The Love Expert: We've Built A Loveless Society & It's Making Us Depressed! (here's the fix!) Alain De Botton

26:42What is love? If we're talking about romantic love, what is that? Well, can I just first start by saying we're a bit confused about it? So I can't give you an immediate answer, but I want to register that not just me, but the whole of the current world is confused about love. And I think we've been confused for about 200 years. Let's go easy on ourselves here, because the way in which we approach love now is a never before approached philosophy. For about the last 250 years, we've been loving under the ages of a philosophy we could call romanticism. And romanticism is a vision of love with very particular assumptions.

27:30Let me run through a few of them. There's one soulmate for everybody. You're going to find this soulmate. You're going to find them in slightly mysterious ways, possibly through almost something almost quasi -divine, like you'll feel pulled. You'll meet them at the supermarket, check out line, the nightclub, and without even knowing too much about them, you will sense that they're your destiny. So you'll feel impelled towards somebody that you don't necessarily know too much of, a force will pull you and you will feel this is the one. And they will be an angel, literally a sort of descended being from another world.

28:06The romantics were very, very keen on the notion that you didn't have to know someone too well to understand them. Even speaking not very much, the connection would be even deeper. The romantics also thought that love and sex absolutely belong together, and that you couldn't have a millimeter of disjuncture between the two. Love and sex had sometimes drifted apart in the old world, and that had been sometimes a problem, but it became a tragedy. So adultery moved from a difficulty to a tragedy. So all modern novels and films are all about the tragedy of adultery. So look, these are some of the difficulties that the modern world has created.

28:46We tend to believe nowadays that love is an emotion that we should feel, never a skill that we should learn. You know, for example, if I said to you, we should probably study love. We should probably go to a school of love. That's not very romantic. Now, every time that someone says that's not very romantic, ding -ding, that's normally a sign of a problem. Like most things that don't sound very romantic are a good idea, and most things that are romantic, like marrying in Vegas after you've met someone for five minutes is not so great. Now, what are we getting wrong? One of the things we're getting wrong is this whole business of instinct.

29:28Right? So we tend to believe that love will pull us instinctively towards marvellous people that will be correct for us. You know, the old world, people were set up in relationships. You'll marry this person because of this reason, you know, that person goes well with my family, blah, blah. Now, there's nothing to do with you. You put together with somebody. Nowadays, we're normally free to choose anyone. Hooray! Fantastic! Are we going to make great choices? No. Why don't we make great choices? Because we're not free. Why we're not free? We need to go to psychotherapists to tell us why we're not free.

30:05We're not free to love just anyone. We love in tracks laid down for us by our childhoods. Adult love sits on top of tracks and a script laid down for us in childhood. You might go, what's the problem with that? So what? Well, what's problematic is that many of us had childhoods in which affection was mixed in with more problematic dynamics that maybe in order to derive love in childhood, we also had to encounter somebody who was in a rage, someone who was violent, someone who was depressed, someone who put us down, someone who preferred another sibling, whatever it was. And we go into adulthood and we find that we're drawn to love stories that feel familiar because they're echoing some of childhood dynamics.

30:53But they don't necessarily for that matter lead to happiness. And you know, sometimes we have situations where you set up a friend, let's say, you've got a really good friend and you know another friend, you think there's people who really go well together. Set them up on a date and then you call them up after you say, so I did it go, you know, you must have gone really well. They say, I'm not sure. Maybe something was lacking a little spark, what they're really trying to get at is. They're not going to put it this way. Your friend, this date, did not show me signs that they would make me suffer in the way that I need to suffer in order to feel I'm in love.

31:32In other words, this relationship threatened to be happy. That's why I had to go away. So we are paradoxical creatures because our past was not necessarily happy. We're not necessarily that happy that our future romantic lives should be happy either. And this is something that they weren't thinking about that when love was reinvented two hundred and fifty years ago. When people say they have daddy issues and things like this, are you saying then that there's often truth in that? Because they had an early experience with a farther figure, a male figure in their life that might have left them or might have created an anxious attachment style or something.

32:11So they then end up pursuing dysfunctional men and relationships because that's the suffering that they associate with love. Sure. I mean, we repeat what we don't understand. So long as we're unaware of the stories that we've grown up with, we will enact them in our adult lives. So we're not compelled to do this forever. I think a lot of us have a desire to give the stories of our childhood a different ending. Our father might have been a distant and mean -spirited creature, but also had some good qualities. The dream is to find somebody a bit like that, but to make sure the story has a good resolution.

32:53So it's not merely a desire to repeat. It's a desire to repeat and give a better ending. But frequently, you know, we don't get there. And I think that, look, the thing about psychology is we see all around us people doing so -called crazy things. You know, falling in love with people and not going to make them happy, sabotaging their careers, not able to open up to people. And we think we can step back and go, why are they doing that stuff? What's going on? Now, one way to look at it, and it's a kind of compassionate way to look at it. A lot of the stuff that looks crazy now once made a lot of sense.

33:34It was once, probably, a really clever thing to do. If you were growing up, let's say, in an environment in which, let's say, a parent was suicidal. A parent was suicidal. And you shut down your emotions totally and decided you would never trust anyone. Fantastic. That's a fantastically clever thing to do when you're five years old, and you've got a suicidal parent. Because that will get you through to the next stage of life. If you open your heart at five and there's a parent who's suicidal, it'll tell you apart. So good for you. You're doing something brilliantly clever. Or imagine somebody who becomes a clown as a child, because there's a very sad atmosphere and there's a depression.

34:20And all they can have time for is jokes. They're just a manic joke. Brilliant. What a fantastic thing for a kid to work out. That they need to be quite a kind of manic joke. But what happens 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later, is that what used to be a fantastic defense against an intolerable situation has turned out to more or less ruin people's chances. Because the person, you know, with that difficult father, will end up never being able to open their heart to anyone, even a very safe person. They won't even know their heart's closed. But they will be acting out the same defensive strategy.

34:56Or the person who, you know, it was a great idea to be a bit of a joke early on. But now they have no time for anything serious and their friends feel that they're a slightly plastic person. Can never connect with them. That's a real toll in the adult world. So, you know, very often what we need to do is to say thank you to our younger selves for having devised strategies that really work lever. But at the same time say thank you, it's enough. I want to live in a different way. That was a fantastic strategy then. It may no longer be the right way for me to live now. I was thinking as you were speaking about that, there's kind of two groups of people.

