The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Matthew Hussey: The Secret To Building A Perfect Relationship

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

Matthew Hussey is one of the world’s most renowned experts on relationships and human connection. He’s not only helped thousands of people be more ready to meet the love of their life, but also how to have a meaningful relationship with them when you do. In this conversation Matthew doesn’t just offer advice, but opens up about how he’s approached relationships in his own life. He freely admits mistakes he’s made, where his approach went wrong, and what he’s learnt. This is some of the most mature and reflective relationship advice I think I’ve ever heard. Because Matthew doesn’t just specialise in how to prepare for the good moments, but how to deal with the bad ones as well. Follow Matthew: YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9HGzFGt7BLmWDqooUbWGBg Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thematthewhussey 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. Think of James Bond in real life. Barely says anything. Not a hint of humanity. This would be a terrible person to have a relationship with. And we've been taught that that's what women want. Number one YouTube channel in the world for dating. And New York Times bestselling author, Matthew Hussey. Let's begin. We have to dispense with this idea that the one exists.

Someone becomes the one by what we build with them. Any commitment long-term requires true effort. I had an issue with my head and my ear. It created the darkest moments of my entire life. I'd always found whatever was going on in my life, I could fix it. I couldn't fix it. If I removed it, what would I remove from Matthew Hussey? Imagine that you're not being judged on anything but how great a chef you are. We spend so much of our lives mourning our ingredients. Don't aspire to have the best ingredients. Aspire to be the best chef.

So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO USA edition. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Matthew, before we started recording, we were having a conversation about how the thing that gets you your glory, in your own words, can often be your downfall. And it always tends to be the case that the start of everyone's journey, especially when I sit here with people that I consider to be anomalies like you, there tends to be some kind of anomalous situation or trauma or exacerbating factor that they can point to and say, that was probably the poke from life or the thing that happened in my early years that resulted in me becoming the man I am today. Have you been able

to identify exactly what that is in your own life? I think so, to a large extent. I mean, we had a lot of financial insecurity growing up and I never knew if everything was going to be okay or not. For me, it was usually, it started out as a major bid for control. I wanted control over my situation. And I remember, we were living in a trailer at one point in my teenage years. And, you know, things were, you know, a certain way at home and, you know, everyone loved each other, but it was, there was a lot of tension, as you can imagine. And I remember going into school and saying, I'm, you know, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. And I would speak so forcefully and aggressively about where I was going. But it, and what was funny is there was a, I remember a girl at school who had never noticed

me before. One of the popular girls, she said, my mom wants me to marry you. And I said, I said, why? She said, cause she thinks you're going to be rich. Which for me, even though it's a fairly shallow thing to say, there was something about that that was interesting to me at the time because I thought, oh my God, I've never been further from that reality. But from the way I'm talking, someone really believes me. Someone really believes that I'm going to be something or I'm going to go somewhere. But at the time, what it really was,

was I was just afraid and didn't want to be at the mercy of life. Didn't want to be at the mercy of whatever I had in my head as the bad out there that could come and get you if you didn't get control. And I think most of my early adult life was defined by an obsessive need for control. When people say that to me, I often presume that that meant something was out of control.

Well, I think for me as a kid, it was because I felt like there were problems. When we had financial difficulties, I felt like there were problems I couldn't solve. I wasn't, they were too big. I wasn't able to do anything about them. So as I, as soon as I got the chance to go out there and do something, that became a kind of obsession. And I think, by the way, combining that with an insecurity that I was just desperate to feel special in some way, desperate to feel important in some way. So, you know, I defined normal as bad, whatever normal is. And I always felt like I had to do something different. I had to do something that was, you know, when I was a,

my dad, when I was a kid, he owned a nightclub and I was a DJ in that nightclub from 14 years old. He was a DJ when he first bought that nightclub. He went in there. Well, actually the nightclub needed a DJ and they didn't have one. So he started DJing. That was how he became a DJ. And then through my teenage years, I did that, but I didn't just DJ for fun. I mean, I was like, you know, while all my friends were going to parties and doing that kind of thing, I was always the one DJing the party. I was always the one working. I was always the one when everyone was going home at 2 a.m.,

I was going home at 2 a.m. to unload the car and all of the equipment. But in my head, I think it was still coming from that place of, it was ambition, but it was ambition, I think, driven by a kind of insecurity. Control, and I just wanted to feel special what was your relationship like with with women in your early years so like when you're 16 odd years old and we start to get those first sort of real we think they're real but uh real heartbreaks crushes romances Iances? I was shy. I was, I was quite, it's not that I wasn't, I was a likable teenager. I was, I was good with people to the extent that I was,

I was kind. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be close to people. I kind of got on with everyone at school. There was no group that I belonged to necessarily. I could hang with the guys who played football. I could hang with the guys who played Dungeons and Dragons. There was no one that I didn't like or get on with. But if it came to someone I thought was attractive, then I could not be my fun self, my best self, my confident self, then I would kind of freeze up. And that was sort of, you know, in a way,

I was, how old was I? I was about 11 or 12 when I first picked up How to Win Friends and Influence People off my dad's bookshelf. My dad was always into self-development. So I picked up that book and I was really immediately taken by this idea that you could be better with people. And that there were skills you could learn that weren't necessarily the things we were being taught in school that really could magnify your impact or the opportunities that you were able to have access to. And as a teenager, one of the ways that that sort of manifests itself is, oh, I might be able to talk to a girl I like. So that was one of my early kind of self-development journeys for myself was just trying to get the

courage to be able to talk to someone that I liked because I realized early on, oh, the, the girl that I'm dating right now chose me. I'm dating her because she happened to be the one who asked me out or at school, whose friend came and asked me out on her behalf. And that's why I'm dating this person right now. It's not because I went to choose who I liked. It's because someone decided they like me. And I said, well, I'm not going to have the confidence to go and talk to someone I really like. So I guess I'll say yes. And that was sort of, I would say that defined my early sort of teenage years with girls. When you were in your late teenage years, what was your, I want to be this when I grow up?

What were you thinking that your career was going to be when you were say 18 years old? At one point I thought I'm going to do this DJing thing. This is going to be my life. And my dream was kind of, I loved self-development. I really loved, I was 14 when I got taken to a Tony Robbins seminar in England at the Excel Center. I was going to say, when I think of the people in society generally that are seen as special and important and have the admiration of crowds it's definitely the first two things that come to mind is like Tony Robbins and DJ well I loved I loved music that was something that really is a that's always been true in my

life I've always loved music even at my events today music play a big part and plays a big part because I've just never lost that love but I also just love ideas there's nothing more fun to me than just discussing an idea but did you love the the attention and the admiration yeah probably I know I did. I think I still, there's a part of me that can be hijacked by that. What are the symptoms of letting the ego drive for too long? I think, firstly, living in a constant state of never enough. Living in a state of fear that you'll never be enough and feeling ultimately disconnected from the results of things, from how good things are already. And when you achieve that thing, there is ultimately a scary moment awaits because it's not just a numbness.

