Status Matters More Than You Think - Steven Bartlett (4K)

you are a guy who likes stories and likes ideas so am I so today I want to go through some of the best ideas that I've learned from you over the last year or so first one the frame matters more than the picture what's that mean I think often in life whether it's marketing or innovation or when we're building companies or products or making content we fall into the Trap of thinking that the thing we're creating in and of itself is doing all of the work to tell the story but when I looked at tons of studies when I looked at apples and art galleries and when I looked at um Coca-Cola studies that they did where they put Coca-Cola in a glass and then Pepsi in another glass and then did a different study where they showed you which one was which it's so clear that much of the work is being done in Psychology not in reality what I mean by that is if we just think about the Apple Store every electronic store you've ever walked into in your life is kind of like a crazy Jungle of wires right that's how electronic stores always were what Apple did differently and which helped them to justify the cost of a $22,000 smartphone was they gave the the iPhone space in the shop and we intuitively know that real estate is expensive so the space that the object is given actually pours into the value of the object itself so in an Apple store because it has two feet e either side of it the frame in which it's presented is telling you that this item in the middle is high value the the context you've always seen that kind of framing in is an art gallery where you have one off special pieces the other thing I think so critical to what Apple do so well is they only show you one of each device and they keep the rest in the back room if we think about scarcity creating value things that are perceived to be in limited Supply like pieces of art whether they're typically one-offs are seen in higher value the frame in which you present something is doing so much of the work to to communicate the value of the thing within within it um and even in the Pepsi Coca-Cola studies which are Super Famous from back in the day people would rate the Coca-Cola drink more highly when it came in the can and you could see what you were drinking they would say that's the better one but when they removed the can and told people that the Pepsi was a Coca-Cola or they had blind um cups with nothing written on them people chose the Pepsi the frame in the story there and making people believe that something tastes entirely better so it's not just about value it's about taste and sense and really at its called pychology there's a story from Sam Harris that I love which kind of takes this from the business marketing into the personal development space and he says after you finish the workout CrossFit or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or intervals or whatever and you're laid on the Flor panting making a sweat Angel you've got the taste of metal in the back of your throat and your hot and every the Visions blurry everything right that sensation although objectively being quite uncomfortable your felt sense of it is satisfaction it's pleasure in a way it's very kind of masochistic type of pleasure but if you spontaneously had that happen while you were sat in traffic you'd be [ __ ] terrified yeah you would ring the ambulance and you would say I'm dying this is a heart attack or a stroke or whatever so the frame that we place around our experience largely determines our experience and the question becomes why so as I talk about a lot from looking at some studies that they did on mice in a maze where they put chocolate at the end of The Maze and then set the mouse off they scan the brain of the mouse as it's going through the maze the first time and it's firing like crazy so much activity in the brain as it's sniffing everything and scratching everything eventually it finds the chocolate the second time in the Maze they scan the mouse's brain they put it back into the same maze with chocolate at the end of it and it Glides through the maze with no cognitive activity appearing to happen at all it's gone into autopilot and like when we think about the the amount of cognitive load that the brain would encounter every day just when I'm in this room the amount of things that I would have to think about or or um to save cognitive capacity tune out of what we know is the brain is taking shortcuts and the frame and the anchors around the thing you're looking at provide tons of shortcuts so even in the case of what I talk talk a little bit about as well is if I gave in these studies they gave people three options do you want to go to an all-inclusive trip to Paris or an all-inclusive trip to Rome and in that study people go I want the all-inclusive trip to Paris but in the second study they say do you want an all-inclusive trip to Paris or an all-inclusive trip to Rome or an allinclusive trip to Rome without coffee people suddenly choose the middle option the all-inclusive trip to Rome and it's purely because this third option which has entered the the frame has trick the mind to think God if they removed coffee from the all-inclusive trip to Rome the all-inclusive must be way better because they haven't removed it from the trip to Paris a slight thing and we see it again on menus and in electronic stores with TVs and if you go into a a steak restaurant and there's three staks people will typically choose the middle one because the the cheapest one and the most expensive one of telling you a story that the cheap one's too probably not good the expensive one's a little bit too bougie and that middle one which is anchored in the middle in the middle of that frame is probably the nice happy medium between the two and this is happening all throughout our lives we're taking short shortcuts using the frame to tell us stories of the thing that sits within it people don't think about the frame they think about the thing they're creating but great artists great innovators your Steve Jobs of the world your Teslas of the world they obsess about the frame because it's hard to check like if you think about we want to make an advance on people's perception of our product the thing we've created all the content it's really hard to do that in reality like it's really hard as Roy Sutherland says to make a train faster or to make an iPhone better but it's easy to play with the frame to change the story in the consumer's mind yeah this is where differentiating yourself with whatever you choose to do people get captured they obsess over the actual thing itself whereas there's all of these other anciliary extrinsic sort of diffuse differences that you can use and um yeah it's why you know I've spent so much money to make this look pretty because when people look at this it's filmed in a different aspect ratio right it's not filmed in 169 it's filmed in a custom version of cinemascope right it perfectly fits and I anybody that's watching on an iPhone now turn it to a wide screen and you'll see that it perfectly fills there's no bars at the top there's no bars at the sides it'll even get cut off by the circle of the bezel of the iPhone that's how perfectly curated this is for the mobile viewing experience should I say what I think the most impressive thing that you do is that's so tiny and it's actually just four characters long hit me in terms of the frame is you write in the title 4K nobody cares right objectively it's not going to change the content uh the experience of the content itself but when you say 4K it's actually telling a much bigger story it's actually saying high quality high production value um and really like the the second order thing is there really worth your time yeah we've invested a lot in this just four characters it's taking in your YouTube title but it's speaking about the quality of what I'm about to watch and I think that is probably doing a tremendous work on retention and it's just you just write 4K in little brackets yeah but it says so much yeah but I think when you're looking at trying to compete with like you say you're limited by the reality of transistor size and circuit board capacity and all the rest of it if you look at the difference between an iPhone and an I don't even know what the other ones are Samsung or an LG or something if you look at the difference the Samsung and the LGs had features and it's had speed and megapixels and all the rest of it the iPhone's still catching up to but what don't you get you don't get the experience you don't get the status that's ass iated with it and all of that is the alchemy that Rory talks about all right next one next one you do not get to choose what you believe how is that the case this is one of the the most I think probably the most important things I've discovered over the last couple of years because our lives are essentially beliefs that we've accepted as being subjectively true whether they are objectively true or not um we our lives are run on this instruction manual of these beliefs that we've inherited and when we're thinking about belief change which is um what we need to do to you know pick up a healthy Habit in the gym or to build a business or to persevere in any context it all comes back to like okay how do I change something that's limiting me how do I change a limiting belief and how do I adopt a new belief there's a a big sort of contingent in the self-development community that say you can go and look in a mirror and you can recite things to yourself and the Brain will believe those to be true so there's a whole contingent that say just think about something and you'll believe it but when I reflected on that in my own life I I ask myself how many of my beliefs have I actually Chosen and I used to be religious up until I was years old I believed in some kind of God Christianity um and I I I zoomed in on why that belief fell away what was it and really what happened for me and what I've come to learn is that um there isn't a single belief I have that I've chosen and I the experiment I'd ask anyone to run that's listening to this is think of a belief you currently have in your life anything you have and ask yourself the question could you unused to believe that right now if I if I put a billion dollars on the table of Elon musk's money and I said um I'm going to give you this billion dollars if you don't believe this hypothetical two pence coin that I'm holding if you believe it's a 5p coin very simple there's a billion dollars on the line and the reality is you couldn't you couldn't for a billion dollars or if I held someone you love at gunpoint you couldn't change any belief you have you could lie I'm not talking about Faith and Hope I'm talking about actually believing it's true so if we if we all agree upon that and I I ran some surveys with people where I asked them this question about 20% of people originally thought um they could choose their beliefs and then when I ran that survey almost 99% of people realized that they're not choosing their beliefs where are my beliefs coming from well all of our beliefs in my view are based on the evidence that we've acquired usually through our first party senses sometimes vicariously from observations and sometimes because they've come from authority figures and figures in our lives that we trust it's evidence that we've accepted as truth doesn't mean it is true but it's evidence we've accepted um and therefore if you want to change your Bel beliefs what's abundantly clear is you have to go and put yourself in situations where your existing beliefs are counteracted with new evidence so when it comes to speaking on stage or when it comes to uh learning how to be a podcaster or when it comes to self-belief or whatever it is you have to go and collide with new evidence yeah Ryan holiday's got this amazing quote where he says self-belief is overrated I prefer to use evidence yeah exactly that it gets back to that hosy quote I said to Goggins right you do not become Confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are outwork yourself doubt and ultimately hoping that you're going to be able to believing that you can think your way out of a thinking problem is like believing you can sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction right you have to give yourself something else that's going to step change where you're at I was hypnotized last week after we met and that I said to her before she hypnotized me I said can I ask you a question do we get to choose what we believe and she actually said yes and I think she she interpreted different she's a very very famous therapist called Marissa Pier did you video this yeah is it going out on the internet yeah amazing 30 minutes it's hypnotizing me to not eat sugar again okay to like have a better relationship with sugar okay yeah yeah yeah right um and it was interesting because she takes me back to my childhood and then confronts me with the the information that my inadequate lunchbox made me feel insecure it made me feel a ton of Shame growing up cuz I never had anything like we didn't have food or like money or those kind things so really my relationship with sugar now is it's it's resembles power control and fitting in the fact I can just order whatever I want and eat so she went took me back there and unwired that but what she's actually doing is she's giving me new evidence because she takes me right back to that kid and she's basically whis bring into his his ear a new story and that's and so I actually think that the principle that we don't get to choose with what we believe still holds true but with hypnosis which seems to be the outlier they're giving you new evidence that counteracts your current beliefs that's all she did interesting yeah so an important sort of caveat is that new evidence doesn't necessarily need to come from the external World it can come from telling yourself a new story about the things that you already believe that you believe and that's what hypnosis is it doesn't need to be first party evidence that you encounter with your eyes it can be someone else that's very very skilled in taking you to to that belief and smashing it I love I love when this happens so let's think about the two things that we've said so far the frame matters more than the picture you do not get to ch what you believe what we're talking about here is that your beliefs are largely determined by the frame that you place around the current moment and that frame given professional help or a powerful hypnotizer can end up being moved in a way that also moves your beliefs yeah right yeah that's very interesting when she people think of hypnosis as like someone tricking you into thinking you're a monkey and then you start clucking it wasn't that I was well aware of where I was and everything going on but she took me back to a hill I sat on when I was four years old looking into my lunch box and I felt like I was there and then she told me a story a a different story about that moment when I said earlier that it's we've interpreted it as subjectively true she gave me a different interpretation on my lunchbox and she then and that was the key thing she gave me new evidence about an old interpretation of an old situation and that's what hypnosis does as an outlier but for those of us that can't access hypnosis the other way to counteract our beliefs as I said is to you have to go and put yourselves in situations where you're going to be presented with new evidence um and it's interesting with belief change you'll accept evidence that is complimentary as I said to you you know if someone says you're more looking than you you thought you were it's shown in the studies that people are more likely to move in that direction if I said you're worse looking than you are people are less likely to move in that direction so even framing the New Evidence as good news is a useful tool for belief change the other thing is if if we have 95% of the same beliefs I'm significantly more likely to accept one from you so when we need to to embody a new belief going and getting it from a source We Trust which typically isn't our mother because we understand the bias there there but someone that we believe and trust in is a useful tool for belief change as well um and yeah I studied this really really deeply I looked at why you could go up to a child and say to the child I just saw a pink elephant flying and they might believe it but you couldn't say that to an adult and they wouldn't believe it have you seen those studies that were done very unethical studies I think in the 60s and 70s where they took two groups of children and pushed onto one the fact that they stuttered and they would bring it up all the time and they would point at them and point at them and these kids developed lifeline stutters throughout their entire adulthood because they were told you you mustn't stutter be careful you're bring you're doing it again you're doing it again yeah we're reinforced by what happens in the world that's labeling theory for you right and that's a form of stereotype threat where you're told implicitly that you are something so you you accept it to be true and start to embody it tell you what I found that was really interesting people are more prejudiced against those with different accents than those with different skin colors so this shows up again and again in the data and it didn't didn't really make sense until I spoke to this evolutionary Anthropologist and he said well think ancestrally about how novel it would have been to have met somebody with a different skin color it's the tribe from the next Valley over right it's not somebody with a different skin color but they'll speak slightly differently they'll have slightly different words that they use MH so we are predisposed to be very prejudice against someone who might look like us or might not but sounds different and it makes kind of sense so you know if someone's not sure not believeing this think about what happens some walks into the room with a