Modern Wisdom–the early years

I am starting on a new project today, which is to go through the archive of Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom broadcasts, which I listen to on Spotify and watch on YouTube.

I have been a fan of his Modern Wisdom channel for about two years, starting with his conversation with John McWhorter (MW episode 390). I am a big fan of Professor McWhorter’s writing on linguistics, having listened to all of his courses on the Great Courses learning platform. I heard on social media that the professor was going to be publishing a new book called “Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America.”

I searched on Google and saw that the professor had a YouTube video on a channel called Modern Wisdom hosted by a young Brit named Chris Williamson. I was impressed with the interview which went into much more depth than a short-format interview (typically less than five minutes on the MSM). But it was then the interviewer who caught my eye, because he was asking very insightful questions. And you could tell he was really listening to his guest, because he didn’t do the automatic “right” or “I see” response you see a lot in other amateur interviews, where the person is just thinking about the next question they want to ask and NOT really paying attention to processing what was just said.

So I looked at the Modern Wisdom channel on YouTube, and saw all of the guests that he had on previously, and I was amazed at all of the depth and breadth of knowledge, experience, and yes, wisdom was represented in the list of guests, let alone the interviews themselves. So I started listening, and the podcasts became the inspiration for a lot of positive changes in my life, from fitness to a career change which I’m in the middle of now, going from Operations to IT at the place where I work (Amazon).

Around Christmastime 2023, I realized that, whereas I had listened to, oh, maybe to at least half of the episodes from the 400s onwards (he is currently as of the writing of this post at episode 743), I was getting interested in how he started. So I started listening to the his very first podcasts, starting with MW Episode #1 on May 29, 2018, “Rowing the Atlantic Solo” with Stu Morton.

Gradually over the past two months, I listened to the first 40 or so podcasts, and saw the evolution of Chris Williamson’s channel, and could pick out various themes that he has been obsessed with (starting with fitness, meditation and mindfulness, productivity). My special favorite type of episode in the first podcasts were the ones co-hosted by his mates from Manchester, Jonny and Yusef of PropaneFitness.

I remember his podcast/YouTube with Jordan Peterson (MW Episode #436), and how he told Dr. Peterson what a tremendous influence that he had been on Chris Williamson’s trajectory in life. It occurred to me upon reflection that my relationship to Chris Williamson is a similar one to Chris’ relationship to Dr. Peterson, in that Chris’ podcasts have had a tremendous influence on my own trajectory in life.

So in the shower the other week, the thought came to me that I should take my personal blog, Integral Eyes, and use it to showcase an episode for each post starting with yes, Episode #1, and posting notes on the episode. I don’t mean for this to be a summary of the episode as much as a reflection on the episode.

I used to be an active creator of a professional blog, 4squareviews, and am resuming my content there, this time with the focus on IT rather than project management, the original subject it was mainly created for. But for my personal blog, I think this is the perfect project to start creating content of my own, and want to use the early Modern Wisdom episodes as a springboard for my thoughts on all the guests and topics that he covers.