Master Human Nature & Hack Your Way To Success - Steven Bartlett (4K)

Chris Williamson 0:00 You are a guy who likes stories and likes ideas.

Steven Bartlett 0:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 0:04 So am I. So today, I wanna go through some of the best ideas that I've learned from you over the last year or so. First one, "The frame matters more than the picture." What's that mean?

Steven Bartlett 0:15 (inhales) I think often in life, whether it's marketing or innovation or when we're building companies or products or making content, we fall into the trap of thinking that the thing we're creating in and of itself is doing all of the work to tell the story. But when I looked at tons of studies, when I looked at Apples and art galleries, and when I looked at, um, Coca-Cola studies that they did where they put Coca-Cola in a glass and then Pepsi in another glass, and then did a different study where they showed you which one was which, it's so clear that much of the work is being done in psychology, not in reality. And what I mean by that is, if we just think about the Apple store, every electronic store you've ever walked into in your life is kind of like a crazy jungle of wires, right? That's how electronics st- stores always were. What Apple did differently, and which helped them to justify the cost of a $2,000 smartphone, was they gave the, uh, the iPhone space in the shop. And we intuitively know that real estate is expensive, so the space that the object is given actually pours into the value of the object itself. So in an Apple store, because it has two feet eith- either side of it, the frame in which it's presented is telling you that this item in the middle is high value. The, the context you've always seen that kind of framing in is an art gallery, where you have one-off special pieces. The other thing I think is so critical to what Apple do so well is they only show you one of each device, and they keep the rest in the back room. If we think about scarcity creating value, things that are perceived to be in limited supply, like pieces of art, where they're s- they're typically one-offs, are seen in higher value. The frame in which you present something is doing so much of the work to, to communicate the value of the thing within s- within it. Um, and even in the Pepsi-Coca-Cola studies, which are super famous from back in the day, people would rate the Coca-Cola drink h- more highly when it came in the can and you could see what you were drinking. They would say, "That's the better one." But when they removed the can and told people that the Pepsi was a Coca-Cola or they had blind, um, cups with nothing written on them, people chose the Pepsi. The frame and the story there are making people believe that something tastes entirely better. So it's not just about value, it's about taste and sense, and really at, at its core, psychology.

Chris Williamson 2:16 There's a story from Sam Harris that I love, which kind of takes this from the business marketing into the personal development space, and he says, "After you've finished a workout, CrossFit or Brazilian jujitsu or intervals or whatever, and you're laid on the floor panting, making a sweat angel, and you've got the taste of metal in the back of your throat and you're hot and e- e- every, the vision's blurry, everything, right, that sensation, although objectively being quite uncomfortable, your felt sense of it is satisfaction." It's pleasure in a way.

Steven Bartlett 2:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:43 It's a very kind of, uh, masochistic type of pleasure.

Steven Bartlett 2:46 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 2:47 But if you spontaneously had that happen while you were sat in traffic, you'd be fucking terrified.

Steven Bartlett 2:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:52 You would ring the ambulance and you would say, "I, I'm dying. Th- this is a heart attack or a stroke or whatever." So the frame that we place around our experience largely determines our experience.

Steven Bartlett 3:02 And the question becomes, why? So as I talk about a lot from looking at some studies that they did on mice in a maze, where they put chocolate at the end of the maze and then set the mouse off, they scan the brain of the mouse as it's going through the maze the first time and it's firing like crazy, so much activity in the brain as it's sniffing everything and scratching everything. Eventually, it finds the chocolate. The second time in the maze, they scan the, the mouse's brain and they put it back into the same maze with chocolate at the end of it, and it glides through the maze with no cognitive activity appearing to happen at all. It's gone into autopilot. And like, when we think about the, the amount of cognitive load that the brain would encounter every day, just when I'm in this room, the amount of things that I would have to think about, or, or, um, to save cognitive capacity, tune out of, what we know is the brain is taking shortcuts, and the frame and the anchors around the thing you're looking at provide tons of shortcuts. So even in the case of what I talk, talk a little bit about as well is if I gave... In these studies, they gave people three options. "Do you wanna go to an all-inclusive trip to Paris or an all-inclusive trip to Rome?" And in that study, people go, "I want the all-inclusive trip to Paris." But in the second study, they say, "Do you want an all-inclusive trip to Paris or an all-inclusive trip to Rome, or an all-inclusive trip to Rome without coffee?" People suddenly choose the middle option, the all-inclusive trip to Rome.

Chris Williamson 4:19 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 4:19 And it's purely because this third option, which has entered the f- the frame, has tricked the mind to think, "God, if they removed coffee from the all-inclusive trip to Rome-

Chris Williamson 4:28 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 4:28 ... the all-inclusive trip to Rome must be way better, because they haven't removed it from the trip to Paris."

Chris Williamson 4:32 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 4:33 A slight thing. And we see it, again, on menus and in electronic stores with TVs. And if you go into a, a s- a, a steak restaurant and there's three steaks, people will typically choose the middle one, because the, the cheapest one and the most expensive one are telling you a story that the cheap one's too, yeah, probably not good, the expensive one's a little bit too bougie, and that middle one, which is anchored in the middle, in the middle of that frame, is probably the nice, happy medium between the two. And this is happening all throughout our lives. We're taking shortcuts, using the frame to tell us stories of the thing that sits within it.

Chris Williamson 5:02 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 5:03 People don't think about the frame. They think about the thing they're creating. But great artists, great innovators, your Steve Jobs of the world, your Teslas of the world, they obsess about the frame, because it's hard to check... Like, if you think about, we wanna make an advance on people's perception of our product, the thing we've created or the content, it's really hard to do that in reality. Like, it's really hard, as Rory Sutherland says, to make a train faster or to make an iPhone better.

Chris Williamson 5:26 Correct. Correct.

Steven Bartlett 5:27 But it's easy to play with the frame to change the story in the consumer's mind.

Chris Williamson 5:32 Yeah. This is where differentiating yourself with whatever you choose to do, people get captured. They obsess over the actual thing itself.

Steven Bartlett 5:41 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 5:41 Whereas there's all of these other ancillary, extrinsic, sort of diffuse differences that you can use. And, um, yeah, it's why, you know, I've spent so much money to make this look pretty.

Steven Bartlett 5:52 Hm.

Chris Williamson 5:52 Because when people look at this, it's filmed in a different aspect ratio, right? It's not filmed in 16:9. It's filmed in a custom version of Cinemascope, right? It perfectly fits an i- anybody that's watching on an iPhone now, turn it to widescreen, and you'll see that it perfectly fills. There's no bars at the top. There's no bars at the sides. It'll even get cut off by the circle of the bezel of the iPhone. That's how perfectly curated this is for the mobile viewing experience.

Steven Bartlett 6:14 Shall I say what I think the most impressive thing that you do is? That's so tiny and it's actually just four characters long.

Chris Williamson 6:18 Hit me.

Steven Bartlett 6:19 ... in terms of the frame, is you write, in the title, "4K." Nobody cares. Right? Objectively, it's not gonna change the content, uh, the experience of the content itself. But when you say 4K, it's actually telling a much bigger story. It's actually saying high quality, high production value, um, and really like the- the second order thing is they're really worth your time.

Chris Williamson 6:43 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 6:43 We've invested a lot in this. Just four characters it's taking in your YouTube title, but it's speaking about the quality of what I'm about to watch, and I think that is probably doing a tremendous work on retention

Chris Williamson 6:53 (laughs) Heavy lifting.

Steven Bartlett 6:54 ... with playthrough. And it's just, uh, you just write 4K in little brackets.

Chris Williamson 6:57 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 6:57 But it, it says so much.

Chris Williamson 6:59 Yeah. Well, I think when you're looking at trying to compete with, like you say, you're, you're limited by the reality of transistor size and circuit board capacity and all the rest of it. If you look at the difference between an iPhone and an, uh, I don't even know what the other ones are-

Steven Bartlett 7:13 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 7:14 ... a Samsung or an LG or something-

Steven Bartlett 7:16 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 7:16 ... if you look at the difference, the Samsung and the LGs had features and it's had speed and megapixels and all the rest of it that iPhone's still catching up to. But what don't you get? You don't get the experience. You don't get the status that's associated with it. And all of that is the alchemy that Rory talks about.

Steven Bartlett 7:32 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:32 All right, next one.

Chris Williamson 7:33 Next one. You do not get to choose what you believe. How is that the case?

Steven Bartlett 7:39 This is one of the, the, the most, I think probably the most important things I've discovered over the last couple of years, because our lives are essentially beliefs that we've accepted as being subjectively true, whether they are objectively true or not. Um, we- our lives are run on this instruction manual of these beliefs that we've inherited. And when, when we're thinking about belief change, which is, um, what we need to do to, you know, pick up a, a healthy habit in the gym or to build a business or to persevere in any context, it all comes back to like, okay, how do I change something that's limiting me? How do I change a limiting belief and how do I adopt a new belief? There's a, a big sort of contingent in the self-development community that say you can go and look in a mirror and you can recite things to yourself and the brain will believe those to be true. So there's a whole contingent that say just think about something and you'll believe it. But when I reflected on that in my own life, I, I asked myself, "How many of my beliefs have I actually chosen?" And I used to be religious up until I was 18 years old. I believed in some kind of God, Christianity. Um, and I- I- I zoomed in on why that belief fell away. What was it? And really what happened for me, and what I've come to learn, is that, um, there isn't a single belief I have that I've chosen. And I c- the, the experiment I'd ask anyone to run that's listening to this is, think of a belief you currently have in your life, anything you have, and ask yourself the question, could you unchoose to believe that right now? If I, if I put a billion dollars on the table, of Elon Musk's money, and I said, "Um, I'm gonna give you this billion dollars. If you don't believe this hypothetical two pence coin that I'm holding, if you believe it's a 5p coin."

