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most resilient parasite is not a bacteria it's not a virus it is a thought and it shapes everything he is
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an expert on the topic of happiness google made him the head of google x the return of
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i know people will hate me when i say this dating isn't entirely an economics problem when you don't know what you're
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looking for then you're advertising wrong how do you find out what you're looking for though if you want to find love it's very straightforward
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at the the last line in your book you say please find the compassion in your heart to want happiness for my wonderful
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son ali why did you bring that up we were having an easy conversation i wrote sulfur happy at a time where ali had just left our world and he helped me
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really really figure things out we think that this brain is supposed to be there to make us successful your brain is
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supposed to make you happy i feel that the top three reasons for unhappiness in the world are without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the dire of a ceo i hope
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nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] the return
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of mo gowda oh man no pressure i mean i don't really know what to say so our first conversation as you'll know as i've said many times to my audience
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is still to this date my favorite podcast episode of all time for so many reasons
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it had everything that i've ever wanted from a conversation it had the personal story delivered in a way with immense honesty and vulnerability and wisdom
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i learned so much from that conversation and of all the conversations i've had whenever i'm asked wherever i go i say
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that that conversation is the conversation that's had the most profound impact on the real fundamentals
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of my life than any other the words that you said then still show up at pivotal moments in my life when
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i'm feeling a certain way or i'm letting something get the best of me and it's really really liberated
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me of so many things so when i heard you were back in london i had to have another conversation with you
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it's an honor honestly thanks for asking i have to ask since we spoke what's changed in your life
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and how does your life look now ah ever changing uh interestingly i'm on you know in 2020 was my year of silence and space
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2021 was my year of flow and then at the beginning of 2022 i asked myself what will this year be about i take a theme for every year
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because it's sort of an interesting way to guide your life in terms of where you want to go i don't like targets it's too
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businessy when you come when it comes to your own connection to yourself and 2022 i decided it will also be a
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year of flow but i called it the year of joy inflow which is really interesting so so to me believe it or not as i worked through the years on empowering more of my
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feminine side and you know creativity uh paradoxical thinking flow all of those sometimes appearingly not so disciplined uh traits are are hyper feminine and
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they're very valuable in terms of enjoying life but also seeing the full reality of life if you want
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i did very well in 2020 with my approach to flow i went wherever life wanted me to go but i was still the same mo you know very targeted very
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focused very able to get the maximum out of everything around that of course there has been
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a lot of interesting repercussions of our conversation that basically allowed me to write more to connect more i tend to be very personal
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when it comes to my presence on social media so got in touch with so many wonderful people and i think that's
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created waves of flow if you want in my life whereby uh by and by end of april i
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packed everything up that i had in dubai put it in a tiny little storage space i've always been a minimalist anyway so it wasn't much and now i have no idea
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where i'm going from here completely inflow what does that mean you have no idea where you're going from here
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i'm in london because of my book publication until end of the month and then we'll find out there's something quite curious about that because i think we tend to believe
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that we need stability or a home or i don't know those home comforts to make ourselves happy so i think about sometimes in my life where i where i was a freelancer kind of like
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drifting through the world i could do it for a short period of time but in the long term i ultimately craved that sense
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of home again so i think we need both right i think we need the balance i think the story that
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most of us don't realize is that every one of us wants an adventure and every one of us wants stability every one of
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us wants at a point in time a long-term committed wonderful connected relationship and a little and at other
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times once the parties and the fun and uh you know russian experience and and so
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on and i think context is a big part of what we miss as humans that that through
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life context changes okay and i've i've been on an interesting journey because of
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course you can imagine i have always been extreme in whichever stage i had been in my life when i when i became you
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know a business executive i was a very serious business executive you know that the 12 14 hour days the you know the
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constant hopping around the world and so on and so forth when i became an author i
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became a very serious author you know i i started to really really spend a lot of hours writing and you know
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documenting my my thoughts and i write two or three books at the same time when you're extreme in those things you
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tend to be quite a bit blinded if you want by the pace by the detail you're swamped into it and it does take uh
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um it does take challenging yourself if you want to to get to a point where you say
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perhaps perhaps this was wonderful for my last seven years of my life but perhaps
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you know context has changed perhaps i need to to explore another part of my life to reach that point where i feel
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complete and was there something that some kind of signal that life gave you that said it's time to pack up and flow
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what was that for most of us who rush really fast in life we don't even recognize what we
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feel we don't even even recognize what our hearts what our souls what our bodies are signaling to us
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and and i think there has been a very strong longing in my life uh to to live that idea of uh i call it half monk which you know
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interestingly again the way we stack life is quite strange and so you you you we work really really really hard for the first 30 or 40 years of our lives and then we retire when we can't really
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enjoy life you know it's like when you retire you're basically taking your stick and going to wherever florida or
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whatever when it's actually the way life should be is that you probably should take the 10 years of retirement divide them across the 40 years and perhaps take three months off every year if if
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we were to redesign life you know it would be wonderful to work seven months of every year and take three more or
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nine months of every year and take three months off similarly you know if you look even at the
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spiritual path of some uh um uh some of the most renowned monks in the world you go through a certain path through life and then you stop completely and then you go become like a monk
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you know for a for uh for a while and then you know you may come back to life or become something else and i decided
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there would be an interesting ambition uh to to to investigate the possibility of
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maybe 50 of your life as a monk and 50 as a modern-day warrior as i call it right and i took the number 50 because that's how mathematicians will work i'll start from the midpoint and then you
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know irritate around it maybe i'll end at 60 or whatever okay and it's actually interestingly possible
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it's interestingly possible to uh spend 50 percent of your days uh in in monk-like activities which would be connection reflection uh you know
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some some stillness and silence some service uh to the world and fifty percent completely engaged in uh you know writings and writing i consider as a
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service but you know like business and business conversations and you know coaching and whatever it is
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else that i do being stuck in traffic and so on and so forth okay and it was a stupid ambition but then it started to become a lot more viable in my mind that actually i could
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do that at 50 percent of every day 50 of every week 50 of every year could actually be spent that way and and then and the thing you need to to make that happen is to step out of the mainstream
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of your steady life okay so i had a wonderful conversation with my uh manager munir who uh you know really wants our success and the success of the mission but that sometimes makes him
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push me very hard to add stuff in my calendar and i said can you allow me the life of a creative
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so can you cram my tuesdays and wednesdays to the point where i start hating you
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but then leave my rest of the week free with one day that is negotiable between us okay and that basically is even better than 50 50. and so so in those two days i'm completely a modern day
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warrior completely engaged in you know whatever the modern world wants from me but then that allows me the rest of the week if you want to do the other things that may allow me to
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find and reflect and maybe maybe figure something out that is so much better for
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the days where i get uh engaged right so if my if my work is to spread some ideas
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then silence to find those ideas is actually useful for it and so that was the the feeling you said
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what what what was the the signal the feeling has been there for quite a bit of time and then when the landlord said
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hey by the way want the apartment back i was like great let's do this let's leave the mainstream
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okay let's go somewhere and see where that takes us see where where serendipity will
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will show us i think that's an interesting place to be are you single ah i am single and not single i think oh that that may get a lot of people
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judging me uh so i again in an interesting way uh found that my current lifestyle does not qualify me
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if you want for a committed relationship okay but that a committed relationship is one specific definition of relationships that i think our world
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has stuck to for a period of time that evolved okay there are multiple multiple multiple definitions of relationships today i think if you if you look back 20 years
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30 years at most you'd realize that that singular traditional model excluded all same-sex
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relationships all by sexual relationships all this and all of that it also included uh it also excluded
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relationships that were not uh till death do us part and so on and so forth i found and i say that with worry that people will judge me i found
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that what i'm doing is more important to me at the moment than a traditional committed relationship okay simply because i feel that an hour spent
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with one person could also be an hour that i spend helping a thousand people okay and even though that hour for me
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uh uh is definitely enriching and fulfilling and so on and so forth it becomes sometimes um the commitment associated with it
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doesn't make it an hour normally makes it several hours makes it a big chunk of your life that i
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lived for 27 years and loved and i would say it's the absolute best way to live altogether right but it's definitely not something that from
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a current phase of my life where the the focus of where i want to put my chips if you want my hours of my life is where i want to be and so i end up when in in very very
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connected very deep very uh wonderful and loving relationships that are super honest but not lasting uh you know if my life will take me
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from here to somewhere else i will not consider sticking around here as a prerequisite to find or you know being a prerequisite to find a relationship more important than my
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journey of finding where i need to be i i learned that interestingly when i spoke to my dear friend matthew ricard
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on on slo-mo so so matthieu is uh is probably one of the most renowned monks in the world he uh was a phd in
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molecular biology if i remember and he quit his life and went and became a monk and he had 60 000 hours of lifetime meditation which reconfigured
