Shaun Galanos - How to Communicate Better for Stronger Relationships

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34hey sean how are you i'm good yourself not bad at all my friend thank you so much for giving me the time what a beautiful background no this background is the sign of my uh relationship failures for several years in a row okay more what happens you inherited the plants and the fish that's actually a very interesting guess. No, I, um, after a very long marriage and then, you know, several failing dates, I'm now, I'm now madly in love, but, uh, you know, over the years that got me here, I ended up basically saying, you know what, at least I can do whatever the fuck I want. Okay. And so I built my home entirely made of nature, basically plants and fish and everything that you can think of because no woman would have the right to tell me no that's not what we want because she doesn't have that right anyway yeah that's a beautiful strategy right yeah you just take a few years and then they come in and they look at the place and they say he's bold a little fat but he's nice and he loves me and he has fish like um i'll take it sort of yeah yeah i think it i think it could um it either it attracts the right people exactly how are you i'm really really really excited about this you are a no nonsense kind of guy my kind of guy yeah yeah no candy coating i mean you got you have to be kind but i try not to beat around the bush too much that's incredible when you really think about it i mean it is it is what attracted me to work very much where's home mode ah man i uh have a coffee machine in dubai okay does that mean a very small apartment it is actually a very small apartment for i mean i i don't know if how much you know about my life but i was extremely successful at the point in time and then i eventually ended up giving up on all of it basically now i have a tiny one bedroom i mean It's not funny.

2:46Honestly, that's so unfair. It's a beautiful one bedroom. Yeah. But simple life, really. You can see from my T-shirts and my choices, nothing fancy at all. And I love it. It's so simple. So why don't we, because I'm actually not planning to cut any of that from our podcast. I think that's a lot to start. So why don't I just give everyone a quick introduction on my wonderful guest today, Sean Galanos is a speaker and a coach. He hosts the podcast, The Love Drive. And he, as I had mentioned earlier, is truly a no nonsense kind of guy. He's not trying to please anyone with his advice. He's direct.

3:31He says it as it is. And I loved that. I came across his work on Instagram and then became a little addicted. and I thought his views would be of enormous value. Sean's podcast is going to be closing our Love and Romance mini-series. So I think we're concluding here. Sean, basically all that he does is about teaching people communication and intimacy skills for a better and more loving relationship. So back to us, my new friend. so hey Mo also honored to be here thank you for having me I was looking at all the fantastic guests that you had for the Love and Relationship series so I'm super happy to be one of your final ones for that for now yes I mean it is a very interesting topic you know the reason why I started on Love and Relationship because it was because on my work on happiness and One Billion Happy I first started by attempting to explain happiness and then I started to address the reasons for unhappiness.

4:36And believe it or not, in my analysis, love and relationships are probably second or third biggest reason for unhappiness in the modern world, right? It's quite interesting how complicated something that was almost part of life, if you want, has become, you know, all of our demands and our expectations and our sort of romantic ambitions. And it's just become so complicated. And I thought you would sort of allow us to get into the parts of this that we're fussy about, that basically makes it so complicated. So maybe we start there, if you're open to this. Yeah, sure. Also, just as an aside, I love how Alain de Botton says that, like, romanticism is what really screwed us up.

5:25Absolutely. I think it used to be simpler in the olden days where like the butcher's daughter would date the cobbler's son because that's who was available in the village. And now we're just inundated with options. Right. Living in huge cities, there's a lot of options. And then you put online dating into the whole mix and you could have an endless supply of potential futures, potential fantasy dreams with these people. And I think that really makes it complicated. It really is. I once attended a presentation about some of the wedding habits of African tribes. right and it was i don't remember the name of the tribe but uh it was fascinating because that tribe basically once a year would hold one big dance boys on one side right and girls on the other side and and basically uh if you like a woman you walk to her and dance with her invite her to dance and dance with her.

6:39And if she likes your dancing, she's yours for a year. Okay. And then the next year they shuffle the entire tribe again. Okay. And basically stand in two lines. And if you still love the person that you're with, you go dance with her again. Whoa, look at that. And I'm sitting there saying, is this absolutely nuts? Or is this actually a very good idea? I'm not sure. What do you think? I mean, it's got some, it has some bachelor vibes to it, you know, with the roses and I pick you. And now I'm getting flashbacks of my dances, my elementary school dances when I was 13. And it was just so awkward and nerve wracking and scary.