different skin color than you have but the exact same accent that tells you so much about this where this person's from the background that they grow up in all the rest of it and let's say someone walks into the room who has the same skin color as you but a vastly different accent they've got a scous accent or they've got a Texan accent and you go wow like this person is very different to me I just think it's professional Prejudice any kind of prejudice so like just the Affinity that you have with the person that's yeah uh and it it shows up as in uh especially in the UK which is a very class-based system right America's dominated by race but the UK I only learned this when a friend came over to the US from the US to the UK and he says you guys talk about people being Posh all the time it's like that's never a term that I've ever heard I know what it means it's never a term that I've heard used in America never talk about someone being Posh it's interesting because Prejudice is such a context dependent thing whereas if you're looking for a 100 meter Sprinter you know I'm you know I'm looking at you if you're looking for you say you can go through different classifications and say who would you want who would you be most happy or have a highest Affinity to in different contexts yeah and and it varies I'm I'm really fascinated as well by like self- Prejudice and the power that that exerts over us and how in the studies that I was reading if a um because there's a stereotype that women are wor worse at maths they did these studies where they just ask you to tick your gender before you do the test and performance dips in women that have to tick their gender same in with black people their performance dips if they're just reminded of their own identity if they have to write their name the performance dips so they did some studies where they got people to change their name and performance increased and it goes to show that there's a stereotype threat going on within us internalizing it at all times and then the most importantly is that when they removed those stereotype threats before doing a test performance was equal there was no deterioration and I think about that from labeling Theory and the harm grades are causing all of us because me getting e and D's yeah it's a miracle that I I didn't interpret that as I'm an e person and then show up in life in such a way there's this similar quote from Anthony Vino it's more socially acceptable to be our own biggest critic than it is to be our own biggest cheerleader and I really coming from a British background I rail against this sort of Zero Sum crabs in a bucket tall poppy syndrome mentality and yeah a lot of people might feel that right that you are able to say things to yourself that you would never dare to say probably even to the worst enemy that you've got out there and you're able to kind of create this designer drug perfectly curated curse you know exactly the scabs to pick you know exactly the pain points you know all of your shame and you're able to you're able to point at it a thousand times a day and remind yourself of it and it's so strange it's more socially acceptable to be our own biggest critic than it is to be our own biggest cheerleader I wish that wasn't the I've been thinking a lot lately I've not actually spoken about it but um in trying to help some friends solve some of their personal problems in their lives where they seem to be in a downward self-esteem spiral or are down with discipline spiral it's always hard to give advice and I'm actually cautious about being a fixer something Simon Sy talked to me about sometimes you just need to sit in the mud with people but one of the observations I've had is that the path out of that despair is by keeping commitments to yourself and this kind of goes back to what you're saying about the self story and what you think about yourself every day I think when I'm trying to give friends advice these days what I say to them is the rewards you get in terms of self-esteem and self story what you think of yourself will be correlated to the size of the commitment you keep when no one is watching so if you say to yourself I'm going to do this when no one is watching we don't think it's important to keep those commitments we think lying to ourself is there's no there's no sort of um punishment for that I actually think the greatest consequence in life is not keeping commitments to yourself and I think that compounds to as we talked about where does beliefs come from I think it compounds as personal evidence which is deposited in this instruction manner of who you are and how you behave and how you show up and what you're capable of all those tiny little commitments and then I think you can get into a downward commitment spiral because of that because you think you're a you know you don't have faith in your own word you don't have faith in anything you do and this causes a downward spiral so isn't it really lovely to know that maybe the way to turn that into a positive upward reinforcing spiral is just keep that tiny commitment you made to yourself today yeah like you don't have to move move Mount Everest you don't need to go on a sday Iowaska Retreat how about when you said you were going to get in bed at 10: p.m. you do that Y and you stack that you talked about Alex os's quite about stacking evidence stack those things for a week honestly I've seen it in my friends and their lives have changed the commitments we keep to ourselves if we say those are the most important things for compounding that evidence in our favor everybody can start there today like yesterday's out of play but then the next thing you do in the next hour can you keep that commitment to yourself that's what I think a lot about I think life is much more simple than we often make out we'll get back to talking to Steven in one minute but first I need to tell you about epidemic sound if you have ever tried to put sound effects or music behind any video you will know just how hard it is to do epidemic sounds has over 990,000 sound effects plus a vast music library that will avoid any copyright concerns your videos are not going to get demonetized or infringe on someone's copyright which happens all the time if you're not using a professional Library all of their tracks are professionally produced by a diverse collection of artists and are EX exclusive to the platform if you've ever been wondering how your favorite creators take their videos to the next level a lot of it comes with sound design and that is the Sound Library selection they have access to so many of them are using epidemic sounds and you can join them for free for 30 days by clicking the link in the description below or going to share. epidemicsounds.com slod wisdom and if you cancel within that 30 days you can still keep all of the sounds that you've used during your trial period That's share. epidemicsounds.com modern wisdom the Mark Manson quote here is the person you have to spend the most time listening to in your life is yourself try not to lose their respect and self-respect and self-esteem I think largely comes from having faith in your own word so if you were to treat yourself like a friend you are responsible for helping which is Peterson's advice right let's say that every time you invited a friend out for lunch they turned up late or didn't turn up at all they didn't text back they just kept not holding to their word after a while you wouldn't believe in them you wouldn't be friends with them and you'd stop inviting them out to lunch you are that friend to yourself how on Earth do you think that you're going to be able to move mountains and get out of that relationship that you don't like and move countries or change career when you can't not hit snooze even though last night you promised yourself that you weren't going to hit snooze and it's how people that are able to do extraordinary things have been able to get there that they've just started off unbelievably small right I'm just not going to hit the snooze button I'm just not going to use my phone before 9:00 a.m. right these are controlling your thoughts is unbelievably difficult and requires a lot of meditation and maybe psychedelics controlling your actions is relatively easy especially stuff like don't pick your phone up before you've gone for a walk just try that in the morning sunlight before screen light as huberman says and that's the easiest way to control your thoughts yeah because there's a two-way relationship between what you do and how you feel absolutely so if you want to change how you feel focus on what you're doing if you want to change how what you're doing focus on how you feel but but you said said about extraordinary people there this is what Chris Eubank Jr said to me which really stuck with me he said my dad flew me to Cuba um and they we had a training camp out there and they surprised me they put the the heavyweight champion of Cuba in the ring with me he's not he's like a middleweight or something he gets in the ring This heavyweight storms across to him knocks him so hard he flies out of the ring and hits the floor dead leg and he's laying on the floor he said he said to me I looked up at the ring and I saw this massive Cuban heavyweight stood there and he said I realized in that moment that I had to get back in the ring because if I didn't it would let the demons in and another instance of when he talks about the demons more specifically was on his story about the treadmill he goes if I'm running on a treadmill and I get to mile 9 and I get complete cramp in one of my legs and I know I've told myself I'm going to run 10 kmers today he goes I will have to limp The Last Mile even if no one's watching because I can't let the demons in and if I let the demons in they'll show up in the 11th round of a championship fight when there's 50,000 people watching me in the audience and I know deep in myself story that I'm the type of person that quits when things get hard because I got off that treadmill at Mile 9 when no one was watching it would modify myself story The commitments we keep to oursel and what we do when no one's watching is the most persuasive evidence that governs everything we then do every day thereafter and this is for me was a huge Revelation in my life because you know you can look at certain people in your lives that are struggling in certain situations and often times it's a result of continually unkempt commitments to themsel yeah I don't know anybody who has done extraordinary things that isn't keeping their word in that way right there's consistency doesn't guarantee that you're going to be successful but not being consistent will guarantee that you're not successful let let me UNS Superman let's like the mess of this is some people are remarkably good at keeping commitments in some areas of their lives and hopeless in others so they'll have kind of dual self-esteem they'll be incredibly you know confident and secure in their work but in relationships or whatever else they'll be Ground Zero and I'm very much one of those people that has areas of my life where I have immense commitment and you'd say I such a disciplined person and then other areas of my life where I res being hypnotized out of sugar you know what I mean yeah i' actually haven't eaten sugar since as well so it did kind of work I have no desire to have sugar anymore hell yeah so no I I know exactly what you mean and this is something how you do anything is how you do everything is a a lovely quote and a lovely idea but it piles an awful lot of pressure on you right and it's very easy especially as we said it's more socially acceptable to be our own biggest critic than our own biggest uh like complimentary given that if you mess up a little bit that can quite quickly spiral oh I I Chris said that I shouldn't check my phone before I go for a walk in the morning therefore it means that I might not as well go to the gym and I might as well like break my alcohol streak and I'm you know all of these other things yeah finding this balance of being robust enough and delicate enough with yourself to say okay I know that you tried well let's get back on the horse again tomorrow right it's it's a delicate balance right holding yourself to high standards whilst also being sufficiently supportive and this is the same in business so it's not you don't break trust when you don't do what you said you were going to do you break trust when you don't do what you said you were going to do and you don't own up to it take responsibil responsibility for it and point it out so in business there's often times where you say something to your team and for whatever reason mitigating circumstances that thing can no longer happen trust isn't broken at that point trust is broken when you then don't sit in front of your team and say this is why this didn't happen and at the same I think applies to yourself you're going to miss some things in life but taking responsibility for it staying empowered and not saying oh I couldn't do that because or I needed d d d no it was your priorities it was the priorities and the decisions you made so when I miss my commitments the Saving Grace for me is I go I did that that was me that was a choice that I made and if it's a choice I made or didn't make it's a choice I can make in the future the what you see in that chapter is you see obis of responsibility um you see blame you see excuses and you see disempowerment in the form of language like I couldn't because you know or I needed to or which I think is scary language what's the difference between parrots and practitioners which just something I've been thinking a lot about I I've observed the most successful intelligent creative Innovative apparently original people in my life and people that aren't even in my life and the the consistent thing amongst all of them and in my businesses is that those that are truly exceptional and that over any extended period of time when you zoom out achieve disproportionate levels of success start with this kind of boring drudgery of obsession over their craft driven by this deep passion and curiosity I mean Jimmy car's a prime example of that leaving his his potentially lucrative career to go and tell jokes for for no money for 10 years Darren Brown left a great potential career and Pathway to becoming very very successful in a sort of typical sense to go and do card tricks on a table in Bristol everyone's story when when I the people that I admire that are the masters of their craft were these deep practitioners and then you have this other type of person which I call kind of the parrots where they observe these people in the learnings that these people have given them and they kind of just regurgitate what they're hearing but they never do the time to practition so they never get to that deeper level of understanding and as they say you know to learn something you read about it they often say to to understand something you write about it for me I think to understand something in this context you do it and you do it in this iter iterative pattern for many many years and your depth of understanding once you've done something is unparalleled and that's the foundation for great creativity you see it with Fred again he's what a guy man he's he's an absolute in my mind he's an absolute genius he's a [ __ ] Savant for the people that don't know who we're talking about Fred again is a classically musically trained DJ who's put turned his hand to like Tech and house music I suppose but will also happily get up on the roof of his flat in Hackney or wherever it is and play a completely solo set classically on piano a keys you see the conviction of that and you see the the first principal nature of his work where he's doing something we've apparently never seen before of course he's taken inspiration points and he's using equipment that was already made before he was born but he's pulling the pieces together in new ways and that's what creativity is and that kind of creativity belongs to people that have gone right down to that first principal level you're talking Elon Musk you're talking y cany of the world and Fred again where he's pulling things together in different ways and expressing himself without the constraints of convention that's what that's what pioneers and practitioners do and Pirates can never do that because they don't understand the seaf Flor they just play with the boats on top of the water there's a quote that I've fallen in love with the magic you are looking for is in the work you're avoiding yeah [ __ ] dude the magic you are looking for is in the work you're avoiding and every single time that there is something in front of me that I I feel like things aren't coming my way sufficiently quickly I'm not making the progress that I want it's because I'm [ __ ] about over here and there is a large frog in front of me that I need to eat I need to spend another half day reading a book I need to spend some more time researching online and upping my skills in this particular area I need to do whatever it is can I do you know what's interesting is most intelligent people I've met no the most successful ACT people I've met as entrepreneurs and practitioners never read never really read books like even in Elon Musk of the world I know he watches movies and stuff he gets his inspiration points from many areas but thinking about the great CEOs that I've met and the great Founders and the great artists I've met there's almost a you know I think I said this to you earlier on that knowing too much can be a real disservice to innovation in creativity like knowing too much innov information whereas this sort of practitioner pathway where you naively stumble through new territories seems to be more conducive with the real Pioneers I wonder whether that's the curse of knowledge in a way you familiar with this yeah Stephen pinker's idea of the curse of knowledge that when you start to learn things you can't understand that other people don't know it and you also lose the learner's mind in