The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Ben Fogle - Overcoming My Lifelong Battle With Self-doubt

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Ben Fogle, a TV presenter broadcaster and author who has reached the peak of Everest, trekked over Antarctica and rowed across the vast Atlantic ocean. A man that has faced adventure and put himself in the most high risk situations doesn’t usually pair with low confidence issues and fighting his own insecurity. Born in Westminster everyone perceives him with a life of privilege, comfort and a quintessential posh lifestyle. Failing at school and only just getting through his university studies, Ben had determination for travel and exploring. He has lived on an island self-sufficiently for year, presented and made numerous well-known documentaries, written 9 Times Best selling books and is the United Nations Patron of the Wilderness. There is more to this man than I believed. The conversation we had was so diverse and we covered so much, going through Ben’s journey and getting down the core of the man everyone sees smiling in front of the lens. A chance for him to express in his words who he really is and the voyage of taking back control of his own narrative. This podcast is going to open your eyes to reality and surprise you in ways you did not expect. The demand we have for materialistic things, to be happy all the time and push ourselves and take those leaps make us question what is happy and how can we be more fulfilled. Follow Ben: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/benfogle Twitter - https://twitter.com/benfogle  Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Ben Fogel. Ben relentlessly pursues adventure, risk and challenge. But this doesn't come from a place of strength and courage. It comes from the opposite. If you think you're going to fail, you're going to fail. You just have to have this positive attitude. And it was only actually working with Olympians that I've done now, when I climbed Everest, that I realised you need this confidence verging on arrogance that I will get to the top of this mountain.

Three weeks before he was due to be born naturally, we lost our third child. And it was an awful, awful experience that affected us profoundly. I became really introverted. I'd go to events and I'd find myself going to the loo and just sitting in the little cubicle for the duration of the whole event. Big mistake. We got death threats and worse. I shouldn't have shared this idea in a social media platform, but I was amazed at the vile, vitriolic abuse.

Ben Fogel. He's a TV presenter, broadcaster and author. He's climbed Mount Everest, he's trekked across Antarctica and he's rowed across the Atlantic Ocean. Ben relentlessly pursues adventure, risk and challenge, but this doesn't come from a place of strength and courage. It comes from the opposite, from a place that you would probably never expect. This was such a diverse conversation and we covered so much and so many things. Ben has been on the most incredible journey, tearing up the script and ignoring the standard society sets for all of us on this never ending, continuous journey of rebuilding himself, as he says in his own words. And that journey has been inspired by one simple idea, his desire to take back control of his own personal narrative, something he believes

we've all lost control of. And this podcast is going to take you on a journey, from the need to a positive attitude, to resisting your labels, to taking leaps, to rediscovering the importance of simplicity in your life that Ben has learned from living in the wilderness, and to answering the question that we all seek to answer pretty much every day of our lives, which is how to be happier and how to be more fulfilled. So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Ben, as I read through your story, your books, your interviews, and I remember watching a YouTube documentary of you sailing across the Atlantic many years ago

obviously the most sort of striking distinctive standout thing about the way that you've chosen to live your life over the last couple of decades is your seemingly insatiable appetite for adventure risk challenge extreme adventure as it relates to everest and things like that where did that come from i think it's do you know it's not necessarily an absolute thirst for adventure i think it's about kind of finding the real me see if i go if i go right back as a child i was so shy i had no confidence i failed all my exams i was hopeless at sport and actually i think it i think all of the things that i've done since have been about like rebuilding it sounds a it sounds a weird way to describe it but it's not just i'm not an adrenaline junkie. There's,

there's this assumption that maybe, you know, that, that would be how to describe myself, but it's not that at all. Actually, loads of the things I do are really, really slow, you know, like rowing across the Atlantic took best part of two months, walking across Antarctica took many, many months, climbing Everest took many months. So actually, if it was jumping off a mountain, base jumping or going on a motorbike or even a mountain bike down a steep slope, I hate all that. It's too fast. I quite like this slow movement, but I'm quite good at long endurance events. And all of those have been about rebuilding my confidence. And what took your confidence or why didn't you have confidence?

I think it's the fact that I was hopeless academically for many different reasons, undiagnosed dyslexia, a slight mistake maybe, not on my parents' part, but they, my father's Canadian. He wanted me to be bilingual. So I was sent to a French school and I just, I just, I just didn't, I couldn't do the French school, the French system. And with all apologies to any French watching or listening to this, it's just quite a hard system, the French one. And, and, and it was quite it was quite um strict and i'm just as a child i just i was surrounded by dogs dad was a vet mom was an actress it was all quite a liberal my actual childhood at home was quite liberal full of actors um lots of drink uh lots of animals around it was i suppose crazy but normal for me but then in this french system it was very rigid

and and it meant that i didn't learn any french and my english went backwards so when i went back into the system i was way behind and it and and the result was the combination of that and dyslexia just meant i was hopeless i could barely write and i and i failed all my exams and i was surrounded by people who were better than me at everything. Everyone seemed to be more handsome if it was the boys. They had more luck with the girls. They were better at playing sports

because they could actually kick a football unlike me that I have two left legs. And they were good at academics. And when it came to the exams, they just, they didn't even, you know, they could be up all night watching stuff and then the next day turn up for the exam whereas i was just i was almost making myself vomit i was so nervous about the exams because i knew i was going to fail and this is this is the first thing i convinced myself i'd fail and of course i ended up failing

because what i've discovered since is that so much of what we do and what we endure and how we test ourselves is here in the mind and if you go in with a negative attitude which I had then it's self-fulfilling and and the result was hopeless at everything and it just stripped me of my confidence I I had you know I just I didn't believe in myself and that that went right through you know probably into my 30s if i'm to be really honest i think that was always lingering over me this little voice just telling me that i was uh that i wasn't good enough at what i did and did that voice come from your own assessment of yourself or was was their external forces bullying or your parents or no my parents were amazing you know my parents have i don't think they could have done more for me than they

did i think it was no i think it was all internal if i'm to be honest i think there's a pressure i think there was an external pressure to conform because if you think about how if you take the schooling model and the education model it is kind of about conforming because exams are all about getting the the correct grades we're learning to a specific model that has been um set by the government and and it's it's sort of painting by numbers when you think about education. And if you don't hit those targets, then you've effectively failed the system. And for me, you can hear from my accent, you know, I'm posh. I went to a private school. Mum and dad worked really hard to send me to a private school. And actually, there was a great guilt that the fact

that they had worked so hard to be able to afford to send me there, and school. And actually there was a great guilt that the fact that they had worked so hard to be able to afford to send me there, and yet I still failed. So I think actually a lot of that voice was internal. And actually I wish if I could go back in time, I wish I could kind of shake my shoulder, shake a young me on the shoulders and go, just don't overthink things,

just chill out a little bit. we were you a chronic overthinker i was and i still am i still overthink things if i'm to be honest i i i to work in the medium that i work in is a little bit strange because i don't really belong in this medium when i say this medium you know it front of house where as a presenter because um i've got a really thin skin and i overthink everything so when i read something negative whether that's on social media whether that's a newspaper review whether that's a journalist that has written something um which i don't like um or or which doesn't seem true i take it really personally which is kind of really strange because i should have i should have been able to overcome that after 20 years and i'm almost there steven i'm

almost there but one of the reasons i'm happy to talk about it is because i know so i'm i know i'm not alone i know there are many many people out there who are high achievers who've done brilliant things in life but are still burdened with their own voice of doubt and through all of these challenges i've done i've been able to really build that confidence and i'm i'd say i'm a few hundred meters from the summit now of peak confidence and i can't wait until i'm there i hope i do i hope i reach that point what is it about those challenges and this sort of slow monotonous nature of those challenges or just the challenges themselves or challenge as a you know as a as a construct itself that helped

you to build confidence because i'm one of the most frequent questions i'm asked in the comment section of this podcast or on instagram or anywhere else is um how do i build my confidence and i think we live in a culture especially Instagram, where it seems like everyone else is super confident and chasing their dreams. And we never get to hear the whispers of their self-doubt. So it might feel like we're the only ones. So I guess my question is, how did those challenges build your confidence? It happened by accident. So that's the first thing to say i didn't chase it thinking this is going to help it was like a slow series of blocks that were built so it started when i failed my a levels and i went off traveling i went to costa rica a place that i know you love

and i went to university out there and i think it was spending time in a different culture in a different culture country with a different country, country with a different culture, different language, different religion, away from home, away from mum and dad. And, and first of all, I had to kind of think on my own, I couldn't defer to other people. Up until that point, I'd always kind of, Dad, what do you? What do you think, Mom? What do you should I do that, you know, I didn't trust my own judgment. So of all that was gone so i had to stand or fall on my own decisions and then secondly just the immersion in this exciting new place was just i mean it just it it was the most exciting year i've ever had if i'm to be really honest and i decided then that that that's what i wanted from life i didn't want to conform by

guess it you know i i didn't want the degree the the um the job the mortgage the sitting in an office i didn't want to go down that conventional route that that is why because i didn't i didn't feel like a conformist i didn't want to be a sheep i wanted to be the shepherd i didn't feel like a conformist. I didn't want to be a sheep. I wanted to be the shepherd. I didn't want to just conform to the expectations of what society deems as successful. Why? Because...

