Steven Bartlett on Brave New World (Preview)

0:00Hi, you're listening to The Standard Podcast, and today we're doing something a little different. We're sharing a preview from our sister podcast, Brave New World, which has just launched the first episode of its brand new season four. Host Evgeny Lipidev is joined by Stephen Bartlett to talk about mindset, ambition and the future. He shares how he manages a million tabs without burning out, why self-empathy boosts performance and how a humiliating paddle match taught him a breakthrough lesson on failure. Here's your exclusive preview. To hear the full episode, just search Brave New World on your podcast app.

0:43So when he came and sat down with me, I said to Ash, based on everything I've learned from my podcast, I said, I think what's going on is you're allowing a loss to cascade. So here's what you're going to do. We're going to get you out of your limbic system, the amygdala, the emotional center of your brain. And we're going to give you a little mantra that's going to put you into the prefrontal cortex of your brain, where logic and reasoning takes place. Welcome back to Brave New World, the standards podcast where we explore the cutting edge of science, medicine and the future of humankind. I'm your host, Evgeny Lebedev.

1:17And in this series, we will venture into the frontiers of neuroscience, longevity, consciousness and the extraordinary breakthroughs reshaping the human existence. Today's guest sits at the crossroads of entrepreneurship, psychology and purpose. Stephen Bartlett is an entrepreneur, investor, author and host of A Diary of a CEO, one of the most listened to podcasts on the planet. He's built and sold companies, spoken with top scientists, leaders, became the youngest ever dragon on Dragon's Den and inspired millions with his ambition, introspection and curiosity about living and working better. In this conversation we shift the focus to Stephen examining well-being the nature of a meaningful life amid increasing optimization and his perspective on the current state of the world.

2:13Mr Stephen Bartlett welcome to Brave New World it's an honor and a privilege to have you on and I just I wanted to start by taking a leaf out of your book and asking you how how are you i'm good yeah good uh just recovering from a bit of jet lag but otherwise very very excited and um happy to be here and got a million tabs open in my head because there's so many things going on at the moment normal yeah feels really normal had you managed to let those tabs not overlap and not scramble and not sort of throw you head into a frenzy i am i think i have my default is to be empathetic with myself and to realize that all i can do is my best and so when there are lots of tabs open and i'm not addressing them there's something in me that's okay with that and it doesn't result in me sort of catastrophizing or beating myself up and i've always tried to explain this to people but i've never been able to this idea of just like being empathetic with yourself like just giving yourself a break but um it seems to be my natural sort of disposition is to just give myself a break did you train yourself or do you think it's just natural um i think it's something to do with first principle thinking like i think i naturally think in terms of like first principles and for me the first principle is am i doing my best and if the answer is yes then there's no there's no more than i can do and i'm at peace with that therefore and i am doing my best and i actually think this is an important point because i think one of the things that really impacts people's performance, whether it's in sports, whether it's in business or life generally, is how they deal with their own shortcomings.

3:53There's two ways that I learned this really profoundly. One of them was watching Roger Federer's commencement speech at university, where he said that in his career, you know, this is for anyone that doesn't know Roger Federer, maybe the greatest tennis player of all time. And he says in that commencement speech, do you know how many points I won in my career? And people are like guessing in the audience, you think the greatest tennis player of all time probably won 80 % of the points. He says I won, I think he says 54 % of the points, which means that like 46 % of the time, almost half of the time he's taking L's.

4:22But the most important thing is he doesn't let the loss cascade into the next point to throw his head off, to put him into his limbic system, the emotional center of the brain, and therefore impact his performance. So all you need to win in Roger Federer's case to be the greatest ever is about 50 % of the points. but you mustn't you mustn't let any loss whether it's jet lag or having a bad day yesterday or not showing up well the day before impact the day that's to come and um on a personal level i learned this story i learned this in a very real practical way about four four five weeks ago on my birthday when all of my friends flew to los angeles to play paddle with me i have a paddle court in my garden so it's a bit of a cheat thing because on my birthday i want to play a game that i can win at um and i so i brought my friends there we're playing paddle and my friend ash my friend Ashley is has been training paddle he's had a paddle coach but when all five of us played paddle I would observe that the minute he lost a point he would spiral down and then he'd lose the game so actually when we when all was said and done Ashley was the worst player he always came bottom everybody beat him which made no sense to me because he had the most training and so as I watched him I realized what was happening that he was letting the last point cascade into the next point so when he came and sat down with me I said to Ash based on everything I've learned from my podcast i said i think what's going on is um you're allowing a loss to cascade so here's what you're going to do um we're going to get you out of your limbic system the amygdala the emotional center of your brain i'm going to give you a little mantra that's going to put you into the prefrontal cortex of your brain where logic and reasoning takes place i said so when you lose a point or whether you win a point whatever happens every single point say to yourself that doesn't matter i'm i'm the better player and i'm going to win this game anyway and he did that and he beat Oliver.

6:01And then he beat my friend, Michael, who was third. And then he beat Logan. And then he beat me. And since then, no one has been able to beat him. And he's posted about it on social media. He's got this video of him dancing. Nobody has been able to beat him. And all he did was he put a mechanism in place to remove him from his amygdala, his limbic system, and to put him back into his actual competency, into his reason, into his logic. And so I think a lot about this as a a broader point, a metaphor for life, which is, it really doesn't matter if you take a loss. Like what genuinely matters as it relates to performance is how you deal with that, how you deal with the embarrassment, how you deal with the mental thoughts and how you deal with the overthinking.

