Simon Sinek: "Strong Thigh Muscles = More friends", This Is Why You Can't Make Friends!

You want to know why we're lonely? Because we've architected our lives to be lonely! We are social animals, of course, it's hurting us! And so, the question is, is, what can you do? And this is the one thing that I learned that was the greatest lesson I ever learned in my life. The true skill that we've lost and everybody's guilty of this.

It's Simon Sinek, the best-selling author, sold after speaker, and unshakable, Optimus is back, with one solution that aims to solve some of the biggest issues we face today. Everyone's looking for Biohack for all the problems that we're facing today, rising suicide, rising anxiety, depression, addiction, mental health. And there's one Biohack that's better than all of the things that we're trying, which is friendship.

But we are not good at making friends and we're not good at looking after friends. There's an entire industry to help people become better leaders, to help us maintain better relationships. And there's no industry to teach us how to be a better friend. And yet, people with close friendships are healthier, they live longer, they better deal with stress, less likely to become addicted.

Friendship is the thing that actually protects us, so why aren't we prioritizing our friendships? It's because we actually don't know how to do it. And mass transportation, technology, social media, all of these things, they've interrupted our ability to make friends. Or sometimes we have old friends where the only bond is time.

But is it a friend? Simply because you've known somebody for a long time. They give you no joy, give you no inspiration, and if you have good friendship, you will not feel lonely. So yes, friends are allowed to change, and it's never too late to make a friend. So how do I make friends? I guarantee you will make friends by learning how to do it. That's all it takes. Simon. Hi, Stephen. Good to see you again. Good to see you again.

It's interesting because we've had a lot of conversations and ahead of the conversation today, I really asked myself, what are the subjects and themes that are front of mind for me at the moment, and subjects that I'm struggling to understand and grapple with and find solutions and answers to. And the sort of macro picture that I have in my head at the moment is that there's quite a lot of struggle going on because the world has changed quite profoundly.

And the struggle is showing up in a variety of ways. We're seeing it in our mental health, which I know you referred to as mental fitness. We're seeing it in suicidality. We're seeing it in the rise of Islam and the rise of religiosity. We're seeing it in the rise in loneliness, which is something we talked about last time. But also now there's these other forces that play like artificial intelligence, which feels like a threat, an increase in digitalization and a falling connection.

What is your take on this moment in time, the times we're living in? These are complicated times and complex times. And I think they are more important, leaderless times. We're seeing the rise of populist movements and strongman leaders, not necessarily because they are the great leaders of the day. But because I think people are desperately lacking for meaning and purpose and to feel like we're going somewhere. We want to be led. People want to be led.

Whether it's young people who are protesting on their school campuses or whether during COVID it was anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers, whether it was Brexit or I think they're all very much the same, whether it's the left side of politics or the right side of politics, which is they're all basically anti-establishment movements. And you usually see anti-establishment when people feel forgotten and left out by whatever the establishment is doing.

In other words, they perceive that the establishment is looking after themselves. So I think we live in visionless and leaderless times. That's the big challenge of the day. And so we find ourselves reactive to each other and against things, but few people can say what they're for. So many of my guests have come here and then after the conversation I've turned to me and said they're concerned about their younger child, often they reference their younger son.

Because they talk about the rise in the sort of toxic male influences online. And it kind of coincides with what you just said about looking for leaders. And now some of those leaders that were looking for are offering us a blueprint of what it is to be a responsible, stable human that involves buying a Lamborghini, having multiple wives and showing up in a certain way. And I've had so many conversations.

In fact, one of my guests the other week brought me a dossier called heroic masculinity and it was a woman and she says, please can you have more conversations about this subject and passed it to me? And the reason she's saying that is because she's concerned her son is growing up in a world where he's not going to know what it means to be a good man. Well, who are the role models? Like who are the strong male or female role models? Who are teaching us values? Who are teaching us service?

Who's teaching us kindness and empathy? And in leaderless times and lost times, we will follow things that make us feel good. And I mean, wealth makes us feel good. Conspicuous consumption makes us feel good because you get that hit of serotonin and dopamine. This is the reason why I've become really fascinated by the concept of friendship. You know, I haven't written a book in many years and so I've started writing again.

And I'm writing a book with a friend, my friend Wilgadera, who wrote unreasonable hospitality. And we've decided to write about friendship because when you think about all of the problems that we're facing today, mental fitness, mental health, rising suicide, rising anxiety, depression, addiction, I mean, take your list, even people's obsession with longevity. And everybody's looking for biohack for all those things.

And there's one biohack that's better than all of those, all of the things that we're trying, which is friendship. People with close friendships are healthier, they live longer, but they have better coping mechanisms, which means they better deal with stress. And I'll give you one an amazing thing. So there's a very famous experiment that's done, I think in the like the 60s, all of our sort of understanding of addiction is based on the studies.

Basically, they put a rat in a cage and they gave it plain water or they gave it water, like, soda drugs. And it tasted both, it got addicted to the water laced with drugs and eventually drank that water until it died. And so this became our understanding of addiction. Many years later, not that long ago, another scientist said, hold on, there's a problem with this experiment.

A rat, like a person, is a social animal. And you took this social animal and you put it by itself and then offered it drugs. So you created loneliness and then you offered the drug. Right? If you want to make it a good experiment, you have to create the right context. So what it did, they created something called rat park. Where basically what they did is they created a new cage filled with things to do and mazes and wheels and other rats and they were social.

And the rats tasted both waters. The one laced with morphine and the one that was just plain, they taste and they drank enough of the morphine laced with one to get addicted. And then they stopped, it diminishes how much they drank and they only drank the plain water. So basically when you have healthy relationships, we are less likely to become addicted. When we are lonely, we are more likely to create addiction. Right? Friendship is the thing that actually protects us.

And then if you look at, even if you do become addicted, right, let's take the worst case scenario. So let's look at alcoholism. Right? Alcoholism, we know that to beat alcoholism, you join A. You join A.A. Community. And everybody talks about the importance of community and finding your community. Right? But alcoholics anonymous knows that there's these 12 steps. And if you master 11 of the 12 steps, the disease is probably going to get you.

But if you master the 12th step, the final step, you're more likely to overcome the disease. So what's the 12th step? The 12th step is to help another alcoholic to become someone sponsor, in other words, to become a friend. In other words, community, you find community. But then the final step of beating the disease is a friend, where you replace the community with a friend. And you have both. And we think community is the thing, but it's not enough. Yes, you can create belonging with community.

And people where we started talking about it, where people are latching onto these anti-establishment populist movements. It's giving them a sense of community. It's giving them a sense of shared purpose with a group of people. Right? But it's also providing new social connections. One of the things we don't do is we are not good at making friends and we're not good at looking after friends.

There's an entire industry to help people like us become better leaders. I'm a part of it. I write books about it. Right? There's an entire industry to help people be better parents. And if you're going to have a child, if you've got a child, you've got a child with problems, you know, you read all the books about how to be a better parent. There are no books or precious few books to teach us. And there's no industry to teach us how to be a better friend.

Like, are you a good friend? Are you a good friend to your friends? Are your friends good to you? You know, do you call people when you are stuck and down or do you make TikTok videos by yourself? Which, you know, and you get, I mean, literally people who are depressed make TikTok videos by themselves. I don't know how many times they reshoot that either to post it to get the validation for their feelings.

But to call a friend and say the same thing you're struggling with is actually more difficult. Why doesn't the industry exist? Because typically... And we take it for granted. Yeah, so the demand isn't that for those kinds of things. But that's the problem, which is I think the demand is there. We don't realize it. Right? Like, we know that our relationships fail and our marriages fail, so there's an entire industry to help us maintain better relationships.

Well, friendships fail. And we think we have friends yet we still struggle and feel lonely. If you have good friendship, you will not feel lonely. You may have moments of loneliness and in those periods you will pick up the phone and say to your friend, I need you, I'm lonely. And your friends will be there. You will feel not alone. Right? Or, and you and I have talked about this about you will feel that someone will get in the mud with you.

And I think the problem is is we don't give intention to friendship. So think about it. And you and I are both guilty of this. In fact, I would argue that everybody's guilty of this. Which is we've got plans booked with a friend. Let's call it a lunch. A work thing comes up. We call up the friend, I got to work thing. And the reason we keep bumping our friends is because they'll understand they're our friends.

So why aren't we prioritizing our friendships? Why aren't we saying to the work thing, I'm sorry, I've got a thing. If we had another meeting, we would say, sorry, I've got an appointment, I can't make it. So why don't we treat our friends with the same intentionality that we treat any other meeting? So one of the things that Will did for a friend that I thought was genius, brilliant, beautiful. Will Guderra, who I'm writing the book with. Will's friends dad died.

Will texted him and said, I feel for you, I know what you're going through, I lost my mom at an early age. I'm sure you've been inundated with calls and texts. So I'm not going to call you today. But what I will do is I will call you every single day at 9.45 am. Do not feel obligated to pick up. I don't mind if you don't. But when you're ready, know that I'm calling you. And for the next, I think it was three months, eight months, something he called every single day at 9.45 am.

And for the first week his friend didn't pick up at all. And then after the first week, he picked up every day and they talked every day for months. Like think about the intentionality that someone who loves and cares about you so much that they will call you every single day at 9.45 just so that you can see their name pop up in the caller ID to know that you're not alone. I mean, it brings me to tears just thinking about it. Like how many of us are that good a friend?

You know, I want friends like that. Here's a good question. Like what's a friend? Like what makes a good friend? Like I don't even know if we have a definition of that. You know, I've been asking people and somebody said to me, well somebody who's there for you in, you know, to support you in the hard times. That's a real friend, right? And I got thinking and I talked to somebody else. She has a friend who she calls Mr. Shadden Freud because he seems to love when things go wrong.

So in hard times, he's always there. He's always there in hard times. He's got the shoulder to lean on. He's giving advice. But in good times, he's nowhere to be seen. And so what happens is it creates this horrible sort of codependent relationship that you want to keep the hard times because that wonderful human being is always there. So you never want to let go and you become codependent.

And so you realize that there's something called a fair-weathered friend who's only there in the good times. But be equally cynical and suspicious of the foul-weathered friends who's only there in the hard times because somehow it makes them feel good about themselves. But they're not there for the good times. And so you realize what's the value of good time versus bad time? So yes, yes, you and I have friends that in hard times, we would call them.

But I would bet money that you have even fewer friends that you want to text out of the blue and say, I want an award. Right? Think about that. Like, if something goes wrong, I've got a group of friends, probably, I've probably got a, you know, a dozen people, I could say and say, I need your help. Things have gone horribly wrong. I need your advice. But if something amazing happens to me, that number probably shrinks down to four.

That I'm going to text out of the blue and go, something amazing happened today and not feel like I'm bragging, not feel like I'm trying to overwhelm them or prove them that I'm better than them. But knowing that they will be so happy for me. And so I've started thinking that maybe a friend isn't just the person who's there for you in the hard times, but the person you can go to in the great times.

Think about that. I have fewer friends that I can go to when things go perfectly than I would go to when things go wrong. So are those my true friends? So this is on the journey. I'm trying to understand what friend means and I'm trying to understand the responsibility we have to look after those friends. You look at all the longevity studies, you know, all the blue zone work. Sure they eat healthy, sure they walk a lot.