Because I'm just making sure you're not playing... You're not doing it just for the sake of devil's advocate, just to go against... No, not at all. I'm actually not a contrarian. I'm not someone who says left just because the other person has said right. I'm really not a contrarian i'm not someone who says left just because the other person has said right i'm really not a contrarian if anything for someone who doesn't like criticism

i should probably stand back and therefore i should sit on the fence and become the sheep but i i'm you're going to discover as we chat i'm a ball of contradictions yeah so nothing kind of makes sense um i just know what i have learned over the years but for me conformity maybe i was stripped of that just by the fact that i couldn't conform when it came to exams so i couldn't conform to what the what the system wanted me to conform to and therefore i wasn't going to conform when it came to other things. I'll wear shorts all year round. I'm not, you know, I stopped wearing a suit ages ago. I kind of slowly, as my confidence has built, has built, I found myself straying even further from conformity. I think I'm going to end up one of those ridiculous kind of English eccentrics wearing a bow tie, you you know the one like walking around with a cat stroking it because i kind of that's how that there is this kind of there's an inner me that i have never i still haven't really fully found but i knew i wouldn't find that person sitting in an office

on a computer um in a job that society expected me to take just so that I could follow the narrative. And the narrative being, as I've kind of explained, you know, getting a good job that you can then get a promotion, you get the good wage, you might get a bonus, you can buy your house, you can get your car,

you marry, you get the dog, you have the children, and then you end up retiring and then you do all the things you want to do marry, you get the dog, you have the children, and then you end up retiring and then you do all the things you want to do. And here's the key, because is it the journey or the destination? For me, it's 100% the journey. Yeah.

But so many people don't see that, but this is where you and I have quite a lot in common. Okay, maybe what we're doing now in life is very, very different, but the fact that you will suddenly just wake up one day and go yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna resign from yeah no honestly it sounds everything you're saying like i want to make this about you but i feel like i've been on the same journey as you're saying with the you know one day you might have the dog and whatever which is just trying to get closer and closer to who i actually am and um trying to find the courage the strength to um not allow society to write to tell me what my how my story has to be

yeah so whose story and this is the thing isn't it whose story is it yeah is it yours or someone else's of course it's someone else's story and it was written at another time in another age if we're talking about marriage and these constructs in our society for someone else in the circumstances they lived in and they probably weren't happy anyway so to think that that same narrative and storyline would be would equal happiness in stephen bartlett's life in 2021 is uh you know probably patently false like but don't you find this strange i'm not gonna don't worry i'm not gonna tell the whole thing although i'd be quite happy to because i think you're a fascinating person but it is strange isn't it that quite happy to because I think you're a fascinating person. But it is strange, isn't it?

That I don't think you have kids. So I've got two young children aged 10 and 11. So obviously I'm really aware of the system that they're now in that failed me. And I'm really nervous about that. Fortunately, I married someone who's really intelligent and has the thickest skin you'll ever meet on anyone in the world.

So actually my children are pretty resilient much more than i was and i owe all that to my wife but i digress if you think about it it's still a strange thing that children are expected from the age of i don't know four or five to go off to nursery and then to school where they're in a classroom with four walls it might have a window if you're lucky. You've got some teachers that may or may not be really invested in their job. I don't want that to sound disparaging to all teachers because I know a lot of teachers put a lot of hard work in. But it's still a gamble as to whether you're going to get those

that are just doing it for the job or those that are really passionate and driven. And then it's just about ticking those boxes, isn't it? Get the exam grades that the government have set so that they can then go look hurrah we're doing a great system yeah gcsc grades are all up a level grades are all up it's all looking great look at the number of people going to university and i'm like hang on what is this expectation that everyone should go to second to further education to university it's nuts i get people calling me or emailing me

getting in touch with me on social media saying how could do you think i should do a uh degree in filmmaking and in broadcast at university i'm like no get an apprenticeship job if i could do that i'd take on apprenticeships no work your way get experience and uh and and it just i find it really odd that in 2021 we haven't changed the model yeah i i did a tv show called um called secret secret teacher with channel four and i was i had the same bewilderment about the education system and what how it was incentivized for grades and league tables and not based on the child's like intrinsic passions and who they want to become because obviously for me I was running multiple businesses in the school all the school trips had done all the vending machine deals so our school made money from the

vending machines and yet I was kicked out because I wouldn't go to health and social care and push a plastic baby around the school like I wasn't interested in that so like the school viewed me as lazy but really if you think about it the school was lazy for not taking the time to understand who I was at that age. But in filming that show, I learned something very valuable about how the whole system works. So I went inside the school, got to sit down with the head teacher,

and I was like, how does this system work? And he said, the better the grades we get, the more students come to the school and we get paid per student. So he gets, let's say, £4,000 from the government per student that they have. So his whole incentive is grades. Grades, grades, grades. And it's just like a business. They have customers and the more customers they get, the more money they make. And then as you go up the institutional ladder or whatever, universities are the same. The more

they send to university, the better their rankings. If the rankings are good, more parents will choose that school. It's a business. And it's incentivized by money at the heart of it. And if at some point you could take the money out of the system, then you'd be able to fix it. But that poor head teacher, he was the CEO and he said,

I won't be able to buy pencils if we have a hundred less students come next year. So we better be on that league table. And then I realized what was what was wrong with it but you know these are good meaning people incentivized badly yeah um and it's how and it's how we change the system though you know because that's this is where i could turn the tables on you and go listen you've done these incredible um startups you've been incredibly successful and i know there have been a couple of entrepreneurs who have attempted dabbled in the school model

and how do you do it? It's kind of obvious to me, one of the problems is that there's so many children. How do you make it financially viable to give everyone access to, you know, a fair education for them and to have bespoke systems for every single pupil costs a lot of money but i in the same way as i'm talking about apprenticeships you know i'm a keen advocate of like a national service not a military one but i think everyone aged 18 should go off and spend a month with the nhs with the fire service with the police service um just volunteering to see what maybe working in the school system and and if you imagine now that if if all parents got invested in the school and volunteered to go

in and help with the classes and help paying for different things i just think our education education system could be in a different place i completely agree yeah i think it's um i i did say when i left social chain that the challenge i'd take on would be the education system so who knows let's see but uh i i came to learn that it's like anchored in place from all angles by parents who believe that success for them as a parent means their kid going to university so my mom was disowned me because it made her look bad that i that i left the system then you haven't but culturally for lots of people it is still a really really really important my mom's african so she left school at seven years old and and all of my friends who live in various countries in africa or or in latin america it is or india

it's still to have further education and by the way still to have further education. And by the way, obviously, to have further education for vocational work, like being a doctor or an engineer, you know, we really rely on all of that. But I think we have to change our attitudes. Because can you imagine, Stephen, this is what I find really shocking. I work with people now who are working on production, who've left university with 40 grand of debt. And they're now, and they're scrabbling to pay that back and get a job in the world that they want to work in, in this post-pandemic or middle of pandemic world that we're in right now. I mean, that cannot be a good way

to start your life kind of in debt. Is that not part of the system? It's awful. And it's so unnecessary. I mean, what you spoke to earlier on about internships for me is is the answer getting experience right however that might be and at my company we employed 700 people at the time that i left and i couldn't tell you who had a university education or not it just it was such low down on the list of things that actually mattered number one is obviously what are they capable of in terms of experience um and then the piece of paper i didn't i didn't have a fucking clue who had gone where or what they'd studied because it just doesn't matter in reality

um but anyway i wanted to ask you get back to one of the points you said earlier you said um you don't think you'll ever you're not sure if you'll ever find out who you really are could you expand on that? What do you mean? Well, I think we're all the product, I suppose, of our experiences and who we are. And I think if you look at life as this journey and not just a destination,

then we're constantly evolving and changing and and growing and i think however much you try to be yourself you you you become a bit chameleon like and and you end up you end up kind of the lines between who you are and what everything else is does begin to blur a little bit. So the way I look at it, you know, I started off as this deeply unconfident, shy child that then kind of morphed into, you know, how I started when I was on one of the first reality shows, which was called Castaway. I was sent to live on an island for a year. And then I kind of became this posh real reality show contestant and then i started working in daytime tv and i became a daytime tv presenter and then i kind of became a broadcaster and and you're i see it all the time you become stereotyped so you whenever whenever your name is is written it will say you know it

will have either an amount that you made or it will have the company that you started but is that really is that really you so so if you or i went on strictly come dancing now by the way that would be changed instantly and it would then be steven from strictly come dancing or better because you're only you're you're as you're remembered for the last big thing and that constantly changes but it then means it's quite hard to leap away from that. So if you're suddenly going to decide, actually, I'm going to become an MP now, people will be like, well, hang on. No, no, that's not the narrative. And what happens, I think what happens is you become blinded by people going, I'm just not really sure this is right, because that's not really who you are.