Chris Williamson 9:10 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 9:10 Very simple. There's a billion dollars on the line. And the reality is, you couldn't. You couldn't for a billion dollars. Or if I held someone you love at gunpoint, you couldn't change any belief you have. You could lie. I'm not talking about faith and hope. I'm talking about actually believing it's true. So if we, if we all agree upon that, and I, I ran some surveys with people where I asked them this question, about 20% of people originally thought, um, they could choose their beliefs. And then when I ran that survey, almost 99% of people realized that they're not choosing their beliefs. Where are my beliefs coming from? Well, all of our beliefs, in my view, are based on the evidence that we've acquired, usually through our first-party senses. Sometimes vicariously from observations and sometimes because they've come from authority figures and figures in our lives that we trust. It's evidence that we've accepted as truth. Doesn't mean it is true, but it's evidence we've accepted. Um, and therefore, if you wanna change your beliefs, what's abundantly clear is you have to go and put yourself in situations where your existing beliefs are counteracted with new evidence. So when it comes to speaking on stage or when it comes to, uh, learning how to be a podcaster or when it comes to self-belief or whatever it is, you have to go and collide with new evidence.

Chris Williamson 10:17 Yeah. Ryan Holiday's got this amazing quote where he says, "Self-belief is overrated. I prefer to use evidence."

Steven Bartlett 10:23 Yeah. Exactly that.

Chris Williamson 10:24 And it gets back to that Hormozi quote I said to Goggins, right? "You do not become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are. Outwork your self-doubt." And ultimately, hoping that you're going to be able to... Uh, b- believing that you can think your way out of a thinking problem is like believing you can sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction.

Steven Bartlett 10:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:46 Right? You have to give yourself something else that's going to step change where you're at.

Steven Bartlett 10:50 I was hypnotized last week after-

Chris Williamson 10:53 How'd that go?

Steven Bartlett 10:53 ... after we met. And that, I said to her before she hypnotized me, I said, "Can I ask you a question? Do we get to choose what we believe?" And she actually said yes. And I think she, she interpreted it differently. She's a very, very famous therapist called Marisa Peer.

Chris Williamson 11:06 Did you video this?

Steven Bartlett 11:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:07 Is it coming out on the internet?

Steven Bartlett 11:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:08 Amazing.

Steven Bartlett 11:09 30 minutes. It's hyp- hypnotizing me to not eat sugar again.

Chris Williamson 11:12 Okay.

Steven Bartlett 11:12 To, like, have a better relationship with sugar.

Chris Williamson 11:13 Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steven Bartlett 11:14 Right. Um, and it was interesting 'cause she takes me back to my childhood and then confronts me with the, the information that my inadequate lunchbox made me feel insecure. It made me feel a ton of shame growing up 'cause I never had anything.

Chris Williamson 11:26 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 11:26 Like, we didn't have f- food or m- like, money or those kinds of things. So really, my relationship with sugar now is it's- it's- resembles power-

Chris Williamson 11:34 A status symbol.

Steven Bartlett 11:34 ... control, and fitting in.

Chris Williamson 11:35 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 11:36 The fact that I can just order whatever I want, anyone... So she went, took me back there and unwired that. But what she's actually doing is she's giving me new evidence, 'cause she takes me right back to that kid and she's basically whispering into his n- his ear a new story. And that's, and so I actually think that the principle that we don't get to choose what, uh, what we believe still holds true. But with hypnosis, which seems to be the outlier, they're giving you new evidence that, that counteracts your current beliefs. That's all she did.

Chris Williamson 12:01 Interesting. Yeah, so, uh, an important sort of caveat is that new evidence doesn't necessarily need to come from the external world.

Steven Bartlett 12:08 Yes.

Chris Williamson 12:08 It can come from telling yourself a new story about the things that you already believe that you believe.

Steven Bartlett 12:12 And that's what hypnosis is. It doesn't need to be first-party evidence that you encounter with your eyes. A- it can be someone else that's very, very skilled in taking you to th- to that belief-

Chris Williamson 12:21 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 12:22 ... and smashing it head-on.

Chris Williamson 12:23 I love, I love when this happens. So let's think about the two things that we've said so far. The frame matters more than the picture. You do not get to choose what you believe.What we're talking about here is that your beliefs are largely determined by the frame that you place around the current moment.

Steven Bartlett 12:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:36 And that frame, given professional help or a powerful hypnotizer, can end up being moved in a way that also moves your beliefs.

Steven Bartlett 12:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:44 Right? Yeah. That's very interesting.

Steven Bartlett 12:46 When sh- h- people think of hypnosis as like someone tricking you into thinking you're a monkey and then you start clucking-

Chris Williamson 12:50 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 12:50 ... it wasn't that. I was well-aware of where I was and everything going on, but she took me back to a hill I sat on when I was four years old looking into my lunch box and I felt like I was there. And then she told me a story, like a different story about that moment. When I said earlier that it's, we've interpreted it as subjectively true, she gave me a different interpretation on my lunch box. And she then... And, and that was the key thing. She gave me new evidence about an old interpretation of an old situation, and that's what hypnosis does as an outlier. But th- for those of us that can't access hypnosis, the other way to counteract our beliefs, as I said, is to, you have to go and put yourselves in situations where you're gonna be presented with new evidence. Um, and it's interesting with belief change, you'll accept evidence that is complementary. As I said to you, l- you know, if someone says, "You're more looking than you, you thought you were-"

Chris Williamson 13:34 Hmm.

Steven Bartlett 13:34 ... it sh- w- it's shown in the studies that people are more likely to move in that direction. If I said, "You're worse looking than you are," people are less likely to move in that direction. So even framing the new evidence as good news is a useful tool for belief change. The other thing is, if y- if we have 95% of the same beliefs, I'm significantly more likely to accept one from you. So when we need-

Chris Williamson 13:52 Hmm.

Steven Bartlett 13:52 ... to, to embody a new belief, going and getting it from a source we trust, which typically isn't our mother 'cause we understand the bias there, but someone that we believe and trust in, is a useful tool for belief change as well. Um, and yeah, I studied this really, really deeply. I looked at why you could go up to a child and say to the child, "I just saw a pink elephant flying." And they might believe it, but you couldn't say that to an adult and they wouldn't believe it.

Chris Williamson 14:13 Have you seen those studies that were done, very unethical studies, I think in the '60s and '70s, where they took two groups of children and pushed onto one the fact that they stuttered, and they would bring it up all the time and they would point at them and point at them. And these kids developed lifelong stutters-

Steven Bartlett 14:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:29 ... throughout their entire adulthood-

Steven Bartlett 14:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:31 ... because they were told, uh, "You, you mustn't stutter. Be careful that you stu- you're bring- you're doing it again, you're doing it again." Yeah. We're reinforced by what happens in the world.

Steven Bartlett 14:38 That's labeling theory for you, right? And that's a form of stereotype threat, where you're told implicitly that you are something so you, you accept it to be true-

Chris Williamson 14:46 Tell you-

Steven Bartlett 14:46 ... and start to embody it.

Chris Williamson 14:47 Tell you what I found that was really interesting, people are more prejudiced against those with different accents than those with different skin colors. So this shows up again and again in the data. And it, it, it didn't really make sense until I spoke to this evolutionary anthropologist and he said, "Well, think ancestrally about how novel it would've been to have met somebody with a different skin color." It's the tribe from the next valley over.

Steven Bartlett 15:08 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 15:09 Right? It's not somebody with a different skin color, but they'll speak slightly differently.

Steven Bartlett 15:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 15:12 They'll have slightly different words that they use.

Steven Bartlett 15:14 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 15:15 So we are predisposed to be very prejudiced against someone who might look like us or might not, but sounds different. And it makes kinda sense. So, you know, if someone's not sure or not believing this, think about what happens. Someone walks into the room with a different skin color than you have, but the exact same accent, that tells you so much about this, where this person's from, the background that they grew up in, all the rest of it. And let's say someone walks into the room who has the same skin color as you, but a vastly different accent, they've got a Scouse accent or they've got a Texan accent, and you go, "Wow. Like, this person is very different to me." And I just think it's, it's a-

Steven Bartlett 15:50 Professional prejudice.

Chris Williamson 15:52 No, any kind of prejudice. So like just the affinity that you have with the person that's across from you.

Steven Bartlett 15:59 Affinity, okay.

Chris Williamson 15:59 Yeah. Uh, and it, it shows up as in, uh, especially in the UK, which is a very class-based system-

Steven Bartlett 16:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 16:05 ... right? America's dominated by race, but the UK... I, I only learned this when a friend came over to the US, uh, from the US to the UK and he says, "You guys talk about people being posh all the time."

