Modern Wisdom - #688 - Steven Bartlett - 17 Raw Lessons About Human Nature

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

Steven Bartlett is the Founder of Social Chain, an entrepreneur, a podcaster and an author. How to become a functioning human is a difficult skill to work out. Should I focus on achieving goals or inner peace? Can I become confident without arrogant? Thankfully Steven has spent the last 2 years distilling a ton of lessons into his new book, and today we get to go through my favourites. Expect to learn Steven’s equation for unbreakable discipline, the biggest lesson from dealing with mainstream media pile-ons, why there are so few actual practitioners in the world, how to stop being your biggest critic, why your weirdness is the ultimate competitive advantage, how Steven discovered he was riddled with fake ambition and much more…⁣⁣ Sponsors: Get a FREE 30-day trial and 2 months at 50% off from Epidemic Sound at https://share.epidemicsound.com/modernwisdom (use code MW50 at checkout) Get 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get $150/£150 discount on Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Stephen Bartlett. He's the founder of Social Chain, an entrepreneur, a podcaster, and an author. How to become a functioning human is a difficult skill to work out. Should I focus on achieving goals or inner peace? Can I become confident without becoming arrogant?

Thankfully, Stephen has spent the last two years distilling a ton of lessons into his new book, and today we get to go through my favorites. Expect to learn how Stevens' equation for unbreakable discipline works, the biggest lesson from dealing with mainstream media pylons, why there are so few actual practitioners in the world, how to stop being your biggest critic, why your weirdness is the ultimate competitive advantage, how Steven discovered he was riddled with fake ambition and much more.

I really enjoy these episodes, where we just get to break down and play about with new ideas that we've come up with or found on the internet and get to discuss them between us. It's kind of like a jazz club freestyle riff with a ton of new and interesting insights. Steven has spent a lot of time speaking to very, very cool people. And I very much value the things that he's got to say. There is an awful lot to take away from this one. If you are new here or if you're a long time listener, don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed.

And that means you will miss episodes when they go up the next few months has the biggest guests that I've ever brought on Modern Wisdom, some absolute world class, storming returners and new guests, and you do not want to miss them, you would be trez sad. So navigate to Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever else you are listening and press the subscribe button.

I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Stephen Bartlett. 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, 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 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 electronics stores always were. What Apple did differently and which helped them to justify the cost of a $2,000 smartphone was they gave 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 either side of it, the frame in which it's presented is telling you that this item in the middle is high value, 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 unlimited supply like pieces of art, whether they're typically one-offs, a scene in higher value, the frame in which you present something is doing so much of the work to communicate the value of the thing within it. 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 cups with nothing written on them, people that the Pepsi was a Coca-Cola, or they had blind 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 core psychology. There's a story from a 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 to work out, CrossFit or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or intervals or whatever, and you're laid on the floor, panting,

making a sweat angel, you've got the taste of metal in the back of your throat and your heart and the vision's 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 a very kind of a masticistic type of pleasure. But if you spontaneously had that happen while you were sat in traffic, you'd be fucking terrified.

You would ring the ambulance and you would say, I'm dying, that this is a hard 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 that the mouse is 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 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 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 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 all-inclusive 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 is entered the frame, has tricked the mind to think, God, if they removed coffee from the all-inclusive trip to Rome,

the all-inclusive trip to Rome must be way better because they haven't removed it from the trips of Paris. A slight thing. And we see it again on menus and in electronic stores with TVs. And if you go into a steak restaurant and there's three steaks, people will typically choose the middle one because the cheapest one and the most expensive one of telling you a story that the cheap ones to probably not good, the expensive ones 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 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 testers 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 or the content, it's really hard to do that in reality. Like it's really hard as Rory Sutherland says to make a train fast or to make an iPhone bed. 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 ancillary extrinsic sort of diffuse differences that you can use. And 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 16.9. It's filmed in a custom version of cinema scope, right? It perfectly fits. And anybody that's watching your iPhone now, turn it to a widescreen 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 full characters long. Hit me. In terms of the frame, is you write in a title, 4K. Nobody cares, right? Objectively, it's not gonna change 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. And really like the second order thing is there really worth your time. We've invested a lot in this. Just full characters that'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 full K and look 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 then, I don't even know what the other ones are, I'm a singer and 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 associated with it,

and all of that is the alchemy that Rory talks about. Next one, next one. You do not get to choose what you believe. How is that the case? This is one of 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. 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 what we need to do to 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 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 reflect on that in my own life, I ask myself, how many of my beliefs have I actually chosen? And I used to be religious up until I was 18 years old. I believed in some kind of God,

Christianity. And 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 there isn't a single belief I have that I've chosen. And the experiment I'd ask anyone learn is that there isn't a single belief I have that I've chosen. And 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 unchoose to believe that right now? If I put a billion dollars on the table of Elon Musk's money, and I said, 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 five-p 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 in hope. I'm talking about actually believing it's true. So if we all agree upon that, and I ran some surveys with people where I asked in this question about 20% of people originally thought 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 is truth. Doesn't mean it is true, but it's evidence we've accepted. And therefore, if you want to change your beliefs, what's abundantly clear is you have to go and put yourself in situations where your existing beliefs account are actively in new evidence. So when it comes to speaking on stage or when it comes to 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 Holidays got this amazing quote where he says, self-belief is overrated. I prefer to use evidence. Yeah, exactly that.

It gets back to that whole mosey 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 out. And ultimately, hoping that you're going to be able to, but believing that you can think your way out of a thinking problem is like believing you can sniff 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 way or at it. I was hypnotized last week after, I got a lemur. And 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 it differently. She's a very, very famous therapist called Marissa Peir. 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. So like have a better relationship with sugar. Okay. Right. And it was interesting because she takes me back to my childhood and then confronts me with the information that my inadequate lunchbox made me feel insecure. It made me feel a ton of shame growing up because I never had anything. We didn't have

food or money or those kinds of 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 anywhere. So she went, took me back there and wired that. But what she's actually doing is she's giving me no evidence because she takes me right back to that kid, and she's basically whispering into his ear, a new story. And so I actually think that the principle that we don't get to choose what we believe still holds true, but with hypnosis,

which seems to be the outlier, they're giving you new evidence that counteractual 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. Yes.