That's not part of the narrative that I think you were going down for the book that you're writing of your life. And I don't mean the physical book, but just the metaphorical one. So speaking of books, in my book, I have a chapter called Resisting Your Labels. And it's exactly what you said. So I refer to it as your label and i i say that your your label comes with a set of instructions implicit instructions about how you have to behave going forward so my labels would be i don't know black social media ceo and with that comes a set of instructions as to how i'm expected to pave in the future and that can be imprisoning right and so when the reason i wrote that in the chapter is because leaving social chain i have that same like existential moment where you're like okay so who the fuck am i

you know and society's going you'll be safest if you just fucking carry on with the social media ceo thing yeah but at my heart i'm like no i'm i no one was born with a passion for something that didn't exist when i was born social media i'm a guy with a bunch of interests music and creating stuff and curiosity and how do i go back to those fundamentals for my life and not the label yeah well i'm slightly obsessed with the label because society loves to label us and uh and and it's and you'll never get away from that but you i say you would never get away from it it will always be there in the context of social media and the the print press and and broadcast journalism but you can i have tried to challenge the status quo a number of

times with different things that i have done in terms of challenges um and other things that the the problem is that i did so many of those challenges to get away from just the daytime tv presenter or just the reality show person that then i became the adventurer who does those things and the expectations you know whenever when i climbed everest two years ago part part of the disappointment was people going oh yeah of course you'll do it of course you'll get up but that's what you do yeah of course you'll get up the mountain i'm like it's not quite as simple as that that's you know i'm not a natural mountaineer you know this is the boy who was hopeless at sport it's still a tremendous challenge but i i love i love just testing failure because i'm deeply fearful of failure because of having

so much of it in in my early childhood you know just to to back up some of the data i've already given you about how hopeless i was as a child you know i ended up going to about five different schools i actually went to three different universities in the end um uh took my driving test eight times so it kind of it failure became a really a word that I was really fearful of. And as I get older, I find myself confronting failure on purpose as much as I can to try and become less fearful of it. I think you have to confront your demons, believe it or not. And failure. of it i think you have to confront your demons believe it or not and uh and failure so if we go back to the challenges for example um because they're one of the things that that kind of have

really defined me you know i somehow managed to row across the atlantic ocean i should have i should have quit there really you know 49 days in a little boat you know, for those who never saw it, it was a 20-foot rowing boat, you know, a couple of oars, me and an Olympic rower. And it's pretty dangerous out there. It's the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. You've got waves that are 30 feet tall. Our boat got capsized. We nearly drowned. You know, it was the most amazing adventure, but also pretty scary and quite dangerous. And I did that. And reaching the other end of that is still probably the biggest achievement of my life and you know a lot of my wife sometimes says why do you not just quit there because quit while you're ahead same i could say to you come on you've you did this amazing tech startup uh and i think a lot of people would think

that you've made all this money what you sit and enjoy it. But then you're just taking life like the destination. And you're thinking that, well, there you are. So money is everything. And money is a really fascinating thing for me, because I am not money motivated. I know people may go, well, you can only say that when you've made enough money to not be motivated by money. And they have a point money buys security money gives you the opportunity to do some of these big challenges i'm aware i told you there's lots of contradictions here um and i'm aware of of all of those things but we also live in a world by where success is defined by your monetary value so when i you know if i google you and i look you up every single one has a sum

of money of various values right next to you it's next to your bio so listen by the way i think it's something you should be really proud of if you have if you have managed to make that that much money i think that is that is your everest that is testament to to dreams that lots of people have. But I think we need to change this notion that being wealthy is a sign of success in life. If you look at the model that Jacinda Ardern was trying to do in New Zealand, it was to change gross national product, to change what the country's values are by including the happiness index and the kindness index and how what what a good nation you are and how healthy you are and your obesity levels you bring into all of those things because for me as a parent i want my children to have the security of having enough

money to put food on their plate and a roof over their heads but whether they make huge amounts of money is kind of irrelevant as long as they are good rounded kind happy individuals yeah i think you've hit the nail on that this is actually why my book is called happy sexy millionaire because when i was 18 all i wanted in life was to be as it says in the front page of my diary at range over sport a million pounds before i was 25 because i was it's the same similar to what you've described the thing that had invalidated me as a child was being the only poor family in a middle class area and never having anything no birthdays no christmases never went on holiday so obviously that was my insecurity and i chased it as an adult and then i got it and then it and by the way just to reiterate i i i think

to have a goal like that is so important whatever your goal is i'm just saying i think to have the the pure monetary goal maybe isn't necessarily for for everyone now for children shouldn't necessarily be the priority it can be a it can be a byproduct of being successful. I'm sure you get the same thing when I go and give talks in schools and I go, so what does everyone want to be when they're older? I get a large number who just want to be famous. And I always say to them, it's all very well. I get why you want to be famous, but there needs to be substance to that fame. so you need to be famous because you have succeeded in business because you're a great footballer because you're a great actor or actress and uh and and then as a byproduct of all of that you can become a great millionaire and and um and and

sort of reach those dreams as well yeah so again exactly what you've just said there i think there's a the distinction for me is like whether the goal was intrinsically or extrinsically motivated and the kid there that says he wants to be famous is pure is actually saying i would like people to like me i want admiration my goals as when i was younger were clearly i want to fit in i wrote millionaire but what i meant was i'm insecure and i want to fit in. And obviously upon reaching that goal, because it wasn't ever intrinsic, it wasn't ever something that I wanted inside of me. It was just to try and satisfy the approval of others. It felt like nothing.

When you asked me earlier about whether I believe the journey or the destination, I just don't think the destination exists. Every time you get there, it moves off into the distance like a mirage. Yeah, because as soon as you've got that car you'll want the better car as soon as you've got the house you'll want the house in the south of france so we're constantly changing our goal posts because we we i think it's human nature you know the grass is always greener that i think of all the sayings i really do think that is the one we all look at other people. And social media is a fascinating medium now, isn't it? Because effectively, social media,

one of the reasons I think it's having such a negative impact, and when I say social media, you know, the kind of Twitter, Instagram, why I think it can have a lot of negative impacts on people is because it's almost, it makes people feel jealous because people are projecting, it's, I don't want to use the word fakery but it is an edited world isn't it however whatever photo you do it's a it's a tiny second of your life that you've thought about how you're going to compose that photograph or the image that you want to project how you're living and uh and i think it that is all built on this notion of of wanting what other

people have but it's even worse because then you get ranked on it yeah likes comments yeah and then and then you know you post you post a certain photo and then the likes are down half and you think oh my god i'm fucking ugly yeah you think the world is just here? And again, for full clarity and honesty, I feel the same. I'm someone who's 47. I should know better now, but I still look at my Instagram accounts and if there aren't so many likes

or if there's one negative comment amongst hundreds of really positive ones, I just look at either the low figure or the the negative comment because i think it's human nature that we're kind of we're drawn to this this sort of um this notion of competition and is life a competition i i can i've read about this at length and um i've realized that value is um obviously just relative. So the analogy I gave was that I was really happy with my Nokia 3310,

but in a world of iPhones, I'm devastated to own a Nokia 3310. It's the same fucking phone. And they have these really remarkable studies that show how we attribute value to things, including ourselves, where they'll put like three steaks on a menu. And if there's

a really expensive steak and a really cheap one everyone picks the middle one three tvs on a shelf people pick the middle tv because they think that one's too expensive that one's a piece of shit and they're just using the context are you in my head now because this is exactly what i would this is yeah exactly so and i but it's just we attribute we attain value by the context we see something in if you remove the other two tvs this now becomes the best tv in the world and it's just, we attain value by the context we see something in. If you remove the other two TVs, this now becomes the best TV in the world. And it's the same with us. I said, you know, in a world where there's no other humans, I am the prettiest, richest, most successful person on earth.

But you put a couple of, and this is the crazy thing about social media, you're comparing yourself to fake, like a fake context. And you can never win, right? Because you get to see your BTS, you're behind the scenes you look in the mirror you think i've got spots and i'm fat what's that pouch down there and no one else has got that so it's a losing game and and so i i implore people but you know because i worked for 10 years in this fucking game so i implore people just to make their context way healthier and real um and for me that means that i meet 95 of the people i follow i have like if i go on my instagram now there'll be 15 people and five of them are in this room do you know what i mean because i just don't want to play these games and even though i'm aware of it my lazy ceo brain

has been wired from the front for 10 000 years to make snap judgments snap judgments to keep me alive i can't stop it you know so i just have to be conscious about the way i use these tools yeah i mean i think it's a it's a fascinating world and again as a father with young kids who are terrifying embarking into that world i i i'm struggling to find the tools to arm them for the battle ahead. Yeah. And I'm aware that they can be fantastically useful, that it's amazing the interactions that you can get. It's how I'm here today.