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his brain in a way that that was publicly a very very interesting science study he was called the happiest man in the world because of that and i asked him and i said why matthew why why would
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you leave your life and your girlfriend and your you know your he was french living in paris and your
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phd and and go and become a a monk and he he said it would be very unfair uh to have someone in my life expect me to be there all the time when what i wanted
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was my pilgrimages and to be next to my teachers and my time of isolation and my
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alone time in my hermitage and so on and so forth he basically said it's not a promise i can make if i make it i would
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be lying and i think that probably was a very enlightening moment for me because there
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are many things i give up on in my life that would make my life richer but they're perhaps not on my path at least not for the time being
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is this uh do you view that as a phase in your life would you view that definitely everything is a phase in your life definitely definitely i think
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that's the the the changing context steve is probably the biggest failure of humanity
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the changing context is we have a tendency because we are designed as survival machines to want things to remain exactly the same
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if it's comfortable if it's safe let's keep it right i want my same coffee machine every day because i know that machine i know it really well i can make amazing coffee with it right and so
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of course when it's time to pack things i needed to hug that machine and say okay baby i'm not going to see you for a
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few months but the truth is there are many places all over the world that will make an amazing coffee too right at that
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attachment is one of the biggest reasons for unhappiness in life it's the idea of
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i want my glass of water i don't want a glass of water i want my mug i want my glass of water i want my streets i want my commute every day i want my job security
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and so on and so forth which is beautiful and by the way every single one of us needs to
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live that for a phase of our life for a season if you want okay but that failure to recognize the changing seasons
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sometimes results in a narrowness of our life that makes us stick to one path when when when we spoke about you you you started as a ceo of a marketing
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very successful business and now you're a podcast host you're an author you're on dragon's den and so on and so forth
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that's a recognition within you that this phase has served its purpose and there is something else i need to do with my life and by the way you could go back to that same phase right you could
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become a ceo again at a point in time and it's that seasonal view of life and and big part of flow you know where i'm trying to live my life now is to recognize those seasons
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is to say look i had an amazing amazing woman for 27 years right and i had a family i have been there i have done that i've enjoyed
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it tremendously it enriched my life but it left gaps behind that need to be fulfilled or completed with other phases
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and other seasons okay and and i think the game here is to be able to allow yourself to rather than plan and say my safety my security my everything to allow yourself
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to sit back and say what where is what's what's life saying is life hinting that i should be in
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london i can be in london let me be in london right let's see maybe at the end of that
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season nothing's going to happen you're going to go like oh it was just very good coffee and a conversation with stephen
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right and and it could be that you know oh my god it was the best coffee of my life and the best conversation i ever
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had right and and i think that uh wisdom if you want uh it depends on if you're spiritual or not if if you believe that there is a part to you that is not physical
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call it consciousness or call it a soul if you're spiritual that part is senses things that are a little bit beyond the limitations of the physical they it might sense
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you know a need for the rest of being someone else somewhere that may benefit from my presence in london or maybe a a
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need in within me to get a little bit of rain which i hadn't seen for i don't know right and if
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the way the way that other part of you communicates to you is through intuition it cannot plant a text message in your head and say by the way by the 14th you need to be in london
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it just gets you gives you that feeling of something is missing from here and something needs to
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be attended to there do you want to investigate and i found from the spiritual teachers
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and happiness teachers and actually business teachers that i worked with in my life that those who are abe who are able to
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go like let me find out okay let me find out let me check this out normally stumble upon some of the biggest changes to to our lives all of us not dutch just
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their lives and you know and it's it's quite interesting because um if you really look back at your life really most of the events that actually shaped
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you that actually changed your lives were not planned at all you know they're probably those were
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always those surprises and often were the surprises you didn't want okay and then somehow you go through
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with them and you end up in a place that suddenly you recognize and go like ah that's why i've been walking for the last 14 days and by the way the game in my view i i say life is a quest it's not
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a journey okay and the difference between a journey and a quest is when you're on a journey you've sort of
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plotted your path okay i'm gonna take that flight i'm gonna go to this place i'm gonna stay in that hotel um it's a
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journey right and it will eventually end up in a destination right a quest is very different the quest is christopher
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columbus taking a crew on a ship and in the middle of the you know fog not knowing where the new world really is okay that's a quest you know you
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don't really know where the destination is you're basically taking a couple of steps forward and then stopping and then
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looking at the fog and then assessing and then reflecting and then saying maybe i should take a step left and then
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you take one step left and then you say okay how does it feel now do i want to go to forward again or do i want to go
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one step back and by the way there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking two steps forward assessing going to the
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left and then saying uh left wasn't what i was supposed to do i'll go back and take a step to the right and and see
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what happens but like christopher columbus you you set off on your quest i'm sure as
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christopher columbus did for a reason you wouldn't load up the ship and put all those men on the ship and get a boat and there has to be some kind of inspiration
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or some kind of reason why you set off that's the question i want to ask but i was also compelled by you said you were
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in a relationship 28 years and eventually there's something missing yeah there's always there is always something missing what was what was missing
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so let's talk about the big picture first because i think people need to understand that there's nothing wrong
00:22:01
with having anything missing okay but we are a very complex being that is made up of so many emotions and so many reflections and so many traumas
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and so many stories and backgrounds and desires and we live in a very very very very
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unsimplifiable world okay and yet we try to simplify it rather than try to enjoy it fully okay when you when when they tell you uh
00:22:31
sweet and sour chicken in a chinese restaurant it's not just a little bit of sweet and
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a little bit of sour there is a ton of flavor happening within all of this okay there is there are layers of complexity
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that creates a life that's worth living and for all for every one of us it's that attachment
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it's the attachment of but i like this i don't want to change this that deprives
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us of all of the other flavors right nibel and i i i believe nibel made me my my ex-wife she we met when she was 18 in university
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we fell in love madly we got married uh the day she finished university uh you know we spent 22 years together uh with our beautiful children and then life
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changed context the context changed ali left our world my son and when ali left our world i hit the pedals and went double speed
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when ali left our left our world nibel on the other hand looked at her life and said
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for the first time i can now focus on me my my children left one went to university in canada area and ali left the world to his next journey and you
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know simply she she looked at herself and said okay it's my time i'm not gonna define my life by you
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anymore i can't travel the world with you because of your passion and your uh mission and what you've now assigned yourself as the new task i'm going to find
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what i want to do with my life and i i think that's wonderful if you're if you ask me that's definitely what everyone
00:24:12
should do now with that contradiction it we became further and further apart remember love and relationships are not ever taken for granted i always
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say this openly i fell in love with nibel six times okay i fell in love with that cute girl
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that i met in university then i fell in love again when she became my wife because when you're
00:24:36
your girlfriend and your wife you're two different people and by the way i was her boyfriend and her husband these are
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two different people too and now suddenly we're left with those boyfriend girlfriend gone and the husband and wife
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looking at each other and saying where's my sweetheart right and then suddenly you know most
00:24:54
people would get into that stage in one of those constant changes and and say hey you
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know i don't like this i want my sweetheart back you know it's an attachment or you can go like okay the sweetheart is gone but oh my god this one is so cute
00:25:10
right and when when you actually see it that way you fall in love again with a totally different person and then again
00:25:16
and then again i i believe i counted six times okay and then eventually when we wanted to to
00:25:23
have our different focuses in life i would call that falling in love again but slightly differently because you see the the the the thing that we
00:25:35
miss in life is we define love love is too big if you ask me as a concept to fit within romance okay we've we've narrowed love down to
00:25:48
that story that hollywood told us which is love is just romance okay it's a it's
00:25:54
a romantic relationship between two people it has intimacy in it and it has to be this and that and they have to
00:26:00
live that way okay the truth is no i i believe there are 20 ways two partners can enjoy and benefit from the company of each other and grow together uh two of which are sex and intimacy and we've
00:26:12
defined love uh a per as per sex and intimacy okay so if you if she's not your woman as in as in you're sleeping together does that
00:26:23
end the love in any way okay uh you know as a matter of fact if if it ends the love then it was never love if you
00:26:31
really think about it huh and and so we we define our our relationships that way and i i think that's a recipe for disappointment because in reality every every
00:26:43
relationship will always go through those changes there will be times where sex won't be great and there will be
00:26:49
other times when your spiritual connection is at its best and you know it really is entirely around again the
00:26:56
layers and the flavors and how you can choose each one of those and embrace it and grow it and and and make it a a
00:27:03
prominent live it as much as you can with that person and yeah if if one of them
00:27:11
ends my feeling is that the rest should not end the rest should grow you more than anyone though after those 20 plus years of being in a committed relationship will understand the value
00:27:21
of that committed relationship and um the place that it would i'm presuming add value to your life now but i guess
00:27:28
there's an equation you're doing about what you would what would come at the expense of that and it sounds like
00:27:34
from my perspective the thing that would come at the expense of that is your mission your freedom which you are also
00:27:41
spending some time to really indulge in no i'm as i i think we all make those choices all the time it just suddenly becomes quite contentious when it's about love and relationship okay but you know what
00:27:55
you you know i left an apartment that i enjoyed because i needed to do something else
00:28:01
right i am here in london where when i could be in uh silicon valley for example because
00:28:07
they wanted me to talk about innovation there because i need to be in london because i want my next book to succeed
00:28:14
right so so we me we all make those uh you know choices all the time and and life sadly is a question of compromise
00:28:26
because you know you you you you often say that the best of both worlds doesn't happen
00:28:32
you can't you cannot have best of both worlds you can you can either say i'm living fully
00:28:38
as my number one priority to achieve a and i'll achieve as much as i can of b as long as it doesn't contradict a or
00:28:45
you can say i'll go for b and you know i'll sacrifice a bit of a for that right and and it's interesting because most people especially the romantics will say
