E41: Simone Heng - Let's talk about loneliness with Human Connection Expert

30:13This is not, you can do it online, but I've done it in person in Koh Phan Yang and also in London. So there's workshops with other people? Workshops with other people you never met before. And I found that to be really helpful. And of course, talk therapy has been really good for me because I'm a talker. For someone who's not a talker, maybe doing something that's more somatic might be better. But because I have this need to express myself verbally, talk therapy has been really great for me. Yeah. So we talked about these messages that you receive every day, right? And there's a lot of people who message you that they can, that their experience resonates a lot with yours, especially with strict upbringings that are fueled by shame and not pride.

31:03And this is for me as a European, this was a new concept. Can you explain the concept of shaming in the Asian culture and where it comes from? Sure. So firstly, I would just alter my experience. I would say pride and criticism versus shaming. However, if you want me to go broad stroke shaming in Asian culture in general, I think I experienced it the most when I was working at a media outlet here in Singapore, how shame was used to discipline people. So things like giving someone a really bad review of their performance on an email which CC'd HR and half of the radio station. This was really, really bad.

31:44or being live on air, and I write about this in the book, being live on air and having a mistake that I made on the WhatsApp group chat for the radio station, you know, commented about in the WhatsApp chat while I was live on air so that people could hear how, or that my boss could hear how that affected me while I was live on air. This is shaming. Yeah. And it's unnecessary, but it's kind of, if you are tied to your ego and a place of face, then you can see how this is very effective. So the shaming only works in our culture because we hold our reputation and face up so highly. Therefore, shaming is the antidote to that works very well.

32:30You can see how that would cripple someone without shouting so much. Yeah. Let's get back to this topic. pride and criticism thing how did I mean how did this affect you I would say from the amount of people that have written to me the thing that we have in common with our Asian upbringing is that there is an abundance of criticism and very small parts affirmation so if you can imagine we were mixing a syrup, the criticism would be the water, the syrup would be the affirmation, is a way to imagine the ratio that a lot of the people writing to me and that I kind of experienced. And I think huge, verbose praise is just not Asian in general.

33:28Asians show love through food and acts of service. And I'm blanketing this because my father was an outlier, but I can definitely say from the dialogues that I've had on socials and DMs and most of my Asian friends, this is even the immigrant ones in Western countries, this is what we experienced. And I think it's kind of genius. And I don't know if I wrote it in the book, but I think I've written an IG post on it. But why it works really, really well is because it allows the child to develop their own sense of aptitude without needing affirmation. So when the parent is gone, your aptitude, your competence builds your confidence.

34:15It's not based on that someone gave you a high five. And I find this really with a lot of, you know, I've lived in two Asian countries, two Western countries. And I find that that's the big difference. For example, I put a video the other night of me singing karaoke on Instagram and all these people like, wow, you're a really good singer. And I was like, well, am I? Like, I know my mum came to a few competitions when I was younger. I knew I had some aptitude, but because there was never any complimenting about it. The same with my ability to write. No one knew I could write until I wrote a book.

34:47But you have this confidence that you know you can do things. You just don't get that confidence from a parent telling you that your painting was great or your song was well sung or your book was well written you get that confidence by the mark I got back in class was 98 out of 100 so I know I'm in the top two percentile of the class for example this is how you learned you were good at anything but what's the most important the mark or the parents telling you that you did great even if you didn't do that great so I think I would have liked that affirmation but I think some things in culture are embedded I think the Singaporean parent of today is vastly different than my mother's generation because my girlfriends have young children and they're different.

35:45They have the internet to see the different models of parenting and ingest the information. I think it's very different. I believe my parents and parents of that generation did the best that they could with what they knew at the time. Absolutely. So these new generation of parents, thanks to the internet, are able to do the work and heal what their parents and their grandparents were not able to heal, to not transmit these bad behaviors to their kids. Of the microcosm of women I know, of the women and the men that I know who are interested in this material, who spend their time and attention to look at it.

36:25But of course... Do you think this is a majority? Probably not. I definitely think that I live... After leaving mass media, I made a choice to live in an environment of my creation. in which I fly all over the world and I am based in Singapore, but who I'm surrounded by are people who are able to have the conversations we're currently having.

36:52And that's my choice. But do I think that that's everyone? Even though my algorithm tells me that itself? No, it's probably not everyone. Back to the thing that we were talking about before, about the subject or how you write the book or the subjects in the podcast, to have more people interested. If the subjects that go more viral and more interesting for people are the simple ones, obviously it means that this complex subject that we're talking about now, which is how do I get better and almost fix myself as an adult before getting kids to not fuck them up. Obviously, the majority of people will not think about that.

37:31I think it's a safe assumption. I think we also have to understand that people like you or I, my friends, are very privileged. There's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, everyone knows. You know, my survival needs are now met. I left old media so that my survival needs would be met so that I could grow. And the majority of people are not so lucky and maybe they're just trying to pay their rent every month and so obsessing about their own personal development is not at the forefront for them. and I throw no shade or judgment because I've been there. Can you tell us more about this taking the leap and saying, okay, this is not helping me fulfill my basic needs?

38:15I think a lot of people in Singapore are in the same situation right now because everything is so expensive and people are not earning more. I mean, in the world in general, but in Singapore, with the price of the food, the price of the rent, everything is becoming so expensive and the people median salary is probably still, I don't know, 4.5K or 4K or how do people live, you know, like that? And how, if you're not happy with your own situation, how do you take the leap and take control of your future? Yeah. So I'm very lucky because of how I grew up is that I was very middle-class. So what I see is a lot of people who grew up in the deficit, who grew up very poor, become quite driven to never return to that state of scarcity again.

39:00And so they become quite obsessed with money materialism in order to satiate that safety. Or the people who grew up with a lot of money also do not know how to live with less money. But because I grew up so middle class, and one thing my parents did really well was I, even though my dad was a shopkeeper, I never questioned my material needs at all. I always felt very safe in that way, is that I am not a materialistic person at all. I literally do not care about money at all. And so when you're looking to take the leap from a stable salary to setting up your own business, and you are bankrolling that yourself, because you are okay, and you don't feel it's any detriment to your self-concept or your identity to live humbly.

39:45Yeah. It doesn't affect my self-value. That's a big one to wear clothes from the high street. That's fine by me. Like I don't care. That is liberty when looking to bootstrap and start a startup. It is liberty. You do not care. And because I am in love with the work, that it was more delicious for me to fantasize about getting paid to do the work I love, then suffering and playing beneath my potential in old media. it was a no-brainer yeah if you have yeah because you don't have the lifestyle of I need to show other people what my life looks like and it was the same for me when I started my first company I mean I was I had a bit of help from my parents because it was just after my master oh look at you so 23 but same all my friends in Switzerland you I mean I did my master in Madrid but in Switzerland I went to do my bachelor in Switzerland in Switzerland you can get an internship where you earn seven, eight K Singapore dollar a month, right?

40:49So after a bachelor and a master, you can go on for a job where you earn eight to 10 K Swiss francs, which would be 12 to 15 K a month. Right. And I would, so that I see it had in my mind because I was thinking, I'm going to start this business first year. We're going to make zero second year. And I remember at that point, I was just thinking, okay, for me, I realize I need 1k a month to live. So, and I can work on my dream or building my company that has no ceiling, you know, and where I'm just driven 24 seven. This is your privilege. Absolutely. So I'm just there. And then I had, I remember I had this message from my friend.

41:28He was, I just, he just texts me, hey, Kevin, how are you? I'm like, yeah, great. Hustling. How are you? And he's like, oh, I earn like a dad's salary. Like directly like that. I'm like, whoa. What do you mean by a dad's salary? means like in French is a French expression meaning I earn like 10, 15k a month you know at 24, 25 and I was like okay I was and I was proud to tell him in my second year business I earn 1850 pounds net per month and I'm fucking happy and I can still save two, three hundred bucks a month to like go to Spain or whatever and I know that I'm working on something much bigger like I'm not in this system where I'm going to be limited not only in terms of salary but also I love the dad's salary term because that is exactly what I thought about leaving old media.