I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for social media chatting to you now. So I'm aware of the beauty of being able to share things. It's just how we get away from kind of the the fakery if if that is the term to use and and the abuse you were talking about a second ago negative comment one negative comment can throw you off i mean the kind of the the whole world of trolling fascinates me because deep down i just know that those people that write the nasty comments sometimes aren't even real sometimes they're just disgruntled and it's probably no different to how life would be in a pub there would be some person in there that would go muttering under their

breath the problem is on social media it get it gets kind of brought to the surface and for whatever reason i think we probably know newspapers love to then regurgitate what that single individual spotty teenager in their bedroom has written uh as as validation they sort of validated so i i had a funny enough during the first lockdown my daughter thought it would be nice to get the nation to sing happy birthday to the queen and i realized there's lots of people who aren't monarchists i understand that we're in a country where not everyone agrees on the same thing but i thought it was quite a nice sentiment and foolishly i decided to let her use my twitter account to kind of ask people to do it. Big mistake. We got

death threats and worse. I mean, the vile abuse to my nine-year-old daughter, partly my fault, you know, I shouldn't have allowed her to, I shouldn't have shared this idea in a social media platform with my daughter, I realized. But I was amazed at the vile vitriolic abuse and that was partly kind of enhanced by the press who jumped on a few negative comments wrote about it and as soon as they had written about it uh it went it i mean it i had to give up twitter i i actually um abandoned it and haven't i haven't gone back to really crazy there's a lot of talk at the moment about what social platforms can do for this type of behavior and i just i always come back to the point of like i'm going to tell a little bit of a story here so when i worked in silicon valley for a little while for about a

year when i was 20 after i left my first company and i got to see behind one of the big social platforms that was emerging at the time and it taught me something about humans because someone in the daytime who was a very civilized school teacher just could being completely honest would get his cock out at night because of anonymity and what it it taught me was that good people are capable of pretty alarming things if you allow them to cover their face. And there's a piece of jealousy and evilness and darkness in all of us. And anonymity allows you to be both.

And so until platforms don't allow people, until we verify who people are when they sign up and there's real world consequences of the behavior it's never gonna stop yeah and i agree i agree it's the anonymity thing so you know the number of people that say just get out just just ignore it and i did largely so i still use instagram and occasionally you know the old troll flares up and i do ignore it now. Occasionally, you know, I get a bit more stung than other times. But I think, you know, it's symbolic of the world that we're living in right now. And I think anonymity can be quite a dangerous thing.

Wokeness. Wokeness. Wokeness is fascinating. Wokeness is fascinating and it's really complex now especially as a documentary maker i go off to to um countries all around the world and and i've been accused of of um gross xenophobia just because i go to these countries now and maybe make a documentary about a local group of people who live there, it's seen by the extreme woke brigade as being, as othering people. This is the, this is the woke term right now. Don't other people. So by, by taking a document, I know, I mean,

it is laughable, but they're quite, but they have quite a strong voice. And I've, you know, I've had to talk about this on national radio. Sorry, what's othering people? To other people is to make them feel like they aren't a part of normal. I mean, this comes, we've come full circle right now. So othering is to make people kind of feel like they don't.

Like they're specimens or something? Yes, specimens, specimens basically so to other so effectively going if you imagine you know going to a group um of indigenous native um people who live in the brazilian amazon where once that was seen as, you know, anthropological study of how people live and what they do. Now it's seen as sneering and laughing at people because you're othering them and you're showing, look at them still hunting with spears and bows and arrows. Now, this is the wokery brigade who interpret it like that. I interpret it as a great celebration because more often than not, I kind of am seeing how we

should be living and how we should be treating nature and the flora and fauna around us rather than living in big cities where we're fantastically wasteful and we're destroying the planet. Actually, this kind of nomadic way of life or this very simple hand-to-mouth way of life, I go and I feel huge admiration. And I'm not laughing or sneering, but there are lots of people that interpret that form of television as that. Now, I've just given you one form of wokery right now. So we have to think about everything we say and everything we do and is that cultural i've just got a kilt i've been sent a kilt because um it's uh the big uh global climate conference in glasgow later this year i'm going to be up there in scotland obviously the kilt is is the national dress and i was asked if

i could wear a kilt with a special environmental fabric. So I've agreed to do that. But I can already see when it comes to that culturally, that, by the way, I'm a quarter Scottish as well, but I'm not even going to try that because it wouldn't get past the woke police because it's cultural appropriation. I was going to say, if you went to the Amazon jungle and you saw that tribe and you showed up with a spear and a skirt.

So if you look at what Bruce Parry used to do, where he would immerse himself and he would live there, and you show up with a spear and a skirt. But you know, if, so if you look at what Bruce Parry used to do, where he would immerse himself and he would live there, I don't know if you remember Bruce Parry, but he would go and live there for, live there being with a group of, with a tribe somewhere. And he would adopt their native dress,

whether it was just a little, you know, whether it was a very simple skirt, whatever it was. And he would live as they do. i don't know if you could get away with that now because it would be seen as a mix of cultural appropriation othering people um and it should be we should leave people to live as they do without trying to mimic it that's that that's how it is interpreted by some people where is all of this wokeness going because i feel like it's gaining momentum and i i worry about the trajectory i'm like it's not is it going to come back this way because it's been i feel like society has swung in a work direction maybe because of social media is kind of

like reinforcing reinforcing all of us in our echo chambers going yeah you're that's perfect you're perfect that was good good you're bad bad that's bad he's bad get him but surely you know this probably more than than i do that you have extreme wokery on one side but then we have the extreme we've got kind of fascism and the complete opposites yeah on the other side and that 4chan and yeah and that whole world is is equally more obnoxious yeah the racism the xenophobia and then you've got wokery here and it's just like everything else in life it's everything has gone like this so you're either in or you're out you're up or you're down it's black or it's white it's there's no middle and for everything i've just said to you about not wanting to be the sheep and wanting to be the shepherd i'd quite like to just be a sheep amongst quite a few others in a field kind of having a reasonable

conversation it's very very hard to have a sensible conversation now because people have gone to these extreme sides it's probably easier for the newspapers to write stories and to highlight the wokery than it is to do the fascism because that's really ugly and it's deeply offensive to so many people. But we see it, you know, we know it's on social media, you see what's happening to footballers, the racist abuse that they get. And we do read about it, but the wokery for some reason is something we hear about even more and maybe it's used to try and counterbalance the really ugly side of racism and xenophobia and and anti-semitism all these things that are equally

rising up and i don't know how we get back to this middle just just being a sheep in a field. Because I, you know, I long for a good solid conversation. I can't sit at a table now with people I don't know really, really well and have a conversation about COVID. Because that's politicized. I can't have a conversation about politics, because that's that that went ages ago. I can't have a conversation about Brexit. I can't have a conversation about Indyref2. I can't have a conversation about Brexit. I can't have a conversation about Indyref2. I can't have a conversation about what's happening in Northern Ireland. I can't really have a conversation about international policy. And by the way, I have more interesting conversations than just these.

I am actually quite fun sometimes. But I really like debate and I like hearing what other people have. So when I travel to other countries, my favourite thing is chatting about their interpretation of what's going on and and uh and i really thrive on that but we can't anymore because it's become too emotional people feel it's really personal to them or they're too afraid to talk talk about it in the first place you talked at the start of this conversation about not wanting to be imprisoned by society's conventions this is a form of imprisonment isn't it of course yeah and it and it and it which

is maybe one of the reasons why i still find myself drawn to far away places so the show that i do new lives in the wild where i go to live with people who've dropped off the grid they've they've woken up one day and they've decided i i don't want this life anymore. Sometimes they're millionaires. Sometimes they're just everyday folk who have got bored of the nine to five job and they've gone to live in the jungles of Bali in a little cabin in Alaska. And, uh, and I really covet their lives. I really admire their lives. I'm really jealous of their lives because they've simplified it. We live in, we it. We've made our lives pretty complicated, haven't we, really, if you think about it. And actually, if you strip it back, what do you really need in life? You need shelter, you need food, you need water,

some good company. We've really realized that with the pandemic. I think people have realized we're social. We need to have friends and family around. You need a smile on your face. And that's kind of it and everything else is a bit right well it's a distraction or it's an extra bonus isn't it you know to to you know have a fine wine or whatever it is you like in life but all these people that i've spent time visiting i've done this series for 10 years now and i've been to 100 places um all around the world that simplicity is is really attractive and they don't worry themselves about the those big topics i was just you know describing there it's it's kind of unimportant to them what happens with brexit doesn't really

matter for the person that's chosen to live on a tiny little island up in Norway, who lives hand to mouth catching fish each day. And I find it really kind of hypnotic and mesmerizing to spend time with people who have stripped their lives back to the absolute bare essentials. And the assumption is that they're really enduring and they're suffering and they're surviving. But that's not always the case. Sometimes it doesn't mean their lives are easy, but almost all of them are happy. Almost all of them have abandoned the complexities that many of us are stepping around.

They don't have to deal with wokery and trolls. You know, all these things are very first world problems, although they're not actually the developing or the lesser developed world i should say um i suffer from all of these um these things as well i was on a uh to speak to the point you just made i was on a motorbike like a little crappy motorbike in bali don't know two weeks ago and i'm just bombing down the street and feel sunshine, walking through the little villages. And I had this like real overwhelming sense that I'd lived my life wrong.

