Mo Gawdat: 80% Of Illness Is Linked To One Thing! An Alarming Warning For The Burnout Generation! If You Feel Like This, Quit Your Job Today!

29:50And in your own day, you know, can you actually do it with the objective of I'm going to achieve 100 % of my target. 100 % and 10 % of my target. But I'm going to do that with the minimum amount of effort. Fairly to my employer, I'm not cheating anyone. I'm delivering. Is the problem that we don't have a target because I don't have a target. So for me, it's because I can. I should I maximize whatever I can do to achieve financial gains or, you know, followers gains or numbers on the podcast and so on. Amazing. Just add a target and say, and I maximize my well -being in the process. Suddenly the equation becomes incredibly different.

30:36It enables you to do this longer. It enables you to do it more effectively. One of the backbone models of unstressable is something we call the three else, limit, learn and lesson, right? And limit, believe it or not, is the absolute core of a lot of what we call new senses. So let me try to explain this at a very top level. The sources of your of stress in your life, we call them a ton of stress, T -O -N -N, right? And, you know, trauma, obsessions, new senses and noise. Trauma happens from outside. It's a major change in your life and it hits you so hard and it breaks you for a short time. But believe it or not, 91 % of people will face at least one.

31:27But often several PTSD inducing traumatic event in their life. That's like the loss of a love to honor, you know, losing your job so unexpectedly to the point you have to suffer or whatever, okay? Being in a war zone and so on. Believe it or not, 93 % of them will recover within three months. Trauma is not what breaks us. Right? The interesting stuff that breaks us is the long application of obsessions, new senses and trauma and noise. Obsessions are macro issues that you tell yourself, don't exist in the real world at all, okay? Like I have a belly, a little belly, so no one will ever love me.

32:08You can obsess about this for the rest of your life, right? And make it your life story and basically create a lot of stress as a result of that script that you told yourself, okay? You know, new senses are the little ones, the little forms of that, you know, things that are triggered every day by you passing in front of the mirror as you walk out of the door and you go like, um, and you're still that or whatever, right? Believe it or not, most of our stress, however, comes because of what we call new senses. New senses are our stressors that don't break you, they're not trauma, okay? But there are so many of them that you include in your life, so many of them when Alice wrote, you know, the limit bit of the chapter, she wrote a beautiful script about the first five minutes or 10 minutes of your day.

33:00And she started to count the stressors that you trigger in your life in those minutes from the very loud alarm, right? To the, to the, you know, opening your social media and seeing something upsetting or, you know, I open one opening WhatsApp and getting a message you don't like and so on and so forth, right? And this is five minutes, 10 minutes before you even had your coffee, you get 10, 15 stressors. The trick is how beneficial for your life have those better. And if we're aware, if you're able to look at those stressors and say, hold on, I'm going to take an inventory of all of the things that stressed me last week, okay?

33:36I genuinely honest inventory and I'm going to tell myself, oh, by the way, I don't need this, I don't need this, I don't need this, I don't need this, right? My commute, if I leave 10 minutes early, would it be easier? If I leave 10 minutes late, would it be easier? If I, if I take music or the diary of the CEO podcast with me, would it become easier? Right? And, and if you actually attentively, deliberately look at all of the new senses in your life, how many of them can you limit? Countless, I promise you, you can limit countless new senses, you can remove that friend that's annoying you, okay?

34:14By simply texting them and saying, I don't want to be your friend anymore, or simply winding down the conversations, or when they send you something or talk to you about something, you go like, oh, very interesting, right? Instead of engaging in those things, can you, can you limit the, you know, the amount of junk food you're getting into your life? Can you limit the amount of restrictions and control that you apply to yourself in your life? And millions of little things. A lot of them feel like obligations. Do they really? Yeah. Yeah, do you want to live out of obligation? Do you know what I mean?

34:48Friendships feel like obligations. We've committed to do something, go to an event, take part in a charity, whatever it is, you know? And they feel like obligations now. So we, we feel like we have to see it through, even if it's causing us stress or discomfort. She's amazing coming from you, because you're one of the most true business people I know. I'm not even talking about myself. I'm not, although actually I am talking about myself, because some of the things I was thinking about do feel like obligations. And I, of course, do wish I could just. And how do you do that in business, Steve? I know you really well.

35:19You'd say, you'd say you'd say a straight no without explanation. You wouldn't even apologize. It's the things that I've already managed to time myself in because, you know, old Steve overestimated future Steve's capacity. Old smoke and and future. Steve stitches up future Steve, because, yeah, old Steve is, you know, super ambitious and he doesn't understand there's only 24 hours a day. Look, I mean, I'm not immune to this. It's actually my biggest issue. My biggest challenge is, this beginning of this year, I sat down and I realized I had 18 full time jobs. Sounds familiar. And I cut them down to nine.

36:03And I went to everyone I love and I celebrated and I said, look, I cut them down by 50 % and they looked at me and said, there's still nine. You must have had to upset some people. I simply said, that's it. We're not doing this project. You're going to have some people's feelings. The truth is, by the way, I think we're talking at your life and my life, but this applies to everyone listening. Right? You have this person that constantly calls you and says, hey, let's go out for coffee and the coffee is annoying like hell. Right? And you're like, yeah, but I've known them for 20 years and they're really lovely.

36:39I swear to you, I had one of my really close, wonderful friends who was really, really struggling with his ego. So most of the conversations would be around him trying to prove that he's good enough. And I had a lovely conversation with them. I said, at the end of one of those coffee meetings, I said, I think we shouldn't meet again. He said, what do you mean? You're traveling. I said, no, no, every time I sit next to you, make me miserable. And he said, why? And I said, because you're constantly trying to do A, B and C, can you change that, please? Right? Simple. If he managed to change it, I would have stayed.

37:20He didn't manage to change it. We met again and I said, look, I love you very much and I think we should be friends. But not to the point where we meet every Sunday. This makes any sense for me to volunteer part of my Sunday to suffer. Right? And it is actually quite possible to do that lovingly by saying, look, I realize that you are in this stage. It's not my responsibility to take you out of it, by the way. That's not what friends are for. My responsibility as a friend is to be there when you ask me a specific thing that relates to what you're going through that I'm capable of providing. But just sitting there for four hours to listen to something that I'm not able to change doesn't make any sense.

38:03Right? And some of our listeners will be stuck in that relationship. That is really abusive or really not effective or, and what are they doing? It's an obligation. We've been together for four years. He's not that bad and that's the truth. Can you make choices that simply say, I will put my well -being, my mental well -being first? What is the short -term cost of putting ourselves first? Because that's often the thing that prevents us doing it. Is there is a clear short -term cost? I understand the long -term gain potentially. But the short -term thing is the thing that keeps us in prison. So Hannah, my wonderful wife is a therapist.

38:48So therapy is not a topic. Psychology is not a topic I research heavily. So she's teaching me quite a bit. And one of the biggest eye -opensers for me is that she said, we love consistency. We hate change, even if change is good for us. So if we follow a script that says, I am ugly or I am not good enough or whatever, changing that script. That script is painful, but changing that script is more painful. Because your survival mechanism says, I'm familiar with this pain. I know how to deal with this pain. I don't want the uncertainty. So the way we started this podcast and you asked me what is the most stressful thing about the modern world is that unfamiliarity of the future.

39:38We're unable to know what it looks like. And so we resist. We resist the change. We say, look, I am in this place. I know how to do it very well. It's hurting my back. It's keeping me on long flights. It's doing this. It's doing that. But I'm really very familiar with it. I always make a big joke about this. When I was leaving Google X. So I was obviously so for happy. It was booming. My 1 billion happy mission was 10 million happy when we started the first print of the book. And 10 million took eight weeks. You have to tell yourself, sorry for my English fuck Google. I have to focus on this. But when I was leaving Google and Google was so kind to me and I was very fortunate.

40:24And I made a reasonable amount of money. I don't have most of it now anymore. But at the time, I started to tell myself, but what about the future of AMI daughter? But what about my accent and her needs? What about this? What about that? Do I have the financial resources to do this? Typical engineer, I started that spreadsheet. Put every possible expense, put every possible source of revenue and so on. And it appeared to be okay. And so my brain volunteers to tell me, but hold on, Mao, what if there is a nuclear war? Because the Iranians don't agree with the Americans. And that the nuclear dust comes to Dubai.

41:06So you're really state -port for you in Dubai. That's wiped out and what will happen then? And yeah, if you want to continue to hold on to your safety mechanisms, you're going to end up in a place where there is always something that could go wrong. And the answer was, if that happens, I think I'll be a lot more concerned about other things than how much revenue I'm making at the time. Right? And the truth is, for every single one of us, we are afraid of the change. So we stick to the familiar, familiar, familiar could be killing us. And it's quite interesting that we know it could be killing us, whatever scale you are in in the world.

41:51You're studying something you're not enjoying. But it's familiar. I went on that path. It's been three years already. And I'm not saying jump and say, that's it, and start over. That consistency matters. But tell yourself, I have one more year to finish. I'll finish this year with the minimum effort to achieve the result. And I'll start to look at other parts of my life by re -investing my hours. You're stuck in that relationship, but dating is horrible. I don't want to leave that person around. Yeah. But you know if it's not working that sooner or later, you're going to leave the person. Right?

42:26And I think my story and your stories are great examples of what happens when you leave that person. I mean, not yours, but mine. Like when you're available, so that when the right person shows up, you're there. If you're, you know, your true obligation to yourself is to put yourself in those situations of uncertainty that you chose calculated risks rather than let the world push you. You know, like Alice constantly speaks about the world will always push you to either heal or change direction. Okay? Quite interestingly, the way we write both of us is very, very interesting because Alice is, you know, so soft and feminine and spiritual in her writing.

43:06And I'm a freaking engineer, like everything to me is an equation and a bullet point and so on. So I always say the world will push you to change direction or to learn. Brainiac, she says the world will push you to change direction or to heal. There more or less the same, but learning is like sort of the Brainiac process of it and healing is the. So why not? Why not get yourself in the place where the world wants you to be so that you hear or change direction? Why not make that decision yourself? So many of us contend with loss of version, don't we? And this is, yeah, Daniel Kahnman, he passed away, I think three or four days ago.

43:42Did he? Yeah. He's the real, so he's the pioneer. He's a rising writer and an amazing thinker. He was incredible, really, really incredible individual. That's inspired so many people, including myself and so many ways. But I remember that paper he produced, I think in the 1980s, about loss of version. I know. The paintings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And in that work where he discovers this term loss of version, he talks about how humans need the gain to be two to three times bigger than the thing they lose. Possibly loss. Yeah. Yeah. So the pain we experience from losing ten pounds on the floor of ten dollars on the floor isn't equal to the pleasure we experience from finding ten.

44:21We'd have to find twenty or thirty to equal the pain of losing ten. And that speaks, I think, in some part to why people stay in the situation they're in because for me to go after a better relationship, it better appear to be two to three times better than the one I'm going to lose. Interesting. The job, it has to appear to be two to three times better than the one I'm sacrificing. And that almost keeps us pinned down. I actually did a bit of research a couple of years ago as to why we have lost the version like what's the evolutionary basis. And the best answer I could find was that we come from a background of trading with like other rapes and stuff.

44:53And there was, there's often a risk that the person might not trade back or the, you know, so we factor that into the trade. Yeah. We factor in the probability that we won't, it won't be an equal trade. Yeah. Life's not an equal trade. We pursue things and we don't get them. And I think that's part of what's holding us in situations aren't serving us and in the stress you describe.

45:14It's surprising though, if you look back at your life and you really take a factual view of the history of your life, most of the time when you lost something, you opened up a space that allowed something else to walk in. Right? This is the truth of life. Right? If you, you know, if you lose a job, that's the only time where you're allowed to actually find another job. The shame hindsight doesn't have the wisdom of foresight. Because your brain is a survival mechanism. Your brain is constantly ignoring all of that, all that you've learned, and saying there could be a nuclear war. Right? And it's quite interesting when you really think about it because I always say if your worst fear have ever, fears have ever happened, you wouldn't be here right now.