Steven Bartlett 16:17 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 16:17 It's like, that's never a term that I've ever heard, y- I know what it means-

Steven Bartlett 16:20 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 16:20 ... but it's never a term that I've heard used in America. You'll never talk about someone being posh.

Steven Bartlett 16:24 It's interesting 'cause prejudice is such a context dependent thing. Whereas if you're looking for a 100-meter sprinter, you know, I'm, you know-

Chris Williamson 16:32 (laughs) I'm looking at you.

Steven Bartlett 16:32 ... if you're looking for... You know, and so you can go through different classifications and say, "Who would you want? Who would you be most happy or have a highest affinity to in different contexts?"

Chris Williamson 16:39 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 16:40 And it, and it varies. I'm, I'm really fascinated as well by like self-prejudice and the power that that exerts over us. And how in the studies that I was reading, if a, um... Because there's a stereotype that women are wor- worse at maths, they did these studies where they just asked you to tick your gender before you do the test, and performance dips in women that have to tick their gender. Same in, with Black people, their performance dips if they're just reminded of their own identity. If they have to write their name, performance dips. So they did th- some studies where they got people to change their name and performance increased.

Chris Williamson 17:09 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 17:09 And it goes to show that there's a stereotype threat going on within us-

Chris Williamson 17:12 Internalizing it.

Steven Bartlett 17:13 ... at all times. And then the, m- most importantly is that when they removed those stereotype threats before doing a test, performance was equal. There was no deterioration. And I think about that from labeling theory and the harm grades are causing all of us, because me getting Es and Ds-

Chris Williamson 17:27 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 17:28 ... it's a miracle that I, I didn't interpret that as an, "I'm an E person," and then show up in life in such a way.

Chris Williamson 17:34 There's this similar quote from Anthony Buccino, "It's more socially acceptable to be our own biggest critic than it is to be our own biggest cheerleader."

Steven Bartlett 17:43 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 17:43 And I really, coming from a British background, I rail against this sort of zero sum, crabs in a bucket, tall poppy syndrome mentality. And yeah, a lot of people might feel that, right? That you are able to say things to yourself that you would never dare to say probably even to the worst enemy that you've got out there.

Steven Bartlett 18:04 A 100%.

Chris Williamson 18:04 And you're able to kind of create this designer drug, perfectly curated curse, you know exactly the scabs to pick, you know exactly the pain points, you know all of your shame, and you're able to, you're able to point at it 1,000 times a day and remind yourself of it. And it's so strange, "It's more socially acceptable to be our own biggest critic than it is to be our own biggest cheerleader." I wish that wasn't the case.

Steven Bartlett 18:29 Oh, I've been thinking a lot lately, I've not actually spoken about it, but, um, in trying to help some friends solve some of their personal problems in their lives where they seem to be in a downward self-esteem spiral or a downward discipline spiral, it's always hard to give advice, and I'm actually cautious about being a fixer. It's something Simon Sinek t- talked to me about, sometimes you just need to sit in the mud with people. But one of the observations I've had is that the path out of that despair is by keeping commitments to yourself. And I, this kinda goes back to what you're saying about the self story and what you think about yourself every day, I think when I'm trying to give friends advice...... these days, what I say to them is, "The rewards you get in terms of self-esteem and self-story, what you think of yourself, will be correlated to the size of the commitment you keep when no one is watching."

Chris Williamson 19:07 Mmm.

Steven Bartlett 19:07 So if you say to yourself, "I'm going to do this" when no one is watching, p- we don't think it's important to keep those commitments. We think s- lying to ourself is, there's no, there's no sort of, um, punishment for that. I actually think the greatest consequence in life is not keeping commitments to yourself and I think that compounds to, as we talked about, where does beliefs come from? I think it compounds as personal evidence, which is deposited in this instruction manual of who you are and how you behave and how you show up and what you're capable of, all those tiny little commitments and then I think you can get into a downward commitment spiral because of that, because you think you're a ch- you know-

Chris Williamson 19:40 You don't have faith in your own word.

Steven Bartlett 19:41 ... you don't have faith in anything you do.

Chris Williamson 19:43 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 19:43 And this causes a downward spiral, so isn't it really lovely to know that maybe the way to ch- check, turn that into a positive, upward reinforcing spiral is just keep that tiny commitment you made to yourself today?

Chris Williamson 19:54 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 19:55 Like, you don't have to move, move Mount Everest, you don't need to go on a seven day ayahuasca retreat. How about when you said you were going to get in bed at 10:00 PM, you do that?

Chris Williamson 20:03 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 20:04 And you stack that. You talked about Alex Hormozi's quote about stacking evidence.

Chris Williamson 20:07 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 20:07 Stack those things for a week. Honestly, I've seen it in my friends and their lives have changed. The commitments we keep to ourselves, if we say those are the most important things for compounding that evidence in our favor, everybody can start there today. Like, yesterday's out of play, but the, the next thing you do in the next hour, can you k- keep that commitment to yourself? That's what I think a lot about. I think life is much more simple than we often make out.

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Chris Williamson 21:29 The Mark Manson quote here is, "The person you have to spend the most time listening to in your life is yourself. Try not to lose their respect."

Steven Bartlett 21:37 Mmm.

Chris Williamson 21:37 And self-respect and self-esteem, I think, largely comes from having faith in your own word. So if you were to treat yourself like a friend you are responsible for helping, which is Peterson's advice, right? Let's say that every time you invited a friend out for lunch, they turned up late or didn't turn up at all, they didn't text back, they just kept not holding to their word. After a while, you wouldn't believe in them, you wouldn't be friends with them, and you'd stop inviting them out to lunch.

Steven Bartlett 22:03 You'd let them go.

Chris Williamson 22:03 You are that friend to yourself. How on earth do you think that you're going to be able to move mountains and get out of that relationship that you don't like and move countries or change career when you can't not hit snooze, even though last night you promised yourself that you weren't going to hit snooze?

Steven Bartlett 22:18 Mmm.

Chris Williamson 22:19 And it's how people that are able to do extraordinary things have been able to get there, that they've just started off unbelievably small, right? "I'm just not gonna hit the snooze button. I'm just not going to use my phone before 9:00 AM." Right? These are... Controlling your thoughts is unbelievably difficult and requires a lot of meditation and maybe psychedelics. Controlling your actions is relatively easy, especially stuff like, "Don't pick your phone up before you've gone for a walk." Just try that in the morning. Sunlight before screen light, as Huberman says.

Steven Bartlett 22:46 And that's the, the easiest way to control your thoughts.

Chris Williamson 22:49 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 22:49 Because there's a two-way relationship between what you do and how you feel.

Chris Williamson 22:52 Absolutely.

Steven Bartlett 22:52 So, so if you wanna change how you feel, focus on what you're doing. If you wanna change h- what you're doing, focus on how you feel. But, but you said about extraordinary people there, this is what Chris Eubank Jr. said to me, which really stuck with me. He said, "My dad flew me to Cuba, um, and they, we had a training camp out there and they surprised me. They put the, the heavyweight champion of Cuba in the ring with me." He's not, he's like a middleweight or something. "He gets in the ring, this heavyweight storms across to him, knocks him so hard he flies out of the ring and hits the floor, dead leg as h- and he's laying on the floor." He says, he said to me, "I looked up at the ring and I saw this massive Cuban heavyweight stood there." And he said, "I realized in that moment that I had to get back in the ring, because if I didn't, it would let the demons in." And a- another instance of when he talks about the demons more specifically was on his story about the treadmill. He goes, "If I'm running on a treadmill and I get to mile nine and I get complete cramp in one of my legs and I know I've told myself I'm gonna run 10 kilometers today..."

Chris Williamson 23:43 Mmm.

Steven Bartlett 23:44 He goes, "I will have to limp the last mile, even if no one's watching, because I can't let the demons in. And if I let the demons in, they'll show up in the 11th round of a championship fight when there's 50,000 people watching me in the audience, and I know deep in myself story that I'm the type of person that quits th- when things get hard because I got off that treadmill at mile nine when no one was watching." It would modify myself story. The commitments we keep to ourself and what we do when no one's watching is the most persuasive evidence that governs everything we then do every day thereafter and this is, for me, h- was a huge revelation in my life because, you know, you can look at certain people in your lives that are struggling in certain situations and oftentimes it's a result of continually unkept commitments to themself.

Chris Williamson 24:27 Yeah. I don't know anybody who has done extraordinary things that isn't keeping their word in that way.

Steven Bartlett 24:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 24:34 Right? There's... Consistency doesn't guarantee that you're going to be successful, but not being consistent will guarantee that you're not successful.

Steven Bartlett 24:42 Let, let me un-Superman. Like, let's like... The mess of this-

Chris Williamson 24:46 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 24:46 ... is some people are remarkably good at keeping commitments in some areas of their lives-

Chris Williamson 24:50 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 24:50 ... and hopeless at in others. So they'll have kind of dual self-esteem. They'll be incredibly, you know, confident and secure in their work, but in relationships or whatever else, they'll be-... uh, ground zero. And I'm very much one of those people, that has areas of my life where I have immense commitment, and you'd say, "Oh, he's such a disciplined person," and then other areas of my life where I resemble-

Chris Williamson 25:11 You've just been hypnotized by the sugar.