And I got off the bike and said to my friend, and it's so crazy. And I don't think me and him will ever forget this moment. Before I could say the words to him, he went, God, isn't that what life's about? And it was just being on this bike, having no problems, no care in the world, but also seeing a culture where they also they live in such a simple manner that made me reflect on the decisions i was i've made in my life and it's such a remarkable thing and as you say those people are typically their lives aren't easy but they seem to be much more at peace than the successful

first world quote-unquote people well there's a great kind of story that's kind of hypocritical but i suspect it's true a tourist goes to west africa let's say they're in senegal they're on a beautiful beach staying in a hotel he's on the beach every day and he sees a fisherman go down and cast his line and catch the few fish and uh and after the week he goes to him and says listen i think why don't you invest in a second rod so that you can catch twice as many fish and then you can sell twice as many fish and then eventually get a net and then you can get a boat and then you can start selling dozens hundreds of fish thousands of fish and earn even more money so that one day you can retire and do what you want to do

and and the man who's fishing says what fish so i just i just think there's a lot to be said in that because it's about chasing these goals and and what your goal is and and i think if we too many people are kind of blinded by and again coming full circle this notion of life is a destination and eventually you're going to reach this nirvana this this this glorious place where everything's perfect where you you just lie around i don't know everyone has different things they dream of you know someone just wants to go and play golf i have no idea why i don't know but someone just might want to play golf all day someone might want to play cards all day someone just might want to just move to the south of france and sit and drink beer all day someone

might want to go surfing all day whatever it is but there's no reason why you can't be doing that throughout your life. You just have to think outside of the box, don't you? You just have to have this positive attitude. And, you know, this comes back to what I was saying to you as a child. I realized this. If you think you're going to fail, you're going to fail. So every driving test, all of those ones I told you I failed, I would get in the car and this booming, deafening voice was saying, you are going to fail. And sure enough, I'd mount the pavement. I got stopped by the police once because I wasn't wearing a seatbelt. Yeah, on a driving test. But because it was almost like self-fulfillment of my mind's attitude. And it was only actually working with Olympians that I've

done now. When I climbed Everest, I went with Victoria Pendleton, the cyclist. When I rode the Atlantic, it was with James Cracknell. And I've been lucky enough to work with some other Olympians that I realized you need this absolute confidence verging on arrogance that I will get to the top of this mountain. I will reach the South Pole. Because as soon as you go into an event where there's there's any self-doubt it's it's it it will be self-fulfilling you must know that you you must know that but it's impossible to fake in my view like i i really i'm i'm quite repelled by this culture of like people looking in the

mirror and saying you are going to be a millionaire you are great but deep because i my opinion of how beliefs work like so i always use this example this millionth time i've said this if i were to hold your loved one at gunpoint now and say believe i'm jesus or i kill them there's nothing you could do to actually believe i was jesus you could only lie to me because that's not how belief works as you've proven beliefs take evidence and you've built that evidence for your challenges right so like just just telling yourself to believe something doesn't work even if everything is on the line um but if i suddenly turn this into wine and then started levitating yeah you might think wait a minute but this is

but but you're you're taking it slightly too literally when it comes to what that is so here's the thing i i there's a a man called mark boyle who who um lives in ireland a fascinating man i think i think you should get him on here he has lived as the moneyless man and he gave up everything and tried to live without any money for a year and he ended up with a with a house is is what he did by by charming trading up uh literally just working his his way through the system but never ever ever using money it was always trade and barter and borrowing. And I don't think there was any stealing. Not that I know of.

But I love this notion that he had an absolute confidence that this would work and that he would be able to do it. Now, with something like Everest, you're right. You couldn't just take someone off the street and say, believe you're going to climb this mountain and you're going to get to the summit because you you need to do with the climatization you have to get yourself physically ready you have to understand about um high altitude and and you have to understand the the basics of climbing at least uh so you you're right

but if you even with all that if you go into that arena as such, into the mountains with any doubt, it's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy that you won't succeed. So it's, I think this idea of belief that you can, you're right. It's much more than just looking in the mirror and going, I'm going to be the best musician in the world.

This comes back to school kids who aspire for fame. You know, I think it's the kind of the X factor Britain's Got Talent has a lot to answer for because it's kind of made this illusion that anyone can be whatever they want in life. Now, part of my whole i i suppose part of of of the story that i tell is that that you can follow your dreams but i always give say that with the caveat that it has to be reasonable if you're if your dream is to be a top footballer you're gonna have to it was pretty good but you have to be but if you know if if someone comes up to me and a youngster says i really want to just be um a top footballer i want to play with a premiership club i don't see why they can't but there has to be a there has to be a base level of pretty brilliant football from a

start do you see what i mean of course so i think you have to be realistic with those aspirations if someone wants to be a top neuroscientist or a top doctor i don't see why they can't but they have to have it was going to be impossible for me i wanted to be a vet and i think i would have been quite a good vet but i just didn't have the academics so i didn't even get off the start plate i think it's a really important thing to reiterate to people that i do believe in that mindset believe you can ant middleton who's been on here he's he's another keen advocate of that just believe in yourself this positive mindset but the positive mindset has to has to also um marry up with ability and skill so i completely agree with the

um because i genuinely when i think there's a buck coming here yeah no so it's actually not a um a but to your point it's a it's a it's a buck coming here. Yeah, no, it's actually not a, but to your point, it's a, it's a, it's a question about how do you achieve this point? Because I completely agree when I've been asked what my talent was, I was like, can't spell, can't do math still, probably dyslexic, just never got gone to check. But I just always believed that's what I've always said for my whole life. I always believed I was going to bit. So you think about what I wrote in my diary as a kid that didn't have a driving test um his parents went speaking to him with shoplifting pizzas gonna be a millionaire within four years gonna have a range over sports gonna be my first car didn't even hadn't done I and I genuinely believed it and for me that was my

mother gift that life gave me was this like low-key delusional belief and that took me out and so when I was living in Moss Side stealing pizzas and stuff i started recording it in my diary and doing little videos and it's crazy in the first page of my diary i lied to my diary i said i'm recording these um this journey because a production company has asked me to because you lied to yourself i lied in my own because i i couldn't i i almost didn't know how to say to my diary that this was going to be part of a story i was going to tell one day and i and it's not that i'll show my diary in the first page of it it's like because and and also because i think i'm gonna have to tell this story one day that is a guy that saw himself on an island and knew he was getting off the island and wanted to like wasn't dwelling on it so i

completely agree. I think the only reason I'm here is not because of smarts. My parents were completely broke. Obviously, I had privileges of being born in this country. Well, born in Africa, actually. But it was just that I always believed I'd be here. However, when I try and impose that onto people

and tell them the importance of self-belief, and I see these people who have got their confidence just absolutely in the bin because of experiences they've had, or their dad, when they were four years old, told them that they of self-belief. And I see these people who have got their confidence just absolutely in the bin because of experiences they've had or their dad, when they were four years old, told them that they're a piece of shit. And my fluffy words, you know, when they're 35, aren't stronger than those words that their dad said to them.

You know, I struggle to try and tell them how to get to that place of genuine self-belief. Because as I said, you can't fake it. If Stephen had a shred of doubt in Moss Side, I'd still be there. So like, what do I say to that person? Well, it's the building blocks of life, isn't it? It comes back to that.

So if you, you know, the series of challenges and things that I've done in my life have slowly built themselves up. So I started on that year on, living on an island in the Outer Hebrides. Now, if you strip that back, it was pretty simple. It couldn't really fail. It was hard work. It was hard being away

from people. No, no contact with the outside world. No, no phones, mobiles, family. I didn't see anyone for a whole year, just this small group of people. Well, once I did that, it was kind of, that was the first, that was like the foundations. I was foundations i was like oh my gosh well i've done this and then and then i put the next block in which was running the marathon desab six marathons in six days i'd never even run 100 meters steven and suddenly here i was agreeing to run across the sahara desert and i i managed to get through that i came last but i didn't manage to do it and and these building blocks have just gone up so when you say to people you know when you're trying to encourage as i do as well people to this self-belief it has to be a realistic self-belief to of the slow building blocks of life if we come back to kind of reality

shows because i'm slightly obsessed with reality shows and and and this kind of what's happened over the last 20 years what it's done is it's given people this belief that anyone can become world famous overnight. And I've already alluded to Britain's Got Talent X Factor, but Big Brother, Love Island, all of those shows, because it takes everyday folk and it catapults them onto the front pages of newspapers, 5 million followers overnight on social media

and earning quite a lot of money. But how long does that last for? Now, for many people, you know, it's the famous Andy Warhol, only 15 minutes. It doesn't last very long because what happens is there's no substance to it. There's no roots. And what happens is the next show comes along and they're cast aside. But what also a lot of people do is that the leap from one brick to the next is too high. And if you go too big, it's doomed to failure. I remember, funny enough, I think one of the reasons why me, a reality show contestant, is still working in TV after 21 years, because I should have, my 15 minutes was up a long time ago. I think the reason is more because of the things that I turned down than the things that I agreed to do. So I turned down

some pretty big shows, big prime time Saturday night shows that a lot of people who work in TV would be like, I would do anything for that. But the leap was too big. And I didn't believe that, I think the, even though I like to confront risks I like to be realistic with those so k2 is a far more dangerous mountain than Everest I could have gone straight to k2 but instead I want I want to do a sensible building block up to that ultimate challenge and I think right back back to television, I think if you take too big a leap, then the reality of continued success is eroded away. When you think about some of those opportunities that you were given that you turned down, what was it about them that made you