6:43It's a very interesting point. I think it applies to a lot of people. But I think they're two slightly different points. One is about the failure that you might encounter in life and what that does to you and how you respond to that. And I think it was Einstein who said that failure is progress in, sorry, success in progress. Yeah. So it's very important to, because if you don't, if you don't fail, it means you don't do stuff. Yeah. You'll stop. But this idea of not pushing that I asked you about originally, I personally relate to that because I find it very difficult. I find it very difficult not to be harsh with myself and not push and push and push.

7:28And even when I know I physically can't do the stuff that I want to do, I still push myself to do it. And sometimes I manage to do it even beyond all reasonable possibility but i i stress and exhaust myself as a result and i was just interested how you so because you are incredibly successful with successful at a very young age so presumably you did push yourself i do push myself and i think this sometimes sounds like a bit of a contradiction that you can really be easy on yourself in terms of the days you fall short or when you don't perform well but at the same time be like wildly ambitious and give it everything but to me that's not a contradiction i think actually most i've come to learn just from podcasting and interviewing these exceptional people that you have to be okay with these like apparent dichotomies where two things that appear not to be true can be true at the same time and in my case it's absolutely true that i give everything i work seven days a week after this i mean well we're going to go back to the office and we're going to record and i'm going to get all of my work done till 2 a.m tonight but at the same time when i know that i could have done better and i didn't i i forgive myself and i wake up the next day with a blank slate and i go again and I found that that is the recipe for performance and as I said earlier a recipe for underperformance or falling short or catastrophizing or ruminating or overthinking is trying your very very best falling short of your very best and then punishing yourself in subsequent days with anxiety with with self-doubt with that voice in your head and I have to add a point of nuance here which is one of the things I've learned from doing my podcast is that everybody has a different internal voice.

9:02And so it's almost impossible for me to give anyone listening now my internal voice, because I think it's a byproduct of my upbringing, my childhood, my parents, my early context. And I've sat with people who are wildly, wildly successful. And they've told me that they are literally fighting a demon in their head every single day. And it makes no apparent sense to me, because objectively, when I look at their lives, you've got all the money in the world, and you've got this great family and these great kids, and you're a superstar, and you're on stages all over the world yeah when you go home at night you tear yourself up did you have that demon or do you think you're just lucky to have not had that demon because you're so right a lot of people have that demon and a lot of people live with it all their lives or they meditate or they have a spiritual practice to or they go to a psychiatrist or all three or or beyond you know take psychedelics yeah did you ever have that demon i have i've i've had i think there's been moments in my life where i've had to really fight my thoughts but i think my default isn't to be sort of tortured by an internal um demon but there's been moments in my life where i've really had to think you know i've been the demon has visited and i visited for like a couple of days or a week when something happens and i have to be very active and conscious and intentional about like taking back control of the of the cockpit and a lot of that has been like one of the things that i did was i would write down in the notes of my phone 10 things that i need to be true and again again i guess this is the same thing I said that I knew to be true.

10:47And I guess this is exactly what I'm saying about Ash, my friend who played paddle with me, is if the limbic system or the amygdala, the fear center of our brain, has taken over the cockpit, the best possible strategy is bringing back logic to the asylum. And so what I did is I would write, and even when I went through heartbreak and breakups, I'd write down 10 things in the notes of my phone that I need to be true, and I would say them out loud. And it really, really helped me. And actually a lot of what some of the great therapists that I've interviewed, even someone like Dr. Steve Peters, who wrote The Chimp Paradox, which is all about the chimp overtaking your brain and overpowering the computer.

11:22And he works with some of the greatest athletes of all time, whether it's like Ronnie Sullivan or Christopher Hoy. And he helps them with that. He helps them take the control back from the emotional center of the brain. And what he would do is a similar thing. When I've sat with him before, is he would basically do the same thing, like list things that he knew to be true, that counteracted that crazy emotional monkey in your brain that was wreaking havoc and, and get you to believe them and articulate them. I mean, things about yourself. So things about the situation. So if you've, if you're going through heartbreak, the monkey in your head will be telling you that the heartbreak means that you're not good enough.

11:58That's like usually the crux of it when you go through heartbreak is it's like someone that knew you well, that really got to see you has rejected you. And at a deep level, that's telling you that you're not good enough, that you're a piece of whatever. And so you can write things down, 10 logical statements that you believe that fundamentally counteract what that emotional center in your brain is telling you. And so that's what I did. Actually, I went through a heartbreak with this particular girl like many, many years ago. It must've been 10 years ago. And my friend called me and he said one line that like suddenly gave me back control of my mind.

12:35And up until then, I tried everything. I'd gone to the gym, I was running out in the street, I was trying everything and I couldn't, I was like being tormented by these thoughts in my head. My friend said this one line, which was logical and I believed it. And immediately I was, I was like, it was a cure. And all it was, was a very logical, true statement that put me back into the prefrontal cortex. So that's what you can do. You can have in any situation, whether it's a business situation, a personal situation, a romantic situation, a family situation, you can return to these 10 truths that you know to be true.

13:00And I would literally read them out because there's something about hearing them even if it's you speaking them that i think impacts a different part of the of the psyche well it's a kind of meditation it is yeah it is yeah and you can incorporate it into meditation if you if you have meditative practices yeah but um i think having a deeper understanding of what's going on in the brain has really helped me here from these people that i've i've interviewed let's talk a little bit about your about your background and and how um and and how growing up and your family has shaped you and your relationship with risk, ambition, success, failure.

13:35Yeah, so I was born in Botswana in Africa. My mother's Nigerian and she left school at a very young age, so she can't grow. Remember to hear the full episode, search for Brave New World. For all the latest news, visit standard.co.uk.