Steven Bartlett 25:12 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 25:12 You know what I mean?

Steven Bartlett 25:13 Yeah. I, uh, actually haven't eaten sugar since as well, so it did kinda work.

Chris Williamson 25:16 Oi.

Steven Bartlett 25:16 I've no desire to have sugar anymore.

Chris Williamson 25:18 Hell yeah.

Steven Bartlett 25:18 So.

Chris Williamson 25:19 No, I, I know exactly what you mean, and this is something... "How you do anything is how you do everything" is a, a, a lovely quote and a lovely idea, but it piles an awful lot of pressure on you, right? And it's very easy, especially as we said, it's more socially acceptable to be our own biggest critic than our own biggest s- uh, like, complementary. Given that, if you mess up a little bit, that can quite quickly spiral, "Oh, I, I... Chris said that I shouldn't check my phone before I go for a walk in the morning, therefore it means that I might not as well go to the gym and I might as well, like, break my alcohol streak and, um," you know, all of these other things.

Steven Bartlett 25:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 25:53 Finding this balance of being robust enough and delicate enough with yourself to say, "Okay, I know that you tried, well, let's get back on the horse again tomorrow," right? It's, it's a delicate balance, right? Holding yourself to high standards whilst also being sufficiently supportive.

Steven Bartlett 26:08 And this is the same in business. So, it's not... You don't break trust when you don't do what you said you were gonna do. You break trust when you don't do what you said you were gonna do and you don't own up to it, take responsibil-

Chris Williamson 26:20 Hmm.

Steven Bartlett 26:20 ... responsibility for it and point it out. So in business, there's oftentimes where you say something to your team, and for whatever reason, mitigating circumstances, that thing can no longer happen. Trust isn't broken at that point. Trust is broken when you then don't sit in front of your team and say, "This is why this didn't happen," and at the same, I think, re- applies to yourself. You're gonna miss some things in life, but taking responsibility for it, staying empowered and not saying, "Oh, I couldn't do that because..."

Chris Williamson 26:45 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 26:45 Or, "I needed da-da-da." No. It was your priorities. It was the priorities and the decisions you made. So when I miss my commitments, the saving grace for me is I go, "I did that. That was me. That was a choice that I made and if it's a choice I made, or didn't make, it's a choice I can make in the future." The part you see in that chapter is you see obfuscation of responsibility, um, you see blame, you see excuses, and you see disempowerment in the form of language like, "I couldn't because..."

Chris Williamson 27:13 Yup.

Steven Bartlett 27:13 You know, or, "I needed to... " or... Which I think is scary language.

Chris Williamson 27:18 What's the difference between parrots and practitioners?

Steven Bartlett 27:20 Just something I've been thinking a lot about. I- I've observed the most successful, intelligent, creative, innovative, apparently original people in my life, and people that aren't even in my life. And the, the consistent thing amongst all of them and in my businesses is that those that are truly exceptional and that over any extended period of time when you zoom out achieve disproportionate levels of success, start with this kind of boring drudgery of obsession over their craft, driven by this deep passion and curiosity. I mean, Jimmy Carr's a prime example of that, leaving his, his potentially lucrative career to go and tell jokes for no money for 10 years. Derren Brown left a great potential career and pathway to becoming very, very successful in a sort of typical sense, to go and do card tricks on a table in Bristol. Everyone's story when, when I... The people that I admire that are the masters of, of their craft were these deep practitioners. And then you have this other type of person, which I call kind of the parrots, where they observe these people and the learnings that these people have given them and they kind of just regurgitate what they're hearing, but they never do the time to practitioner so they never get to that deeper level of understanding. And as they say, you know, to learn something, you read about it. They often say to, to understand something, you write about it. For me, I think, to understand something in this context, you do it, and you do it in this iterat- iterative pattern for many, many years and your depth of understanding once you've done something is unparalleled, and that's the foundation for great creativity. You see it with Fred Again. He's an-

Chris Williamson 28:50 What a guy, man.

Steven Bartlett 28:51 ... he, he's a, he's an absolute... In my mind, he's an absolute genius.

Chris Williamson 28:54 He's a fucking savant. For the people-

Steven Bartlett 28:55 He's a savant.

Chris Williamson 28:55 ... that don't know who we're talking about, Fred Again is a classically musically trained DJ who's put, turned his hand to, like, tech and house music, I suppose, but will also happily get up on the roof of his flat in Hackney or wherever it is and play a completely solo set classically on piano or keys.

Steven Bartlett 29:14 You see the conviction of that and you see the, the first principle nature of his work where he's doing something we've apparently never seen before. Of course he's t- taken inspiration points and he's using equipment that was already made before he was born, but he's pulling the pieces together in new ways and that's what creativity is. And that kind of creativity belongs to people that have gone right down to that first principle level. You're talking Elon Musk, you're talking-

Chris Williamson 29:34 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 29:34 ... your Kanyes of the world, and Fred Again. But he's pulling things together in different ways and expressing himself without the constraints of convention. That's what, that's what pioneers and practitioners do. And parrots c- can never do that 'cause they don't understand the sea floor. They just play with the boats on top of the water.

Chris Williamson 29:50 There's a quote that I've fallen in love with, "The magic you are looking for is in the work you're avoiding."

Steven Bartlett 29:56 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 29:57 Fuck, dude. "The magic you are looking for is in the work you're avoiding." And every single time that there is something in front of me that I, I, I feel like things aren't coming my way sufficiently quickly, I'm not making the progress that I want, it's because I'm dicking about over here and there is a large frog in front of me that I need to eat.

Steven Bartlett 30:16 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 30:16 I need to spend another half day reading a book. I need to spend some more time researching online and upping my skills in this particular area. I need to do whatever it is.

Steven Bartlett 30:25 Can I... Do you know what's interesting?

Chris Williamson 30:27 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 30:27 Is the most intelligent people I've met... No, the most successful act- people I've met as entrepreneurs and practitioners never read, never really read books. Like, even an Elon Musk of the world-

Chris Williamson 30:41 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 30:41 ... I, I know he watches movies and stuff, he gets his inspiration points from many areas, but thinking about the great CEOs that I've met and the great founders and the great artists I've met, there's almost a... You know, I, I think I said this to you earlier on, that knowing too much can be a real disservice to innovation and creativity. Like, knowing too much innovate- information-

Chris Williamson 31:00 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 31:00 ... whereas this sort of practitioner pathway where you naively stumble through new territories seems to be more conducive with the real pioneers.

Chris Williamson 31:07 I wonder whether that's-... the curse of knowledge, in a way. You familiar with this?

Steven Bartlett 31:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:11 Yeah, Steven Pinker's idea of the curse of knowledge, that when you start to learn things you can't understand that other people don't know it, and you also lose the learner's mind in some regard, which is you're not... Look, he said about you come into this room and there's a million bi- bits of information that you could be focusing on, but you're not focusing on those, you're focusing on the ones that matter.

Steven Bartlett 31:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 31:27 And I think that when you start to kid yourself that you know what you're talking about, you're no longer quite as open to these new ideas.

Steven Bartlett 31:33 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 31:33 I would say the difference for, you know, our industry, what we largely traffic in are anecdotes and insights, right? And they can come from experience, but I also like exposing myself to new ideas from other people and the quickest way to do that... Actually, you know, this is a lie. The quickest way to do that would be to permanently be going for dinner with interesting people. But that's like an unsustainable life. It would be like two hours of dinner with Douglas Murray, then Jimmy Carr, then Steven Bartlett then da- da- ... Like it, that would just be my existence and I'd just hear, "Oh yeah, and that's cool," and, "Oh yeah, what about that?" And, "Oh, I've never thought about this before." Like, that would be the way I'd do it. But in lieu of living this perpetual dinner life, reading books is a- a- a good second for me.

Steven Bartlett 32:16 Yeah, it's a good second. I just think about the things that I couldn't even express in words with my vocabulary, that I know about the art of marketing and human psychology and what- why people do what they do. Like, and the- the deep experiences that are all fundamentally intertwined and the mistakes that I made in the journey of getting there. Now in a book I might give you like the- the four paragraphs, but the rest of the iceberg-

Chris Williamson 32:36 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 32:37 ... is the foundation of the thing that sits on top of it, and if you think about podcasting, w- we both came into this industry, I'd say fairly late, compared to like the rest of the industry, right?

Chris Williamson 32:46 (laughs) Yeah, fair.

Steven Bartlett 32:46 But because of that, th- there's a naivety to it which allowed us to do new things, um, because we didn't read the book.

Chris Williamson 32:52 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 32:52 Um, that I think some of the radio industry are struggling with, with that transition.

Chris Williamson 32:56 Dude, I mean you're seeing it in America, the late night show hosts are trying to pivot from heavily scripted, heavily supported by writers and the production team and researchers and all this stuff, and then you put them down in a garage with a MV7 bus powered microphone in front of them and you realize, oh, like these people don't have any skills beyond being able to be very good at reading the script, and that's a massive skill. I- I couldn't do that. You put the script in front of me, I'm gonna fall to the floor. But, yeah, I-

Steven Bartlett 33:25 What's the takeaway here, though? If- if someone's listening to this now and they're a young person and they're at the start of their career, or even if they're not if- necessarily a young person, for me the takeaway is to go and fail at something that's high value in the future as soon as you can, with a l- with a- with the least amount of p- potential cost to yourself.

