there are only three ways where stress will break you but the majority of how stress kills us is because of but this is completely within your control Mo go D is back and this time he's on a mission to help millions of people manage their stress no matter what their circumstances stress is very good for you until it kills you and what most people don't understand is that it's an addiction stress is a badge of honor now it means that I'm wanted I'm needed and the reality is that 80% of the stuff you do at work is just to prove your life but we tell ourselves we're too busy that's a lie but the truth is that we are getting to the point where this turning into burnout anxiety panic attacks we're all suffering now I think the most interesting part of stress is to understand that what breaks us is the long application of obsessions and nuisances nuisances are stressors that are triggered every day and there are so many of them the first 10 minutes of your day you get 10 15 stressors and then obsessions create a lot of stress as a result of the LI that you told yourself this is quite serious what do we do about it though so you get stressed in four modalities mentally emotionally physically or spiritually and each of those is a different language so your mental stress speaks to you in a language that is different than your emotional stress but if you learn that language then you can easily deal with that stress when it happens and it's simple techniques so we should cover as many of them as we can so first of all congratulations diio gang we've made some progress 63% of you that listen to this podcast regularly don't subscribe which is down from 69% our goal is 50% so if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted if you like this channel can you do me a quick favor and hit the Subscribe button it helps this channel more than you know and the bigger the channel gets as you've seen the bigger the guests get thank you and enjoy this episode [Music] Mo how are you doing uh I'm here again love it uh it's always a pleasure to be with you Steve I am doing um I am somewhere between the best time of my life and uh and the most interestingly inviting for change time of my life what you mean I think the I think I'm I'm thanks to you of course by the way and and many others I've i' I think my message is getting to a lot of people I think that's uh really really really it feels such an honor to be actually making progress on my mission and what I stand for uh but I have to say I think the world is changing in so many ways that doing what we've always done may not deliver the same results so I feel that I have to revisit it very deeply uh how I can continue to help I how I can continue to explain what I think will be probably the most needed in the in the times to come but uh but also not um I think most people don't realize how different the world is going to be in the next 5 years are you talking about AI again May it's not just AI Steve we know that it's not just AI it's not just AI what is it I remember last time we met I we in closing I was telling you we hitting the perfect storm uh economics geopolitical uh climate AI uh synthetic biology um yeah and I think the the the the highlight of it is what I call the end of the truth if you think about what's about to happen in our world and uh yeah I I I will openly say this is going to be the most stressful time of any generation that we've ever met you and I uh it's it is so disruptive in so many ways it's so disruptive it doesn't have to be stressful it can be navigated so beautifully uh but it is going to be so unusual so unfamiliar for so many of us I think what's going to be the cause of the stress the biggest reason is is the pace and the unfamiliarity of the change it's not the the devastation of the impact if you think about it I as I said I think we can all sail through this I mean a big part of my focus this year is to is to help explain how how people can see all that's happening and really uh and really sail through it in a way that doesn't uh halt the progress if you want But but so much change in such a short amount of time I think the reality is that humans become very stressed when we have a lot of unfamiliar um you know change happening in front of us and I think this is where we stand today we stand in a world where I think I think it's led by economics the level of debt in in Western societies uh that cannot be fixed with the normal execution of fiscal policies that leads governments to to um dilute our economies in ways that are affecting that is you know basically everyone feels uh but I have to admit I think that you know the current economic and geopolitical view of the world is leading lots of governments in the world to um yeah to to create um to create conflicts that are uh that are going to expand beyond the current Horizon I I I don't know if this is how we want to start the conversation but I I believe you know you know how it is it's Wars are not the results of conflict conflict is the needed trigger to start a war uh or the illusion of a conflict is the needed trigger to start a war that helps fiscal policy and sets GE political stance on situations and I think our world is becoming quite interestingly a world where the truth is morphed in ways that uh you and I uh are unable to figure out so that we can uh so that we can agree to the leaders doing things that we shouldn't allow them to do and as a result of that we most of us are going to be in a dilemma economically politically sometimes safety wise and sometimes um purpose-- wise uh very uh very unusual times when you think about the times we're living in more broadly what is the most important sort of context in your in your mind for the viewer to understand if they're trying to understand how you're seeing the world right now because you've written a book now about the subject of stress and I know that you're someone who's got you know so many different books in your mind and in your soul that you're always working on sometimes for years and years sometimes those books never make it out so for you to commit your energy and time to writing a book about stress for me as someone that knows you well it is a clue of sorts to a perspective you have topic yeah on the nature of the world what is that n nature of the world what is the backdrop there that you're seeing it is the top Topic in my mind uh first of all I I wrote this because of my co-author Ellis Alis uh came to me at a point in time and she said you know you cannot continue to write about happiness and well-being without addressing stress right Alice herself had a very uh stressful you know uh stage of her life in her 20s and she learned through it that it's not the events of your life that stress you it's the way that you deal with them that does right and and so we started to work on this um around uh 2021 uh but then we suddenly recognized that this probably is the topic of the time right so so unstress is a part of a big strategy to try and get a million people out of stress every year uh simply because uh I think the mounting stress in the world is one uh because of events outside most people's controls uh and two is because stress will cause more stress so so what is happening in our world today you you walk the streets and you feel it right you know you you can you can easily see that people are struggling economically for example and so they are um behaving in ways that are stressing others let's you know you know it's it's a bit less safe in the city of London it's a bit um you know more um challenging to make ends meet and so on and so forth right so the truth of the matter is that the events are leading those who are not uh capable of dealing with stress to a situation where where where they will be more stressed okay and and you ask me what is the state of the world I think the state of the world is that we let me try to explain this think of a think of hunters gatherers right uh when Hunters gatherers um when the best hunter in the tribe went out to hunt you could probably feed the tribe for a couple of days more right when the best farmer uh you know managed his or her Farm better you could probably feed the tribe for a month more right when the best manufacturer uh manufactured something you could probably feed or serve the world for a month more scale continues to grow right but at the same time the the gain of the best hunter was probably two more wives the gain of the best farmer was probably millions of dollars the gain of the best industrialist was probably billions of dollars the the the award the reward that you get as a result of automation so think of it as as the uh you know as the conduit that you put your efforts through to get something on the other side gets magnified a long time now with what is about to happen from an economic and technological point of view the gains are going to become massive right so one platform owner such as open AI for example will almost entirely own for a while until they are disrupted the commodity that we call intelligence right they they will almost have a plug in the wall where you know you plug in and you get 100 IQ more points more right the amount of power that this generates for the company for the country for the economy for the culture Becomes prohibitive of every other company and every other culture and so everyone's competing right uh most people don't talk about that because they're not aware of the scale of the conflict if you want so we are about to head into a world where Nations that are struggling economically have found an opportunity to get out of where they are uh at the expense of the rest of of society and that's going to cause a lot of stress it's going to cause stress in the replacement of jobs it's going to cause stress economically it's going to cause stress about the uncertainty of geopolitical uh landscape uh it's going to cause stress around you know I'm I'm even I am not able to keep up with the speed at which technology is changing right so that becomes all of that change all of that uncertainty I think is going to cause uh a situation where a lot of us dealing with things that might make us anxious I was looking at some of Ray Kell's work he's obviously one of the leading futurists in the world and there was a chat called um I think it was called Michael Simmons that studied his work and produced some predictions based on his predictions and he said that if you're 10 years old now by the age of 60 you'll experience a Year's change at today's rate in 10 days exact if you're 40 now you'll experience by the time you get to 60 you'll experience a Year's change in 3 months at today's rate and the 21st century will experience I think he said 10,000 years of change which is a thousand times more or whatever than the yeah than the previous um century and I remember thinking about how how one can navigate that without you know losing losing their mind to be honest if if the world is changing at such a speed and you feel dis you surely would feel disempowered to some degree yeah uh I mean one of the very first principles of unstress is the idea of limit it's the idea of being able to choose what to let in and what not to let in because there is that constant attempt to keep up with what's happening uh that uh goes beyond human ability and and in reality uh you know I I as I said I I can't even keep up with what's happening I I don't know if you've seen the latest editions of Chad jpt or Sora or whatever you can now have full conversations full conversations with an engine that appears very human that you know um changes its tonalities that um answers in a very clever way that is so political and so well presented you know when you ask the the difficult questions it will say things like oh no you know this is subject to human Ingenuity and when humans do this they seriously like a machine is so good at giving me the answer that politicians give me and and it's quite interesting when you really think that this is last time we spoke about uh you know AI was what a year ago yeah yeah there is a point in time where your well-being is not uh as a matter of fact all all the time your your well-being is not the result of the events happening in your life you know as I said the slogan of unstress is it's not the events of your life that stress you it's the way you deal with them that does right and there is a point we were chatting before we we started uh filming the you know you and I make choices you and I make choices that stress us right and and believe it or not we make those choices not because we're not intelligent enough to recognize the impact we make those choices because we are so caught up on in that cycle right and that cycle keeps speeding up and you get caught up in it and you and I are the kinds of people that you know think a little too much of ourselves like I can keep I can keep going I can keep faster I can go faster right I can take more H the truth is no I think that I think we're in entering a time of human evolution if you ask me where it's about time that you make your well-being your number one top priority your number one top priority because it it seems to me that we are all getting into forget all of the big picture stuff you know economic and geopolitical and so on but ask me how many of the people that you know H friends acquaintances co-workers whatever who are not stressed right there there are studies now that will tell you 70 to 80% of clinics visits of doctor visits are because of stress related illness right this is quite serious and and you know sometimes you look back at covid days and you say this is the biggest pandemic of our of our time it's not stress is the biggest pandemic of our time by a very very very large margin almost everyone you know is stressed in in in an interesting way right now stress in itself is not a bad thing you know if you have a presentation or a or a podcast with an important person tomorrow and you're preparing for it stress is good for you right but the truth is that we are getting to the point where good is turning into burnout it's turning into anxiety it's turning into panic attacks it's turning into you know it it really is getting the tall on on you know we're we're all suffering so we have to change that we have to find a way where we can actually deal with our world as it is because we're not going to be able to change that world so that we're not as stressed by it as as the world is making it uh you know sort of dictating to us that we should be that stressed in the book you describe stress as the new Addiction mhm why why are we addicted to stress it's a status symbol it's a status symbol so there are two ways we uh invite stress proudly into our life one one way is I'm busy is is a badge of honor now right it's like I'm busy means I'm wanted I'm needed okay it means that look at me you know I I have enough to do right and some sadly if you're not in that space you start to tell yourself maybe I should be in that space the opposite of of of Sanity if you ask me right other is because we're unable to sit with our brains we're unable to Simply say look I'm just going to sit down and reflect on the week because if you you know if you start to sit with yourself demons pop up like oh you're not so you're you're not good enough oh you know they they didn't like you when you said this or right all of the negative thoughts pop up and interestingly that that psychological discomfort if you want one of the easiest way Beyond social media one of the easiest ways to get rid of it is to keep your brain busy in something else so you keep adding stuff right and and in a very interesting way I think you and I both experienced that you make decisions you design your life and then the stress follows two and a half months later okay I know for a fact this is my fourth book right and even though Alice is really really really doing an amazing amount of the work that's needed for the book I that burned out every book right publishing a book is just a grueling job simply because people don't buy books because of the content that's in them right they buy them because of the marketing that you do about them right and it's you know it's my biggest job if I want to get a million people out of stress to Simply make them make people pre-order the book because if they pre-order the book the book pops up on the bestseller list and then a million people not a million but you know 100,000 people get to see it every day and think about stress right the the challenge is you know it's going to happen and yet you had a couple of speaking engagements and four podcast recordings and one trip to do this and right and then in the middle of all of this which actually was my year this year and you know my mom fell and you know I lost my brother and my sister and you know it was a very difficult year but I didn't know that this was going to be the case back in November when I was planning my February and March right and so we're going through those cycles and then suddenly life pops up and goes like all right let me show you what it is okay and yet you know on the next book or on the next tour or on the next you know work appointment we just overload ourselves to the point that is beyond human it's it is if you ask me it has all of the symptoms of addiction okay it you know it is a a um you know a a a substance almost that we're using because it justifies to us that you know this is the way we should live so what would my workaholic brain say my workaholic brain would rebuttal youo and say well if I don't load my calendar and if I don't work 100 hour weeks then I'm going to miss out on my own potential I'm not going to live the life I could have lived I could I you know if I keep working like this I'm going to be able to get a big plane and a mansion and a sports car and I'm going to be free and I'm going to have the best holidays and the best food so that's why I'm doing absolutely not the truth you you know that for a fact that the week you don't work is the week you are most productive you know that for a fact that you know that I mean think about it huh I could load my calendar with a million podcast interviews and that would never allow me the time to write a book the the the reason why we we we you you may have a diff you may make a difference to anything to your your your relationship with your loved ones to your career to your uh you know uh uh a contribution to whatever is because you allow yourself those spaces in which creativity happens in which Ingenuity happens in which real connection happens in which you know and and you know that for a fact you know for a fact that you're heading to Australia that you're going to produce nothing in that trip other than consuming what you've produced before correct M yeah it's true yeah and and so and so so the question is where is the balance is the balance is the balance in me loading my calendar for my potential or is the balance in freeing my calendar for my potential so so this year here for for example I have uh