think it was too big of a leap? Because I'm trying to answer the question for my viewer, which is how do I know if it's too big of a leap i think you just have to be sensible about what you're capable of i think so it's this really fine line i told you i'm full of contradictions so i'm telling you you know i'm sitting here kind of saying to people follow your dreams don't be told that you can't do it nothing no dream is too big um you know believe in yourself and and you're halfway there you know i really do believe in all of that but you also have to be sensible so i think i okay so here's the thing i reckon that i i'm the son of a an actress and i believe that i could be an actor i always wanted to be an actor

i got rejected by all the drama schools by the way because i couldn't remember my lines but that's a whole other thing um but i still think i could be an actor and and i have quite a confidence that i could but if i was suddenly offered a steven spielberg film yeah i wouldn't take that now because my ultimate goal is to try the acting thing at some stage in my life when it's appropriate but i don't want to do it on in in such a big extreme explosion of public ridicule if it goes wrong now i i together with that i add this sort of confidence that yes i will be able to do it but i'd prefer to start in a little pub theater with 20 people just on a smaller stage and build up because there has to be and and i think we all have to agree with this there as well as this confidence and this self-belief you have to have the skills yeah if you don't have the skills there's just no point and we're

just being delusional and it's no different to that instagram fakery of of of showing people this idyllic life when actually that's just a tiny little one second of actually what was a really miserable weekend because it was the only time the sun came out and someone threw on a bikini. I didn't throw on a bikini, but you know, you get my point, you know, to show that instant moment of perfection. So I think there has to be an actual skill and you have to earn it i think you know this this instant gratification just doesn't exist there is a few examples and you're you're one of those where you were able to write down i'm going to be a millionaire i'm going to have that range rover sport and you did

it and and you are what gives so many people hope but i failed i failed in my first company but it doesn't but it doesn't matter. But that doesn't matter. Surely failure, if you haven't failed, you haven't been trying hard enough. Yeah. Don't you think? I think the people who,

because I realized that quite early on, if you haven't failed at various points through your life, then you're being too measured with the challenge that you take. Which is a failure. Yeah, which is a failure in itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so many of the things you said there,

I was just, you know, I was captivated by. I was wondering whether you're, if you're, so you said you were a contradiction at the start of this conversation, but then you've also alluded to the fact that you like to not be on either pole and you like to be like the sheep in the field, which actually probably makes sense because you can appreciate the need for ambition,

but then you also appreciate the need to have self-awareness, right? So it kind of puts you in the middle of the field somewhere. Well, if you think about it, it's a really weird thing because I'm actually, again, true to the contradictions, you know, the son of an actress, I've kind of got the jazz hands and I quite like talking and I like being on stage as such, but I'm also still quite shy. So I kind of like being in the wings. I want to be on the stage, then I want to be in the wings, then I want to be on the stage. And the same goes for kind of how I project myself. So I want to be part of the conversation, but then I don't want to be part of the conversation. I don't like the uncomfortableness of it i want to be a politician but i i couldn't bear the you know the the the focus and the the um the derision that you're going to get from one side or the other and i

actually think once you've accepted that because i think a lot of people i'm sure a lot of people are like that really um once you've accepted that's who you are you just work out how to walk those stepping stones and kind of move around it and i kind of do this i dance my way through it and dip in and dip out and i have moments where i kind of i wish i hadn't kind of i wasn't on the middle of that stage but i am so i own it and it's it's back to this whole thing i do i do believe you kind of have to own your narrative it's very easy to let someone else steal it from you i think i i think i actually read that on the last page of the first chapter of your book it said um the ocean taught the ocean had taught me to take control of my own narrative and believe in myself when you're talking about um

what you learned from the sea in your book inspire the lessons from the wilderness and that taking control of your narrative point really stuck with me um because obviously society writes your narrative one of the things that i picked up a lot of from listening to your interviews and your books was your about your relationship with your lovely wife and you're both very vocal about the, dare I say, not radical, but the sort of like innovative way that you've built your relationship in various areas. One of the really interesting things to me was this idea that you have preventative marriage counselling. Yeah. Tell me about that and why do I need it?

So my wife Marina, we've been married married for this will be our 15th year together wow she's half austrian thank you she's half austrian and she's she's got skin like a rhino it's unbelievable uh as as in can i just say that that in terms of uh be not ever being offended she's got glowing skin her skin is really it's really she moisturizes the whole time she doesn't have this big wrinkly gray skin oh my god i'm blushing i'm gonna get in so much trouble for that but she is she she's really tough she's really resilient she's no nonsense she doesn't beat about the bush and we're very you know i am by my own admission a much more sensitive soul now it doesn't mean she isn't sensitive but but she but she kind of calls a spade a spade.

Whereas I might say, well, that is a spade, but you probably could use that as a fork. Do you see what I mean? I kind of, because I want to please all the people and I don't want to offend. So I kind of find myself kind of dancing around a little bit. In the middle, there you go. Whereas Marina has always just been straight down the line.

And our kind of of our relationship is has been built on me being away a lot because outside of the time of covid i'm probably traveling eight months of the year so there's a lot of time away but that's how it's always been and we have a really solid relationship and and we we had a terrible tragedy about um six years ago when we lost our third child a little boy willem who was stillborn so he so three weeks before he was due to be born naturally um unfortunately marina had something called a placental abruption and he died and and and it was an awful awful experience that I've kind of spoken about before, but it affected us profoundly, much more than I thought it would.

The feeling that this emotion of losing someone you'd never had a chance to meet is something I'd never experienced before. And I couldn't quite understand my own emotions. And added to that, when this this all happened i was on the other side of the world i thought marina was going to die so it was a big very impactful part of our relationship and we sought counseling afterwards to help us through the complexities of all of those emotions and it was through that that we we kind of realized that actually our own relationship we we talked about things that we hadn't talked about before outside of the the awfulness of that situation

we talked about our very different characters and how how we kind of tread around one another and i think a lot of a lot of relationships have that they don't you you might joke about your very different personalities but there are certain areas that you know oh no i can't ever say that i couldn't do that well why couldn't you you should be really really honest the best relationships are ones where you can say anything to one another without fear of offense now i've already said that i've got thin skin so i'm easily offended and marina has offended me many times over the years and I've offended her and and I think this marriage counselling prevention came was born out of that and about a year afterwards

Marina we were struggling a little bit it was such a profound thing that it affected us because we had different ways of dealing with with the grief of losing that little boy Marina was was very tearful and then she'd be totally fine she'd have big tears and was fine and mine i became really introverted and and and uh and i became really antisocial didn't want to be anywhere i remember going trying to go to big events i had to go to some big red carpet events and literally just arriving and just saying to the driver just drive on i couldn't go where i'd go to events and i'd find myself going to the lo arriving and just saying to the driver, just drive on. I couldn't go, or I'd go to events and I'd find myself going to the loo and just sitting in the little cubicle

for the duration of the whole event. Parties, I would find myself just literally arriving, saying hello, hello, hello, and then just literally diving out the door. Because I think it's because I couldn't control, I couldn't control the narrative, this narrative that I wanted to be in control of. I didn't know who was going to come up. Were they going to talk about my loss? Were they going to... There were things I couldn't prepare myself for. And those two very different approaches and two very different kind of emotions that marina my wife and i had meant that it did create tensions so we saw someone and and she was the one that suggested that once a year we just go and speak to her as a preventative and do you know it kind of just makes a lot of sense you know marina i've

told you already she's very straight laced and she's very straight and she was like well why wouldn't we why wouldn't we just go and with someone there say tell you what i do find really frustrating it's when you always do this or you always say that if you do it in a home environment the natural reaction usually it's going to be over dinner probably had a drink you're going to be even more emotional and go i don't you'll defensive. I defy any relationship to say that that doesn't happen. But to do it with a third party who is trained to kind of be non-judgmental is a very good way of speaking to you via that person without fear of getting really emotional. Because Marina and I are also really, we do get really really emotional we probably argue once a year

but when we do it's massive people may be surprised because we do we're highly emotional and we get it's really tearful it's not there's no uh black eyes or anything but it's a really but you know we don't argue very well and what we found actually was that speaking to someone else once a year has has i can't remember the last time we had an argument. We really, we haven't for years and years now, which is saying something because I, you know, I'm also all for honesty, you know, in this world of kind of social media fakery, I wear my heart on my sleeve and I've always been really honest. So talking about the loss of Willem, talking about my dyslexia. But I think it's really important that you're very honest, especially if you live in a very public sphere.

Hearing that you've not had an argument for years is a pretty incredible achievement, one would say, in a relationship. Why? How? How? Why? Well, I think it's part, I think the fact that we speak to the same person every year for only like an hour or two. 12 months apart though. Yeah, I know. But it's because it all comes, because I think we are able to just be really, really honest there and then. And by the way, I'm not saying our relationship is really, it's not one of these wedding cakes perfectly formed.

