wear my helmet on this run. So I put my helmet on. A local thought I'd left my indicator on. So I'm slowing down to turn. He's overtaking me as I've turned and T-boned me.
And I remember just cracking my helmet on the floor. I was wearing all the backpacks as well, which worked out like.
Body armor.
Yeah, like body armor. I get up, I'm screaming at this local guy, and these Americans come out and they're like, bro, you're fine. You're fine. My moped was written off, petrol all over the floor, people putting sand on it. The one time I needed a helmet was when I.
From Globe.
Safe, safe keep it. I didn't want to lose the helmet and pay whatever it was. But now every time I go around, I just imagine if there was no helmet on for that, my brains would have been over a road in Da Nang, on a tram.
Talking about advice for relationships, do and do not do, George from the Tin Man posted this thing, which was asking a bunch of men who've been married for quite a while advice for guys and how to navigate your relationship. And lots of them were quite silly and quite cute. And I thought that one of them was really interesting, which is when you're trying to help your girl decide what to wear for the evening, a lot of the time there might be a fashion show that happens. And after a while, it can delay you to the point where you're late for the meal and that's not good and she might get frustrated.
So one of the pieces of advice was when your girl comes out in the first outfit, you say, darling, that looks, you look fantastic. This is gorgeous. But I do want to see another one. Like, can I see, can I see what your second choice would be? Then when she comes out in the second one, say, I mean, this is, this is stunning, but I did prefer the first one. Save yourself three more outfit changes.
You do realize that every single time a man does that now, they've listened to this podcast. I know what you're doing. You're manipulating.
Yeah. If you're listening to this in the car, it's not going to work. A lot of couples listen to this either in the car or separately. We hear this a lot at the live shows where they'll come up and they go, we listen to you all the time. Like when I go to work and he goes to work and then we talk about it over dinner on a nighttime. And if you now try and use this. So basically, boys, if you've listened to this one before your girl has, you need to say, don't listen to that one with Chris and James. It's actually, it's kind of bullshit. They're sat on the bus. It's a, yeah, it's a mess. It's a bit of a mess that Guardian's going to do an article about it. You don't need to listen to that one. Get her to skip over that and you can keep that hack for you.
But I do think, what was, what was some of the other ones?
My dad's got one where he said, the key to a long successful marriage is accepting you're wrong even when you're right.
That sounds dismissive though. Chicks don't like it. But then it's not just accepting that you're wrong, even if you're right, it's making it convincing that you actually think that you're wrong. Because otherwise it's, you're just being dismissive.
He got 52 years married.
Can't argue with the outcomes.
I had a bit from the last show where I was talking about death row meals, where I was saying, it's kind of mad that you do the most heinous crimes of rape and murder and whatever. And when we do execute you, we're going to let you pick your last meal. And I joked that my dad's been married to my mom for 52 years and he doesn't get to pick what's for dinner. So like, why is it that people that, anyway, so like, if we're going to kill, sorry mate, we're going to kill you because you're a heinous murderer. But what do you fancy? We'll make it happen.
I mean, think about that lady, the one, the first person in history to have had the lethal injection twice in the same session and survived it.
It gives me a good idea of a new way to torch people. So let's say someone's on death row. Let's just inject them with saline and keep doing it and go goodbye.
But they're on death row.
Yeah, yeah.
But you're not supposed to torture them.
No, no, no. It's only saline, Chris.
Right.
We're just going to make a psychological trauma to make them feel that they're about to die. They'll be like, ah, got you. We'll do it again tomorrow. And then they like Russian roulette.
This sounds like Guantanamo. This is like John Kerry account stuff. You can't be doing that. I'm friends with John Kerry account.
Oh, no, no.
He's going to shout at you. Other advice, other bits of advice. If she can't decide what she wants to eat, tell her you've decided, but it's a surprise. Give her one chance to guess where you're going. Whatever she says, say yes and go with it. 99% of the time, it's where she really wants to go. It's so manipulative. I can't work out if this is horribly misogynistic or like actually a beautiful way to just cut through a lot of the mess of a relationship. Here's the final one. Just order fries. She's not hungry, sure, but she'll eat the extra fries.
Have you seen those videos where this is so, this is ruthless? You can't do this. Guys will ask their chick whether or not she wants a snack. So do you want to go out? Should we go for a drive-thru? We could get ourselves a little treat. Why don't we go for a drive-thru? And then when they pull up, say, you can order, what is it that you want? She orders. And then when the person asks him, he's like, I'm all right, I'm not eating. It drives people. But the same thing is true. In a relationship, you are allowed to gain weight, but only relative to your partner.
Like you and your partner's level of fatness or fitness is supposed to oscillate together. When you start to.
It's a massive point of friction. Coaching people over the years, I used to call it the relationship saboteur, where if one party wants to lose weight and the other doesn't, they will not succeed.
I think that's now called a fitness gap relationship.
Look at that. I'm trying to teach him stuff. I'm learning back.
And you're ahead. I'm just giving it nomenclature. So I came up with a cool name for it. You came up with the concept.
Don't know what that means. But yeah, in essence, they were just finding ways to sabotage. Oh, I just got a sachari. Oh, but you know I'm dieting here but this one, you know, it's Friday night. Like Friday night change.
Yeah, you've got to be on the same page together. You have to. From a health and fitness perspective, you have to be on the same page.
When do you reckon this is one for you? Like, I, you know, the Russians used to have those like umbrella tips with poison in. They used to give little people.
Poking you in the back of the leg.
Yeah.
Didn't some guy, that happened in the UK, right? They did some guys.
Yes. So I was thinking we get those, but we put like two tied in it.
Just jab, unsolicited jab people would retter.
They would be fat family members. So there'd be.
So this is an intervention from within the family.
Yeah, fat uncle.
Okay.
So fat uncle Trevor, he's just a walk-in bloody NHS heart attack. You get the little umbrella.
160 over 110.
Yeah, absolutely. Fucking get up to him, give him a little prick. Oh, what was that? Oh, sorry, uncle. You know, I didn't see you there. Do that once a week. 2.5 milligrams start off, whatever. But then I'm thinking we're moving to oral. I think they've got oral Ozempic.
Oh, you're looking for the Bill Gates solution.
So I'm wondering, imagine in the future, I'm just saying.
That's a deep cut.
Imagine your wife, you've started training, you're in your fitness, and your husband's dragging a little bit behind and he's not losing the weight. Imagine soon there could be just a little je ne sais quoi going into.
A little seasoning.