But they also eat with each other. Whereas you look at some of the people who are promoting sort of longevity in all of those bio hacks and how you have to exercise the certain way and eat the certain way, you'll find a lot of them are pretty unhappy people and pretty lonely people. I don't think they're going to live very long. So here's a crazy, crazy one. Physiologically, right? What are the most important organs to keep strong for longevity? Like we know the data, right?

So I'll tell you what they are, right? Number one, heart, obviously. That makes perfect sense, right? You've got to have a healthy heart if you want to live a long time, right? Second one, lungs. Got to have healthy lungs to live a long time. Cardione will the rest of it, right? Don't smoke. Like we know that makes perfect sense. You know what the third most important organ is? I didn't know how it's going to say the brain, but... The thighs. Thigh muscles.

So if you have a healthy heart, healthy lungs and healthy thighs, statistically you're more likely to live longer. I know. I said the same thing. Thighs, do you want to know why? Because historically, thighs are the most important muscle responsible for what? Motion, walking, right? Not exercise, social, going to visit your friends before there were cars, before there were trains. We had to walk to go visit our friends.

And so people who are mobile, if you're more mobile, you're more likely to maintain friendships, which means you're likely to live longer. So the three most important organs to keep healthy, historically as human beings, heart, lungs and thighs for mobility. Thighs for sociability, which I think is amazing that we never thought about. So all of these things that technology is interrupted.

Mass transportation, cars, social media, all of these things, they've interrupted our ability to make friends, proper friends where you can look each other in the eye. You and I could do this over Zoom. They wouldn't feel the same. But the macro, so the remote work culture, the rise in, as you say, screens and phones, optimizing interaction out of our lives.

I mean, like, you know, if you think about social networking or Uber eats or I don't know, delivery room, you're living your life behind a screen in white walls now. And it feels like it's becoming harder and harder and harder to make friends, also to find someone to remember. Yeah, but up to make friends. In fact, what's interesting thing is, sometimes when I come off stage, I'll have, it's always young men come up to me and they'll get right up in my personal space and I get this strange.

And then they'll say something to me like, how do I make friends? And they, and I respect them so much for saying it because I can see how difficult it is for them to add to those words. And I reflect on I was doing something at Canary Wharf in a kid in the front row. In a crowd of 500 people, they're all wearing suits because they're working in the corporate world. He's surrounded by 500 of his peers, his age.

In the front row, pass the microphone. His question to me on stage is, how do I make friends? Yeah. And there's 499 people sat next to him. That is his age. And he's asking in the front row, how do I make friends? Yeah. And he's so moving because, you know, looking down on that individual surrounded by people, I'm like, well, you know, the brain, the simple brain gets, we'll just turn to the person next, you'll introduce yourself. But clearly, that was not, not the answer.

Because if it was so simple, he would just do that. And you said something interesting as well, which I think maybe overlays with that, which is that we've kind of lost the art or the skill of making friends. What would you've said to that kid? So I'll tell you by way of a story. I wouldn't answer that. So a friend of mine was struggling. Her career, it wasn't going as well as she'd wanted. And her marriage was in a bad place.

In other words, when it rains, it pours. Like she couldn't get a break, right? And she was in a really bad place. And so she knows what I do for a living. So she said, she asked me, can you help? Can I come and talk to you and get some advice? And I said, of course. And so we had a standing Wednesday meeting get together. We got together every Wednesday for 90 minutes. And she would tell me what was going on in her life. I gave her some advice. She felt amazing when she left me.

It lasted about two days. And then she'd go back into her slump. And then we'd get together the next Wednesday. She'd feel amazing for about two days. And she'd go back into a slump. And this went on for months. This was our pattern, right? So I thought I was doing good work. And then it then I just rinse and repeat. Right? Then I remembered my own work. And I remembered alcoholics anonymous, which is the final step.

The 12 step is service, helping somebody who's struggling with the problem you're struggling with. Right? Is the way to actually help you overcome your problem. So I have struggles. I have needs. I have insecurities. And I don't have a safe outlet to talk to. So I, she's one of my closest friends in the world. I trust her implicitly. So I said to her, can I need the coaching as well? Can we split our time? 45 minutes for me, 45 minutes for you. She agreed.

And it was, I knew what I was doing, right? There was kind of an experiment happening, which I didn't let on. Which is, I wanted her to help me as a way of helping herself. And so what ended up happening was it, it would, it would cease to be 45, 45. I, we got together. And for 90 minutes, we talked about me. And then the next Wednesday, we got together. And for 90 minutes, we talked about me. And then we got together. And for 90 minutes, we talked about me.

And within about three or four weeks, her life was full on back on track. Fully back on track. Because when you help someone with the thing that you were struggling with, you actually end up solving your own problems. And so what I would say to that kid is find somebody who's struggling to make a friend and help them make a friend. Make it an act of service. Because fundamentally, we dig down deep. The true skill that we've lost is service. We've overemphasized taking over giving.

We've overemphasized selfish over selfless. Selfish is important. Taking is important, but not at the expense of giving and not at the expense of serving. Right? We've lost, we're out of balance. And I think we, we've lost the ability to serve society. We've lost the ability to serve each other. You know, the Prime Minister of course, for national service and literally the whole country erupts and says, are you trying not to get reelected? You know, where did you think about it?

I thought it was brilliant. I do believe in service. It doesn't have to be military service. You know, when we say national service, go be a teacher in the inner city for a year. You know, go, go work on a one day a month in a hospital. Go work for one weekend, one day per month in a in hospice and palliative care. Right? Serve other human beings who are underserved or forgotten. Serve your nation in some way, show up in the form.

Put, you know, let the government give you a list of 20 or 30 options of things you can do. And say that if you do these things, it makes you eligible for, you know, scholarships, it makes you eligible for whatever, you know. I'm a great believer in it, just like you can get in at least the United States, very, very generous packages for education if you serve in the military. Give very generous packages for education if you do any of these other things, teaching.

You know, like we have problems, you know, we're losing teachers. Okay, well, we can fill those gaps. What, why is, do you think that would help our society at large over the coming years? Because I think the skill that's the skills that people learn when they serve. A, they learn hard work, but they learn to be a part of something larger themselves. And you talk to anybody who goes often does volunteer work or takes a gap year where they go and do service or anyone who's gone to combat, right?

And you talk to, if you talk to soldiers or Marines who have been in the shit, none of them want to go to combat. And it's not fun. There's very, very, very few combat-related suicides. In other words, suicides don't happen in a combat situation. They come, they happen when they come back home, right? And they all weirdly have warm feelings about their time in combat. And it's not the shooting and the fear. It's the intense responsibility and awesome feeling to be there to look after each other.

Not just a feel looked after, but to look after another. I talk to Navy SEALs and I talk to SEAL Team 6. And I wanted to understand the why of the SEAL teams. This is one of the highest performing organizations on the planet. And you think it's going to be about brawn and courage. And all the stupid things that the outside world thinks that the commandos and the special operators have. It's actually not that at all. Which is they care for each other more than others think possible.

It's their love of each other that makes them special operators. And their courage doesn't come from raw courage. I've asked many, I've talked to many, many, many SEALs and special operators about this. They don't have just raw courage to run into danger and all of this stuff. It's that they fear letting down their comrades more than dying. And we saw it happen recently where a SEAL mission, one of the SEALs fell into the water and another SEAL dived in to catch him and they both died.

Right? They feel they fear letting each other down more than dying. That cannot be described anything else. There's no other word to capture that feeling than love. That is love at a level that few of us will ever understand. And that love is so deep that a lot of them have failed marriages. Because when they're wives, say to them, it's either me or your fellow SEALs, they choose their fellow SEALs. That's love. And even in my world, like you and I have colleagues and co-workers.

In the military, they have brothers and sisters. Those relationships are real. And I remember the first time a friend of mine in uniform called me brother. We're on the phone and he said, hey brother, it's the first time he called me brother. And I felt it. You don't use that term loosely. It's not just a generic term of endearment. You earn to be called brother or sister. And I remember when he called me brother, that it meant something.

And this guy, this guy, this friend of mine, he's still active duty. He's a combat hero. He's risked his life. He's put himself in harm way. He's saved the lives of people. He's an absolute warrior. Right? He is by any definition of frickin badass fucking warrior. Right? And he was the first man who said to me, I love you. We got off the phone and he goes, we just saying goodbye to each other. We had a nice long conversation. We got off the phone and he goes, I love you. He didn't say, love ya.

He didn't say, love you. He said, I love you. That's real. And we hedge because we're afraid of our emotions. We're afraid of expressing ourselves to each other. We say things like that. We say, love ya. Even love you. Say those three words to somebody. They are excruciatingly, excruciatingly difficult unless you actually mean it. I love you. And it was so powerful that now every time he and I talk, and we talk politics and we talk global stuff and we talk leadership.

And then at the end of our calls, I'll say, I'll talk to you real soon. I love you because I love you too. That's how we end our phone calls. And I started experimenting. I started saying those words to the, especially the men in my life that I love and care about desperately. My male friends, it's easier to say to a woman, there's less of a stigma, right? And guys who are, some of my guy friends who are, if you met them, you would describe them as not very warm.

You would describe them as distant or cold or guarded. And they are. And I remember taking the risk, saying to them, when we got off the phone or when I said goodbye to them when I was hanging out with them, I said, I love you. And in not, in very short order, they started saying it back. And we would hug differently. And we would kiss each other in the cheek. And one of my friends who, he's a cold guy, he's not warm. He's lovely and smart and fantastic and funny, but he's not warm.

It took him a long time and I always said it to him. I love you. I love you. He goes, yeah, huh? Okay. And I would like hug him because I'm in the cheek of bye. He's like, okay. And then he started saying, I love you back. And this is what I've learned from the highest performing teams on the planet. This is what I've learned from people who understand service. That you cannot have service without developing some sort of love.

And so I think, I think to go all the way back to the question from the kid in the front row, how do I make friends? You can't make a friend until you learn how to serve. Because friendship is fundamentally service. Friendship is an active service. And if you don't know the skill of service, then you probably don't know how to be a friend, let alone make a friend. I think you have to learn to be a friend before you can make a friend.

Because only people only want to be your friend if you know how to be their friend. Right? Which is not like having fun, which is not like going out and get pissed with your mates. That's fun. Those are mates. Are those friends that you love? Maybe sometimes. Sometimes there's overlap. That's the other problem. And I live in America where you meet somebody once and they call you friend. And the problem is I think we overuse the word friend.

Right? Like if you have a mild melanoma and you have stage for a liver cancer, we call both those things cancer. Clearly they're not the same thing. And I think we have the same problem with the word friend. Like somebody who hang out with casually, it's a laugh. You know, we call that person friend. But then somebody who we have deep love for and we would be there for them no matter what. We call that person friend. Best friend doesn't seem to capture it either.

And so I think we need more words. Like I've started using the word acquaintance. I've started using the word work friend. Or deal friend. That's like in finance. Right? I like them. I get along with them. I enjoy them. I enjoy them. But if we weren't working, if our companies weren't working together, what I hang out with them is probably not. Probably would make less of an effort. Right? Are you religious? I believe in belief. What does that mean?

I believe in the importance of believing in something. And so for those who choose faith, traditional faith as the thing to believe in and offer guidance, I think that's good. For people who find cause, whether it's social cause, or some type of other cause to feel a part of, I think it is essential that we believe in something. I believe in belief.

It's funny because all the subjects we were talking about then about community and other subjects that intersect with that service and purpose, these all came inherent within religion. Yeah. Religion gave us all of these once upon a time. And in the absence of religion, like, and the rise in digitalization, we're struggling to find those things and we're trying to make them. It's such a good question, right? Which is religion provided a code, and arguably a code that you...

