227. Why Doing One New Thing Every Week Could Change Your Life, with behavioural scientist Patrick Fagan

0:00Al Elliott:We want you to meet Patrick Fagan. He's a behavioural scientist, a best-selling author, and the guy who spent a year deliberately making himself really uncomfortable. I take the science of psychology and think about how to practically use it and apply it. With this experiment, I was seeing if I could apply it to happiness and making life kind of more meaningful and actually trying to slow down time a little bit. Patrick made a commitment to do 52 new things in one year, one a week, which involved him joining a cult, cuddling strangers and visiting a psychic, all in the name of science. And here is what he discovered, the experiences that made him the most uncomfortable, but also the most transformative.

0:41You haven't lived until you felt a strange man's grizzled face between your hands as you stare into his eyes for a minute, which as an introvert, I absolutely hated that. But the struggle, the awkwardness, the challenge was actually what made it meaningful.

0:54Al Elliott:This insight completely flips our understanding of workplace happiness because we spent billions trying to make work comfortable and frictionless. But Patrick's research suggests we might be making people more miserable in the process. Today we're asking what if the secret to engaged teams isn't more comfort, but the right kind of productive struggle? Patrick's got a framework called Marvels that could revolutionise how you think about employee experience. This could challenge everything you think you know about workplace wellbeing. Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

1:37My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist.

1:40Al Elliott:My name is Al and I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Our guest today, Patrick Fagan, is an applied behavioural scientist who's written best-selling books and manipulation, fake news and marketing psychology. But his most interesting experiment was personal, spending an entire year doing 52 completely new experiences, from, as we said, joining cults to learning cuddle techniques. What makes Patrick's story really interesting isn't the wild experiences, it's the science behind why uncomfortable, challenging moments create deeper meaning than pure pleasure.

2:13And that has profound implications for how we design work experiences.

2:17Al Elliott:His research reveals that while we're obsessed with making work comfortable and frictionless, we might actually be draining the meaning right out of it. So after this break, we're going to hear about Patrick's most transformative experiences and discover why struggle might be the secret ingredient your team is missing. The dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across three teams and four systems. And in our case, it's about 216 ,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it. What you should be doing is using HubSpot because why?

2:49HubSpot connects it all. Every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.

3:05Al Elliott:Nice. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

3:14I'm an applied behavioral scientist, meaning I take the science of psychology and think about how to practically use it and apply it. So normally I do this for money reasons, boo, hiss. But with this experiment, I was seeing if I could apply it to happiness and making life kind of more meaningful and actually trying to slow down time a little bit, which I know sounds odd. But we don't really psychologically think about time in terms of clocks and calendars when we look back on our lives. we think about in terms of holidays and weddings and fun nights out and things like that. But yeah, normally in my day job, I'm helping with marketing, advertising, I do a bit of academia, some lecturing, I've written and co-written some peer-reviewed papers on things like price psychology and Facebook psychology and a couple of books.

4:03One of them is a Sunday Times bestseller about how not to be manipulated by fake news, real news, social media, everything else. And the other book is about how to manipulate people through marketing, advertising, so how to make messages more attention grabbing and memorable and effective. So this experiment feels like a bit of a pivot then from what your normal work is. So tell us a bit more about it, where the idea comes from and your motivation for wanting to try it. Yeah, there were a couple of things really, which kind of came together at the same time. So we were just coming out of lockdowns and all of the digital transformation that happened off the back of that.

4:45So a lot more remote working, screen time went up a lot. And then I also, or I should say my wife also had a baby. So that was a big kind of life shaking up event. I actually from my book on how to not get manipulated spoke to somebody who escaped or survived a cult and a multi-level she went from a cult to a pyramid scheme but she escaped those things and she was saying that she joined the pyramid scheme after she just had a baby because when you have these big life events it tends to kind of disrupt your normal way of thinking and new things happen so that was going on in my my personal life and then I was on a holiday a kind of extended honeymoon slash digital nomad type thing and we were in Croatia and we'd been away for a month and we phoned someone back home and they said oh have you been away for a month already it only feels like yesterday but for us it felt like a lot longer than a month it felt like six months or something it had gone by a lot more slowly because we were experiencing new things all the time.

5:57We went to Kato in Montenegro, this old town full of cats, and climbed the castle and saw the bay. When we were falling asleep in Croatia we could hear wolves howling in the distance. We had all these new rich meaningful memories and that kind of slowed down time for us. So I realised, very much set against the contrast of being indoors on my laptop all the time over the last few years that actually what makes life meaningful and uh happy and and uh something worth remembering is actually just doing stuff getting out there and experiencing new things um so all of these things together oh and also uh i did some research for that book about how to not get manipulated where i joined a cult which uh i wasn't really looking forward to I had to go away for a whole weekend to this cult, kind of light cult in the woods for a weekend.