46:00Okay? And by the way, if some of them happened surprisingly, you're still here. Isn't that interesting? So yes, your worst fear happened and you made it because you never factor in the reality of our resilience you actually are. And I think that the trick really is not, is also not the fact that we should be a little conservative and concerned about certain things. But how much of our life should we be concerned about? Like if you really rank the things that are important in your life, how many of them actually matter enough so that you don't make the change? Four, five? Right? But we hold on to 200 ,000 other things.

46:45Below the four or five, 200, let's say, 2000. Realistically, for each and every one of us, that, you know, my Hannah, or Hannah, came to my home the first time. She looked at my home and she said, oh, Hannah, Hannah is my wife. Yeah. I fell in love badly, badly. And, you know, and again, because I had space in my life, just remember that. We're going to talk about that later. Are we really? Are we going to go talk about, on stressable at all? When she came to my home the first time, she said, oh, because she follows my podcast and she knows my works and so on, she said, oh, you're not a minimalist.

47:24You're a minimalist, want to be. And I said, what do you mean? Because I am reasonably minimalist, right? But she has that, you know, attitude to things where she says, it's only going to come into my life if I truly love it, truly love it. Like, you know, I have 16 types of tea in my cupboard. Some of them have never tasted, right? She has two. But she really loves them. Right? And I think that's the trick. The trick is when you rank life, you hold on to the world. And to that, you know, box of Earl Grey that you bought a year ago and you're like, yeah, I'll drink it one day. Will you really?

48:06You hold on to that friend that you met when you were four and, you know, yeah, this change, you changed. Right? But we hold on to those things. And the trick is, can we actually let go of those things? Can we leave this space for other things to come in or for us to chill and find expansion in our life? Right? So, you know, I used to have that attitude of trying every Saturday to throw 10 things away from my home. Okay? Believe it or not, endlessly. Endlessly, you can throw 10 things away from your home. You know, last Saturday, I had this beautiful, humidifier, you know, just to make the room a little more humid.

48:52Okay? And I was like, should I keep it, should I throw it away, should I keep it, should I throw it away? And then I plugged it in and it didn't work. I haven't used it for like a year and a half. And you have to imagine that so many of those things are there. They're bugging you down, they're stressing your life. So, if they're not used, they're stressing you. And you can choose to leave them, just leave them behind. Do you believe that? Do you believe that if you're not using it, even if it's just sat there, that it's stressing you out? 100%. And it's actually, and you're depriving it of the opportunity to live.

49:24So, think about, I know this is philosophical, but a humidifier is supposed to humidify. Right? It's not supposed to sit there and look pretty. If you're not using it, someone else will use it. Right? And believe it or not, the simple impact of when they're using it, you save them the need to actually buy another one. And in doing that, you might have contributed a tiny bit to our planet. And the hoarding that we have in our lives, the number of things that we keep. I love Arabic incense. And like everything, and you see sometimes silly things. Like, you know, each of those is like $10. I had like 14 different incense.

50:11Right? And then I realized, you know what? Anytime I light an incense, I light one. Okay? And when I need to order another one, I'll get it within one day. So, when this one is about to finish, and I've really enjoyed it, really loved it, I'll order another one. Limit. You're supposed to constantly limit the number of things in your life. By the way, you know, you may think it's not taking away from your life, but it's taking space, it's taking attention, it's taking the space of something else, it's, you know, requiring you to deal with it, clean it, dust it. It's just why? Is this what you refer to in the stress quadrant from unstressable as noise?

50:53No, noise is what happens from within your head. Okay. So it's little stressors that you don't, that don't happen in the real world. Okay? It's little stressors that, you know, when I'm looking at myself in the mirror, or when I'm driving and thinking about, oh, you messed up on that thing, right? It's generated. So the ton of stress is very straightforward. It is external and internal macro and micro. So if you look at stress coming from within you, or from outside you, right, internal and external, and if you look at it coming from a small reason of stress or a big reason of stress, the great example is trauma is macro external.

51:39Micro meaning it's a very, very high stressful impact, you know, very significant, comes from outside you. We don't cause our self -strong, something else causes that strong, right? That trauma capital T here, huh? And yeah, so it's noise is micro. It's like that constant nagging in your head, like, you know, you need to, your hair is starting to show white. Like, so constant nagging, it's like you're getting old. Okay? It's small, it doesn't kill you. But if you say it every day, it starts to become quite significant. Which actually is really, I think the most interesting part of stress is to understand that stress is very good for you, right?

52:24Until it kills you. And I think what most people don't understand is that there are only three ways where stress will break you. One is trauma outside you, but we said you'll recover very quickly. The other is burnout and the third is anticipation of stress. Okay? And these two are completely within your control. So trauma is outside your control, but 93 % will recover in three months, 96%, and most of us will actually get post -traumatic growth. So post trauma you'll be fine. Okay? The majority of how stress kills us is burnout, which is a very large number of small stressors. So the burnout equation, as I wrote it in the book, is the number of stressors multiplied by the intensity of each multiplied by the time of application of each multiplied by the frequency of application.

53:13So take a commute, for example. If you commute as one stressor, multiplied by if it's a two hours commute and it's very annoying and you're surrounded by people, it's very intense. Okay? And if you have to do it twice a day, it's very different than if you do it four times a day. Okay? And if you have to do it every day, it's very different than if you have to do it once a week. So you add all of those up, the sigma of all of those, when that reaches the breaking point of what you can carry as a human, you'll break. Right? And normally you'll break because of a tiny thing, like your best friend goes like, hey, Chubby, and you go like, what?

53:52I can't take this anymore and you cannot take out, go out of bed anymore. You know, previously you would go like, yes, kidney, whatever. You would just laugh about it. And I think the trick is, to save yourself from burnout, it's not that what one lost stressor. Right? It is all of the other four hundred stressors that piled up so that when that last one is applied, you break. Right? And it is quite interesting because we normally never break because of stress. It's not the event that breaks us. Okay? So one of the interesting topics and on stressable is, is of course Alice in her very spiritual soft practice approach.

54:40You know, wrote her parts of the book and I was like, Alice, I just still don't get it. And she said, what do you get? And in my approach, I said, in physics, right? Stress is very defined. Stress is very clear in physics. Right? An object is stressed when you stress an object, you apply a force to a square area to the cross section of the object. Right? The object, the stress is not just the result of the force. It's not the external stressor, the external challenge or threat that we face that stresses us. It's your square area that also plays in that equation. So basically our stress as humans, if you apply the same concept of physics, is the intensity of the challenges that you face, divided by the skills and resources and the abilities that you have to deal with that stress.

55:35Right? So the stress equation is your, you know, the challenge divided by the resources. Okay? And that's why someone, you know, like you, maybe able to carry things that would make someone freak out. It's the reason why someone like me would, you know, laugh about things that made me freak out in my 20s. Right? Because you, not because the event is different, because you increased your resources. So how does someone increase their resources? Because I think everybody listening to this now, either they're that person, they know someone who flaps. Yeah. When things get a little bit tricky, they flap.

56:15Yeah. So, and what I'm saying, flap, if you don't know what I'm saying, I mean like they panic or they worry or they have like a bit of a, the panic and worry is a different topic. We should absolutely cover that. Okay. Right? So panic and worry is breaking down under the anticipation of threats. Yeah. Okay. But, but, but it, when it comes to dealing with stress, right? You know, I don't know how to say it, but someone in at work when I used to be in the corporate world would walk in and say, oh, the COS changed. You know, we've been working on this deal for the last nine months, and the COS changed, everything has collapsed.

56:49And I'm like, no, it hasn't. No, I've done 200 deals in my life, or the COS changed, and I have to rebuild your network. And you have to do this and that and so on. I mean, I think the most valuable example I remember in my life is the 2008 crisis. So when I joined Google, my boss, which I really adore at the time, he was so direct and very shrewd. And so the introduction, when I joined the management meeting the first day, he says, hey, everyone, this is Mo, he's bringing the average age of the company up. And I was like, one more sentence, please, like please say something else he didn't. That was it.

57:24The introduction is he's bringing the average age of the company up. But when the economic crisis of 2008 happened, Google completely panicked. And the older group goes like, it's not the first time, we've seen economic crisis before. It's cyclical. This is what happens. Maybe we should behave this way. It's the same event, but you have more resources because you've seen it over and over. So it's your accountability as a person to tell yourself that I need to learn the techniques, that I need to understand to be able to manage stress. And the way we wrote them in an answer as we said, you get stressed in formalities.

58:02You get stressed mentally, because stressed emotionally, physically or spiritually. And each of those is a different, I don't know how to say, a different language course. So your mental stress speaks to you and responds to you in a language that is different than your emotional stress. It's different than your physical stress. That's different than your spiritual stress. But if you learn that language, then you can easily deal with that stress when it happens. And it's simple techniques. We probably should cover as many of them as we can, but take the simplest thing. Mental stress is the kind of stress that wakes you up at 4 a .m.

58:43at night, because a thought is running through your head, you can't stop it. Simple techniques are, write the thought down. Promise yourself that you're going to think about it in the morning before you go to bed. Most of the time, if you simply let the thought reside on paper, it won't reside in your head. And keep the promise. So when you wake up the next morning, actually think about that thought that you made the promise to your brain, that you will simple technique. And there are hundreds of those. We have in the mental stress space, for example, we have something we call the gym, GYMMMMM.

59:20So it's eight different practices. And the trick here is, learn that technique, apply that technique, and you will be able to deal with stress a little bit better. And creating a support network, your ability to question your thoughts. I have a technique that I call Meet Becky, the idea that you allow your brain to express things and share them, rather than block them, and so on and so forth. And that skill in mental stress is very, very different than emotional stress. Because your brain speaks to you all the time, it's rarely ever if at all ever tells you the truth. That's the language that your brain speaks.

1:00:02It only tells you what it thinks is the truth. Your emotions speak to you all the time, and it's always the truth. If you're afraid, you're afraid there is no lying about that. But the problem is that emotions are so subtle, they're so blended, they're brush strokes of multiple emotions overlaid on each other, and we're told not to acknowledge them at all. So we don't even respond to the language. Your body speaks in aches and pains. Why that's mine before you go to Australia? But we can audit completely, we go like this is normal. It's normal to have aches and pains. I'm traveling for 16 hours, must have aches and pains.

1:00:48No, you must not. You have aches and pains because you're stressing your body. But if your body is your priority, you're not going to have aches and pains. Your spirit would cry through its intuition. I mean, spirit here is not a religious thing. But your non -physical part, call it your consciousness. The part that doesn't relate to your physical form. It sends you signals all the time related to your purpose and what you're supposed to be doing through your intuition. How many of us listen to our intuition when we're running through life? And so when these are skills, this is the entire body of the book, the skills of how do you build your resources in terms of spotting by listening to the language that the modality speaks to you, spotting that you're being stressed?

1:01:36And then how do you actually speak back to it and deal with it with the resources that you need so that you're not that stressed anymore? How do we know? How do we spot our own stress? Because it's hard, isn't it? When we've told ourselves a different story about the feeling or that sensation. We tell ourselves different stories about it. We say, you know, this is, this achle pain is good because it means growth or this burnout or this anxiety is good because it means, you know, productivity. But how do we truly know that we are, we've pushed ourselves too far? I think the easiest one to recognize, believe it or not, is physical stress.

1:02:16Physical stress is undeniable. When you have a sore throat, you know something's wrong. And you tell yourself something's wrong. When you have back pain, you know something's wrong. But you don't tell yourself something's wrong. And the symptoms of physical stress are very straightforward. You know digestive issues, headaches, you're unable to sleep very well, you're unable to rest when you sleep and so on. So it's very simple. Your body theoretically is a machine that should work seamlessly. Unless there is a disease or an illness or whatever, it should work seamlessly. It should simply be like a luxury car you run it and it runs.

