Megan thinks that I tend to go for the joke
rather than the truth in a conversation. -That's because I'm afraid of her.
-Not true. My name is Craig Ferguson. I'm a stand-up
comedian, actor, writer and talk show host. Darling? I'm also the husband of a very beautiful
and clever woman called Megan Ferguson. She is my best friend and the love of my life. But we don't agree on everything. I
sometimes wonder if we agree on anything. -You don't say, "That guy's a..."
-"Psychopathy"? Well, you don't say, "He's a psycho-path." Thirteen years ago we started
a conversation, and it has never stopped. -I think you're wrong.
-No. Sometimes it stops for a bit, for sleeping. In this programme, we try really hard
to get new perspectives on our discussions. Food is the new Internet.
You'll make plenty of money. -The universe is alive within us.
-This is magical! We get the facts
straight from the horse's mouth. And by "horse's mouth", I mean expert.
Not an actual horse...obviously. -It's sickening.
-Yes, I'm sick of it. Sick of being too busy.
"I have to do that and that..." I thought when I finished the late-night,
I'd be less busy. Right. I feel like you've been more busy. I thought I was gonna go for long walks
with my golden labrador. I don't have one. I know. I thought the idea
was, when you finish doing something, you go, "Now I can really relax," and feel... -But you don't.
-I just feel like, you know... The whole idea of being successful was that
you get a good job, you make some money, you live in a nice house with a nice person
and nice children, your offspring. -You have fruit - your own fruit.
-A fruit bowl! And everything is great - just ### great. -But you're up to your eyes in bullshit.
-It doesn't feel very successful at all. I don't... I don't know if I feel more or less
successful than when I was 25 years old. What does success feel like to you? -I don't know. What does it feel like to you?
-I don't know anymore. Does success change? It's a weird game
that you place with yourself, I think. Because...you know, travelling the country
playing at different venues every night, getting to meet girls
that I don't know every night... It does not appeal to me anymore.
But that was success at one point. You just keep moving the bar up.
"I'll be fine when I get that." Then you get that and you go,
"Now I have to get that." I don't think that's right. There has to be
more to life than this...said Björk. -Is there someone we can ask?
-Yes, but not Björk. -No. Although her answer would be great.
-Yeah. I think Arianna Huffington is
a very good choice to talk to about success. Arianna has been very successful,
so it makes sense. She's clever, accomplished and rich,
so the world thinks she's successful. She does what she wants to do
on her own terms. And I think that's successful.
And she talks about success and the challenges and benefits
that come with it. -I'm gonna ring the door and run away.
-Oh, no. Someone who's open and forthright
about success, that's the right choice. ...don't really do that. -Welcome!
-Wow, Arianna! -You must have been standing by the door!
-I couldn't wait. -Hello, sweetheart. Have you met Megan?
-Hello. Wonderful to meet you. It's great to have you in my home. I met your husband in 2005.
When did you meet him? -2005.
-What a coincidence! -We have to talk about it.
-Let's find him. We will. Arianna Huffington is
an author and business woman, the co-founder and editor-in-chief
of The Huffington Post. Always outspoken, to some controversial, but either way highly successful and one
of the most influential women in the world. But it all came, as it often does, with a cost. After collapsing from exhaustion,
she asked herself, is this what success should feel like? Is money and power really the definition
of success if you are too busy to enjoy it? How do we turn things around
to also feel truly successful? This is quite interesting. I have this theory
about what we came here to talk about, which is success. Now, success as defined
by a 16-year-old boy in Scotland is different to what a 55-year-old man
defines as success in California. -Right.
-I'm not sure I know what it is. I know what it was when I was a kid,
what I wanted to achieve, but I'm not sure
if I, A, achieved it or, B, it works. I'm very interested in,
what is a successful life? Because I feel
that we have shrunken that definition down to money and status/power.
And that's deeply unfortunate. -What do you define as success?
-A successful life... ...has to include, beyond those two things...
We're living in a material world. Being financially successful
and having a place in society, fine. But these are two metrics. And the third
metric, which is like the third leg of a stool... Otherwise you fall off. For me,
it consists of four key ingredients. One is your wellbeing. If you're completely burnt out, you affect
your health, you walk around like a zombie because you don't sleep or eat right, all the
things that we know go into a healthy life... Is that success? The other thing is wisdom. I really believe that we all have
this centred place of wisdom in us. Being able to access it
and make good decisions from that place is for me another aspect of a successful life. The third thing is wonder. I think
we're missing out the wonder of life, the fact that
there's an incredible mystery about life. Sometimes being in nature or watching
a baby being born or reading poetry helps you rediscover that sense of wonder. And finally giving. A life that doesn't include
some form of giving is a very stilted life. These are for me all elements that go into
what I would define as a successful life. I remember when I was a kid, actually,
you did a show on British television at night. That was a complete failure.