Chris Williamson 33:45 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 33:46 It's like, to go and practition... If I had kids now, I would tell them to go and join an AI startup that- that's well-funded, that's what I'd tell them to do, small group of people where they're gonna be close to the information, the- and the-

Chris Williamson 33:58 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 33:58 ... the evidence, and I'd tell them to go fail in a high value future industry. Th- that's the thing I would do. If you wanna be a master... But then okay, they have to pick an industry that they are innately passionate about-

Chris Williamson 34:06 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 34:07 ... 'cause you won't go for a decade with Fred again or Jimmy Carr or Darren Brown's curiosity if you don't, you're not innately captured by that thing. But I think we are looking for cheat codes, I think much of the reason why people probably listen to our stuff is we're, we want, we want the three tips.

Chris Williamson 34:22 How can I growth hack my personal development?

Steven Bartlett 34:24 You meet anyone, like you'll, you meet Jimmy or you meet Darren, you go, "Oh, huh, 15 years-"

Chris Williamson 34:29 It's a long time.

Steven Bartlett 34:30 "... of no money and busking." Think Capaldi.

Chris Williamson 34:32 Think- think about this. I wonder, and I ask myself this question a lot, I wonder how much of the development that we really value in ourselves isn't because of our own agentic, highly sovereign approach to marshaling our own life. I wonder how much of it just comes along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older.

Steven Bartlett 34:49 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:50 You're just, "This was gonna happen anyway."

Steven Bartlett 34:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:52 "And maybe I sped it up a little bit, and maybe I can, you know, create a nice story about why it happened," but the most wise people I know, they... It's very rare that I meet somebody who has, who is much older than me that doesn't have wisdom that's come along with it, which suggests that wisdom is just there for the ride-

Steven Bartlett 35:08 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 35:08 ... right, as a byproduct of aging. But yeah, I would say takeaways

Chris Williamson 35:12 from this, aim to focus on executing, so the f- the- the four disciplines of execution, a really interesting a- analogy that's used. The word strategy is in the top 10 of all LinkedIn words in bio descriptions and execution and executioner aren't even in the top 1,000.

Steven Bartlett 35:29 Mm.

Chris Williamson 35:29 Right? Because it's much easier to strategize than it is to execute, but if you... This is a term that's... You can tell people that really know business when they use one of a few terms. Talking about someone being a real operator-

Steven Bartlett 35:41 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 35:42 ... right? That's, you go, "Oh, okay." Say no more. Like I know there's someone that will get things fixed, right? That they're able to take charge of whatever the challenge is that's in front of them, and our mutual friend George Mack's got this beautiful idea. I'll ask you this one actually, so the way to work out who the highest agency person in your life is... Have you heard him do this before?

Steven Bartlett 36:01 No.

Chris Williamson 36:01 Fucking brilliant. Okay, so you are trapped in some South American jail, right? And you're about to be transported somewhere where no one's gonna be able to get you back. Let's, fucking Columbia, Argentina, somewhere, right? You have 24 hours and you only have one phone call to ring somebody to come and get you out. Who's that person that you ring?

Steven Bartlett 36:24 Ooh. (laughs) Prince William. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 36:39 (laughs) Right, okay. I feel like you've broken the game a little bit there.

Steven Bartlett 36:45 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 36:46 I don't think that was, that was perfectly fair.

Steven Bartlett 36:48 Do you know, my framework though was find someone that is both smart and influential, and that cares about me.

Chris Williamson 36:52 And a member of the royal family.

Steven Bartlett 36:54 Yeah, well, okay, and that cares enough about my predicament.

Chris Williamson 36:56 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 36:56 So-

Chris Williamson 36:57 But that- that- the- the framework that you came up with there if you don't know the future King of England is someone that is able to think on their own, that doesn't need instruction, that is going to be able to solve problems at a very high level, under pressure, very quickly. You know, just all of the things that you want in a friend.

Steven Bartlett 37:13 Yeah, so true. It did, you whittled it down to five people instantaneously in my head-

Chris Williamson 37:17 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 37:17 ... and I was deciding between them, but I thought, "I don't know if they can pull enough levers."

Chris Williamson 37:20 Fucking Prince William. Yeah, you've got an idea that's kind of similar, you must become a plan A thinker.

Steven Bartlett 37:26 Yeah. And just- t- on that last point-

Chris Williamson 37:27 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 37:27 ... it just popped into my head then that I think that what I'm saying here is that no matter what you're aiming at over the next 10 years in your life, I think this horrible realization that bucks the trend of every Instagram quote you'll ever read or every course you'll ever buy is that the fast way is the slow way because the slow way is the only way. Like, I s- I stood behind friend again this weekend as he did his show in an alley-palley to 10,000 people or whatever it was, and I'm looking at this guy going, "I want to do that. I wanna be able to do that." But my better sense from interviewing all these smart people knows that it's not a case of me doing a call... It goes- my m- my, my brain now goes, "Are you willing to put 20 years of silent, boring drudgery and obsession into doing that?" My brain goes, "No." So separate out the aspiration from the aberration.

Chris Williamson 38:10 Dude, I g- I, I gotta show you this. I gotta show you this. So Mark Manson put this quote up a few months ago, and I've not been able to stop thinking about it. "The most important question to ask is, 'What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?' Anything worthwhile is going to require some degree of pain and struggle. So, if you're oriented toward the pain and the struggle, you're probably going to be more aligned with what you're capable of accomplishing rather than if you just orient toward the pleasures." Hmm, so good because w- we say, "Find the thing which you enjoy the most," but really what you're finding is what is the pain you're prepared to swallow the most. Nothing worthwhile is going to come without discomfort. You know, even for me and you, love doing this show, love speaking to all these interesting people, get to fly around the world, and all th- but I would be lying if I said I love writing show notes or doing research in Guatemala airport at 3:00 in the morning because I'm on a delayed flight and I've got a flight- I've got a episode tomorrow. Like, it's grind. It's grind that I care about and it's grind that I can do that other people couldn't do, but it's not not-grind, right?

Steven Bartlett 39:16 This goes to the discipline equation, which I'm-

Chris Williamson 39:18 Yes, yes, yes.

Steven Bartlett 39:19 ... you, you might be-

Chris Williamson 39:20 I'm familiar with-

Steven Bartlett 39:20 ... might be coming at-

Chris Williamson 39:20 ... but hit it, hit it.

Steven Bartlett 39:21 Because that, that really embodies it, that Mark Manson quote about the pain you're willing to encounter. Um, I was trying to figure out why there's some areas in my life where I'm disciplined and other areas of my life where I seem to lack discipline, kind of what I was saying earlier about being a dualistic type of individual, and I came up with this discipline equation that I'd love to interrogate with you, because I've not thrown it at enough people to know that if it's, if it's true or not. So h- discipline equals, um, the importance of the goal plus let's just say the importance of the goal to you, so the subjective importance of the goal. How much does that goal matter to you? Plus the psychological y- enjoyment you get in the pursuit of the goal, right? So as you pursue the goal, how psychologically enjoy- enjoyable and reinforcing and, you know, is that for you? Minus the psychological cost of the pursuit of the goal. So I can... I'll run you through some examples. Simon Sinek said to me, "Well, Steve, I take the bins out at 7:00 AM in the morning yesterday. Um, I didn't want to do that, but I did it." So okay, let's run that through the framework. What would happen if you didn't take the bins out? That under- that sort of underpins and defines the importance of that goal. Well, he'd get a fine and then he'd have- have an overflowing bin out the front of his house. So the why is high, the psychological enjoyment of pursuing taking the bins out is very low, right? And the friction of getting out of bed at 7:00 AM is high, but thankfully the why is so strong that regardless of the fact that the pursuit- the enjoyment of the pursuit is low and the friction is high, the behavior still occurs. Going to the gym, learning to DJ, in all areas of my life I can run it through that equation and go, "Okay, so in the pandemic the reason I've been going to the gym for three years straight now is because my why surged, the s- the p- the perception of the importance of that goal surged." I saw how our existing health correlates to our health outcomes, and I realized for the first time in my life, this clear thought that I couldn't unshake, that my health is my first foundation. It is this table that everything I love and care about sits upon. So that has to be my number one priority reflected in my schedule. So that, that changed, that went up. The psychological pursuit of going to the gym is kind of enjoyable, there's a bit of a dopamine release there and it's fun to do, that feels good for my self-esteem, and the friction associated with it is low, unless, unless I go to a gym where people know me and I spend the whole time talking. Then what I ha- what happens if I'm put in that situation is I don't go to the gym. The discipline equation changes. So part of the reason I made a big investment in a company called Until is because I can have somewhere I can work out and focus on the workout, genuinely. (laughs) That, that's one of the things that actually changed my relationship with the gym and nearly threw me off the habit-

Chris Williamson 41:46 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 41:46 ... was th- that psychological cost. So how do you... how does that sit with you?

Chris Williamson 41:49 It does... There's... You've got the discipline equation, death, time, and discipline.

Steven Bartlett 41:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:52 What's the death part?