Yeah. You can put it in a grinder. Yeah. And then he's dropping weight and be like, yeah, do you know what? You know, Trevor's looking amazing. Is that going to happen?
What did you think of that guy? So we just managed to finesse our way into Exeter University Gym, University of Exeter Gym, which for a high-class sporting university was actually a bit of a shitty gym.
Bit mid.
It was, yeah, not enough machines. I can't get pump on. Everyone in there probably very fit, probably great at the sports that they do. Not massive, right? But also 19.
Sleepy blessing.
We brought the average age up by.
The average free testosterone level.
Yeah, you did. The average free testosterone doubled just by you walking in. But as we were walking back, this is a question that's been asked a bunch at the live shows, and we got to do it in person today with one of the guys who came up and said, I'm a first year, I've been at uni for a month. He's only been at uni for a month. It's the fucking middle of October. He hasn't been at university. He's been at university for.
Maybe freshers, September.
Six weeks.
Six weeks.
Been at uni for six weeks, and I feel like I'm not making any progress, and I want freedom. So should I just sack it all off?
Studying business. And he's like, I suppose the dilemma here is you're like, well, if I'm studying business, am I going to learn as much as I would run in a business or being in a business?
You're 18. You can't go and run a business. Anyway, what, when people ask you that question, because they've asked me it a lot, because I do the Q&A, what's your perspective? Because you tried uni. What was, give me your perspective on this.
I told you a little bit about, on that reel the other day that I got kicked out of school. So I got kicked out of school technically. I didn't get enough grades to go to sixth form. So I went in, spoke to the teachers, and they didn't want to have me on into the college because I only had four GCSE. You're supposed to have five. Eventually they go, right, we'll do it, but you've got to be on your best behavior. You've not been a great student. Two weeks in and get kicked out.
What did you do?
So actually this is going to be crazy. When I was younger, I wanted to be in the military. So I was in the Army Cadets, applied to Welbeck College. My dad said I could only join the Army if I went in as an officer. So you have to go into like officer training and in essence, usually you have to be well qualified, which I wasn't. My school grades weren't good.
You can go straight to Sandhurst with a degree, or you can do OTC.
Yeah, so officer training called. The Welbeck College was where I was going to try and go. That's pretty much my only way through. And on my interview for that, I had a little police report coming up. I got in trouble when I was younger for shooting someone with an air rifle. But we'll glaze over that.
Check James' Instagram for the full story.
Yeah, so I go, yeah, I go to sixth form. I had pretty bad behavioral problems. Imagine this. I had a really cool lock knife that I used to use because we used to go off into.
What's that?
Like where you flick a knife out and then it doesn't come back.
Okay.
So we used to.
Why?
Because we used to go camping. That's cadets. You like go out, face paint. You get like an assault rifle. The bowel's concreted. But you'll have live rounds on you. If you shoot a live round in someone's face, half their face is coming off. So like, it was super cool, by the way. I don't think people would do, I went club scouts, cadets, then I wanted to go into the Army. So I could strip.
How were you such a tearaway? You had all of the guardrails to be highly disciplined and well behaved, and you shot someone at 13 and had a police report.
Well, this thing, I was excited to join the Army. I just wanted to go shoot someone.
So excited that you shot someone. Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out there's a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us, become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. They've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria so your cells can actually renew themselves. Timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 patents and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet. This isn't just theory. In clinical trials, people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40% in just 16 weeks, along with improvements in their overall energy.
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So the British Army rifle is called an SA-80. The ones that we use in cadets is called an L89AI GP cadet rifle. And basically it has a nine sight instead. I could still strip one, blindfold it, and put it back together. I still remember, yeah, where to clean the barrel. I still remember you would do drills where even as you're checking the barrels empty on the weapon, you do a sweep with your hand underneath the magazine cover to make sure there's no magazine in it. Like we, even as a cadet, as a 15-year-old, you do these drills.
Become very proficient.
I've been to Arborfield, Purbright. I've shot on some of the best rangers in the country. I've even used one of the digital rangers. This was like 20 years ago. So I was like obsessed. I loved it. But one day I was just like, oh, I'm just going to take the knife to school and show my mates. Got caught. And me as.
Sixth form.
Now this is 13, 14. It was just after I'd been arrested.
So you shot someone.
Yeah.
Got out of it.
Yeah, so it was.
Then took a knife to school.
It's criminal damage.
It doesn't the optics.
It would have been actual bodily harm because.
Do not.
The guy looked great. Seven stitches in the face. And I've told you about the ballistics report.
Can you just give, tell the story from start to finish because I wanted to take the piss out of you on Instagram for this story and I couldn't do it.
So we would, we had brake barrel air rifles. We'd have the pellets. We'd have the shot pellets.
Who's we?
Me and my neighbor. And we would shoot different things. And then we wanted to kind of raise the stakes. And at 13, you know, a freeway going past with cars driving, moving target, in our heads we'd be like, oh, that'd be cool. It didn't really occur to us in our brains that we would be committing damage on cars. Like imagine you're driving and someone shoots a pellet at your car. That is.
Would it leave a dent? Would it go through? Wouldn't go through.
Wouldn't go through. Significant damage. But we were just pissing around. And then one day.
So where were you pitched up?
Outside our house.
Outside of your own house.
Outside of our own house.
Right, cool.
Because my brain hadn't developed. The same time in my life, I took a knife in school to show my friends. The teachers were like, James, you don't understand that you can't bring a knife in school. And I was like, why? They were like, in case you stab someone. I'm not going to stab someone. They were like, but James, it's school. You can't bring that here. So shooting cars and thought nothing of it. One day I'm playing Age of Empires II. My mom walks in and she throws, great game, throws like a yellow pager. She's crying. She's like, what have you done?
The yellow pagers?
Like a phone book.
Why?
She was obviously trying to call someone when the police came.
Call who?
I don't know. But she's come to the, she was obviously in the middle of doing something. Police threw at the front door. Said to my mom.
And the closest projectile that she had to exact her outrage on you.
It was the yellow pagers.
She felt, okay. So your first.
All I remember is telling mom.
Apart from packs.
What have you done? Not the police pagers.
You had to say it again.
The image of a bomb. So go out and there's just two police officers sat in the front room with notepads. And I had to talk to my parents about this afterwards. I was like, what did they say? They said, we're looking for some lads, looking for some kids maybe that got air rifles. My mom was like, they'll be my son. She wasn't like, oh, I don't know what you're going about. She was like, they'll be my son. Come in. So I come out and they're like, what have you.
She's a good citizen.
