Mo Gawdat: A WARNING about Stress & Anxiety! This Is Causing 70% Of Heart Attacks In Young People!

There are only three ways where stress will break you. But the majority of how stress kills us is because of this. But this is completely within your control. Mo Gode 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 is 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 lie 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, Dio 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.

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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 do you mean? I think the, I think I'm, I'm, thanks to you, of course, by the way, and many others. I've, 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, how I can continue to explain what I think will be probably the most needed 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 five years.

Are you talking about AI again? May, it's not just AI, Steve. It's not just AI. It's not just AI.

What is it? I remember last time we met, we, in closing, I was telling you we're hitting the perfect storm: economics, geopolitical, climate, AI, synthetic biology. Yeah. And I think 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 will openly say this is going to be the most stressful time of any generation that we've ever met. You and I. 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 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 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 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, 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 Western societies, 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.

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 believe, you know, you know how it is. Wars are not the results of conflict. Conflict is the needed trigger to start a war, or the illusion of a conflict is the needed trigger to start a war that helps fiscal policy and sets geopolitical 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, 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 purpose-wise. Very, 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 on the nature of the world. What is that nature of the world? What is the backdrop there that you're seeing?

It is the top topic in my mind. First of all, I wrote this because of my co-author, Alice. Alice 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 stressful, you know, 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 so we started to work on this around 2021. 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, simply because I think the mounting stress in the world is one, because of events outside most people's controls, and two, is because stress will cause more stress.

So, so what is happening in our world today? You walk the streets and you feel it, right? You know, 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, it's a bit less safe in the city of London. It's a bit, you know, more 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 capable of dealing with stress to a situation where, where, where they will be more stressed. Okay? 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 hunter-gatherers, right? When hunter-gatherers, 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 managed his or her farm better, you could probably feed the tribe for a month more, right? When the best manufacturer 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 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 award, the reward that you get as a result of automation. So think of it as the, 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 OpenAI, for example, will almost entirely own, for a while, until they are disrupted, the commodity that we call intelligence. Right? 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? 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, at the expense of the rest 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 the geopolitical landscape. It's going to cause stress around, you know, 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 a situation where a lot of us dealing with things that might make us anxious.

I was looking at some of Ray Kurzweil's work. He's obviously one of the leading futurists in the world. And there was a chat called, 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 three 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 previous century. And I remember thinking about how one can navigate that without, you know, losing their mind, to be honest. If the world is changing at such a speed, and you feel disempowered to some degree.

Yeah, 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, that goes beyond human ability. And in reality, you know, I, as I said, I can't even keep up with what's happening. I don't know if you've seen the latest editions of Chat GPT or Sora or whatever. You can now have full conversations, full conversations with an engine that appears very human, that, you know, changes its tonalities, that answers in a very clever way, that is so political and so well presented. You know, when you ask 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 it's quite interesting when you really think that this is, last time we spoke about, you know, AI was what, a year ago? Yeah, yeah.

There is a point in time where your well-being is not, as a matter of fact, all the time, 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 started filming, you know, you and I make choices. You and I make choices that stress us, right? 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 in that cycle. 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 going, I can keep faster, I can go faster, right? I can take more." The truth is, no.

I think that we're 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 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, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, whatever, who are not stressed? Right? There are studies now that will tell you 70 to 80% of clinic visits, of doctor visits, are because of stress-related illness. Right? This is quite serious. And, you know, sometimes you look back at COVID days and you say, "This is the biggest pandemic 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 an interesting way right now.

Stress in itself is not a bad thing. You know, if you have a presentation 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 really is getting the toll on, you know, 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 the world is making it, 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 invite stress proudly into our life. One way is, "I'm busy." It's 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 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 sanity, if you ask me. 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, you're not good enough." "Oh, you know, they didn't like you when you said this." Right? All of the negative thoughts pop up. And interestingly, that psychological discomfort, if you want, one of the easiest ways 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 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. 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 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 is, if you ask me, it has all the symptoms of addiction. Okay? It, you know, it is a, a, you know, 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 you 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 it.

Absolutely not. The truth, 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. 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 reason why we, we, you may have a difference, you may make a difference to anything, to your relationship with your loved ones, to your career, to your 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 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?

Mhm. Yeah. It's true. Yeah. And so, and so, so the question is, where 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 example, I have, I struggled 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 all pull on my availability 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 Bartlett guy is a 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 so on, right? And what ends up happening is that, you and I don't blame you, and everyone 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, you're depriving yourself of the true productivity. The true productivity is that one hour in the morning where you're not stressed, where your calendar 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 is that one 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 realize your potential, but to, but to react to potential you've already achieved. And for all of work, I mean, I, when I ran my business at Google, I refused to be in meetings openly. I was like, "Why?" And by the way, I encouraged my people, 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. Stamped my entry card or whatever, I don't know what you call it in English, but 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 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 weren't you sending, initiating more emails? Because you initiate one email and you get a shitload of emails back, right? And what's the point? Why don't you just simply 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 initiated an email, people read it.