There is a feeling of total disconnection. And when that happens, panic sets in. And it's a terrible feeling. It's a terrible feeling because then you really freak out. Because as long as you're telling yourself, yeah, life is really hard now. But when that happens, it won't be so hard. As long as you're telling yourself that, what you have to hold on to is hope. And the hope will drive you even if you're unhappy today. But when you arrive and it doesn't work, then hope goes away. Matt Damon won the Oscar at 27 for Good Will Hunting. And Graham Norton, I always remember

watching this interview where Graham Norton said to Matt Damon on his show, show. You know, how does it feel when you were 27 and you won an Oscar, something people worked their whole lives to do? How did you feel? He said, I went home, my girlfriend went to bed or went to sleep. And Graham Norton joked like, so you didn't even get laid on Oscar night. He goes, my girlfriend went to sleep and I laid in bed and I had this Oscar in my hand and I just felt so sad because I imagined this version of me in kind of in a parallel universe that had worked his whole life to get this. And then realized 70 years later that this wasn't it. This wasn't the thing that worked. And so I think that when that ego is driving and that ego is never fed, it's always hungry. It's always wanting more. There is the danger of just constant comparison,

nothing ever being enough. And ultimately, anytime you do get something you think might be enough, you feel completely and utterly disconnected from the result after the initial high of it, which is no different from a drug fix. Here's the hard part, because we've heard this a thousand times.

We all think that, you know, I get it. I get it. When you get money, it's not going to make you happy. When you get status, that's not going to make you happy. When you become known, that's not going to make you happy. We all, we all can regurgitate that. And then five minutes later, we're back to chasing it in our own lives. And, and what's curious to me is how do you take something that is a bumper sticker phrase and turn it into a kind of meaningful, practical way of living and reconnecting so that you don't fall prey

to not taking that advice that we all can say it because it sounds good. How do we do that? I- If you had to hazard a guess. I'll tell you, well, I'll talk about what I do. I'm, I firstly am very aware of the simple things that make me happy. And I, I have them written down. I was saying to you before we started, I'm a big note taker.

I'm someone who I believe Winston Churchill said people occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and carry on as if nothing happened. Well, I would say the reason I write so much when I feel something, if I feel something good, if I feel an emotion that I like, whether it's peace or happiness, or I feel connected, or I feel love for something or someone, I don't anymore just pick myself up and keep going when I stumble over an emotion like that. I pause life. I go, okay, hold on. What's happening right now?

Why am I feeling this? I can just kind of treat emotions as an accident or I can try to bottle them and figure out what's my formula for getting to this feeling of peace. I feel peaceful right now. I don't feel peaceful a lot. This isn't like my tendency is towards anxiety. I don't feel peace a lot. So when I feel peace, I want to know how I got here. How did I stumble into this wonderful room? And I look at it, I go, what's going on around me? What was I just thinking about that led to this thought that led to the thought that what was the chain of thoughts that got me here? Who am I with right now? What did I just do? Because what I want is a formula for getting back there again,

an hour from now when life does its thing, because it will. Five minutes later, life will do its thing. I'll read an email. I'll get a phone call. Someone will say something that annoys me and there it's gone. I need a place where I can get back to that. And I need that formula. So I call these emotional buttons. I have a list of emotional buttons in my phone, on my computer. And I teach this on my retreat, but it started from, this was selfishly just something I did for me. And to this day is I'm always suspicious when someone teaches something, but you never see them using that thing. You never see them doing that thing.

I, because not because that makes them a hypocrite. It just, I feel like how important can it be if you don't do it? This emotional buttons concept, I live this concept because when I wake up in the morning, what I do is I immediately wake up and I look at these little formulas. And usually there's one thing that kind of triggers that formula. The reason I call them emotional buttons is because if there's one idea or thought or YouTube video or person even, an idea of a person,

if there's one thing that can connect me to that formula, then I can get there instantly. So like, I don't know, Anthony Bourdain, who I really loved, he did jujitsu and he was really, really into it. I do jujitsu. Most mornings when I wake up and do jujitsu, I don't want to do it. I really don't. I'm so happy. Every time I come home from doing it, I'm like, I'm so glad I went. That was so good. I'm so, why don't I do this all the time? I almost never feel like going. And therefore I have emotional buttons that get me to want to go to jujitsu. I have these little triggers. One of them is a two minute YouTube

video where Anthony Bourdain is being asked about jujitsu and he speaks about it and the way he speaks about it. And because I feel connected to him as an individual, it makes me go, oh, I want to go. I want to go. Or there was a Rich Roll had a phrase, mood follows action. And that one phrase became an emotional button for me because I went, oh, mood follows action. That's so great. I don't need, I don't even need to feel like going before I go. Do you write your emotional buttons down somewhere? Yes. In your notes or something? So you say, jujitsu, this is my emotional button. Exactly. Exactly. It gets that specific for me that they become a kind of manual for living for me now the reason i say all of this even though this might seem disconnected

from the idea of uh of not allowing's really about is being connected in life. What I experienced a lot in my twenties, which was really scary at a certain point, was on paper, I'm doing everything that I thought I wanted to do. I, when I was a teenager, I teenager, I was reading self-development books and talking about them for fun. I'd grab uni mates and be like, let me tell you about this thing that I just read. And I'd have some very patient friends at uni who would be like, tell me more. That's really interesting. I would do that just for fun. At 27, I'm doing it for an audience of millions of people with a best-selling book and TV shows and all these things. I'm doing this

on the most incredible level, this thing that I would do for free, for fun. And I can't feel it. Why can't I feel it? What's happening? And I had someone once say to me at the time, you're disconnected. And at the time I just couldn't, I couldn't even, I didn't even know what that meant. I just said, I don't, I'm not, I don't, I feel somehow like I'm on the outside of my own life. And what I've come to truly believe in at my core is that so much of life is just about getting connected. When we, you know, whether it's Simon Sinek talking about the power of why, or anybody who's saying you need to find

your motivation, or it all ends up being about the same thing really, which is, are you connected? Do you feel connected to why this thing you're about to do, whether it's a conversation with a friend or a podcast or going to the gym, do you feel connected to why that's even important to you? Not important in the world and blah, blah, blah. Everyone wants to change the world. Why it's important to you. What makes it meaningful to you? That level of connection, a friend of mine, Aubrey Marcus,

put it, I don't know whether it was his or someone else's, but he put it as being on the inside of the moment. When there's a moment happening, do you feel like you're on the inside of the moment? Or do you feel like you're on the outside looking in? And every day I wake up and the first thing on my best days, there are days where life gets in the way and I rush straight into work. And I always pay the price for that. When I rush straight into work and emails and all of that, I pay the price for that. But more often than not, the way I start my morning is to wake up. I get out my emotional buttons, the things that remind me what's important to me and what makes me feel good and connect me to those things. And I read those and I write, sometimes I just write them out again. I don't get creative. I just, I just write them out again. And as I write them, I connect to them again. And I play beautiful music. I play music that makes me feel

really connected. Usually not with words, just a track that's an instrumental. And that process immediately begins my day with a feeling of being on the inside of my life, instead of waking up and getting dragged through my day. When we think about the things that make people disconnected from their lives or causes them to live on the outside of the moment, because as you were saying that, I was thinking about the listener and I was thinking there's going to be

so many people listening to this now that have veered off course of alignment. They've been dragged, they're good. There's something called the, I think it's called the excellence syndrome or something or the curse of excellence, where you're so good at something that people start paying you more and more to do it. And you keep accepting the money. And what you're not ever asking yourself is you're being paid more and more to do this thing that you were good at, or you were qualified in, is it in alignment with

myself, you get 10 years down the line, and people have these like midlife crises or burnout because they're so far from themselves. But the temptation or the money or the applause was able to drag them away. From your personal experience, what was it that was dragging you out of alignment? We talked a little bit about ego there, but was there anything else that we haven't covered where you go,

that is the thing that keeps drifting me off course? It's interesting because I remember I was thinking as you're talking as well about the study about the impact money has on our motivation

and you can take a task as you, you know, you're a kid and you liked doing personal development. You can take a task that someone once loved doing and when they introduce

financial remuneration in the studies, people's motivation to do that exact same thing drops it's mad isn't it mad yeah makes no sense well there's a um there's a study that involves two rats one of them is on a wheel that it controls the the rat can run whenever it wants to run. That's rat A. Rat B is on another wheel.