What have you been doing? And we'd been pissed around. Like we didn't mean to shoot. Anyway, he goes, my mom's in hysterics. My dad's come home from work. He's like, don't say anything until you've seen a lawyer.
Good man.
I've already done everything at this point. And the police officers knew we weren't trying to hurt someone. So they were like, oh, so you were shooting items, you were shooting objects, you obviously missed. I'm like, correct. They actually were helping because they knew we weren't bad kids. They knew the neighborhood, whatever. We didn't go out that day to try and hurt someone. So they go, yeah, unfortunately, someone has been shot. Currently at Heatherwood. They're having stitches now. So.
Headwood.
Heatherwood. Heatherwood Hospital. It's like Ascott's biggest hospital. So they were like, my mom and dad obviously in hysterics. They go, let's do this tomorrow. Come to the police station. We'll do everything there. So I was like, oh God. Mom and dad were not happy. Next day, go there. And as you get into the police station, I was like, oh, I'm about to get a telling off. And I remember the police officer going, you ready? I was like, yeah. He's like, okay. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you do say at 13. Maybe used against you in a court of law. I'm there with my mom.
What does that mean when they say that? You're under arrest.
I'm under arrest now. So I'm going in.
As a 13-year-old.
Fingerprints, DNA, mug shot, the lot.
So you can't commit a murder in the UK now.
Interrogation room. Interrogation. My friends at school didn't believe I'd been arrested because they were like, oh, you're just lying. So one of my friends who'd been arrested had an ankle tag. He was like, tell me about the interrogation room.
You grew up in a really nice area.
That's how it begins, mate. He was from Ashford. My school was in Surrey. So anyway, I said, take deck, two tapes, two red buttons. He was like, oh, you did get arrested. So yeah, I came back and basically the police officer was like, look, you're going to meet the guy you've shot and you're going to apologize and he's not going to convict you. He's not going to press charges.
Who was it that you shot? How did you hit someone?
So before we met him, they took us to a ballistics report. So he went to Heatherwood Hospital. He said, I've been shot. The doctors then have to call the police. There's been a shooting.
If the sentence is proclaimed, I've been shot.
Armed response.
All hell breaks loose.
Armed response. So the guys that came to the door didn't have guns, but they were armed response in Ascott for this. So that would have been where my mom and dad had seen them. Full ballistics report. He was passenger. So this is in England. His wife's driving. Back window was open on the right side. Missed his son. Hit him in the face in the passenger seat. So the police are like, you could have shot the wife, blinded the wife, killed the wife.
He was driving.
Crashed the car. Could have crashed into another car.
And the.
Could have hit the son. And they were like, if you hit the son.
How old is the son?
Six or seven. They're like, if you hit the son, he's convicting you. He had seven stitches across his face, just under his lip that he needed from the shot.
Who shot it? You or your mate?
We don't know. Obviously, it must have been him. It must have been him. I'll give you everything. But you can imagine a world crashing down on you for what seemed like just being idiots, just shooting out and moving objects. So go through the ballistics report, have to meet the guy. Like, obviously, so apologetic, but there's nothing you can do at this point. Afterwards, if you don't get the conviction, I have a police reprimand until May 18. So in essence, if I get in any more trouble, I'm fucked.
Like bringing knives to school.
Yeah. So then. We haven't even got to my univ yet. So we had that. But then it meant that when I was out drinking, being like a yob when I was like 14, 15, 16, you know, and the police pull over and you've got alcohol in you and they're like, your lad's got booze. Yep. What have you got? WKD, four Fosters. What did you do? I'll pour it down the drain right now. I just didn't want to get in trouble again. Where my mate, she'd be like, oh, fuck off, mate. I was like, yes, sir, no, sir.
Goodie two shoes.
Yeah. And so that was a bit rough. Then got my four GCSEs. Then I couldn't even get into sixth form. So then we were pissing around one day in sixth form. We're bunking. I'm already like two weeks in. And Salesian School in Chelsea, there's a school hall and there's a drama department. All this props are behind the stage. And we thought that'd be a good place to bunk. We smoked cigarettes. We smoked in there. It was less likely to get caught in the drama hall than you would be outside. Anyway, we're dressed up in the props. We're fucking around. And I shove my mate. He's on a sofa that's got wheels on it.
I shove him off the stage. But he's holding onto the curtain. And the curtain's going, dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk, tipping off.
It's like a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
I'm pissing myself. I turn around at the back of the hall, cross arms to my head of year. He's just been watching us.
Smoking and pushing someone off a stage on a wheelie sofa.
So I think at this point I'm what, 16? Just turned 16. So go to my head of year. And they make you sit outside. So I'm sat outside. I'm like, oh God. Then my mom comes in.
Another yellow pagers.
Sit in there. This is like, what, two years after I've been arrested. Three years after I've been arrested. And also, I didn't get the grades. My mom's like, you need to go get a job. Sixth form was my way to not get a job. So my head of year was like, we can expel James formally. We have the grounds for it. Or you can take him out today. Like, you remove him from school today. We don't expel him. That was pretty much the ultimatum.
It's either leave or we fire you.
Yeah. So get in the car, drive on the way home. My mom takes like a slightly different route. We're not going home. She takes me to Bracknell Job Center. She pulls up. And as we're walking across to the job center, I'm walking behind her. I'm like, I'm a knockie out. And I'm texting my mates. Like, I've just been expelled. She gets my phone and just smashes it in the road. Just smashes it in the road. I've never seen like my parents like this before. Going to the job center, she turns to me. Don't come home without a job. That was it. Don't come home without a job. I was like, oh my God. So I went there and I sat down.
And one of the questions was, do you want to like keep going in education? I was like, what are my options? And there was an agricultural college doing a BTech in sport. And I was like.
The most canonical.
Like, can I qualify for that? They said, yeah. So I came home and I had to try and barter to my mom that I wanted to remain in college. So then what was good there was all my subjects were PE because of sports coaching. So that went pretty well. But then I got a BTech. And actually, I just got on really well with my lecturers. Played rugby for the college. Did a lot of sport. Used to give rugby kit that I got from playing for county to my lecturers. And they give me extensions on my work. So it was cool. I was like, oh mate, I'm going to Tenerife. I can't do the coursework.
Because you need to play sevens or whatever.
I was like, that waterproof looks quite nice. I was like, I'll get you one.
You were bribing your teachers with good merch.
And.
It's the same as us now. It's the same with Newtonic.