How did you get things done then? Phone calls, or walks, or conversations in the corridors, or, you know, a quick, "Hey, by the way, what's up with this?" And we had weekly reviews, and we had, you know, lots of connections, human connections. 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 I think that the reality is that we're creating, 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 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 big lie I think I have with myself, if I'm honest. 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 narratives I tell myself, which as I say them, I know I'm like, "That's embarrassing." Sorry. I am so sorry. But this is identical to the story of, you know, there is this very, very interesting fable of the billionaire that goes 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 wrong. You're wrong. You're doing this wrong. You should, you know, go get four fish or as many as you can." And, you know, 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 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 a fancy guy, don't drive 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, 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?

Most people, when people go to work, 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. 20% of what you do at work actually achieves the numbers. Okay? That's the truth of all work generated. 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 problem that we don't have a target? Because I don't have a target, so for me, it's because I can, I should maximize whatever I can do to achieve financial gains or followers gains or numbers on the podcast and so on. Amazing. Just add a target and say, and I maximize my well-being in the process. Suddenly the equation becomes incredibly different. 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 sources of your stress in your life, we call them a ton of stress, T.O.N.N. 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 often several, PTSD-inducing traumatic event in their life. That's like the loss of a loved one, or losing your job so unexpectedly to the point you have to suffer or whatever. Being in a war zone and so on. Believe it or not, 93% of them will recover within three months. Trauma is not what breaks us. The interesting stuff that breaks us is the long application of obsessions, nuisances, and trauma 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 obsess about this for the rest of your life, and make it your life story, and basically create a lot of stress as a result of that script that you told yourself. 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 mirror as you walk out of the door, and you go like, "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 stressors that don't break you. They're not trauma. But there are so many of them that you include in your life. So many of them.

When Alice wrote the limit bit of the chapter, she wrote a beautiful script about the first five minutes or 10 minutes of your day, and she started to count the stressors that you trigger in your life in those minutes, from the very loud alarm, right, to the opening your social media and seeing something upsetting, or 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've 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." 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 take music or the Diary of the CEO podcast with me, would it become easier? Right? And if you actually attentively, deliberately look at all of the nuances in your life, 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, by simply texting them and saying, "I don't want to be your friend anymore," or simply winding down the conversations. Or when they send you something or talk to you about something, you go like, "Oh, very interesting," instead of engaging in those things. Can you, can you limit the, you know, 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 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 how do you do that in business? Steve, I know you really well. You'd say, 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 into because, you know, old Steve overestimated future Steve's capacity. Old Mo and future old Steve stitches up future Steve because, you know, old Steve is super ambitious and he doesn't understand there's only 24 hours a day. And, you know, look, I mean, I'm not immune to this. 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 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 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 him. 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 A, B, and C. Can you change that, please?" Simple. 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 Sunday to suffer." Right? 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 four hours to listen to something that I'm not able to change doesn't make any sense, right? And some of our listeners will be stuck in that relationship that is really abusive or really not, you know, effective. And what are they doing? It's an obligation. You know, we've been together for years. It's, you know, he's, he or she is not that bad. And is that the truth? Is, you know, 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 a clear short-term cost? I understand the long-term gain potentially, but the short-term thing is the thing that keeps us in prison.

Hannah, my wonderful wife, is a therapist. So therapy is not a topic, you know, psychology is not a topic I researched heavily. So she's teaching me quite a bit. 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 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 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, you know, the way we started this podcast, and you asked me, what is the most stressful thing about the modern world? Is that unfamiliarity of the future, where we're unable 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 big joke about this. When I was leaving Google X, so I was, you know, obviously Soul for Happy was booming. One, you know, my one billion happy mission was 10 million happy when we started the first print of the book. And 10 million took eight weeks. Like, you have to tell yourself, sorry for my English, Google, like, you know, 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 needs? What about this? What about that? Do I have the financial resources to do this?" Typical engineer. I started that spreadsheet. Put every possible expense, put every possible 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 Iranians don't agree with the Americans, and 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 hold on to your safety mechanisms, you're going to end up in a place where there is always something that could go wrong. And the answer was, if that happens, I think I'll be 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 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 the world, you know, you're studying something you're not enjoying, but it's familiar. "I went on that path. It's been three 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 the minimum effort to achieve the result, and I'll start to look at other parts of my life by reinvesting my hours." Right? You're stuck in that relationship, but dating is horrible. "I don't want to leave that person." Right? 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 mine, like when you're available so that when the right person shows up, you're there. If you're, 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. Quite interestingly, 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 says the world will push you to change direction or to heal. They're more or less the same, but learning is like, sort of, the brainiac process of it. And healing is the. So, why not get yourself in the place where the world wants you to be so that you heal or change direction? Why not make that decision yourself?