But rat B's wheel is hooked up to rat A's wheel. So rat B doesn't get to decide. Rat A, whenever that rat runs, rat B's wheel moves and rat B has to run. They're both doing the exact same amount of exercise. But the results of the experiment are that rat A has all of the markers associated with, all the positive markers associated with exercise. Rap B has all of the negative markers associated with stress. They're both running the exact same amount. One's not doing more exercise than the other, but one is choosing and the other one is having to. When we start to think that we're no longer choosing,

when we're now having to do something, it could be the exact same thing that we were doing before. We used to be rat A. But now, because it made money, and with that money, we went and bought a house, and we got an expensive mortgage, and we got the car, and we got the car and we did this and we did that. Or we just had the expectation now because our identity is built on earning that much money. So it might not even be the stuff that's weighing you down. It's your identity

that's weighing you down and the perception you want other people to have of you or retain of you. That now has turned you into rat B. You're no longer choosing this thing. So I'm fascinated by that idea. And I think that as much as there will be people in life listening to this who have maybe grown tired of what they're doing and therefore have concluded that they need to do something else. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's reconnecting with what you do from a different place. And there are a lot of people that have convinced themselves that happiness lies in a career change. Happiness lies in them going in a different direction. And when we do that, we glorify everyone else's job. We think everyone else does a better job than me.

Everyone else has something more exciting going. Everyone else has something that, oh, I wish I was where that person is. But that's not true either. There was an imagineer at Disney who was one of the main imagineers responsible for a lot of Animal Kingdom in Disney World. And he got asked,

do you ever not feel excited about a project you're given? And he said, sure. He said, but my job is to find what's exciting about the project I just got given and I think there's something important in that because we're often seeking passion elsewhere instead of creating the passion where we are I'm not saying every job is made equal in terms of its ability to allow you to do that. But I do think that there's a lot more room to, there's a lot more room to experience passion within the confines of where we already are than we think when we're constantly trying to change our environment to make things better. One of the three lines of like, I guess, business, but life in general,

and also with relationships is, and I really wanted to ask you this, because it's something that I'd seen in my DMs from people. People sometimes message me about relationships. And one of the things that I find concerning when I meet someone in their personal development journey, or in my DMs talking about their boyfriend, or in other facets of business, is when I identify a lack of personal and self responsibility, where you meet certain people in life where they just can never seem to take responsibility. They never want to like look in the mirror

and ask themselves the question, what role have I played in this? And I sat with Lewis in London on this podcast about a week ago or two weeks ago or something. And one of the things that really astounded me about Lewis was when he said something about his ex-partner, even if it seemed like a fault on the surface, he would say, and that's on me, and then end the little, the paragraph with why he was responsible. Even if it was like,

you know, she wouldn't let me have females on my podcast or something like that, then he'd say, and that's on me. And I remember thinking, damn, this guy's going to go far. So what role have you seen that taking personal responsibility has on the positivity of your outcomes in dating, life, business, and everything in between? Well, I think that to start with it, it makes you a much more likable person. Amen. The idea of extreme ownership is in some ways powerful,

but we all know there are things that have happened in life that are not our fault at all. There are things that we, trauma we have experienced that it would be insulting to say that we have to take responsibility for these things. It would be sinister in some cases to suggest that. But if we can get into the habit of genuinely saying, how this is affecting me is something I can take responsibility for. And if I do, it actually gives me a shot at feeling better about this thing. It actually gives me a chance of improving it. Because if I say I'm powerless, then I can't have it both ways. I can't say I'm powerless and I have no responsibility over how I feel and then make it better.

I have to say, okay, this thing is happening. It's not that it's happening is not my fault. That someone is making my life really, really difficult right now with what they're doing, their behavior, their abuse, their whatever. That is not my fault. But I want to get really curious about how I can handle this in a better way, in a more productive way. And the one of the things, our mutual friend, Lewis Howes, who you're talking about, one of the beautiful things about him, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, is that he is, Lewis is not a complainer. Lewis is someone who, he'll talk about the things that he's struggling with right now, or he'll talk about the things

that he's trying to work on, but it's never from a place of being the victim. It's always from a place of what can I do, which I think is different. I think part of the problem for a lot of people is they conflate the idea of ownership with fault. And that takes us into some really dangerous territory. It's not your fault that something's happening, but you can take responsibility for how you turn that into art. I thought about confidence a lot in my career and the injustices of confidence, right? Because we are not distributed things equally in life.

We are not distributed things equally at birth. We're not distributed opportunities equally. You know, it's super easy for anyone who's objectively decent looking to talk about, you know, how easy it is to go and approach someone or do this or do that. And you're like, you cannot even imagine what it is for someone who has been rejected their entire lives. They are starting from a completely different position than you in their confidence. It's so easy for someone to say, you just need to be confident. Okay. Start from where I'm starting from. And then tell me that, you know, the confidence is a really, again, it can be a very insulting concept,

but I do believe that there's a, I, there's a TV show called Chopped, and I'm probably, I'm not familiar with the show, but so I'm probably going to get wrong the concept, but in my head, the concept of this show is very, very interesting from the point of view of confidence. I think the chefs get given different ingredients. So it's like just lucky dip. What do you get? What's interesting is if you get a basket of ingredients and I get a basket of ingredients, we're both getting judged on what we make of those ingredients. In that format, it's what are you able to do with what you have and what am I able to do with what I have? And I think there's something really fascinating about that because we spend so much of our lives mourning our ingredients, really being upset or frustrated about what the ingredients are that

we were given. Imagine that you're not being judged on anything but how great a chef you are. Because that show isn't about ingredients, it's about chefs. Well, imagine life isn't about ingredients, it's about chefs. Don't aspire to have the best ingredients. Aspire to be the best chef. And the best chef is going to be the one who can be the most creative with the ingredients that they have. I'm fascinated by that because if I apply that to my own life, I just go, whatever thing that just happened, I wish didn't happen. Whatever thing that's happened to me this year that is so painful, so devastating, so whatever, whatever

that thing is, it just became a new ingredient in my life. I can either judge myself on my ingredients, which if I do that, I'm always at the mercy of the next thing that happens in my life. Something cataclysmic could happen in my life and and I lose everything and then what I'm going to judge myself and my life on my ingredients it to me it's always how great of a chef are you ingredients are luck of the draw being a chef is something we can continue to get better at our entire lives and it's actually the antidote to whatever happens. If you're a great chef, you can cook something out of whatever you have. It's such a, it's such a powerful analogy. And it really, really did like, yeah, I sort of do what

you probably do when you hear an analogy, you kind of test it from multiple scenarios and it really stands up. And I was thinking then again about when we look into that basket of the ingredients we're handed if we if we believe that the ingredients we were handed are inadequate or inferior to the chef stood next to us we're probably also going to prepare the meal with a certain level of pessimism that's going to result in a worse dish anyway and the the agony also of looking over at someone else's basket of ingredients and going fucking oh they got the ribeye look at me that, you know, because we both know the negative power of comparison and how it can drive down performance, belief, confidence, and all those things. But it's a beautiful, beautiful analogy.