42:15I was like, I could keep making the dad's salary forever, but I have a chance to make the dad's salary for one hour on stage. Exactly. So then, and then it's limitless. So then you just multiply how many times you want to go on stage, you know? Yeah. And then your mind is rocked once you become an entrepreneur and you can never go back. Never go back. We always say that. You can never go back. The taste of unemployment, the taste of freedom makes you unemployed. Babe, I get what you mean. You get the point. I absolutely get your point. The taste of freedom makes you unemployable. I feel your point.

42:49Oh my God, my English. I feel your point at my cellular level. At my cellular level, babe. You moved to, you said before, you moved to Switzerland when you were 18 years old. How did this change your perception of life? I think the same way as becoming an entrepreneur. no, you can never go back. I was like, I can never go back to live in the suburbs of Western Australia. If I remember thinking, if I had no idea that other people could live so differently from how I grew up, I have a great story for this in a second. What else do I not know? How many other countries I can live in? So I ended up living four countries, six moves before I turned 30 on my own I remember inviting my second host family shout out Franny and Quart the most Swiss name Franny and Quart are legends.

43:43Franny is actually the name that you get in all the the books when you learn German. What's the name of the Frank is a gold Frannerly. Yeah yeah actually so she they I they were staying with them and I had a really good friend who was also an Australian exchange student. And I invited him to have dinner with us one night in the village. He was living in Kreuzlingen-Konstans, which is on the border with Germany. So he wasn't that far East Switzerland, but far enough that he made the trip all the way to the village that he would never turn away. It's not like he lived in the house next door. And we had this beautiful dinner.

44:18And then after he left the next day, my host mother said to me, you know, Simone, we didn't have enough slices of meat. So we had to cut your host father's meat in order to give it to David. So next time, if you want to invite someone over, can you let us know like well in advance? And this is the moment where I was like, oh, not everyone grew up Asian with a thousand Hoki and me frozen Tupperwares in the freezer for any visitors. We had food overflowing in my house in Australia. Some of it expired, but the freezer certainly was always there literally for the reason that my dad and mom would feel so ashamed should people drop in and there would be nothing for them.

45:02But I learned that not everyone grows up like you and what a blessing, what a lesson to learn to have that cultural malleability at the age of 18. And then after that, for me, Pandora's box opened. I wanted to learn every single thing about how everybody else operated so I could be the best guest in their house and not a terrible exchange student like doing that so I could be more culturally sensitive. But it has been the biggest gift and also the biggest curse because now I find living in a monoculture so boring. If I don't live in a place, where on earth am I going to settle? Who on earth am I going to marry?

45:41That code switches like this. but once your mind is open I don't think you can close your mind back in I tried it when I first came back to Singapore and I worked at that media outlet I tried it I was very depressed undiagnosed but I think very close to being depressed what's really interesting is you say that your mind was open in Switzerland where I'm from and I find Swiss people very close-minded you haven't met my girlfriend so i've destroyed them that's really interesting i mean i think what's good is that switzerland was the first of all these experiences right if you had gone to dubai and then switzerland afterwards you probably would have been like but i did do dubai and went back to perth and that was very very difficult yeah what was so different between the swiss household and the Asian Australian household?

46:39I think I felt it in my body and I'm actually writing this in a in a new chapter for the new book and I felt always in a low-level fight or flight in my childhood home I was always tiptoeing like many children who experience small t trauma constantly tiptoeing around the moods of the primary caregiver who is unpredictable so in my house growing up the the floor was carpeted with eggshells like that's how I felt I was tiptoeing all the time and in my the households in Switzerland I had three families and in all three families it was calm no shouting no criticism well-stocked fridge and regular routine and just I felt in my nervous system calm.

47:30Do you think it's because they are inherently like that or it's because you were not their true daughter and towards a child you might be more tough? No one day when you're in Switzerland I'm there at the same time you will come to Eshlakon with me and my second mother Irene she's my mother like there's we're hilarious the level of intimacy is second to my mother only. So I don't think it's because they were like that. I don't think it's cultural because my second host family, the father is Argentinian. I think it's that they loved in a different way. And they, I mean, the one thing that is cultural is that Swiss people are very organized.

48:19So a lot of the chaos that I experienced around disorganization, not enough groceries in the fridge, things like that growing up. That didn't happen in a Swiss household because the mothers were like house frowns. Like they took pride, a sense of cultural national pride in running a household like a finely tuned machine. And so a lot of the arguments that I had in my household growing up about being late, not being prepared and something forgotten didn't exist also because they were just culturally, they're more organized. They're very organized culturally. So you have this amazing life-changing experience when you were 18.

48:59And then you have another terrible life experience that happens one year later. Yeah. So I get back to Australia and then my dad is diagnosed with terminal cancer and dies within 90 days of the diagnosis. so that was um that was like the best year of your life and then back to that and that was hard I think contrasts are always hard I think when the universe brings you a contrast it's for a reason it's to really um emphasize a point when did you learn that what what I just said yeah that the universe brings you back to exactly I mean kind of like the destiny you know or like you have these highs and these lows and it's kind of how you learn about life and it's normal it's actually you at some point you even see it as beneficial for your own development yeah I think that's when you have the awakening where you go all of these bad things uh to teach that I also know this because I'm a vampire Kevin like I I have I feel like I've lived a thousand years in a like Botoxed Asian body, but really there's just calloused flesh under here of experience after experience.

50:19I think life has really beaten me up and put me down and lifted me up again. And I think it's because so many things happened that were so synchronistic and so serendipitous that I was like, I can't ignore the patterns in this are crazy. Let's look at, for example, how Virgin Radio found me and how I got the book deal. I was working at a radio station in Singapore in 2007, earning$2 ,900 a month. I had to beg them for that because I said, I'm not Singaporean it. So I'm not living in a room with my parents. I need enough to pay rent. So you actually paid well. I was paid very well for that time.

50:55Okay. This 2007 is a long time ago. Vampire. I told you, vampire. And then at the beginning of that, I met a Filipino guy who was working the station. I said he had been working in the UAE in Sharjah. And he said he had a great time. He was finishing out a radio contract there. And if he was a single man without kids, he would totally move there. And I was like, that's where I want to go next. And I'm going to build a portfolio and create a reel. And then I'm going to send it to radio stations in Dubai. Four weeks later, I got an email from Virgin Radio International. The guy who brought me over, my mentor, had seen me on HBO Asia as the presenter inside a hotel room in China where he was setting up, trying to set up Virgin Radio in China.

51:40He then searches my name online because they're looking for people with an ethnic exterior and a Western voice and finds out that I actually have radio background, that I'm working on a radio station. He emails me and one other presenter in Singapore at the time and I'm the only one who replies. Six months later, I moved to Dubai. Changes my whole life. And then with the book, I self-published this book in Southeast Asia and I fly to Edinburgh to attend a course held by my publisher about writing. And I take three copies. One I give to the girl next to me, who's now one of my best friends. One I give to the CEO and one I give to the commissioning editor.

52:19The next day, day two of the course, I'm sitting there 11am. I open my LinkedIn. The commissioning editor who's already gone back to London read my book overnight and was like, you'll be getting an email from us on Tuesday. We were very, very interested moving forward within four weeks to book deal. Like, and that book is the republished version of the Southeast Asian book. So my point is, how do I know the universe is doing all this stuff with contrast and synchronicity? It has happened too many times for me to think it's an accident. How do you call that? I call that living all out and not being risk averse.

52:55I come from a very risk averse family. I come from a risk averse culture. You only get to see these things when you're really licking the earth. you're playing all that yeah yeah the the previous guest that we just posted last week pretty big guy um he said pretty much this but in other in other words luck is when preparation meets opportunity and you you need to make your luck happen basically all day and the more you're out there um the more you're gonna get lucky because you're just facing many more opportunities because you're not risk averse. Absolutely. But I think the preparation part is the interesting part here because I didn't perceive that anything I had done as a presenter, as a DJ was the preparation.