some regard which is you're not lucky you said about you come into this room and there's a million bit bits of information that you could be focusing on but you're not focusing on those you're focusing on the ones that matter mhm and I think that when you start to kid yourself that you know what you're talking about you're no longer quite as open to these new ideas I would say the difference for you know our industry what we largely traffic in are anecdotes and insights right and they can come from experience but I also like exposing myself to new ideas from other people and the quickest way to do that actually know this is a Lie the quickest way to do that would be to permanently be going for dinner with interesting people but that's like an unsustainable life it would be like 2 hours of dinner with Douglas Murray then Jimmy C then Steven Bartlett then like it that would just be my existence and I'd just hear oh yeah and that's cool and oh yeah what about that and oh I've never thought about this before like that would be the way I'd do it but in lie of living this Perpetual dinner life reading books is a a good second for me yeah it's a good second I just think about the things that I couldn't even express in Words with my vocabulary that I know about the art of marketing and human psychology and why why people do what they do like and the the experiences that are all fundamentally intertwined in the mistakes that I made in the Journey of getting there now in a book I might give you like the the four paragraphs but the rest of the iceberg yeah is the foundation of the thing that sits on top of it and you think about podcasting we both came into this industry I'd say fairly late compared to like the rest of the industry right but because of that there's a naivity to it which allowed us to do new things um because we didn't read the book yep um that I think some of the radio industry are struggling with with that transition dude I mean you're seeing it in a America The Late Night show hosts are trying to Pivot from heavily scripted heavily supported by writers and a production team and researches and all this stuff and then you put them down in their garage with a mv7 bus powered microphone in front of them and you realize oh like these people don't have any skills Beyond being able to be very good at reading the script and that's a massive skill I couldn't do that you put the script in front of me I'm going to fall to the floor but yeah what's the takeaway here though for someone's listening to this now and they're a young person and they're at the start of their career or even if they're not necessarily a young person for me the takeaway is to go and fail at something that's high value in the future as soon as you can with it with with the least amount of potential cost to yourself it's like to go and practition if I had kids now I would tell them to go and join an AI startup that that's well funded that's what I tell them to do small group of people where they're going to be close to the information and and the the evidence and I'd tell them to go fail in a high value future industry that's the thing I would do if you want to be a master but then okay they have to pick an industry that they are innately passionate about because you won't go for a decade with Fred again or Jimmy Carr or Darren Brown's curiosity if you don't you're not innately captured by that thing but I think we are looking for cheat codes I think much of the reason why people probably listen to our stuff is where we want we want the three tips how can I growth hack my personal development you meet anyone like you you meet Jimmy or you meet dar and you go oh 15 years no money in busking the pal think about this I wonder and I ask myself this question a lot I wonder how much of the development that we really value in ourselves isn't because of our own agentic highly Sovereign approach to marshalling our own life I wonder how much of it just comes along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older yeah you're just this was going to happen anyway and maybe I sped it up a little bit and maybe I can you know create a nice story about why it happened but the most wise people I know it's very rare that I meet somebody who has who is much older than me that doesn't have wisdom that's come along with it which suggests that wisdom is just there for the ride right as a byproduct of Aging but yeah I would say takeaways from this aim to focus on executing so the the four disciplines of execution really interesting analogy that's used the word strategy is in the top 10 of all LinkedIn words in BIO descriptions and execution and execution aren't even in the top 1000 right because it's much easier to strategize than it is to execute but if you this is a term that's you can tell people that really know business when they use it one of a few terms talking about someone being a real operator right that's you go oh okay say no more like I know there's someone that will get things fixed right that they're able to take charge of whatever the challenges that's in front of them and our mutual friend George Max's got this beautiful idea I'll ask you this one actually so the way to work out who the highest agency person in your life is have you heard him do this before no [ __ ] brilliant okay so you are trapped in some South American jail right and you're about to be transported somewhere where no one's going to be able to get you back let's [ __ ] Columbia Argentina somewhere right you have 24 hours and you only have one phone call to ring somebody to come and get you out who's that person that you ring oh Prince William [Laughter] right okay I feel like you've broken the game a little bit there I don't think that was that was perfectly Fair do you know my framework though was find someone that is both smart and influential member of the royal family yeah and that cares enough about my predicament yeah so but that that the the framework that you come up with there if you don't know the Future King of England is someone that is able to think on their own that doesn't need instruction that is going to be able to solve problems at a very high level Under Pressure very quickly you know just all of the things that you want in a friend yeah it's so true it did you Whitted it down to five people instantaneously in my head and I was deciding between them but I thought I don't know if they can pull enough levers [ __ ] Prince William yeah you've got an idea that's kind of similar you must become a plan a thinker yeah and just on that last point it just popped into my head then that I think what I'm saying here is that no matter what you're aiming at over the next 10 years in your life I think this horrible realization that bucks the trend of every Instagram quote you'll ever read or every course you'll ever buy is that the fast way is the slow way because the slow way is the only way like I I stood behind fren again this weekend as he did his show Ali P to 10,000 people or whatever it was and I'm looking at this guy going I want to do that I want to be able to do that but my better sense from interviewing all these smart people knows that it's not case of me doing a court it goes my my brain now goes are you willing to put 20 years of Silent boring drudgery and Obsession into doing that my brain goes no so separate out the aspiration from the adir I got to show you this I got to show you this so Mark Manson put this quote up a few months ago and I've not been able to stop thinking about it the most important question you ask is what pain do you want in your life what are you willing to struggle for anything worthwhile is going to require some degree of pain and struggle so if you're oriented toward the pain and the struggle you're probably going to be more aligned with what you're capable of accomplishing rather than if you just Orient toward the pleasures so good because we say find the thing which you enjoy the most but really what you're finding is what is the pain you're prepared to swallow the most nothing worthwhile is going to come without discomfort you know even for me and you love doing the show love speaking to all these interesting people people get to fly around the world and all but I would be lying if I said I love writing show notes or doing research in Guatemala airport at 3: in the morning because I'm on a delayed flight and I've got a flight I've got a episode tomorrow like it's grind it's grind that I care about and it's grind that I can do that other people couldn't do but it's not not grind right this goes to the discipline equation which yes you might be I'm familiar glad hit it hit it because that that really embodies it that Mark Manson quote about the pain you're willing to encounter um I was figure out why there's some areas in my life where I'm disciplined and other areas of my life where I seem to lack discipline kind of what I was saying earlier about being a dualistic type of individual and I came up with this discipline equation that I'd love to interrogate with you because I've not thrown it at enough people to know that if it's if it's true or not so discipline equals um the importance of the goal plus let's just say the importance of the goal to you so the subjective importance of the goal how much does that goal matter to you plus the psychological enjoyment you get in the pursuit of the goal right so as you pursue the goal how psychologically enjoy enjoyable and reinforcing you know is that for you minus the psychological cost of the pursuit of the goal so I can I'll run you through some examples Simon Sy said to me well Steve I take the bins out at 7 a.m. in the morning yesterday um I didn't want to do that but I did it so I go okay let's run that through the framework what would happen if you didn't take the bins out that under that sort of underpins and defines the importance of that goal well he get a fine and then he up have an overflowing bin out the front of his house so the Y is high the psychological enjoyment of pursuing taking the bins out is very low right and the friction of getting out of bed at 7 a.m. is high but thankfully the why is so strong that regardless of the fact that the pursuit the enjoyment of the pursuit is low and the friction is high the behavior still occurs going to the gym learning to DJ in all areas of my life I can run it through that equation and go okay so in the pandemic the reason I've been going to the gym for three years straight now is because my why surged the the the percept of the importance of that goal surged I saw how our existing Health correlates to our health outcomes and I realized for the first time in my life this clear thought that I couldn't unshake that my health is my first Foundation it is this table that everything I love and care about sits upon so that has to be my number one priority reflected in my schedule so that that changed that went up the psychological pursuit of going to the gym is kind of enjoyable there's a bit of a dopamine release there and it's fun to do that feels good for my self-esteem and the friction associated with it is low in less and unless I go to a gym where people know me and I spend the whole time talking then what I what happens if I'm put in that situation so I don't go to the gym the discipline equation changes so part of the reason I made a big investment in a company called until is because I can have somewhere I can work out and focus on the workout genuinely that that's one of the things that actually changed my relationship with the gym and nearly threw me off the Habit y was that psychological cost so how do you how does that sit with you it does there you've got the discipline equation death time and discipline yeah what's the Death part so like when I started writing that particular chapter in my book to understand discipline you have to understand the scarcity of time because you know so I started because I was going to write a a chapter about time management people want to know how to manage their time and as I went through the hundreds of available time management techniques I realized the promoter technique the time blocking all this one two three four the ABC the reason why there's so many time management techniques is because none of them work unless you have this underlying thing called discipline it's the same in The Fad diet industry that industry will always churn out new things because there's an underlying issue which is discipline so it's kind of a mirage industry so the chapter pivoted and started focusing on discipline well the next thing was time um why is time important round the numbers if you're how old are you now 35 okay so you have if you reach the average age of an American you have just over 177,000 days left to live and I think all of that goes to show that time is the currency we're playing with in every moment of Our Lives it's a sense point of our influence I talk about the roulette table of my life it's it's the frame I think through where we wake up in the morning with these 24 chips if you spend 8 hours sleeping you wake up with six 16 chips left and how you place those chips on this roulette table that sits in front of us just before the wheel spins every day determines all of our outcomes in our lives so I've chosen now to put to allocate two chips to this little piece here called Fitness the roulet table spins and I get my returns as I went down that chapter I realized that in the context of time and death um and time management the most important question to answer the fundamentalist discipline how can I allocate more of these chips to the things that are in line with my values where does This Thing Called discipline come from if it underpins everything we do it even underpins what you just said there with Fred again in that Mark Manson quote the reason why Fred again is doing that is because his discipline equation is in is in is in line if for whatever reason you just tipped any part of that equation you could knock him off that discipline yeah with with Jimmy car and with all these people that go do that decade of dedication to become Masters in their craft if you look to their discipline equation you'll see moments where the friction came up and they fell off or they got writers block or whatever it might be called in their context um and then so you can influence your discipline if you understand that equation when my DJ equipment was on the floor of my spare room I did not dj use it the minute I put it on my kitchen counter and had it one button away from being able to practice at any given moment I put it right in front of me same thing for any Creator if you're starting to do a YouTube channel and this is this is a life hack here do you remember you might have had this in your house when you were younger radio uh infrared soer Turner honor us it's like a single remote it's like 10 bucks on Amazon and you leave the wall socket on at all times and you run it through one of these additional sockets and then you plug your [ __ ] into that thing and you it's like 10 bucks right on Amazon my entire Studio at home is run through one of these so I go in and I just press 1 two 3 four and everything comes on because when I was first starting out it was super effortful for me to set up the camera and I'm going to do the thing and I'm already trying to learn to do YouTube and it's terrifying and I'm looking into this black lens and it says precisely same as you DJ kit can't be on the floor if you want me to practice as much as possible make get it in the way put it in the way of things right it's almost harder for me to DJ than it is for me to to to avoid it this it was on my kitchen counter so I would sometimes be going into the kitchen to eat something and just oh um press the button and just I'm off four hours later I've just done a 4-Hour DJ practice Yeah if you think about give me something in your life you're disciplined at and we'll run it through the equation something you've shown great discipline at recording the podcast recording the podcast does it really matter to you yes is there psychological enjoyment from the pursuit yes is the friction High what's what's the level of friction four out of 10 four out of 10 but if we added up the first part of the equation how much does it matter to you out of 10 10 and how much how much what's the psychological enjoyment of the pursuit nine so I'd say we're about 19 takeway four and because it's positive the behavior will occur you can do that as a minus four right the behavior will occur if at any point the friction gets really high and for whatever reason if the pursuit of it or the the why behind you you know the subjective meaning behind it falls the behavior will not occur I've heard you do this with your meditation practice yeah which is why you're not meditating yeah exactly my why isn't strong enough I don't I don't I haven't quite had the the evidence inic enjoyment it as well sometimes we need a little bit more pain right it's a it's a robus in way to to frame it I guess if Alex was sat here he would say we might say a lot of people are driven by pain rather than pleasure right 100% And that's the why part the chip on your shoulder accounts for so much it can account for so much right um you know somebody who had really bad period of mental health they suffered with anxiety attacks and it lost them something or somebody scorned them and they go oh okay and then they decide to commit themselves to mental health and improving the texture of their own mind that's coming from a place of wanting to prove other people wrong well whether someone is driven or dragged is impossible to tell on the surface and I've sat in my podcast over and over again and asked people are you driven or you being dragged by something when I say dragged I mean some kid on the playground at 7 years old told you you're a scumbag and you'll never be anything and you're poor and then that's dragged you that insecurity and that shame has dragged you to entrepreneurship into becoming a millionaire driven is what you know Gary