And the college I was at was called Barkshire College of Agriculture. They had like a grave digging course on site. So they were teaching people how to dig graves. Then we had the sports part. Then it was a question. But then at the end of that, you can top up and do something called a foundation degree. So you can turn your BTech into a first year of uni foundation degree. FDSC, it goes down as. And so I applied for that. But my mom and dad originally were like, we're not letting you go to uni because we know you're fucking up. We know you're getting debt.
So I actually.
They literally didn't trust you to go to university.
Yeah. I was like, I want to go to Bournemouth. They're like, no. I was like, what do you mean no? I'm 18. They're like, no. So I continued at my college.
My dad hadn't been arrested for like three years now.
So I did two more years. Technically university, technically Buxton Uni and Buckinghamshire. But the campus for it was my existing college. So I did four years at college. Loved it. It was great. Lived at home. Then for my third top-up year, to go from a foundation degree to a full degree, you have to do a top-up. And that's why I chose Hartbury College. Now Hartbury College is a rugby college. I thought I was pretty good at rugby until I went there. So I was like, Barkshire Under 20s captain. Playing like adults rugby was good. When I get there, they're like, oh, you can try out for the third team. I was like, one of the hardest games of my life.
We had like England Under 20 boys in the second team. And when I got there, freshers, a load of us got mumps. You ever had mumps?
I got mumps on one side in my first year of uni. Yeah. Do you want to explain what mumps is?
I first of all woke up thinking I'd been in a fight. Because I don't remember the night out and my jaw was killing me. So I'm asking my mates to be getting a scrap last night. And then I went to go see the nurse on site and she was like, you've either got glandular fever or I reckon you've got mumps. Now I had it in both sides and you look like a hamster. Is it your lymph glands?
Whatever's under here, I'm sure people in the comments will tell us, but yeah.
So from freshers, I got sent home, but like all the rugby team got down.
Because it's super contractable.
We said it was from sharing water bottles, but we were just all snogging birds on freshers. You know, it's like, and this is before camera phones. So boys can neck like 10 birds and two blokes in a night. And that's a heterosexual male. One time, me and another.
Sometimes you just miss the target, I suppose.
I remember one time, me and another bloke snogged each other to prove to the girls we were good at kissing. And in rugby, that was like, that's just normal. Like, just imagine giving someone a sweaty shot, I'm really good at kissing. Prove it. Dave, come here. Not my proudest semi. But anyway, so I got mumps, had to go home. And I was home for like three weeks. I lost a lot of weight. I lost maybe like eight or nine kilograms.
I remember I was in the trenches.
The fevers are terrible. Then just as I got good and it passed, it went to my nuts. And my nuts.
I've heard about this.
Massive. So I go to Heatherwood Hospital again. Same place as the first moment when they got shot. And they were like, yeah, you just got a lot of hold of them. So I was worried I was maybe going to be infertile for a minute. It's just really bad for your fertility. So I go back to uni. This is a long story, by the way. And I'm looking at like my cohort, my year, whatever. And I go to my first lecture, but I've been off campus for three weeks. So I expected when I first walked into that lecture, someone goes, James, welcome. Where have you been? I walk in and everyone just stares as if I've walked into the wrong room.
When I know fully well this is my lecture theater. And they're like, can we help? And I paused for two seconds and just turned around and left. Because I was really embarrassed. It wasn't what I was expecting.
It wasn't as welcoming as you hoped.
Yeah, I was like, we'll deal with this another day. And then I never went to a lecture again.
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Well, this is the thing. At uni, I was told, this may not be true. If you don't hand in your coursework, they kick you off campus. Well, I was living on campus. But someone said if you hand in a blank cover letter with every bit of coursework, they can't. So I did that.
How'd that work out?
Well, I didn't get kicked off campus. So remember I told you earlier that my name was Jimbo? So Lucy Lord, who you met last night, knows me as Jimbo. So everyone at uni knew me as Jimbo. No one knew me as James Smith. My last week of playing rugby for Hartbury, one of the coaches went, are you James Smith? I went, yeah. He goes, mate, I'm your dissertation supervisor. He's like, none of us know who you are. I only know you as Jimbo from playing rugby.
You Jason Bond yourself.
Yeah.
Big university.
He was like, mate, where have you been? I was like, oh mate, yeah, I went to my first lecture and no one ever let me in. He's like, we've been emailing you. I go, yeah, I never got my logins. I never even got into my student uni account to log into it. And yeah, that was my one year at uni. And the issue was though, did you have to do stats and research?
Yeah.
Stats and research was 7 a.m. on a Thursday. The social was on a Wednesday night. So it was never going to work. I was never going to pull an all-nighter in Liquid Gloucester, have my one-pound cheeseburgers on the way home, and get up at 7 a.m. for stats and research. I didn't even do my foundation degree properly. I swapped rugby stash with people I knew at college to get the first part of the degree. So then that was it. And then I had one year spending it at uni. And best year of my life. And didn't get the degree. So that guy, back to full circle, half an hour.
We pretty much said to him, like, you're away from home. You're building independence. You're learning how to feed yourself and wash your own clothes. That year away from uni for me like accelerated my, well, I didn't do that well, accelerated my maturity. I say maturity and I've got to backtrack on that. So you ever played Centurion?
Yeah. You're going to have to explain for the Americans.
I got banned from the prom. So we had a game. We were bored one day at uni. We're like, right. Every minute, on the minute, you got to do a shot. So we do a shot of beer. So we had like proper, decent pint glasses. And we've been drinking a bit before. And all I remember is kind of blacking out again. And at Hartbury College, you've got these different campuses. And the one we were in was the one they show people around. And so I get woken up by like our head of year at uni, knocking on our door where I was, took us to the block we'd been drinking in. I'd been using cans of deodorant to graffiti windows, but I'd been drawing cocks.
That's how everyone knew it was me. You know, super bad where they draw cocks and everything. That was me at uni. But I don't even know how I did this. I somehow put a knife in a fridge door.
Stuck it through it. What is it about you and weapons?
I don't know, mate.
It seems like a consistent, I mean, you know, we've run Newtonic for four years now and I haven't seen you with a weapon once. I'm worried that you're going to turn up one day with an improvised explosive device.
But the good thing is, I got this all out of the way. So like up until 23, 23, 24, I was a fucking liability. That's the only word. Nothing was impressive I've ever done. Like even on rugby tours, puking on the back of a bus, necking a bottle of wine, being a degenerate. Like really, university for me was learning the skills of drinking.
It's a really interesting archetype because everyone that's gone to school, college, sex form, and university in the UK knows like that kind of archetype of person. I certainly do. And I was facilitating it for much of my time in nightlife. I don't know what the equivalent is in America. I imagine that there will still be that maybe like Greek.