53:43And I was so asleep to that. It was all the preparation. The way that the brain crafts the content, like I was very naive in that way. Also because when you're in entertainment, similar to being parented by my mother, which is why I chose that industry, you are not getting affirmation. You're being criticized all the time. So you have no idea your aptitude, actually, until you get the book deal, until someone poaches you and brings you to Dubai. I had no idea I was actually good at any of this because all I ever experienced was being criticized. You're too fat. Your nose is too big. You're too short.

54:16Your accent's too Australian. All of these things. So it's still amazing to me. I'm still like a kid and be like, oh my God, I just got this email. Next month I'm speaking at Harvard. What is happening? I still, I send you them. I still get surprised. But that's much, on one side, that's much better because there is a lot of people in business. I kind of became like that, unfortunately, which is you go through all these ups and downs and you're, at some point, you become numb to the bad and to the good. So you, oh, I'm not surprised anymore. This customer is leaving or this person left or this person is not happy or I got fucked over.

54:57Do you know what the antidote to this is? No. Are you ready? Yoda's going to tell you. Okay. Joy we know is the highest vibration, right? Before enlightenment. So having that childlike joy about each and every opportunity brings into your vibration more opportunities. So I choose to be joyful about a DM from TikTok or an invitation to speak at Harvard or any of these things. I choose to feel wonder or enjoy because I know that it stops the jadedness and it brings us. So all of these CEOs just tell them, pretend you're a child and look at that email again. Okay, so that's how you do it. Pretend you're a child?

55:35Yeah. Okay. Okay, with your childlike eyes in Switzerland, Kevin at 10. Okay. You know? With my glasses, my Harry Potter glasses. Exactly. And my little rat's tail. That all my friends' mother used to play with. How 90s of you. I love that you've brought that back. I forgot about that, actually. You must watch The Idol on Netflix. He has a rat's tail in that. Let's just go back to the CEO thing for one second. You know, and this idea of it's human to get used to a new level of anything, right? It's why super famous celebrity male superstars, or let's use a bad example, someone like a Harvey Weinstein, started to perceive it was normal for him, someone who looked like Jabba the Hutt, to always have hot women.

56:27And when those hot women didn't come because they wanted to, he then, against their will, chose to do this, which is obviously terrible. But it's this idea of your exposure and then your desensitization. So to create childlike joy, I think it's also important not to be hedonistic. Yes, you might have the wealth to access. Yes, you might have the beauty to have access to whatever you want. But the minute you start getting desensitized to it and using it as a privilege and taking it for granted, and I think I was a little bit like this in Dubai, you are shooting yourself in your own foot because then you stop experiencing childlike joy.

57:08I get this point, but I also get the point where you're kind of protecting yourself against like these huge mood swings. when you start a company, it's the same. You have this huge mood swing because it's your baby, you know, it's this thing and then the day after it's horrible. Or we're not going to make money and then, oh, we got this client and all these things are not working. Or for example, my own story with money was that this thing where like massive money swing in investment, in crypto, then I felt like an imposter. It was horrible. I felt horrible, like making too much money. So then I became numb to the whole thing and I was like, oh, whether I lose a lot or I make a lot, I'm more numb.

57:46So I feel I'm less hurt by these crazy emotional swings that come with a child. Yeah, but this is also you needed to have that experience to know what you know now. Right. So the next time this happens again, you won't react the same way. It won't affect you as much. It's how I feel about bad and good reviews. Right. Yeah. Good example. Do you get affected by bad reviews? I got one the other day and then I posted it and then the guy removed it. This is very Singaporean. I love it. He's like, now my name is exposed on the interwebs. He got shamed. He used a shame. No, no, no, you didn't get shamed because I, the truth is, on the same day I got two men who, the book wasn't written for men anyway, but one from the US and one from Singapore with completely contradicting reviews.

58:35And this is where I go back to the beauty of the Asian parenting system that makes you ignore compliments because you're not getting any. So you don't actually, so you're like, I got to be a great writer and a great thought leader and have a deep inner world, regardless of what people say, because you just can't place your importance on either bad or good. You can't, because you will never create anything again. You'll never. I will, you know, that's the day I become a Tai Tai and stop having opinions, which will never happen. Right. But that, I got to make you. Simone, the Taitai, like the polar opposites.

59:15I'm totally over Taitai age now. They'll be like, really? They'll be like, she's too old. But, you know, that is the day you stop creating, when you start believing. Can we get back to your dad's story? And for me, I really want to understand how do you get the strength to move on from something like that at such a young age? So firstly, not to diminish my dad's passing, but now that I've really processed it and healed from it and have such an awareness of how other people have gone through so much worse. I had my father for 19 years. So I was almost a fully, a very immature 19, but a fully formed adult by, well, my prefrontal cortex was not fully developed.

1:00:05So was I a full adult? By the law, I was a full adult, but I was very immature and very sheltered. But I had him for 19 really good years and some people. So for the people watching that don't have their parents for that long, or don't have either of their parents, my heart goes out to you. So how do you get over something like that? Well, you don't do what I did, which was listen to all the Asian aunties saying, be strong, don't cry, be strong for your mother, and push your natural reaction to let the feelings pass through you, to feel the feelings, and then push them deep inside you and pretend everything is okay.

1:00:43For God's sake, don't do that. If I can just say this and one young girl can watch this and it will give her the courage to ignore those voices. What we know now, which we didn't know back in 2004 when Dad passed away, is all of this incredible knowledge about therapy, processing trauma, connecting with your feelings. It's the work of the next book that I'm writing right now. And we know all of this because we've seen how it aids people's recovery. We have empirical evidence that this works. We do not have any empirical evidence that says, push the feelings deep inside you and don't feel anything.

1:01:19We have no evidence to say that that worked for anyone. So my biggest thing would be, you know, it only took me, it took me a whole decade before I went to deal with my mother becoming paralyzed. And then the therapist started digging around dad's death and we revisited everything. And it was extremely painful going for therapy when you haven't dealt with grief and you've let it calcify like that. It's like going for facial and getting an extraction and having that outbreak for a good five days before your skin's amazing. That's therapy. You all need to expect that there's a little bit of an outbreak and this is why people eschew going to therapy because they want an instant fix and it's not.

1:02:06Can you talk about the funeral experience and because you talk about that in the book lack of cultural space to grieve and how suppressing grief or feelings in general is actually long-term damaging? Yeah so I think a lot of what we learn is modeled to us so the aunties would tell my mum to be strong for us kids and then when I would see my mum trying to be strong then I would do the same and therefore it gets passed down like it's modeled to you um I think you know dad I you know I watched dad die in front of me so it was extremely um traumatizing and I felt very unprepared for it but how could anyone prepare me for it when no one else in that room had experienced it.

1:02:53So we were around the bed. He was actually in my room because my room was on the ground floor of our two-story house. So that's where the hospital bed had been placed while he was in palliative care because we knew he wouldn't recover. And we were all called into the room. And I literally remember seeing my mother and my uncle Jeremy keening, you know, so it's not crying it's this primal animalistic wailing and I think when I write a lot about the science of connection and I go back to this thing about tribes it was it was a moment where I realized like we are animals like this there is a lot of this to do with connection that is just it's it's in us at the cellular level we can't ignore that and um and I watched my dad's eyes like clothes and his last exhalation and it was just so final it was this thing that we'd have been anticipating that it happens and just the silent you know the silence of it besides the crying and then the next day because he I slept next to my sister that evening because obviously I didn't want to be alone but the next day I had to go back into my room to get my stuff and I knew his body was there until they were taking it for the next stage of things.

1:04:16And I remember going to hold his hand and my dad had a beauty mark on his hand and holding his hand and looking at him and feeling how cold he was and just knowing that my dad was gone, like my dad wasn't in there. And I think anyone who's seen someone pass in front of them has this realization of there is something so much bigger than us. I had gone to church every single Sunday since I was born. but never been as spiritual as I was in that one moment. To know there is something, all of this stuff that we're talking about, my book, your relationships, whatever, it's all just entertainment. You know, this is all what we're here on the ride before we die, filling our time.