So here's the example, right? So take the Victorians. There were some incredibly wealthy Victorians who gave tremendous amounts of their wealth back to society. They established charities, they built hospitals. In fact, many of the institutions that exist today were established by wealthy Victorians. The same is true in the United States, the Carnegie's and the Rockefellers. Right? And I went and looked this up.

I went and looked up the tax code from the Carnegie and Rockefeller days, or the George Eastman days. And I went and looked up the tax code in the UK as well. And there was no sophisticated tax code. In other words, there was no refund or rebate or deduction for giving to charity. Zero. Zero. There was no tax benefit in the UK or the US for giving to charity.

And in the conversations with the Carnegie's, the Rockefellers and some of the wealthy Victorians, they all said that they believed that they had a, quote, unquote, moral obligation to give back to society. And it was born out of religion without a doubt. They were God fearing without a doubt, right? But they believed in moral obligations to return their wealth and give something back to society, establishing universities, hospitals, and the rest of it. Right?

Now it seems that people give charity if they can get a tax benefit from it. And the question is, where is the moral obligation coming from? And so when we talk about the fact that people are less religious today, but I think your assertion is correct, people are abandoning the traditional church membership is down. And I would argue that because the churches have lost relevance, right? Like take the Catholic church, for example.

Like you're trying to appeal to young people by wearing 400-year-old clothes and speaking in Latin. Maybe we're jeans and speaking English or whatever the local language is. Like if you want to be, quote, unquote, relevant, you're not changing the faith, abandoning the faith, you're not blasphemous by changing the, what you're wearing and the language you're speaking in, you're still preaching the faith, but you'll find yourself more attractive.

I had the opportunity to go to Kanye Sunday service back when he was okay to do anything with Kanye. I just was invited as a friend of a friend and I went to the Sunday service, right? And it was, I don't care if you're religious or not, that was a religious experience. Did you ever go? I did, yeah. It's unbelievable. And for those, when I say for those who haven't gone, like anybody could go, you just get on the sign-up sheet.

Like you could just sign anyone could go, it was open to the general public, it just sold out quick. I mean, it was free, but the list filled up quickly. And basically what happened was there's a band, a choir in the middle, and the parishioners sat all the way in a circle around the outside. You sat there, your body was consumed by song and music.

And it was, and you know, there's like Sufi tradition where music becomes the thing, the way you find spirituality, the way you find meditation, or like the whirling dervishes who spin around in the music. And it's the repetition. And it was sitting in this beautiful place consumed by songs that went on for 10 minutes, 10 minutes each, that you found spirituality, whether you had traditional religion, you know, in your life or not.

And there was community, and I, for one, went with a friend, and I think that's what traditional church doesn't realize, which is you can modernize old beliefs. And if you do that, you will find relevance amongst young people. But young people are looking for something. There's something called Hillsong, which is an American church, but the joke is it's like where all the pretty people go to pray.

It's young and it's relevant, and like the pastors like got a beard and earring, and you know, jeans and, you know, duck martens, and there's a rock band, but they preach the gospel. And it has, and it fills up entire arenas. So people are looking to belong to something, and they're looking to believe in something, and they're looking to be led.

And they're looking for community, and they're looking for codes of conduct and values that they can keep alive in their own lives and their own traditions. And there are precious few of those places left, which is why I think people are desperately looking for them, and latching on to kind of the first thing that shows up. I think it's one of the biggest business opportunities of our time as well.

I say this at multiple levels, I'm talking about, if I'm an entrepreneur, thinking about where to start a business, but also if I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm thinking about how to run my company and my culture. It's funny, this, I've got one particular opinion that went out of fashion, and now has come into fashion over the course of the pandemic, which is I always believed in doing things in person, and having people together, even this podcast, never did it over Zoom even through the pandemic.

We just two-meter distance, and if someone couldn't come in, and we weren't going to release, I just didn't want to, because it's what's the point, right? But also in terms of company culture, I think companies now that offer, I'm in so many interviews, I don't think people would believe. I'm in so many interviews where the candidate asks me to check that they're going to be going, I was in one yesterday with a young 25-year-old lady.

She checked that people were going to come in the office and be together. It was almost like she wasn't going to take the job, unless we were a community, she was talking about running clubs, she was talking about reformer plateaus, she was talking about that she likes to do climbing walls, and she wanted to check that we were in the office together. And I think, you know, good for her. You know what I mean?

But the narrative through the pandemic, especially led by the West Coast of America, was that remote forever and all that kind of thing. But I've always believed that the fundamental needs of human being will mean that connection and being together will prevail. Yeah, I agree with that, but how much damage has to be done until we get there? You know, and I think we have a responsibility to help people, like, to bring people together.

So one of the trends that I'm seeing in the States, at least, is young people, especially those who started their careers in the pandemic or slightly before the pandemic, who kind of fell in love with the romance of the remote work thing. Are struggling, a lot of them are struggling with mental health challenges with mental fitness challenges.

And when they're forced to come into work, which is actually an antidote, once they get there, they freak out, and they think that it's the workspace that's making it more stressful, but it's not. It's that you've been at home and alone so much that it's like a shock to the system to come back in. You know, it's like, when you're out of shape and you go to the gym, it really hurts, you have to stick with it.

You know, it's like when you get off drugs and you go through with a draw, you make sure you want to go back to the drug. Right? And so my fear is that the connection that it's the being at home in a remote work environment is the thing that's making me mentally unfit. And it's not the coming back into work, even though it hurts, and it's a shock when I come in, and I run away from it, I have to stick with it. I have to keep going to the gym. I have to stay off the juice.

Do you think this is in part because the office is outdated? It was a concept that was designed multiple decades ago, and the needs of the human being in the modern world. If we're saying it's much more about connection and community, the office itself should be redesigned. It should serve more as a community centre. I mean, versus just a place to come out of it. I mean, the office has changed multiple times to reflect the times.

I mean, it used to be the executives had the corner offices with windows, and the rest of us had cubes in the middle. And then at some point, we started giving the nice offices to the younger people on the outside, and then we made the outside offices, the conference rooms, and then we went to open plan. I mean, like the offices have taken multiple different cultural changes rightfully so, the office should reflect the times you're right.

One of my favourite ones is if you visit the Pixar offices, the way Steve Jobs helped design the Pixar office is they put the bathrooms in the middle. Most offices have the bathrooms on the outside, and they put the bathrooms in the middle. So no matter where you worked, you had to walk past other people to go to the Lou, and at some point in the day, everyone has to go to the Lou. And so that was done on purpose to force you to interact and have serendipity.

But little things like that, communal leading, I'm a huge fan of communal leading, I'm a huge fan of like, let's eat together. I built my office to feel like a living room. There's like different living room areas. You can sit up here, you can sit over there, but it's just couches. And people sit wherever they want, and people have their, quote-unquote, their desk, where they like to sit. And there's back rooms if you need to make calls, but it's all just couches. It's all super comfy.

It feels like a home. If people want to work at home, great. Here's a home. Literally, you walk into my office. I mean, you've been there. It's a home. It's a home, yeah. It's a home. And because I want people to have that home experience, we've got a fridge and a kitchen, and you can, you know. I can imagine a rebuttal to a lot of people that are listening to us.

Where they genuinely, they have an hour commute to go into some horrible, little cubicle, surrounded, they have to wear a suit, they get no freedom. So my bias is that, obviously I'm the CEO of the company, so I have, you know, these freedoms, and our culture is much more relaxed and free. But there's a lot of people that their relationship with work is, it's awful. It's like an awful place to be. Yeah, and I think so. The question is, great.

Okay. So instead of rejecting it, how would you redesign it to make you want to come in? Okay, you don't want to wear a suit? Don't wear a suit. Maybe you only have to wear a suit if you have a meeting with a client. That seems, if you're in that kind of business. Yeah. You know, I live in Los Angeles where everybody dresses like 16 year olds. But, you know, that seems fair. Wear a suit only when you're meeting with a client of that, if your business requires that. Otherwise wear whatever.

You know, so, again, it goes back to service, which is, I think that people have to earn the right to complain. Right? And you earn the right to complain by trying in some small way to fix the problem yourself. Not exhausting every possibility. Like, you're not allowed to complain about politics, unless you've at least voted. Right? You don't have to join the movement, you don't have to campaign just the minimum. The minimum, then you can complain about anything you like.

And so, if you've tried to fix the office, then you can complain about the office. If you just sit at home and whine about it, like maybe like get involved. And don't do it for yourself. Here's we go back to service. Don't do it for yourself. Do it for the other people who hate coming to work with an hour long commute to sit in a little cubicle and wear a suit that they don't want to wear. Do it for the people you love.

Do it for the people you care about. Do it for the person to the left and to the right. Don't do it for yourself. You selfish bastard. Right? Do it for someone else to make their feeling of coming to work better. How can you make it feel better for somebody else you work with to come to work? And that's what we're missing. We're all about ourselves. And yet we've forgotten them. Email is another one. You know why you get so many emails?

Because you send so many emails. Stop B.C. seeing everybody. Stop C.C.ing everybody. Like when somebody says what time's the meeting? And you reply all in right three o'clock? Or what do you want for lunch? And you reply and write chicken please? Like you made everybody open that email. You thoughtless bastard. Right? Why don't you help everybody else get to inbox zero instead of worrying about you getting to inbox zero? So in other words pick up the phone when possible.

You know? Send for your emails. Take people off the C.C. list. Like I get an email. It's got five people C.C.D. I realize that my reply only really matters to two people. And I take people off the C.C. list. You know? Because I want them to have fewer emails. Because otherwise everybody's hitting, you know, reply all and then we're all, you know, suffering from email bankruptcy. The, anyway, acts of service, acts of service. I mean there's so many little things. There's so many little things.

Stupid things. Stupid things. I was walking on the streets of New York and a guy was parking his car. And it happened to be a huge space big enough for two cars, right? And he parked right in the middle. And it wasn't like he was his brand new car. He was like afraid of getting it bumped into a car, right? And I said to him, hey, I sort of like tapped on this sort of like wave down his window. Like a wave. And like, hey, just you know there's a ton of room behind you or in front of you.

If you move your car up or back, you'll make room for another car. And he goes, there's no room. I'm like, no, no, no, I'm standing out here. You got like five feet in front of you. Like there's plenty of room. I'll guide you if you want. You know, it's being super nice about it. And he goes, I think it's just fine. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Like you, another car, you're trying to park your car? He says to me. I said, no, but I've tried to park in New York before.

And I know it's hard to find a space. So, you know, maybe it'd be nice to pull your car up and let another guy with here nothing of it. He turned his car off and got out of the car and walked away. And like, that's what I mean. You know, which is, you know, here's the advice I wanted to tell him. I didn't say this, but I wanted to be like, hey, just can I offer you an observation. You live in the world. Like you live in the world. There are other people in the world.

And I'm not asking you to give up your weekends and work in hospitals. I'm not asking you to join the military. I'm not asking you to give up your salary and become a teacher. I'm not asking you to do any of those things. I'm asking you to consider that somebody else might want to park. And it's an active service to like move your car to make a little room for somebody who you don't know. Do you think that individualism is hurting us?