00:28:55
how can you sacrifice love you know love is the most important no a billion happy is more important than love
00:29:02
in all honesty for me and my to my personal love okay because in in in my capacity to
00:29:08
to feel love for a billion people okay and actually try and dedicate my life to as many as i can reach with that i tend to believe that's that
00:29:20
prioritizing my own comforts and my own life and my own settlement if you want being settled
00:29:28
is selfish to be honest it's it's a different phase it hopefully will happen in two three years time but it's not the phase now it's not the right time for it at all okay and yes i wish i could get a
00:29:40
b again get a and b and maybe i'll stumble upon that wonderful woman that is completely aligned and you know spends the that my trips with me and you know supports this
00:29:52
and if i do that's amazing but if i don't what would i prioritize it's life is a question of choices
00:29:59
you could be doing anything with your time you know you're clearly someone that is make
00:30:04
being very intentional about the use of your time and making sure that every hour of your time is allocated towards
00:30:11
what you want whether that is playing video games whether it is writing a book so why did you choose to write a book
00:30:18
called that little voice in your head i feel that the top three reasons for unhappiness in the world uh without competition beyond that like they are by far
00:30:30
bigger than all of the others are ego lack of self-love and actually in order it would be lack of self-love ego and that little voice in your head okay and
00:30:42
the little voice in your head as i as i say at the beginning of the book that i would dare say that there
00:30:49
has never been a moment in your life where any event had the power to make you unhappy until you turned it into a thought okay so so
00:31:01
anything could happen it's the story you tell yourself about it that makes you unhappy it's not the
00:31:06
event it's the story right and so if my if i'm true to my commitment to try and make the world happier then i need to talk about those three topics in three
00:31:18
different books if you if you want or maybe some content of some form but but that's not
00:31:23
the point the point is what's tag what's what struck me and really really puzzled me was that i realized uh when i wrote
00:31:30
scary scarysmart and you know scarysmart was entirely about technology and where technology is going and so on i realized
00:31:37
that we humans have the ultimate technology in our heads a brain that is so sophisticated
00:31:44
so capable of doing things that are really really beyond the capacity of any supercomputer still today
00:31:52
and yet we know how to use our smartphones and our devices better than we know how to use that brain
00:31:58
most people get trained on how to use excel but they never really get trained on how to streamline the thoughts in their head okay and and that appeared to me to
00:32:10
be a very interesting engineering problem and so the idea was to create that analogy between neuroscience and
00:32:17
computer science so the book in my mind was if i can show people that those brains the neuroscience of them is is
00:32:24
actually similar very analogous to computer science and the devices you have in your hand because people already know how to use
00:32:31
those devices then that knowledge would allow them to use the brain as good as they use the devices
00:32:37
the basics here which is the the title of the first chapter of your book and it's and it feels like the first
00:32:44
chapter really kind of introduces some of the inspiration behind you why you wrote wrote the book you talk a lot about your
00:32:50
wife and the illusions that you live under what are the illusions that you you live
00:32:55
under or you lived under again let's think about the bigger picture first everything that we have you haven't visited and investigated and arrived at a competent confident uh
00:33:11
conviction that this is your own view is probably an illusion okay which is quite striking because for
00:33:18
a man like me who spends a lot of his time reflecting uh we're surrounded we're submerged in
00:33:26
illusions okay everything from the value of uh you know a branded bag all the way to
00:33:32
you know what the tv is telling us what the government is supposed to do and all of that stuff
00:33:39
unless you've reflected on it and said okay i'm being told this i'm you know behaving this way which might be contradicting what i've been told but i'm feeling that way which might be a
00:33:51
third contradiction and where is my reality it's safe to assume that this was an illusion so a big part of that little
00:33:58
voice in your head is an admission of all of the mistakes i made using that machine in my life or not all but many
00:34:06
not even many but many mistakes that i've made using this machine not all of them there are many more mistakes
00:34:13
one i think the biggest of them was a conviction in my early years that my kids were a burden my family was a responsibility okay which does happen
00:34:24
when they come to life when you're very young i mean i had ali when i was 25 i was
00:34:30
just turned 26 and and uh and uh and uh you know i got married when i was 25 so basically
00:34:38
you start to feel responsible you start to prioritize work you start to go out in that treadmill uh you know the hedonic treadmill and just run run run run run run okay and and the pressure
00:34:50
that you that you put on yourself when you do that makes you start to think okay they are the reason why i'm working so hard they are the reason why i'm stressed okay when in reality if you had
00:35:03
asked them they would have said papa just come play with us right we don't want more than what we have it's me
00:35:11
losing context and running like crazy that made me think that way and the basics of the challenges we have with
00:35:17
our brains is that we believe what our brains tell us okay so when my brain tell me they
00:35:24
are the the burden they are the challenge my whole being responds to that my whole
00:35:30
being starts to behave that way okay and and i think what the reality that we miss when we do those things becomes uh what you have seen in the if you if
00:35:41
you like the movie inception um you know when she when his wife had that um thought uh you know we're waiting for a train or train you know basically that
00:35:54
kept playing in her head over and over and over that convinced her that this is not the real world that they are in a dream and that the way to go out of it is to die that actually led her to
00:36:04
committing suicide and and and you know big opening of the movie that my favorite movie line of all time is what
00:36:11
is the most resilient parasite okay and the most resilient parasite is not a bacteria it's not a virus it is a
00:36:19
thought that you implant deep in your brain and believe in it over and over and over through your life and it shapes everything shapes everything interestingly without
00:36:30
you even knowing why you're doing what you're doing is because because of that thought because of that
00:36:36
belief because of that ideology and people do the weirdest things i i have a very very dear friend who is a brilliant engineer brilliant engineer
00:36:46
who had that thought in his head uh he's now in his early 60s that if i tell my ideas to a businessman he's going to steal it
00:36:57
so every startup he ever attempted he wanted to be the engineer and the ceo okay and as a result everything he
00:37:04
started failed even though the ideas and the engineering the the the rigor was incredible
00:37:10
but he just couldn't get that idea out of his mind and and you can go all the way to people who have ideas that lead
00:37:17
to wars or to destruction or to terrorist acts or whatever it's just one idea seeded deep enough in our head that
00:37:25
really leads us to become who we are and digging out that idea and finding it that's the basic the basic is to find those thoughts and how you can deal with them so that
00:37:37
you eradicate them so that you can actually live through to who you are not the thoughts that have been implanted in
00:37:43
your brain and how does one go about even knowing where to start that search for those
00:37:48
sort of limiting or imprisoning thoughts that are have become the satellite navigation of
00:37:54
our lives it is um it's a moment of truth it's a moment of honesty you know i i think you started
00:38:00
with that very uh i can't believe i spoke about that about the very personal question about
00:38:06
my relationship choices right but that's a moment of truth it's not that i don't want someone in my life
00:38:13
but it's that if that someone contradicts priority a then priority a is actually what i stand for right and
00:38:19
and you get those by comparing what you're thinking to what you actually do and what you
00:38:27
actually feel and it's a very interesting exercise if you're coherent in something if you say
00:38:33
i am vegan for example okay if if you identify yourself as vegan but you crave eating animal protein and you feel that you're
00:38:44
pressured then you're not a vegan okay you could be a striving vegan you're trying to be vegan you could be
00:38:51
an ideologist vegan you want you believe in the ideology of veganism but you're not
00:38:57
don't call yourself i am a vegan okay you can then change that thought and say i want to be vegan
00:39:04
okay that's a different thought than i am vegan and and you can apply that to everything
00:39:09
to every part of your life i am in that partnership i love her and i want to stay with her
00:39:14
forever but i'm looking at every other woman and i feel that i'm in jail okay great have
00:39:22
that conversation with yourself have that conversation with yourself because what you're
00:39:27
feeling is contradicting what you're doing is contradicting what you're thinking so much of my life is filled
00:39:33
with contradict absolutely what does that say so i'm thinking about you know i i say that i want to be in a
00:39:39
committed relationship but then i s what i do is work all the time and want to work all the time and choose work all the time
00:39:51
um so what does that mean what does that mean you can tell me on the camera i'm not gonna cry
00:39:57
it is uh it's it's really it is look you're not alone all of us are and it's not on one topic it's on every topic
00:40:04
okay so so there are as i always talk about there are three compartments in our brains okay one compartment is what
00:40:10
i call compartment one which are things that are true and we know are true okay the other is compartment three which are
00:40:16
things that are that are not true and we know they're not true okay and the majority of what's happening inside us
00:40:22
is what i call compartment two which are things that are needed undecided we either don't know them or we know that
00:40:28
they're not aligned but we can live with them for now we don't prioritize them what matters is not solving them
00:40:35
what matters is marking them as compartment two if you mark them as compartment two in your head you go like
00:40:41
okay hold on this topic is unresolved it's not within my priority today but i need to come back to that topic just as
00:40:48
just like my choice of relationships right you know it takes a long time and a lot of experimenting after my
00:40:54
separation with my with my wife to try and get to a point where i actually know that i'm going to put in the time and investigate where i am in life during throughout that time i i
00:41:07
acknowledge to myself and i say this is compartment two i don't know what i want i don't right and the point is so many
00:41:14
of those exist if you live assuming that it's compartment one you're completely messed up right because your actions are not matching your your feelings and your feelings are not matching your thoughts
00:41:26
okay you're not you're not complete you're not full you're not settled you know we we
00:41:32
you know that that idea of equilibrium most people the easiest way to imagine it visually is to imagine a pendulum right if your life is in equilibrium it's in
00:41:44
total balance that total balance is the point at which uh minimal effort is needed to live if you're in balance you're not struggling okay just like the pendulum
00:41:56
depending on when it's at it's a equilibrium point you literally need zero force to keep it
00:42:02
in the equilibrium point forever you don't have to apply any force to it you want to push it a little bit to the right
00:42:07
you have to apply a force and keep that force for as long as you you want it to stay within that place and that's what
00:42:13
we do with our lives all the time that our nature our balance our equilibrium is not exactly how we're living and so we're constantly applying effort we're constantly trying to be in a place
00:42:25
that is not our natural place to be we want to be there so we apply the effort is there anything wrong with that absolutely not because life is cyclical okay and life is all compromises as we
00:42:37
start but the the trick is to say when i am in that place i am aware that this place is not my natural tendency and i am okay with that
00:42:49
because that place gives me a b and c there is a utility to that place at the same time i want to tell myself
00:42:57
openly that i'm heading from that place to that point of equilibrium could that could be by saying in the
00:43:04
next seven years i'm not going to do anything about it but in seven years time i'm going to start to head in that equilibrium or you could say i'm going
00:43:10
to take a step every day for the next seven years whichever way you want and or you by the way or you can also tell
00:43:16
yourself i don't care i know it's not my equilibrium but i'm going to do it anyway because that's
00:43:21
what i believe in i think that's very much at the state i'm in okay if you ask me i'd like to be in you know 50 percent
00:43:29
of the year doing absolutely nothing okay with someone i absolutely love with some a very simple life but that's
00:43:36
not my life every day and i know that to be true and i will do it for a while to go you know because i have a i have
00:43:43
assigned myself something that i believe requires that effort okay the other thing that humans do most of us is we leave a lot of pendulums out
00:43:54
of it out of equilibrium so so it's actually quite easy to tell yourself look my number one pendulum is my work
00:44:02
okay i'm going to put that in equilibrium then my second uh uh importance is relationship or reverse them if you want the third is my impact the fourth is my friendships the fifth
00:44:16
is my health and so on and and then the game is if you want your work to actually benefit
00:44:22
put the others in equilibrium okay or acknowledge to yourself that they're not but you but don't complain
00:44:28
about it don't feel bad about it okay and if you do that you manage to then simply focus yourself on the one that is
00:44:34
your most priority and then life is in an interesting way linear that way in in physics it's basically it's instead of
00:44:41
the parallel processing of trying to fix all of them at the same time you're simply saying i'm gonna
00:44:47
process them in series i'm gonna fix this work element pendulum first and when it's done i'll fix the next one and
00:44:53
then when it's done i'll fix the next one and it's a constant journey so you're not alone i'm exactly like you
00:44:58
constantly constantly searching and constantly reflecting and investigating and finding
00:45:04
that equilibrium just going back to something you said there about what you'd probably want is
00:45:09
it a case that you don't believe you could live a life where you have priority of your mission
00:45:14
one one billion happy and a partner who is is not impeding on the mission no absolutely not i believe it's 100
00:45:25
possible just not met the person yet absolutely okay okay the economics of love and romance are quite
00:45:31
shocking most people don't understand how that works you know if you have if you have one requirement in the if you
00:45:37
have zero requirements in the person that you need in your life uh walk out of your door
00:45:43
the first person that you meet is that person right because you have zero anything that this person is is okay for you if you have one requirement and and say one of every 10 people in the world
00:45:56
has that requirement okay brunette yeah yeah yeah or something deeper you know let's start
00:46:03
you know i am straight so i need a woman okay that by definition removes 50 percent of the population yeah okay uh i
00:46:10
i'm you know i need a certain age bracket in my life that by by itself removes maybe 70 percent of
00:46:17
the remaining population and so on so every layer that you add to your requirements