It was such a devastating flop. I've had plenty, too.
I'm not trying to lord it over you. Let me tell you,
you did not have such a flop, because... I remember my first interview.
I was the interviewer, and I interviewed Terence Stamp.
Remember, the actor? And he basically answered every question
in a completely monosyllabic fashion. He's a shocking interview.
I would never interview him. This was my first interview and, on top of it,
people made horrendous fun of my accent. -Oh dear.
-I've had plenty of failures. But there are certain failures that
when you mention it, I can still feel it. Is that one of them?
Because it's an early one? Because it was so early,
and really, I hadn't had any... I had a book which was very successful,
that I published at 23. -But that was such a public humiliation.
-That's the nature of... Do you think that failure is key to success? Yes. I really do. My mother brought me up
to believe that. She used to say, "Failure is not the opposite of success -
it's a stepping stone to success." How do you move past that?
What did you do? Well, what I did was... I locked myself up
and wrote a book I really wanted to write about the crisis in political leadership,
which nobody wanted to publish or read. So I wrote this book
which was rejected by 36 publishers, by which time I had run out of the money
I made with my first book. I lived in London. I was walking down
St. James's Street, I remember very well, thinking it was time to change careers.
Clearly, my first book, I thought, was a fluke, and I was not meant to be a writer. And I saw in the corner a Barclays bank. Something made me walk in and ask
to see the manager and ask for an overdraft. Do you remember, they call them overdrafts. But I had no assets. For some reason,
this manager, whose name is Ian Bell... I still send him a holiday card every year.
He gave me an overdraft, which made it possible for me to keep
my life together for a few more months, by which time I had got an acceptance. You're talking about someone
who had faith in you. -Based on not very much.
-An interesting component of success... ...is finding someone - anyone - who says,
"It's gonna be OK. Here." -Who believes in you and supports you.
-I really believe that. Also, if you think in terms of fairy tales, you know how often in fairy tales when
the hero or heroine is lost in a dark forest, you suddenly have these helpful animals
coming out... Bank managers from Barclays coming out... "'Ere, take some money, Arianna.
You'll be all right." "Take some money, girl. You'll be fine." "You're very clever.
You'll sell your book. Go on." -I really believe that.
-I think so, too. Do you want me to tweet you?
I'll tweet you something. Tweet me, text me, Instagram me...
See how many likes I get. I was actually just looking at
how rich Sean "Diddy" Combs was. -That's useful information.
-I didn't know it. Do you think
that we could unplug from social media? I have never counted how long
I'm on the phone, but it's probably not good. No. It's probably bad. I think you're on it way more than I am. What? I only have Twitter.
You have Twitter, Instagram, whatever... I don't have any of those things. -You're on Instagram all the time.
-Yes. I look at pictures of other people's thighs
and feel bad about mine. Why don't you look at pictures of people
whose thighs you do not covet and feel good about yours?
It's all perspective. Do you think social media does that? I definitely think that social media gives
kind of a false picture of what success is, other people's success.
It seems to be really image-based. "Here is me with my face mask and my cat."
Who needs to see that? -Exactly!
-Or like that? Shut it down.
Does that make you uncomfortable? -It does, and that makes me angry.
-Well... Maybe you've got a problem. It's not the phone that's the problem.
There's a phone in the house. If anybody wanted to get us,
they should call that phone. But people don't even want to call
each other. It's a text. "Hey, text me back." "I'm driving a 2.5-ton car
on the 101 Freeway..." -Going 70 mph.
-Which is like being in a "Mad Max" movie. And then, "I've got to get on and text you
a picture of my lunch...or crotch"? "Oh, I like your lunch and crotch." "Hitåt, ditåt" or whatever it is.
I don't speak Swedish. -Except in the bedroom.