Football jock?
Life. Yeah, like they take their sport so seriously. Once you get, if you're talking college, university, you're a pro athlete. You're bigger than some pro athletes. The following that you have, they've now unlocked all of the sponsorship stuff. So Nike and Gatorade and Newtonic can come in and sponsor college athletes. If you're a college athlete, the fucking rules, we want to hear from you. That archetype of person that you just think this person should not be allowed near anything requires responsibility.
Can you imagine these people I went to uni with now? They're like, he's got what?
Yeah, that guy.
$100 million drinks business.
I think this is one of the things that's been interesting for me to reflect on. When you're young, you have no perspective over whether or not you're going to amount to something in future. And I think that we're able to make predictions based on how people perform in school. Because that's really the only merit that you have, even in sport. You knew that kid at 15 that played for England Under 17s. I did in cricket, right? Which was my sport. Or there was, because cricket's not a physical sport in the same way that rugby might be or even football, it means that you can speed run the adult game as well.
So you can have some superstar, Scotty Borthwick, who played for, played and I think still plays for Durham County Cricket Club. I remember he was 14 playing seconds, county seconds. This is something that men do full-time and he was still in secondary school. So you look at these very precocious young guys and girls and you're like, wow, they've speed run success. They're so much closer to this. And I think that it can create a sense of helplessness in young people. They go, well, look, this is the time when my future is being predicted by my present.
What's happening right now is going to be indicative of where I'm going to end up. And when puberty comes online, one of the things that you do is you start looking around and comparing yourself to everyone that's nearby because you're getting ready to become an adult in the world. And this is one of the reasons that trends seem to be particularly permeable. Like they seep through groups of especially girls, but also guys in puberty through college, through university. And you can think, fuck, like I'm not going to amount to anything.
Like how can I amount to anything?
That guy was what, 18?
18, yeah.
And he's been at uni for six weeks.
I said to him, I was like, mate, like not to say that I'm going to be your role model, but 18, I was still not allowed to go to uni at your age. I was house bound. I was on house arrest by my parents. Then at 20, I went to do freshers. Then by 21, I was failing my third year at uni, having the biggest, booziest year of my life. I was like then 22, 23, still lived in Gloucester, did door knocking. It was 22 when I did the door knocking. 23 did it during corporate. Then Empire. Yeah, there was door knocking for Empire. So I was like, mate, if in three years you're not door knocking in GL1, Southern Gas and Electric.
You're ahead.
Yeah, yeah, you're ahead. Then 24, I didn't become a PT because I wanted to run my own business. I did it because I just hated everything I'd done before. It was a move of desperation. I was like, oh, if I can charge three people 30 pounds and make 90 pounds a day, I could live off that. And I could get that done between nine and one. And then cool, I'll go and play Call of Duty. Everyone seems to think retrospectively like, oh, it was a strategic move. I was like, no, I fell into it by accident through hating my job. And here's another thing. In corporate, no one really does anything. So for instance, in a sales job.
There's a lot of input and not a lot of outcome.
I won't name the company, RSA Security, part of EMC. I was in the inside sales department and my job was marketing would bring in the leads. I would qualify the leads on the phone, find out the size, pass it to a distributor or reseller. So similar to our model, although we do sell direct, you don't buy Mars Bar from Mars. You get it from Costco or you get it from your local corner shop. And I had a set commission amount and I had to make a certain amount of phone calls every day. And I said to my boss, oh, I've hit target. It's April.
Is there any way we can expand my commission? She goes, no, I'm sorry. I was like, well, what am I supposed to do for the rest of the year? She was like, look, as your manager, I just need you to take your phone calls. I was like, and I'm not going to get anything else. So I would call up Cormoral County Council every morning at the same time. And basically it would have press one, press two, press three, press four. And if nothing happened, it would go back to press one, press two, press three. So I'd leave it off the hook for like 50 minutes. Then at the end of the day, I would just keep putting the phone down and bashing it. So then the statistics.
Total number of calls, total time on call. So I did something similar when I worked at the AA. So I was doing outbound warm tele sales, upgrading people to get vehicle cover. So if you got something broke that wasn't the engine and wasn't the timing belt, the AA would be prepared to cover it. But it was really specific. It was very hard to actually end up getting it covered. So I realized that when the other person put the phone down, if I didn't close my call off, I could just leave it for 15 minutes.
And they look at your dead time. They look at how much time in between calls that you do, but they don't look at how much time. They weren't able to log that the other person was off the call. So they would see that my ratio and then someone cottoned on to what I was doing. I worked at the AA for like nine months during my placement year. And someone cottoned on to that. All of this together is to say, I don't know whether outcomes in early life, I don't know whether outcomes even in like middle early life in your 20s are that predictive. Like Greg Leveckia, for the people that don't know him, he's the CEO of.
He's only 22. Look at the age, he's aged a bit.
The 2000 nanograms per deciliter of testosterone will do that to you.
But the interesting thing here, so with that office job, 90 was like gaming the system. From April to December, I did nothing. So I would just sit at my desk. I had to do 40 hours a week, sat at a desk doing nothing. And it was the worst torture. If you gave me the opportunity of going back there, that was worse than my busiest of times now. And I remember we were next to a building that was empty. I was there for a year. And if someone came through maintenance with a ladder, I was like, oh, I'll move my chair. I'm like, this is interesting.
You just needed novelty so desperately.
That pure boredom actually set me up. And you know I was saying to you that, you know, I hit target in a job that I hated. If I have this mindset to a job that I love, I can do.
It's one of my favorite, it's one of my favorite lessons from you.
So like.
If you're achieving it in a life that you hate, imagine how good you'd be at one that you enjoy.
So almost that 18-year-old, he doesn't get to just skip to the successful part because he needs the job that sucks. He needs to be bored. He needs to have the manager.
Why do you think it is this sort of speed running, trying to skip past it mentality? Is that a social media comparison thing? Being able to see people of your age or even people that are outside? Because your exposure, I don't know, but maybe because you come from an area that was much more affluent than mine, I was never exposed to anybody that had sort of entrepreneurial gumption. I never felt like I was compared. I was comparing myself to my peers, like they were better at me, better than me at cricket. They were getting more time. They were batting up the order in firsts.
Or when I went to university, you can compare your grades with other people, et cetera, et cetera. But it didn't feel like the same fervor. Do you know what I mean? Like this rushy, desperate need to speed run childhood and early adulthood into maturity.