1:05:03And then it's final. And it really is true. You don't bring anything with you. your entire legacy is how you behaved while you were here and what children you created. And then you're just gone. And for me, he was just the carcass of flesh. There was no part of Robert Heng was in the building anymore. It was so apparent to me. And I think people who've seen someone pass really get that. Yeah, it's very paradoxical because we are, The thing would be, why do we even stress in life? Yeah. Because we have all this stress, but if it's to end, I mean, I lost, it was not my dad, but it was almost my dad.

1:05:50Like it was my sister godfather. And it was the same, very similar reflection, which was from one day to another, this person is gone, heart attack. And then you're shocked. And then you're like, and then you go to the funeral. and you see the hole there and you're like, this person who I love so much is in a hole and he had his entire life with all his stress and you're just thinking, I'm going to end up like that. Why the hell am I stressing out about all this small shit in my life? It makes no sense because at the end of the day, I'm going to be there in a hole and people will forget me. There's a fantastic book that please everyone watching this read, Untethered Sold by Michael Singer.

1:06:33And I'm buying this for you next time we meet because I love bringing gifts to people. And there's this whole chapter on the choice of unconditional happiness. You make the choice to be happy, not I'm happy if I make a million in crypto, I'm happy if I find the perfect husband. No, I am childlike, joyful, happy, regardless of what's happening, which is very easy to say when things are going well. Ask me again when things, things are going pretty well for me right now, but when things are going bad. And if you make that choice, you will not regret your life. that's where you find the that's where you find the blessing in the bad shit because once you go through good shit and then things go terribly wrong you learn that happiness comes from the basics and and this is why your 20s is so tortured because you've probably only gone through one cycle of bad and good by the time you get to 39 you've gone repeated cycles and you realize oh i'm always going to be okay you also realize that this thing this carcass that i was mentioning this is why I go yeah I got Botox I got like because I am not attached to this it's here it helps but it it's not my value none of this external stuff is our value and I feel like everyone's like clicking off YouTube now because this is such high it's we're getting too high level this is not going to make the reel that goes on Instagram this could this could I was thinking about that we were talking about that's probably a good one this is the stuff if we could have dinner that I I could sit and talk and think about this is the stuff that I spend my time thinking about besides my Botox appointments like all the time the summary is basically you can't if you can't be happy with a coffee you can't be you won't be happy with a jet well human beings are not we're not wired to be unfortunately we are wired to increasingly feel we want more we are not meant to sit at the table of success or that one level for too long.

1:08:28But you can use that in your favor rather than against you. How do you do that? To look for happiness in little things. Therefore, little things make you more pleased. Is it possible to look for happiness in the little things without going through extreme pain or going through something really rough? I think you have to ask this guy called Buddha, that one. No, I'm just reflecting on my life experience and yours. And I think like the moment you start to realize these things is, is going back full circle. You know, it's, there's this. You have to be at a rock bottom. Is that what you mean? Yeah.

1:09:06Like, I mean, there is this guy, a friend of mine, he told me this story. I'm probably not going to be perfectly telling it, but. It's okay. English, second language. We forgive you. It's, I'm trying my best here. So it's, and he's all, he's a French guy who told me that in English. So like, imagine like second degree. I'm actually part French. No hate. No hate of your command of English. No, but he's talking, it's the story of the fisherman. Right. And I think there are two friends and there's this businessman who goes and meets this fisherman. And the fisherman just goes out there every day, fishes, and then brings the food for the family and he's happy.

1:09:45And then the businessman says, oh, it's amazing what you're doing. But like, look, you should take this fish instead of giving it to the family. You should sell it. And then if you sell it, you're going to make some money and you're going to be able to hire another fisherman so you can make more fish and then you can buy a bigger boat and then buy a bigger fish and then make more money and then become a billionaire, you know? And then he's asking, but why would I do that? Right? And then the guy said, so one day you can become a billionaire. And then he says, yeah, but why would I, why would it change to my life?

1:10:18Right? And then the guy realizes actually nothing would change. It's all this, I interview a lot of super successful people, multimillionaire, billionaires, and we talk about that. And it's kind of always the same, which is you do all these, you have all these objectives, often it's career and money wise, especially money at this target and his goal and retire early and all that stuff. And then you get there and you get to these numbers and you realize, what's the point? Like, what am I going to do the rest of my life? oh it's actually and then obviously to get there you get burnt a few times really badly because your life is not a straight line just to see if you can hit a number and that was what it was like when I first started the business like I did a lot of launches and sold public speaking programs and things and I could still do it again but the truth is I don't enjoy the work for me public speaking tips if you compare teaching someone to articulate versus the kind of discussion we've been having today.

1:11:13So it's like, oh, I could, but what difference would it make if the money I make now is also enough? I mean, if my survival needs are made and it allows me to be less stressed and kinder to others, which is what really matters and see my mum more often, which is what really matters then. But on your fisherman story, great book, Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth. You'll love it. It's the original, it's an Asian story written by an American missionary who grew up in China, spoke Mandarin, all of that. I think it won a Pulitzer. It's about a Chinese peasant who's dirt poor. And one day there is a huge uprising.

1:11:50I think it's a revolution, cultural revolution, in the neighbouring city. And he and his very, and she's described as a very plain, ugly village wife that he was given to marry, goes past this temple that's being raided, or the house of a rich person that's being raided. And they go in and they're able to get jewels and things and they sell these riches and then he uses the money this is very Chinese as a Chinese person it's very Chinese and then they invest and he buys land with this right then he starts spending every single day he's up produces children barely sees them he's in the field breaking his back every single day he eventually becomes really wealthy he then falls in love with a prostitute in an opium den he becomes corrupted by the love of this woman he abandons his first wife who helped make him the wealth she ends up dying alone surrounded by the children who loved her.

1:12:37She was an incredible, loyal spouse, and he ends up completely corrupted. This is one generation, okay? And this is the cautionary tale about whether you're a crypto billionaire, whether you become Simon Sinek, whatever it is, where is your connection to the self along this journey? You are the navigator of the ship. Actually, there was a podcast where Simon says that he's doing all this stuff, but he feels incredibly lonely. I know. Diary of a CEO. Everyone sent it to me and I said, Simon Sinek, the facts, you're not giving the right loneliness facts. It was killing me. It was killing me. I was like, everyone's sending this to me, but I'm glad that he's speaking out about loneliness because everybody needs to know more about this, this topic.

1:13:21And Simon, if you see this, yeah, call me. Talking about this suppression of emotions. what's your message out there to young people suffering in silence because they lost someone or they got molested or abused by a stranger a friend or family member but their family or culture requires them to suppress their true emotions instead of feeling them so i would like to just speak broadly about people experiencing grief rather than specifically because I have not experienced molestation or abuse. So I don't feel that it's right for me to speak on behalf of those people. But say you're grieving and you need to, you are connecting with yourself.

1:14:14You can do this easily through 448 breathing technique or box breathing. Just Google it. Take a really quiet moment. Do the breathing two to three minutes and then ask yourself what emotions are coming up? where are they in your body? And if you feel that you need to express these emotions, my biggest piece of advice is go to someone who is either first option paid professional, who knows how to hold your grief in a safe space where you can fully express it. And it is private because it's not approved of in certain cultures to be telling stuff about this. And secondly, if that's not an option, go to a friend that you trust that will give you a silent hug.

1:15:05Do not go to the friend who is going to be like those aunties I mentioned and say, give you advice. Go to the friend that you trust will hold the space without telling you what to do. Because if you're repressing, you just need to express. without judgment. And if you don't have anyone and don't have the resources to pay a professional, go to a park somewhere and scream it out. Have you tried that? I haven't. I've tried burning things, very effective, writing a letter and burning things. But I think that going to a park and screaming it out would have really helped me. When dad died, I was a student.