Steven Bartlett 41:54 So, like, w- when I started writing that particular chapter in my book, uh, to understand discipline you have to understand the scarcity of time because, you know... So I, I, I started because I was gonna write a, a chapter about time management. People want to know how to manage their time. And as I went through the hundreds of available time management techniques, I realized the Pomodo technique, the time blocking, all this one, two, three, four, the A, B, C... The reason why there's so many time management techniques is because none of them work unless you have this underlying thing called discipline. It's the same in the fad diet industry. That industry will always churn out new things because there's an underlying issue which is discipline, so it's kind of a mirage industry. So the chapter pivoted and started focusing on discipline. Well, the next thing was time. Um, why is time important? Ran the numbers. If you're... How old are you now?

Chris Williamson 42:38 35.

Steven Bartlett 42:39 Okay. So you have, if you reach the average age of an American, you have just over 17,000 days left to live. And I think all of that goes to show that time is the currency we're playing with in every moment of our lives, it's the center point of our influence. I talk about the roulette table of my life. It's a frame I think through where we wake up in the morning with these 24 chips. If you spend eight hours sleeping, you wake up with six- 16 chips left. And how you place those chips on this roulette table that sits in front of us just before the wheel spins every day determines all of our outcomes in our lives. So I- I've chosen now to put... to allocate two chips to this little piece here called fitness. The roulette table spins and I get my returns. As I went down that chapter...I realized that in the context of time and death, um, and time management, the most important question to answer, the fundamental, is discipline. How can I allocate more of these chips to the things that are in line with my values? Where does this th- thing called discipline come from if it underpins everything we do?

Chris Williamson 43:34 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 43:34 It even underpins what you just said there with Fred again and that Mark Manson quote.

Chris Williamson 43:37 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 43:37 The reason why Fred, again, is doing that is because his discipline equation is in- is in- is in line. If, for whatever reason, you just e- tipped any part of that equation, you could knock him off that discipline.

Chris Williamson 43:46 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 43:47 With- with Jimmy Carr and with all these people that go do that decade of dedication to become masters in their craft, if you look to their discipline equation, you'll see moments where the friction came up and they fell off, or they got writer's block, or whatever-

Chris Williamson 43:57 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 43:57 ... it might be called in their context.

Chris Williamson 43:59 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 44:00 Um, and then, so you can influence your discipline if you understand that equation. When my DJ equipment was on the floor of my spare room, I did not DJ.

Chris Williamson 44:07 Never gonna use it.

Steven Bartlett 44:08 The minute I put it on my kitchen counter and had it one button away from being able to practice at any given moment-

Chris Williamson 44:13 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 44:13 ... I put it right in front of me.

Chris Williamson 44:14 Same thing for any creator. If you're starting to do a YouTube channel, and this is- this is a life hack here, do you remember, you might have had this in your house when you were younger, radio, uh, infrared socket turners on or off. It's like a single remote. It's like 10 bucks on Amazon.

Steven Bartlett 44:30 Never had that.

Chris Williamson 44:30 Um, you leave the wall socket on at all times and you run it through one of these additional sockets, and then you plug your shit into that thing.

Steven Bartlett 44:36 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:37 And you, it's like 10 bucks, right, on Amazon.

Steven Bartlett 44:39 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:39 My entire studio at home is run through one of these. So I go in and I just press one, two, three, four, and vroom, everything comes on.

Steven Bartlett 44:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:47 Because when I was first starting out, it was super effortful for me to set up the camera, and I'm gonna do the thing, and I'm already trying to learn to do YouTube, and it's terrifying, and I'm looking into this black lens and it stares back at me.

Steven Bartlett 44:56 It's friction.

Chris Williamson 44:57 Precisely. Same as you.

Steven Bartlett 44:58 Psychological friction.

Chris Williamson 44:58 DJ kit can't be on the floor. If you want me to practice as much as possible, oh, make... get it in the way, put it in the way of things.

Steven Bartlett 45:04 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 45:04 Right? I- it's almost harder for me to DJ than it is for me to- to- to avoid it.

Steven Bartlett 45:08 It, this was, it was on my kitchen counter, so I would sometimes be going into the kitchen to eat something and just, "Oh, I'm, uh..." Press the button-

Chris Williamson 45:14 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 45:14 ... and just I'm off. Four hours later, I've just done a four-hour DJ practice.

Chris Williamson 45:17 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 45:18 If you think about... Give me something in your life you're disciplined at and we'll run it through the equation. Something you've shown great discipline at.

Chris Williamson 45:24 Recording the podcast.

Steven Bartlett 45:25 Recording the podcast. Does it really matter to you?

Chris Williamson 45:27 Yes.

Steven Bartlett 45:28 Is there psychological enjoyment from the pursuit?

Chris Williamson 45:30 Yes.

Steven Bartlett 45:31 Is the friction high? How, what's- what's the level of friction?

Chris Williamson 45:34 Mm, four out of 10.

Steven Bartlett 45:36 Four out of 10. But if we added up the first part of the equation, how much does it matter to you out of 10?

Chris Williamson 45:39 10.

Steven Bartlett 45:40 And how much, or how much, what's the psychological enjoyment of the pursuit?

Chris Williamson 45:42 Nine.

Steven Bartlett 45:43 So I'd say we're about 19 take away four.

Chris Williamson 45:46 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 45:46 And because it's positive, the behavior will occur. You can do that as a minus four, right?

Chris Williamson 45:49 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 45:49 The behavior will occur.

Chris Williamson 45:50 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 45:50 If at any point the friction gets really high, and for whatever reason, if the pursuit of it or the- the why behind, your, you know, the subjective meaning behind it falls, y- the behavior will not occur.

Chris Williamson 46:00 I've heard you do this with your meditation practice.

Steven Bartlett 46:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:03 Which is why you're not meditating.

Steven Bartlett 46:04 Yeah, exactly.

Chris Williamson 46:05 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 46:05 Uh, uh, my why isn't strong enough.

Chris Williamson 46:07 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 46:07 I don't- I don't, I haven't quite had the- the evidence to know-

Chris Williamson 46:09 The intrinsic enjoyment of it as well. It-

Steven Bartlett 46:11 Yeah. Sometimes we need a little bit more pain, right? In our lives.

Chris Williamson 46:13 It's a ro- it's- it's a robust in, uh, way to- to frame it. I guess if Alex was sat here, he would say, we might say, a lot of people are driven by pain rather than pleasure, right?

Steven Bartlett 46:26 100%.

Chris Williamson 46:27 And...

Steven Bartlett 46:29 That's the why part.

Chris Williamson 46:30 The chip on your shoulder accounts for so much. It can account for so much, right? Um, you know, somebody who had a really bad period of mental health, they suffered with anxiety attacks and it lost them something or somebody scorned them, and they go, "Oh, okay," and then they decide to commit themselves to mental health and improving the texture of their own mind, that's coming from a place of wanting to prove other people wrong.

Steven Bartlett 46:52 Well, le- wh- whether someone is driven or dragged is impossible to tell on the surface. And I've sat in my podcast over and over again and asked people, "Are you driven or are you being dragged by something?" When I say dragged, I mean some kid on the playground at seven years old told you you were a sc- scumbag and you'll never be anything and you're poor, and then that's dragged you, that insecurity and that shame has dragged you to entrepreneurship and to becoming a millionaire. Driven is what, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk describes to me where he says his mother loved him so much and she encouraged him so much that he had that drive to kind of like prove her right. Whatever force it is, it comes down to why, which is the start of the equation.

Chris Williamson 47:26 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 47:26 And even in my case, super sh- sh- tons of shame as a kid, the only Black kid in- in a white area pretty much, the poorest family in our street definitely, dilapidated house in a- in the context of a wonderful area. Deep shame and insecurity about not being enough drove me like you've, like I was an obsessed hungry dog for... It's still doing it now in a back room somewhere, you know?

Chris Williamson 47:48 I, one of my favorite quotes that I've heard from you recently is this.

Chris Williamson 47:52 "I was riddled with fake ambitions. My ambitions were fake. They weren't ambition, they were insecurity. Most of our lives are dragged by insecurity and shame. They're not driven by ambition. And it's a tragic truth that most of us are going to have to have. Our ambitions and our narratives fail us before we realize that they're illusions and mirages and they're false."

Steven Bartlett 48:14 100%. And j- it's afst- I have beliefs sometimes that a lot of people disagree with, um, but, and I think this is typically one of them, because people want to take control over their success. They wanna have that sort of power over it. But if I se- I remember sitting with Eddie Hearn and I remember what Will Smith said, and they all describe, they can all very clearly articulate the reason for their- their motivation and their drive. They live in a world where every media reporter will say, "Oh, you're so amazing. Like tell me how you, you're motivated every day." It's not the case. I actually, I question how much choice they have over that motivation. In the case of Eddie Hearn, he lived in the footsteps of his father, Barry Hearn, who pulled up to school in these Rolls-Royces, and he was known as Eddie Hearn's son. He's competing with his father, he'll say it.

Chris Williamson 48:55 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 48:55 "I'm driven, I'm dragged by the insecurity of- of being Barry's, Hearn's little son, and I wanna outdo him."