Yes. Of course, you want to know why we're lonely because we've architected our lives to be lonely. Of course, it's hurting us. We are social animals who've over indexed on rugged individualism. We heroize CEOs. Like, I love you. You're great. You're wonderful. But people consider you a hero and their business guru blah, blah, blah. I know for a fact that you didn't do it alone. I know for a fact that you've got teams of people who make you look good.

What are you talking about? I know for a fact that people took bets on you, took risks on you. I know for a fact that people made introductions for you. I knew when you had nothing. Sure you had moxies. Sure you had talent. But if it weren't for people who tried, supported, helped, you know, opened a door, there would be no Stephen Bartlett. Of course. Even my parents, the first people I think about is my parents. I don't know why they can't so much about me.

I feel like, you know, kids that feel they objectively look like such a burden. But yeah, I can't the same way. I was like, why would you do that? Why would my mom and dad care so much about this little bundle of cells? I don't understand. They would just like kill themselves. But it matters. But we know parenting matters. We know parents that build up their kids' confidence is really, you know, parents that are capable of building their kids' confidence.

Really, really matters. You know, as opposed to telling a kid constantly that they do everything wrong. Like that'll hurt the kid for the rest of their life. And they're going to have to do a tremendous amount of work to overcome that. You know, it's interesting even on this, overlaid with this is the idea that populations in the Western world are actually declining because by having less and less kids,

we're actually making it more about ourselves. We want to work longer. We want to achieve our career goals. And now having kids, and that's what active service of parenting has now become deprioritized. And it's a real problem for the Western world because of the aging population. And very often for selfish reasons, like I want to live my life. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think to your point, I think we have forgotten that we're social animals.

I mean, like just go back a few years, a few decades. Right? So second world war. Right? The camaraderie. I mean, think about what happened in America and in Britain during the Second World War. So during the Blitz, the number of people who sent their children to the countryside. And they stayed back to support the war effort. Okay? They didn't move to the countryside with their children. They could have.

They sent, think about the insanity of that right now that parents sent their children to the country to be safe, to be raised by another family with the full expectation that they would, that they may never see their kids again because they might die in the Blitz. Right? Like that is incomprehensible to a modern day. And yet that made total sense that we stayed back to support the war effort and to be a part of it. And we sent the kids to the country in the United States.

More people died by suicide who didn't get coal to action. The shame of not being called to serve was more of a well-menged than the coal to service. There were more suicides in the United States from people who didn't get coal to serve. What does this say about the, the Gen Z, the millennial now that's trying to decide which direction to take their life in?

But you know, all the, it says, you know, go be a lawyer is the clear incentive because I'll get paid more or my, you know, people will be more proud of me on Instagram. If you're saying that service and it also sounds like intertwined within there, a little bit of like challenge is so central to being happy. How does like the young person decide like make build their life road map? What do they, what do they need to be adding to that road map?

What is kid in my head that is currently behind a video game screen, he's spending all his time on the internet watching certain male influences that are telling him to be individualistic. He doesn't have a romantic relationship in the world, doesn't have any friends. He's not really leaving the house much, not going to the gym at all, often referred to these individuals as like being in cells on the internet.

And the rise in that type of individual according to a lot of people I've spoken to is rising because of the nature of the world and disconnection and lack of friendship and all these things. What do you say to that person? He's probably a guy looking at the statistics. Well, you and you've talked to, you've talked to Scott Galoway, you know, he's, he talked a lot about this.

And I don't think we talk enough about this as it relates to extremism and terrorism and things like that, you know, where you take a 24, 25, 26, 27 year old in cell, virgin, with no social life. There's a lot of pent up frustration there. And that comes out in all kinds of screwed up ways, usually anger, usually victimization, addictions, you know, vengeful behavior, you know, antisocial behavior.

And if you look at, you know, even just in the, this is not a discursive, this is decades and decades and decades, but you look at sort of the rise of extremism in the Middle East, you know, you take a shame based society where you're 24, 25, 26 years old, you're living at home, you're a virgin. The only way you can leave the house is if you like get a job and if you get it, you won't get a girlfriend and IE a wife, IE have sex until you get a job and move out of the house.

And so this, there's the, and, and, and you're in a, in a shame based society, like the, the pressures are extreme. And the anger is extreme. So I think, yeah, I think this idea of not knowing how to make friends and finding online community of people who are, you know, where we all support each other's victimhood is, is incendiary. I could never imagine Simon Sinek and one of your books telling people that they were losers, that they were losers and that they suck on the other, never do that.

But when I look at Andrew Tates approach in his videos, multiple videos and tweets, he really mocks the people that he's speaking to. He says, your life sucks, you're an absolute loser. And then he tries to offer them a road map. Yeah. And it seems to work. Yeah, of course it works. Why? Because you're validating their feelings of victimhood, you're affirming it and then offering them a way out.

Because if you simply say, everyone can be a winner, like, and I don't feel like a winner, you're not talking to me. But if I say you've been forgotten, like, look, we, we do it in work all the time. It's like the corporation doesn't care about you. The corporation prioritizes profits over you. You're like, yeah, like you're disposable. Yeah, it's kind of a rhetorical clickbait. Right?

Because what you're doing is you're validating someone's feelings, you make them feel not alone in their loneliness and victimhood. And then you offer them, but you're not just berating them, you're offering them a validation and then a way out of that feeling.

And it's not wrong. It's, it's too much. Like, it's totally fine for you and I to say, look, if, if you feel like your career isn't going anywhere. And yet you have ideas that you think of how you can do it better, maybe, maybe an entrepreneur life is for you. Like we're, we're saying similar things. The difference is is we're not berating people, right? But we definitely want people to feel seen, right?

I just think, you know, when you play in the extremes, you're playing in the extremes. And so you're going to get extreme behaviors, extreme reactions. You know, you, you could do the same thing to the same people without a riling them up, because emotions are a powerful thing, right? And so you're playing with the delta. I'm going to push you down even harder. You know, and then I'm going to show you that I can lift you even higher.

You know, that must make me the savior because the delta is so much bigger. If someone is listening now and they are, they have no friends and they're lonely and they're also, and there's someone else that's listening and they are single, romantically single. The first step to solving those two conundrums, finding a friend and finding a romantic partner in terms of where I go, like the physical location that I go to in a modern world where digitalization is just, you know,

social networking exists in Tinder exists. What is that place, the location? Because I have so many conversations with people in my life that are struggling on both fronts to find a friend and to find a partner where they're saying, I just hate dating apps. And then we even have friendship dating apps. I'm wondering where the location is these days, like, you know, once upon a time it would be in the village, it would be maybe a church, it would be a, you know, somewhere in person.

But with the decline in skills of building friendships or romantic relationships, it feels like both groups are struggling. And I've got a particular friend in mind that I don't know what to say to her about this subject because she's finding desperate to find someone finding a partner is as difficult as finding a friend. And it's different for introverts and extroverts, right? So like me, take me, for example, I am absolutely socially inept in social places.

Parties, bars, clubs, networking events, I am absolutely uncomfortable and inept. I stand in a corner by myself. And the funny thing about my career, it's actually been helpful that some people recognize me because they'll come up to me and do all the talking, which is like a relief.

Right? One of my best friends makes fun of me because she says like when we go to a party, like when we go to like a party, someone's house has something and it's like 100 people or whatever there is 50 people, that all these conversations are happening, you know, these like little pockets of conversations.

And I don't know how to inject myself into combat. I don't know how to like, saunter up without feeling and looking really uncomfortable and weird and like ruining the relationship, ruining whatever dynamic exists.

And so she makes fun of me because I'll just stand by myself in the middle of the room with my drink perfectly comfortable. But like when she stands on the corner and looks around like she goes to like get something, she'll see all these little conversations and one person standing by them with their drink and it's me. So I'm useless in social places. It's the introvert in me. But in unsocial places, I'm more relaxed. So like put me in a museum.

And I'm looking at a piece of art and somebody next to me is looking at a piece of art. And I actually have no problem saying you like it. And I'm not trying to make a friend. I'm, but I do like making a connection. And sometimes I talk for them for 30 seconds about the piece. And it's happened a couple times where we just kept talking.

And then you end up having a cup of coffee and you ended up making a friend like that's happened to me that because of the shared interest you fundamentally know that you I don't want to. I also think and this is a weird thing. I actually think it's easier to make a connection when you're standing next to somebody than when you're standing across from somebody. So like in social situations like bars, clubs, networking events, you, you face each other, which I find adversarial and tense.

And you have to gauge the right amount of social distance. You know, it's 18 inches is actually the right amount. You know, anything less than that is like too close. Anything that then too far is weird. You know. But I find standing next to somebody is easier. If you like going for a walk with somebody or strolling with somebody or standing next to somebody in a museum, standing next to somebody in a buffet line.

You can actually get really close without it being uncomfortable. So any place where I can stand next to somebody I find it less and being quiet is easier when you're next to somebody. Like when you go for a walk of somebody for standing next to somebody, you can say a few words and then you can go completely quiet. That's not awkward. When you're facing somebody, you go completely quiet. It's just flat out uncomfortable.

So the way I define, you know, social versus like social environments versus non-traditional social environments is am I standing next to someone or standing across from someone? Well, something that you're struggling with. And when I ask that question, I'm talking about where I feel like every time I've met you, but also every time we've met, we've both been at crossroads. And those crossroads are professional crossroads, personal crossroads, et cetera.

I'm at so many crossroads in my life. I think that's just where it will tell me. So many crossroads. So trying to understand, get a clearer idea on what my north star is professionally and therefore what I should be prioritizing. And this really relates to like, it's not even professionally, it's just in life. It's like, had a lot of thoughts about, I've worried for a long time that the way I'm living my life,

is going to turn out to be, my priorities were wrong. And that I allocated my time when I was young that I had the wrong set of priorities. And those priorities that I allocated towards were like work and material success and all those things. And that, you know, I had, this is story you've probably heard it before about the fisherman who was down by the head a little boat and he went out to see every day.

And he went out and caught two fish and came back by lunchtime. He sold one fish to pay for the boat, the petrol and the servicing and he gave the other fish to his family to feed his family. And then in the evenings and after the news, he spent the time at the beach, relaxing with his family. And like a guy comes past and a sadie's and has like listen, I've got an idea for you.

What we're going to do is we're going to keep you out on the boat all day. You're going to catch four fish. We'll, we're the extra two fish will get other boats will employ people will increase the flip fleet or catch loads more fish with all these new boats. We have them will take the company public will sell it and then the fish man's like and then what and he goes and then you can spend the day with your family. And I kind of look at how I played my life.

And I'm worrying that's how I'm playing my life a little bit. There's obviously all these other things like I made the face season of life where I'm thinking about fatherhood and becoming a dad and how do you know 31. So I'm right that age and my partner's 31 so that's a you know across right and that. So what do you what what are you going to do about it? I don't know. What are you thinking about?

I'm I think I'm collecting evidence to form a perspective just bullshit. You have a perspective. You don't need evidence. You have all the evidence. You talk to you do this podcast every day of your life. Yeah. You talk you do know it and I'm not the talking on your podcast. You do all of the listening. I'm onto you. And I'm going to go to a break now.

So that's nonsense. You have an opinion. You have a perspective. I'd like to know what that perspective is because you're at a crossroads where you said yourself. I'm questioning the priorities I made. Yeah. So that means you have a point of view. And I'm worrying that I'm bullshit to myself about why I'm working. So why what is the bullshit line you're giving yourself? Why are you working? What's the bullshit line? What's the bullshit answer to that?