00:46:22
sadly follows the n squared problem okay so the n squared problem is if you're looking for a person with one criteria and one in every ten persons have that
00:46:36
if you add another layer of criteria it's not one in twenty it's one in a hundred
00:46:41
if you add the third criteria it's one in a thousand if you add a third fourth criteria it's one and ten thousand right
00:46:48
so it's constantly ten to the power off right now if if you take anything that you want
00:46:55
i'm i'm looking for someone for example supportive of my mission and free to travel
00:47:00
whatever that is if if that person is you know is described by six criteria you're now talking about one in a hundred thousand do they exist absolutely
00:47:13
absolutely hundred percent do i have the time to spend looking for one in a hundred thousand
00:47:20
i don't i do but it's not my priority do you understand and we do that with everything in life you you invest in
00:47:27
your six-pack i invest in my little belly right why because for you the i the ability to prioritize the six-pack at your age with your current you know a lifestyle and so on is
00:47:41
actually taking a certain amount of investment from you that's justifiable by the roi
00:47:47
okay for me if i wanted to achieve your six-pack i'd probably take double the time maybe double the effort right and at the same time i would require a lifetime that has a lifestyle that has a
00:47:58
consistency in it that i may not be able to to achieve now and you look at it and you go like damn
00:48:05
you steve i want a six-pack but then at the same time i tell myself but then you
00:48:11
mow you're traveling everywhere and you're really really being true to yourself that's fine it's a reasonable
00:48:17
compromise okay so so the question just to be very specific everything exists but the probabilities of them happening if i'm the luckiest person on earth
00:48:28
okay i would walk out of here and she's the first person i meet right but if you
00:48:34
count that and say no reasonable probability you will say you'd have to encounter 50 000 encounters for that
00:48:41
person to show up if you're unlucky not unlucky and not lucky right suddenly it starts to become
00:48:47
interesting you tell yourself and i know this sounds really weird for the romantics by the way i'm i'm completely
00:48:53
a love you know junkie but but but there is a reality to life that sometimes gets you to prioritize things differently it's really interesting because i've never heard anybody describe it in like a
00:49:05
mathematical way before yeah you know so there is mathematics underlying everything i mean think about
00:49:12
that idea of one in a hundred thousand right the mathematics of that it is it's true when you see the mathematics
00:49:19
doesn't mean that you have to act in a way that's not human but it just allows you to understand how the
00:49:25
system is working so that you can fit in so the example i gave is you're if you're into shelby cobras right if you
00:49:31
want to sell that one car among a million other cars on on on a site that million other that car will have very little chance of being found on a general site but for the fans of a
00:49:44
shelby cobra if you go to a show of shelby cobras everyone there a hundred percent of the people there are
00:49:50
interested in it okay so the interesting bit is that you can actually increase your probability of being found quite a
00:49:56
lot if you're true to yourself if you start to advertise yourself exactly who you as as who you are and
00:50:02
mix with the people that you believe are the people that you want to be with right that's
00:50:08
it changes the probability drastically actually that's so very very true that's very very true kind of goes back
00:50:14
to what i was saying when i did your podcast about my hairdresser who was dripping head to toe in the material position
00:50:21
he's advertising himself to a certain audience that he doesn't actually want to attract and if he is successful in
00:50:28
that advertisement he'd attract something that makes him unhappy and gives them shitty relationships so you get exactly what you advertise and
00:50:35
that's the interesting thing you know if if a young lady wants to to find a committed partner but goes to the pub
00:50:41
every friday evening or the or the club every friday evening to find that partner you know dressed in a certain
00:50:47
way acting in a certain way she's gonna get the person because people are you know
00:50:53
we don't see beyond what you're advertising so if that's what you're advertising the person who's interested in this will show up right if you're
00:50:59
into tango dancing and you sho and you go to a tango class the people there will be interested in
00:51:05
tango and and those people will be the ones that you want to create that relationship with and yeah of course
00:51:12
there are not a million people in the city that are interested in tango but a hundred percent of the people that are
00:51:19
in that class are so i guess you get what your advertisement attracts so be careful
00:51:25
what you advertise absolutely and and to advertise correctly the one thing you need most is to know actually who you
00:51:31
are what are you as a product right most people don't know that i still don't know who they are absolutely you don't
00:51:38
you don't know what who you are multiple multiple uh layers of confusion you don't know who you are you don't love who you are you know or love who you are
00:51:51
but you're advertising differently because you think others are more interesting okay
00:51:56
uh or by the way you don't know what you want so one one of the most eye-opening one of the chapters so i'm writing all of this in a book called finding love one of the most interesting
00:52:07
chapters is all the models of love okay and it's so eye-opening today someone in
00:52:12
my generation only believed that the only way to be with with with someone is to have a traditional relationship
00:52:18
look at all of the models that are available in today's world you know with all the way from hookups to our
00:52:24
lifetime commitment everything's available all you know and and when you when you when you don't know what you're
00:52:31
looking for then you're advertising wrong how do you find out what you're looking for though again it's the triangle
00:52:37
what is what am i thinking what am i feeling and what am i doing okay so openly some of us will say especially if you may say say for example you're
00:52:49
a woman in her 30s okay uh and you want a child you want a child you you feel it in you but you're so you know so so when you look at the
00:53:00
triangle what you feel is i want a child but your actions are you're dating people without talking about the topic okay and then what you're thinking is maybe if i if i tell them i want a child
00:53:12
they will not want to be with me which is quite interesting because yes if they don't want to be with you when
00:53:18
you don't want a child you don't want to be with them either right and and accordingly there is a
00:53:23
contradiction if you want a child you want to advertise to the world openly to say
00:53:29
when you meet someone before you get too involved you say what's your position on the topic
00:53:34
isn't it so funny that our strategy tends to be the total opposite it's false advertise until we get them
00:53:40
because the false advertisement's going to get more people and then once we've got them switch up
00:53:46
gradually um well i don't even know if it's a conscious decision to switch up gradually but it's an inevitable
00:53:52
inevitability you can't act for years so eventually once we've got them on the false advertisement of who we think we they wanted us to be then we'll change and that's when all the conflict and relationships happen is
00:54:04
when absolutely this is not what you wanted at all yeah and you've attracted you're
00:54:11
you attracted the wrong person and you're stuck by acting yeah but but the more interesting part of this is
00:54:17
uh we we're prioritizing for the wrong target so remember you if you really sit with yourself and you say what do i want from a relationship i want a committed partner that wants to have a family with
00:54:30
me if you if you come to that choice you would behave very differently but interestingly you have this other
00:54:37
conflicting thing of but i want reassurance that i'm interested interesting and people are
00:54:43
still you know men are still attracted to me so i'm going to go out dating others who are not
00:54:48
just to make sure that when i find this guy i'll i'll be i'll be you know still still
00:54:53
ready to to grab right that doesn't make any sense at all because by the way the ones that you're attracting are not
00:54:59
resembling a sample to what you're actually looking for and i know it sounds really weird when
00:55:05
you talk about those things in mathematics and probabilities and sets and subsets and so on but believe it or
00:55:11
not it's entirely and i know people will hate me when i say this dating is an entirely an economics problem it is economics economics meaning
00:55:24
in my days when i met nibel she was one of 14 friends i knew okay the economics were very straightforward of the 14 nibel was
00:55:34
the one that matched my soul most she was the most beautiful woman on the planet for those 14 and everyone else
00:55:39
and so i said i'm after this one right today from a supply and demand point of view you're talking about 14 million people at any point in time that are in
00:55:51
a market that is so complex it's like the nasdaq market okay literally if products are on the
00:55:58
market instantly all the time and and the game isn't a game of economics sadly the more supply there is
00:56:07
the less the value of a product right so if if you simply said to yourself you know a um this camera is now going to be uh we're
00:56:18
going to make 14 million copies of it because it's easier for the factory to make 14 million copies than to make 4
00:56:24
000. every one of those copies to manage to sell 14 has to go down in price okay because otherwise peop only people who uh can afford the four thousand would buy and then you'll be left with
00:56:35
the other ten and that's what's happening in the dating and romance market is that there is so much
00:56:41
supply out there that nobody values that relationship anymore everyone is like okay i'll try anyway you know it's gonna
00:56:48
what it's going what's it what is it gonna take a couple of dates but then that's not what happened you go on a couple of dates and then it's a nice
00:56:54
case and then you stay a little longer and then right and and all of that basically you realize that you've spent seven months of your life to figure out
00:57:01
that this person is not interested in children for example if we take that example so what does that mean in real
00:57:07
time say that i was single and i was looking right i'm someone you know who what i'm like i'm someone that's deeply interested in ideas and thoughts and you know
00:57:18
self-development and all of these things you know what i'm interested in we've talked long enough for you to have a at least a gauge of that where would i
00:57:27
go is it a place and where would i not go it could be i mean if you want to find love do what you love very straightforward if you're into
00:57:39
reflection and personal development go to personal development conferences sit with personal development uh people like
00:57:45
me i'll buy you coffee anytime uh you know and or or or you know go to a retreat for example the
00:57:52
people that will go to the retreat will be the type of person that you're looking for i'm i gave that advice to one of my dear friends and colleagues
00:57:58
when i worked at google she was part of google in poland and i told her that i said if you want to find love do what
00:58:05
you love so she went and asked herself what do i love i love tango went and started you know attended the
00:58:12
tango class ended up marrying the the the instructor right it's simple you you want someone that matches you go to the places where those things happen those places could be physical places they
00:58:24
could be online okay they could be serendipitous because you're searching for those things but just know
00:58:31
what you stand for i'm you know not a party animal i'm never gonna find my match in a party so so do i go to parties no i don't
00:58:43
really i mean i i go sometimes when there is a reason to go but otherwise no that's not how i spend my time
00:58:49
quick one we bring in eight people a month to watch these conversations live here in the studio when we're here in
00:58:55
the uk and when we're in la if you want to be one of those people all you've got to do is hit subscribe
00:59:01
you asked me a question about money and then you said you know what does money mean
00:59:06
to me and then when i asked you you said you think you've come to learn that you think money is one of your illusions
00:59:12
what do you mean by that money is an illusion at every every level money doesn't exist you and i know that anyone who understands fractional reserve and how money is printed and
00:59:23
generated money does not even exist you walk into a bank and you ask for a 50 000 pounds loan for a car and they
00:59:30
literally write the numbers five zero zero zero zero in a spreadsheet and poof money comes out of nowhere that money never existed before you borrowed it okay and will only exist when you work
00:59:41
your backside off to pay it back right and interestingly that in that illusion uh was created to make our lives easier and then it ended up create making our
00:59:52
life a lot more difficult now why because most of us are so chasing the revenue side of money without a full understanding of the cost
01:00:03
side of money let me try to explain for you to get a job in london that pays you a hundred thousand pounds just for simplification of the mathematics you have to live in london
01:00:18
which costs you seventy thousand pounds for example i don't know london very well but let's
01:00:24
say these are the numbers but on top of the seventy thousand pounds it also causes costs you str your stress
01:00:31
it also costs you being far away from your mom if your mom lives elsewhere it costs you you know your time which is
01:00:37
your most valuable resource the only thing you really have in your life is your time and it costs you so many other
01:00:43
things right and so most people uh uh don't understand the the cost uh benefit relationship to start now you you take that and then you add a louis
01:00:56
vuitton bag or a fancy car and suddenly your money is not even going as far as it could because you could get yourself a bag that is beautiful and everything for 100
01:01:07
pounds but then you choose to to buy one for several thousand pounds and then you have to work harder which makes you may
01:01:14
pay more costs and that and the cycle becomes even more vicious right you continue further than that and you start
01:01:20
to say so i save some of that my some of my money in the future but your savings are suffering inflation so you save a thousand pounds they become 900 they become 800. when in reality by the
01:01:32
way you've saved the thousand pounds when you could have bought borrowed them by entering some numbers in a
01:01:38
spreadsheet the entire recipe around that story is wrong everything around money is not what we believe in it is
01:01:45
okay which basis basically makes it an illusion now the biggest part of that illusion believe it or not is and i know
01:01:52
you have money in the bank is that you have nothing i i don't know if you realize that i most most people
01:01:58
don't understand that if i have a hundred pounds in the bank i literally have nothing i have nothing the bank has
01:02:04
my 100 pounds and the bank can decide whatever they want to do if they wanted to take it away from me okay and it is
01:02:12
only my money when i choose to buy an iphone or something with it for that one instant that money is mine and then once i get the iphone it's not
01:02:22
mine anymore i now have the iphone right you basically assign that money that is never yours it's the banks until the minute you spend it to spending it on things that
01:02:34
most of us don't ever ever interact with i mean look at your own home anyone listening to us and how many things you
01:02:40
have in that home that you've not ever used ever you know you you saw that pair of shoes in the
01:02:46
window and you were like oh my god i have to have them spent several hundred pounds on them or several tens of pounds
01:02:52
on them and then ended up taking them home never ever putting them on right now all of that waste along the
01:03:00
way the cost of earning the money the things that you spend it on the actual value of the thing that the things that
01:03:06
you spend it on basically tells you that there is one truth to money which is i have basic needs