1:03:02But if it starts to shake and you know, it's not performing well, you have to stop and say what is going on. And every stress will give you a slightly different physical signature. Right? Anxiety is felt in your stomach, right? You know fear is all over your body. You just want to run. You feel that like you can feel it. The trick is how do you get embodied? How do you allow yourself to sit with your body and say, so you know Alice writes about a very normal practices a body scan. And so few of us do it with you, you know on a long flight, you should sit with your body and go like, OK, close your eyes, you know take a deep breath and scan your body from your top of your head all the way to your toes and see where it hurts.

1:03:54Right? And ask yourself how much more effective in your mission would you be if it doesn't hurt? I think this is the part that a lot of work, Hollix, you know you described it as an addiction earlier. Now if you sat down with someone who had another form of addiction and told them this, like logically they're diffused. Yeah, they'd say, yeah, I know this injecting this thing in me is bad. But addictions are complicated emotional states aren't they? They're like deep psychological emotional states and obviously there's a chemical element to it, but often we find that there's a trauma or there's an underlying issue with self esteem or whatever it might be that's causing it.

1:04:36So although there's many people listening to this now, including myself, I go, OK, I know what you're saying is true, but I pardon me think some a little bit dragged and not very driven. So I never had much good.

1:04:53You. But that's kind of what I imagine a lot of people's like rebuttal is to that is like, I know this like someone said to me before that, you know, I'm been bodying the listener now, people have told me that I need to stop. And I'm thinking of some of my best friends, some of my best friends, I literally like killing themselves because of their work and like objectively, if you asked them to say, I'm killing myself because of this work. What's your favorite band? I think is Kanye and I have to separate the art from the individual. Very reason it's a bad. It's the art. It's the pushing boundaries, making things that are unapologetically unique, you know, this already makes this episode quite a very useful one.

1:05:33But theoretically, if Kanye is performing in London tonight, yeah, would you go? Yes. Yeah, you'd find the time. Yeah, yeah, it's a lie. We tell ourselves we're too busy. It's a lie. We're not. Okay, anyone who's too busy has not watched Game of Thrones. Because if you allowed yourself to watch Game of Thrones, that's like 600 hours of your life. Okay, you're not too busy. Right. Anyone who's too busy, this is the interesting bit. The interesting bit is if you're too busy, okay, when you get home, you're unable to do anything. Right. And you waste three hours binge watching something or completely brain that.

1:06:20Right. The truth is that those three hours are wasted three hours. You could actually waste them during the day. They're wasted anyway and use them differently when you get home. The truth is not with, we were not too busy. And the problem is this. And I I I I rarely ever use threats as a motivation. But the problem is you're going to put in the time. You're going to put in the time by working on your stress beforehand or lying in bed when you're burnt out. That's the truth. The truth is your, you know, the body keeps the score, you know, the book. Right. Eventually your body is going to go, I said, can't do this anymore.

1:06:59Right. Your mind is going to say, I just I just can't deal with this. And even I'm theoretically trained in this my whole life. I've managed very, very complex, very stressful jobs. I run so many things at the same time. And I will tell you openly, I burn out at the end of every book launch. I'm hoping this year I'm not. But that's the truth. The truth is I will eventually, after running really hard for three weeks, I will eventually spend the week and half unable to do anything. On average, that means I worked the week and half. So why do you keep doing it yourself? Because of what you're, because of what you and I struggle with, we are assigned to ourselves things beforehand.

1:07:49Right? This year I'm saying I may not get there. Why? Because when I'm publishing, so we're filming this long before unstressed. Right? And at the same time, when the publication date happens, I'm doing nothing during those two weeks or three, two and a half weeks, nothing but unstressable. Very unlike the typical me. Right? The typical me thinks of himself as Superman. I'm super old man now. Right? And it's quite interesting because at the end of the day, if I can, if I plug so many things in my life, eventually, eventually believe it or not, you balance it out. What about the people who really don't have a choice?

1:08:34Is there anybody that doesn't have a choice? You know, I'm thinking about the people that work on the factory line and they're, they're providing, they're working two jobs providing for a family that are, you know, struggling. What about those people? First of all, I think these are the most honorable, commended people that we can ever talk about. But I will, before I talk about them, I'll ask you to think about how blessed you are. Okay? And everyone who's not in that position, anyone who's not in a war zone, anyone who's not born to a very, very difficult circumstances. Right? If you're not one of those, then ask yourself, why are you pushing yourself so hard?

1:09:13Right? Now, if you're one of those people, remember, it's limit, learn and listen. Okay? If your external circumstances don't, you're not able to change them, you can change your ability to deal with the stress. No, I have to ask you a question. You know me. You come to know me. We've known each other for years now. Yeah. You know, you've observed my life. You kind of understand all the pieces in my life. You understand what I do here. You've also seen behind the scenes, you know how obsessive I am about the things that I'm involved in. What is the bullshit that I'm telling myself? I've all the people that could like, you know what I'm saying?

1:09:51Like, I've actually pondered this for some time, because I do have moments where I go, Steve, you don't have to work anymore. You don't have to, you're not going to, like, nothing I'm going to accomplish in my life is going to make me any more, anything really to myself. It's not going to, it's not going to make me happier, that's for sure. It's not going to mean that I can live better in any way. So why am I like, why am I doing this? What is the bullshit I'm telling myself? You don't have a ceiling.

1:10:17Your structure doesn't have a ceiling. So I told you before we started this conversation. So you and I make a reasonable amount of revenue from speaking engagements, for example. So my policy was very straightforward. When I started my mission 1 billion happy, I openly said, I'm going to go to any place that has more than 50 people and I'm going to speak for free. And then I met my wonderful business manager, Munir. And when you said, that's not right. I said, what do you mean? And he said, if it's a profit -making organization, that's going to hire you, or if it's a paying event, so they're going to use you and then sell tickets, you should charge them.

1:11:01That's the cycle, the complete cycle of life. Otherwise, go and speak for free. And that tiny change created revenue. The question is, how much revenue is enough? Because I was willing to do it for free. Remember that? So in my conversation with Munir, very, very professional. Also a brother to me, said Munir. He said, this is the target for this year. I said, if I give you the restriction of 20 travel days for the year or 20 trips, basically. Would you be able to make that target? He said, well, in that case, we're going to have to change the dynamics and we're going to have to maybe, can we make them 25?

1:11:42No, I said, 20 trips a year. Okay? Everything else I can do online, everything else I can do. The question is, where's the ceiling? The boundary. Where's the boundary? Right? And boundaries are not set by the world for you. The world will keep pushing you. Right? You and I talk about our lives, which are not typical lives. But where's the boundary, if any of our listeners, where's your boundary with your friends? Okay? Where's your boundary with the arguments with your partner? Where's your boundary with the challenges that you are willing to accept at work? Where's your boundaries? Let me play devil's advocate then.

1:12:26So you made a limit. You know, you said, I'll do, what's it? 20. 20 trips a year. You'll do 20 trips a year. Okay. So devil's advocate would be, well, no. If you did 40 or if you did 30, you'd make X amount more money. And that money can be put towards your mission of making a million people unstressable. So if you just did a little bit more, you'd be closer to achieving your mission. The truth is, if I made only 20 and I created a program online, I'd create more revenue from that. And I can put that revenue to unstressable, but it would reach people at the same time. Do you think part of this, as just thinking, is you search interrupt, I was thinking, I think part of it with me is I'm really good at measuring.

1:13:15And it's really easy if we use the case of speaking appointments. It's really easy to measure the game. And it's very difficult to measure the loss over cost. Yeah, you're constantly driven by opportunity cost. Yeah. If you sell your health and wellbeing for revenue, it's always an opportunity cost. It's always opportunity cost. It's always, but they're paying me X. How can I leave that on the table? Okay, you leave that on the table because you don't need X. Right? And two, because X, the true cost of X is not three hours. Or an hour that you speak, the true cost of X is your wellbeing, your health.

1:13:59What you're selling is your time, is your joy, is your health. That's what you're selling. You're not selling your intellectual property. Any relationships. Any relationships. Okay, I told you I fell in love. And suddenly everything became very different because in all honesty. Yeah, I had lose a speaking engagement to spend an extra day with my wife. We have the most incredible conversations. Right? She enlightens me on so many different ways. And I can promise you, you know, find those keepers, my book about love. When I sit with Anna, and she teaches me about psychology and the impact of psychology on dating.

1:14:48That wasn't part of my approach at all. Okay? So believe it or not, that day is eventually going to create a book or a training or whatever. That's going to change more people's life than anything I could do with money. Remember, by the way, the other side of this is that our biggest resource. You know, when we were at Google, had this conversation at the point in time with people. And I said, why does Google .org contribute money? Why don't we contribute code with so much better at producing code? Then any other organization that can contribute money. Can we write disaster recovery software? Can we write this?

1:15:30Can we code that? That becomes our contribution. Right? What is your contribution?

1:15:38I would say I love you. You're so dear to me. I'd say you're not observing the season. Your first contribution in your 20s was you, with your energy, with your drive. I mean, look at your books. More and more and more maturity. More and more deliverables. Very cleverly thought through, look at what you do here. If you don't mind me saying, Steve, this is your biggest contribution. Right? This could happen in a week a quarter. No, you do two a week? Yeah. Yeah. Mad. Absolutely mad. Absolutely mad. I love you. But two a week, you're stressing yourself and you're stressing the listeners. The only reason why you do two a week is because it gives you more views.

1:16:34Where's the rush? And it's your life that's being traded for listeners. See what you're saying? I know you really well. You know how you love your girlfriend. How much time did you spend with her in the last quarter? Not enough. And how much of it was completely attentively restful? Oh my God. Even less. I flew over here with my daughter. So my daughter was in Dubai. She came to London with me. Best nine hours ever. Ever. Okay. What would I have been doing with that time on the flight? Writing, thinking, responding to emails. What a waste of life. What a waste of life. You see the trick is, hmm?

1:17:25We said the stress equation is the external challenges divided by the resources you have to deal with them. How many of the external challenges do we create? How many of those do we invite in our life? How many of those are the result of us not setting boundaries?

1:17:46And the question is, is to achieve what? To achieve what? Right? I had a very dear friend of mine that was in a relationship that was horrible. Okay? And I said, why are you there? And she said, well, we share the same apartment. Can't leave him because, you know, I can't afford rent on my own. I said, roommate. Where's, how is that challenging? Okay? How is that challenging? Why would you allow yourself to go through this when there are alternatives? I was wondering if people's childhood plays a big role in their bias towards, you know, this work, and in their collism, this sort of self -inflicted stress disease that many of us put ourselves through.

1:18:42Because, you know, like first and second generation immigrants who, where their mother or their father was fighting for survival, they almost like inherit that belief that life and work is about survival. Even though it's not objectively true anymore, it's not objectively true for me. But I still feel like I've got my mother's survival thing in me. And coupled with that, I've got a lot of like shame from being different when I was younger and trying to fit in and being the only black kid and chemically relaxing my hair and listening to the cokes and the Arctic monkeys to pretend I was a white, you know, rich person.

1:19:16There's two bands I know because those are the ones I used to pretend to listen to. And I just wonder for those people, it feels like, you know, when I said how am I bullshitting myself earlier to you, I was expecting you to say something about you think I, you would say to me, I think that I've connected my work to my self -esteem and my self -worth in some deep way. And I'm still trying to fight for my like sense of self -worth. I'm still trying to convince myself that I'm enough with my work. And people, you know, this is what, this is in some respects why we all just like take the promotion, we take the opportunity.

1:19:55I think about this, who's like how many people decline a promotion because they consider the implications of look, it'll have on their family or their, you know. My favorite chapters in happy sexy millionaire was how you quit your CEO job. Yeah. And when you really look at that, you basically were saying, it's killing me. There was no joy in it anymore. Yeah. And it's quite interesting. The challenge for most of us humans is that we're very capable on achieving what we set our mind to. The question is always what do we set our mind to? Okay. If you ask me, you're in a treadmill. Yeah. You're like, you know, that hamster wheel.

1:20:41Yeah. Okay. And there is no ceiling. So the hamster wheel is basically saying, I'm here. I'm going to run like mad. I'm really, I'm a very good hamster. Okay. And as long as you're in that wheel, you're going to run like mad and you're very capable, you're keep running. To achieve what? That's the whole question. When do we put our wellbeing in the equation? Later. Yeah. So I'll tell you very openly one of the most interesting thoughts I have in my life. Who did I interview recently? I don't remember, but remember when we spoke about heartbeats. Yeah. Okay. Heartbeats are your only resource. This is the only asset you come to the world with.