It's like the fish and then it's like and then I'll and then I'll make more boats and then we'll make more boats and then for what reason? To what end like why is it important for you to keep having all those boats in the water? So I wonder whether it's about the end or if it's about just the fun of the journey. And that's what I'm that's kind of what I'm not sure is it about the end? Is it about you know being able to do.

Have it even greater levels of freedom in the future, which sounds like bullshit because I've got so much freedom now. Or is it life is just about the climb not not getting to the top and having this incredible view, but I just have to keep myself sufficiently challenged in my life. That's why I'm giving myself more responsibly, setting myself bigger goals, bigger challenges because the joy of life is waking up in the morning and feeling a little bit scared about today.

And you know, okay, so if that's the answer, then you wouldn't be at a crossroads. You would this wouldn't be a conversation. So here's the blunt question. Yeah, I think what in your life is off. I think it's probably the balance of my romantic relationship. I feel like I'm deferring. I feel like I'm telling myself that I'll have a really focus in the way that I need to on my romantic relationship, which is also going to then become my family.

In the future, and I've been especially this year, I've been doing that all year. I think that I'll have time for my relationship in three years when I saw the business or something. That's what I've been telling myself and I think I'm I feel that disconnection. Not just in my romantic relationships, but I just feel that disconnection because I've told myself now that I'll figure it out in three years. That's when I'll focus. I'll sell this business, then I'll focus on, you know.

What's so funny is that if it was a business problem, if you and I were talking about a business problem and I was telling you about a business challenge I'm having, I'm having. And if I said to you, you know what, whatever I'll figure it out in three years, you would say no, you figured that out now. Because that problem will not go away. And three years from now, you'll default it to for another three years or new problems.

Like if this was a business problem, you would never let yourself defer that problem for three years. So how are you giving yourself a different standard for your romantic relationship of something that is of utmost importance to you that desire to start a family one day? Why did why the different standard for your perfect a lower standard for your personal relationship than your professional work? I think sometimes our romantic relationships becomes the residual beneficiary.

I get whatever's left. It's kind of what you were saying about friendships. When you was talking about friendships, I was thinking, that's that time residual beneficiary, like you get whatever's left. It's not allocated in the calendar. So if there's nothing in the calendar, it gets nothing that day, but the business meeting gets priority. The thing I think relationships are become the residual beneficiary because it's unclear in the near term the impact of neglecting them.

So like brushing, not brushing your teeth today, you don't really see it today. You don't see the pain today. There'll be no dental visit. Don't brush it every day this week. You also won't see the impact. Don't do it for five years. Dove horse. You're in the dental chair, gaffing the molars pulled out. And these things in life where they're easy to do and therefore easy not to do. And the impact is delayed. They always become residual beneficiary.

And like that's that's the nature of my life, like friendships, family, relationships. I've got this meeting today and I can quantify the return. The meeting is going to make me a million or whatever. But the relationship not missing the date today or not checking your trading. You're trading consistency for intensity. You're trading brushing your teeth every day for going to the dentist. So intensity, easy to quantify, easy to measure, immediate result. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Consistency, slow, no easy way to calculate. How long does it take to get into shape? I don't know. Neither does any doctor. How many days do I have to brush my teeth every day? What if I take a day off? That's fine. How many days can take off? I don't know. Yeah, exactly. So consistency going to the gym. Like you don't treat your relationship like going to the gym. Yeah, right? Which is basically you're out of shape and you're like, I'll go to the gym when I have time.

And then you're surprised that you're out of shape and out of breath. So you recognize this. And so the question is, is what can you do? And by the way, you can also just discover the results all by yourself. No, I don't want to. Right? Because I've got friends that I met when it's short at Chelsea the day and he said, I don't know how it happened. He goes, my wife was focusing on her business. I was focusing on mine. We got 13 years in and the relationship had just vanished.

And I don't really know when it happened. By the way, the opposite is true when things go right, which is if you invest in the relationship, just like you invest in exercise, you're like, I don't even know when I got into such great shape. But look at this. Right? And what I have found is that what makes great friendships, what makes great relationships, what makes great businesses is not just the big things.

It's the countless little things like a corporate culture, saying good morning to everybody. Right? Just on a daily basis. Like it's the countless little things that add up to build trust, to build foundation. And I think this is one of the great tragedies of entrepreneurship, which is entrepreneurs have a unique gift to excel at the things that are easy to measure. But how many of them are really good at the things that are hard to measure?

You know, because what drives you is the ability to say, look how much effort I got, but look at the return I got for that effort. And if I can't show you a return, I can only say trust me, have faith, because back to the question of faith. I need you to have faith. You'll be like, I don't know. But you know intellectually. So I'm going to go, so you're a man of action. I'm going to go into you, by the way. You're a man of action. You're a man of action.

If you know that you're not prioritizing your relationship and you're over emphasizing work to the sacrifice of your relationship and that your relationship is getting the residual benefits, I mean, I'm sure that makes your partner feel so special. Honey, I love you. I want you to have all my residual benefits. I mean, look. But you know what, I have to say, she's running her own business. She's flying around the world doing her own thing. And there she's got.

I have Studio Upstabs, which is her business, her breathwork studio. So you're forcing her to take a breath and for herself and take time. What I'm trying to do, do you have a schedule? Yes. And are you obedient to those date nights? Yeah. These days I am. And is she? Yes. But they're not frequent enough. And this is a new thing we're trying. So I remember the first time I had the conversation with her about putting her in the calendar.

And when people hear that, this idea of scheduling time with each other, there's this sort of initial visceral negative reaction because what you think I'm like your work or whatever. She wasn't like this a little bit. But when I explain the whole residual beneficiary thing, which is everything else is being scheduled in our relationship isn't. So I want our relationship to be equally more important than all these other things that are taking my diary. Then we bought into it a little bit.

And that's helped our relationship a little bit. But then I don't know. This year I really fucked it up like this. I just over. I said yes to too many things and she's got her business and I felt like we're too. Is it like passing ships in the night? Are you going to taking holiday? No. Oh, holiday with the hell. No. No. You work on a holiday? Yeah. My old team. Well, I went to a bought house in South Africa. So I went over there. But I was, I know it was. So you do know, right?

That nothing undermines trust more than telling your team you're taking a holiday and then checking in every day. Yeah. And that's basically what we're saying is I don't trust you to do this without me, which I know is not true. But that's what you're communicating that I can't even take a holiday without having to double check everybody's work and make every decision. As opposed to saying I'm going on holiday. If there's an emergency deal with it, I'll see you in two weeks.

Bye. And what you will find is everybody will work to higher level because you let them. When I was on holiday, which was about two weeks ago, I woke up every day wanting to do the work. Of course you did. I did action. So addiction. Yeah, probably work every day to get a hit. Yeah, I wanted to. It's how you get your validation. I'll play paddling the morning, but then I wanted to come home and get stuck in. Yeah, but you talked about prioritizing your relationship.

Honey, I'll be there in two hours. I'm just going to spend some time checking email. Then we'll go for dinner. He was on a bloody laptop as well, not saying it's healthy. You just sound like, well, I can be an addict if she's an addict. Yeah. It takes one of you to break the addiction and bring the other one along with. I dare you to take a holiday. And you just start with one day. I'm not even saying two weeks. One day you both leave your phones in the hotel.

What do you think is going to happen if I do that? I think you'll actually get along really well and have a great time. You might have a little stress to start. There's always a withdrawal. You might need to do it for two or three days in a row. Because the first day might be excruciating the second day, not too bad. The third day you will bond like you've never bonded in your life. I actually am with her of plan day retreat to this weekend for three days.

And they deal with, we have us no phones. So we have. What does no phones mean? It's a glass. It's a glass. It's a weekend alone. Does that mean you won't check your phones? Does that mean you turn your phones off? Do you put your phones in airplane mode? If I'm going to be honest with you, I think that's really important. That means that I'm still going to check my phones, but not when we're doing the activities.

If, for example, if I like, you know, in the evenings, if she's getting changed, then I'll just quickly check my phone. So can I make a recommendation? Yeah. You hold her phone and she holds. You hold her phone and she holds your phone for the whole time. So if you need to take a picture of food or whatever, take a picture with each other's phone. You know, you can turn a phone on without somebody's password. And at no point do you say, can I have your phone?

She goes to the toilet. She takes your phone with you with her and vice versa. And if you're in a restaurant by yourself, God forbid you should have to just look around for a little bit. Okay. I'll do that. Try it. Well, my team are listening now, so they'll know that from Friday till Monday, if you need me, I'm a glass and ready to give me a call. Cool mouth. Yeah. So it's a gift, but don't think of it as a selfish thing.

Think of it as an act of service and it's an act of service to two different people. It's an act of service to your relationship, but it's also an act of service to your team. Give them a break, right? And let them let them solve difficult problems. I am a big Manchester Nightfan and I travel all over the world. One of the big life savers for me as someone that never misses a game ever, regardless of where I am in the world, is NordVPN.

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If you head to netsuite.com slash Bartlett, that's netsuite.com slash Bartlett, B-A-R-T-L-E-T-T, you can check that out. Well, I'm writing a book and writing a book is always personal conundrums. I'm actually in a really good place right now. I think we've talked about this. My big struggle is I've taken a huge break, a big step back from public speaking. It was so much of my life for so long that to some degree, I'm trying to reconfigure what I want to do with my life.

I feel like I just left university and I'm like, okay, now what do I do? I'm on a journey, but I like it. You left a lot of money off the table, many, many, many millions by making that decision. Sure. So what? That's not my calculation. I'm the person who I'm okay making less and lying on the beach. I don't have, you know, I want a comfortable life, like anybody wants a comfortable life, but I don't need to be the biggest, richest, most powerful. I don't have that in me.

You know, I want to be really happy. And I want my friends to love me and I want to love my friends. And I don't care, like my tombstone won't have my bank balance on it. You want to be successful, right, in the things that you commit yourself to? Of course. But how I define success, you know, money, money, I believe money is fuel, right? So it's not that I'm, this is not some hippie, you know, commune, you know, thing.

I view money as fuel and just like, I don't, I don't own a car just to buy petrol. I own a car to go places. And I know the value of petrol is, it'll help me go places. But I have to want to go places and I have to have destinations. And so I view my life and my career as a car. My career is a car to help me go places. And money is the fuel to make that thing happen.

But I still have to have a destination and I still have to look after the career and look after the machine to make it well oiled so it can get from A to B. But for me, the joy is the journey that I take on the career, not how much petrol I have. But if you did the speaking still, if you did all this, you know, flying around the world speaking, you'd have more fuel for the mission.

Now I've heard that argument, which is if you just doubled down for two years and like said yes to absolutely everything and hated your life for two years, you'd be fine. And the answer is yeah, but what about those two years? By the way, it's the same mentality I want to work with people I like working with. I sometimes turn down and work from people who I just don't like them. Or I don't trust them even though, and people have accused me, it's like well you can afford to turn work down.

I've been turning work down since before I could afford it. And I've been saying no to things before I could afford it. And when I was living hand to fist and had no money in my bank account, I still lived a very similar philosophy. Because for me, my career was not just about advancing, it was about the joy along the way.

Because I recognized when I worked with people who I didn't like working with, I literally found myself saying think of the money, think of the money, think of the money, think of the money, think of the money, think of the money. And I would leave exhausted. And yet I would work with people who I loved working with. And sometimes I literally made zero, like because I would like do volunteer stuff.