vuk describes to me where he says his mother loved him so much and she encouraged him so much that he had that drive to kind of like prove her right whatever force it is it comes down to why which is the start of the equation and in t of Shame as Aid the only blackid in an all white area pretty much the poorest family in our street definitely dilapidated house in in the context of a wonderful area deep shame and insecurity about not being enough drove me like you've like I was an obsessed hungry dog for it's still doing it now in the back room somewhere you know one of my favorite quotes that I've heard from you recently is this I was riddled with fake Ambitions my ambitions were fake they weren't ambition they were insecurity most of our lives are dragged by insecurity and shame they're not driven by ambition and it's a tragic truth that most of us are going to have to have our Ambitions and our narratives fail us before we realize that there Illusions and mirages and they're false 100% And it's I have belief sometimes that a lot of people disagree with um but and I think this is typically one of them because people want to take control over their success they want to have that sort of power over it but if I I remember sitting with Eddie Hearn and I remember what Will Smith said and they all describe they can all very clearly articulate the reason for their their motivation and their Drive they live in a world where every media reporter will say oh you're so amazing like tell me how you're motivated every day it's not the case I actually I question how much choice they have over that motivation in the case of Eddie Hearn he lived in the footsteps of his father Barry Hearn who pulled up to school in these rolls-royces and he was known as Eddie hearn's son he's competing with his father he'll say it I'm driven I'm dragged by the insecurity of of being Barry's hearn's little son and I want to outdo him it's the same with some of my other B billionaire friends and it's the same with Will Smith he's being dragged by an insecurity and shame so the key thing because that's not always a bad thing right in in every context of life it might make you arrive at Financial Freedom sooner than others but you just want to make sure that you're cognizant of it at least in my life I realized at about 24 years old when we had an offer from a very big company to sell the business I went home that day and I googled mansions and lamborghinis on autot Trader and I looked into that screen and F felt a deep sense of emptiness like I'd been betrayed by somebody like someone had lied to me and it was true someone had lied to me 18-year-old 12-year-old Steve had told me that that would fix everything and as I played out it arriving on my doorstep I realized that i' would be poorer if I bought it some I'd lose something I'd lose my company and the community and the love I had but I'd lose something else then I went through this six months of sort of existential crisis of like okay so if it wasn't for that if if we weren't obsessing like a dog what the [ __ ] was I doing it for and um my fear this woman came into my office one day and she said to me just imagine for a second you have everything you've ever wanted she goes because the truth is you do there's no goal that you haven't completed that you need to complete to be worth more and I remember walking away and thinking what a load of rubbish two years of dwelling on that thought and I arrived at this conclusion I think because I was scared of this idea that losing my drive would would lead to no ambition but it's very much the opposite it losing your am losing your losing your insecurities and your shame that's dragging you doesn't dissolve your ambition it dissolves your fake ambition and creates room for your real Ambitions that are internally intrinsically motivated so instead of wanting a Lamborghini in a mansion I wanted this whole set of other things when I realized that the Lamborghini in the Mansion were never going to make Steve Bartlett worth more than one Steve Bartlett deeply in me I genuinely think part of me thought that if I got Lamborghini in a mansion Steve bartett would be worth two or four Steve bartletts but your your your currency is one of one and so in that moment once I'd realized that nothing was going to change the intrinsic value of me I could focus on things that I would do regardless of that P perception of value fluctuation like starting a podcast or um learning to DJ or doing a musical up and down the country or joining a psychedelics business just to learn for a year about mental health and psychedelics and the funny thing is if we think about Fred again and Darren Brown and all of those people that achieved Mastery from a decade of natural dedication is that's Al also the path to real Mastery when you're not being dragged in other news this episode is brought to you by nomatic no literally it's actually brought to you by nomatic that carryon Pro is the hand luggage that I used to transport my laptop and all of the stuff that I brought with me to the UK the difference between having proper well designed durable highquality luggage and not is everything it makes the difference between packing a compl complete hell or actually quite enjoyable the teamut nomatic creates the most functional durable and Innovative backpacks bags luggage and accessories everything from nomatic comes with a lifetime warranty which is exactly how confident they are in the quality of their products especially if you're someone that travels quite a lot you need to make sure the luggage you're using is high quality and nomatic is the best that I found so if you need to upgrade your luggage game for work for travel or for anything else the first place to go is nomatic head to the link in the description below or go to Nom matic.com sodern wisdom and use the code modern wisdom at checkout for 20% off everything sitewide that's Nom matic.com modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout the thing that's interesting to fold in here that I think is useful most people have more pain than they do anything else especially when they're starting out I don't think when you very very first beginner Pursuit you've got this perfectly balanced desire to maximize your guy and show up in the way your logo's being spoken forward is supposed to it's not people took the piss out of you from being different in school or your parents didn't believe in you or they coddled you too much or you don't feel like you were given the opportunities that you should have got or you failed yourself or other people failed you that's [ __ ] power that's fuel right and you know what it can be as well it can be a tiny thing oh throw away comment throw away comment lunch money oh yeah and that taught you a story going back to what we said about evidence about money and other people and that has just dominated your self story for the for the next three decades a story you learn about money you know so I think that that fuel is toxic especially when used for a long period of time but I reckon you can get a good five or 10 years out of it and I think that to get yourself past the activation energy to go and do something in the very very beginning it's all well and good for you or me to sit here and say ah you know you can find the balance in the way that everything works like we've been through that fire let's neither of us kid ourselves about what got us here in the first place it was [ __ ] resentment right I had a desire to prove everybody that had ever picked on me in school every person that thought I wasn't going to amount to anything everyone that had ostracized me socially I wanted them to regret that decision don't get me wrong and it's only been after a long long long time of realizing that actually if it wasn't for the fire that they'd given me I wouldn't have got to where I am now which is a place that I'm incredibly proud of so I should thank them oh that's a [ __ ] interesting realization and here's the here's the risk though and what I came to learn is it will take you somewhere that drive but it's not guaranteed to take you to happiness and the the obsession of being dragged by an insecurity like the one you've described and the ones that I describe is so overpowered ing that it might mess up your priorities and and I think at a deeper level humans regardless of their we do need these fundamentals to be happy we need that sense of connection we need relationships we need all of those things and in my case I work seven days a week in that Bloody office I would come in even when I didn't have anything to do because there was a deep sense of sort of self-esteem associated with my work the cost was I didn't speak to my family for two for two years the cost is like even as I sit here I haven't spoken to my mom for months like we fallen out the cost is I have very small group of friends and the cost is I've spent years struggling in relationships and I'm I'm I'm now 31 I've managed to get in a relationship and rep prioritize my life urgently but the cost I see in a lot of people I meet is okay they're successful in one of nine metrics of happiness and I sit there with I've sat there with some of my close billionaire friends they got all nine cars that I've ever dreamed of rning up outside and they tell me at 4:00 a.m. by their indoor pool that they're deeply unhappy and ask me to sleep in their bed with them that night because they're lonely I don't disagree I don't disagree that if you scale this for long enough it's not good for you right but it is so potent at getting that activation energy in the beginning and I just don't know if you were to take me back and say you can dispense with your fear of insufficiency the chip that's on your shoulder all of those things I don't know if I would have done anything I don't I I think that I would have been significantly less motivated to go and to be able to deal with the uncertainty of the Lonely chapter so I came with this idea with hosi a couple of weeks ago called The Lonely chapter I [ __ ] love it so there is a period in everybody's Journey where they are so different because they've started to do new things that they no longer fit in with their old set of friends but they're not sufficiently developed that they've gained their new set of friends and they're unsure should I go back should I lean back into getting a bad game with the boys on a weekend is that the highest you know know way that I can live my life passion forward because that's what everybody else does and all of my friends are taking the piss oh not drinking again too good for us are we not going out again this week oh okay well like enjoy staying in home and reading [ __ ] nerd so you're going to feel the pain of being ostracized from the group of friends that you used to have but you're stuck in this messy Middle where you haven't yet worked out who you are on the other side of this and that lonely chapter that's in the middle is something that I I would say almost nobody that I've ever met who has gone from a place where they are to a place where they want to be hasn't gone through are you out of the Lonely chapter yes yeah 100% uh I it's difficult for me to find it it's difficult for me to find it again facilitated largely by being in Austin um but that being said most of the work that I do is on my own you know I I spend hours sat at my desk researching sorting stuff for episodes dealing with the team making sure that everything is set for this trip or the next trip or whatever we've got coming up I think High performers actually they they do exactly what you've described there they leave the the tri the comfortable tribe that you know is social expectation and their childhood friends whatever else and once they leave there there's that initial point of resistance and then I think they to some degree live forever in the loneliness chapter the start of it is much more difficult but there's so few people that that can relate to their experiences once they come out of the the crowd anyway that they're always going to live to some degree in a heightened sense of sort of loneliness they can find a tribe at home and with family and with a partner but it's never the same as having you know what you see other people have from your hometown well that's you know look at any bell curve right the fattest bits right in the middle and to move yourself out to the edges is to accept being alone in some regard alander boton's got this quote where he says loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind yeah there's two things we don't want to be not enough and different it's what a therapist said to me recently that came on my podcast she said there's two things that fundamentally I interview billionaires and CEOs and royalty sorry she goes I I'm a therapist for billionaire seos and royalty she goes the two things are that people struggle with fundamentally are feeling different we don't want to feel different that's a rejection from one's tribe which used to mean back in the day through a process of self-preservation we'd die earlier as you you've heard about in the studies of you know that they did at Harvard um would get more ill our immune systems would break down and the second one is not feeling like you're enough which means you're not valuable to the tribe so not being part of the tribe of good or of good use to the tribe causes a bunch of signals in our body which then manifest as physiological disease and psychological disease so at at its call sometimes I think when I'm feeling in that such a way maybe I'm feeling lonely or I'm feeling really different or some I've got some feedback which makes me feel like I'm Different in a fundamental way I just ground myself in the understanding that even the fact that I feel that makes me like everybody else and um in terms of loneliness I've had to kind of carve out my own new tribe in my life a very small group of Prince William H yeah but no moving moving to Austin was a big part of that for me because I was around it's a city of cultural immigrants yeah right everybody has gone from one place to this place so that is the selection effect and that's why you know again another great way to work out who's agency in your friend group is are they living in the same town that they were born up in or in a new one are they living in the same country that they were born in or a new one have they decided to do something on their own and take risks that they were the only people who they were responsible for um in relation to your riddled with fake Ambitions thing this great quote from Alex that says you've already achieved goals that you said would make you happy yeah and that encapsulation of the honic treadmill in a single tweet I think is so interesting it but it also calls you to refrain what you're what you're pursuing and this is why the part of the discipline equation the psychological Pursuit is actually really a nice thing to focus on because we both know in all of our Lives even the the podcasting game you're playing now there's not finish line here is there every day is the finish line so I I think it reframes what we're aiming at because there are mirages that move off into the distance as we approach them yeah and if you if you become too think about unhappiness coming from unmet expectations if you're too focused on the the the podium giving you pleasure when it doesn't the expectation that it would could lead to unhappiness what happened when you hit a million Subs how did I mean i' sit down my team I go I know none of you really care but the reason why we should celebrate is because and then I give them the reason and it's same with 3 million when we hit 3 million Subs same thing walked into the back room of our studio I go listen I know this doesn't actually matter what matters more was the old lady that came up to me when I went to penguin the other day and said that was almost crying in the lobby that's what we all care about we care about the Chris Kamar thing where he came on the podcast then his former football club put banners up in the stadium about it we care about impact and this is just a a a trailing metric of impact so um it's important you know I've done a lot of research over over the last 10 years about how to build a company in such a way where you don't get those moments of burnout or anticlimax and Simon Sy talk talks about B building things as if they are infinite so how would you set up you and this podcast team through the frame of we're going to do this for a 100 years what you you design design this system to be sustainable over over the long term you'd aim at consistency You' try and optimize intensity but not at the cost of in consistency and the whole system of how you treat the people and how this everything and how you treat yourself would be set up in such a way that's what I think about now I'm actually thinking about our podcast through the lens of heavily inspired by what Joe Rogan's done sticking at that for like 15 years how do we run this game for 50 years and I think that's a huge competitive advantage to think through that frame because there would be a lot of people that would have designed their systems in a way that is not sustainable and I see it with podcasters all the time I see it where they've you know they've got four mates who are all on the podcast and they're doing it twice a week well then what happens when Jerry you know has a divorce with his wife and has to leave and then it was the system was never designed for longevity so all facets of my life my companies my teams all designed for longevity 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode three really and of the 10% that do 90% of them don't make it past episode 20 so by making 21 podcasts you were in the top percentile of all podcasters ever in history and how many get past 10 years of [ __ ] hell that's the game I want to play I want to I want to do a 20 20 30 year I said it to my team all time multi-decade systems long-term games with long-term people so my team