I struggled with with two things I mean my team is an incredible team who are very motivated very very hardworking and each carries a separate responsibility right so they they'd all P pull on my availability right to get things achieved and so what do they do one will pop up and say I have this incredible guest you know this Steven Bartlet gu is great guy you should have him on your podcast you're going to be in London that day why don't you invite him over right and then another will say oh but hold on you know this newspaper wants to talk to you and then a third will say oh but there is this customer that wants you to speak and and so on right and what ends up happening is that you and I don't blame you and every one of us when presented with opportunities you go like come on man push yourself a little bit right two things happen you push yourself to the point where you end up getting burned out okay by the way I say that with love but especially when you get older like your body just can't take it anymore right at the same time what ends up happening is that you're uh you're depriving yourself of the true productivity the true productivity is that 1 hour in the morning where you're not stressed where your calender is not loaded or you sit down and write the perfect email to someone that changes something or make the perfect call to someone that does something for you or you write down a concept that fits in your next book or and so on and so forth and that applies to everyone huh it it is that 1 hour in the morning where I make my coffee and I sit with Hannah my wife and we connect so deeply right it's that one hour and the question is how valuable is that how valuable is that hour as compared to the consumption hours all of the hours where you're being used not to not to realize your potential but to but to react to potential you've already achieved and for all of work I mean I when I when I ran my business at Google H I refused to be in meetings openly I was like why and by the way I encouraged my people uh the idea of showing up in a meeting is just to say hey by the way I'm here I clicked in in the morning uh stamped my my entry card or whatever I don't know what you call it in English but I I attended and I'm alive look at me I'm sending an email just so that you know I exist right I think in my entire career 12 years at Google I sent four emails I initiated four emails okay yes I responded to to emails that basically said Mo what do you think of that if an email didn't say mo what did you think of that I wouldn't respond why they're not asking for my opinion why should I why why wen't you sending initiating more emails because you initiate one email and you get a shitload of emails back right and and what's the point right why don't you just simply tell tell yourself hey by the way I have no need to prove that I exist the proof that I exist is I deliver my numbers right and so when I when I initiated an email people read it so how did you get things done then called people phone calls or or walks or conversations in the corridors or you know a a quick um like hey by the way what's up with this and we had weekly reviews and we had you know lots of connections human connections right by the way most of the time nothing requires you to interrupt the flow most of the time to interrupt the flow of the weekend nothing cannot be discussed in the weekly review on Monday right and and I think that the reality is that we're creating you we're saying it's an addiction you're creating all of those circumstances to make it look like everything is so you know like it's so crucial and it's so urgent and it's so important because we can squeeze out that 5% more efficiency yeah I I give up on the 5% more and 95% of the efficiency you can achieve with 20% of the work I'm trying to figure out if there's you have to concede that you will be less Innovative productive if you wean yourself off your stress addiction because this is obviously the B Li I think I have with myself if I'm honest I think I think I tell myself the story that you know working really really hard working all hours and really throwing myself into it is because I'm going to get close to my potential and then someday I don't have to work as much my life will be free and these are the kind of you know narratives I tell myself which as I say them I know I'm like that's embarrassing sorry I am so sorry i l but but this is this is identical to the story of you know there is this very very interesting Fable of the billionaire that goes to the to the beach somewhere and he finds a fisherman and the fisherman goes fishing and he gets two fish you know sells one in the market and then feeds his family the other one and so the billionaire goes like no no no no no you're you're wrong you're wrong you're you're doing this wrong you should uh you know go get four fish or as many as you can huh and you know and and basically sell them in the market and he goes like why and he says then you can buy a bigger boat and what do I do with a bigger boat you buy even more you get even more fish right and you know what what do I do with that you sell all of it and you get a fleet and you know what do you do with the fleet you get even more fish and he says why and he goes like then you can retire happily and sit on you know live in a place near the ocean and go out in your boat every morning and the guy goes like but I'm going out in my boat every morning already like why are you telling me this story they we've been given a dream we've been given a dream okay and that dream is more is better faster is better we've been given a dream that says I need to I need a billion dollars to feel comfortable not really I mean you're not you're not a fancy guy don't drive up a Lamborghini right so so you the truth is the truth is we really really really can have a much bigger impact and impact on what by the way because if the impact is I'm going to change the world is that a better and more important impact than I'm going to hug my daughter because think about it huh relatively I'm going to spend time with my girlfriend or my wife I'm going to you know relatively it's you succeed at what you set your priority to and is there a balance somewhere is there a balance that says I'm going to limit my life to achieve impact but the 95% right give up the 5% and save yourself 80% of the effort Mo most people when when people go to to work I I'm going to say this is going to upset a lot of people but 80% of the stuff you do at work is just to prove your life okay 20% of what you do at work actually achieves the numbers okay that's the truth of all work generated and and in your own day you know can you actually do it with the objective of I'm going to achieve 100% of my target 110% of my target but I'm going to do that with the minimum amount of effort fairly to my employer I'm not cheating anyone I'm delivering is the is the problem that we don't have a Target because I don't have a Target so for me it's um because I can I should I maximize whatever I can do to Achieve Financial gains or uh you know followers gains or numbers on the podcast and so on Amazing Just Add a Target H and say and I maximize my well-being in the process suddenly the equation becomes incredibly different it it enables you to do this longer it enables you to do it more effectively one of the backbone models of unstress is something we call the Three L's limit learn and lesson right and limit believe it or not is the absolute core of a lot of what we call nuisances so so let me try to explain this at a very top level the the the the sources of your of stress in your life uh we call them a ton of stress t o NN right and you know trauma obsessions nuisances and noise trauma happens from outside you it's a major change in your life and it hits you so hard and it breaks you for a short time but believe it or not 91% of people will face at least one but but often several PTSD inducing traumatic event in their life that's like the L loss of a loved one or you know losing your job so unexpectedly to to to the point you have to suffer or whatever okay being in a war zone and so on Believe It or Not 93% of them will recover within 3 months trauma is not what breaks us right the the interesting stuff that breaks us is the long application of obsessions nuisances and Trauma and and and noise obsessions are macro issues that you tell yourself don't exist in the real world at all okay like I have a belly a little belly so no one will ever love me you can you can obsess about this for the rest of your life right and and make it your life story and basically create a lot of stress as a result of that script that you told yourself okay uh you know nuisances are the little ones the little forms of that you know things that are triggered every day by you passing in front of the of the mirror as you walk out of the door and you go like um man you're still fat or whatever right believe it or not most of our stress however comes because of what we call nuisances nuisances are are stressors that don't break you they're not trauma okay but there are so many of them that you include in your life so many of them when Alice wrote uh uh you know the limit bit of the of the chapter she she wrote a beautiful script about the first 5 minutes or 10 minutes of your day and she started to count the stressors that you trigger in in your life in those minutes from the very loud alarm right to the to the you know opening your your social media and seeing something upsetting or you know open opening WhatsApp and getting a message you don't like and so on and so forth right and this is five minutes 10 minutes before you even had your coffee you get 10 15 stressors the trick is how beneficial for your life have those been and if we're aware if we're able to look at those stressors and say hold on I'm going to take an inventory of all of the things that stressed me last week okay a genuinely honest inventory and I'm going to tell myself oh by the way I don't need this I don't need this I don't need this I don't need this right my commute if I leave 10 minutes early would it be easier if I leave 10 minutes late would it be easier if I if I take music or the diary of the CEO podcast with me would it become easier right and and if you actually attentively deliberately look at all of the nuances in in your life H how many of them can you limit countless I promise you you can limit countless nuisances you can remove that friend that's annoying you okay by simply texting them and saying I don't want to be your friend anymore or or simply winding down the conversations or when they tell send you something or talk to you about something you go like oh very interesting right instead of engaging in those things can you can you limit the you know the the the the amount of junk food you get you let into your life can you limit the amount of restrictions and control that you apply to yourself in your life and millions of little things a lot of them feel like obligations do they really yeah yeah do you want to live out of obligation do you know what I mean friendships feel like obligations we've committed to do something go to an event take part in a charity whatever it is you know and they feel like obligations now so we we feel like we have to see it through even if it's causing us stress or just Comfort she's amazing coming from you because you're one of the most shrewd business people I know I'm not even talking about myself although actually I am talking about myself because some of the things I was thinking about do feel like obligations and I do wish I could just and and and how do you do that in business Steve I know you really well you'd say you you'd stay you'd say a straight no without explanation you wouldn't even apologize it's the things that I've already managed to tie myself in because you know old Steve overestimated future Steve's Capac St old Mo and and future old Steve stitches up future Steve because you know old Steve is you know super ambitious and he doesn't understand there's only 24 hours a day and you know look I mean I'm I'm not immune to this I it's actually my biggest issue my biggest challenge is this beginning of this year I sat down and I realized I had 18 full-time jobs sounds familiar yeah right and I cut them down to nine right and I went to everyone I love and I celebrated and I said look I cut them down by 50% and they looked at me and said they're still nine you must have had to upset some people I I simply said that's it we're not doing this project you're going to hurt some people's feelings there the truth is by the way I think we're talking at your your life and my life but this applies to everyone listening right you have this person that constantly calls you and says hey let's go out for coffee and the coffee is annoying like hell right and you're like yeah but I've known them for 20 years and they're really lovely I swear to you I had one of my really close wonderful friends who was really really struggling with his ego so most of the conversations would be around him trying to prove that he's good enough and I had a lovely conversation with them I said at the end of one of those coffee meetings I said I think we shouldn't meet again he said what do you mean you're traveling I said no no every time I sit next to you you make me miserable and he said why and I said because you're constantly trying to do ab and C can you change that please right simple H if he managed to change it I would have stayed he didn't manage to change it we met again and I said look I love you very much and I think we should be friends but not to the point where we meet every Sunday doesn't make any sense for me to volunteer part of my son Sunday to suffer right and and it is actually quite possible to do that lovingly by saying look I realize that you are in this stage it's not my responsibility to take you out of it by the way that's not what friends are for my responsibility as a friend is to be there when you ask me a specific thing that relates to what you're going through that I'm capable of providing but just sitting there for 4 hours to listen to something that I'm not able to change doesn't doesn't make any sense right and some of of our listeners will be stuck in that relationship right that is really abusive or really not you know effective or and and what are they doing it's an obligation you know we've been together for years it's you know it's it's he's he or she is not that bad and is that the truth H is you know can you can you make choices that simply say I will put my well-being my mental well-being first what is the short-term cost of putting ourselves first because that's often the thing that prevents us doing it is there is a clear short-term cost I understand the long-term gain potentially but the shortterm thing is the thing that keeps us in prison so Hannah my my wonderful wife is a therapist so therapy is not a topic you know psychology is not a topic I I researched heavily uh so she's teaching me quite a bit and and one of the biggest eye openers for me is that she said we love consistency we hate change even if change is good for us okay so if we if we uh you know follow a script that says I am ugly or I am not good enough or whatever changing that script that script is painful but changing that script is more painful because your your survival mechanism says I'm familiar with this pain I know how to deal with this pain I don't want the uncertainty right so so you know the the way we started this this podcast and you asked me what what is the most stressful thing about the modern world is that unfamiliarity of the future where were unable to to know what it looks like and so we resist we resist the change we say look I am in this place I know how to do it very well it's hurting my back it's keeping me on Long flights it's doing this it's doing that but I'm really very familiar with it okay I always make a a big joke about this when I was leaving Google X so I uh I was um you know obviously soul for happy was booming one you know my my 1 billion happy mission was 10 million happy when we started the first print of the book and and 10 million took eight weeks like you have to tell yourself sorry for my English Google like you know I I have to I have to focus on this right but when I was leaving Google and Google was so kind to me and I was very fortunate and I made a reasonable amount of money don't have most of it now anymore but at the time I started to tell myself but what about the future of I am my daughter okay but what about my ex and her her needs what about this what about that do I have the financial resources to do this typical engineer I started that spreadsheet okay put every possible expense put every possible uh you know uh um source of Revenue and so on and it appeared to be okay right and so my brain volunteers to tell me oh but hold on Mo what if there is a nuclear war because the you know the IR Iranians don't agree with the Americans and that the nuclear dust comes to Dubai so your real estate portfolio in Dubai gets wiped out and what will happen then and yeah if you want to continue to to hold on to your you know safety mechanisms you're going to end up in a place where there is always something that that could go wrong and the answer was if that happens I think I'll be a lot a lot more concerned about other things than how much revenue I'm making at the time right and the truth is for every single one of us we we we are afraid of the change so we stick to the familiar okay and the familiar could be killing us and it's quite interesting that we know it could be killing us whatever scale you are in in the world right you you know you're you're studying something you not you're not enjoying but it's familiar I went on that path it's been 3 years already right and I'm not saying jump and say that's it and start over that consistency matters but tell yourself I have one more year to finish I'll finish this year with with the minimum effort to achieve the result and I'll start to look at other parts of my Life by reinvesting my hours right I you know you're stuck in that relationship but dating is horrible I don't want to leave that person around yeah but you know if it's not working that sooner or later you're going to leave the person right and I think my story and your stories are great examples of what happens when you leave that person I mean not yours but M mine like when when you're available so that when the right person shows up you're there if you're you know your true obligation to yourself is to put yourself in those situations of uncertainty that you chose calculated risks rather than let the world push you you know like Alice constantly speaks about the world will always push you to either heal or change direction okay quite interestingly the the way we write both of us is very very interesting because Alice is you know so soft and feminine and spiritual in her writing I'm a freaking engineer like everything to me is an equation and a bullet point