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 it's very, very skilled in taking you to that belief and smashing it.

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 choose 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 people think of hypnosis,

is like someone checking 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 lunchbox and I felt like I was there. And then she told me a story, 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 that you have to go and put yourselves in situations where you're going to be presented with your evidence. And it's interesting with belief change, you'll accept evidence that is complementary.

As I said, if someone says you're more looking than 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 we have 95% of the same beliefs, I'm significantly more likely to accept one from you. So when we need 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, but someone that

we believe in trusting is a useful tool for belief change as well. 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. You've 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 lifelong stutters

throughout their entire adulthood, because they were told, you mustn't start to be carefully, you're doing it again, you're doing it again, 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 accept it to be true and start to embody it. Take 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 really make sense until I spoke to this evolutionianthropologist 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. So we are predisposed to be very prejudiced 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 believing this, think about what happens. Someone 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 scall saxon. 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 across from you. Yeah. And it shows up as in, 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. So 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 looking at you. If you're looking for, you know, 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?

Yep. And it varies. I'm really fascinated as well by self prejudice and the power that that exerts over us and how in the studies that I was reading, because there's a stereotype that woman were worse at maths, they did these studies where they just asked you to take your gender before you do the test and performance dips in women that have to tick their gender, same with black people, their performance dips, if they just reminded of their own identity, if they have

to write their name, the performance dips. So they did the 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 internalizing it at all times. And then 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 ease and ease. No. It's a miracle that I didn't interpret that as an I'm an E person and then show up in life in such a way. There's this similar quote from Anthony Vettino. It's more socially acceptable to be our unbiggest critic than it is to be our unbiggest 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. It's so strange, it's more

socially acceptable to be our biggest critic than it is to be our biggest cheerleader. I wish there wasn't the case. I've been thinking a lot lately, I've not actually spoken about it, but 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 a downward discipline spiral, it's always hard to give advice and I'm actually cautious about being a fixer, something Simon Sinek 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 gonna do this,

when no one is watching, we don't think it's important to keep those commitments. We think lying to ourselves is, there's no sort of 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 manual 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 yourself today. Like you don't have to move them out Everest. You don't need to go on a seven-day ayahuasca retreat. How about when you said you were going to get in bed at 10pm, you do that. And you stack that. You talked about Alex Hemosa's quote 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 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,

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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 extra ordinary things have been able to get there

that they've just started off unbelievably small, right? I'm just not gonna hit the snooze button. I'm just not going to use my phone before 9am, 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 what you're doing, focus on how you feel. But you said about extraordinary people there. This is what Chris Ubank Jr said to me, which really stuck with me. He said, my dad flew me to Cuba and we had a training camp out there and they surprised me. They put 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 to me, I looked up at the ring

and I saw this massive Cuban heavyweight stood there. And he said, I've 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 nine and I get completely cramp in one of my legs, and I know I've told myself I'm gonna run 10 kilometers 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 sharpen the 11th round of a championship fight when there's 50,000 people watching me in the audience, and I know, deep in myself's story that I'm the type of person that quits when things get hard, because I got off that treadmill at mile nine when no one was watching. It would modify my self-story. The commitments we keep to ourself 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, it 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 unkept commitments to themselves. 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 me unsuperman. 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 are there is of my life where I was able to hypnotize out of sugar I mean, yeah, I actually haven't eaten sugar since as well. So it did kind of work I've no desire to have sugar anymore hell yeah, so no, I know exactly what you mean

And this is something how you do anything is how you do everything. Is 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 biggest critic than our biggest, like, complimentary. Given that, if you mess up a little bit, that can quite quickly spiral. Oh, 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. 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 a delicate balance, 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 gonna do. You break trust when you don't do what you said you were gonna do and you don't own up to it,

take responsibility for it and point it out. So in business, there's often times where you say something to a 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 in power, not saying, oh, I couldn't do that because, or I needed to do, no, it was your priorities. It was the priorities and the decisions you made. So when I missed 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. What you see in that chapter is you see, obviously,ation 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 just something I've been thinking a lot about. 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 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 Carls of prime example of that, leaving his potentially lucrative career to go and tell jokes for no money for 10 years, down and 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, the people that I admire that are the masters of their craft, with these deep practitioners, and then you have this other type of person, which I call kind of the parrots, where they observe these people and 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 practice. So they never get to that deeper level of understanding. And as they say, to learn something, you read about it, they often say 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 iterative pattern for many, many years. And your depth of understanding, which you've done something, is unparalleled. And that's the foundation for great creativity. You see it with Fred again. He's a... What a guy, man.

He's an absolute... In my mind, he's an absolute genius. He's a fucking savant for the people that don't know who we're talking about. Fred again is a classically musically trained DJ who's 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 keys. You see the conviction of that, and you see 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 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 principle level. You're talking Elon Musk, you're talking you cany-ays of the world, and Fred again. He's pulling things together in different ways

and expressing himself without the constraints of convention. That's what, that's what pioneers and is and practitioners do and parrots could never do that because they don't understand the seafloor. 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. Fuck 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 feel like things aren't coming my way sufficiently quickly, I'm not making the progress that I want. It's because I'm dicking 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? Joel's interesting. Is the most intelligent people I've met? No. The most successful people I've met as entrepreneurs and practitioners. Never read, never really read books. Like even in Elon Musk of the world, I mean, 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 artist 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 and creativity, like knowing too much innovate 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're familiar with this,

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 learners mind in some regard, which is you're not lucky, you said about you come into this room, and there's a million bits of information that you could be focusing on,

but you're not focusing on those, you're focusing on the ones that matter. 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 our industry, what we largely traffic in, or anecdotes and insights, 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, 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 two hours of dinner with Douglas Murray

then Jimmy Carr, then Stephen Bartlett, then 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 do it. But in lieu of living this perpetual dinner life, reading books is 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 people do what they do. And the deep experiences that are all fundamentally intertwined in the mistakes that I made and the journey of getting there. Now in a book I might give you the four paragraphs, but the rest of the iceberg 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 the rest of the industry, right? Because of that, there's a naivety to it, which allowed us to do new things, because we didn't read the book, that I think some of the radio industry are struggling with with that transition. Dude, I mean, you're seeing it in 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, like I couldn't do that.