can move through the chapters of their life right they're going to be fathers and mothers they're going to get you know they're going to have certain moments in their life where they have health risks and is our system designed to guide them through that but retain the talent that we want to retain um is it is it designed for for a changing world that's going to get AIC Centric like do we have enough uh fast acting feedback loop so we know when the next thing's coming would you not just slot people in and move people out like the differences and the challenges that you're going to encounter at 10 million Subs is going to be different to what you encounted at 10,000 Subs so I don't know I get that and there will usually be a core group of people but really the only core thing is you right ultimately if you want to start doing Stadium Edge shean Style Productions the people that did the first Steven Bartlett tour they're not the people that can do that right you need new people you need a different cinematography team and you need people that can do live broadcasts and they need to be able to do switching on this huge [ __ ] desk camera 3 camera 4 like I I don't disagree but fundamentally what it seems to me it comes back to is how can you make sure that it's your infinite game yes it trickles down to the rest of the team but ultimately the team are going to come and go the only thing that's going to remain is you CU if you go it's it's [ __ ] done you're not selling Diary of a like Diary of a CEO now presented by [ __ ] Jimmy car like it's not happening so in that sentence there was a key thing I said which is the talent you want to retain and in building businesses I've built businesses from 0 to 700 I always know that the first phase one people the cult we call it it's the cult the growth and then the Enterprise phase three stages in business and then you have the decline which is inevitable for all companies in the cult phase the people that can wear multiple hats and that are fired up and sleeping under the desks are not always the people that thrive in the Enterprise phase where there's your your your job description is very very narrow you need to be very process orientated and fit into a bigger system they're not always the same people but the people you want to retain that have a decade of information capital in their heads about who we are the disciples if you think about C Ferguson there's a reason why he kept Gary Gary Neville on the pitch and Gary Neville has told me this directly I've seen the conversation he had with CeX Ferguson where he asked him the question gaffa why did you keep me around like three or four years after IID I clearly couldn't kick a ball anymore and it was because of he represent he knew the culture he knew the values and you need disciples all of those players all those man united players said to me how many times do you reckon Sir Alex Ferguson came into the training ground dressing room in 26 years I said I don't know for 2000 they went twice why because my disciples were in there I didn't need to go in when cultures are strong they're self- policing when cultures are strong new people become the culture when a culture is weak the culture becomes the new people so in in my teams I want as many people that were there from the jump if they have the capacity to move through those phases of growth and um and the key sentence was the talent I want to retain yeah you must sweat the small stuff why I just I just think uh just think it's the most important thing I remember one of the most important books I ever read was the slight Edge by Jeff Olsen when I was 18 years old um because it helped me understand the importance of marginal gains and the tiny things in life and how they're compounding for or against you invisibly in every aspect of your life your teeth your skin your finances your relationship the tiny things are compounding for against you and the the analogy I give to help sort of illuminate this is if you didn't brush your teeth today no one in this room would know if you didn't brush your teeth every day this you might I might because I'm in close proximity if you didn't brush your teeth every day this week really you a couple of people might notice but they wouldn't say anything no real costs if you didn't brush your teeth every day for five years your teeth would fall out you'd be on a dental chest screaming and the question becomes when did that happen it happened today it was that small seemingly invisible decision which was easy to do and easy not to do as they always are that you chose not to do that compounded invisibly against you and as they say in compounding returns which they call the eighth wonder of the world according to Warren Buffett um it's slow then it's fast and that's why it's so difficult and so easy to overlook the smallest things it's easy to save one pound so it's also easy not to I believe that most people in any discipline I'm competing in will not sweat the small stuff they'll Overlook the small things which gives us a great competitive Advantage um by obsessing over the smallest things and also as we talked about earlier we talked about the frame and how it's hard to it's really hard to make huge steps forward in reality but much easier to make them in Psychology it's very difficult to find big steps forward in business it's very difficult like think about us as podcasters is there really like another platform we could go on to we're both on airlines now I think we're both on YouTube Spotify and apple is there like a breakthrough step forward we if there was we'd all be doing it right they're hard to find small things though I can stack a hundred of those and make a 100% gain as Sir David braford said and the unobvious thing that no one thinks about is the psychological impact on a team when you stack small things this is what we call the progress principle Harvard Business Review interviewed thousands of people in work and said when was your most enjoyable day in work and they all pointed out in their Diaries a day when they had a sense of progress even small a tiny little gain they made sir David bford who's known for his marginal gains Theory and has written about in the first chapter of James K's book Atomic habits said to me yeah the the small gains the making the water bottle just a little bit bigger and the pillow softer mattered but the thing no one gives us credit for thing no one talks about is I took over a team that were depressed psychologically they were down and out they didn't want anything and by finding tiny little gains quote we felt like we were going somewhere that psychology of momentum is the greatest force in business I can I can tell you in all my companies now which ones have that feeling of momentum and the impact in in 6 12 182 four months that'll have on that their excellence in their work and their delivery in terms of bottom line and I can point at the companies now that don't have that I call it it's I say it's in the air they don't have the momentum in the air the collective don't feel like they're going somewhere the easiest way to jump start this like I said about keeping commitments to yourself is to go and find tons of small things and share them with the group and Sir David bford said to me we started finding all these things small things and what you'd find was people were staying till 2: a.m. because we were in the in the in the shops making the tires a little bit bigger and people were fired up we felt like we were going somewhere how do you apply this to your personal life this the small stuff I just see this it goes back to what we said about letting the demons in I see the small things that I do is they're all compounding for or against me so this morning when my girlfriend got out of bed and walked out of the room I remember thinking like we developed a habit and we're developing a habit now where we don't interact first thing in the morning we say good morning to each other we used to always this sounds a bit soy or whatever but it's the truth when we first met when we woke up we'd cuddle just for a bit we're kind of tired with cuddle we moved out of that and I can see if I just zoomed out over the last three years how our Behavior like our our interactions in the morning are just veering off so this morning she got out of bed and she was walking off and I go hey come back come back I said let's have a cuddle and we laid in bed for about 20 minutes and just cuddled that's that course that subtle course correction which they talk about in aviation was it the 611 rule where for every 60 mil you fly if you're one degree off Target you'll miss the airport by one mile that that need for that's also why the small stuff is so important it's that continual course correction of that compounding curve that's dominating areas of your life you're not thinking about and if I just give you that lens of every area of your life your relationship your health your teeth your skin your money is subtly compounding in One Direction based on the tiny decisions that you're choosing to make or not make and the way that you can change that trajectory over the next 10 years is by saving that pounds brushing your teeth taking care of that relationship checking in with that friend and if you zoom out on you know you look at Warren Buffett and how he made his millions it's all that it's all this obsession with the compounding returns which he calls the eth wonder of the world so his business partner Charlie Monga says the first rule of compounding is never interrupt it necessarily yeah so that so this is the other side right you must sweat the small stuff but when you are sweating the small stuff stop [ __ ] about with it right are you on a path it's the same for me like a lot of the questions and stuff that we've had over the last year is like what are you going to do next what are you going to change what's the next project a big part of me is like everything is so vertical like line go up and to right right which I know you know the feeling of I I really don't want to touch too much this doesn't mean that we're not looking at different ideas you got this this is a different way of shooting things it's in a much smaller room actually trying some different angles we're shooting on different cameras blah blah blah but it's not a massive change right the first rule of compounding is never interrupted unnecessarily and so many people I think because there is an allure in the novelty of doing something new like oh yeah maybe I'll try like I'm sure I could start a [ __ ] VC firm or some [ __ ] or like start it with a friend or like be like Stephen like how should I begin to do this thing it's like look one thing the thing that you've said is already most important is going up and to the right stop [ __ ] about with it right the compounding is on your side so it's temptation is highest when we're unsuccessful and when we're successful it's not it's not high in the middle because when we're unsuccessful there's so much alluring us away my mother started 25 businesses before the age of me being 25 because her when her business was struggling someone would walk in and tell her that estate agents down the road and making loads of money so my mom literally started an aate agent she couldn't access the internet she couldn't read or write so she started that and then someone walked into the shop six months in and said warehouses that do furniture down the road is selling lots of money so I watched my mom start 25 different businesses at and then at the top let's look at the top so when you go when things are going really well and temp Temptation optimal as well if you think about the biggest podcasters in this country previously I won't name them cuz I don't want to but the thing that took them off their Throne was diversion even true Jordi the other day did a tweet where he said um somewhere along the way I lost track of what my job was which was to give value to my audience London real [ __ ] hell he changed his YouTube channel to be to run for mayor and he posted at at times it looked like 30 video iPhone videos a day still the same Temptation was high the temptation of becoming London mayor so I think when I'm an optimal Temptation Focus stop [ __ ] about Focus don't interrupt the process as Charlie Munger would say this episode is brought to you by eight sleep we have decided to land in the UK during a heat wave and every Hotel I've stayed in the airon has broken I thought I'd left Austin so I could escape the heat turns out I haven't and the Pod cover from eight sleep would have been a lifesaver the Pod cover sits over the top of your existing mattress just like a normal mattress topper and actively tools and heats each different side of the bed based on yours and your partner's sleeping preferences As you move through sleep stages it'll change the temperature to ensure that you stay in deep Sleep it is the biggest game Cher to sleep that I think I've ever found the Pod cover even tracks your heart rate variability your resting heart rate your sleep stages your sleep consistency it's like having a wearable built into your bed they also deliver internationally and if you are not happy with your pod cover within 90 days for any reason they will give you a full refund you can get a $150 discount plus that 90day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com slod wisdom that's EIG ghts sleep.com slod wisdom I fell in love with an essay by strangest Loop and it is a list of things that are not doing the thing so here is a list of things that are not doing the thing preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing scheduling time to do the thing isn't doing the thing making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing telling people you're going to do the thing isn't doing the thing messaging friends who may or may not be doing the thing isn't doing the thing writing a banger tweet about how you're going to do the thing isn't doing the thing hating on yourself for not doing the thing isn't doing the thing hating on other people who have done the thing isn't doing the thing hating on the obstacles in the way of you doing the thing isn't doing the thing fantasizing about all of the Adoration you'll receive once you do the thing isn't doing the thing reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing reading about how other people did the thing isn't doing the thing reading this essay isn't doing the thing the only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing and I love this Insight that you can dress it up however you want the work just needs doing and you can fluff it and you can change it and you can talk about compounding But ultimately it comes down to sitting at the desk and answering the email opening the word document recording the podcast and one of the things that I found is a really great hack for me I would have none I would have no success as a YouTuber that I've had being a podcaster because I work well when I have someone else in front of me like I would clean my room at home if mom came and sat and like just watch or talk to me right because I I just didn't want to [ __ ] do something that sucked on my own being a YouTuber and staring down the lens hi guys welcome back to the channel today we're going to [ __ ] do whatever we're going to do I really really struggle with that sitting down with someone else in front of me that makes it easy so there are ways that doing the thing can become more easy but ultimately the work just needs doing really highlights the discipline equation but but also all of those things in that essay really pointed at procrastination and there was hints of um trying to realign one's cognitive dissonance by announcing to the world that you are something that you know is not consistent with your actions but one of the things that I really got from that was people think we're motivated by Pleasure and if you when I sat with Nel who wrote the book on distraction and procrastination and why people do it one of the really key messages I took way was that we're actually motivated by the avoidance of discomfort and like so I I quizzed him on it I was like really okay so sex he goes yeah horniness is a form of discomfort so you're motivated to relieve yourself of the horniness and if you look at any aspect of your life when you're procrastinating cleaning the house or you're procrastinating doing the essay so you end up cleaning the house it's because that's the path of less discomfort you we're motivated by the avoidance of discomfort this is really useful because if you want to understand why you're procrastinating in some area of your life the most important question is tightening your self-awareness on the thing that's causing the discomfort because in most areas where we procrastinate we have no idea we're just avoiding it do you think do you ever think about the weird [ __ ] that you do when you're procrastinating from the thing you're supposed to do yeah like I have an essay or an email to write that I don't want to write or I need to reply to someone that and it's an awkward an awkward conversation or something like that and guess what now my cupbo sources are perfectly aligned like you will find the most inventive way is to not do the thing I I I noticed this about myself I flew to Barley to write my latest book and as I was in the jungle I noticed this pattern where every time I picked up my phone like just see needlessly was because I was at a hard point in the book yeah so every single time I'd be get I'd get to a point and I was trying to summarize it or find some research to back it up within 30 seconds as if I'm possessed by this Puppet Master above me yeah pick up the phone start swiping and I'm on Instagram and I and I go [ __ ] of course I'm avoiding the disc comfort and it's so important to get clear on that because you you need to understand the forces that are pulling and pushing you and then you can say to yourself okay why am I avoiding this chapter what is it well I don't feel researched