And I had so much fun and I left supercharged, I'm like with more inspiration, more ideas, and more friends than when I started. And so I just came to the realization that if it's got nothing to do with how hard I work, I work really hard for both. And it fills me with energy, the element saps me of energy. And so no amount of money is worth having my energy, my ideas, and my inspiration sapped. And yet money cannot buy the energy, ideas, and inspiration I get.

And so I try very hard, it's imperfect. But I try very hard to say yes to the things that fill me up. And some of them make good money and some of them don't. And that's okay. And the reason I keep writing books and the reason I keep having ideas, it's not because I'm smart. It's not because I'm somehow more creative than other people. It's because I'm surrounding myself with people who fill me up, give me energy, and give me ideas.

But it's more than that, because it's got to be more than that, because you're someone who is so remarkably good at articulation and ideas, and thinking through fast principles, and really coming up with original perspectives on things. One of the things I've always really wanted to ask you is, is how? What is the process? Where does the inspiration come from? Where does that come from?

If people are sat there, creative people, or they're, you know, they just want to advance their own knowledge, they want to be wise like you are. What would you recommend they did? So, and you talk about first principles. First of all, I hate the term first principles. It's so condescending. Let's just call it beginner's mindset. Because that's what you are. You're basically pretending that you're a beginner and you know nothing.

What I like to call it, that's a student mindset. I'm not an expert. I'm a student. I've always viewed myself as a student. And so, my favorite people are the ones who ask the questions that other people are embarrassed to ask, because they don't want to be seen as dumb. Students, if you're in a classroom, nobody minds raising their hand and asking the teacher, how does that work?

Because we're the students. So, I treat myself as a student in every meeting. I don't mind asking the questions that I don't know the answers to. Even if it makes me look like a fool. I don't mind saying, I don't understand that. I never try and be an expert in somebody else's business. They're the experts in their business.

And so, when you say, like, where does the first principles come from? Where does the beginner's mindset? I'm not curious about everything. I'm curious about the things that I'm curious about. And I ask a ton of questions and I don't mind not knowing answers. I have strong opinions loosely held.

Somebody just told me that the day, one of the things they liked about me, which is, like, I'll come out swinging and I will argue hard for something. But the minute you give me a good argument or a piece of evidence that proves me wrong, I'm like, yep, that's your totally right. Like, again, strong opinions loosely held. Is there a practice, though?

This is an impossible line of thinking, right? And I'll tell you why. That's like me asking Michael Jordan, how do I become a great basketball player? It's like, well, you need some natural capacity. Like, I'm way too short, so I lost that one. And I can work my brains out. But I don't have any talent whatsoever. So, work ethic is definitely part of it. And I can follow all of Michael Jordan's, you know, routines. And there's no chance, zero, that I will become a great basketball player.

Not to mention the fact that he started when he was a kid, and I didn't, right? So, I think that, you know, people come up to me sometimes and say, I want to be a public speaker. How do I get into the business? I'm like, well, what do you want to talk about? They're like, I don't know yet. I'm like, you've completely missed the point. Like, I never wanted to be a public speaker. I just had a thing that I wanted to talk about.

Right? And so, you have to have a passion for something. And then you figure out a way to bring it to life. You either become an entrepreneur, or you bring it to life in a corporate environment, or you, like, you find a thing, and then you find the way to bring that thing to life. So, number one is, like, I don't think somebody can just choose to become me. Like, they can't choose to become you.

Are there things that you could practice that I've learned that will help you hone some's particular skillseture? The courage to say, I don't know. That one was a hard learned lesson. That was the greatest lesson I ever learned in my life. Give me something technical in terms of how to deliver ideas and to speak. That is transferable. Okay. That's totally, I can totally do that.

Yep. I totally give you that. Number one is, what's the motivation of why you're walking up on the stage, or standing up in front of the room to give a presentation, or, you know, giving a pitch? Right? What's the motivation? Is it to get, or is it to give? Most people present to get something, to get funding, to get a client, to get an applause, to get a book sale, to get a follower. Right?

It's a takers mentality. And I had learned to have a givers mentality. And literally every single time I have a meeting, or I give a speech, I will say to myself, under my breath, out loud, you're here to give. I have a point of view, and I'm here to share it. And I don't want anything in return. And that has profoundly helped me. I just heard a thing that Michael Keaton talked about, about how he reconfigured his,

mind set for auditions. So the problem with an audition, the problem with actors is actors come into an audition specifically to get something. I want the role so that I can be an actor. Right? I'm going to audition so that you can give me the role so that I can be an actor. One, one, one, take, take, take. Right? And it's brutal.

And what Michael Keaton did is he stopped treating the audition as an act of selfishness, gimme. And he started treating it as an act of service, which is that is, I'm an actor, my part today, whether it's for two minutes, or 10 minutes, or 15 minutes,

and though I don't get paid, my role today is to play this part for my audience of three people here. And it still hurts sometimes if you didn't get the part that he's still a human being, but his mentality of he treated the audition like the role and the joy he got from being an actor.

And so he was a hard working actor because he went to a lot of auditions, not books, he got a lot of parts. Right? And it's the same, which is to treat everything as an act of service, as an act of giving that the joy comes from being in the room from having the meeting like I give good meeting.

Right? Because I enjoy meetings because I give I give the people on the other side everything. And sometimes we do business together and sometimes we don't, but I often find meetings that go nowhere really enjoyable. So one thing that everybody can learn is if you have a point of view, or if you have a product, if you have a service that you think has value in the world, then show up with the joy of giving.

So number one is showing up to give. And if you want like real technique for standing on stage, I can give you that too. Let's do both. So on the first point about showing up to give, if I show up with that mentality of I'm going to give today, does that also changes the content and the way that I... Everything changes. Everything changes. Your tone of voice changes. Like we've all experienced somebody who takes versus somebody who gives, right?

Go to a shop where the employee is paid by commission and tell me if you can feel it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now go to a shop where the employee is given a salary and there's no commission for every sale and tell me if you can feel the difference. Night and day. Night and day. Right? So it's the same thing. People are smart. People can feel when you're a taker and people can feel when you're a giver.

I see it all the time on stages. It's really easy when somebody's on a stage. When they walk up on the stage and the first thing they tell you is put your phone's way, give me an hour of your time. I, you know, show me some politeness. Okay. Asshole. That's your job is to hold my attention. You know, when they stand up and they tell you their credentials. Oh, it's just a logo being on the screen. When they stand up and the screen behind them has their logo, their URL, their... All their QR code.

All the QR code. All the handouts for all their socials. When you ask them a question and they say, well, if you read my book. Oh, my God. Right. My online course, like you, they kind of help themselves. It's the dripping. People hate that on this podcast. In one of our recent episodes, a certain guest reference their book, every three sentences.

And honestly, the amount of comments in the comments section. That honestly, I was like, I have to have a chat about it as a team because so many of the comments, even though it was a great conversation, it's done millions of millions of downloads and views, the people in the comments were like, really not tackled with the fact that they mentioned their book. Let's say 20 times in a throughout conversation.

Yeah. But, you know, but some, in their defense, especially first time authors, but even multiple time authors, the publishers give them bad advice. Yes. The publishers say, push the book, push the book. And I always tell people who have a new book. Just come on and have a conversation with me about what I want to talk about. I'll make you shine. Don't worry. It'll be a wonderful conversation. And if people like you, they will go find out and they will buy your book. And let me plug it.

You just answered my questions. Yeah. Right? I had a guest once who, same thing, every, my Netflix special, my new Netflix special, my next Netflix special, my first Netflix special, you know, my third Netflix special, my upcoming Netflix special, like it was so gross. And I, I shouldn't say this on, but we edited it. I was so annoyed. We edited it out. Every single mention. And so the total mentions of Netflix specials in that episode is zero.

You probably did them a favor because I took them all out. But it was gross. He wasn't showing up to give. He was showing up to take. And the conversation, he never engaged with me. He had an agenda. And I was simply some platform. The thing that I like about the podcast and you look, you have guests that you like more than others, not because they're nice people. It's because you realize that you're having a nice conversation or you realize they're, they have an agenda.

Agenda is a taking mentality. So if there's, so going back to techniques that I've learned, you know, like even when I talk about my work, I'm talking about it in a way that I, like, I've discovered something where I'm on a journey of something and I really want people to come on the journey with me. So let me tell you what I'm learning.

As opposed to look at Smartie, I'm look at the stuff that you should buy my book and, you know, what is that the, the core of a human though that appreciates someone and that walks upon that stage? Well, is that presentation room doing the pitch when they can just feel in their bones that this person came to give versus take? What is it like the human level? Oh, it's super simple, right? Because we're highly attuned social animals. Our survival depends on our ability to trust each other.

Right? Think about where we came from. We lived, we're tribal animals that have I fell asleep at night. I need you to watch for danger and I need to do the same for you. So we, we're very, very good at assessing. Are you looking at for me? Are you looking at for you? And so it's deep seated into our, you know, our caveman brain that, if I sense that you're a taker, I'm not sure I want to fall asleep at night.

So where have I sensed that you have a giver's heart? Like, yeah, I'll fall asleep at night and let you, I'll let you watch for saber two tigers. Yeah. So we're very, very attuned. We can be tricked. We can absolutely be tricked. But for the most part, we're pretty, we're pretty good at assessing. We're pretty good at being attuned to when someone's a giver or a taker.

But like I said, I am sympathetic. I'm not judgy because I know some people it's born out of insecurity or incredibly bad advice that they're given by their publishers or, you know, push, push, push, push, push, push. But as the wrong advice, just tell the story. Just tell the story. Born out of insecurity. It's funny. I was watching a conversation with you this morning, someone you spoke to and you were asking them about their, they asked you how they find their why. Yeah.

And you're basically coaching them through that exercise. And one of the, you asked them about an early memory in their childhood, that they can remember from their career. And you're using that as a way to kind of track their why. And the answer, the first answer they gave you was actually just about validation. It was about their school teachers to say they couldn't do something and then the moment they proved they could. Yeah.

And as I was listening to that, I thought, God, that's not a why that's insecurity. And so many of us, probably including me. And we've confused the confuse them. I sometimes validation can feel like purpose. Well, that's an interesting. That's an interesting. I was watching a conversation going, oh my god, this because I, because the person who's speaking to I know them. Yeah. And I know how they're very, very complicated, very, very, they've said it publicly. They're very insecure.

And I know what to talk about. Yeah. His response was all about I proved my teacher wrong. And I was stood there having this great career moment and look at me. I finally done it. Yeah. And as I was watching, I was saying that that's not purpose. That's insecurity. And it's even for me in my life, I think I, I confused. If you look at the first page of my diary when I'm 18, it says.

Four goals before I'm 25, number one, six pack, number two, a girlfriend, number three, Range Rover, sport, number four million, ever from 25. That wasn't purpose. This was all the things that made me insecure. Those are goals. People, I think people confuse goals and purpose. But these were all four things made me feel insecure and I was a kid. Yeah. And I had a girlfriend skinny, smallest kid of four, no money in our household. And never could drive youngest in the age that have money.

This was a list of my insecurities in reverse. Yeah. That makes sense. I think there were my goal missions in life. But I think that's normal. You know, I think we're all a jumble of who is it who said it was really nice, which is, you know, we're all seeking validation from others. And yet if you're, if you forgot who said it was brilliant, but we're all seeking validation from others and hoping people like us.