You put the script in front of me, I'm gonna fall to the floor. But yeah. It's the takeaway here though. If 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, 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 the least amount of potential cost to yourself. It's like to go in practice. And if I had kids now, I would tell them to go and join an AI startup.

That's well-funded. That's what I tell them to do. Small group of people, whether they're going to be close to the information and 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 a master but then I can't they have to pick an industry that they are innately passionate about because you don't go for a decade with Fred again or Jimmy Car or Darren Brown's curiosity if 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 meet Ginny or you meet Darren, you go, oh, 15 years of time, no money and busking. Think of Paldy. 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 marshaling our own life. I wonder how much of it just comes along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older. 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 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 four disciplines of execution, really interesting analogy that's used. The word strategy is in the top 10 of all linked in words in bio descriptions and execution and executioner aren't even in the top 1000, right, because it's much easy to strategize than it is to execute. But if you, this is a term that's, you can tell people that really no 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 challenge is that's in front of

them. And our mutual friend, George Max, 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, if you had him do this before, no, fucking 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 fucking 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? Ooh. Prince William. Right, okay. I feel like you've broken the game a little bit there. I don't think that

was that was pretty much a fair. My framework though was find someone that is both smart and influential and that can't be right. And that can't be right. Yeah, and that can't is enough about my predicament. Yeah, so. But that 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 he's going to be able to solve problems at a very high level, under pressure, very quickly. Just all of the things that you want in a front.

Yeah, you're so true. You willed it down to five people instantaneously in my head, and I'm deciding between them, but I thought I didn't know if they can pull enough levers. Fucking 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 stood behind Fred again this weekend as he did his show in at Ali Pellie 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 a case of me doing a call. It goes, 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 that. I got to show you this. I got to show you this. Mark Manson put this quota a few months ago, and I've not been able to stop

thinking about it. The most important question to 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. Even for me and you, love doing the show, love speaking to all these interesting people, get to fly around the world. But I would be lying if I said I love writing show notes or doing research in Guatemala airport, it's three in the morning because I'm on a delayed flight and I've got an 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. Yes, yes, yes. You might be familiar with it. Let's hit it, hit it. That really embodies it.

That Mark Manson quote about the pain you're willing to encounter. I was trying to 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 juicetype of individual. And I came up with this discipline equation

that I'd love to interrogate with you because I've not thrown out enough people to know that if it's true or not. So discipline equals 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 enjoyable and reinforcing and 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 Sinek said to me, well, Steve, I take the bins out at 7 a.m. in the morning yesterday. 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? And that sort of underpins and defines the importance of that goal. Well, he'd get a fine and then

hear that have an overflowing bin out the front of his house. So the why 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 perception 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 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 myself, a steam.

And the friction associated with it is low, in less. Unless I go to a gym where people know me, I spend the whole time talking. Then what happens if I'm putting that situation, so I don't go to 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's one of the things that actually changed my relationship with the gym and nearly threw me off the habit

was that psychological cost. So how does that sit with you? It does, 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 this guesty of time.

Because, you know, so I started because was going to write a chapter about time management. People want to know how to manage their time. 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 turn out new things because there's 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. 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 17,000 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 a frame I think through where we wake up in the morning with these 24 chips. If you spend eight hours sleeping, you wake up with 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 allocate two chips to this little piece here called fitness, the roulette table spins and I get my returns. As I went down that chapter, I realized that in the context of time and death 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 line. If for whatever reason you just tip any part of that equation, you could knock him off that discipline with Jimmy Karin, 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 right his block or whatever it might be called in their context. 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 do that. Never gonna 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, you remember you might have had this in your house when you were younger. Radio, infrared socket, turner onerers. It's like a single remote. It's like 10 bucks on Amazon. You leave the wall socket on it all times and you run it through one of these additional

sockets and then you plug your shit into that thing. It's like 10 bucks on Amazon. My entire studio at home is run through one of these. So going and in and I just press one, two, three, 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 gonna 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 stares back at me precisely. Same as you. DJ Kit can't be on the floor. If you want me to practice as much as possible, get it in the way. Put it in the way of things. It's almost harder for me to DJ than it is for me to avoid it. It was only kitchen counter, so I would sometimes be going into the kitchen to eat something and just, oh, press the button,

and just, I'm off, four hours later, I've just done a four hour DJ practice. 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 doesn't really matter to you. Yes. Is there psychological enjoyment from the pursuit? Yes. Is the friction? I have what's what's the level of friction? Four out of ten for out of ten, but if we added up the first part of the equation, how much does it matter to you at ten ten and how much? Oh, how much was the psychological enjoyment of the pursuit? 9.

So I'd say we're about 19 takeaway for. And because it's positive, the behavior will occur. You can do that as a minus for, 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 why behind, 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. Yeah. My wife isn't strong enough. I don't, I haven't quite had the evidence in my mind. The intrinsic enjoyment of it as well. Sometimes we need a little bit more pain, right?

It's a robust way 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? You know, somebody who had a 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 that the people wrong. 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 are you being dragged by something? When I say dragged, I mean some kid on the playground at seven years old told you you're a scumbag and you'll never be anything in your poor. And then that's dragged you, that insecurity and that shame has dragged you to entrepreneurship into becoming a millionaire. Driven is what Gary Vaynerchuk 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 even in my case, super, tons of shame as a kid, the only black kid in an all white area pretty much. The poorest family in our street definitely, dilapidated house in the context of a wonderful area. Deep shame and insecurity about not being enough, drove me like you, 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 are illusions and mirages and their false. 100% and it's... I have believed sometimes that a lot of people disagree with, but 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 Hahn and I remember what Will Smith said, and they all describe, they can all very clearly articulate the reason for 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. Actually, I question how much choice they have over that motivation. In the case of Eddie Hahn, he lived in the footsteps of his father, Barry Hahn, who pulled up to school in these roles, Royces, and he was known as Eddie Hahn's son. He's competing with his father. He'll say it.

