Love Island star to podcast guru: Chris Williamson on how he reinvented himself in seven years

By Digital Content Editor Dominic Hewitson

Chris Williamson spent 18 days in the Love Island villa as a contestant on the first season of the ITV show back in 2015.

The then 27-year-old thought he had reached the pinnacle of reality TV and party culture. His profile in the North East was at an all-time high, riding on the back of his flirt with fame, he was also running a selection of incredibly successful nightlife and events companies in the North of England, as well being a male model and DJ.

The only way was up for the nightclub promoter, however, seven years on Chris’ life has gone off in a completely different direction.

The Newcastle University graduate now hosts one of the fastest-growing podcasts in the UK.

He has recorded over 420 episodes, interviewed over 100 New York Times bestsellers, spoken to some of the smartest people on the planet, from all ends of the political and social spectrum, (Douglas Murray, James Clear, Aubrey Marcus. Seth Godin, Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker), and has had over 30 million plays since its birth in 2018.

So how did the 34-year-old go from a Love Island star to a podcast philosopher?

“Bizarrely, Love Island was kind of like a mini existential crisis,” says Chris.

“I basically got to the Champions League of being a party boy and then I realised that I wasn't supposed to be there at all.

“I spent just under a month in a villa with no distractions, no phone, no internet, no friends, no contact with the outside world surrounded by people that were the epitome of the person I thought I was.

“I thought I was this super extroverted big name on campus, a big guy around town. And it turned out that maybe I wasn't like that.

“I made myself into a club promoter, which I needed to do to make a successful company, but that perhaps wasn't fully aligned with who I truly was. 

“I then took the opportunity to think - could I do with a little bit of self-work and some personal development to try and figure out who I actually am and what I want to try and contribute to the world?”

On the back of this self-enquiry Chris, who lives in Gosforth in Newcastle Upon-Tyne, made it his mission to build something that he could be proud of and genuinely change the way people live.

“I’m not saying I'm not proud of running nightclubs. But there's something different about putting out content that genuinely changes the way that people live their daily lives.

"So in February 2018, I decided to start doing a podcast.”

Chris started podcasting in his spare time. The first episode he did was in the office of his events company, using a USB mic and an iPhone camera propped up on a bunch of books.

It was a passion project at first. Chris says he was enjoying having conversations about a variety of different topics ranging from nutrition and the modern dating world, to climate change and cancel culture, and he admits the early days weren't easy;

"If I showed you the graph of how it looked for the first two and a half years of running, it's just basically a flat line right on the bottom - like 1000 plays a week.”

He then began honing in on conversations that he would like to have heard when he was 23, fresh out of university and with no idea of how to operate in the world effectively. 

He devised a plan to get some of the smartest minds on the planet and sit them in front of a microphone and get them to tell him how the world works - he knew once he got one big name it would make life much easier going forward.

One big early coup for the show was James Clear, the author of New York Times best-selling productivity book Atomic Habits.

“I got James by episode 30. I think he's got the number one selling book across all of 2021 on Amazon. He was a big one - a big assist. He was one of the names that got the ball rolling.”

From then on the dominoes began to fall. It was partially aided by the covid lockdowns as a new form of virtual communication became the norm, and this opened the door to names that would otherwise be unavailable in person.

The Modern Wisdom podcast slowly started to grow, and has now accumulated over five million hours of content in the last 12 months and has grown almost four times bigger since February last year. 

"I decided to turn pro about halfway through 2020," says Chris.

"I was doing two episodes a week at this point, so I've gone up from one episode a week for the first year and a half to two. And then at the start of the pandemic, I just asked myself, Do you really want to try and be one of the best in the world at this?

"Because if you do, you're going to have to commit. You're going to have to work on everything on the quality of the guest that you're bringing on, to the quality of your questions, to your speaking, your diction, your flow, everything."

He did just that, and since going full-time he has done TED talks at Newcastle University and hired a speech and diction coach so he could refine the enunciation of his words.

Chris’ latest podcast was his most daring yet - interviewing Canadian author and public intellectual Jordan Peterson. His team flew over to San Antonio, Texas and recorded a two-hour-long interview using 4K cameras and created a full audio and visual experience.

The video has already been viewed over 1.3million times and in the two days after its release, the audio had more plays than all of his episodes in the entire first 12 months of the podcast.

However, for Chris, he says this isn't about making money, it's about making a difference to people's lives.

"I really wanted to do something that I was genuinely proud of. That I would look back on as a body of work and think, Yes, I really, really appreciate doing this.

"So as an example, I get messages from people that listen to the show - maybe 100 a week, and they're saying really nice things like, 'I'm a rugby player that lives in Cumbria, and none of my friends understand me.'

"None of my mates get the fact that I've got these sort of weird interests about psychology or philosophy, or the stars or aliens or conspiracy theories or journalism or whatever it is that we're talking about. But when I listen to your podcast and I don't feel so alone.

"I never got that from running nightclubs.

"No one ever came out to one of my events and said, 'I was lost and alone but dude when I went in there and heard those banging house tunes and got those £1 jager bombs in my mind, you changed my life', but no one ever said that.”