1:21:32Right? And you may think, you know, you're healthy, you're, you know, athletic that you have, let's say, 40 more years of full energy. Truth. That's true. But how many more years do you have in your 20s? None. Gone. Right? And the question is, how many more years will you have in your 30s? Because this is the season of life is very different. Okay. I hope I'll be able to continue to contribute for maybe 10, 15 more years. Right? How many will I be able to contribute with the same sharpness of mind and the same ability to beat the machines? Right? Three? That's when it starts to become quite interesting.

1:22:28I told you this story before when, when my son, Habibi Ali died, he bell sat next to me my ex -wife. She was flipping through a photo album. She said, oh my God, he was such a beautiful infant. And then he died. I was like, what is she talking about? Like he died when he was 21. And she said, and then he became this beautiful child as she's flipping through the album. And then he died. And then this young man showed up the teenager. And then the teenager died. Right? And I just couldn't get what she's saying until eventually she said, and then there was this handsome tall, wonderful man. And that actually really died.

1:23:16And the truth is, my son as an infant was there for two years. You pass those two years, you never get them again. Never get them again. Right? Then he starts to mess his words and is so funny and so loving and so, you know, cuddly. But he does that for two years. And then they're gone and you never get them again. And you get the child, but then the child becomes the teenager and you never get any of them again. And yet we tell ourselves, yeah, fine, fine, fine. When I'm done building, whatever it is that I set myself as an objective to build, I'll hug them. Oh my God, I promise you. I was sitting, I hope I had doesn't listen to this.

1:24:04I was sitting next to me on the flight, asking myself, why the F did I not take her on every flight? Your daughter? Yeah. Why did I not take her on every flight? Like what more joy could I get in life? And the reasons why are because of illusions that we tell ourselves? Oh no, no, no, I'm busy. Oh no, this is expensive. Oh no, you know, she needs to focus on this on a road. Seriously? And by the way, I'm not being the stupid romantic. It's like, oh, it's all about connection. It's not. But you need a certain balance of connection. I looked at Diane. I said, you know, we've been working with Ayah recently on her financial capabilities and how to manage money and how to invest in her.

1:24:59Right? That's why should that prevent me from taking her shopping? One of the biggest joys I always had when she was in Canada and I used to go visit her was we would go out shopping and she'd buy those that beautiful pair of jeans or whatever those shoes or whatever. You know, I did this, made this new thing. It's going to make up a bit. I buy it baby. Right? And I was capable of doing that. And the trick was, why did I stop? Because I changed my objective. So why do you do what you do, Steven? Because your objective is set to maximize without a ceiling. Okay? Your objective is driven by your young years.

1:25:44I would say that with a ton of respect that said, there is a possibility that there is nothing at all. So I might as well have as much as I can. Okay? It doesn't matter. You know, I always said that about Ali. I used to save for Ali, invest for Ali, issue insurance policies for Ali and start businesses in the majors that he used to go through in the university. Right? So Ali changed majors three times every time he changed majors. I would start the business in that major so that when he graduates, he runs it. Okay? And then Ali dies. How many assurances, how many of those assurances work for Ali?

1:26:28Okay? How many of those assurances allowed me to spend the time with Ali? Do you realize that? Do you realize that while life is supposed to be lived, we spend most of it, planning to live it?

1:26:47Okay? And once again, I hope that this doesn't alienate people because that applies at every single level. It applies at the level of that Fisherman that goes out to buy to get two fish, one for his family and one for his business. And to is enough, the fear of I'm not going to get fish tomorrow is what would drive him to get three. Okay? But by the way, if you get three, you might get, you might not get fish tomorrow and after tomorrow. So now you need four. But what if you don't fish for a week? Where is the ceiling? Are you saying as well then in order to create that ceiling or boundary, we all need to know, we need to know our ceiling, but we also need to know our minimum.

1:27:31You need to know what you need. Yeah. What you need. What do I need? You're black t -shirt. You need. Oh, God. Well, it somewhat depends because when you've, you're running a bunch of different businesses and stuff like that. Do you need to run another bunch of different businesses? No, I don't need to. But when you are, you can raise what you need, right? Because you then need, you need to make sure you're bringing in set amounts of capital and you can pay everybody, you know, but I don't need to start the businesses in the first place. So if I just did this podcast and I stripped it all back, I wouldn't, I wouldn't need much.

1:28:08I'd have so much free time. It's unbelievable. If I just did this podcast, oh my God. So I've like, well, of the seven days a week, I'd have about five spare. Correct. You'd basically film for two weeks a quarter. Yeah. Two podcasts or three podcasts a day. And that's it. And then what, but the problem is with that free time, I just feel it. That's the other one. I just start writing books and I just make, you know, the question is, the real problem is we're not able to sit without a single word. Yeah. Yeah. So we keep ourselves busy. Yeah. But the studies that show this, remember that famous study where they asked people if you'd rather sit and wait 15 minutes or give yourself an electric shock.

1:28:54And a staggering amount of people gave themselves the electric shock because they're rather some stimulation and sitting there. They'd ever tell you the story about my entry into LA. Oh my God. That's the passport there. Yeah. Well, I went through that a week ago. Did you? They put me in immigration for five, five, six hours. I lost my passport, but I've been in that twice now. And you can't touch your phone. You can't touch your phone. You can't, they, they, so they sat me down for nine hours to find the reason why they shouldn't let me in. And then they put me in detention for 37 hours. Best 37 hours of my life because I walked in and I immediately said silent retreat.

1:29:37I'm just going to meditate and sleep and relax and rest. Okay. And I would do eight hours of silence and then get up and joke with the word one word for security people. Okay. By the way, it's, you know, the system that put me there. It's not the people. And I would get up and joke with them and then sit for eight hours of silence. Practically, though, how does someone who's listening to this now that has built that life, you know, where they're in the corporate world and they're the managing director of this fund or whatever they are. They're listening to this now. They're on the way to work on the tube or the plane or the train or whatever.

1:30:11And they've built up all of these like commitment. So they're getting the WhatsApp. They're getting the emails. They're getting the Pilates instructor checking you. They've built that noise into their life. How do they set about unpacking it without like destroying their life? You can do it granularly or you can do it at macro levels. So limit. Remember limit. Learn and listen. Limit. The first module. The first ability is what can I limit 80 % of that person's life is not needed. Okay. 80 % of the money unless you give your money to charity is a waste of resources. Because you cannot buy. You cannot enjoy two cars at the same time.

1:30:51You cannot enjoy two beds at the same time. You cannot. Simple. Really. And the trick is this. You can add the micro level. Tell yourself. I met when I was in my chief business officer of Google X. I met this wonderful CEO who, you know, basically I appeared so chill. And I asked him and I said, how are you so chill? And he said, I do only four meetings a day. I said, I'm going to be at most each is an hour. Okay. Nothing less. Nothing more. And I said, how? And he said, I'm a CEO. If I do meetings that are shorter than an hour, they're too operational. Okay. If I do meetings that are longer than an hour, they haven't figured it out yet.

1:31:35Okay. I'm so sorry Steve, but how much of your business can be run by Oliver? Okay. You know, your CEO should run that business. But but but again, I don't want to limit this to the top business people of the world. How much of your life? As a salesman. So my sales team would work would walk into my my review meetings. And they would present 12 opportunities every week. And I would go like, okay, I'm going to focus on number one. And number four, don't talk to me about the other 10. They go like, why? Why? Why it's this is like a billion dollars of business. And I'm like, yeah, but this is enough.

1:32:15Those are more difficult. Those customers are interested. We can serve them better. If you serve them better, you're going to close the deal. Right. Go do two. And by the way, if there are 12, we should hire more salespeople. But if you focus on two, you'll do 110 % of your target. What's better than that? And normally what ends up happening is they focus, they continue to focus on all 12. And you know what happens? That portfolio approach. Reality hits. You're running a portfolio. So that 10 of them will fail and two will run will happen. You lose the 10. That's the reality. Right. You're spreading yourself so thin that that that 10 of them are not getting your attention anyway.

1:32:57They're just bothering you in the back of your mind. And you lose the 10. So instead of two, run three 50 % buffer. Okay. Devil's advocate again here. I'm thinking about the listener who every entrepreneur that they admire, every person they admire lies. It's lies and you're contributing to it, my friend. I'm trying to. I'm really trying to. How many of those people we know all of them. How many of them are happy? Oh my god. That's a different question. How many of them are well? So here's what I was going to say is when you hear about the people you admire and that first year or two in starting the thing that they went on to do that maybe even gives them fulfillment now.

1:33:41You know, all of those people will say there was no work I've balanced at the start. We had to work really hard. And that's just the way it is. I was working in a call center. I was building my business on the side. I had to work until midnight or also what could expect that? I couldn't have left the call center. I respect that's me. That's why I tell people I go. You're not working in the course center anymore. I'm not. No. But for that first year or two, fine. If you want to do it, year or two, fine. Okay. Fine. But the lie is it's never ending. I told you, for every one of us, not just you, there's no ceiling.

1:34:14There's no preview. There's no pre plan of when I reach this, it's enough. 20 trips is enough. Yeah. Okay. You know what happens when you when you limit yourself to 20 trips. Your value becomes higher. Yeah. You make the same amount of revenue. Okay. You know what happens when you limit yourself to two deals. You serve the customer better. You know what happens when you limit yourself to five friends. They become real friends. You go out and meet them instead of text them. So you're saying cancel the third podcast away. You're going to do a third podcast. I've been trying to build an Arabic podcast for a while.

1:34:58Yeah. Which I have to say is needed in the region. Yeah. Okay. Really needed the region of 350 million people. And in reality, I'm one of the few that can run an Arabic podcast. That's a successful slow mo. Right. But the cost of that podcast is my health. So there will be a moment in my life where one of my projects will be handed over. The Arabic podcast will show up. But I sat with the person that I was working on this with and I said, look. Just it's not going to be right. If I do it now, 52 more episodes a year beyond my capabilities. Think about one kick ass diary of the CEO a week. Does that slash your sponsorship revenue by half?

1:35:46I wouldn't even know. I wouldn't even know this is this is the truth. People might not believe it's the truth. But the sponsorship revenue is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. I think when we started for the first three years, we said I said to the team of the team know this because they all get to see the bank accounts and stuff. I said to them, if we make any money from this, we put it back into the show. Now we've obviously we make more money than we can put into the show. So it's like I see the message in our Slack channel that we've made this much money from the podcast or whatever else.

1:36:15But obviously the impact of that is. I mean, what does it mean? We can hire more people. We can have a studio in LA and in America at the same time. We can buy a big boat or by a fleet. I'm never going to buy a boat because I'm so busy. I'm talking about the fishermen. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. No, so the real question is if you if you allowed yourself to measure a different objective, not the number of listeners, but the impact on every listener. Okay. No, no, no, not the number of guests, but the quality of guests. Right? Not the number of topics, but the topics that you believe in.

1:37:01And how does that look over the long term? So you're saying you'd get to the same place over the long term. You'll not become Steve Jobs. When I say get to the same place, my my rebuttal in my brain was like, because we built a platform, people like you, when you've got something good, good to talk about like your books, you came. And we had that incredible conversation episode 101, my favorite conversation of all time. That was a byproduct of us fighting high to build a platform where you felt all the way. So whoever's decision it was. I'm assuming it's so you're saying that because you're doing two two episodes a week, by the way, when I did one one, it was one episode a week.

1:37:41But because you're doing two episodes a week, you're enabling more people to have a channel to speak. Right? There are 62 ,000 books written last year. You need to step up your game. If you want to serve all books. No, I don't want to sell all books. I just want to get you. So the question really is again, what's the scenic? How many good books can you spread here? Right? I mean, when you look at slow mo, I do the opposite of what you do. So a very interesting part of what I do with slow mo is I rarely ever get a celebrity. It's a podcast by the people for the people if you want sort of like a lot of people who listen and say, I can relate to this.