1:15:45I didn't have a dollar to rub together. And unfortunately, I took family friends advice of going to my local church to the counselor that was for free. And that counselor happened to be the parent of a kid that I went to school with. Bad move. I did not feel safe to express what I wanted to express. It wasn't safe. And that put me off going to find a therapist for a very long time, which is a tragedy. Because I think how happy I am now, I could have lived like this before, but everything we do gets us to where we are now but my point is find go to book a team a reservoir go wherever you need to express get it out of you because what we know from louise hay's work who is the founder of my publisher those undealt with emotions can actually manifest in um physical illness and we see this even with loneliness the science behind it in the book so it's not just woo-woo now, there's science behind it.

1:16:44You talked about running away from your emotions for years. What were some of the ways that you expressed that? When I first moved to Asia as a young commercial model in 2005, I did a whole lot of partying, whole lot of drinking, whole lot of trying to find love in places where love didn't live. and thinking that sex would also be comfort, not realizing without that self-awareness, that self-connection, that what I was looking for was to be held. You know, you're 21 years old, prefrontal cortex, no bueno, right? Like it's, and no good role models. My mother wasn't speaking to me at the time because I had chosen to leave my university degree partway to go into entertainment.

1:17:39And so that very Singaporean reaction was just to not talk to me and didn't feel there was any compassion or anyone around that would give me that safe space. So I think that's why I do the work that I do now and why I'm so open to destigmatize this for anyone going through that. Because if people can see me and the way that I present, cohesive, confident, eyelashes, all of that, and that you are still able to keep it together and you will rise from these things, but you've experienced that, it gives them hope that they'll come out the other side. So what we're saying here is the more you suppress your emotions and you don't allow yourself to feel them, the more, and talking about it in the book, you are likely to develop some sort of addictions.

1:18:35one way or another? I think that a lack of connection, we know from the work of Dr. Gable Marte that lack of connection can lead to addictions. That doesn't mean always, that doesn't mean for everyone, but what we want to avoid is people self-soothing to avoid feeling negative emotions or to avoid feeling their deficits. So self-soothing behaviors can be shopping, can be sex, can be food, can be alcohol, can be drugs. These are all used as distractions from healing the self and often happen, I think, when people aren't conscious, which is why my second book is all about being aware and finding that consciousness because it all starts there.

1:19:22You called yourself a love addict at some point? Didn't call myself, was told by the therapist I was. you said that you were constantly seeking validation from others due to childhood unlovability and that this paradoxically repelled connection yeah and I subscribe to Young Pueblo weekly newsletter which I love of course you do I'm missing you in Boston by one day I fly out and he's doing an event I'm very sad so I read one thing that I really loved that made me think about what I read in the book. He says falling in love will not fix your life. Healing your emotional history will. Yes.

1:20:11I feel this is coming to your life at the right time, Kevin. I think it comes to the life of everyone at some point. Multiple times, probably. Multiple times. I think the reason that I am still single is that there's work to be done. And until that work is done in the way that it's supposed to be, that person's not going to show up. Somebody will show up, but it's going to be crazy and not right. But why? Because the wrong person will show up or because you will reject the person? You will attract the wrong person. Attract the wrong person. And then you will make babies. and then this cycle will continue forever.

1:20:54So if you think about it, the reason why so many divorces happen is probably around all this unresolved childhood trauma stuff that people are not aware of and they pair at the wrong time or with the wrong type of people. I used to think this, but I recently watched an incredible episode of Soft White Underbelly on YouTube. Leading divorce lawyer from New York comments on why there are so many divorces. He says, again, back to tribes, when we had a life expectancy of 30 years old or younger, married for life. I get where you're coming. We're now, that whole thing about the boredom and having to re-inject love, like that's, I think there's some, that takes effort and hard work.

1:21:39And what we know with human beings is like, we get bored. We need the dopamine. In other words, we're not monogamous. I don't think it's not we're not monogamous I think we were not built for marriage to last as long as it's lasting because we are living to 115 years old right so that partner and so you can see why egg freezing is becoming more and more popular maybe the generation my friend's kids who are 13 and 15 they're going to live to 110 maybe they're going to get married at 45 but their womb is not cooperating so that at 25 that all these girls are going to end up freezing their eggs so that they can make a choice to get married later and do more because they're going to live longer so something interesting to understand that would be to look at when do most divorces happen is it in the first year in the first five years in the first 10 years you know because if it's after 10 years let's say this would make sense but if it's very shortly after the the marriage it's not because of boredom or people get bored faster but because you think about i would agree with you if if we were to say and this is obviously not based on science this is based of two single people like making a guess hello internet don't judge us but if we were to look at yes marriages that get annulled So maybe somebody gets married and the marriage gets annulled straight after the honeymoon or very early on, then maybe we could correlate that with a lack of self-connection.

1:23:10Most likely. But I would not like to give my non-professional opinion on this, Kevin. We're talking about relationships and you moved to Dubai. I also lived there for in 2021 for a while. I find it very interesting. You're very Dubai. Yeah. The whole Kevin vibe is very Dubai. So I find it very interesting because I didn't like it actually. I found very disconnected there because of a few things. The first one is the wealth gap I found shocking. Like I would literally go, I mean, it was the crypto craze, everybody making too much money. I would go to have these dinners with my crypto friends, spending like thousands of dollars on dinners.

1:23:52And then these dudes would be 25, 26 years old. and then I would take the cab, a normal cab to go home and the taxi driver would be 25 years old and I would talk to him and it would be during COVID so I would be like, okay, how are you? And he would be like, oh, listen, like it's 11 p.m. I started at 4 p.m. You're my second customer of the day. I'm here to feed my family and to send my sister to go to school. I'm from Pakistan and I don't even earn, I don't have a day off. I work 30 days a month and I don't even earn enough to pay for my dormitory here because there is no customers. And I would have this crazy, obviously the crypto bubble is a bubble, but Dubai is attracting these kind of people, right?

1:24:38So I think that this exists also in Singapore, but I think it's more apparent having lived in both Singapore and Dubai because wealth is more demonstrated in Dubai. It's more cultural here that people are very discreet. whereas it's more presented in Dubai. How do you feel about that? You live there. You said you loved your life there, but now you're working on loneliness and human connections. I found it to be one of the shallowest places on earth where you can create. It's just a show of culture. I moved there after the global financial crisis. So you've got to imagine that a lot of the people that it's now attracting, they were ejected from the city during that time.

1:25:19There was no crypto. It was bankers, finance people. so I moved there just at the same time that all these people were leaving so the Dubai that I lived in was also different but I also do um I actually went on a date ages ago where the guy was thinking of leaving Singapore to go to Dubai and I was telling him that I could never live there now because I understand the quality of life I had was built on the backs of um you know other people and he said to me well if you start having this thought process you can't live anywhere completely dismiss what I was saying but I'm glad that you um could see that I I don't I yeah for me as a Swiss villager like the values didn't match at all like it was just crazy and I also found it attracts the most insecure people on it attracts I think it attracts people who like to be abandoned let me tell you that in a second so firstly you know I was 24 years old when I moved there.

1:26:18But what became very clear to me was like me and a set of my girlfriends, there was always love life drama, always, always, always. And this is before I knew any of the things that I now know. And what we know about people, if you've had abandonment in your childhood, or you've had, like with my mum, a roller coaster of a primary caregiver, is that you are used to being left over and over again emotionally, right? So therefore you would move to a city that's extremely transient, that would allow you to be left over and over again as your friends each move. Dubai is extremely transient, much more than Singapore.

1:26:58And so I was like, that's why when people say everyone in Dubai is crazy. People, when they live Dubai, they go, oh man, everyone was crazy. I'm living back in the UK now. We were all crazy. Everything was crazy. It was like, no, but maybe there is some correlation there. But I loved my time there. Let me caveat this by once you put this on the interwebs, as an unknowing 24-year-old. You loved it. I loved it. I bought my first property with that money. I loved that I was paid properly for my skills, which I wasn't in Singapore by any means in the media. I could barely feed myself. So would I go back now as someone who's 39?

1:27:35No. It's very interesting. So the question then is, is it better to be awake or asleep? Is it better to be aware or unaware? What is true happiness? If you are unaware, that is also a form. I was very happy when I was there. I was totally unaware. But I thought that that was happiness. If I compare that to how I feel now, the calm that is in my nervous system, oh my gosh, you wouldn't trade it for anything. Is ignorance bliss better than knowledgeable gloom? That's basically the whole, that's basically not only that, but like what you talked about before, which is I started to move around and it was amazing, but it was also a curse because I don't know where I'm going to settle down.