-That's so creepy. You're talking about public humiliation
at a young age, which is interesting, because nowadays, it's no longer just the young girl
who's starting out, everybody is subjected to that
on social media, too soon. It's too much too soon. That's one of the major problems
with social media. So many young people,
before they really develop their own identity, are basing their self-worth
and their validation on what people say on social media or how
many likes the picture of their salad got. Yeah, that's right. Do you think it's dangerous
to allow other people to define success? Absolutely.
I think it's the expectations game and, again, what society expects of us and buying into these expectations
and looking over our shoulder for approval. That has always been part
of living in society, but I think social media
have dramatically exacerbated it. -Because...
-I agree. Social media, most of the time,
present somebody's glamorous image of... -Somebody's highlight reel.
-Exactly. The highlight reel. And it's rare that they present
the agonies and the failures. I think also, and I wonder
if you would agree or not... My feeling is that unless you recognise
in yourself the success you've had, then you haven't had any. Absolutely. I think that is so true. We're constantly looking at what's around
the corner, what's the next hill to climb? And we don't give ourselves any gratitude
for where we are and where we got to. -For me, gratitude is so key.
-Absolutely. But in terms of health and success,
when did you most feel successful? You had an accident
when you collapsed from exhaustion, running around
trying to keep up with this life. Did you find that that was a catalyst
for health vs. success? You know, I don't see it as "versus". I'll tell you why. First of all, I...
In 2007, ten years ago... -Two years after I met you on the show.
-I have that effect on women. -I collapsed.
-Two years later. It was a delayed reaction. -I'm sure some collapse much faster...
-Me too. Everybody's different, Arianna. You have a different impact
on different women. So two years after that,
in my office here in this house, I stood up to go and get a sweater
because I was feeling cold, and I collapsed and hit my head on my desk
and broke my cheekbone. That was basically the result,
as all the doctors I visited told me... When that happens out of the blue, they
suspect a brain tumour or a heart problem. At the end of
all these endless doctors' visits, I was diagnosed with burnout. And as a Belgian philosopher put it,
"Burnout is modern civilisation's disease." Hundreds of millions of people
are burnt out. Literally, they walk around every day,
perpetually tired and depleted and think that's the price for success. Running on inertia all the time. To your point,
whether it's health vs. success, what is fascinating is that all modern
science proves now, unequivocally, what ancient wisdom has told us, which is
that when we take care of ourselves... We are more effective, productive
and creative when we are healthier, which also has an impact on success.
There's no trade-off. How do we avoid burnout,
what we can all suffer from from the avalanche
that comes at us every day. The first thing is that we need to recognise that we have been living under this
collective delusion for decades now, that in order to succeed, you have
to burn out. It's a real delusion. Most of us have been living under it.
I was fascinated... I wanted to trace it. When did we start
believing something so patently false? It goes back to the first Industrial Revolution
when we became fascinated by machines. The goal of a machine is
to minimise downtime. So we thought, "Well, that has to be
the goal of human beings." But in the human operating system,
downtime is not a bug - it's a feature. We need downtime.
Even in the story of the creation, God created Heaven and Earth in six days,
and then, Megan, she took the seventh day off. -She took a break.
-Clearly, God didn't need that day off. If God is omnipotent and omnipresent
and everything, God could have kept going, but it was a message to humanity. So
the first thing is changing our belief system. If we continue to believe that in order to succeed,
you have to be always on and work 24/7... Look at our language.
We congratulate people for working 24/7. We say things like, "Craig is amazing.
He responds to my texts immediately." -No one's saying that.
-Saying you can always get hold of them. Yes. We need to change
the things we celebrate. We're working on an app that turns
your smartphone into a down phone. Like right now, we could all put our phones
in a power down mode. If somebody texted me, they'd get a text
back, "Arianna is in power down until 7 pm." -It's a bidirectional message.
-I'll buy that right now from you. Put me in your beta-testing right now.
I'm serious. The other thing that it does, it will give you
a mirror of your social media consumption. So it would say, "Megan,"
at the end of the week, "you spent 7.5 hours
on Instagram this week." Which is entirely possible, by the way. And then it could make a suggestion like, "May we suggest you cut it down to 6.5?" And if you agree, it will give you warnings,
and at 6.5 it will cut you off. -That's genius. I love it.
-The point is that we all need some help. Because we are all addicted,
to a small or a large extent. Our phones have become the new nicotine.
It's the new cigarette. Except it's worse, because it has
a lot of valuable functions too, so we can't entirely give it up,
unlike cigarettes or alcohol. And also, that we start so young. Why...?