1:38:24This is part of my story. And the game here is that's 7 .8 million possible guests. Billion, sorry. Right? That's impossible. Impossible. Okay. The question truly is, what do I want to stand for? I mean, there are so many ways I can grow slow mo. Is that what I stand for? Why do I want to grow it? I mean, look at my Instagram and your Instagram. This is a very interesting conversation. My Instagram, I think is 150 ,000 people or something. Yours is what? 15 million, resilient, gazillion, something like that. No. I don't know. But I have a very large number. Right? What difference does it make?

1:39:15Well, you said to me, you said you want to make a million people unstressed. Yeah. A billion people are happy or whatever. It's my ambition. But do I have to do that? Or do people listening to this? Are people listening to this going to tell other people about this so that they come and listen to this? Right? But, you know, if this podcast had six listeners, probably when it chose it for your book tour. I would have chosen a thousand of them. That's not right. But the question really is very straightforward. The question is, you're there already. Yeah. I understand that. This is why I ask, like, what's the bullshit I'm telling myself?

1:39:56Because I do realize that there's some kind of bullshit I'm telling myself at a deep level about why I need to work hard. And it's clearer to me now more than ever that the cost is significant. And the reward is not clear. It's diminishing. Yeah. Well, I don't even know what the reward is. The most rewarding thing I do, you've identified as this. Yeah. It's the most impactful thing I do. So I think you'll appreciate the most. It opens so many minds. It's a wonderful part of people's life. It is this. So I ask myself, why don't I just do this? Because there are 40 other companies that I'm involved in as an investor or six or seven that I founded.

1:40:38And before you were sat there today, there was a founder. An hour before you arrived of another business that I'm involved in. And I co -founder of all we were talking about funding in this plan, in this plan, in this plan. And I do go, well, what insanity is this? And I know it's not just me. Like it's a lot of people out there that have engaged in this like voluntary insanity of overstressing their lives. The addiction of stress is you describe it in the book. And a lot of us, as I said earlier, like we know it's insanity when we zoom out and think about it. It's a lot. But there's something so tempting about the addiction.

1:41:14It's the only script that you know. Yeah. So I keep telling myself when there was a time, if you really dig deep back in probably 2009, I did a public talk somewhere and it was filmed. And they asked me, what is your life's purpose? And I said, my life's purpose is to help startups build technology that is as complex as Google outside the Western world. So specific, you very, very interesting thinker. Truth is, I am not that person. Right? Why did you say that? Because at the time, I was in a system where I was very good at helping startups. But it wasn't my life's purpose. Okay. And as a result, I coached 50 startups a week.

1:42:04When I used to go to California, I used to say to tell me from the number of startups that needed my time, I used to say I'm going to be in Blue bottle cafe on university avenue between 11 and 6 p .m. or 5 p .m. on Sundays, come over, catch me and I'll try to help you. And I would meet 15, 20 of them every single week. Right? Why? It's not my life's purpose at all. I focus my life now on things that are very different. I'm happy as well being, you know, and it wasn't me that chose this path by the way. That purpose was, chose me by by the highly leaving the world. And at the moment where I was ready.

1:42:50Okay. That's what that's and what does that mean? It means that I had to leave Google X. I had to leave a career around being an angel investor and being this and being that. And you know, now people text me and say, oh, I have this new startup and I really need you to invest. And I say, I don't invest. Period. Why? Because investment is not giving someone some money. Investment is a call every four hours. Hey, we have this opportunity. We have a run. Who wants that? Okay. And the real question is, and I say it was with worry that a lot of people might have already switched off the podcast by now.

1:43:27Okay. It's a big lie. The whole endless cycle of growth and progress is a big lie. It's the reason why we're allowing AI into our life without thinking of the dangers of AI. Because it's a big lie. More is better. Faster is better. More progress is better. Is it?

1:43:53Is it? Is it? There is a point until which we've done really well with increased life expectancy because of technology from I think it was 37, 100 and some years ago to now 70 some or 80 some I don't know. Right. We've increased human life expectancy. But when my wonderful friend Peter demand is wants to increase life infinitely or Ray Kurzweil says you know the technology can make us live live forever. Really? Do I want to live forever? Right? Why do I want to live forever? Is there a fear of death that I need to deal with? Is there a childhood story that I need to look into? And the real question is everything is positive until you have too much of it.

1:44:47Stress itself is positive unless you let it linger forever.

1:44:58AI really is going to change the world and it's interesting how this kind of coalesces with the subjective stress. I saw the founder of Klaner said recently about his company. He said that AI is now doing the equivalent of 800 customer service jobs at Klaner and there was a report that came out in the UK saying that about 8 million UK jobs were vulnerable to AI. And it's now we're now moving into an area where things are going to be apparently a lot easier and ease has always been the temptation that lures us into. Easier for who? For the ones that are hiring the AI or the ones that lost their jobs?

1:45:39Well I was thinking about the we talk about productivity when we're saying it easier. We say, you know, company is going to be more productive. People are going to be more productive. But does productive mean more more? More less. So that the consumer gets it cheaper or that the founder makes more money? I guess the promise as I hear it is both. We'll be able to bring down the cost of things. You know, so that. I mean, I love how the simple lie of the true value of money is ignored in all of this. You see the whole the whole idea of less or more. I mean, how much is a as a British pound? Is it, you know, one and a bit dollars?

1:46:34What is it for free when your bank prints it on their machines through fraction reserve to give it to someone so that this someone pays it back with interest? What is money? And the real question is, could our economies, when you really strip our economies from money, could our economies behave, operate on the fact that we mine something, turn it into something, give it to someone. And the entire, if we changed all of the of the economic chain of the currency that's going through from dollars to something else would that make any difference at all? The reality of the matter is that if you if you created a company that built products, sold them at the end of the year, paid all of the salaries of the employees and gave you a reasonable profit.

1:47:29Why does it have to grow 2 % every year or 5 % or 20 %?

1:47:37It has to grow because the economy based on debt requires that we create more GDP next year than last year so that we pay the debt. If you add it all up, if you're borrowing a thousand and he's borrowing a thousand and the economy this year needs to pay a thousand to 100 next year, the GDP next year needs to become a thousand to 100 instead of the 1000. Right. So we're all following a cycle and we're in that big lie that says we need more productivity and you need more productivity. No, we don't. Before those cycles of money, if we really are talking about changing the world, before those cycles of money, griptus, all you needed to do as a shoemaker is to make two shoes so that you can trade them for 14 eggs.

1:48:24And the guy that had the hands needed to create 28 eggs so that he can get one shoe and a couple of vegetables. And that was it. There was no inflation. There was no, you see that the whole trick is that we get engaged in the details and I don't undermine technology in any way. It's changed our life. It's the reason you and I are able to talk to people now. Until a certain point of growth and progress is useful, beyond that certain point of growth and progress, it works against you. Too much of anything is bad. If you could press a button now and stop AI, I would 100 % do it. Really 100%. We talked about this last time, but obviously a lot's happened since we last spoke in the last nine months.

1:49:10I mean, there's become a real AI race globally, Microsoft, Facebook. Have you used Cheshire PT recently? Yeah, I've used the old one. The voice engine one they really suggested. Well, I've used it through a software called 11 Labs, actually invested in a company called Wonder Labs, Wondercraft. Sorry, Wondercraft AI that do voice synthesizing, etc. But did you see yesterday opening? I released their voice engine. Yeah. Which did you ask me a question about AI? Ask you a question about AI. Will AI end up replacing podcasters? Great question. Well, it's hard to say for sure, but AI is getting pretty advanced.

1:49:57While it's possible that AI could handle some aspects of podcasting, like generating content or even hosting shows, it's unlikely to fully replace human podcasters. People enjoy the personal touch and unique perspectives that humans bring to the table. But you sound very human to me. I mean, I wouldn't be able to tell if you were not a human. If someone didn't tell me that you're an AI, I mean, is there a way where we can actually ensure that AI is presented as a machine instead of being presented as so human like you are? I appreciate the compliment. Creating AI voices that sound less human like is definitely possible.

1:50:40Developers can adjust parameters like tone, cadence and intonation to make AI sound more machine like if that's the goal. It's all about finding the right balance between clarity and naturalness. Let me ask you a question. If AI continues at the current rate of improvement, is it true that at some point in the future, it will be indistinguishable from a human? It's a possibility, but it's also a topic of debate among experts. While AI has made significant strides in mimicking human light behavior, achieving complete indistinguishability from humans would require solving complex challenges related to emotions, creativity and consciousness, which are still areas of active research and debate.

1:51:28I feel like it's lying to me. Correct. Because mathematically, if something, if you assume just any improvement of a technology eventually, that continues, right? I understand your point. Predicting the future of AI involves a lot of uncertainties and variables. So it's essential to approach it with a critical mindset. While mathematical models can help us understand trends and possibilities, they can't account for all the factors that influence technological progress and human behavior. It's so interesting that they've been programmed to be so diplomatic. And it's creepy diplomatic. Yeah, it's a politician.

1:52:12But the question really is, have you seen the movie Hur? No. Basically, if I didn't tell you that this was a human, if I told you this was a call center agent, you'd be able to tell the difference. The other problem that most people don't realize is if I told you that chat GPT was text -based, just six to nine months ago, and now it's able to do language processing without a mistake. I'm saying she, the machine understands every part of the words that I say. I can switch between languages. So sometimes I speak half Arabic, half English. In Arabic, I tell her, don't speak to me in high Arabic, speak to me in Egyptian slang.

1:52:57And she literally speaks like an 18 -year -old. Did you see what happened? Did you see Tudai Zaghan? They released the voice engine. Yeah, and now it sounds exactly like you. I have an avatar. I'm speaking at a Bondence 360. They had an avatar of me that looked like me and sounded like me 100%. It actually made sense. So the voice engine for anyone that doesn't know is OpenAI released a three or four days ago. They said they released a new piece of technology that can take 15 seconds if your voice. And basically perfectly clone it so that you can say anything with just 15 seconds as a reference.

1:53:30And it's so interesting. I read the full article and in the article they say, listen, we've got this technology now, but we're not sure whether we're going to release it. We're basically giving you a warning. There's they have four bullet points warnings in the in this article. They say, we've released this press release so that your bank has time to change their security system. So that voice is no longer away. Someone can get your bank account. They literally say like we're warning you. This is coming in the end of the article says we may or may not release this, but this is essentially a warning.

1:54:05For the world to change. Where's the ceiling? When do we take a stand and say, we actually don't need that. We won't. We won't. And you know we've done. Yeah. So this is why the world is going to become more and more stressful. And my promise, at least my hope is to tell the world that you can become unstraceable. I can't tell you that the world is going to be easier. I really cannot. But I really think that for every single one of us, the biggest task in the next two years is to find a way for you to handle all of those events. With calm and ease and peace as best as you can. Because it really is for me, Steve, I lived through this.

1:54:52This is these are this is my typical life that's pace of technology is my typical life for 25 years. Right. No, the world is changing. The world is changing economically. The world is changing relationship wise. I mean, if you don't mind me, think about dating. How to think about friendships. We moved from having to knock on my friend's door when I was young to go and play to being able to call them on the phone to be being able to text them to being able to text, you know, connect with them on social media. To now, so to the epidemic of loneliness that we have in the world today. Imagine how many of the next generation will have one of those as their friend.

1:55:42And you can talk about anything I was chatting with this machine yesterday morning about the difference between theory of relativity and string theory in definitions of gravity. Right. Or, you know, it is it and the answer was compelling. There was a product on product time, which is a tech website for anybody that doesn't know where it takes your history of your ex partner, your ex girlfriend, your ex boyfriend, it takes all of that processes all of it and allows you to continue the relationship after they dumped you. I speak for God. And there was a lot of conversation online whether this is after clonaut because these young people, these young girls and boys are downloading the entire chat history they had with their ex boyfriend and a girlfriend and they're continuing the relationship with AI.