1:28:18I don't know who I'm going to settle down with. I don't know if the grass is greener. And that's something that I really, that's something that my Swiss friends who grew up in a Swiss village and are married now and have the same friends since forever and are super happy, will never experience. and there's probably bliss in ignorance. Honestly. I'm not saying we're in a bad place or in a bad situation. I love my life. I would not want to be there, but I'm also able to take a step back and realize before when I was younger and not understanding these things, I would just think, I don't understand these people.

1:28:58They're just uninteresting. They don't understand. They never moved. I almost criticized them. judging them judging completely now would be don't go down that hole because if you judge other people you have to judge yourself but i've done it a lot also because i had to yeah but that's the shit that happened in life that's the way that you are growing as a person so in the words of michael singer you're bothering yourself about the moment because what can you change are you going to close your mind back in are you going to rewind and go back in time and never see the things you've seen no so we are discussing and giving anxiety to something we cannot change i I cannot go back to 2002 and say to my parents, I don't want that scholarship to Switzerland.

1:29:39Don't send me. I want to stay in Perth forever, marry a guy who works in the mines, make Eurasian babies and hang out here and go to the movies once a month. That's not an option for me. It happened already. You know, so the only option is to have faith that the person that you're meant to be with exists because if you exist, they exist. Right. So you live both in Dubai and Singapore and some people compare both cities, right? They were both modeled off Switzerland, by the way. I didn't know about Dubai actually. So Dubai was modeled off Singapore and Singapore was modeled off Switzerland. Okay.

1:30:24How is Dubai different from a place like Singapore? I think that when we talk about multiculturalism in Singapore and Singapore being diverse, it is nothing compared to Dubai. That's one of the things that really shocked me. There's a lot of rhetoric, even when I was on the radio here, a lot of rhetoric about racial harmony and the races. And yes, Singapore is fantastically diverse, which is why I've chosen to live here versus be back in Australia, right? however it is 10 % of the diversity of Dubai you know really from every corner of the globe and these people are majority of the city versus here we have a majority locals small bit of expats we're talking about majority of the Dubai population being foreign which means that you are so ripe to learn and to have your mind opened by people's different stories and their viewpoint on things and if you have an open mind and you don't just stay within your own culture and you make friends like I did as a mixed race person you learn to do that from the day you're born that you don't quite belong so you don't belong to any tribe so why bother just be friends with everyone and I think that oh my gosh like that is one of the greatest gifts of Dubai

1:31:45so there is good sides of Dubai I loved it is it possible to create meaningful and deep human connections in big cities where most people are abandoned or insecure or materialistic of course like Dubai of course there's a whole chapter in my book called Nomad about how expatriate friendships are different and I wish there was more research on this. This and why Asians love karaoke are two studies that I want to do. But I would not be living in Singapore if I thought that I couldn't make deep connection here. Can you explain the difference between the expat and the local? Connection in Singapore specifically or just globally?

1:32:30I think let's focus on Singapore. Okay, so one big thing that's very different from Dubai, for example, is that Singaporeans, just like Swiss people, I feel, and this is generalizing grossly, of course, I had to work very hard at my Swiss friendships. I had to work very hard at my Singaporean friendships to get to the level where my Singaporean friends would invite me into their homes for meals. You really know as a foreigner in Singapore, if you've really penetrated local society, when the door to the HGB or the home is open to you and you're sitting at a meal. And that's not just if you're dating an Asian chick and you get invited for Chinese New Year, I'm talking friends like you and JM doing the video here are buddies and JM invites you into his house.

1:33:11That is a huge badge of honor. And that takes years in building trust with Singaporeans to allow that to happen. Now, I was lucky I had that with my family, but I had to win that privilege on my own as a friend with my Singaporean friends. And it's one of my proudest things. And the same with my Swiss, you know, my Swiss girlfriends too. And the cultures are quite similar in that way. It's like you have to work hard, but once you're in, they are so loyal in a way that Dubai is not. For example, it's very, it's so easy to make friends on a surface level, but there is that transience with people moving and leaving all the time.

1:33:51So you have to work on a filtering process. And my filtering process is always, do we share the same values? you know then for if we share the same values we're going to feel less alone together we're going to have connection and vulnerability and build something authentic but if we don't have the same values then it's going to be hard what's one of the key things you look at to make sure you have similar values uh for example for me it's my word is my bond so if i tell you let's meet we just met, but there's good connection, a girl or a guy. Let's meet in two weeks, Friday evening, 8 PM. We don't put it in the calendar, right?

1:34:33I don't need to send you an invite. I just write it down in my own calendar. And then the same, so two weeks later I come and say, okay, we're meeting tonight. Right? And if the person is like, okay, they didn't forget, right? So Dubai is notoriously flaky for this stuff. Right? I think cities in general are flaky for this stuff. And that's where, from my own experience, I realized I bond much better with people who are from the countryside because their word is their bond. If they say something, they're much more likely to do it. Whereas in cities, there is all these transient... Distractions.

1:35:08Where people just don't follow up with their own words. And in the dating, it's the same. Like people ghost each other. I hate that. It's just all this shit where I don't even understand as a Swiss villager. I don't understand how you can be that. Tell me you don't want. Tell me you're not interested. Tell me. Tell me. I understand. I'm not going to be mad at you. But like, it's just so city vibe. Disrespectful. But Kevin, you getting mad about this is creating resistance and stress hormones in you. You need to let it pass through you. I'm fine with you. I'm much older than you. So I used to be you like that.

1:35:47But you have to let it pass through you. You can't control other people. You just know that the universe naturally filtered them. How wonderful. The universe naturally filtered these people for you. That means you're loved and guided, right? The universe is like, we're just going to make Kevin see the truth of who this person is to save him time. Is that why you messaged me on Instagram today? Be like, are you ready for tomorrow's podcast? No, no, it's just because I spend a lot of time preparing. He was filtering me. There is so many. Are you coming tomorrow? Yeah. have you forgot it? I had one person who didn't show up but it was an online person anyway let it pass through you let it pass through you it was completely fine it's just it was very late in the evening and I was like oh man like this is gonna ruin my night just because I will have gone to sleep too late for being there for nothing I was ready to push myself to the next level like extra push where I know I'm gonna be feel bad tomorrow anyway but now I'm here I mean anyway so here this is an interesting discussion you see for me now at 39 I have constantly like, if I'm happy now, but that ambitious part of me is like, you should push.

1:36:56But then I'm like, but if the whole point, if I've read all these spiritual texts and learned from all these courses and masters, if I know the end goal is to be happy and I am happy now, and this little voice is saying, you should push it. Well, what if I tried not to push it and just stayed and tried to receive whatever is sent to me versus trying to catch the opportunities all the time? So this is my latest experiment at 39 with the universe. I understand that. The only thing is we need to release a podcast every week. So like if there is no podcast in the pipeline, I'm like, fuck, I need to do another one.

1:37:33Let's get really freaking meta right now. Who says you have to release the podcast every week? The consistency of the game. Who says that? I agree. I agree. I can just do freestyle podcasting and see where it goes. You can just do the Simone Hang method of, does it really matter? In the grand scheme of life, absolutely doesn't matter. Absolutely not. We were talking about dating. That's a great transition. Kevin, I'm sweating. It's like aluminium falling here. Do you want to take it off? No, no, I'm staying because you're asking me about dating. No, no, no, no, no. not about your dating life okay your dating life in general you wrote a chapter called paradox where you talk about going to your friend's birthday being at the table while taking him for dinner exactly and then he's on tinder swiping did you relate you want to talk about So I related, absolutely related.