I'm driven. I'm dragged by the insecurity of being Barry's her own little son. I want to outdo him. It's the same with some of my other billionaire friends. And it's the same with Will Smith. He's being dragged by an insecurity in shame. So the key thing, because that's not always a bad thing, right? 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 that about 24 years old when we

had an offer from a very big company to sell the business And I went home that day and I googled mansions and Lamborghini's on auto trader And I looked into that screen infant felt 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 riving on my doorstep, I realized that I would be poorer if I bought it. 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. If it wasn't for that, if we weren't obsessing like the dog, what the fuck was I doing it for? And 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'm a 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 lead to no ambition,

but it's very much the opposite. 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 entirely 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 would 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 a Lamborghini in a mansion, Steve Bartlett would be worth two or four Steve Bartlett's. But 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 perception of value fluctuation, like starting a podcast or learning to DJ or doing a musical up and down the country or joining a psychedelics business, just a 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 also also the path to real mastery when you're not being dragged.

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and use the code modern wisdom at checkout for 20% off everything sight-wide. That's nomadic.com slash 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 icky guy and show up in the way your logos 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 fucking power. That's fuel, right? And do you know what it can be as well? It can be a tiny thing. Oh, throw away comment. Throw away comment. The one lunch money. Oh yeah. And that's what you were story going back to what we said about evidence about money and other people. And that has just dominated yourself story 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 ten 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 a 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 fucking resentment, right? I had a desire to prove everybody

that had ever picked on me in school, every person that I thought I wasn't going to an out 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 fucking interesting realization. And here's the risk, though, when I came to learn, is it will take you somewhere, that drive, but it's not guaranteed to take you to happiness. The obsession of being dragged by an insecurity, like the one you've described and the one that I described, is so overpowering that it might mess up your priorities. I think at a deeper level, humans, regardless of their term, 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 years.

The cost is, like even as I sit here to I haven't spoken to my mom for months, like we've 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 now 31, I've managed to get a relationship and reprioritize 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. 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 running outside. And they tell me at 4 a.m. by their indoor pool

that they're deeply unhappy and asking me to sleep in their bed with them that night. Look, it's their 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 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 up with this idea with a whole mosey a couple of weeks ago called the Lonely chapter. I fucking 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 the 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 bag in with the boys on a weekend? Is that the highest, you know, way that I can live my life passion forward? 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, fucking 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 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, and that's...

100%. It's difficult for me to find it. It's difficult for me to find it again. Facilitated largely by being in Austin. But that being said, most of the work that I do is on my own. 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-performance actually, they do exactly what you've described there. They leave the comfortable tribe that 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 can relate to their experiences once they come out of the crowd anyway. That they're always gonna 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? Fatus bits right in the middle. And to move yourself out to the edges is to accept being alone in some regard. I'll end up on this quote where he says, loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to a tone for a certain complexity of mind.

Yeah, there's two things we don't wanna be. Not enough and different. That's what my therapist said to me recently that came on my podcast. You said 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. So she goes, I'm a therapist for billionaires, CEOs and royalties.

She goes to two things 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 with die earlier, as you've heard about in the studies that they did at Harvard, we'd get more ALO immune systems, we'd 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 or of good use to the tribe causes a bunch of signals in our body, which then manifests as physiological disease and psychological disease. So at its core, sometimes I think when I'm feeling, in that such a way, maybe I'm feeling lonely or I'm feeling really different, or 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 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. Yeah. But no, 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 whose high 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? 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. And that encapsulation of the hedonic treadmill in a single tweet, I think is so interesting. But it also calls you to refrain 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 though the podcasting game you're playing now

there's not a finish line here is there. Every day is the finish line. So I think it reframes what we're aiming at because they are mirages that move off into the distance as we approach them. And if you become too, you think about unhappiness coming from unmet expectations. If you're too focused on 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 you feel? I mean, I'd sit down my team, I know,

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 three million, when we hit three million subs, it's the same thing. Walked into the background of our studio. I go, listen, I know this doesn't actually matter. What matters more was that 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 Camara 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 trailing metric of impact.

So it's important, you know, I've done a lot of research 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 anti-climax. And Simon Sinek talks about building things as if they are infinite. So how would you set up you in this podcast team through the frame of, we're going to do this for 100 years?

What you design, design the system to be sustainable over over the long term, you aim at consistency, you try and optimize intensity, but not at the cost of consistency. And the whole system of how you treat the people and how this everything and how you treat yourself would be self-insert your way, that's what I think about now.

I'm actually thinking about our podcast, do the lens of, heavily inspired by what Joe Rogan's done, sticking out 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 will be a lot of people that would have designed their systems in a way That is not sustainable and I see it with podcasts as 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. And over 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 podcasts as ever in history. And how many get past 10 years of fucking hell? Yeah, that's the game I want to play. I want to do a 20, 20, 30 year.

I set it to my team all the 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 some moments in their life where they have health risks and is our system designed to guide them through that but retain talent that we want to retain is it is it designed for a changing world that's going to get a i centric like do we have enough fast acting feedback loop so we know when the next thing's coming, would you not just lot 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 encountered at 10,000 subs. So, I 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, sheeran style productions, the people that did the first Stephen Bartlett tour, don't know what 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 fucking desk, camera three, camera four. Like, 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 gonna come and go.

The only thing that's gonna remain is you. If you go, it's fucking done. You're not selling Diurvis CEO, and now presented by fucking 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 book businesses

from zero 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 fight up and sleeping under the desks, are not always the people that thrive in the enterprise phase,

where there's 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 Salis Ferguson,

there's a reason why he kept Gary Neville on the pitch and Gary Neville's told me this directly, I've seen the conversation he had with Saralix Ferguson where he asked him the question, Gaffa, why did you keep me around like three or four years after I had, I clearly couldn't kick up all anymore. And it was because of he represented, he knew the culture, he knew the values and you need disciples. All of those players, all those many night players said to me, how many times do you reckon Saralix Ferguson came into the training ground dressing room in 26 years? I said, I don't know, for 2000, they went twice. Good, why? Because my disciples were in there.

I didn't need to go in. When cultures are strong, they're self-policing. Very cool. When cultures are strong, new people become the culture. When a culture is weak, the culture becomes the new people. So 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 the key sentence was the talent I would retain. Yeah. You must sweat the small stuff. Why?