And sometimes imagine if you took pride in being able to still make, even if you knew like this ingredient is, this one sucks. Like there's no getting around it. These ingredients I have right now suck but you took pride in look what i can make out of out of this i get you made something amazing with your truffle salt and your you know your caviar and your uni like i get you did something amazing with that. No shit. Look what I just did with kelp jerky. Yeah, it's a real powerful analogy for privilege as well, isn't it? 100%, because then you realize I'm in a different game altogether.

This is why comparison is so insidious because what am I going to do? Compare myself to someone who got a completely different basket of ingredients and say, and by the way, the basket of ingredients isn't just what you got in life in terms of circumstances or parents or whatever, education, your basket of ingredients is also what you got here. You have a sharp mind. Thank you. Now, you've no doubt honed that mind. You've respected it. You've honored it by reading and by educating yourself and do all of these things. But you also started with a sharp mind.

Yeah, probably. It's funny because I'm really bad at math, English and everything. I'm good at the thing I honed, but you're right. I definitely had a predisposition. But your speed of like, you hear something and I've watched you in interviews. And when you talk, your speed of how you assimilate information and draw patterns, you're good at pattern recognition,

which is why from a philosophical standpoint, there's a strength there, right? Because you're good at pattern recognition. These things, you just won the lottery on that one. Like with your brain, you just happened to win the lottery on that one right that's this is going to be my confidence button i'm gonna get this clip i'm gonna you won the lottery it's a 60 second emotional button those ingredients extend to everything they extend to everything you you

couldn't have grown up in the most dire circumstances, but have a sharpness of mind that other people can't even relate to. And for that reason, if you know how to double down on that thing, anything can happen. I love the idea. And I think that everyone could benefit from a kind of acceptance of just, I'm starting from where I am. Forget starting from when you were a baby and all of the circumstances you were born into and so on. I'm talking now. Forget what's happened. Forget everything you've done. I had a great brain, but then for 10 years, I did a bunch of drugs and then I hurt myself and then blah, blah, blah, whatever. It doesn't matter. I think about it like this. Imagine that you woke up into your life right now and your only job was to make the most of that life. So forget the years that Stephen

has already had your 29 right now. So forget the 29 years that have already happened. You, this brand new soul is waking up this morning into Stephen's body at 29 with whatever his opportunities are and whatever his problems are. It would be awesome. You'd be so happy for the opportunity. I'd be honestly terrified. Do you know why?

Because I'd lose the lessons as well and then i think i literally was thinking of this soul coming down getting my credit card and going and buying a lamborghini he was like he will go back to the club you start with a 60 year old level of wisdom let's say that keep the wisdom but i get the wisdom it's so funny i saw i was having this conversation with my fiance the other day and we were like we would not go back to our 20s for any amount of money in the world there is nothing

I would not want those extra years back if it meant that I didn't have the lessons that I have today that have brought me more peace than I had then Mo Gowdat sat here and he said when he was the head of Google X that I have today that have brought me more peace than I had then. Isn't that bizarre? Mo Gowdat sat here and he said, when he was the head of Google X,

he said that when they did the eraser test, which was asking people if you could erase the most traumatic experience of your life, these are really horrific things. But in erasing it, you'd erase the lessons that came with it. 99% of people said no. And it's the same thing. It's like, I wouldn't even go back to being younger if it meant that I'd lose the last 10 years of lessons,

as you said. Yeah, because you erase that trauma and you want to, because my God, who would want to go through that? But you're playing roulette with your wisdom. Yeah. Who wants to take that gamble? And some trauma, not all of it, got to be clear there,

some trauma is a consequence of a lesson we had to learn. And so life will probably have to teach you that lesson again. In my case, whether it's heartbreak or whatever it is or failure, it was a lesson I had to learn about the nature of the world and people. And if you remove it, then I'm going to have to learn it again. That means more pain. And that trauma that you went through, even if it wasn't a result of something that you needed to learn, may have been the catalyst for you to learn something that is going to prove essential for something you've yet to experience.

Amen. that have prepared me for the rest of my life in some way that I had an issue with my, well, I have an issue with my head and my ear that bothered me. To say it bothered me is ridiculous. It created the darkest moments of my entire life. A tinnitus, is it? I have tinnitus, but it's not tinnitus alone. It's a kind of a pain and a throbbing that rides up through my ear and my head. It's been very traumatic because there were times when I was, there were times when I couldn't, I couldn't imagine,

I didn't know what I was going to do. It robbed me of all of the joy in life. I couldn't, I couldn't experience any joy. I was so, it was so centralizing, this pain, this chronic pain. And I would go through cycles of every time there was some new treatment that I thought could help, I would get some hope. And that hope would give me a momentary kind of, for a couple of weeks or a month before the treatment, I would feel uplifted. Even though I would still be in pain, I would feel like there's this thing that's going to work. And I'd

talk about it to friends and family. I know they'd be like, how's your head? And I'd be like, well, it's bad, but I'm going to go and do this thing., I would plummet even deeper. And it got so dark that I didn't know. I thought, oh, I'm not signing up for this. I can't do this. I cannot do this for another 50 years. In my head, it was the closest I'd ever been to suicidal without truly going there in a practical sense. It was

a kind of conceptual thought where I thought, I can't sign up for this for the rest of my life. And because I had friends that I love, family I love more than anything in this world, staff, a company, all of these things. I had a big life. There was never a real option. It was never like a real thing that I'd considered. But I remember the thought that that triggered was, I am just going to live for the people that I care about now. I'm just going to live for other people, whether it's my audience, when I make a video or whether it's my family or whether it's my team who rely on this company for their living, I'm going to live for other people because I don't experience joy anymore. This just, this robs me of everything in my life.

I'm always thinking about it 24 hours a day. There would be 15 seconds when I'd first wake up in the morning where I'd forget that I wasn't, that I was in pain for just a brief moment. And then it would rush back in and I'd remember. For me, it was the first brush in my life with anything. It was my first brush with something that my ingenuity, my determination, my ambition, my intelligence, my problem solving could not. I'd always found whatever was going on in my life, I could fix it. I couldn't fix it. And in that sense, it sort of became my first brush with mortality because I went, I just have to, I have to somehow learn how to make peace here. And

in doing that, and there's a whole conversation to be had on how I did that, but in doing that, I have now learned to deal with something that I know in one form or another is going to come up again and again in my life. It may not be in the same context. It might be through the death of somebody I care about. It might be through some other traumatic circumstances I can't even picture right now that are going to happen to me. But I know that in the process of handling that trauma, I have become more robust in my ability to deal with all manner of chronic conditions in life

that there isn't an easy answer to. If I removed it, what would I remove from Matthew Hussey? I mean, so, so much. It would remove an extraordinary amount of empathy. Look, chronic conditions can come in the form of physical pain, but they can also come in the form of emotional pain. And there are people that when they talk about being depressed or when they talk about struggling with anxiety, there's a chronicity to that, that they are dealing with. That is incredibly hard to understand if you've always been able to make things go away. There is something about a thing

you can't make go away that brings you to your knees and truly, truly humbles you. And so it wouldn't just take away an enormous amount of empathy, it would take away an extraordinary amount of humility. To lose that would be to lose, I think, the most powerful parts of who I am today. Do you still have the pain now? Yeah. do you still have the the pain now yeah but i i what i learned and this is true for many people with chronic pain is that there is an emotional component to it and so

the way that i relate to it is has the ability to either make worse that emotional component or reduce it. The pain is always there waiting to flare up. And some days it's at a four, some days it's at a nine. When it's at a four, I can get on with my life. When it's at a nine, I have to almost do the opposite. I have to practice immense self-compassion because I'm like you. I'm like, I want to wake up every morning and get after it. And there's so many things I want to do.