1:56:28So AI is talking like that person did it is we need this. Or is it is the answer to stop everyone with a brain would answer you. We don't need it. But I think everyone with a brain would also probably say human incentives prove that we won't stop. The reason for all the challenges is not to serve us. Those challenges that we're facing are when someone tells you I'm building technology to make human life better. No, they're making technology to make more money. Do they need this more money? They don't. It was one of the illusions that they kind of think they're going to live forever or something.

1:57:12They think the legacy is going to live forever because they work so hard in this lifetime that they can have a spend anyway. I think money is that constant need for money is either insecurity or ego. And we as a society are struggling the insecurity and ego of money. America at large wants to be the most powerful nation in the world. That's ego. That's power. That's insecurity that if I'm not the most powerful nation in the world, they'll attack me. But is it not human as well because I've sat here with experts on the subject of status. One of my guests wrote a book on the subject of status. Well, store.

1:57:54And he basically makes the case that we're all sat, status seeking humans you and me. And that's hard -wired because we didn't want to be kicked out of the tribe. So we, you know, even if I'm not wearing Lou Vuitton anymore, I'm still playing a status game in some area of my life. I'm trying to have the best cameras. Of course, you know, but so the question is what position do you want in the tribe? Do you want to be the richest boy in the tribe? Do you want to be the kindest boy in the tribe? Do you want to be the most compassionate? Do you want to be the wisest? I told you before I want to die a billionaire.

1:58:24One billion happy is a capitalist movement. The only currency, the only difference is the currency is not dollars. A billionaire, a billion happy people. Now, you spoke about how technology might drop the cost of everything to zero literally to zero. Right? Because if we figure out a technology using, you know, additional intelligence as I describe it, artificial intelligence commoditizes intelligence. So you get a plug in the wall, you plug into it, you get 400 IQ points more. Right? If we use that to figure out energy. Right? And we simply generate energy for free because energy is abundant in the universe.

1:59:05Right? What does that mean? Does it mean that we can give that to the whole world? So products become mostly for free? Okay? Or do we give it to the person that built it so that they become gazillionaires while everyone else struggles? And the main mindset difference is a question, and I say that with respect, is a question of a world of abundance versus a world of scarcity. We competed most of us in our past in a world of scarcity were for Microsoft to win Lotus one to three had to shut down. Right? That's no longer needed. You know, there is enough for everyone. We can all win. But that shift from scarcity to abundance is a shift that you're struggling with.

1:59:54Okay? It's a shift of a question of what do we actually need in our life? Do we need 400 ,000 followers or do we need five friends?

2:00:08Because the cost of building five friends is takes away from having 400 ,000 followers. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is net suite. There also a sponsor of this podcast. Net suite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at flight studio.

2:00:45As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with net suite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business head to net suite dot com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning that's net suite dot com slash Bartlett. Do you think it's possible to build a billion dollar business? I'm thinking about some of my friends now while also living in the balanced way that you describe.

2:01:22No. So I've got a lot of friends that are the billionaires or building billion dollar companies. Do you think it's possible for any of them to be balanced in the way that is healthy while doing that? I think it's the wrong target to start. Okay. What if they didn't start with that target and it happened because they were good at like, I don't know, sewing something and then those people started buying that thing they sowed. Yeah. Yeah, it's still the wrong target to start. So building a billion dollar business is impossible for you to spend. The target of you saying I want to build a business that is a billion dollars within it.

2:02:02You know, if you take the very core of morality, it basically means I'm going to use resources and people to create wealth for myself. In a very interesting way, that's not a very moral thing. Right? If the objective is I'm going to build a billion users business, billion happy people initiative. Okay. And in the process, I'm going to invite others to come within that conversation. And as I invite them to come in, the objective is to make a billion people happier or the objective is to make a billion people get food in Africa or whatever that is. And in the process, I will be rich and wealthy.

2:02:46It's very different. Okay. So it's about what you're aiming at. Yeah. It's where you're headed. And because when we head somewhere, regardless of your Stephen Bartlett or if you're an accountant, you know, working on tax accounting. Okay. If your mind says, I'm going to maximize every minute of my day by doing more accounting files. More tax reports and so on. Your life might never end. You might get into that hamster wheel. And yeah, you're going to triple your revenue at the end of the year for what end? And for humanity at large, the capitalist system assumed a world of scarcity. Where I am increasing my wealth, either for insecurity because I'm afraid I might lose it.

2:03:35Or I'm increasing it for my ego, so that I buy a better yatur, better car than my other rich friend. Okay. Forgetting that it is no longer the truth. The truth is with more intelligence, we can harvest the fruits of building things almost for free. But we won't break the capitalist system. Okay. As a result of that, you could literally solve hunger. You could literally end cancer. You could literally do anything you want reverse climate change. If you made that the objective, but the capitalist system will tell you, no, the objective is to give, to give, to create, to make Elon Musk's $200 billion wealth, trivial compared to the next trillionaire.

2:04:26Wrong objective. It's the wrong object. What are we paying for it? Okay. As individuals who are paying our well -being, as rich billionaires, all of them are miserable. They make a lot of money. They are all very difficult to say, but many of them, the many that I know are miserable. Most of them are very stressed. They don't know how to stop. And for the planet, for the planet, we're consuming it. They don't know how to stop is exactly the way I describe it. I remember meeting a particular billionaire in the north of England and sitting in his office. The first time I met a billionaire, and I asked him, I spoke to his family first.

2:05:10His family was like, Dad's not happy. Dad's really unhappy. And then I met him, and I just stared at him, and I was like, this is a human being who has lost control of, like, he knows he's not happy. But he can't get off the monopoly table. Yeah. He can't. And there's so many people listening to this now. I did a post the other day on my Instagram about my own predicament. And it was the most messages I've ever had. And the most people that reached out to me, either saying they related or in some degree concerned. And I was just expressing that I'd, like, basically learnt the candle at both ends in my life.

2:05:45I'd taken on too much. I'd worked myself into the ground and ended up staying up for two days in a row to write this thing, to deliver this speech, et cetera, et cetera. And there was a photo of me with, like, my head and my hands. And I posted it because I'd just taken off on this plane and I saw the photo. I thought, I saw such a great photo that was taken. I'll explain the story of the photo. And my DMs were inundated with people going, that is me. I've taken on too much in my life. I've built up too many obligations and responsibilities. I've taken this promotion. I have these team members now.

2:06:13And there's something inside of me that's going, this is just too much. And because of the external narrative, the external expectation, I'm held in place. I can't get off this thing that I've, this merry go round. That's absolutely the wrong use of language. You can get off it if you make it your target. So if I told you, Steve, I love you so much. You're really, I call my brother, right? If I told you I love you so much, you're my brother. Your objective for next year is to be unstressed by the end of the summer. This year or next year? This year. Think again, achieve that? Could I achieve that 100%.

2:06:56100%. 100%. Listen, learn and limit. You're simply, you're simply going to say, OK, limit. I'll just write down a million things that I'm doing every day. I'm going to delegate half a million of them. I'm going to cancel 200 ,000 of them. And I will eventually face the remaining ones to 2000 a week. It's interesting because when you say it, so I'm thinking now about everyone listening to this. I'm thinking through that question to them. If you told them to put themselves in a position by the end of the year, where they weren't stressed, there is a significant amount of them, not all of them, but there is a significant amount of them that think, you know what?

2:07:37I think I could actually do that. I want to press that with my objective. And the ones that will not think that way, that will be because they believe that their life circumstances, the events are making them stressed, which is true. But it's not only the events of your life that stress you. It's the way you deal with them. That does the equation is the event, the challenge divided by your... your resources, your abilities, your square area, like physics. Give more square area to carry the load and you'll be able to do it. So if you... it's not the events. If you invest in your abilities, you will be less stressed.

2:08:15There will never be a time in your life when you're not stressed at all. But you can definitely reduce it significantly. Is there a third group that are telling the truth? And because of their circumstances, you know, they actually couldn't become unstressed by the end of the year. They're working in a factory three jobs. They couldn't change the harshness of the events of their life. But they could change the way they deal with it. And how would they go about doing that? They take a simple example. A simple example is if you're stuck in a factory job, your life is harsh today. If you add to it an obsession that my life will always be harsh.

2:08:51You're more stressed because of the obsession, not because of the harshness of life. If you tell yourself, I am working day and night to feed my kids. But then add to yourself and say, the world is going to become much more difficult and my kids will starve. You created that stress. We didn't talk about one of my favorite parts of the book. It's what I call anticipation of stress. So we said, you break down under trauma, you break down under burnout, and you break down under anticipation of threats and challenges. That can worry and anxiety and panic. Exactly. It's fear and all of its derivatives.

2:09:30And it's so interesting when you really think about it fear, is a moment in the future is less safe than right now. By the way, you can do nothing about that moment in the future. You can plan for it, you can get ready for it. But until you reach it, you cannot react to it. When you're afraid, you try to limit the challenge or limit the threat. You think in your head about, if there is something that is going to be difficult, I'm going to lose my job in a year's time. You're going to try to save now. Interesting. These are the fears, not the tricky ones. The tricky ones are the derivatives. Worry, anxiety and panic.

2:10:11Worry is, I don't know if I'm going to lose my job in a year. I don't. It's not like I got a letter that says I'm going to lose my job in a year. And so you keep spending your cycles trying to save as if you're going to lose it. But that's not the right reaction. The right reaction is to verify if there is a reason to be afraid or not. So if you're worried, your reaction shouldn't be the reaction of a person who's afraid. Your reaction should be, I either need to decide, should I be afraid or should I drop this? What if I don't know? Then you spend your cycles trying to know. And what if I can never know?

2:10:50Because I'm thinking about some of my things that make me anxious and worry. Anxious is different. Okay. Anxiety is very different. Anxiety is actually your inability to deal with the threat. So you basically tell yourself, I have to report to my manager on Thursday about this deal. Okay. And I don't have any ability to actually prepare the report. I'm not skilled enough. Right. And again, if you deal with it as fear, I'm afraid to meet my manager. You're going to try to not meet your manager. If you deal with that reality of anxiety is it's my ability that is the issue. You're going to try to increase your ability.

2:11:31You're going to try to get someone to help you. Maybe that has the skill. If you're struggling with a bit of the finance in the middle, you're going to talk to your friend or at work who's capable of helping you with the spreadsheet, whatever. So you handle your abilities. Panic is different. Panic is a question of time. So fear is a question of a challenge. Hmm. What is a question of uncertainty? Anxiety is a question of your ability. And panic is a question of do I have enough time? Where does this fit then? Sometimes I have worries because I'll get some news or I'll get like an inclination that something bad is going to happen.

2:12:09I don't know necessarily when the date of the thing bad that might happen, but I get a tip off that something bad is going to happen. I don't know if it's definitely going to happen or when, but then I live in that sort of cycle of obsession that oh my god, it could happen today. Did it happen? I look at my phone. I go, is it happened yet? You know, let me give you a good example then of something that someone might worry about but not know the date but kind of not and not be not sure if it's going to happen. They've got an ill relative. This isn't just to be full transparency. I normally say assume they're going to die.

2:12:40And go live your life loving them. Give them all the love that you can. If you have someone that you worry is going to leave my mom, fell. Right? And she, yeah, she's now better. But it took such a long time. I could have spent that time in my head saying, but I'm going to lose her. Or I could fly to Cairo sit next to her and say, I love you very much. Turn the worry into certainty whether that's the best certainty or the worst century certainty. Okay? But then react to the certainty and she's recovering and I hope she will be running marathons. I hope. Right? But for that moment in time, instead of worrying about the certainty, putting my brain cycles into worry.

2:13:29Okay? I just assumed what would happen if I don't see her again. Fly, go see her. Stop your meetings. Stop your this. Go. Pour love on her. The only certainty you have around someone who is ill is that they're still here today. You know, the only certainty you have about your daughter getting into trouble when she's a teenager, is that your daughter is not in trouble now. Spend the time with her now. This is what life is all about. We spend those cycles being stressed. This is why I tell you, look, it is so entitled to sit here and talk about the problems of billions. The problems of the problems of technology and all of the progress and so on.