I think it's status signals have changed. So for instance, like I said to you before, came home with the God Royal X and my dad was like, that's nice. Come home first class, my dad goes that nice. Come home with the sun, my mom and dad like, my dad cried when I told him that Tay was pregnant. So like the status signals of their generation, the child was the biggest accomplishment. They would rather have one child than three number one best selling books. I assure you, rather than a thousand. So now I do think that young people, and again, I play into this a bit, but young people at 18 shouldn't know what a Lamborghini Avensis or SVJ is.
And they shouldn't.
You knew what a Nissan GTR Skyline was like, right? When you were growing up as a 14-year-old.
But I don't think I knew how much it would cost and how much money I needed to earn to then have the revenue to do it. I didn't have ChatGPT to talk to and say, how can I afford this car?
It feels a little bit more like the dream. It's almost like being a fan of like Harry Potter or a sports team, like having Messi as a poster on your bedroom wall and thinking, I love Messi, not I'm going to be Messi. And the same thing for whatever the fancy car is, because we would have had like Fast Car Magazine and stuff growing up.
Pictures of birds from the zoo.
It was a great, Fast Car Magazine in the UK, I don't know what the, there must have been equivalents in the US, was a wonderful way to, for a teenager to buy softcore porn under the guise of being interested in cars.
Yeah.
That's what that entire industry was based on.
But I think this is the crazy thing though, to those, I don't know, can't speak on behalf of 18-year-olds, but I think those metrics have changed so much that people go, okay, well, if I'm going to have that at this age, like that person does, because there are 24-year-old millionaires that live in Miami, the Matt Armstrong is rebuilding that car from the Alex FG, the, he teaches people at F, foreign exchange and whatever. By fixing that car.
How old is he?
23, 24.
Right. Imman Gadzi was super young when he did his thing.
Imman Gadzi is 24.
Still?
He's 24, 25. Rohan Metmasher is 24.
Fucking hell.
He's young, bro. He's got, so you think they will set the benchmark as that and go, right, the only way I get access to these signals is not through employment. It must be through having my own business.
Do you think my vaping adds to the ambiance?
Yeah, it's like having a smoke machine in the background.
It's cool, isn't it?
Especially if I'm talking, they're like, wow, they've got the smoke on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the status signals, I think, have changed. I think the people now reverse engineer.
It's only a tour thing. Jared, have you ever considered you might have a drinking problem?
I don't consider a lot, Chris.
Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Coke last night.
But they're non-alcoholic.
And that's not a problem?
Sorry, man. I kept chugging waiting for the regret to creep in. Never happened.
Didn't you end up going home with that chick with the lazy eye?
I didn't seem lazy to me.
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If you're, because I remember 100K a year because you made it. That's why I thought growing up.
Fuck it. I didn't know anybody that earned 100K when I was growing up.
So then I think the growing, and when I was growing up, I was like, cool, if I can get there before I'm 35 or 40, sweet. And then that's it. I remember my goal was personal training with six hours a day, 60 pounds an hour.
I remember when I saw you do your how to make money as a personal trainer. What was it? Get in at six, do two hours, 15 minute break.
Six, 7:15, 8:30, 9:30, then 10:45, 11:45.
And you're done by one.
Done. You're done by one. So you do two hours, two hours, two hours.
What's the meta lesson to all this? Because it's fun and it's interesting stories, but what, at least for me, trying to, it might feel a bit like needless nostalgia, largely anglicized needless nostalgia as well for people the rest of the world that don't understand it, or at least can't directly relate to it. One of the things that at least comes up for me is a reminder of how unpressurized my childhood and even young business time felt.
I didn't feel the pressure really sort of turn the taps on until probably about 10 years ago. It was probably 2015, 16, 17. Okay, like this is, this really feels like I am competing with the world. And I didn't have a massive amount of ambition beforehand, but I just, I don't know, I wish that I could gift that young kid that we saw today. Fucking young kid, he's 18. I wish that we could give like gift like all of the freshers that we've seen at these events that have come out to see us.
Just the liberation of not feeling like it needs to be done right now.
I've got a concept. I've been working on it. I've been trying to explain it a little bit.
Because you're writing a book at the moment.
Yeah, this actually, I actually just said it to someone, giving them advice. And I was like, oh, someone record that. And we're talking, it was actually Ed Lawrence asked me the most important financial metric to aim for as a business owner. And I call it head above water. So you write down, what's my rent? What's my car finance? What's my holiday fund? What is it? What is that amount? Now, what is that per month? Now, as a business owner, you work towards it. And actually, there's a rowing coach that I work with. And him and his wife have a glass of champagne every month. They hit the number they need to survive. And sometimes they do it on the 20th day, but sometimes they do it on the seventh day.
And if on the seventh day of the month, they've hit enough money, they're invincible for the rest of the month.
Yeah.
No matter if they don't get.
It's quite a short-term window to be thinking.
But every month, they get to sit down and have a glass of champagne. And the harder they work, the sooner they have it. And it's like, and then if you have it on the 29th day, babe, we still hit it. And I thought that's amazing. But the head above water thing, a lot of people think that potentially I don't give a fuck online. I do give a fuck. I give selective fucks. But actually, ever since I started my business in 2015, 2014, I've made enough money for my head above water. And that's made me invincible. So when my first brand deal came to me and I told them to fuck off, it's because I had 1300 pounds in my Monzo. I was like, you can't buy me. I've got 1300 pounds in my Monzo, mate.
And if people only realize that your head above water level changes, obviously your needs, your wants, the house you're in, whatever. But once you hit that, you are really invincible from the world. And people don't look at that, that line in front of them. They don't look at that line in the sand and go, as long as I hit that, I'm fine. Their line is fucking miles ahead of them. I'm realistically far ahead. And they feel that void with depression, anxiety, and reasons to be unhappy. We even do that. I don't know why I'm giving this advice. I can't take it myself. But really, if they just looked at that number and said, right, as long as I hit that, I'm fine. That's it. And as a student, this guy's number for his head above water is a tiny amount.
And I say, bro, the whole world of business and everything you've got ahead of you, how much work or how much services or how many products you have to sell to hit that number? It's not scary and big and as daunting as you like. Then if you supersede that number, hey, you can have more cool stuff.
Wealth is just reality minus expectations, right? And by that definition, a lot of billionaires are broke.
You have to explain that to me again.
Wealth is reality minus expectations. So if you are overachieving what you expect from life, you're wealthy.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you are underachieving what you expect from life or what you want from life, your desires minus what your reality is delivering to you, everybody always wants to grow. They always want things that are beyond where they're at at the moment. But there's a difference between expecting it from life and desiring it from life. And I think that if you are permanently reminding yourself of all of the things that this other person has got that's your comparison group, the problem is that our comparison group has been spread out so much more. And it's interesting being around students today. We gave out, unsolicited, gave out a ton of Newtonic cans in the middle of the Exeter Student Union today.