7:29I can imagine, wow, it's such a public way to choose a person. and then i think about how i always thought if you had a hard time meeting someone if you were a man if you were a heterosexual man you had a hard time meeting women that you should absolutely learn to dance 100 or yoga or yoga yoga also works you know well yoga so the thing with yoga is that it's inappropriate to meet people at yoga. Why is that? Right? Well, for the most part, yoga studios, that's a female-dominated area, and that is a safe space for women to go and do their thing, right? So of course, you don't approach anybody during yoga, you know, while they're in their down dog, you don't go and say hi.

8:23But for the most part, I think yoga is a tough one. I think you really do have to, like anything in life, you sort of have to approach people with the desire to connect in a platonic way. Right. I think basically what I'm trying to say is that women don't want to get hit on at yoga. So I had I have a theory that I have absolutely no scientific proof of at all. like I cannot prove it in any possible way that the only reason why manly man would learn yoga or would learn like serious yoga or learn to dance is to actually pick up women tell me I'm wrong please give me hope you're so wrong you're so wrong I mean okay so as someone who has done yoga for me yoga I mean it's such a it's such can be such a profound practice spiritually and you must have come across some research on spirituality, connection to spirit and the connection to happiness, right?

9:24So yoga is a branch of that is one accessible way to access spirituality. But even from just a physical standpoint, I do yoga because I need to stretch. Not that the yoga class populated by 92 % women. Yes, because I can't, I won't do it. If I do a YouTube video, I won't do it correctly. I don't have the determination or the motivation to do it on a regular schedule. So going to yoga classes is how I stay limber and how I stay accountable, right? Because I've paid the membership. So now I have to go to use the membership. Yeah. I don't think it's a great place to meet women. Okay. But I mean, anything that you do, here's how you meet people.

10:10You meet people by going to places where you can regularly be in contact with new people, right? Ceramic class, pottery, dance, yoga, any sort of hobby that you have. That's how you meet people. So yeah, of course you can meet people in yoga, but don't go to yoga just because you want to meet people, just because you want to hit on women. It's sort of the message that I'm trying to tell people here. So that's actually a very, very interesting description because I used to always say, if you want to find love do something that you love but the way you describe it is so accurate it's like go to a place where you're enjoying something that you can do regularly so that you meet the same people over and over and that allows you to engage conversations and then get to know each other that's a very interesting way yeah and and uh the kind of activities where there's always new people coming in right so we're not going to my buddy's chess night where it's the same four people playing chess and that's not going to do it right it has to be like a meetup or an event or like a weekly or monthly thing where there's new people coming in and out of the space so that you can then you know be introduced to new people does this apply to all genders like you think that women for example would have the same chance by going to places like this and you know what's your take on who approaches who oh man i mean there is such a huge discussion about female and masculine polarity in the dating advice world um and some of it comes from tantra and a lot of people believe that you know in heterosexual relationships the man must approach the women right because if a woman approaches a man then the sort of the the polarity is inversed and then you'll have a relationship where the woman is doing most of the leading and the man is doing most of the following and according to some ancient rules, that's not going to work.

12:09And I don't really put too much emphasis or really even belief on that. Like, if you're a woman, you're attracted to a man and you want to ask him out, just ask him out. If you want to approach and say, hey, you look interesting. Do you want to, you know, what are you doing this afternoon? I think that's totally fine. I don't think that we need to take these archaic polarity rules. This is not a popular opinion. A lot of my audience agrees with me, and a lot of them really disagree with me. They really have these rules around polarity and how it's important for a man to lead. But also, what about all the queer relationships?

12:47What about the same-sex stuff? Then it doesn't make sense, right? So I'll have to ask you about my own personal experience. So as you can imagine, when I was available, I got tons of women approaching me, you know, in several forms, like on dating apps, for example, being an engineer for a while, I really perfected the funnel. So I could really, really write the exact right words so that women of every single nationality, depending on which nationality, you know, would approach me. and also of course through my work sometimes I would get people approaching me through meeting you know people in speaking engagements and so on and so forth and I have to say there are two layers of a conversation with a woman that actually would determine if I would be interested in a relationship or not one of them for me was if a woman outright came to me and said hey by the way I think you're really interesting why don't we go out on a date that would almost turn me off like it would tell me hey you know what in the in the dynamic i'd like to be the masculine side of this but if she approached and said hey loved your speech or hey uh you know are you a friend of this person or you know and so basically opened the conversation yeah would actually really get me interested because i believe it or not have never once in my life approached a woman I mean, it's one of my worst skills on earth.

