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His chiselled jaw can today be found on billboards in places as far-flung as Texas, while his podcast has hit an astonishing one billion downloads.
From his humble Love Island roots, Chris Williamson – who appeared on the first series of the ITV dating show in 2015 – has undoubtedly undergone a hugely successful reinvention to become what he is today: an international wellness guru.
His self-help show Modern Wisdom, which aims to extract ‘life lessons from the smartest people on the planet’, has welcomed guests such as Hollywood star Matthew McConaughey, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and entrepreneur Steven Bartlett.
But the pivot towards personal development hides a rather more tawdry past indeed.
Many will remember the Teesside-born hunk, with his sculpted physique and professional party-boy confidence, frolicking with bikini-clad wannabes on Love Island – a stint he later described as ‘boring’ and prompted him to have what he later described as a ‘mini existential crisis’.
Before that, however, and what is little-known, is Williamson’s connection to one of the most debauched club nights in British student history.
Carnage, essentially an organised pub crawl which was billed as the ‘student party of all student parties’, was linked to at least one death, and the kind of drunken criminal behaviour that one judge described as ‘disgusting and reprehensible’.
Although A-level students celebrating their results last week will be oblivious to the behemoth that was Carnage, it was an iconic part of university life in 45 towns and cities across the UK from 2007 onwards. In its heyday, it attracted 350,000 students who paid around £10 to don its orange and yellow branded T-shirts and chug back pints of cheap beer and £1 shots of Sourz on a trail around local pubs and clubs.
And in its midst was a young Chris Williamson, then a student at the University of Newcastle where he worked as a promoter for Carnage before becoming a franchisee of the company behind it, Voodoo Events Newcastle Ltd. He later became one of its directors.
Chris Williamson, pictured earlier this year, hosts self-help show Modern Wisdom which aims to extract 'life lessons from the smartest people on the planet'
He appeared on the first series of Love Island in 2015 – which he later described as 'boring'
However, as Williamson’s star has ascended, what has happened to Carnage?
The organised pub and nightclub crawls of nearly 20 years ago have ceased to exist, although, as I discovered, Voodoo Events is still running nights in Newcastle, which – when I attended one in 2022 as a student at nearby Durham University – paled in comparison to Carnage’s hedonistic reputation.
Newly examined accounts for Voodoo reveal that its net assets fell by more than half from £8,590 in 2017 to £3,658 in 2022, before net liabilities of £95 were recorded in the financial year ending September 2023.
Williamson resigned five months later, in February, 2024, ending his decade-long tenure as its director.
Its position has since deteriorated further. Net liabilities increased to £410 in 2024 and had more than doubled to £894 by September 2025, according to the company’s latest accounts.
In that most recent year, Voodoo listed £18,841 in current assets but £19,925 owed to creditors within 12 months.
Perhaps a waning of Voodoo’s financial fortunes was inevitable given the controversy its Carnage nights courted.
Biology and biochemistry student Gethin Bevan, 20, was found hanged in Bath city centre in October 2007 after attending a Carnage pub crawl the previous night.
An inquest heard there was no evidence to explain why the straight-A undergraduate of the University of Bath – described by friends as ‘always smiling’ – had died, and the coroner was not able to determine whether his death was intentional or accidental.
As a student, Williamson worked as a promoter for Carnage, which organised pub crawls and was linked to at least one death. He later become one of its directors
19-year-old Sheffield Hallam University student Philip Laing was convicted after urinating on a wreath at a war memorial following a seven-hour Carnage bar crawl
It provoked at least 17 student unions to bar Carnage and its advertising from their premises, while police and councils complained that the events placed additional pressure on emergency services.
Richard Budden, then vice-president of the National Union of Students, said the events put students’ welfare at risk and left ‘student unions, police and sometimes even the hospitals to pick up the pieces’.
Two years later, 19-year-old Sheffield Hallam University student Philip Laing was convicted after urinating on a wreath at a war memorial following a seven-hour Carnage bar crawl involving more than 2,000 students.
Laing told the court he had been ‘the drunkest I have ever been at uni’ and could not remember what he had done.
District Judge Anthony Browne described his behaviour as ‘disgusting and reprehensible’ and said: ‘Carnage is the name of the organisation I believe promotes this activity, and some might say somebody should be standing alongside you this morning.’
Yet the drunken antics of Carnage occupy a world far removed from the one Williamson now inhabits in Austin, Texas, where he speaks for hours about purpose, productivity and the construction of a meaningful life.
He has admitted that little remains of the persona he created to become a successful promoter.
‘I want to focus on conversations with people,’ he said in a previous interview. ‘There’s not much in my life now that I would get rid of. I like what I do.’
Now 38, Williamson started out working as a model before appearing on another ITV dating show, Take Me Out, in 2012.
Three years later, the programme’s casting producer approached him about a new reality show involving attractive singletons spending six weeks together in a villa in Mallorca.
He entered the villa on the opening day in 2015, but was voted out by his fellow contestants on Day 19.
It was there, he has since said, that the persona he had spent years constructing began to unravel.
In 2022, he told ITV: ‘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.’
He added: ‘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?’
The answer was Modern Wisdom, which he launched in 2018, recording his first episode in the Voodoo offices, hoping it would become a smash hit and take him away from the events industry.
And, it seems, that is exactly what happened.
Critics have argued that prolonged exposure to Modern Wisdom can lead listeners towards a murkier online ecosystem populated by conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and the ‘manosphere’, which promotes misogynistic beliefs.
Williamson has rejected such suggestions.
But while the memory of Carnage might be lost to a previous student generation, Williamson himself might find the connection harder to shake off.
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