35:36I was bouncing through different people that I know to see how it fit with them. And I identified in my mind that there's basically two groups of people there. The ones that are aware of their cycle, you know, and whether they've acted to change it or they're just reliving it, you know, and the ones that are totally unaware that they're in this cycle. And they just think, oh god, my luck, you know, they say phrases like that, just my luck. How does one increase their awareness of their own cycle? Do you think there's a way? Yes. So much that can be done. Let's imagine the very simplest exercise.

36:11Psychologists have these things called sentence completion tests, where you start with a stub of a question and then you end it with an ellipse. It's a dot dot dot. And you say to somebody, don't think too much. Just finish the sentence. And typical ones are men are dot dot dot. Women are dot dot dot. I am dot dot dot life dot dot dot. Now if you give somebody that sheet of paper and say to them, don't think too much, just write it down. Right? Amazing things bubble up. Men are, you know, authoritarian villains. Wow, whoo, where did that come from? Right? You're carrying out, you know, women are, you know, whatever it is.

36:50Life, you know, I am, you know, a nobody who deserves to be stamped. Did you know a minute ago that you have that in you? Not necessarily. In other words, sometimes you need these little levers to shine a light. Now, a thing that really helps. And I'm not, you know, for your viewers, many therapists, many psychotherapists, and not what they should be. But some are great. If you find yourself with a good psychotherapist, they can also increase your level of self awareness. I think that's what we're talking about. Increasing level of self awareness. And the reason is very simple. There's stuff that we all do.

37:31Let's imagine, I don't know, when you're a round of man, you think that person's judging me, therefore I'm going to withdraw and not enter into competition with. I'm around a woman, I think, I'm going to have to, you know, I'm going to be treated badly, therefore I'm, you know, whatever it is, something from your past is projected onto it. You end up in a therapy room with a man or a woman. And lo and behold, what do you do? You bring out that thing and you bring out that thing that you're doing normally. Except this time, you're not doing it in the office, you're not doing it in a relationship, you're not doing it in a context where people are busy and have got their own stuff going on or they're doing their own games.

38:05You're doing it with somebody, a trained professional, in a quiet room and they can see. It's like a petri dish. They can see the stuff that you're doing. And so suddenly you'll be saying to your therapist, I know you hate me and the therapist will be going, I really don't think so. But I'm interested that you have that conviction that you do. Or someone will be going to the therapist, I need to look after you. I think you're quite tired and I really, you know, you've been doing such great work. I feel I want to look after you. Maybe you'd be doing that all your life and the therapist will be going, you don't need to look after me.

38:43But was there someone in your past that you needed to look after and that made you feel guilty? And that is meant that every time you're with somebody, you feel that their needs are more important than your needs. And there's a chance, therefore, to see more clearly than ever before, outside of the kind of hubbub of relationships or office life, the kind of stories that you're projecting onto reality, to your huge cost. So I'm now aware of my cycle that originates from my childhood. The next step is doing something about it. How do I overpower that sort of hard, wide urge to repeat the cycle that comes from my childhood?

39:24Well, look, even let's not minimize that's already an enormous achievement. Yeah, you know me. I mean, that's, that's, you know, if you're there that you have a handle on, look, we don't need people to be perfect, right? We don't need people to be perfect. At best, we need people to know how they're imperfect and that they can have a chance to warn us of their imperfections in good time before they've done too much damage. There's an enormous difference. I mean, look, again, take the, take the dating idea. Let's imagine, you know, I often say, don't do this to me because we're not, we're not on a date.

40:00But, but a great question to ask somebody on a date is how you mad? How you mad, right? If the person says, I'm not mad, I'm completely sane, run away because, you know, everybody has folly inside them and we're approaching a measure of every day, tolerable sanity when we put some flags in the areas of our madness. So total sanity is not a possibility for any human being. But the awareness of where the insanity lies and a little bit of warning and prompt apology, you know, after an incident goes a huge long way. You know, people often say, I'm looking for a partner with a good sense of humor. No one needs jokes.

40:46It's not, it's not about jokes. It's really about modesty about oneself. Somebody was able to go, I think, I mean, take the other thing. If you meet somebody who thinks they're easy to live with, run away, no one's easy to live with. And someone who thinks they're easy to live with is really trouble. So somebody who could put up the hand, go, you know what? Yeah, I'm a bit of, I'm pretty tricky to live with. Great, that person is safer. Not necessarily totally safe, but they're safer because they've started on the road to self -awareness. And so ultimately, the best we can do in this world is self -awareness, prompt apologies when we slip up.

41:23And a genuine intention to make progress, I guess. Is that important as well? So like me being aware that I have certain habits in my relationship is one thing. But then I think my partner would like to know that some of the destructive cycles I might have, I'm working on them. I'm at least trying to make forward motion. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think one of the most destructive ideas in the modern world is the idea that true love means accepting somebody for who they are in all of their, you know, all of their good and bad sides. It's a lovely dream. And sometimes when you hear of breakups, they'll go, you know, my ex, you know, they just didn't accept me for who I was.

42:09And everyone will go, oh, yes, God, what a terrible person. You know, how, you know, politely one wants to go, hang on a minute. Do any of us really deserve to be loved for the whole of who we are? Is that really a fair expectation? Or isn't, as you suggest, isn't it fairer to suppose that all of us are works in progress? And that, you know, there is nothing contrary to the spirit of love in a desire to improve. The ancient Greeks had this right. You know, for the ancient Greeks, Plato saw love as a classroom. Beautiful idea. Love is a classroom in which two people in a spirit of generosity and kindness.

42:46I mean, we're not talking about shouting here. We're talking about generosity and kindness. Two people endeavor to help each other to become the best version of themselves, of each other, right? That love is geared towards progress and working on yourself. That sounds very odd now. And if you went around saying, I've read some Plato and he's kind of guiding me towards the idea of the love is a classroom. So therefore, I'm going to give you a 40 -minute lecture on some of your flaws. And then I'd like you to give me a 40 -minute lecture on some of my flaws. This would be considered ding, ding, ding, unromantic, right?