01:03:13
i have basic needs and my basic needs are to be reasonably covered reasonably fed uh reasonably safe and so
01:03:20
on and so forth and in in isla in the islamic culture we call this risk which is different than
01:03:27
income risk is not what how much money you earn it's the good that that money brings you
01:03:34
it's did you eat a meal today that is actually what you're looking for in life it's not the money that gets you the
01:03:40
meal okay what you're looking for is the meal could you actually buy something for your daughter today the thing is
01:03:46
what you're looking for it's not it's not the money that got the thing and if you start to chase that
01:03:54
something very different happens right suddenly you start to ask yourself hmm is buying that thing worth the 17 hours of work i'm going to put in them
01:04:06
right is it which of those which would i prefer if i gave you the two choices and said buy this bag
01:04:12
or spend 17 hours with your friends if you see it that way you may make very different decisions leaves us with the very big other illusion which is but money is safety mo you know it's not
01:04:24
like i want money because i want more fancy things i just want to feel safe because the world is unpredictable
01:04:31
sadly when the world is unpredictable money is not going to save you okay and i think my story has been very very very
01:04:38
big eye opener i had enough money i you know i had enough connections and enough influence and i you know failed to protect my child's life when it was
01:04:49
time for him to go right i you know i think we know many stories of someone that maybe falls and breaks your back
01:04:56
what will your money do for you safety is a much bigger thing than just a little bit of money in the
01:05:02
bank and by the way safety is an attitude it's an idea to tell yourself when i need it i will make it when i
01:05:09
need it i will have it perhaps the answer is i don't need so much of it anyway and i think
01:05:15
you know again like everything in in life you you want to to have the skill of making money money is is power you know again when you were speaking on slo-mo you basically said i love the
01:05:27
idea of being able to build this setup for the podcast of spending on my show and so on that's wonderful okay money is power but it's power as long as you own it and it
01:05:41
doesn't own you the minute money owns you and lack of it starts to distract you and looking at
01:05:46
how much your your other friend has and he has a little more than you you know hurts your ego once it gets into that
01:05:54
realm then money works against you it doesn't work for you do you think it's a noble cause that when i answered that question
01:06:01
and i said um for me money is basically the fuel of my mission it enables me to i said i put
01:06:07
on my my diary overseer live tour it cost me about 600 000 pounds to book these 10 venues to book the london
01:06:13
palladium for three nights to book this massive choir of you know 40 people to book this big music there was about 100
01:06:18
of us 100 people i had to book and pay for to put on that show at the end of the show i break even but
01:06:25
without the that tors you know reaches almost 20 000 people it's the most thrilling fulfilling and uh biggest honor that i've ever had to be able to do that in front of all of those people
01:06:35
and to share that message which is very much in line with my mission and i look at money and said if i didn't
01:06:41
have the money it would have been much much harder not impossible but much much much harder to do that
01:06:48
absolutely so is do you feel like that is a noble relationship with with money look uh we agree on this nothing is good or bad nothing is right
01:07:00
or wrong everything is both right and wrong and everything is can be both good and bad it depends on what you want to
01:07:06
do with it and one of the messages i constantly tell everyone in the world is absolutely become successful become
01:07:13
powerful become rich because the biggest problem with our world is that the most successful most
01:07:19
powerful then and the richest are the worst of us okay and i don't generalize and say
01:07:25
that's the truth but it's actually easier to make money if you break some rules than if it than it is if you're
01:07:31
ethical and so as a result of that a good chunk of the big money in the world is not super ethical right and if if i have more money i can fuel my one billion
01:07:43
happy mission and that's a good thing for the world that's by the way owning money not letting it own you right so
01:07:50
what if i if i can get to the point where i make it and actually give it to one billion happy then that's amazing if
01:07:55
i get to the point where i make it and then suddenly go like oh let's wait a little bit grow it a tiny bit and then
01:08:01
give it to 1 billion happy then i'm not doing the right thing having said that you know of course you know how i admire you and respect you this is your
01:08:12
zoom lens of the world okay for someone else four pounds some sticky paper and a couple of scissors and spending an hour with her daughter doing something beautiful okay
01:08:25
is as impactful maybe even more impactful than the entire show because that one daughter
01:08:32
with the sticky paper and scissors might end up becoming one of the most pronounced artists in the world
01:08:37
prominent enough to change the world with four four pounds scissors and a piece of paper right now we we somehow especially those of us like you and i
01:08:48
who who had experiences in life where they put effort and the effort rewarded them
01:08:54
okay we think that we're the ones that are changing the world or making a difference or no
01:09:01
we're not okay the reality is we need we need to understand that again i you know i admire you and i know you'll you'll you'll not feel upset but half of what you know is wrong half of
01:09:13
what i know is wrong absolutely right and it's it's just an attempt it's just an attempt with you
01:09:19
know whether that attempt uh uh steve is is is an attempt because of money or is it it's an attempt because you just spend time with your driver talking
01:09:31
about something or you know you you you were telling the story all of those things
01:09:37
i think the game is i'm going to do the best that i can to acquire the resources that i'm good at acquiring to direct them in the
01:09:50
investments that i have accessible to me okay if if you are a cashier uh you know
01:09:57
at a supermarket and you're making enough money to spend wonderful time with your daughter
01:10:03
to be you know to to do a bit of art and that in itself is a form of contribution
01:10:09
that changes the world and you'll never know that one daughter might cure cancer
01:10:17
it's interesting i was i was bouncing around in my head back and forward about like about the role that
01:10:25
a lot of my i don't know maybe my traumas and insecurities are playing in driving my decision making around these
01:10:30
things obviously putting on a big show you have lots of people there that are clapping for you there's lots of admiration it's very like it's very
01:10:37
massaging of the ego so one might say to themselves well i'm serving the world when in fact it's more of a selfish
01:10:42
thing and you're like you know what i mean it's that that constant battle i find in my life where the the greatest
01:10:47
service that i do to others is also woven in there with loads of like absolutely insecurity so even this
01:10:52
podcast like i'm sure the people listening enjoy listening i'm sure they get a tremendous amount of value from it
01:10:58
but there is still this guy in me that is so desperate to be number one and to win right and it's almost i'm almost at
01:11:05
peace with the conflicting forces because i know i think as we sit here the podcast is number one in the apple store pretty sure of that and i know it wouldn't have been and it
01:11:16
wouldn't have reached as many people if i wasn't someone who was desperate to be the best
01:11:21
but i also know that there's this that pursuit of being the best is also quite an ugly one because it comes means you
01:11:27
end up sacrificing a bunch of things in the pursuit of being the best that might make you more fulfilled so it's this weird it's this weird
01:11:34
balancing act of contradiction and confusion and not really knowing why i'm doing what i'm doing at like the real
01:11:40
fundamental level you can broadcast what people want you to hear oh i'm doing it because i want to help others but i
01:11:46
actually know that there's it's a recipe a concoction of many conflicting forces
01:11:52
and pretty much all my success has been uh this this sort of recipe of conflicting forces
01:11:58
well i mean what i what i admire most about you is you're able to see and say this okay if you're you know if you've achieved total enlightenment you'll be
01:12:09
gone okay none of us is ever there that the challenge is this some people are completely egocentric
01:12:17
and not even aware yeah okay some people are struggling okay and some people are um you know doing the best they can
01:12:29
understanding as i say that in compartment two there is something and they're okay with it okay and the the
01:12:36
the trick is you're always trying to move a little bit higher and that higher you know and that little voice in your
01:12:42
head i i follow that model and it's it sounds simple but it's actually quite interesting i call it b learn do right
01:12:49
be learn do is most of us in our life we look at problems and we say here's the solution right that's we're mostly almost anchored in doing
01:13:00
doing again is a very masculine trait okay it's interestingly a lot of doing is as harmful as it's it is as it is beneficial you know the the good doing is a doing
01:13:14
that is informed by a form of being and by a certain level of skill that comes from learning okay so when i what i normally try to follow in the entire
01:13:25
manual to your brain is to say okay for everything that we will find we will have to be then learned and do
01:13:30
okay so you're you're very good one of the people i respect most about that idea of being you look at yourself and you say oh i am doing that because of that insecurity that happened when i was
01:13:42
this that's an amazing achievement in itself that's a third of the way right i know what's what i need to work
01:13:48
on and i think it's the challenging third of the way believe it or not because we humans are very good at
01:13:54
solving the problems when they're defined if you make it your priority you're going to learn the skill everyone
01:13:59
is capable of doing that again i speak a lot about neuroplasticity and how learning works
01:14:04
but once once you've learned once you've realized what it is that you need to work on
01:14:10
you're going to learn the skill and then you're going to start practicing and doing it the right way the challenge is when you don't know what you're working
01:14:16
on now i'll say this openly what you're doing to the world with your awareness that part of it is ego driven of course part of what i do is ego driven i tell the whole world that i am
01:14:27
an engineer being being an engineer is an ego right why do i tell the whole world that there is a utility to that
01:14:33
ego the utility is by the way guys if you're going to read my work or listen to my my analysis it's going to appear a
01:14:39
little over engineered even when i talk about something as beautiful as love and relationships right it will have that engineering
01:14:46
element to it which is not entirely myself by the way it's just the way i present myself to the world because
01:14:53
others don't present themselves that way so i'm differentiating yeah it's i wish i didn't have to use
01:14:59
that ego you may wish that you stood on stage and didn't feel the rush of people
01:15:05
clapping and saying well done you're amazing but by the way if you're delivering to thousands and hundreds of
01:15:12
thousands of people on your podcast great you're so much better than those who are not
01:15:17
and now the fact that you have your awareness makes you even better than those who are but are not aware of their
01:15:24
uh you know the parts that they need to work on yeah it's challenging i think i i think i was bouncing around in my
01:15:30
head on that because if i cared a ton about the the clapping part i probably would be trying to convince everybody that i'm perfect a bit more than i do it's just a
01:15:42
an interesting battle of ego but i but i also think that i think i said this on your podcast is it's okay to be a
01:15:48
contradiction and i think in all facets of my life when i look at my decisions what i want what i say what i do and
01:15:55
there's so many interwoven contradictions and it's so remarkable that the contradictions often
01:16:00
lead me to success in in the things that i'm aiming for it's not making sense i think the whole idea is that we're all contradictions the only difference is you're aware yeah you realize that huh so so the
01:16:12
thing i i think you should be the example for everyone to recognize that we're all contradictions okay it's
01:16:19
everyone every single one listening to us life is a contradiction this is why one
01:16:24
of my favorite feminine qualities is the ability to embrace paradoxes right and and the reality is the only way you can
01:16:32
almost like at a quantum level solve life better is if you're able to embrace two extremes and say both are true and i'm going to include both of them in my lifestyle both of them in my decision
01:16:42
making because both of them are me it goes back to your point about the equilibrium as well that the reason why
01:16:49
the pendulum sits in the middle is because it's that balance with two opposing forces
01:16:54
gravity has balanced it on that particular point but when you apply one force to either side it will swing into
01:16:59
a direction maybe balance is being a perfect contradiction absolutely balance is always a contradiction okay balance
01:17:05
is is that ability to take all of those forces now you have to imagine i i separated them into six forces and said your health you know suspend pendulums your health is one and your love is one
01:17:17
and this is one but the reality is you're one pendulum apply so many forces are applying from so many directions and
01:17:24
the contradiction is not just if i work harder i'll make more money or less money if i work harder i will also be a
01:17:30
little more stressed if i work harder my relationships will be affected and each of those eventually you're ending up in
01:17:36
one place that is very very complex you're we're a very complex being as a as a human and we're dealing with an even more complex life and the the thing is we need to take it
01:17:49
easy on ourselves and say yeah yeah yeah i'll figure out my relationship bits in
01:17:54
a while i now need to figure out my one billion mission and you know a little more or i need to figure out this more
01:18:00
or i need to do that more and it's okay to say it's never perfect it's absolutely never perfect the the game is
01:18:06
if i told myself no no hold on i've done the thinking and this situation is my perfect situation
01:18:13
i'm doomed because i'm basically telling myself keep that pendulum in this place
01:18:18
and defend it with your life okay put all of the effort in the world when that pendulum is in the wrong place it's not
01:18:24
in balance in your book as well that little voice in your head you describe how like all thoughts aren't really made equally and
01:18:29
that there's different sort of categories of thoughts and some of them like observation are
01:18:35
closer to the truth than others what are the different categories of thoughts that we have in our head
01:18:41
the first challenge with thought is that we [Music] create our thoughts from the wrong ingredients so if i if i gave you bad vegetables and told you to make the
01:18:55
best salad recipe on the planet it's still going to taste bad and and the the reality is
01:19:02
we have only one proper ingredient that we should allow into our brain so that we create proper accurate thoughts and that that
01:19:13
one ingredient is actual observation okay observation is i look at this glass and i say this glass is uh 37 full
01:19:25
okay that is an observation yeah you can we can debate in physics if it is or if it isn't and so on but in in you know
01:19:33
the typical way we look at life this is 37 full right my brain would then tell me if i used that information i may ask for someone in the team and say guys can can
01:19:45
i please another have another a little bit more water my brain would then then tell me no no hold on it's tapered
01:19:52
okay uh it is not you know the same from the top as it is in the uh from the bottom now
01:19:57