14:20It's really, really, really bad. And I had lots of, there must be quite a few traumas that led me to that place, but I never did. Okay. Yeah. And so I can't. Still to this day. Still to this day. Still to this day. Yeah. Wow. And hopefully never again. But the idea is that if a conversation starts, either because we have common friends or because we met at a convenient place or whatever, or because she spoke to me, that either way, to me, I could keep a conversation. But otherwise, I wouldn't go to someone and say, hey, you're interesting. I'd like to introduce myself or whatever, which seems to be very easy.

15:02But to me, it was always very difficult. Well, you know, Matthew Hussey says, drop the handkerchief. Right. So if you're the woman, you don't go and you don't go and ask the man out, but you drop the handkerchief. You create an opening. And that's the same as someone saying, love your talk and giving you the opportunity to kind of step into this interaction. Although I'm kind of curious if someone, if your current partner had said, hey, Mo, love your talk, would love to grab a drink with you. and you felt a little bit turned off, I'm kind of curious what would have happened if you had said, okay, yeah, let's go grab a drink.

15:40Would you have been able to turn it back on? Would there have been enough connection there? Or would it just be dead in the water, you know? No, no, no. Grab a drink, have a coffee. All of that would be wonderful, okay? But sometimes, you know, especially because I talk about love and romance publicly quite a bit, I would get someone saying, hey, by the way, I'm single. I'd like to see if we can be a good match or that doesn't work. Yeah, that's too much. That's too much. Yeah. Yeah. I think that I think that I think anyone would maybe find that too much unless they were really looking for a relationship.

16:20And yeah, I think that would be that would be just a little over the top. from you know the african tribe that dances on both sides to us talking about all of the etiquette of who starts in daswat and what went wrong in the middle like what how did we end up where we are i don't know is it is it so bad it's sort of what i'm asking myself like is it so bad did we actually go wrong? Or is this just a natural evolution of us, right? Like evolving as species, including technology and everything. I think that's where we went wrong. We included technology. We think that technology can solve, that this was a problem that needed to be solved.

17:08Oh, I mean, technology screwed it up really badly. I mean... Plus capitalism. Because technology is applied to serve capitalist needs, not to get people together. Right. Right. The online dating apps don't really care about the success rate of their product. They do actually. They want you to fail. Right. Okay. They care about it in the negative sense. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the hinge sort of says, this is the app that wants you off the app, but seriously, are it really like one more? Well, it's it. The app meant to be deleted? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's meant to be deleted over and over and over and over again.

17:51But this to me is where we failed. I think this is really, I want to talk about technology in detail, but I want to also say where we failed, and I did some stats on this. So they say 50 % of all marriages end, right? I find that to be a very deceiving stat, right? because how many relationships actually end up in match. So, so if we really want to measure success of the current dating scene, the current dating scene should be measured the way I measured it as I said, okay, how many average lifetime partners does a Western country have? And if you divide that by, you know, assuming that the only, only the last one succeeded, assuming it succeeded, by the way, it could have not succeeded, but assuming the last one succeeded, then the previous 17 didn't and one over 18 basically is that is your calculation of success rate and that's closer to two percent right so so so basically it means that every time we get together uh you know 98 times we fail and two times we succeed right if success if success is defined as long-term everlasting uh you know uh committed relationship and i think this is where we got wrong where we where we failed on multiple levels level number one is we've defined mostly only one type of success when in reality every one of the 98 in my mind was amazing right yeah but two if that's the target then we're really missing it and it's causing a lot of heartache a lot of heartache a lot of you know depression and conversation and so on so i would i would say it's failure yeah also the idea that marriage is success right is a problem because not everybody wants to get married not every man wants to get married more i think women want to get married than men if we're honest yeah of course i think so but not all women want to get married right i have a large percent of my audience is is happy just being in a long-term relationship or or just being in some sort of partnership right and then you have open relationships so there's a lot of non there's a lot of alternative non-traditional relationship styles out there but i think traditionally yeah we view as you marriage or everlasting love as the disney fantasy that everybody is striving for but i like your point that a relationship that ends is not a failed relationship so should people enter into relationships thinking that it's okay that it fails oh gosh i feel like that that is a very realistic view of a relationship maybe we hope that it doesn't but we understand that it might and so maybe that makes it a little less devastating when it does or if it does yeah i think it also makes us focus on the journey and the learning rather than the fantasy basically i I mean, I call it Dizzywood, Disney and Hollywood from a very young age.