43:18That's not very romantic, is it? Doesn't mean it's a bad idea. As I say, love is a skill to be learnt, not just an emotion to be felt. And some of that means that we might need to go back to school. I've been thinking more recently that most relationships, the success of most relationship, comes down to this idea of how good you are at conflict resolution. Because I've had a previous relationship where we both can take the blame per se. We were just not good at conflict resolution. And then I've had a more recent relationship where we seem to be much better, not perfect, but much better at conflict resolution.

43:55And it makes all the difference. But I think, Stephen, you know, it's not, if you were bad at conflict resolution, it's not just your fault, it's it's partly the way our society works. Come back to the idea of romanticism, right? Romanticism gives us this extraordinary idea that love is something that should be felt and communicated without words, right? So the most romantic people thing, the most romantic sentence that often people will say is, I met this person and we didn't even need to speak. We just felt on the same page. Everyone goes, oh, romantic, ding, ding, danger, because it's, you know, well, this leads to a catastrophic outbreak of sulking, right?

44:37What is sulking? What is a sulk? A sulk is a fascinating pattern of behavior where you get very angry with someone because they have not understood you without, even though you haven't said anything, they've not understood you and you get offended because you think, because you're a romantic person, you think they can't possibly love me because true love means understanding somebody injuratively, wordlessly, and therefore I'm not going to speak. And so, you know, you come up from a party with your partner and they say to use anything wrong, darling. And you go, of course there is, but you're not going to tell them.

45:12And then they start saying, come on, you can tell me, what's wrong? And the sulking person goes, no, no. And this can go on and on and on. I mean, you know, we've all been at it sometimes, you know? You go home, you go straight upstairs, you go to the bathroom, you shut the door, and the new partner's kind of knocking at the door, and please, darling, just tell me what's wrong. And then you go from behind the door, no. And the reason is that you're a romantic and you believe that your partner should have miraculous, almost alien capacities to look through the bathroom door into your gnarled and wounded soul to understand what the upset is.

45:49But of course they can't because they're just human. You know, it takes us a long time to realise that other humans are not mind readers. You know, one of the first things we should always ask is, have I told them this? I know I'm upset, but did I tell them this? And so often the answer is not quite because we're romantic. And so we have to do that really, I mean, you know, we can accept it's really boring. We've got to use words. We've got to painfully stack up words and go, the reason that I'm getting a little touchy is because, and you've got to explain yourself, it's not very romantic, but that is normally a sign.

46:24It's a good idea. So honesty, I've struggled at times to be completely honest in my relationships when I felt like the honesty might hurt them. So can we have true love and total honesty? I believe that the wish to tell someone absolutely everything is both beautiful and ultimately utopian in a problematic way. Because we, all of us, have within us ambivalences, doubts, unfaithful thoughts, etc. And it isn't the work of love to rub your partner constantly up against the most troubling, disturbed sides of your psyche. Now, we're not talking, this is not an advocacy for sort of total mendacity and lies, but it is an advertisement for editing.

47:19We should hope that we don't meet the fullest version of each other all the time. I know it sounds romantic, but sometimes it's as parents know, is it that great as a parent to tell your child absolutely everything about what's going through you? Or sometimes, is there a role for saying, I'm just going to edit myself, not in the name of subterfuge or deceit, but in the name of love, that love could be compatible with an editing of certain aspects of your reality? One of the areas where a lot of editing happens is in the bedroom, in relationships, in sex, in sex, less relationships. I was looking through some statistics earlier on, because I know that you've talked quite extensively on relationships and sex and sex and sex I found this stat that says, a 2022 study by Relator UK -based counseling network found that 26 % of people in relationships were having sex less than 10 times per year and 8%, were having no sex at all.

48:26This is a stark rise from 2018, whether numbers were quite significantly lower than that. It seems like as a society, we're getting increasingly sexless. Yeah, so the question is, where's the problem? Is the problem in the body? Or is the problem in the mind? Now, being the kind of guy I am, I'm going to shift us to the mind. I'm sure sometimes there are bodily issues and they deserve attention too. But if I can talk about the mind, why is it that sex is easier at the beginning than in a long -term relationship? One of the leading answers is anger. It's not very easy to have sex or want sex with someone that you're angry with.

49:10And in many relationships, there's a lot of stored anger that neither party knows is there. And that anger has come from micro -incidence of disappointment. Someone didn't quite call when they said they would. Someone didn't laugh when they might have done. Someone didn't show generosity when it might have been required. And these things get stored up. And the result of too much of this is that you don't want someone going anywhere near you. Contents. Because you're furious. You're essentially furious. But in the way of these things, you don't know you are. You don't know your furious. Again, the mind is not obvious to itself.

49:47So, if you want to have more sex, don't just invest in candles and fancy linen. A quite useful thing to do is to go and have dinner with your partner and say to them, we're both going to ask each other how we've annoyed each other. Because we have annoyed each other, not because we're evil people, but because we're human and we're in a relationship and no relationship could survive more than an hour without a build -up of frustration. And the more we can let out that frustration at the dinner table, the more it won't create a blockage in the bedroom. And so, the chance to discharge frustration.

50:21And often the reason why we don't tell our partners what our frustrations are, is that they sound ridiculous. It's like, hang on, you're upset with me because I use the word really in what you thought placed too much emphasis on the why when I was speaking to your mother. Are you crazy? You are laying yourself open to your partner, pointing to your going, are you crazy? But I think that we're all in love, very small children, at least a small part of us is. As we know, small children get upset about really weird, tiny things. You'll move a button and they start wailing and you go, what's happened?

50:59And they go, you moved the button and you go, I did? Why does that matter? But for them it matters. Or, you know, pencil has slightly changed direction. So we should learn, we should remember what it felt like to be a child. And we should acknowledge that there remains even in an adult who's very competent and all sorts of areas, a small child who is liable to be getting very upset about small things. Triggered. Triggered. But because they're an adult, this is the problem. We think an adult can't possibly have be having such childish reactions. Again, we need to just cast aside our fears of shame and say, you know what?

51:35Yes, an adult can get very upset about tiny things. An adult probably is upset about tiny things and we're doing ourselves and honor when we can dare to reveal this to our partner and they can do likewise. So if I'm, if I'm someone listening to this now and I'm in a relationship where I don't think, because it's interesting, even when I say I don't think I'm having enough sex, the idea of how much sex is enough sex has probably come from movies, which is a bit of a trap as well, right? But if I'm in a relationship and we are in a sexless relationship by whatever definition, solution one you've presented there is try and resolve the anger, the underlying contempt.