And that's like, and to a fault, I pack my days and I'm always trying to, and what it taught me was how to slow down and not beat myself up for slowing down. Because there were days where I was so miserable with it that I had to learn how to just be okay with being miserable today. I'm so unhappy with this today. This is so affecting that I can't do that piece of work that I really want to do. I can't get that thing done. I don't want to hang out with people. I don't want to. And once I let go of all the expectations of myself on that day and said, you know what, then fuck it. Let's just be in pain today. Once I did that, that would impact the emotional component of it.

Because now I wasn't upset about being in pain and I wasn't stressing about being in pain and I wasn't beating myself up for being in pain because I felt like it would even sometimes go to the core of me being a man. I'd be like, I'm weak. I'm deficient somehow. I'm not this, you know, I don't feel able. And that, that made me feel like an elderly person in a 30 somethings body. I was like, what's wrong with this? So then I'll beat myself. All of this, by the way, is just making the pain flare up. So when I flare up, when emotions flare up for me, it goes straight there for me.

And what I learned is, oh, that's interesting because the game now is, can I control stress or anxiety or self-judgment or any of the shame, any of these things? Can I control these and get a handle on them and reduce them? Because for me, there's a very literal consequence to them going up. And there's a real benefit there's real treasure to be had in being able to get a handle on those things so that again was a gift very few people will be able to relate to the chronic pain um experience that you've had but people will be able to relate to how their out of control emotions have an impact on their broader immune system so when we get stressed we get ill like for me in my life when i was running my my company i i would get ill so rarely that when i did i would know the email or

the situation or the cash flow issue that had caused it in the preceding 48 hours i'd go ah fuck yeah you know and then i'd get a cold right so it happened like twice a year and it would always be typically always be when we had a cash flow problem um is there anything you've implemented in your life to get to get control of your emotional sort of stress response that life you know will will um cause because of whatever's because life happens whether it's meditation or something else just to bring yourself back down to a place of peace one of the things that's important to me is to recognize that actually what I need to be happy is not actually that impressive. What is it? If I get to, I have a certain, I call them my criteria.

My criteria are the things that need to happen every day for me to feel like I'm living a good life. And therefore my head hits the pillow and I feel like today mattered. Today was a good day. And I've distilled that down to a few key words, create, move, learn, connect, appreciate, and contribute. Interesting. And I really thought about those as like my, my personal formula for happiness. The reason that those words sound quite vague is because I actually have many, many different ways of achieving any of them. Right now, I'm writing a book. It just so happens that every day I write is contributing to the goal of producing a book. But even if it wasn't, it still ticks my create box. Every day when I sit

and write for 45 minutes or an hour, I tick that create box in my criteria. Now it doesn't matter whether I'm writing a book or making a video or doing something else that's creative. I just have to tick that box. I don't, by the way, have to tick it for six hours a day. There's diminishing returns. If I do it for one or two hours a day, I tick that box. Movement or move. I typically, I do jujitsu or I do boxing or I'm in the gym. But I could even, if you and I went for a hike tomorrow, I'd meet that movement box with that. There's multiple ways of achieving our criteria, but it matters to me immensely. It's everything that I do meet them each day. And an unhappy life for me is one where I don't, where too many days in a row, I didn't hit those criteria.

It has nothing to do with how big my book deal is or how many people watched a video today or, you know, all those external things that are stressing me out. Because in that moment, when I'm stressed, I've convinced myself that that's what really matters. What helps me is stepping out of that game altogether and stripping my life back down to the absolute basics. If today I call my mom or my brother and have a nice conversation to connect. If I go spend an hour doing Brazilian jujitsu, if I write 500 words, if I learn something new from a book,

if I help someone, that's my contribute. If I help someone, I've done what I need to do to live a good life. All the rest, and none of those things are dependent on how well everything is going in my life. And that to me is really liberating because it means all the stress that I'm creating is self-imposed. One of those boxes was connect. And you have connected with someone who's actually sat in the room. I am, you know, you historically not posted a lot on social media about your relationship situations. You've been, as you said in your own words

on that wonderful proposal announcement post you did, you'd been quite a private person. One of the lines in that post you did when you announced that you and Audrey had become engaged was, and finally, thank you for teaching me how to love in a way that I was too scared to before.

I found that quite intriguing. I think like a lot of men, I struggled with genuine vulnerability. We all have our fake version of vulnerability. It's the version of going for a job interview and saying, what's your biggest weakness? I work too hard. Everyone's got their PR version of vulnerability. It's vulnerability if on some level, it just makes

me feel like I'm expressing a part of myself that you might not like, or you, you know, I can't control your reaction to this. And I had been in relationships in the past where I had revealed an insecurity. Like? I was jealous of somebody, you know, I felt threatened by somebody else. And it was fed back to me that that was unattractive. And in my mind, that kind of stuck i think there is a especially in a lot of men there is a kind of there's a kind of double thing going on in their head where they go yeah yeah i know that's really important but i'm not saying that because if i say that she's not going to think I'm cool anymore. I've spent a lot of time curating this

sexy, alpha, cool image that has attracted this person. You really think I'm going to jeopardize that by showing an actual weakness? And again, I'm not talking about the weakness of I cry in movies. That's not vulnerability. You know that's going to be cute. You know that she's going to see that and go, oh my God, he's sensitive too. That's not vulnerability. Real vulnerability is this is something that I never really wanted anyone to see. And I'm taking a risk that when you see this, you're going to still think that I'm what you want. Have you got something in mind when you say that?

Like when you had a conversation with Audrey and you think, now this is one of the things where I wouldn't normally have had the safety. I think that for me, times when I was anxious, I would normally bottle those up and keep them to myself. I wouldn't express what I was anxious about or what was doing that to me. Times if we were arguing, where I wouldn't really be honest about why I was upset. I'd give the kind of strong version of why I was upset,

the PR version. But I wouldn't give the real reason I was upset that went to the core of me not feeling enough, of me not feeling good enough, of me feeling scared, of me feeling like something was being triggered that I didn't know how to handle. Sometimes even when I was in pain and there would be other situations from my past where I would kind of not want to reveal how much pain I was in with my head because I was worried

that someone might determine this is not, I can't, I don't want to deal with this. So I kind of keep it to myself. For a lot of guys, their experience of growing up wasn't one where being vulnerable would have been rewarded. And then you add on to that the additional layer of, as a guy, we've been culturally led to believe that being the caricatured alpha male, that's what women want. And some of our experiences have confirmed that. We lost out to the guy in high school who was much meaner than us and who we knew was not a very nice person, but he had his pick.