Chris Williamson 49:02 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 49:02 It's the same with some of my other bili- billionaire friends, and it's the same with Will Smith. He's being dragged by an insecurity and shame. So the key thing, 'cause that's not always a bad thing, right? In- in every context of life. It might make you arrive at financial f- freedom sooner than others, but you just wanna make sure that you're cognizant of it, at least. In my life...I realized at about 24 years old when we had an offer from a very big company to sell the business, and I went home that day and I Googled mansions and Lamborghinis on Autotrader. And I looked into that screen and felt- felt a deep sense of emptiness, like I'd been betrayed by somebody, like someone had lied to me. And it was true, someone had lied to me. Eight- 18-year-old, 12-year-old Steve had told me that that would fix everything. And as I played out it arriving on my doorstep, I realized that I'd be poorer if I bought it, some- I'd lose something. I'd lose my company and the community and the love I had, but I'd lose something else. Then I went through this six months of sort of existential crisis of like, "Okay, so if it wasn't for that, if- if we weren't obsessing like a dog-"

Chris Williamson 49:57 What the fuck was I doing it for?

Steven Bartlett 49:59 "... what the fuck was I doing it for?"

Chris Williamson 49:59 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 49:59 And, um, I- my fear, this woman came into my office one day and she said to me, "Just imagine for a second you have everything you've ever wanted." She goes, "'Cause the truth is, you do. There's no goal that you haven't completed that you need to complete to be worth more." And I remember walking away and thinking, "What a load of rubbish." Two years of dwelling on that thought. And I arrived at this conclusion, I think because I was scared of this idea that losing my drive would- would lead to no ambition, but it's very much the opposite. Losing your am- losing your... losing your insecurities and your shame that's dragging you doesn't dissolve your ambition. It dissolves your fake ambition and creates room for your real ambitions that are internally, intrinsically motivated. So instead of wanting a Lamborghini and a mansion, I wanted this whole set of other things when I realized that the Lamborghini and the mansion were never gonna make Steve Bartlett worth more than one Steve Bartlett.

Chris Williamson 50:52 Hmm.

Steven Bartlett 50:53 Deeply in me, I genuinely think part of me thought that if I got a Lamborghini and a mansion, Steve Bartlett would be worth two or four Steve Bartletts. But your- your- your currency is one of one. And so in that moment, once I'd realized that n- nothing was gonna change the intrinsic value of me, I could focus on things that I would do regardless of that per- perception of value fluctuation, like starting a podcast or, um, learning to DJ or doing a musical up and down the country or joining a psychedelics business just to learn for a year about mental health and psychedelics. And the funny thing is, if we think about Fred again and Derren Brown and all of those people that achieved mastery from a decade of natural dedication, is that's altho- also the path to real mastery, when you're not being dragged.

Chris Williamson 51:34 In other news, this episode is brought to you by Nomatic. No, literally, it's actually brought to you by Nomatic. Their Carry On Pro is the hand luggage that I used to transport my laptop and all of the stuff (laughs) that I brought with me to the UK. The difference between having proper, well-designed, durable, high-quality luggage and not is everything. It makes the difference between packing a complete hell or actually quite enjoyable. The team at Nomatic creates the most functional, durable, and innovative backpacks, bags, luggage, and accessories. Everything from Nomatic comes with a lifetime warranty, which is exactly how confident they are in the quality of their products. Especially if you're someone that travels quite a lot, you need to make sure the luggage you're using is high quality. And Nomatic is the best that I've found. So if you need to upgrade your luggage game for work, for travel, or for anything else, the first place to go is Nomatic. Head to the link in the description below or go to nomatic.com/modernwisdom and use the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout for 20% off everything sitewide. That's nomatic.com/modernwisdom, and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. The thing that's interesting to fold in here that I think is useful, most people have more pain than they do anything else, especially when they're starting out. I don't think when you very, very first begin a pursuit you've got this perfectly balanced desire to maximize your ikigai and show up in the way your logo's being spoken forward it's supposed to. It's not. People took the piss out of you for being different in school, or your parents didn't believe in you or they coddled you too much, or you don't feel like you were given the opportunities that you should've got, or you failed yourself or other people failed you. That's fucking power. That's fuel, right?

Steven Bartlett 53:15 And do you know what it can be as well? It can be a tiny thing

Chris Williamson 53:18 Oh, a flo- throwaway comment.

Steven Bartlett 53:19 ... when you were seven.

Chris Williamson 53:19 Throwaway comment that went-

Steven Bartlett 53:20 Someone grabbed your lu- lunch money.

Chris Williamson 53:21 Oh, yeah.

Steven Bartlett 53:21 And that taught you a story, going back to what we said about evidence, about money and other people. And that has just dominated your self-story for the- for the next three decades, a story you learn about money, you know?

Chris Williamson 53:32 So I think that that fuel is toxic, especially when used for a long period of time. But I reckon you can get a good five or 10 years out of it. And I think that to get yourself past the activation energy to go and do something, in the very, very beginning, it's all well and good for you or me to sit here and say, "Ah, you know, you can find the balance in the way that everything works." Like, we've been through that fire. Let's neither of us kid ourselves about what got us here in the first place. It was fucking resentment, right?

Steven Bartlett 54:06 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 54:07 I had a desire to prove every bully that had ever picked on me in school, every person that had thought I wasn't gonna ana- amount to anything, everyone that had ostracized me socially, I wanted them to regret that decision. Don't get me wrong. And it's only been after a long, long, long time of realizing that actually, if it wasn't for the fire that they'd given me, I wouldn't have got to where I am now, which is a place that I'm incredibly proud of, so I should thank them. Oh, that's a fucking interesting realization.

Steven Bartlett 54:37 And here's the- here's the risk, though, and what I came to learn, is it will take you somewhere, that drive, but it's not guaranteed to take you to happiness. And the- the obsession of being dragged by an insecurity, like the one you've described and the ones that I describe, is so overpowering that it might mess up your priorities.

Chris Williamson 54:58 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 54:58 And- and I think at a deeper level, humans, regardless of their drive, we do need these fundamentals to be happy. We need that sense of connection, we need relationships, we need all of those things. And in my case, I work seven days a week in that bloody office. I would come in even when I didn't have anything to do-

Chris Williamson 55:12 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 55:12 ... because there was a deep sense of sort of self-esteem associated with my work. The cost was I didn't speak to my family for two- for two years. The cost is, like even as I sit here, it's like I haven't spoken to my mom for months.

Chris Williamson 55:22 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 55:22 Like, we've fallen out.

Chris Williamson 55:23 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 55:23 The cost is I have very s- small group of friends. And the cost is I've spent years struggling in relationships.And I'm- I'm- I'm now 31, I've managed to get in a relationship and reprioritize my life urgently, but the cost I see in a lot of people I meet is, okay, they're successful in one of nine-

Chris Williamson 55:40 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 55:41 ... metrics of happiness, and I sit there with, I've sat there with some of my close billionaire friends, they got all nine cars that I've ever dreamed of wanting outs- outside, and they tell me at 4:00 AM by their indoor pool that they're deeply unhappy-

Chris Williamson 55:53 Fucking miserable.

Steven Bartlett 55:53 ... and asking me to sleep in their bed with them that night-

Chris Williamson 55:55 Look-

Steven Bartlett 55:55 ... because they're lonely.

Chris Williamson 55:56 ... I don't disagree, I don't disagree that if you scale this for long enough, it's not good for you, right? But it is so potent at getting that activation energy in the beginning, and I just don't know... I- if you were to take me back and say, "You can dispense with your fear of insufficiency, the chip that's on your shoulder, all of those things," I don't know if I would have done anything. I don't... I- I think that I would have been significantly less motivated to go and... to be able to deal with the uncertainty of the lonely chapter. So I came up with this idea with, uh, Hormozi a couple of weeks ago called the Lonely Chapter. I fucking love it. So, there is a period in everybody's journey where they are so different because they've started to do new things that they no longer fit in with their old set of friends, but they're not sufficiently developed that they've gained their new set of friends, and they're unsure. Should I go back? Should I lean back into getting a bag in with the boys on the weekend? Is that the highest, you know, way that I can live my life passion-forward? 'Cause that's what everybody else does. And all of my friends are taking the piss, "Oh, not drinking again? Too good for us, are we? Not going out again this week? Oh, okay. Well, like, enjoy staying in home and reading. Fucking nerd." So you're going to feel the pain of being ostracized from the group of friends that you used to have, but you're stuck in this messy middle where you haven't yet worked out who you are on the other side of this, and that lonely chapter that's in the middle is something that, I- I would say almost nobody that I've ever met who has gone from a place where they are to a place where they want to be hasn't gone through.

Steven Bartlett 57:31 Are you out of the lonely chapter?

Chris Williamson 57:33 Yes. Yeah, and that's-

Steven Bartlett 57:34 100%?

Chris Williamson 57:36 Uh, I... it's difficult for me to find it. It's difficult for me to find it again, facilitated largely by being in Austin. Um, but that being said, most of the work that I do is on my own. You know, I- I spend hours sat at my desk researching, sorting stuff for episodes, dealing with the team, making sure that everything is set for this trip or the next trip or whatever we've got coming up.