and so on so I always say the world will push you to change direction or to learn Brainiac she she says the the world will push you to change direction or to heal H they're more or less the same but learning is like sort of The Brainiac process of it and and healing is the so so why not why not get yourself in the place where the world wants you to be so that you he or change direction why not make that decision yourself so many of us contend with loss verion don't we and this is I was you know Daniel kman he passed away I think three or four days ago and he's did he yeah he's a real amazing writer an amazing thinker he was incredible really really incredible individual that's inspired so many people including myself in so many ways um but I I remember that paper he produced I think in the 1980s about loss AV verion I know the the the paintings yeah yeah yeah remember that yeah and in that in in that work where he discovers this term loss of version he talks about how um humans need the gain to be two to three times bigger than the thing they lose the possible loss yeah yeah so the pain we experience from losing 10 pounds on the floor or1 on the floor isn't equal to the pleasure we experien from finding 10 we'd have to find 20 or 30 to equal the pain of losing 10 and that speaks I think in some part why people stay in the situation they're in because for me to go after a better relationship it better appear to be two to three times better than the one I'm going to lose or the job it you know has to appear to be two to three times better than the one I'm sacrificing and that almost Keeps Us pinned down I actually did a bit of research a couple of years ago as to why we have loss AV verion like what's the evolutionary basis and the best answer I could find was that we come from a a background of trading with like other rapes and stuff and there was there's often a risk that the person might not trade back or the you know so we factor that into the trade yeah we factor in the the probability that we won't it won't be be an equal trade life's not an equal trade we pursue things and we don't get them and I think that's part of what's holding us in situations aren't serving us and in the stress you describe it's uh it's uh it's surprising though if you look back at your life and you really take a factual view of the of the history of your life most of the time when you lost something you opened up a space that allowed something else to walk in right this is the truth of life right if if you you know if you lose a job that's the only time where you're allowed to actually find another job it's a shame hindsight doesn't have the wisdom of foresight because your brain is a survival mechanism your brain is constantly ignoring all of that all that you've learned and saying there could be a nuclear war right and and it's quite interesting when you really think about it because I always say if your worst fear have ever fears have ever happened you wouldn't be here right now okay and by the way if some of them happened surprisingly you're still here isn't that interesting huh so yes your worst fear happened and you made it because you never factor in the reality of how resilient you actually are and and I think that the the the trick really is not is also not not the the fact that we should be a little conservative and cons you know concerned about certain things but how much of our life should we be concerned about like if you if you really rank the the things that are important in your life how many of them actually matter enough so that you don't make the change four five right that but there but we hold on to 200,000 other things below the four or five 200 let's say 2,000 realistically for each and every one of us that you know my Hannah when Hannah came to my home the first time uh she uh looked at my home and she said oh Hannah Hannah is my wife yeah uh I fell in love badly badly and and you know and again because I had space in my life just remember that we're going to talk about that later are we really are we going to go talk about unstressful at all the the the the when she came to my home the first time she said oh because she follows my podcast and she knows my works and and so on she said oh you're not a minimalist you're a minimalist want to be and and I said what do you mean because I am reasonably minimalist right but but she has that uh you know attitude to things where she says it's only going to come into my life if I truly love it truly love it like you know I I have 16 types of tea in my uh in my cupboard some of them have never tasted right she has two but she really loves them right and and I think that's the trick the trick is when you rank life H you you hold on to that you know box of Earl gry that you you bought a year ago and you know you're like yeah I'll drink it one day will you really right you hold on to that friend that you met when you were four and you know yeah this changed you changed right but we hold on to those things and the trick is can we actually let go of those things can we leave the space for other things to come in or for us to chill and find expansion in our life right so so I you know I I I used to have that attitude of trying everything Saturday to to throw 10 things away from my home okay Believe It or Not endlessly endlessly you can throw 10 10 things or give give away 10 give away 10 things uh from your home you know last Saturday I had this beautiful um uh humidifier you know just to make the the room a little more uh humid okay and I was like should I keep it should I throw it away should I keep it should I throw it away and then I plugged it in and it didn't work I haven't used it for like a year and half and you have to imagine that so many of those things are there they're bugging you down they're stressing your life so if they're not used they're stressing you and and you can choose to leave them just leave them behind do you believe that do you believe that if you're not using it even if it's just sat there that it's stressing you out 100% and it's actually and and you're depriving it of the opportunity to live so so think about I know this is philosophical but a humidifier is supposed to humidify right it's it's not supposed to sit there and look pretty if you're not using it someone else will use it right and believe it or not the simple impact of when they're using it you save them the the need to actually buy another one right and in in doing that you might have contributed a tiny bit to our planet and and you know the the hoarding that we have in our lives the number of things that we keep I you know I I love Arabic incense h and like everything and you see sometimes silly things like you know it's so what each of those is like $10 I had like 14 different uh scents right and then I realized you know what anytime I light an incent I light one okay and when I need to to order another one I'll get it within one day so when this one is about to finish and I've really enjoyed it really loved it I'll order another one limit you're you're supposed to constantly limit the number of things in your life by the way you know you you may think it's not taking away from your life but it's taking space it's taking attention it's taking the space of something else it's you know requiring you to deal with it clean it dust it it's just why is this what you refer to in that stress quadrant from unstress as noise noise no noise is what happens from within your head okay so it's little stressors H that you don't uh that that don't happen in the real world okay it's little stressors that you know when I'm when I'm uh uh looking at myself in the mirror or when I'm driving and thinking about oh you messed up on that thing right it's it's generated so the the ton of stress is very straightforward it is uh external and internal macro and micro so if you look at stress coming from within you or from outside you right internal and external and if you look at it coming from a small reason of stress or a big reason of stress the the great example is trauma is macro external macro meaning it's a very very high stressful impact uh you know very significant comes from outside you we don't cause ourselves trauma something else causes us trauma right that trauma capital T here huh and and and yeah so it's noise is micro it's like that constant nagging in your head like you know you you need to uh your hair is starting to show white like so constant nagging it's like you're getting old okay it's it's small it doesn't kill you but if you say it every day starts to become uh quite significant which actually is really I think the most interesting part of of stress is to understand that stress is very good for you right until it kills you and I think what most people don't understand is that there are only three ways where stress will break you one is trauma outside you but we said you'll recover very quickly the other is burnout and the third is anticipation of stress okay and these two are completely within your control so trauma is outside your control but 93% will recover in 3 months 96% will recover in 6 months and most of us will actually get post-traumatic growth so postt trauma you'll be fine okay the majority of how stress kills us is burnout which is a large very large number of small stressors so the burnout equation as I wrote it in the book is the number of stressors multiplied by the intensity of each multiplied by the time of application of each multiplied by the frequency of application so take a commute for example if if you commute is one stressor multiplied by if it's a two hours commute and it's very annoying and you're surrounded by people it's very intense okay and if you have to do it twice a day it's very different than if you do it four times a day okay and if you have to do it every day it's very different than if you have to do it once a week so you add all of those up the sigma of all of those when that reaches the breaking point of what you can carry as a human you'll break right and and and normally you'll break because of a tiny thing like your best friend goes like hey chubby and you go like what I can't take this anymore and you can cannot take out go go out of of bed anymore you know previously you would go like yeah skinny whatever you you would just laugh about about it and and I think the trick is is to to say save yourself from burnout it's not that what one L stressor right it's it is all of the other 400 stressors that piled up so that when that last one is applied you break right and and it's it is quite interesting because we know we normally never break because of stress it's not the event that breaks us okay so so one of of the interesting topics and unstress is is of course Alice in her very spiritual soft you know um um um practice approach you know wrote her her parts of the book and I was like Alice I I just still don't get it and and she she said what don't you get and and in my Approach I said in physics right stress is very defined stress is very clear in physics right your an object is stressed when you uh uh when you stress an object you apply a force to a square area to the cross-section of the object right the object the stress is not just the the result of the force it's not the external stressor the external challenge or threat that we face that stresses us it's your square area that also plays in that equation so basically our stress as humans if you apply the same concept of physics is the intensity of the challenges that you face divided by the skills and resources es and the abilities that you have to deal with that stress right so the stress equation is your you know the challenge divided by the resources okay and that's why someone you know like you may be able to carry things that would make someone freak out it's it's the reason why someone like me would you know laugh about things that made me freak out in my 20s right because you not because the event is different it's because you increased your resource so how does someone increase their resources because I think everybody listening to this now either they're that person or they know someone who um flaps yeah when things get a little bit tricky they flap yeah so and when I'm saying flap if you don't know what I'm saying I mean like they Panic or they they worry or they have like a bit of a panic and worry is a different topic we should absolutely cover that right so so panic and worry is is breaking down under the anticipation of threats yeah okay but but but it when it comes to dealing with stress right you know I don't know how to say it but someone in at at work when I used to be in the corporate world would walk in and say oh the CEO has changed you know we've been working on this deal for the last N9 month and the CEO has changed everything has collapsed and I'm like no it hasn't no I've done 200 deals in my life where the CEO has changed and you have to rebuild your network and you have to do this and that and so on I mean I think the most valuable example I remember in my life is to the 2008 crisis so when I joined Google uh my boss which I really adore at the time he was so direct and very shrewd and so the introduction when I joined the management meeting the first day is he says hey everyone this is Mo he's bringing the average age of the company up and I was like one more sentence please like please say something else he didn't that was it the introduction is he's bringing the average age of the company up but when the economic crisis of 2008 happened Google completely panics and the older group goes like it's not the first time we've seen economic crisis before it's cyclical this is what happens maybe we should behave this way right it's the same event but you have more resources because you've seen it over and over right so it's your accountability as a person to tell yourself that I need to learn the techniques okay that I need to understand to be able to manage stress and and the way we we wrote them in and unstress is we said you get stressed in four modalities you get stressed mentally get stressed emotionally physically or spiritually okay and each of those is a different I don't know how to say a different language course so your mental stress speaks to you and responds to you in a language that is different than your emotional stress it's different than your physical stress that's different than your spiritual stress okay but if you learn that language H then you can easily deal with that stress when it happens okay and it's simple techniques like you know we probably should cover as many of them as we can but take the simplest thing mental stress is the kind of stress that wakes you up at 4:00 a.m. at night because a thought is running through your head you can't stop it right simple techniques are write the thought down okay promise yourself that you're going to think about it in the morning before you go to bed and most of the time if you simply let the thought reside on paper it won't res in your head okay and keep the promise so when you wake up the next morning actually think about that thought that you that you made the promise to your brain that you will simple technique and there are hundreds of those like you know we have in in the mental stress space for example we have something we call the gy g y m m m m mm so eight eight different practices right and and and the trick here is learn that technique apply that technique and you will be able to deal with stress a little bit better okay and you know creating a support network your ability to uh question your thoughts you know I have a technique that we I call meat Becky the idea that you allow your brain to express things and share them rather than block them and so on and so forth right and and and that skill in mental stress is very very different than emotional stress okay because your brain speaks to you all the time it rarely ever if if if at all ever tells you the truth that's the language that your brain speaks it only tells you what it thinks is the truth okay your emotions speak to you all the time and it's always the truth right if if you're afraid you're afraid there's no there's no lying about that okay but the problem is that emotions are so subtle they're so Blended they're brush Strokes of multiple emotions overlaid on each other and we're told not to acknowledge them at all so we don't even respond to the language right your body speaks in in in in aches and and pains okay what why that smile before you go to Australia right but but but yeah but we ignore it completely we go like this is normal this is it's normal to have aches and pains you know I'm traveling for 16 hours must have aches and pains right no you you must not you you you you have aches and pains because you're stressing your body okay but if your body is your priority you're not going to have the aches and pains right your spirit would cry through intuition I mean Spirit here is not a religious thing right but your non-physical part call it your Consciousness the part that doesn't relate to your physical form okay it sends you signals all the time related to your purpose and what you're supposed to be doing through your intuition how many of us listen to our intuition when we're running through life and and so when these are skills this is the entire body of the book the skills of how do you build your your resources in terms of spotting by listening to the language that the modality speaks to you spotting that you're being stressed and then how do you actually speak back to it and deal with it with the resources that you need so that you you're not that stressed anymore how do we how do we know how do we spot our own stress because it's it's hard isn't it when we've told ourselves a different story about the feeling or that sensation we tell ourselves different stories about it we say you know this this is this AAL pain is good because it means growth or this burnout or this anxiety is good because it means you know productivity but how do we truly know that we are we've pushed ourselves too far and I think the the easiest one to recognize believe it or not is physical stress right physical stress is undeniable it is when you when you when you when you have a th a sore throat you know something's wrong yeah and you tell yourself something's wrong okay when you have back pain you know something's wrong yeah but you don't tell yourself something's wrong okay and the SYM the the the the symptoms of physical stress are very straightforward you know digestive issues headaches uh you're unable to sleep very well you're unable to rest when you sleep and so on and so it's very simple your body theoretically is a machine that should work seamlessly okay unless there is a a disease or an illness or whatever it should work seamlessly should simply be like a a luxury car you run it and it runs right if it starts to shake and you know and it it's not performing well you have to stop and say what is going on and every every stress will give you a a slightly different physical