I 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 Olson when I was 18 years old, 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 or against you.

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 not in close proximity. If you didn't brush your teeth every day no one in this room would know. If you didn't brush your teeth every day this... You might. I might. Because I'm not in close proximity. If you didn't brush your teeth every day this week, really, 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, it's slow than 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 computing in will not

sweat the small stuff. They'll overlook the small things, which gives us a great competitive advantage by obsessing over the smallest things. And also, as we talked about earlier, we talked about the frame and how it's hard. 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? I would both on airlines now, I think. We're both on YouTube, Spotify and Apple. Is there

like a breakthrough step forward with, 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 hundred percent gain as Sir David Brelsford 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 game they made. Sir David Brelsford, who's known for his marginal games theory and has written about in the first chapter of James Cliz Buck Atomic Habits, said to me, yeah, the small games that making

the water bottle just a little bit bigger and the pillow softer matted, 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 forcing business. I can tell you, and all my companies now, which ones have that feeling of momentum and the impact in six, 12, 18, 24 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, 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. So David Brostford said to me, we started finding all these small things and what you'd find was people were staying till 2am. He goes, we were 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 it, it goes back to

what we said about letting the demons in. I see the small things. I just see it, 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 her against me. So this morning when my girlfriend got out of bed and walked out of the room, I remember thinking like we've developed a habit and we're developing a habit now where we don't interact first thing in the morning. We didn't start happening to each other. We used to always, this sounds a bit soppy or whatever, but it's a treat. When we first met, when we woke up, we'd cuddle, just for a bit.

We're kind of tied 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 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 subtle course correction, which they talk about in aviation, this was a 61-1 rule, where for every 60 miles you fly, if you're one degree of target, you'll miss the airport by one mile. That need, that's also why the small stuff is so important, it's that continual course correction of that compounding curve that's dominating the 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 and 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 eighth wonder of the world. So his business partner, Charlie Munger, says, the first rule of compounding is never interrupted unnecessarily. So that, so this is the other side, right? You must sweat the small stuff. But when you are sweating the small stuff, stop fucking 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 write, right? Which I know you know the feeling of, I really don't want to touch too much. This doesn't mean that we're not looking at different ideas. You know, got this, this is a different way of shooting things. It's in a much smaller room. Actually, trying some different angles were shooting on different cameras. Blah, blah, blah. 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, I'm sure I could start a fucking VC firm or some bullshit. I'll like start it with a friend or like Stephen, how should I begin to do this thing? It's like, one thing, the thing that you've said is already most important is going up into the right. Stop fucking about with it. Right. Compounding us 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 a state agent's down the road and making loads of money. So, my mum literally started in a state agent, she couldn't access the internet, she couldn't read a write. So she started that and then someone walked into the shop six months in and said,

where houses that do furniture down the road is selling lots of money. So I watched my mum start 25 different businesses at that. And then at the top, let's look at the top. So when things are going really well and temptations optimal as well, if you think about the biggest podcasters in this country, previously, I won't name them because I don't want to but the thing

That took them off their throne was diversion Even True Jody the other day did a tweet where he said Somewhere along the way I lost track Of what my job was which was to give value to my audience London real of what my job was, which was to give value to my audience. London Real. Fucking hell. He changed his YouTube channel to run for mayor

and he posted 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 fucking about. Focus, don't interrupt the process as Charlie Mungo would say.

This episode is brought to you by 8th Sleep. We have decided to land in the UK during a heat wave, and every hotel I've stayed in, their aircon has broken. I thought I'd left Austin so I could escape the heat, turns out I haven't, and the pod cover from 8th Sleep would have been a lifesaver. The pod cover sits over the top of your existing mattress, just like a normal mattress topper,

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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 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8 sleep.com slash modern wisdom. That's e-i-g-h-t sleep.com slash modern 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 it 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, scheduling time to do the thing, isn't doing the thing. Making it 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 and 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. Fanta-sizing about all of the adoration you'll receive once you do 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 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've 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 mum came and sat and like, just watch or talk to me, right? Because I just didn't wanna fucking 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 gonna fucking do whatever we're gonna 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 to do. Really highlights the discipline equation,

but also all of those things in the essay really pointed out procrastination and there was hints of trying to realign one's cognitive dissonance by announcing to the world that you are something that 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 when I sat with near I.L. who wrote the book

on distraction and procrastination and why people do it, one of the really key messages I took away was that we're actually motivated by the avoidance of discomfort. And it's like, I quized him on it. I was like, really? Okay, so sex. He goes, yeah, horniness is the 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'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 heightening 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 shit that you do when you're procrastinating from the thing you're supposed to do? Like, I have an essay or an email to write that I don't wanna write. I need to reply to someone and it's an awkward conversation

or something like that. And guess what, now my cupboard sources are perfectly aligned. Like you will find the most inventive ways to not do the thing. I noticed this about myself. I flew to Bali 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 neatlessly, was because I was at a hard point in the book. So every single time I'd get to a point and I was trying to summarise 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 get, of course, I'm avoiding the discomfort. And it's so important to get clear on that because 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 object you just can't hit. So that changed my life, that question. What is the psychological discomfort I am avoiding right now? You must make pressure your privilege.

So pressure is a privilege, is on a lot of t-shirts by Chris Bumsted, who is the current Mr. Olympia classic physique champion. He was on the podcast a little while ago, made t-shirts with pressure is your privilege on it. Turns out that one of my best friends in Austin, his godmother first came up with that. They're tennis players.

Yeah, and sued Chris. No! And I was like, oh! Yeah, her book is called Pressure, is a pressure as a privilege. This is awkward. Yeah. The guy, and it was the first question I asked him.