Steven Bartlett 58:02 I think high performers actually, they- they do exactly what you've described there. They leave the- the tri- the comfortable tribe that, you know, is social expectation and their childhood friends, whatever else, and once they leave there, there's that initial point of resistance, and then I think they, to some degree, live forever in the loneliness chapter.

Chris Williamson 58:19 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 58:20 The start of it is much more difficult, but there's so few people that- that can relate to their experiences once they come out of the- the crowd anyway, that they're- they're always gonna live, to some degree, in a- a heightened sense of sort of loneliness. They can find a tribe at home and with family and with a partner, but it's never the same as having, you know, what you see other people have from your hometown.

Chris Williamson 58:40 Well, that's... you know, look at any bell curve, right? The fattest bit's right in the middle, and-

Steven Bartlett 58:45 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:45 ... to move yourself out to the edges is to accept being alone in some regard. A- Alain de Botton's got this quote where

Chris Williamson 58:54 he says, "Loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind."

Steven Bartlett 58:59 Yeah. There's two things we don't want to be, not enough and different. That's what a therapist said to me recently that came on my podcast. She said, "There's two things that fundamentally... I interview billionaires and CEOs and royalty..." So she goes, "I- I'm a therapist for billionaires, CEOs, and royalty." She goes, "The two things are, that people struggle with fundamentally are feeling different. We don't want to feel different. That's a rejection from one's tribe, which used to mean back in the day through a process of self-preservation, we'd die earlier, as you- you've heard about in the studies of, you know, that they did at Harvard. Um, we'd get more ill, our immune systems would break down. And the second one is not feeling like you're enough, which means you're not valuable to the tribe. So not being part of the tribe or of- of good... or of good use to the tribe causes a bunch of signals in our body, which then manifest as physiological disease-"

Chris Williamson 59:40 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 59:40 "... and psychological disease."

Chris Williamson 59:41 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 59:42 "So, at- at its core, sometimes I think when I'm feeling in- not such a way, maybe I'm feeling lonely or I'm feeling really different or some... I've got some feedback which makes me feel like I'm different in a fundamental way, I just ground myself in the understanding that even the fact that I feel that makes me like everybody else. And, um, in terms of loneliness, I've had to kind of carve out my own new tribe in my life, a very small group of people."

Chris Williamson 1:00:04 With Prince William.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:06 Ah, yeah. (laughs) No.

Chris Williamson 1:00:07 But no, moving- moving to Austin was a big part of that for me because I was around... It- it's a s- s- city of cultural immigrants.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:16 Right? Everybody has gone from one place to this place, so that is the selection effect, and it's why, you know, again, another great way to work out who's high agency in your friend group is, are they living in the same town that they were born up in or in a new one? Are they living in the same country that they were born in or a new one? Have they decided to do something on their own and take risks that they were the only people who they were responsible for? Um, in relation to your riddled with fake ambitions thing-

Steven Bartlett 1:00:41 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:00:41 ... this great quote from Alex that says, "You've already achieved goals that you said would make you happy."

Steven Bartlett 1:00:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:48 And that encapsulation of the hedonic treadmill in a single tweet I think is so interesting.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:55 It- it... but it also calls you to reframe what you're- what you're pursuing, and this is why the part of the discipline equation, the psychological pursuit, is actually really a nice thing to focus on, because we both know in all of our lives, e- even the- the podcasting game you're playing now, there's not a finish line here, is there? Every day is the finish line. So I- I- I think it reframes what we're aiming at because they are mirages that move off into the distance as we approach them.

Chris Williamson 1:01:18 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:18 And if you're... if you become too... you think about unhappiness coming from unmet expectations. If you're too focused on the- the- the podium giving you pleasure, when it doesn't, the expectation that it would could lead to unhappiness.

Chris Williamson 1:01:29 What happened when you hit a million subs?How did you feel?

Steven Bartlett 1:01:32 So we hit- I mean, eh, I'd sit down my team, I go, "I know- I know none of you really care. But the reason why we should celebrate is because..." and then I give them the reason." And it's same with three million, when we hit three million subs, it's the same thing. Walked into the back room of our studio, I go, "Listen, I know this doesn't actually matter. What matters more was the old lady that came up to me when I went to Penguin the other day and said that, was almost crying in the lobby. That's what we all care about. We care about the Chris Kamara thing where he came on the podcast and his former football club put banners up in the stadium about it. We care about impact. And this is just a- a- a trailing metric of impact." So, um, it's important, you know, and I've done a lot of research over- over the last 10 years about how to build a company in such a way where you don't get those moments of burnout or anti-climax. And Simon Sinek talk- talks about bidding- b- building things as if they are infinite. So how would you set up you and this podcast team through the frame of, "We're gonna do this for 100 years"? Well, you- you design- design the system to be sustainable over a- over the long term. You'd aim at consistency. You try and optimize intensity, but not at the cost of in- consistency. And the whole system of how you treat the people and how this everything, and how you treat yourself would be set up in such a way. That's what I think about now. I'm actually thinking about our podcast through the lens of, heavily inspired by what Joe Rogan's done, sticking at that for like 15 years. How do we run this game for 50 years? And I think that's a huge competitive advantage to think through that frame, 'cause there will be a lot of people that would have designed their systems in a way that is not sustainable, and I see it with podcasters all the time. I see it where they've, you know, they've got four mates who are all on the podcast and they're doing it twice a week. Well, then what happens when Gerry, you know, has a divorce with his wife and has to leave and then it was- the system was never designed for longevity. So all facets of my life, my companies, my teams, all designed for longevity.

Chris Williamson 1:03:15 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode three.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:18 (laughs) Really?

Chris Williamson 1:03:19 And of the 10% that do, 90% of them don't make it past episode 20. So by making 21 podcasts, you are in the top percentile of all podcasters ever in history.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:30 And how many get past 10 years?

Chris Williamson 1:03:31 Oh, fucking hell. Jesus.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:32 Yeah, that's the game I wanna play. I wanna g- I wanna do a 20- 20, 30 year, I say it to my team all the time, multi-decade systems.

Chris Williamson 1:03:38 Long-term games with long-term people.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:40 Yeah. So my team can move through the chapters of their life, right? They're gonna be fathers and mothers. They're gonna get, you know, they're gonna have certain moments in their life where they have health risks. And is our system designed to guide them through that but retain talent that we want to retain? Um, is it re- is it designed for a changing world that's gonna get AI-centric? Like do we have enough, uh, fast-acting feedback loops so we know when the next thing's coming?

Chris Williamson 1:04:01 Would you not just slot people in and move people out? Like the differences and the challenges that you're going to encounter at 10 million subs is gonna be different to what you encountered at 10,000 subs. So and I know, yeah, I get that, and there will usually be a core group of people, but really the only core thing is you, right? Ultimately, if you want to start doing stadium Ed Sheeran-style productions, the people that did the first Steven Bartlett Tour, they're not the people that can do that, right? You need new people. You need a different cinematography team and you need people that can do live broadcasts and they need to be able to do switching on this huge fucking desk, camera three, camera four. Like I- I don't disagree, but fundamentally what it seems to me it comes back to is, how can you make sure that it's your infinite game? Yes, it trickles down to the rest of the team, but ultimately the team are gonna come and go. The only thing that's gonna remain is you, 'cause if you go, it's fucking done. You're not selling Diary of a C- like, Diary of a CEO now presented by fucking Jimmy Carr. Like it's not happening.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:00 So in that sentence, there's a key thing I said, which is the talent you want to retain.

Chris Williamson 1:05:03 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:04 And in building businesses, I've built businesses from zero to 700, I always know that the first, phase one people, the cult, we call it, it's the cult, the growth and then the enterprise phase, three stages in business, and then you have the decline, which is inevitable for all companies. In the cult phase, the people that can wear multiple hats and that are fired up and sleeping under the desks are not always the people that thrive in the enterprise phase where there's, your- your- your job description is very, very narrow. You need to be very process-orientated and fit into a bigger system. They're not always the same people, but the people you want to retain that have a decade of information capital in their heads about who we are, the disciples. If you think about Sir Alex Ferguson-

Chris Williamson 1:05:38 Your voice.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:38 ... there's a reason why he kept Gary- Gary Neville on the pitch, and Gary Neville's told me this directly. I've seen the conversation he had with Sir Alex Ferguson where he asked him the question, "Gaffer, why did you keep me around, like three or four years after I'd- I clearly couldn't kick a ball anymore?" And it was because of he represent, he knew the culture, he knew the values, and you need disciples.

Chris Williamson 1:05:55 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:55 All of those players, all those Man United players said to me, "How many times do you reckon Sir Alex Ferguson came into the training ground dressing room in 26 years?" I said, "I don't know. Four- 2,000?" They went, "Twice." I go, "Why?" "'Cause my disciples were in there. I didn't need to go in." When cultures are strong, they're self-policing.

Chris Williamson 1:06:11 Very cool.

Steven Bartlett 1:06:11 When cultures are strong, new people become the culture. When a culture's weak, the culture becomes the new people. So in- in my teams, I want as many people that were there from the jump if they have the capacity to move through those phases of growth. And, um, and I thi- the key sentence was the talent I want to retain.

Chris Williamson 1:06:26 Yeah. You must sweat the small stuff. Why?

Steven Bartlett 1:06:30 I ju- I just think, uh, just think it's the most important thing. I remember one of the