What did, what did I say to the guy who left? I went up to him. I went, bro, you're six foot two and blonde. You are, you've won the lottery, brother. I said, mate, you could have been born any country in the world, statistically most likely to be born in Africa, followed by Asia. You're in Great Britain. I was like, by the sound of your voice, your parents grew up in an affluent area. You're six foot two. There's what, 3% of men taller than you? Plus, if you get any taller than six foot two, I reckon you start to see negative returns, because then you're too tall. Then you've got bloody knees touching the seats on easy jet.
Not that I would know. And no, I'm joking. I was like, bro, you, you, you have so much already. I was like, you haven't even accomplished anything.
Yeah.
And you've already won the lottery. I was like, so everything from here on in, it's kind of cool. And it sounded like you had a hot girlfriend.
There's a, he did. There's a line from Joe Hudson. Most people believe confidence comes from being really good at what they do or never messing up, but unshakable confidence comes from knowing your worth isn't tied to performance. And it feels a little bit like managing to detach those two things. That switch of worth being tied to performance, especially in the status realm, which is now being quantified on social media, in the financial realm, which you're now able to compare more easily because of transparency online, all of that being made more obvious and broadcast is what I think the switch that got flaked for me when I was in my 20s.
It's like, ah, I now have a metric to compare myself to, and I should be ahead. And we're doing it now. And the interesting lesson is, if you can't unpick that, knowing that your worth isn't tied to your performance, if you can't unpick that, I think you'll always feel lacking because the game just gets bigger. We're going to announce this most recent valuation and raise and all the rest of the stuff that we've done for Newtonic. We're about to announce, we will by the time that this goes out, I've announced Walmart, HEB, Morrison's Daily. Look at that. Isn't that cute? We got, for the people that are listening, we're holding up custom woven coasters that we were gifted.
We've also got, there's a bunch of Easter eggs that we have managed to slot into this scene. Let's see who picks up on them. The game just gets bigger, and you keep on fighting with harder and harder opponents or rivals or whatever it is. It's like, oh, you thought that your Nissan, your Renault Megane R26 F1 was nice. Well, I know a guy who's got, what's Greg's car? What's that stupid thing that I was in? Ferrari.
What is it?
Summit 28.
Is it? No, is this?
It's absurd. Whatever it is. It's silly and fast and like $1.2 million. Smart car. It is a smart car.
But you know what's interesting? I'll also have the back of that. As you're saying this, there's a meme in my head where you got like black and white, two portraits of two people. One guy's got loads and loads of money, and he's pointing, no, you got a person with a family and a wife pointing at a millionaire saying, you're rich. And the millionaire's there on his own, pointing at the people with two portraits.
And you're happy.
You're rich.
Yeah.
Like the wealth subjective, we always say it's like money, money, money. When I meet people, sometimes they say people aren't in the career they want. They're not earning the money they want. They're not driving the car they want. But they still have so much. And I think in a world now, we're not really told like, hey, you've got a wife that you guys still get on after being together for 10 years. And you've got.
Pretty fucking cool.
Two kids. And despite having the normal struggles that everyone else has and half-term being expensive or whatever, I wish we counted that more as.
But there's a rebellion at the moment. You know, for all that this can sound like, like needless nostalgia or two guys trying to over-intellectualize what just the challenge of being human and trying to sort of weave through that, the competing priorities that everybody has. That definitely feels to me to be a rebellion that's coming, at least in part at the moment, which is as both men and women, men in the past, recent past, and women right now are able to socioeconomically get to where they want to.
Maybe they don't have the spending power that they wish that they had, but they're able to like achieve a lot of things and got a new job position and so on and so forth. I think that a lot of the backbiting and the scrappiness and the sort of discomfort and the finger pointing that's happening is people completing things that they thought would make them happy, only to realize that the problem that they thought they were going to solve is still there, despite the fact that the antidote to it has already been ingested. Like I have got to the place that I thought would be escape velocity from my issues.
I've already achieved the goals that I said would make me happy. Fuck. Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I did something wrong. And one of the wonderful, and it's very hard to thread this needle, the original live show that I did, that I wrote to go to Australia with was all about the arrival fallacy. You call it, you have a similar thing, end of history.
End of history illusion.
End of history illusion. So arrival fallacy, the view from the top of the mountain is not as good as you think it's going to be when you're on the climb up. If you're at the top trying to tell people who are still climbing that the view isn't that good, it sounds like a fat guy telling a starving man that food isn't very tasty. That's what it sounds like. It's a luxurious position to be in. No one wants to hear it, et cetera, et cetera. And it's a bit trite. And I saw Jake Humphrey talk about it, and then it kind of killed the like glamour of it because it doesn't sound contrarian anymore when it's kind of like, you know, really hitting the mainstream. But there is definitely a big group of people who are achieving success in the way that society told them that they should be satisfied and realizing that it's not scratch the itch that they hope for.
And there's two choices. You're sort of, when you are faced with that thing, you are offered one of maybe like three routes. One of them is gold medalist syndrome, where you think, ah, it wasn't, it wasn't regional manager, it was national manager. It wasn't, it wasn't getting the bachelor's degree. It was getting the, it was getting the MPhil. That was the thing that was missing. So you try and run it back. The dose wasn't sufficient in order to complete that. The second route is to sort of rail against the system generally and say this whole thing is broken.
That's when people get really spiky about it, I think. And the third one, which at least at the moment, my bro science brain is telling me is the one that is more accurate, is to be more reflective and say, maybe the whole game of this, beyond what do I need to be able to survive and get myself to where I want to, and associate my desire for like status and respect from people, because we're a social species, right? We need to be validated by the world through getting some accomplishments. I've closed those loops. I shouldn't run it back. I shouldn't say that someone somewhere is oppressing me and like limiting my happiness.
I need to actually turn it inward and look at what is the part of me that is always feeling dissatisfied, no matter what the dose is that I get that's in return of this. And speaking as two guys that are trying to build a billion-dollar brand for whatever reason it is, you know what? Actually, on this, to give you your flowers, one of the best frames, and I was so jealous of this when I first heard you say it, it was a long time ago now, you used to talk about success on social media as a game. It's just game points. And today I like didn't play the game quite so well.
I lost some points. And in other days, I played the game a little bit better. And that frame of once you have got yourself to a level of comfort that is accessible for most people, maybe it's not palatial, maybe it's not, you know, even house ownership, but it's like, okay, like we're moving and we're grooving here.