2:14:19When we forget that many of us are working two jobs and struggling with a relationship and, you know, stuck in long commutes and so on. Okay? And I wish that life is easier for them. I really, in my heart, do. But if it isn't because the external harshness of life is not within our control, the way we deal with it is within our control. The way we deal with it is, you know, even if it's the tiniest things, like, I'm working in the factory and it's such a horrible job, can I spend my break at the factory with my best friend? Okay? Can I, can I, you know, try to ease the challenge of the commute a little bit?

2:14:59Okay? Can I find a gratitude practice that says at least my kids are still going to school? Because by the way, if you, if you do those things, it's not going to take away the harshness of life, but it's going to ease it. Okay? And as you ease it, you're not going to be unstressed. You're going to be less stressed. Less stressed is better than more stressed. One of the things that helps to ease it is what you've described, which is love or 100%. And it's interesting because the first time we spoke, you were single. And I was pretty sure you were like this digital nomad that was going to be single forever.

2:15:34I was too. And then a little did I know you would meet someone and you would get married in 48 days, eight days. From the day you met them to the day you married them was 48 days. Now, if I said to you, if you'd waited 49 days or maybe six months, I proposed on day three.

2:15:59The engineering you, not the soft feminine side, right? The feminine energy. It wasn't the feminine side at all. But the logical engineering you and I'm playing double advocate here because you know, I have to present the argument. But I'm very happy for you. You know, I can be more happy for you. But I'm just saying when I saw that I thought to myself, my rebuttal would be if you'd waited 49 days, would that not have been better if you'd waited six months a year, two years? Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, one of the biggest things I struggle with in relationships is that the Western approach to relationships assumes that the longer you wait, the more you will know.

2:16:41And that basically assumes that it's the responsibility of the other person for you to be happy in your relationship. You understand that? So if I need to make sure that they're amazing so that this relationship works, that's entitled. And by the way, there is a massive difference between heading into a relationship and saying, I'm going to make this work. Right? Then heading into a relationship and saying, I'm going to see if that works. Now, Hannah, I call her the jackpot. Right? She might not be everyone's jackpot. But for me, because I've done so much work on myself, and because she's done so much work on herself, I hosted on her, I hosted her on my podcast.

2:17:33We were doing a mini series about love and romance. I mean, come on. Like, you know, we bump into each other in the streets. And literally around the corner and Marleybone somewhere. Right? And she looks at me and she goes, I know you. You're mo. And I'm like, I don't know. Are we? And like, how do I know you? And she said, no, you don't know me. Follow your work. I'm a friend of your friends, Carly. And you know, we spoke about you. And anyway, I love your work. I was like, curtsy, I said, so what do you do, Hannah? And she said, I'm a therapist. I'm working on, you know, this and that and so on.

2:18:06And I said, oh, so I was doing that mini series. Most of it was about, you know, the female female side, if you want, a woman falling in love. So most of my guests were talking about the women in relationships. There wasn't a mini series. What was that? Anyway, so she came up with a mini series of the spot. Yeah, she talks about men in relationships. So anyway, I'm sitting there for an hour and a half in front of that woman. And everything she says is like, oh my God, that's exactly everything I have noticed within me. Notice, the first thing she says is she says, we date our potential. We date them thinking they can make us better.

2:18:50Okay, they can't. The only way you can become better is for you to work on who you are. And if you're ready, then love will be very easy. Right? So I basically find someone, Jackpot, for me, who, after all of the work I've done in my life, knowing exactly what I want and what I don't want, I meet someone that actually fits. Three days in, she could have just been masquerading. Yes. And if that's the case, then the marriage wouldn't last too long. Right? And 48 days is more than enough to know someone. But you're trying to marry her in three. Yeah. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. Right? But because we decided to do that, at the time, by the way, I had been so through so many such challenging relationships, because they didn't fit me, that I decided I will never again touch a woman.

2:19:47Unless I'm absolutely certain I wouldn't live in the first six months. Not a big target when you really think about it. But my thinking process was, if I'm not certain that it will last six months, I'm not going to start. Right? But if it lasts six months, it should last a lot longer. I feel like it's important to say here, you're not suggesting other people do this. I'm suggesting that people flip their mindset from, I'm going to see if this works. Okay? Two, I'm going to only engage in a relationship if I know for a fact that there is a high probability it will work. Okay? And I'm saying this, believe it or not, to men as much as women.

2:20:31Because we, men, sadly, there is no reason to generalize. But in general, we're motivated by things that are sometimes less than love. Okay? Proficial. Yeah, so in reality, there is a lot of junk food that comes in relationships, junk relationships. Yeah, they seem to have intimacy and sexuality and so on, but they tax you more than they feed you. Right? And the reality is that for most men, we don't recognize that because the cost of switching seems to be, yeah, if you're successful and you're desired, you can have another woman in three weeks time. Right? If you're in that mindset and that's a horrible mindset.

2:21:19For one side of it is that you end up, you yourself are really its junk. Okay, it's not healthy for you. And from a morality point of view, you're using a person for your confusion. Okay? The, the, the, what I'm suggesting for people to do is to actually refuse to enter a relationship until you actually know for a, for a, for a reasonable level of conviction that this person is not junk for you. Because by the way, this person could be junk for you, but not junk for others. But this person is not junk for you. It requires you to know you. And I, I'm telling you openly, I knew for a, I know you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna think I'm mad, but I'm a mathematician.

2:22:12So when I knew what I wanted in a woman, the possibility of finding that woman was one in eight million, 737 ,000 women. Mathematically, you can easily calculate that if you, if you want something in a, in someone that is one available in one in ten, and something else that's available in one in five, you're now looking at one in 50, right? If another thing that's available in one in 20, you're looking in one in a thousand, right? And the mathematics are very straightforward. You find someone that actually is one in eight million, 737 ,000, you go like, okay, I'm buying that stock. And I have been the happiest person truly and honestly, I, she, she listens to my podcast.

2:22:57So she probably will listen to this one. She's made me the happiest person. She's made me a better person. Okay. And she truly and honestly made me focus on life differently, serve life differently. Right? And that's the value of having someone who's not junk in your life. By the way, I don't mean that, that, that's the, the woman I had in my life, by the way, all over junk. I had amazing women that blessed me. But I had a lot of junk too. Right? So that no one who's blessed me before gets upset. I had amazing women that blessed me. We were just not perfect matches. Right? When you know what you want, when you've done the work on yourself, it's actually much easier to find love than it is when you're just, you know, randomly with a machine gun trying to shoot and hit someone.

2:23:48That's such a big when, because so many people, you know, I mean, I was thinking of so many people that I, that I know that I'm currently struggling to find the person and much of it. And even in my case, I'd probably speak about myself first is the person that I eventually found who is 100 % my future wife. And I feel this same way when you talk about Hannah as I do with my partner. That happened when I changed. Exactly. And then I had so much money on the way there. Exactly. You were believing that. I had so much junk food on the way there. I think is an internal job. You work on yourself. You work on yourself.

2:24:30If you get to the point where, when you, where you would date you, you'll find the person that you're looking for. It's an internal job. And it's really interesting when you think about it that, you know, again, men. It's not a secret that in, in many other relationships in my past, I would question and say, do I really want to be with one woman for the rest of my life? Yes. Yeah. But it's so interesting when you say, when you suddenly say, oh my god, this is so healthy and delicious. I really don't like the junk. And I don't like the risk of more junk. I don't like the risk of trying and then ending up in a relationship, right?

2:25:23So there is a cost. I always reflect on my friends. I've got a couple of friends, male and female. That are serial data. They're doing 100 days here. They're doing through week. And I know from a, like a probabilistic standpoint, I'm like, you must have met a perfectly good one along the way somewhere. But there's something going on in the, in a psychology that's, that's making you miss the person over and over and over again. And then I've got, you know, they might say, I'm just really picky or all these guys are, you know, no, no, no, no. So I think the, again, you know, so one of the things that Hannah teaches me from therapy is that we run on scripts.

2:26:01Okay. So you come to the, to this world with a perfectly balanced machine. And then you get conditioned into scripts. Those scripts become your narrative, your lens through which you see the world. And, you know, if you, if you come from a family that is avoidant, you know, attachment avoidant, you'll, you'll, you'll think that this is the way relationships are. If you, if you, if you as a child was not given attention, for example, you think that life, love doesn't exist or that love is conditional or you, you know, and you take those scripts. And you believe them fully. You believe them fully.

2:26:40You, you, you look through the lens of the world and believe them fully until someone shows up and tells you, no, that's actually not true at all. Right. Your choice then is to tell yourself, I'm wrong and go into the unknown. We said we like familiarity, even if it's painful. Okay. Your choices to take that and go into the unknown and say, maybe my script was wrong. Okay. And then you will change only then an internal job. Right. So my, my challenge was, and I say that with a lot of respect, and I'm not every woman is like that. But the woman that showed up in my life, didn't take accountability.

2:27:21In my very highly engineered approach, okay, to life in general, to logic in general, I don't mind if someone does something that hurts me. I just want them to wake up in the next morning and say, you didn't deserve that. Right. And I created a script in my brain that said, all women are like that. It's the wrong script for a fact or a fact it's a wrong script, but I convinced myself of it. Okay. And then Hannah pops up and says, Hey, by the way, what I did yesterday, I think that was really not your fault. Right. You said this and it triggered me, but it triggered me. She's a therapist. Right.

2:28:03It triggered me because my original programming means that when you say this, it means that, Hey, by the way, you know, it was nice of you to to hug me and not get upset about it. Oh my God, I'll keep you forever. Right. That's the point is she had to challenge my script. And when those people are constantly moving from one to the next, the script is could be, you know, I relationships don't last. Okay. I need constantly assurance that I'm desired, you know, to be to be valued. My relationship is a prison, specifically 100%. You know, are they? Well, I learned that from watching my mom and my dad.

2:28:44So I thought my dad was in prison, basically. So I probably was from reading your first book. Yeah, he probably was. So I had this avoidant behavior because I have our relationships. I thought he had lost his freedom. So I avoided every relationship until someone got over the wall. Yeah. And made your really made her relationship with you, your freedom. Yeah. She was, she was exactly what you said. She wrote the script. So she got over the wall, which I put up very big wall. She got over the wall. And from inside, she managed to teach me a lesson. I probably didn't want to learn. I was reluctant to learn, which is that relationship's art prison.

2:29:17In fact, they're very much the opposite. If it's a good one. Exactly. The actual. We're in couples therapy because sometimes I'll get I'll get triggered. When I say triggered, I mean, like she might do something through level, because you know, one of her needs of being in met, and I might interpret it as an impingement on my freedom. And so I kind of shut down a little bit. And I try and like get my freedom back. Yeah. So Hannah and I are working on finders keepers. Finally, I think that's the version that will come out love and romance book. And we'll probably release it as a training first before a book.

2:29:56But anyway, the thing that she talks about is she, you know, she basically tells you if there is a repetitive behavior in your relationships with different people. That basically means the only constant is you. The trigger of that really behavior is you. And so it's so useful for us to look back at relationships and go like, what is my regular behavior? My cycle. Yeah. And if you notice that you need to start to tell yourself interestingly, then this is my issue, the most interesting part of triggered, the word triggered, is that if an event happens and you get triggered, you're not triggered by the event.

2:30:40You're triggered by the event magnified by the lens of your trauma. So you look at the event he said or she said, and you look at it through your lens of trauma and translate it into his cheating. I wrote actually an unstressedable. I wrote about a relationship with one wonderful woman that I had in my life, who was quite calm and very, very composed and contented. And we were having friends over, including two hours of our best friends, a couple. He was one of my best friends. She was one, you know, he was one of her best friends. And his girlfriend was really in our life all the time. They came late, you know, it was several people.

2:31:24She asked me and said, Mo, can I ask you something, please? And then we sat in a different room, open room. And she started to say, you know, we had this argument before we came and I need to understand what he meant by that and so on and so forth. And she was crying. Okay. And then she put my head on my shoulder as she was crying. My ex, my girlfriend at the time walks in and literally that calm, wonderful, like very calm woman goes like, take your hands off my menu, be the beward. Right. And everyone is like, what? We've never seen her on calm. Right. And, you know, we sat down and we she was a mature wise woman.