And then I spoke to Sky, and I was like, have I been, has this recreated some trauma inside of the family as Thanksgiving dinner going to be ruined because I brought it back up again? But yeah, you must make pressure your privilege. Why? If you look at any aspects 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 it's cliche, speaks to this and such profanity. And even when we think about the comfort crisis, we're living in in all of the health outcomes and predicaments that we're facing through our obsessive 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 are. It's the avoidance of pressure. And it goes back to what you said earlier about avoiding that difficult conversation, that difficult piece of work. 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 move that discomfort and that pressure into the current moment yields

much greater returns and 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 best female tennis player in the world. 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 Those individuals I think are setting themselves up for a brighter future

Those individuals, I think, are setting themselves up for a brighter future. How do you deal with the discomfort that comes along with pressure, though? You have... Okay, the fact that I have pressure means that I care about something. It means that it's fulfilling to me. There are people that go through their entire life and don't ever have anything to approximate like importance, right? And I have it. But the felt sense of pressure isn't that. The felt sense is overwhelmed and chaos and concern and... And there's 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? That's the base layer. In the interpretation, 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.

And we all have different stories about our pressure. And if your story is that it is X, Y, and Z, it's going to get me kicked out of the tribe. It's going to expose myself and not being good enough. If your story about difficult situations is I'm an imposter versus this is a growth moment, not only are 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, 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 imposter 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 shit yourself and say something racist, right? It would be like, everything's gonna go wrong. Despite the fact that you've got 300, 400 fucking bits of proof that that's not the case. Mm-hmm.

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 I can do the thing that I'm trying to do. 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've spent a lot of time during social chain doing on stage speaking, which presumably gave you even just a tiny little bit of a base that, oh well, podcasting's kind of not a million miles away from being on stage and being on YouTube's not a million miles away from being on. So it starts to 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. 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 dragons then 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 Tenor between these two worlds when I was a podcaster or a CEO I Wasn't of public interest at all. That's actually the legal definition the way public interest When you become and you become part of the BBC show, you legally become public interest. What does that mean? Means that people can write certain things about you that they couldn't otherwise. That's the actual, it's a legal term.

So if you were to, for example, sue a newspaper, they would make a case that we could say that about them 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 the BBC. So 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, tighten close and small. You have to put systems in place, and I think this is actually the case, this is what your organ's done really well, and I've heard him speak about it,

a great length, is you can't search your name online. I try to never do. I don't search my name on anything. Not TikTok, not Instagram, not YouTube, nowhere. Because it's for me, like, there's a set of principles and there's a set of principles which are more important, which is like me being obtuse 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

produce and say, this is terrible, this is dreadful, you need to do this, this, this, in 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 easy. But you've had a few periods where the press have been a bit bulky and accusatory and attacking. How have you dealt with the felt, and what's that been like? You've gone from this world where you got to be rich and largely anonymous, although you won't totally anonymous, but relatively now very much changed.

How do you deal with that as a felt sense of... You. It's systems and processes again. It's like, even my friends, right? So if my friends see something on TikTok or Instagram or if it's like about my golf, whatever, do not send it to me. I will not see it. And again, I've 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, because it's not useful information. And the truth is, and again, I spoke to Simon Sinek 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 which isn't necessarily based on even their own perception of reality anyway. It's not a useful way to allocate your chips. I talked about those 24 chips, you know, 16 F and U wake up. It's a really inefficient use of your time. It 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're all, your survival led to the survival of the other 19 people. So 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.

And the broken solution was heavy kettlebell workouts, five minutes of cold therapy and three grams of magic mushrooms today. Oh really? Yeah, as he's... Ah, how do I say that when the Spotify, yeah. Correct, yeah. And that's, I mean, that's his system. 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's kind of retracted from like social media as we know it. I don't think he was ever a huge part of it. I understand why. What would you say, people from the outside looking in, somebody that gets the accolades and can hang with Prince William and make breakfast in a pret or whatever,

what do people not realize about the reality of the sort of scrutiny that comes along with big platforms, especially mainstream platforms. I would probably draw more on other people's experiences than my own, from like interviewing people that have dealt with like real fame, because I didn't consider myself to be really famous. I think it's maybe just, never, maybe there's a, you probably experience 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 in 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, he did this business initiative.

Every single message I received was amazing. How is he? Amazing. Is he nice? Amazing. Is he nice? Amazing. Was he sociable? It's this realization that everyone you meet, you're meeting everyone they know. And 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 counter 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 watch the video of him going, please can you not come to my home, please? And I go, how mad. It's no way to live your life, is it? That ambient anxiety, there's sort of sense that you're being followed or that something could go wrong. Yeah. Yeah, I get you with that.

And I'm like, I'm nowhere near some of these people that live like a drake or even a rogan or a Justin Bieber. I can't imagine. I'm going to teach you a lesson that I learned from Ben Francis that didn't happen on the podcast. So we went for Nando's in Manchester, at Jim Shark Lift LA weekend, and he'd got his EA to text me and say where it was going to be

and why not, maybe he'd text me or whatever. And I walk in and he sat down reading something on his phone or watching or whatever. And I think his EA and his EA's assistant are something that sat on a different table. He was just there. And I sat down and we got talking to the people who don't know. Ben Francis is the CEO of Jim Shock. 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 Nandos with Drake? And Drake wouldn't have got within two miles of this. He would have been mobbed, he would have been swamped, it would have been chaos, you can even do this thing, there's like a law 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 if I carelessly through fame or some bullshit. And it made me start to think about the price that people pay for the wealth that they have. Right. Ben Francis is 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 has like five foot six, 100 pounds with the cost of in Ben's case. Of not being as famous? Of the game he's chosen to play, which is business-wise. I suppose that, you know, 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 hot girl on your arm that you can trot out at some event. He's very rarely going to be sat front seat at a Lakers game and it pan and go, and here's the CEO of Jim Shark, Ben Francis. For me, that's like, Pucks, 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 them all. I mean, 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've seen from Matt Molding at the Hutt Group, Matt Molding said to me, again, not a famous, not a Drake, right? So, it's a sea of the Hutt Group. He said, on stage, actually, at the event we did at Soho Farmhouse, he says, sometimes at night, I just lie on that cold kitchen floor at 3am because it's just cold and it's calling me down.

Like, the chaos of what's going on in that company means, that he's lying at 3am on the kitchen floor because it's just the coldest surface he can feel to call his body. That level of like, the chaos of what's going on in that company means, that he's lying at 3 AM on the kitchen floor because it's just the coldest surface he can feel to cool his body. 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 paid a 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's.