6:52And I really wasn't looking forward to it. But my co-author is very stubborn and very much baddest me into it. And it was so kind of transformative and special and meaningful. I mean, maybe the cult brainwashed me, I don't know. But it was a really great experience. And so all of these things together just really made me realise that, hey I need to actually get out of this routine and the screens and go and try crazy new things. And I mean 52 is quite a commitment. Where did that timeline come from? Yeah it seemed easy at the time. It didn't really seem like a big deal but actually yeah it's it was hard work planning, planning them.

7:32They were harder to plan than you might think. For example I wanted to see a psychic, have a psychic reading. I thought this would be easy. I'll just google psychic near me um no it's very difficult actually to find someone um and the weird thing is a couple of days later I was driving past a pub in my house and there was this big sign saying psychics every Thursday so I almost feel like you know psychically uh it was out there in the universe but planning them was difficult thinking of them was difficult coming up with 52 things is harder than you think um and then it's also quite expensive i mean it was more expensive than it needed to be most of them were free um but i did things like went to monaco to to go to a casino which i didn't need to go to monaco for that but uh um yeah it was fairly expensive in the end um but once you kind of get the ball rolling uh it just kind of happens and you tell people about it and they give you their ideas um if anyone's thinking of doing it you don't have to make such a huge commitment you could do one new thing a month for example what was some of your your highlights like if you were saying if somebody wanted to try this which which ones would you recommend oh that's really difficult um i really i really enjoyed meeting people that I had caricatures of or that maybe I disagreed with um uh politically I'll give you an example I think it's a fairly safe example is is just stop oil which I understand the intentions but I just see them in the news and I think god they're so annoying like throwing paint on paintings and and lying down in front of cars well I hate these people and that so I went to one of their meetups and it was so eye-opening to kind of meet them and no longer were they these caricatures in my mind that they're real flesh and blood people with hopes and dreams and big fears and anxieties um and it really um did something for me in terms of empathy um so there was that there was also i went to my little pony convention again bronies in my mind with these kind of weird cartoonish ironically um caricatures but then you know i met them they're actual people and it changed how i see them a bit i mean not completely but it changed changed it a bit.

9:48I went to a BDSM nightclub, which is not, you know, each to their own. Everyone needs a hoppy, but it's not my cup of tea. But it's very interesting, again, to see these as real people. So that's one of the things I really take away, one of my favourite things to do. Anything involving people and also anything involving something that I didn't really want to do. So for example, a cuddle workshop where I had to cuddle strangers. You haven't lived until you felt a strange man's grizzled face between your hands as you stare into his eyes for a minute which as an introvert I absolutely hated that but um the struggle the awkwardness the challenge it was actually what made it meaningful so those are the if you're going to start anywhere I would start with what do you really not want to do what's something that you would say god I'll never do that I think you have to immediately put that on the list and then anything where you're going and getting out of your comfort zone socially I guess and meeting people and talking to people that normally you wouldn't.