52:14Are there anything else that you think is effective ways of solving for that? Look, I think one useful thing to do is to go, why does sex matter? What is this thing called sex? Why does it matter? And when people get very upset, I think the answer tends to be that sex is a symbol of something very poignant and very delicate, which is my partner loves me. And the reason why it becomes such an acute issue is that they cannot hold on to the idea that the partner might love them and might not want sex. This is psychologically impossible. Now, it is important to say, is this possible? It is possible that your partner both loves you and doesn't want to have sex.

52:54There could be other reasons. They're feeling unwell, so and then we can ask ourselves, what does sex really aim at? Sex aims at intimacy. We'll say they, in people, polite language, they became intimate, which means they had sex. So what we know about sex is that the really exciting thing about sex is not the sex bit, it's the intimate bit. It's the idea that someone is without their guard. Most of the time we approach other people with our guards on. And in this very rare and unusual thing we do, we meet another human being in a vulnerable state. And this is such a relief from the normal limitations of life.

53:37And there are other ways of doing this. Sex is not the only way of doing it. By understanding better what sex is, we can also have a chance to get some of what we get in sex in things that are not sex. If that makes sense. I had Tracy Cox on the podcast and she said something to me, which really stuck with me, because I hadn't noticed it until she said it, which is this idea I believe she called uthanas, which is when your partner almost becomes like a family member, or you start seeing them as like a sibling because they are in their sweatpants around you. And she made the claim, which I think I've read in your books as well, that in many respects, that's the very opposite of the the spice that makes sex so appealing in those early days, when it's new and novel and risky.

54:28And so she kind of alluded to the fact that love and sex were actually set on two different ends of a poll. Right. And again, come back to my theme. What does a romantic say? A romantic, romanticism tells us sex and love belong entirely together. But I think what you're saying and many of your viewers will know is that the relationship is trickier. And again, let's not torture ourselves about this. Let's get curious and then let's communicate about this. And I think that a growing child has a paradox to deal with. And this is what Freud famously does matter what you think of Freud. Very useful observation really, that the child experiences love in the first instance, at the beginning of life, we all experience love.

55:21At the hands of people who everything's gone right, we will have no sexual connection with. So given the debt that adult love owes to childhood, that sets us up with a problem when we as adults start to fall in love with people and start to build up relationships, which is that the more we get cozy with someone, the more we feel like we did a little bit with our parents, with things we're really cozy, which is oddly why people like going to hotels. Why do people like going to hotels to revive a relationship? It's because the furniture doesn't remember you. The curtains don't remember you. You are allowed to be for a chosen moment, somebody without history.

56:06And it's the history that is making intimacy hard, because that history while it's knitting you together and making you emotionally close is also rendering sexual freedom problematic. And I think it's just we need to go very easy on ourselves for the fact that this happens. And what do we do about it, though? Well, we need to book a lot of hotel rooms, so we need to spend a lot of time away from my partner. I noticed even that you're laughing, you're smiling as you say that. And I think that's partly the clue. When we come up against the hardest conundrums in life, having the tolerance of a sense of humor, a shared sense of humor, you know, if a couple can turn the sexual challenges from a tragedy into something closer to a comedy, it's an enormous achievement.

56:56Think of teasing, right? There are sides of couples that they find really, really hard. Isn't it wonderful when a couple learns with affection to tease one another? They go, oh, Stephen, there's that thing that you do, because you're a little nickname, of course, whatever it is, you know, a little affectionate nickname. That's a wonderful moment because it means that irritation has been sublimated into tender, compassionate understanding for why someone is difficult as they are. So the best thing we can do with our irritations with our partners is to be able to tease our way out of them. And we may need to do this in troublesome areas like, like, say, it's an enormous achievement if your partner can call you, you know, can go from thinking that you are an idiot to smiling at you and thinking, you're a lovable idiot, right?

57:43We're all in the end of the day, a lovable idiot. We don't need to believe in God, but if God was watching us from up there in the space station, we are all, you know, 8 billion lovable idiots. And once we can have that sort of compassionate relationship to ourselves, that's the beginning of a big bit of the solution. I often think, you know, I've been in my relationship now for a couple of years, I think, how do I stop my partner getting bored of me? Well, they've become a day. Sometimes it does cross my mind. Like, is she just going to get like bored of me? And also, you know, vice versa, you think of being with someone for like 40, 50, 60 years, I'm sure some people listening have been with their partners for multi decades, is there a risk of us getting bored of our partner and then seeking the sort of, you know, the novelty and affairs?

58:29And how do we prevent that? Okay, well, look here's one suggestion. The thing that becomes very boring in all relationships is when people cease to listen to each other. Now, you know, when you say the word listen, you've got to think, oh, yeah, I know what that means. Hang on, let's complicate this, let's just say a little bit, usefully. To, you know, most of us have never been listened to properly. It's not something that normally we know how to do. We know how to speak, you know, there are, there are, there are lessons in how to become a good public speaker. Not very many lessons in how to become a good listener, right?

59:00That's telling us something. So what is it to listen? Imagine a situation where someone says something to you and rather than you jumping in going, oh, that reminds me of, you know, something happened with my auntie, or that reminds me of, or, you know, starting to give advice and going, the thing that you need to remember is one, two, three, four, right? Which is normally what we do when people speak. It's a simply hold back and therapists are good at doing this and simply do what they call reflexive listening. So, you know, you say to somebody, I'm really annoyed, I've had such difficult day at work, this happened, that happened, that happened.

59:30And then you simply repeat back to them using slightly different words, the essence of what they've said. And you say, I'm hearing that life's quite difficult for you at the moment at work and that you, you know, coming out of pressure from your boss and the person, you know, it'll be a triad because the person will immediately feel, I'm being heard. And then they will have, they will feel more, they understand more about themselves. You know, why is it that in the company of some people, we feel really interesting and have lots to say. And then the company of others, we kind of feel more, we don't have anything to say, with the same people.