And that's what Ben will be encountering. He'll do, he doesn't with such grace as a lot of CEOs do, but you've had about 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 gonna lend him 20 million to save Tesla 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 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 because I know the feeling of like the angst of a business, a ship. Yeah. They're two different costs and it goes back to what you said is with the Mark Manson quote, which cost are you willing to incur? 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 incumbent that disrupts itself. It's so often a couple of kids in a basement that didn't go to university that have seen the introduction of a new technology and that thought, let's fuck around with this. And they've been able to

displace a century old incumbent because they are not incumbent by the rigidity of convention. Yeah, from a personal perspective, I came up with a name, the vestigial pattern bias. It turns out it's also got, it already existed before I came up with it called the Einstein-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 in data ease when we are developed. The tools that got you from 0 to 50 are not the same ones that get you from 50 to 90 on 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, 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, plane A for a piece of paper.

And the guy on YouTube, it's like, got millions of views on YouTube. Just with a biro, 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 imagination. They do the same with the spider. They get a piece of paper, there's a little spider on it, they draw a circle around it with a biro. 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 bireau and then it can never ever in its life be trapped by the bireau again and you watch it just run off the page and he's trying to trap it again and it worked, it can never, because it realizes 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 kilometers on this tread machine. And when I do 10 kilometers, I get this physiological signal that I'm tired, but 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 and I run and I'm not getting tired. Keep running and running and running. I look up at the time, I'm gonna have to get off at this treadmill at some point. I hit the button 21 kilometers. I was perplexed, absolutely perplexed. Every time I run 10 kilometers, I feel mackered.

I ran 22 when I couldn't see the thing and I don't, it was just a limiting belief, a wall-eyed built and I told myself that I wasn't, 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 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're 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, and they tread water for like 12 hours, right? Because their belief is, I'm going to be safe. And that's a lent helplessness, right? You'll have heard about the dog

where it pushes the button to stop itself from being electrocuted on the floor. It's the same sort of thing. But yeah, I do wonder, 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 Normand, or people that are really like moving very, very quickly. And it's like through fucking 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 know 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, it's like this is really fucking potent.

And it's a powerful for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On that point about the limitations we both have that we probably don't realize there, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say,

I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say,

I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, that 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 that direction. You are not a podcaster. In fact, like podcasting didn't even have 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 resisting the labels. You are curious,

you like intellectual conversations, you like 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 thing and you look at why people get middle-life crises when they hit, you know, 40, 30, 40 years old, when they look at how the hell did I get here? I'm working in the city. Well you embodied a label and lived that label for 15 years. 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, learnt to 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 who I am, and it's staying attached to that, and resisting at all costs, societies, prep, um, temptation to put you in a box, so we understand you, and we understand why you fit. Don't get in the box. More difficult at the cocktail party, but yeah, I understand. I know, I don't disagree.

I like Contrappinac because it's brilliant. 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 skillset to the biotech industry because one of my friends built one of the biggest psychedelics companies in the world and my skillset 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 Godboss for a 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 nine months of work. There's no fast-fashion 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 one billion to three billion. So they could off eight million is a flash in the pan. One of my best friends spent a long time in Manchester designing nightclub flyers, getting paid 50 quid, a hundred pounds per flyer.

Yeah, probably employed himself. You probably did. Yeah, and I remember in COVID being in his house and the guy was like really down and out, he was like something needs to change in my life. I'm 35 now, I'm still doing the same old thing. And his talent objectively, 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, and 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 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 three 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 great return for those that hire him. And I think, and I went through in my book all the different industries from writing, to acting, to creative pursuits, where if you just moved yourself from a different market,

it's from the market, you're onto a different market, you'd get a yield of great 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 Frankfurt, when I sat with Barclays and a variety of different banks, the thing they kept on saying is if we uplist over to the NASDAQ, that the company will be worth three times more. And I remember thinking to myself, say, 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 the same thing. I'm the same person, they can understand me,

like, you know, going to Belarus or somewhere, you're different, 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? But apparently. You could be doing this exact same thing in the Salford radio station to 77 listeners. And there's so many, the exact same thing, the exact same podcast, the exact same talent that you have, but in the wrong market, where 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 ceiling, because of the constraints of radio, the time constraints just aren't there to get the best out of your talent and 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 get a promotion and I 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 life changing for the right people. Kevin with this idea called monofinking 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 they're demand for answers outstrips the supply.

And I like the idea of calling it monofinking. It's another explanation for me about why people who are not extremist cookie cutter ideologues get criticized and awful lot. So if I know one of your views and from it, I can accurately predict everything else that you believe. Then I'll view you. 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 grouped 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?

And you're tribe. 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 good control or on Joe Biden

or on whether January 6th 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 ally. Yeah, sure, you're with us on abortion, but what about Donald Trump? You went 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 Stephen so much. And it's not an actual thought,

but he's just something that sits in the back of their mind. And it really, 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 a little bit outside of the group because, but I do the main thing with you. I do the thing that was 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 psychologists that 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 in life to not realize that most truth is in the middle somewhere. It's much more comfortable in creating that sense of belonging in the same way that identity and labels do to fit into the crowd and accept 95% of what the people that wear the same football kit as me were. If the socks are different, someone's going to point it out. Sitting in the middle is, there's no home there. There's no team. There's no safety in the middle,

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 of success, is it truth or is it conformity, 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 opinions stretched over two hours, so there's context. And I think people that gravitate towards this medium and shows like yours appreciate nuance. They're not looking for a left wing podcaster or an alt-right podcaster, whatever. It's tricky, it's really, really tricky in this day and age. Really tricky. It takes 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 tribe, you would have been kicked off the island. It would have led to death. So it's no one to that we were so quick, especially with the aid of algorithms to fall into these tribes and say in swear allegiance to everything they believe. Yeah. The other interesting thing is that an absurd ideological belief is less about what you believe in and more about showing fealty to the ideology overall. I learned this from the same guy, Gwinda, that did that quote. You basically said that if you have a really crazy ideological belief, let's say it's to do with the well-being flat, pick whatever it is that you want.

It's kind of like 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 on all of this other stuff, right? It's a show of fealty. 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 a 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 psychological dissonance, where you have like, there's something that's contradictory, 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 most people can't even have a conversation with someone that they know disagrees with them.