But the skills here are actually very simple to break down. So for first thing you need to consider, leveling up your character is one of the best messes in the game. So for instance, GTA, you might get access to money, which gives you access to weapons.
That'd be great for you.
When you use the cheats, it's not as fun. So if I could give you a million.
That was a funny joke.
I'm sorry. If I could give you a million followers tomorrow, it wouldn't be as fun because you would use the cheat codes.
Correct.
The second thing is just pure volume and repetition. So if we're doing shotty snipes on Valhalla, Halo 3, anyone know about that? You ever played shotty snipes on Valhalla? All right. Call of Duty. Whatever it is, if you want to get a headshot mastery, nothing is going to beat pure volume. And everyone could say, I'll get the new controller, change your settings, and yes, you should push your sensitivity up, but nothing beats pure volume. So then you have that as well, where no bit of advice you could give someone on starting a podcast would beat doing 400 episodes.
Yeah.
So you've got leveling up your character, which might be getting a better microphone, choosing a better camera, researching before you do a pod, working on hooks, looking at what other competitors are doing. All of these things come from gaming. Then you've got cooperation in gaming. When you work together as a team to work towards the same objective, even though you're separate characters, that can then put you into a team player. And an organized team in a game of Call of Duty are going to win the war zone better than four people playing on their own.
Also tends to be much more enjoyable because you get to celebrate the wins together and you also get to mitigate the losses together.
Exactly. And gaming and reality have so much, because also, if you have a bad day gaming, you don't let it ruin your day. It was just a tough day. If you die on a level, you get another opportunity to.
That is unshakable confidence comes from knowing that your worth isn't tied to your performance. And what you're doing with the game analogy is unpicking performance and worth.
Yeah.
Right? Unless you're a pro eSports player, but again, your worth is tied up in this thing. I love this analogy. When I started doing speech coaching, a lot of people, I think maybe even you did this, maybe you didn't, some of my friends said, but what about your lovely natural speaking voice? Like you're not worried that it's going to sort of take that away from you. And I thought it was really interesting. I wasn't really too sure how to feel about it. And then I realized that if you're a pianist and you go and take piano lessons with a teacher, you're an amateur pianist, no one goes, well, what about your lovely natural piano playing?
You're not worried that the teacher is going to take that away from you. And what I learned is that there are certain things that we feel is very close to our sense of self. It's very sort of central to who we are as a person. And then there are other things that we see as like pursuits or augmentations or like presentations of how we put our true self across. Accent, way that you speak and communicate, very close to your sense of self. Way that you play piano, less so.
I'll challenge this, but only from a pure giving another point of view to this. So there's an interesting thing there where, however, sometimes speaking too perfect could be a reason not to listen because you briefly got.
Oh, I agree. I agree. But that's just another game of mastery.
Here's a concept that I've got, another one that I was talking about where in Jujutsu, we've got a belt. Everyone seems to think it's best to learn from a black belt. And yes, I agree, because they've got a plethora of experience and lived experiences, whatever.
Plethora.
Good word. Thank you. However, sometimes I think as a blue belt, you're best to learn from a purple belt, because although they do not have the answers to everything, they're much closer to where you were than the black belt. The black belt hasn't been a blue belt for 10 years.
This is model the rise, not the result. Like you don't want to be learning from the person and what they're doing now. You want to learn from the person who knows what they were doing when they were where you are.
So to the pianist thing, if you have a grandmaster pianist, yes, they will know so much. But actually, someone that's maybe only two years ahead of you might have more familiarity and memory.
You're still learning, right? You're still making developments.
So with the voice thing, I would just make sure that, and I don't know whether you do this, whether or not you might start putting in little idiosyncratic ways of speaking into the perfect text.
I asked. So for a long time. Episode, if you go back and we'll look at like 200 to 500, I got worse as a communicator because I was thinking so consciously about the way that I speak, about tongue position when I was saying S and L, because I've got a slight list. So I need to work on that. I wanted to work on, I wanted to get rid of that. I wanted to get rid of filler words wherever I could. I wanted to stop saying, mm-hmm, and yeah.
Who's that Jefferson guy? What's his name?
Jefferson Fisher.
That's it.
Great. Wonderful communicator. James Sexton, same thing. But they've got idiosyncratic ways of speaking that are still precise. They're not sterile.
I feel like he's a witch.
He is a little wizard.
Because he's so good at speaking, I'm like, get off my screen.
Scary.
Because he's going to do his NLP and get into my mitochondria and he's going to, he's going to make me buy some. Yeah, because when he's sounds off-line. So when he's talking to me, sometimes I'm like, no.
All right, we need to fuck off. I can see all of the boys twitching because we need to go and sound check on stage. This is the first and maybe final podcast that we're ever going to do in a tour bus.
If you don't drink Newtonic, every person that doesn't drink Newtonic, your neighbor's cat will die. Save your neighbor's cat. Drink Newtonic. Available in Sainsbury's, Meal Deal, Walmart.
HEB.
HEB.
Gelson's, Vitamin Shop, GNC.
Morrison's.
Morrison's Daily, and Morrison's fuel stations. Motor Fuel Group.
If it's a good petrol station, it'll be in there. If it's not, buy fuel somewhere else.
Bingo. All right. Goodbye, my beauties.
James Smith is a podcaster, author, personal trainer, and co-founder of the world's greatest clean energy drink, Neutonic.
Expect to learn why solving your problems never leaves you with fewer of them, why more money buys less happiness than you’d expect, how James got arrested at 13 for shooting a stranger, why it's important to gamify your life, and much more…
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Timestamps:
(0:00) Why You’ll Never Have Fewer Problems
(5:34) You Can’t Speed-Run Hedonism
(8:00) The Danger Of Waiting To Have Kids
(12:41) Why You Still Feel Like A Teenager
(14:12) Crazy Experiences In Asia
(24:25) Manipulative But Loving Dating Advice
(30:21) Getting Kicked Out Of School
(34:31) When James Shot Someone In The Face
(44:36) Mumps, Parties & Dropping Out Of Uni
(51:16) Early Outcomes Don’t Predict Your Future
(58:28) Why You Can’t Speed-Run Success
(1:07:52) Your Worth Is Not About Performance
(1:12:37) The 3 Paths For People Who Still Aren’t Happy
(1:14:10) Why Life Needs To Be Gamified
Extra Stuff:
Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books
Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom
Episodes You Might Enjoy:
#577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins
#712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson
#700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman
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Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact
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