1:38:35But for me, it was many years ago. I haven't been on dating apps for many years because I think we can talk about that later. But I think it's completely useless, especially as men. Like, I think the whole game is completely screwed because it's skewed toward women. And then it creates narcissistic women who just want more and they have the illusion of options. But then and then. To be honest, when I was in my 20s and young and pretty, I didn't have dating apps, but I was still a narcissist. So just your theory on dating apps is slightly thrown. But it's even more now with Instagram and dating apps where you have these women who always have the next option and then they all go for a few men, right?

1:39:13And these few men, they get all the options so they're never going to settle down, right? So they also become sort of narcissistic, which is what Jordan Peterson talks about. Which is the guy that I was, yes, they recently. Exactly, the guys. They're so desensitized. The guys are mistreating this woman, right? And this is, let's say, top 5 % guys or top 1%. They get all the women. And then you have the other 99 % of the men who get one like per week, maybe, right? And basically they get nothing. They get no woman. And they end up watching porn or going on OnlyFans because that's the place where they can get sex without the fear of rejection.

1:39:46And then the problem is just a mathematical problem. If all the women want to go for a few men because they have this illusion of options, it cannot work. And then also one thing that's really important is like a lot of women through these online apps and Instagram is one of them is basically, I think is a dating app, except if you use it for business. If you post pictures of yourself, it's basically the ultimate dating app. The problem is a lot of women confuse sexual value with relationship value. And they say, oh, I can get sex from this top 1 % guy, but like, he's not necessarily going to settle down.

1:40:22And the point is if you confuse both, you're more likely to always think I want, I deserve this guy I deserve this guy and and never basically set off but that guy is never going to choose you never and then you're going to be and then you're going to be lonely so you have this woman lonely the top the top guys they're doing all this shit but if you mistreat women I don't think you can feel great about it for a long time oh they have issues they have issues too of course and then you have the bottom 99 % men who are lonely as fuck gone only fans so the whole situation is kind of screwed up, which is why since many years, I'm not on that anymore.

1:40:59It's a bit old school. But you are a bit old school. It's good. Probably. But the question, so you were saying, can I relate to that? So a couple of years ago, I would go. So I had friends. My best friends were a bit probably like you, like in different cities, in different countries, right? So we say, oh, let's go all to Hong Kong, three, four best friends and spend the weekend together because we see each other every couple of month, right? If we make it happen. So we go to Hong Kong, the first reflex. Go on Tinder. There was not Tinder, raw, gold, whatever. We can swipe in another city in advance.

1:41:37It didn't exist. I think now you can do that where you pay and you can swipe in the next countries. You can prepare, line up the girls or the guys in advance. Yeah, in Hinge, you can do that for free. okay so we would go arrive there and then first thing plane lands on tinder but it doesn't stop it's not like hey guys let's each take one hour to swipe through the entire city it's then you go to the hotel then you go to the to have dinner swipe and then you're just there like you realize it's wrong you're like man we're not even talking and we never see each other and we're swiping all these women who most of them they're just there to sell to to seek validation like you're never gonna meet them like you won't or maybe you will meet one or casual sex but we have we're best friends and we haven't met for six months and you're just gonna say sorry guys I'm just gonna go have sex with a girl now that I don't know for like an hour and then come it's all can be nonsense and so but most people don't think it's nonsense and that's the the issue for people like us I guess You're saying most people don't think it's nonsense.

1:42:45Yeah, most people are in it, right? Probably, yeah. I found the most quality, well, decent men that like meet my looks minimum, you know, about that. Like I'm not attached to it, but I'm attached to it if it's on someone else. So they are not on the apps, you know. The ones that are, you know, really busy building things in the world don't have time to do that. And these are all mass generalizations too. Everyone has to come to their own awakening about this at their own time, Kevin, right? You have to use it for a bit to realize how futile that is. Absolutely. Because it's low-hanging fruit. So what's your experience if we talk about that dinner?

1:43:36You know, you're there and like you were there for him, inviting him and he's there on Tinder. how do you react and yeah how do you feel about it obviously I was a bit irritated because I wrote a chapter about it and then I had to let it pass through me um yeah it was hard because it he had been using them for years and years and years with no difference so definition of insanity you just do the same thing over and over again expect a different result you expect the quality of the women that you're saying that you were dating that you met on there were terrible mistreated you and yet you're back on there doing the same thing you know and so the and he's not young he's older than me so the lack of wisdom in there was frustrating but like everyone has their own journey but mostly I missed my friend just like you missed your friends I missed my friend it has it had and has taken over his life so I haven't seen him since that ah yeah and especially because we are from a generation.

1:44:38I love that you say we, thanks. Yeah, always. No, but we're from a generation where even, I mean, I'm 31, I grew up, we didn't have all this stuff, you know, I went outside play games, like all these real connections. And so I can still relate to this and see the difference today of how we connect to each other. And I'm just wondering how the people who are 10 years younger than me are dealing with that probably not well and what the consequences will be. Yeah so Gen Z according to the 2018 Signal Loneliness Index are the most lonely generation that's America and also in Australia they come up as the most lonely generation and the U.S.

1:45:25Surgeon General's advisory on the loneliness epidemic has pointed to social media use. And I think, this is my opinion as someone who works in the area, is obviously the pandemic interrupted a lot of the period of time where they were studying online. You know, in your early teens, you're asserting your identity through its comparison with others. It's how you form your identity through social interaction. So they miss two and a half years. When you're 13, two and a half years is a huge amount of time to not be able to practice your social skills. So there's a social awkwardness maybe. There is maybe it's not as nuanced for them learning to reconnect after disconnection.

1:46:15I think having an analogue childhood greatly helped my social skills and my communication skills. Was definitely not raised by an iPad.

1:46:30which seems crazy today because you just see you see the parents with like the first thing they do the first thing yeah the first thing they do oh you're pissing me off take this take this watch this play this game three years old and it's kind of like have and the kids love it they love it because it's so addictive yeah we're all addicted we're all addicted we're all addicted so imagine you do that to a kid who is like we're all addicts now yeah complete completely for sure That's why Gabor Marte's work is so powerful because our definition and the chapter in my book on this, our definition of what an addict used to be is like totally different now.

1:47:07We've all got something that we are not using in the right measure. Absolutely. That we are dependent on. And we know about it, but yet we can't do anything. It's so accessible to us, yeah. Yeah. Like the YouTube people are now watching this on. right now. Like the Instagram, people are watching this on right now. Think about that. We're all in the game, babes. We are. It's not going to get any better. Honey, it all matters and then it doesn't matter. Exactly. It all matters and it doesn't matter. We're all going to end up in the hole. We're getting so existential now, but this all matters, but doesn't really matter.

1:47:49Yeah. One person watches this, it matters. And then if a million people watch, maybe you're investors. won't care but it's true i i will not be ringing you up and complaining about the views that's for sure won't be me you built your business in 2019 we talked last time about something we call loneliness at the top so having this even like taking your own example you talk about loneliness but you're moving a lot you take planes you're jet lagged you probably don't sleep as much as you want. You go in front of these big rooms with hundreds or thousands of people, you have this high, and then you go back to your hotel room, probably most of the time alone, probably feeling like the low afterwards, you know, like, so, so the whole thing, and it reminds me when I was 16 to 21, I used to DJ a lot to sometimes thousands of people.

1:48:44And I had the same, you have this high, and then you go home and then, you know, like, and, and even a lot of big DJs, they talked about especially during the COVID and after Avicii's death, they talked about this crazy high and low and how this lifestyle of famous people is actually very lonely or building businesses, even successful businesses, very lonely because no one understands what you're doing. No one understands the pressure you go through and you can't talk about it to anyone. You can't talk about it to the people you employ because it makes them lose confidence in the security of their job.

1:49:22So this is why entrepreneurs become lonely because the people they're dealing with day-to-day are not their family. They're their employees and their co-workers. And they can't say this to their staff. Their staff are going to be scared for their employment. So who do they be vulnerable with? That's very isolating. I don't get the high and the drop actually from the speaking. For me, it's a... You're numb to it. That's why I've taken a bit of a pause, a pause right now. and I'm focusing on the book because when you, you know, 2021 and 2022, I was booking so many, be they online or in person. And, uh, that resistance started to get built up.