1:00:03It's because we feel we ensure that we're in the presence of a listener. And the best way to listen is literally to not give advice, not give a anecdote, but repeat back to somebody what they've said in slightly different words. And I mean, you know, parents bless them. I've been a parent, we've all been parents, many of us been parents. Parents are often quite bad at listening to their children. They think they're listening. I was in a holiday resort a few months ago. And there was this kid, little kid must have been three or four. And it was having a bad day, it was really screaming. And the parent, the mother, was saying, my mother, someone was saying, what's wrong?

1:00:47And the kid was saying, I hate it here. The whole place smells. It's a poo, and I want to be back home at kindergarten. And the caregiver said, don't be so silly darling, we're on holiday, holidays are fun. And what's more, this hotel has cost a lot of money. And you want to go, okay, I get it. This woman was trying to help. She was trying to calm down this distress child. Was she listening? Not really. Because basically what the kid was saying is, I'm having a really bad day. Everything feels absolutely disastrous. Help me. Right. And we're all, we all have a version of those days. And we don't want to be told, come on, you're living in really wonderful times.

1:01:27The sun is shining. There's lots to celebrate. We want someone to go, I hear things are bad for you. I'm hearing things are bad for you. I'm hearing you're not coping very well. And you're pretty sad. If you do that, don't rush them, don't give advice, don't give, you know, you will get a great response back. We can put money on it. Listening. What are the other core components then? Because I really want to close off this topic on love and sexless relationships. What would you say are the core components or the core habits of two people who have a really successful long term enduring sexual and romantic relationship?

1:02:15If we just focus on the sex side of things first, what are those core habits? So I guess communications when that's come through quite loudly. Look, I'd start a little bit further upstream. I go like overall, what do these guys need to do? And I think overall, they both need to acknowledge that they are frail, fragile, slightly crazy people because not because they are them, but because they're human and there's no other option for a human being than to be slightly crazy. And nevertheless, against that background, they're attempting to do their best. So the combination of an acknowledgement of their fallible nature mixed in with a dedication to trying to understand it through broadly therapeutic means.

1:03:00So this is a very crucial thing. The other absolutely crucial thing is an acknowledgement that a lot of what people will be getting up to in relationships will have nothing to do with the person in front of you, that you will be importing from different periods of your life scenarios and assumptions that owe nothing to the here and now and owe quite a lot to mum, dad, caregivers and other scenarios. And the capacity to acknowledge that with grace to say, okay, I'm sorry, I'm getting confused about who's in front of me. I'm importing into this situation an energy that doesn't belong there. We all do this.

1:03:38The whole basis of attachment theory, let's remind ourselves, is that your attachment style is governed by your first attachment, the attachment that you had with a parental figure. And therefore, you know, you will be, let's say, insecurely preoccupied attached to somebody, not because they deserve that quality of attachment because your early care giver did. That's what they mandated through their own behaviour. But your partner, maybe someone completely different, is someone completely different. So if I can put it this way, getting on top of your projections, we project wildly as human beings and being able to have at least a sense that the person in front of you may not be entirely who you think they are and that reality in the here and now may be slightly more innocent.

1:04:25And I think, you know, owe it to yourself. It's, look, it's so boring. I'm sorry, Stephen, I'm sorry to your listeners. You have to get on top of your childhood. It's so boring to be told this, to be, to be 30, 40, 50, 60 and to be told that you have to get on top of your childhood. I mean, my goodness, this is not an nostalgia fest. The only reason is so you can put the damn thing to bed and never have to think about it again. But it's going to be rattling around unless you have done so. And I think it's so, look, think of language, all of us, when we were kids, we were put in an environment where without us doing anything, we learned an entire language with syntax, grammar, a complicated vocabulary, etc.

1:05:08And this happened while we were doing handstands in the garden, drawing buttercups in the kitchen, etc. We absorbed an entire language and we had no idea. The same thing was going on emotionally. We learned an emotional language, not a language about grammar and vocabulary, but a language about trust, a language about self -esteem, a language about who we are, a language about what will happen to us when we trust someone, a language about whether it's safe to go with someone, to be ourselves, etc. We learned that whole language and we have no idea we learned it just that we had no idea we ever learned our language of birth.

1:05:43It just happened. But it's inside us, no less than the grammatical language. And what we have to do, and it's just as difficult as learning in adulthood, you know how difficult it is, imagine if I said you learn Finnish now, now you're going to learn Finnish, or next week we're going to go off and we're going to learn, you know, I don't know, Korean, right? You'd be like, in a week, well, it's going to take a long time, isn't it? We're going to have to do this for a long time. You know what I'd say, there's two things I'd reply if you toy to learn Finnish. First one is, oh, that's going to, this is what I think that's going to take forever and the second one is, what's the point?

1:06:19But I'd also say, let's say we're not trying to learn Finnish, we're trying to learn trust. Let's say we're not trying to learn Korean, we're trying to learn the lesson of vulnerability, safe vulnerability, right? These are very valuable lessons, very valuable lessons that we need in our relationships. I say that because I point at the childhood patterns that you're talking about. And I think one of the reasons why people don't open up that closet and do the work there is because they don't realize that that is the puppet master dictating their career relationships and everything in between. So I think step one is like them understanding the impact that that childhood narrative is having today.

1:06:54And then also realizing, you know, this is where language can be a useful metaphor is about time. Because sometimes people say, okay, so I understand, I saw a listen to podcasts, great, great guy, Stephen, you know, really get a guess on top of it, listen to many of his podcasts. The problem is after three podcasts, I'm not healed. And you want to go, look, how many lessons of Finnish or Korean did you do? Are you fluent? I'm not quite. I might need another 150. Yes. So in other words, we need to take it slowly and we need to repeat these things, which we went at religion earlier. One of the things about religions is they understand that our minds are like siffs.

1:07:33You know, take Islam. Islam wants us to remember their god three, four, five times a day. In many religions, you're on your knees constantly because they know, these religions know that it goes in one ear, it goes out the other. It comes in, you know, that we're not very good at holding onto that, even the truths that we are most attached to. And I think part of the problem with the modern world is we tend to think, I'll just listen to that idea once. I'll just read an interesting book, said something me once, and I'm going to change my life. You want to go, no, no, you know, again, think of the holy books.