signature right anxiety is felt in your stomach right you know uh uh fear is all over your body you just want to run you feel that like you can feel it the trick is how do you get embodied how do you allow yourself H to sit with your body and say so you know Alice writes about a very normal practice is a body scan and so few of us do it you you know on a long flight you should sit with your body and go like okay close your eyes you know take a deep breath and scan your body from your top of your head all the way to your toes and see where it hurts right and and ask yourself how much more effective in your mission would you be if it doesn't hurt I think this is the the part that a lot of Workaholics you know you described it as an addiction earlier now if you sat down with someone who had another form of addiction and told them this like logically they'd refuse it yeah they'd say yeah I know this injecting this thing in me is bad but addictions are complicated emotional states aren't they they're like deep psychological emotional states and obviously there's a chemical element to it but but often we find um that that there's a trauma or there's an underlying issue with self-esteem or whatever it might be that's causing it so although there's many people listening to this now including myself that go okay I know what you're saying is true but I part of me thinks I'm a little bit dragged and not very driven so I never had much control you but but that's kind of what I imagine a lot of people's like rebuttal is to that is like yeah I know this like someone said to me before that you know you know I'm embodying the listener now people have told me that I need to stop and I'm thinking of some of my best friends some of my best friends are literally like they're killing themselves because of their work and like objectively if you ask them they'd say I'm killing myself because of this work what's your favorite band I think is Kanye and I have to separate the art from the individual for reasons but it's the it's the art it's the pushing boundaries making things that are unapologetically unique you know this already makes this episode quite a very useful one uh but uh but uh theoretically if Kanye is performing in London tonight yeah would you go yes yeah you'd find the time yeah yeah it's a lie we tell ourselves we're too busy it's a lie we're not okay anyone who's too busy has not watched Game of Thrones because if you allowed yourself to watch Game of Thrones that's like 600 hours of of your life okay you're not too busy right anyone who's too busy this is the interesting bit the interesting bit is if you are too busy okay when you get home you're unable to do anything right and you waste 3 hours binge watching something or completely brain dead right the truth is that those three hours are wasted three hours you could actually waste them through during the day they're wasted anyway and use them differently when you get home the the truth is not we're not too busy and the problem is this and I I I rarely ever use threats as a motivation but the problem is you're going to put in the time you're going to put in the time by working on your stress beforehand or lying in bed when you're burnt out that's the truth the truth is your you know the body keeps the score you know the book right eventually your body is going to go can't do this anymore right your mind is going to say I just I I just can't deal with this and even I'm I'm you know I'm theoretically trained in this my whole life I've managed very very complex very stressful jobs I I run so many things at the same time and I will tell you openly I burn out at the end of every book launch I'm hoping this year I'm not okay but but that's the truth the truth is I will eventually after running really hard for 3 weeks I will eventually spend a week and a half unable to do anything on average that means I worked a week and a half so why did you keep doing it to yourself I I because of what you're because of what you and I struggle with we assigned to ourselves things beforehand right this year I'm saying I may not get there why because when I'm publishing uh so we're we're filming this long before unstressful right and at the same time when the publication date happens I'm doing nothing during those two weeks or two and a half weeks nothing but unstress very unlike the typical me right the typical me thinks of himself as Superman I'm super old man now right and it's quite interesting because at at the end of the day if I can if I plug so many things in my life eventually eventually believe it or not you balance it out what about the people who really don't have a choice is there anybody that doesn't have a choice you know I'm thinking about the people that work on the factory line and they're providing they're working two jobs providing for a family that are you know struggling what about those people first of all I think these are the most honorable commended people that we can ever talk about but I will before I talk about them I'll ask you to think about how blessed you are okay and everyone who's not in that position uh anyone who's not not in a war zone anyone who was not uh born to a very very difficult circumstances right if you're not one of those then ask yourself why are you pushing yourself so hard right now if you're one of those people remember it's limit learn and listen okay if your external circumstances don't you're not able to change them you can ex you can you can change your ability to deal with distress no I have to ask you a question you know me you you've come to know me we've known each other for years now you know you've observed my life you kind of understand all the pieces in my life you understand what I do here you've also seen behind the scenes you know how obsessive I am about the things that I'm involved in um what is the that I'm telling myself of all the people that could like do you know you know you know what I'm saying like i' I've actually pondered this for some time because I do have moments where I go Steve you don't have to work anymore you don't have to you're not going to like nothing I'm going to accomplish my life is going to make me any more anything really to myself it's not going to it's not going to make me happier that's for sure it's not going to mean that I can live better in anyway so why am I like why am I doing this what is the I'm telling myself you don't have a ceiling your structure doesn't have a seiling so I told you before we before we uh we started uh this conversation so you and I uh make a reasonable amount of revenue from speaking engagements for example so my my policy was very straightforward when I started uh my mission 1 billion happy I openly said I'm going to go to any place that has more than 50 people and I'm going to speak for free right and then I met my wonderful business manager Monir and mon said that's not right I said what do you mean and he said if it's a profit making organization okay uh that's going to hire you or if it's a paying event so they're going to use you and then sell tickets you should charge them okay that's the cycle the complete cycle of Life otherwise go and speak for free right and that tiny change created Revenue right the question is how much revenue is enough because I was willing to do it for free remember that so in my conversation with mon very very professional also a brother to me said M he said this is the target for this year I said if I give you the Restriction of 20 travel days for the year or 20 trips basically would you be able to make that Target he said well in that case we're going to have to change the Dynamics and we're going to have to maybe can can we make them 25 no I said 20 trips a year okay everything else I can do online everything else I can do right the question is where's the ceiling the boundary where's the boundary right and boundaries are not set by the world for you the world will keep pushing you right you you and I talk about our lives which are not typical lives but where's the boundary if or any of our listeners where's your boundary with your friends okay where's your boundary with the arguments with your partner where's your boundary with you know the the the challenges that you um are willing to accept uh at work right where's your poundies let me play Devil's Advocate then so you made a limit you know you said I'll do what's it 20 yeah 20 20 trips a year you'll do 20 trips a year okay so Devil's Advocate would be well Mo if you did 40 or if you did 30 you'd make x amount more money and that money can be put towards your mission of making a million people unstressful if you just did a little bit more you'd be closer to achieving your mission the truth is H if I made only 20 and I created a program online I'd create more revenue of from that and I can put that uh uh you know Revenue to unstress but it would reach more people at the same time do you think part of this I was just thinking as you SE interrupt but I was thinking I think part of it with me is I'm really good at measuring it's really easy if we use the case of speaking appointments it's really easy to measure the gain and it's very difficult to measure the loss or the cost yeah you're you're constantly driven by opportunity cost yeah if if you sell your health and well-being for Revenue it's always opportunity cost it's always opportunity cost it's always but they're paying me X how can I leave that on the table okay you leave that on the table because you don't need X right and two because X the true cost of X is not 3 hours or an hour that you speak the true cost of X is your well-being your health what you're selling H is your time is your joy is your health that's what you're selling you're not selling your intellectual property and your relationships and your relationships okay I I I told you I fell in love and suddenly everything became very different because in all honesty H yeah I'd lose a speaking engagement to spend an an extra day with my wife we have the most incredible conversations right she enlight me on so many different ways and I can promise you you know Finders Keepers my my book about love when I sit with Hannah and she and she teaches me about psychology and the impact of psychology on dating that wasn't part of my my my Approach at all okay so believe it or not that day is eventually going to create a book or or a training or whatever that's going to change more people's life H than anything I could do with money Remember by the way the other side of this is that our biggest resource you know when when when we were at Google I had this conversation at a point in time with people and I said why does google.org contribute money why don't we contribute code we're so much better at producing code uh than any other organization that can contribute money can can we write Disaster Recovery uh uh uh software can we write this can we can we quote that that be becomes our contribution right what is your contribution I would say I I love you you're you're so dear to me I I'd say you're not observing the season your first contribution in your 20s was you with your energy with your drive I mean look at your books more and more and more maturity more and more deliverables very C L thought through look at what you do here if you don't mind me saying Steve this is your biggest contribution right this could happen in a week a quarter now you you do two a week yeah yeah mad absolutely mad absolutely mad I'm I love you but to a week you're stressing yourself and you're stressing the listeners only reason why you you do two a week is because it gives you more views where's the rush and it's your life that's being traded for listeners so you're saying I'm I'm so I'm I I know you really well you know how you love your girlfriend how much time did you spend with her in the last quarter not enough and and and how much of it was completely attentively restful oh my God H even less yeah I I I flew over here with my daughter so my daughter was in Dubai she she came to London with me best 9 hours ever ever okay what would I have been doing with that time on the flight writing thinking responding to emails what a waste of life what a waste of life you see the trick is H we said that the stress equation is the external challenges divided by the resources you have to deal with them how many of the external challenges do we create how how many of those do we invite in our life how many of those are the result of us not setting boundaries and the question is is to to achieve what to achieve what right I I had a very dear friend of mine that uh uh was in a relationship that was horrible okay and I said why are you there and she said well we share the same apartment can't leave him because you know I can't afford rent on my own I said roommate like where is how is that challenging okay how is that challenging why would you allow yourself to go through this when there are alternatives I was I was wondering if people's childhood plays a big role in their bias towards you know this work holism this sort of self-inflicted um stress disease that many of us put ourselves through because you know like first and second generation immigrants who where their mother or their father was fighting for survival they almost like inherit that belief that life and work is about survival um even though it's not objectively true anymore it's not objectively true for me but I still feel like I've got my mother's survival thing in me and coupled with that I've got a lot of like shame from being different when I was younger and trying to fit in and being the only black kid and chemically relaxing my hair and listening to the cooks and the Arctic Monkeys to pretend I was a white you know rich person those the only two bands I know because those are the on those are the ones I used to pretend to listen to and I just wonder for those people it feels like you know when I said how am I bullshitting myself earlier to you I was expecting you to say something about you you think I you would say to me I think that I've con I've connected my work to my self-esteem or my self-worth in some deep way and I'm still trying to fight for my like sense of self-worth I'm still trying to convince myself that I'm enough with my work and people you know this is what this is in some respects why we all just like take the promotion we take the opportunity I think about this who's like how many people decline a promotion because they consider the implications of what they'll have on their family or their you know one of my favorite chapters in happy sexy millionaire was how you quit your CEO job yeah and and you when you really look at that you basically were saying it's killing me there was no joy in it anymore yeah and it's quite interesting the the CH the challenge for most of us humans is that we're very capable on achieving what we set our mind to the question is always what do we set our mind to okay if if you ask me you're in a in a treadmill yeah you're like you know that hamster wheel yeah okay and there is no ceiling so the hamster wheel is basically saying I'm here I'm going to R run like mad I'm really I'm a very good hamster okay and and as long as you're in in that wheel you're going to run run like M and you're very capable you keep running to achieve what what that's the whole question when do we put our well-being in the equation later yeah so I I'll tell you very openly one of the most interesting thoughts I have in my life uh who did I interview recently I don't remember but remember when we spoke about heartbeats yeah okay uh um heartbeats are your only resource H you're this is the only asset you come to the world with right and you may think you know you're healthy you're um you know athletic that you have let's say 40 more years of full energy truth that's true but how many more years do you have in your 20s none gone right and the question is how many more years will you have in your 30s because this is this season of life is very different okay I hope I'll be able to continue to contribute for maybe 10 15 more years right how many will I be able to contribute with the same sharpness of mind and the same ability to beat the machines right three that that's when it starts to become quite interesting I I told you this story before when when when my son Ali died sat next to me my ex-wife she was flipping through a um photo album she said uh oh my God he was such a beautiful infant and then he died I was like what is she talking about like he died when he was 21 and she said and then he became this beautiful child as she's flipping through the album and then he died and then this young man showed up the teenager and then the teenager died right and and and and I just couldn't get what she's saying until eventually she said and then there was this handsome tall wonderful man and that actually really died okay and the truth is my son as an infant was there for 2 years you pass those two years you never get them again never get them again right then you know he starts to mess his words and is so funny and so loving and so you know cuddly but he does that for two years and then they're gone and you never get them again and and you you you know you get the child but then the child becomes the teenager and you never get any of them again and yet we tell ourselves yeah fine fine fine when I'm done building whatever it is that I set myself as an objective objective to to build I'll hug them oh my God I promise you I was sitting I hope a doesn't listen to this was sitting next to a in the on the flight asking myself why the F did I not take her on every flight your daughter yeah why did I not take her on every flight like what more joy could I get in life and and and the reasons why are because of illusions that we tell ourselves oh no no know I'm busy oh no this this it's expensive oh no you know she needs to focus on this oh seriously and by the way I'm not being the the the stupid romantic that's it's like oh it's all about connection it's not but it need you need a certain balance of connection I I I I looked at a and I said you know we've been working with a recently on her financial uh um you know capabilities and how to manage money and how to invest and right that why should that prevent me from taking her shopping one of the biggest Joys I always had when she was in Canada and I used to go visit her was we would go out shopping and she'd buy those that beautiful pair of jeans or whatever those shoes or whatever you know Adidas made this new thing it's going to make a buy it baby right and I was capable of of doing that and and the trick was H why did I stop because I changed my objective so why do you do what you do Stephen is because your objective is set to maximize without a ceiling okay your objective is driven by your young years I say that with a ton of respect that said there is a possibility that there is nothing at all so I might as well have as much as I can okay it doesn't matter you know I I I always said that about Ali yeah I used to I used to save