10:46I have to follow up on some of these experiences. I mean, you mentioned, first of all, that the cult, you call it a cult light, and it was transformative. Tell us about that, because I'm sure there'll be eyebrows raised by some people listening to this. So for that book, I joined two cults. One, I think it's safe to say it is a cult, although I can't say that because they're very litigious. So I actually wrote a chapter on that, but we couldn't publish it because they were so litigious and their lawyers sent this big letter when we asked if they had any comments um you can probably guess who that is right i did a personality test and all that um the other one was i think it's a little unfair to call it a cult but it you know it's um sensational so i do um but what they do essentially is kind of like a psychological therapy for men so it's a men's meetup in the woods where they take away your phone and your jewelry and take away your name and give you a number and then um you kind of do these therapy exercises where another person acts like your dad and you shout at him uh and get out all your frustrations and events that you might have against your father um there was one point where we all sat around naked uh talking about our sexual insecurities and stuff um which sounds crazy i guess in the way it was but it was it was um yeah it was transformative it was definitely memorable i'll tell you that but um it was just getting out there and having these like showers outside at 6 a.m in the morning and doing a sweat lodge and these kinds of things uh dancing around a bonfire at night uh it's cathartic in a way um it was it was uh there's this psychological principle called disrupt and reframe where if you want to change people's behaviors and habits you have to kind of grab them and shake them a little bit um you have to get people out of an old habit if you want to introduce a new one i think in that sense it was very powerful because it was very odd new um experience that kind of shakes you up a bit and allows you to break off break old habits kind of break them down and get free of them a bit um so cock-ish i mean they did lots of cock things like they they took away my name and uh when i arrived actually everyone was sat in this tiny room um and they were all kind of cramped together it was almost guantanamo bay light but it was very uncomfortable and they all had to squeeze in there it turned out they had to wait in that room until everyone had arrived and i was about an hour late because uh i'd stopped off for a burger king on the way um so they definitely use these kind of cult-ish techniques but i would say to good effects there's something i'd imagine quite liberating about that as well kind of breaking all of those those social norms um yeah i can i can see i can see the the cathartic aspect of of that and i also want to ask you about the psychic did you go were they right did they predict your future um I went to the psychic it was very interesting um she said some quite wise things to me um she said a lot of bollocks as well if I'm being honest but she said some things about funnily enough about business um about how I should make sure I read contracts properly and protect my IP um she told me about she kind of psychically guessed with a lot of help from me that I had a friend who was going through a tough time um so she was like oh you have a friend called uh George who's died and I said no I have a friend called George but he's not dead um but I guess uh and then she goes well he's going through some tough times and I said no but I have another friend who is and she went yes yes that's the one so I'm not really convinced that um she is psychic However, she gave me some really good advice about that friend and about, as I said, business.

14:46And that was a theme that I found with a couple of these things, was that insight and wisdom came from surprising sources. So from the psychic, for example, and also from an acupuncturist. So I had this problem with my mouth where I had kind of tinglyness and numbness in my tongue sometimes. And I went to doctors and they couldn't see anything wrong. I couldn't find anything wrong. I even went to a specialist and I said, I have a funny feeling in my mouth. And he diagnosed it as oral dysastasia, which means funny feeling in the mouth. So I was like, that's 300 pounds well spent. But then this acupuncturist, he told me I have too much fire energy and I have a hot mouth and I need to drink more water.

15:30And so I started drinking more water and it actually helped and it's basically gone away. So I wasn't drinking enough water, I guess. But none of the experts or the doctors told me that So as kind of crazy as it was, it was actually really helpful. So again, getting out of your bubble and seeking wisdom where you might not normally find it. And I suppose it sounds a lot as well like it's facilitating that reflection, introspection that was quite powerful. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with acupuncture, I really enjoyed it. And I have people who really rave about it. That has really helped them with illnesses and physical ailments.

16:09And for me, it was just the fact that I was kind of pinned down like a butterfly to a table for an hour and I couldn't move. And I had to just be there, reflect on my thoughts, which was a very similar experience in the flotation tank. Just not being distracted for an hour, not being on my phone or emails or whatever it might be, and just having time to reflect is actually extremely powerful because that allows you even subconsciously to face up to your anxieties and deal with them. And you come away from it feeling much better. Patrick's told us about his year of radical experimentation. We're talking cult weekends, psychic readings.

16:43But here's when it actually gets really interesting for leaders.

16:46Al Elliott:Yeah, after this short break, we're going to rejoin the interview where Patrick talks about the difference between pleasure and purpose and why your employees might be craving struggle without even knowing it. Don't go anywhere. Did you know that the UK's number one management podcast, that's us by the way, and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network? We actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioural science to help people do better at work. And we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode. And two out of three of us are devilishly good looking.

17:18Al Elliott:And you're not going to say which. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you, we need to do this in threes. The HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination. Or business professional. Seamless. Seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil. We've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioural science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff. And do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business and brands as well.

17:53It is. It's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. but there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street personally i enjoyed can balsamic vinegar make beer taste better it can and are we all just

18:10Al Elliott:status seeking monkeys i am go and listen to nudge wherever you get your podcast but come back yeah come back definitely come because nudge isn't as good as this so come back i'll cut that out Keep that in.