20:59As we go through life, you know, it really is a fantasy because my mathematical mind will say it works every time on the screen, every single movie. I mean, probably one of every 10 ,000 movies will end with the couple loving each other. but reality is only two out of every 98 will go further than the dream that Disney would sell yeah Disney would really screwed us up for sure it's not realistic but also realistic doesn't sell movies and we're going to the movies to escape reality right I also think that a relationship can fail if you fail to learn anything from it agreed i think that's top result honestly you have to you have to learn something from it from you have to learn uh you have some awareness around your patterns your attachment styles how you relate to others what needs weren't being met how could you do differently how can you show up differently how can you ask for your needs to be met how can you set boundaries before you know before it's too late there's so much that we could be learning to make our next relationship a little bit more aligned yeah so first of all can we just openly discuss some of those untraditional relationship types so i'll make a confession i i wrote a book called finding love several times right seven times to be exact and every time i gave it to someone of course 82 of my audience are women so when i do we have the same audience Probably the same.

22:45You know, when I gave it to someone who there was in chapter three, I think, the idea of all, I called it all the different recipes, all the different kinds of love, right? And relationships. And those who were convinced of the Dizzy Wood traditional model were really upset. they basically put the book down when i said look there are people who love who actually are looking for long distance others that are not people who are looking for together alone and others that are looking for i mean there are millions of types what do you think is more common than we think it is of those types well first of all i think you should put that chapter at the end of your book yeah and then people would would if they stopped reading at least it would be the last chapter but then they'd hate me at the end of the book you want them to go like yeah but you got them to read the book which of the models that you've been exposed to is a lot more common that we would want to believe is oh that's a great question I don't think I know I don't think I know I don't think I have access to to that answer come on this is my podcast I'm allowed to say, I don't know.

24:06I'm allowed to say, I don't know. So I did the math. I did, I looked for research. So hookups, if you, if you consider a hookup, a relationship. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. 75 % of people under 30 have had one kind of hookup or another. Friends with benefits. That number seems low.

24:30There you go. I mean, what is a hookup, Mo? Like, is it a one-night stand? Is it a friends with benefits? Is it, yeah, I mean, that's, I find that number really low, but also I'm a pretty, you know, have been, was a very promiscuous guy. So I had a lot of hookups with a lot of women and I'm like 75. But yeah, I guess there are people that are saving themselves for marriage or only interested in a long-term relationship. Exactly, for a long-term. So a hookup is someone who is getting together with someone for sex with no expectations of ever meeting again. Okay. Yeah. So that is more common than people realize.

25:11Very, very common. And, you know, especially if you include people who get drunk in a party and then wake up in the morning next to someone they don't even remember. I didn't even consider this because I live in such a sex positive culture world circles that like this to me, this isn't a big deal. this isn't something that you know isn't uncommon right so so i didn't put it under the category of might be more common than people think because to me that is actually quite common so so stretch our imagination in a sex positive culture what does that look like what do you mean like what are the weirdest things as compared to the traditional model this but highly accepted well what would happen is that people wouldn't have to hide the fact that they are sexual beings right uh we would have probably less sexual assault we would have more expressions of desire uh i think that would be a beautiful world where we didn't shame other people for for just being sexual beings right it's one of the most natural things in the world.

26:20Interesting. So, so let's dig deeper in that conversation. If someone asks someone out for a cup of coffee and a conversation, humanity would think of this as normal, right? Yeah. If someone wants to have more than a cup of coffee, there is a line beyond which there is shame, right? Yeah, definitely. But there must be a reason. I mean, it's instinctive for many people to feel that or is it conditioned that sex is like a little bit more higher net worth if you want or more taboo like it requires a few more arrangements than a coffee yeah i think it is conditioned because we weren't raised with role models that showed us that sex was okay right you just don't you don't see your for the most part you don't see your parents having sex.