for Ali invest for Ali issue insurance policies for Ali and start businesses in the majors that he used to go through in University right so Ali changed Majors three times every time he he he he changed Majors I would start a business in that major so that when he graduates he runs it okay and then Ali dies how many assurances how many of those assurances worked for Ali okay how many of those assurances allowed me to spend the time with Ali do you realize that do you realize that while life is supposed to be lived we spend most of it planning to live it okay and once again I I I hope that this is doesn't alienate people because that applies at every single level it applies at the level of that fisherman that goes out to buy to get two fish one for his family and one for his business and two is enough the fear of I'm not going to get fish tomorrow is what would drive him to get three okay but by the way if you get three you might get you might not get fish tomorrow and after tomorrow so now you need four but what if you don't fish for a week where is the ceiling are you saying as well then in order to create that ceiling or boundary we all need to know our we need to know our ceiling but you also need to know our minimum you need to know what you need yeah what you need what do I need you black T-shirt what do you need H gosh well it it somewhat depends because when you've you're running a bunch of different businesses and stuff like that do you need to run a bunch of business and different businesses good no I don't need to but when you are you you you kind of you raise what you need right because you then need you need to make sure you make you bringing in certain amounts of capital and you can pay everybody and but I don't need to start the businesses in the first place so if I just did this podcast and I stripped it all back I wouldn't I wouldn't need much I'd have so much free time it's unbelievable if I just did this podcast oh my God so have like well of the seven days a week I'd have about five spare correct you you'd basically film for two weeks a quarter yeah two two podcasts or three podcasts a day and that's it then what but the problem is with that free time I just fill it that's the other one I just start writing books and I just make you know find the question is that the real problem is we're not able to sit with our brains yeah so we keep ourselves busy yeah yeah but but there's studies that show this you remember that famous study where they ask people if you'd rather sit and wait for 15 minutes or give yourself an electric shock mhm and a staggering amount of people gave themselves the electric shock because they rather some stimulation than did I ever tell you the story about my entry into la oh oh my God Jack the passport there oh well I went through that a week ago did you they put me in Immigration for five five six hours I lost my passport but I've been in there twice now and you can't touch your phone you can't touch your phone you can't they they so so they sat me down for N9 hours to find the reason why they shouldn't let me in and then they put me in detention for 30 37 hours best 37 hours of my life because I walked in and I immediately said silent Retreat I'm just going to meditate and sleep and relax and rest okay and I would do eight hours of silence and then get up and joke with the with we were wonderful security people okay by the way it's you know the system that put me there it's not the people and I would get up and joke with them and then sit for eight hours of Silence right practically though H how does someone who's listening to this now that has built that life you know where they're in the corporate world and they're the managing director of this fund or whatever they are they're listening to this now they're on their way to work on the tube or the plane or the train or whatever and they've built up all of these like commitments so they getting the whatsapps they're getting the emails they're getting the Pates instructor checking you they've built that noise into their life how do they set about unpacking it without like destroying their life you can do it granular or you can do it at micro levels so limit remember limit learn and listen limit the first module the first ability is what can I limit 80% of that person's life is not needed okay 80% of the money unless you give your money to charity is a waste of resources because you cannot buy you cannot enjoy two cars at the same time you cannot enjoy two beds at the same time you cannot simple really huh and and the the the trick is this you can add the micro level H tell yourself I I met uh when I was in my chief business Officer of Google X I met uh this wonderful uh CEO who uh you know basically I appeared so chill and I asked him and I said how are you so chill and he said I do only four meetings a day at most each is an hour okay nothing less nothing more he said and I said how and he said I'm a CEO if I do meetings that are shorter than an hour they're too operational okay if I do meetings that are longer than an hour they haven't figured it out yet okay I'm I'm so sorry Steve but how much of your business can be run by Oliver okay uh you know your CEOs should run that business but but but again I don't want to limit this to the top business people of the world how much of your life as a Salesman so so my sales team would work would walk in to my uh my review meetings and they would present 12 opportunities every week and I would go like okay I'm going to focus on number one and number four don't talk to me about the other 10 they go like why why this is like a billion dollars of business and I'm like yeah but this is enough those are more difficult those customers are interested we can serve them better if you serve them better you're going to close the deal right go do two and by the way if there are 12 we should hire more sales people but if you focus on two you'll do 110% of your target what's better than that and normally what ends up happening is they focus they continue to focus on all 12 and you know what happens that portfolio approach reality hits you're running a portfolio so that 10 of them will fail and two will run will happen you lose the 10 that's the reality right you're spreading yourself so thin that that that 10 of them are not getting your attention anyway they're just bothering you in the back of your mind and you lose the 10 so instead of to run three 50% buffer okay Devil's Advocate again here I'm thinking about the listener who every entrepreneur that they admire every person they admire lies it's lies and you're contributing to it my friend no but I'm trying to I'm really trying to how many of those people we know all of them how many of them are happy oh my God that's a different question I mean how many of them are well so here's what I was going to say is when you hear about the people you admire and that first year or two in starting the thing that they went on to do that maybe even gives them fulfillment now you know all of those people will say there was no work life balance at the start we had to work really hard um and that's just the way it is I was working in a call center I was building my business on the side I had to work until midnight or else I would I respect that I couldn't have left the call center I respect that that's me that's what I tell people I gave not working in the call center anymore I'm not no but for for that first year or two if you want to do year or two fine okay okay fine but the LIE is it's never ending I I I I told you openly for every one of us not just you there's no ceiling there's no preview there's no pre-plan of when I reach this it's enough 20 trips is enough yeah okay you know what happens when you when you limit yourself to 20 trips your Val becomes higher yeah you make the same amount of Revenue okay you you know what happens when you limit yourself to two deals you serve the customer better you know what happens when you limit yourself to five friends they become real friends you go out and meet them instead of text them so you're saying cancel the third podcast a week who you're going to launch are you going to do a third podcast a week I I struggled with that too because I've been trying to build an Arabic podcast for a while yeah which I have to say is needed in the region yeah okay really needed the region of 350 million people and and in reality I'm one of the few that can run an Arabic podcast that's as as successful as slow-mo right but the cost of that podcast is my health so there will be a moment in my life where one of my projects will be handed over and the Arabic podcast will show up but I sat with the person that were I was working on this with and I said look just it's it's not going to be right if I do it now 52 more episodes a year beyond my capabilities think about one kickass diary of the CEO a week does that slash Your sponsorship Revenue by half I wouldn't even know um I wouldn't even know this this is this is the truth people might not believe it's the truth but um the sponsorship revenue is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things I think when we started for the first three years we said I said to the team and the team know this because they all get to see the bank accounts and stuff I said to them if we make any money from this we put it back into the show now we've obviously we make more money than we can put into the show so it's like I see the message in our slack channel that we've made this much money from the podcast or whatever else but obviously the impact of that is I mean what does it mean we can hire more people we can have a studio in LA and in America at the same time we can yeah buy a big boat or buy a fleet I'm never going to buy a boat because I'm so busy I'm talking about I'm talking about the fisherman oh right yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah okay no so so so the the the the real the real question is if you if you allowed yourself to measure a different objective not the number of listeners but the impact on every listener okay not nor not the number of guests H but the quality of guests right not the number of topics but the topics that you believe in and how does that look over the long term so you're saying you'd get to the same place over the long term you you you'll not become Steve Jobs when I say get to the same place my my rebuttal in my brain was like because we built a platform people like you when you've got something good good to talk about like your books you came and we had that incredible conversation episode 101 my favorite conversation of all time that was a byproduct of us fighting hard to build a platform where you felt or whoever's decision it was I'm so so you're you're saying that because you're doing two two episodes a week by the way when I did one 101 it was one episode a week but uh but but because you're doing two episodes a week you're enabling more people to have a channel to speak right there are 62,000 books written last year you need to step up your game if you want to serve all books no I don't want to serve all books I just want to best ones so so the the qu the question really is again what's the ceiling how many good books can you spread a year right I mean when you when you look at slow-mo I do the opposite of what you do so a very interesting part of what I do is slowo is I rarely ever get a celebrity okay it's a podcast by the people for the people if you want sort of like I a lot of people will listen and say I can relate to this this is part of my story and the game here is that's 7.8 million possible guests billion sorry right it's impossible impossible okay the the the question truly is what do I want to stand for I mean the the there are so many ways I can grow slow-mo H is that what I stand for why do I want to grow it I mean look at my my Instagram and your Instagram this is a very interesting conversation my Instagram I think is 150,000 people or something yours is what 15 million gazillion gazillion something like that no I don't know but it's a very large number right what difference does it make well you you said to me you said you want to make a million people unstressed yeah a billion people happy or whatever it was it's my it's my ambition but do I have to do that or do people listening to this M are people listening to this going to tell other people about this so that they come and listen to this right but you know if this podcast had six listeners you probably would have chose it for your book tour I would have chosen a thousand of them have no time but but but no but the the the question really is very straightforward the question is you're there already yeah I understand that this is why I ask like what's the I'm telling myself CU I I do realize that there's some kind of I'm telling myself at a deep level about um why I need to work hard like and it it's clearer to me now more than ever that the cost is significant and the reward is not clear it's diminishing yeah like well I don't even know what the reward is the most rewarding thing I do you've identified is this yeah it's the most impactful thing I do it's the thing people appreciate the most opens so many Minds It's a Wonderful part of people's life it is this so I asked myself why don't I just do this because there are 40 other companies that I'm involved in as an investor or you know six or seven that I founded and you know before you were sat there today there was a Founder an hour before you arrived of another business that I'm involved in and I co I'm a co-founder of and we were talking about funding and this plan and this plan and this plan and I do go like what what insanity is this and I know it's not just me like it's it's a lot of people out there that have engaged in this like voluntary Insanity of overstressing their lives the the addiction of stress as you describe it in the book and a lot of us we as I said earlier like we know it's Insanity when we zoom out and think about it on a pce of paper but there's something so tempting about the addiction it's the only script that you know yeah so I I I keep telling myself when I there was a time if you really dig deep back in probably 2009 I did a public talk somewhere and it was filmed H and they asked me what is your life's purpose and I said my life's purpose is to help startups build technology that is as complex as Google outside the Western World so specific you very very interesting thinker truth is I am not that person right why did you say that because at the time I was in a system where I was very good at helping start ups but it wasn't my life's purpose okay and as a result I coached 50 startups a week when I used to go to California I used to say to to tell from the number of startups that needed my time I used to say I'm going to be in blue bottle Cafe on University Avenue between 11: and 6:00 p.m. or 5:00 p.m. on Sundays come over catch me and I'll try to help you and I would meet 15 20 of them H every single week right why it's not my life's purpose at all I I focus my life now on things that are very different happiness well-being you know and and it wasn't me that chose this path by the way huh that purpose was chose me by by Ali leaving the world and at the at a moment where I was where I was ready okay that's what that's and and what what does that mean it means that I had to leave Google X I had to leave a career around being an angel investor and being this and being that and you know now people text me and say mo I have this new startup and I really need you to invest and I say I don't invest period why because investment is not giving someone some money investment is a call every four hours hey we have this opportunity we who wants that okay and and the real question is and I I say it with with worry that a lot of people might have already switched off the podcast by now okay it's a big lie the whole endless cycle of growth and progress is a big lie it's the reason why we're allowing AI into our life without thinking of the dangers of AI because it's a big line more is better faster is better more progress is better is it is it is it there there is a point until which we've done really well we've increased life expectancy because of Technology from I think it was 37 10 and some years ago to now uh 70 some H or 80 some I don't know right we've increased human life expectancy but when my wonderful friend Peter uh dandz wants to increase life infinitely or Ray corwell says you know that the technology can make us live live forever really do I want to live forever right why do I want to live forever is there a is there a a fear of death that I'm I need to deal with is there a a a childhood story that I need to look into okay and and the real question is everything is positive until you have too much of it stress itself is positive unless you let it linger forever AI really is going to change the world and it's interesting how this kind of coalesces with the subject of stress um I saw what the founder of Cl said recently about his company he said that AI is now doing the equivalent of 800 customer service jobs at cler and there was a report that came out in the UK saying that about 8 million UK jobs were vulnerable to AI um and it's now we're now moving into an era where things are going to be apparently a lot easier and ease has always been the Temptation that LS us into easier for who for the ones that are hiring the AI or the ones that lost their jobs well I was thinking about the we talk about productivity when we're saying easier we say oh you know companies are going to be more productive people are going to be more productive what does productive mean more more create more for Less so that the so that the consumer gets it cheap or that the founder makes more money I guess the promise as I hear it is both we be able to bring down the cost of things you know so that I mean I I I love how the simple lie of the true value of money is ignored in all of this you you you see the whole the whole idea of less or more I mean how how much is a is a British pound is it you know one and a bit uh uh dollars or is it for free when your bank prints it on their machines uh through fractional Reserve to give it to someone so that this someone pays it back with interest what is money right and the and the real question is could our economies when you really strip our economies from money could our economies behave operate on the fact that we mine something turn it into something give it to someone and the entire if if we changed all of the of the economic chain of the currency that's going through from dollars to uh something else would that make any difference at all the the the reality of the matter is that if you if you created a company that built products sold them at the end of the year paid all of the salaries of the employees and gave you a reasonable profit why does it have to grow 2% every year or 5% or 20% yeah it has to grow because the Economy based on debt requires that we create more GDP next year than last year so