you you've calculated wrong no you're getting old and your mathematics are not accurate anymore you're you know you can
01:20:03
go into so many different uh uh um inputs into your thoughts that would debate that fact that it is more empty than it is full okay
01:20:14
you take that and you find you can find them in categories one of them is conditioning believe it or not
01:20:21
one of the most frequently used sources for creating your thoughts is not what's
01:20:27
happening in the world at all it's your conditioning and your conditioning creates thoughts
01:20:33
within you that are not not at all a reality i i i speak about an experience where i was dating a buddhist girl who
01:20:40
was very calm and wonderful in every possible way and you know two of our best friends were a couple and they had
01:20:47
a big fight before coming to our uh uh place and so anyway the the girl basically said no i need to talk to you about something and you know want to ask your view and she sat next to me very
01:20:59
very very good friends all the four of us for a very long time and so she she hugged me she sat on you know put her
01:21:05
head on my shoulder and cried okay my girlfriend came in and said excuse my english she said take your
01:21:12
hands off my man you be okay and you know i was like whoa she's one of the calmest people i know what happened here and what happened was she had been
01:21:25
cheated on before right by the best fri by her best girlfriend and a a you know a friend of the person she was dating at the time and the input into her head
01:21:38
that said this girl was sort of doing something inappropriate with me it was coming from the fact that she had that
01:21:44
conditioning in her it wasn't the event itself the event was highly exaggerated by the conditioning so we're unable to find that when we when we look at our at
01:21:55
the makeup of our thoughts the second i i and the third are recycled emotions and recycled thoughts okay so we recycle so much of what our parents told us
01:22:06
recycling of a memory or the recycling of a thought you know your your friend uh tells you hey by the way all men are
01:22:13
cheats and you recycle that thought okay all men are cheats all men are cheats and then you know
01:22:19
you you end up making decisions based on that the fourth and i think the most the biggest challenge we have in the modern world is the mainstream uh media
01:22:30
basically the the the large advertising media uh story that we're told that is a
01:22:36
ton of input whether it's movies it's social media it's you know tweets or or reels or or if
01:22:43
it's the bbc or channel for playing the news and the the the reality of what we're getting is we're getting a highly biased section of
01:22:54
life why because of the human nature which is around negativity bias humans are only
01:23:01
paying attention most of the time to the negative side of life those all all of those outlets are
01:23:07
constantly using that negativity bias to broadcast to you what's actually not the full truth but the negative side of the
01:23:13
truth so you know the the ch a channel will not talk about a child that went out with his mother
01:23:20
and played on the swings they'll talk about a child that fell in a well and we have that disaster and and you know a
01:23:27
social media person i i always say you're a balanced one but a social media influencer will
01:23:33
always show this the the pictures that appear to be more than what they're living and there will be filters and so
01:23:38
on and that negativity that you feel as a result is not a reflection of the actual truth of life
01:23:45
it's a reflection of the subset of knowledge that you get from life now what does that mean i mean i'm trying to say if i give you your phone and your phone has a perfect phone
01:23:56
app on it if you type the wrong number you're going to call the wrong person nothing
01:24:02
wrong with the phone nothing wrong with the app okay in your brain if you put in the wrong data all the time if you allow
01:24:09
all of that negativity coming from the media and the news if you allow the conditioning to be part of your of your
01:24:14
decision-making criteria the recycled thoughts and emotions then you're eventually going to end up calling the
01:24:19
wrong action okay and and i and i think the reality is that at that very fundamental level unless you start to really iron out all of the wrong inputs
01:24:31
there is very little possibility that you're actually going to get to the accurate output you were talking about all these types
01:24:38
and categories of thoughts and all of these inputs one of the inputs is the mainstream media some of the inputs come
01:24:43
from i guess our conditioning and experiences and when you talked about the glass and your observation that the
01:24:48
glass is 37 full how do you know that that's not your conditioning speaking how do you know that that's not the influence of the mainstream media how do you know that there's not a second layer that's running over your
01:25:00
what you're seeing called your perception that is influencing that i'm trying to figure out for people listening how they can distinguish
01:25:07
between a thought that is truth and observation and worth pursuing and incredible and one that is
01:25:14
conditioned you're spot-on okay this is 37 full is my brain's calculation let's use a simpler example you have an argument with your partner
01:25:26
the next morning you wake up and say he doesn't love me or she doesn't love me anymore right the argument is what you
01:25:32
observed that there was a bit of attention that those specific words were said that's observation right
01:25:39
observation is literally like narration of the situation that's it and if you can stick down you can take
01:25:46
yourself all the way down to narration you're done okay i observe that you're sitting cross hand you know crossing your arms i that's an observation my brain could
01:25:57
take that observation and say he's bored he's protective he is angry with me we've been talking too much whatever okay i can translate it into a million
01:26:09
things in my head none of them is true the only truth is stephen's sitting in front of me and he's crossing his arms if i if i accept that to be the truth then my brain suggests those other
01:26:22
things i can then ask and i say have we been talking too long steve do you want should we take a break or can we do this
01:26:28
can we do that right and then you would say something and that would be my next observation i can include that in my
01:26:35
analysis as another fact okay without those facts sadly what happens to us in life is that we're completely absorbed and consumed by stories
01:26:46
that we've built the story is this is 37 full that's a story believe it or not even so though it appears to be very accurate it's a story that includes hey by the
01:26:58
way mo you're good in geography you've done your mathematics really well you've looked at those two it looks as if you
01:27:05
and you know it's a big story and i would tend to tell myself hey it's 37 if i complain complemented this with you know i think it's for 37 it could be a little more a little less that's a
01:27:17
much better observation right if i tell myself the story and believe it and start acting upon it
01:27:24
then i'm in a very deep trouble because because basically my input into my brain is leading me to
01:27:30
confusion certain confusion because i'm not using the truth it's that kind of like requirement of
01:27:35
having like a looseness of our beliefs as well isn't it that just the that old adage of strong strong beliefs but held
01:27:42
loosely whatever it is that phrases i think is beautiful thing ever yeah because because what are your beliefs
01:27:49
your beliefs are built within context again i write about this you know there was a proverb in egypt uh that was
01:27:56
developed in the in the times of poverty and famine people couldn't have enough and it was a difficult time and it basically said as far as your
01:28:08
extend your legs as far as your blanket goes okay interesting when and you know it's
01:28:14
basically in within context it invites people to say hey within you live within your resources live within your means it's not an easy time you take that and take it out of context
01:28:26
and it's widely widely used in egypt when you put it out of context and it becomes you know a bit of complacency it's like don't try to buy a bigger blanket just live within your blanket
01:28:38
okay and that's a very very very different view of looking at something that was meant to be correct and if you
01:28:46
take so when i talk about conditioning you have so many of those in you so many something that your mom said at
01:28:51
a point in time something that your you know teacher said at a point in time something that you did and your friends
01:28:57
in school reacted in a way that you didn't want and so on and all of that is embedded within us
01:29:04
again it's very simple it's that contradiction it's a very simple contradiction of
01:29:09
something is not in balance i say that i want a rolls-royce but i actually go you know go to the rolls-royce and then feel that maybe people will think this way about
01:29:21
me maybe uh you know it's gonna cost me that much maybe right and and and suddenly you go like okay so i'm not in
01:29:28
balance because what i think we're talking about here is like really self-awareness it's becoming really but also self-reflection self-introspection
01:29:35
and that's that's what i was gonna say is i think for most of my life especially because of my conditioning i'm essentially this puppet to my
01:29:42
conditioning with all these pieces of string hanging off my limbs and self-awareness is the process of
01:29:48
gradually cutting one of these strings at a time and taking back more control of why i'm doing what i do in my
01:29:53
behavior so that like journaling or producing content that that introspection and self-reflection
01:29:59
is has been the cutting of these strings one by one or you could view it as like the turning on of lights in a room so
01:30:05
you can kind of navigate better the world but until you do that the lights really are off and i think that's kind of central to
01:30:12
what we were discussing about how to distinguish conditioning media influence from
01:30:18
truth and your own thoughts quick one as you might know crafted are one of the sponsors of this podcast and
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01:31:00
that's why i buy crafted the other thing that you mention in your in your book that little voice in your
01:31:06
head is this concept of neuroplasticity and it says it on the back of the book it says um
01:31:11
retrain your brain for maximum happiness this concept that we can retrain our brain physiologically seems like
01:31:20
nonsense and i can't change my arm so when someone you know asserts that you can
01:31:26
actually change your brain you can change your arm i can change my arm of course what tattoo
01:31:32
no you work out that's true when you work out you're building muscles in your arms and that same exact process is
01:31:39
exactly what happens inside our brains and it's called neuroplasticity the only difference is that you don't see it you
01:31:45
don't see it visibly you can see your muscles growing because that's the function that they need you know they
01:31:50
need to grow to perform but in your brain what actually happens again like computers it's almost as if you loaded a
01:31:57
new piece of software i need a new piece of operating system on your brain literally for every one of
01:32:04
us listening uh everyone listening to us right now at the end of this conversation their brain
01:32:10
will be wired differently than when it started every single instance of anything that
01:32:16
you do literally rewires the hardware itself the neurons that fire together wire together okay so imagine the old days of the switchboard okay and
01:32:28
you know steve wants to call his mom so you ra you know crank your phone and the
01:32:34
operator says uh you know hi how can i help you and you say can you please connect me to that number and she would
01:32:39
literally take a wire and patch you and your mom's phones together okay after a while the operator constantly every time you call you want to you ask for your mom so the operator goes like why am i
01:32:51
even wasting my time on this let me just patch that wire to his mom all the time okay so that's exactly what happens in
01:32:58
our brains if you if you perform a single a certain function your brain starts to build networks that make that
01:33:04
function easier to perform in the future if you do it one time it becomes a little easier if you do it 20 times it
01:33:09
becomes permanent okay and there are there are tons of studies if you if you take a simple task like tapping your
01:33:16
finger on the table okay and you're requested to do that say 20 times every hour after a few days
01:33:23
you'll find that you're so much better at tapping your finger on the table and you can do it much faster and you can do it consistently and you can do it in the
01:33:29
background gamers know that for certain okay the problem with neuroplasticity is
01:33:34
if you tell your brain to wire for tapping your finger it will if you tell it to wire for solving
01:33:42
complex mathematical equations it may take a little longer but it will if you tell it to wire for hating people it
01:33:48
will become very good at hating if you tell it to wire for fearing the end of the world because of what the media is
01:33:54
telling you it's going to become very good at fearing the world i know some of those people no absolutely and you don't want them in
01:34:00
your life the challenge of our modern world is that we think that this brain is supposed to be there to make us
01:34:06
successful yeah okay first of all it's not the primary function of the brain the primary
01:34:11
primary function of the brain is to make you safe okay and then the secondary function that we push huma as humans to
01:34:19
that brain to do is to invent iphones and create podcasts and have amazing things right that's a secondary function
01:34:25
but believe it or not before that secondary function your your brain is supposed to make you happy
01:34:31
because happy is the ultimate form for you to perform in life if you're not happy you're not as effective as you
01:34:38
could be at achieving survival think about it huh if you're grumpy all the time at work people don't like you
01:34:45
you're not focused uh no one wants to help you uh you're wasting most of your time your brain cycles uh you know thinking
01:34:52
about the negative and so you're not innovative or creative and so on and so forth it degrades your performance
01:34:58
happy is a better place for you to be at work because it will make your customers want to do business with you it will
01:35:04
make your colleagues want to you know to help you out it will make your boss welcome you and their team and so on and
01:35:10
so forth we are social animals by definition and we want to have that in our life and
01:35:16
the easiest way to connect and to open up and to discover the world is to be in a happy place that's a primary function
01:35:23
of your brain it's hard for some people you know because we can all think of someone in our lives who has um
01:35:29
certain wiring very stubborn wiring that almost seems impossible to unwire and i think we all have that ourselves as well certain worrying in our brains where something happens and our reaction
01:35:42
to that thing might be uh you know to catastrophize it's the end of the world that's like a it feels
01:35:48
like it's a certain set of worrying where trigger and then the brain goes through the circuitry and it goes catastrophe panic
01:35:55
yeah and and the answer to that i found was to actually guide that person or yourself if that's yourself to the opposite of your wiring so if my if my wiring is to look at everything and see
01:36:07
what's wrong with it i should deliberately force my brain to look for what's right with it
01:36:12
so uh you know i uh when i was when i was coming here it was very busy in the morning and so i came late if you
01:36:18
remember and my brain's immediate reaction is oh what's going to happen i'm going to
01:36:24
be late for steve right that's the immediate reaction of a brain because something is wrong so it looks
01:36:31
for what's wrong i could also say and what is good about that what is good about being a little late you know he's been recording for the last few days so it may give him a little bit of extra
01:36:44
time do you want to know the truth i was so happy you were late because i was late right so i was doing upstairs
01:36:49
reading that i was reading the book and i was thinking i just hope he's like 15 minutes late and then i'm looking at my phone i'm
01:36:54
like he's not coming at perfect so i carried on going and carrying on going and carrying on going and i just finished as you arrived yeah so it's perfect time