And that's quite scarring for a guy. Because you go, what does that mean? Yeah. What do I, so I have to be more like that? And so we close parts of ourselves down and then, you know, God forbid you come across or have a relationship with someone who confirms that. Yeah.

Now you really feel like I need to be that guy. And it can take a lot of rewiring and deconditioning to get to a place where you go, oh, if I keep being this way, I'm actually going to attract, I'm just going to continue to attract people who do value the wrong things, who are looking for an Instagram man.

Can you do that from the jump though? I was just thinking about some of my friends in my head and I was thinking they're going to hear that. And I know some of my friends who are actually probably scared of, especially at the start in the dating phase, of laying it out. So they they come they put the makeup on they get the hair done they go get the tan whatever and their objective is i just need to

keep this fucking person and i believe the way to keep them is just you know keep trying to be that sexy perfect at what point you go from sexy perfect to listen i'm you know pretty fucked up in a number of ways I think that we have to there's a way to firstly vulnerability in the beginning of dating isn't well vulnerability is is can be really attractive but not in a way where you've exposed all of your wounds and the things you don't like about yourself instantly. And offloaded, I guess. Exactly. It's fine to talk about something that you're working on or even in a playful tone,

kind of nod to something that you're not very good at. But that's not the same. I remember being on a TV show in Australia where I, there was this one woman, she was an amazing woman, but every time she went on a date, it would just be a kind of all on the surface laughing and just on the surface, on the surface, on the surface, on the surface. And I was like, part of the problem is these guys that go on dates with you, by the end of the date, they don't feel connected to you in any way. And the reason they don't feel connected to you is because there's no real vulnerability at that stage. So I said, the next day, I want you to actually connect and be a little vulnerable.

Now, what she did with that advice is went on the next first date and told the story of her dad getting in a car accident that changed her whole life in a really awful way at the time and I was I had to say at the time when I said vulnerability I didn't mean go and tell the story of the worst thing that's happened to you in your life. Vulnerability can be paying someone a compliment because in a way, when you pay someone a compliment, you're handing them a little power, right? Not in a bad way, but you're saying like, there's something great about you and I'm acknowledging it. And now you know that I think that you're great in some way. Or it can be laughing at somebody else's joke, or it can be talking about something that you really enjoy doing that's a little bit nerdy that you, you know, I might not put on social media all

the time, but it is something I actually do in my spare time that's kind of geeky. But I love it. Sometimes, or even if it's not geeky, if it's just something you're super passionate about and you talk about something with passion, that's a vulnerable act. To express that you're passionate about something is vulnerable because they may not think that thing is cool or even just to be passionate is to be vulnerable. You might think that my passion is too much or you might think it's silly or so you could be vulnerable about the right things early on and the more someone gets to know you the more you can kind of let them in on some of the things that you struggle with vulnerability isn't necessarily revealing all of our insecurities all at once. And one important reason for that is because when we tell an insecurity, if I tell you something I don't like about my face,

I'm telling you what to think about my face. I'm not letting you have your own opinion of my face. You can take the view that there's some part of your body or there's something you're not a fan of in yourself. You can take that opinion, but you don't get to be the opinion for everybody else. The reason we're saying it is because we're almost trying to beat them to it. You know, let me just tell you

that I don't like this thing about myself because then I'll feel better that it's out in the open. But I'm pres me just tell you that I don't like this thing about myself because then I'll feel better that it's out in the open. But I'm presupposing what you're going to think about it. That's an awful quality people have, that self-disparaging thing. It's really insidious in many ways. And that isn't vulnerability. That's a different thing from vulnerability. Vulnerability can be acknowledging that there's something that you don't like about yourself all the time. That can be an act of vulnerability, but you have to suspect yourself if your instinct with someone

you don't know that well is to immediately go to that place. I've been in relationships where I felt like my partner was trying to fix me. And it really is a shitty feeling for men. I think it really emasculates us as well, right? We want to be, I guess, perfect. We want to just make our woman happy. And I've been in relationships where I felt like she was trying to fix me and it fucking sucked.

That's a rough situation to be in. It's really, and I had a conversation with her about it where I was like, by the way, when you do that thing where you try and correct me constantly, what you're actually also doing as a consequence

is saying that I'm not good enough. I remember having that conversation with her. Fortunately, she was someone that could really listen. But women, I think women and men, I only can speak from the perspective of women because I've only ever been on the receiving end of it from women. But what do women need to know about that, of this? Because a lot of them do it

they they meet someone he might be they're doing this he might be down the pub too much he might be have this bad habit this thing what do they need to know about this desire they have sometimes to try and fix us does it work where does it lead well i think people have to suspect themselves in the beginning if they're choosing people that they're not aligned with in the first place. That I think is a, the fixing thing is often a big symptom of the fact that instead of choosing a partner, you chose a project of some kind, right? And now I'm unhappy because I needed these things from the beginning, but this person isn't doing them. But I knew that in the beginning. It's not like I suddenly found out that he enjoys

going to the pub. Our first four dates were in a pub. You know, the guy likes a drink. I knew that in the beginning. And does that mean there's a certain level of acceptance that's required when you meet someone? Well, I think that we have to, we have to, to a certain extent, say, am I at peace with who this person is today? Because if I'm not, why would I get into a relationship with them?

I'm literally getting into a relationship on a wager that they're going to become what I want. What are the chances of that? It goes back to the point we were saying about this inauthentic initial connection, when you kind of, you don't really show who you are. And you might also have a presumption that the bits you don't like about them, you're not going to mention it just yet or you're going to kind of, maybe 12 months in, you're going to start mentioning that that's really a big problem to you, but you connected in authentically from the start.

So yeah, I'm just totally thinking about my own experience of that. And the other part of it was hugely my fault in the sense that I would compromise. So say that I loved watching the football and she didn't want me to watch the football or whatever. Sure, fucking turn the football off for the first couple of months

just to keep happy families. And then this resentment starts building and you go, I fucking miss the football and you're the reason I can't watch it. You know what I mean? Again, that's like I was inauthentic. I wasn't honest. And we all in some way are prone to that.

We are trying to oil the joints of early dating so that everything moves in this nice, smooth, romantic direction. And we kind of, if we're not careful, we do end up playing a part that we think will just create the most energy, the most good energy, the most romantic energy. I think that what I've learned as a personal lesson is that I would judge things very quickly in people without trying to understand what was behind them. Like, why is this thing important to you? Why do you like doing this?

What is it about this thing? Because it's very easy when someone's different to how we are, it's very easy to decide what that means. Yeah, amen. To decide what the intention must be behind that. Yeah. And then to judge someone on that. And one of the things that I think would help people, because it's very easy to say, well, date people who you already like the way they are and don't date people or don't go any further with people that do things you don't like. That's an oversimplification. What I would say to people is

there's always going to be differences between you and the person you date. There's always going to be things that you, I'm not talking about things that you genuinely ethically abhor. That's a problem, right? But if someone is doing things that are different than what you do or what you enjoy take a moment to be curious about that thing what is it for them about that thing that they really like what does it represent to them what's's driving them there? Why are they that way? I have found that to be an immensely connecting experience because you may do something different to me, but why you like that thing might actually resonate with me in terms of why I like this thing. I might find that we're actually at the core quite similar, even though the way those values or those desires or those needs are represented on the surface

is different. And I think people give up a lot of great people because of their immediate judgment of the differences, because they haven't actually sought to understand the connections that are under the surface. What's your longest relationship? Ever. Proper one. Two years, two and a half years. Mine's roughly the same.