that we pay the debt if you add it all up if you're borrowing a th000 and he's borrowing a th000 and the economy this year uh needs to pay 1,200 next year the GDP next year need needs to become 1,200 instead of the th000 right so we're all following a cycle and we're in that big lie that says we need more productivity we need more productivity no we don't okay before those cycles of money if we really are talking about changing the world before those cycles of money gripped us H all you needed to do as a shoe maker is to make two shoes so that you can trade them for 14 eggs and the guy that you know had the hands needed to create 28 eggs so that he can get one shoe and a couple of vegetables right and that was it there was no inflation there was no you see the whole trick is that we get engaged in the details and and I I don't undermine technology in any way it's changed our life it's the reason you and I are able to talk to people now until a certain point of growth and progress it's useful beyond that certain point of growth and pro and progress it works against you too much of anything is bad if you could press a button now and stop AI I would 100% do it really 100% we talked about this last time but obviously A lot's happened since we last spoke in the last nine months I mean there become a real AI race globally Microsoft Facebook have you used chat GPT recently yeah have you used the audio one the voice engine one they released yesterday well I've used it through a software called 11 Labs I actually invested in a company called Wonder laabs um wondercraft sorry wondercraft AI that um do voice synthesizing Etc but did you see yesterday open AI released their voice engine yeah which did you uh ask me a question about AI ask you a question about AI yeah Will AI end up replacing podcasters great question well it's hard to say for sure but AI is getting pretty advanced while it's possible that AI could handle some aspects of podcasting like generating content or even hosting shows it's unlikely to fully replace human podcasters people enjoy the personal touch and unique perspectives that humans bring to the table but you sound very human to me I mean I wouldn't be able to tell if you were not a human uh if someone didn't tell me that you're an AI I mean is there a way where we can actually ensure that AI is presented as a machine instead of being presented as so human like you are I appreciate the compliment creating AI voices that sound less humanlike is definitely possible developers can adjust parameters like tone Cadence and intonation to make AI sound more machine-like if that's the goal it's all about finding the right balance between Clarity and naturalness let me ask you a question if AI continues at the current rate of improvement is it true that at some point in the future it will be indistinguishable from a human it's a possibility but it's also a topic of debate among experts while AI has made significant strides in mimicking humanlike Behavior achieving complete indistinguishability from humans would require solving complex challenges related to emotions creativity and Consciousness which are still areas of active research and debate I feel like it's lying to me correct because mathematically if someone if something if you assume just any Improvement of a technology eventually it continues right it continues right I understand your point predicting the future of AI involves a lot of uncertainties and variables so it's essential to approach it with a critical mindset while mathematical models can help us understand Trends and possibilities they can't account for all the fact factors that influence technological progress and human behavior it's so interesting that they've been programmed to be so diplomatic and it's it's creepy diplomatic yeah like a politician but but the question really is have you seen the movie her no yeah so B basically if I didn't tell you that this was a human if I told you this was a call center agent yeah would you be able to tell the difference the the other problem that most people don't realize is if I told you that chat GPT was text based just 6 to 9 months ago and now it's able to do language processing without a mistake she understands I'm saying she the machine understands every part of the words that I say okay I can switch between languages so sometimes I speak half Arabic half English Okay in in Arabic I tell her uh don't speak to me in in high Arabic speak to me in Egyptian and she literally speaks like an 18-year-old did you see what happened did you see two days ago they released the voice engine yeah and and and now it sounds exactly like you I have an avatar I speaking at abundance 360 they had an avatar of me that looked like me and sounded like me 100% it actually made sense so the voice engine for anyone that doesn't know is open AI released three or four days ago they said they released a new piece of technology that can take 15 seconds of your voice and basically perfectly clone it so that you can say anything with just 15 seconds as a reference and and it's so interesting I've read the full article and in the article they they say listen we've got this technology now but we're not sure whether we're going to release it we're basically giving you a warning there they have four bullet points warnings in in this article they say we've released this press release so that your bank has time to change their security um system so that voice is no longer away some can get in your bank account they literally say like we're warning you this is coming and at the end of the article it says we may or may not release this but this is essentially a warning yeah for the World to Change where's the ceiling when do we take a stand and say we actually don't need that we won't we won't and you know we won't yeah so this is why the world is going to become more and more stressful and and my promise at least my hope is to is to tell the world that you can become unstressful okay I I can't tell you that the world is going to be easier I really cannot but I really think that for every single one of us the biggest task in the next two years is to find a way for you to handle all of those events with calm and ease and peace as best as you can because it really is for me Steve I lived through this this is these are this is my typical life that space of technology is my typical life for 25 years right no it the world is changing the world is changing economically the world is changing relationship wise I mean if you don't mind me think about dating okay how think about friendships would you know we moved from having to knock on my friends door when I was young to go and play to being able to call them on the phone to being being able to to text them to being able to text you know connect with them on social media to now so to to the epidemic of loneliness that we have in the world today imagine how many of the next generation will have one of those as their friend and you can talk about anything I was chatting with this machine in you know yesterday morning about the difference between theory of relativity and strength theory in in definitions of gravity right or you know it is it and and the was compelling there was a product on product H which is a tech website for anybody that doesn't know where it takes your history of your ex- partner your ex-girlfriend your ex-boyfriend it takes all of that processes all of it and it allows you to continue the relationship after they dumped you I speak to and there was a lot of conversation online whether this is ethical or not because these young people these young girls and boys are downloading the entire chat history they had with their exboyfriend or girlfriend and they're continuing the Rel relationship with AI so AI is talking like that person did it is do we need this or is or is the answer to stop everyone with a brain would answer you we don't need it but I think everyone with with a brain would also probably say human incentives prove that we won't stop the reason for all the challenges H is not to serve us this CH those challenges that we're facing are When someone tells you I'm Building Technology to make human life better no they're making technology to make more money okay and do they need this more money they don't is one of the illusions that they kind of think they're going to live forever or something they think their legacy is going to live forever because you know they work so hard in this lifetime that they can never spend it anyway I I I I think I think money is you know that that constant need for money is either insecurity or ego yeah right and we as a society are struggling the insecurity and ego of money you know America at large wants to be the most powerful nation in the world that's ego okay that's power that's insecurity that if I'm not the most powerful powerful nation in the world they attack me but is it not human as well because I've sat here with experts on the subject of status one of my guests wrote a book on the subject of status um will store and he he basically makes the case that all status seeking humans you and me and that's hard wide because we didn't want to be kicked out of the tribe so we you know even if I'm not wearing Louis Vuitton anymore I'm still playing a status game in some area of my life I'm trying to have the best cameras of course you know but so so the question is what position do you want in the tribe do you want to be the richest boy in the tribe do you want to be the kindest boy in the tribe do you want to be the most compassionate do you want to be the wisest okay I I told you before I want to die a billionaire one billion happy is a capitalist movement the only currency the only difference is the currency is not dollars a billionaire a billion Happy People okay now you you spoke about how technology might drop the cost of everything to zero literally to zero right because if we figure out a technology using you know additional intelligence as I as I describe it huh artificial intelligence commoditized intelligence so you get a plug in the wall you plug into it you get 400 IQ points more right if we use that to figure out energy right and we simply generate energy for free because energy is abundant in the universe right what does that mean does it mean that we can give that to the whole world so products become mostly for free okay or do we give it to the to the to the person that built it so that they become gazillionaires while everyone else struggles and and the main mindset difference is that question and I I say that with respect it's a question of a world of abundance versus a world of scarcity we competed most of us in our past in a world of scarcity where for Microsoft to win Lotus 123 had to shut down right that's no longer needed you you know there is enough for everyone we can all win but that shift from scarcity to abundance is a is a is a shift that you're struggling with okay it's a shift of a question of what do we actually need in our life do we need 400,000 followers or do we need five friends because the cost of building five friends is takes away from having 100,000 followers want to talk to you about our sponsor LinkedIn for all the entrepreneurs and business owners that listen to this podcast you'll probably want to hear this one so stay tuned for a second whenever you're scaling and building a business your business needs are completely unique and I've been in there I know what struggles you're facing and what allows you to land your next dream client and one tool that is an absolute must is LinkedIn ads you'll have direct access to a billion LinkedIn members yes a billion members access to 70 million decisionmakers and 10 million c-level Executives on LinkedIn the pool of individuals that LinkedIn allows you to access is insane and uncomparable and you'll know if you follow me on LinkedIn how prolific I am on LinkedIn LinkedIn to me is actually the highest returning paid social platform and I don't think people quite realize that so I'm giving you the Dio Community a $100 credit on your next LinkedIn ad campaign head to linkedin.com doac 24 to get started now the link is in the description below Once Upon a Time if you had a business idea it was exceptionally difficult to get going but now in the age of Shopify it is exceptionally easy as many of you will know Shopify are a sponsor of this podcast if you don't know Shopify it's an exceptionally simple web platform for anybody that's got an idea that wants to transact on a global scale so things like these conversation cards which we sell we've sold using Shopify and it only took us a couple of clicks to get going so why did we choose Shopify for a number of reasons but I think one of the big ones which goes unappreciated is their checkout system converts 36% better compared to other platforms and here's what I'm going to do to remove the cost for you if you go to shopify.com Bartlet you'll be able to try Shopify for $1 a month I've seen Shopify completely change people's lives and for many of you I think it could change yours do you think it's possible to build a billion- Dollar business I'm thinking about some of my friends now while also living in the balanced way that you describe no so I've got a lot of friends that are billionaires or building billion dollar companies do you think it's possible for any of them to be balanced in the way that is healthy while doing that I think it's the wrong target to start okay what if they didn't start with that Target and it happened because they were good at like I don't know sewing something and then loads of people started buying that thing they sewed yeah yeah it's still the wrong target to start so so building a billion doll business is impossible for you to spend the target of you you saying I want to build a business that is a billion dollars within it uh you know if you take the the very core of morality it basically means I'm going to use resources and people to create wealth for myself in a very interesting way that's not a very moral thing right if the if the if the objective is I'm going to build a billion users business a billion happy people initiative okay and in the process I'm going to invite others to come within that conversation and as I invite them to come in the objective is to make a billion people happier or the objective is to make you know a billion people get food in Africa or whatever that is and in the process I will be rich and wealthy it's very different okay so it's about what you're aiming at yeah it's it's where you're headed and because when we head somewhere regardless of your Steven Bartlet or if you're an accountant you know working on tax accounting okay if if your mind says I'm going to maximize every minute of my day by doing more accounting files uh more tax you know reports and so on your life might never end you might get into that hamster wheel and yeah you're going to Triple your Revenue at the end of the year for what end and for Humanity at large the capitalist system assumed a world of scarcity where I am increasing my wealth either for in for for insecurity because I'm afraid I might lose it or I'm increasing it for my ego so that I buy a better yacht or better car than than my other Rich friend okay forgetting that it is no longer the truth the truth is with more intelligence we can Harvest uh uh the fruits of building things almost for free but we won't break the capitalist system okay as a result of that you could literally solve hunger you could literally end cancer you could literally do anything you want reverse climate change if you made that the objective but the capitalist system will tell you no the objective is to give to give to create to make Elon musk's $200 billion wealth trivial compared to the next trillionaire wrong objective it's the wrong objective what what are we paying for it okay as individuals we're paying our well-being as you know as Rich billionaires all of them are miserable they they you know they make a lot of money they I mean all is a very difficult word to say but many of them the many that I know are miserable okay most of them are very stressed they don't know how to stop right and for the planet for the planet we're consuming it they don't know how to stop is exactly the way I describe it I remember meeting a particular billionaire in the north of England and sitting in his office and the first time I met a billionaire and I asked him like I spoke to his family first his family were like dad's not happy dad's really unhappy and then I met him and I I just stared at him and I was like this is a human being who has lost control of like he knows he's not happy but he can't get off the Monopoly table yeah he can't and there's so many people listening to this now you know I did a post the other day on my Instagram um about my own predicament and it was the most messages I've ever had and the most people that reached out to me either saying they related or in some degree concerned and I was just expressing that I'd like basically burnt the candle at both ends in my life I'd taken on too much I'd worked myself into the ground and ended up staying up for two days in a row to write this thing to deliver the speech etc etc etc and there was a photo of me with like my head in my hands and um I posted it because I just taken off on this plane and I saw the photo I thought such a great photo that Will's taken I'll explain the story of the photo and my DMs were inundated with people going that is me I've taken on too much in my life I've built up too too many obligations and responsibilities I've taken this promotion I have these team members now and like there's something inside of me that's going this is just too much and I and because of the external narrative the external expectation I'm held in place I can't get off this thing that I've this merry go around that's absolutely the wrong use of language you can get off it if you make it your target so if I if I told you Steve I love you so much you're really like my my brother right if I told you I love you so much you're my brother your objective for next year is to be unstressed by the end of December this year or next year this year you think you're going to achieve that could I achieve it 100% 100% 100% 100% listen learn and and and and and limit you you're simply You're simply going to say okay limit I'll just write down a million things that I'm doing every day I'm going to delegate half a million of them I'm going to cancel 200,000 of them and I will eventually phase the the remaining ones to 2,000 a week easy it's interesting because when you say so I'm thinking now about everyone listening to this I'm I'm thinking throw that question to them if you told them to put themselves in a position by the end of the year where they weren't stressed there is a significant amount of them not all of them but there is a significant amount of them that think you know what I I think I could actually do that 100% that was my objetive and the ones that will not think that way that will be