01:37:01
you see that that is the truth that's the truth that your brain tries to deny you from seeing and interestingly you can train your brain so so basically
01:37:11
what you can do is for every thought for every negative thought that your brain gives you task it with the task of
01:37:17
giving you a positive one or two positive ones nine i say nine yeah because in reality if you look at life
01:37:23
around you more than 90 percent of life is okay for your brain to contribute more than that as negative is not fair
01:37:31
right so if literally if your brain says hey by the way this studio is a little warm
01:37:36
what else is about this studio my friend steve is there the lighting is perfect the crew is amazing that you know the
01:37:42
coffee is is not that bad you guys get got me honey i can go on for hours right and and the idea is by training your brain to look for that
01:37:53
what are you actually doing you're firing the neurons together so and exactly your your book basically
01:38:01
says it is the answer the answer is when you find gratitude what what the gratitude journal that you keep ever
01:38:08
that you kept for years every day what was it telling you it was training your brain to look for
01:38:14
what's right that your brain every night that you did it was like okay it seems he's going to
01:38:19
be asking to call his mom a lot more often it seems he's going to be asking for good things a lot more often i might
01:38:25
as well observe them i might as well find them and so yes you said some people are impossible to
01:38:30
rewire they're impossible to rewire if they've been practicing a certain wiring for 21 years it's not going to take 21
01:38:37
seconds to rewire anyone including me and you it will take 21 days let's say for your
01:38:44
brain to recognize i need different wiring and it will take maybe 20 one month for your brain to say and i don't
01:38:50
need the old wiring anymore okay and the game here is can you actually keep doing
01:38:55
that can you keep tapping your finger in a way that trains your brain that this is the worrying that you need
01:39:02
like can i keep going to the gym and working on my absolute guns yeah believe it or not the research will tell you
01:39:08
that a big part of being athletic is wiring of your brain not your muscles for your brain to be able to say i will go even if i feel a little tired i will go even if i feel a little uh busy i
01:39:22
will go and i will do the right exercises even if the last push is a little painful a lot of people will hear that
01:39:28
and go what's the evidence for this what's the evidence for neuroplasticity is there science oh there is a ton of
01:39:34
science behind neuroplasticity any anything from between neuroplasticity and neurogenesis is when
01:39:40
you know neuroplasticity is to rewire um the connections between the neurons and
01:39:45
neurogenesis is to actually create new new neurons when if you're hit with a ball for example and part of your brain
01:39:52
is damaged how we can cr recreate that right if you have a stroke and how you create recreate that and
01:39:58
ample evidence one of the very famous stories is matthew ricard when we spoke about him in the beginning matthew's
01:40:04
brain looks different than the average human brain his insulin is much bigger in
01:40:10
relative comparison his prefrontal cortex is is bigger and and it fires more often it's simply because of the constant neuroplasticity of i need you to
01:40:23
meditate i need you to stay quiet i need you i mean some of the of of of matthew's journeys would last four
01:40:29
years in isolation he would meditate for four years be in isolation in a hermitage for four
01:40:35
years right and and so at that level your brain starts to do very different things and by the way that's not unusual
01:40:42
many farmers around the world live in isolation for a very long time believe it or not you and i
01:40:49
when we when we spend a long time on airplanes i i chose a long time ago to not watch a lot of stuff on on you know
01:40:56
i maybe watch one movie but not the entire trip the other bits of silence that's actually a form of of meditation
01:41:03
i uh you know my my absolute wonderful friend jamie nelson the photographer if you know him he photographs indigenous tribes and the way he does it is he would go
01:41:14
and uh and spend a few months outside their premises you know their village if you want in silence you know camping out there he doesn't speak their language he's just sitting there waiting for them to accept
01:41:27
him and then he would start to you know communicate to them in sign language because it doesn't speak their language
01:41:33
and he's one of the wisest people i know and i and i said how did you become this wise he never studied any of those
01:41:40
things and the reality is is because he's in constant reflection and meditation he's sitting out there
01:41:45
and he's spending hours and days in reflection and meditation right because you're sitting alone
01:41:51
all of those things are our habits and all of us have the chance to do it right so you you could be on the tube
01:41:58
for a commute of 40 minutes a day and you could be in that commute cursing life and that's a very good 40-minute exercise to work and another 40-minute going back or you could be spending the
01:42:11
40 minutes in gratitude you could be first for you know spending the 40 minutes listening to
01:42:16
music could be doing whatever what you will do for 40 minutes a day will rewire your brain
01:42:23
it really is like a paradigm shifting thought that our brains are in this constant growth and evolution but when
01:42:28
we look at as you said my muscles are my muscles are changing state size growing more fibers to achieve their
01:42:34
objective in a different way and of course my brain is as well and when you think about that it's really
01:42:40
liberating because you realize that you're not stuck with who you are absolutely not it's from my friend ro
01:42:45
she's got a podcast as well she um one of the smartest people i've ever met and she she worked in my company for
01:42:50
many years and she got a brain tumor and she showed me the scan of her brain they
01:42:56
found this golf ball in the middle of her brain and they removed it and she showed me those brain scans and
01:43:03
then just months later the hole is gone yeah and her brain has regrown that part and there's no longer a hole in her brain and that was one of those moments when i go oh my god the brain
01:43:16
like like everything around us is a living organism that is shaping and evolving based on the inputs
01:43:22
and what's happening to it yeah so let's choose what's which parts of it are we going to grow i think that's the whole
01:43:28
point and we grow it with our actions and our thoughts repetitive actions thoughts and memories believe it or not one of the interesting
01:43:34
things is if you take a memory in the past yeah and you think about it over and over and over it's as if you're hap
01:43:42
it's happening over and over and you're growing the neurons that are needed or you're growing the connections between
01:43:48
the neurons that are needed to trigger that memory think happy memories okay if you sit
01:43:53
next to your partner and focus on one thing that they do and go like they say do this they do this they do this they
01:43:59
do this and forget that they do a hundred other things that you you love and appreciate your neuroplasticity is making you
01:44:06
completely obsessed about that one thing and you can only see that one thing and eventually you know
01:44:11
some of my friends after a breakup i go like so what happened then they'll say one thing it's like just they obsess about it over
01:44:18
and over because your brain is growing to say he needs to think about this right i'm going to make it easier to
01:44:24
think about this i'm going to make it faster more accessible and you'll see it more often like the
01:44:30
red cars you know the old thing about when you buy like a red car if you buy like a green car then every car you see will
01:44:36
appear to be green if you're buying every car you see is a range over well this other thing that's really intriguing topic from our last
01:44:42
conversation that you mentioned and you mentioned in your new book is this idea of masculinity and femininity i don't really hear many
01:44:48
people talking about this yeah believe it or not my my publisher really was asking should we include this it's a con you know con contested topic do we want to but i
01:44:59
think it's very important for people to understand we've mixed up again a few definitions
01:45:06
like i said we mix love and romance for example with mixed biology with gender identity with sexual preferences with the reality of what the feminine
01:45:17
and the masculine is the feminine and the masculine in my definition are approaches to life okay some basic basically um some people will
01:45:30
want to hold their mug this way and others will want to hold it that way it's an
01:45:36
approach to life not no way is right and no way is wrong okay uh some of us will
01:45:41
want to go through life with creativity and playfulness and and you know intuition and some of us will want to go
01:45:48
with analysis and and discipline and linear thinking it's an approach to life neither is right and neither is wrong there is a high
01:45:58
correlation between those who are archetypically feminine if you want uh between certain of those qualities certain some of those qualities and you know those who are masculine again there
01:46:11
is a correlation with some other qualities so you would find that a person who's masculine
01:46:17
whether that's a man or a woman straight or gay doesn't matter if if a person acts in their masculine they'll tend to
01:46:24
be a little more forceful if you think about it you know we the masculine one of the masculine
01:46:30
qualities is strength okay strength is a is a quality whether it's strength in mental strength or physical strength you wanna you wanna use your strengths to move things okay
01:46:41
if you're dependent on your masculine side or more associating with your masculine side you're gonna show that
01:46:48
and as i said statistically correlated those who have male body parts tend to use that a little more
01:46:54
reasoning doesn't matter the problem with our world at the global level and the problem at us about us as individuals is we've decided that
01:47:07
some of those properties or qualities are more valuable to our world than others okay if if you live in a capitalist
01:47:14
world and the capitalist world is entirely about let's produce more let's make more let's you know
01:47:20
do more we're gonna have to borrow more from the doing qualities which are mostly masculine okay this leads to a world where there is a lot of doing
01:47:32
with little being which basically means it's a world where we do a lot of what we haven't really properly thought about
01:47:39
we've what what is not really informed by the realities of who we are being being that beautiful some of the feminine is being the feminine is
01:47:51
the masculine does there is a difference between them and if you continue to do without actually
01:47:57
asking yourself that awareness question of what should i do you end up doing things like building
01:48:05
technologies that make our life slightly better and destroy the planet in a in in the process why because you haven't
01:48:11
really internalized some of the most beautiful feminine qualities of intuition of creative thinking to look
01:48:18
for alternatives of um um since sensuality to actually sense what is actually happening in the world as a result of your doing of inclusion you know to connect to the rest of being
01:48:30
to understand that this is not just about us it's also about the bees and the and and the bears and everyone else
01:48:36
and so on so that world that we've created being hyper masculine is i think the biggest mistake
01:48:42
humanity's ever done and i think humanity is paying for that mistake and will pay more in the future the the
01:48:48
savior is for us to stop doing this and to start waking up and saying hold on hold on we need a lot of being before
01:48:55
you continue to do so interesting it's particularly tricky to understand for men
01:49:02
of course because men i mean there'll be a lot of men again you know listening to this podcast now that hear the idea that
01:49:08
they need to embrace their feminine that go oh gosh no yeah it will scare them it
01:49:14
will it will appear to um hurt their identity theirs their sense of self um it'll make them feel weaker maybe
01:49:27
it'll make them feel like they're they have they lack purpose if they're not that masculine because a lot of a lot of
01:49:32
us as men a lot of our sense of purpose comes from being competitive from winning from
01:49:38
being strong apparently that's how it feels anyway but what is masculine i mean if masculine is to protect for example because we have the strength
01:49:50
or the masculine has the strength can that protection happen without empathy how can you protect if you don't have empathy you need the feminine empathy to be able
01:50:02
to protect if the masculine is to solve a problem can you solve the problem without actually identifying the problem you need intuition and sensuality and
01:50:14
right if the masculine is about safety and survival how can you do that without living without uh beauty without uh you know or
01:50:27
art all of that is in the feminine your comment is right by the way but it is not because of any difference between
01:50:32
the masculine and the feminine men will will feel less comfortable with this because women have been sadly pushed
01:50:40
to live in their masculine to survive in this hyper-masculine world i i will tell you honestly and i say that with a
01:50:46
hundred percent uh on you know uh honesty of that view i thought to myself that i was intelligent until four and a half years ago i started to empower my feminine
01:50:59
and i promise you i'm 10 times more intelligent i was in my left brain doing all of the analysis thinking i'm a smart person but i was doing all of the analysis with
01:51:09
all of the wrong inputs the feminine gives you the inputs the feminine gives you the the picture of
01:51:15
the reality the the inclusion the big the big view of life you can't see that with your narrow minded linear brain and
01:51:23
i think the reality is that men who are most successful ever in changing the world believe it or not are more in their
01:51:34
feminine than their masculine anyone has that has ever changed the world has been more in their feminine than in
01:51:39
masculine the example i gave when we spoke about this steve jobs okay most people think that steve jobs
01:51:46
was an amazing success for ceo because he was pushy he was you know a bit obnoxious actually sometimes huh
01:51:52
not at all the reason steve jobs was steve jobs is because of his feminine qualities his appreciation of beauty his
01:51:59
appreciation his creativity his art his appreciation of color and shape his empathy to his users needs all of these are what made steve jobs that amazing visionary that he was
01:52:12
obnoxious by the way pulled it back a little bit gandhi even though sometimes gandhi is contested but gandhi's success
01:52:20
is not in saving his nation through the masculine qualities if it was the masculine qualities he would have
01:52:26
rallied a billion people to kill the brits no he went into a a peaceful non-violent uh a a an empathy an attempt to make things work through
01:52:38
communication all of these are feminine qualities and somehow we forget in our narrow-minded hyper-masculine world because we've narrowed everything to dollar signs
01:52:49
so productivity and profit and all of those dollar signs and so if that's the target yes doing
01:52:55
more producing more selling more is a good is a good way to go but the reality is anyone who's ever made the world
01:53:01
better not richer did it by living in their feminine first how does one tap into their feminine
01:53:08
side because i think it's important to also say because these words have been associated with genders for so long but
01:53:14
a woman or someone that's trans can also be too much in their masculine side absolutely and vice versa a man or
01:53:20
someone that's trans identifies as whatever gender can also be too much in their feminine side but so how does
01:53:25
someone tap in more to their feminine self is there an activity is it just a choice
01:53:31
we make is so so i i think it first requires an exercise of awareness so and actually
01:53:38
in in that little voice in your head in in that chapter specifically i have quite a few awareness exercises okay
01:53:45
those awareness exercises start by recognizing what's the feminine and that's a beautiful exercise a
01:53:51
