Herald columnist and Radio Hauraki breakfast host Matt Heath is taking on a new role as Happiness Editor for our Great Minds mental health project. He will share his own insights in his search for wellbeing as well as interviews with international experts in the field.
"You're not in Guatemala now, Dr Ropata" — Nurse Carrie Burton.
Chris Williamson has spent the last four years speaking to smart people about the human condition for his life-changing Modern Wisdom podcast. Hundreds of millions of downloads later, Chris has turned this intellectual pursuit into a successful business. In one of these 500 pods, he mentioned he was in Guatemala, so I assumed he lives there. I scheduled our Zoom chat with that in mind.
Turns out he lives in Austin, Texas. As dumb luck would have it, those two places share the same time zone, so the man appears on my screen as incorrectly scheduled. The only thing missing is his shirt. This is surprising but totally understandable — it's 42 degrees where he is. Williamson is thoughtful, articulate, funny and sports a rocking bod.
What motivated you to start your search for modern wisdom?
I got toward the end of my twenties and had achieved things modern society tells you will make you feel fulfilled, like running nightclubs, being well known and making good money but I didn't feel fulfilled at all. I decided I needed to learn more about myself, so I figured I'd start a podcast where I speak to smart people and learn from them how to refine my thinking about life.
After all your interviews and studying, do you believe the human condition can be fixed if we find the right philosopher or the right scientist?
That's a great question. I think that a degree of dissatisfaction is built into the human experience. Humans weren't built to be happy. We're built to be constantly vigilant. Where are the predators? What's that threat over there? Is my partner going to leave me? Maybe my child's going to be eaten by a tiger. We live with ambient anxiety.
The problem is our response to the threats in the modern world isn't always appropriate to the size and shape of today's threats. We have an evolutionary mismatch. We can do things that will make us happier and more well-balanced, but we are not the sort of thing that can be completely fixed.
Even if we could, things would change. If you take the happiest person on the planet right now, and you give them minimal sleep, a ton of stress, stop them from speaking to their friends, wreck their diet or don't let them see sunlight — that human will feel terrible. Wellbeing is a bank account that you need to deposit into every single day. That's how it works.
Is there a place for the old or even ancient in Modern Wisdom? When I'm listening to cutting-edge neuroscientists talk to you about how to deal with anxiety, it sounds like our grandparents' attitude, 'you need to face your fears'. This is similar to Aristotle saying 'we can't learn without pain' or Seneca saying 'It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult.'
Yeah. I think that in a world that is as convenient as the one that we're in now, it is difficult to convince people that they need to face hard things. I can Amazon Prime a TV to my house, so I can watch Oscar-winning Netflix series whilst ordering in a Michelin Star meal. I don't have to leave my comfortable, air-conditioned room ever if I don't want. But I believe not facing your fears will lead you to become weaker and more vulnerable over time.
Maybe the struggles and difficulties that we all naturally experienced in order to get food or shelter need to be recreated in some way today in order to assuage our modern problems.
As for ancient wisdom. I think the Stoics were the closest to a full operating schedule for how to run the human body and mind. It's 2000 years old but sounds like it was written yesterday. It shows us that human problems are perennial. The things we face aren't really that new.
Sure the challenge of social media and tech addiction and being trolled on the internet are new in a sense, but take Marcus Aurelius' famous quote 'When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil'. That's just Twitter. Human nature has stayed the same for a very long time.
After hundreds of long-form conversations with smart people, if you could recommend one current mental wellbeing thinker, who would that be?
I would point people to our episode with the neuroscientist, Dr Andrew Huberman. He has a great line, 'you cannot control the mind with the mind'. What he means is that the body and our physiology are a precursor to all of the mental states that we have.
Anybody that's done a really good hard workout or a walk in nature, or spending time with friends knows these things impact our mental state more than trying to think our way out of whatever our problem is. Do an ice bath and compare the way your mind was 10 minutes before you did it. It's night and day.
When it comes to mental wellbeing, I find myself believing everything the current person I am talking to has to say. Then the next person shows me that the last person was wrong, and I believe that too. How do you combat this and find the truth? Smart people can be very convincing.
Haha, availability bias is a hell of a drug. When you're speaking to people regularly, you can lily pad hop from one worldview to another. But over time, you can build up scepticism to everything, even the things that confirm your worldview. I try and apply my strongest scepticism to the things that confirm my worldview. More than I do to things that I disagree with because you're already sceptical about those things.
Millions of people start podcasts that no one listens to. You started one that millions of people listen to. What did you get right?
It was a passion project. I think that's a competitive advantage because you enjoy what you're doing. There is nothing that I would rather do than speak to super-smart people about being human at 2pm every afternoon.
• With that, I let the shirtless man get back to his brutal Texan heat wave. Last week Williamson released a special podcast, Modern Wisdom #500 - 18 lessons from 500 episodes. In it, Chris shares some of the most helpful things he's learnt over the last four years. It's a great listen, the man is a top bloke. He's not in Guatemala.
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