So many of us contend with loss aversion, don't we? And this is, I was, you know, Daniel Kahneman, 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 remember that paper he produced, I think in the 1980s, about loss aversion. I know the paintings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Remember that? Yeah. And in that, in that work where he discovers this term loss aversion, he talks about how 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, or $1 on the floor, isn't equal to the pleasure we experience 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 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 aversion. Like, what's the evolutionary basis? And the best answer I could find was that we come from a background of trading with, like, other apes and stuff, and there was 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 probability that we won't. It won't 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 I 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 Grey 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 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 a 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 incense, 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? 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, I 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. 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, it 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 post-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 your commute is one stressor, multiplied by, if it's a two-hour 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 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, and 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. And 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. 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 when it comes to dealing with stress, right? You know, I don't know how to say it, but someone 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 nine months, 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 reside 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 GYMMMMMMMM. 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 Meet 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 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 brushstrokes 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 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 ache, this 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 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, 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 three 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 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 three 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's, 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'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'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 in 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 any way. 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 ceiling."

So I told you before we, before we, uh, 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 Monir said, "That's not right." I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "If it's a profit-making organization, okay, 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 Monir, very, very professional, also a brother to me, said, "Mo," 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, 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 challenges that you, um, are willing to accept, uh, at work, right? Where's your boundary?

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 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 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 said, 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 three 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. It's your joy. It's 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 enlightens me on so many different ways. And I can promise you, you know, Finders Keepers, 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 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 lives, 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 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, software? Can we write this? Can we, can we quote that? That 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 clearly 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 two 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 flew over here with my daughter. So my daughter was in Dubai. She, she came to London with me. Best nine hours ever, ever. 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 into 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 workaholism, this sort of self-inflicted, uh, 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, 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 Kooks and the Arctic Monkeys to pretend I was a white, you know, rich person. Those are the only two bands I know because 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 know, 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 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 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 mad, 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. Um, 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, 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 my son Ali died, sat next to me, my ex-wife, she was flipping through a, um, photo album. She said, "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 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." And the truth is, my son as an infant was there for two 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. Right? Then 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 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, no, I'm busy." "Oh, no, this, this, it's expensive." "Oh, you know, she needs to focus on this." Oh, seriously? And by the way, I'm not being the, the stupid romantic. That's it. It's like, "Oh, it's all about connection." It's not, but it needs, you need a certain balance of connection. 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?" 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. "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. 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? And once again, 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. But by the way, if you get three, 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? Gosh, well, 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're 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. Remember that famous study where they ask people, "If you'd rather sit and wait for 15 minutes or give yourself an electric shock?" Mhmm. 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 they sat me down for nine hours to find the reason why they shouldn't let me in. And then they put me in detention for 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, 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're getting the WhatsApps, they're getting the emails, they're getting the Pilates 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 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 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? 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 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 value 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 are you 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 kick-ass "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 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, 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'll not become Steve Jobs. When I say "get to the same place," 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 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, 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 the best ones. So, so the, the, 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 Slow-mo 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 question truly is, what do I want to stand for? I mean, the, the, there are so many ways I can grow Slow-mo. 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." 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 chosen 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 piece of paper. But there's something so tempting about the addiction. It's the only script that you know.

Yeah. So 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're a very, very interesting thinker. Truth is, I am not that person.

Why did you say that?

Because at the time, I was in a system where I was very good at helping startups, 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, 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 11:00 and 6:00 PM or 5:00 PM 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 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 lie. More is better. Faster is better. More progress is better.

Is it? Is it? Is it? 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, D'Amato, wants to increase life infinitely, or Ray Kurzweil says, you know, that the technology can make us live, live forever. Really? Do I want to live forever? Why do I want to live forever? Is there a, is there a fear of death that I'm, I need to deal with? Is there 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 Klarna said recently about his company. He said that AI is now doing the equivalent of 800 customer service jobs at Klarna. 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 lures 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'll be able to bring down the cost of things. You know, so that, I mean, I, I love how the simple lie of the true value of money is ignored in all of this. You, you see the whole, the whole idea of less or more. I mean, how much is a, is a British pound? Is it, you know, one and a bit, 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 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 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 thousand, and he's borrowing a thousand, and the economy this year, uh, needs to pay 1,200 next year, the GDP next year needs to become 1,200 instead of the thousand, 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 shoemaker 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 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's become a real AI race globally. Microsoft, Facebook. Have you used ChatGPT 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 Wonderlabs, Wondercraft, sorry, Wondercraft AI, that, um, do voice synthesizing, etc. But did you see yesterday? OpenAI 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 factors that influence technological progress and human behavior.