beautiful exercise that you can actually experience if you invited a couple of friends over uh that are you know feminine in their
01:54:02
actions most of the time and a couple of friends that are masculine interactions all of the time and allah an allocated
01:54:10
proper time for each of them to solve a problem okay and observe the behavior you will
01:54:15
find incredible differences between the masculine side man or woman it doesn't matter which will jump in and say okay we're going to carry this and then take it 10 steps away from here and
01:54:27
then we're going to do this and lift it on the shelf right away okay when the feminine will say things
01:54:33
like um i i feel that this might be a little heavier for john than it is for jack and
01:54:40
i sense that if we can collaborate around it as one being we can do this slightly differently okay so sometimes
01:54:47
they'll say things like why do we have to do this at all isn't there a bigger world where maybe
01:54:53
we could uh just keep it here okay and and and by that observation you'll start to to to identify the the qualities that's that's number one number two is
01:55:04
what i call the appreciation exercise the appreciation cri exercises to flip rules okay is to sit in front of you and
01:55:10
say uh steve how would you solve that problem and then wait and then tell you how
01:55:17
would you solve it if you were jackie okay and that appreciation exercise basically starts to get you to say oh my
01:55:24
god there is another way and that other way is not really me it's jackie's way but it's interesting okay and then the
01:55:29
third is practice practice practice practice i i tell you openly i've been empowering my feminine for the last four
01:55:35
and a half years okay now probably five years and my biggest exercise for the last two years has been an exercise of
01:55:41
flow we spoke about that at the beginning the idea of flow is the is the is the truth of the feminine the feminine is life itself it's flowing it's gushing across life
01:55:54
across the world across territories across uh uh you know times and stories and and we if we live in our masculine we go like nope not going there this is not my place
01:56:06
this is my place i'm going there and i i liken it always with a river a raging white water river if you put the masculine in the boat the masculine will take will take the the
01:56:17
you know the water then push it because they want to go there they want to be right there the feminine will just hold the arms and
01:56:24
and basically say okay the river is going i just need to balance it every now and then with one
01:56:31
one strike just to stay in and on track but it's okay to take a little longer with the river to get to where i want to be and and that massive difference
01:56:42
i'm sorry to say and i'm you know someone who associated with the masculine for a very long time is stupid
01:56:49
honestly stupid because suddenly somehow you realize that life itself is talking
01:56:54
to you through your family life itself is saying let go i'm i'll do things okay i'm much more powerful mighty wheels i can do stuff
01:57:05
just let go a little just flow with me a little and if you manage to do that i chose flow i i think there are you know several other major pillars of the
01:57:15
feminine one of them is inclusion as i say so so relating to others choose that if you want to one of them is temporal
01:57:22
okay the masculine is very linear we associate with the arrow of time where the feminine is very rhythmic we
01:57:29
associate with cycles okay and so if you can actually see the difference between them that's a very interesting exercise
01:57:35
um you know i i think creativity and playfulness uh and breaking the rules sort of i think paradoxical thinking i do to me these are the big five pillars
01:57:45
paradoxical thinking is to in is to be able to be humbled enough to embrace that two opposing stories are true two opposing facts can actually exist
01:57:56
together interesting and the role of the masculine amazing the role of the masculine energy so so that's a beautiful question so the
01:58:08
problem we had with the movement of feminism and i say that with love and respect is that it demonized the
01:58:14
masculine now what needs to be demonized is overdoing the masculine okay so you know strength is good that
01:58:21
is me sometimes by the way i have to admit i definitely overdo the masculinity my girlfriend tells me as well she goes
01:58:27
she'll literally say it like that though because she's very in touch with her feminine masculine and
01:58:32
she'll say you're being you know you're being too in the masculine right now yeah you know what's one of the most
01:58:38
yeah one of the most common uh um things i'm told by a woman who's uncomfortable with how her boyfriend is behaving is he's unable to
01:58:49
be available emotionally yeah of course we we suffer from that that's a consequence of toxic absolutely
01:58:56
so let's talk about this concept because it's very important huh there is no demonizing of a quality linear thinking
01:59:03
is a wonderful quality okay if you can think about a problem linearly that's a wonderful quality over doing it
01:59:10
makes you stubborn do you understand it's the overdoing that's the problem it's strength wonderful you overdue
01:59:16
strength you become violent we don't we don't want the overdoing and what's what should be demonized is over doing that
01:59:23
it's overdoing anything including by the way overdoing the feminine so you know if if you're intuitive it's a wonderful quality but if you're uh if you're too much into
01:59:36
intuition you're ignoring linear facts and analysis if you're um let's say paradoxical my
01:59:43
one of my favorite as i always say if you can if you can embrace paradoxes it's a wonderful quality it gives you a
01:59:50
double the amount of information to analyze if you want to do analytical thinking but if you overdo it you become a little
01:59:57
irrational right if you're disciplined as a masculine quality or not discipline at discipline at all
02:00:04
you become irrational so overdoing something or underdoing something is not good for any of us what is the right amount of doing something by the way
02:00:14
it's how you are configured so i am much more empathetic and maybe creative and maybe playful than i am paradoxical
02:00:27
okay uh i am much more uh in uh you know in linear con thinking and control than i am in um uh you know flow this is why i work on my
02:00:39
flow believe it or not through neuroplasticity so what i'm doing with my life now for the last two years is
02:00:44
i'm living a life of flow i'm allowing life to tell me what to do and instead of my hyper-engineered mathematical
02:00:50
brain saying nope that's not the way it should be done i've done my analysis it's 37 i'm gonna
02:00:55
do this okay i i start to listen and say hey i'm gonna make the decision if it's 37
02:01:02
or not in a couple of weeks time no harm done if i was wrong but intuition is beautiful
02:01:07
it's hard to uncondition oneself but it goes back to this point about we were rewiring our
02:01:13
brains by repetition and you know when i think about being more in my feminine energy and my
02:01:20
feminine qualities and characteristics it is a it is achieved by repetition by um being opening up to that side of me
02:01:31
and spending more time wiring my myself to in that way which i think is so important it's funny because i know there'll be a lot of people listening to this that either don't understand or
02:01:44
have kind of misunderstood because we're using terms that come with like stigma when we think of femininity or when we think of masculinity there's there's
02:01:51
connotations with that but it's um so unbelievably true and if people have listened to this podcast
02:01:56
they would they'll know it's true from you know we had terry crews on here who talked about his masculinity and how that became
02:02:02
incredibly harmful to him and destructive and risked his relationships and his and everything that mattered to
02:02:07
him we had patrice evra talk about how early experiences that made him lean towards masculinity to help him
02:02:13
survive being abused by his head teacher and watching his brothers and sisters die because of drug addiction on the
02:02:19
streets of france made him turn more to that masculinity as a tool for survival but then it but then that cost him so dearly but because he lived out of balance to one day sat with his partner
02:02:30
she said there's something not right with you there's something not right with you he resisted he resisted he resisted then boom burst into tears
02:02:38
and that's the moment where he opened up yeah you see it you see it then you know it
02:02:43
but and by the way i think i think in reality what i'm asking for is now that the world has finally
02:02:51
accepted gender diversity and fluidity and so on i'm asking us not to be more categorized
02:02:58
okay i'm asking us to stop saying so i'm category a category b category category
02:03:03
d because we've just moved from man woman to more categories now i'm asking us to say that mo
02:03:10
is unlike anyone else in his mix of masculinity and femininity i'm 58 okay in certain qualities of the
02:03:16
feminine are more than others and you could be 42 percent and in other qualities of the feminine and not more
02:03:22
than others and i think the idea is to say each and every one of us is an individual each and every one of us is a
02:03:28
category of their own okay everyone the only category i fit in is i'm a mo that's it that's my category and that category includes a beautiful
02:03:38
blend of qualities that i can use that are not any better or any worse than anyone else okay those qualities that i
02:03:46
blend together might be amazing for this podcast conversation but horrible at [ __ ] making pizza i don't know right and i think the reality is if you can become true to that reality of who you are
02:03:59
you'll become the best at that that you're supposed to do in life and without that balance you will always
02:04:05
always feel incomplete now you've written what is another legendary book on a very related but incredibly foundational topic which is
02:04:16
our thoughts and that little voice in our heads and um i think if this conversation is a flavor
02:04:22
of the book than it is i think in everyone's view that's listening a must read you know it's
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funny that we i talk about time being the single currency that we can allocate to determine the outcomes of our lives
02:04:34
but thoughts are the interesting they're the thing that is determining how we spend that
02:04:40
currency yeah i think i think time is the rhythm of your song the song of your life and thoughts really are the lyrics that you put on top of it they are the melody
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they are they are as as we spend a minute of our life thinking a certain thought
02:04:58
that minute completely shapes how the song of your life is going to be it's quite interesting how we ignore
02:05:05
that and so maybe maybe thoughts are the most important thing and what this book does is it
02:05:11
helps us to adjust the code that runs our brains at the last line in your book um you say i have one last selfish request
02:05:22
please find the compassion in your heart to want happiness for my wonderful son ali and wise teacher
02:05:29
send him a prayer a generous wish that he is happy wherever he is right now he started it all and he truly was the kindest happiest human i have ever known
02:05:39
i'll keep working on mine for ali why did you bring that up we were having an easy conversation yeah so um
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yeah i wouldn't be here if it wasn't for what he taught me and i wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the example he said and
02:06:00
i wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for him leaving us and um and i uh it's interesting that i told i may have told you this once
02:06:11
before that i write the last sentence of every book before i write the rest of the book
02:06:18
yeah and i i have to say i have been blessed with so many people that send me messages that say i love ali and yeah i feel that
02:06:31
if it was that only that that i got from the work i've done then i've lived it's there's
02:06:38
nothing worse more and and and but i'm getting so much more i'm getting so much um purpose if you want but i don't want to be forgetting him in
02:06:50
that purpose i think that's where i stand today that i'm so driven but by what i'm trying to achieve
02:06:58
and he's been away for seven years almost eight years now so i once again need him to be part of our journey so so yes please send him happy wish
02:07:12
the work he's done through you is truly magical through you is the exact right word
02:07:21
it's funny when when we spoke about the idea of control being a masculine quality
02:07:27
only when i let go only when i let go that life whether with him or through him or maybe he's the boss i have no idea but
02:07:37
what i've what i've accomplished was so much more than what i did when i was trying to control everything
02:07:43
and it's because of how he showed me to do to do with as you know we have a closing tradition on this podcast oh i should have prepared for that
02:07:58
oh my god i didn't think about this it doesn't matter it doesn't matter sometimes you know a lack of preparation
02:08:04
leads to the best outcomes okay question is ooh that's not encouraging steve oh so i really like this question it's very
02:08:16
fitting i think the previous guest wrote for you what is the greatest wealth in your
02:08:24
life what was not the greatest wealth was all of the money all of the cars all of the uh
02:08:34
things it was a waste of life i promise you and i know most people will say yeah you you
02:08:40
say that because you had it when you have it too you will feel the same it was a total waste of life
02:08:45
uh when you wrote in your book that we come to this life with 500 000 chips you say you remember you wrote 80 hour eight if you live 80
02:08:56
years you will have 500 000 hours of active life or something like that and that this is your wealth
02:09:02
this is what you come to the to the world with and you place those chips hour hour by hour the thought that came
02:09:09
to my head was i was born a millionaire 500 000 hours is a lot of hours but then you turn you take that cash and you turn it to equity it's really interesting how you take those hours
02:09:22
and by placing those chips you turn one chip into equity into something that lasts
02:09:29
and and the things that i know last are experiences knowledge and love and i promise you we will never acquire anything more important than any of those three
02:09:41
in in an interesting order actually they are love knowledge and experiences so so what we
02:09:47
what we what we go through in all of our life is we do tons of things that we think are gonna acquire us
02:09:58
uh one of those three you know unhappiness of course but but in reality it's so much easier to acquire those three directly the biggest wealth you will ever have
02:10:11
are a set of experiences that can't be repeated some knowledge that can be beneficial
02:10:17
for yourself and those around you and uh the feeling of love which i have been overwhelmed with
02:10:24
i mean i can tell you i'm the richest man i know by far from the number of kind messages that i get from people
02:10:31
saying you know we love what you do we appreciate your your attempt to make the world better that love i think is the biggest wealth i have ever acquired and i always say
02:10:43
alien i am my daughter definitely have been the biggest love of my life for sure and
02:10:49
when ali left to take that life away i feel that the fairness of life replaced it with the li with the love of hundreds of thousands of people which interestingly i'm so grateful for
02:11:02
but it's almost exactly barely enough to balance the love that i have for him and so yeah maybe maybe we should spend our life acquiring more of these
02:11:17
thank you i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast for many years
02:11:24
people have been asking for a coffee flavored huel and quite recently he'll release the iced coffee caramel flavor of their um ready to drink heels and i've just become hooked on it over the
02:11:36
last couple of weeks and now i'm drinking that as well as the protein make sure you try the new ready to drink
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flavors the caramel flavor is amazing the new banana flavor as well is amazing and obviously as i said the iced coffee
02:11:48
caramel flavor has been a real smash here so check it out let me know what you think on social media i see all of
02:11:53
your tags and instagram posts and tweets about you back to the podcast um [Music]
02:12:17
[Music] you