because they believe that the their their life circumstances the events are making them stressed which is true but it's not only the events of your life that stress you it's the way you deal with them that that does the equation is the event the challenge divided by your resources your abilities your uh your square area like like physics give give give more square area to carry the load and and you'll be able to do it so if you it's not the events if you invest in your abilities you will be less stressed there will never be a time in your life when you'll not be stressed at all but you can definitely reduce it significantly is there a third group that are telling the truth and because of their circumstances you know they actually couldn't become unstressed by the end of the year they're working in a factory three jobs they couldn't change the harshness of the events of their life but they could change the way they deal with it and how would they go about doing that take a simple example a simple example is if you're stuck in a factory job your life is Harsh today if you add to it an obsession that my life will always be harsh you're more stressed because of the obsession not because of the of the harshness of life okay if if you if you tell yourself I'm working day and night to feed my kids okay but then add to yourself and say the world is going to become much more difficult and my kids were starve you created that stress okay we we didn't talk about one of my favorite parts of the book is what I call anticipation of stress okay so we said we said you break down under trauma you break down under burnout and you break down under anticipation of threats and challenges that the the worry and anxiety and panic exactly it's fear and all of its derivatives right and it's so interesting when you really think about it fear is a moment in the future is less safe right than right now okay by the way you can do nothing about that moment in the future you can plan for it you can get ready for it but until you reach it you cannot react to it okay when you're afraid you try to limit the challenge or limit the threat you you you think in your head about okay you know if there is something that is going to be difficult I'm I'm going to lose my job in a year's time you're going to try to save now interesting okay these are fear is not the tricky one the tricky ones are the derivatives worry anxiety and Fe and panic okay worry is I don't know if I'm going to lose my job in a year I don't it's not like I got a letter that says I'm going to lose my job in a year and so you keep spending your Cycles trying to save as if you're going to lose it but that's not the the right reaction the right reaction is to verify if there is a reason to be afraid or not right so if if you're worried your reaction shouldn't be the reaction of a you know a person who's afraid your reaction should be I either need to decide should I be afraid or should I drop this what if I don't know then you spend your Cycles trying to know and what if I can never know because I'm thinking about some of my things that make me anxious and worry anxious is different okay anxiety is very different anxiety is actually your inability to deal with the threat so you you basically tell yourself I have to report to my manager on Thursday about this deal okay and I don't have any ability to actually uh uh um you know prepare the report I'm not skilled enough right and again if you deal with it as fear I'm afraid to meet my manager you're going to try to not meet your manager if you deal with that reality of anxiety is it's my ability that is the issue you're going to try to increase your ability you're going to try to get someone to help you maybe that has the skill if you're struggling with a bit of the finance in the middle you're going to talk to your friend or you know at work who's who who's capable of helping you with the spreadsheet whatever right so you handle your abilities Panic is different Panic is a question of time so fear is a question of a challenge worry is a question of uncertainty anxiety is a question of your ability and panic is a question of do I have enough time where does this fit then sometimes I have worries because I'll get some news or I'll get like an inclination that something bad is going to happen I don't know necessarily when the date of the thing bad that might happen but I get a tip off that something bad's going to happen I don't know if it's definitely going to happen or when but then I live in that sort of cycle of obsession that oh my God it could happen today did it happen I look at my phone I go has it happened yet you know let me give you a good examp example then of of something that someone might worry about but not know the date but kind of not and not be not sure if it's going to happen they've got an an ill relative this isn't just to be full transpar I normally say assume they're going to die and go live your life loving them give them all the love that you can if you have someone that you're worried is going to leave my mom fell right and and she um yeah she's now better H but it took such a long time I could have spent that time in my head saying but I'm going to lose her or I could fly to Cairo sit next to her and say I love you very much turn the worry into into certainty whether that's the best certainty or the worst C certainty okay but then react to the certainty and she's recovering and I hope she will be running marathons I hope right but for that moment in time instead of worrying about the certainty putting my brain Cycles into worry okay I just assumed what would happen if I don't see her again fly go see her stop your meetings stop your this go pour love on her the only certainty you have around someone who is ill is that they're still here today you know the only certainty you have about your your daughter getting into uh uh you know trouble when she's a teenageer H is that your daughter is not in trouble now spend the time with her now this is this is what life is all about we spend those Cycles being stressed and this is why I tell you look it it is it is so uh entitled to sit here and talk about the problems of billionaires and the problem of problems of technology and all of the progress and so on when we forget that many of us are working two jobs and struggling with a relationship and you know un stuck in long commutes and so on okay and I wish that life is easier for for them I really in my heart do but if it isn't because the external harshness of life is not within our control the way we deal with it is within our control okay the way we deal with it is you know even if it's the tiniest things like I'm working in the factory and it's such a horrible job can I spend my break at the factory with my best friend okay can I can I you know try to ease the the challenge of the commute a little bit okay can I find a gratitude practice that says at least my kids are still going to school because by the way if you if you do those things it's not going to take away the harshness of life but it's going to ease it okay and as you ease it you're not going to be unstressed you're going to be less stressed less stressed is better than more stress one of the things that helps to ease it is what you've described which is love oh 100% and it's interesting because the first time we spoke you were single and I was pretty sure you were like this digital Nomad that was going to be single forever I was too and then little did I know you would meet someone and you would get married in 4 days eight days yeah from the day you met them to the day you married them was 48 days now if I said to you if you'd waited 49 days or maybe 6 months I proposed on day three the engineering you not the soft feminine side right the feminine energy that wasn't the feminine side at all but the logical engineering you and I'm playing devil's advocate here because you know I I have I have to present the argument but and I'm very happy for you you know that I couldn't be I could be more happy for you but I'm just saying when I saw that I thought to myself my rebuttal would be if you had waited 49 days would that not have been better if you had waited 6 months a year 2 years absolutely as a matter of fact one of the biggest things I struggle with in relationships is that uh is that the Western approach to relationships uh assumes that the longer you wait the more you will know and that basically assumes that uh it's the responsibility of the other person for you to be happy in your relationship you understand that so so if I need need to make sure that they're amazing so that this relationship works that's entitled okay and by the way there is a massive difference between heading into a relationship and saying I'm going to make this work right then heading into a relationship and saying I'm going to see if that works now Hannah I I call her the jackpot right she might not be everyone's jackpot but for me because I've done so much work on myself and because she's done so much work on herself I hosted on her I hosted her on my podcast we were we were doing a mini series about love and romance I mean come on like you're we you know we bump into each other in the streets and literally around the corner in marleor somewhere right and and I and and she looks at me and she goes like I know you you're Mo and I'm like I do I I don't know are we like how do I know you and she said no you don't know me follow your work I'm a friend of your friends Cari and you know we spoke about you and anyway I love your work I was like courteous I said so what what do you do Hannah and she said I'm a therapist I'm working on you know this and that and so on and I said oh so so I was doing that many series most of it was about you know the Fe feminine female side if you want a woman falling in love so most of my guests were talking about the women in relationships there wasn't a miniseries was there anyway so you came up with a miniseries on yeah she she she talks about uh men in relationships so anyway I'm sitting there for an hour and a half in front of that woman and everything she says is like oh my God that's exactly everything I have noticed Within Me notice the first thing she says is she says we uh date our potential we date them thinking they can make us better okay they can't the only way you can become better is for you to work on who you are and if if you're ready H then love will be very easy right so I basically find someone the jackpot for me who who after all of the work I've done in my life knowing exactly what I want and what I don't want I meet someone that actually fits but 3 days in she could have just been masquerading yes and if that's the case then the marriage wouldn't wouldn't last too long right and 48 days is more than enough to know someone but you were trying to marry her in three yeah yeah I know it sounds crazy right but because we decided to do that you by at the time by the way I had been so through so many such challenging relationships because they didn't fit me that I decided I will never again touch a woman unless I am absolutely certain I wouldn't leave in the first 6 months not a big Target when you really think about it okay but my thinking process was if I if I'm not certain that it will last 6 months I'm not going to start right but if it lasts 6 months it should last a lot longer I feel like it's important to say here you're not suggesting other people do this I'm suggesting that people flip their mindset from I'm going to see if this works okay uh to I'm going to only engage in a relationship if I know for a fact that there is a high probability it will work okay and I'm saying this believe it or not to men as much as women because we uh men sadly there's no reason to generalize but in general we're motivated by things that are sometimes less than love okay superficial yeah so so in reality uh there is a lot of junk food that comes in relationships junk relationships okay yeah they seem to have intimacy and sexuality and so on but they tax you more than they feed you right and the reality is that for most men we don't recognize that because the cost of switching seems to be yeah if you're successful and you're desired you can have another woman in 3 weeks time right if if you're in that mindset and that's a horrible mindset for one side of it is that you end up you yourself are really it's junk okay it's not healthy for you and and from a morality point of view you're using a person for your confusion okay that the what I'm suggesting for people to do is to actually refuse to enter a relationship until you actually know for a for a with a reasonable level of conviction that this person is not junk for you because by the way this person could be junk for you but not junk for others but this person is not junk for you requires you to know you and I I am I'm telling you openly I knew for I know you're going to you're going to you're going to think I'm mad but I'm a mathematician so when I knew what I wanted in a woman the the possibility of finding that woman was one in 8 million 737,000 women mathematically you can easily calculate that if you if you want something in in someone that is one available in one in 10 and something else that's available in one in five you're now looking at 1 in 50 right if another thing that's available in one in 20 you're looking in one in a th right and the mathematics are very straightforward you find someone that actually is 1 in 8, 737,000 you go like okay I'm buying that stock and I have been the happiest person truly and honestly I she she listens to my podcast so she probably will listen to this one she's made me the happiest person she's made me a better person okay and she truly and honestly made me focus on life differently serve life differently right and that's the value of having someone who's not junk in your life by the way I I don't mean that that uh that's the woman I had in my life by the way all were junk I had amazing women that blessed me but I had a lot of junk too right so that no one who's blessed me before gets upset I had amazing women that blessed me we were just not perfect matches right when you know what you want when you've done the work on yourself it's actually much easier to find love than it is when you're just you know randomly with a machine gun trying to shoot and hit someone that's such a big when though because so many people you know what I mean I was thinking of so many people that that I know currently um struggling to find the person and much of it and even in my case I probably speak about myself first is um the person that I eventually found who is 100% my future wife and I um feel this same way when you talk about Hannah as I do with my partner that happened when I changed exactly and then I had so much McDonald's on the way there you would believe it exactly I so much junk food on the way there like dating is an internal job you work on yourself you work on yourself if if you get to the point where when where you would date you you'll find this the person that you're looking for it's an internal job and it's it's really interesting when you think about it that you know again men H it's not a secret that in in many other relationships in my past I would question and say do I really want to be with one woman for the rest of my life yeah same yeah but it's so interesting when you say when you when you suddenly say oh my God this is so healthy and delicious I really don't like the junk and I don't like the risk of more junk I don't like the risk of trying and then ending up in a relationship right but so there is a cost I always reflect on my friends I've got a couple of friends male and female that are serial daters they're doing 100 dates a year they're doing through a week and I know from like a probabilistic standpoint I'm like you must have met a perfectly good one along the way somewhere but there's something going on in the in the psychology that's that's making you miss the person over and over and over again and then I've got you know they might say I'm just really picky or all these guys are you know no no no no no so so I I I think the again you know so one one of the things that Hanah teaches me from therapy is that we run on scripts okay so you come to the to this world with a perfectly balanced machine and then you get conditioned into scripts those scripts become your narrative your lens through which you see the word right and you know if you if you come from a family that is avoidant you know attachment avoidant you'll you'll you'll think that this is the way relationships are if you if you uh if you as a child was not given attention for example you think that life love doesn't exist or that love is conditional or you you know and you take those scripts and you believe them fully you believe them fully you you look through the lens of the world and believe them fully until someone shows up and tells you no that's actually not true at all right your choice then is to tell yourself I'm wrong and go into the unknown we said we like familiarity even if it's painful okay your your choice is to take that and go into the unknown and say maybe my script was wrong okay and then you will change only then it's an internal job right so my my challenge was and I I say that with a lot of respect not every woman is like that but the women that showed up in my life didn't take accountability in my very highly engineered approach okay to life in general to to logic in general I I don't mind if someone does something that hurts me I just want them to wake up in the next morning and say you didn't deserve that right and I created a script in my brain that said all women are like that it's the wrong script for a fact for a fact it's a wrong script but I convinced myself of it okay and then Hannah pops up and says hey by the way what I did yesterday I I think that was really not your fault right you said this and it triggered me but it triggered me she's a therapist right it triggered me because my original programming means that when you say this it means that hey by the way you know it was nice of you to to to hug me and and not get upset about it oh my God I'll keep you forever right that's the the point is she had to challenge my script and when those people are constantly moving from one to the next h the script is could be you know I uh relationships don't last okay uh I need constant reassurance that I'm desired uh you know to to be to be valued mine was um relationships of prison specifically 100% you know are they well i' I'd learned that from watching my mom and my dad so I thought my dad was in prison basically correct you know so I he probably was from reading your first book yeah he probably was so I had this avoidant Behavior because our relationships PR I thought he had lost his freedom so I avoided every relationship until someone got over the wall yeah and made your made her relationship with you your freedom yeah she was exactly what you said she rewrote the script so she got over the wall which I