enough on this subject matter okay well I'm going to step away from the computer and I'm going to read that book or watch that YouTube video as opposed to just banging my head against this word document you can if you become aware of the discomfort you can counteract it but if you're not aware of it it's just it's an an object you just can't hit so that that changed my life that question what is the psychological disc Comfort I avoiding right now you must make pressure Your Privilege so pressure is a privilege is on a lot of t-shirts by Chris Bumstead who is the current Mr Olympia classic physique Champion he was on the podcast a little while ago made t-shirts with pressure as your privilege on it turns out that one of my best friends in Austin his godmother first came up with that the're tennis player yeah yeah and sued Chris no and I was like oh yeah her book is called pressure pressure is a privilege this is awkward yeah that the guy that I and it was the first question I asked him and then I spoke to Sky and I was like have I has there been has this recreated some trauma inside of the family is Thanksgiving dinner going to be ruined because I brought it back up again but yeah you must make pressure Your Privilege why you look at any aspect of Our Lives where we experience growth it's under pressure there's an old cliche adage about how Diamonds Are Made which I think although is cliche speaks to this in such profundity and even when we think about the Comfort crisis we're living in and all of the health outcomes and predicaments that we're facing through our obsessive um pursuit of comfort and how the body has started to break down and we've got all of these mismatched diseases they call it where the world we're living in and the way we behave within it isn't aligned to who we who we are um it's the avoidance of pressure and it goes back to what you said earlier about avoiding that difficult conversation or that difficult piece of work if if there is an antithesis to pressure it is in my mind it is Comfort it is ease and that means that today is great and tomorrow is bad and anyone that has the foresight to have move that discomfort and that pressure into the current moment yields much greater returns in terms of happiness and health in the long term and in the book I go through tons of examples from Health from Sports to Everest climbers who understand and that famous tennis player who was the best in the world and I still think she is the the best female tennis player in the world um it was her Mantra it was that what is your relationship with difficulty and everybody including people in my family who have a adverse reaction to difficulty just defer it into the future in a bigger way it compounds against them to make their future harder than their present so everyone's relationship with difficulty whether it's difficult conversations or difficult workouts or difficult physical psychological exertion um those individuals I think are setting themselves up for a brighter future well how do you deal with the discomfort that comes along with pressure though right you have okay the fact that I have pressure pressure means that I care about something it means that it's fulfilling to me uh there are people that go through their entire life and don't ever have anything that approximates like importance right and I have it but the felt sense of pressure isn't that the felt sense is overwhelm and chaos and concern and and there's a a story below those words you've just used that really is the problem it's I'm not good enough I'm going to be kicked out of the tribe I'm Different all of those things right those that's the base layer the pretation you're right there's a story We Tell ourselves about our pressure which determines how we experience the pressure I actually did if you look at that famous Ted Talk on stress and pressure what they found out is that stress and pressure don't actually kill people unless you believe it will you have a negative interpretation of your pressure and your stress then it shows up in your physiological response you get more diseases but in that famous Ted Talk which I think has like 30 million views she found out that pressure in itself isn't the problem it's the story We Tell ourselves about our pressure that causes us to be unhealthy healthy um and we all have different stories about our pressure and if and if your story is that it is x y and Zed it's going to get me kicked out of the tribe it's going to expose myself for not being good enough if your story about difficult situations is I'm an impostor versus this is a growth moment not only you going to show up worse you're going to perform worse and the physiological impact and psychological impact is going to be detrimental and that's what this whole argument about imposter syndrome is so confusing to me because if I asked anybody would you like a life where you were never outside of your where you never did anything that challenged you or pushed you would you choose that no so why are you complaining about your life being full of that I think anyone who has a healthy relationship with pressure goes in search of continual imposter syndrome like you know what I mean like and they would be they would be dismayed at a life without it without that pressure and feeling out of your depth well the presumption would be that you're never doing anything you haven't done before right there are people that have imposter syndrome which I call imposter adaptation which is your impostor syndrome persists despite the fact that you've disproven it at this very thing it would be like every single time that you did a podcast you being adamant it was going to be terrible and you were going to fluff your words and and [ __ ] yourself and say something racist right it would be like everything's going to go wrong despite the fact that you've got 300 400 [ __ ] bits of proof that that's not the case MH but imposter syndrome should show up in someone who's healthily moving forward into new areas that they haven't been in before like imposter syndrome largely is a very realistic assessment of wow I've never I have no proof that can do the thing that I'm trying to do like what did you expect do you have Blind Faith and over time what you end up with what really good robust confidence is is when analogous situations start to bleed into other ones you spent a lot of time during social chain doing onstage speaking which presumably gave you even just a tiny little bit of a base that oh well like podcasting is kind of not not a million miles away from being on stage and being on YouTube's not a million away from being okay so it starts to sort of bleed into these other things and that's when it's really cool and that's when you get real compounding of confidence confidence evidence yes yes that's what we said earlier talking about criticism you've moved from like being rich in an independent media way to now being famous in a very sort of normal traditional media way as soon as you accept the Dragon's Den deal that is you allowing yourself to be noticed by the guardian and BBC and all of the rest of these people what have you learned about the differences in scrutiny and ten between these two worlds when I was a podcaster or a CEO um I wasn't of public interest at all that's actually the legal definition the word public interest when you become and you become part of a BBC show you legally become public interest what's that mean means that people can write certain things about you that they couldn't otherwise that's the ACT it's a legal term so if you were to for example sue a newspaper um they would make a case that we could say that about him or we could reveal his private business because it's of public interest they wouldn't be able to do that for someone that wasn't on on the BBC so that all all of that stuff changes the things that you have to keep the same and I think this is the same for everybody is you need to keep your circle of information your circle of feedback tight and close and small you have to put systems in place and I think this is actually the this is what Jo ogan's done really well and I've heard him speak about it at Great length is you can't search your name online which I never do I don't search my name on anything not Tik Tok not Instagram not YouTube nowhere because it's it's for me like the there's a set of principles and there's a there's a set of principles which are more important which is like me being true to myself and delivering in my way the feedback can be really distorting because it's not necessarily like always helpful so someone could comment on something that I produced and say this is terrible this is is Dreadful you need to do this this this and this now if I take that feedback violate my principles we end up in a place which we talked about earlier where you lose focus to go for the decade which I talked about the systems I'm setting up in my life you have to limit the amount of feedback you get which is not not not easy but you've had a few periods where the Press have been a bit buky and and accusatory and attacking how have you dealt with the the felt and what's that been like you know you you've you're a young guy like you've gone this world where you got to be rich and largely Anonymous although you weren't totally Anonymous but relatively now very much changed how do you deal with that as a felt sense of it's systems and processes again it's like even my friends right so if my friends see something on Tik Tok or Instagram or if it's like about my go whatever do not send it to me I will not see it and I again I've I actually took a lot of advice from Rogan's system Rogan's the same none of his friends can send them anything I don't see that stuff cuz it's it's not useful information and the truth is and again I spoke to Simon synic about this you don't want to start aiming at ghosts you don't want to start exerting energy on trying to counteract public perception um which isn't necessarily based on even their own perception of reality anyway you don't want it's not a useful ex sort of way to allocate your chips I talked about those 24 chips have 6 enough when you wake up it's a really inefficient use of your time doesn't bring you forward in any way so it all comes down to systems and processes you need these principles in your life which take you right back to your caveman days when there was 20 people and you all your survival led to the survival of the other 19 people so in in my hardest moments when I'm being criticized or scrutinized or whatever for me that's what it comes down to it's like keep my circle super small focus on what I'm doing you know Rogan's solution was Heavy kettle bell workouts five minutes of cold therapy and three grams of magic mushrooms per day really yeah I heard him say that when the spot fight yeah correct yeah and that's I mean that's his system he's and he's built up like a social network as well to guard him from you know news and articles and feedback and stuff and he he's kind of retracted from like social media as we know I don't think he was ever huge part of it and I understand why what would you say you know people from the outside looking in at somebody that gets the accolades and can hang with Prince William and make breakfast in a pratt or whatever what do people not realize about the reality of the sort of scrutiny that comes along with big platforms especially mainstream platforms um I would i' probably draw more on other people's experiences than my own from like interviewing people that have dealt with like real Fame because I don't consider myself to be really famous um I think it's maybe just never maybe there's a you probably experienced this as well but there's like an ongoing always on paranoia which I think is just this numbing paranoia in the background and also this realization which is actually something I learned from that one day by the way where I was with Prince William we're not friends he doesn't know who I am but when I spent that day with him and I posted I've just been with Prince William we did this bu business initiative every single message I received was amazing how is he amazing is he nice amazing is he nice amazing was he um sociable it's this realization that everyone you meet you're meeting everyone they know [Music] and and that's that's a that's a lot of pressure to never have a bad day in public and it actually gives me huge empathy for someone like Justin Bieber who is actually famous who goes out in public on his worst days and tries to pick up a can of milk and there's 74 Paparazzi following him down the street and thousands of fans literally outside his front door in New York City and he's literally going please can you not come to my home I watched the video of him going please can you not come to my home please and I go oh man there's no way to live your life is it that ambient anxiety there sort of sense that you're being followed or that that that something could go wrong yeah uh yeah I I get you with that and I'm I'm like I'm nowhere near some of these people that live there like a drake or even a Rogan or a or a Justin Bieber I can't imagine going I teach you a lesson that I learned from Ben Francis that didn't happen on the podcast so we went fernandos in Manchester uh at gym Shark Lift La weekend and he'd got his EA to text me and say where it was going to be and when or maybe he' text me or whatever um and I walk in and he sat down reading something on his phone or watching or whatever and I think is EA and is EA's assistant or something has sat on a different table he was just there I sat down and we got talking for the people who don't know Ben Francis is the CEO of Jim shark and his net worth is three times what Drake is worth triple Drake and then I thought what would the experience have been like if I tried to come to this Nando with Drake and Drake wouldn't have got within two miles yeah of this he would have been mobbed he would have been swamped it would have been chaos there would have been you can even even do this thing there's like a law right where if a normal person if like a super super famous person turns up in a very crowded place that they can be it's like inciting violence vicariously through fame or some [ __ ] and it made me start to think about the price that people pay for the wealth that they have right Ben Francis has managed to accumulate an awful lot of wealth and the felt price that he has to pay is at the very least three times less than Drake right because he doesn't have to have security with him he no security his EA is like 5 foot6 100 100 what's the cost of in Ben's case of not being as famous of the game he's chosen to play which is business versus I suppose that you know he's he's he's not going to be get the public Accolade as much he won't get access to as many cool things because people aren't going to be constantly looking for him he's not like the the hot girl on your arm that you can Trot out at some event he's very rarely going to be that front seat at the Lakers game and it pan and going and here's the CEO of Jim shark Ben Francis for me that's like pu he's not going to get but the cost he's going to encounter is seven days a week he's got thousands of people who are relying on him to pay their mortgages that me how many people's Drake got relying on him honestly on the business side of things probably directly not that many Ben's the CEO which means that when the markets go down and when they go public which I'm sure they'll go public when that stock price dips as You' we've seen from mat molding at the h group Matt molding said to me again not a famous not a drake right so to see of the Hut group he said on stage actually at the um an event we did at SoHo Farmhouse he says sometimes at night I just lie on that cold kitchen floor at 3:00 a.m. because it's just cold and it's cooling me down like the the the chaos of what's going on in that company means that he's lying at 3:00 a.m. on the kitchen floor because it's just the coldest surface he can feel to cool his body that that level of like the hardest times of my life were running business they weren't like dealing with journalists it was like the pressure of knowing payroll is tomorrow and looking at the bank balance and knowing there's nothing in there and then looking up in the office and seeing 200 people in our HQ that are joyous and celebrating because they think it's payday tomorrow and me knowing in my head that I have 24 hours to persuade Natalie at our bank to put money in our account or else they're not getting paid the pressure of that is much worse than any article or getting mobbed at Nando and that's what Ben will be encountering he'll do he does it with such Grace as a lot of CEOs do but you've heard about you know Elon Musk talking about the pain of trying to save Tesla and SpaceX being out in the street on Christmas Eve like crying he says it's the deepest pain he's ever felt then he got that phone call that someone was going to lend him 20 million to save Tesla and and SpaceX it's a different level of pain different game they're playing so all things in life have a cost this is my conclusion Drake's thing has a cost which is privacy and all of those issues Ben's thing has a cost as well which is even thinking about it gives me goosebumps cuz I know the feeling of like The Angst of a business a [ __ ] yeah um they're two different costs and it goes back to what you said is with the Mark Manson quote which which cost are you willing to to incur for which rewards you've got an interesting idea deep expertise is often a recipe for rigidity it goes back to what we said a second ago and that was those were the words I was actually looking for when we were talking about how knowing too much about a thing can make you unable to be agile and Innovative and think from first principles and that when we think about the real innovators over the years that disrupted the incumbents it's very rarely an that disrupts itself it's so often a couple of kids in a base basement that didn't