And yet if we can just remember to validate somebody else, you're ahead of the game. You know, we're all worried about what people think about us and whether I made the wrong joke or with the ice or the wrong thing. And the reality is nobody's thinking about you. Yeah, they're thinking about themselves. And if you can just validate other people. And again, this goes to the skill of service.

You know, which is you have to have a friend you have to learn to be a friend. The one thing that I've learned of the course of a career and I'm now in middle age is the people in my life matter more than I thought they did. The friends in my life matter more than I thought they did. Learning to be a human being matters more than I thought it did. Being smart, being successful, having the sex pack, having the Range Rover, any of those things is fun.

But the people with whom I share those things matters more. Like going to the gym with someone matters more than the sex pack. Going on the adventure with someone in the Range Rover matters more than the Range Rover. Who I get to share money with and spend money on and give money away to matters more than the money I make. What I do with recognition and how I use it to make other people feel seen or heard matters more than how many people see or hear me.

And I think that's the single most important lesson I've learned in a career. I think that answers the question about the difference in insecurity and purpose. Because insecurity is about me. And purpose becomes, who can I give this much time? I share it to. Because none of those things are fun unless I get, like, and I have some friends who are insanely generous. And when I say insanely generous, you just realize the joy that they get from sharing whatever they've accomplished with.

And by the way, I'm not just talking about financial success, like a friend who's an incredible artist and loves to share her art. You know, and if you're one of her friends, you will get one of her pieces of art. This kind of, I want to go back to the public speaking advice because I really want to get that from you. But this kind of, maybe think about corporations and business leaders and how they can introduce service into their companies as a way to create better businesses.

Well, they've come a lot of companies have misunderstood what service means. They think services, the company gives money to charity. Or we have a giving day where we all go take a day off work and work for Habitat for Humanity or something like that. The company sponsors a fun run and run that raise money for charity or something. And we give our people a day off to go do the run and we all volunteer.

Like, those things are good. That's charitable giving and you should do that. But that's not purpose. That's just do that anyway. That's just giving. So, real purpose, real service is, and we've talked about this a little bit before, which is in a day and age where coming to work or staying home has controversy and mental fitness issues attached. How do I help redesign work so that the people I go to work with feel safe, heard, seen when they come to work every day?

And I do at the office to make somebody else feel seen and heard and validated to protect somebody else's mental fitness. That's service. Teach people that. And this is one of the reasons why I work so hard and built a whole company to teach human skills. Because the skills to do those things are not well understood. And their skills. Remember, cats don't have to work very hard to be cats, but it takes a lot of work to be a human being.

And most of us actually lack the skills to be a good human being and clear things like listening, active listening. Like, do you know how to hold space for somebody who's struggling? Do you know how to do that? Do you know how to have a difficult conversation? Can you have a conversation about race in your company? Do you know how to have, how to give somebody incredibly difficult feedback in a way that they can hear it without being defensive?

Do you know how to have an effective confrontation to go up to somebody who is your level higher or lower than you in the corporate hierarchy and confront them because they did something that upset you in a way that they will hear you? Like, do you have any of those skills? Most people, including people in positions of leadership lack those skills. Now, the best part is those skills are teachable, learnable, and practicable. Every single one of them can be learned by absolutely 100% of people.

Just like every single person on the planet can learn to write a bicycle. Everybody can learn to write a bicycle. You just have to do a little bit of the work and you're going to wobble and you're going to scrape your knees a few times. But I guarantee you, you'll get to the point where it becomes second nature. And so, if you want to build a company that builds service and purpose into the company, please, please teach people human skills.

And don't ask me what the ROI is, right? Let's like what Gary Vaynerchuk says, like, what's the ROI of your mother? Like, it's everything you and I've talked about. What's the ROI of going to the gym one day? Nothing. The answer is zero, unless you do it every day.

And so, if you have a company filled with people who are brilliant listeners, brilliant at confrontation, brilliant at expressing their feelings, brilliant at having difficult conversations with each other, watch what happens, to productivity, to engagement, to innovation, to loyalty, to customer service, just every metric on the planet. And the most important one, the joy of the people who come to work. Where people say, I love my job. I feel like I'm a part of something bigger than myself.

And it's nothing to do with the product or service we sell. I get the ultimate joy of taking care of the people I work with. And I feel taken care of by the people I work with. And that is, that's about the greatest gift you can give to a company. That's good leadership, by the way. And that service to society. And the reason that service to society is for a very simple reason.

Because if you learn all these skills and my company teaches me these skills, even if it's selfish because they want to make their office better, they want more innovation and more productivity and more engagement. Fine, great. Somebody who is a, who's a better listener and better at confrontation.

Once you have that skill, you have that skill, which means you go home with that skill. And you now have, are better able to hold space for your spouse or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your children, which means you have now improved your relationships, which means they feel seen and heard and understood better than they ever have before.

And because they now know what it feels like, they in turn instinctively do it for their friends and their neighbors. And those people do it for their friends and their neighbors. And before you know it, the ripple effect you have world peace. Because remember, world peace is not the absence of conflict. That's not what world peace means. World peace is the ability to resolve our conflicts peacefully.

There's no such thing as a marriage or a relationship without conflict. Successful relationships are able to resolve their conflicts peacefully. World peace doesn't mean we all agree. World peace doesn't mean we we all like each other. There's something about this idea of being able to have those difficult conversations, which is so central to the health and trust of our organization.

And I've really been learning this recently over the last couple of years that you can probably predict the amount of quiet dissatisfaction in any team organization family relationship based on their ability and capacity to have uncomfortable conversations. Yeah.

Because so many companies so many founders so many leaders that are listening right now will relate to this idea of quiet dissatisfaction. It is when some of your expectations are being unmet by your colleagues or co-workers, your employer, whatever. And for whatever reason because of the culture, you've not felt or maybe you don't have the skills to address it and it's now growing.

And then eventually you'll either leave something or break the company will die. But we now need to start teaching us. I think especially in this generation, how to have those uncomfortable conversations for our relationships. It's been a game changer in my relationship. It's been a game changer in my businesses. And it's something that I'm trying to get even better at.

What advice do I need to get better at it but also to drag my teams up and to make sure that all of us collectively as a culture are creating that culture of like having a difficult conversation today. Well, number one, like I said, teach it. Right? Teachers. Which is like, you know, the, I mean, I said, like I said before, which is I recognized that I didn't have the skills.

I recognized that I wasn't able to teach people the skills. I recognized my teammates didn't have the skills. And so we started to look for the people, the books, the TED talks so that we could learn so that we could be better to each other. And it was so valuable that we said, okay, well, what if we taught this to other people as well?

Because I would just be at a dinner table talking about how I'd learned the skill and how it benefited my relationships and my work. And somebody says, oh my God, can you teach that to me? You know, I was like, I guess that was a lot of what drove the early stuff from the, from the optimism company, you know, that where we teach human skills, it was the skills that I lacked. It was the skills that I needed. And I sought them out. I went and took them from other places, wherever I could get them.

And realized there was a distinct lack of these skills in the world and the best place to get them would be at work. Again, because that's where the people are. Because if you turned around today and you're working in a business, either at any level in a company and you said, listen, and you just started giving like difficult feedback or you started exhibiting that behavior on your own,

you would be so unusual in the culture that people wouldn't understand it. So you can't just listen to us have this conversation and go into a, like being radically transparent with people. No, you can't, don't do that. Don't do that. But what you can say, and I've done this, as what I've said, even to my team, I've said out loud, I realize that one of the skills that I'm lacking in is X.

I am going on a journey to hone that skill. I'm going to be practicing. I might fumble it and get it wrong sometimes. I might start acting in a way that you will perceive as weird. Bear with me. I'm just practicing a new skill. I just want you to know that I'm on this journey. So when I start acting weirder differently, you'll know why. And the journey is I'm going to start trying to accept difficult conversations and feedback better. And I'm going to try and give it more honestly and openly.

Is that the essence of your journey? I mean, if that's the one you're working on, you know, because I mean, I took a listening class many years ago. And here's what I learned. I learned that I am an absolutely fantastic, brilliant listener. With people I will never speak to again for the rest of my life.

But with my friends and colleagues, a fricking disaster. And so when I would have arguments with friends and colleagues and they would say, you are such a bad listener, I would say, seriously, like, do you know what I do for a living? I think I'm doing just fine, right? And I was right. But in a different context with people who I will literally never see or talk to again for the rest of my life.

And so when I took this class, I was like, shit. And I remember when I was done with the class, I picked up the phone and like called a bunch of people. I said, I think I owe you an apology. I just took this class and I realized I'm a terrible listener. And they were like, yeah, we know. And yet they stuck with me still. You know, why would they do that? Right? But I fully owned it. And then like even in my relationship, like I said, I'm learning how to be a better boyfriend.

I'm learning how to be a better listener. I'm learning how to resolve conflict better. Like bear with me. But I can't do it alone. Like I need you to point it out. You know, I need you to tell me when I get it wrong or I need you to tell me, you know. And so my girlfriend and I, we got really good at sort of like pointing it out to each other like when we slipped up. So like when one of us, we were having a difficult conversation, we're having an argument. And I'm saying my feelings.

And she would correct my facts. And I'd be like, babe, don't correct my facts. I just tell you my feelings. And she'd be like, you're right, you're right. Like, so we both took the education. So we could like, we both knew the curriculum. So we could both like, we never, we didn't take it personally if the other person just helped block and tackle it in the middle of an argument. And this led to all kinds of remarkable creativity. So I'll give you one example of creativity.

Because what happens is when you learn the skills, you become hyper aware of how people are speaking and how you're speaking in the situation. You're not just arguing. You're not just trying to be right. You're not just trying to defend or prove the other person wrong. You actually become hyper aware and you gain a situational awareness. Like it's kind of amazing. So my girlfriend and I were having a pretty bad argument and it went something like this.

Here's what I did right and here's what you did wrong. The response was, well, here's what I did right. In fact, here's two things I did right and here's four things you did wrong. Right. And this went on and on clearly going nowhere. It's getting more heated. It's getting more aggressive. It's getting more personal. And and I had the situational awareness to realize this is, this is a loose, loose situation.

And I literally interrupted. I said, okay, hey, I'm interrupting our argument and I'm making new rules. Okay. Currently what we're doing is I'm telling you the things I did right and I'm telling you the things you did wrong and you're doing the same. I'm changing the rules, new rules. I'm going to tell you the things that I did wrong and I'm going to tell you the things that you did right.

I'm going to go first and then you're going to go, okay, here's what I got wrong and here's what you got right. And she goes, well, yeah, well, here's what I got wrong and here's what you got right. And I said, well, here's what I got wrong. And in four minutes, we were joking and laughing and hugging and realizing that we were contributing to the tension, but also the other person was really trying.

Interesting. It's a nice reverse. And literally, it was only from all of these classes and skills and practice and practice that I at least had the sensibility to recognize the situation I was in to change the rules midway. Because I think part of the problem is even if you have the skills, sometimes we forget to deploy them.

That's how to be a remarkable listener. I always reflect on this conversation I had with Julian Treasure, who's the Ted, Ted, I talk about that, that famous speech about how to be a great speaker. And he said he also did a, he said that, that talk on how to be a great speaker did like 30, 40 million views. And then he did a talk on how to be a great listener and it did like three million views. Yeah, nobody wanted to listen to that. Ironic, isn't it?