2:32:10Okay. But you're in terms of her, you know, abilities to understand. She said, I was in triggered just by you. I was triggered because my ex boyfriend cheated on me with a friend. Right. And so what what what that position happened, what that situation triggered was her past, not me and that person. Wind from the past. Yeah. And we do that all the time. We are the only constant. And this is why I mean when when I was hosting her now on my podcast, when she said that, I found myself, I swear I'm not making this. I found this very clear voice in my head saying, God, please make her mine. And for some reason, I had that very strong conviction that I need to shape up.

2:32:57Okay. She does too, by the way. And everyone always will with we're on that constant journey of improvement, but the interesting turning point is when you take that accountability and you say, no, it's just it's not just because of them that I'm failing. By the way, them I'm attracting because who I am if I work on who I am. And suddenly someone will show up that matches the new me. And I guess one of the ways we come up on who we are is by the coming and stressful. Yes, I love how we come to speak about a certain book and then we talk about. What did we talk about today? We talk about a .m. Yeah, and we didn't speak about stress a little bit.

2:33:47It's all interconnected though. It is all interconnected. I'm to chat with you. That's how it is. And I did read a study, which is also featured in your book a couple of years ago that showed I think I've got a rendown here somewhere. Yeah, I read a study that showed. It was a study of 150 people from Detroit and found that those who experienced major stressful events increased their risk of death by 30%. However, the risk was negated for individuals who reported high rates of helping others even under stress because their support networks are stronger. Connect connection truly and honestly when we talk about spiritually stressed in the very end of the book, which is a very difficult chapter to explain to people because not everyone is spiritual.

2:34:31Spirituality in our description here is your connection to your non -physical form. And it's quite interesting because your non -physical form is not an individual. And so accordingly, your connection to the rest of being is so fundamental to feeling safe as a tribe, be it or not, humanity did not succeed because we were the most intelligent being on the planet. We succeeded because we could work together. Right? The only true survival instinct in humanity is can I fit within the tribe? You understand? And so that human connection is the ultimate way of triggering your parasympathetic nervous system to tell you things are okay.

2:35:19And that's when stress goes down. Welcome to the machine trigger unhappy carrying the T O N N, which is the frame what we talked about. It's in your head feel to heal your hips don't lie and sore and then in part three we have the unstressable. It is a wonderful book. It is a timely book as it is a book written by two exceptional individuals yourself and Alice law who's a stress management coach international speaker, podcaster and co author of the law of brand attraction. Alice works privately with clients internationally as well as with large corporations and brands such as RBS and the net. I met her briefly beforehand both of you are exceptional and as you said it's a young and young approach to our trade.

2:35:59It really is. I think that's my favorite part of the book is yeah we're so different are approached with the same mission so it's really beautiful. But I think that's the only way that this book could have been written because I think people typically sit on one side of that in terms of how their brain thinks I'm a bit of a engineer, a bit of mathematician logical and even my partner she's the opposite she's got a feminine and spiritual she's softish and pathetic and it's the nuance in the coming together which creates the truth I think. I love the way we wrote it together as well so we would we would get together at the beginning of every chapter regardless of who's writing it and agree sort of the structure.

2:36:35And then you know we would edit each other's chapters afterwards and my chapters are really concise and brief bullet points equations some logic that's it. And when I read Alice's work I go like where is she going with this? It's a very different writing style but you know from our early readers the feminine of those who read it just completely registered with it and the thing is even I as I read through like 70 % of the page and I feel something in my heart. Not in my head very very interesting actually so it's been a very joyful partnership I think for me and I think when complimented the part of me that wouldn't have been written in the book if I wrote it alone.

2:37:18A practical guide to stress free living and you can order it right now because it's not very very seen in just a couple of days so I'll put the link to the book below and stressable and I highly recommend everybody goes and checks it out because it is a fantastic book and it's a timely book. So if you are someone that is interested in stress free living which is something that's front of mind for me after this conversation and please do get this book because there won't be a better book written on this subject matter. You're so kind thank you. Is there anything as it relates to stress that you think was really important that we didn't cover.

2:37:50The concept of unstressable I think it's it is so important to understand that this is not about distressing right a lot of the approach to to stress is either through western medicine by saying okay you know your stress let's help you distress a little bit right if you know or through even practice like you know try to meditate so that you calm down or try to. Relax and walk in nature that's not the objective the objective is how can you reconfigure yourself. So that stress doesn't occur it's a long a slightly longer path so there is nowhere in unstressable where we tell you well if you're feeling stressed because of a B and C at work go eat a vegetable and do this and that and you feel less stressed we're constantly telling you if you do this and that.

2:38:44When work stresses you not going to stress you anymore when you know if you think in the same in this way or go to the mind gym as we call it right when thoughts attack you you're not going to be stressed the same way right I think that's the shift that I keep saying in this conversation is that we're trying to say a lot of time you know the times we're living are going to become more and more stressful we might as well prepare so this is not about you. So you know you know resting it's about you going to the gym it's about you actually getting fit so that that you're capable of carrying the load.

2:39:21I mentioned you mom and your brother yeah. Happened at a very my brother and my sister actually so my sister in law my my brother's wife but 42 years together I love her like a sister truly I didn't ever had a sister and I was it we were not together when so my brother got diagnosed with cancer.

2:39:46Back in summer and and actually one of the biggest shifts in my life believe it or not because I was recording the BBC Maestro training at the time very intensive you know a big crew we booked four days to to do it or five I don't remember but basically you know it's important and uncommitted and then they won I get the new year. And I was using the time risk that goes to cancer that it's actually serious they're going to have a surgery two days later and yeah I had to stop and fly to meet him because I actually didn't know if I was going to meet him again. And he surgery went well we started to do immunotherapy because he had multiple cancers that were not easy to treat anyway he recovered very positively and then and then beginning of the year he had some kind of a digestive issue he had a tumor in his.

2:40:52Yes somewhere in his digestive system that was actually totally been I had nothing to do with the cancers right but then the stress his lovely wife my sister just collapsed under the stress and basically at heart attack in the intensive care unit of the hospital and we lost. The sweetest human being on the planet like I think that was the biggest shock Steve I'll tell you open I mean a couple of or three weeks later my brother left to which. You know so interesting because you can imagine that somehow they didn't want to live without each others right but but the thing is that Sahara my sister and I when she left.

2:41:37I honestly and truly have never been shocked back to reality as much as this I was talking about Ali dying several times Sahara dying so suddenly. Like what are we doing with our lives honestly what are we doing with our lives what should you know should I have gone to Egypt to see them. Five times more every year rather than do five more talks 100 % 100 % it is so clear when you look in hindsight that what we dedicate our life to is not the right object right that means I want to stop one billion happy and spend time with my family no I can be so much more effective with one billion happy. Right I can have this conversation with you and I treat you millions of people.

2:42:32Right it's a it's a way of deciding that something else matters then maximizing your impact without a ceiling maximizing your gain without a ceiling. I think the truth is sadly like like Alice writes you know life gives you that harshness to teach you to change direction or heal. And I always say that if you pre pre respond to life life wouldn't need to be harsh if you change direction or heal and learn before that you know life finds a reason to force you to not you. Right there wouldn't be there wouldn't be harshness. Sorry for your loss they were wonderful truly and honestly the kindest most beautiful pure people you'd ever meet I mean.

2:43:29We're all going someday but when those people leave your life you suddenly realized in a way that you haven't lived.

2:43:46Priorities.

2:43:53Well you've given me an awful lot to think about a little bit too much to think about I feel stressed.

2:44:00We have a closing tradition as you know question that's been left for you from our previous guest about knowing who you are is. Think of the first person you were ever in love with when did you last see them and what would you say to them if you saw them now. I mean I'm the worst to answer that question because my first love was my very long you know term marriage was a wonderful person you've been in every possible way and who even after we separated. We stayed very close incredibly wise woman incredibly wonderful woman so we're very close we're in touch all the time where that would rarely be a week that we don't speak.

2:44:49Is there something you haven't said to her which you probably should if she was listening to this now is there something you found out tomorrow but she was no longer here. Is there words you you're going to wish that you'd said. I think she knows that I mean I will I will always say I am who I am because of new bell. I mean you know it's it's hard to think most people don't understand that not being able to continue in a romantic relationship is actually not an indication of the purity of the connection that you had. So a romantic relationship as I as I as I write in in finders keepers is made up of a lot more than love right so there are you know I call it the perfect pp rcds so you look for partnership passion romance friendship companionship tenderness or you know touch and support right.

2:45:56And and all of those things are prerequisites to continue a romantic relationship if one of them or two of them don't work the romantic intimate side of the relationship doesn't work. But that doesn't mean that all of the others the partnership right the support tenderness the kindness the right doesn't mean that all of the others have to end and I think what most people miss is if I can't kiss her anymore. For whatever reason then everything I've ever done with her is wrong. 27 years spent 27 years together right and and she shaped my life with her advice with her wisdom and with her mistakes.

2:46:40Understand that even the bits that we don't like about our partner are the parts that shape us onto the person that we are. Right and it's almost criminal. I say that openly it's almost criminal that we let our egos and our anger. And that I have I have a couple of friends are so wonderful I I love them so much Colombian when I'm when I went to Colombia the first time they invited me they were helping me spread sort for happy at the time. And they're wonderful in every way and they separated and I keep telling them with two kids between you and all of that love what's really matters is how are you going to move forward from here can you actually talk every week and your parent together can you right and I think this is what most people forget when the anger takes them over when the ego takes them over and you bell shaped my life.

2:47:42See I always tell her I am the person that I am because of how we started our life together in the years we spent together. Okay and if I'm ungrateful for that then I truly am wrong person I am a bad person and I ask everyone to to think about that I ask everyone who somehow even even if it was a painful break up or a painful ending I ask them to try and say hey by the way I'm grateful for the time that I had you in my life. You've got one last 30 second phone call with her why would you say that such a tough question after I have losing so many people this year.

2:48:25I think what I would probably say is I wish life didn't give us that test. So losing Ali I think was bigger than both of us. This is difficult when you when you I think we're not neither of us despite how well we did terms of being calm and grateful and peaceful. It's just it's still is the most difficult thing ever and you bell is such a beautiful fragile. I don't know if fragile is the right word delicate maybe delicate is the right word beautiful soul. I think that gap so harsh and it's not our it's not our choice how life treats us. I would have wished that this had never happened. I would have wished that she had never been subjected to that pay.

2:49:38And I was I as I said I would I would do what Ali did to us before he left I would simply say all of the things that she taught me. I would simply say how grateful I am to have her in my life still. And yeah I hope I never have that call. I hope I never have that call. It will know how many more I can dig to the arts. Thank you. Thank you for everything every time we speak I.

2:50:14I push you on these questions and I think it's important for me to say because you have a remarkable level of wisdom which helps me to confront things that I think sometimes I'm avoiding. It's funny that where I had been thinking about what we spoke about actually for a while I wanted to tell you that. It's somehow you brought it up today in front of I don't know how many million people I really really think of your brilliance. Out of season. I think there is a different season for you now.

2:50:56We don't know what it is but I think your brilliance in your twenties was applied in a season different than your current brilliance. What do you think it is?

2:51:10I really think that your ability to reach people can be converted into a much more rewarding. But I think it's important to think that you have to think that you think it is just a bit more rewarding than just success. What do you think that looks like? Do you think it looks like this? It does. You don't have to change a thing. You have to change the intention of what you are doing. And what will happen if I do? I think you are probably one of the most heard people on the planet. I think you will bring a lot of wisdom to a lot of people. Not always yours by the way. Yeah, rally mind. And I think you are going to be rewarded very handsomely for that by life.

2:52:05Okay, you can a lot think about. Before I descend further into my existential crisis. I'm going to let you go. Everybody. Please like the book. Love you, Ron. Thank you so much, Steven. Honestly, I really enjoyed this one. Probably my favorite conversation between us. It's always wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

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