1:08:04How many times you've been to read the Bible, the Quran, it's at Buddhist texts every day because we're not very good at holding on, even to the things on which our lives depend. Is there a risk though in this sort of healing culture where we're all just healing forever and we're all kind of like broken and trying to recover from our early years where someone snatched candy out of a hand or something. Is there a, I read an article a couple of weeks ago and it said there was a bit of a, bit of a risk to this long term ongoing healing mentality that we're. Look, I sense your frustration and I share it.

1:08:38It would be so nice if we could just get on with life without having to bother with all this stuff. I understand. But I think, Stephen, the thing you have to bear in mind is we are no longer merely trying to survive. We're trying to thrive. The age of survival is behind us. We're not just looking to reach the age of 30 and then collapse into bed and thinking, it's been fantastic life. I've not been butchered by an enemy. We want to reach 80, 85 and we want not just survival, we want fulfillment. And if we want that, we're going to have to pay attention to things that previous generations didn't.

1:09:16Again, let me use another metaphor. For most of human history, people here I am drinking glass of water. People didn't pay much attention to water. If it looked like there wasn't anything actively floating in it like a frog or something, they think it's clean water. I just gulp it back and through such non -shelence, if I can put it that way, millions of people died. Okay. And then towards the end of the 19th century, at about the very same time that Sigmund Freud and Vienna was getting going, helping us to think about certain things in the psyche, various people got very interested in water supply.

1:09:46And all the main cities, Paris, London, New York got a complete overhaul of their water supplies because it was suddenly discovered that microscopic organisms could kill hundreds of thousands of people. In a glass of water that looked completely clear, you might have enough to kill a city. And this is deeply perplexing. You think, hang on a minute, it's just a glass of water must be fine. And I don't want to be hard on you. But in that tone of like, really, can we be bothered with that old childhood stuff? Why don't you just get on with it? You want to go, unfortunately, we have to take care because there are macrobiotic organisms, as it were, in our lives that are gumming up our capacities for fulfillment.

1:10:27And it's not necessarily that they're going to kill us, but they will hamper our capacity to be, to exploit our full potential. And after all, this is what this podcast is about. This is what many people are concerned about. And it's going to require work. Can we ever truly heal from those things? Or will they always be there in the backroom just exerting less power over us? Look, wonderful German philosopher Schopenhauer, he says that the goal of life is to turn tears into knowledge, wonderful progress. Tears, what are you going to do with those? They just end up in your pillow. They might end up being things you can learn from.

1:11:05So I think the best we can do is to learn, to turn so many of the troubles that afflict us. No life is without affliction. But that moment when we go, you know what? I've learned something from this torment. This was a total nightmare, but I've pulled out of it something about myself, about human nature, about psychology. Then we're really learning. Then we're really on the path to a good life because a good life is not a problematic free life. It's a life in which we found a way of learning from our inevitable pains. You will never find the right person. I read that sentence and that sounded a little bit negative.

1:11:43I think I read it in your book. You will never find the right person. Well, I was teasing gently our old friends, the Romantics, who tell us that of course we will find the right person. The belief in the right person has led to more rage, more disappointment, more frustration than any other. If you tell people, you will find the right person, if you build up a model of what it will mean to find the right person, you will be dooming people to disappointment. If, for example, they meet somebody who's really good, many ways very, very good, but they've had an argument with them, well, I'm not supposed to argue with somebody that the right person was supposed to be blissful.

1:12:22I'm teasing really the concept of rightness. Rightness can include a lot of wrongness. That's why, wonderful English psychoanalyst Donald Winnickott came up with this phrase, a good enough applied to parenthood. He argued that no child needs a perfect parent. Indeed, quite dangerous to have a perfect parent because you never leave home. Quite good to have a parent who causes you a few frustration. It'll get you out there. But he argued no one needs a perfect parent, no one needs a perfect lover. They need a good enough parent, a good enough lover. Do you think that people that are in relationships, romantic relationships should spend time apart?

1:12:59Do you think that's healthy for the stuff we've talked about with sexlessness and stuff? Because I think I tend to get more excited about sex with my partner when she's been away for a while and there's a real novelty to it. Yes, look, I think one of the things that distance can do is to remind you that there is no preordained reason why someone should be with you. I mean, it's one of the most miraculous things that anyone should choose to be with anyone because anyone is a quite complicated proposition. Some of the mystery of that can achieve its necessary force after a period away. Look, it's like being very ill.

1:13:37Imagine being ill for a while.

1:13:43You've feeling better. You go out into the world. You go to the park. Suddenly, oh my god, there's this thing called a tree. It's amazing. It's got leaves. There is some bugs crawling all over. There's something called grass. There's a brick wall. You are suddenly like a three -year -old full of appreciation and wonder. One of the great challenges of life is how to keep being people who have wonder in their life because habit swallows everything up. Oh, yeah, tree, I know what a tree's like. That's the point of art. Small topic. Let's bite that one off too. What's the point of art? Well, one of the things that happens when you go to one of these bases called galleries or museums is they're full of paintings by people who look at the world as they've never seen it before.

1:14:27Maybe it's their wife or husband. They look at their wife or husband as they've never seen them before. A loan behold, quite an amazing thing. Wow, it's got an amazing, it's full of tenderness and beauty and compassion and interest. Wow, I could like this person. They look at a tree. They look at a cloud. They look at the grass. And you know, we are part of what makes children, small children. So fascinating but also frustrating is you suggest a walk to the park. It takes them an hour and a half to go to the park. Why? Because everything's interesting. What have we done with those layers of interest that we also used to possess?

1:15:01We think we know what's going on. But we don't. And one of the wonderful things that children can remind us is the foreignness, the true foreignness of a world that we feel we know, we feel we've seen, but we haven't actually looked at. You say on page 75 of that book that the solution to long -term sexual stagnation is to learn to see our lever as if we had never laid eyes on him or her before. It feels so natural though that through this process of sort of habituation, everything in our lives becomes less, yields less joy than it once did. And I often fight with that because as things get financially more, as you get more financially free in life, you're able to experience the nice restaurants and the nice things and the nice holidays and the nice planes, all those kinds of things.

1:15:50But with that, the awe and the surprise escapes you. Absolutely. And I think we need to work at it. The Buddhists were onto this. The wonderful Buddhist scroll from the Middle Ages, Medieval scroll, six Persimans, you know, the Persimmon are kind of fruit. It's got a bit like an apple. And it's just six Persimans on a canvas, beautiful rendition. And the idea is that the Buddhist sage is meant to look at those six Persimans for an hour. The true one could keep going for even a day, just six Persimans. You might go hang on a minute, can I change the channel please? Can I look at something else?