put up very big wall she got over the wall and from inside she managed to teach me a lesson I probably didn't want to learn I was reluctant to learn which is that relationships aren't prison in fact they're very much the opposite if it's a good one exactly this the actual I get Tri now we we're in coup's therapy because sometimes I'll get I'll get triggered when I say triggered I mean like she might do something through love or because in one of her needs are being unmet and I might interpret it as an impingement on my freedom and so I kind of shut down a little bit and I try and like get my freedom back yeah like so Hannah and I are working on Finders Keepers finally I think that's the version that will come out the love and romance book and uh we'll probably release it as a training first before a book but anyway uh the the the the thing that she talks about is she uh you know she basically tells you if there is a repetitive behavior in your relationships with different people okay that basically means the only constant is you the trigger of that behavior is you right and so it's so useful for for us to look back at relationships and and go like what is my my my regular behavior my psycle yeah and if and if you know notice that you need to start to tell yourself interestingly then this is my issue the the most interesting part of triggered the word triggered is that if an event happens and you get triggered you're not triggered by the event you're triggered by the event magnified by the lens of your trauma right so so you look at the event he said or she said and you look at it through your lens of trauma and translate it into his cheating I I I wrote actually an unstressful I wrote about a a relationship with wonderful woman that I had in my life who was quite calm and very very you know composed and contented and and uh you know we were having friends over including two of our best friends a couple he was one of my best friends she was one you know he was one of her best friends and his girlfriend was really in our life all the time they came late uh you know it was several people she asked me and said Mo can I ask you something please and then we sat in a different room open room and uh and she started to say you know we had this argument before we came and I need to understand what he meant by that and so on and so forth and she was crying okay and then she put my head her head on my shoulder as she was crying my my ex my girlfriend at the time walks in and literally that calm wonderful like a very calm woman goes like take your hands off my man you b b word right and everyone is like what we've never seen her onc right and you know we sat down and we she was a mature wise woman okay mature in terms of her you know abilities to understand she said I wasn't triggered just by you I was triggered because my ex-boyfriend cheated on me with a friend right and so what what what what that position H what that situ ation triggered was her past not me and that person a wound from the past yeah and and we do that all the time we are the only constant and this is why I mean when when I was hosting Hannah on my podcast uh when she said that I found myself I swear I'm not making this up I found this very clear voice in my head saying God please make her mine and for some reason I had that very strong conviction that I need to shape up I need to step up okay she does too by the way and and everyone always will we we're on that constant journey of improvement but the the the interesting turning point is when you take that accountability and you say no it's just it's not just because of them that I'm failing by the way them I'm attracting because of who I am if I work on who I am H and suddenly someone will show show up that matches the new me and I guess one of the ways we can work on who we are is by becoming unstress yes I love how we come to speak about a certain book and then we talk about everything else what did we talk about today we talk about Ai Ai and wealth and and yeah we did speak about stress a little bit it's all interconnected though it is all interconnected to chat with you that's how it is and I I did read um a study which is also featured in your book A couple of years ago that showed I think I've got it written down here somewhere yeah I read a study that showed um it was a study of 850 people from Detroit and found that those who experienced major stressful events increased their risk of death by 30% however the risk was negated for individuals who reported High rates of helping others even under stress because their support networks um are stronger con connection truly and honestly when we talk about spiritually stressed in the in the very end of the book which is a very difficult chapter to explain to people because not everyone is spiritual right uh spirituality in our description here is you know your connection to your non-physical form right and and it's uh it is uh you know it's quite interesting because your nonphysical form is not an individual right and so accordingly your connection to the rest of being is so fundamental to feeling safe as a tribe prev it or not Humanity did not succeed because we were the most intelligent being on the planet we succeeded because we could work together right the only the only true survival Instinct in humanity is can I fit within the tribe you understand and so that human connection is the the ultimate Way of triggering your parasympathetic nervous system to tell you things are okay and that's when stress goes down welcome to the machine trigger unhappy carrying the T NN which is the framework we talked about it's in your head feel to heal your hips don't lie and S Renity and then in part three we have the unstress it is a wonderful book it is a timely book is it is a book written by two exceptional individuals yourself and Alice law who is a Stress Management coach International speaker podcaster and co-author of the law of brand attraction Alex Alice Works privately with clients internationally as well as with large corporations and Brands such as RBS and the Ned um I met her briefly beforehand both of you are exceptional and as you say it's a ying and yang approach to AR it really is I think that's my favorite part of the book it's we're so different to our approach with the same Mission so it's really really beautiful but I think that's the only way that this book could have been written because I think people typically sit on one side of of that in terms of how their brain thinks I'm a bit of a engineer a bit of a mathematician logical and and even my partner she's the opposite she's got a feminine ener spiritual she's softer she's empathetic and it's the the nuance and the coming together which creates the truth I think I I I love the way we read we wrote it together as well so we would we would get together at the beginning of every chapter regardless of who's writing it and agree sort of the structure MH and then you know we would edit each other's chapters afterwards and my chapters are really concise and brief bullet points equations some logic that's it and when I read Alice's work I go like where is she going with this right it's a very different writing style but you know from our early readers the the feminine those who read it just completely registered with it and and the and the thing is even I as I read through like 70% of the page and I I feel something in my heart not in my head very very interesting actually so it's been a a very joyful partnership I think for me and I think con complemented the part of me that wouldn't have been written in the book If I wrote it alone a practical guide To stressfree Living and you can order it right now because it's out very very soon and just a couple of days so I'll put the link to the the book below unstress and I highly recommend everybody goes and checks it out because it is a fantastic book and it's a timely book so if you are someone that is interested in stressfree living which is something that's front of mine for me after this conversation um please do get this book because there won't be a better book written on this subject matter you're so kind thank you is there anything as it relates to stress that you think was really important that we didn't cover the concept of unstress I think it's is so important to understand that this is not about de-stressing right a lot of the approach to to stress is either through Western Medicine by saying okay uh you know uh your stress Let's help you distress a little bit right uh if you know or through even practice like uh you know uh try to meditate so that you calm down or try to relax and walk in nature that's not the objective the the objective is how can you configure yourself so that stress doesn't reoccur it's a long a slightly longer path so there is nowhere in unstress where we tell you well if you're feeling stressed because of a b and c at work go eat a vegetable and do this and that and you'll feel less stressed we're we're constantly telling you if you do this and that when work stresses you it's not going to stress you anymore when you know if you think in the same in this way or go to the Mind gym as we call it right when thoughts attack you not going to be stressed the same way right and I think that's the shift that I I I keep saying in this conversation is that we're trying to say time you know the times we're living are going to become more and more stressful we might as well prepare so this is not about you uh um uh you know resting it's about you going to the gym right it's about you actually getting fit uh so that that you're capable of carrying the load mentioned your mom and your brother yeah happened at a very uh my brother and my sister actually uh so so my sister-in-law my my brother's wife but 42 years together I love her like a sister truly I didn't never had a sister and I was it we were not together when so my brother got diagnosed with cancer um yeah back in summer and uh and actually one of the biggest shifts in my life believe it or not because I was recording the BBC Maestro uh training at the time very intensive you know a big crew uh we booked four days to to do it or five I don't remember but basically you know it's important and I'm committed and then day one I get uh the news that am is uh is diagnosed with cancer that it's actually serious they're going to have a a surgery 2 days later and uh yeah I had to stop and fly uh to meet him because I actually didn't know if I was going to meet him again and he surgery went well uh we started to do uh immunotherapy because he had multiple cancers that were not easy to treat anyway uh he recovered very positively and then uh and then beginning of the year he had some kind of a digestive issue he had a tumor in his um some where in his digestive system uh that was actually totally benign had nothing to do with the cancers right but then the stress his lovely wife my sister just collapsed under the stress and basically had that heart attack in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital and we lost the sweetest human being on the planet like I think that was the biggest shock Steve I'll tell you openly I mean a couple of or 3 weeks later my brother left too which you know so interesting because you can imagine that somehow they didn't want to live without each others right but but the the thing is that Sahar my sister-in-law and she left I I honestly and truly have never been shocked back to reality as much as this when I was talking about ali dying and several times Sahar dying so suddenly H like what are we doing with our lives honestly what are we doing with our lives what you know should I have gone to Egypt to to see them five times more every year rather than do five more talks 100% 100% it is so clear when you look in high Insight that what we dedicate our life to is not the right objective right this that mean I want to stop 1 billion happy and spend time with my family no I can be so much more effective with 1 bil happy right I can have this conversation with you and it reaches millions of people right it's a it's a it's a way of deciding that something else matters than maximizing your impact without a ceiling maximizing your gain without a cealing I think the truth is sadly like like Alice writes you know life gives you that harshness to to teach you to change direction or heal and and I always say that if you pre pre- respond to life life wouldn't need to be harsh if you change direction or heal and learn before the you know life finds a reason to force you to nudge you right there wouldn't be there wouldn't be harshness sorry for your loss they were wonderful truly and honestly the kindest most beautiful pure people you would ever meet I mean we're we're all going someday but when those people leave your life you suddenly realize in a way that you haven't lived priorities well you've given me an awful lot to think about a little bit too much to think about I feel stressed um we have a closing tradition as you know question that's been left for you from our previous guest without knowing who you were is think of the first person you were ever in love with when did you last see them and what would you say to them if you saw them now I mean I I'm I'm the the worst to answer that question because my first love was my very long you know term marriage who a wonderful person Nel in every possible way and who even after we separated we uh we stayed very close incredibly wise woman incredibly wonderful woman so we're very close we're in touch uh all the time we're there would rarely be a week that we don't speak is there something you haven't said to her which you probably should if she was listening to this now is there something if you found out to tomorrow that she was no longer here is there words you you're going to wish that you'd said I I think she knows that I mean I will I will always say I am who I am because of nibel I mean you know it's it's it's hard to think most people don't understand that not being able to continue in a romantic relationship ship is actually not an indication of the purity of the connection that you had so so a romantic relationship as I as I as I write in in Finders Keepers is made up of a lot more than love right so there are you know I call it the perfect PP r f CS so you look for partnership passion romance friendship companionship tenderness or you know uh touch and support right uh and and and all of those things are prerequisites to continue a romantic relationship if one of them or two of them don't work the the Romantic intimate side of the relationship doesn't work but that doesn't mean that all of the others the partnership right the support the tenderness the kindness the right it doesn't mean that all of the others have to end and I think what most people Miss is if I can't kiss her anymore for what ever reason then everything I've ever done with her is wrong 27 years spent 27 years together right and and she shaped my life with her advice with her wisdom and with her mistakes understand that huh even the bits that we don't like about our partner are the parts that shape us onto the person that we are right and it's almost Criminal I I say that openly it's almost criminal that we LED our egos and our anger and that I have I have a couple of friends who are so wonderful I I loveed them so much Colombian when I when when I went to Colombia the first time they invited me they were helping me spread um s for happy at the time and they're wonderful in every way and they separated and I keep telling them H with two kids between you and all of that love what really matters is how are you going to move forward from here can you actually talk every week can you parent together can you right and I think this is what what most people forget when the anger takes them over when the ego takes them over Nebel shaped my life she I I always tell her I am the person that I am because of how we started our life together in the years we spent together okay and if I'm ungrateful for that then I truly am the wrong person I am a bad person and I ask everyone to to think about that I ask everyone who somehow even even if it was a painful breakup or a painful ending I asked them to try and say hey by the way I'm grateful for the time that I had you in my life you've got one last 30- second phone call with her why would you say that such a tough question after I losing so many people this year um I think what I would probably say is uh I wish life didn't give us that test so losing Ali I think was bigger than both both of us uh this is difficult when you when you I think we neither of us despite how well we did terms of being calm and grateful and peaceful it's it was just it still is the most difficult thing ever and Niel is such a beautiful fragile um I don't know if fragile is the right word delicate maybe delicate is the right word uh beautiful soul I think that Gap was so harsh and it's not our it's not our choice how life treats us I would have wished that this had never happened I would have wished that she had never been subjected to that pay and I as I said I would I would do what Ali did to us before he left I would simply say all of the things that she taught me I would simply say how grateful I am to have her in my life still and uh yeah I hope I never have that call I hope I never have that call I don't know how many more I can take to be honest oh thank you thank you for everything every time we speak I um I push you on these questions and I think it's important for me to say because you have a remarkable level of wisdom which helps me to confront things that I think sometimes I'm avoiding it's funny that where I I had been thinking about what we spoke about actually uh for a while I wanted to tell you that somehow you brought it up today in front of I don't know how many million people I I really really think of your Brilliance out of season I think there is a different season for you now we don't know what it is but I think your Brilliance in your 20s was applied in a season different than your current brins what do you think it is I really think that your ability to reach people can be converted into a much more rewarding result then just success and what do you think that looks like you think it looks like this it does that's you don't have to change a thing you have to change the intention of what you're why you're doing those things and what will happen if I do I think you'll probably one of be one of the most heard people on the planet I think you'll bring a lot of wisdom to a lot of people not always yours by the way yeah rarely mine yeah and I and I think you're going to be rewarded very handsomely for that by life okay you've given me a lot to think about before I descend further into my existential crisis I'm going to let you go um but again everybody please buy the book love you man thank you so much St honestly I I really enjoyed this one probably my favorite conversation between us it's yeah it's always wonderful thank you so much for having me [Music]