Yeah. You don't know what it's like to go 50 years in a relationship, right? Are you not scared on any level? Do you not have a fear of boredom? I have humility about long-term relationships. You've just got a fiance as well. That's a, as you wrote on that caption, a forever commitment. Right.

I have massive humility about commitments like that, in the sense that, like I said to you earlier in this conversation, I don't pretend to know about things I don't know. But do you personally have a fear of boredom in your relationship? Because I, I don't, she's going to listen to this. I wonder, I think, well, I've now, I've only ever done two or three years. So what, how do you get 30 years in and still have the spice and the, you know, I love her, you know? Well, I think that firstly, it's, you have to look at, I almost take it out of the context of relationships and say, there's lots of areas of life where you could say, how do you not drink or not get high and not eventually find life boring where you need to do that? But then you also know if you're drinking or getting high, there's a

cost to that, right? There's an actual cost. It makes you feel like crap afterwards. There's a hangover. And so there's a price to pay for that. I don't think of it just in terms of, will I get bored? I'm always thinking in terms of, okay, but what's the other option? And has the other option ever worked for me? Now, the answer to has the other option ever worked for me is no. I got to a point in my life where I felt like I have empirically proven that this thing doesn't work. Casual relationships don't make me, they don't make me happy. There's a, you know, it literally is just a feeling followed by hangover. And that was became reliable in my life where I just went, oh, this doesn't work. For me to continue down that path would be literally that definition of insanity. I'm what I'm going to be, I suddenly am going to find the

right set of casual flings that's going to make me happy. It just, it's nonsense. I got to a point in my life where I saw two things happened. I met someone who had everything that I could ever want in someone that you would build with. Not to mention the obvious stuff, the chemistry, the, you know, the fun we have together and all of those things were all there. I'm not one of those people who, you know, when people talk about like a relationship as if chemistry is overrated. You just need someone who's a great teammate or whatever. I don't think chemistry is overrated. I think an absence of chemistry can be dire and will hurt you. But those things were there. But what was also there is I thought this is someone that I can really build with.

And I'm in a place in my life where I want to build. Because there's so much more that can come from building something here. There's so much more that can come from the beauty of what gets built than just... Like for me, dating was like resetting every time. It was like, go build a couple of bricks down and then move on again and reset, reset, reset. It's like renting. Yeah. It was like, there's nothing. Yeah. Every time you leave, I'm back to the same place. Now there's nothing wrong. I have no judgment on any of that. If someone's enjoying being single,

if someone wants to do that, if it makes them happy, I have no judgment anywhere. I'm not, I don't want to be an evangelist for a long-term relationship. I can only speak to what feels good to me in my life and what feels like, I want to be careful, not just what feels good, but what I actually believe is a, is a path to a more meaningful life, to a happier life. And I truly believe that is the path that myself and Audrey are on is she could be single and she could like, she's a beautiful person. Everyone loves being around her. Everyone loves her company. She could be out there having a ton of fun. She could be out there having

all of this excitement. She could, but she also is someone who value, she is very, very big on valuing the things that lead to long-term happiness, not short-term pleasure. And I always want to be in a relationship that is, you know, has pleasure in it. I don't, you know, I don't want to ever settle for a relationship where you say, well, I'll sacrifice that because I have all of this other stuff. But, you know, I, I do believe that it's, it takes, I think that takes effort I don't I'm suspicious of anyone who says when it's right it's easy I'm suspicious of that because to me anything anything long term any commitment long term requires true effort. My last question then so on that in that example of you and Audrey I'm trying to get so I'll tell you the the basis

behind my question I'm trying to understand if we I'll tell you the basis behind my question. I'm trying to understand if we have to be in the right place. And this goes back to my point about sort of personal responsibility. If we have to be right when we meet this person, or it's just a case, because there'll be a lot of people listening to this going, okay, I've just not met the right one. I've not met my Audrey, so I'm just gonna keep waiting. But what I see a lot is, I met my girlfriend actually three years ago. We dated for a year and broke up. I was totally not the right person.

Well, for all the reasons I said, immature, not willing to communicate. If she said something and it was an issue, I thought this isn't perfect. So it's not worth it. I had all of those faults in me. We took a year out. I did a lot of work, came back

and I genuinely will marry this person. We genuinely have gone through those things. So I think timing is an issue, but largely because sometimes like we haven't done the work. We've gone through life. I've just, I'm too picky. I've not found the right one. All of this bullshit.

What would you say to that about the self-work we need to do so that when you do meet your Audrey, we're also ready to receive them? Well, I think we have to dispense with this idea that the one exists. I think that's really, really important. I don't think the one exists any more than the one true career exists. I think that someone becomes the one by what we build with them. Now, they have to start with the right raw materials as do we. You can't just, not anyone can be the person we do that with, but the person

who becomes the one is the person that, I mean, it sounds so funny, but is the person that becomes the one. You know what I mean? If you go the distance with someone, they were the one. If you don't go the distance with someone, then they weren't the one. They weren't this idea that there's one person for you in the world that you're supposed to meet is silly to me because it, it gets into all these ideas of love at first sight. And, you know, I just, we came to each other ready-made to be each other's person. I think that's an insult to the amount of work that a long-term relationship actually takes. And, and I think that we get so terrified of making the wrong decisions in life that we avoid the decisions altogether and that's a form of commitment phobia is avoiding the

decision because you're so terrified that you're going to make the wrong choice in a decision that feels so high stakes. I, I never, um, I realized I never, I always used to kind of, when I was younger, friends of mine that would get tattoos, I'd be like, you're insane. You're crazy. Why would you put something on your arm that you can never take off again? That every fiber of me said, that's a terrible idea. I had never enjoyed anything for my whole life. I'd never, I can't point to a piece of clothing I've always liked. So why would I think, why would I have faith that I'm going to tattoo something on my arm and I'm still going to like it 20 years from now? That freaked me out. And what I came to realize, not with everyone who gets tattoos, there are plenty of foolish tattoos out there. But what I did realize is that

actually a lot of the people that I knew who got tattoos just had a different relationship with the idea of permanence. I knew someone with a lot of tattoos and she said, you know, this just, the meaning changes over time. She was a client of mine who said, I, over time they come to mean different things and they kind of evolve with me. And so in a way, though to you, it may look like the same tattoo, to me, it's always evolving in its meaning and what it represents. That's actually what someone said to me, because I was telling them, I was going to ask one of my team in the room that I was going to ask you this question. And he's been in a marriage for some time, he has kids.

And he said, well, you have different relationships with them over time. And the adage of you fall in love with them over and over again in different ways. Right. I couldn't agree more. And I can't speak as somebody who has done it already. I can only speak as someone who I've realized that my relationship with the idea of permanence has not been a very productive one. Has it been? For me, it was definitely an insecure one and a fearful one.