It's so ironic, but that's how to be a great listener to just to close off on this idea of then how to be a great speaker. We touched on a couple of points there. Is there any more technical things you would give me as an advice if I was going up on stage? And I wanted to be able to connect with people, influence them and you know, share my message. Value narrative stories, right? I mean, it's, I mean, it's so hackneyed to even talk about it, right? But nobody wants to be explained to, right?

People will listen to stories and remember stories. They will forget explanations and they won't learn from explanations. And the facts and the figures can come afterwards. But metaphors, stories, things that help people understand what you're trying to say. Then it's, then it's, so most people get it backwards. First, they tell you the explanation and then they use the metaphor or the story to prove the facts.

I've learned that the total, total opposite is actually much more effective. Tell the story, suck people in. They'll remember the story and then tell them the salient bits. So for example, and all of my work I start with story, right? So for example, if I'm introducing finite infinite games, right? I will say something like doing the Vietnam War. Most people don't realize that the United States actually won most of the battles at Ford.

Not only did it win most of the battles, if you look at the numbers, America lost 58,000 troops of the course of 10 years of fighting. The North Vietnamese lost 3 million people, which raises a really interesting question. How do you win all the battles and decimate your enemy and lose the war? Clearly there's more than one definition of winning and losing.

What are you doing there? You're making me curious. You're creating a curiosity gap. You're, you know, I'm emotionally connected to this now. Right. Or I'll tell you the story of when I went to Afghanistan, you know, and how I learned what true purpose means. Or I'll tell you the story of the, the A 10 pilot, Johnny Bravo, who risked his life other people.

And I asked the rhetorical question at the end of that amazing story, you know, in the military, they give medals to people who willing to sacrifice themselves that others may gain. And in business, we give bonuses to people who willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain. What are you doing that? And so all of these things are ways of making people relate their experiences and their lives to my stories.

I want them to go, yeah, so it's no longer about me and my facts and my point of view. It's about us and our shared journey and our collective experience. People are interested in things that make them feel something. Curious that he's a feeling. Data isn't going to do that. Data's not going to do that. It's like try arguing with somebody with data. Try, try, try using facts to prove your girlfriend wrong when you're having an emotional argument. That's not going to go well, right?

And I think we make this mistake all the time. You know, we bring, we bring, we bring data to an emotional gunfight. It's never going to go well. Data has to meet data and emotion has to meet emotion. And good leaders and good presenters know how to modulate. And so I want people to be emotionally invested in whatever I have to tell them. And the easiest way to do that is with a story, a story that produces some sort of emotion. A story that allows people to relate.

And even if it's nothing to do, like I'm telling a story of an Air Force pilot, at some point they'll go, yeah, I want to work with people like that too. You know, because I even say that. I want to work with people like that. How do I get that at work if I'm not in the military? What about you other things that you're doing? As you're speaking now, I can see that you have like intonations in your voice. You're being, you're going low, then high. These like technical body language things.

What else is it? What other advice would you give? So when I tell people I'm an introvert, they go, that's impossible. You, you're a public speaker. How can you be an introvert? And what they're misunderstood is that is, they're one thing is unrelated to the other. But more important that being an introvert actually makes me a better public speaker. Because I don't like holding court. I like talking to an individual.

And so when I'm on a stage, I look at one person in the eye, and I give them an entire sentence or an entire thought. And that'll go to somebody else, and I'll give them an entire sentence or an entire thought. And I just make sure to do something called painting the edges, which is I make sure that I'll get somebody in the upper left, the lower left, the upper right, the lower right, the back, the middle, the front middle, not necessarily in an order.

But I just make sure to make eye contact with somebody in each area of the audience. And I have an, like I said, and by the way, it works in meetings too. If you're sitting in meeting with half a dozen people, a dozen people, and you're telling them whatever it is you're telling them, look somebody in the eye, give them an entire sentence or an entire thought. And look, you can feel it. You can feel that connection.

So I did an experiment. I was standing on a stage, like a thousand people, whatever it was. And it was just doing Q&A and somebody was asking about speaking. And I was telling them about eye contact and giving an entire sentence or a entire thought to one person. And I picked just a random person in the audience and I looked at them and said, okay, I'm going to keep talking to you. I'm going to look you in the eye. I'm going to keep talking to you until you feel a connection.

And all I want you to do is I will keep looking at you and talking to you. And I want you to raise your hand when you feel some sort of connection. And about eight people around that person all raise their hand. And that's why it works. Because I'm actually connecting with everybody, even though I'm only actually looking at a few. So eye contact as opposed to scanning and panning. Like talk to a person. Talk to a person. And the same in the meeting. Talk to a person.

Make it feel like you're talking to them. Most of us are very bad at that. We don't, we sort of scare and pan the whole time. The other thing you said earlier, which kind of have been related with that, which I've noticed in you, is that vulnerability is another way to make your message really land and to feel connected to what you're saying. And you do that well because you're often bring it back to you and your feelings and you'll share things with people that others might not share.

And that for some reason makes your message even more powerful. Well, I don't think of myself as special. And even though I'm standing on a stage, I don't think of myself as talking down to people. And so one of the big things that I do on purpose is I use we instead of you. Unless there's a very specific reason why not to. So for example, I'll say, I'll never, I'll never say you need to do everything in your power to live a life of service.

Because until you learn to live a life of service, you will never find happiness. You will never hear those words come out of my mouth. I'll say things we need to all learn how to do the things that give us a sense of service because none of us will ever find happiness until we learn to live lives of service. I'm on the same journey. I'm on, I have the same struggles. I am imperfect and bumbling myself.

And so how dare I stand on the stage and tell people what they need to do when I haven't got it all figured out myself yet. Right? I will share what I'm learning on my journey, but we are going on this journey together shoulder to shoulder side by side. And you will teach me things and I will teach you things. But I'm in it. And so I, one of the reasons I think my work connects with people is I don't think that I'm above anyone. I think I'm right in it with it.

And I do. I come up, I come as a student and I share what I'm learning on my journey and I, and I, and I learn from questions and I learn from comments and I learn from people and I learn from the debates I have and I learn from the discussions I have and I love it. All of my works are incomplete and imperfect. But they're, they're steps forward.

Simon, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for. And the question that has been left for you is, what area of your life do you still think you need some good advice on? I mean, it's, I mean, every area of my life, I've gotten none of it figured out. I don't understand finance. I mean, I'm kind of an idiot when it comes to that stuff.

And I sit in these meetings and people talking with the jargon and I literally, I feel so dumb. You know, my mind just doesn't, my brain just doesn't work that way. But, you know, I mean, I'm learning to understand some of the stuff that I'm supposed to know. Literally, personal things or... No, I mean, work things like, like, like, deal making. Like, I don't understand any of it.

Like, you and I were talking before the camera started rolling, like, about valuations and then, like, I kind of understand. I mean, this is one of the really interesting things is, I think, our success kind of correlates to us even admitting that there's things we don't understand. I think the greatest entrepreneurs that I've sat here with are great because they're very good at knowing what they absolutely don't know.

I remember Richard Branson telling me when he was on my podcast in New York, he was saying, he'd built, like, the biggest, one of the biggest groups in Europe called the Virgin Group. And he was, like, 55 years old and sat in a meeting with his directors. And they looked at him and said, Richard, you don't know what profit is, do you? And he goes, no. Yeah, he didn't understand I read a PLL. Yeah. And so they took him outside of a room.

He said to me that they drew a picture of an ocean with crayons. He said, use the word crayons. And they said, they drew a net in the ocean and put fissures in the net and said, Richard, the fissures in the net, you get to keep that that's your net profit. Richard goes, got it. And the fact that he'd been able to build such a mega business without knowing the basics.

And he goes, I go, why? And he goes, well, because in his business, because I'm a dyslexic thinker, he said, I've always just asked who not how. I've just, I've always had to delegate. Yeah. And a lot of people, I'm the same. I know what I don't know. And I trust myself when I know things, and I don't trust myself when I don't know things.

The mistakes I've made, and I've made the same mistake over a few times, which causes me a bit of self-loathing, which is when I didn't understand something, and my insecurity about not knowing that thing made me overly trust somebody who claimed that they would guide me and help me, and they did know the thing that I didn't know.

And the mistake that I made was, I never really liked those people or trusted those people, but because their skill set, you know, bolstered mine, I let them tell me what to do. And I did what they told me. And 100% of those times, I got fucked, and those people ended up taking advantage of me. What's the lesson? You've learned. The lesson is trust my gut, right, which is, and I don't mean to make my own decisions about everything.

But if I believe the advice that I'm being given by somebody who knows more than me, literally about something, I don't understand. And if I feel wrong, it doesn't mean the advice, isn't it? I just say the wrong, find a different person. Yeah. And so the mistake I made was rejecting all advice that felt wrong. No, no, no, you can't do that. But what I have learned is to reject the people who feel wrong, and that's the lesson.

And I wish I knew that then I wouldn't have made some of the worst mistakes I've made in my career. Unfortunately, taught me that lesson. So interesting. And the thing that annoys me is I made it more than once. I had a meeting yesterday where the guy presented something to me and he's so much more about that than me, the subject. And my body just didn't connect with him in some way. And I found myself questioning something I didn't know. Yeah. I subject I didn't know.

But as I walked out of the meeting, I go, no, it was the guy you didn't, you didn't like. What does Warren Buffett say? You can't make good deals with bad people. Yeah. And because I do deals with people who know a lot, they could take advantage of me. I have people that I've worked with that absolutely could bamboozle me. But they didn't, you know, because they're good people. Because they're good people.

This is unfortunately why we have lawyers is because you need, you know, people will take advantage of you. And it's sad. You and I both know this, which is the best deals you go with the lawyers and you rumble and you go through all the terms. But once the deal is signed, you'll never look at that contract again for the rest of your life. And if you did, I can guarantee you that both sides have breached that contract and violated the terms multiple times.

But you don't care because you trust each other. You know that a relationship in a business deal has gone horribly sour if you refer to the contract. Well, according to the contract, that deal is done because great business relationships, you never pull the contract out. Ever. And you break it all the time. Pay late, work too many hours, take advantage of each other, overuse things. Nobody cares. Because there's trust. Simon, thank you so much.

If people haven't seen it yet, if people haven't checked it out, I highly recommend everybody go and check out the optimism company because you're all the things that you've talked about today. And all the skills that I think are deficient in society. And even the idea of how to like, how to other win friends, influence people, listen better, communicate better, so that we can resolve problems and move in the same direction. All of those things are taught and answered at the optimism company.

I kind of look at it as like a modern university that's filling the deficit of skills that the, all of us, I was going to say the younger generations, but it's really all of us have started to either disregard or loose sight of. And it's nice that in a world where education is teaching us so little about what it is to be a successful human being and friend and partner and colleague and leader that you've created a business that endeavors to fill that whole. It's remarkable.

It's really actionable. Great, very, very experienced teachers at the optimism company and it's delivered in such a friendly way. And when I say friendly, I mean, friendly to a brain like mine. It's tremendously patient. So I recommend everybody go to something. I'll link it below as well. And we're all very excited for your next book about. Oh, that's very nice of you. Thank you. I love coming on here. I always learn something. I love that we get to take an idea and wrestle with it.

And I always appreciate that you push. And you push for the best reason of all, which is because you're curious to understand more. And in so doing, you always teach me. So thanks again for having me on. It's always such a joy. Thank you so much, Simon. Thank you. How many of you started thinking about your long-term health when you hit 30? For me, this was a wake-up moment of me thinking to myself, okay, I probably need to start paying a little bit more attention now.

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