1:50:03And anytime you do something artistic and deeply human, you don't want to be chat GPT. You want that to feel fresh for you. So when that starts to get a bit stale, you know, let's, let's pull back and turn to something else in the creative realm. And then maybe after three book launches in three years, I will be like, whew, resistance. And speaking will be the thing. You said that addiction doesn't look the same anymore today. And you also said that loneliness doesn't look the same as it used to be anymore. What does loneliness look like today? Any generation, any human being, anyone, the most extroverted, confident person, the old lady in the nursing home the gen z walking down the street bumping into polls because they're typing on their phone anyone how do we how do we deal with this phone thing so i i listened to a guy who was saying i have two phones yeah one phone is with my instagram and all these apps is only the one doesn't have a i don't have a sim card So it's only when I'm connected to a Wi-Fi somewhere I can use.

1:51:19And the other one that I have outside doesn't have these apps. That could be one thing. Do you have something else that you do or that you would try to do or recommend? If I was to go by my married girlfriends, have children. Because then you are so busy. There's one thing you love way more than that phone. That's your children. I think it's the number one thing that's really helped me is like plug it in outside your room to not have that phone in the room. Everyone says this. Are you able to do it? Yeah. And when I started doing it, my sleep got really good. So definitely getting that phone in a separate room when you sleep is the first step and then boundaries.

1:52:02So, for example, notifications of certain apps, like I don't have TikTok on, I don't have WhatsApp. No, I think, no, I don't have WhatsApp on, but I do check it regularly. That's the thing. I wouldn't say I have no notifications these years, but I do check. And then when you have a video going viral, you don't have notification. Yeah. Yeah, so we're all addicts. It's like, oh, I'm not going to drink wine. I'm going to put the wine in the cupboard under the sink. And then I'm just going to think about the wine in the cupboard under the sink for the whole day.

1:52:35I think personal boundaries are the way to go. But I wouldn't really like to speak into this because I think I'm one of the most connected people, both emotionally, but also digitally that I know. One of the things that really helps me is just not holding anyone else to the same level of connectivity as me because most of my friends, like I said, are married with children. So I don't expect them to be online as much as I am. And I think that also helps. if your peers are not as online as you you will be less on the phone because what are you going to the phone behind every phone is a user wanting to have human connection yeah exactly so first you look stupid if you do it but second if it's basically a classic if the other person takes your phone you're first reflected i'm taking my phone too because i feel like you're not connecting with me so i need to get busy doing something else right why would 39 years old simon tell 18 years old simone oh my god when you say my name the french way it sounds like something else say it again what's my name simone

1:53:48simone simone um okay if i go so that i that distracted me please the question again that's okay i love it what would 13 years old yourself yeah tell 18 years old yourself so I don't have to pronounce your name if you could talk to her today um I would tell 13 year old me 18 years old sorry 18 years old me so this is Switzerland um if I'm in Switzerland yeah oh I wouldn't tell her anything different than I did that was the best year of my life I played that year exactly as the game was supposed to be played it's like it's like my body knew dad was going to die like I had the most family-friendly fun you can imagine it's like me on the cruise ship last week I was just goofy and childlike and happy and relaxed and made friends that I'm still friends with today who've asked we're all going to go on our 40th birthday trip next year all together we're still friends I wouldn't have done that year and maybe I would tell an 18-year-old's mind, you do know you're Asian, right?

1:54:59And the cheese, you're not tolerant. That's why you're going to the bathroom. That's the only thing. Like there isn't much research out here on this already, but there will be in 20 years. And Asians are not meant to eat as much cheese as you are eating. That would be it. What would you tell your 19-year-old self? so one year later. Oh my gosh, I've done this so many times in therapy where you talk to your inner child. I would just say to her, come here, I'm going to hold you. Express everything you want to express. I'm here and I love you. It's okay. That's all I would say. I would hold my 19-year-old self.

1:55:42That's a very interesting perspective, especially for men, especially in relationships because as men, we're fixer you know we want to fix problems so when a woman comes and she has an issue for us it's extremely difficult to just listen and do nothing we're trying to say okay this is the potential issue this is again the biology right like yeah for men you're just like okay you're having this issue here are the five potential causes and this is the three ways you can solve each cause so let's do one after the other I mean obviously it's a bit caricatural but and the woman just wants to be listened she doesn't even care about the solution she just says Shut up and listen to me.

1:56:19I remember having to teach my, at the time, 50-year-old ex this at the age of 50. And that's no shade to him. But what I'm saying is you're doing a huge service sharing this information. Yeah, but it's very difficult. I tried to apply it too, but it's so difficult. You're just there like so wired to fix problems. I feel like an avoidant, if you're dating an avoidant, they don't give you any fixing or advice because they just can't get involved that much. You know? So it's good. But now we know you're non-avoidant. I'm reading the book about the power of attachment. It's not the one you sent me, but the other one I told you.

1:56:52No, you need to read the one that I've sent me because you get in stuff confused when we have dinner. Read attached. Everybody, where's the camera I can look at? Read attached. Please, everybody. And Michael Singer, Untethered Soul. And Barbara D. Fredrickson, Love 2.0. That's enough for the next month of reading. Yeah, let's do a book club, Kevin. I'm serious. I want to eventually, when I take a break from writing my own books, start a book club. Do you think people are still able to read books today? It takes practice. I wasn't able to. I didn't read for about 10 years. And then because we're all addicted, once you read a good one, the book that started me reading again was Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle.

1:57:40That book is inspired a lot in my style. the way that I write stories. Oh my gosh. That book was like a movie. You get a book that's like a movie. Yes, you'll read again. Because have you seen what's on Netflix right now? What are my alternatives for entertainment? If I want real story. Read what you love until you love reading. I think it's what he said. Really? Yeah, read what you love until you love what you read. Oh. Basically, it's that. Start with something that you're passionate about and then get the skills on. And then when you have something that you're interested in, even if it's not your perfect passion, you're going to be more likely to read it.

1:58:22Definitely. Well, I mean, with anything you want to start from a fitness routine to anything, just start with the low-hanging fruit. Start with the easiest entry point. Do you think you can listen to a book? I listen to books all the time. Do you think it's as effective as reading? So this is how I read like two books a week. You want to know? So I read like two books in two weeks. So fiction I listen to on Audible Yeah Because I don't need to take any notes And it's there for pleasure And when you're writing non-fiction You cannot listen to other books in your category Like for me anyway And so I listen to fiction And then I read non-fiction Okay You listen to accelerate You accelerate to be faster 1.5 sometimes Okay Yeah Amazing Thank you so much for doing this You're so welcome Simon

1:59:11where can people find you and connect with you um i am on all the social media platforms but the thing that i would love people to know is that they can grab the book kevin give me the book thanks are you gonna hold it am i gonna hold it it's the book let's talk about loneliness is the book where am i i don't even know where i'm looking let's talk about loneliness is the book you can get this in all major bookstores, UK, US, Europe. In Singapore, grab it on Amazon. WH Smith, have it in the UK on the shelf for books that will change your life. And I think that's true. Did things in there, did you learn things that you thought were life-changing?

2:00:00I mean, for me, I learned a lot of new concepts. No, I learned a lot of new concepts. and I can relate through my previous, I'd say two relationships where I could see. Faults in others. No, no, no, it's not that. Because I know I have a lot of fault. I'm at fault too. And it's not fault, but it's more understanding where they come from, you know. And not only in terms of being Asian, but the whole upbringing and some sort of reactions. And then you're just much more, I mean, you're just much more understanding. And I think it's very important for a man to not only understand more about yourself, attachment style, love languages, but also if you can learn more about the other person, because you're going to be much more patient and less likely to act from an egoistical point of view where you're just, you know, exploding for nothing.

2:00:54You move to a more secure place, which you'll read about once you read Attached. Just move to a more secure place. yeah I um I hope everyone likes it and then of course Instagram at Simone Heng LinkedIn it's all there it's all on the interwebs just put Simone Heng into Google it all matters but it doesn't matter you can't miss her amazing thank you so much for doing thank you honey thank you