Everything is idyllic, birds flying around, chirping. It's like any relationship. It's strained and we get snappy at one another. But we've learned to resolve. I think conflict resolution is there. And I'm, you know, I have, although I kind of try to be i'm an optimist and and i try to be smiley and happy as uh uh more often than not i still wake up some days and i'm

feeling a bit under the weather or i do just get out of bed the wrong side and i know when i'm a bit more snappy and marina now we we have we are armed with ways of saying to the other person you you you're a bit irritable today you seem a bit miserable you're not much fun to be around we we can say that in a way that doesn't the other person doesn't jump to a defense game i'm not you you're the one that's annoying me do you see i mean that it turns into that that argument and i think if you learn how to speak to one another and that's what we have kind of been armed with it it is just a great way to to kind of avoid those unnecessary arguments listen some people have really fiery relationships and they thrive on it we've got friends that kind of need that they have big battles and flames

and then and then they make up and it's all fine and i've got some friends i just find that exhausting yeah it's a mental health awareness week this week and um one of the things you said earlier on about going to going to those events and like you're telling the driver to carry on going or hiding in the toilet sounded similar to you know shades of um anxiety maybe even ptsd to some degree um does is that what you think you were experiencing at that time were you anxious i was yeah i was super anxious no without doubt i um anxiety um uh panic attacks you know all of that happened for about a year i experienced a lot of that

really i just just and i think it was because i had lost control i wasn't able to protect my wife i wasn't able to protect that little boy and i think my my the the um reaction to that was to try and take back control of my life and the only way i could take back control of my life was to control my environment and and things were out of my control when there were lots of people around and i didn't know who i was going to be talking to and about what and where and when i was going to go away and and all the things that i'd lost control of i wanted to regain control of and and yes anxiety definitely came into it and i'm i i've never suffered depression as i'd call it but i have every so often always coincides with the full moon which is a bit weird but i i get i get what i just call the dark cloud and even if everything in my life

is perfect i just have this kind of for a couple of days. It does kind of happen almost every month. Just a couple of kind of gloomy days when it's difficult to feel happy and optimistic. I don't think I would define it as depression because I think that would be demeaning to people who really, really suffer from what is known as depression. I have lots of friends who are suffering and have suffered from clinical depression, but I think it's human nature.

You know, I am an optimist i am happy most of the time but i also feel that little cloud of of just darkness and it's and it comes and goes and i can't i don't know when it's there um or why it's that i i know when it's there sorry i don't know um why it's there and then it it sort of disappears and for me sport has been my way so active to be active has been my way um for about 20 years of getting rid of that has that always been there has always showed up no i think it i think it probably showed up? No, I think it probably showed up about, I'd say about probably just when I started in this business and the pressures, I think, so 20 years or so, I think it started being there.

And it was, I came quite late to kind of doing exercise and it's not big bulging bicep. That's not my kind of form of exercise, but I went for a run just before coming here oh you know so i most days i will do something and it just sets me up for the day and it it keeps that cloud away sometimes it's quite even that doesn't work but i've got i've just got different different ways of of trying to kind of keep the cloud away super interesting really interesting really interesting so many questions to ask within that i i am i have i have gone through my life i think probably

in the same sort of optimism and you know generally really happy but you know i i do worry that uh as the pressures of my life get more intense that, you know, I feel like, I feel like when I was growing up, I thought mental health was, was not a real thing. And it was like crazy people. And I was like, well,

I'm happy. I'll never be. And then I had, I remember one day I had, I had anxiety for the first time and I just couldn't understand it. But what it did for me was told me that I'm susceptible to everything else, depression and all of these things. But yeah, I mean, it's good to hear that exercise has been a bit of an antidote but the other thing we're

coming back to labels so a bit like I don't need of course you know I've got dyslexia I think you know you might be able to go to a a doctor and he might say yes I actually did suffer a bit of PTSD um but actually I think if you're strong in yourself and you're strong in your self-belief and you've got a good kind of family dynamic around you, you've got a strong set of friends, I think you should be able to navigate quite well if you learn the tricks of dealing with it.

And like I say, for me, it has been a lot of reading i i love i i read a lot about happiness um the the there's a great book um about happiness and i've got a complete mind blank of the author but he hypothesized about happiness is it something that um we're we're is it is it something to strive for it's a bit like the destination or the journey is happiness something we're striving for are we work do we find happiness or is it other things that are disguising the happiness and and hampering it so if you think his theory is that if you look at a child children are by and large okay they might they're going to be crying if they've got a dirty nappy or they're hungry or whatever but by and large okay they might they're going to be crying if they've got a dirty

nappy or they're hungry or whatever but by and large their emotion their default emotion is it's laughing think of children in a playground yes they have little that you know their tears come very easily but the default is happiness and when does that start eroding away kind of puberty and the anxiety you know those anxious times of when you're just, you know, when sexuality is coming into your life, all those things probably do start to affect that happiness. But then moving on in life, and this man had done fantastically well, made millions. And exactly like you were saying about the cars, as soon as he made his first million, went out and bought his Ferrari, sat in the Ferrari and then was like well yeah I've got it I've done it now and now what and it was this constant aspiration so the hypothesis is

that actually we're we're kind of adding apps almost things to us that are making us unhappy rather than striving for this happiness thing because if we're if if the happiness is the Ferrari or the million pounds Range Rover sorry I got it wrong but if if we're if if the happiness is the ferrari or the million pounds range rover sorry i got it wrong but if if but but if that is your goal for happiness the human nature of always wanting more is going to mean you're constantly searching for happiness and you're going to have it fleetingly and then it will go and then you'll get it again fleetingly and then it will go but actually if we take away the things that are making us unhappy, whatever that is, social media, get rid of it.

Living in a big city, get rid of it. You know, you've just got back from Bali. Yeah. I saw a picture of you under a waterfall. I mean, how happy were you in a nice warm place, out in the jungle, in a waterfall, listening to nature all around you? I'm going to do something now. One second.

So I actually wrote a little paragraph. I wrote a paragraph in my book about being sat by the river in Bali. I described the words of how I feel. And it's funny because the chapter's called and I'm not plugging my book here it just seems like it's the best way um the chapter's called the journey back to human and the reason why the chapter's called that is because I'm hypothesizing that I think we've kind of lost our way and being sat by this river in Bali was it felt like I'd come back to where I was meant to be here we go as I this chapter, I'm sat in an Indonesian jungle in Bali

by a gloriously glistening river with the unobstructed glare of the sun overhead bearing down on me. There's this perfect light breeze stroking my warm skin and an earthy floral smell of the jungle surrounding trees occupies my senses.

I came here to live in hap... As I sit here, and you may have experienced this if you spent time in nature, I feel at peace. As the Stoics might have described it, I feel tranquil. It's hard to explain this in any other way

than to say that I feel like this is where I innately belong. My primitive survival orientated senses that often use prehistoric devices like pain and discomfort as a usual way to guide me away from danger and towards safety seem to be telling me

that this is where I should be. The absence of discomfort and stress and pressure is telling me that this might just be home. And it's what you were saying there about like the removal so when you said did i feel happy the first thing that came to head was like i didn't feel unhappiness there you go right so i didn't feel like there was no notification but that is such a fascinating notion this idea that it wasn't that you just felt a default just yeah human you felt just yourself tranquil theics, they use the word tranquil, right? So all this noise that we get, you know, we're here in central London right now.

And when I say noise, I don't just mean the police cars and the ambulances and the pneumatic drills. I just mean all the things, the shops that are saying you should be buying this, you should be getting that. The newspapers that are telling you about other, whoever your rivals are, we all have rivals, the social media promise of someone who's having a better time than you, the someone who's, someone else who's still in Bali when you're not there. It's all these things. And I do think they have a habit of making us unhappy. And it's weird, isn't it? Because we think that those are the things that will make us happy. You know, being on social media, fishing for those likes,

buying into the kind of commercial world and trying to keep up with the Joneses. Now, that's where money, again, coming back to this, that's why money is seen by so many people as the cure for everything, because with money, you could go to Bali, you could get the better car. But once you've got it, as you know, it's like, well, actually, that was quite fleeting. Yeah. And this is when it's funny, because when you look at the ways that we're medicating mental health disorders now, we went through this phase of thinking that it was like a biomedical problem. So we would give people like SSRIs and, you you know try and correct the serotonin with these chemicals

and the more modern treatments all seem to be trying to return us back to probably what you go and see when you go to the the the tribes that you you see in like the amazon which is human connection movement like we used to hunt for our food, not like fucking Uber and Deliveroo. So connection with nature, which again, you know. Nature is therapy. I mean, this is, you know, there's a lot of people who've realized, especially for mental health, you know,

back to the mental health week, there's a lot of people who have seen the benefits of nature. So in Japan and Sweden for many, many years now, they've done something called forest bathing. And forest bathing is like many people do on the beach, but instead you just go into a woods and you lie on the floor and you stare at the canopy. And just imagine now, I want everyone who's watching this

to just imagine all those leaves rustling in the wind, birds, you know, because once you stop walking in a wood, so many people kind of go we're gonna go for a walk and they just march through often have headphones on and it's like well you're not connecting with that you're just you're racing through but actually if you just sit there animals start coming out you start noticing colors you start noticing a flower that wasn't there and don't never underestimate the power of that to just reconnect us to you know where we're supposed to be really we're not supposed to be in big cities living in

apartments with your own um you know with with running water and things it's it makes it very comfortable for us but uh i think most of us really kind of belong in a jungle in a woods on a mountain on the ocean closer to nature Do you know Yohan Hari? Do you know who that Yohan Hari? He wrote a book called Lost Connections. Yes, of course. He's going to be sat there in two hours. Amazing.