18:26Al Elliott:Welcome back. Let's discover why forced fun might actually be a good thing and how leaders might be able to use Patrick's Marvels framework to create genuinely transformative workplace experiences. I think it's such an awesome way to learn more, as you say, about ourselves, about other people. But what does the science say? What does the science say about going through these experiences, this novelty, and how it links to our happiness and well-being? um so the science says first of all that experiences make us happy um especially compared to material things so there was a think a diary study that found that someone who just purchased something experiential like a dinner with friends for example versus someone who bought something material the people who bought something experiential was six percent happier which is statistically significant so um and there's other studies on this as well but experiences generally do make you happier um and there's all sorts of reasons to that uh might be because they're social and we're very social creatures and we like being around other people it's cathartic um also um there was a study i think i'm not sure if it came out recently but i saw it recently on mind wandering and it found that activities or moments with more mind wandering tend to be less happy um so if you're kind of ruminating or reflecting on things uh you tend to be less happy than if you're just getting stuck in and doing something and getting lost in something um which is flow of course um one of the things that makes people happiest is spending time with kids i think the only thing that makes people happier than that is making kids uh according to that study um so if you're like doing something and you're absorbed in something you're not kind of ruminating on your anxieties and your stress.

20:13So I think that's what makes you happy from it as well. And then there's also, as I said, the memory component. If you're doing new things, meaningful things, these are just stored more richly in memory. And it kind of, as I said, slows time down a little bit, I think. I know our listeners, I know some are going to be thinking, this is really cool, I'm going to try one new thing every week. There'll be others going, I've got kids, I've got a full-time job, I've not got the time. How can we approach this in a way that is maybe a little bit more digestible? Well, I think there's a psychological principle that actually cults use called incrementalism.

20:49So you need to take people through the lobby before you show them the penthouse. So you don't have to commit to this huge, daunting 52 new things project. You can just do little breadcrumbs, just try something new here and there. I mean, since that year, I've now committed to doing just something every weekend, typically with my family. It doesn't have to be a big thing. Going to Bird World, for instance. Even just popping out to Nando's on a Sunday. But just getting out of the house and just having some new mini experience. Because actually, in that year, some of the most memorable experiences were quite small.

21:30And it was the minutiae which made them special. so I really enjoyed seeing my first sunrise I actually purposely like sat down and watched the sun come up for the first time um and that's not a big deal the sun rises every day right but um there were all these little details like the little birds flirting and playing with each other the crunching the ice under my boots um these small things what made it special so they don't need to be grand things um on my there were two things on my list I didn't get to do I wanted to go to North Korea and I wanted to go cage diving because sharks are my biggest fear and I was like if I have to do anything that I don't want to do it probably do that I didn't get to do those but my point is it doesn't have to be those although North Korea's borders are now open if anyone wants to do that yeah feel free to come with me and it doesn't have to be those it can be small things like sunrise or I had my first donna kebab yeah they don't have to be huge things I'm wondering then can this then potentially be an extension of hobbies we already have so for example I love to cook so if my new thing is right every month I'm going to do a new recipe something I'd never attempt or I feel I don't think I like or can it be an extension of things we're already doing I think it depends what you're you're you're trying to get out of it so I'm I've picked up the guitar again for the first time in in many years and I'm getting more value out of trying to learn songs that I wouldn't have before if that makes sense so that use different techniques um different kinds of riffs etc um because it's like getting out of your comfort zone getting out of what you already know I think it has so much more I don't know exponential power to to learn what you're doing whereas if you're just kind of in your safety zone you're not really learning that much new um however i think if you're going for the kind of really memorable and and transformative experiences then you need to just abandon everything that you currently know and do and just try something completely new and what so with that in mind then because as you say it sounds like the the the experiences that pushes out of our comfort zone make us more uncomfortable will have more of a transformative impact than activities that we might find pleasurable where's that what is that difference then between pleasure and meaning and why is it important it's really interesting so there's some psychological research on happiness that says there's two dimensions to happiness um pleasure and purpose um so having uh like a lovely um i don't know i mean this is not the height of pleasure but for example going to nando's and and eating the peri chips and a chicken burger.

24:15Very pleasurable, hedonistic, and that does contribute to happiness to an extent. But I think too much of that and too little purpose actually makes people miserable, which is something I think kind of we're seeing at the minute. You know, we're very comfortable and there's these trends like having a cold shower or dipping yourself in ice water in the morning. And I think the whole point of that is to kind of reset your pleasure centers to give yourself deliberately some pain some light pain and struggle because then the rest of the day doesn't seem so difficult whereas if you're if you're happy and relaxed and comfortable all the time then little stresses actually cause a lot more anxiety and stress than they should so too much pleasure is probably a bad thing um purpose is interesting because um you know we live in an age where brands and tech platforms are trying to make things as easy and frictionless for us as possible that again that might be making us miserable actually a little bit of friction in the right way a little bit of struggle is actually a good thing as i found with these experiences you know if they were awkward difficult and that actually made them more more meaningful so i think there's a great opportunity for experiences to add friction but in in a good good way to give people purpose okay so so far we've heard about patrick's personal

25:36Al Elliott:transformation through these really uncomfortable experiences. But I'm thinking about our listeners who are managing teams, people with limited budgets and even more limited time. Exactly, because while joining a cult might be transformative, I'm not sure most HR departments would approve that as team building. But Patrick's insight about struggle creating meaning, now that's something every leader can use. And this connects to something we're seeing everywhere, really. The back to office debates, discussions about forced fun, questions about how to create authentic connection in hybrid teams.