Well, I think that, you know, there's a Oliver Berkman who you may have met. I think you may be interviewed Oliver Berkman. Yeah. His book for anyone who's struggling with, with being ready for commitment is a really powerful book. You could read that book as a dating book because he, he talks about the, the issue of deciding, deciding to do something. And then the thing that we decide on, we resolve to make that as good as we can make it. Because by definition, you can't experience all of life. You can't experience every man in the world.

You can't experience every woman in the world. You can't, like, you can't. So when we're trying to, what he describes it as is almost a fear of our own mortality or a lack of acceptance of our own mortality. He talks about it in a time management sense that the fact that we're trying to cram so many things into our day is really a representation of our lack of acknowledgement that we're going to die. Right? I keep telling myself, I'm going to do all of these things that I'll never get to, but because I can't come to terms with the fact that I'm going to die and I'm not going to get to do even a quarter of these things I'm planning to do. Because if you really understand how short life is, you know, you're not going to go to half of the countries you want to go to. So you better

start picking the ones you really want to go to. However, that seems to make the stakes of every decision really high, right? This is Berkman's point that it makes the stakes of every decision really high. And that would make us even more indecisive. My God, if you're already telling me that I have to carefully select the books I'm going to read, because I'm only going to get to read 1% of the books that I ever even want to read, let alone the number of books out there, then how would I ever choose what book to read next when I know I'm only going to read 60 more in my whole life or 100 more in my whole life? What he says, which is so compelling, is that there's no one right book. There's no one right country. There's no one right person.

There's the person we decide, we resolve to make the best relationship with. There's the country we decide to make the most of living in. There's the job that we decide to make the most of. And the way I think about it is not people settling is a very emotive, loaded word. I used to write in people's books when people would bring me on tour a copy of Get the Guy.

I used to write as standard in the front of their book, never settle. And I now look at that and I'm like, I don't think that was strong advice. I don't think that was strong advice because what I did was demonize the word settling, which self-development tends to do. It's all about optimization. Never settle. And I was coming from that kind of maximizing, optimizing, self-development place. But there's a difference between settling for and settling on. Settling for says that you had a standard that you accepted less than.

Settling on says, I'm going to put my focus and my energy on something. And it's going to be extraordinary because I'm going to make it extraordinary. And it sounds voluntary to be extraordinary because I'm going to make it extraordinary. And it sounds voluntary, doesn't it? Whereas four is kind of like you were given that. And four is like I gave up. Settling on is I made a conscious decision. I settled on living in London. I didn't settle for living in London. I decided this is a great city. Yes, there are many other great cities, but this is a great city and I am going to make living in London incredible for myself. I'm

settling on living in London. And I, for years, I noticed in my language, even though I've been living in LA for 10 years, anytime someone would ask me, so is LA home? I'd go, I don't know. I might leave. Next year, I might not be here. I'm not sure. We'll see. I've been doing my job for 15 years. I clearly, in a practical sense, do not have an issue with commitment. I've been doing what I do for a very long time, longer than most people do any job. But if you'd asked me, in general, do you see yourself doing this for your whole life? I'd say, I don't know. I mean, we'll see. Now that's okay to build in flexibility, but not if it's a way of ever avoiding settling on something. Because when we

don't settle on something, we actually rid ourselves the opportunity of making it the best it can be. And when we were going through a time recently where we were talking about, should we stay in LA or should we go somewhere else? What do we think? And we kind of thought about all different places we might go. And we did this whole exercise, this mental exercise of thinking about all of these places we could live and would live and so on. We ended up settling on LA and we came right back to where we started, but we both said, actually, no, we want to be here. And what was really funny is the moment we decided, okay, no, we're going to be here. We started doing all of these little things in the house. And we went out and bought a couple more plants. And we started

thinking about what we wanted to put on this wall that doesn't have anything on it right now. And we, in other words, the moment we decided to settle on, we started investing differently and consciously in the house that we were actually in. And that's actually where all the enjoyment comes from is once you start investing where you are, you start making the best of where you are and you lose this idea that there is some perfect state of anything outside of where you are. Perfectly comes back to your point about the ingredients as well and making the most of where you have, settling on your ingredients.

Matthew, thank you. Honestly, I could sit here for 10 hours. This was so much fun, man. Thank you for having me. And thank you for such thoughtful questions. Like your vulnerability comes across and that's not, you know, when you've achieved a lot,

it's easy for your identity to calcify. And yours hasn't. And you stay vulnerable. And it's reflected in the kind of conversation you're open to having. So I really appreciate it. Well, I sit here very often and I get to hear from people like you about the importance of a vulnerability, being honest with myself, and controlling and containing ego. So again, this has been a real refresher about what's important in life and i i really really you know you've really reinforced a central idea i mean so many central ideas but the one that i think about in the context of i mean the ingredients one is definitely the one that will stay with me the most but as it relates to the relationship part that important the importance of men and and I plead with men,

because I know they're listening, trying vulnerability out in their relationships. It was the thing that changed my relationship, thing that changed my life in that regard. It's the reason why people listen to this. It's the reason why this podcast has done well. It's because I took the bet on recording myself at 3am saying

I was really struggling with some shit and this and masturbation and my family and all these things that you're not allowed to talk about make you feel uncomfortable. Vulnerability has been the thing that happens before all the good things in my life. And you're a real testament to vulnerability and also the importance of it. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the previous guest writes a question for the next guest. So our previous guests wrote a question for you.

That's cool. Yes, it is. Because it's a nice through thread. So they're all connected, which we love. Okay, so I look at the question when I open the book and I opened the book a second ago. The question is, what is your dark side?

I think my dark side is the part of me that thinks everyone has an agenda that they can't be trusted and that if they're being, even if they're being nice, there must be some angle somewhere. And therefore I should be on my guard and suspicious at all times. That I think is my dark side. And I think that that, I think that has been one of the things in recent years that I've really had, that's been part of my vulnerability is opening myself up to acts of kindness and connection that aren't driven by any agenda and making peace with the times where they are but I was I I brought forward. I, I, I don't even know when it started. I, I can't, I can't remember

if I ever felt like that when I was a kid, but certainly as an adult, that's been something that I've, I think has, it's been a part of my life that I've really had to let go of. And one of the things that allowed me to start to let go of it was real friendships, real friendships where I noticed that there were people around me that just were really kind or if I needed help, if I needed advice. And I think probably during that period of time where I was desperate with my chronic pain, there were people that gave me their time and their energy, even if they didn't know how to help. There were people that had no reason to give me time and energy.

It would have been perfectly acceptable for them to not, who decided to give me their time, even people who had no time. And that limiting belief started to dissolve in the face of that. And it made me want to, you know, it really made me want to represent that in the world and not, even if people can take advantage, not going into life, waiting for that, waiting to, to like spot that, but instead just going, some people will take advantage and other people won't but i want to be

someone who trusts people thank you thanks steve really wonderful conversation and for all the reasons i've described you're a really necessary important voice in the world and if we need more men that are willing to be vulnerable and open because I think it's a catalyst for a very important systemic change in us as men receiving and achieving what we want. And when I reflect on the statistics around men, their mental health and the consequences of their ill mental health, a lot of it is rooted in an absence of expression.

So I love having these conversations. Thank you so much, Matthew. Thank you, sir. having these conversations thank you so much matthew thank you sir you