So are they unfollowing 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. 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, 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, 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 not 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 personally know, I keep my Twitter following below a hundred, which means that it's difficult to get in there. But certainly on Instagram, yes, a bunch of my friends have extolled to me the importance

and the virtue of exposing yourself to content that you purposefully disagree with. I actually listened 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 decoding the gurus, conspirituality, QAnon Anonymous. Interesting. Those are three of them. And they're like sort of centre 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, 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 it when it's about you. But yeah, I found that very interesting. Do you also interested in 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 you observe closely, it's 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 way I wanted the world to be. It probably came from people that I agreed 95% of things on otherwise. And the fragility of belief. So the fragility of all the beliefs you have about you

and what you're capable of and who you are, if that person over there is so clearly completely wrong, maybe I am too, a really fundamental level. I actually have been thinking that's been creeping into my mind over the last couple of weeks that like, maybe the person I think I am, as could be kind of said earlier, 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're all del. We're all deleted. It's fundamentally, you know, we both speak about this a good bit, I think, and I wonder what the part of it's because we're 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 poll for people to conform in the UK. Her effect example, look at the vaccination rates. I think it's like 93, 94% of people in the UK got their first dose. It's like sort of high 80s, second, and then like low 80s, third. Right?

I think America maybe scraped the bottom of the dick of 50 or 60 for the first dose. Right? But who are the Americans of the 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, fuck 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 a fear of breaking out 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,

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 different to the one that they would do. Being more experimental, being more motivated. Yeah, 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's, you're not the second, you're not the third, you're not the fourth, you're not the fifth. So I hear it all the time. And you hear it even when you think about innovation and we even sit on the loan stock market now, the public company CEOs that I know that float on the stock market are just being destroyed. They're like personal characters 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 in on the front cover of, you know, whatever. They're torn to pieces here. They are just torn to pieces. It's terrifying. One of the things that I've really, really been fascinated by recently

is this sort of what happens when people gain status or fame rapidly, what it does to people? And it feels like there's a little bit of something going on here too. Louis Capaldi, you watch his documentary? Yeah, I'm feeling now, I think it's called. I'm in the podcast as well. Yeah, I really enjoyed that. He's got this one line in it that I just fucking can't stop thinking about. Louis 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 Brazilian streams and he's asked to write a second album during COVID, WME or CAA or whoever is recording company or 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 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 is fucking one line in the middle of the documentary.

He says, fame doesn't change you. Just changes everybody around you. 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, 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 fucking get rid of that in the UK. And you'll even probably would have observed this as a podcaster, but speaking to Daniel Pink, who's the great motivational speaker, I guess, researcher. He talks about how when you're in center 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 Lysk Pahalis 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. So you've got to be careful, I think this is what Rogan has

done so unbelievably well. We think about building decade-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'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 circles 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 rang. You change your principles. Change what, that's a motivation threat. And he's managed to stave off that motivation throughout 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're showing 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 fucking episode. It could not be a better person for to be crossing over with me in British podcasting because our then diagram circles of how we have our conversations are fucking 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 they've seen. How does this apply in a different setting, right? That's fucking 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 savant of the journalism industry. And he decides he's

going to release a West End show about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets. And this guy is like at the zenith of his career. So he says, 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 shit turn of enemies as well. Anyway, opening night by the half time 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. Douglas asked him, he said, are we thinking, fucking show in the west end of London about

the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets? He said, well Douglas, I trusted my instincts. An instinct that may sometimes lead you wrong, but they're the only thing that's ever led you right. I was like, holy fuck, 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 the late night show TV who don't actually run their own show. They're the mouth puppet of whatever the big exact in 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. They're making a decision against your instincts and then it fails. I've sat with so many people in the media industries who've done daytime talk shows, actually had one of my podcast. She said to me, you know, the part that hurts the most is I knew the show sucked. I didn't speak out and say it didn't. I always say to my team and I've said this to my managers in the room now, I said, we're doing a new TV show, right?

And I said to him, I wanna fail at something that I believe in, because failing at something that I didn't believe in more, all suck more than any pain in my life. So 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? So all facets of my life, that's my thing going forward is fail at something you believe in. 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 being glad that it was in line with your principles, your instinct and your values. You just got to hope on the outside that it resonates with someone else. And typically the truth is, 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 that we're doing pieces of content for client I think which one of my friends is good. I always say this to people. I say I say we'll say to my team Tell me now which one of your friends is gonna 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, my friend Dave,

he's going through this divorce at the moment and did a, actually, I need to change this bit. Because in Dave's, through the lens of Dave's life, I'd 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. How are you? How are you? How are you? Stephen Bartlett, ladies and gentlemen, Stephen, I appreciate the hell out of you, man. What are you doing next? Great question.

Loads of meetings back to back. Hopefully we go for dinner tonight here in London. Yeah, that would be great. Working out probably in about an hour's time. Lots of things. What about you? What are you up to next? 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 really excited for this. I'm gonna try and do a new, I can't say it yet, because if it doesn't happen, it's gonna be disappointing. I'm gonna try and do something relatively new in podcasting that I don't think has quite been done before it's released.

It's not been done for quite a while. And then... My share? Like a live thing? No. No, no, no. A round team. I'll tell you what fair, when I can't get help to account if it doesn't happen.

I'm looking forward to that live tour. You can island at the end of this year, then US and Canada. I'll be doing a little bit of work around there with James Smith. I've got a show in Dubai, toward the end of November. And I need a break, man. I need a Christmas. I'm working toward December now. How do you know you need a break?

Actually, I don't. I don't know that I need a break. I just feel like it would be rejuvenative. I haven't seen Mum and Dad much this year. But yeah, resilience is a strange thing. It creeps up on you. You don't mean to build it, and then it just appears. You don't really know. Dude, I appreciate you. I really do. I appreciate the fact that we support each other throughout what it is that we're doing.

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 awe of Fred again because I was like, this is a person that's acting on his own career of steering first principles. And I see that in you. And I know how that plays out. It's an amazing, amazing thing. Game recognises, game man. Thank you brother. Thank you. Thank you.

of that