go to university that have seen the introduction of a new technology and they thought let's [ __ ] around with this and they've been able to displace a century old incumbent because they are not incumbered by the rigidity of convention yeah that from a personal perspective I came up with a name uh the vestigal pattern bias it turns out it's also got it already existed before I came up with it called the Ein Stelling effect so the successful deliberate approaches that we learned during our development can become a prison which stops us from being more free flowing and at ease when we are developed the tools that got you from not to 50 are not the same ones that get you from 50 to 90 or 90 to 95 but we found success with this approach in the past so we cling on to an overly rational deliberate approach we hope that applying pure cerebral horsepower to a situation will fix it without realizing that our subconscious has aggregated the thousands of hours of experience that we've clocked up now and not using that experience is keeping us in the same league we've always been in it's so interesting it's a prison you've built around yourself that you don't know is there and I reflect on that video have you ever seen that video of the ant in the pen no they get an ant on a piece of paper plain A4 piece of paper and the guy on YouTube It's like got millions of views on YouTube Just with a brro draws a circle around the Ant and the Ant runs to the edge of the circle and believes it's trapped and it will not cross that line it will not cross that line looking down on it from a bird's eye view you go oh no it's just a figment of its imag in they get they do the same with a spider they get a piece of paper there's a little spider on it they draw a circle around it with a brro it will not cross that line as the guy's drawing the circle smaller and smaller he accidentally draws it so close to the spider that the spider steps over the brro and then it can never ever in its life be trapped by the Bro again and you watch it just run off the page and he's trying to trap it again and it can never because it realizes that that that's just a wall it's built in its mind and I reflect on that always in my life and go there was this time I was in Boston and I was running on a tread machine and I always do 10 kilm on this tread machine and when I do 10 km I get this physiological signal that I'm tired like my my muscles break down I landed in Boston I've got a talk later that day the tread machine doesn't have the kilometer dial on it so I can't see how fast I'm running so I think okay I'll do it the other way around I'll wait for the signal in my body telling me I'm tired and then I'll get off I run and I run and I run and I run I run and I run I run I'm like I'm not getting tired I keep running running run running I look up at the T I'm going to have to get off this treadmill at some point I hit the button 21 km and I and I was perplexed Leed absolutely perplexed every time I run 10 km I feel knacked I ran 22 when I couldn't see the thing and I don't it was just a a limiting belief a wall I'd built and I told myself that I was that was my limit and you me we have drawn circles around ourselves and those circles are determining how far we push how far we aim the the things we decide to do but they are just figments of our imagination have you seen there was a study very famous study where they put rats into water and they let them tread water tread water tread water to see how long they would do it until they just gave up so first iteration of the study they put rats in and I think they last around about 30 minutes something like that not long second iteration of the study new rats obviously unfortunately rats go in for 28 minutes then they pull them out they dry them off and they let them calm down then they put them back in they tread water for like 12 hours right really because their belief is I'm going to be saved that's a learned helplessness right you have heard about the dog where it pushes the button to stop from being electrocuted on the floor it's the same sort of thing but yeah I do wonder what where where are the lines that are drawn around us that we've drawn around ourselves and especially since moving to America my ambition has changed so much I don't have a massive amount of ambition intrinsically or I didn't and then I start to hang around with guys like Bill Perkins right or Rogan or Mark Norman or you know people that are really like moving very very quickly and it's like through [ __ ] osmosis man you just can't not start to have bigger goals and dreams and it's scary it's scary when you realize especially for me because I know what it's like to not have ambition I don't I not that it doesn't come for me but for some reason I hadn't lit the fire that went underneath it and then after a little while you realize oh hang on a second like this is really [ __ ] potent for you on that point about the limitations we both have that uh we probably don't realize are there the the best place to always search I think is in the labels we've given ourselves like what do you label yourself as when you introduce yourself podcaster yeah and and the if you think about labeling Theory what we said earlier about grades or telling kids certain things that is building a wall around you in your own mind that you're a podcaster and this happens in all of our Lives the last thing we achieved becomes the identity that we embody and it traps us in a cage so I'm super careful all the time especially when I left my last marketing company to not Define myself with a particular label because I would become the label I would act in service of the label and move in Direction you are not a podcaster in fact like podcasting did wasn't even a thing when you were born so how can that be who you are you are someone that is curious and this is what I mean by like resisting the labels you are curious you like intellectual conversations you like um self-improvement and forward motion and if those are your labels think about all the things you can apply that to business and creativity and you're doing shows soon right and I think that's a fre and you look at why people get midlife crises when they hit you know 40 30 40 years years old when they look at how the hell did I get here I'm working in the city well you you embodied a label and lived that label for 15 years and it wasn't even something you particularly enjoyed you were just good at it that resisting of labels I think is so important for long-term happiness so part of the reason why I went and worked in psychedelics part of the reason why I did the musical learned a DJ wrote the books because I don't see myself as anything I don't see myself as social media marketing CEO social media didn't exist when I was born there must be something more fundamental to to who I am and staying attached to that and resisting at all cost society's prep um temptation to put you in a box so we understand you and we understand where you fit don't get in the Box it's more difficult at a cocktail party but yeah I I know I I don't I don't disagree I don't I like entrepreneur because it's broad it means you create stuff yeah creative writer Etc all those things are great yeah your skills are worthless but your context is valuable yeah just a really interesting observation I've had from observing some of the most the people that have made huge pivots in their life but also my own experience of being a social media marketing CEO for 10 years and then upon leaving that business where I sold you know I did marketing for big fashion brands and big consumer electronics Brands six months to a year after I left there I moved my skill set to the Biotech Industry because one of my friends built one of the biggest psychedelics companies in the world and my skill set of social media and marketing was in such low Supply in that industry that the offer he made me to join his business was outstanding and I often think about you know we think the way to get ahead in life is to get promotions or to ask our boss for pay rise but if you think about your core skill set and the market in which you're selling your skill set is it in low Supply in that market and is the upside for the person that is hiring me tremendous you can get paid so much more they offered me $8 million in options for 9 months of work there's no fast fashioned brand that would have offered me that because the return for the fast fashion brand would have been 20,000 more dresses sold in the Biotech Industry it was moving that IPO price from potentially 1 billion to three billion so they could off 8 million is a a flash in the pan one of my best friends spent a long time in Manchester designing nightclub Flyers getting paid 50 Quid 100 pound per flyer I probably employed him you probably did yeah and I remember in in Co being in his house and the guy was like really down and out he's like something needs to change in my life I'm 35 now I'm still doing the same old thing and his talent object L his talent for design incredible incredible but he was selling that skill of design in the wrong Market nightclub Flyers where you might get a couple more people coming through the door um and in an industry where it was abundant in terms of supply of that skill so we made this big wall in his house and we put up um a few things where is your skill set going to be in the least Supply and where is this luxury design style you have going to be in the highest demand and also looking at industries that were coming into Shore where his design skills could yield the greatest returns should be quite obvious as I say this Dubai and nfts artists suddenly came into fashion the web 3 Community moved to Dubai so he picked up his life from Manchester two years ago and he moved to Dubai and this guy is making millions now selling the exact same skill to a different Market where it's in low Supply but it's yielding a greater return for those that hire him and I think and I went through in my book all the different industries from writing to um acting to um creative Pursuits where if you just moved yourself from a different Market from the market you run to a different Market you'd get yield a greatest return and lastly where I noticed this most is when our company went public we went public on a fairly small redundant German Stock Exchange and in those rooms in Frankford when I sat with Barkley's and um a variety of different banks the thing they kept on saying is if we uplist over to the NASDAQ that the company will both be worth three times more and I remember thinking to myself so the same business just moved to a different stock market the market cap would multiply by three that's kind of a metaphor for this idea that maybe your skill set is currently existing on an in lucrative and un lucrative market and all you need to do is find the market where it's in lowest Supply and yields the greatest return for those that need it and honestly biotech is one of them well I mean since moving to America it's the first time that I've ever been in another country where I've spoken the language but I've also somehow been considered exotic do you know what I mean like it's same thing I'm the same person they can understand me like you know going to bellus or somewhere you you're different you're you're different but where you speak the same language you're the same but somehow still exotic no one that's ever been British has been called exotic right apparently you could be doing this exact same thing in sford radio station to 77 listeners and there's so many as the exact same thing the exact same podcast the exact same talent that you have but in the wrong Market where that the economics of the business that you're applying your skill set in aren't there to give you to reap the greatest returns and the the ceiling because of the constraints of radio and the time constraints just aren't there to get the best out of your your talent and the the value from your talent so I think it's just a different lens to look through because so many people want a nicer house or a faster car and they're thinking okay so I work here for three years and I'll get a promotion and I'll get there but there's another lens to look through which is my core skill set what is it and where can I get the greatest return for it and where is it in the least Supply it's a different frame to think through but I yeah it's it's life-changing for the right people came up with this idea called Mono thinking this week after I read a quote from a friend you can gauge someone's Ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer those who blame many different issues like War poverty and pollution on just one cause capitalism are recycling explanations because their demand for answers outstrips the supply and I like the idea of calling it mono thinking it's another a explanation for me about why people who are not extremist cookie cutter ideologues get criticized an awful lot so if I know one of your views and from it I can accurately predict everything else that you believe they're not your views you're not a serious thinker right you have adopted a onesie wholesale and you've decided to put this on now the disadvantage is you haven't thought for yourself and you don't actually know what you're talking about the advantage from a group scenario is that I can very accurately predict what you're going to think about the next thing because it's what everyone else is going to think about the next thing right in your tribe yeah precisely correct now the problem that you encounter is that it makes you an unreliable Ally if your particular set of views doesn't fall into this cookie cutter design like there is no reason why your view on abortion should relate to your view on immigration or on economic policy or on Healthcare or on gun control or on Joe Biden or on whether January 6 was a thing and whether aliens are actually happening and yet for a lot of people it does and there will be some skew right some people will be more likely but it shouldn't be that you have the cookie cutter ideology of this particular group the disadvantage of being someone who doesn't take their ideology wholesale like that and this is the term that I loved about it was you basically become an unreliable I yeah sure you're with us on abortion but what about Donald Trump you weren't with us on that so what about when the next thing happens I don't actually know I don't actually know if we should trust Steven so much and it's not it's not an actual thought but it's just something that sits in the back of their mind and it it really um I think it's comforting to people who maybe sometimes feel like they are ostracized from a group they're a rugby player and they're there with the boys and they do the training and they do all the rest of it but they're not that bothered about going out and getting smashed on a Saturday night and they feel like they're they're like a little bit outside of the group because of but I do the main thing with you I do the thing that we're supposed to be together for and yet I'm made to feel outside of the group in the main thing because I don't do the other thing why is the other thing a part of the main thing do you know what I mean does that make sense I mean it goes back to what we said earlier about one of the issues in our psychology is we don't want to be different in any way and there's a real comfort in the Conformity of the crowd so it's much easier to not realize that most most truth is in the middle somewhere it's much it's much more comfortable and creates that sense of belonging in the same way that identity and labels do to fit into the crowd and accept 95% of what my of the people that wear the same football kit as me wear if the socks are different someone's going to point it out sitting in the middle is is there's just no there's no home there there's no team there's no safety in the middle um but the truth is in the middle and so it's a decision you have to make about your strength of conviction and what you care about what's your kpi success is it truth or is it Conformity um but it's tough that's why I love so much about podcasting is we've created a bit of nuance in the medium it's not just Echo Chambers and algorithms separating left and right there's a diversity of opinion stretched over two hours so there's context and I think people that gravitate towards this medium in shows like yours appreciate Nuance they they're not looking for a leftwing podcast or an all right podcast whatever um It's Tricky it's really really tricky in this day and age really it takes a certain a certain strength that most of us can't embody in our pursuit of finding our tribe and fitting in and avoiding self-preservation and not being kicked off the island if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint it would literally have led to death if you didn't have a clear tribe like if you didn't have a it would have been kicked off the island would have led to death so it's no wonder that we we're so quick especially with the aid of algorithms to fall into these tribes and say and swear allegiance to everything they believe yeah the the other interesting thing is that and absurd ideological belief is less about what you believe in and more about showing fty to the ideology overall I learned this from the same guy ginda that that did that quote he basically said that if you have a really crazy ideological belief let's say it's to do with the world being flat you pick whatever it is that you want it's kind of like a a canary in the coal mine it's like this is so counter to your rational thought that if you're with us on this we can probably reliably say that you're going to be with us and all of this other stuff right it's a show of fty that's what's important about it and when people don't adhere to that they're seen as uncommitted by the opposition and unreliable by their own side and also in their own view of who they are it causes dissonance so if I say I'm left leaning and then I encounter a policy