He's coming and we always talk about this particular topic. But yeah, it's one of the biggest revelations I had in my life was that much of my ambitions were taking me further away from like being human. So, you know, living in the heart of New York City, I could pretty much go through a whole day without moving you know the uber picks me up takes me to work takes me back home i use the same glass screen to order my food i don't really see anybody because i lived alone uh and then you look at the stats and you know new york is 30 times 30 more likely to be depressed than

bali or you know something crazy like that but um yeah i and i as an adventurer and someone that's spent time in nature um i find it so fascinating that you've had you've you've come to the same conclusion about the true nature of happiness what is your goal now though you we talked about there not being a destination what when you think about what your goal is what is it don't i i again true to the contradictions i think we all all need goals. I think we have to have something to aspire to, something to be working towards. But I don't have, contrary to popular belief, I don't have a little black book that says, right, okay, we've done that. Now I'm going to cycle around the world. And now I'm going to climb this mountain. It's not like I just have

a list of things. But I'm kind of, I try to live my life as a yes man so i like to seize opportunities i think the human nature default of no to think about things uh really carefully is something i've tried to wean myself away from and i try to kind of say yes to things on a whim uh a little bit more so i think i think my goals are about continuing to test myself, continuing to confront failure, risking what I do. Now, given I've kind of got, you know, I write books, I do TV presenting, and I do adventuring, I think I'd probably quite like to find something else, whether it's acting, whether it's politics,

whether it's... EJ. There you go. I'm all for trying. Yeah, I'd love to know if I have a voice. Maybe I'll become a singer. I'd love to, you know. I wonder whether I could compete in the Olympics.

Is there any sport where a 47-year-old could start from scratch and really test themselves and work their way up to the sport there are a few believe it or not i think that i think we don't so i kind of i do have i kind of think big but i don't have absolute goals they're not written there but i think i think a bit like you were saying you you would like to kind of tackle the education system i would like to make a difference because i think the older you get you're still way too young steven but the older you get you start to question why why have i done all these things

because if you think about if you just break down those big challenges that we've been talking about it's quite egotistical you know you climb on mountain hey look at me you you walk across a pole i get to come and sit and chat to you all about them and say how brilliant I was. But actually, what's the point? There has to be more substance to why I did those things. And more importantly, how I can translate those into something useful for other people. So I would love to, again, work on an education model, work with other people to actually be able to start making a difference because my life up until now has all been about me it's been about self-building about about building my own self-confidence and that's quite selfish and and i would like to think of myself as a or i'd like to be more selfless and i'd like to do things for other people that doesn't

mean i haven't done stuff and i've done a lot of charitable things and philanthropic things over the last few years but i kind of feel i'm moving towards a time when i really would like to focus on um trying to improve the system because if the likes of you and me and other people don't do it it's never going to happen we can talk about it we can sit here and look all smug kind of saying this is what needs to be done and kind of nod our heads. But if you don't action it, it will never happen because politicians are just busy doing their thing and they'll kind of just do what they can,

but they're never going to be able to break those glass ceilings that have been set by previous generations. And i guess from what you talked about earlier about you know gradually picking your battles i guess you know you've done so much in your career as well from everest to the shows you've done to all the other achievements you've had that you're in search of an even grander battle yeah i like i like a battle but the battle doesn't have to it's not a it's a battle within it's it's not a you know this term of of a battle i think some people think it is um

it's against another person or against a system or against a belief or you're battling against the trolls or the wokies or the fascists but i i think the battles we all have are the battles within and i think as soon as you start accepting that that's when we will start kind of taking mental health more seriously than we do because it's really obvious to me that you know that how your brain feels and how what your brain is telling you is is far more powerful than any cuts or broken bones that we have and it's kind of weird isn't it that we still you look at someone who's been in a road accident think oh poor you you broke your leg you you see that injury and we can relate to it and we we wince at it but here what goes on beneath the the skull is is deemed as something kind of still a bit taboo

and it's not it's not really taboo because people talk about it but you still meet a lot of people who are like no it doesn't care it's no just get over it come on just just man up uh just uh you know just just believe in yourself and you'll do it and as much as i'm saying you need this this um self-belief it's far more complex than that. It is. And that's what makes giving advice so difficult, right? Because you give it from the basis of your own bias. Yeah.

And advice is bespoke. So, like I say, many people are asking, how can I do X or Y? It depends on so many things. And I can't really give that advice. It's a bit like a doctor giving a prescription. I can't really give that unless I genuinely know what your ability is, what your aspirations are, what your mindset could be. All of these things come into it. But if we could start you know helping people within that context i think we would be in a very different place you're scared of dying no i'm scared of

i'm scared for other people but i'm not scared of dying it sounds really glib i know but i genuinely am not and and i don't know why i've had many near-death experiences. Maybe I've had to look at those clouds and think that I'm heading that way quite a few times. And maybe that is what makes you less fearful when you've been so close to it. But it's also perhaps that I don't think I have many regrets in life. I've kind of seized those opportunities, but I'm deeply fearful for those I love and the void that would be left, which sounds really kind of egotistical, but I know how much I feared about losing my parents or loved ones when I was a child. Super interesting idea that idea. I feel the same.

After I stopped being religious at the age of 18, I was actually scared of dying when I was religious because I thought I was going to go somewhere. And then beyond that point, gradually as I've achieved more in my life, I've got less scared of the idea of... I think, well, I've been true to myself and that seems to be the most important thing as it relates to... And you've referred to it as regret there.

Have you got any regrets? Not really really not no because i've tried to it's kind of one of the ways i've tried to live life with no regrets and you can you're only likely to have a regret let me change i was going to say you're more likely to regret regret the things you didn't do than the things you did do but i know that's not true i think plenty of people have made made the wrong decisions we've all done that but no in all seriousness i don't think i i kind of i am an optimist and i try to see the positives in everything i've done and all the decisions i've made think i can say that i regret anything because it's the it's the old cliche what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and i think even those things that i could maybe say well probably wasn't the best decision something good has come of it there's gonna be

so many ben 18 year old ben ben's listening to this right now who have listened to this and thought you know i'm really low confidence and i've been knocked and you know i'm not sure if i'm good enough and i've been called a failure by my job dad whatever it is what do you say to those people having walked you know live their life what you say to them what's the advice you give them don't don't buy into someone else's narrative that's what you're doing by listening to the failure whether it's absolute words coming out of someone's mouth saying well you're no good whether it's whether it's even perceived narrative that you go into a pub and everyone looks like they're having more fun than you and and the girl

or the boy doesn't want to be with you they want to be with the the other person i think i think you just have to own your narrative you are you in this world of what are we 6.7 billion i probably got that wrong but in this world of many many billions of people there is no there is no other steven yeah that is fact. Yeah, there might be someone similar. There might be someone with the same abilities, the same body type, maybe even looks a bit like you, but you are completely unique because your personality belongs to you. And don't try and change that. Don't try and be the person that other people want you to be. Be the person you are. And it's a really hard thing to buy into because I spent so much of my life

trying to be the person I thought society wanted me to be. Always embarrassed that I wasn't, I was either too posh or I wasn't posh enough. I was either too successful or not successful enough. You see what I mean? It's almost like you're always just trying to fit in but actually once you own your narrative once you're confident that you are unique in whatever way it might be a it might be a geeky kind of unique it might be a cool kind of unique it might be a quirky kind of unique but that's if if you can own your personality, your narrative, and accept that, you're halfway there to this self-belief and this confidence. And that also means not trying to buy into someone else's narrative. You might think you want to be the, if you're the geeky one, you might think you want to be the if you're the geeky one you might think you want to be the cool kid you might think that you want to be playing in the first football team you might think that you um

want to be sitting at that top table but that's not necessarily where your personality um uh wants you to be and i I think stop wanting and start being. Very powerful. It took me back to something I read from this Swedish philosopher, I can't remember his bloody name, but he was talking about how when you try and abandon your true self, you'll despair if you fail or succeed. If you succeed in abandoning your true self, you'll despair because you've abandoned yourself. If you fail, you'll despair because you've attempted something and failed at fitting in.

So the conclusive point of this flow chart he wrote 200 years ago was that the only way to fulfillment is to be. And I just, I mean, very, very powerful. And your story is incredibly inspiring for so many reasons, but I think mainly because of your willingness to share it so honestly all parts of your story and i know that will help a ton of

people because the stories that you've told me about yourself especially when you're younger and the lack of confidence are it's my dms are full of young men young you know women that are um desperately trying to uh um understand why they um they don't feel adequate. And so I want to thank you for coming here today. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, it's truly fascinating. I don't know what I was expecting us to talk about,

but I'm glad we talked about all the topics we did. And I just hope that, you know, we could do with a lot more people in the world that are willing to be as transparent and honest, warts and all. So thank you so much, because this is exactly why I started this podcast and it's going to be super valuable to all the people that listen. Well, listen, thank you so much because this is exactly why i started this podcast and it's going to be super valuable to all the people that listen well listen thank you so much it's been a pleasure being here thank you Thank you.