26:06What if the answer isn't making work more comfortable, but making it more intentionally challenging in the right ways?

26:13Al Elliott:So here's Patrick explaining how leaders can apply his discoveries without sending their teams to cuddle workshops. So how could teams or leaders use this idea and these principles to build that connection, that meaningful work? So I think any time that you're creating experiences for people, you're going to be fostering bonding between people and colleagues. So back in my young man single days, I had a principle to take a date to a second location. So you go from the restaurant then to a bar or whatever it might be. And because you're going into that experience together and you're experiencing it together, that creates kind of social links and bonding and you're kind of facing something together.

27:00So it's very good, I think, from a morale and teamwork perspective. Also from an empathy perspective, if you can get people to see, say, their colleagues' perspectives or live life, do an experience that a colleague does. I don't know if a colleague does marathons maybe that's not the best example but uh if a colleague does marathons get everyone else to do that so you can with the colleagues you can kind of see life from their their perspective a bit um resulting in empathy um yeah just more experiences I would say I like this idea of experiencing something that a colleague might what what springs to mind for me is having worked in in kind of operational delivery there was always a bit of tension with compliance because there are things that we wanted to do in the ways that they they insisted we needed to be done so it seems like what would like job swaps or kind of shadowing and that type of thing might be effective yeah i think so i think that's a really good idea job swap i like that and how about in terms of like the socials because we hear a lot of organizations say oh you want to have a fun culture and we want people to to have these shared experiences but they're often things like away days or um going to the pub after work and kind of encroaching on employees time um how do organizations use these principles so it's effective without seeming intrusive it's really um difficult i suppose because as i said struggle is kind of part of effective experiences so in a way i've always not been the biggest fan of forced fun but now that i think about it after this i think forced fun might actually be a bit of a good thing if it's a bit awkward that's probably kind of the point um and it it yeah it's the struggle and challenge of it that makes the experience meaningful um but that's an interesting point you raise that it's usually in employees time but actually there's so much benefit to it um in terms of well-being social connection seeing things from other people's point of view um and making life and work meaningful for um that arguably it should be part of the job really rather than something that's tacked on outside of hours but most work is just you know sat on on zoom calls and staring at a screen and that's when life goes by in a blink um i think as an employer you probably want people to have a different relationship with work right and not have this uh i guess like that tv show severance where your work life and your not work life are so separated.

29:38And I think that resonates because the work life is so screen-based and often remote and indoors that you're not actually forming rich memories. It just goes by in a blink, right? If you're on a laptop all day, you look back on the day, you don't really remember anything. Probably it's useful for leaders if actually people relate to work as something meaningful that they remember. and actually creates deep connections in their memory, which would involve experiences. I can also imagine some people going, oh, well, that's why we should make everyone go back to the office then. So we have these experiences, but it's not the point.