1:16:30The capacity to stare intensely at something and draw benefit from it is absolutely something that we lose, as especially his life gets more dizzying. The thing to bear in mind is life can ever only be so exciting. It's not by more stimulation that you'll ever, if your senses are wrecked, if you're unable to draw benefit from one lemon, having a thousand lemons or a sports car isn't going to make you more of an appreciator, the goal is to learn to appreciate more of what we've already seen. And that is, you know, we talk about German exercises and workouts. It's something we need to do. I mean, it's literally learning to see and to appreciate is a skill.

1:17:14And you can dial it up or dial it down. And as I say, one of the good things about works of art is there are records of careful looking by people. They might not be looking at things you're looking at, but it's less about what you're looking at that it's a method of looking that you can learn. 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. They're also a sponsor of this podcast.

1:17:47Net 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. As 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 netsweep .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning.

1:18:23That's netsweep .com slash Bartlett. A therapeutic journey, lessons from the School of Life, the Sunday Times best selling author of the School of Life. I've seen this book everywhere. I walk into bookshops all the time and I just wish my book had the prominence. And they show you. It does. I was in a foils the other day and I think you've got some signed copies in there. I picked up one. Yeah. Why did you write a book called A Therapeutic Journey? Because I have to say, you have written lots, lots, bit too much. A lot of books. I mean, this is not even half of them. No, there's about 70 of them.

1:19:04Yeah. This book, A Therapeutic Journey, it's really following the arc of what we could call mental breakdown or a mental crisis from the moment of its inception, the moment it strikes us through to the moment of recovery. And then I go into lots of byways and lots of digressions. But essentially it's saying, how can we keep our minds safe? How can we help them to heal? What can we do when we are in a mental crisis? It's written in a tone, I hope, of sympathy, of kindness. And also trying to give people a sense of what's happening to me. Because very often, when there is a breakdown, we don't know what on earth is going on.

1:19:49Yesterday we were happy, go lucky. Now we can't get out of bed. Yesterday we were able to hold it together. Now everything that comes out of our mouth makes no sense. So I think that the, it's supposed to be a companion through what might be some of our loneliness hours. Why do we need this book right now, do you think in society? I think because, look, I hope that people will think, hmm, okay, this is written from a place of somebody who probably gets what they're saying, what I'm feeling. I think we need companions through things that probably feel very personal. But actually, this is the good news, very general.

1:20:26But I think, you know, at the school of life, we see so many people who are going through these things. And the thing that each one thinks is, I'm alone. And the best thing you can say to people is say, no, you're not. And the reason they think they're alone is that, you know, it's a paradox of human beings. We only know people from what they choose to tell us. But we know our own minds from introspection. And so there's a massive sort of cognitive gap between self -knowledge and knowledge of others. And in that gap, shame develops, right? And there's so much shame around mental illness because it's still, as we know, so rarely spoken about.

1:21:04And so the book aims to rehabilitate, to educate, and to comfort. This is a book about getting unwell, imagining that we have let everyone down and losing direction in hope. It's also a book about redemption, about regaining the thread, rediscovering meaning, and finding a way back to connection warmth and joy. One of the ways in which we're unwell, increasingly. Well, you know, it's very hard. When your mind is operating well, you almost don't notice what it's doing because it's doing so many things to keep you feeling, you know, even though that word normal, right? How do you feel? I feel normal.

1:21:46Yeah, that's my baseline. That's just how I am. It's the result of what we call it gifts because when those gifts are taken away, goodness me, do you notice, right? So for example, there's something in our mind, in a well -functioning mind, that more or less keeps us on our side. There would be so many reasons for all of us to despair of who we are. You know, why would I be on my side? I've made mistakes. I'm not perfect, etc. But most of us, you know, on a good day, you see me, we'll go, well, look, I'm not perfect, but you know, I'm okay. I can keep going. When you're mentally unwell, that that faculty breaks down and suddenly you can't abide your own self.

1:22:25You can't forgive yourself. You know, there are people who are unwell who will say 17 years ago, I said something to someone and I can't forgive myself. And you want to go, that's 17 years ago. It's okay. And they can't let it go. That's what illnesses. Illness is not being able to let go of an argument against yourself because you've turned into your own worst enemy. The other thing that people manage to do in a healthy mind is bracket things so that not all the things that could be in your mind are active in your mind at any point. Right? So you're able to sequence thoughts. So you think, you know, well, you know, I've got this to do.

1:23:03I'm interviewing this guy now. Tomorrow I'll be in New York. There's also a thing with my granny and there's also a thing with a friend, etc. But those thoughts are sequenced. You're able to line them up in a coherent order. When health breaks down, all of these things come at all angles. There's no order anymore. There's no hierarchy. So something that happened 10 years ago is expressing something's happening right now. Something that's deeply urgent collides with something that, you know, by rational means is not that urgent, but it seems as urgent. And so everything coherent breaks down. You can no longer order things.

1:23:37There are voices that start coming in, not friendly voices. All of us have voices in our minds. Not necessarily, you know, they're not, I'm not talking about psychotic voices, but there are voices, voices of encouragement often. You can keep going. Just, you know, do it. Well, it's okay. You could dare to take that risk often kindly voices that we've incorporated from kind people around us. When mental health breaks down, we can only hear the worst voices. The voices that are telling us you don't deserve to be here. You've made a mistake and we don't want you here anymore. Better thing would be if you didn't exist.

1:24:08Those voices and those voices don't let up. And then we're in trouble. And we need to raise the white flag because things are not well. And sometimes we keep going. We're so good at keeping going that it's terrible. Half the problem is that we keep going so well. You know, we're half dead before we realize there's a problem, right? And so the ability to go hang on, hang on. I can't take it anymore. That is the beginning of being knowing how to get help because when the mind is in trouble, what it most needs is another mind. It's like calibration, right? When you've lost the correct calibration, you need somebody else to go, you know, when you go, everyone hates me and it's all terrible and nothing I've done is of any value.