or a theory or some kind of idea that is typically belongs to the right my sense of identity on a psychological level will be challenged and threatened in in an really unhelpful way so in order to alleviate the dissonance of who I think I am I have to reject that idea or else it throws you into this state which psychologists called dissonance where you have like there's something contradictor what contradicting what I think I know about myself and who I am in the world so we have to throw it out this is why we most people can't even have a conversation with someone that they know disagrees with them it's why they unfollow and block people because it's causing dissonance the truth popping up on their timeline and being something that challenges their sense of identity or their ability to be as far on the left or as far on the right as possible it's not nice for ourselves it's actually I think much of it is actually the threat it poses to ourselves in our own mind the identity threat it's like a psychological protection mechanism I said I was on the left I said I was a labor supporter that's who I am that's the Friendship group I've built that's how I understand myself this new piece of information okay that's a right leaning thought I can't if I if I if I entertain that I have to entertain dissonance cognitive friction so the easiest thing to do is shoot at the person who said it discredit them yeah or find some way to just you know kill it on site and that's the thing can you deal with dissonance I think many of the greatest thinkers in our world are able to sit in dissonance for long enough to interrogate something for its merits yeah being able to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time is like very valuable but increasingly rare do you follow people that disagree with you and no even further do you follow people that really piss you off when they tweet because of their ideas are so far from your own me person no I I keep my I keep my Twitter following below 100 which means that it's it's it's difficult to get in there but certainly on Instagram yes uh a bunch of my friends have extoled to me the importance and the virtue of exposing yourself to content that you purposefully disagree with I actually listen to a number of different podcasts that are like typically wouldn't be the sort of thing that I would listen to but it really gives me an interesting Insight so um decoding the gurus can spirituality um QQ andon Anonymous interesting those are three of them and they're like sort of Center left or left leaning like debunking kind of shows there's a lot of criticism of like I've been criticized on those shows there's criticism of people that are in my industry uh that are my friends but I find it really interesting to observe what someone who isn't me sees and that's been very Illuminating really really Illuminating it's not so easy to hear hear it when it's about you but um yeah I find that very interesting do you know what's interesting when you see how someone on the other side let's just say on the other side of the belief system feel so strongly about something that you just think is absolutely absurd like the Flat Earth or whatever you know it also tells you a story about your own beliefs and one that if if you if you observe closely is probably the most important thing you can learn which is like my beliefs are also based probably on the same fundamentals like I heard something from somewhere it confirmed the the way I wanted the world to be it probably came from people that I agreed 95% of things on otherwise um and the fragility of belief so the fragility of all the beliefs you have about you and you what you're capable of and who you are if if that person over there is so clearly completely wrong maybe I am too at a really fundamental level I actually I've been thinking it's been creeping into my mind over the last couple of weeks that like maybe the person I think I am as we kind of said earlier is is not actually who I am and it's just a bunch of beliefs that I've like I'm living by like those disciples on the left and right do and like how do I unpack all of that and find out who who I can be and who I really am what would I have to do what's the journey I'd have to go on so this is why we all deluded we're all deluded so fundamentally you know we both speak about this a good bit I think and I wonder whether part of it's because were from the UK and for the American people that are listening it might not make quite as much sense although if you're from some small town in the midwest maybe it does there is such a strong pull for people to conform in the UK perfect example look at the vaccination rates I think it's like 90 93 94% of people in the UK got their first dose uh it's like sort of high 80 second and then like low 80s third right I think America maybe scraped the bottom of a dick of 50 or 60 for the first dose right but who are the Americans in the room they're a nation of people who said yeah [ __ ] it I'll get on that boat right the British people I don't know maybe there's genetic predisposition maybe it's cultural imposition probably a part of both but I certainly see in the UK a fear of breaking out and and very very strong criticism when people do and if I could bring back if I could export from my life in the US and import to the world of the UK uh one thing it would be a lack of cynicism like it would be less cynicism around people doing different things because I think that it's stifling happiness flourishing Innovation people leading a life that's that's different to the one that they would do being more experimental being more motivated uh yeah I I I really wish that I could like sprinkle a little bit of that motivation you know the first Brit that's moved to the LA that works especially in the creative Industries that has said that to me there you're not the second you're not the third you're not the fourth you're not the fifth say I hear it all the time and you hear it even when you thinking about Innovation and we even see on the London Stock Market now the public company CEOs that I know that flirted on the stock market are just being destroyed they're like personal character is being destroyed and the stocks are in the bin you think about some of the big unicorns we've had from the UK being the founders of those is just an awful experience if they were in the US they would be applauded and clapped and on the front cover of you know whatever [ __ ] I wish we could change torn to they're Torn to Pieces here it feels like there's a little bit of something going on here too LS Capaldi you watch his documentary yeah how I'm feeling now I think it's called um had him on the podcast as well so yeah I really enjoyed that uh he's got this one line in it that I just [ __ ] can't stop thinking about leis Capaldi writes this first album songs that he was singing since 2017 when he was playing them in working men's pubs all around the Northeast of Scotland then he blows up trillion bazillion streams and he's asked to write the second album during coid WME or CA or whoever his recording company are how's the album coming along and he's feeling this pressure and he develops this tick because he's under all of this anxiety and he's noticing he has stayed the same right he is still the same person that he was from before and he's noticing the world treating him in a different way and he's scared and he's a uncertain about his own abilities and about what the world wants from him and he can't work out why other people are treating him differently this [ __ ] one line in the middle of the documentary he says Fame doesn't change you just changes everybody around you yeah and it seems to be as far as I can tell the truth that a lot of people feel especially someone like Lewis the same songs it's literally the songs that he wrote from before and when you see the CEO the business owner the rugby player that's trying to break out and do things differently as you ascend in status as you change the world around you as you start to become more competent as the texture of your own mind improves other people will notice the difference in you more quickly than you do and in poor versions of culture they won't respond nicely to it they won't respond well and I wish that we could somehow just [ __ ] get rid of that in the UK and you'll even you probably would have observed this as a podcaster but speaking to Daniel pink who's the you know great motivational speaker I guess researcher he talks about how when your incentive structures of performing a behavior change and it becomes about making sure the people at your record label can pay their mortgages the enjoyment of the pursuit of the thing itself decreases think about the discipline equation friction goes way up the psychological enjoyment of the pursuit is no longer you in the corner of the pub in L kali's case where he said to me I want to go back to the pub like that's basically what he's saying sometimes I just wish I could go back to the pub where no one knew my name and I had to shout over people as they were drinking their beers and ignoring me less pressure more psychological enjoyment less friction um so you got to be careful I think this is what Rogan has done so unbelievably well we think about building decad Long Systems that will endure in the face of status and Temptation Rogan has said I'm going to stick to my principles and I'm not going to do a podcast one single episode that I don't love a conversation I don't want I I I'm not going to do a single conversation I don't want to have whether it's my boy from The Comedy Store talking about anthills or whatever I'm going to stay true to my principles incredibly difficult to do you know he's done it perfectly keep his Circle small try and stay away from those red carpets as much as he possibly can and keep his principles laser focused why did I start this and I can't imagine the pressure he's had why don't you have more of these people on why don't you have more of this type of person on you should all the Articles writing you change your principles change your what that's a motivation threat and he's managed to saave off that motivation threat for 15 years would you know why it's so important to not damp that down is because your instincts are so idiosyncratic and personal to you and if you try to reverse engineer what you think you should be doing the only thing that you have which was your instincts are going to be eroded away yeah that's all that you've got ultimately like you you're show and mine despite the fact that we traffic in very similar circles we're friends with a lot of the same people we even cross over in terms of guests listen to the [ __ ] episode it could not there could not be a better person for to be crossing over with me in British podcasting because our vend diagram Circles of how we have our conversations are [ __ ] completely different and that's perfect right because I couldn't do your show you're interested in stories right you fundamentally love stories you love the passion behind people you love the emotions that are driving that you want to understand why they are the way they are I want ideas right I want to understand what's the framework that seen how does this apply in a different setting right that's [ __ ] great so Douglas Murray tells me this story right one of my favorite stories Douglas one of the first newspapers that he works at he has this boss who's like a legendary Sant of the journalist journalism industry and he decides he's going to release a uh West End show about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets and this guy's like at the Zenith of his career so he's this big dog and there's going to be loads of scrutiny and he's been in the journal industry so he's probably made a [ __ ] ton of enemies as well anyway opening night by the halftime interval there was no one left in the entire Auditorium including the cast so this guy's despondent egg on his face articles upon articles upon articles about how embarrassing it was and Douglas asked him he said what were you thinking [ __ ] show in the West End of London about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming coulet he saidwell Douglas I trusted my instincts an instincts that may sometimes lead you wrong but they're the only thing that's ever led you right I was like holy [ __ ] that's true and if you don't listen to your instincts in that regard you can actually get yourself to the stage where you've eroded them away and you've pushed them away so much you can't really hear them anymore and then you're no better than the guys on Late Night show TV who don't actually run their own show they're the mouth puppet of whatever the big egac and the big company and their agenda is that sits behind them and if you want to feel a great regret in life it's making a decision against your instinct and then it failing making a decision in line with your instinct and then it failing is much less of a place to fall from than making an in making a decision against your instincts and then it fails and I've sat with so many people in the media Industries who've done daytime talk shows I actually had one of my podcast and she said to me G you know the part that hurts the most is I knew the show sucked and I didn't speak out and say it didn't I always say to my team and I've said this to my manager who's in the room now I said we're doing a new TV show right and I said to him I want to fail at something that I believe in because failing at something that I didn't believe in will suck more than any pain in my life so if I fa if I do something and I believed in it and it was in line with my instincts and I fail you go cool right okay I've learned something here but God can you imagine the regret of acting out against your instincts and then it going badly like so on all facets of my life that's like that's my um my thing going forward is fail at something you believe in you know you can't predict the output you can't predict whether there's product Market fit in most walks of life but the input of you you know you being glad that it was in line with your principles Your Instinct and your values you just got to Hope on the on the outside that it resonates with someone else and typically the truth is you know they say when you're Building Products or businesses don't create for someone you haven't met create for your best friend because there'll be lots more people like you and your best friend and you know your best friend best and I always think about that when I when we're making like the trailers for the podcast or we're doing pieces of content for client I think which one of my friends is go I always say this to people I say I say we say to my team tell me now which one of your friends is going to share that in the WhatsApp group and that's not a rhetorical question I want to know his name because if there's one of them there'll be Millions so they'll go okay um my friend Dave he's going through this divorce at the moment and actually I need to change this bit because in Dave's through the lens of Dave Dave's life i' actually probably need to take out this little part and emphasize this and when you create stuff through that lens you make stuff that's resonant at scale it's a nice frame to run whenever you make something name the friend that this is for and why they're going to pick it up and put it in the WhatsApp group or share it on their story or love it or buy it or click or care wonderful frame stepen Bartlett ladies and gentlemen Stephen I appreciate the hell out of you man what you do next great question um loads of meetings back toback hopefully we go for dinner tonight here in London yep yeah that'll be great um just yeah working I work working out probably in about an hour's time um lots of things what about you what are you up to next uh we're going to do some interesting stuff back here in London at the end of October I'm really excited for this I'm going to try and do a new I can't say it yet because if it doesn't happen it's going to be disappointing I'm going to try and do something relatively new in podcasting that I don't think has quite been done before it's least it's not been done for quite a while um and then live show like a live thing no okay no no no um a round table I I I'll I'll tell you off Fair I'll tell you off fair when when I can't get hell to account if it doesn't happen um I'm looking forward to that uh live tour UK and isand at the end of this year then US and Canada I'll be doing a little bit of work around there with James Smith we got a show in Dubai toward the end of November and I need a break man I need a Christmas I'm looking I'm working toward December now so how do you know you need a break uh actually I don't I don't know that I need a break I just feel like it would be rejuvenative haven't seen Mom and Dad much this year um but yeah resilience is a strange thing it comes it creeps up on you you don't mean to build it and then it just appears yeah you don't really know dude I appreciate you I really do I appreciate the fact that we we support each other throughout what it is that we're doing I I really want to give you a big compliment because there's very few people you encounter in this game that it's so abundantly clear that they're acting in line with their principles like they're leading with their curiosity and it shows in the consistency of what you do that you're someone that is like creating from first principles you're led by what you actually care about and that's it's really inspiring for me to see it's really inspiring that's why I was so in a Fred again cuz I was like this is a person that's acting on his own curiosity and first principles and I see that in you and I know how that plays out it's an amazing amazing thing game recognizes game man thank you brother appreciate you thank you thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Steven then press here for the fulllength 3-hour long podcast with Alex hosi which has been blowing people's minds go on press it