30:12It's more the intentionality, the experience, the potential novelty of it and how the team engages with it. Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, probably not popular, but I do see the value of getting people to go to the office, at least a little bit. I do think it's important. but absolutely yeah try and create more of an experience I suppose in the same way that retailers are trying to create more experiential shopping the way that in London here the mayor has just announced that experiences are a big pillar of the economy for London marketers are doing more and more experience marketing secret cinema type events uh vr and ar events these kind of things um i think we should probably bring that into the workplace and have experiential workplaces why not what would that what would that look like if you're in charge of putting that together where would you start oh gosh um that's a good question though um that could be a whole new a whole new kind of industry i guess i can kind of think through this out loud i mean one thing i'm thinking is don't necessarily have to work in the same place every day or every week now I mean there's remote working there's cafes there's parks why not mix it up a bit that could be one way to do it so I did a project for an experienced marketing company called We Are Collider and they design these experiences for brands and I found the psychological levers that make experiences more effective in marketing and we came up with this acronym marvels so m is for magic which is about making things emotional surprising and different so any kind of magic you can sprinkle into the work there's things that basically people haven't seen before that become the emotional peak of their day you know the peak end rule we remember the emotional peak so if you go on holiday you remember the jet skiing but you don't remember the flight really as a rule because it's very boring so i think the problem with work is that it tends to be the flight that people don't remember um and then they maybe remember going to the pub afterwards which is the peak of their day so can you bring in an emotional peak ideally a good one to the day um the a is for adequacy which is just about meeting basic standards being comfortable having amenities which i think most workplaces do just fine but also going above and beyond those standards um with little kind of surprise and delight moments so companies do this already I guess with uh having pizza for lunch um especially if people aren't expecting it and especially if it's a pizza from a nice pizza place for instance just those surprise and delight moments up a lot um the R is for relevance I guess that could be figuring out what your employees care about and bringing more of that into the workplace rather than just being this functional thing where employers often are just kind of extracting taking what they want from the employees you know not to generalize too much but could it could go the other way a little bit and finding out what employees want and giving it to them being relevant it doesn't necessarily have to cost anything but people have hobbies and interests don't they and b is for value which is about getting something out of the experience which again can be freebies people like gifts and things but it can also be information learning curiosity so any kind of anything new or interesting that you can bring into the workplace would be good uh e is for exchange which is about interactivity so can you have an element of physicality about the workplace of interacting with things um you know typically google might have a slide in the workplace i mean maybe that's a bit of a trite example but just things that people can physically interact with and not just be passive um l is for labeling which is about branding don't think that really applies here but i suppose the takeaway is what kind of sensory flash bulb impression are you leaving of the workplace is it somewhere with office chairs and halogen lights um and you know plastic tables that's probably not great versus if it's somewhere more kind of um comfortable and and um nice to be and then the final one the s is for social which i think we've talked about a lot can you foster those social connections between people i love that and i'm sorry for putting on the spot pat but that was brilliant and i can see i can see entrepreneurs loving that as well like you say there's just so many little ways that they can add that little bit of magic or improve the relevance and i think particularly around um as you say this whole conversation about people bringing themselves to work which can sound a bit fluffy and a bit meh but if you're talking about a way what are they interested in?

34:59What are their hobbies? What is valuable to them? And bringing that into that environment will be really powerful. Yeah, absolutely. Especially with AI as it is. There's certain, you know, there's PII and data privacy and stuff, but I'm sure there's data that you can get on your employees and feed it into an LLM and it will give you really good, creative, relevant recommendations for things that they'd like. I have to ask you about your whole experience and kind of its impact on your happiness were you happier well I mean I was very unhappy to begin with so yeah in that sense yeah definitely no it definitely did make me happier and also the lessons that I've taken forward from it have definitely made me happier so I as a rule don't work weekends anymore except last weekend I did work I have to say but generally I don't work weekends anymore I'm quite like strict about that because weekends are very very very important for experiencing things, spending time with family and resting.

35:58And that might sound obvious, but I see some people seem to think weekends are disposable. Like Elon Musk says he works every weekend. It's a superpower. And I don't think, I don't know, he's very successful. So what do I know? But for me personally, I don't function as well if I'm not taking that time to rest and experience new things. And then all of the lessons that I learned have helped with happiness so things like empathy so I don't if I see a group like just the oil in the news you know they used to annoy me I don't really get annoyed by by things in the news anymore I actually don't watch the news at all to be honest but I find it hard to dislike groups of people because I've kind of realized everyone's human everyone has their own motives everyone believes their beliefs everyone wants the best for themselves and their family generally speaking so that really opened my eyes and I think I'm happier for that you know I don't hold grudges or anything and I also learned kind of new things so when I went to the cuddle workshop I learned about melting hugs and armchair hugs which are something that my wife now loves so she's definitely benefited from that.

37:13What are they? So melting hug is where you go up to someone and you hug them and then you kind of breathe into them so as you exhale you kind of both exhale together and melt together um an armchair hug is where uh the other person is sitting down and you sit behind them and with your legs and your arms you kind of envelop them like an armchair wow and they're they're higher quality hugs that's a good yeah i would say yeah the melting hug is definitely because a normal hug can be a bit like um I don't know superficial you know not really putting any effort into it whereas a melting hug like you're really getting into the hug.

37:50I love that and I suppose the breathing aspect of as well we'll connect with there. Okay so your wife is your wife is getting high quality hugs which every wife should uh and how about how about with your son has it impacted any of your approach to parenting? Definitely in terms of the fact that I'm now very deliberate about doing things with him uh we have a new baby as well nine weeks old so with both of them eventually thank you um