27:11You don't even want to think about your parents having sex. So we don't have great role models around the conversation around desire. It could be okay to say, I'd love to have coffee with you. And if things go well, it'd be really nice to get naked. That shouldn't be a weird conversation. But for a lot of people, that's unacceptable. It's inappropriate. Because at the same time, it should be okay for someone to say, oh, thank you for letting me know that's totally not what I'm interested in. And then for both people to do a sort of part ways amicably. I mean, please don't be upset with me, but isn't that a very masculine view?

27:47Well, I'm not upset with you. Is asking someone to get naked a very masculine view? I mean, the idea of there are lower stakes, at least historically, for a man to have sex than there is for a woman. Until today, I would say, even with contraception and all of that, there is an emotional attachment that comes more in the woman's emotions set up, if you want, than it is for the man. I don't know. Is that true though? That women get more emotionally connected after having sex? I mean, I've heard it said before, but I also have a largely female audience with a lot of sex positive followers and I also have a lot of friends who are sex positive and the women are just as likely or the men are just as likely as the women to get connected or emotionally connected so i think it depends on the population depends on how open you are so so that uh that's actually so another interesting stat i found was that in a survey of people who went for a friends with benefits relationship 75 of the time it was the man that got attached it's quite interesting when you think about right which is interesting because i hear mostly from women saying, you know, how do I ask my friends with benefit, you know, to be in a relationship, right?

29:09But my data is skewed, right? My audience is skewed. It's like your audience. Also, why are mostly women interested in being happy? I think men are conditioned to believe that we're not supposed to show our pain. We're not supposed to show that something is not right. It doesn't help you to have an image of vulnerability as a man. I think it's high that big boys don't cry. And so accordingly, I think, you know, even, you know, even those who read my, my work would always start in scary, smart, the AI bit, and then go like, oh, interesting. This guy has something to say. And then they get surprised when they read any of the other books.

29:51It's like, whoa, happiness. What's, you know, what's that all about? Right. I didn't sign up for this. That's wasting my time here, boy. Yeah, so it is actually quite interesting. I think when the conditioning gets to the point where a man basically says, I can't take this anymore, it becomes very valuable. So my style of writing and my style of communicating in general is very algorithmic, almost very data-driven, facts-driven, and so on. logical. And so it works really well because men don't find other things from the gurus and the teachers and so on. But yeah, it actually takes a very long time for men to acknowledge that they're unhappy to start.

30:37I mean, they're basically looking at solving for happy as an alternative to suicide. Yeah. So a lot of the time, you know, I get my male readers when it is really beyond uh tolerance like they got to the point where i can't do this anymore yeah and here are my options i can either get better or just yeah well that's bad but but also also i have to say the movement that was created so i i think it's unfair my my last comment is you know there is also a big population of of male readers that get recommended my book by a female reader right yeah so there is that but as i said i mean it's it's not it's not common for the typical high you know high pace man of the world today to admit that they're stressed or unhappy yeah yeah yeah i've been i've been um sharing recently about how i'm burned out and unhappy and not fulfilled i had a really rough year and when my father passed away my relationship ended um yeah thanks mom my house was robbed and i ended up in the er after after a bike accident it was a rough summer and so it's been really hard to find happiness in these last this last half a year pretty much six months and i've been sharing a little bit about it and the feedback has been wow it's so rare to see a man share about his unhappiness or about his struggles yeah absolutely and i mean that's the that's the beautiful thing is being able to share about this stuff and like feeling sort of humanizing the experience for other people and and showing people like oh it's okay to be unhappy it's even okay to care about being unhappy it doesn't actually lower your worth as an individual.

32:38It actually makes you, makes me more relatable to people. I think it's, it's almost stupid to assume that we don't feel unhappy, right? So it's, it's almost like, yeah, old news, but you're absolutely spot on. It's quite refreshing when a man opens up to this and basically says, Hey, I, again, I have absolutely no scientific proof for what am I about to say, but I think, you know, it's well known that suicide rates are much higher in men, much significantly higher in men than they are in women. And sometimes this is attributed to the fact that men are doers, so they're able to do the action if you want, or that they are more aggressive, so they can actually get into that violent space.