1:24:52Just have another mind that says, okay, I know how you feel. Let's think about this. Is that really who you are, who that is? And then, you know, gradually with love. And let's remember, people always get mentally unwell because of love. I don't mean romantic relationships, but all mental unwellness stems somewhere. If you scroll back, there's always a deficit of love, always. There's always an experience of cruelty in some way that breaks the mind. And when people get well, there is also always an experience of love that heals. And it could be love, you know, not a romantic love, love from a friend, love from a therapist, love from professionals, but it's essentially an act of love, an act of love saves us, redeems us.

1:25:41So the problem and often the antidote is love. Release the cause and the antidote is often love. Yes, imaginatively understood, not merely romantic love, but it's broadest sense. And you know, because mental breakdown is often emerges from a build up of cruelty, an unbearable cruelty, which makes life unbearable for the person. And they then have to, you know, project it outwards. I mean, when, when, when illness becomes very severe and you have a psychosis, you know, what can happen is that people become obsessed with the idea that everyone is against them, the CIA is against them, other people are plotting against them.

1:26:16Really, what this is, an outgrowth of is an unbearable inner negativity that hasn't found any way of being handled. You use the word resilience in this book. And I think the word resilience is often misunderstood because we think of resilience as like tough it up and, you know, take it. What is your definition of resilience? Why is, why is that such a prominent word in this book? Look, I think true resilience should be compatible with things that don't look resilient at all, things that look very desperate, very humble, very broken indeed. So, yes, I mean, I like you, I'm suspicious of the use of that word resilience as really just meaning a kind of stoic bouncing back from all problems immediately.

1:27:02I think it means a generous understanding of how much madness has a legitimate claim on even a healthy life. Towards the end of the book, I have a little thing I riff on about the seasons. Some of it is understanding that this is normal. This is part of the natural cycle, not railing against it. Some of what, what does that help? Sometimes when people have mental troubles, they will have ups and downs, right? And sometimes people can box themselves in and they'll I suffer now and better again, you know, I'm better. And the advice is always, careful, careful, that belief that you're better, the rigid belief, the past is behind me, the darkness is behind me, can itself start to see, kind of starts, that can itself start to seem like a problem because it means that you'll be intolerant towards any regression.

1:27:53And regression belongs to progress, just like dark days belong to good seasons, you know, we need some of that. And tune to it of telling us about cycles, really what we're talking about cyclicality, darkness is followed by light, autumn is followed by winter is followed by spring, the mind has its own seasons and the more we can accept the legitimacy of those seasons, the less will rail against some of the necessary sliding into darkness, which for many of us is simply going to be unavoidable. If someone chooses to pick up this book and they get to the final page, what do you hope they'd learnt or taken away from them by getting to the end of this book?

1:28:37Real sympathy for the complexity of their minds, a real understanding that it's not easy being human, that there is nothing indulgent about, you know, working on oneself as you put it, that this is a boring but ultra very necessary task, some tools in there about how to do it from the very practical to the more theoretical, there's a practical book about how you can work on the most broken bits of yourself and find a kind of equilibrium. But it's also very deliberately a warm book, it's a book of comfort and I think that something that we often miss, we can get a little too intellectual in this topic, thinking that people who are in trouble mentally and just psychologically, they're all they need is some ideas, you know, get some ideas and yeah sure we need ideas but you know what we also need is warmth, kindness, friendship in a way now you could say well how how could a book be a friend?

1:29:36Well, you know many of my best friends are books, let me tell you and I think it's absolutely in the remit of a book to act as a friend and to say to you very simply you are not alone. You said earlier that a good conversationalist, a good friend, a good romantic partner is someone that makes you feel heard and understood and I think that's exactly what you achieve in this book, it is a very difficult thing to do because books can often feel quite exclusive especially when the author is as smart as you are but this book does a wonderful job and first and foremost making you realize that the thing you're going through in the way that you are isn't evidence of your inadequacy, it's actually evidence that you are perfectly human and that you are like everybody else and through that lens you can offer support and some very practical tips about how to you know endure or rise rise from the situation that we all find ourselves in in the different seasons of life that you describe and that's why it's such an important book and it's done so tremendously well and it's being passed around by so many people.

1:30:43Alan, thank you so much for your time today and thank you for all your wisdom. You're a remarkable talker. I was learning, I was watching you and I was just thinking, f**k and how you know, got a wonderful way to hold people with the way that you articulate yourself that is so unbelievably powerful and speaking in the art of speaking is such an important incredible talent to have and you have that in such a wondrous way. It's so soothing and engaging and intelligent and there's a real poetry to the way that you frame things which I think is just a superpower that I would love to have more of. You do see even you do see.

1:31:19No, but not like you have it so it was wonderful to learn from the way that you speak. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is Ah, interesting. What was the last thought to keep you awake at night? The last thought to keep me awake at night. Well last night I was quite worried about coming here. So I was I was kept up but you know I'm often kept up. I do I do sleep in quite a fragile way and I think that one of the ways of thinking about is that there are thoughts that happen in the middle of the night that can't happen at any other time.

1:32:07There are actually some quite important thoughts. Often there to do with things that you didn't even know you were concerned about but the night teaches you. There is the school of night you know and I used to be very impatient in Somniac. So I used to wake up and think oh my goodness I can't believe that I'm still awake how annoying etc. Now I'm thinking maybe there's something to learn here. Maybe my mind is trying to teach me something and it might not be anything sort of totally earth shattering. I'm not sound pretty earth shattering but it might just be something might just be like oh I really love this thing or I think I should really steer away from that or this is really beautiful or whatever it is something a kind of acknowledgement of the night and so I've become a better not a better sleeper but something perhaps even more important a better in Somniac.

1:32:57Why were you staying up about coming here? We're all friendly people. I know you are. I think you know we've spoken a lot about expectation haven't we? And you know if your podcast had one listener and we were just going down to the pub that would be so lovely. If you call me up and say hello we're canceling the show but we're just going to go to the pub I would just look like a baby. Well you've certainly exceeded all my expectations and it's a real honor and a privilege that you chose to come so thank you so much for that and your wisdom I'm sure has impacted countless people not just for the last couple of decades but even in this conversation that I guess you'll never get to see so on behalf of them thank you so much.

1:33:34Thanks do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know you'll enjoy it.

1:33:59Q1 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 they're 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 as 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 arrows 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