It's so interesting that they've been programmed to be so diplomatic. And it's creepy. Diplomatic. Yeah, like a politician. But, but the question really is, have you seen the movie *Her*? No? Yeah. So, 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 ChatGPT was text-based just six to nine 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, "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'm 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 OpenAI 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 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 a way 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." 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 unstressed. 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, 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 friend's door when I was young to go and play, to being able to call them on the phone, to being able to text them, to being able to text, you know, connect with them on social media, to now, so, 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 string theory in definitions of gravity, right? Or, you know, it is, and, and the, was compelling. There was a product on Product Hunt, 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 ex-boyfriend or girlfriend and they're continuing the 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, 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 think, I think money is, you know, 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. If I'm not the most 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, Will Store. And he, he basically makes the case that all status-seeking humans, you and me, and that's hardwired 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?

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. It's 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, H, 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? 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 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 1-2-3 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 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 takes away from having 100,000 followers.

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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-dollar business is impossible for you to spend. The target of you saying, "I want to build a business that is a billion dollars within it." Uh, you know, if you take 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 Bartlett, 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 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 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 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'd just taken off on this plane and I saw the photo. I thought, "Such a great photo. Will's taken that." 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-round.

That's absolutely the wrong use of language. You can get off it if you make it your target. So 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 limit. 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 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 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 think I could actually do that."

100%. That was my objective. And the ones that will not think that way, that will be because they believe that 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 does. The equation is the event, the challenge, divided by your resources, your abilities, your, uh, your square area, like, like physics. Give, give more square area to carry the load, 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 will starve." You created that stress. Okay?

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 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 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 fear, and panic.

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.

Worry is anxious. It's 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, 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, "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'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 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 ill relative. This isn't just to be full transparency. 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 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 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 teenager, 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, 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, unstuck 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. 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 four 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 Marlo or 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, "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, Carrie. 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 mini-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 mini-series, was there? Anyway, so you came up with a mini-series 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 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 8,737,000 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 one in 50, right? If another thing that's available in one in 20, you're looking in one in a thousand, right? And the mathematics are very straightforward. You find someone that actually is one in 8,737,000, you go like, "Okay, I'm buying that stock." And I have been the happiest person, truly and honestly. 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'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 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 three 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 Hannah teaches me from therapy is that we run on scripts, okay? So you come 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 world, right? And, you know, if, if you come from a family that is avoidant, you know, attachment avoidant, you'll, you'll think that this is the way relationships are. If you, 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 hug me 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 are 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 triggered. Now, we, we're in couples 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, we'll probably release it as a training first before a book. But anyway, 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 go like, "What is my, my, my regular behavior, my cycle?" 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, "He's cheating." I, I wrote actually an unstressful. I wrote about a, a relationship with a wonderful woman that I had in my life who was quite calm and very, very, you know, composed and contented. And, and, 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. 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, 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 once." 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 that position, H, what that situation 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, 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 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 talked 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. 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 non-physical 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 TNN, which is the framework we talked about. It's in your head. Feel to heal. Your hips don't lie. And Serenity. And then in part three, we have the unstress. It is a wonderful book. It is a timely book. Is it, is it 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 yin and yang approach to AR. It really is. I think that's my favorite part of the book. 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 an engineer, a bit of a mathematician, logical. And, and even my partner, she's the opposite. She's got a feminine energy, 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 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 complemented the part of me that wouldn't have been written in the book if I wrote it alone. A practical guide to stress-free 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 stress-free living, which is something that's front of mind for me after this conversation, 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, 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. 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 Ali 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 his surgery went well. Uh, we started to do, uh, immunotherapy because he had multiple cancers that were not easy to treat. Anyway, he recovered very positively. And then, and then beginning of the year, he had some kind of a digestive issue. He had a tumor in his, um, somewhere in his digestive system, 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 other, right? But, but the thing is, 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 hindsight 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 billion 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 ceiling. 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 worst to answer that question because my first love was my very long, you know, term marriage, who a wonderful person. Nibel, 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 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 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 C S. 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 let our egos and our anger. And that I have, I have a couple of friends who are so wonderful. I, I loved them so much. Colombian, when I, 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. Nibel 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 if it was a painful breakup or a painful ending, I ask 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. This is difficult. When you, when you, I think we, neither of us, despite how well we did in terms of being calm and grateful and peaceful, it's, it was just, it still is the most difficult thing ever. And Nibel is such a beautiful, fragile, um, I don't know if fragile is the right word, delicate, maybe delicate is the right word, 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 pain. 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, 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 brilliance. What do you think it is? I really think that your ability to reach people can be converted into a much more rewarding result than 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]