33:23But I also tend to believe it's because they have zero ability to admit to their struggles. So it's like, Like, you know, I can't even talk about this and I keep it within me. And that keeps mounting up to the point where you basically lose hope that it will ever be fixed. That's the moment of suicide. So is this the reason for your sabbatical? Is that the reason you decided to? Yeah, the sabbatical is social media. I didn't set out to build a large audience. I have about a quarter million followers on Instagram and on TikTok. I didn't start out doing that. I just started out creating little videos about sex, love and dating, you know, and eventually see what came about.

34:07And that was about 10 years ago. And so it's grown. And now I find myself in a position of really having to reevaluate my relationship to social media. And it's kind of connected because, you know, you said, oh, it's kind of obvious that some people aren't happy or that humans aren't happy all the time. Right. But on social media, it's skewed. You don't really know your sad moments or your bad moments or moments where you're not proud. You show the highlights real. Yeah. And so I'm trying to reevaluate my connection to social media because I very much use it as a drug. Oh, right. I get dopamine.

34:48I get dopamine hits from the comments and the DMs. And you're talking to a recovering drug addict and alcoholic who's, you know, I've been sober for 15 years, but I still use substances. like caffeine or I've used sex or I've used social media technology to feel better, to bolster my sense of self. And I want to examine that, right? And so the sabbatical is sort of an opportunity for me to re-examine my relationships to a lot of the things that I use, online dating, women, relationships, sex, caffeine, nicotine, all that stuff, so that I can be a little bit more objective about how I use these substances.

35:25It's the most incredibly brave public statement about this I've ever heard. Honestly, I commend this is amazing that you say that in a very, I mean, especially coming after the comments that men never admit it, so they never really do anything about it. Yeah. Yeah. In a way, I don't know how to say this, but you're not very different. I think most others just don't admit it. you know yeah i can't believe you said i'm not unique mo

36:01you're you're unique in admitting it and you're unique in your ability to take a sabbatical like well done there you go but uh well that's i mean again like uh like long distance relationships it's it's uh not everyone can do it right you you need to have resources you need to have money to be able to take a break from working for a year right or six months or whatever man that is a good question. The plan is I'm actually not just going to disappear because that would not be very strategic of me. Although at some points in my career, I have thought about just deleting social media, but every time I don't, I'm actually quite glad that I didn't because I think there's a lot of value in the community that I've built personally for me, but also for the people that just resonate with my message, which is speak up when you want to.

36:52It's okay to be vulnerable, all that kind of stuff. So the plan is to give over my social media to a friend who's going to just play around with it. I mean, they work with brands, but in a much smaller capacity, brands with like a thousand or 10 ,000 followers. So I'm handing over my Instagram and she's going to create content based on all the content that I've created. I'm also going to feed her all of my writing. So I'm going to be writing a lot during this sabbatical. And she's going to use that writing to like create, you know, quotes and text and all that kind of stuff. And then I'm going to do a Q &A session.

37:33You probably noticed that most of my Instagram is just me answering questions. It's so simple. It's just the simplest way to create content. I will do Q &A once a month. I'll log in once a month I'll do 40 Q &As and then she'll use those for the rest of the month so it's like kind of a sabbatical light there's still going to be a little bit of work that happens there it's quite interesting if you don't mind me saying I asked you what's your plan and you spoke about social media that's not your plan that's your social media plan well that shows you how much social media is like part of my life and how I don't like it.

38:21I don't like it. The larger answer is that I'm going to do a bunch of silent meditations and write and take big periods of abstinence from all of the behaviors. Okay. So can I tell you what I do? Because I'm unable to sit in my seat and I really want to tell you about my favorite experience of every year yes of course okay so i so i uh i um take a 40 days of silence one shot okay uh not not silence like a vipassana where you have a a monk on top of you annoying you but silence basically i allow myself 40 minutes of device time you shouldn't do that because you're trying to get off it completely but i allow myself 40 minutes of human connection a day i listen to music i write a lot like you're saying i eat a very healthy diet i spend a lot of time in nature and the reason i said 40 days because something freaking magical happens around day 21.

39:33i promise you after i've tried this i can assure you something magically everything falls in place like suddenly you have this enormous clarity around and you don't even have to sit down and and uh and sort of like say okay today i'm going to address the topic of you know my addiction to this or my interest in that you just sit there for 21 days of silence listening to music journaling writing uh meditating when you can and so on and bam, day 21, you will not be able to stop taking notes. It's unbelievable what happens. In my very last one, not unfortunately, not this year, the year before, I would write a chapter a day.