We don't let our children start drinking. My mother used to say, "If you watch
too much television, you'll get square eyes." And she was wrong. The way my parents'
generation thought about television is the way my generation feels
about smartphones. "If you play with that too much,
you'll go crazy." But you can spend too much time
on a smartphone. Milo is 16. He has a phone,
but he's good with it. He's smarter than his phone. I guess
you have to be smarter than your phone. It's interesting you bring up alcohol.
You know my history with alcohol. I stopped drinking 25 years ago. And what I have noticed is
when I try to remove myself from the phone, the discomfort I feel is very familiar.
I've walked down this road before. The overwhelming symptoms of addiction... You experience restlessness,
irritability and discontent. So I would put it to you that
if you put down your phone and start to experience restlessness,
irritability and discontent by not using your phone... That would seem to be symptomatic
of some form or addiction. I'm not a doctor. But it sounds similar. The first symptoms of addiction -
the primary symptom of any addiction, is, weirdly enough, the denial of the fact
that it exists in the first place. So if you say, "That's ridiculous, I'm not
addicted to my phone," then give it up. If you can't answer that question, "Sure,"
and throw it out the window, then you are. Right. Or even give it up for a day. And it affects everyone. There's
no specific person, like an alcoholic... Exactly. It does affect everyone,
to different degrees. It's not even like it was when I was drinking,
the use of it. It's the trying to not do it. It's the weird games
that you play with yourself. "I don't have a problem. This is so stupid.
Oh, come on, this is ridiculous..." It begins with, "I'll just check my texts." Which is the same as going to a bar
and saying, "I'm just going to have one." "I'll have a shandy." Then it's five days later
and I'm in a shallow grave in Bogotá. -I mean...
-Totally delusional. It is, but it's the "drip, drip" of addiction. I think addiction is portrayed
as a large, dramatic event. -It's not.
-I don't think it is. It's a slow grind, a slow burnout to the end. And I think a lot of social media companies
know how to manipulate that addiction. If you think of it, what is a like? It takes somebody less than a second, so it's not exactly a meaningful indication
of approval, and yet, people obsess over it. -Why did that picture not get as many likes?
-Like a rat at the saccharine thing in the lab. People have notifications
every time they get a like. Can you imagine that your life is interrupted every time some random person
likes your picture or follows you? -That's absurd.
-Yes, but millions of people have that. Oh yeah, we've all seen that. Having people like your photographs
on social media... I've fallen into this. I got bewitched by it.
I'm not anymore. It's silly. Someone you haven't seen for ten years
liking your lunch? It has no value to me. Social media absolutely does that to me,
where I'm compare and despair. It just creates its own wicked little world
inside of your head. Am I addicted to being online
and looking at these apps? No, I wouldn't go so far as to say that,
but I definitely see traits. I can put my phone down, but I don't like to. It just is a slippery slope. So am I addicted? No, but I can definitely see some of the...hallmark traits of addiction and I'm starting to feel bad
about myself when I use it. But what is the need in us?
Why do we need success? Why do we need to look bigger
than we are? Is it connected to fear? Just plain old insecurity? What is it? The more dependent we are
on some external definition of success, the more connected we are with ourselves. Because if you think of the people we all
most admire, whether it's Nelson Mandela... -...or Eleanor Roosevelt...
-Gandhi's... That famous collection of
what he owned what he died. The sandals, the spectacles and...
I mean, no material success. Success for them had to do
with their values, what their life was about
and what they brought to the world. Even without going
to these incredible examples in history... We need to give up
other people's definition of success and find out what it is for me,
for Megan, for you, and honour
our own personal definition of success. I've met a lot of what the world
would consider successful people, and it doesn't seem to follow any correlation
whether successful are more happy or not. Success is different for everybody. If you allow the outside world or anyone else
to define what success is for you, then it's never gonna make you happy. I think that the overwhelming thing
that I took from it is that it probably is a good idea
to be easier on yourself and not try to frantically be right or be 100 % efficient. Just, you know, take it easy a little bit.
A little more mañana. I do think that the prevailing advice
to take is that when you do slow down,
when you are kinder to yourself, you are more productive in your life,
whatever you're doing. Also, beyond a certain point... -How #### productive do you need to be?
-That's true. Slow down. It'll get done. It's ok. Multitasking is not as efficient
as it may seem. Subtitles: Jenny Gregory
www.btistudios.com
